Breaking down Andrew Cuomo’s 17-minute mayoral campaign launch video

Andrew Cuomo finally launched his mayoral campaign Saturday, bringing his intentions into the public sphere and out of the realm of speculation, rumor and leaks. 

The vehicle for this long-awaited announcement was peculiar: a 17-minute video, shot in a nondescript room, featuring Cuomo alone, speaking directly to the camera. It recalls Cuomo’s famous COVID-19 briefings – he projects calm and frankness, and he’s undoubtedly the star of the show. He addresses New Yorkers directly, and he uses the first person plural “we” throughout. It’s also sort of boring. As campaign content goes, it’s almost ASMR. 

The video is unusual on many levels – beginning with its length. This is someone who believes people will listen to him for a long time. One Democratic political video editor described it as a “power move.” A Democratic consultant said: “It’s exemplary of his enormous ego.” Another Democratic operative described it as “a speech without a crowd.”

“Seventeen minutes is a lot for one person, one voter, one resident, to digest in one sitting,” said political consultant Lupe Todd-Medina, who ran communications on Ray McGuire’s mayoral campaign in 2021. But the lengthy speech also served to reintroduce Cuomo on his own terms, after several years away from the spotlight in which voters may have heard more about his scandals than his accomplishments, suggested Basil Smikle, former executive director of the state Democratic Party.

The campaign launch video, a relatively new art form, is usually one to five minutes long. It usually involves movement through the community the candidate hopes to eventually represent. Fellow candidate Zohran Mamdani walks through a bodega and down the middle of a street in his. Brad Lander rides the subway and chats on a street corner in his. Jessica Ramos is all over the place in hers: a soccer field with the backdrop of the East River, on the bus, on a pier, on the block.

They usually reach for a certain New Yorkiness. McGuire’s launch video from 2021, narrated by Spike Lee, features the candidate jogging through Times Square. “We used a New York voice,” Todd-Medina said. “We had him running through iconic areas of the city. We were really trying to make it New York-specific.” 

It’s not clear from Cuomo’s video where in the world he is. Of course, shooting outside on the streets of New York City is a bit vulnerable. It requires you to walk around in public with cameras – perhaps a sensitive thing for a guy under as much scrutiny as the former governor was while he was preparing to run. And making a dynamic, highly edited video that shoots in several locations is expensive. Though it’s lengthy, this is a low-budget product.

“It was a direct address to New Yorkers and judging by the positive reaction and widespread coverage it got, I take it that New Yorkers watched it,” Cuomo campaign spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said in a text. “As soon as it dropped he went to the Bronx to hear from concerned residents and everyday New Yorkers. We’ll be seeing you on the trail!”

Dire is the vibe of the actual content of Cuomo’s address. Cuomo sees a city in crisis: “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” he says. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you're walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty store fronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control.” Though concern about disorder is doubtless present in the city, Cuomo’s B-roll belies some of his rhetoric. “Today, people stand with their backs against the walls, away from the tracks and away from each other, wary, on guard, afraid they might be the next victim,” Cuomo says of subway straphangers. B-roll shows a woman calmly waiting for the train standing in the middle of the platform – not with her back against the wall. He later says: “We now walk down the street passing homeless people living in garbage” while B-roll shows a man who is clearly a canner dozing on a bench. 

Cuomo never names Eric Adams, the man he is seeking to deny a second term, but he sounds a lot like the conservative mayor. “It is not advancing civil rights to abandon seriously mentally ill people to the street, allowing them to endanger themselves or others,” Cuomo says, echoing a point Adams often makes in defense of policies that allow the city to commit people to in-patient psychiatric treatment against their will. Like Adams, he also says he can work with President Donald Trump (though he also vows to stand up to the president), decries the impact of an influx of migrants to the city in recent years, stresses an urgent need to build more housing, criticizes pro-Palestine college protesters and attempts to reclaim the term “progressive.” 

Despite not mentioning Adams by name, Cuomo refers to a “lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders” in a statement that could be read as referring to Adams, or even City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, one political observer suggested. “I’m a lot more sensitive to how Black leaders are addressed, so when he uses a phrase like not intelligent, it sort of leans into the DEI strain a bit more than I would have wanted,” Smikle said. “I think what he’s trying to say is you have to have a savvy political mind and a strong spine, and I think that’s the point he was trying to make.”

But Cuomo, who held the most powerful position in the state for more than 10 years, can point to a record that his opponents simply can’t match. In one breath, he namechecks four massive infrastructure projects that were substantially advanced or completed during his tenure: the revamp at LaGuardia, the new Moynihan Train Hall, the Koskiusko Bridge and the Mario Cuomo Bridge. In 17 minutes, it almost feels like this is a role Cuomo could be shrinking into, that this is someone who only deigns to run for mayor.