New York City Can Do Better Than Andrew Cuomo

New York City’s eight million inhabitants are used to a certain amount of ambient misery. Bags of trash line the streets from time to time, although the city recently spent $1.6 million on McKinsey consultants who told them they could and should use wheeled bins instead. There are more rodents than people. They (the people, not the rodents) pay astronomical sums for rent. Aaron Rodgers briefly played quarterback for the New York Jets.

When you bring any of this up to New Yorkers, they scoff. Sure, there’s some downsides, they often say, but they live in the Big Apple! An international capital of art, culture, media, finance, sports, and the human experience! The place where Babe Ruth hit all those home runs! The place where some of the Marvel movies are set! New York City’s intrinsic and ineffable greatness, they argue, is well worth the price of everything else.

Perhaps this high tolerance for low expectations is why New Yorkers might elect Andrew Cuomo as their city’s next mayor. The city’s electorate will go to the polls on Tuesday to elect its next leader. (Well, technically, they will elect the Democratic candidate for mayor, but in the sapphire-blue Big Apple, that’s often the same thing.) Cuomo, the state’s former governor, is among the many candidates vying for the Democratic nomination and is one of two currently leading in the polls.

Eleven Democrats are running for the mayoralty this year. (Not among them is incumbent Eric Adams, who is running as an independent for reasons we’ll discuss later.) I admit that I am baffled, as a non–New Yorker, that Cuomo is not ranked eleventh in the public opinion polls of voters’ preferences. He would be the worst possible choice to lead the nation’s largest city at the worst possible time.