Andrew Cuomo will never be a poster, or a populist

Plus: scrambling the lines on Obamacare, gerrymandering news, and much more

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

I’m sending out the Midweek Rundown a bit early this week so that I can make sure you know that we will be holding a live video interview later today with upstart Seattle mayoral election frontrunner Katie Wilson! The housing and transit activist just topped the city’s incumbent centrist mayor in the primary election, scoring the grassroots left’s second major mayoral upset this summer. We will talk live at 5pm EST in the Substack app — check your emails and alerts later today for an invite — and then the interview will be available to watch or listen to as a podcast later tomorrow.

OK, lots of news to discuss today, so let’s get to it — see you later today!

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Texas: House Democrats who skipped the state to prevent further Republican gerrymandering may or may not be on the verge of returning home. According to a local TV news station, the lawmakers have decided that they‘ve accomplished the primary objective of shining light on the redistricting crisis and can go back to Austin, where the GOP majority will pass cooked Congressional maps. On the other hand, CNN reports that the Texas Democrats are discussing their next steps and haven’t yet decided to leave whichever Hyatt is serving as their safe house. In the meantime, Republicans in the state Senate passed their version of the map on Tuesday after two Democrats returned to that chamber.

Freedom: The Trump administration, fresh off imposing martial law on Washington DC, is reportedly discussing the creation of National Guard strike forces that could be deployed at any moment to quell unrest in cities across the country. Remember, nobody rings a bell and announces that fascism has officially arrived.

Vibe shift: For a tangible idea of how the GOP’s deep cuts to healthcare programs could scramble political alignments over the next half-decade, meet the newest pro-Obamacare advocacy organization, Florida Conservatives for Affordable Health Care. The product of a GOP-aligned lobbyist shop, the group will advocate for Congress to extend the subsidies that significantly lower the monthly premiums on ACA health plans, which are due to expire at the end of the year. There’s also a letter writing campaign to GOP lawmakers planned, as well as events featuring round tables of hospital executives, who are likely funding the effort.

While the GOP’s implementation of so-called “work requirements” will most drastically impact states that expanded Medicaid, the expiration of the expanded ACA credits will disproportionately wallop states like Florida, which did not open up the low-income health program and thus have more residents using subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges. There are 4.9 million Floridians who purchase their insurance on the ACA market, and 4.8 million of them receive some kind of federal credit. Those subsidies allow 2.3 million Floridians to pay $10 a month or less for their insurance… at least until next year.

Definitely a vampire: Having fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics economist over inconveniently low job growth numbers, Donald Trump needed to hire somebody who could count really, really high. Unfortunately, his top choice wasn’t available, so he asked his team to find him somebody who at least looked just like The Count from Sesame Street.

Not cool to tease Heritage Foundation goon and eager hack EJ Antoni about his vampire-influenced aesthetic? How about the fact that he’s got a big mural of a Nazi warship hanging behind his desk?

New York City: The inflation here is too damn high. Which is, as we’ll discuss, one of the core reasons that Andrew Cuomo’s cringe-inducing general election revamp as a cross between John Gotti and Andrew Dice Clay just isn’t going to work. The spike in food, rent, and childcare prices have radicalized just about everybody I know (and as I’m experiencing, the cost of childcare here makes even free 3K a challenge to afford).

Ohio: Former Sen. Sherrod Brown is officially running for his old job next year, opening the door for a gubernatorial run by former Rep. Tim Ryan. Right now, the only Democratic candidate for governor is a doctor named Amy Acton, who run the state’s health department in the early days of Covid. She’s currently getting clobbered in fundraising by Vivek Ramaswamy, who has to be beatable by a more established candidate.

Wisconsin: Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill that would have required voters with felony convictions to pay all fines, fees, and other costs associated with their imprisonment before regaining their right to vote. Republicans have used this rule to prevent more than a million people from reclaiming their voting rights in Florida, as bad record-keeping often makes it impossible for former felons to even figure out what they owe and to whom.

Nevada: The growing city of Henderson received special permission to redraw its legislative map every few years based on the city council demographer’s estimates of population shifts. The result of the opaque process been just about as democratic as you’d anticipate.

Cuomo’s cringe makeover proves populism isn’t just about shitposting

The only thing stopping me from accusing Andrew Cuomo of being a masochist is his clear lack of self-awareness.

After a dour and low-energy anti-campaign led to a thorough trouncing in the Democratic primary, the disgraced former governor is trying to win the NYC mayoral election as an independent by emulating the clever, digital-first populist strategy that helped Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani to his double digit upset victory. The problem? He’s still Andrew Cuomo, a 67-year-old career politician with a long record of scandals and a famously vituperative personality.

The makeover has been expansive: Cuomo has traded suits for polo shirts and khakis, co-opted the handheld aesthetic of videos produced for social media, and suddenly adopted an irony-soaked voice that sounds like a millennial working for a marketing agency. Where he used to post photos from pulpits with perfunctory thanks to whichever congregation hosted him, Cuomo now tweets with a bizarre aggression accented with pithy responses that a fast food restaurant would have posted in 2014.

Very few politicians post on social media themselves, and even those who do are rarely responsible for whichever zingers their account produces; it would be disingenuous for me to criticize Cuomo for having social media ghostwriters after the campaign work I’ve done over the years. The real issue is that Cuomo is too well-known to suddenly replace his voice with that of a pithy 30-year-old account manager, especially one very clearly informed by the rival who he’s spending so much time attacking with increasing viciousness and desperation.

Though he was backed with north of $25 million by the city’s financial elite, who have experienced a very public collective meltdown since his loss in the primary, Cuomo has attempted to recast himself as a pugilistic populist. Don’t get it twisted: Cuomo is still running with modest policy proposals that won’t inconvenience his Super PAC donors. But now, he’s also trying to define Mamdani as an out-of-touch elitist, an approach that has thus far largely just highlighted the former governor’s weaknesses.

Cuomo and his team — namely Rich Azzopardi, the self-styled “bulldog” of a spokesman who doesn’t allow replies to his tweets, and Melissa DeRosa, his “emotional mistress” and right-hand woman — have been accusing Mamdani of being a “nepo baby” who coasts by on the supposed wealth and fame of his parents, a professor at Columbia and independent filmmaker. It’s a silly allegation coming from the son of an esteemed former governor, not to mention somebody who married into the Kennedy family, but Cuomo has continue to pursue the narrative despite plenty of mockery.

On Friday, he accused Mamdani of being “callous” and being personally responsible for a single mother and her children sleeping on the streets. The offense? Still living in the rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in Astoria that he began renting in his late 20s, which now costs around $1000-per-month less than the neighborhood average.

Once again, Mamdani’s supposed sin pales in comparison to Cuomo’s own history: the former governor didn’t pay rent, mortgage, or property taxes between 2009 and 2024, having spent his political exile crashing with rich friends in the Hamptons and as well as at the Westchester estate belonging to his sister and her husband, fashion mogul Kenneth Cole. He now pays $8K a month to live in his daughter’s apartment in a luxury building in Sutton Place, one of Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods.

Still, Cuomo thought he had a real winner with his takedown of Mamdani’s living situation, and even proposed a stunt law that would require people in rent-stabilized housing to devote at least 30% of their income to rent. As every housing advocate in the city has pointed out, Cuomo’s proposal would literally require New Yorkers to be rent-burdened and lead to mass turmoil for half a million residents, which further underscored the former governor’s disconnection from the realities of living in New York City.

The proposal also reveals Cuomo’s disconnect from his own record, as he signed a law that prevented landlords from throwing out high-earners from rent-stabilized apartments.

The hits keep coming for Cuomo: after his team demanded that Mamdani “release the apartment,” a tasteless allusion to the so-called Epstein list, the Mamdani campaign hit back with a call for Cuomo to release a list of the sleazy clients he represented as a lawyer after being forced out of the governor’s mansion. Throw a cheap shot, get hit with a haymaker.

Up to this point, opponents have largely danced around Cuomo’s scandals as governor, and even less has been made of his work during his three years in the wilderness. Other than serving as one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense attorneys, Cuomo’s brief time in private practice largely went under the radar, but that’s now about to change: Mandani’s spot highlights scandal-scarred clients in crypto and real estate, including one with close links to Jeffrey Epstein.

(Cuomo also wrote a leniency plea letter on behalf of Kenneth Cole’s brother, who was found guilty of cooking the books at his fashion licensing business, but that one was just personal advocacy.)

When Mamdani scored his big upset victory, the conventional wisdom among pundits and centrist Democrats was that it was the product of relatable messaging and slick social videos, which served to divorce the success from any inconvenient ideological or political facts. Cuomo’s attempted transformation showing the emptiness of that theory, which is predicated on voters being driven by pure aesthetics, with the memories of turkeys and the instincts of roadkill.

Mamdani produced clever videos and posted like a digital native, but his success cannot be divorced from the authenticity of his populism and relatability of his persona. The deep hunger for a new generation of leaders who understand the struggles of a middle class losing its grip on any hope of the American dream demands exactly that, not new creative direction for the same old hacks.

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