The many New Yorkers familiar with Andrew M. Cuomo’s voice can be certain of one thing: He has adopted a new one on social media.
To an X user who seemed confused about an apparently AI-generated video of a toddler mouthing Mr. Cuomo’s words in Mr. Cuomo’s voice, he shot back, “Turn the sound on bro.”
When someone fondly compared Mr. Cuomo to the Energizer bunny, he swiftly responded, “Twice his age, twice his energy.”
What’s behind the chattier, looser social media persona? Mr. Cuomo’s convincing loss in the Democratic mayoral primary to Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
During the primary, Mr. Cuomo saw a huge polling advantage dwindle as he held only limited, tightly controlled public appearances. His relative absence from the trail and his negative focus on New York City’s “chaos” created an opening for the emergence of Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old digital native with charisma and clear, positive messaging.
Now, Mr. Cuomo, the former governor of New York, is running in the general election on an independent ballot line, and he is using X, Instagram and TikTok to challenge the proposition that an old dog can’t learn new tricks, at a time when more and more voters are getting their news from social media.
“We were too cautious, too buttoned-up,” said his spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, on Thursday morning. “And the philosophy for the general election is we’re going to meet voters where they are.”
But as any teenage girl on Instagram can tell you, being online comes with risks.
When a self-described “elections junkie” turned to social media to express reluctant praise for Andrew M. Cuomo’s new campaign logo, he did not expect much of anyone to notice.
The “elections junkie,” Anthony Emerson, a writer based in Portland, Maine, for Uni Watch — a website that “deconstructs the finer points of sports uniforms” — had only 1,000 or so followers on X, many of them fellow democratic socialists.
So he was more than a little surprised when Mr. Cuomo took note after Mr. Emerson wrote, “Unfortunately I do like the new logo. The sun rising over the crown of the Statue of Liberty is great.”
“Thank you we worked hard on it,” Mr. Cuomo responded in a post sharing the praise to his 98,000 followers on X.
Then a fellow user suggested Mr. Emerson change his vanilla X handle to something more provocative: “Andrew Cuomo Is A Sex Pest.” Mr. Cuomo soon found his X stream populated by an unwanted reference to the 11 sexual harassment allegations that drove him from office (and which he denies). Mr. Cuomo ultimately deleted his response.
His spokesman mocked the posters as trolls. “We’ve clearly been more aggressive with our online strategy, and engaging with those who have great cellphone reception under the bridges they call home is one of the great joys of social media,” Mr. Azzopardi said.
Mr. Azzopardi declined to say much more about Mr. Cuomo’s new social media strategy, though he did acknowledge the team has “new people helping us with social media.” He declined to name them.
And he acknowledged that Mr. Cuomo was pivoting from a primary campaign that critics and ultimately the former governor himself acknowledged did not meet the moment.
“He’s out in the streets, he’s in every corner of this city, but where people are is also social media, as everyone has noted,” Mr. Azzopardi said. “We’re not going to out-Mamdani Mamdani. That’s not what we’re trying to do here, but we are trying to reach as many New Yorkers as possible, and that’s just part of that approach.”
It is a noteworthy shift for a former governor whose X feed before the primary read like that of any middle-of-the-road baby boomer politician. There were endorsement alerts; notices about an upcoming heat wave and early voting hours; photos of Mr. Cuomo campaigning in Brooklyn. It was an approach that arguably made sense, given Mr. Cuomo’s popularity among older New Yorkers who are not particularly online.
After Mr. Mamdani’s 12-point win in the primary, and Mr. Cuomo’s prolonged deliberation about whether to continue onward and run as an independent, his online tone began to shift.
His feed became populated with shaky, artfully casual video of the governor chit-chatting about infrastructure as well as direct engagement with supporters and critics, and cutting, unbridled critiques. He even deployed online jargon.
“lazyweb what’s the correct term for this?” he asked his followers, referring to a New York Post headline: “Inside Zohran Mamdani’s posh multiday Uganda wedding bash with phone jamming system, armed guards.” He offered them two choices, via an X poll: “Champagne socialism” and “Trust fund socialism.” The former won, with 57.9 percent of the vote.
Mr. Cuomo is riding a trend in political communication.
“We’re seeing a normalization of ‘influencer aesthetics’ in political messaging (think chatty captions, behind-the-scenes imagery, emotional relatability) all aimed at humanizing the candidate and boosting algorithmic visibility,” wrote Eunji Kim, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, in an email. “It also reflects a deeper change in how people experience politics: not necessarily through formal news consumption, but incidentally, through content designed for entertainment or personal connection.”
But to Chi Ossé, a 27-year-old Brooklyn councilman who has occasionally advised Mr. Mamdani on social media, Mr. Cuomo’s effort to suddenly display facility with social media seems inauthentic.
As the former governor’s feed stands now, “It’s really hard to watch,” Mr. Ossé said. “The general sentiment that I have is that it’s insincere.”
Mr. Cuomo’s new social media persona did find some praise online, and even Mr. Emerson conceded that “it probably can’t hurt” to try. Still, it is not clear how effective Mr. Cuomo’s new approach will be.
Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at N.Y.U., said that Mr. Cuomo was trying to use social media “to make himself seem relatable.”
But he added that Mr. Cuomo appeared to be relying on an “outdated” social media playbook, by failing to more effectively suffuse his messaging with actual policy goals.
“Mamdani has done almost the exact opposite,” Mr. Sanderson said. “He made himself feel approachable and knowable by communicating his policy agenda and by us coming to understand him through his articulation of his policy agenda directly to the public via social media.”