During the brutal push and pull that whittled away at much of Biden’s agenda, the midterm elections of 2022 were fast approaching. Democrats understood the stakes: the Republican recapture of either chamber of Congress could effectively end even the limited ability the Biden administration had to pass meaningful legislation. Losing the majority also threatened to spawn a swarm of vexatious partisan investigations, and provoke crises like a government shutdown or standoff over the debt ceiling.
The poll numbers looked bleak and losses in the midterms had obvious implications for Biden’s presidency and prospects of reelection. The tough landscape also posed problems for progressives as they sought to build their footprint in Washington.
Alessandra Biaggi and Yuh-Line Niou, two of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s closest allies in New York, exemplified the shocking victories some insurgents scored against the Big Dem establishment during the Trump administration. Their stories showed how—as Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” gained steam in Washington—progressives were also expanding their influence at the local level. In time, their roller-coaster trajectory also revealed the limitations of this new generation. Within three short years, the pair managed to help topple three entrenched political machines before failing in their quest to reach Capitol Hill as the Empire State proved to be ground zero for Biden’s issues in the midterms.
Niou and Biaggi, who are both in their thirties and participated in a series of interviews for this book, tend to describe themselves as sisters. However, their backgrounds could not be more different. Niou is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who came to the US with almost nothing. Her mother and father moved Niou and her two siblings from state to state—Idaho, Texas, Washington, Oregon—as the parents built careers as a hospital administrator and an engineer.
Biaggi, who grew up in the suburbs just north of the five boroughs, was an insider. Her grandfather was a Democratic congressman, Mario Biaggi.
The elder Biaggi, whose parents came from Italy, was a decorated New York City police officer before he won a House seat in 1968. His story was emblematic of the old-school urban Democratic Party machines which drew support from working-class European immigrants. Decades later, his granddaughter would see how the heirs to those machines retained power and resisted reform.
From these disparate roots, Niou and Biaggi both blazed a path to Albany, the state capital, after battling powerful incumbents.
Niou cut her teeth working for anti-poverty advocacy organizations and as a campaign staffer for state assembly member Ron Kim. She set her sights on the legislature after the shocking fall of one of New York’s most infamous Democratic Party bosses, Sheldon Silver.
Silver, who came out of the historically Orthodox Jewish community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a power broker who plied his trade in back rooms. He first entered the assembly in 1977. That same year, a Republican named Joe Bruno was elected to the state senate. Both men became leaders of their respective chambers in 1994. For the next fourteen years, Silver and Bruno were the two permanent members of the triumvirate whose dealmaking defined New York’s government, the so-called “three men in a room.” The third member of this unholy trinity was the governor. This arrangement spanned the terms of four governors from both parties. Silver’s and Bruno’s power lasted through them all.
In 2008, Bruno stepped aside amid a federal corruption investigation. Silver was hit with an indictment of his own in 2015 for a series of schemes that netted him millions and benefitted connected real estate developers. He died behind bars in early 2022.
Despite Silver’s fall from grace, his powerful allies were still able to control the selection of his initial replacement in 2016. With the incumbent abruptly out of the picture, there was no Democratic primary. Instead, that February, party leaders met to pick the nominee. It was a smaller-scale version of the backroom process that helped Joe Crowley come to power in Queens. Once again, the choice was largely being snatched from the voters by the smooth operation of the political machine. But this time, Niou decided to spoil the festivities.
Several candidates had put their names forward to succeed Silver. The likely favorite was Alice Cancel, who was dubbed Silver’s “crony” and “handpicked successor” by some local press. While only the members of the New York County Committee for the Sixty-Fifth Assembly District could vote, the meeting was public and each candidate was given five minutes to speak. Niou used her time to denounce the insider-run proceedings and withdraw herself from the running.
“Let’s be honest here,” Niou said. “This process is the problem.”
Despite Niou’s protestations, the committee overwhelmingly chose Cancel to represent Democrats in the general election.
Niou felt confident bucking the party because she had a way to circumvent the machine. The week before, Niou had secured the nomination of the Working Families Party, an organization founded in New York City in 1998 by a coalition of advocacy groups and unions. The WFP was tailor-made to provide voters in the five boroughs an alternative to the Democratic establishment.
New York has long been a breeding ground for third parties, in large part because of a unique legal quirk: fusion voting, which allows one candidate to run on multiple party lines. If a party can get enough votes on their line, they get guaranteed access to the ballot in subsequent elections. The system means smaller parties seeking to establish themselves can work with politicians from either of the two major outfits. The mainstream candidate gains coalition members, the upstart party gains legitimacy, and the dominance of the two-party system is a little bit lessened.
In 1998, fusion voting meant the newly formed Working Families Party didn’t have to directly confront the city’s network of Democratic Party clubs, many of which were remnants of the infamous Tammany Hall machine. Instead, they made a tactical choice to back Peter Vallone, the Democratic Speaker of the New York City Council, as he ran for governor against the incumbent George Pataki, a Republican. This gave voters an option to signal their desire to push the party left by supporting Vallone on the WFP line while still backing a main-line Democrat who had a good chance to win. And if Vallone attracted 50,000 votes to the Working Families Party line around the state, the organization would cement its place on the ballot in the next elections.
Even in that first year there was also clear foreshadowing of an issue that would remain a major thorn in the side of the WFP and other modern progressive groups—the labor movement that formed the core of the progressive coalition was not united. Some of the city’s unions were reluctant to cross Pataki and stayed neutral. And while the nascent WFP backed Vallone and a candidate for state attorney general, they refrained from jumping into other races that year—like the marquee race for US Senate—because, as the New York Times put it, “leaders of the various unions could not agree on one” candidate. Staying out of that race that year meant the WFP played no role as Chuck Schumer, a man who would go on to become majority leader and one of the most powerful figures in Washington, first ascended to the Senate.
Despite these issues and Vallone’s eventual defeat by a more than twenty-point margin, that first campaign ended victoriously for the WFP. Vallone earned 51,325 of his votes on the party’s line. That was only about 3 percent of his total, but it was just over the 50,000-vote threshold needed to ensure the party’s continued relevance.
The Working Families Party would go on to rack up more meaningful wins, including the 2013 election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a WFP ally. In his first term, de Blasio pushed through several of WFP’s top priorities including paid sick leave, universal pre-kindergarten, and a guaranteed $15 minimum wage. Following the race, the party’s national director, Dan Cantor, promoted an ambitious plan to expand to multiple new states around the country.
As the Working Families Party grew in size and stature, New York—and specifically the five boroughs—remained the organization’s base. And, in 2016, the party helped Niou win her first election.
It wasn’t a straight path. Niou fell 1,219 votes short of beating Alice Cancel in the April 2016 special election to replace Silver. However, that race helped Niou build a brand. The regularly scheduled election took place a few months later. This time, Niou reversed the margin and defeated Cancel in the Democratic primary by nearly 1,700 votes.
Niou might have taken down Silver’s machine in Manhattan, but in the state capital, the tradition of backroom wheeling and dealing remained strong.
“It was just toxic from top down,” Niou said about the political culture in Albany in an interview for this book. “People accept these things as the status quo and I never understood that.… It’s only status quo if you let it be.”
Niou found a kindred spirit in Biaggi, who was elected in 2019 after her own battle with one of the city’s entrenched machine leaders.
Alessandra Biaggi got her start in politics with her grandfather, Mario, the congressman. She spent weekends with him and credits that time with sparking her interest in legislative work.
“Growing up at the time that I did, there weren’t young people in politics, there weren’t young women in politics,” Biaggi said in an interview. “I still felt like my voice mattered and I belonged because of him.”
After college and law school, Biaggi continued on the inside track. Her first major political work came as a staffer on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She credits the experience of going house to house for Clinton in New Hampshire with deepening her desire to get involved and defining her approach. Her brief stint on the trail also left Biaggi wondering why “the Democratic Party doesn’t obsess about organizing and do it off cycle and all the time.”
“That is where you learn what people feel,” she said. “It’s where you learn what people are suffering from.”
After that race, Biaggi caught the political bug—and she wasn’t the only one.
Following Clinton’s defeat and the rise of Trump, there was a newly energized Democratic “resistance.” Biaggi capitalized on the anti-Trump momentum and worked with some of the organizations that popped up in the aftermath of his win. She came up with a “curriculum” focused on local government and started going house to house again.
“I taught civics in peoples’ living rooms for like four months,” Biaggi said, adding, “Then, I was like, ‘Oh shit … I need to actually get a job.’ ”
She landed a gig in the counsel’s office of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo was the son of former governor Mario Cuomo and a veteran of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet. With his credentials, inborn fluency in retail politics, and calm confidence, Cuomo, who had been in office since 2011, was a popular figure with the state’s Democratic voters. Those same attributes would carry him to national stardom during the dark early months of the COVID pandemic—but the reality of Cuomo’s approach to governance was often at odds with the person he played on TV.
During his time in office, Cuomo elevated Albany’s opaque dealmaking to an art form. The governor was known, to close observers of politics, for an iron-fisted leadership style characterized by foul-mouthed lieutenants who doled out intense retribution for the smallest of slights.
Cuomo’s many progressive critics accused him of aiding Republicans by empowering a breakaway group in his own party, the Independent Democratic Conference. The IDC, which formed shortly after Cuomo took office in 2011, caucused with GOP lawmakers in exchange for committee chairmanships. The arrangement dashed Democrats’ hopes of a senate majority.
Cuomo always implausibly denied supporting the IDC even though there was ample evidence he encouraged their rise. And he was clearly sympathetic towards their position. In a 2022 interview for this book, Cuomo defended the IDC and suggested it served an important political purpose defending Democrats’ frontline districts in the state. Most New York City legislators, he said, can vote for “crazy” and “far-left” policies “because there’s no Republican opponent” to run against them. IDC members, on the other hand, couldn’t “vote for crazy” and keep their seats.
“They all happened to be from the moderate districts that could go Republican,” Cuomo said of the IDC.
The IDC offered many advantages for Cuomo. The faction relieved his administration of significant pressure from the left. Republicans were also weakened by their dependence on the conference, with their cherished leadership positions and chairmen’s gavels subject to the continued support of opposition party members beholden to the Democratic governor. Thanks to this unique arrangement, the old tradition of “three men in a room” had started to look a lot more like one man’s reign.
Biaggi was aware of Cuomo’s aggressive reputation when she joined his administration.
“I had very clear eyes about who this guy was, but I also knew being inside was my best bet of helping,” Biaggi said. She stayed in Cuomo’s counsel’s office from April through December of 2017. It was a baptism by fire.
“The worst thing that Andrew Cuomo could have ever done was literally hire me in his office,” explained Biaggi. “It gave me a front row seat to the worst show on Earth, which was behind the scenes in Albany.”
Years later, Biaggi’s voice still grew sharp as she rattled off a litany of alleged outrages. She described a “toxic” culture where staff was “incessantly berated and yelled at.” Biaggi was particularly alarmed that, with Trump ascendant, New York had not codified abortion protections.
During his first years in office, Cuomo had repeatedly expressed support for a plan that would codify Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling allowing abortion, at the state level. However, he stood by as the IDC blocked passage of the legislation for years. (Abortion protections would only become state law in 2019.)
Along with getting an inkling of Cuomo’s leadership style, Biaggi began learning about the intricacies of the IDC. She came to blame them—and by extension the governor—for blocking a slew of progressive reforms.
In the summer of 2017, Biaggi was approached by the IDC’s nemesis, State Senator Mike Gianaris, a legislator who was working on a plan to oust the eight rogue Republican-aligned Democrats.
“We were the victims of Cuomo’s centrism,” Gianaris said in an interview. “He wanted a Republican senate and actively opposed our efforts to take the majority.… That ultimately culminated in the creation of the IDC, which he supported.”
Gianaris asked Biaggi if she might be interested in taking on the leader of the breakaway conference, Jeff Klein.
After hearing the proposition, Biaggi sought advice from Bill Mulrow, a veteran political hand. Mulrow had served as a secretary to Cuomo in between stints at a private equity firm. A powerful businessman and operative might seem like an odd adviser to a young reform-minded staffer, but he was close with Biaggi’s grandfather.
“Bill Mulrow was my mentor,” Biaggi said. “He was really important to me.”
Her mentor didn’t encourage Biaggi to run for office. Instead, she said Mulrow urged her to notify Cuomo’s chief counsel, Alphonso David. The experience led Biaggi to see her grandfather, who left office in 1988 after two corruption convictions, in a whole new light.
“I didn’t realize it even until a little bit later, like, ‘Oh, my grandpa was like part of the machine,’ ” said Biaggi.
David’s handling of Biaggi went off the rails. She has a vivid sensory recollection of the scene in his office where the governor’s top lawyer was “eating pistachios” as they spoke. “The noise of, like, the nut cracking was so crazy,” she said. “He kept putting the shells in the drawer and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ ” The meeting was the first of many searing experiences that converted Biaggi from Cuomo’s staffer to his sworn enemy.
After telling David that she had been approached about challenging Klein, Biaggi said he pressed her to print her emails and to recount every detail of her interactions with Gianaris, the Democratic senator who presented the idea.
On October 2, 2017, the New York Daily News published a story detailing Gianaris’s effort to convince Biaggi to take on Klein. The paper’s piece quoted one of the emails Gianaris sent her proposing plans for the race. It closed with a quote from Cuomo framing challenges to the IDC leadership as “ego” and “petty politics” getting in the way of Democratic Party unity.
It seemed to Biaggi that everything she’d told David in confidence was being used to plant a “trash story” in the press attacking potential IDC challengers.
“These fuckers,” Biaggi thought to herself. “They placed the story in the fucking paper.”
When she went into work that morning, Biaggi said David called the counsel’s staff in for a meeting. He began by discussing the article with the team.
“I had a conversation with Alessandra and she fully appreciates and understands the severity of this,” David said, according to Biaggi’s recollection, before adding a distinct Cuomonian flourish, “The governor thanks her for her loyalty.” (David did not respond to a request for comment.) Then, Biaggi claimed, David threw his head back, burst out laughing, and said, “It’s not like we think she could win.”
The public belittling put Biaggi over the edge. Her voice still quakes with anger when she recalls the moment.
“In that moment, in that room, I was like, ‘I don’t care what happens to me. I’m running against Jeff Klein and I am going to literally do everything in my being to expose what is going on here,’ ” she said. “Laughing at me in front of all the counsels was one of the most demeaning, degrading moments I’ve ever had in my life. It just sparked complete rage in me and that was it.”
Biaggi’s campaign focused on Klein’s role in the IDC. She framed him as someone who enabled the GOP and blocked progressive policies in order to benefit himself and his allies.
“What I was saying was like, ‘There are fake Democrats in office who are empowering Trump Republicans.’ ”
The message was a simple one, but the race was still an uphill battle. Amid pressure from progressive groups ahead of the primaries, Cuomo finally presided over a deal to dissolve the IDC in April 2018. Klein was given a powerful legislative post, deputy minority leader, as a consolation prize.
That leadership position enabled Klein to dole out discretionary dollars to pet projects and key leaders in his district. He also had a substantial personal fundraising machine. Klein piled up about $3 million to spend on the race compared to roughly $300,000 for Biaggi. Outspent ten-to-one, Biaggi turned back to her affinity for door knocking and focused on running an aggressive ground game.
“We organized the shit out of the district,” said Biaggi.
Biaggi also had support from progressive allies including the Working Families Party and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was just a few months removed from her own shocking primary victory.
Ocasio-Cortez’s story, which had made national headlines, dovetailed nicely with Biaggi’s campaign and helped galvanize voters around the idea of young women taking on powerful insiders. One local paper, the Journal News, even dubbed Biaggi “The Next Ocasio-Cortez.”
The race was also when Biaggi joined forces with Niou, who brought in groups of young volunteers who’d joined her during the insurgency on the Lower East Side.
After the polls closed on September 13, 2018, Biaggi was driving to her election-night event when news broke on the radio that she won the primary. “My sister almost crashed the car into a pole,” she said. “Everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs.”
And Biaggi wasn’t the only winner. Five other challengers won their primaries against the IDC incumbents. The Riverdale Press, a local paper in Biaggi’s district, dubbed the campaign cycle a “progressive guillotine.”
Klein made one final effort to avoid the chopping block. Taking advantage of the same fusion laws that enabled the rise of the WFP, he remained in the general election against Biaggi on the ballot line of the relatively obscure Independence Party. His move was a failure. The district Klein had used to block a Democratic majority was, in the end, staunchly Democratic. He only netted about 7 percent of the final vote.
Biaggi was headed to Albany as part of a growing progressive faction that included Niou and the other IDC challengers. One of the insurgents, State Senator Julia Salazar, was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which brought their ranks in the legislature up to three. That number would more than double by 2021.
Gianaris, the lawmaker who helped orchestrate some of the challenges to the IDC, said in an interview for this book that defeating the breakaway conference allowed the legislature to “be a lot more muscularly progressive.” The new lawmakers supported measures like police reform, added protections for renters, expanding public education, and environmental initiatives. They also chafed against Albany’s traditional ways of doing business.
Albany didn’t necessarily like them, either. Shortly after her victory, Biaggi said she met with her assembly counterpart, Mike Benedetto, at a diner in the overlapping Bronx portion of their districts. Benedetto, who was a close ally of Klein’s, allegedly was seething because Niou had campaigned for Biaggi in his territory.
“Yuh-Line, she came to my district,” Benedetto said, according to Biaggi. “When her bills come through the committee, I’m gonna stop them.… When I see her, I’m gonna rip out her throat.”
Reached on the phone, Benedetto said he was “shocked” and had “no memory” of making the threatening remark—unless it was in jest. “I never had any reason to have any dealings with Ms. Niou that I would get annoyed with her or mad at her,” Benedetto said. “I remember the breakfast meeting I had with Ms. Biaggi.… I can’t think of why that would be the case that I would say something like that unless I was just making a joke or something.”
Either way, the disputed threat was just the beginning of the hostilities between Cuomo, his cronies, and the new lawmakers.
The rancor particularly accelerated at the start of the pandemic—a moment when Cuomo had more power than ever.
In March 2020, when New York City emerged as the epicenter of America’s first COVID outbreaks, the state legislature granted Cuomo broad emergency powers that expanded his ability to issue executive orders without approval from lawmakers. Cuomo was also enjoying a newfound national spotlight. His daily COVID briefings were being carried live on cable news and Democrats eagerly embraced the governor as a calming counterpart to President Trump’s shambolic pandemic denialism. There was even an emerging Twitter subculture of “Cuomosexuals” whose appreciation of the governor’s leadership amid the outbreak had turned romantic.
Cuomo previously experienced the national spotlight alongside his father, the late New York governor Mario Cuomo, who was considered a viable presidential candidate in both 1988 and 1992, though he never launched a campaign. That second time around, the elder Cuomo came particularly close. The Washington Post described it as “a sometimes bizarre, two-month odyssey” of indecision. Mario even had a plane waiting to take him to New Hampshire on December 12, 1991, the filing deadline for that year’s primary. However, shortly before that cutoff, he walked out before the assembled press at the state capitol and announced he wouldn’t run for the White House after all.
While Mario attributed his decision not to enter the race to delays with that year’s budget process in Albany, there has long been speculation about what really happened. In an interview for this book, his son, Andrew, who was one of his top advisers, explained that his father’s heart simply wasn’t in it.
“At the end of the day, he didn’t want it bad enough,” the younger Governor Cuomo said. “He did not want it bad enough and that was the bottom line.… I said, ‘That’s the end of the conversation, because, if you don’t want it like you want oxygen, you’re going to lose.’ ”
Andrew Cuomo also flirted with a presidential run in 2020. A source close to Cuomo said he abandoned that bid after a phone call and meeting with Joe Biden. According to the source, Biden appealed to Cuomo’s concerns about the ascendant progressives. The source recounted Biden’s words to Cuomo: “Do me a favor, you and I will be going after the same vote and some nut on the left will win. You’re young, you have time. Support me, otherwise we’re going to have some nut.’ ”
According to the source, Cuomo was swayed by Biden’s prediction that his candidacy would lead to the rise of a leftist “nut.” He stayed out of the race. It was yet another example of the effective coordination among more moderate Democrats that helped Biden consolidate support to fend off the left and win the 2020 primary.
Back in Albany, there was much less cooperation between Cuomo and progressives in the legislature. As always, the annual budget proved to be a flashpoint. Lockdowns caused by the pandemic were expected to cost the state billions in lost taxes. These revenue shortfalls were paired with the urgent need to buy supplies like ventilators for the sick people pouring into the hospitals and masks for essential workers.
Cuomo proposed drastic cuts to the budget, and most Democrats were ready to follow his lead. The progressive faction was up in arms. Niou voiced her fellow progressives’ frustrations in an impassioned speech on April 2, 2020.
Niou cut a striking figure in the assembly chamber. Wearing a coat with a black-and-white splatter print, she stood out against the staid maroon carpet and high leather-backed chairs as she explained her vote against the governor’s budget proposal.
The subject of Niou’s remarks was decidedly bleak. Manhattan’s Chinatown, the core of her district, saw a steep drop-off in business amid a wave of discrimination and hate crimes based on the coronavirus’s initial emergence in Asia. In the days before the budget vote, the number of COVID cases and deaths in New York City had increased exponentially. Some patients in emergency rooms who were gasping for breath could not be placed on ventilators due to short supply. Refrigerated morgue trucks appeared outside city hospitals to accommodate the flood of corpses. Unclaimed bodies were piled into mass graves on Hart Island, the public cemetery and potter’s field.
Niou blamed the grisly scenes on “decades of shortfalls” in social spending. She expressed shock that the legislature was being asked to respond by “cutting more” during an escalating crisis.
“This virus has laid bare just how weak our institutions have become in a time when we need them to be strong,” Niou continued, with evident pain in her voice. “People are literally dying in the halls of our public hospitals because they simply don’t have the capacity.”
While Niou’s remarks addressed the specifics of the pandemic, they were also essentially a progressive manifesto in favor of taxing the rich to fund social programs and health care.
“Are we choosing to cut our social safety net when the needs have never been greater?” she asked incredulously. “Are we making deep, devastating cuts to our basic needs while protecting tax credit programs for big businesses?”
Niou, who is outspoken about being on the autism spectrum, speaks with quiet, forceful deliberation. Biaggi is more rapid-fire, drawing listeners in with enthusiasm and broad hand gestures that she attributes to her Italian ancestry. But both are thirtysomethings with native millennial fluency in social media. They used those skills to mount a full-scale PR blitz against Cuomo in the first half of 2020.
With the world around them locked down, Biaggi and Niou relentlessly criticized the governor on Twitter, taking shots at everything from the budget process, to his enabling of the IDC, and New York’s lack of automatic voter registration. They also honed in on the governor and his team’s reputation for targeting enemies with abusive language and political retaliation.
Taking on Cuomo, especially at the height of his pandemic popularity, was a risky move that could have led to their legislation being stalled, discretionary funds frozen, and even primary challenges. But they both had managed to push past serious political machinery to be seated in Albany. Now that they were there, the pair had no qualms about attacking the biggest machine of them all.
“It was born out of rage,” Biaggi said of their anti-Cuomo offensive. “I started to realize the evil—that’s really what it is—in him, and that overtook me.”
As the pandemic progressed, real questions began to emerge about the governor’s handling of the crisis and his efforts to promote himself as a hero of the outbreak. In late March 2020, two weeks after COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic, Cuomo used his expanded powers to order nursing homes to accept people returning from hospitals with active COVID infections. The directive mandated that COVID patients who were still contagious be reintroduced into facilities filled with the people most vulnerable to contracting severe disease—the elderly and immunocompromised. Mortality rates at facilities subject to the policy spiked dramatically.
Cuomo argued that it was a catastrophe that stemmed from necessity. At the time, New York was ground zero for the virus in the United States. Hospitals around the state were slammed and needed their beds for the most severe cases. However, to critics, Cuomo’s sin wasn’t only the order, it was an attempt to cover up the fallout.
For months during 2020, Democrats in the legislature pushed the Cuomo administration for precise figures showing the number of people who died in nursing homes after they began accepting COVID patients. Cuomo’s team worked to downplay and obscure the numbers.
At the same time, it would later emerge that Cuomo was pitching a book about his leadership during the crisis that would ultimately sell for an advance over $5 million. In it, he cast himself as the most accomplished governor “in modern history.” The book, which was published in October 2020, dismissed criticism of the nursing home deaths as a “truly despicable” right-wing smear campaign.
Cuomo’s state health department initially released data showing over 6,000 people died in nursing homes during 2020. The following January, a scathing report released by Attorney General Letitia James determined that figure “may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent.” James’s claim turned out to be an understatement, too. Following the report, Cuomo’s administration made multiple updates to the data. There are now known to have been over 15,000 deaths in nursing homes during the first year of the pandemic.
On February 10, 2021, during a videoconference with Democratic lawmakers, Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, apologized and essentially admitted they withheld the data for political reasons. DeRosa said the governor and his team “froze” and feared the numbers would be “used against us” by enemies in Albany or by Trump, including as a pretext to a federal investigation.
The following day, Assembly Member Ron Kim, Niou’s mentor, spoke to the New York Post about the admission and argued that the rationale was essentially “that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration … in further trouble with the Department of Justice.”
Kim, whose uncle died in a nursing home from a presumed case of COVID in 2020, had been one of Cuomo’s loudest critics on the issue. Hours after the article came out, Kim said he got a phone call from the governor himself. Kim recounted Cuomo’s call in an interview and accused the governor of yelling for about ten minutes, questioning his honor, and threatening to “destroy” him.
Kim’s allegations went viral. Cuomo responded at a news conference with an approximately twenty-minute tirade against Kim.
“If you attack my integrity and my administration’s integrity, am I going to fail to respond? No. No,” Cuomo sniffed.
The governor’s outburst was fresh ammunition for Niou and Biaggi. They spent their nights on audio chat apps trashing the governor to anyone who would listen. The pair also filmed a YouTube series in which they outlined Cuomo’s expanded emergency powers, the nursing home scandal, and what they framed as a generally toxic atmosphere in the state capitol. Along with Kim, they became Cuomo’s most vocal opponents, steadily slamming the governor.
And then, the floodgates broke open. On February 24, 2021, Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo aide, alleged in an essay on the self-publishing platform Medium that the governor had made sexual advances towards her during her time working in the executive chamber. Three days later, another former Cuomo aide came forward and accused him of making inappropriate and explicit comments. By March 9, two more ex-aides and a current Cuomo staffer had levied more harassment accusations.
As the scandal grew, more than a dozen current and former staffers from Cuomo’s office also spoke to reporters about a work environment they called brutal and traumatizing. James, the attorney general, began mounting an investigation into the alleged harassment. Calls for the governor to resign turned into a cacophony that included most of New York’s congressional delegation.
Even with federal firepower arrayed against him, Cuomo saw Niou and Biaggi as two of the driving forces behind the cascading controversies. In his interview for this book, Cuomo accused them of “plotting” his demise along with his accusers.
“Biaggi and Yuh-Line Niou on Twitter were talking about how to get rid of me,” Cuomo said. “They were planning it because they were part of the new left and they were the real lefties.… They literally were plotting it.”
Cuomo also offered a harsh assessment of the pair’s record in Albany. “What I’d say to them when I see them is: Name one thing that you accomplished. Name one thing that you got done,” Cuomo said. “A ‘new progressive?’ Really? What did you get done?”
Biaggi shares Cuomo’s belief that she and Niou helped amplify the accusations against the governor, though she had a decidedly different take on the matter. In her view, the years she and Niou spent going after Albany’s culture of “three men in a room” helped break the fear and silence that came along with it.
“Consistently banging the drum meant that we basically took an iron clad shut door and we held it open like a little—like a centimeter—just enough where people saw an opening that they could also say other things,” Biaggi said.
In an interview, Lindsey Boylan stressed that she chose to come forward with her allegations of sexual harassment by the governor on her own and had been raising the issue on social media for months before her Medium post; however, she noted “all of us together made each other safer.”
On August 3, 2021, Attorney General James released a report detailing claims Cuomo had harassed eleven different women.
“I got calls when the [attorney general’s] report came out from all kinds of elected [officials],” Boylan said. “The only person whose call I answered that day was Alessandra. And I texted Yuh-Line back, because I had formed a sisterhood with them.”
President Joe Biden, who had reportedly considered appointing Cuomo as his attorney general in 2020, responded by calling on the governor to resign.
Despite the pressure, Cuomo fought back. The governor had initially apologized for having “offended” anyone and said his “customary way of greeting” was to kiss and embrace people. But it wasn’t all hugs. Cuomo retained an aggressive legal team that attempted to poke holes in James’s report and cast it as a politically motivated attack. Although that fight would go on for months and Cuomo denied the most serious wrongdoing, he announced a decision to step down one week after the publication of James’s report. The two young lawmakers who had beaten local party bosses had now helped topple the most powerful man in New York.
“I’m still shocked by it. I really am. I really, really am,” Biaggi said over a year later. “It’s unbelievable.”
After the battles that brought them to Albany and brought down the governor, Biaggi and Niou set their sights on Congress. They found themselves in the worst state for Democrats in the midterm elections. This time, the pair would be unable to beat the odds, leaving Boylan and others suggesting two important voices for transparency and reform had been shut down.
“Look how they’re both not in office right now,” Boylan said. “I wonder who’s served by that.”