‘Cuomo killed my father. But I still might not vote Mamdani’
- voicesforseniors
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- Oct 23
- 6 min read
Older Democratic New Yorkers, still upset by their former governor’s policies, are torn by a tough question in the mayoral race: Socialist or Republican?
Peter Arbeeny, 59, has met nearly every candidate who has run for New York mayor this year. That includes 11 Democrats, frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and current mayor Eric Adams, three independent candidates and Curtis Sliwa, the lone Republican.
Everyone except Andrew Cuomo.
That’s because, for five years, Arbeeny has been fighting to make the former New York governor Cuomo accountable for the disastrous Covid policies that led to the death of his elderly father, Norman, in 2020. He doesn’t think Cuomo, who required nursing homes to accept Covid patients from hospitals which led to 15,000 deaths, should return to public office.
“There is no choice to elect a person who failed to own his mistakes,” Arbeeny told The Times.
“All I seek is the truth,” he continued. “And I have the resources and the tenacity to keep pressuring the lie.”
But now that he is forced to choose between an avowed socialist in Mamdani or a longshot Republican in Sliwa, the lifelong Democrat finds himself torn.
“I like Zohran but I’m a capitalist because I’m a business owner,” said Arbeeny, who has run his own business installing air conditioning and heating units for 38 years. “I don’t align with socialism.”
And though he attended Wednesday’s debate as Sliwa’s guest, and hugged both Mamdani and the Republican, he is still keeping his cards close to his chest. “I vote for people that protect my family,” is all he would say.
Days out from the New York mayoral election on November 4, Arbeeny’s reservation is felt among many voters, especially for those who are 50 or older. An AARP poll released this week found that more than 25 per cent of NYC voters remain undecided, and nearly 80 per cent of those people are over the age of 50.
This year’s election is nothing if not colourful. After Adams, indicted on fraud charges, dropped out last month there are three polarising candidates left to run the capitalist headquarters of the world: a 34–year-old Democratic socialist, a disgraced former governor accused of sexual harassment and nursing home deaths, and a 71-year-old beret-wearing vigilante who lives with six cats.
Even though Cuomo, 67, handily lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June, he has refused to give up, returning as an independent candidate in September. This has come as a shock to the New Yorkers who lost relatives in nursing homes during the pandemic and blamed him for letting it happen.
“We’ve always been surprised he’d have the gall to run again,” said Vivian Zayas, 54, who lost her mother, Ana Celia Martinez, to Covid at the Our Lady of Consolation nursing home in West Islip, Long Island.
“When he lost the primary, we thought that was it. Then he came back as an independent — like the vampire that just doesn’t die. It shows his ego.”
But Zayas, who co-founded Voices for Seniors, an advocacy group with 5,000 members, is also struggling with who to vote for. She said that Sliwa is a strong voice on the nursing-home deaths, but has stopped short of endorsing him.
“We’ve listened to him, and he has heard us,” she said.
Zayas and Arbeeny’s conundrum is symbolic of the larger question facing older, established Democrat voters in this race. Though Cuomo was expected to be a shoo-in for those who prefer a sensible, experienced Democrat, his baggage has weighed him down. Yet Mamdani is too radical and Sliwa is too kooky — and for a city that’s two-thirds blue — too Republican.
That leaves these voters stranded and mostly undecided with less than two weeks till the election.
“We do have questions about Mamdani’s record and who he is,” Zayas said. “He’s young, and some of his vision feels unrealistic. We want someone with a little more wisdom — with a few years behind them.”
Stacie Druckman, 52, who blames Cuomo’s administration for the 2020 death of her 73-year-old father, Arthur, in a Bronx nursing home, is another Cuomo skeptic. “Cuomo shouldn’t be able to run,” Druckman told The Times. “He wasn’t honest about everything, and I don’t think he ever will be.”
Druckman said she is also undecided in the race, but is now leaning toward Sliwa. “He’s always around on the streets, trying to help people. He’s promising to fix crime.” Mamdani, meanwhile, “wants to do nice things” but is “an unknown quantity”.
For five years, Arbeeny and his brother Daniel have been fighting to force Cuomo to apologise for the policy that led to the death of their father Norman, an 89-year-old Korean War veteran, on April 21, 2020. Norman was receiving rehabilitation treatment for a slipped disc at Cobble Hill Health Center when the Cuomo administration allowed Covid patients to move into the home.
Norman died at home 14 days after contracting Covid in the centre; a total of 55 Cobble Hill residents died of the virus.
Even today, the brothers are angry that their father’s death was not counted in the official Covid death statistics. They want his name added to the list — and they want a bipartisan federal investigation with subpoena power to determine why the Cuomo directive was issued in the first place.
“Five years later, none of them have happened,” he said.
Arbeeny estimates that he has spent 3,500 hours travelling to Albany and Washington DC to lobby dozens of state and federal politicians in his quest for justice. And he said he has spent tens of thousands on legal Freedom of Information requests to the state government to find out why patients were sent to nursing homes.
According to a report by the New York attorney general’s office in January 2021, Cuomo’s administration undercounted nursing home deaths by as much as 50 per cent. Cuomo later said he had withheld accurate figures because he feared being targeted by the Trump administration.
Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s campaign spokesman, said this week that Cuomo had “expressed his sorrow and his sympathies” to the Arbeenys’ multiple times. He said the former governor had been cleared of wrongdoing in four separate investigations, and that a class-action lawsuit led by Daniel Arbeeny, 62, had been dismissed earlier this year.
“More than one million Americans died as a result of the Covid pandemic, and our hearts break for the families of every person who lost a loved one,” Azzopardi said. “But unfortunately… that pain has been weaponised and politicised for purely electoral purposes for years.”
Lupe Todd-Medina, a Democratic strategist who worked with Cuomo on the 2018 governor’s race, still believes he has a chance to win over older voters. She said his name recognition — being the son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and once married to Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of RFK — is a plus for him in the race.
“Older voters have known Andrew Cuomo from when he was a child,” she said. “They know the father, Mario. They remember the marriage to a Kennedy, they’re familiar with the legacy. Their memory of Andrew Cuomo is long, vast, wide. The name means something.”
She added that older New Yorkers tend to be traditional Democrats with little time for socialism, and are unimpressed by Mamdani’s social media-driven campaign. “They think their kids and grandkids are online too much and it’s damaging. They don’t like it. They don’t think Mamdani is serious.”
Still, Cuomo — whose third term as governor ended in August 2021 — has more than just the nursing home scandal to overcome. He also faced sexual harassment complaints from more than a dozen women as well as claims that he misused state resources to write his $5 million pandemic memoir, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
That Cuomo is now pitching himself as a pragmatic, business-friendly unifier has reopened old wounds for Arbeeny.
“I promised my father when he died that I wouldn’t go visit him at the grave until I got an investigation,” he said. “I thought that the investigation would have started under the Democratic administrations. But I was politically naive about how the system works.
“I have been waiting five years for the Democratic Party to advocate on behalf of the 15,000 people that died. I often ask myself ‘when did the Democratic Party start normalising lying?’ Is there a new slogan, ‘we lie less than the Republicans?’”
Zayas agreed. “We’re not a vengeful group, we’re just families who are still grieving in many cases,” she said. “And we just want to know that whoever’s going to be mayor of New York City is not going to fail New Yorkers again.”
“At the end of the day, that’s what we’re still calling for. Cuomo failed us once. He can fail us again.”
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