Has There Ever Been a Campaign as Pathetic as Cuomo 2025?

A historical investigation.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

There are a number of moments in recent history that should have marked the end of the political career of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

If he were smart, he would have retired for good after he was forced to resign in disgrace under threat of impeachment in 2021. If he had any shame, he would have never shown his face in public again after his attempted political comeback in New York City ended in a shocking landslide defeat to a once-unknown socialist challenger. But rather than use either of these moments to save face and walk into oblivion with even just a shred of dignity intact, he is choosing to end his public life in the most humiliating, pathetic way possible. Still unable to understand that no means no, Cuomo is now back in the race for mayor as a passenger in the clown car of anti-Zohran Mamdani candidates.

There is not much to say about his prospects for November. While some polling shows the former governor within striking distance of Mamdani in the event that every other candidate besides them leaves the race, there are no indications that this will happen. As things stand, the former governor is in a distant second place, leading the rest of the non-Mamdani field but behind his once-and-future opponent by as much as 20 points citywide. It’s a bad situation that is far more likely than not to get worse over the coming months. Just as it did during the primary, Mamdani’s support in the general election has only increased as more voters have gotten to know him. Skeptical national Democrats are beginning to fall in line, most dramatically so with Barack Obama’s tacit declaration of support for his campaign this week. Although he is still in the process of denying it, Cuomo’s political life is well on track to end in a wholly unnecessary and somehow even more embarrassing rerun of the crushing rejection he saw this June.

What we are seeing play out in real time is more than just a simply bad campaign. It is a rare kind of failure, one utterly pathetic and mortifying both in practice and in concept. Even before it ended in an unimaginably devastating defeat, this stage of Cuomo’s political career was already deeply embarrassing for him. He had spent over a decade at the top of the political world, so secure and his prospects that politicians of both parties regularly joked about his inevitable presidency. At one point in 2020, there was a draft effort to make him the nominee after Biden had already won the primary. Five years later, he was barely campaigning in a city he had not lived in for a job his own ex-staffers said he always considered to be for “lesser men.” Even if he actually did glide to victory, it would have been an embarrassing step down. That he outright lost in the primary on top of all of this was one thing. That he will almost certainly lose once again of his own accord, all while desperately trying to ape his opponent’s strategies on the way, is something truly historic—the kind of humiliation that only happens once every few generations.

The only question is this: can what Cuomo is doing right now be called truly unprecedented? Between all of the embarrassing failures in American political history, can any hold a candle to what the former Governor is doing to himself right now? This article will answer exactly that.

Contender #1: Jeb! for President, 2016

Even now, a near-decade after it officially ended, Jeb Bush’s campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination still stands as the standard measurement humiliation in American politics. The story behind it is simple and one you likely all know well already. Well before the race started, Jeb, the potential third Bush president, was hyped up immensely as a nigh-unbeatable early frontrunner. Talk of a Bush v. Clinton redux was commonplace, to the point where major outlets were publishing pieces titled things like “Newsflash: It’s Going To Be Hillary vs. Jeb” as early as the spring of 2015. But despite all of his money, his connections, and his supposedly golden last name, his absolute peak in the primary only saw him at 17% of the vote. Trump beat him out to take the lead months before a single debate was held, and he never proved capable of breaking out of the single digits at any point afterward.

This, obviously, was embarrassing for him, his wing of the party and his family. It also wasn’t that unusual. The history of presidential primaries is filled with hyped-up prospects who went on to flame out, and many of them began in positions far stronger than where Jeb started. That same exact 2016 primary saw countless other candidates fail to live up to expectations; that’s what happens when an outsider wins. The reason why Jeb’s loss is special—why it still sticks with us today—is because it was more than the sum of its parts. Jeb wasn’t just outmaneuvered by someone more charismatic or in touch with the base with him, as countless candidates are. His loss wasn’t “normal” in that way. He was demolished by a complete novice who had oriented his entire brand around insulting him and his family. At a fundamental level, the entire question of the race was transformed into whether or not voters respected him as a man. The result was a resounding no. While the New York City mayoral race certainly became very personal at many points, it never involved the outright bullying-as-campaigning that Trump dispensed at his first-ever target.

Can Cuomo 2025 even compete? I believe that it can, and that it actually still stands out as more humiliating for two reasons. The first is that, unlike Cuomo, Jeb! never actually was a prohibitive favorite at any point in the race. He was covered as one because journalists who had decided after 2012 that party primaries were an insider’s game wanted to sound smarter than everyone else, but he never saw anything close to Cuomo’s 50-point polling leads. Additionally—and very importantly—Jeb at least knew when to quit. He gave himself the dignity of competing in the first few races, dropped out, and went away forever—a course of action far more dignified than Cuomo’s refusal to recognize his own defeat. If you squint and judge him relative to the other 2016 contenders who have spent the past decade debasing themselves for Trump, he even looks a little principled.

Is this kind of face-saving completely basic? Are you right to be unimpressed by something so banal and normal? Yes and yes. Unfortunately for Cuomo, just acting normal in any capacity whatsoever is more than enough for someone to be less embarrassing than him. To find the real contenders, we’re going to have to reach for the more obscure.

Contender #2: Shirley Temple Black for Congress, 1967