Former governor Andrew Cuomo upended the New York City mayoral race this weekend with his highly anticipated announcement that he is running to unseat Mayor Eric Adams. With the Democrat primary scheduled for June, Cuomo has launched himself into an abbreviated campaign calendar, though he has already garnered significant endorsements and should have little trouble raising money. He is already the front-runner, according to recent polls.

In this season of political comebacks, Cuomo’s resurrection would be less dramatic than fellow Queens County native President Trump’s, but nonetheless impressive. A popular third-term governor, Cuomo became a national hero of the anti-Trump Left, hailed for his supposedly masterful management of the Covid crisis in 2020 and 2021. He was awarded a special “Emmy” for his daily televised pandemic briefings and earned $5 million for his October 2020 book American Crisis. Talk-show hosts bathed him in lavish praise as a kind of anti-Trump, and his fans dubbed themselves “Cuomosexuals” as a sign of their dedication.

Cuomo’s rapid fall from grace and resignation in August 2021 followed a series of accusations of sexual harassment by former staffers and members of the public. He was said to have groped or propositioned several women. Cuomo denied the charges, but an investigation by Attorney General Letitia James determined that the governor was, in her words, a “serial sexual harasser,” as well as being “sick and pathetic.”

Calls for criminal investigations and impeachment led him to step down, but the affair was a kind of palace coup; his popularity had certainly declined, but he was still seen as likely to win an unprecedented fourth term in 2022. He was, and still is, widely criticised for his March 2020 order mandating nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients, which led to thousands of deaths in long-term care facilities. But such was the accepted standard of care at the time, pursued by other blue state governors as well.

Today, Cuomo polls well among the outer borough white ethnics who still remember his father, former governor Mario Cuomo, fondly, as well as with the same black New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens who comprise Eric Adams’s base. Adams’s legal troubles and his avowed cooperation with the Trump Administration in pursuing the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have damaged his credibility among even erstwhile supporters.

Cuomo’s video announcement that he is running for mayor highlights his decades of experience and competence, and focuses on the public safety and quality of life problems that New Yorkers face on the streets and subways. “We know that today our New York City is in trouble,” he intones. “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.” Cuomo says he wants to increase NYPD headcount and “tackle retail theft, identify habitual offenders, disrupt fencing operations, and increase enforcement”.

This all sounds fine, and will appeal to the right voters. But it’s important to recall that it was Governor Andrew Cuomo who signed into law the legislation that cratered New York’s public safety climate in the first place. Criminal justice reform — including the elimination of bail for most crimes, the imposition of strict discovery rules on prosecutors, and raising the bar on felony shoplifting charges to $1,000 — passed under Cuomo’s leadership in 2019. At the time, it was understood as a means of outflanking his opposition on the Left in advance of his 2022 re-election campaign.

Cuomo also decriminalised marijuana use across New York State. The effects have been felt most profoundly in New York City, which ended the prosecution of the sale of marijuana before the state was able to license legal storefronts, and permitted the consumption of marijuana anywhere it is legal to smoke cigarettes. This radical permissiveness goes far beyond any other jurisdiction, which typically permits home use, and has led to the ubiquity of marijuana sale and use throughout the city. Research has tied chronic marijuana use to the onset of schizophrenia in young people, and the exacerbation of symptoms among the seriously mentally ill. A series of high-profile murders in the last few years have been committed by self-admitted users, though the state’s leaders have been reluctant to admit it.

Cuomo is running to capture the vote of moderate Democrats who favour the traditional blue city high-tax, high-service model but who still believe that traditional policing is necessary to ensure that crime doesn’t get out of control. His Rightward tack makes sense electorally. But whether it will be enough to overcome his personal baggage and vigorous campaigns from the socialist Left remains to be seen.

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Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of The Last Days of New York.

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