The inside story of Andrew Cuomo’s campaign collapse

Another conference call. This was what strategy looked like on Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign: A small circle of aides and advisers listening to longtime aide Melissa DeRosa, who denied working on his campaign in public but whom all involved knew was running things, as she pressed them about early voting numbers showing the Zohran Mamdani surge was real.

Another conference call. This was what strategy looked like on Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign: A small circle of aides and advisers listening to longtime aide Melissa DeRosa, who denied working on his campaign in public but whom all involved knew was running things, as she pressed them about early voting numbers showing the Zohran Mamdani surge was real. Some felt scolded. They all felt frustrated. A few raised the same point they had been pleading for weeks and months: We need to get him out more. “He’s doing a lot,” DeRosa said. “He’s doing as much as he can.” The call less than two weeks before primary day, described to CNN by three of the people who participated, was one of many moments of a campaign that soared in its first few weeks, agonizingly ground down everyone involved, then finished with a spectacular flop. Cuomo ended up conceding to a person he had long dismissed as an upstart who talked a lot, someone as young as his daughters with a fraction of his government experience. Mamdani’s historic expansion of the electorate, his tapping into the hunger for a leftward lurch and fresh voice, defied almost every poll and expert’s expectation. A month before the June 24 election, one veteran progressive operative told CNN that Mamdani’s decisive army of volunteers was composed of naifs “who thought they could door-knock their way to the revolution.” But all but a few involved with the Cuomo campaign acknowledge, at least privately, how much they did wrong. The former governor came off constantly clueless about intricacies of the city and its politics. And despite what DeRosa said, he would call a few short appearances a full schedule and avoided interviews or unscripted interactions with voters, leaving him vulnerable to Mamdani’s go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone strategy.