People Are Already Talking About an Andrew Cuomo “Comeback” and We’re Exhausted

It’s barely been a day since disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he was resigning in the face of looming impeachment threats over sexual harassment, and people are already talking about his potential “comeback.” In fact, that idea started getting thrown around pretty much immediately after the announcement—like, within minutes.

To be clear, most of the people talking about a potential Cuomo comeback are not necessarily hoping for that outcome. (Not that that makes it any less exhausting or less potentially insensitive to the very real women who bravely came forward to report Cuomo’s harassment and workplace abuses.)

Cuomo’s resignation was surprising, as he made it clear in his longwinded announcement that he is “a fighter.” But the idea here is that by avoiding impeachment, he’s allowing himself the opportunity to run for office again. If he were impeached, the New York Senate would have the option to bar him from running for office again. (If you remember, we had a similar conversation around Donald Trump’s second impeachment.) But by stepping aside voluntarily, Cuomo reserves that possibility for the future.

It’s also important, then, that he made a very big deal out of his claim that he was not resigning because he had done anything worth resigning over, but just because he wanted to save New Yorkers from a big political impeachment circus.

As MSNBC’s Chuck Todd put it, “His career was either permanently over, or almost-permanently over, and he chose the path of almost-permanently over. We know the way our world works. It’s amazing, the people we’ve seen make political comebacks. You can’t ever rule it out … He did something that, maybe over time, will at least give him an opening to not be a full pariah in the party in three years, four years, five years.”

Todd’s reaction verged on reverential, while mine is complete exhaustion, but I don’t think he’s wrong in his analysis. “I expect in my lifetime, Andrew Cuomo to run for office again,” Todd said. “What that office is? I don’t know, but that’s what this resignation tells me today. He wants to live to fight another day.”

I hate even having to consider this possibility, but I do believe that Cuomo has it in him to try to wait out our collective attention span before he tries to come back to politics. Preemptively calling him out for it, then, is a good way to try to make sure that never happens.

(image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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