1. Screwing Over the City

What’s ironic about Cuomo’s mayoral campaign is that he’s competing to run a city he has repeatedly screwed over. Notorious among New York insiders for his petty vindictiveness and ambition, Cuomo has more than once put the New Yorkers he’s now trying to win over into the crossfire of his attempts to exact vengeance on his almost exclusively Democratic political foes (more on that later), or simply sacrificed them to burnish his résumé.

To both protect his Republican allies and avoid angering wealthy donors (more on both of those later too), Cuomo spent his time as governor making savage cuts to education and health care, cuts that often hit the city hardest. That was the case from the very start, when then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg — who had endorsed Cuomo during the gubernatorial campaign, and who is backing Cuomo again now — bitterly complained about the way the city was treated exceptionally badly by Cuomo’s austerity budget in 2011.

That budget cut $1.5 billion from schools while lowering taxes on high earners, hitting the poorer districts that are mostly concentrated in the city by far the hardest, and in the process defying a landmark court order forcing the state to up spending on the city’s schools to make up for years of systematic underfunding. For more than a decade, he refused to go along with the school-funding formula that came out of the court order, threatening to withhold $2 billion of state aid from city schools in 2020 — more than twelve times the size of his second-largest school district cut — and only agreed to fully fund the formula in 2021 when the sexual harassment scandal put his career on the ropes.

By targeting Medicaid, that 2011 budget made similarly brutal cuts to the city’s municipal health care system, which its officials warned would lead to “significant service reductions” and hospital closures. Sure enough, in the years that followed, the city saw hospitals merged and closed and experienced the largest loss of hospital beds in the state. This didn’t deter Cuomo from taking aim at Medicaid again, in the middle of the pandemic no less, as hospitals were being overrun with sick people and piles of dead bodies were being left in trucks — leading a group of Brooklyn Democrats in the state legislature to declare Cuomo’s proposed cuts “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable.”

But this was par for the course for Cuomo, who had a habit of singling the city out for health care cuts. A year earlier, he had signed into law a state budget that sharply lowered how much the state contributed to health care costs for New York City, and only New York City — every other of the state’s municipalities went untouched. A year after health care workers bravely got the city through a tumultuous and deadly year, he unveiled a budget that made even more cuts to the city’s struggling safety-net hospitals.

Sometimes it was specific communities in the city he screwed over. When the NYPD’s scandalous spying operation on Muslims in the city was laid bare, Cuomo did nothing, even as Democrats, thirty-three civil rights groups, and even the New York Times called for an inquiry, and civil rights advocates demanded a meeting with Cuomo when the attorney general declined. He didn’t “believe there’s any reason to second guess” either the NYPD or the attorney general, Cuomo told reporters, about an operation that saw police build a disturbingly detailed database on the daily lives of Muslims in the city.

Cuomo was so nonplussed, he later appointed the police commissioner who oversaw it all, Ray Kelly, to his special “counterterrorism advisory council,” at the same time that Donald Trump was whipping up hate against Muslims by accusing them of being national security threats. Kelly — who as police commissioner had also appeared in and screened for his officers a movie that claimed “much of Muslim leadership here in America” was trying to “infiltrate and dominate” the country — defiantly defended the spying program after it was revealed.

But maybe most infuriating for residents of New York City was Cuomo’s responsibility for the ramshackle, delay-plagued state of the subway, caused by years of systematically defunding and raiding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to offset tax cuts and fund wasteful superficial improvements. Happy to take credit for subway advances when they came with political benefits, Cuomo started claiming anyone but him was responsible as New Yorkers’ unhappiness with subway service ballooned and his petty feud with then mayor Bill de Blasio intensified.

2. He’s Not Much of a Democrat

This gets to another paradox of Cuomo’s mayoral campaign: he’s running for the Democratic nomination to be mayor of a heavily Democratic city despite having repeatedly betrayed and undermined his own party.

Cuomo’s original near-fall from grace came in 2002, after he launched a bruising, down-in-the-muck gubernatorial primary challenge to Democratic state comptroller Carl McCall. Long after he started trailing McCall in the polls and had even run out of money to pay his staffers, Cuomo persisted with his campaign, including attacking McCall, running negative ads against him, and, according to Cuomo biographer Michael Shnayerson, likely leaking a damaging story about his choice for lieutenant governor.

Republicans watched with glee, while Democrats, worried Cuomo was undermining their chances of retaking the governor’s mansion, stepped in and pressured Cuomo to end his campaign. According to Shnayerson’s biography of Cuomo, The Contender, he decided to use that as leverage to try to extract concessions from McCall’s camp — including a prominent role in McCall’s gubernatorial campaign and a pledge to endorse Cuomo if he ran for governor in 2006 — threatening to stay in and keep hammering him with attacks if he didn’t get what he wanted.

Cuomo’s willingness to hurt the party and boost Republicans for the sake of his own ambition became his standard operating procedure after he became governor. He promised to veto any partisan redistricting plans that gave New York Democrats hope that they would finally get a state legislature that accurately represented the party’s two-to-one vote support in the state.

Instead Cuomo let the two respective leaders of the state senate and assembly once again draw the districts behind closed doors. That process saw black and Latino communities split up and corralled into gerrymandered districts where they would be swamped by white conservatives, and it handed the state’s Republicans an extra senate seat that let them keep their majority, incensing Cuomo’s own party — all because he preferred working with Republicans over downstate Democrats. Those gerrymandered lines would stay in place for the rest of the 2010s, giving Republicans outsize power in the New York State Legislature until this decade.

More betrayals followed. When New York Democrats asked him to stump for them in 2012 to help get the party a governing majority, Cuomo, who had made a deal with the state senate’s Republicans not to campaign or raise money for its Democrats, demurred. He wanted “to see the best people in the state Senate that we can attract,” he told the press when asked if he wanted Democrats to take the chamber, adding that “you make a decision on the person, ultimately.”

Two years later, he appeared side by side with an indicted GOP congressman and refused to commit to campaigning for his Democratic challenger. He did it again in 2016, demurring once more on whether he would help Democrats take the state senate.

In any case, Cuomo had already encouraged a splinter group of conservative Democrats called the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) to strike a power-sharing deal with senate Republicans that would effectively keep the state GOP in control of the chamber. Cuomo, who always denied he was even capable of doing anything of the sort, was in reality intimately involved in not just putting the deal together, but in directing how it would function in practice.

His then running mate and current New York governor Kathy Hocul unwittingly detailed just how badly Cuomo had shafted the party and its voters, complaining about the “aberration” of having representatives who were “sent to Albany as Democrats by their voters [. . .] acting as Republicans.” There had been “enough Democrats to have the control of the Senate several years ago,” she said, “so if those Democrats had organized where the voters sent them to organize and where they had been voting,” New York would have had many more progressive accomplishments passed, like codifying Roe v. Wade.

Or as journalist Ross Barkan put it, Cuomo’s actions resulted in “a decade devoid of progressive legislation that should have been passed in 2013,” which translated into “six years of tenant harassment and the permanent loss of affordable housing, as rent-stabilized housing stock was legally deregulated.”

There was also Cuomo’s role in the infamous 2014 “Bridgegate” scandal, which saw allies of Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie close traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge to punish a local Democratic mayor who hadn’t endorsed him. You would think a Democratic governor would be unhappy about officials from the opposing party causing chaos for the people of his state to stick it to one of his fellow Democrats. Instead Cuomo allegedly tried to cover it up, with Christie’s former aide testifying that Cuomo’s administration warned the official investigating the lane closures to “lay off” the New Jersey governor, and that the two governors personally agreed to blame it on a nonexistent traffic study.

Cuomo’s flirtation with the Right extended to the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump. Cuomo took $64,000 from Trump and his family during his time as governor, money he pointedly refused to return even after Trump’s 2016 win caused a spasm of revulsion through New York. Instead Cuomo gushed about how Trump’s New York roots would be a “bonus” for New York and other states. Two years later, he was taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Trump-connected donors.

This quiet connection to Trump and the GOP hasn’t gone away. As he runs for mayor, Cuomo is again benefiting from hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of support from Republicans and Trump donors, including $250,000 from Trump backer Bill Ackman alone.

3. His God-Awful Pandemic Response

It’s easy to forget now that at one point in 2020, Cuomo had rocketed from net disapproval in his own state to becoming one of the most popular politicians in the country, with the distant possibility of his replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate openly discussed and fantasized about. What caused it, ironically, was the same thing that also helped cause his career to disintegrate: his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He got a heavy assist on this from Trump, who set the bar so low that Cuomo was able to stroll over it, his daily press briefings imprinting him on voters’ minds as a calm, sober leader who was in control. That image was soon detonated by the shocking nursing home scandal that continues to follow him around five years later, in which Cuomo was implicated in the deaths of thousands of elderly New Yorkers that he worked to hide from the public.

But bad as that was, Cuomo’s overrated pandemic response went way beyond it. He at first fiercely resisted taking drastic steps to limit the virus’s spread, lagging behind states like California and Illinois whose Democratic governors had issued shelter-in-place orders. As usual, it seemed driven by his need to undermine New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who had first suggested the idea of a shelter-in-place order, only for Cuomo to blast out a press release rejecting it in the middle of the mayor’s press conference, before doubling down that evening, as well as the next day for good measure. Then he issued that exact shelter-in-place order a few days later.

It was hardly the picture of decisiveness and bold leadership that Cuomo would get an unearned reputation for. His foot-dragging even put him to the right of Trump, who had early on floated imposing a travel quarantine for New York, New Jersey, and parts of Connecticut, before Cuomo vociferously objected, complaining that it would “would paralyze the financial sector.”

Cuomo’s vindictiveness would impact New Yorkers throughout the crisis. According to a 2024 review of pandemic response put out by the city government, Cuomo’s “strained relationship” with De Blasio meant his “administration was reluctant to share data with the city and often refused to give advance warning of policy changes and new directives,” which “hindered the city’s ability to plan and respond to the pandemic effectively” — like when the state government restricted the city’s access to state hopital capacity data, limiting its ability to track the pandemic’s impact on hospitals and provide the needed support.

The chaos he caused extended to the eventual vaccine rollout, which was severely constrained by the complicated, strict rules Cuomo put in place. It also saw the then governor both defy federal guidelines to prioritize farmworkers and delay vaccinating inmates in the state’s prisons and jails, which a judge called “arbitrary and capricious” and with “no acceptable excuse.” As a result, hundreds of thousands of shots sat around unused or were even thrown out, and New York, the epicenter of the pandemic for many months, lagged in vaccinating its people, even trailing Ron DeSantis’s Florida at one point.

Even when Cuomo relented to pressure to change course, it added to the bedlam: after threatening million-dollar fines on providers who vaccinated the wrong people first, he suddenly threatened them with $100,000 fines if they didn’t vaccinate more people. Nine different health officials quit, whispering complaints about Cuomo’s smothering leadership style. A taxpayer-funded report that whitewashed part of his record nevertheless concluded that Cuomo had “almost immediately disregarded and overruled” the state’s wealth of preexisting knowledge about and policies for dealing with emergencies in favor of his “top-down, centralized” approach, which it called “a significant and unnecessary mistake.”

Then there was that nursing home scandal. With New York hospitals overrun by sick and dying people, Cuomo signed a directive forcing nursing homes to take in patients recovering from COVID-19, creating the perfect opportunity for a virus most lethal to elderly people to spread among them in a contained space. Both statistical and anecdotal data showed the policy led to a surge in infections and deaths. No less than four separate inquiries and several pieces of reporting have since established that Cuomo and his aides then rushed to cover up the true death toll in nursing homes.

In the midst of the hurricane of scandal, it was easy to forget that the reason the policy had been deemed necessary in the first place, to free up beds in overrun hospitals, was because of the decade’s worth of health care cuts Cuomo had pushed, which had left the state and city woefully unprepared to deal with the pandemic. Not that it deterred him from making billions of dollars more cuts to Medicaid in the middle of the pandemic anyway.

Fortunately for Cuomo, he was immune to the kind of shame that anyone else responsible for such a lethal debacle would have felt. He happily took $5.1 million to churn out a book lauding himself and the “leadership” he had provided during the pandemic — which, as the final, unethical cherry on top, he improperly used state resources to write and promote.

4. The Many, Many Corruption Scandals

A lot of the criticism of Cuomo’s mayoral campaign has centered on the large amount of real estate and other corporate money backing him. It’s a fair critique, since the joke about Cuomo’s time as governor is that he ran on and continually promised to clean up Albany, while his administration was constantly mired in the dirt he was meant to be cleaning up.

Cuomo’s very first effort as governor — which saw him steamroll unions to make severe budget cuts — was made possible by an onslaught of millions of dollars’ worth of ads from the Committee to Save New York (CSNY), a group bankrolled by these same interests and whose creation he had personally urged, just twenty of whose donors raised $12 million for it. Those included the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), the powerful real estate industry trade group, which is today again backing Cuomo as it fights tenant protections and rent caps.

Even though CSNY was clearly lobbying on Cuomo’s behalf, its definition as a “nonprofit” meant it was legally able to keep its donors secret (“We don’t have to report it, so why tell you?” REBNY’s then president told the New York Times). Nevertheless, some of those donors ended up coming to light anyway, including gambling company Genting, whose $2 million donation came just weeks before Cuomo came out for legalizing casinos and unveiled a closed-door agreement he had signed with the company to build a convention center and casino in Queens. (That plan from a private business was another thing that Cuomo said he was in no place to “second-guess.”)

The whole thing loomed over Cuomo’s first effort to “clean up Albany” through the creation of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) in 2011, a nominally independent ethics watchdog that seemed suspiciously not all that independent. Those suspicions were soon vindicated when the lobbying rule it ended up creating conveniently exempted CSNY from having to disclose its donors, only for the group to just as conveniently shut up shop soon after.

The whole affair was a preview of the more infamous instance of Cuomo quashing an “independent” anti-corruption initiative he had started: his gutting of the Moreland Commission. Created in summer 2013, it took just two months for Cuomo’s office to step in and tell the commission to back off because it had subpoenaed a firm that had him as a client. It was the first of many times Cuomo or an aide would pressure the commission to stop looking into groups politically connected to him, including CSNY and REBNY, whose president had, they found, written an unusually frank memo telling real estate titans that their “future ability to adopt favorable legislation, stop terrible legislation, or modify legislation to limit the pain to our industry” rested on them giving more money to Democrats.

In the end, Cuomo simply shuttered the commission nine months into its eighteen-month long tenure. After trumpeting upon setting the commission up that it “clearly has the legal authority to look at anything they want to look at — the governor, the attorney general, the comptroller,” Cuomo now claimed that by definition he “can’t interfere with it because it is mine. It is controlled by me.”

Then came the corruption prosecutions. In 2016, three Cuomo officials — two of them longtime top aides, including a man he once called his “father’s third son” — were indicted and, eventually, convicted of a massive bribery scheme that involved a slew of Cuomo’s donors and his revitalization program for Upstate New York. It was a “profoundly sad situation” for him, Cuomo said. “I hold my administration to the highest level of integrity,” he insisted. Even so, he refused to stop taking money from firms trying to win contracts from his administration.

That decision would come at the cost of years of more accusations that he was running a nakedly pay-to-play operation. But it was a cost Cuomo was happy to pay, evading donation limits and capitalizing off the campaign finance loophole he promised to close but never did, to amass intimidating war chests that terrified political foes. Little has changed, as Cuomo maxes out his mayoral campaign coffers and benefits off independent expenditures from donors that he, as mayor, will have to take on, regulate, or do business with.

After All That

All this is just a brief list of the misgovernance and scandals that have defined Cuomo’s career. It’s a list that helps explain why, for a front-runner who has way outraised his rivals, the former governor’s favorability rating among New York City voters is surprisingly anemic.

It’s hard to believe someone who has done all this could simply disappear for a few years and run for office as if none of it had ever happened. And maybe they can’t: Cuomo’s once insurmountable lead over socialist state assembly member Zohran Mamdani has drastically shrunk in the past few weeks as the race enters its home stretch. New York City voters are about to show the country if everyone really does get a third act in politics — or, more accurately, if having influence and power means you can more or less get away with anything.