EmailNew York governor Andrew Cuomo faces an insurgent challenge from a pair of university academics in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, but his allies looked to the sports field to explain why party voters should stick with the incumbent.
“When you have a successful quarterback who is driving us down to win, there is no reason to call a timeout and ask the coach to put in another,” said Carl Heastie, the chairman of the Bronx Democrats at a rally on Sunday. “The governor has been a tremendous quarterback for the state of New York.”
“Some folks want us to change our horses midstream in the middle of the race,” Ruben Diaz Jr, the borough president, put it to activists at the same rally in Riverdale, an affluent neighbourhood in the Bronx. “They must be out of their minds.”
Unfolding on stage was a late effort to emphasise the commonsense executive credentials of Cuomo and his running mate, Kathy Hochul, and to paint their opponents, Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu, as a pair of naive leftwing eggheads – “professor one and professor two”, as assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz called them.
“I’ll tell you something about being a lieutenant governor. Or a governor,” said Cuomo. “You need to know what you’re talking about.”
Having ignored their boisterous campaign for the party’s nomination all summer, Cuomo finally emerged on to the election trail last weekend. After marching in Manhattan’s Labor Day parade – where he was caught on video ignoring Teachout’s attempts to catch his eye – he delivered a pair of speeches extolling his first term performance.
Cuomo and his backers remain bullish about a comfortable victory, confident that Teachout can not realistically hope to beat him at the top of the ticket. Yet they appear increasingly concerned that Wu may pose a serious threat to Hochul, a former congresswoman for a more conservative part of the state, in the lower-profile vote for lieutenant governor. In New York, the two offices are voted on separately, rather than as a team.
Party heavyweights such as Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, have in recent days been hastily co-opted by Cuomo to record robocalls urging New Yorkers to support Hochul. It was a humbling development for the governor. “Who knows what that conversation was like,” Teachout said in an interview. “Maybe he promised her not to run for president.”
‘Anyone want to be my first patient?’
Publicly addressing his opponents for the first time on Sunday, albeit still not by name, Cuomo attacked Wu, a professor at Columbia University known for his pioneering work on the internet. According to the governor, Wu, who won the endorsement of the New York Times, is an ingenue lacking the background to serve as his deputy.
“Experience matters,” Cuomo repeated. “People say ‘Well, I don’t have any experience, but I think I could be lieutenant governor.’ ‘I don’t have any experience, but I think I could be a heart surgeon.’ Anyone round here want to be my first patient?” His audience laughed.
The message seemed to be getting through. “It’s like the Mets going out on a football field,” Cuomo supporter Walter Fuller, 74, said of Teachout and Wu after the event, in a gleaming high school gymnasium near the northern border of New York City. “They’re not professionals.”
But Wu firmly rejected the charge. “I would love to have a conversation about qualifications,” he told the Guardian, at a campaign stop in Brooklyn. “Bring it on.”
He stressed that he had worked as an official in the Obama administration, published two books, and served as a director of a technology firm in Silicon Valley. “I’m an internationally and nationally known figure for net neutrality,” he said. Having lost her US House seat after just 18 months last year, Hochul took a job in “government relations” with M&T Bank. “Her primary qualification, as far as I can tell, is that she’s a bank lobbyist,” said Wu.
Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University and community organiser, defended her own hinterland. “I’ve run non-profits, I’ve met payroll,” she said.
Moreover, Teachout and Wu allies said that such a stress on whatever-works displays of political power and managerial competence by Cuomo’s camp strikes at the heart of why they mounted their idealistic challenge in the first place.
The pair of 42-year-olds are giving voice to liberals angry at Cuomo for working so closely with a coalition of Independent Democrats and Republicans that denied Democrats control of the state senate after the 2012 elections. The dynamic limited the influence of the party’s left wing in Albany and allowed Cuomo to pursue a fiscally moderate agenda that could also be convenient for him in the event of any future US presidential campaign.
Teachout claims that Cuomo does not even deserve to use their party’s name, condemning him as “a Reagan, trickle-down Republican”. She said: “The number of Democrats who see him as serving his own interests as opposed to serving New Yorkers has risen dramatically.”
“Andrew Cuomo campaigned for governor in 2010 as a progressive, but has proved himself to be far more interested in catering to rich Wall Street donors than in the serving average New Yorkers,” Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, said while endorsing Teachout and Wu.
Cuomo flatly rejects the attack, claiming after the rally that he had “objectively passed more progressive measures that have been passed in the past 50 years in this state”. He has ushered in same-sex marriage, relatively far-reaching gun control and an increase in the minimum wage. And after years of dysfunction and scandal in the state capital, “we made the government work, which is the fundamental progressive policy,” he said.
But some liberals wants more, pointing to the state’s thwarting of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to increase taxes on the city’s top earners, before an alternative funding deal was reached for his universal childcare pledge. Teachout and Wu propose abolishing Cuomo’s much-vaunted 2% cap on property tax rises and tax breaks for corporations, and boosting spending on education. Wu said his first act would be a public inquiry into cable companies.
They are also hammering the governor on the environment, pledging to outlaw fracking, the controversial gas extraction whose proponents are eyeing lands in upstate New York. Cuomo has so far managed to avoid taking a stance either way.
And as federal authorities investigate Cuomo’s disbanding of his own anti-corruption commission earlier this year, after it appeared to be inquiring a little too close to home, Teachout – a scholar in the field, and the author of a new book titled Corruption in America – has pounced on a governor who pledged in his first election campaign to “clean up Albany”.
Teachout wants public funding of elections to rid the system of what she calls “structural rules that encourage corruption”. “The key is being free from your donors,” she said. “Andrew Cuomo, for all his bravado, works for his donors.” New York’s governorship being among the nation’s most powerful is “a real problem”, she said. “I think it’s why we keep having scandals. The founding fathers knew that concentrating power led to corruption.”
Cuomo has raised more than $35m for his re-election campaign, a figure that dwarfs Teachout-Wu’s haul of about $800,000. It is also about 15 times the size of the war chest being sat on by Rob Astorino, the Westchester county executive and Republican nominee, who Tuesday’s winner will face in November’s general election.
Campaigning in the wake of the Occupy movement and the victory of De Blasio’s populist campaign last year, Teachout portrays Cuomo as a shameless creature of the executives and corporations behind some of these donations. While Cuomo has brought in 900 contributions from individuals, Teachout has received more than 8,300, according to her campaign, most of them in small amounts.
Teachout led a whistlestop tour of tycoons linked to the governor on Sunday, starting at the Manhattan offices of Koch Industries. The firm’s co-owner David Koch, who is New York state’s richest man and better known for his backing of conservative causes, donated $87,000 to Cuomo in 2011. “Ken Langone is a billionaire donor who compared progressives to Adolf Hitler,” said her talking points for the next stop, outside the home of the Home Depot co-founder, who earlier this year likened the campaign to reduce income inequality to national socialism.
Lack of recognition
“Do you know who the Koch brothers are?” Teachout asked Clara Sevwright, a 60-year-old fruit seller later in Flatbush, Brooklyn, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She did not. But “I feel like they are the sort of people who would help us,” she said. Cecilia George, a 50-year-old babysitter and registered Democrat, said she struggled to pay $1,200 for her one-bedroom apartment. “I need them to help with the rent,” she said. “The rent is too high.” She didn’t know about Teachout and Wu before, but said she would now be turning out for them on Tuesday.
This lack of public recognition has, predictably for an outside candidate, led to a conventional wisdom that Teachout will struggle to seriously embarrass Cuomo at the ballot box. A Quinnipiac poll last month found that 85% of Democrats – the only voters on Tuesday – said that they didn’t know enough about her. She was “about as anonymous as a candidate can be”, said Maurice Carroll, assistant director of the polling group.
No public polling pitting the candidates against one another has been released, though campaign filings showed that Cuomo had spent $40,000 on private surveys. A secret poll by the leftwing Working Families Party grouping earlier this year, which set a hypothetical liberal professor and organiser named Teresa Woodstock against Cuomo, reportedly indicated that almost 20% of respondents would back such a candidate.
Teachout claims that her policies are popular if they can get a hearing. “When people know that I exist, I’m a serious challenger,” she said. “So we just need to get enough people to know who I am.” She and Wu have embarked on a frantic schedule of campaigning and media appearances to spread word of their existence before Tuesday.
But Cuomo’s policy of acting as if Teachout does not exist, including a repeated refusal to engage in televised debates, appears to have been effective. “He won’t even say my name,” she said. However, his attempts to have the Vermont native thrown off the ballot altogether, on the grounds that she had not been a continuous resident of New York for five years, were not.
Teachout and Wu have won endorsements from dozens of unions, activists and fellow academics. But Cuomo and Hochul aggressively leveraged their influence to secure the backing of state lawmakers. “I will tell you I’ve gotten calls from other politicians saying ‘I’m so sorry I have to do this, but I need X or Y, so I’m going to have to go endorse them,’” said Teachout, who was none the less emboldened by the Times’s decision not to endorse Cuomo.
Crucially, Cuomo has also managed to outmanoeuvre Teachout in relations with the left. Facing the threat of a wave of primary challenges, he and De Blasio in June successfully engineered the breakup of the bloc of Independent Democrats and Republicans in the state senate. After November’s elections, the Democrats will be reunited.
After promising to secure this truce and make other concessions – which Teachout allies say that her burgeoning campaign helped to force – Cuomo beat her to the coveted endorsement of the Working Families Party, a coalition of many of the trade unions and activists on the Democratic left that had pushed her to run for the party’s nomination.
Cuomo pledged in his stump speech to revive a women’s equality act that would codify Roe vs Wade, the landmark 1973 supreme court ruling in favour of women’s right to abortions. He also promised to pass a state version of the Dream immigration bill.
He did not, however, mention Hochul’s past hardline stances against undocumented migrants – including denying them driver’s licences as the Erie County clerk in 2007 – which liberals have seized on to champion Wu, who is half Taiwanese. “This campaign is committed to an upset,” said Wu. “We’ve seen crazy things happen in primaries.”
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