The inside story of Andrew Cuomo's campaign collapse

CNN

5 hours ago

Another conference call. This was what strategy looked like on Andrew Cuomo's mayoral campaign: A small circle of aides and advisers listening to longtime aide Melissa DeRosa, who denied working on his campaign in public but whom all involved knew was running things, as she pressed them about early voting numbers showing the Zohran Mamdani surge was real.
Some felt scolded. They all felt frustrated. A few raised the same point they had been pleading for weeks and months: We need to get him out more.
'He's doing a lot,' DeRosa said. 'He's doing as much as he can.'
The call less than two weeks before primary day, described to CNN by three of the people who participated, was one of many moments of a campaign that soared in its first few weeks, agonizingly ground down everyone involved, then finished with a spectacular flop. Cuomo ended up conceding to a person he had long dismissed as an upstart who talked a lot, someone as young as his daughters with a fraction of his government experience.
Mamdani's historic expansion of the electorate, his tapping into the hunger for a leftward lurch and fresh voice, defied almost every poll and expert's expectation. A month before the June 24 election, one veteran progressive operative told CNN that Mamdani's decisive army of volunteers was composed of naifs 'who thought they could door-knock their way to the revolution.'
But all but a few involved with the Cuomo campaign acknowledge, at least privately, how much they did wrong. The former governor came off constantly clueless about intricacies of the city and its politics. And despite what DeRosa said, he would call a few short appearances a full schedule and avoided interviews or unscripted interactions with voters, leaving him vulnerable to Mamdani's go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone strategy.
CNN spoke to a dozen Cuomo aides and advisers, along with another dozen operatives and officials working in and around the race. Many were granted anonymity to discuss internal meetings and private conversations. They privately single out mistakes that should have been visible at the time and point fingers over who got what wrong how.
'You are not going to turn Andrew Cuomo into the new Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo is Andrew Cuomo. He's exactly the person he always was,' one adviser told CNN. 'He was not going to build alliances. Not clear he could anyway. He wasn't all of a sudden going to be warm and friendly. And his operation wasn't all of a sudden going to be warm and friendly.'
Cuomo launched his campaign in March with huge advantages.
He faced a splintered primary field and a short race to June 24. He could run on his experience with President Donald Trump, arguing in a Trumpian way that he alone could deal with the pressure that the second-term Republican and fellow Queens native was already exerting on New York.
Operating within a city campaign finance system with spending caps, DeRosa wasn't the only longtime Cuomo aide pitching in expertise for free. Chris Coffey, who had managed Andrew Yang's 2021 mayoral campaign, had his firm pay for early polls while helping bring in key Orthodox Jewish support and landing Mike Bloomberg's endorsement, which the billionaire former mayor followed with over $8 million to the super PAC Fix the City.
Fix the City would ultimately spend at least $22 million just through early June but was still blamed by the Cuomo campaign for not going more negative on Mamdani, who believed that would have elevated Mamdani. (Cuomo was convinced going after Mamdani more himself would have reinforced the sense of him as a bully.)
Lording power over politicians and the press was the Cuomo way when he was governor. His close aides thought they could go right back to yelling and cursing and making demands of endorsers and reporters alike, who tended to respond by treating Cuomo as a menace and Mamdani as a fascination.
One adviser regretfully compared how New Yorkers pick their mayor to testing, smelling, squeezing fruit at the store.
'You have to be able to touch it,' the adviser said. 'It's not going to happen from behind a glass box.'
But Cuomo didn't want to do many events because he thought he'd be interrupted by protesters and hounded by reporters. He avoided interviews because he thought he'd just get asked about the scandals that chased him from the governor's office. He regularly canceled plans for both at the last minute.
When Cuomo released a housing plan determined to have been written partly by AI, or when his campaign's mistakes led to problems with matching funds from the city campaign finance board, the coverage was vicious.
He would not apologize for Covid-19 nursing home deaths or the accusations that he harassed women while governor.
The people who didn't like him, Cuomo would tell people, were a 'lost cause.' Nothing he was going to say or do would matter. He certainly wasn't going to apologize or offer a 'sorry you feel that way.'
Some blame themselves for not confronting him to do more to make amends. DeRosa, who most people involved thought was best positioned to reach Cuomo, does not. In fact, she told CNN, before asking to speak off the record, 'I didn't really work on the campaign.'
Told about this response, several other aides said it encapsulated what they had gotten used to. Though DeRosa was not paid, everyone else who worked on the campaign told CNN she was calling shots on every major decision, the main conduit for the candidate's micromanaging, a key part of Cuomo's triumphs and failures for more than two decades, and a public figure in her own right who had once called Cuomo 'the Tom Brady of New York politics.'
Multiple union leaders came away from conversations with Cuomo feeling like they had to endorse or he'd exact revenge in contract negotiations when he was inevitably mayor. State legislators, whose support Cuomo racked up mostly to be able to tout that he'd turned around the very people who'd called on him to resign, were rarely followed up with and largely waved off. In the final weeks, they were calling with warnings that Cuomo's campaign was invisible and that Mamdani's people seemed everywhere.
'He was surrounded by a lot of people who were probably protecting him,' said state Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who also runs the powerful Brooklyn Democratic Party and was given the honorary title of senior political adviser to the campaign. 'My definition of ground game was very different from theirs.'
Bichotte Hermelyn said most of the conversations she had with Cuomo as she prepared to endorse him two weeks after he launched his campaign were listening to him talk about how he would beat incumbent Mayor Eric Adams in the fall.
But already back then, she sent a message to Mamdani, her colleague in the Assembly, telling him he was doing phenomenally.
By May 28, just under a month before the election, the race had changed.
Mamdani had started to catch progressive interest and small-dollar contributions from his sunny message and videos promising a rent freeze, city-operated grocery stores and tax increases for millionaires. He had become Cuomo's chief rival, a three-term state assemblyman half Cuomo's age and a democratic socialist in the vein of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime Cuomo foil.
Cuomo held a rally at a union hall in midtown Manhattan to try to out-progressive the progressives by announcing his support for a $20 minimum wage, a way of reminding people that he had raised the minimum wage as governor.
Some aides felt the walls closing in on them, even as public polls still had Cuomo well ahead. But still most were sticking with the strung-out stick-to-itiveness that had them repeating what they were hearing directly from him or DeRosa: the polls! the polls! the polls! is how more than one campaign aide described his validation for not changing anything.
A few old friends and allies whom Cuomo would call for his famously marathon monologues tried to break through. Beating Mamdani's positions and issues was going to take positions and issues of his own, they said, not just drum-beating that he was the only competent manager around. He'd been secretary of housing and urban development – maybe talk about housing? He's passed gay marriage and strict gun control laws before almost anyone else — those might be worth mentioning more. His pinnacle of success and celebrity was being a hero of Covid-19 before investigations into the nursing home deaths, so much that there were whispers he might swap in for Joe Biden as the 2020 presidential nominee — what about some events with pandemic survivors or business owners he helped?
Cuomo hemmed, hawed, made no changes. He hammered on public safety and a city in crisis, even as Mamdani's affordability talk was clearly catching on. He wouldn't stop sneering at the left. And he stayed on antisemitism, the issue he had identified as his own ever since the proud Italian had started his 'Never Again, NOW!' group last year, collecting checks and never doing much of substance to combat hatred for Jews or build up the support for Israel he said was so important.
Some of his own aides suspected then that his focus on Mamdani's criticism of Israel wasn't working and perhaps backfiring.
'So much energy was expended around it — and for what?' said one campaign aide. 'We got lost on that on an issue that, while important for a lot of people, if they can't afford their rent, they're going to go with the guy talking about their rent.'
The person playing Mamdani in Cuomo's debate prep sessions was another member of the inner circle: Rita Glavin, the attorney who has worked to undermine the accusations of the women who had come out against Cuomo while governor.
Cuomo was less concerned with Glavin's acted-out responses than ideas he had, like holding up three fingers to show the three bills Mamdani had passed since getting elected to the Assembly in 2020: It means he didn't even do his job, Cuomo would say. A government guy, the lack of work product offended him.
Don't do it, aides told him. Voters don't care.
In the debate, Cuomo didn't do the fingers, but he did mock the three bills. Then later in the same debate, he did it again. Then he had the point put in the script of one of his last ads.
His aides tried over and over to get Cuomo to say Mamdani's name correctly. Was it a mental block or passive-aggressive disrespect that made it come out 'Mandani' or 'Mandamni' every time? No luck.
Looking back, Cuomo is proud that he didn't snap more given all the attempts to needle him. But when City Comptroller Brad Lander in their second debate asked him to answer a man whose father died in a nursing home during the pandemic, Cuomo responded defensively, mentioning that Lander was born in St. Louis and ticking through facts that he said exonerated him. No sympathy, even when saying the words that he was sorry the man's father had died.
Aides watching were too resigned to be apoplectic. Mamdani's response telling Cuomo how to say his name was already going viral.
The next day, Cuomo was working through more of his phone calls.
'What are people saying on Twitter?' he asked one of the people on the other end.
New York's ranked-choice voting system in the primary lets voters list up to five candidates, prioritizing alliances between campaigns. Mamdani and Lander pushed their bases to rank the other candidate on their ballots. Cuomo didn't bother.
He was enraged by the way Lander had made such a focus of torching him, making himself what the former governor would call a 'kamikaze pilot' against him. And Cuomo was wary that if Mamdani collapsed, his support could rush to Lander.
Cuomo had been in the race for under two weeks when Shontell Smith, his political director, called the team of her friend and fellow mayoral candidate, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, and suggested both a non-aggression pact and a cross-endorsement deal. Myrie said no.
In the second debate, longshot candidate Whitney Tilson said he would rank Cuomo No. 2. Cuomo did not return the offer. How, he figured, would he credibly say Mamdani didn't have the experience to be mayor while lining up with Tilson, who had spent no time in government?
Two days after the first debate, state Sen. Jessica Ramos suddenly dropped out and backed Cuomo. Ramos, who had called for him to resign as governor and labeled him a 'corrupt bully' earlier in the campaign, ripped Mamdani during the debate as inexperienced beyond his flashy videos.
Cuomo didn't say much nice about Ramos at their joint event. He didn't bring her on the trail with him or deploy her as a surrogate. When he went to vote on Tuesday, he didn't bother putting her on a ranked-choice ballot. He announced he had voted only for his own name and no others. She dropped out, Cuomo thought, so why would he say any of his supporters should rank her?
'This is such ingratitude,' Ramos told a friend after seeing that. 'This is so classless.'
Cuomo's team tried once more in the final days to make a cross-endorsement deal with Scott Stringer, the former comptroller with an Upper West Side base. Stringer didn't take the deal and ended up getting just over 1% in the first round.
Cuomo and his closest allies were combative to the end. When asked by CNN on Tuesday morning what Cuomo's schedule was for primary day beyond a brief appearance to vote, communications director Rich Azzopardi said he didn't know and that Cuomo was 'in his car.'
As bad as things had gone, Cuomo largely hit or exceeded the Election Day numbers he thought were enough and probably would have been four years ago. He was running 6 points ahead of Eric Adams four years ago in the first round of ranked-choice voting. He dominated on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan and working-class neighborhoods across the outer boroughs.
Through 8 p.m. on primary night, Cuomo himself was feeling like it might work. Their model was proving out. Then the returns started arriving at 9 p.m.
Mamdani hadn't just eaten into their base, as some aides and advisers had been warning to little avail, but now the model was useless. One top campaign source argued Mamdani changed how majority-Black districts would vote by turning out so many 'White gentrifiers.'
'Had we run a perfect campaign, I'm not sure the outcome would have been different,' Coffey, the volunteer top operative, told CNN. 'There are always things you wish could do differently, but Andrew, Melissa and the senior leadership team (me included) helped bring on board most big unions, biggest group of electeds, every business group, top-notch donors and supporters like Mike Bloomberg, mended fences with and turned out Hasidic Jews, helped every editorial board to be for us or against our opposition. We came up short. You have to respect Zohran's team and movement.'
Cuomo has been making aides and advisers apoplectic (not to mention opposing candidates laugh) as he continues to say he did everything right, or at least that there was nothing he could have done differently.
Several who served in senior positions on the campaign said to CNN that they didn't see any viable path for Cuomo without approaching the race totally differently. One adviser suggested the staff needs to change or be replaced but it was ultimately on Cuomo being willing to change himself.
'If he's not, then he shouldn't run,' the adviser said.
But a few aides and advisers are urging him on. Asked whether the financial support exists to reload the pro-Cuomo super PAC in the fall, a person familiar with the group's operations said bluntly, 'The answer's yes.'
His opponents would be Mamdani, who still elicits deep concerns from establishment and moderate Democrats; Adams, a former Democrat who is widely unpopular and had his corruption case dropped by Trump's Department of Justice; and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican seen as a marginal candidate. There will be no ranked-choice voting in November. Whoever wins a plurality will be mayor.
Cuomo has been saying this race wasn't about his own redemption. Few believed that.
Either way, redemption didn't happen when the primary votes came in.
'It hasn't happened yet,' a top campaign source corrected in an interview. 'There's still a general election.'