They Sold Their Souls and Nobody Was Buying

Do these Democrats believe in anything?

This is a day to celebrate Zohran Mamdami’s victory. Still, I can’t forget the Democrats who supported Andrew Cuomo. This may have been the most shocking and cynical sellout yet from the Democratic Party establishment.

The party machine has long embraced feminism and #MeToo as core values. That position is both ethical and convenient—ethical because our society is rife with sexism, and convenient because they used it to change the subject from economic inequality. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party’s feminist stance has long been one of its core strengths.

Once again, however, the institutional party has shown that it will cast aside its expressed values in the pursuit of billionaire cash—plenty of which went into Cuomo’s mayoral campaign. The business community, we were told, was “terrified” of a Mamdami victory.

Most people in this precarious economy would love to know what it’s like to be “terrified” about a modest hike in corporate taxes or a 2 percent surcharge on millions of dollars in income.

But the resulting flow of Cuomo cash helps explain why so many Democrats chucked their values out the window in a frantic, and ultimately futile, attempts to stop Mamdami. How? By embracing a man who resigned in disgrace after being accused of sexual abuse by multiple women—one of whom was awarded $450,000 in a settlement with the state of New York for failing to protect her from him.

Consider Sen. Kristin Gillibrand, who cast herself as an avenging angel when she spearheaded the successful campaign to drive Al Franken from the US Senate for less egregious offenses. “We must believe women,” the senator said in 2019.

Gillibrand once called the charges against Cuomo “deeply, deeply troubling.” That was in 2021.Here’s what she said in March 2025:

“This is a country that believes in second chances.”

Even for serial sexual abusers?

This is the same Kristin Gillibrand who called on Trump to resign over sexual abuse allegations in 2017, saying that the president “has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations ... and he should resign.”

Reps. Ritchie Torres and Gregory Meeks also backed the former governor’s mayoral run, which Torres called “the resurrection of Andrew Cuomo.”

Eventually, they brought out Bill Clinton to speak for the would-be resurrectee. Bill Clinton to defend Andrew Cuomo? I can’t even ...

It’s fair to note that accusations aren’t proof of guilt, and Cuomo’s Democratic defenders seized on the lack of a criminal conviction to proclaim him innocent. Nassau County’s Laura Curran, for example, blamed the accusations on “cancel culture” and called the charges a “nothingburger.”

$450,000 says you’re wrong, Ms. Curran. So does a document entitled “Agreement Between the United States and the State of New York Executive Chamber Regarding Workplace Reform.”

That agreement was reached after an investigation by the Justice Department found that “former Governor Cuomo subjected at least thirteen female employees of New York State, including Executive Chamber employees, to a sexually hostile work environment.”

Specifically, the Justice Department found that Cuomo repeatedly engaged in “unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact; ogling; unwelcome sexual comments; gender-based nicknames; comments on their physical appearances; and/or preferential treatment based on their physical appearances.”

The report also found that “Cuomo’s senior staff were aware of his conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed.”

Then there are the deaths. His mismanagement of the Covid crisis includes, but is not limited to, the fatal decision to force unprepared nursing homes to admit Covid patients (not to mention his subsequent cover-up of these failures). While Cuomo was grandstanding on television, New Yorkers were dying because their governor was an inept manager who nonetheless wanted to micromanage everything.

Yes, Zohran Mamdami’s win is a beautiful thing. Cuomo’s loss is a different, but equally beautiful, thing. It is gratifying to see this unpleasant man’s gutterball campaign go down in flames (and to see that anti-Palestine, anti-Muslim rhetoric doesn’t work like it once did).

Cuomo may run again in the general election, but what’s noteworthy about him today is that these party leaders backed him in complete defiance of their core values—or what they told us were their core values. They sold their souls and nobody was buying.

If they haven’t learned better by now, when will they ever learn?