Cuomo gains some ground but is still behind with a month left in NYC's mayoral race

When New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped his re-election bid last month, it was former Gov.

When New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped his re-election bid last month, it was former Gov. Andrew Cuomo who stood to benefit most.

Both longtime Democrats, running this year as third-party contenders, had positioned themselves as moderates in a multiway general election. And Cuomo was thought to be the most likely destination for voters unconvinced by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the race.

But with just over three weeks before Election Day, Cuomo is still staring at a massive upward climb to overtake the upstart state assemblyman, despite some additional consolidation behind Cuomo following Adams’ exit.

Cuomo has seen a notable bump in polling taken since Adams left the race, but the same surveys — as well as interviews by NBC News with voters and strategists closely watching the race — also illustrate that Cuomo hasn’t been able to expand his support levels beyond picking up those former Adams voters. What’s more, he likely doesn’t have enough time to expand much more. Early voting begins Oct. 25.

“Even if Cuomo were to have gotten all of Adams’ voters, it was still going to be hard for him to make up all of the ground — and that seems, to some measure, to have happened,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who was previously the executive director of the New York state Democratic Party. “What Cuomo needed was to grow his base — but there aren’t enough voters to do that. Not in this amount of time and with his ideology and in this political environment.”