Andrew Cuomo Thought He Could Bend a Passive Party to His Will
Zohran Mamdani’s stunning upset over Andrew Cuomo reveals how the Democratic Party’s hollowness and passivity cuts both ways — first enabling Cuomo’s absurd candidacy, then failing to insulate him from a left-wing challenger.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo addresses the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on June 22, 2025, in New York City. (Alex Kent / Getty Images)
Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist, could very well become the next mayor of New York City. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 following sexual misconduct allegations, was widely considered the front-runner throughout the race. Though the contest had grown closer in recent weeks, few anticipated Mamdani’s victory. The outcome was especially stunning given the financial mismatch: Cuomo outspent Mamdani by a ratio of about four to one, with pro-Cuomo super PACs like Fix the City spending millions portraying Mamdani as an unhinged radical. Its ubiquitous negative ads were an expensive attempt to distract from Cuomo’s reputational liabilities, which Mamdani was not reticent to name.
Despite his broad unlikability (a Politico headline: “The Cuomo paradox: Unpopular, yet still leading the New York City mayor’s race”), Cuomo’s political comeback initially appeared inevitable. He had the money and connections. If he wanted to reboot his political career, it was his choice to make and his race to lose. Many in the coming weeks will ask how Mamdani managed to win the primary — what policy demands and campaign strategies were most effective, what his coalition looked like. But another glaring question also needs answering: Why was Cuomo, who slunk out of office humiliated just three years ago, empowered to run to begin with?
No one was clamoring for his candidacy. But once Cuomo decided to run, the Democratic Party establishment fell in line. Forty percent of Andrew Cuomo’s top endorsements this campaign came from politicians who publicly condemned him in the thick of scandal. Top Democrats went from calling Cuomo’s behavior “inappropriate, unlawful, and abusive” to praising him as “a strong and proven leader” overnight. Heavyweights like Bill Clinton, Jim Clyburn, and the Third Way foundation threw down for Cuomo as though he had never been ostracized from political life. How is it possible for a disgraced and unpopular politician to compel such allegiance by simply deciding to run?
A key part of the answer lies in the Democratic Party’s fundamental organizational weakness. As political scientist Adam Hilton argues, American political parties are not like other parties. They are weaker, looser, less democratic, and less political than traditional party formations. Absent meaningful structures for collective deliberation or binding programmatic commitments, politicians function as autonomous actors within a loose confederation rather than as members of a coherent political organization.
The Democratic Party behaves less like a traditional party than a professional association for individual liberal politicians. Its membership has few opportunities for substantive democratic membership participation, the platform it adopts at each convention is toothless, and most Americans can’t identify its political goals. In the vacuum of politics, the party conforms to the individual career aspirations of powerful strivers. Cuomo expected to mount an expensive and well-connected, reputation-burnishing campaign with a passive party vehicle at his disposal. He had good reason to assume it would work.
Cuomo’s decision to run calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Epitomized by the shadow slogan “It’s Her Turn,” the campaign seemed to result not from serious strategic deliberation on the part of Democratic Party leadership but from Clinton’s own career ambition. When asked about why she ran for president in her series for MasterClass, the online education subscription platform, Clinton answered that she had been inspired by a female gold-medalist athlete who encouraged her to push herself as far as she could go.
Personal achievement was her raison d’être, not the realization of a political vision for society. Clinton’s legacy was at stake, and she was relying on eighty-plus million voters to help her write it. Cuomo’s motivations seem similar.
Gerontocracy and Careerism
There’s also the question of the party’s ossification and how it came to be. Zohran Mamdani is half Andrew Cuomo’s age. His supporters made much of this, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez passionately describing “a world and a nation that is crying to end the gerontocracy of our leadership, that wants to see a new day, that wants to see a new generation ascend.”
She wasn’t wrong; US political parties do have a gerontocracy problem. But this is downstream from the central issue, which is that weak parties contribute to individual career advancement taking precedence over collective strategy. Aging politicians refuse to pass the torch, even when their continued presence imperils the very causes they claim to champion, because they are chiefly animated by a desire for personal achievement — and because the party lacks the organizational capacity to compel them to step down for the greater good.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stubborn refusal to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency, despite being an octogenarian cancer survivor, allowed Donald Trump to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett, providing the decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Dianne Feinstein’s choice to cling to her Senate seat well into her nineties, despite obvious functional decline, paralyzed judicial confirmations and threatened Joe Biden’s entire court-packing strategy. Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to seek reelection at eighty-one, despite clear signs of cognitive decline, resulted in a rare example of the Democratic Party leadership taking decisive collective action. They were too late, however, and the spectacle of the torch being wrenched from Biden’s hands contributed directly to Trump’s return to power.
In each case, these figures prioritized their personal legacy and the psychic rewards of holding power over the strategic needs of their party and the constituencies they purported to serve. Beneath gerontocracy, we see the deeper problem: that the Democratic Party’s institutional weakness and political hollowness enables individual ego and career considerations to override group political judgment, repeatedly placing personal ambition above the shared goals that should animate a functioning political organization.
Double-Edged Sword
Fortunately for the Left, the Democratic Party has one crucial democratic mechanism: the primary, however stilted and flooded with donor money. This process, and the opportunity it gave to a historic bottom-up, grassroots army of volunteer Mamdani canvassers, halted Cuomo’s primary campaign, surprising him and all the Democrats who embarrassed themselves by aligning with his self-serving mayoral pursuit.
This turn of events highlights a paradox about American parties’ organizational flimsiness. Yes, it allows careerist ladder-climbing to masquerade as meaningful politics. But it also, as Hilton has argued in Jacobin, makes parties potentially open to insurgencies from the Left. There is a vacuum in the Democratic Party. It can be filled by personal careerism; it can also be filled by democratic socialist movements committed to reshaping economic relations and redistributing power to working people. Mamdani’s victory, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s before him and the popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaigns (both endorsed Mamdani), are examples of the latter.
Despite the ongoing ranked-choice tally, Cuomo conceded to Mamdani on Tuesday night. Third-place candidate Brad Lander, a progressive who cross-endorsed Mamdani, is expected to have his supporters’ votes — 11 percent — transfer to Mamdani, making a Cuomo comeback via ranked-choice rounds virtually impossible. But Cuomo announced late Thursday that he will indeed be competing against Mamdani in the general election on a third-party ticket — no doubt with the backing of even more billionaire Trump supporters like Bill Ackman, defenders of the status quo who have no hesitancy to spread absurd smears about antisemitism like Democratic New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and a whole range of other big money-backed slime-slingers. Other democratic socialists have taken advantage of the hollowness of the Democratic Party in the past, only to see the party elites mobilize in extraordinary ways to stop them. Mamdani’s road to city hall will be a bumpy one, and he will have to rely on the extraordinary grassroots campaign he built to win the primary to overcome the power of big money and win the general.
In the case of the New York mayoral primary, the Democratic Party’s inability to serve as an effective gatekeeper worked both ways, first enabling the disgraced governor’s ludicrous candidacy, then failing to insulate him from a challenger who represented everything the old guard feared most. Cuomo’s pivot to an independent run strips away any pretense about his motivations. This race was never about party or even politics for him — just the relentless pursuit of personal vindication at any cost. Our bigger problem is that he assumed the party could be so easily manipulated for personal gain. Why wouldn’t he? It had worked many times before.