When New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped his re-election bid last month, it was former Gov. Andrew Cuomo who stood to benefit most.
Both longtime Democrats, running this year as third-party contenders, had positioned themselves as moderates in a multiway general election. And Cuomo was thought to be the most likely destination for voters unconvinced by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the race.
But with just over three weeks before Election Day, Cuomo is still staring at a massive upward climb to overtake the upstart state assemblyman, despite some additional consolidation behind Cuomo following Adams’ exit.
Cuomo has seen a notable bump in polling taken since Adams left the race, but the same surveys — as well as interviews by NBC News with voters and strategists closely watching the race — also illustrate that Cuomo hasn’t been able to expand his support levels beyond picking up those former Adams voters. What’s more, he likely doesn’t have enough time to expand much more. Early voting begins Oct. 25.
“Even if Cuomo were to have gotten all of Adams’ voters, it was still going to be hard for him to make up all of the ground — and that seems, to some measure, to have happened,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who was previously the executive director of the New York state Democratic Party. “What Cuomo needed was to grow his base — but there aren’t enough voters to do that. Not in this amount of time and with his ideology and in this political environment.”
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in the first week of October and released Thursday showed Mamdani leading Cuomo among likely voters, 46%-33%, well outside the survey’s margin of error. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa received 15%, according to the poll, one of the first major surveys taken after Adams exited the race in late September.
The poll showed nearly all of the voters who had previously backed Adams now throwing their support to Cuomo, boosting the former governor 10 points since the school’s prior poll in September.
But in addition to Mamdani staying in the lead, the latest survey showed the state assemblyman enjoying other crucial data points over Cuomo, including enthusiasm and favorability. Ninety percent of voters supporting Mamdani said they were very or somewhat “enthusiastic” about their candidate, compared with 69% of Cuomo’s supporters who said so about their choice. In addition, 43% of respondents said they had a favorable view of Mamdani, while 35% said they had an unfavorable one — compared to 37% saying they had a favorable view of Cuomo and over half saying they held an unfavorable one.
Cuomo campaign spokesperson Rich Azzopardi claimed in a statement that the race was “shifting decisively” and that Sliwa “continues to fade away” — even though Sliwa had the same support among voters in both the September and October surveys.
“The path is now clear: This is a two-person race between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani,” Azzopardi said.
Mamdani campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement about the survey that Mamdani “is meeting voters every day in all five boroughs, who are ready to turn the page on the broken politics of the past and build a city everyone can afford.”
While the mayor is no longer in the race, Adams’ name will remain on the ballot. (His decision to drop out came after the deadline to print them.) And barring a Sliwa exit from the race — the Republican has repeatedly said he won’t quit — Cuomo is running out of time and ways to find the next chunk of voters he’d need to close the existing gap between him and Mamdani.
Most significantly, strategists said, Cuomo simply hasn’t chipped away at any of the obstacles that have faced his campaign and his brand. They said the former governor hasn’t made inroads with progressives and hasn’t engaged in the kind of retail campaigning style that might help persuade voters who have a solidified view of him already, including over his resignation as governor amid sexual harassment allegations.
Asked if he had any regrets about his behavior when he was governor, Cuomo told NBC News’ “Meet the Press Now,” “Vis-a-vis those allegations? No. In general, have I learned to be more careful, frankly — just don’t put yourself in a situation where anyone can say anything, where you always have witnesses.”
Smikle said that Cuomo is “a known entity. People have had a long time to form an opinion of him — there isn’t any more learning that you have to do. People have made up their minds.”
He added that Cuomo’s positioning as a moderate simply doesn’t give him a path to victory amid the current leftward shift of the Democratic Party and the New York City electorate.
“There are really smart, passionate people supporting Cuomo, but there isn’t the growth in his base that one would need to overcome this deficit,” Smikle said.
It hasn’t been for lack of activity.
Cuomo in recent weeks has darted around the city, talking to media outlets and to voters at churches and synagogues — mostly in the city’s outer boroughs — and attending forums targeting Black voters and members of the business community, often speaking about public safety and his plan to add 5,000 police officers to the police force.
Like Mamdani and Sliwa, Cuomo has also launched general election TV ads in the last 10 days.
One, featuring AI-generated clips of Cuomo doing classic New York City jobs, centers on public safety and highlights his plan to add police officers and to move homeless people “off the streets.”
Another, released on Friday, features the voices of New York voters touting his experience and his bulldozing style.
“He’d kick anybody’s a-- standing in the way,” one person in the ad says.
“You may not always agree with Andrew Cuomo, but you’ve got to admit he knows what he’s doing,” another person says.
Mamdani’s path isn’t certain, to be sure. Notably, he has not crossed the crucial 50% threshold in any major polling of the race. And while many influential New York Democrats have endorsed him, led by Gov. Kathy Hochul, many high-profile holdouts remain, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who announced publicly that he will not support Mamdani.
Nevertheless, Cuomo’s efforts in recent weeks haven’t appeared to move many voters opposed to him to reconsider.
At a candidate forum at a studio in the Apollo Theater in late September, where Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa all addressed voters, a 37-year-old Manhattan woman who identified herself as Bea (but asked that her last name be withheld to discuss politics), said she was firmly behind Mamdani “because he’s an inspiring candidate” and she “loved” that he’d made affordability “the center of his agenda.”
When it came to Cuomo, she said only that there were “so many negatives about him, it’s just really hard to support him.”
Another voter, a 50-year-old Brooklyn resident named Gisella, who also asked that her last name not be used, firmly replied “No” when asked if she was considering voting for anyone other than Mamdani after having heard all three candidates speak.
Mamdani is “a candidate that will base his campaign in the way that New Yorkers would like to see this country,” she said.
As for Cuomo?
“He’s part of the institution. He’s part of the democracy that we’ve seen for so many decades that we haven’t been happy with,” she said. “I appreciate, and I think a lot of New Yorkers, we appreciate the work that he did during the pandemic. But there are a lot of other marks against him, in terms of his history.”
