How New York Explains the Other 49 States

On Monday, Cuomo defended his conservative approach to reopening the state.

“We’re not the first to reopen. And that’s a good thing, because you can look around and learn,” he said at his daily briefing, referring to both states and countries that have arguably moved too quickly.

The governor’s senior adviser, Rich Azzopardi, was even blunter in responding to Cuomo’s critics on the right. “We are not going to succumb to political pressure,” he told me. Azzopardi cited polls in which respondents overwhelmingly backed the continuation of stay-at-home orders. “They look to lead, and they look back and there’s nobody following them,” he said of critics like Hayssen and Reed. “The emperors have no clothes.”

As elsewhere in the U.S., the debate over reopening in the nation’s hardest-hit state tends to fall along partisan lines. Hayssen is a conservative whose Twitter profile features a photo of him and President Donald Trump giving a thumbs-up together. Reed has carved a moderate profile in Washington, where he is a co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, but he has positioned himself against Cuomo back home.

Svante Myrick, 33, is the mayor of Ithaca, a liberal college town in the state’s youngest, healthiest county that’s been devastated economically by the suspension of in-person classes at Cornell University and Ithaca College and the cancellation of the schools’ graduation ceremonies. Like in Corning and Seneca County, the spread of the virus has slowed to a trickle; Ithaca’s hospitals are empty, but so are its bars, restaurants, and businesses. Last week, Myrick had to lay off one-quarter of the city’s workforce. “It’s tough, man, it’s tough,” he told me. “We were built on education and tourism here, and both have just stopped.”

Ithaca’s politics actually resemble Sweden’s—or at least Sanders’s: “There’s Democrats like me and then there are Socialists. That’s the two political parties,” Myrick joked. Yet when I asked him if he was ready to reopen, he replied: “Not really.”

“It seems like the answer would be ‘yes,’ right?” Myrick continued. “We’re safe, we’re healthy, let us reopen.” The problem, he explained, is that “our economy—and I think this is true of most economies in the U.S.—is one that only functions when it’s connected.” If Ithaca reopens, and people don’t visit, or go out to eat, then the layoffs start again.

“If there were a thing worse than having no party at all, it’s throwing a party but nobody shows up to it,” Myrick concluded. “So it would be better if we opened in an environment where everybody in the country feels comfortable opening, not just when we feel like we’re safe enough.”

Russell Berman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.