Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to be counting on support from President Donald Trump in the New York mayoral election. Cuomo is doing this even as he also claims he is the candidate most capable of protecting New York City from the president.
I argued in June that the NYC Mayoral race was by far the most important election in America in 2025.
Zohran Mamdani’s crushing (and shocking) 56-44 ranked-choice win over Cuomo in the primary raised the stakes even higher.
The presence of an outright Democratic socialist in Mamdani, his forthright opposition to genocide in Palestine, and the walloping he put on the Democratic establishment make this race far more revealing of future possibilities than the 2025 gubernatorial elections I covered Monday.
Those races, in Virginia and New Jersey, pit lavishly-funded centrist national security state girl boss Democrats against a pair of Republicans with virtually no national significance.
But, back to New York, Politico got the scoop:
Andrew Cuomo’s counting on President Donald Trump and top Republicans to tell the party faithful to vote for Cuomo for mayor if they want to stop Zohran Mamdani, and not to vote for GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.
“We can minimize (the Sliwa) vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate,” Cuomo told the crowd at a Hamptons fundraiser Saturday, according to audio obtained by Playbook. “And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa. So I feel good about that.”
Publicly, Cuomo has shunned the idea of getting any help from Trump. Cuomo said he’d decline an endorsement, and denied a New York Times report that he’d spoken with the president about the race.
But Cuomo seemed hopeful for the president’s help behind closed doors, speaking to the more Trump-friendly crowd gathered at media mogul Jimmy Finkelstein’s home in Southampton. Another co-host, former New York City Council President Andrew Stein, briefed Trump last month on how Cuomo would be competitive in the general election, according to the Times.
An attendee asked Cuomo directly if he or his team was in conversation with the White House about how Trump might influence the race. Cuomo didn’t directly deny it this time.
“Let’s put it this way: I knew the president very well,” Cuomo said. “I believe there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York. He feels that he was rejected by New York. We voted for Hillary Clinton. Bill de Blasio took his name off things. So I believe there will be opportunities to actually cooperate with him. I also believe that he’s not going to want to fight with me in New York if he can avoid it.”
The New York Times has more detail on the Cuomo-Trump discussions that Cuomo denies:
President Trump may have moved out of New York City, but he has privately discussed whether to intercede in its fractious race for mayor to try to stop Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, according to eight people briefed on the discussions.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has quizzed a Republican congressman and New York businessmen about who in the crowded field of candidates, which includes Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, has the best chance of beating Mr. Mamdani, the leftist front-runner.
The president has been briefed by Mark Penn, a pollster who has worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president and decades-long friend of Mr. Trump, on a range of polling that showed Mr. Cuomo could still be competitive as an independent candidate. Both men have pushed Mr. Cuomo as the best candidate despite his loss in the Democratic primary, including in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. One of Mr. Penn’s firms did extensive work for a pro-Cuomo super PAC in the primary.
And in a previously undisclosed call in recent weeks, Mr. Trump spoke about the race directly with Mr. Cuomo, an old associate and foil, according to three people briefed on the call, who were not authorized to discuss it.
…
It is unclear what precisely Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo discussed, or who initiated the call. Mr. Cuomo has publicly denounced Mr. Trump, and the Justice Department had opened an investigation into Mr. Cuomo after House Republicans accused him of lying to Congress about his handling of the Covid pandemic. Their conversation came around the time that the former governor was privately discussing with supporters in New York whether to continue with his campaign, and publicly pushing Mr. Adams and other rivals such as the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, to drop out.After this article was published, Mr. Trump was asked by reporters at an event in the Oval Office if he had spoken with Mr. Cuomo. “I haven’t, no I haven’t,” he said.
…
Mr. Trump has aired some of his views publicly. In early July, he repeated baseless claims that Mr. Mamdani immigrated to the United States illegally and threatened to arrest him if he blocked immigration arrests in New York City. “I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York,” he said.Mr. Mamdani would be among the most left-leaning mayors the city has seen in decades, but he has said he is not a communist.
A few weeks later, and just days after Mr. Penn’s polling presentation to the president, Mr. Trump told reporters he thought Mr. Cuomo should stay in the race. “He’s running against a communist,” he said. “I would think that he would have a good shot of winning.”
CNN had more on Cuomo’s denial and also his claims that he would be the best New York mayor to deal with Trump:
“That’s false,” Cuomo told reporters at a press conference in Manhattan.
But the former New York governor also pressed his case, both at the press conference and at a closed-door gathering a day earlier, that he would be better suited than Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani to deal with the Republican president, a native New Yorker closely attuned to his hometown’s politics but also someone who is broadly disliked by the city’s Democrats.
“My knowledge gives me an ability to be in a formidable position as an opponent for the president but also, at the same time, I would try to work with the president where we could,” Cuomo told reporters.
…
Cuomo’s tone adjustment on how he would handle Trump if elected mayor was also on display during a meeting with the city’s business leaders on Wednesday, according to two people in attendance who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting.The meeting, which was organized by the Partnership for New York, a nonprofit group which represents the city’s corporate interests, was attended by approximately 50 business executives gathered at an office in Rockefeller Center.
While addressing them, Cuomo described his relationship with Trump as a “dysfunctional marriage,” telling the group he was not looking for a fight with the president.
A key part of Cuomo’s strategy: He needs to court business leaders and high-powered donors who fear Mamdani’s potential mayoralty and his proposal to tax the city’s wealthiest residents.
But despite a slight tilt to the right in the 2024 presidential election, New Yorkers still strongly disfavor Trump. The prospect of Cuomo seeking his support in November’s election – or accepting his help in pushing out or suppressing the support of Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa or incumbent Mayor Eric Adams – could potentially drive supporters away from him even if they’re uncomfortable with Mamdani.
…
“Nobody has had more contentious relationships with President Trump than I have.” Cuomo told reporters. “But at the same time he could be very, very helpful to New York City.”He argued a Mamdani victory would help the president and Republicans who argue Democrats have moved too far to the left. And he suggested Trump would consider a federal takeover of New York City were Mamdani to win.
“I think it would be like Los Angeles on steroids,” Cuomo said in reference to Trump’s recent deployment of the National Guard to that city and high-visibility immigration raids. “I think the President would like to have control of New York City. Why does he want control of New York City? Because he’s from New York City.”
Another NYT piece, published before their report on the alleged Cuomo-Trump conversation showed Cuomo softening his opposition to Trump before an audience of “business leaders”:
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has positioned himself as the only candidate in the New York City mayor’s race who can forcefully go toe-to-toe with President Trump. But in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday with some of the city’s biggest business leaders, Mr. Cuomo suggested he might adopt a more conciliatory strategy.
As he made a case for his candidacy, Mr. Cuomo said he was not “personally” looking for a fight with the president and compared their yearslong relationship to a “dysfunctional marriage.”
“I think he wants to be accepted by New York City, and I think there’s an opportunity there,” Mr. Cuomo said, according to four people who shared accounts of the private meeting with 50 corporate executives gathered at Rockefeller Center.
He added: “I know, personally, he doesn’t want to fight with me. Personally, I don’t want to fight with him, right? So I don’t think he’s going to be eager to create a conflict with us.”
Mr. Cuomo also made the case that Mr. Trump cared about his hometown and wanted to “find a way to be a hero in New York City.” Mr. Trump knew, he said, that confronting Mr. Cuomo would lead to a “nasty, ugly, drawn-out fight.”
“We are standing in front of Federal Plaza, the very site where New Yorkers are being stolen—whether from their families, their friends, or from the city that they call home,” Mamdani said at a news conference Thursday. “It is at this very site that we understand the cost of this news: that former Governor Andrew Cuomo has been conspiring with President Trump about the fate of this city, about the future of this city, about the facts of this race.”
“It is knowledge that is a betrayal of everything that we stand for as New Yorkers,” he added.
…
Mamdani… said during Thursday’s address that “it is time for us to make clear that what this city deserves is a mayor who, when he sees Donald Trump attacking the people of this city, will stand up and fight back against that vision, who will not get on the phone with the architect of that vision to speak about a race that we already know should be a referendum on how to make the most expensive city in the United States of America affordable, not a question of how we can install yet another ambassador for Washington, D.C., in City Hall.”“The job of mayor is not to audition to be the jester for a wannabe king. It is to be the person that stands up for the values of this city, for the fabric of this city, and for the people of this city. And that is what I’m running to do. I believe The New York Times over President Trump and Andrew Cuomo. And we’ve seen as of this morning that they stand by their reporting.”
Polling from last week shows why the drowning Andrew Cuomo might be reaching for a life raft from Trump:
A Siena Institute poll published Tuesday found 44 percent of registered New York City backing Mamdani followed by 25 percent for former Governor Andrew Cuomo, 12 percent for Republican Party nominee Curtis Sliwa and only seven percent for Mayor Eric Adams. Broken down by party, Mamdani also receives the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters compared to 32 percent for Andrew Cuomo and three percent for Adams, who won the Democratic nomination just four years ago. Notably, 68 percent of Republican voters are supporting Sliwa. The poll surveyed 317 registered voters in New York City as part of a larger statewide voter sample from August 4 to 7.
Siena also looked at the candidates’s favorability ratings both in the city and statewide. 46 percent of city voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mamdani compared to 32 percent unfavorable. Statewide, those figures shift dramatically with 28 percent of voters viewing him favorably to 37 percent unfavorable. For Andrew Cuomo, 54 percent of city voters view him unfavorably while 61 percent of voters statewide also hold a negative view of the former governor. Adams also received low marks from city voters with 58 percent holding an unfavorable opinion of him compared to 30 percent who viewed him favorably.
The Ettingermentum Newsletter argues that Cuomo’s campaign for Mayor of New York is “the kind of humiliation that only happens once every few generations”:
There are a number of moments in recent history that should have marked the end of the political career of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
If he were smart, he would have retired for good after he was forced to resign in disgrace under threat of impeachment in 2021. If he had any shame, he would have never shown his face in public again after his attempted political comeback in New York City ended in a shocking landslide defeat to a once-unknown socialist challenger. But rather than use either of these moments to save face and walk into oblivion with even just a shred of dignity intact, he is choosing to end his public life in the most humiliating, pathetic way possible. Still unable to understand that no means no, Andrew Cuomo is now back in the race for mayor as a passenger in the clown car of anti-Zohran Mamdani candidates.
There is not much to say about his prospects for November. While some polling shows the former governor within striking distance of Mamdani in the event that every other candidate besides them leaves the race, there are no indications that this will happen. As things stand, the former governor is in a distant second place, leading the rest of the non-Mamdani field but behind his once-and-future opponent by as much as 20 points citywide. It’s a bad situation that is far more likely than not to get worse over the coming months. Just as it did during the primary, Mamdani’s support in the general election has only increased as more voters have gotten to know him. Skeptical national Democrats are beginning to fall in line, most dramatically so with Barack Obama’s tacit declaration of support for his campaign this week. Although he is still in the process of denying it, Cuomo’s political life is well on track to end in a wholly unnecessary and somehow even more embarrassing rerun of the crushing rejection he saw this June.
What we are seeing play out in real time is more than just a simply bad campaign. It is a rare kind of failure, one utterly pathetic and mortifying both in practice and in concept. Even before it ended in an unimaginably devastating defeat, this stage of Cuomo’s political career was already deeply embarrassing for him. He had spent over a decade at the top of the political world, so secure and his prospects that politicians of both parties regularly joked about his inevitable presidency. At one point in 2020, there was a draft effort to make him the nominee after Biden had already won the primary. Five years later, he was barely campaigning in a city he had not lived in for a job his own ex-staffers said he always considered to be for “lesser men.” Even if he actually did glide to victory, it would have been an embarrassing step down. That he outright lost in the primary on top of all of this was one thing. That he will almost certainly lose once again of his own accord, all while desperately trying to ape his opponent’s strategies on the way, is something truly historic—the kind of humiliation that only happens once every few generations.
While no truly progressive Democrat has yet emerged in the 2028 Presidential race, there is at least one centrist who is openly speaking of coming to terms with Trump.
I’m talking about Rahm Emanuel whose recent Wall Street Journal interview shows him aspiring to be the Joe Lieberman of 2028:
Throughout our 90-minute conversation, he levels many criticisms against Mr. Trump and his administration. But unlike other ambitious Democrats, Mr. Emanuel speaks of the president in a way that doesn’t sound demented. “A lot of people have decided,” he says, “and I’m not criticizing them for it”—I assume he’s talking mainly about California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—“but they’ve decided they’re going to be on that end of the field, defining themselves against Trump.” He gestures to one end of the conference table: “They’re going to fight Trump.”
Then he waves to the other side of the table. “I’m on this end, about how to fight for America.” Is the Democratic Party ready for a less feral politics? He thinks Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s victory in June’s New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary—she is a former member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition—suggests the party rank and file may have grown weary of wall-to-wall anti-Trump mania. “After 2026,” he says, referring to the midterm elections, “my goal is to own all the real estate on this other side. And I’ll be willing to say things that may be unconventional in the party, and maybe I’ll attract new people to the party. That’s my bet.”
Emanuel has been attempting to contrast himself with Mamdani for months now.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 1, 2025
Emanuel is an outlier among former Barack Obama insiders however.
The former POTUS himself reached out early to Mamdani in a June phone call following the primary:
Former President Barack Obama, the last Democrat to captivate the party’s base, got on the phone. In a lengthy call in June, Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Mamdani, offered him advice about governing and discussed the importance of giving people hope in a dark time, according to people with knowledge of the conversation.
Others in Mr. Obama’s orbit have also shown a keen interest in Mr. Mamdani and his campaign. Jon Favreau, who served as Mr. Obama’s speechwriter, and Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser, have been in communication with the Democratic strategist Morris Katz, among Mr. Mamdani’s closest aides.
David Axelrod, who served as Mr. Obama’s chief campaign strategist and senior adviser, was also curious. Last month, he stopped by Mr. Mamdani’s campaign headquarters, then in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, to meet the candidate and his staff, and see things for himself.
“What I found when I went over to that office was a familiar spirit that I hadn’t seen in a while of just determined, upbeat idealism,” Mr. Axelrod told me. “You may not agree with every answer he’s giving, or every idea he has, but he’s certainly asking the right questions, which is how do we make the country work for working people?” He said Mr. Mamdani’s ability to inspire young Americans, who feel economic uncertainty acutely, was critical and something the party at large needed to reckon with.
Mr. Axelrod was introduced to Mr. Mamdani by Patrick Gaspard, another Obama insider. Mr. Gaspard — Mr. Obama’s 2008 national political director, and later the U.S. ambassador to South Africa — has been serving as an informal adviser to Mr. Mamdani.
The interest from the closely guarded world of Mr. Obama and those around him is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Mamdani is likely to be embraced by the Democratic mainstream, whether the party’s leaders and donors like it or not. It comes at a time of dueling visions among voters, Democratic politicians and donors over the future of the party.
Obamaworld’s interest in Mamdani seems to indicate they won’t be backing their colleague Rahm Emanuel in the 2028 primary.
What remains to be seen is whether Mamdani’s ally New York congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will leverage his success to launch a 2028 Presidential campaign of her own.
