Will Cuomo Run for Mayor? Racial Politics Complicate His Decision.

An ill-fated run against a Black opponent nearly ended the career of Andrew Cuomo. As he weighs challenging Mayor Eric Adams, he cannot afford a repeat.

Andrew M. Cuomo has been here before.

In 2002, fresh off a stint as the nation’s housing secretary, Mr. Cuomo decided to run for governor of New York. Fellow Democrats already had a well-liked Black candidate in mind, H. Carl McCall, but Mr. Cuomo bet his family name and raw political talent would carry the day.

It did not. Mr. Cuomo, who is white, came across as brash and entitled. He quit the race days before the primary, but Black leaders still accused him of undermining Mr. McCall’s chance at making history. Mr. Cuomo later called the humiliation “the worst thing that could happen to you, short of death.”

Two decades later, that race offers a cautionary tale as Mr. Cuomo wrestles with whether to run for mayor of New York City. Now, like then, he appears to be caught between his own conviction and a prominent Black leader, Mayor Eric Adams — and he cannot afford a repeat.

Nearly a dozen people who have spoken with him said they had little doubt that Mr. Cuomo, 67, was pining for a comeback after he resigned as governor in scandal in 2021. His boosters believe Mr. Adams has been mortally wounded by federal corruption charges and that Mr. Cuomo will benefit this time from deep reserves of good will he built up with New Yorkers, including African Americans, during his decade as governor.

But to run against Mr. Adams, a pugnacious rival who insists he is being unfairly targeted by prosecutors, could also open the kind of unpredictable political and racial fault lines Mr. Cuomo has scrupulously avoided since “the Carl McCall debacle,” as Black leaders — many of whom became Cuomo allies — sometimes refer to it.