Cuomo is a very bad choice, but the alternatives are worse.

Jim Geraghty argues that it would be a terrible mistake for New York City’s voters to elect Andrew Cuomo as their next mayor this November, entrusting him with an office that famously eluded his father in 1977. As usual, Jim is correct and detailed in chapter and verse on why Cuomo is a terrible person with a terrible public record who does not deserve to be rehabilitated and returned to public life.

But the question of the June 24 Democratic primary is not “Cuomo again?” but “compared to whom?” And that question is almost certain to be decisive of the November 4 election. The city’s moribund Republican Party is likely to re-nominate Guardian Angels founder and talk-show host Curtis Sliwa, who lost to Eric Adams by 39 points in 2021. Adams himself, fresh off becoming the first sitting mayor of New York to be indicted (from which he was bailed out by Donald Trump) is running again as an independent, as is wealthy attorney Jim Walden. The city that once elected Mike Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, and John Lindsay may yet see a revival of either a Republican or independent candidacy, but this won’t be the year, even if Adams stages a comeback to something like respectability in the final tally when people consider the alternatives. An Emerson College poll taken in late March showed Cuomo drawing 43 percent of the general electorate if he was the Democratic nominee — not a strong position for a Democrat in New York — but the opposition divided 13 percent for Sliwa (half of his 2021 support), 11 percent for Adams, 4 percent for Walden, and a whopping 29 percent undecided.

It seems telling that, when SurveyUSA asked what characteristics Democratic primary voters want, the listed alternatives were as follows:

Focus on Affordable Housing: 24 percent
Public Service In Government: 17 percent
Communication/Leadership Skills: 17 percent
Experience Managing Budget: 12 percent
Challenging Powerful Interests: 10 percent
New Ideas/Outsider Perspective: 8 percent
Record On Climate/Sustainability: 6 percent
Community Engagement/Asian Community: 5 percent

Notice three things that weren’t even listed. The first is public safety, which typically is the overriding issue in a New York mayoral election. The second is education. And the third is honesty, integrity, character, or trust — none of which anybody expects if they are asking Andrew Cuomo to face off against Eric Adams.

If Democrats want the city to be run at all well, where else can they turn? Cuomo is an old-style liberal whose ethics are non-existent and whose abrasive personality led Jake Tapper to write his political obituary in 2002, but the other ten Democratic candidates (led by Uganda-born socialist state legislator Zohran Mamdani and city comptroller Brad Lander, an AOC/Elizabeth Warren progressive) are a menagerie of leftist lunacy that makes the Star Wars cantina look like the School of Athens by comparison. At least Cuomo has some concept of how to run things plausibly well enough to get reelected to a chief executive position. He’s the guy who can make the trains run on time; he knows where the bodies are buried because he put half of them there himself. After Bill de Blasio, with whom Cuomo feuded endlessly, New York can’t afford another mayor who will go full Brandon Johnson. Like Adams, Cuomo is a very bad choice, but the alternatives are worse.