Andrew Cuomo Could Beat Trump … If He Can Win Over the Left First

The governor of New York suddenly looks like the kind of take-no-prisoners pol his party needs. With one catch.

By DAVID FREEDLANDER July 07, 2017

NEW YORK — The scene is unfolding in the shabby headquarters of the Hotel Trades Council just off Times Square in the late spring of 2017, but it’s not hard to imagine the speech somewhere in the Rust Belt in 2020, with a Democratic nominee trying to reclaim the Upper Midwest for his party.

“The truth is the middle class is under attack. The working families are under attack,” Andrew Cuomo bellows, his tough-guy accent coming in a little thick. “Middle-class wages are behind where they were 20 years ago. Think about it. All the pundits on TV say, ‘We don’t understand why there is such anger and anxiety.’”

Standing before a crowd of unionized hotel workers several hundred strong, the governor of New York rails against Republicans for feeding workers like them a lie all these years. He speaks to them like he alone understands what they have been going through, watching wages disappear while the rest of the country gets richer. “It’s the labor movement that built the middle class and it’s the labor movement that’s going to have to rebuild the middle class in this country,” he thunders. He has the room, completely.

Cuomo is a big-name politician who has long seemed an extremely unlikely national candidate — until now, when suddenly he’s seeming like a very likely one. In theory, he is here to ceremonially sign a bill that would allow union members to deduct their union dues from their state taxes, but it’s clear what he is really doing today is waging a bigger argument against President Donald Trump.

“You want to deport immigrants? I say to them, start with me, Andrew Cuomo, the grandson of Andrea and Immacolata Cuomo, Italian poor immigrants,” he tells a roomful of people who are mostly immigrants. The hotel workers stand up. They cheer. “Andrew Cuomo for president!” Someone yells. And then all at once. “2020! 2020!”

Cuomo stops. He wags a finger in mock annoyance, a broad smile across his face. “Don’t start trouble for me today. You are supposed to be my friends. This is not helpful.”

New Yorkers love to assume that their politicians are national figures by default, even as one by one they flame out on the big stage. For much of his career, Cuomo has looked like another in this long line: someone too nakedly ambitious, too pushy, with too messy of a personal life—too, well, New Yorky—to play much beyond Buffalo and the Battery. But suddenly it seems that Americans are willing to pull the lever for a muscular, messy, rough-edged leader shouting for the common man, and suddenly the governor is starting to show up on a lot of people’s lists. “Look at his career, look at his work in New York,” said Jonathan Cowan, president and founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank, and a former Cuomo adviser. “He is laying out a model for what it means to be a 21st-century Democrat. Our party is in a deep hole. You have to look around and say, ‘Who is succeeding? Who is doing it differently?’”

It’s not just Democrats who see Cuomo showing up on the radar. “I would say Cuomo is the one I am most nervous about,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime adviser to Trump who helped put together an aborted Trump gubernatorial run against Cuomo in 2014, and helped lead the campaign for Carl Paladino, Cuomo’s 2010 Republican opponent. “Hillary Clinton wouldn’t take the gloves off. There isn’t a counterpunch Andrew Cuomo won’t throw.”

So far, Cuomo’s forays onto the national stage have been far more muted than some of the other talked-about potential 2020 Democratic nominees. There has been no book tour, no earnest Facebook videos or airport protest bullhorn photo-ops, no whispers that he is even thinking about it—although longtime friends and advisers have gingerly begun to bring it up to him. (They say Cuomo seems intrigued, but noncommittal.) In the world of political betting, most oddsmakers have him in the top 10, but barely.

Subtly, however, Cuomo looks very much like someone doing the spadework to run for president. His speeches, like the one at the Hotel Trades Council headquarters, are increasingly laced with the kind of big themes that become the rhetorical cornerstones of presidential campaigns. He rails against Washington, contrasting the gridlock of Congress against his own relatively smooth management of the previously dysfunctional Statehouse, the misplaced priorities of national Republicans against the steady progress he has made in Albany. Over the past several months, Cuomo has hired Chris Christie’s former chief of staff, a move widely seen as further burnishing his own bipartisan credentials; his aides have reached out to out-of-state donors about a possible fundraising swing later this year.

But if he runs, he’s got one big roadblock in his way first: The energy in the Democratic Party right now comes from a newly energized left. And the energized left, not to put too fine a point on it, hates Cuomo. “The worst of the worst,” said Nomiki Konst, a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention and frequent cable TV defender of the candidate who now serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission. “Andrew Cuomo is somehow the only politician in America who still thinks neoliberalism and triangulation work, who opens up the Blue Dog playbook and says, ‘How can I use this to run for president?’”

Cuomo has in many ways solved New York, a state whose government routinely ranked among the most dysfunctional and corrupt in America. But if he hopes to be taken seriously as a standard-bearer, he has to solve something far more complicated: The Democratic Party, an institution that can make Albany seem like Sweden in its functionality. There are signs he’s already trying to work that puzzle: The state Democratic Party has run ads out-of-state featuring Cuomo alongside Sanders, trumpeting the Sanders-esque free college proposal that he pushed through. After six years of straddling the center line, can Cuomo convince his party’s progressive wing that he is actually one of them?

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