View in browser
Jessica Ramos, a Democrat running for mayor of New York, has had scathing words for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who is also running for mayor. In 2021, the state senator called on Cuomo to resign or be impeached after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment (he denies wrongdoing); the New York state attorney general also found that his administration had undercounted COVID deaths in nursing homes.
On the campaign trail this year, Ramos called Cuomo a “corrupt egomaniac” and a “remorseless bully.” She said, “I wish I lived in a city where voters cared about women getting harassed.” She also used the scandal to question his acuity: “I imagine having to resign in disgrace must have really taken a toll on, at the very least, at the very least, his ego, but most certainly his mental health,” Ramos said, adding that the city could not “afford a Joe Biden moment.”
This made it surprising when, earlier this month, Ramos “cross-endorsed” Cuomo in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. (My colleague Annie Lowrey recently detailed the complicated system.)
“We need serious governing. We need delivery over dogma. Knowing how to govern matters, and that’s why I’m endorsing Andrew Cuomo for mayor today,” Ramos said at a joint rally with Cuomo. Making clear that this was a swipe at the leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani, she added that only one of the mayoral candidates has the “experience, toughness, and the knowledge to lead New York for what’s about to come.” Ramos is hardly alone: Politico found that more than 40 percent of Cuomo’s top endorsements by elected officials in the mayoral race came from people who publicly condemned him in 2021.
Voting in the Democratic mayoral primary ends today, and if the polls are right, Cuomo and Mamdani are the likely winners. The ranked-choice voting system means that the outcome is difficult to predict; Cuomo has led most polls, though an Emerson College poll released yesterday suggests that Mamdani could pull ahead once voters’ downballot choices are counted.
Cuomo’s strong position is a reminder that this is, for better or worse—almost certainly for worse—a golden age for comebacks. President Donald Trump is only the most blatant example. This has led journalists and political scientists to wonder whether scandals even matter anymore, or to bluntly assert that they don’t. Such despondency is understandable, but the situation is somewhat more nuanced. Where major scandals used to seem like simple disqualifiers, ending or thwarting many careers, voters and politicians now treat the taint of scandal as just another factor in a cost-benefit analysis.
Cuomo’s story illustrates how this has happened. The first relevant dynamic is a shift in how the public views sex scandals. Starting with President Bill Clinton, politicians realized that they could gut out a scandal rather than step down, a path since followed by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Trump, and others. The #MeToo movement complicated that: Consensual-sex scandals might be survivable, but harassment and assault became grounds for banishment. Cuomo was never convicted in a criminal court (the only charge filed against him was dismissed in 2022), but an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James found that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” (Cuomo has admitted to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation," but continues to deny wrongdoing.)
Much has changed in four years. In The New Yorker last week, Alexis Okeowo profiled Tina Johnson, one of the women who accused the Alabama Republican Roy Moore, then a Senate candidate, of sexual assault in 2017 but who now feels forgotten. (Moore has denied the allegations and is suing Johnson and other accusers.) “The #MeToo movement had created a sense of immense possibility for survivors of sexual violence. But, in time, that sense seemed to fade,” Okeowo writes. “A general fatigue with ‘cancellation’ took hold, and conservative media outlets and politicians weaponized this weariness against the movement.” Cuomo didn’t just ride that wave: He participated in it, launching a podcast to complain about cancel culture and paint himself as a victim.
Second, in a perverse way, Cuomo likely benefited from the sheer number of accusations against him, as well as the nursing-home scandal. A 2021 paper by the political scientists Steven P. Nawara and Mandi Bailey, based on a survey experiment, found that although scandals exact a toll on candidates, multiple scandals don’t hurt them more, because the “cognitive load” required of voters to process additional stories is too great. “This finding is troubling from a perspective of democratic accountability, as it suggests voters are either incapable or unwilling to punish politicians involved in multiple instances of wrongdoing beyond the initial hit that those candidates take to their evaluations after a single scandal,” they wrote.
A third factor is the polarized, partisan landscape of politics today. Many partisans feel that every election is not just important but existential—if their side loses, they may also lose their way of life. (They aren’t necessarily wrong!) You may be more willing to vote for a candidate you dislike if you believe they are more “electable,” or if you find their rival’s worldview not just worse but also unacceptable. New York’s Democratic primary is an intraparty affair, but it is strongly polarized—for a sense of this, see this New York Times rundown of celebrity ballot rankings, which shows a Cuomo faction and a Mamdani/Never Cuomo faction, including most of the other candidates, in various ranked orders. Or look at Ramos’s endorsement, in which she doesn’t absolve Cuomo but voices a fear that only he can effectively protect the city from Trump’s wrath. Other reluctant Cuomo backers have cited Mamdani’s leftist politics or inexperience as their motivation.
Trump embodies these dynamics just as much as Cuomo does. His misdeeds instigated #MeToo, and later, he was a beneficiary of its fade; he is embroiled in so many scandals that hardly anyone can keep them all in mind, and his political rise has both encouraged and been fueled by hyperpartisan polarization. Various things should have disqualified Trump from a return to the White House—most notable, his attempt to steal the 2020 election—but saying that the scandals didn’t hurt him is too nihilistic. The Times’ Nate Cohn has argued that given voter dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden and the economy, Republicans might have done better in 2024 had they not been weighed down by Trump.
The fact that scandals can still hurt a flawed politician, as part of a broader consideration of pluses and minuses, is reassuring. Even so, one can imagine a version of American politics in which voters feel that they can hold their leaders to an even higher moral standard.
Related:
Today’s News
- President Donald Trump admonished Iran and Israel for launching attacks after he announced an end to their fighting last night. He added that the cease-fire remains “in effect.”
- An initial U.S. assessment found that the American strikes that hit Iran’s nuclear facilities did not collapse their underground buildings and set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials.
- Senator Bill Cassidy, the chair of the Senate health committee, said yesterday that many appointees to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine-advisory panel lack experience.
More From The Atlantic
