This article appears in the February 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In the 20th century, New York was the home of great progressives like Gov. (and later President) Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and Sen. Robert F. Wagner. In the 21st century, New York progressives have put their faith in men who collapsed, either in sex scandals or in the dead weight of their own egos.
In 2006, New York elected a strongly progressive governor in Eliot Spitzer. But he had a weakness for paid sex assignations. He resigned in disgrace 15 months after his inauguration. When the bullying Andrew Cuomo took over in 2011, the new hope was his chief rival, attorney general Eric Schneiderman. His Achilles’ heel was even worse: physically abusing former girlfriends. He would resign in disgrace too. Eventually, so would Cuomo.
In 2013, the progressive Working Families Party (WFP) elected one of its own, Bill de Blasio, as New York City mayor, succeeding Michael Bloomberg. De Blasio first came to prominence as a WFP-endorsed candidate for city council in 2001, and the WFP managed his successful campaign for public advocate in 2009. De Blasio achieved a number of goals early in his term, including tax-supported, universal pre-kindergarten. He cruised to re-election in 2017. But by the time he left office in 2021 after an impulsive and quixotic run for president, he had managed to alienate most of the city’s political class.
In the 2021 mayoral election, the WFP, the major progressive grassroots force in New York, endorsed their longtime ally, city comptroller Scott Stringer. But they rescinded the endorsement when Stringer also turned out to have a Me Too problem. (What is it with these New York pols?) Unable to agree on a single candidate, the WFP awkwardly endorsed two backup contenders; both lost.
These catastrophic decisions have ushered in a team of inept leaders in Albany and Manhattan. New York voters sit well to the left of the country at large, but few bold reforms get done. What currently stands in the way is a governor in the pocket of business who doesn’t know how to play even rudimentary politics, a corrupt New York City mayor who nonetheless has the support of major unions that depend on his decisions, and a bitter former governor bent on retribution.
New WFP leadership that’s as diverse as the progressive movement it commands could reverse the squandered opportunities of the past couple of decades. New York should be leading the way on progressive policy, but it often doesn’t represent the wishes of the majority of its citizens. This sours the public on an unrepresentative democracy. Can the state rise again as a bellwether of the nation?
WHEN THE WORKING FAMILIES PARTY WAS FOUNDED in 1998, New York had a Republican governor in George Pataki, Republicans controlled the state Senate, and Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City. Many Democrats had simply accommodated to the neoliberal mood. The situation cried out for smarter progressive organizing.
The idea behind the party was to take advantage of New York state’s fusion law, which allows political parties to get their own ballot line and cross-endorse major-party candidates. If the WFP could turn out activists to work on campaigns, the thinking went, Democratic candidates would value its endorsement, and some would move left. In other cases, the WFP could run progressives and defeat centrist or machine-backed candidates in Democratic primaries. It could even run candidates just on the Working Families line.
The key creators of the WFP were Dan Cantor, a longtime organizer who had worked with political scientist Joel Rogers to conceive and promote the idea; Jon Kest, then a leader of community organizing group ACORN; and several trade union leaders, including Bob Master of the Communications Workers of America. Cantor served as the party’s executive director and guiding strategist from its founding in 1998 until 2018, when the party passed the torch to Maurice Mitchell, a respected organizer with a well-earned national reputation as a coalition-builder.
Under New York law, a party needed 50,000 votes for governor to qualify for its own ballot line. In the 1998 election for governor, the fledgling WFP endorsed the Democratic candidate Peter Vallone, who was no progressive. He lost the general election, but earned 51,325 votes as a WFP candidate, getting the party the coveted ballot line.
One of the party’s early successes was a neighborhood activist in Brooklyn named Letitia James. She was recruited by the party to run for New York City Council in 2001, losing narrowly. When she ran again in 2003, James ran as WFP-only and became the first third-party member of the council since 1977.
In 2007, Spitzer, the former attorney general, became governor. Though Spitzer resigned in March 2008, during the next two years, progressives achieved a number of long-sought reforms. They got rid of the gerrymandering that counted upstate prison inmates as part of the local population for purposes of inflating the number of conservative legislative districts. By 2010, under Spitzer’s successor, Lt. Gov. David Paterson, they repealed the last of the draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws—a bill sponsored by Schneiderman—passed a domestic worker bill of rights, and more tightly regulated wage theft. They also enacted a progressive state income tax on the wealthy, with a top marginal rate of 10.3 percent on incomes over $1 million. The tax brought in $4 billion a year.
But this golden age was short-lived. And the millionaire’s tax had a sunset date at the end of 2011. In 2011, the new governor, also a former attorney general, would kill the extension as one of his first actions, despite polls showing that three-quarters of New Yorkers supported it. Astoundingly, the new governor repeatedly analogized the repeal to Mario Cuomo’s decision to end capital punishment, as unpopular but the right thing to do.
The new governor was Mario’s son, Andrew.
THE CORE POLITICAL FACT ABOUT ANDREW CUOMO is that he is a brilliant strategist and dealmaker who walks over people whenever he needs to. Even his detractors are quick to point out that “Andrew gets shit done,” whatever the personal fallout. He is thinking several steps ahead of everyone else in the room, but his relationships are purely transactional.
The same year Cuomo became governor in 2010, Republicans took back the state Senate. Democrats regained it in 2012, but four conservative Democrats (later expanded to eight), with Cuomo’s active behind-the-scenes encouragement, created a pro-Republican bloc called the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), and voted for a Republican Senate president. Cuomo had resented the pressure from the Senate Democratic leadership and liked the arrangement of a Democratic Assembly and a de facto Republican Senate, because it enabled him to play one chamber off the other and make the key legislative decisions himself.
Cuomo’s formula was to pursue big public-works projects (such as the rebuilding of decrepit LaGuardia Airport and a replacement for the aging Tappan Zee Bridge) and go leftish on social issues, but be a close ally of Wall Street and real estate interests. His early support for marriage equality won him scads of gay campaign money. He kept SEIU Local 1199, which represents hospital workers, on board by supporting increases in health and hospital spending. But with the help of the IDC, he pushed through cuts in New York’s corporate income tax to their lowest level in 50 years, and reduced taxes on yachts and private jets. During the pandemic, Cuomo passed a budget with $10 billion in spending cuts, rather than support higher taxes on the rich.
Cuomo’s successful use of raw political power for conservative policies put the WFP in a tactical bind. To keep its ballot line, the party must choose between running its own long-shot challenger and risking bad relations with the governor, or holding its nose and endorsing candidates it doesn’t like and denying the endorsement to its close allies. These decisions tend to divide the party leadership and send mixed signals to the electorate.
Andrew Cuomo’s formula was to go leftish on social issues, but be a close ally of Wall Street and real estate interests.
In 2014, after extensive internal debate, the party decided to seek a challenger. With few plausible candidates available, the WFP contacted Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University who was well known in progressive circles as a champion of antitrust, regulation of Wall Street, and campaign finance reform. Teachout was not a political novice—she had directed online organizing for Howard Dean in his 2004 presidential campaign—but she had never run for office herself.
A WFP leader, Karen Scharff of Citizen Action, leaked a story to The New York Times that Cuomo would likely face a challenge. The governor went ballistic, vowing to destroy the party and warning the unions that were early affiliates and funders of the WFP that there would be hell to pay. The mess that followed laid bare all the schisms in the WFP.
The Times story about the WFP running Teachout ran on May 29. By June 1, the WFP was back to endorsing Cuomo. In the intervening two days, intense pressure from the party’s union affiliates and second thoughts from its leaders caused the party to reverse course.
But the WFP made the mistake of thinking that Teachout would go away quietly. She would instead contest Cuomo for the WFP nomination. At the party convention, she had the clear sympathy of the room, but the votes of several big unions won the endorsement for Cuomo. She continued the campaign, winning a respectable 34 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Teachout’s policy director was a young law student named Lina Khan.
The governor did not deign to show up to the WFP convention, sending as his proxy WFP favorite Bill de Blasio, who often locked horns with Cuomo but in this case reaped a nice IOU. But the WFP needed some kind of face-saving concession. That turned out to be a commitment from Cuomo on video that he would stop tacitly supporting Republicans. The promise in the initial video was too flimsy, so WFP leaders insisted that Cuomo record a second one. It came to be known as the “hostage video.”
Cuomo, still livid over the whole affair, later bragged that he had not delivered on his promise. The Independent Democratic Conference continued until 2018. This failure to keep his word on a public commitment, recorded on video no less, was not lost on the WFP either.
In the 2018 election, after more battles with Cuomo, the WFP decided to challenge him again. This time, they endorsed actress and activist Cynthia Nixon, who lost the Democratic primary by about the same margin as Teachout. The WFP then awkwardly withdrew its endorsement and backed Cuomo once again, in order to win enough votes to keep their ballot line. This time, under more pressure from Cuomo, the big unions disaffiliated from the WFP for keeps.
In the general election that year, the WFP finally destroyed the IDC by running primary challenges against its leaders, ousting six. But they paid a big price in the form of Cuomo’s retribution. Cuomo nearly succeeded in ending fusion voting in New York entirely and made it more difficult for third parties to qualify. And he used a variety of carrots and sticks to keep the big unions out of the WFP.
IN 2014, CUOMO PUT AN OBSCURE FORMER Erie County clerk and one-term congresswoman from Buffalo, Kathy Hochul, on the ticket, because he needed an upstate female as his running mate. When she was lieutenant governor, Cuomo had as little to do with her as possible and tried to dump her from the ticket twice. She busied herself by going to ribbon cuttings, parades, and other minor ceremonial events; photos abound of Hochul with local officials in obscure towns holding up an enlarged symbolic check. In 2018, Jumaane Williams, a rising WFP star who is now New York City public advocate, nearly ousted Hochul in the Democratic primary, winning 46.6 percent of the vote.
An even more intriguing 2018 statewide primary was for attorney general, replacing Eric Schneiderman. Teachout seemed well positioned to win off her name recognition from the gubernatorial primary. But Tish James got into the race, and in a deal to raise the necessary campaign funds, took Cuomo’s endorsement while refusing to seek the endorsement of the WFP, which helped launch her career. James—aided by a quixotic candidacy from Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who bashed Teachout repeatedly on behalf of Wall Street—won the primary and became attorney general.
Despite the deal, James would not stay silent on Cuomo, however. In August 2021, she released a report finding credible evidence that Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 women while governor. After it looked like he might be indicted, numerous political leaders including Joe Biden called on him to step aside.
Cuomo’s currency was power. Once he was on the verge of losing power, people were happy to see him fall. An Albany veteran, who has a relatively cordial relationship with Cuomo, says, “When you abuse people for no purpose, at some point that becomes tiresome. When Bill Clinton got into his sex scandal, he had friends he could turn to. Andrew had zero goodwill.” Cuomo resigned on August 23, 2021.
SETH WENIG/AP PHOTO
When she suddenly found herself in the governor’s chair, Hochul tried to emulate Cuomo’s toughness, but kept making rookie errors. In the course of interviewing dozens of people for this piece, I did not find one who had a kind word for Hochul or considered her an effective governor. “She hasn’t learned anything about politics,” says one Albany insider, “since she was Erie County clerk.”
“She’s all corporate all the time, at least as right-wing as Andrew on anything having to do with business interests but without anything like his smarts or muscle,” says another influential Democratic legislator. “In this business, perception is power, and the accurate perception is that Hochul is weak.”
An early blunder was her failed effort to appoint a conservative chief judge of New York’s highest court. New York lost at least four Democratic-held seats in the U.S. House in 2022 because the Court of Appeals had rejected a redistricting map created by the legislature and turned to an expert panel that created new maps far friendlier to Republicans. The key vote on the 4-3 decision was Janet DiFiore, a former Republican chief judge appointed by Cuomo in 2015.
DiFiore and three other conservative judges had increasingly voted as a bloc. According to a tally by the publication City & State in 2022, the four voted in tandem in 96 of 98 cases that came before the court. Their decisions included rulings to prevent criminal defendants from presenting expert testimony supporting their innocence, bar workers from suing employers for workplace injuries, and make it harder for victims of police misconduct to sue for damages.
When DiFiore retired in 2022, Hochul had a chance to shift the high court. Instead, she was persuaded by consultants to name Hector LaSalle, a conservative of Puerto Rican ancestry, on the premise of shoring up her popularity in the Hispanic community. As a lower-court judge, LaSalle had supported a viciously anti-union decision, Cablevision Systems Corp. v. Communications Workers of America District 1, which allowed a personal defamation lawsuit against two union officials to go forward, despite a state law that prevents union leaders from being held personally liable for the activities of their unions. The nomination of LaSalle infuriated the entire progressive community, including numerous younger Hispanics.
State Senate leaders warned Hochul that they would not vote to confirm LaSalle, but she went ahead with the nomination anyway. “I’d rather lose than surrender,” she told several. When the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to approve the nomination, Hochul demanded a vote of the full state Senate, which overwhelmingly defeated LaSalle 39-20.
Hochul then elevated progressive Judge Rowan Wilson to the chief judge post, and named another progressive, Caitlin Halligan, to Wilson’s slot, creating a secure progressive 4-3 majority. She might have gotten credit for doing this in the first place. Instead, she looked inept and weak.
“She thinks the hardball goes with the office,” says Teachout. It doesn’t. Hochul doesn’t bother to count heads or trade favors, skills at which Cuomo excelled. Albany veterans were stunned last year when Hochul approved a pay raise for legislators without getting anything in return.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was the Working Families Party’s close ally, but the shift to ranked-choice voting in 2019 backfifired on the party.
Another fiasco was housing legislation. New York City has long subsidized affordable housing through a state property tax credit called 421-a, which rewards developers for setting aside a fraction of units in market-rate buildings as supposedly affordable. In FY2022, the credit cost the city a staggering $1.77 billion in lost property tax revenue. Housing activists and progressives have long argued that 421-a is an absurdly expensive way to create affordable housing, and that it would be far more cost-effective to give the subsidy to community nonprofits and reform the property tax system.
In 2022 and 2023, progressives and the governor were unable to agree on the terms of an extension. Progressives had put a deal on the table in which an extension of a revised tax credit would be combined with expanded housing vouchers and “good cause” legislation to give tenants more due process in evictions. But the Real Estate Board of New York was very nervous about any eviction protections, and Hochul followed their advice to stonewall the entire idea. Negotiations with the legislative leadership never got serious, and the tax credit program lapsed.
Instead, Hochul went off on her own tangent. Last January, she unveiled a “Housing Compact,” which would impose new requirements on the suburbs to permit development of multifamily housing. This is a good idea in principle, though it does nothing to solve New York City’s shortage of affordable housing.
But Hochul, characteristically, hadn’t done her political homework. Her proposal was a total surprise to everyone. She had failed to clear the idea with suburban political leaders, and was not proposing to trade her proposal for something else that legislators wanted. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, who represents part of affluent Westchester County, opposed the bill. The plan led to a massive backlash and collapsed last April, leaving New York with no new housing program.
One recent instance of Hochul’s close alliance with Wall Street and her clumsiness at political bargaining involves legislation sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee chair Sean Ryan that would ban noncompete clauses in employment. These clauses, routinely part of employment contracts in New York for both low-wage workers and executives, undercut worker bargaining power and save corporations fortunes.
Several states have banned noncompete clauses, and the federal government via the FTC has been exploring a national ban as a possible antitrust violation. Business groups contend that these bans are a burden on corporations. But as Ryan points out, California has banned noncompetes since 1872, which has enabled tech entrepreneurs to launch new startups without being constrained by their current employers. “The noncompete law made Silicon Valley,” he says.
Hochul opposed Ryan’s bill. She initially wanted a carve-out that would have exempted executive jobs in finance. Her final counterproposal was a noncompete ban on workers making $250,000 or less. This sounds not too bad, except that it would bind many tech entrepreneurs and deter startups.
New York’s major industries divided on Ryan’s bill. Tech supported it, as did the medical profession. Wall Street opposed it. The Business Council of New York was prepared to live with some version until the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched an all-out campaign. Right before Christmas, negotiations broke down and Hochul vetoed the bill, handing Wall Street another victory.
WHILE THINGS WENT AWRY IN ALBANY, in New York City the WFP had a lot to celebrate. Bill de Blasio, its candidate and close ally, was elected mayor in the 2013 election. Two other WFP favorites won the other citywide offices, with Letitia James succeeding de Blasio as public advocate, and Scott Stringer as city comptroller. When the new city council convened in 2014, it included 12 of the 13 candidates explicitly endorsed by the WFP, and 20 of the council’s 51 members became dues-paying members of its progressive caucus, another WFP creation.
But de Blasio’s career fizzled, and the shift to ranked-choice voting in 2019, a long-sought goal of some reformers, backfired on the WFP when it came to the mayoralty. Had the old rules been in effect, providing a two-way runoff election if no candidate wins a primary outright, progressives in 2021 would have united behind a single candidate.
Initially, the 2021 race appeared to be a fight between Scott Stringer and Eric Adams, a centrist former police captain and Brooklyn borough president. After Stringer dropped out, there were three plausible anti-Adams contenders. WFP leaders favored Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who had served as counsel to de Blasio and chair of the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. Wiley had the endorsements of AOC and Elizabeth Warren, among others.
To Wiley’s left, Dianne Morales, a director of social service organizations, hoped to galvanize Hispanics and young people. She promised to cut the police budget in half. But Morales’s campaign collapsed in May when her campaign manager and senior political adviser both resigned and four women attempting to organize a staff union were fired. The WFP, badly split, had briefly endorsed both Wiley and Morales. It then withdrew the Morales endorsement.
The most centrist of the alternatives to Adams was Kathryn Garcia (she is not Hispanic; Garcia is the name of her former husband), who served as de Blasio’s sanitation commissioner and then as the city’s “food czar” during COVID. She had a strong reputation as a good public manager. The Times endorsed Garcia.
On primary day, Adams placed first with 30.7 percent, Wiley was second with 21.4, and Garcia third with 19.6. But when the ranked-choice votes were reallocated to reflect voters’ second, third, fourth, and fifth choices, the final result was Adams, 50.4, and Garcia, 49.6, a win of less than 10,000 votes. Under the old system, Garcia would not have made the runoff, and most observers think that Wiley would have easily defeated Adams in a two-way.
Though a combination of bad luck and fragmentation cost progressives the mayoralty, the WFP did exceptionally well in the two other citywide races, and also in electing the youngest, most progressive, and most diverse city council in living memory. The problem has been that council’s difficulty in counteracting a mayor who has been both inept and corrupt.
ZZ/DENNIS VAN TINE/STAR MAX/IPX
ADAMS, ONLY THE SECOND BLACK MAYOR in city history, had built a formidable coalition. His base includes the still-potent Brooklyn machine, home of U.S. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries; African American voters throughout the city; real estate interests (Adams is close to developers); and outer-borough older whites concerned about crime, one of Adams’s signature issues.
But this year, Adams has stumbled in multiple respects. His approval rating, 61 percent in March 2022, is now at 28 percent, the lowest in the history of Quinnipiac polls of New York mayors. Though his promise to get tough on crime while reforming police excesses was central to his campaign, Adams has defaulted on both commitments, in ways that seem politically weird.
In mid-November, Adams ordered deep cuts in city spending, citing a $12 billion budget deficit out of a municipal budget of just over $110 billion, and blaming the imbalance substantially on the costs of the influx of migrants. Because of dwindling federal COVID aid, New York’s budget crunch is real. But the size of the deficit and the role of immigrants have been grossly exaggerated. As this piece was going to press, Adams admitted as much, and agreed to some token restorations of cuts. In response to my questions, his press spokesman, Charles Lutvak, in an email, attributed the brighter budget picture to better than expected revenues, but Adams had exaggerated the deficits all along.
In fact, according to Comptroller Brad Lander’s latest report, the city budget actually has a small surplus for FY2024, but a deficit for 2025, and a net deficit for the next two years of about $5.8 billion. The anticipated deficit doesn’t reach anything like $12 billion until FY2027, and a lot could happen between now and then. To get his large deficit numbers, Adams’s budget uses more pessimistic economic projections on economic growth, job creation, inflation, and interest rates.
Most of the deficit is the result of expiring federal COVID aid, not increased costs of housing migrants and refugees. According to Lander, “the Comptroller’s Office estimates that asylum seeker costs will total $465 million less than the City has budgeted this year, and $1.61 billion less than planned for FY 2025,” before rising in the out-years. Adams’s scapegoating of migrant arrivals has increased his unpopularity with immigrant communities. “I can’t explain his reasoning for the budget cuts,” says Crystal Hudson, who represents a Brooklyn district in the city council. “To blame the budget crisis on newly arrived people is just not honest.”
New York City mayors have the power to freeze spending. Adams is refusing to fund the city’s civilian police review board, one of the few such bodies with real teeth, and is cutting education and health outlays as well as libraries. At the same time, his cuts include a hiring freeze on new police officers, which will entail postponing five classes of new officers, bringing the total force to under 30,000 for the first time since the 1980s.
This drew opposition from conservatives as well as liberals, including the police union, which had been a strong Adams supporter. It strikes critics as bizarre that a former police captain whose campaign portrayed him as tough on crime is literally defunding the police.
In the 2022 campaign, one of the city’s two tabloids, the New York Post, was a big supporter of Adams. The Post has begun to desert him. The Post ran a scathing piece by a writer from the conservative Manhattan Institute. Nicole Gelinas excoriated Adams for ill-considered cuts that won’t even save serious money. “His cancellation of new police-academy classes would save less than three hundred million dollars next year. Reducing litter pickup will save … five million dollars. Reductions to library hours barely hit $20 million annually … he’s only scaring the people he needs to stay here and pay their taxes.”
Adams has exercised little if any leadership in seeking new sources of income, rather than pushing for cuts in popular services. New York magazine reports that the city is owed $2 billion in uncollected fees and fines. The city’s Independent Budget Office calculates that hiring 50 auditors in the understaffed Department of Finance could bring the city $165 million a year in revenue—nearly half a billion over the next three years.
New York City faces a shortage of affordable housing, compounded by the arrival of 100,000 new migrants.
Comptroller Lander has proposed that the city could impose higher taxes on pied-à-terre apartments that are kept vacant most of the time, exacerbating the housing shortage. The city could take money that goes to developers via tax breaks for building some affordable housing and get the housing built far more efficiently.
The city, says Lander, also needs a progressive income tax. The city has a personal income tax, but its top rate of 3.876 percent is reached at an income of only $50,000 for a single and $90,000 for a couple. That means a multimillionaire basically pays the same marginal rate as a working-class person. Lander proposes a higher tax bracket of 4.4 to 5 percent for the top 1 percent, about 40,000 households. Because of New York’s extreme income inequality, that modest shift would bring in nearly a billion dollars a year.
The political problem is that these and other progressive changes in city taxation require approval of the state, which is to say Gov. Hochul. The city has plenty of progressive legislators in Albany, but they don’t have the numbers to override a Hochul veto.
The strongly progressive city council has overcome Adams’s opposition on a few issues. The city faces a terrible shortage of affordable housing, compounded by the arrival of 100,000 new migrants. Adams’s solution to that is to arbitrarily limit how long a family may stay in a shelter. The council had a better idea. According to the mayor’s own report, it cost the city around $8,773 per month to house a family of two in the shelter system in 2022. A city housing voucher for a one-bedroom apartment to house the same family would cost a maximum of $2,387.
In July, the council passed an expansion of the rent voucher program over Adams’s veto. Given the budget freeze, it’s not clear how many families will benefit.
The week before Christmas, the city council overwhelmingly passed a ban on solitary confinement in city jails, including the notorious Rikers Island. The union representing prison guards has opposed the bill, but 38 members of the 51-member city council co-sponsored the measure. Inmates held in solitary have committed suicide, and in 2019, one detainee, Layleen Polanco, died in solitary following an epileptic seizure. Her family received a $5.9 million settlement from the city. New York is also under a federal order to give up control of Rikers, which Adams has also resisted. Adams has 30 days to decide whether to sign the solitary confinement bill. Progressives expect to pass the ban over his veto.
Meanwhile, Adams is now under investigation for what looks like a crude bribe. He accepted campaign money, both as Brooklyn borough president and then as a candidate for mayor, from Turkish donors close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He then used his muscle to overrule Fire Department safety concerns over a rushed 35-story tower called the Turkevi Center, so that Turkey could open a palatial consulate there in time for Erdogan’s 2021 U.N. visit.
It remains to be seen whether Adams will be criminally indicted, or just how weakened he is politically. But it doesn’t look great when FBI agents stop you on the street, shove your security detail aside, and confiscate your iPad and phones.
HOCHUL’S TERM HAS MORE THAN TWO MORE years to run. Few people in Albany think she could win another term in 2026; she barely won her 2022 election with 53 percent of the vote, running eight points behind Biden’s 2020 New York win. One person who could beat Hochul handily, according to many observers, is Tish James. Meanwhile, resurgent progressives could likely defeat Adams in 2025 if they could agree on a candidate.
A wild card in any major New York election, incredibly, would be Andrew Cuomo, who now feels that resigning was a huge mistake. Cuomo has been dropping broad hints that he might run for New York City mayor in 2025, and even use that as a stepping stone back to governor in 2026.
Cuomo’s entire life is politics, a longtime ally points out. He doesn’t have hobbies or charities. Since stepping down, he has not offered his contacts and formidable talents at management of large government projects to potential corporate clients who’d pay Cuomo a small fortune as a consultant, broker, or lobbyist. At 66, he is conscious of his age and wants back in.
That calculus is complicated by the possibility of an Adams indictment and resignation. Should Adams step down, there would be a special election. In a head-to-head between Cuomo and a single progressive unity candidate, Cuomo’s career might be ended once and for all. However, if Adams stays in office and Cuomo gets in, a three-way between Adams, Cuomo, and a progressive could break any number of ways.
At the WFP, meanwhile, there has been both a generational and an ethnic transition. The founders and initial leaders of the party were white male political intellectuals and organizers, now mostly in their sixties and seventies. Many of their early elected leaders were also white males. The new leadership is young, nonwhite, and heavily female, including its two state co-directors, Ana Maria Archila and Jasmine Gripper.
Archila headed a key and highly effective constituent group of the WFP, Make the Road New York. Gripper was director of the Alliance for Quality Education. “We want to make sure going into 2025 that we learn from the party’s mistakes and have the whole left united,” Gripper tells me.
“Polling shows that what people in New York want is the agenda we are working for: affordable housing and child care, decent jobs, transportation,” Archila adds. “The right’s answer is to make government small. We have a mayor and a governor who want austerity policies and cuts in services, and blame migrants. There is a profound lack of sympathy for people who are down.”
There is no doubt that Adams is vulnerable, both personally and on the issues. But it’s a long way to 2025.
“There is a majority coalition of New Yorkers who voted for one of the progressives for mayor, or who voted for Adams but backed progressives for the city council and who also love Jumaane Williams and Tish James,” says Lander. “The opportunity for progressives is to demonstrate that a social democratic vision and a competent, well-run municipal government to deliver the goods go together.”
This combination sounds like Lander himself, who is said to be taking soundings for a mayoral run. Despite the WFP’s determination to have unity on the left next time, he could be one of several candidates, including Williams, Wiley, and others. It’s an embarrassment of riches, set against Hochul, Adams, and Cuomo, a rich set of embarrassments. But to dislodge these incumbents of the past and present, and win a governing majority out of a popular majority, progressives must unify.
