Editor’s Note: This story ran before Andrew Cuomo lost to Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary election.

New York CNN —

They are two men from the outer boroughs of New York – both with the Queens accent to prove it, each with his own distinctive rhythm – born of domineering fathers who chose their careers for them and made them righthand men. They revered their fathers but also saw them as not quite ready to do what it took to truly get ahead.

One brought his father’s real estate empire into Manhattan and turned it into a global brand. The other took his father’s political mantle and built a career in both Washington and New York, winning three governor’s elections of his own.

Both revel in finding weakness and needling those they don’t respect. Both can be abrasive, then charming a moment later. Both present themselves as forever underestimated. Both have faced a litany of scandals and been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in allegations they both deny and dismiss as politically motivated. Both have small circles of ultra-loyalists and much longer lists of enemies who want them to fail.

Now, seven months after Donald Trump won a second White House term that he presented as part vindication, part retribution, Andrew Cuomo is seeking his own restoration.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary for New York mayor, Cuomo has centered his bid on the idea that he alone has the stature and experience to fight Trump. Their lives have intersected and crashed into each other for 40 years – over politics and policy, literal questions of life and death during the Covid-19 pandemic, but also personality and self-assurance that each knows better what their parties, and Americans, want.

That worries some who have clashed with both.

“Seeing what I see from Washington, DC, which is only focused on retribution and revenge, there are a lot of similarities in certain people running for the mayor of the city of New York, and I don’t need those sa