Five years ago, on August 24, 2021, New York’s political world was upended by the resignation of the man who had dominated the state’s politics for more than a decade, Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s resignation came after a series of women—some employed in state government—came forward to allege sexual harassment and sexual misconduct by the powerful Democrat.
The scandal and resignation would prove far more significant than just another #MeToo event. With hindsight, we can now see that Cuomo’s departure removed the major obstacle to the emerging dominance of the far Left—radical progressives, socialist fellow travelers, and avowed socialists—in Empire State politics. The most dramatic evidence of this shift, of course, occurred in 2025, when the former governor, attempting a political comeback in New York City’s mayoral race, was defeated by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
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As governor, Cuomo was hardly a conservative, or even a centrist. He aggressively pushed a bill legalizing gay marriage though the state legislature long before many other high-profile Democrats had come to embrace that position. After the 2011 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, Cuomo convinced Albany lawmakers to back the SAFE Act, his gun control bill that, arguably, gave New York the strictest gun laws in the country.
Yet, despite these noteworthy wins for progressive causes, Cuomo’s relationship with New York’s far Left was never better than chilly, and usually hostile.
Cuomo’s most Machiavellian and longest-running effort to stymie the far Left may have been his behind-the-scenes backing of a group of centrist state senate Democrats known as the Independent Democratic Conference. The IDC formed after Republicans retook control of the chamber in 2010, the same year Cuomo was elected governor. Few doubted that the newly elected governor had a hand in creating the breakaway centrist conference. The IDC’s influence only grew after the GOP lost its majority in the senate two years later. With Cuomo’s almost-certain backing, the IDC teamed up with the GOP and ran the chamber as a coalition.
Those on the Left didn’t just grumble about Cuomo. They actively tried to defeat him in his reelection campaigns—twice. Cuomo, however, prevailed over each of these progressive opponents—law professor Zephyr Teachout in 2014 and actress Cynthia Nixon in 2018—by an almost 2–1 margin.
In both these contests, one of the New York Left’s leading political players—the Working Families Party—appeared ready to abandon Cuomo, costing him a key position on the ballot in New York’s unique system of fusion voting. But in the end, the WFP would stand down. After a bruising fight at the WFP convention, the party backed Cuomo over Teachout in 2014. Four years later, it initially nominated Nixon over Cuomo. But thanks to some eleventh-hour legal machinations after Cuomo’s primary win, the party removed Nixon as its gubernatorial candidate and replaced her with Cuomo.
When the scandal broke that would force Cuomo from office, some of the earliest and loudest voices calling for his resignation came from the legislature’s progressive and socialist members, including freshman Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. But Cuomo’s successor, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, was no darling of New York’s progressives. Hochul first rose to prominence when, as Erie County Clerk, she opposed Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, a plan she later embraced. During her brief tenure in Congress, Hochul even earned the backing of the NRA, though she now strongly supports more restrictions on gun ownership.
Still, unlike Cuomo, Hochul was never an outright antagonist of her party’s Left. From the Left’s perspective, replacing Cuomo with Hochul might not have been ideal, but it was a step in the right direction. Whatever her moderate credentials, Hochul proved willing to shift, adapt, and follow the political winds. If there was a political benefit to backing the far Left or its causes, she’d do it. And in 2025, Hochul, the onetime Democratic centrist from Buffalo, endorsed Mamdani’s New York City mayoral candidacy. Mamdani repaid the favor in early 2026, endorsing Hochul’s reelection and signaling to his socialist allies that they should get on board with the governor, too.
In the five years since Cuomo’s resignation, traditional liberal or progressive Democrats have seen themselves outflanked by socialists, and the DSA has grown from a bit player in New York politics to a major force in state Democrats’ lurch leftward. Since Mamdani’s win in 2025, socialists have grown in strength. In 2026, they shocked the political establishment by winning numerous races, from congressional primaries in the Big Apple to state legislative primaries in Syracuse and Buffalo.
Andrew Cuomo was never a conservative and should not be confused for one. But during his governorship, he held the line on the Left and blocked its emergence as a major force in state politics. He delivered wins for progressives on key issues, but he also managed to keep major progressive figures and institutions in check, preventing them from gaining undue influence over the direction of state politics.
Since Cuomo’s resignation in 2021, New York Democrats haven’t preserved that check on the far Left. Today, it’s Mamdani, the DSA, and the WFP with their hands on the state’s levers of power.