But he was no longer the formidable figure in New York he had been. His popularity ratings had dropped. State legislators, who had never been fond of him, were emboldened to challenge him. He pinned the blame for this erosion of support on the way the news media had covered his response to all the talk about a presidential run.

“You’ve done everything but call me a liar,” he told The Washington Post, speaking generally of the press. “You said that I was cute. You said that I misplayed the game. You said that I was really waiting for another scenario. Well, the net result of that is it costs me credibility, because you spent all those months saying I was conning people.”

Recession, too, was looming and state revenues were declining. Still, in 1990, he won a third term. His Republican opponent, Pierre A. Rinfret, a financial consultant and economics adviser to presidents, had not been taken seriously even by his own party.

It was a convincing but unsatisfying victory: Mr. Cuomo had done better against Mr. O’Rourke four years before.

When he returned to Albany to deliver his ninth State of the State address, Mr. Cuomo suggested diminished ambitions for his next term. “This is a wonderful year for raw truth,” he said. “We don’t have any money.”

But he had one more presidential flirtation left in him: in October 1991, while on a trip to Chicago, he said he was “looking at” a run. Many of his supporters had grown weary of such talk, some viewing it as a ruse to reinvigorate his sagging political image. And that December, with the planes waiting on the runway, he announced again that he would not be a candidate for president.

It always bothered him, Mr. Cuomo said years later, that no one had taken him at his word. He would have run, he said in an interview for this obituary, had Republicans simply agreed to his request to pass a budget.