‘Maddeningly unacknowledged’

Mr. Cuomo certainly has accomplishments. He oversaw one of the nation’s strongest gun-control measures and a minimum wage hike, the passage of gay marriage and paid family leave, a property-tax cap and spending restraints, plus eight mostly on-time budgets. He has built new bridges and launched a limited free college tuition program.

Along the way, he has cemented a reputation as a win-at-all-costs chief executive. His bulldozer personality and zero-sum approach to power in New York — the more you have, the less he has — have led to fierce fights with fellow Democrats, most recently Mayor Bill de Blasio. Liberal activists complain that he has stalled key priorities — driver’s licenses for the undocumented, recreational marijuana, limits on campaign money — and too often must be pressured to act.

So as the Democratic Party searches for its voice in the age of President Trump, few seem to rank Mr. Cuomo high among the party’s hopes, despite his prominence and lengthy list of victories.

“I find him to be astonishingly productive and maddeningly unacknowledged,” said Harold Holzer, who worked for Mario Cuomo and remains close to the Cuomo family. “Why? I don’t know.”

Mr. Cuomo, who can be intensely sensitive to how he is portrayed, declined on-the-record interview requests. But conversations with more than 30 current and former senior advisers, activists and elected officials who have worked with him reveal a political tactician of almost limitless ambition and extraordinary ability, a leader with jagged edges and little regard for rules, especially if they are standing in the way of the results he wants.

By the end of a third term, Mr. Cuomo, 60, will have had the run of the governor’s mansion for a majority of his adult life: 12 years as governor, 12 years as a governor’s son. In between, he served as state attorney general and federal housing secretary. He has more and deeper creases in his forehead now — they especially emerge when his eyebrows flare to make a point — but he is the same hard-charger he was in the 1980s as his father’s top lieutenant.