Former Governor Andrew Cuomo will stay in the race for New York City’s next mayor despite conceding his loss in the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani and losing that election by more than 12 percentage points.
Cuomo, who resigned from the governor’s office in 2021 under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, will stay in the mayor’s race as an independent, joining an already-crowded general election ballot alongside scandal-plagued current Mayor Eric Adams.
Cuomo, 67, announced his return to the campaign trail in a social media video released on Monday, hours after it was filmed on the Upper East side, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. Compared to the 17-minute video that launched his primary campaign, Cuomo’s latest clocks in at 94 seconds with a promise to be “hitting the streets” to “meet you where you are.”
Following a primary campaign dogged by criticisms for its low energy and rare engagement with reporters and voters, Cuomo appeared to acknowledge the complaints in a casual short-sleeved shirt, a bodega coffee cup and selfies and handshakes with New Yorkers — not unlike the social media videos that propelled Mamdani’s campaign.
Mamdani appeared to troll the former governor’s announcement on X by replying to the video with a donation link to his campaign — which has twice as many shares as Cuomo’s post.
“As my grandfather used to say, when you get knocked down, learn the lesson and pick yourself up and get in the game,” he says in the video. “I am in it to win it.”
Wealthy real estate developers and financiers have called on donors and voters to get behind a single candidate in November’s election, fearing multiple candidates on a crowded ballot risk splitting the votes against democratic socialist Mamdani, thereby increasing his chances of winning.
Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by a 6-to-1 margin in New York City, and the winner of the Democratic primary is generally favored to win the general election.
If elected, 33-year-old Mamdani would be the city’s first Muslim and Indian American mayor.
“We got him making man on the street videos with a guy in Carhartt,” Mamdani wrote on X. “By next week, he’ll be sipping adeni chai and eating khaliat al nahl.”
In remarks to supporters on Monday, Mamdani said Cuomo and Adams “trip over themselves to make deals in backrooms with billionaires.”
“I think he’s struggling to come to terms with what [the Democratic primary election] meant,” he said. “We spent an entire campaign being told that it was inevitable for Andrew Cuomo to become the next mayor. He believed that himself. What we saw was New Yorkers’ hunger for a new kind of politics.”
In his video announcement, Cuomo laments that “only 13 percent of New Yorkers voted in the June primary,” but that accounts only for registered Democratic voters. More than 1 million people voted in this year’s Democratic primary, the highest voter turnout of any city mayoral primary in the last several decades.
After the ranked-choice voting results were tallied, Mamdani received more than 56 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 43.8 percent.
Cuomo’s entry in the race for mayor had sought to revive his political career, and he remained a favorite among pundits to narrowly defeat Mamdani in the Democratic primary in the days before the election. Instead, Mamdani received more votes than any candidate in the city’s mayoral primary history.
Both Mamdani and Cuomo received more votes than Eric Adams did in the 2021 race.
In his video, Cuomo accused Mamdani of offering “slick slogans but no real solutions” while offering up a platform that sounds remarkably similar to the affordability-focused agenda that Mamdani is running on.
“We need a city with lower rent, safer streets, where buying your first home is once again possible, where childcare won’t bankrupt you,” he said.
Eric Adams also is running as an independent — an announcement he made one day after Donald Trump’s Department of Justice dropped a major criminal corruption case against him.
Former prosecutor Jim Walden is also running as an independent, while Guardian Angels founder and right-wing radio personality Curtis Sliwa is the Republican nominee. Sliwa ran as the GOP nominee against Adams in 2021.
