Andrew Cuomo blames his Democratic party primary loss to Zohran Mamdani last month on “under-30s” who turned out for the contest and “distorted” expectations, singling out young Jews in particular. The former governor made the comments to a flock at a synagogue in the Hamptons on Sunday, offering a post-mortem on the race, and elaborating on how he views the contest in the broader context of the Democratic party’s changes at a national level.
“There was an explosion of the under-30 vote,” the former governor said, later adding that “they were highly motivated and they came out to vote and that totally distorted what was expected.” Cuomo argued that the 100,000-vote margin by which he lost in the June primary was mostly made up of these voters, and told the Jewish audience that this included a sizable portion of their community as well. “Young people who came out, they were socialists and they were pro-Palestinian,” he said. “And I would wager that in that primary more than 50% of the Jewish people were [voting for] Mamdani.” Cuomo also added that people in this group who are pro-Palestinian “don’t consider it being anti-Israel.”
The former member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet went on to say that Mamdani’s victory was part of a “socialist wave in the Democratic party” on a national level. “AOC [and] Bernie Sanders going across the country, The No Kings [protests] brought out hundreds of thousands of young people at rallies all across the country,” he said. “But anti-Trump then fits with socialism, then fits with pro-Palestinian, and he was the perfect vehicle for this under-30 wave of reform and a new reality.”
Cuomo also outlined another major cause for his twelve-point loss in June, which he said “hurts” and was “embarrassing.” He described how his campaign had a false sense of security, with many polls showed him ahead leading up to June 24th primary. “All the geniuses say, you know, you’re up 15 points, you want to play it safe,” Cuomo said, having limited his public campaign appearances where he could take questions from the press, and rarely appearing at the many forums featuring other mayoral candidates, other than the two debates in the final stages of the campaign. “And he was nowhere on the radar screen, Mamdani,” he remarked, adding that in hindsight he “wasn’t aggressive enough.” Cuomo is now running in the general election on an independent ballot line.
While Cuomo himself did not engage in as much public rhetoric as he now feels he should have, Super PACs associated with his campaign did target Mamdani aggressively with controversial messaging, at one point darkening and lengthening his beard in a picture of him sent out to voters as part of a mailer. Mamdani called the move “blatant Islamophobia” at the time.
