Battery Park City resident Andrew Cuomo greeted a supporter Tuesday — after voting at the High School for Public Leadership and before cruising to victory in the state attorney general’s race. He beat Republican Jeanine Pirro, 57 percent to 40 percent, according to the returns, which will not be certified until Dec. 15.
When asked if he knocked on every one of his neighbors’ doors looking for votes, Cuomo said: “Oh, I’ve been knocking on doors all across this state.”
He did not comment on his fellow Democrat, Alan Hevesi, who got almost as many votes as Cuomo in winning the state comptroller’s election — despite a state ethics report saying Hevesi broke the law by using public money to chauffer his wife. Cuomo said he didn’t think it was appropriate “to voice a political position on the comptroller’s race.”
He did praise the man he is succeeding, Eliot Spitzer, who will become governor in January. “I want to continue those fights that Eliot Spitzer started,” Cuomo said. His new city office will be at 120 Broadway, a short walk from B.P.C.
Cuomo, son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo, may also be happy when Spitzer takes control of the Battery Park City Authority and presumably takes down neighborhood signs with Gov. George E. Pataki’s name at the top. Pataki beat Gov. Cuomo in 1994, thus ending the senior Cuomo’s political career.
Andrew Cuomo was not the only famous, civic-minded person who voted in Lower Manhattan. Like other New Yorkers, Tribecan Harvey Keitel perhaps cast his last vote with the old-style machines — that’s voting, not political — at 97 Hudson St., where an anti-Bush poster was covered up after complaints from other voters.
