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Photo: Angelina Katsanis/The New York Times/Redux

Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.

“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”

The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.

Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.

It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.

As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.

Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.

Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.

“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”

Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.

Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.

“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”

Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).

For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)

Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.

“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.

Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.

Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”

With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.

“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”

Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.

“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”

Andrew Cuomo’s Plan to Win

Andrew Cuomo’s Plan to Win