Governor Cuomo Delivers GOTV Remarks to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 and Catholic Council
That’s why I’m proud to be the labor candidate in this race—endorsed by most major labor unions, 650,000 working men and women. Because the labor movement was the heart and the soul of the Democratic Party. And if we’re going to get the Democratic Party back again, it’s going to be because the labor movement brings back the Democratic Party.
- Andrew Cuomo
Photos of Event Here
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, candidate for Mayor of New York City, joined the Catholic Council and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3, delivering a powerful address which highlighted New York City's decline and outlined his plan to restore safety, build affordable housing, support working families, and make government work again. He called on voters to join his campaign to bring competence, common sense, and real results back to City Hall.
A transcript of remarks is below:
Good morning. Well, after that introduction, I don’t know what to say—there was a lot of cursing for a Catholic Council. Thank you. It’s really my pleasure to be here. I applaud the Catholic Council, and let’s give President Tom Cleary a round of applause, Chris Erickson, congratulations.
Let’s get right into the Catholic Council. I didn't get that kind of language growing up, but I went to Saint Magella Elementary School, then Marist High School with the Archbishop—lawyer with the Marist Brothers. When the Marist Brothers were really the Marist Brothers, they were a tough order of brothers. You couldn’t get away with any—then I went to Fordham with the Jesuits, which got me totally confused. So I've been trying to figure it out ever since.
I go back with Local Three. Forty years. Forty years, as you heard from Chris. My father ran for governor in 1982. Mr. Harry Van Arsdale, God rest his soul, was my father's number one supporter and organized everything. He was bigger than life. I was 20-something years old.
And Harry Van Arsdale was just a—a monument, living monument, right? And we were having an event once, and Mr. Van Arsdale said to me, “You can call me Harry, you can call me Harry.” And my father turned to me then and said, “Don't you dare. You call him Mr. Van Arsdale.” But what a legacy of leadership. What a legacy for Local Three and what you represent and who you are. And then Tommy and Chris Erickson have kept that legacy alive. And that's the way I'm trying to keep the legacy alive with my father.
I'm running for mayor because the City of New York is in trouble. That’s simple. I wasn’t planning to run for mayor. I did my time. I was HUD Secretary under Bill Clinton for eight years. When you work with Bill Clinton for eight years, it is like dog years because the man works seven days a week. Then Attorney General, then governor for 11 years, and I was in the private sector. I was okay. But I was watching what was happening to New York City, and I'm just afraid of the direction of the city.
You know, post-COVID, it is a different reality for a city. In the old days, you had to be in the city, right? You had to go to work in the city. The lawyers had to go to the city. The financial guys had to go to the city. Post-COVID, you can do wherever you want—Zoom, remote work, come in, don’t come in. And once you have that mobility, now people start to expand the options, right? “Well, maybe I move out to the island, maybe I move upstate, or you know what? Maybe I'll just move to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, or Texas where taxes are better.”
And that’s what’s happening.
We lost 500,000 people in New York City since COVID. 500,000—disproportionately the wealthiest—because they left due to the taxes. But all throughout our population—middle class, lower income—500,000 people. Part of it is the cost. Part of it is money. It’s always about the money. But part of it is just that they feel the city is deteriorating. They feel it is declining—because it is declining. It is out of control. You feel an anxiety when you walk down into the subways. That feeling you feel—you feel an anxiety when you are walking down the street. You are looking around and you see these homeless, mentally ill people on the street. You don't know who’s dangerous and who’s not dangerous.
I have my daughter here with me, Cara, today. And I'm back to the stage where, if she’s taking the subway, I wait up to make sure she gets home when she gets off the subway. Haven’t done that in 20 years, right? That was the old New York—that you were afraid. But we have gone back to that, and people are responding.
I think the Democratic Party is in trouble because the Democratic Party has lost its way. Look at what happened in the last national election. That’s not the Democratic Party that my father was part of, that Harry Van Arsdale was part of. That’s not FDR’s party or Ted Kennedy's party. That’s not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was a party of the working men and women. They were middle-class people who were struggling to pay their bills, looking to move forward. They were working families, trying to figure out how to make life better.
And the Democratic Party has become disconnected from what was the base of the Democratic Party. They’re no longer at the kitchen table talking about the issues that matter. “How do I pay for the groceries? How do I pay for the tuition? How do I pay for the taxes?” They are disconnected.
And Chris is right. It has been taken over by this far-left socialist mentality: dismantle the police, abolish the jail system, legalize prostitution, invest all the money in education—because if people have an education, nobody will commit a crime. What a beautiful concept. I think the Marist Brothers talked about that. It was called utopia. You know, it’s a nice concept, but it has nothing to do with reality, right? Everything free. Everything. Free transportation, free food, free clothes, free education. Who pays? So we’ll raise the taxes on the people who can pay the taxes. No—nobody left in this town. If you raise taxes, their proposal to pay for the free would—double income taxes—would raise the debt beyond the constitutional limit.
It is just a fantasy. It’s all a fantasy. But you know what? It sounds good. Everything free. Who’s against everything free? I’m in favor—everything free. I’m in favor. And that’s what they’re selling: this story that is nonsensical, but it sounds great.
And the Democratic Party is in trouble for another reason. The Democratic Party delivered for people. It produced for people. The Democratic Party politics was not a debating society. It wasn’t about talking. It was about doing. It was about making life better for people, and you accomplished things that made life better. And then people said, “I understand. The Democratic Party is on my side, and they did this and this and this, and it helped me.”
What has the Democratic Party produced for anybody recently? What has it done for the people in this city? The city’s going backwards. What did it do for the country? The country’s been going backwards. And that’s the problem with the Democratic Party.
We have a microcosm here in the City of New York, and it’s frightening. And we have to get back to basics. And basics are: make government work, stabilize the city, bring confidence back in the city.
First of all, make the city safe once again. Safety is job one.
They—the far left—defunded the police. Remember the defund the police movement? Which has now migrated to my opponent—now it’s dismantle the police. But defund the police—they cut a billion dollars from the police department, reduced the force 3,000 officers. It’s gotten so bad that the attrition rate is so high you can’t even keep officers. That’s how bad it is in the police department.
You're trying to hire new officers—nobody’s applying. In my era, when you took the police test, you passed the police test, you waited three years to be called. Now they can’t literally fill a class of police. I want to add 5,000 new officers. Tell them that they’re going to be respected. They’re going to be able to do their job. That the city has their back. We appreciate them. Develop a relationship with the community. Put 1,500 on the subway system and put the rest on the street so New Yorkers have a sense of safety—because that’s the foundation for everything else.
Second, we have to build affordable housing. Why is the rent so high? And the rents are high—pricing everybody out of the economy. The rents are high because we haven’t been building enough affordable housing. It’s that simple.
Well, why aren’t we building affordable housing? Building affordable housing is not like building a rocket ship, right? This is not a SpaceX. This is the simplest form of construction—affordable housing. You built a Leicester, 1949. 1949, you built Leicester, which today would be an innovative model of affordable housing. Of course, we know how to do it. We just don’t do it. Why? Because we have a government that isn’t competent. It can take you six years to get a permit through the city government to build a building. Six years. That’s if you don’t have to go to the city council, which is the place where projects go and die—because they never say yes in the city council.
If you are doing it by right? Think—six years to get the permit. We built the LaGuardia Airport in four years. And it takes six years to get a permit out of New York City? Makes no sense.
We have to build hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units. We have to get the bureaucracy out of the way. We have to have a master plan to just do that—increase the supply, bring down the rents, and create good union jobs.
We have to get the mentally ill off the subways and off the streets. This is a distortion. This never happened before. You never saw this before. Homeless, mentally ill on the subways. Why? Well, because the theory is they have a right to sleep on the subways.
First of all, they don’t have a right to sleep on the subways, and they don’t have a right to sleep on the streets. Second, it is an abandonment of compassion and humanity to leave a mentally ill person who’s incapable of taking care of themselves—who’s endangering themselves. Our answer is—we’re going to leave them on the street? It’s not Matthew 25. It’s not common sense.
If a person’s mentally ill, get them the mental health assistance that they need to be better. Don’t leave them on the subways. Don’t leave them on the street. That’s common sense. We did it for a lot of years. We have to do it again. Get them off the subways, off the streets. Get them the mental health assistance they need. It is better for them. It’s better for society. We did it for many years. We can do it again. Bring the city back to a sense of order and control.
It’s even the little things. It’s these crazy e-bikes all over the place—which is like a metaphor for a city out of control, right? They come from the left, they come from the right, they come from behind. They’re dropping from heaven. Can’t you come up with a simple set of regulations that tell people how to ride an e-bike, right?
Does everything have to be so political and so difficult that the politicians run away from it? It’s literally that level of chaos that people feel, and it’s what’s disorienting to them when they’re walking down the streets to cross the street. You know, you take your life in your hands.
And then there’s apparently this whole system—green lanes, white lanes, red lines—you know, all these lines going all different ways and not even meaning anything. None of the lines mean anything. They’re going wherever they want, whenever they want.
And we have to—we have to change the attitude of New York City to make it business-friendly once again. This is this attitude by the socialists that they’re anti-corporate. They’re anti-corporation. If we are anti-corporation, there will be no businesses here. If there are no businesses here, there will be no jobs here.
I worked for two years on a project to bring Amazon to Long Island City—25,000 high-tech jobs. Average pay: $150,000. Two years. It was a national competition. We won it. It was a shock. And we were going to Long Island City, on the site that had been vacant for years—going back to my father’s administration, they were trying to develop that site. And the local community leader said, “Oh no, no, no. That’s corporate welfare. Uh, we’re not going to support a corporation.” We lost down the site.
You can’t have that attitude. We welcome corporations because we welcome those jobs. That’s the only way this city is going to survive. There is no complexity here. It is basic operations. It is basic management.
We did all of this before. We did. We had a high crime problem under the mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, and we solved it. We hired more cops. We got the sleeping men off the corner. We solved it, right?
We had a problem where businesses wouldn’t come to New York. Mike Bloomberg, businessman, made them feel comfortable. They came. We know we can get the homeless mentally ill off the subway system. During COVID, every night I closed the subway system, because we had to disinfect the entire system. During COVID—every homeless person off every train and every subway station—every night. So don’t tell me we can’t do it. If we wanted to do it, of course we can. We just have to get back to basics and make it work.
I'm running because if there's one thing I know in life and one thing I've done in life, it is make government work—actually producing results.Knowing how to do it, having the experience, having the qualifications, and frankly, having the guts to deal with the controversy that comes from change.
You know, politicians don't like controversy, right? They want to make friends. They want to make everybody happy. So as soon as there's any controversy—they run. But there's nothing you can do in New York City that doesn't create controversy. It's just in our DNA. We are an argumentative group of people.
You know, you want to change a light bulb in this town? The next day, you get sued by the historic committee to preserve old light bulbs. You know, that's just the nature of the beast.
So you have to be willing to challenge the system to actually make change. And we did it when I was governor of the state of New York.
People forget—we took over the state, we had an $11 billion deficit, highest deficit in the history of the state of New York. And we turned that around. Passed 11 budgets in a row on time—hasn't happened since. Only 2% growth—to keep fiscal discipline. We passed the highest minimum wage law in the United States of America, the best paid family law in the United States of America, the best Janus protection law—protecting labor unions, right to organize—in the United States of America.
That's why I'm proud to be the labor candidate in this race—endorsed by most major labor unions, 650,000 working men and women. Because the labor movement was the heart and the soul of the Democratic Party. And if we're going to get the Democratic Party back again, it's going to be because the labor movement brings back the Democratic Party.
And that's what this election is all about. But we know we can do it, and we know we can build.
Look at what we did: Beautiful new LaGuardia Airport. New JFK coming out of the ground. A new Second Avenue subway. New Kosciuszko Bridge. New Mario Cuomo Bridge. New Shirley Chisholm Park. New Moynihan Train Station behind Penn. Beautiful. All done at the same time.
All done at the same time—while they still couldn't put bricks together to build affordable housing in New York City.
We know we can do it. We know our potential, and we know what we can do when we work together.
And I learned a lesson that I'll never forget during COVID, because COVID was traumatic. It was a once-in-a-lifetime. It was a situation that nobody knew anything about and was life and death. I had all the best experts in my office, and none of them agreed with anything. But I always believed in New Yorkers. And I always believed that New Yorkers would follow common sense, and New Yorkers would look after each other.
And we did.
During COVID, people wore a mask to protect one another. Everybody stepped up and did exactly what they had to do. We had to do 18 million tests—never done before. 18 million vaccinations—how do you even do that? Never done before. And all of this as a first—and with no help from anyone.
And if one piece fell apart, the whole system would've crumbled.
If the NYPD said, “You know what? I'm not showing up to work,” this society would've crumbled. If the utility workers said, “You know what? I'm not showing up to work.” If Local Three said, “I'm not showing up to work.” If the nurses said, “I'm not showing up to work. It's too dangerous.”
Everything would've crumbled.
But everybody stepped up, and everybody did the right thing, and we made it through. And we saved lives.
If we can do that, my friends, we can bring this city back.
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