A cast of candidates plagued by a scandal tests the limits of what the voters of New York will forgive

Few political agents are easier than opposition researchers in New York this year.

New York municipal races in 2025 have a distribution of characters laden with scandals whose alleged or proven misdeeds have made the headlines on the front page for years. They include the front course towards the primary mayor mayor on Tuesday.

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spent much of his attempt to become the next mayor of New York to clean the skeletons of his closet, whether or not. The scion of a legendary political family, Cuomo resigned in disgrace of the governor In 2021, after an investigation by the State Attorney General, Letitia James discovered that he had harassed 11 women and subjected some of them to touches and unwanted gropes. A formal agreement Between the State Executive Chamber and the United States Ministry of Justice, released in 2024, Cuomo had submitted at least 13 employees of women to a “sexually hostile work environment”.

But Cuomo is not the only candidate for the search for political redemption in New York this month. If he won the Democrat primary on Tuesday, he will face the president as an Eric Adams epançon, a democrat who presents himself to his re -election as an independent. Adams was charged in September on the federal corruption accusations, which were abandoned this year When the Ministry of Justice argued, among other things, that the case distracted Adams’s ability to adopt President Donald Trump’s immigration program.

And then there is Anthony Weiner.

Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 after accidentally tweeting a sexually explicit photo of himself. More sexually explicit messages were published in 2013 when he introduced himself to the mayor during a first attempt at political return. In 2016, the The FBI launched an investigation After Weiner, he was accused of having sent sex messages to a 15 -year -old girl. After seizing Weiner’s computer, the investigators discovered Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, had used the same laptop to send emails to her boss: the presidential candidate in Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The event launched a new FBI review of Clinton’s use of a private messaging server just days before the 2016 presidential election, which Clinton lost against Trump. The FBI investigation also led to Weiner pleading guilty in 2017 for the transfer of obscene equipment to a minorbe condemned to Almost two years in prison And register as a sex offender.

Weiner is now outside prison and his political animal cannot be put in a cage. He is in the running for a place at the New York Municipal Council – part of an unofficial slate testing what the voters will forgive and what they will not be in 2025.

In an interview this month, Weiner argued that the way he managed his controversies cannot be compared to the ways in which Cuomo and Adams managed theirs.

“I don’t deny. I do not point my fingers. I do not ask for forgiveness, ”said Weiner, who presents himself for a district encompassing the districts of the Lower East Side and East Village in Manhattan.

“I served my time. I accepted the responsibility. Now I advance,” said Weiner.

In the first debate on the Democratic mayor, when the moderators asked Cuomo to share a regret of his years in politics, he did not share any personal failure; Instead, he said he regretted “that the Democratic Party came to a point that we have allowed Trump to be elected”.

Cuomo’s rivals do not let him forget the accusations he was confronted with.

Asked an apparently harmless question during this debate on improving public security on the New York metro system, Michael Blake, candidate of the oppressed, jumped: “People who do not feel safe are young women, mothers and grandmothers around Andrew Cuomo. It is the greatest threat to public security in New York. ”

A week later, during the next debate, the main rival of Cuomo, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, sparked a new multitude of attacks. After Cuomo castigated Mamdani about his experience, Mamdani jumped.

“I have never hunted down the 13 women who accused me in a credible way of sexual harassment. I have never continued for their gynecological files, and I have never done these things because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo,” said Mamdani in a monologue that has become viral.

The allegations that led to his resignation – which Cuomo has denied several times, although he too said to resign That there had been “generational and cultural changes” that he “did not fully appreciate” – presented themselves in the campaign alongside other controversies of his governor. Another 2021 report of the prosecutor general of the accused state Him of the under accountability of the deaths of nursing houses During the cocovio-9 pandemic. On Juneteenth, the member of the Chi Ossé municipal council, who approved Mamdani, published on X to redo an interview in 2019 in which Cuomo said the word n While quoting an editorial of the New York Times.

However, Cuomo leads the pack in the ballot, Although he can face a fight Due to the city classified voting system of the city.

Adams also denied the reprehensible acts and claimed justification since the federal charges that were faced with abandoned.

Weiner says that his experience has shaped the way he perceives the situations of Cuomo and Adams.

“By going through the public outcry of the public outcry, outcry and scandal, I read the newspapers differently from what I was doing,” said Weiner, 60. “I have what they say in Yiddish or Hebrew” Rachmones “. I have a feeling for people in difficult circumstances. »»

Despite empathy, he said that the comparison of his checkerboard in Cuomo and Adams is “apples and oranges”.

“They deny that they did something wrong. They continue their detractors and their accusers. I accept responsibility. I paid my debt to society,” he said.

“I have this notion that everything I have done so far led me to this exact location.”

For New Yorkers heading to the this cycle ballot, forgiveness is not a single size.

Carmen Perez, 55, from West Harlem, is ready to give Cuomo another chance but is not crazy about other besieged candidates.

“I saw what Cuomo can do,” said Perez, who runs a program for the elderly. “During the pandemic, he literally took over and said:” This is how we are going to do this and this is how we are going to pass through it. “”

“This is what you want to hear a leader during a crisis.”

Regarding Adams, Perez is less enthusiastic. “I hope most people would take this opportunity and really examine why people run and what is the real goal behind their race,” she said about Adams, which implies that the controversies around him are more sticky than those around Cuomo.

In the case of Esther Yang, a city yoga teacher, none of the besieged candidates deserves his vote. “I think their parents did not have them well enough,” she said.

“I am a yoga teacher, so I believe that the way you do anything, is the way you do everything,” said Yang, before turning specifically to Cuomo and Adams: “I think if you cannot come together for your personal life, then I don’t think you should be a mayor for your professional life.”

Weiner’s candidacy is also a non-start for Yang.

“I like to see how someone will be a good husband, a good father and how he leads his personal life,” said Yang.