New York
They Pushed for Cuomo to Resign. Now They’re Clearing His Comeback Path.
Back in 2021, when Andrew M. Cuomo’s governorship was in free fall, the real estate developer Jeff Gural was clear about what he thought of the man: “He’s smart, but he’s a bully, and his tactics are a disgrace.”
Representative Ritchie Torres took a graver tone against Mr. Cuomo, declaring that New York was “no longer governable under his leadership” amid mounting sexual harassment claims.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a leading exponent of women’s rights, called the accusations “deeply, deeply troubling.” The remarks were part of a Democratic pile-on that helped force a reluctant Mr. Cuomo to resign.
How quickly things can change.
Not quite four years later, as Mr. Cuomo attempts a comeback as a candidate for mayor of New York City, the state’s powerful Democratic establishment now appears more interested in getting back in his good graces than in stopping him.
It is a striking about-face that may prove to be a defining feature of June’s Democratic primary. The born-again Cuomo supporters include elected officials, business titans and labor unions whose collective influence could push Mr. Cuomo to victory — whiplash be damned.
Mr. Gural recently donated $2,100 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign. Mr. Torres gave his blessing to “the resurrection of Andrew Cuomo” before he even entered the race. Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the Queens Democratic chairman, gave Mr. Cuomo the nod with little mention of his past criticism.
Powerful interest groups that helped end his governorship, like the Real Estate Board of New York and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, have indicated they may soon follow. Even Ms. Gillibrand made clear she does not intend to stand in the way.
“This is a country that believes in second chances,” she recently told NY1. “So it’s up to New York voters to decide if he should get a second chance to serve.”
The spate of election-season conversions undoubtedly reflects a broader cultural shift that has led voters and power brokers alike to reconsider the case of Mr. Cuomo, who denies wrongdoing. Others say that the threat posed by Washington, or the left, is too grave to elect anyone less experienced.
But privately, prominent New Yorkers are also engaging in far more transactional calculations. Many still loathe Mr. Cuomo. But they take notice of his polling lead and privately reason it is best not to be on the bad side of a notoriously vengeful leader who could have sway over zoning rules, labor contracts and more.
“Right now, the way the game is being played politically is that when you look to other people, you assess how their fortunes affect you,” said former Gov. David A. Paterson. “That is a display of power — not necessarily righteousness, not necessarily fairness.”
He added, “It really looks hypocritical.”
Mr. Paterson, who has remained neutral, compared it with the dynamic around President Trump, who managed to win back not only his voters but Republican leaders who tried to push him aside after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
There are notable holdouts. Eight Democrats are running against Mr. Cuomo in the primary, and Mayor Eric Adams remains in the race as an independent. They have support from politicians and civic leaders who say they cannot stomach Mr. Cuomo’s return.
A group of high-ranking Democrats, including the state attorney general, Letitia James, were so alarmed by a potential Cuomo return that they quietly tried to recruit a formidable moderate who could beat him. Ms. James even briefly considered doing it herself, but like the others, she passed and has largely restrained from attacking.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who took office when Mr. Cuomo resigned in 2021, recently told reporters that she stood by her comments at the time, calling his actions “repulsive.” But, she concluded, “I have to deal with the reality today.”
Several prominent civic and political leaders were unwilling to criticize Mr. Cuomo on the record, citing his penchant for holding grudges and acting on them. One conceded to having done everything possible to try to undermine him — and failing.
All of it has left allies of the women whose accusations ended Mr. Cuomo’s governorship feeling betrayed and worried he could do damage if elected.
“The politicians who support him now will be responsible for the damage,” said Mariann Wang, a lawyer for Brittany Commisso, who accused Mr. Cuomo of groping her while she worked in his office. “They can’t say they weren’t warned.”
Mr. Cuomo denied harassing Ms. Commisso; the Albany sheriff’s office filed a criminal complaint, but prosecutors declined to press the case.
His return has been years in the making. He spent millions of dollars in taxpayer funds fighting to defang the sexual harassment claims and investigations related to his Covid-era policies. He assiduously courted former critics.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said no one should be surprised by the groundswell of support for the former governor. He called him “the only person in this race with the proven track record of results to tackle” the city’s problems. He argued that time had allowed for “clarifying due process” for Mr. Cuomo to defend himself.
“Since the beginning, we said all of this was political and wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “Four years later, that has all borne out.”
Some have been less receptive than others. Mr. Cuomo has been pushing, without luck, for a private meeting with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The New York Post, to try to smooth a rocky relationship with the conservative tabloid, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The Post has hammered Mr. Cuomo daily.
Others are open-minded. Assemblyman Ron Kim was so disgusted by Mr. Cuomo’s attempt to conceal Covid-related deaths in nursing homes that he led a drive to impeach him. Their war of words — Mr. Kim said Mr. Cuomo threatened to “destroy” him — once consumed Albany.
But Mr. Kim now says he is willing to reconsider. “I’ve always been open to giving people a fair shot,” he said. “I want to see sitting across from him if he’s changed.”
Mr. Cuomo has also benefited from larger social and political shifts.
Laura Curran, the former Nassau County executive, said she felt tremendous pressure when claims against the governor first surfaced in spring 2021 “to jump on the bandwagon and do it fast.”
But after no legal charges were brought against Mr. Cuomo, she now views the whole case as “a nothingburger” that says more about the “cancel culture” that gripped her party than the former governor. She recently co-hosted a Cuomo fund-raiser with other women, and said having “a tough guy like Cuomo as the leader of New York City is a good thing” in the Trump era.
If anything, the bandwagon now appears to be pointed in the opposite direction.
“Any endorsement for him is predicated on a belief he’s going to win,” said John Samuelsen, whose Transport Workers Union has not taken sides. “It doesn’t have to be deeper than that to understand the rationale.”
Jay Jacobs, a former Cuomo ally who leads the New York Democratic Party, offered another theory: “Time cures a lot of stuff, and people’s memories are not as sharp,” he said. “That doesn’t make it right or wrong. That’s just the reality.”
Many have simply refused to discuss their transformations.
Mr. Torres told The Post that he was not interested in “relitigating” Mr. Cuomo’s resignation and did not respond to questions for this article. In any case, his early endorsement of Mr. Cuomo could prove useful if the congressman follows through on threats to run against Ms. Hochul in a primary next year.
Ms. Gillibrand’s carefully stated neutrality caught many Democrats by surprise, given her role helping to push Senator Al Franken of Minnesota from office in 2017 over allegations of unwanted touching and kissing. Her spokesman pointed to remarks in which she said it was up to voters to weigh Mr. Cuomo’s alleged misconduct against his accomplishments.
As for Mr. Gural, the real-estate developer, he said in an interview that he would have preferred Mr. Adams for another term. But he sounded ready to move past his attacks from 2021, when he told The Wall Street Journal that he donated to Mr. Cuomo because he felt pressure to. (The governor’s office said then that Mr. Gural was upset because his casinos had not gotten favorable treatment.)
“Andrew gets things done,” Mr. Gural said. “Everybody is looking at all the others as too left-wing.”
Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
It has never really occurred to Marian or Charles Wade to live anywhere but the city where they were born and where they raised their children.
New York is in their bones. “We have our roots here, and our families enjoyed life here before us,” Ms. Wade said.
And they feel lucky. Between Mr. Wade’s pension, earned after more than 40 years as an analyst at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and his Social Security benefits, along with Ms. Wade’s work as a physical therapist at a psychiatric center, they bring in about $208,000 a year.
Still, it’s hard for the couple not to notice how much the city has changed as it has become wealthier.
About 10 years ago, Ms. Wade, 65, and Mr. Wade, 69, sold the Morningside Heights apartment they had lived in for decades. The Manhattan neighborhood had become more affluent, and tensions over how their building should be managed and how much residents should be expected to pay for upkeep boiled over between people who had lived there for years and newer neighbors.
They found a new home in Harlem, large enough to fit their two children, who are now adults struggling to afford the city’s housing market.
All in the Family
Ms. Wade knew it was time to leave Morningside Heights when she spotted her husband hiding behind a bush outside their building, hoping to avoid an unpleasant new neighbor. They had bought their apartment in 1994 for $206,000, using some money they had inherited from their families, and sold it in 2015 for $1.13 million.
The couple found a new apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem for $811,000, and put most of the money down upfront. They took out a loan with a good rate for the remaining cost, and had a $947 monthly payment. They recently finished paying off the mortgage, but they have monthly maintenance payments of $1,555, as well as two temporary assessments to help improve the building, totaling $415 a month.
Their two children each moved home shortly after graduating from college.
The couple’s son, Jacob Wade, 28, split an apartment with three roommates nearby for a while, but spent down his savings and moved back in with his parents. He is searching for an affordable one bedroom nearby and plans to move out later in the year. Their daughter, Elka Wade, 27, came home after college but recently moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, with roommates.
Until their daughter moved out a few weeks ago, she and her brother each took a bedroom, and Mr. and Ms. Wade slept in the dining room, which they had converted into their bedroom with the help of a Murphy bed and a new set of curtains for privacy.
There is very little storage space. A piano occupies an entire closet in their son’s bedroom, because the family has no other place to fit it.
The setup is cramped, but close quarters have their benefits: When their daughter, a classically trained cellist, was living there, she often practiced at home in the evenings. “I love listening to her play,” Ms. Wade said.
Three Foodtowns and a Thrift Shop
The Wades do what they can to keep their costs low. They’ve decided against installing new, better insulated windows in their drafty apartment. They don’t go on vacations, instead visiting their small weekend home in rural upstate New York. And they’ve pulled back on takeout food and retail shopping.
Instead, Mr. Wade surveys the three Foodtown supermarkets near their home for the best deals, preferring one for produce and another for meat. The weekly grocery bill has been around $500 with both kids living at home, and the family usually orders delivery twice a week, rotating between Chinese and Indian food, which typically costs $70, including leftovers.
For an occasional splurge, they love Pisticci, a nearby restaurant where the penne with homemade mozzarella costs $21.
The couple owns a car, which they park on the street for free. But they often use public transportation to avoid paying the $9 congestion pricing fee to drive downtown, or when they have a good parking spot they don’t want to give up. They have a senior discount for their transit cards, which allows them to pay $1.50 per subway or bus ride, rather than $3.
Ms. Wade stopped shopping at the stores she used to frequent, like Eileen Fisher and Banana Republic, years ago. Instead, she visits a thrift store called Unique Boutique on the Upper West Side. She was browsing the aisles a few months ago, before a big Thanksgiving dinner, and spotted the perfect dress for the occasion for just $20.
But she has one nonnegotiable weekly expense: a private yoga lesson in an instructor’s apartment nearby, for $150 a session.
Swapping Mortgage Payments for Singing Lessons
For every member of the Wade family, life in New York is all about the arts.
The children each attended the Special Music School, a public school focused on the arts. Their son, an actor, teacher and director, works part time at the Metropolitan Opera and the Kaufman Music Center, a performing arts complex in Manhattan. His sister works in administration at the Kaufman Center.
Mr. Wade is still close with friends from high school who are now professional musicians, and the couple often goes to see them play at venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where shows typically have a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum.
The couple has cut back on going to expensive concerts — they used to try to see Elvis Costello every time he came to New York, for example — but have timeworn strategies for getting affordable theater tickets.
They recently splurged on tickets to “Oedipus” on Broadway for themselves and their daughter, who they treated to a ticket as a birthday gift. The seats were in the nosebleed section, but still cost $80 apiece.
The couple has a $75 annual membership to the Film Forum, which gives them reduced price tickets to movies. They occasionally get discounted tickets to the opera through their son’s work, and when they don’t, they pay for family circle passes, which are usually $47 a head, plus a $10 fee.
Ms. Wade, who grew up commuting from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan to take dance lessons, sometimes takes $20 drop-in ballet classes during the week at the Dance Theater of Harlem, just a few blocks away from the apartment.
Recently, when the couple paid off their mortgage, Ms. Wade celebrated by giving herself a treat: weekly private singing lessons, for $125 a session.
The technology industry is obsessed with the future.
Many of our modern marvels are rooted in the legacy of Bell Labs, an innovation powerhouse in suburban New Jersey.
Bell Labs, the once-famed research arm of AT&T, celebrated the centennial of its founding last year.
In its heyday, starting in the 1940s, the lab created a cascade of inventions, including the transistor, information theory and an enduring computer software language. The labs’ digital DNA is in our smartphones, social media and chatbot conversations.
“Every hour of your day has a bit of Bell Labs in it,” observed Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory,” a history of the storied research center.
Bell Labs’ most far-reaching idea — information theory — forms the bedrock of computing. The mathematical framework, known as the “Magna Carta of the information age,” provided a blueprint for sending and receiving information with precision and reliability. It was the brainchild of Claude Shannon, a brilliant eccentric whom the A.I. start-up Anthropic named its chatbot after.
Last month, Nvidia announced a new A.I. chip packed with more than 300 billion transistors — the tiny on-off electrical switches invented in the lab.
Bell Labs became so powerful and renowned that it is entrenched in pop culture. The 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” drew inspiration from Bell Labs, and the father of the titular character in the period dramedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” worked there. Most recently, characters in the show “Severance” report to a former Bell Labs building.
Here are some of the labs’ most prominent inventions.
Bell Labs described itself as a wide-ranging “institute of creative technology.” And it was a well-funded one, thanks to the monopoly held by AT&T — with incentive to expand Ma Bell’s phone business.
One invention was Telstar, the first powerful communications satellite, which could receive radio signals, then amplify them (10 billion times) and retransmit them. This allowed for real-time phone conversations across oceans, high-speed data communications and global television broadcasts.
1960
In 1960, Bell Labs launched an earlier orbital communications satellite in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — a passive balloon satellite called Echo that could reflect signals one way.
1962
The lab again teamed up with NASA to launch the smaller Telstar, which was about three feet in diameter and weighed 170 pounds.
1962
Bell Labs also developed some of the rocket technology that launched the satellite, a byproduct of an antiballistic missile project.
1962
Lyndon B. Johnson, vice president at the time, spoke on the first phone conversation bounced off a satellite. “You’re coming through nicely,” he assured Frederick Kappel, the phone company’s chairman.
PRESENT
In the decades since, those groundbreaking inventions from Bell Labs have become ubiquitous and affordable. International phone calls and television broadcasts are part of daily life. Today, more than 11,000 satellites provide internet, surveillance and navigation services, and are crucial for driverless cars and drone warfare.
While developing mobile-phone service, Bell Labs scientists drove around in a van to check transmission quality.
The labs submitted its plan for a working cellular network to the government in 1971, and AT&T opened the first commercial cellular service in Chicago more than a decade later.
1968
An early, simple version of mobile service was essentially a conventional phone on wheels — the car phone. Through radio technology, it connected to the landline network for calls.
1972
Smaller, more powerful chips, radios and batteries made a truly mobile phone possible. It still weighed nearly two pounds.
PRESENT
The technology continued to improve, as cellphones grew smaller and more sophisticated. Smartphones, which gained popularity with the iPhone’s launch in 2007, helped cement the devices as everywhere, ever-present and the dominant device for communication, information and entertainment — for better or worse.
The Picturephone allowed you to see the person you were talking to on a small screen.
1968
And it was heavily promoted. An ad for the Picturephone said it amounted to “crossing a telephone with a TV set.” Its tagline: “Someday you’ll be a star!”
1964
The Picturephone was introduced to great fanfare at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
1964
Even the White House was enlisted for a publicized demo. Lady Bird Johnson spoke via Picturephone to a Bell Labs scientist, Elizabeth Wood.
1968
But at the cost of $16 for a three-minute call (more than $165 today), the novelty soon wore off. Though a market failure, the Picturephone had a star turn in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
PRESENT
Decades later, tech giants ran with the vision of talking with people on video. Similar technology is now incorporated in every smartphone, allowing families to chat in real time. Video calls have also transformed the way we work — connecting people around the world for meetings.
The light-sensitive electronic sensor, called a charge-coupled device, opened the door to digital imaging. It captured images by converting photons of light into electrons, breaking images into pixels.
1978
Efforts to use the imaging sensors in cameras and camcorders began in the 1970s, and the products steadily improved. The cameras got smaller and the images sharper. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith earned a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.
1978
The science is complicated, but the sensor converts light to electrical charges, stores them and then shifts them across the chip to be measured.
PRESENT
By the early 2000s, a smaller, cheaper technology, CMOS, had won out in mass markets like camera phones. But charge-coupled sensors remained the choice for tasks requiring very high resolution, like mapping the Milky Way.
The silicon solar cell was a Bell Labs triumph of material physics.
The solar cell performs a special kind of photon-to-electron conversion — sunlight to energy.
1956
But while a scientific success, the early solar cell technology was a market flop — prohibitively expensive for mainstream adoption. By one estimate at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million for the solar cells needed to meet the electricity needs of the average American house in 1956.
PRESENT
The solar industry would take off decades later, riding the revolution in semiconductor technology, with prices falling and performance soaring. Government subsidies in many countries, eager to nurture clean energy development, helped as well. Today, light-catching panels stretch across fields and deserts.
All computer technology stems from the transistor, the seemingly infinitely scalable nugget of hardware that is essentially an on-off electrical switch that powers digital technology. It was invented at Bell Labs, which licensed the technology to others, paving the way for today’s tech industry.
The versatile transistor can also boost signals by gating electrons and then releasing them.
1956
These transistors — seen on the face of a dime — were the tiniest in their day. The smaller the transistors, the more that can be packed on a chip, using less electricity and enabling faster, more powerful computers.
1950s
Improvements in transistor design led to mass production in the 1950s, helping inspire new products like the portable transistor radio.
1956
The transistor’s inventors — John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley — shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their creation.
1979
The technology continued to improve as a “computer on a chip” in the late 1970s. It was smaller than a fingernail and a few hundredths of an inch thick.
PRESENT
Today’s microscopic transistors animate the chips that go into our phones, computers and cars. The artificial intelligence boom is powered by chips of almost unimaginable scale. Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, recently showed off the company’s new Rubin A.I. chip, with 336 billion transistors.
The first primaries for the 2026 midterm elections are scheduled for early March. For Republican and Democratic state lawmakers still trying to redraw district maps for the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans have a razor-thin margin, there is not much time left.
While legal challenges remain — including a potentially seismic Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act — here is a breakdown of states where maps affecting November’s election have already been redone, or states have taken action to make changes.
These states have changed their maps
Texas could add 5 Republican seats in the midterms
The first group to heed President Trump’s call last year to reshape Congress was the Republican majority in Texas.
Democrats staged a two-week walkout, arguing that the new districts would illegally dilute Black and Hispanic representation. But Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the measure into law in August, and the Supreme Court upheld the map in December.
California could add 5 Democratic seats
In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, persuaded the legislature in August, and voters in November, to counterpunch.
The Supreme Court, echoing its Texas order, upheld California’s new map in February, dismissing Republican claims that it illegally favored Latino voters.
Missouri could add 1 Republican seat
Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, in late September signed into law a new map that would split Kansas City, a Democratic stronghold, into rural and largely Republican districts.
Republicans hope to oust the longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, who was the first Black mayor of Kansas City. But lawsuits are in progress.
North Carolina could add 1 Republican seat
The Republican-controlled legislature approved a new map in October that imperils the re-election chances of Representative Don Davis, a Democrat, who represents the northeastern corner of the state.
Under the state Constitution, Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, cannot veto the new map.
Ohio could add 1 to 2 Republican seats
Even before Mr. Trump’s push, Ohio was required, under its state Constitution, to redraw its congressional maps. So in October, a state commission approved plans to dilute Democratic-held districts near Toledo and Cincinnati.
Utah could add 1 Democratic seat
A state judge in November tossed out a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature as being unfairly tilted against Democrats. The judge then adopted an alternative proposed by a centrist group that preserved a Democratic-leaning district surrounding Salt Lake City.
The Utah legislature has appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, while two of state’s congressional Republicans have filed a federal lawsuit to void the map.
These states are trying to change their maps
Florida could add 2 to 4 Republican seats in the midterms
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has proposed that a special legislative session be convened in late April on redistricting. Republicans, who control most of the state’s congressional seats, are eyeing a gain of two to four more in central and South Florida.
Virginia could add 2 to 4 Democratic seats
The Democratic legislature has passed a constitutional amendment allowing lawmakers to redraw congressional districts before the midterms. If voters say yes to a referendum on April 21, the Democrats could net between two and four seats under a proposed new map.
A state judge initially blocked the effort to change the map. But the Virginia Supreme Court has allowed the referendum to proceed, and says that it will rule afterward on whether the plan is legal.
New York could add 1 Democratic seat
A state judge has ruled that a district represented by Nicole Malliotakis, New York City’s only Republican member of Congress, disenfranchises Black and Latino voters. The judge has ordered an independent redistricting commission to come up with new maps for the district, which includes Staten Island and part of Brooklyn. Republicans are appealing.
Maryland could add 1 Democratic seat
In Maryland, a latecomer, the House of Delegates has approved a plan that would ask voters to ratify new congressional boundaries in November — while also choosing the candidates to represent those districts.
The State Senate appears reluctant, so far. But if the plan proceeds, Democrats could turn what is now a 7-1 advantage into 8-0.
Reporting contributed by Nick Corasaniti.
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