Queens Dems back Cuomo
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Former Governor Andrew Cuomo was endorsed by the Queens County Democratic Party and its chairman, Rep. Gregory Meeks, on Sunday from the party’s headquarters in Forest Hills. Photo via Cuomo/X
By Jacob Kaye
The Queens County Democratic Party and its chairman, Rep. Gregory Meeks, officially backed former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the race for New York City mayor over the weekend.
The party boss, who nearly four years ago called on the former governor to resign after being accused of sexual harassment by several women, described Cuomo as the man for the moment – a mayor who would stand up to President Donald Trump and pursue ambitious projects to better the city.
Meeks, who announced the endorsement from the Queens Democratic Party’s headquarters in Forest Hills, was joined in supporting Cuomo by a number of elected officials from around the borough, including State Senators Joe Addabbo and Toby Ann Stavisky, State Assemblymbers Sam Berger, Ed Braunstein, David Weprin, Vivian Cook and Alicia Hyndman and City Councilmember Lynn Schulman.
The endorsement further cemented Cuomo’s status as the front-runner in the Democratic primary for mayor, which he only officially entered in February. The Queens Dems’s endorsement comes a couple of weeks after Cuomo, who was raised in Queens, picked up the backing of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, and as he continues to top mayoral polls and rake in a significant amount of campaign cash.
The endorsement also comes as a major blow to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a longtime ally of Meeks whose district overlaps with the party boss’s congressional district. The speaker, who, like Cuomo, was a late entrant into the mayor’s race, also lost out on the endorsements of a handful of Black elected officials in Southeast Queens last weekend after they announced their support for Cuomo.
It also comes as a hit to Mayor Eric Adams, whose chances at reelection grow slimmer by the day. Though Meeks did not personally endorse Adams in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor, many members of the county party eventually went on to support the mayor. Now, that support has shifted to Cuomo, who said on Sunday that he was “damn proud” to be a Queens boy.
The Hollis-raised former governor turned his sights toward another Queens native on Sunday – President Donald Trump, who was raised in Jamaica Estates.
Though Cuomo has been accused by his opponents of shying away from criticizing the president while on the campaign trail, he began to beef up the rhetoric over the past week. His stern tone toward Trump continued on Sunday when Cuomo called the president an “existential threat” and a bully.
“[Trump] puts his finger in your chest and he thinks you're going to step backwards,” Cuomo said. “Not the Queens boy.”
Cuomo claimed that Queens, the most diverse county in the United States, was most suited to fight Trump, who Cuomo said “sells fear” and a “social cancer.”
“[Queens] has to be the place to stand up to Mr. Trump and say, ‘No how, no way,’” said Cuomo, who didn’t explicitly describe how he would fight the president’s agenda. “The counter revolution starts here. The home of the opposition is New York City, and we're going to push back and we're going to win.”
Trump was similarly a focus of Meeks’ remarks on Sunday. The congressmember, who serves as the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he believed “the last person that Washington, D.C. wants to see to be mayor of the City of New York is Andrew Cuomo.”
But while Cuomo and the Queens Democratic Party’s leadership had their eyes on the nation’s capital on Sunday, the endorsement was reverberating throughout the city.
The party’s backing of Cuomo came as a major hit to Speaker Adams’ campaign. The speaker has enjoyed support from Meeks throughout the entirety of her political career and is allies with many of the lawmakers who backed Cuomo on Sunday.
"Adrienne has always put Queens first, and that will never change,” Lupe Todd-Medina, the speaker’s spokesperson, said in a statement to the Eagle. Todd-Media also accused Cuomo of playing “political games with Queens vaccines and defund[ing] our borough’s hospitals, public transit and schools.”
“Adrienne will always work for the people and never use her power for vanity or to settle political scores,” she added.
The speaker also lost out on endorsements from a group of lawmakers from Southeast Queens, where she calls home, last weekend. In a messy roll out, State Senator James Sanders sent out a press release announcing that a coalition of elected officials from the area had voted to encourage Queens residents to rank Cuomo first and Speaker Adams second on their ballots. And while most of the elected officials mentioned in the release stood by the coalition’s position, three, including State Assemblymember Khaleel Anderson, State Senator Leroy Comrie and City Councilmember Nantasha Williams broke from the group and said they wouldn’t be ranking Cuomo on their ballots.
There also appeared to be a split within the Queens Democratic Party on Sunday. Outside of the party’s headquarters, a group of reform-minded district leaders, state committee and county committee members protested the Cuomo endorsement and said that they’d prefer if their party stayed out of the endorsement game entirely.
“Aside from just candidates themselves, we just think that in a primary, the [Queens County] Democratic Party shouldn't be putting a sizable thumb on the scale,” said Maria Kaufer, a state committee member and a member of the New Reformers. “What's the point of primary?”
