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| Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, celebrated Tuesday night with his father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times |
N.Y. TIMES
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.
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 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 won 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.