This was the election in which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had every reason to think he would outdo his father.
He had kept his promise to steady New York’s teetering state government, restoring a sense of competent leadership in Albany after years of turmoil. He had cemented an image of himself as the Cuomo who got things done — not just gave memorable speeches — by recording high-profile victories legalizing same-sex marriage, capping property tax increases and tightening gun-control laws. He faced an unknown, underfinanced, socially conservative opponent.
Instead, Mr. Cuomo, 56, who easily won re-election on Tuesday — but with what appeared to be a considerably smaller majority than the 65 percent that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo got during his bid for a second term, in 1986 — enters the next four years with less political clout than when the campaign began. Gone is the aura of invincibility that made Albany lawmakers clear out of his path. The governor’s future is uncertain, with a presidential bid presumably blocked by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
New York Governor Results
Mr. Cuomo has hinted occasionally at the makings of a broad, if workmanlike, agenda for the next four years: creating jobs, particularly upstate; rebuilding infrastructure, including upgrading New York’s aging airports; demanding better performance from the state’s public schools. But his basic message to voters has been simpler: “Keep this state moving forward,” he urged. More of the same.
“We are just getting started,” Mr. Cuomo said to a jubilant crowd celebrating his victory on Tuesday night in a Manhattan hotel ballroom.
Yet more of the same is now a loaded phrase for Mr. Cuomo. A re-election year that was shaping up as a coronation — complete with the rollout of a memoir — proved unexpectedly trying. Liberal members of his own party rebelled against the unreliability of his liberalism, leading to a primary in which a little-known law professor claimed a third of the vote. His pledge to clean up Albany ricocheted against him, as federal prosecutors started an investigation into his shutdown of an ethics panel he had made a show of creating only nine months earlier.
For all that, Mr. Cuomo’s victory over his Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, came during an arduous year for Democratic candidates across the country. And unlike incumbent governors in many states, his re-election never seemed in doubt.
With 98 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo held 54 percent of the vote, compared with about 41 percent for Mr. Astorino. Howie Hawkins, who as the Green Party candidate emerged as an alternative to Mr. Cuomo for exasperated liberals, had 5 percent.
Mr. Astorino, speaking after Mr. Cuomo to a subdued gathering of supporters in White Plains, said he hoped the governor had “heard some of the cries of New Yorkers” during the campaign.
“Better governing is what New York needs,” Mr. Astorino said. “The Empire State is failing, and that’s not acceptable.”
In the race for state attorney general, which was slightly more suspenseful, the Democratic incumbent, Eric T. Schneiderman, fended off a challenge from John P. Cahill, a Republican who was a top aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki. The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Democrat, also handily defeated his Republican challenger, Robert E. Antonacci, the Onondaga County comptroller.
Mr. Cuomo’s victory came despite mixed feelings on the part of voters who, in interviews, frequently complained about the lack of an acceptable option. “He’s somewhat progressive as far as woman’s issues,” said Jeff Arberman, 58, an information technology programmer who voted in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. But he added that he mainly voted for Mr. Cuomo because he saw him as “the lesser of two evils.”
In the end, Mr. Cuomo fell short of his own result in 2010, when he won over 62 percent of the vote against Carl P. Paladino, a Republican businessman from Buffalo.
But Mr. Cuomo also is measured against an inherited set of benchmarks. His father, Mario Cuomo, after all, won a landslide victory in his first re-election, in 1986, against another Westchester County executive, Andrew P. O’Rourke — a campaign that Andrew Cuomo managed.
Mr. Cuomo himself has ruminated lately on both the pride he takes in his father’s record as a three-term governor and the burden it imposed upon him. In his memoir, “All Things Possible,” he praises his father’s unshakable “sense of right and wrong.” And at his celebration Tuesday night, he saluted him as “the father of the modern Democratic Party, a man who is all about principle and inspiration.”
But in an interview with Charlie Rose last month, Mr. Cuomo said that he had a “different mission” than his father, focused more on concrete results than on philosophical inspiration.
“My father convinced people of the concept of progressive government, especially in opposition to the Reagan era,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I see my mission as proving to them that it can actually work efficiently, effectively.”
He added, more pointedly: “I heard the speeches. I’ve heard them all. I want to see the results and the performance.”
Yet with Mr. Cuomo’s reputation for political mastery dented slightly, some longtime Cuomo observers suggested that the governor could benefit from laying out a bolder animating vision for the next four years.
Norman Adler, a semiretired political consultant, recalled that Mr. Cuomo had called him soon after his election in 2010 and asked, “What would you do?”
Mr. Adler, who had worked for Mario Cuomo, said he urged the new governor to become an agent of serious political reform — and that, if asked, he would give him the same advice today.
“Bobby Wagner went from being a Tammany Hall hack to a great reformer,” Mr. Adler said, referring to a three-term New York City mayor. “Andrew could redefine himself too.”
For Mr. Cuomo, the campaign for re-election seemed like a bother to be dispatched with, rather than a victory lap to be savored. Relying on his prodigious fund-raising, he blanketed the state with television advertising, painting Mr. Astorino as a dangerous “ultraconservative” whose views on issues like abortion were unacceptable.
In contrast to the turnaround project of the past four years, in which he proudly enacted on-time budgets each March, Mr. Cuomo heads into his second term with more of a blank slate.
And though he rattled off a list of liberal priorities as his own on Tuesday night, in the same speech, Mr. Cuomo made clear that a centrist path was where he felt most comfortable: He boasted of having resisted being “pushed or pulled by the extreme forces on the left or the right.”
Some liberal leaders were already sounding enraged by the election results, in which Republicans claimed a majority in the State Senate. Mr. Cuomo had promised to help Democrats take over the Senate, but he was almost invisible as their candidates struggled in tight races, while he devoted considerable energy promoting a new ballot line he created called the Women’s Equality Party.
“Governor Cuomo spent his time and money creating a fake party instead of fighting for the State Senate and congressional candidates of the party he is supposedly a member of,” said Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, a group of labor unions and liberal activists.
With Republicans in control of the State Senate, Mr. Cuomo will have a smoother path to continuing his efforts to hold down spending and cut taxes. But it could also prevent the governor from achieving several of his leading campaign priorities, including legislation relating to immigration, abortion rights, the minimum wage and campaign finance reform.
“He has asked to be judged by the prose of governing rather than the poetry of politics,” said Bruce N. Gyory, a Democratic political consultant. “So the question becomes, Can he continue to produce works of prose that deliver?”