Cuomo To Tap Longtime Ally For Likely New York City Mayoral Bid Against Eric Adams

NEW YORK — Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is turning to a longtime ally as he builds his likely campaign for New York City mayor, and he is considering a February rollout for the campaign, six people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.

Cuomo is expected to hire Charlie King, a consultant whose relationship with the Democrat dates back decades. King worked for the former New York governor when Cuomo was housing secretary in the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Cuomo also tapped King as his running mate in an ill-fated bid for governor in 2002. The two men competed for the Democratic attorney general nomination in 2006, but they have nevertheless remained close.

King did not deny he would work on Cuomo’s potential campaign.

“As far as I know, there is no Cuomo campaign for mayor but should that change, I’m sure everyone will know who is on board,” he said Wednesday in a text message. “Judging by the unsolicited proposals and resumes that have flooded in, should the former governor decide to run, I'm sure he'll have his pick.”

King is a partner at the Manhattan-based consulting and lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs, which has offices around the country. He has been vetting other potential staff to work on the campaign, according to three people familiar with the operation.

Cuomo is also considering an early February launch date as the political clock ticks. Petitioning for ballot access begins Feb. 25 are due April 3. The Democratic primary is scheduled for June 24.

Cuomo’s advisers had initially suggested he would not want to challenge Adams in a primary. Both men draw support from Black and Jewish voters, and he runs the risk of Adams — the city’s second Black mayor — making a race-based case against his challenge. But his calculus has changed as the indicted mayor’s legal woes have deepend and three people who have been in touch with him told POLITICO Cuomo is actively preparing his potential campaign against the incumbent. They were granted anonymity to freely discuss the former governor’s private deliberations.

Spokesperson Rich Azzopardi in a statement touted Cuomo’s record as governor, but insisted “nothing has changed and neither apparently has the rumor mill in all its glory.”

“This all remains premature, but Andrew Cuomo will always be a Queens boy who loves New York, is deeply concerned about its direction, and will always help any way he can,” Azzopardi said.

Cuomo resigned in 2021 after a report found he sexually harassed 11 women, charges that he has denied.

The expectation that the mercurial and hard-charging Cuomo would re-enter politics is one of the most anticipated storylines in New York politics. Cuomo has been signaling to allies he is weighing a bid for mayor for more than a year, and his discussions have intensified as Adams fights a five-count federal indictment alleging he took bribes from Turkish interests in exchange for official actions.

The former governor would bring advantages to a crowded Democratic primary field his non-Adams potential opponents lack, including high name identification and ready access to donors.

In the leadup to his likely launch, he has railed against critics of the Israeli government — a nod to the city’s active Jewish voting population, some of whom he upset with his Covid-era restrictions on large gatherings. He would likely run as a no-nonsense manager who can accomplish big goals and criticize most of his opponents’ left-of-center politics as out of step with the Democratic zeitgeist.

Adams, anticipating this challenge, criticized Cuomo to POLITICO recently for the former governor’s decision to sign into law changes to the state’s bail laws. The mayor argues those led to an increase in crime, which Cuomo’s team responded to by pointing out Adams has focused lately on recidivism instead of bail.

Cuomo has long kept counsel with a coterie of intensely loyal advisers, some of whom worked for his father Mario, who was governor for three terms.

The younger Cuomo served a decade as the state’s chief executive and became a national celebrity for his televised Covid briefings in the initial months of the pandemic. But his administration’s handling of the crisis quickly came under scrutiny for how officials tabulated the deaths of nursing home residents.

Out of office, the former governor has sought to recast the scandals that led to his ouster and has argued politically motivated opponents — left-leaning Democrats and Trump-allied Republicans — helped engineer his fall from power.

He has also seized on recent developments as evidence of vindication. One of the women who accused him of inappropriate behavior, Charlotte Bennett, dropped her lawsuit against Cuomo. (The former governor subsequently moved to sue Bennett for defamation.)

Just this week, a report from a Department of Justice watchdog found Trump administration officials tried to influence the 2020 election by leaking to the media details of nursing home-related investigations in New York. A Cuomo spokesperson said the findings sustained the former governor’s long-standing view that Republicans sought to “weaponize” nursing home residents’ deaths.