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He can't help but be the status Cuomo.
On Thursday night's debate stage, Andrew Cuomo looked a little sharper than he did during the primary debates, and he never fully lost his cool. But he also utterly failed to counter Zohran Mamdani's relentless message of optimism and affordability, and pitched no new ideas or platforms to attract New Yorkers to his cause.
When asked directly what he felt he did wrong during his double-digit loss to Mamdani in the primary, and what he had learned from it, Cuomo basically admitted that nothing had changed.
"I think in the primary campaign. I did not do enough on social media," Cuomo said. "I also increased my activity, significantly. But my agenda is exactly the same."
That "agenda" has been relentless negativity, painting an increasingly bleak picture of a Mamdani mayoralty, and using the same handful of issues—Mamdani's NYPD tweets from 2020, the "globalize the intifada" debate—that have been exhaustively litigated over the past several months, including on the primary debate stages in June. "And he gave the finger to the Christopher Columbus statue!" Cuomo declared onstage at the end of a list of Mamdani's sins. It was a laugh line, though he surely didn't mean for it to be.