New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo will win the Democratic nomination for a third-term on Thursday night, CNN projects, easily defeating a challenge from his left by progressive activist and actress Cynthia Nixon.
The Empire State primary marked the final opportunity this year for left-wing insurgents to unseat powerful Democratic incumbents. But Cuomo, a battle-tested campaigner with deep pockets, consolidated establishment support in the spring and spent the summer blitzing the airwaves, spending more than $8 million over three weeks late in the contest to head off any momentum growing around Nixon's insurgent bid.
Nixon's decision to run was met with a hard line of resistance from top party officials inside the state and nationally, who backed Cuomo as both a liberal champion and the best positioned candidate to stand as a bulwark against the Trump administration and an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
Pushing for universal rent control, single-payer health care, new funding for public schools and a large-scale renewal of New York City's broken-down subway system, which is controlled by the state, Nixon spent much of the spring and summer relentlessly attacking Cuomo and his political agenda as insufficiently ambitious for one of the country's bluest states.
"I voted for him eight years ago because I remembered his dad," Nixon said of the governor and his father, the popular late former Gov. Mario Cuomo, at a rally in Brooklyn on Saturday. "And because I believed that he was a Democrat, the way he said he was. But what happened? Since he's taken office, he seems to have forgotten that he's a Democrat. He's governed like a Republican."
The charge was a familiar one among New York progressives, who fault Cuomo for the state's failure to pass its own DREAM Act, legislation to protect abortion rights and serious campaign finance revisions. And while they credit his successful push to legalize same-sex marriage in 2011, years before most other states took the step, his critics also point to it as evidence that he is not committed to delivering on other liberal priorities.
On the trail last weekend, Cuomo veered strategically between listing his achievements and railing against Trump.
"The President says, 'I'm fighting with Gov. Cuomo but it's just Gov. Cuomo that I'm fighting with, just Gov. Cuomo -- everybody else agrees with me,' " Cuomo said at a rally on Long Island, rehashing his recent Twitter dust-up with Trump before framing the ask: "I want you to come out Thursday and vote for me. And I want, when you fill in that little hole there on that little ballot, I want you to be saying, 'No, President Trump, it's not just Andrew who disagrees with you. Every decent New Yorker disagrees with you.' "
Cuomo will face Republican Marc Molinaro in the November general election.
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