Hillary Clinton (AP)
KNOWS WHEN TO FOLD ’EM: Gov. Cuomo has told close associates that running against Hillary Clinton would be pointless. (
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Gov. Cuomo has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected, sources told The Post.
“The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation.
“He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary decides not to run, which seems unlikely,’’ the source continued.
While Cuomo has repeatedly claimed he has no interest in running for president, his sharp turn to the political left this year after two years governing as a moderate convinced many Democrats and Republicans that he was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign.
For now, Cuomo is expected to focus his political energies on trying to run up as huge a re-election victory next year as possible, with many on the inside saying he hopes to top his father Mario’s landslide margin over Westchester County Executive Andrew O’Rourke in 1986, when Mario got just over 64 percent of the vote.
But matching his father’s showing won’t be easy. Andrew Cuomo’s polling numbers have plummeted in recent months, especially among upstate voters, as he has moved politically leftward.
A University of New Hampshire poll late last week showed how hard it would be for any Democrat to challenge Clinton.
The poll found her the blowout favorite to win the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary in 2016, backed by 61 percent of Democrats. Vice President Joe Biden ran a distant second, with just 7 percent.
Cuomo was tied for an even more distant third with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, at 3 percent.
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While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has yet to endorse a candidate for mayor, insiders predict he will follow Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and back former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, who lost narrowly to Mayor Bloomberg four years ago.
Silver and Tisch are longtime friends and political allies and many on the inside say Tisch wouldn’t have endorsed Thompson last week without Silver’s approval.
“Shelly backing Billy, the only black in the race, would win him a lot of points with the African-Americans in the Assembly, who help keep him as speaker,’’ said a longtime Thompson backer.
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A majority of voters oppose efforts by Cuomo and other Democrats to impose a New York City-style publicly financed campaign system on statewide campaigns for the Legislature, a little-noticed section of a statewide poll earlier this month showed.
The Quinnipiac University survey found 53 percent against and just 37 percent in favor of having taxpayers underwrite state-connected political campaigns.
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Cuomo is being blasted by the leader of the pro-fracking Joint Landowners Coalition (JLC) in the Southern Tier for claiming in a recent interview that one of the reasons he has held off giving fracking the go-ahead is that a child could fall “into a [natural-gas] well casing.’’
“If the governor had ever visited a well site, he would not posit such an outrageous and unfounded statement about safety,’’ said JLC President Dan Fitzsimmons.
Industry representatives, meanwhile, said they never heard of a case of anyone falling into one of the heavily engineered and tightly capped, 5,000-foot-plus-deep wells, which are used in the fracking process. A spokesman for the governor didn’t respond to a request for an example of such an accident.