I think the legacy of Cuomo is in the physical infrastructure of New York State.

It’s typical of partisans to praise their opponents as they are turfed out of real power. I’m no different in this regard. When I think of Andrew Cuomo’s legacy now that he is presumably finished as a political figure, I’ll never forget him telling people like me that we had “no place” in New York State. He rose to a kind of national celebrity at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He filled a role that many American people wanted to cast at the time: the politician who was taking the worst-case scenarios seriously. New York started preparing the Javits Center to become a temporary hospital. It wasn’t needed. In the mania to free up hospital beds, Cuomo chose to move elderly Covid patients out of them and back to their nursing homes faster, unwittingly increasing the death toll of the pandemic.

But I think the legacy of Cuomo is in the physical infrastructure of New York State. It’s the new replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, named after his father. It’s the new LaGuardia Airport which has gone from America’s worst major airport to its finest. The momentum to rework JFK began under him too. Although these were expensive projects, their completion was a real record of accomplishment to run on. The Tappan Zee had been needing a replacement bridge since the early 1990s.

New Yorkers have used these new arteries to flee the state. For Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, and even for Montana. Cuomo didn’t start New York’s relative decline — the upstate region has been bleeding population for decades. The population loss really took off when a post-2020 exodus from New York City added to the slow-motion upstate debacle.