Cuomo's Tent
The Self-Sabotaging Instinct of New York Democrats
Three weeks ago, Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson held a fundraiser for her re-election campaign hosted by local community leader Gene DeFrancis. Gibson, a 46-year old Black woman who has held an elected office in the Bronx for sixteen years now, is a moderate Democrat. She runs with endorsements from all the major unions and local organizations that you expect to receive as the incumbent. She will win her primary easily, and is a safe bet to endorse Andrew Cuomo for mayor some time in the next few weeks.
Gene DeFrancis, to unbury the lede, is a Republican, an avid Trump supporter, and an attendee of the December 2020 “Million Maga March,” in Washington DC, where he got into a physical altercation with a counter protester and was caught on camera announcing that he would “bring some Proud Boys back to the Bronx.” DeFrancis was once so politically toxic that in 2023, Bronx City Councilwoman Kristy Marmorato, also a Republican, had to distance herself from him after receiving his endorsement. Two years later, the climate seems to have shifted in DeFrancis’s favor. “Our supporters are Bronxites from all walks of life invested in the success of everyone across the borough,” a Gibson campaign spokeswoman told reporters. “We are proudly building an unstoppable grassroots coalition committed to economic progress and prosperity for all.”
Must Trump-supporting Republicans with ties to white supremacist groups really be part of Gibson’s unstoppable grassroots coalition, in a county that voted for Kamala Harris by more than forty five points? Nationally, liberals must include all sorts of unappealing figures in order to cobble together a coalition, including anti-urbanist weirdos from the Pacific Northwest, mercurial coal brokerage firm owners from Kentucky, SALT cap hardliners from New Jersey, and sartorial heretics with untreated mental illnesses from Pennsylvania. In a city where Democrats frequently win general elections with more than seventy percent of the vote, you would think that they could afford to be a bit more discerning about who they let in.
But New York Democrats often show a frustrating refusal to discern. Start looking and you’ll see it everywhere. In 2023, Brooklyn State Assemblymember and Cuomo endorser Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn nominated lawyer Rachel Frier, an Orthodox Jewish community leader who opposes abortion and publicly called Roe v Wade a “mistake,” to the county’s highest trial court. On a state level, Governor Hochul tried to nominate Hector Lasalle, a judge who had run for election on the Conservative Party ticket and had recently ruled against abortion providers and unions, to lead the state’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. Democrats in the state legislature stopped her, unlike when her predecessor Governor Andrew Cuomo successfully nominated conservatives Michael Garcia and Madeline Singas, ensuring that New York State, a state that has voted for a Democrat for president by more than fifteen points every cycle since 1988, was ruled by a conservative judicial majority at its highest level.
Our current mayor is no longer a Democrat now, but long before he made this official, when he still claimed to be “the Biden of Brooklyn,” Mayor Adams filled his inner circle with people far to the right of the city’s median voter. Frank Carone, his first chief of staff (and now a close confidant to the Cuomo campaign), started lobbying against the city’s climate laws as soon as he left office. His current Deputy Mayor is former Guiliani aide and congestion pricing foe Randy Mastro, and so far all he’s done is enable ICE to build an office on Rikers, sabotaged the city’s composting initiative, and added yet another delay to the construction of senior nonprofit housing on Elizabeth Street Garden. Adams’s top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin left City Hall after getting indicted for cartoonish levels of corruption, but while she was in power essentially running the city, she called herself “a very conservative Democrat,” bragged about having never taken the subway in 40 years, sabotaged any bike lane and street safety development she found out about, and posed for tea with Republican City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov the day after she got arrested for brandishing a gun at college students at an anti-Israel protest.
It’s that last item that gives the game away. There are New Yorkers who are so terrified of the Democratic Socialists of America, of the progressive, or if you prefer, “woke,” politics of the growing cohort of college-educated new grads in Astoria and North Brooklyn that they are willing to cut deals with Republicans instead. You can cobble together a majority coalition in New York with Democrats, but you probably can’t if you are dead set on excluding this cohort and opposing their agenda at every turn.
This will be my last blog on the subject of why you, a reasonable, liberal, college-educated parent in Manhattan or Brownstone Brooklyn, shouldn’t rank Andrew Cuomo for mayor. I’ve hopefully outlined a bunch of reasons, which you can find by diving into his disastrous record as Governor, observing his key similarities to our last two lame mayors, and spotlighting the composting issue as an example of how good governance will go to die in his administration. But if I’m being honest, the core reason I don’t want you to vote for him is this: I’m sick of Republicans running my supposedly blue city.
It has become increasingly obvious that no Republican can be trusted with even an iota of power here, or anywhere else. Cuomo is not a Republican (yet), but he has empowered Republicans and fought progressives at every step of his career. In order to fight the progressive wing of the party (which he has an incredibly expansive view of, and probably includes you), he will need to include Republicans in his ruling coalition, and they will wield power in ways we simply cannot afford. By contrast, there will not be Republicans in the ruling coalitions of Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Adrienne Adams, Scott Stringer, or Jessica Ramos. There will instead be progressives, and you might find some of them unsavory, annoying, or even dangerous. But that is the choice before you. If you read the New York Times and watch MSNBC as much as I imagine you do, my beloved reasonable, liberal, college-educated parent in Manhattan or Brownstone Brooklyn (who I admire and respect greatly despite my somewhat patronizing tone), I’m sure you’ll find the choice as easy and obvious as I do.