Cuomo Discusses His Plan If He Wins NYC Race
In a revealing interview with POLITICO, the former New York governor laid out a bold strategy for leveraging the New York City mayoralty into a national platform aimed squarely at opposing a second Trump presidency.
Cuomo, now 67 and still facing fallout from a series of political scandals, including allegations of sexual harassment and a DOJ investigation into a potentially falsified COVID death report, made clear he sees the mayor’s office not just as a local executive post, but as a launchpad for sustained political warfare in Washington.
“If I win, I’m spending eight years in Washington,” Cuomo told POLITICO, not as a federal official, but through organizations like the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Governors Association.
His goal? Use the bully pulpit of the Big Apple to rally national opposition to Trump-era policies, particularly Medicaid cuts—a political strategy aimed at flipping red congressional seats by highlighting the program’s importance in conservative strongholds like Mississippi and Texas.
But Cuomo’s campaign comes with heavy baggage. He’s currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for allegedly misleading Congress over a report that downplayed COVID-related nursing home deaths in New York—deaths many attribute to his controversial 2020 directive requiring nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients.
An audit later revealed that fatalities were undercounted by as much as 46%. Cuomo, once hailed as a pandemic leader, now dismisses the federal probe as “laughable” and “purely political nonsense,” but questions about transparency and accountability continue to haunt him.
Cuomo’s shifting statements—first claiming no involvement in the report, then saying he doesn’t recall reviewing it—have done little to reassure critics. As House Oversight Chair James Comer puts it, the evidence suggests Cuomo was fully aware of the miscount.
Yet Cuomo’s political instincts appear far from dulled. He currently leads the race to unseat incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who’s running as an independent after falling out with Democratic leadership. But the race is tightening.
Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose platform includes progressive housing and policing reforms, has surged from just 10% support in March to 45.6% in the latest PIX11/Emerson College poll. Cuomo still holds the lead at 54.4%, but the margin is shrinking fast.