The chaos of Trump’s election gives Cuomo and de Blasio a chance to reset – but will they?

Before the polls closed, one of the most remarkable things about this election was how, though the race had begun and ended in New York City, the state came up so little in the conversation. There was the time Donald Trump said Bill de Blasio was the single worst mayor in the history of New York City and an incompetent maniac, but if the hometown came up at all the debate centered around issues from an earlier era: stop-and-frisk, terrorism, Muslim surveillance. Both de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo did their duty at the Democratic convention, but Michael Bloomberg was the scene-stealer, and on the other side Rudy Giuliani re-emerged as Donald Trump’s Donald Trump.

As the Democratic Party picks up the pieces, it is hard not to imagine it playing out something along the lines of what we have seen here in New York: Is the Democratic Party a party of sensible centrism, pro-business and socially liberal along the lines of what Andrew Cuomo has pushed for in Albany? Or is it like de Blasio: anti-establishment, angry, and hungry for a radical redistribution of economic power?

The rest of the nation is going to watch this play out over the coming months and years in much the same way we have in New York, and Cuomo and de Blasio are likely to be the very ones shaping the contour of the argument. It is nearly impossible to remember now, but back in the days when Cuomo was seen as the champion of marriage equality and someone willing to risk his political capital to bring unruly liberals to heel, he was on the short-short list of 2016 presidential contenders, a dream that fell into the abyss once Hillary Clinton signaled that she was reversing her previous inclination to not seek the presidency again.

Back then, Cuomo was so hesitant about being seen as having any ambitions outside of Albany that he wouldn’t even step foot outside the state, as if New York was the cornfield in “Field of Dreams” and the governor’s political ambitions would age decades the minute he crossed into Connecticut.

Expect that to change. As much as Cuomo has fashioned himself as the anti-de Blasio, it is easy to see him taking a page from the mayor’s playbook and start travelling farther afield in the guise of “telling the New York story” or some other avowedly non-politically ambitious frame.

As for de Blasio, for the moment at least he seems to have a temporary reprieve on receiving a serious challenge in 2017. When the party is in disarray, the appetite to start eating one’s own begins to dissipate. The window for someone to start laying the groundwork for a mayoral challenge is swiftly closing, and it will close further as the city takes time to recover from the shock of a President Trump.

Once de Blasio gets some breathing room, expect him to continue to try and play the role that he did in the early days of this campaign, when he tried to position himself as the leader of Left America, at the moment when Bernie Sanders still seemed like the second coming of Dennis Kucinich and Elizabeth Warren was set on staying out of it.

That effort of course was a disaster for de Blasio. His progressive contract with America landed with a thud. Clinton aides newly moved to Brooklyn couldn’t understand who this guy nipping at her heels was. When the person who got his start in New York politics pointedly refused to endorse Clinton, one of the only home state holdouts, it looked petty and hypocritical.

And it got worse from there, as the 6-foot-5 mayor showed an astonishing capacity to shrink on the national stage.

His much-hyped Presidential Forum was a disaster when it was revealed that no one much cared about it. His eventual backing of his former boss was ignored by the campaign, and his forays into battleground states were met with shrugs by heartland voters who had no idea who this guy who had come to buck up their spirits was.

When the WikiLeaks emails came out, it was revealed that not only was the mayor emailing top campaign brass at all hours of the night, but that they didn’t much care for his opinion. Worse, it looked as if the whole non-endorsement thing was a piece of cynical political gamesmanship, since he had let the Clintonites know that he was pretty much with her all along.

Height notwithstanding, de Blasio doesn’t yet have the oversized stature of some of his predecessors, who either by the size of their bank account or sheer force of personality were able to command media attention and bend the political class to their will.

That stature is even more diminished in November 2016 than it was in November 2015, but the resulting chaos of Trump’s ascension brings de Blasio another chance. There was an outsider charm to Bernie Sanders’ primary rise, but the real fuel behind it was the message: that the game is rigged by powerful insiders who are enriching themselves on the backs of the working class. That is de Blasio’s message, too. Whether that brand of progressive populism resonates just with liberal Democrats, antsy after eight years in power and looking for a vessel – or resonates among the wider public, for that matter – is something that isn’t quite known yet.

Pretty soon though, we are going to find out.