How Cuomo Plans To Seize The Adams-less Moment

NEW YORK — Andrew Cuomo got exactly what he wanted: incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped his reelection bid, making the former governor the sole middle-of-the-road Democrat vying to run the nation’s largest city.

But Cuomo only has five weeks to capitalize in his uphill battle to defeat Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. Whether he can is still a longshot, and the trick of overcoming that remains in the how.

Cuomo staff and allies said Monday that more money has begun flowing into his campaign and supportive super PACs since Adams bowed out, a sign they believe will help position Cuomo as the only candidate with experience against a 33-year-old democratic socialist and a subway vigilante talk show host.

The latter of those two is Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who’s now facing stepped-up pressure to suspend his campaign to further narrow the field in favor of Cuomo, whose team says they’ve given up on that effort. Instead, they’re focused on getting voters to view the election as a binary choice between him and Mamdani, no matter how many other candidates are on the ballot. You don’t have to like Cuomo — you just have to vote for him, their thinking goes.

But the level of palace intrigue surrounding the GOP candidate could end up complicating the former governor’s plans.

“Cuomo needs every day he can get to be a one-on-one with Mamdani,” said Chris Coffey, who heads up the consulting firm Tusk Strategies and advised Cuomo during the primary. “The more focus that’s put on whether Sliwa will drop out, the more it freezes the race, freezes money and freezes the news cycle.”

To what degree the focus will be on Sliwa dropping out or a Mamdani-Cuomo tête-à-tête remains unknown. But the tension between those two themes began playing out Monday with calls ratcheting up for Sliwa to bow out. The Daily News called for him to do just that the day after Adams announced he would do the same. And Sliwa’s long-time employer, billionaire John Catsimatidis, hinted that the time might soon be coming for the beret-wearing Sliwa to reconsider his options. Cuomo, instead, focused his attention squarely on Mamdani, demanding that the democratic socialist make good on the apology he said he owed the NYPD for calling the department racist. For his part, Mamdani honed in on the former governor, holding a press conference calling attention to cuts to a state housing program under Cuomo’s tenure as governor — a charge Cuomo’s team denied.

Adams getting out wasn’t a surprise, and pollsters already tested the field without him. A September Marist Poll showed Cuomo only slightly closed his 21-point gap with Mamdani with Adams out of the field — cutting the margin down to 16 points, with Sliwa still pulling 18 percent of the vote.

But the hope of the former governor’s team is that the polls don’t capture the real world momentum shift of Adams getting out of the race. “It’s the first break he’s gotten,” said a Cuomo ally, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the campaign’s chances.

Cuomo wants a clear lane to take on Mamdani, warning that his hard-left platform will hurt the city. The goal is to leverage those attacks on the state lawmaker into enthusiasm and campaign cash — a strategy that didn’t work during the closed party primary with a different universe of voters. The former governor needs every break he can get ahead of Election Day and is seizing on Adams’ dropping out to change the narrative of the race and make a skeptical public think he’s got a shot. Mamdani, on the other hand, has said Adams dropping out doesn’t change anything.

“I don’t see a big shift to Andrew,” said Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and Democratic pundit who’s known Cuomo for years. “But it’s Andrew's job to prove us wrong.”

In August, with Adams still in the race, Cuomo told the crowd at one of his political fundraisers in the Hamptons that he was counting on President Donald Trump to help make the case that voters should ignore Sliwa and that he was the only realistic choice to defeat Mamdani.

Trump followed through. He called Sliwa “not exactly prime time” in an interview this month on Fox News and joked that the animal-loving candidate wanted to bring “thousands of cats” into the mayor’s residence.

On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that a Mamdani victory would help Republicans and threatened to withhold all federal funds from the city if the democratic socialist is elected. That could help Cuomo in some quarters — underlining his argument that a Mamdani win would hurt the city financially and bringing to mind his debate-stage boast that Trump would go through Mamdani “like a hot knife through butter.” But it won’t help him with voters who loathe Trump and are uneasy with the president involving himself in the race.

Cuomo predicated his candidacy on Adams being removed from the race — and his allies stoked the expectation the mayor, dealing with low poll numbers and spiraling corruption allegations, wouldn’t be a factor. Both men share an overlapping base of older, moderate blue-collar voters, Black and Jewish New Yorkers and outerborough residents — a coalition that propelled Adams to the mayoralty in 2021. They also share a clutch of wealthy donors who fear Mamdani’s candidacy represents an existential crisis for the city.

There’s frustration among some New York City Democrats who pressed the mayor to leave the race weeks ago in order to consolidate opposition against Mamdani amid his struggles to win over moderate-to-conservative voters who comprised Adams’ support.

“Adams took too long and his name will appear on the ballot, and that, no matter what, will confuse many people,” said the Rev. Ruben Diaz, Sr., a socially conservative Democrat and former state and city lawmaker. “There will be votes that people waste because they’ll vote for Adams. On the other hand, yes, I believe Cuomo has a better chance now. I believe many people will move to Cuomo’s side.”

That’s already happening, to some extent. A group of Jewish leaders in Crown Heights, Brooklyn who had been torn between Adams and Cuomo endorsed the former governor Monday morning. Other Hasidic groups are up for grabs, as well as the law enforcement unions that endorsed Adams' bid. Cuomo would now be in line to scoop up their support.

Former Democratic Gov. David Paterson, who endorsed Cuomo’s primary bid only to switch to Adams in the general election, said Monday he is once again supporting his successor in Albany to become mayor.

Paterson expects people — including deep-pocketed donors — to also return to Cuomo’s fold.

“Money will be following him. He’s a terrific organizer, and I think he can get a lot of people to come back,” Paterson said. “A lot of people may have given up on him. He was still grappling with the fact that he lost the primary. Now he gets something to go in his favor.”

Adams scuttled his primary bid in April, a move that did little to affect Mamdani’s eventual — and shocking — 13-point victory over Cuomo.

Polling suggests Adams’ departure from the race alone will do little to change the dynamics.

His paltry share of the vote — which has been hovering around 10 percent — will not do much to assist Cuomo, since not all of those voters will migrate over to the former governor.

And most polls have shown voters have fully formed opinions about all the candidates, with Mamdani the only one to boast a positive approval rating.

A recent survey from Fox News along with Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research found half of likely voters had a positive opinion of Mamdani with only 4 percent unaware of the frontrunner. Cuomo, meanwhile, had a 45 percent approval — underwater but better than his rating during the Democratic primary — with only 1 percent of voters unaware of the former governor. That same survey found that Mamdani supporters were more enthusiastic to vote compared to Cuomo voters by a margin of 63-32. More than 80 percent of Mamdani voters were certain to pull the lever for the democratic socialist, while only 65 of Cuomo supporters felt the same.

Mamdani’s upset win also yielded support from crucial New York powerbrokers and union leaders — many of whom previously backed Cuomo’s failed bid. Yet some Democrats remain on the sidelines.

Rep. Greg Meeks, the leader of the Queens Democratic Party, will meet with Mamdani this week — their first one-on-one sit down since the June primary. In an interview, Meeks hesitated to say whether the race had fundamentally changed with Adams’ departure.

“Mr. Mamdani has clearly run a great campaign,” he said. “There’s issues that I agree with him on, and there are some that I do not. Just like other candidates, too. Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo are better than the Republican alternative.”

But as much as Cuomo tries to ignore that alternative, Sliwa remains a factor.

“Adams dropping out changed the psychology of the race with some movement, and that may bring in money and consolidate support,” said political strategist J.C. Polanco. “But Mr. Sliwa is still the elephant in the room.”