Eric Adams’s Exit From the NYC Mayoral Race Isn’t Having a Major Effect on Cuomo’s Bid So Far

When Mayor Eric Adams suddenly ended his re-election bid just over a week ago, the development seemed tailor-made for former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

As one of just three major candidates left in the New York City mayoral race, Mr. Cuomo had a wider lane to attract centrists skeptical of the front-runner, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, and dismissive of the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa.

“It’s a totally different campaign,” Mr. Cuomo said last week. “I have much more of a field operation, much more presence on the ground, much more social media presence than I’ve had before. And I’m doing much more personal outreach myself.”

But so far, there is little evidence that Mr. Adams’s exit has been a game changer for Mr. Cuomo, and time is short: He still trails Mr. Mamdani by 20 points in most polls with a month before Election Day, though those polls were taken before the mayor dropped out.

Polls suggest that Mr. Cuomo’s chances will only meaningfully increase if Mr. Sliwa drops out — a scenario that the Republican nominee has repeatedly rejected.

Donations to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign did rise last week, with nearly $400,000 arriving in the 36 hours immediately following the mayor’s announcement. Super PACs supporting the former governor also registered slight upticks in contributions, but nothing that matched the tens of millions of dollars raised for the spring primary.

A group of wealthy Cuomo supporters, including, among others, Ricky Sandler, Lisa Blau and Gregg Hymowitz, prominent figures in real estate and finance, were slated to meet on Tuesday morning to drum up financial support for Mr. Cuomo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Later on Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo is scheduled to appear at a fund-raiser in Flushing, Queens, hosted by Steve Valiotis, a 79-year-old real estate developer and self-identified Republican. He said he expected about 200 people at his event, largely from the Greek community, and put Mr. Cuomo’s chances of winning at “50/50.”

Cornell Belcher, Mr. Cuomo’s pollster for the general election, said in an interview that Mr. Cuomo’s hopes partly rested on Republican and conservative voters who might be drawn to his focus on public safety.

Still, Mr. Cuomo’s own team seemed cautious during a donor call to not oversell his chances of catching Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, given the former governor’s status as a third-party candidate.

In a brief Zoom pitch to about 40 donors last week, Mr. Cuomo called Mr. Mamdani an “existential threat” to the city — amplifying a message he regularly delivers on the campaign trail. He then turned the call over to several members of his campaign team.

The aides said the former governor planned to distinguish himself from Mr. Mamdani in terms of leadership and experience, especially with President Trump’s large funding cuts to New York City. They contended that they had identified a tranche of swing voters who were attracted to Mr. Cuomo’s positions on public safety among other policy issues.

A path to victory exists, the advisers told the donors, by pulling together Mr. Cuomo’s constituencies and seeking to unite people who were supporting Mr. Adams and those worried about Mr. Mamdani becoming mayor, two people on the call said.

“We definitely have an avenue here,” Mr. Belcher said he told those on the call. “With Eric dropping out, we can compress the vote and we can compress the Republican vote even with Curtis in it.”

But despite Mr. Cuomo’s assertion that the campaign was transformed, his pitch to donors and voters has not demonstrably changed since Mr. Adams’s exit. He plays up his 10 years of leading the state as governor and contrasts that with Mr. Mamdani, who he says is inexperienced and not up to the job of leading the nation’s largest city.

“The message is the same,” said Ruben Davidoff, a personal injury lawyer who hosted a fund-raiser where Mr. Cuomo spoke, hours after Mr. Adams dropped out. “What he stands for is pretty firm.”

Last Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo spoke before a meeting in Queens of Local 3 I.B.E.W, a union that had endorsed him, using his 10-minute speech to attack Mr. Mamdani’s policies and experience.

As he did during the primary, Mr. Cuomo also focused on Mr. Mamdani’s former support of the defund the police movement and the decriminalization of prostitution. He said Mr. Mamdani would not be able to stand up to President Trump.

But there have been subtle changes to Mr. Cuomo’s approach. He has focused more on appearing before Hindus, Muslims and other South Asian immigrant groups in last few weeks.

A more noticeable shift came on the eve of Yom Kippur, when Mr. Cuomo released a message that seemed clearly aimed at the Orthodox community, a constituency that has stood by Mr. Adams. His nearly two-minute video included an apology over pandemic restrictions on gathering when he was governor that particularly affected Hasidic communities in Brooklyn.

Mr. Cuomo might be an attractive choice among the three active candidates for the growing Orthodox community, which tends to vote as a bloc.

“When you’re tallying up the different options and possibilities of where you’re going to gain some ground on the front-runner, this would kind of be the right thing to do,” said Rabbi David Zwiebel, an executive vice president at Agudath Israel of America, which sued Mr. Cuomo over the restrictions. “We’ve learned the art of holding our noses with one hand and voting with the other hand.”

Mr. Cuomo later clarified that he was sorry that the Hasidic community felt the shutdown was related to their religion. He insisted that was untrue but said that he would not have changed his actions.

An editorial on Sunday in Yeshiva World News, a widely read publication in the Orthodox community, criticized the shift, writing that Mr. Cuomo had gone from “disrespecting and insulting our religion to disrespecting and insulting our intelligence.”

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign said the race’s dynamics had not been affected by Mr. Adams’s exit. Mr. Mamdani had already raised enough money to hit the $8 million spending cap, and support for his campaign has only increased since the primary. The campaign now has 80,000 volunteers, 30,000 more than when the primary ended.

Any increase in Mr. Cuomo’s donations, Mr. Mamdani’s campaign asserted, was because of his appeal to the billionaire class.

“Zohran Mamdani has already beaten $20 million in attack ads and a former governor by 13 points,” said Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani. “And he’ll do it again because New Yorkers are ready for a politics that works for them.”

But in recent weeks, the billionaires have not opened their wallets wide for Mr. Cuomo.

Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $22 million for Mr. Cuomo’s losing bid in the Democratic primary, has raised roughly $3.5 million since the primary. It reported raising $334,000 last week, according to state campaign disclosures.

Two notable donors were Patricia Duff, the political influencer and philanthropist, and Benjamin Stein, an investment banker who is the son of the former City Council president, Andrew Stein. The elder Mr. Stein met with President Trump over the summer to make the case for Mr. Cuomo staying in the race. Ms. Duff and Mr. Stein each gave $100,000, according to state disclosures.

Another super PAC tied to Mr. Cuomo’s interests, New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor 25, raised more than $200,000 last week after Mr. Adams’s exit, according to a person familiar with the super PAC’s fund-raising efforts.

Reporting was contributed by Theodore Schleifer, Dana Rubinstein and Nicholas Fandos.