Not long ago, nearly everyone — Democrats included — agreed that Andrew Cuomo was finished, a despicable scoundrel unfit for public office. As governor of New York, he presided over the deaths of thousands of seniors by forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. He pushed bail “reform” laws that unleashed violent criminals on the public. And after years of lecturing others about sexism, he resigned in disgrace for allegedly groping female subordinates.

That should have been the end of his political career. It wasn’t.

The conservative establishment’s embrace of Andrew Cuomo exposes what it has become: a protection racket for failed elites.

Now Cuomo is back, running for mayor of New York City, and astonishingly, he’s doing so with the blessing of the so-called conservative establishment. The Murdoch media, Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis, and a parade of Fox News personalities are all urging New Yorkers to cast their ballot for him on Nov. 4. Their justification: Cuomo’s opponent, Zohran Mamdani, is a hundred times worse.

The establishment’s favorite ‘lesser evil’

Mamdani, a self-described socialist and Hamas sympathizer, is undeniably radical. But the hysteria surrounding him has become an all-purpose excuse for elites to rehabilitate Cuomo. We’re told by pundits that electing this pro-Hamas, pro-LGBTQ Marxist from Uganda would unleash terrorists on the city’s Jewish population.

On Fox News this week, Democrat donor Bill Acker and Manhattan rabbi Elliot Cosgrove — who still insists, falsely, that Donald Trump praised Nazis — pleaded with viewers to vote for Cuomo. Moments later, Catsimatidis commanded Republicans to follow Trump’s “endorsement” and support the disgraced ex-governor.

The spectacle would be farcical if it weren’t so cynical: lifelong Democrats and media barons treating Cuomo as the savior of civilization because the alternative offends them more.

The New York Post’s moral collapse

The lowest point came with a New York Post editorial on October 20, which offered Cuomo a backhanded endorsement while smearing his rival Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder who has spent decades fighting crime in New York’s subways.

The Post dismissed Sliwa as an “oddball with a sometimes-shady past and zero experience relevant to running the behemoth that is city government.” The same editorial mocked his animal-welfare activism as proof of eccentricity.

Contemptible doesn’t begin to describe the awfulness of the Post’s inept editorial. What “shady past” is the Post’s editorial board talking about? The editorial didn’t say — perhaps because nothing in Sliwa’s record compares to Cuomo’s documented abuses of office. The paper that once condemned Cuomo as unfit for power now cheers his comeback, pretending that the only alternatives are socialism or sleaze.

Rejecting the real alternative

The irony is that New York had a credible choice all along. Sliwa, a Reagan Republican with a populist streak, ran close behind Cuomo in the primary. He could have united voters across party lines, much as Fiorello La Guardia did in the 1930s, by campaigning on a single theme: restoring safety to a city in decline.

Instead, the city’s plutocrats and media elite sided with the insider they knew. Cuomo belonged to their cocktail circuit; the “oddball” Sliwa didn’t. He talked about crime too much. He didn’t chant “anti-Semite” often enough for their tastes. He simply refused to play their game.

Now, with Mamdani leading in the polls, the same establishment that once excoriated Cuomo has gone into panic mode, insisting that he’s the only bulwark against chaos. The New York Post, in particular, has worked overtime to rebrand him as the city’s last line of defense — conveniently forgetting its own editorials from two years ago calling him corrupt and dangerous.

RELATED: Why Zohran Mamdani will be ‘one of the most catastrophic mayors ever’

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

What the election reveals

Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel is reckless, and his support for Hamas is morally obscene. But none of that would give him the power to conduct foreign policy. His real danger lies in domestic policy: dismantling what remains of New York’s police protection, completing the work Cuomo started when he ended cash bail.

If Mamdani wins, the result will be anarchy. But if Cuomo wins, it will be something worse — vindication for a ruling class that believes corruption is preferable to conviction, provided it keeps the right people in power.

The conservative establishment’s embrace of Andrew Cuomo exposes what it has become: a protection racket for failed elites. In the name of “stopping the left,” it now rewards the very figures who wrecked the state in the first place.

New Yorkers don’t have to choose between a Marxist and a predator. They could have chosen the man who actually rides the subway and fights for the normal people who live in the city. They chose not to. And the city will keep getting what its establishment demands — chaos, decay, and the return of the despicable scoundrel they once swore they’d never defend.