Petty, abusive — and popular: Why New York Democrats are afraid to speak out against Andrew Cuomo

Democrats who were once vocal critics of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are sitting on the sidelines of the New York mayoral primary, and insiders think it’s because Cuomo’s victory appears inevitable. At the same time, critics argue that they’re letting Cuomo off the hook.

Democrats who vocally criticized Cuomo in the past, like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have declined to remind the public why they called on Cuomo to step down. Hochul called the allegations of sexual harassment against Cuomo “repulsive” in 2021 and now says that she’ll “deal with whatever the voters decide to deal with.” Gillibrand, who called the allegations against Cuomo “serious and deeply concerning,” now compliments Cuomo, saying that “He has a lot of talent as an executive.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., called for Cuomo’s resignation in 2021, issuing a joint statement with other New York Democrats saying, “It is clear that he engaged in inappropriate, unlawful and abusive behavior.” He has since endorsed the former governor in the mayoral primary, saying “we need not a nice guy, but a tough guy like Andrew Cuomo.” 

Gillibrand's office responded to a request for comment from Salon by referencing comments the senator made in an appearance on WNYC, when she said: "The question being asked today is what's my opinion about someone after they've resigned, after they've taken the penalty that I called on them to take? Do they have any say from you one way or the other? And my answer to that is everyone gets to decide in this election who they want to vote for. It's up to New Yorkers. It is not up to me. And that's it."

Hochul's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Former New York Gov. David Paterson, who immediately preceded Cuomo as the state’s chief executive, told Salon that elected Democrats coming out against Cuomo at this stage of the race probably won’t matter. Given many Democrats’ unpopularity in New York, he argued that criticism might even help Cuomo in the primary.

Paterson said that the bigger question in his mind is why haven’t voters in New York City “taken him to task.”

“I'm not advocating that they should, I’m just wondering why they haven’t done that," Paterson said. "Somebody has a commercial: ‘Andrew Cuomo spent $60 million of your money defending himself against allegations.’ Now that's a pretty significant amount of money, and it's a pretty significant amount of money and it's to review someone now running for office, and the public paid for all his legal bills. That's an interesting subject, but it doesn't seem to matter."

In Paterson’s view, Cuomo is almost certain to win the New York City mayoral primary, which discourages elected Democrats who have spoken out against Cuomo in the past from doing so again.

New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, was first elected in 2010, the same year Cuomo was elected governor. He said that Cuomo’s personal and political style helps explain Democrats’ reluctance to speak out.

“He was vengeful and petty, and certainly politically popular and politically powerful,” Rivera said. “He's somebody who's been an abusive bully, who only cares about himself, how people perceive him, and how people view him, and he does not particularly care about well-being, regardless of what he says. His actions say something different.”

Rivera said that Cuomo has held a grudge against him because of his outspoken criticism of him, alleging that the former governor even moved an early COVID vaccine distribution site from his district because it was the district he represented. Cuomo has denied the allegation.

“For the sake of a political slap on my face, because I was one of the only people who stood up to him publicly, he made the decision to put it someplace else and that means that there’s people in my district who died because they did not have early enough access to the vaccine, based on a political decision that he made to be some sort of payback,” Rivera said.

Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told Salon that there is deep irony in Cuomo promising to fix the city’s problems as a mayoral candidate, because many of the city’s problems stem from Cuomo’s time as governor. The Working Families Party previously endorsed Cuomo in the 2018 New York gubernatorial general election, even after backing activist Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary and criticizing Cuomo as a corporate Democrat. The endorsement, however, came after Nixon declined to run on the Working Families Party line in the general election.

The party, which had to receive 50,000 votes in November or else lose its party line, ultimately decided to endorse Cuomo at the last minute. It is not likely to ever do so again.

“New York City lost hundreds of mental health beds while Andrew Cuomo was governor. He is the reason why our mental health infrastructure in the city was decimated and, as a result, we see the people in our streets with nowhere to go, and the people experiencing homelessness — that is Andrew Cuomo,” Gripper said. “The reason why our subways are delayed and flooding, and not up to date, is because of Andrew Cuomo.”

Gripper pointed to Cuomo’s record working with Republicans in the state Senate to sideline Democrats in the upper chamber as another topic that deserves to be discussed in the mayor's race. Gripper said that, working with the IDC, Cuomo was able to sideline priorities for many New Yorkers, like investments in transit, public edcation, healthcare and housing, while simultaneously raiding the MTA budget and cutting funding for schools.

"Andrew Cuomo helped orchestrate a coup where a group of Democrats decided to conference with Republicans, and so Republicans, plus what they call the IDC, the Independent Democratic Conference, gave Republicans control of our state Senate and that structure existed for many years,” Gripper said. “He was holding the line for the wealthy, for the billionaires, for the developers, and at the expense of everyday working people. And he really was holding the line against New York City and not adequately funding the city the way he should have been.”

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, told Salon that Cuomo had nothing to do with the formation of the IDC. Politico has, however, reported as far back as 2014 that, while the IDC was not the governor's idea, Cuomo and top aides made it "very clear they wanted the IDC to work with Republicans to run the Senate."

In response to Gipper's statements, Azzopardi said, "Those are empty advocate talking points with no relation to reality." He said that the mental health care beds that were cut were non-forensic beds, set aside for people who are not considered dangerous and who are not involved in the criminal legal system; he added that the cut beds had been unoccupied for six months.

Responding to Gripper's other criticisms, Azzopardi said that Cuomo oversaw an increase in operational funding for the MTA by $2.4 billion annually and a $54.8 billion Capital Plan, which represented the largest investment in the authority's history. He also claimed that Cuomo's administration never cut school funding.  

Susan Kang, a professor of political science at John Jay College who has written extensively on New York under Cuomo and the IDC, told Salon that this sort of maneuvering to prevent a Democratic-controlled legislature was typical of Cuomo during his time as governor.

Kang also referenced the post-2010 Census redistricting process, in which Cuomo signed off on maps drawn by the state legislature, with the then Republican-controlled state Senate proposing legislative districts designed to help them retain control of the chamber. The same deal allowed Assembly Democrats to draw maps that helped protect their incumbents.

The maps Cuomo signed off on carefully underrepresented voters in New York City by packing more voters into the city's state Senate districts compared to upstate, Republican-dominated districts. When Cuomo was sued over the issue, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York found that population distortion across the state Senate districts had fallen just within the legal limit courts have allowed under the 14th Amendment. 

In practical terms, this means that, despite campaigning on independent redistricting, Cuomo signed off on a carefully-calculated maximal gerrymander designed to reduce the power of New York City's largely Democratic voters and help Republicans maintain control of the state Senate. Thirteen years later, Cuomo is running for mayor of New York City, pitching himself as the candidate who will stand up against a Republican administration in Washington.

Kang said that, politically speaking, having a Republican-controlled state Senate was useful for the former governor because it meant “he got to control the spigot of changes coming out of Albany.”

“I think he wants to present himself as sort of like a bipartisan compromise-maker in a state where you don't have to do that,” Kang said. “But he wouldn’t have to do that, if he hadn’t propped up this artificial division."

While the exact effects on what legislation made it into law are hard to quantify and still debated, critics blame the conference for blocking major legislation on ethics in government, reproductive health care and health care more broadly, voting rights, climate change and even earlier versions of the Child Victims Act, which extended the period that victims of child sexual assault have to bring civil cases.

Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

On the topic of redistricting, Azzopardi pointed to the passage of New York's independent redistricting amendment, which was passed during Cuomo's tenure.

Other critics have highlighted Cuomo’s handling of COVID as an area ripe for scrutiny, especially his handling of nursing homes during the crisis, which has received renewed interest given the Justice Department’s investigation into his congressional testimony on the topic. 

Dennis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York, told Salon that the full impact of Cuomo's COVID-era policy of discharging recovering COVID patients into nursing homes is unknown, but that it likely contributed to new infections in nursing homes. Nash also criticized the subsequent effort from the administration to undercount the number of deaths among nursing home residents by excluding residents who were infected in nursing homes but who died in hospitals from official tallies. A 2022 state audit conducted by the comptroller's office found that New York's health agency undercounted COVID-related deaths in nursing homes by at least 4,100.

“This greatly obscured the scale of the crisis. It also compromised the ability to learn from what happened in a very high-stakes situation. We can’t evaluate the effectiveness or harm of policies if our government officials and agencies are not transparent about the outcomes. New York eventually corrected the death count, but I think really only after external investigations forced its hand,” Nash said.

Paterson said that the nursing home fiasco and its subsequent cover-up point to one of Cuomo’s core political instincts: “Don’t ever admit to anything.”

“He just doesn't do it. Somewhere, he must have read a book that said, ‘Don’t ever admit to anything.’ And that has largely worked in his favor,” Paterson said. 

Cuomo has publicly admitted that there was a "delay" in the reporting of some nursing home-related deaths during the pandemic, though he has stopped short of apologizing for either the policy or the undercount. In congressional testimony in 2024, Cuomo said he did not review a State Health Department report on nursing home deaths, a statement that appears to be contradicted by emails between Cuomo's aides, according to the New York Times.

Azzopardi, Cuomo's spokesperson, told Salon that New York's nursing home policy was consistent with federal guidance and that the issue had been "weaponized and politicized for purely electoral purposes for years." Azzopardi referenced a report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, obtained by ABC News in early January of 2025, which found that DOJ officials were directed to "focus specifically on New Jersey and New York despite having been provided data indicating that the nursing homes with the most significant quality of care issues were in other states."

The same report found that in October of 2020, a Justice Department Office of Public Affairs official proposed a plan to leak information to the New York Post pertaining to information related to nursing home deaths in New York and New Jersey. That official texted another OPA official in mid-October 2020 that the leak would "be our last play on them before the election but it's a big one."

Paterson said that he’s advised Cuomo to reflect on his record, whether it be relating to the nursing home issue or his multiple sexual harassment scandals, and say, “If something such as this came up again, I’m pretty sure I would handle it differently.” In Paterson’s view, such reflection would open “the door for people to embrace your humanity.”

“And this is a conversation that he and I have had over the years. He agrees with me when we have the general conversation, but he never seems to adapt it. And I guess the reason that he's never adapted is that it's never actually come back to bite him,” Paterson said.

Editor's note: This piece was updated with additional comments from the Cuomo campaign.