Ahead of California’s 1934 gubernatorial election, William Randolph Hearst and MGM Studios cooked up a batch of attack ads aimed at besmirching the socialist upstart Upton Sinclair. These ads, framed as real interviews with prospective voters, painted Sinclair supporters as outspoken Communists and leeching hobos, making his incumbent opponent Frank Merriam look like the reasonable Republican — and Sinclair famously went on to lose the election as a result. In 2025, independent mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo bypassed a corrupt political liaison with a movie company, opting instead to create an AI-generated advertisement featuring blatantly hateful, overtly offensive and just frankly repulsive depictions of New Yorkers voting for Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani — clearly hoping to paint him as a locus point for chaos and abuse. The audacity and spectacle of this advertisement makes it clear that Cuomo will pull out all the stops to smear his opponent, which also elucidates just how much trouble his campaign must be in.
For a quick roundup of the offenses: The video shows a Black man using a keffiyeh as a disguise to rob a supermarket while highlighting a headline for an article accusing Mamdani of creating an “E-Z Pass for Criminals,” which then goes on to vaguely gesture and catastrophize about the plans of the evil Democratic Socialists of America. Another clip depicts trafficked sex workers in a van while showing a trumped up New York Post headline accusing Mamdani of doubling down on “pro-prostitution policies” — despite the article only saying he agreed with former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s policies, sheepishly mentioning at the end that New York City hasn’t prosecuted prostitution cases since 2021. The video goes on to suggest that Mamdani will stop any and all responses to domestic violence calls, trespassing incidents and drunk driving — as well as erroneously claiming that decriminalizing drug possession is the same as legalizing the sale of drugs, accusing Mamdani of emboldening drug dealers.
Cuomo’s intentional misunderstandings of Mamdani’s policies are glibly excused by the ad’s AI strawmen, implying that Mamdani supporters routinely wave away his statements and policies as figurative rather than literal — as if it were the same as President Donald Trump and his stooges for the past decade.
According to Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi, “The video was a draft proposal that was neither finished nor approved, did not go through the normal legal process, and was inadvertently posted by a junior staffer — which is why it was taken down five minutes later.” But even then, the video was clearly far enough along to be released as is the night of the mayoral debate, and its release by a junior staffer is no excuse for the fact that Cuomo’s team wrote and generated a prejudiced and misleading attack ad.
According to government watchdog group Common Cause New York, undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in ads, as was the case here, might violate state election law — but at the very least its usage is, “offensive and a shocking attempt at fear-mongering.” Considering surveys from the AARP report that eight out of 10 undecided voters are over the age of 50, there’s a strong chance that older voters who struggle to distinguish between real and generated content will fall for ads like these. If Cuomo’s own campaign has been any indication, or Trump’s juvenile videos of dropping loads of feces on protesters, this generative propaganda tool isn’t going anywhere fast. As this type of content becomes more realistic, we’re going to see more and more egregious tests of reality as people try to pass off generated content as truth.
Cuomo has been lobbing disrespectful character attacks against Mamdani since March, jovially agreeing with conservative radio hosts when they suggest Mamdani would cheer at a 9/11-type attack taking place — despite the fact that, as a person, Cuomo is probably the bottom of the moral barrel compared to every other conceivable mayoral candidate. This could have been an election based on policy and concern for the city bringing us all together, but Cuomo’s complete lack of moral backbone and corrupt ideological ambitions means that he needs to turn the race into a dramatized slugfest to gain any ground. If this election had stayed a measured discussion of policy and efficacy, then Cuomo would have never been given a platform in the first place.
On the subject of desperation, we can’t forget about Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams — who once called the former governor a “snake and a liar” — suddenly becoming best-basketball buddies, so close that Adams has officially endorsed Cuomo for mayor. Cuomo attributed the change of heart to Adams’ willingness to put his political ambitions aside to serve his love for New York City, and also — probably on an unrelated note — because, “we all have to do our best to make sure that Zohran does not become the next mayor.” They’re really not even trying to be subtle.
Pair this with the obvious context Mamdani laid out during a speaking event, saying ”We have a president of this country who has spoken publicly of his desire for Eric Adams to drop out of the race. Eric Adams dropped out — spoken of his desire for candidates to consolidate behind Andrew Cuomo. Today, Eric Adams is endorsing Andrew Cuomo.”
It’s always great to see cooperation across the aisles of politics, especially when it comes to Republicans and Democrats systematically weeding out any third perspective which might shed light on how stupid our current political quagmire is.
Honestly, it’s hard to see a scandal like this having much of an effect on Cuomo. His character is so slimy that accusations of moral misconduct seem to just slide right off him like teflon — it’s clear no tactic, talking point or amount of money is beyond use for Cuomo’s desperate last-bid attempt at being inside of the political machine. Only time will tell whether all these tricks add up to a last-minute election upset, or just serve as fun window dressing for the twilight political era of a dirty old man.
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Noah Zaldivar at [email protected].