CN

If you look at the lack of progressive change that’s happened here in the last seven and a half years, you can lay that directly at the doorstep of Andrew Cuomo.

There’s a reason that the Koch brothers gave him $87,000 when he ran in 2010: despite calling himself a Democrat, he has governed like a Republican and has handed over massive amounts of power to the Republican Party. He’s allowed the Republicans in the state senate to gerrymander their own districts. As soon as he entered office, he incentivized a group of Democratic state senators to vote in caucus with the Republicans, shoring up their majority.

We’ve had a Democratic majority in the state senate for more than five years, but the Republicans control that body because Andrew Cuomo has enabled and encouraged them to. It’s the reason that we have so little progressive change. It’s the reason we haven’t become a leader in renewable energy or in campaign finance reform. It’s the reason we haven’t passed the Reproductive Health Act, GENDA [Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act], the New York Dream Act, or the Liberty Act, which would protect our undocumented people from ICE.

It’s not just that he’s given them political power — his policies are purely Republican. Upon entering office, he eliminated the bank tax. He slashed taxes on corporations. He slashed taxes on everybody earning more than $300,000 a year. In seven budgets, he’s cumulatively cut $25 billion out of state revenue.

If he was a Republican, we would have voted him out of office a long time ago. But because he is a Democrat, the son of Mario Cuomo, and a genius at getting headlines rather than enacting change, New Yorkers have a false sense of security about how progressive our state really is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling us so. Our campaign is saying, “Look at all these things that New Yorkers want that we could have had, but Andrew Cuomo hasn’t fought for them — and has actually empowered the other side to make sure we don’t get them.”