Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will reportedly remain an option on November’s general election ballot for New York City mayor, despite conceding the Democrat primary to socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday.
Sources told CNN that while Cuomo — who resigned from the governorship in 2021 after an investigation found that he allegedly sexually harassed at least 11 women — has not fully committed to continuing an all-out campaign, he will not give up his spot on the ballot as the candidate for his own party that he formed last month.
Citing “disillusionment with the Democratic Party,” the disgraced former governor unveiled the “Fight and Deliver” Party in early May to appeal to discouraged Democrats, “as well as to independents and Republicans.”
A campaign source confirmed to CNN that Cuomo would not pull his name from the ballot ahead of Friday’s deadline to do so, though it remains unclear whether he will keep campaigning.
With 93 percent of the votes counted, the Associated Press reports that Mamdani, a state assemblyman whose plans for NYC include city-run grocery stores and investing $65 million into “gender-affirming care” for minors and adults, has 43.5 percent over Cuomo’s 36.4 percent.
The Democrats held a ranked-choice primary, however, and Mamdani did not reach the 50-percent vote threshold needed to win the primary outright.
Curtis Sliwa, founder of the crime-prevention volunteer group Guardian Angels, won the Republican primary uncontested. He previously ran for mayor in 2021, when he was beaten by incumbent Mayor Eric Adams by a 40-point margin.
Like Cuomo, Adams is also running as an independent after feeling disillusioned with the Democrats, Breitbart News reported.
“There isn’t a liberal or conservative way to fix New York,” the mayor said as he announced the move to skip the Democrat primary in April, just a day after the criminal corruption case against him was dropped. “There is a right way and a wrong way and true leaders don’t just know the right path, they have the guts to take it.”
Prosecutors dropped the bribery and wire fraud charges against Adams after receiving a request to do so from the Trump administration. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the “timing of the charges,” initially filed in September 2024, has “threatened the integrity of the proceedings, including by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that risks impacting potential witnesses and the jury pool.”
Pointing to Adams’ vocal resistance to former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, Bondi said, “It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior Administration’s Immigration policies before the charges were filed,” and that the case “improperly interfered” with Adams’ abilities to campaign for reelection and “to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”
“More than 25,000 New Yorkers signed my Democratic primary petition, but the dismissal of the bogus case against me dragged on too long, making it impossible to mount a primary campaign while these false accusations were held over me,” Adams said at the time.
Before Bondi ordered the DOJ to drop the charges against Adams, Trump said he would consider pardoning him, Breitbart News reported.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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