Politico reports that at a Hamptons fundraiser last Saturday, Cuomo told his well-heeled supporters that, contrary to all available evidence, he could win the New York mayoral race as an independent—because he was likely to have the implicit support of President Donald Trump.
The imperative of defeating Mamdani justified the new coalition Cuomo is trying to create of his die-hard loyalists (who are Democrats) with Trump Republicans.
Some of that latter group might be tempted to back Curtis Sliwa, the actual GOP nominee in the race. Cuomo told these donors, “We can minimize [the Sliwa] vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate. And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa.” Cuomo went on to emphasize that he’d be a mayor who could find common ground with Trump:
What you’re missing is that the drug you’re injecting that’s labeled “chemotherapy” might actually be a mislabeled carcinogen that will accelerate the cancer.
Politicians lie. They even lie about what party they belong to. What’s a power-hungry Republican to do if they happen to live in a solidly blue state? You can’t get elected being yourself. So instead you lie. You pretend to be a Democrat and actively lie to the voters. You join a party that you share few values with.
Once elected, you do everything possible to destroy the party from within. After all, you would prefer to be able to run openly as a Republican. You want Democrats to be electorally unpopular. So you do everything you can to make the Democratic brand as toxic as possible.
The critical failure of “blue no matter who” is that labels often lie. You may think you’re voting for a Democrat, but you’re actually voting for a Republican. And once that fake Democrat has been elected to a safe blue seat, they’ll be nearly impossible to remove due to incumbency advantage. If a fake Democrat gets the presidential nomination and wins in 2028, we’re guaranteed Republican rule until at least 2036. The 2032 election will be a contest between that fake Democrat and an open Republican; one of the two will win. By voting for the fake Democrat, you guarantee 8 years of Republican rule. If the base stayed home and refused to vote for the fake, at least there would be some nonzero chance of a non-Republican winning in 2032.
The fatal flaw of your strategy is that you assume labels mean anything. There is in fact nothing preventing people from simply lying about which party they most strongly identify with. And your voting strategy leaves you completely at the mercy of these fraudsters.
Back to your chemo example, you would be like a desperate patient randomly injecting any drug that someone told you was chemotherapy or a cure for cancer. You would be spending thousands on bogus homeopathic treatments, because, “has to be better than cancer, pick the lesser of two evils.” In the end, you actually end up dramatically shortening your life because you injected yourself with bleach, thinking that it had to be the lesser evil to the cancer.
“Vote blue no matter who” is to politics as the Steve Jobs strategy is to medicine.
Here’s that rewriting the analogy that I was talking about. The goalposts have now been moved to paint the picture in more pleasant and acceptable colors for those that shoulder the blame.