Trump as foil disappears from Andrew Cuomo's rebooted New York mayoral bid

NBC News

6 days ago

Andrew Cuomo framed himself as President Donald Trump's foil during the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, adamant that his past record standing up to Trump as governor positioned him as the party's best choice to defend the city during Trump's second term.
But as the former governor reboots his campaign for a third-party general election bid, after losing the Democratic primary to state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Trump is taking a back seat.
In about a half-dozen interviews conducted in his first few days as a general election candidate, Cuomo has hardly referenced Trump, pivoting questions about the president back to the race at hand.
Instead, Cuomo and his campaign are framing him as more concerned about policy and campaigning across New York City — after criticism that his primary campaign was too closed off to the media and that his opponent drew his strength from meeting voters where they are, both physically and on key issues like affordability.
With 16 weeks to go until Election Day, Cuomo is making it clear he wants to run this race differently.
Cuomo framed the Trump presidency as a unique threat to New York City's well-being during the Democratic primary, with his campaign describing the president as 'at the city's gates' in a campaign ad that highlighted Trump's decision to call National Guard troops into California. He ad went on to say that 'we need someone experienced to slam them shut.'
Addressing a crowd at the National Action Network. a group helped by civil rights activists and MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton, weeks before the election, Cuomo hit Trump at the top of his remarks as an 'existential threat' who is 'worse than he was in his first term,' taking personal credit for Trump never sending federal troops to the city in 2020.
That message was typical of one of the key points Cuomo hit on the stump and in debates.
Then, when Cuomo announced plans to run in the general election with a social media video last week, Trump didn't receive a direct mention. A promise to 'take on anyone who stands in the way' of the city's prosperity could have been a reference to the president, but it could have also been a veiled attack at his general election rivals.
Trump virtually never came up in the high-profile media interviews Cuomo did in the past week. When reporters referenced Trump's recent comments about the race (he said Cuomo should 'stay in' because he has a 'good shot' at winning), Cuomo used the comments to criticize his mayoral opponents, with a brief wave at the anti-Trump message he put at the center of the campaign during the primary.
'We have a long history together, the president and myself, we have a lot of back and forth. I fight for New York against Washington, I fought for New York against President Trump,' Cuomo told WABC-TV of New York, framing Trump's comments as simply 'his analysis of the race.'
Most of Cuomo's announcement video and interviews focused on policy and strategy, dripping with implicit and explicit acknowledgments that he made mistakes during his primary campaign and won't make them again.
Cuomo's campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the change in strategy.
'Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that the Democratic primary did not go the way I had hoped,' Cuomo says in the video, amid video of him shaking hands with people in the city.
Going on to criticize Mamdani's 'slick slogans, but no real solutions,' Cuomo says he's focused on a city with 'lower rent, safer streets, where buying your first home is once again possible, where child care won't bankrupt you.' And in interview after interview, Cuomo pitched proposals for issues such as lowering rent, building more housing, addressing public transportation and other proposals completely divorced from the politics of clashing with the Republican president.
The focus on policy comes after many Democrats credit Mamdani's emphasis on the issue of affordability in the city, as well as his social media and engagement strategy, for his upset victory over the far more established Cuomo.
In an interview with NY1, Cuomo sought to go after Mamdani's perceived strength on the issue of affordability by panning his solutions as unrealistic.
'I agree with him on the problem — and by the way, he didn't figure out the problem,' Cuomo said, referencing the quixotic 2010 gubernatorial campaign of Jimmy McMillian, who ran against Cuomo on his slogan, 'The rent is too damn high.'
And later, he responded to a question about why he ignored the warning signs of his campaign by admitting he 'did not run a good campaign,' saying it was 'uncharacteristic' of him to run a 'very non-aggressive campaign' considering how he's been tagged as 'too aggressive, too difficult, too hostile' throughout his career because 'all the geniuses said I was way ahead for the entire campaign, so the campaign played it safe.'
'There was no inspiration to it, there wasn't enough positivity to it. But the campaign itself was just not good, not good in aggressively communicating the affirmative, or frankly, in debunking the simplicity of his solutions,' he said. 'Three word solutions are great on social media. Yeah, except in reality, they are all BS.'
Shedding the anti-Trump messaging for a more policy-oriented one comes not just after a campaign Cuomo himself admitted was lacking, but it also comes as the race opens up to the wider New York City electorate facing a complicated choice between the Democrat Mamdani, two independents in Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams (who dropped out of the Democratic primary after the Trump administration dismissed federal corruption charges he had been facing) and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Basil Smikle, a New York Democratic strategist who previously served as the executive director of the state Democratic Party for a portion of Cuomo's governorship and ran Ray McGuire's 2021 mayoral campaign, told NBC News that he understands "Cuomo's need to push Donald Trump to the back burner and speak more positively about himself and what he'll do for New York," particularly amid a need to bring out "more conservative voters who would come out in a general election."
But he warned that Cuomo's decades in politics will make it harder for him to reboot.
"Are you going to lose more people than you gain by not attacking Trump, by trying to be too cute by half and say: 'I Want people to get to know [me] better?' We know you, we know you were governor, we know why you resigned. What is it about Cuomo 2.0 that makes him a better, more relatable candidate?" Smikle said.
Sam Raskin, a New York Democratic strategist who worked for Democratic mayoral hopeful Scott Stringer in the primary, told NBC News that while both the 'text and subtext' of Cuomo's launch video show that he recognizes he needs to embark on a different strategy this time, that it remains to be seen whether the campaign addresses the issues with the 'substance' too, because Mamdani didn't just connect with voters because of his style.
'Cuomo is adjusting in certain ways but I have yet to see an overall vision and an overall idea of what exactly Andrew Cuomo is going to do for New Yorkers and what exactly he is going to deliver," he said.
Mamdani and his campaign have responded to the reset by accusing Cuomo and his campaign of imitation, needling his comments about housing affordability and arguing that voters won't buy any reset.
'What we found is that New Yorkers knew those answers three weeks ago, they will know those answers in November,' Mamdani said during a rally with a labor union shortly after Cuomo's announcement, discussing pension issues, according to video from a New York Daily News reporter reposted on social media by the candidate's campaign.
The schedule demands of having to reboot the campaign so quickly after the late June primary could also be an issue for Cuomo, added Raskin, the Democratic strategist.
"Not a lot of time has passed between election night, when we saw him last, and the new and improved Andrew Cuomo out on the street," he said.