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DON’T RANK CUOMO

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IF YOU DON’T WANT CUOMO

MEANWHILE: CURTIS SLIWA for POLICE COMMISSIONER?
https://fairvote.org/a-brief-history-of-ranked-choice-voting/
https://nybooks.com/online/2025/10/23/the-curtis-sliwa-era
https://nymag.com/70-percent-voters-didnt-rank-andrew-cuomo
A Stunning Number of Voters Didn’t Rank Andrew Cuomo for Mayor
by Nia Prater / July 25, 2025

“For months, opponents of Andrew Cuomo urged voters to leave the former governor unranked on their ballots in favor of the numerous other candidates in the crowded Democratic field, citing his tenure in Albany and past scandals. Well, a new analysis of primary-election data found that many voters did just that. A Gothamist analysis of data released by the Board of Elections found that more than 70 percent of voters who fully filled out all five slots on their ballots, a number that comes to 376,418 voters, did not rank Cuomo among their chosen candidates.

Notably, the outlet found that of the 469,018 voters who ranked Assembly member Zohran Mamdani first, close to 8 percent of them also ranked Cuomo somewhere on their ballot. The “Don’t rank Cuomo” movement had its beginnings in the D.R.E.A.M. campaign, which urged voters to “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor,” a reference to Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, who would ultimately leave the primary to pursue an independent bid for reelection. The Working Families Party embraced the message, issuing its own slate of endorsed candidates for voters to rank instead of Cuomo.

The data also shows that a late-stage alliance between two candidates likely had an impact on the final results. Just weeks before the primary election, Mamdani and comptroller Brad Lander announced that they would be cross-endorsing each other and urged their supporters to rank the other second on their ballots. According to Gothamist’s findings, 40 percent of the 120,544 voters who ranked Lander as their first choice would go on to rank Mamdani second on their ballots. Mamdani, who had long held second place behind Cuomo in the polls, won the first round of voting handily after the polls closed on June 24. But it was the third round of voting, which saw 103,414 votes transferred from eliminated candidates like Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and State Senator Zellnor Myrie, that pushed Mamdani over the needed threshold to secure the nomination.”

EVIL ANDREW: DON’T RANK ERIC or ANDREW for MAYOR
https://timesunion.com/editorial-don-t-rank-andrew-cuomo
https://wsj.com/new-york-progressives-pin-hopes-on-dont-rank-cuomo
https://newyorker.com/2025/06/progressives-dont-rank-evil-andrew
A New Progressive Rallying Cry: Don’t Rank Evil Andrew!
by Jael Goldfine / June 16, 2025

“The line for the new Bed-Stuy outpost of the Jamaican restaurant Juici Patties snaked down the block on a recent hot evening, making the intersection of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue even more jammed than usual. Lawrence Wang, a thirty-seven-year-old political-communications strategist, was happy to see a crowd; he was looking for people to use in a man-on-the-street video. Wang is an organizer with the DREAM campaign, a grassroots group trying to keep the former governor Andrew Cuomo from winning the Democratic mayoral primary later this month. He and his team were in Bed-Stuy to convince voters, on camera, that Cuomo was the wrong choice. DREAM stands for “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor,” and one of the group’s aims is to educate New Yorkers about the city’s still new ranked-choice system, in which voters can rank five candidates, with their votes transferring to their next choice if their top pick fares poorly. “If you put Cuomo on your ballot, you are voting for Cuomo,” Wang said.

“If you don’t want to vote for Cuomo, don’t rank him third, don’t rank him last, don’t rank him at all.” Wang argues that Eric Adams won the election in 2021 — beating Kathryn Garcia by seven thousand votes — in part because people didn’t think too much about whom they put in the lower slots. At Juici Patties, Brandon Tizol, who had come from his day job as a communications manager for a union, hoisted a video camera. Carla Marie Davis, a political-content creator, approached people in line. “Can I grab you for a couple seconds to talk about the mayor’s race?” she asked, holding a microphone and a stack of notecards scrawled with unpleasant facts about Cuomo. The customers, for the most part, smiled back in silence or looked at their phones.

DREAM originated last fall, and the acronym was designed to be flexible. Initially, it stood for “Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor”; when Cuomo entered the primary, it morphed to “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew.” “Evil Andrew” emerged when Adams left the primary to run as an independent. (Wang, a former ad copywriter who once crafted slogans for Dunkin’ Donuts and Ram Trucks, has a knack for names.) The idea has caught on: “Don’t Rank Cuomo” has been plastered across bus shelters and Instagram, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shouted it at the recent Puerto Rican Day Parade. A Cuomo spokesperson dismissed DREAM as “performance art.” But, in mid-June, a surprising poll showed Cuomo’s chief rival, Zohran Mamdani, inching ahead.

That day in Bed-Stuy, however, Cuomo’s spotty record was not top of mind. A clean-cut man in a green sweater gave Davis a killer quote: “He’s running as a criminal. Nobody believes in him . . . that comment about Negroes, that lost me.” Unfortunately, the man was referring not to Cuomo but to Mayor Adams, who had recently remarked, “All these Negroes who were asking me to step down, God forgive them.”

Wang, who has an Eagle Scout’s militant optimism, was undeterred: “Hey, he talked to us!” The team left Juici Patties to explore the intersection. In front of Cricket Wireless, they dodged a young white man who was eager to chat (“I’m going Zohran No. 1!”) and approached two Black men in Yankees caps. One offered that the current mayor “doesn’t do shit,” but declined to go on camera. A man selling sea moss and ginseng extract outside 99 Cent Supreme Pizza called out, “Adams gave me a raise!” The organizers had zip.

Many of the street conversations ended before they could even bring up Cuomo, or the nuances of ranked-choice voting. Their luck finally changed on a shady block of Halsey Street, where they found a smiling woman named Tonisha, holding hands with a little girl in a tutu. “Do you feel like we’ve had a mayor that truly cared about Black New Yorkers?” Davis asked, after Tonisha signed a release. “I have not, given what he said publicly about so-called Black people,” she said. Davis explained that Adams was out of the primary and Cuomo was in. Tonisha began praising Cuomo’s improvements to the city and his action on police brutality.

Surprised but unfazed, Davis offered up statistics about rising rents and home prices under Cuomo’s governorship, and his record-breaking cuts to the M.T.A. “Hearing that, would you still want to rank Cuomo?” she asked. “I’m not too sure,” Tonisha answered. “After everything the current mayor has put us through, we need someone who’s going to make sure that every New Yorker benefits from the city.” The team was ecstatic: they’d converted a Cuomo diehard. The celebration turned out to be premature. Before she left, Tonisha realized that she’d mixed up Cuomo with Bill de Blasio, whom she adored. She wasn’t sure whether she hated Cuomo: she couldn’t remember.”

CUOMO HATERS UNITE
https://nocuomo.org/
https://nydailynews.com/the-same-old-cuomo-dividing-as-always
https://nygroove.nyc/dream-campaign-cuomo/
The ultimate guerilla hating campaign
by Virginia K. Smith  /  Jul 10, 2025

“It’s never been a better time to be a New Yorker who hates Andrew Cuomo. One of the central rallying cries of the recent democratic mayoral primary was “don’t rank Andrew Cuomo,” and boy did it work — Cuomo was losing so badly to Zohran Mamdani on election night that he conceded just a couple of hours into the count. By the time all the votes were tallied a couple weeks later, Mamdani’s campaign had earned more votes than any campaign in New York City primary history. And as we stare down the barrel of the November general election, recent polling has Mamdani with a 10-point lead over the detested former governor, who may or may not even remain in the race.

Much of the groundswell of pure, uncut Cuomo loathing was thanks to the strategic work of the DREAM for NYC campaign, which first stood for “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor” then quickly pivoted to “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor” after Adams dropped out of the primary to run as an independent in early April. The movement gained near-instant momentum after launching in late February, with buzzy, well-designed merch flooding the streets and our Instagram feeds, a memorable slogan that included an actually understandable ranked-choice directive, and eager adoption from influencers and local politicians alike (Brad Lander was among the early boosters).

While the anti-Cuomo contingent isn’t exactly resting on their laurels — the disgraced ex-frontrunner is still weighing his options for the general and trying to convince Eric Adams to drop out — it’s reasonable to ask: once you’ve defeated the politician your entire organization was created to defeat, what happens next? We’ve gotten a glimpse of potential next steps during the primary as DREAM’s messaging expanded to become more explicitly pro-Zohran, and in the weeks since his win, with the small super PAC using its platform to call for Sen. Kristin Gillibrand to resign following her racist anti-Mamdani tirade on Brian Lehrer, and pushing for New Yorkers to call their legislators to advocate for taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. This week we caught up with Charlie Heller, one of DREAM for NYC’s organizers, for a deep dive about how this whole thing got started, running campaigns that don’t rely on the mega-rich or stuffy institutions, and the power of being a true hater.

Q: First things first: where did DREAM for NYC come from, and who’s the team behind it?
A: We all met through the DSA, specifically climate organizing, and were really involved in the campaign to pass the Public Renewables Act, the first statewide Green New Deal program in the U.S., that passed in 2023. A lot of us on the comms side all had different backgrounds, I had a journalism background, another of our organizers, Lawrence Wang, has an advertising background. Some of us started a communications co-op called Greenpill that did messaging for [Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha] and State Sen. Kristen Gonzales. We kept working on the Build Public Renewables act until it passed. Some of us also worked on the Jamaal Bowman campaign last year in different capacities. In that one we encountered AIPAC spending the most money ever on an election, bludgeoning with infinite money, and they won. We thought, they have infinite money, they’ve found this thing that works, they’re going to keep doing it every time to stop progressive candidates.

Q: And how did the focus turn to the mayoral race?
A: We started even before Trump got re-elected, and it was just Eric Adams in the race. We knew he won by just 8,000 votes in 2021, and it’s very possible that if people knew how ranked-choice voting worked we’d have a different mayor. The ranked-choice slate thing is a very wonky thing. How are you going to explain that to people who aren’t politics people? We knew there was the ranked choice strategy stuff, and then there’s needing to make sure everyone is turning their fire on the worst candidates, which didn’t really happen last time. We had a core of probably a dozen people organizing in different ways, including our lead designer Sofia Demopolos and video lead Brandon Tizol. Some were paid, but it’s mostly volunteering, people doing this outside of work. Over the course of the thing we amassed probably 70 volunteers in different capacities.

Q: And what about the DREAM messaging and acronym, specifically?
A: We were considering a couple ideas, one was more zombie themed, that was more Adams, the idea that these corrupt execs have a way of hanging around. We ended up going with DREAM because here’s an acronym with instructions, but it’s also not purely negative; we can dream of a better New York City. The overall idea was we need to turn all of this into a mass rallying cry that feels like New York common sense. You get your bacon egg and cheese, you get your coffee, take the subway, don’t rank Cuomo. And while Zohran had this inspiring heart of New York campaign, we were harnessing a different part of being a New Yorker which is being a huge hater.

We look at it as, we ran the ultimate guerilla hating campaign. We made hating Cuomo into a citywide phenomenon, and harnessed the renewable energy that is New York’s desire to hate some asshole. The candidates spend a lot of time defining themselves, but they don’t spend a lot of time hating, and that’s what we can do. Even with Trump, there wasn’t that much hating. But that’s how normal people think about stuff. This guy sucks, we should just say he sucks, and say why. We don’t have to wrap it up in all this stuff. And we can do that because we’re running our own thing. Once there’s all these institutions involved, people don’t want to go full hater. You can tell the truth in a way that feels true and you don’t have to bury it in weird language that no one ever uses in conversations.


“The same people [behind Cuomo] are going to try to keep Zohran from winning and prevent him from doing the stuff New Yorkers elected him to do.”

Q: Well speaking of running your own thing — where did the money come from? How do you get attention when the other side has a $25 million war chest?
A: We’re technically a Super PAC, and we raised around $100,000. Initially The Jewish Vote Pac gave us around $5,000. They totally got it. The institutional progressive funder world was not very supportive for a mix of reasons. We’d like to have done broadcast [TV ads] if we had the budget, but because we didn’t, we emphasized other things that were working. Merch, working with influencers. We made our entire strategy public and called it the DREAM box. Normally you want to keep it close to the chest.

We’re thought, we don’t have the money to do a $10 million ad campaign with this theme. All we have is people. So we made all these influencer toolkits, regular people tool kits, put all these assets on our website like logos and info so people could make their own stuff and we could push these talking points into the press. At some point people were literally bootlegging our designs and selling them on the Lower East Side, someone sent us that they had seen bootleg DREAM shirts at the Mermaid Parade. That’s how you know you’ve made it in New York City.

I would like some proof that Cuomo is still alive. [Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi] is just writing these unhinged press releases, what is going on? I would say, we don’t know exactly who the candidates are and what level of support each will have. What we do know is the same people are going to try to keep Zohran from winning and prevent him from doing the stuff New Yorkers elected him to do. The way we’re looking at it is twofold. First of all we do need to finish off Eric Adams. I don’t think he’s going to win but he’s there. And then there’s laying groundwork for the bigger fight to make these things happen, like taxing the rich.

We had this big Tax the Rich fight in 2021. I think there were 5,000 volunteers on that campaign, essentially against Cuomo to stop him from closing hospitals and to tax the rich [instead]. Now there’s something like 50,000 Zohran volunteers, and they’re not going anywhere. They’re still going to live in New York City. The question is how do we keep up that fight and the story of ordinary New Yorkers versus billionaires. Institutions are already trying to stop it. I do think they’re going to spend even more money on the general. They could even spend $100 million, I would not be surprised.

There’s a few different routes we can take. In making this a bigger battle thing, our role is still attacking the enemies. In a way that candidates generally can’t do as much because they have to talk about their own vision. We’ve built this as a model to defeat these Super PACs with a lot fewer resources. And it worked. In some ways it’s proof of concept that you can use these unconventional strategies to win this stuff. We want to figure out ways to take this model to other places. [Calling for Gillibrand’s resignation] is part of the bigger fight. The primary is over, all of these people who didn’t want that outcome are trying all this other stuff. We want to create a popular understanding that that’s what is happening. Not just that they don’t like [Zohran], but that people who benefit from a status quo where everything is really unaffordable, and the idea of something being better is essentially not allowed, they are there and going to try to prevent this stuff from happening. And we can beat them again.

If ordinary people come together, we’ll beat them. That’s how history has always worked. We have something they’ll never ever have, which is that we are right. Morally right and factually right. And when we can convey that to a mass populace — and convey how to act on it — we win. People really want to know what to do.  I think that New York City can lead us out of this fascist mess. And I think that’s what a lot of these people are afraid of who are trying to stop it. If you can do this, what’s next? Maybe everyone can be in a union?  Maybe we can have a better world? It’s about what could be next, and that’s why they’re so unhinged. I would like in 2028 for people to talk about the billionaire problem the way they talked about the border [in 2024]. “What are you going to do about the billionaires?”

PREVIOUSLY

HONEST GRAFT
https://spectrevision.net/2016/11/25/honest-graft/
WORST MAYOR EVER
https://spectrevision.net/2024/10/16/worst-mayor-ever/
DETROIT’s LAND VALUE TAX
https://spectrevision.net/2023/06/14/taxing-blight/