People close to the campaign describe New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as fairly confident he would win his third term. | Seth Wenig/AP Photo Elections Cuomo scrambles to stamp out Cynthia Nixon revolt The New York governor leads in polls, but is spending big ahead of Thursday's primary

NEW YORK — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is determined not to become the latest casualty of the progressive uprising of 2018 on Thursday — that’s why he’s spending feverishly in his primary campaign against Cynthia Nixon, trying to juice turnout through direct mail and touting infrastructure projects across the state.

But both camps remained on edge in the waning hours of the New York Democratic primary, as the volatility of this year‘s primary cycle hung over deep blue New York and the governor took sharp criticism for his campaign tactics after the state party machinery that he controls sent out a flier accusing Nixon of anti-Semitism — a move that appeared aimed at bringing some Jewish voters out to the polls.


Cuomo, widely assumed to harbor presidential ambitions, is a notoriously fastidious campaigner, ever-mindful of his father Mario’s losing bid for a fourth term as governor, and sources close to his campaign said in that respect, this year is no different than when he fended off a primary challenge from Zephyr Teachout in 2014.

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“They’re spending money, they’re making announcements. They’re doing everything they can think of, they’re trying to cut off lines of attack. And, so, because of that, I think they expect that they’re going to win. They didn’t take anything for granted,” Bill Cunningham, a former Mike Bloomberg aide who also worked for Mario Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaigns, told POLITICO. “The wild card are these new energized voters, how many are there, and will they show up if it’s raining.”

"You don't spend half a million dollars a day for the last several weeks if you're feeling good about your chances,” Nixon’s campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt told POLITICO by email.

People working in the Cuomo campaign and sources close to the governor said they think Nixon, the former “Sex and the City” actor and activist, is a flawed candidate who ran a flawed campaign — a white, wealthy progressive woman who will have a hard time winning without the support of a majority of New York's black female voters, and who has failed to garner game-changing endorsements from political figures or any of the city’s biggest news outlets.

“The press gave her a pretty good ride, and she’s making him a little crazy which is part of what she’s supposed to do,” one person close to the governor said. “If she’d been far better qualified, she could have really given him a run for his money.”

Another New York campaign operative put it more bluntly: “If Cynthia Nixon were black, I think Andrew Cuomo would be in a lot of trouble.”

Going into last weekend, people close to the campaign described the governor as fairly confident he would win his third term — his campaign has even scheduled a fundraiser for the week after the primary election. Cuomo has consistently held double-digit margins over Nixon in every poll taken in the race, and a new Siena poll out Monday showed the governor with a commanding 41-point lead over Nixon, an enviable cushion with just three days left until the election.

But 2014 is nothing like 2018. And in 2018, no incumbent is safe.

Nixon’s campaign has repeatedly pointed to the cases of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who were down 35 points and 13 points in polling in the run-ups to their respective primaries in New York City and Boston, but who managed to topple longtime incumbent male congressmen with double-digit margins of victory.

Polls like the Siena poll released Monday sampled heavily from older, wealthier voters who might not match the makeup of the electorate that shows up on Thursday.

New York campaign operatives pointed out that Cuomo hasn’t faced a primary race this competitive since 2002, when he famously crashed and burned in his gubernatorial primary race against Carl McCall; his behavior this campaign cycle suggests a candidate who is especially paranoid, they say.

Sources close to the governor say he feels he’s likely to win, but is still leaving nothing to chance.

"Our approach has to be ‘leave no doubt’ — we are not walking into this thinking we are winning," former Cuomo secretary Steve Cohen said. “That is very much the Cuomo view of how you can approach an election — leave no doubt."

Cuomo campaign sources say the governor has taken Nixon’s candidacy very seriously since she announced earlier this year, unlike Rep. Joe Crowley, who lost to Ocasio-Cortez in June after running what she described as an absentee campaign.

The Crowley election galvanized an already alert-Cuomo, a person close to the governor’s circle said.

“If they had any tendency to be that way, the Crowley election probably caught their attention,” Cunningham said.

Cuomo almost immediately sought to neutralize the threat from Nixon earlier this year; since Nixon entered the race, Cuomo has announced his support for the legalization of recreational marijuana use and the imposition of a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags, and accelerated a timetable to force a group of renegade Democrats to rejoin the larger Democratic conference in the New York State Senate.

“Very early on he understood that 2018 would be a very different year from 2013 or 2010 and that you can’t take any vote for granted — and you need to understand there are a lot of people who are looking for any reason to vote against the incumbent,” one Cuomo campaign source said.

Cuomo is burning through the nearly $40 million in cash he’s raised. In recent weeks, he’s blanketed MSNBC and ESPN with ads, spending $8.5 million in three weeks, over half of it on television ads featuring former vice president Joe Biden and touting his track record on women’s rights. At this point, Cuomo is on track to spend $20 million more on this race than he did in 2014, when he barely acknowledged the existence of his challenger, Teachout, and won the primary race handily, with $25 million left in his bank account.

But unlike 2014, this year is favorable for any Democrat in a general election, so the Cuomo campaign is less concerned about fending off Republican challenger Marc Molinaro in November. It’s his own party he has to worry about.

“The primary is his Achilles‘ heel,” one operative said. “The calculation is we just have to get past the left and then we cruise to reelection.”

And to “get past the left,” the campaign has to boost turnout among the rest of the Democratic Party.

In recent weeks, Cuomo’s campaign and the state party apparatus he controls have been investing heavily in direct mail, an effort that reflects the campaign’s understandable anxiety about voter turnout, outside operatives said. Primaries are typically low-turnout affairs. In 2014, total turnout was less than 10 percent.

Cuomo’s campaign is facing a foe of an unknown size — a potentially large quantity of enthusiastic new primary voters, some newly registered, some newly active, who might be backing Nixon’s candidacy.

The incendiary mailer sent out by the State Democratic Committee this weekend was likely aimed at New York’s ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic voters, who typically turn out in high numbers and vote as a bloc. Sources close to the campaign speculated the mailer was intended less to turn off voters to Nixon and more to boost turnout among Jewish voters, who might stay home if they think the race isn’t competitive.

The Cuomo campaign has assumed that if it can get black and brown voters to the polls, they’ll pull the lever for him. The big question mark is, will they show up to vote?

“I think the momentum is definitely with Nixon, both with the electorate and with voters generally,” one person close to the campaign said.

It’s impossible to know whether Nixon actually poses a threat until election day, Cunningham told POLITICO. “You can’t control the new voters. You don't know who they are or where they are.”