Andrew Cuomo Sees a City in Crisis. Do Voters?

“New York is the greatest city in the world and everything is wrong with it.”

That sounds a lot like former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, finally opening his long-anticipated mayoral campaign on Saturday with a nearly 18-minute long video that quickly dispensed with pleasantries: “Let me start with telling you what you already know: New York City is the greatest city in the world and there is no other place like it.” 

From there, he launched into a second-person narration about how “we know that today, our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis.”

The career politician blamed that on career politicians, naturally. It’s a case Cuomo has been making behind the scenes since just after his resignation, out of some mix of genuine concern and political opportunism. Recall, Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021 in a promise to make the city feel safe again, yet the polling over his term shows that New Yorkers, including many Democrats, don’t think he’s delivered on that agenda and still want somebody to do so.  

When Cuomo, who hadn’t been registered to vote in New York City for nearly 20 years, says that “the city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis,” the word “feels” is doing a lot of work. Yes, crime remains higher than it was before the COVID pandemic destabilized so much, and felony assaults have gone up significantly. But New York remains much safer than most other big cities — and than it was not so long ago. 

Cuomo enters the race as the clear frontrunner given his name recognition and reputation as a can-do public-sector manager, but he still needs to make the case for why a politician who resigned not even four years ago — saying “I have been too familiar with people. My sense of humor can be insensitive and off-putting… No excuses” — is offering himself today as the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency answer New York City needs. 

Never mind the Buffalo Billion debacle that only paid off for Elon Musk’s company or the prematurely shuttered Moreland Commission to investigate public corruption, or the corruption conviction (later overturned) of Joe Percoco, a long-time aide to Mario and then Andrew who once called him “my father’s third son.”

Forget about the nursing home death undercount during COVID and his involvement in shaping a related state Health Department report he conveniently forgot about while testifying before Congress, or shutting down the city and in-person school. Forget about the $5 million deal for a book on COVID that government staffers were helping to write in his name as he often seemed at least as concerned with tormenting the then-Mayor Bill de Blasio as he was with protecting the city. 

Forget about how Cuomo in 2020 said defunding the police was a “legitimate school of thought” before declaring in 2025 that those were the three stupidest words in the English language, or how he signed into law many of the criminal justice reforms he’s now bashing, or how he played the central role in making congestion pricing law before distancing himself once it was on Gov. Kathy Hochul to see it through. 

He and his people can and will deliver exhausting chapter and verse on how the critics are wrong and he was right about each and every one of these things — and that’s not to mention the workplace sexual harassment findings that led to his resignation. 

They’ll go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and — well, if 17 “ons” is tiring to read and 17 minutes of monologue is tiring to hear, think about how long the following four years could be. 

There’s almost a zombie movie feeling here if no single issue, including the one that forced him to resign, is a political kill-shot in this race. 

Still, there are reasons Cuomo was dominating the polls even before he entered the race. His centrist Democratic agenda is what city voters went for in 2021, with the leading leftist in that race placing third. They turned on Adams not because they changed their minds about his agenda but because they don’t think he got enough stuff done.

The next mayor will almost certainly be decided in a ranked-choice primary only open to registered Democrats, a weird system that seems like a big advantage for a candidate who begins with a big head start in profile, resources and polling position. If Cuomo’s opponents can’t convince an awful lot of voters to leave him off their ballots entirely, he’s in a very strong position, even before using his frontrunner’s prerogative to cherry-pick from their plans and applause lines.

When the challengers finally force the frontrunner to share a stage and confront him about all the messes he was involved in, he’s going to reply, briefly, something like: “They want to talk about the past because they don’t have a plan for the future, and I’ll get stuff done because I have.”

But past is often prologue in politics. Mayoral candidate and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie told Vanity Fair’s Chris Smith that the former governor has a “Wizard of Oz effect”:

 “I want to remind people that he cut funding for our schools during COVID. I want to remind people he cut rental assistance and we saw a spike in homelessness. The MTA was cut! He hurt the city because he didn’t like the last mayor. That is not the leadership that we need in this moment.”

Ranked choice also means the “dwarves,” as one Cuomo aide called the other candidates running to replace Adams, can try to swarm the former governor with different attacks and see what sticks.  

That “New York is the greatest city in the world and everything is wrong with it” line at the top of the column isn’t from Cuomo, who’s echoing it now, but the opening salvo of an award winning “City in Crisis” investigative series that launched in January of 1965 in the New York Herald-Tribune and was later reprinted as a book with the subtitle “A Study in Depth of Urban Sickness.” 

It detailed how the gap between rich and poor had grown much too large, the streets no longer felt safe, racial tension was on the rise and the budget was out of whack as smug machine Democrats failed to deliver for ordinary New Yorkers. Sound familiar?

But there were 634 murders in New York City in 1965. When Mayor John Lindsay left office eight years later, there were 1,680. He won office talking about a city in crisis, and by the time he left there really was one.

There were 377 murders in New York City in 2024 — half the 1965 rate, accounting for population growth. 

Cuomo hoped to have someone else banging a City in Crisis drum ahead of his I-alone-can-fix-it mayoral appeal. That message clearly has resonance to many Democratic voters who are understandably suspicious of the candidates to his left suddenly preaching a gospel of public safety — while largely answering to the same interest groups and seeming almost interchangeable.

I’ve been writing for years about many of the problems Cuomo is talking about, and share his doubts about Democratic Party regulars’ willingness and ability to get big things done. But while the city has felt increasingly precarious since COVID, in part because of how Cuomo shut things down, there’s really not a crisis — just a grim vibe and an upcoming election. 

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which helped elect Adams and generally tries to own the “common sense” lane Cuomo hopes to control, would seem like the natural fit to boost his campaign, but it has long-standing, deep-rooted beefs with the former governor and grabbed a lot of attention with a brutal editorial just after he announced his run titled “Behold! Biggest Liar in New York wants to be mayor.”  

So Cuomo is banging his own crisis drum. 

Democrats working out how to rank their ballots will need to think seriously about whether or not they want to break the glass and list Cuomo.