Defeat Isn’t Enough For Andrew Cuomo And His Pack Of Lunatics

A New York City mayoral election is, definitionally, not anyone outside of the city's business. That this year's campaign, which ended in Zohran Mamdani's victory on Tuesday night, became everybody's business, and a big stupid national story, speaks to the effectiveness of Mamdani's campaign and the power of his socialist message, but also to the wild bigotry that was arrayed against him.

Pundits and politicians will spend the next few weeks attempting to sort out the lessons presented by Mamdani's victory, but here's one that has always been true: There are no consequences for engaging in gutter racism in this country, so long as it is aimed at a brown-skinned Muslim. One story about this election can be told through the increasing intensity of the racism and Islamophobia that was aimed at Mamdani by those who were emboldened by that lack of consequences. This story began with Mamdani being peppered with ludicrous questions about Hamas and the precise meaning of "intifada," and it ended with several United States lawmakers talking and posting like Klansmen.

At the center of this intensification was one of Mamdani's opponents, Andrew Cuomo. The premise of Cuomo's primary campaign was that the mayor's office was his by right, because of his last name and because of the indignity he had been forced to endure when he resigned in disgrace from his position as New York's governor. Cuomo carried himself throughout the run-up to the summer primary like someone who didn't even want the job, but nevertheless understood it as something that the people of New York City owed to him. To call Cuomo's loss to Mamdani in the primary a "wake-up call" is too kind to Cuomo's effort and attention span, but the thumping he took in June clearly convinced him that the general election would require a new strategy. There is a rotten machine designed to dispense Islamophobia at the center of American politics, always waiting for someone to come along and start it up again. Cuomo's general election strategy was to push the start button.

Refusing to pronounce Mamdani's name correctly was just the beginning. Eventually Cuomo got around to (clumsily) trying to make Mamdani's faith a point of attack during a debate. He then stood by and nodded in agreement while Eric Adams, who endorsed Cuomo after dropping out of the race, delivered a stump speech against Mamdani that could have been lifted directly from Anders Breivik's journal. Soon after that, the campaign strategy became Just talk about 9/11, which Cuomo did on a local conservative radio show by invoking the terrorist attack as something that Mamdani would not be experienced enough to handle. When the host who was interviewing Cuomo suggested that Mamdani would be "cheering" if another 9/11 was to occur, he just laughed and said, "That's another problem." Cuomo closed his campaign by releasing embarrassing and racist AI-generated attack ads, accepting the endorsement of Donald Trump, and calling diversity a weakness.

It doesn't matter if the GOP congressman who tweeted footage of 9/11 with the caption "WAKE UP NEW YORK!" was taking his cues from Cuomo or vice versa. What matters is that the bigotry machine had by then whirred to life and was being kept at max capacity by the likes of Cuomo, Adams, Trump, Ted Cruz, Stephen Miller, Bill Ackman, various racist congressional oafs representing districts hundreds or thousands of miles away, and even by Democratic leaders who refused to endorse Mamdani. The predictability and familiarity of this process didn't make the reality any less shocking: The Mayor-elect of New York City had to overcome a racist hate campaign, waged on a national scale and fueled by millions of dollars in donations from local billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Ackman, as well as rich freaks like Airbnb co-founder, DOGE vet, and Texas native Joe Gebbia. This campaign was all guided by a man who is ostensibly a Democrat.

By the end, Cuomo had no platform or political vision to offer New York City's voters. All he had was a request: Use the ballot box as a place to register and honor your racial animus. That this message was not enough to earn him an electoral victory is heartening; that it was enough to get over 850,000 people to cast a vote for him is not.

One can hope, as Mamdani does, that this is the last we'll ever hear from Cuomo, a disgraced former governor who just lost two municipal elections in the same calendar year. His concession speech was short and graceless—after pronouncing it "Mandami" one last time for effect, he warned the crowd in front of him about the "dangerous, dangerous road" that the city is heading down. When the losers he'd spent weeks whipping into a racist froth began booing Mamdani, the insincerity behind his eyes as he said, "That is not right, and that is not us," was impossible to miss.

Even if Cuomo does, blessedly, disappear from public life after running one of the most disgusting campaigns in American history, the stain his last campaign left behind will remain for some time. It will be worn by all those who voted for him, and the surrogates who spent the last few weeks trafficking in racist smears. Defeat is a just reward for these people, but absent any social and professional consequences that extend beyond the boundaries of Election Day, you can count on them trying harder next time.