NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) — Donors and advisers mounting a campaign to convince Andrew Cuomo to drop out of the New York City mayor’s race are facing an imminent deadline to get his name off the ballot.
Cuomo, who says he wants to “look at all the numbers as they come in” after his stunning defeat in the first round of the Democratic primary to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, has until Friday to decline to run as an independent in the November election, according to the city’s official election calendar.
“If he doesn’t drop out by tomorrow, he will appear on the ballot in November,” New York election law expert Jerry Goldfeder said of Cuomo.
Some of Cuomo’s donors — many of them opposed to Mamdani’s populist platform of taxing the wealthy and raising corporate levies — have been discussing whether to pivot their support to incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and encouraging the former governor to drop out of the race to avoid being a spoiler, Bloomberg has reported.
Even if Cuomo eventually decides to bow out, his name would still appear under the independent “Fight and Deliver” party he created to run under if he’d lost the primary. It’s a circumstance that could confuse voters and only be avoided if Cuomo is nominated for an open seat or disqualified from running — typically by dying, going to prison, or moving out of the state.
A Cuomo campaign representative declined to say whether the former governor, 67, will drop out in time to get his name off the ballot. Instead, the representative pointed to comments Cuomo made in a television interview Wednesday, where he described his path to victory in a general election if he continues running on the independent line he created.
“The Democratic primary is always an interesting situation, right? There are about 5 million voters in New York City, there are about 8 million people in New York City, and about 1 million people vote in the Democratic primary. So it’s not, necessarily, representative of the city at large,” Cuomo told CBS News. “In the general election, more people come out to vote. It’s a broader pool.”
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