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Standing on a corner of Lexington Avenue, Lewis passed out Cuomo palm cards to passersby. An elderly Hispanic man in a MAGA cap asked to take some cards with him to The Bronx. Lewis bade him goodbye: “Vote for Cuomo — and make America great again!”
“At the end of the day, he will be a good mayor,” Lewis said of Cuomo. “A vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani.”
On her Instagram account, she has made no secret of her disdain for Mamdani, recently posting a video urging her fellow Republicans to prevent, as she put it, “a communist mayor.” Wearing a MAGA hat and a Trump shirt, she implored her followers, “I need you to hold your nose. I need you to vote for Cuomo.”
With the Nov. 4 election looming, Cuomo’s path to winning the mayoral race is to consolidate the anti-Mamdani vote. But with Mamdani’s double-digit lead in polls — and in a city where a majority of voters are registered Democrats — it’s a tall order, even with Mayor Eric Adamsout of the race. Cuomo’s best shot at getting more votes is to turn out conservative independents and Republicans — without alienating liberals and Democrats.
Cuomo is walking a tightrope when it comes to Trump — persuading voters he can stand up to the president while courting those who ardently support him.
“The task before Cuomo is simultaneously trying to win some of the most loyal members of the Democratic coalition while convincing a bunch of Republicans he’s their guy,” said Evan Roth Smith, a founder of political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies. “This might be the biggest reach they ever tried to pull.”
Volunteers like Lewis could help break through for Cuomo, one of the most identifiable Democrats nationwide and a scion of the state’s blue establishment.
Talking to voters on the sidewalk, Lewis made a measured case for Cuomo, stressing his experience managing the state as governor; his plan to hire 5,000 police officers; his promise to expand public school gifted-and-talented programs; and his relationships with business leaders.
Cuomo’s campaign is focusing on undecided voters and framing the race as one between Cuomo and Mamdani. So is Fix the City, an independent expenditure committee that has raised a record-breaking $28 million to promote Cuomo to voters, including mobilizing paid and volunteer canvassers.
“The majority of voters have not lined up with Z.M., and that's the opportunity of our campaign, to take a message to the majority the of the general election electorate who are concerned about safety, are concerned about crime, are very concerned about homelessness,” said Cornell Belcher, Cuomo’s pollster. “If you look at the favorability among Republican voters, they’re not in love with any of the candidates, but certainly Cuomo has an advantage there…if we can bring people to a binary choice.”
Andrew Cuomo holds a mayoral campaign event in Chinatown, Oct. 3, 2025.
But some Republicans who back Sliwa, like Councilmember Joann Ariola, aren’t buying what Cuomo is selling.
“Former Gov. Cuomo would like you to think that he's putting out a big tent message, but really what he's doing to independents and Republicans is putting out a message of fear: that if they don't vote for him, that they will get Mamdani, and that Curtis Sliwa does not have any chance of winning, and that's simply not true,” said Ariola, the current minority leader who represents parts of south Queens.
The COVID pandemic, during Trump’s first term as president, gave Cuomo a national stage as a leader who directed a forceful response while the White House downplayed the pandemic.
But Cuomo’s status changed after multiple female employees accused him of sexual harassment, prompting his 2021 resignation and protracted court battles against his accusers at public expense. Cuomo denies the allegations.
Meanwhile, his COVID response alienated many conservative voters in New York, from public workers opposed to vaccine mandates to Orthodox Jews outraged at state attempts to shut down religious gatherings. Opponents also pilloried Cuomo for policies that they claimed led to preventable deaths of nursing home patients.
Little love lingers for some Republican leaders. Marko Kepi, founder of the political club New York City Republicans, said he is standing by Sliwa.
“We remember Cuomo as the same Cuomo who said conservatives have no place in New York,” Kepi said. “He felt he didn’t need us as governor, but now he’s begging for our votes. There’s a saying that the wolf changes his fur but not his tactics. He’s still the same.”
But Cuomo also has a history of making alliances with Republicans. As governor, he hired Republican Senate staff to top positions and empowered the state Senate’s Independent Democratic Conference, Democratic members who teamed up with Republicans to weaken Democrats' majority control of the state legislature.
Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis, who describes himself as “anybody but Zohran” and ran for mayor himself in 2013, declined to discuss Cuomo’s inroads with Republican voters or say who he plans to vote for.
“Listen, people have to decide,” Catsimatidis said. “Socialism is not a good thing for America or for New York.”
Catsimatidis had been in touch with Trump about how to coax candidates out of the mayoral contest in the hopes of defeating Mamdani. Cuomo denied knowing anything about Trump’s involvement, though the two reportedly have discussed the mayor’s race.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks about Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s tweets about defunding the police, Aug. 4, 2025.
Political consultant Lupe Todd-Medina said Cuomo’s path to victory relies in large part on the strength of his get-out-the-vote operation and getting reliable Democratic voters to fill in the bubble on the ballot for someone other than the Democratic nominee.
“It’s not impossible. It’s probably improbable. But it’s a bit of a Sisyphean task,” Todd-Medina said. “He's really got to get out there, into those pockets where he can pull some votes out.”
Overall, Cuomo fared best in the Democratic primary in areas with more homeowners than renters and with lower-income voters, winning some of the poorest neighborhoods in The Bronx and most of Staten Island. He had large margins of victory in Orthodox Jewish communities, like Borough Park in Brooklyn. And he did better with voters over age 55 than Mamdani did.
Trump Card?
Cuomo did not utter Trump’s name when he spoke in Elmhurst recently to members of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, one of the unions that has endorsed him in the general election — mostly men in t-shirts and work boots, drinking beer.
“We need a mayor who will stand up and fight for New York City because these are tough times for this country, and Washington is targeting New York,” Cuomo said, referencing retaliatory funding cuts.
But Cuomo has also strategically invoked Trump’s threats to New York City as a reason voters should choose him. On multiple TV appearances in local and national media, he warned of dire scenarios, and argued that Trump wants Mamdani to win.
“Two reasons,” Cuomo said on The View Monday. “One, going into the midterms, he will take a picture of Mamdani, run around the country and say, ‘Here’s what happened to the Democrats. They are now communists. They hate the police. They legalize prostitution, legalize drugs. They want to elect this Democrat, no experience whatsoever, being mayor of New York would be his first real job.’”
Cuomo added: “Second move, it’s good for Donald Trump,” Cuomo continued, “because it’s the excuse he needs to take over New York, which he said he will do.”
Mamdani has pointed the finger back at Cuomo, calling him Trump’s pick for mayor.
“New Yorkers know that while Andrew Cuomo would simply roll out the red carpet for Trump, Zohran will be a mayor who fights relentlessly to protect us against Trump’s authoritarianism and deliver a more affordable city,” the campaign said in a recent statement.
Dhruba Tiwari canvasses in Woodside for Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, Oct. 1, 2025.
Cuomo told NBC he’d draw a line at accepting an endorsement from Trump. And in the home stretch, his most fervent support still comes from true believers, who have never forgotten the governor who helped sustain them during the worst of the pandemic.
Dhruba Tiwari, a chef who lives in Woodside, Queens, said he tuned into Cuomo’s “inspiring” briefings every day after he lost his job cooking at a tech company’s office during the pandemic.
He volunteered for the Cuomo campaign after seeing an online ad and has been reaching out to voters in the neighborhood. Canvassing in front of a Hindu temple on a recent Wednesday night, Tiwari showed off a selfie he took with the former governor and said: “He is my idol.”
Dhruba Tiwari shows the selfie he took with Cuomo this summer. Credit: Samantha Maldonado/THE CITY
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