Would 2014 be Cuomo's last campaign for NY State Governor?
A. Yes: he saw what happened to his father in 1994
B. No
New York's electorate has changed just a tad since 94.
There were telltale signs that the elder Cuomo was slipping in 1990; he won an easy election, but that's because there was a Conservative Party candidate who almost edged out the Republican nominee for 2nd place. Mario Cuomo only got 55% of the vote that year, but this was masked because he was over 30 points ahead of the 2nd place finisher (who was only a hair ahead of the 3rd place finisher).
There would have been a collective panic attack if the Conservative Party candidate got more votes than the Republican candidate in 1990 because of the ramifications in NY's election laws. NY's Boards of Election are "mirror image"; there is a person in each position who is from the top vote-getting party and a person in an identical position from the top vote-getter in the 2nd leading vote-getting party. By "vote-getting", I mean GUBENATORIAL vote, and I mean PARTY vote. In NY, candidates are often the nominees of more than one party; their names appear more than once on the ballot, and the same candidate could be the candidate of the Republican and Conservative parties. If the Conservative nominee had finished 2nd in the total vote in the 1990 Gubenatorial election in NY, EVERY ONE of the Republican appointees to the Boards of Elections in NY State would have been tossed out and replaced by registered Conservative Party members. It almost happened.
