The Forgetful Electorate

Why Cuomo and Mamdani's Attacks On Each Other Fall Flat

I see you driving round town with the girl I love, and I’m like…

“Trump is trying to make the -- the country forget about the dark and unsettling things that he did when he was president,” Joe Biden told a rally in Chicago in May 2024, overcoming his characteristic stutter to reiterate the central animating theory of his re-election campaign. “Well, we’re going to not let them forget.” Biden trailed Trump by an average of three points in national polls, and more in the tipping point states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin at this time. Yet despite increasing anxiety from Democrats, his campaign was a portrait of complete confident calm. Steve Richetti, Mike Donilon, and the rest of the Biden campaign team were sure they were going to win, as Evan Osnos reported in the New Yorker in March, because once they reminded voters of Trump’s record, his numbers would crash. Trump had left office with a negative-28 approval rating, an unpopular president for his entire term, falling to subterranean levels after his administration’s chaotic management of the coronavirus pandemic and his attempts to violently overthrow the democratic order and kill his own Vice President on January 6th. He faced at least four different felony indictments, for mishandling confidential documents, for misusing campaign funds to bribe a porn star, for menacing a state bureaucrat in charge of administering the election results in Georgia, and for treason on January 6th. This was a battle for the soul of the nation, Donilon insisted, and while they weren’t winning it yet, when the Biden campaign had sufficiently jogged the electorate’s memory on “all the dark and unsettling things Trump did when he was President,” Biden would be re-elected comfortably.

A similar delusion has plagued the current New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary, and my coverage of it specifically. When Cuomo launched his campaign in March, I was ready with receipts, formatted into a flashy slide deck. I was determined to remind the Cuomo-sympathetic voters in my life that he was a disaster as governor, that he was not aligned on any of their policy priorities, that he was dispositionally unfit for leadership of a major city, and that they, the Cuomo-sympathetic readers, had been correct to despise him and boot him from office four years ago. Because despise him they did. It took polls telling him that 78% of New Yorkers wanted him to resign for him to finally acquiesce. Four years later, he had not atoned for or meaningfully addressed any of the issues that brought him to that point, the tyrannical micromanaging and bullying, the nursing home policy and ensuing cover-up, the rampant sexual harassment. He entered the race with high name recognition, sure, but if voters had time to be reminded of how they felt four years ago, surely his numbers would crash. All we needed was some pithy blogs, a slide deck or two, and above all, a candidate to clearly and passionately make this case, through persistent, high-profile reminders.

Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, and Zellnor Myrie have all tried valiantly to be that candidate. Once again, the problem is that no one cares. Not literally no one, I should say. You, my Manhattan/Brownstone Brooklyn liberal, seem to care a great deal. Michael Lange projects Mamdani to win the Upper West Side by about two points, on the back of what he calls the “No Kings, No Cuomo” faction of the electorate outnumbering and out-energizing “Bloomberg’s Base” which is demoralized by distaste for both frontrunners. But these two factions make up a small slice of the electorate (and they remembered Trump’s faults too). For everyone else, these reminders are woefully insufficient. People don’t want to hear them. They want to forgive and forget. They like the guy for the reasons they always liked him, they don’t want to be told not to, and they exist in echo chambers that are very good at insulating them from messages they don’t want to hear. A lot of voters are also just a lot younger, and perhaps genuinely do not remember Cuomo’s handling of the Moreland Commision. They also did not remember Trump’s Access Hollywood tape until it went viral on TikTok the week before the election, one of many late breaking momentum swings that, like Bad Bunny’s endorsement, Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist Madison Square Garden speech, and intriguing crosstabs in polling of registered Republican women, was supposed to lock up the election for Harris.

This is kind of an existential crisis for this blog. I write about ghosts, about the things that people bring from their pasts, and how they weigh on them and shape their presents and futures. If people have just decided to stop caring about the past at all, I’m not sure I have a beat any longer. I think it’s also a crisis for politics, which at its core is about telling a story about the past and then making a case about how it applies to the future. An electorate where everyone has no interest in the past, in anything that happened more than 18 months ago, makes this extremely difficult.

Or maybe not. Maybe the secret is to get in on the amnesia train yourself, and ride it as far as it will take you. For the last three weeks, Cuomo’s Fix The City super PAC has flooded the airwaves and stuffed mailboxes with reminders of Zohran Mamdani’s record. Mamdani used to support defunding the police, they bawl. Mamdani has refused to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Mamdani is a member of the DSA, and the DSA has said a bunch of wild stuff in the last five years, especially the NYC-DSA. Remember how extreme the socialist left got in 2020, Cuomo’s team has implored voters. Remember how much you hated these guys five years ago. I know he seems cool and young and handsome and has flashy videos, but surely with enough reminders of his past, voters will change their minds, right?

Don’t count on it. Amnesia is a powerful drug, one that has fueled Cuomo’s unlikely, phoenix-like comeback. He’s inches away from returning to power, and I still think he’s a decent favorite to do so, despite the recent hype. But if he doesn’t, amnesia will have been a crucial ingredient in that too.