Andrew Cuomo was inevitable – until he wasn’t

As the polls closed in the 2025 general election for New York City mayor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo found himself in a position he had rarely before been in: as a real, bona fide underdog.

He used to be – and was used to being – the top dog. But after his shocking loss to now-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary, many of the institutional power players and advisers who had flocked to him earlier in the year deserted him even as he decided to stay in the race as an independent candidate.

The polls at the start of the primary had Cuomo in the lead. Despite having been forced out of office less than four years earlier, he had near-universal name recognition. A relentlessly shifting news cycle had softened the usually career-ending scandals that might have kept lesser politicians out of the limelight forever. And the Cuomo name still held power as unions, lawmakers and political power players lined up behind his comeback bid.

But no one expected Mamdani’s ascendancy. Faced with his first real electoral fight in decades, Cuomo’s traditional playbook failed him, and he seemed incapable of adapting to the sheer ground power of the Mamdani campaign. By the time he tried to shift gears for the general election, the damage was already done, and Cuomo struggled to rehabilitate himself with his long-held power so thoroughly dispatched.

Former advisers, close aides and campaign staff painted a picture of Cuomo as a classic Greek tragic hero, undone by the very pride and ambition that helped him rise to power in the first place. And like any good tragedy, the death knell reverberated generationally, marking the end – and perhaps permanently marring – a once well-respected political dynasty.

He was Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario Cuomo, New York political powerhouse – and he was inevitable. Until he wasn’t.

The year was 1977, and Mario Cuomo was ready to try his hand at running for mayor. He had served a short time as secretary of state after a failed bid for lieutenant governor three years earlier, but the storied legacy of future Gov. Mario Cuomo had not yet taken off.

His son Andrew, then a young man of 19, played a leading role in his father’s mayoral campaign despite his youth and relative inexperience in the political ring. The crowded Democratic primary was bruising, with Mario ultimately losing to Ed Koch in a runoff. But the elder Cuomo decided to stay in it – much like his son would do decades later – and challenge Koch as an independent.

The race was infamously contentious, and the relationship between Mario and Koch was permanently damaged after yard signs reportedly appeared urging voters to “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo,” a reference to Koch’s then-closeted homosexuality. Both Cuomos denied having any hand in the attack, and Mario strongly denounced it, but the prevailing rumor has long been that Andrew Cuomo created the offensive slogan.

Despite the initial setback of his unsuccessful mayoral run, Mario won the race to be lieutenant governor in 1978. Four years later, Andrew served as his father’s campaign manager during Mario’s first successful campaign for governor. The younger Cuomo worked for his father during the first of his three terms, beginning his reputation as a hardball political operator. Although the elder Cuomo ultimately lost his bid for an historic fourth term to Republican George Pataki, he left office a beloved Democratic institution. The Cuomo family had risen among the ranks of New York political royalty.

Andrew Cuomo hopped around for several years after a stint in his father’s administration, before then-President Bill Clinton appointed him as an assistant secretary in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993. Cuomo took over the department in 1997 and led it until Clinton’s departure from office in 2001. He would make much of his tenure at HUD decades later when he ran for mayor to prove his chops when it came to building housing.

Andrew Cuomo’s first attempt at elected office ended poorly. He started as the favorite in the Democratic primary for governor in 2002, polling well ahead of then-state Comptroller H. Carl McCall. But a well-publicized gaffe criticizing former Gov. George Pataki’s handling of 9/11 and the awkward racial dynamics of a young, upstart white man looking to overtake an established Black Democratic politician led Cuomo to drop out of the race shortly before the election, after it became clear he would lose. 

Cuomo finally won elected office himself in 2006, when he became the state’s attorney general. But his true ascension began in 2010 when he won his first race for governor, after successfully muscling then-Gov. David Paterson out of the race. A former longtime aide said that the 2010 election was when Cuomo was ideologically and policywise at his most “natural,” despite his later reputation of adopting positions that best suited him politically. He ran on a promise of bringing back government order at a time of intense disorder, of cleaning up the bureaucracy, and didn’t shy away from his criticisms of the powerful unions which he would rely heavily on years later in his attempted comeback. “He was just in a better space, I think, and more comfortable with that,” the aide said.

The aide, like most former Cuomo advisers who spoke to City & State, requested anonymity to speak candidly about a man known for his vindictiveness and who may still call upon some of his past staff for advice or favors.

Cuomo quickly settled into his new role as New York’s executive, almost immediately racking up one of his landmark achievements by negotiating the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state in 2011. He achieved another tenure-defining success in 2013 when he ushered in the SAFE Act, establishing broad new gun control laws. Making good on a campaign promise, Cuomo also stewarded the first on-time budgets in years. “Andrew Cuomo’s core strength is he can identify these vectors of power in government, he can identify them and use them to accomplish an objective,” said one former top aide who has been in and out of Cuomo’s immediate orbit for nearly two decades.

Even back then, those who worked with and around Cuomo acknowledged the shrewd political calculus inherent to the man, and the inherent difficulty of working for the demanding and at times cruel boss for too long. “During that first term, there was this thought that Andrew could run for president one day,” the first-term adviser said. “So his intensity was almost accepted, because it was like, ‘Yeah, well, like nothing can go wrong because he might want to run for president.’” Camaraderie formed among staff, who could feel proud about the work they were doing in Cuomo’s quest to grow his power because his machinations resulted in policy beneficial to the state.

When Cuomo became governor, Republicans still controlled the state Senate, while Democrats controlled the Assembly – and Cuomo shrewdly pitted them against each other. “You had a compliant Republican majority that was just looking to survive as long as possible,” said a first-term adviser. “So if they could cut a deal (with) Andrew and then he would work with them and do deals with them and not go after them in their elections.”

Democrats won a majority of state Senate seats in 2012, but a breakaway faction of Democrats known as the Independent Democratic Conference continued to work with Republicans – a situation that suited Cuomo just fine, but enraged progressives, who accused the governor of undermining the Democratic Party.

In 2018, progressive primary insurgents defeated many IDC members and handed control of the state Senate back to Democrats. Soon, years of simmering animosity between Cuomo and Democratic state lawmakers were pushed to the forefront as Cuomo found himself competing for influence over state policy. A unified state Legislature began flaunting its power to advance more progressive priorities than Cuomo would have normally entertained. “This was a direct challenge to his power,” said one of Cuomo’s former longtime advisers. “His political coming of age was during the Clinton administration, the triangulation approach to politics, and that's what he was comfortable with, where he could play both sides off of each other to get what he wanted.”

The beloved son of a Democratic Party icon could no longer claim to be New York’s Democrat-in-chief. “The question I would pose to students, knowing history, is look at history and opine on whether Andrew Cuomo was a real Democrat or not,” said state Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, a frequent Cuomo critic. “Someone who had come from a legendary lineage (in) the Democratic Party, but spent much of his time supporting and appealing to Republicans, whether it was in the state Senate for the better part of a decade, keeping his own party out of power, or in this mayoral election.”

Over time, Cuomo lost his tight grip on the state’s power. “I think he became less disciplined,” said the first-term aide. The makeup of Cuomo’s inner circle also changed.  Some of those who have known and advised Cuomo for years suggested that by his third term, the governor had lost many of his best staffers who could manage some of his worst instincts. Others said it didn’t matter who was around Cuomo at that point, as he would inevitably do whatever he wanted in the end. But most agreed that he had begun leaving a toxic trail behind him based on how he treated staff and other people that was becoming harder to contain. “He was so fucking competitive, Andrew Cuomo, that he was always trying to one-up everybody in every single state, with every single politician,” said a former campaign adviser. For example, Cuomo’s turf war with de Blasio while both were in office was legendary, and he infamously toyed with the Working Families Party in both 2014 and 2018 for criticizing him.

Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson, said that there has been “a lot of mythology” surrounding the administration, particularly around the governor’s penchant for personal grudges that would bleed into governing. “There's a lot of stuff that popped up about the end of the administration, that when it actually went through the court system and it went through any outside analysis, it turned out to be just paper,” Azzopardi said. “Same goes with a tired trope about the governor. We worked every day, 24/7, in order to make life better for New Yorkers.”

Despite setbacks, Cuomo has always been tenacious. The embarrassment of 2002 did not stop him from running for statewide office again. The botched Moreland Commission into government corruption in 2013 didn’t tarnish his reputation in a significant way. Cuomo even managed to avoid any implication in a corruption scandal that took down his top aide and longtime friend Joe Percoco, a man Mario had once called a third son. The younger Cuomo unceremoniously severed all ties with Percoco upon his indictment and prosecution.

“The guy had incredible staying power,” said former Working Families Party Executive Director Bill Lipton, with whom Cuomo frequently clashed. “He was a three-term governor, and it took multiple scandals to bring it down, so I just think the guy's unbelievably tenacious, hardworking and super dedicated. But only to power for himself.”

Those well-documented scandals around alleged sexual harassment, the handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes, subsequent accusations of covering up negative data from the pandemic and a controversial book deal ultimately forced Cuomo from office. In his resignation speech, he denied any wrongdoing but asserted that the investigations into his conduct were distracting from the work of government. “New York tough means New York loving, and I love New York, and I love you,” he said in a streamed address in 2021. “And everything I have ever done has been motivated by that love. And I would never want to be unhelpful in any way.” Had Cuomo refused to resign, he almost surely would have been impeached by the Assembly and removed from office by the state Senate.

For lesser political animals, that may have been the end. But Cuomo not-so-quietly began considering his options for returning to power almost as soon as he resigned.

The 2025 New York City mayoral election presented a perfect opportunity. The scandal-scarred Mayor Eric Adams was so vulnerable he ultimately decided not to even run in the Democratic primary. Cuomo treated the primary election as if he were running as a statewide incumbent. Influential unions fell into line immediately, in part because of his track record delivering for many of them, and in part because his name still carried weight.

“You don't want to be on the other end of the table from Andrew Cuomo after not endorsing his campaign,” said a person affiliated with the primary campaign. Elected officials who had previously called for his resignation hit the campaign trail for him. Institutional powers saw the writing on the wall. They just didn’t know that writing was done in pencil rather than permanent ink.

The meteoric rise of Zohran Mamdani on the campaign trail came as a shock to nearly everyone watching the race. No one expected the young, democratic socialist Assembly member to skyrocket in the polls with a groundswell of support through a combination of novel social media engagement and a massive field operation – least of all Cuomo. And according to those who worked with him on the campaign, Cuomo was slow to recognize the threat and slower still to adapt his strategy. “He did not have experience running in a campaign where he was not the favorite,” said one of his former longtime advisers.

While Mamdani criss-crossed the city, meeting voters in every corner of every borough, Cuomo was hard-pressed to spend time among the electorate during the primary, despite advice from those on his campaign. “If you're running for mayor, people want to hold you, touch you, yell at you,” said the person affiliated with the campaign. “And if you're not willing to do that, things can crumble very quickly … People don't want to be taken advantage of or taken for granted.”

A person involved with the campaign said Cuomo did not especially enjoy the traditional gladhanding involved in running in a local race, and he was out of practice from his long tenure in state government. “Electeds were very clear with him: If you want some type of endorsement or collaboration, you have to show us that you're going to be in the streets … You can't do this ivory tower approach,” the person said. “He said he understood. But in reality, I don't think he ever comprehended, or he just didn't care.” In short: “He got cocky.”

Azzopardi admitted the campaign made mistakes in the primary that are “easy to see in hindsight,” but denied that anyone disagreed with the general tactics employed at the time. “We did run the wrong campaign during the primary,” Azzopardi said. “We ran the right campaign during the general.”

Primary election night ended in a decisive victory for Mamdani and a crushing defeat for Cuomo. But despite the loss, the primary campaign had allowed Cuomo to somewhat rehabilitate his image. “The thing that I think no one will say out loud that everyone was proud of is that towards the end of the primary, (people) weren't calling him ‘disgraced politician Andrew Cuomo,’” said the person involved with the campaign.

Cuomo might have made a gracious exit at that point, having lost as a Democrat but reminded people of the good accomplished while he was governor.

But those who know Cuomo well knew that was never in the cards. “He's the self-gaslighter that will, to the end, deny certain truths because he is a super narcissistic person that can't admit that he made mistakes and he's screwed up, and he needs the public to understand that he's human and he's willing to do better,” said Assembly Member Ron Kim, who led the charge against Cuomo regarding his handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes. “He never had that moment of clarity with the public.”

Weeks after the primary, Cuomo announced he would continue running for mayor as an independent.  He never renounced his party, but he began courting Republican voters – the very same people who hated him while he served as governor – in the hopes of besting Mamdani. By the end, even President Donald Trump offered a begrudging endorsement of his friend-turned-foe-turned-frenemy. Cuomo denied reports that he had sought to coordinate with the president.

As he worked to win over conservatives, Cuomo associated with people who made Islamophobic comments about Mamdani – which turned off some of those who had once worked for him. The former governor himself never called Mamdani a jihadist, but he sought and proudly accepted the endorsements of City Council members who had. He didn’t directly agree with conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg’s suggestion to him that Mamdani would cheer on another 9/11, but his chuckle at the remark was a far cry from denouncing it. Azzopardi, however, called any implication that Cuomo himself was racist or Islamophobic “bullshit.”

At least Cuomo received a slightly higher vote share than his dad did in 1977 – a fact he proudly pointed out during his concession speech.

In his own election night victory speech earlier this month, Mamdani didn’t mince words when sharing his thoughts on his main opponent. “My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty,” he told supporters. “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life – and let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”

After a double-loss comeback attempt following a resignation in disgrace, it’s hard to imagine that Cuomo will get another shot at public redemption, nor that he would be jumping at the possibility of a third letdown in a row. Private life has treated him well during his years away from the political spotlight – he reportedly earned $5 million as a consultant last year alone. Short of a call to public service, or perhaps more accurately a need to remain in the political game that has been his entire life, Cuomo is hardly in want of employment in the public sector.

But Cuomo has not actually ruled anything out, and for someone with as much to prove for not just himself, but for his family name, nothing is impossible. During the annual Somos conference in Puerto Rico, which started just a day after the general election, rumors already spread like wildfire that Cuomo might explore a run for Congress in the 12th District. And after giving up the governorship before finishing his third term, quiet buzz about an attempted return to the Executive Mansion has never truly gone away.

Greek tragedies may not play out in three acts, but Cuomo surely doesn’t see himself as a tragic hero. And the race for mayor may turn out to simply be the second act in the stage play that is the Political Life and Times of Andrew Cuomo.