She Stood Up to Cuomo and Soon She'll Be the First Woman to Lead the N.Y. Senate

The Democrats were asking for the governor’s help in winning elections and breaking up a group of eight Senate colleagues who had crossed party lines to help keep Republicans in control of the chamber. But Cuomo suggested that the Senate Democrats’ problem was that they only understood New York City voters.

Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democrats’ leader, interjected.

“You look at me, Mr. Governor, but you don’t see me,” she said. “You see my black skin and a woman, but you don’t realize I am a suburban legislator.”

When lawmakers return to Albany in January, formally allowing Democrats to take control of the Senate for the first time in a decade, Stewart-Cousins will become the first woman, and the first African-American woman, to lead a New York legislative chamber.

Her encounter with Cuomo, in July 2017, offered a telling glimpse of her political style: unassuming, but self-assured, conciliatory, but willing to challenge men in power who may take her for granted.

Albany insiders were stunned that Stewart-Cousins had rebuked Cuomo, who is known to hold a grudge. And they were especially struck that she had invoked her race, a topic she often plays down.

The meeting with Cuomo eventually helped lead to the disbanding of the Independent Democratic Conference, the renegade Democratic group, and paved the way for Stewart-Cousins’ rise.

Stewart-Cousins, 68, declined to elaborate on that meeting or describe what had prompted her response. But she said the episode, although surprising to some, was emblematic of her history for speaking up “in places and spaces whether other people might not.”

“My being here is not a natural progression,” she said. “I think that people have underestimated me over the course of my political career.”

As Democratic leader in the state Senate, Stewart-Cousins has reliably advocated for the party’s mainstay positions. She sponsored bills to codify Roe v. Wade, enact early voting and introduce public campaign financing. Drawing on her background as a public-school teacher, she has spoken of her passion for education, and she has also signaled her intention to strengthen sexual harassment laws.

On financial issues, she has been more moderate, emphasizing her suburban district in southern Westchester County, and promising to hold the line on taxes.

But as Stewart-Cousins prepares to redefine the so-called three men in a room — the governor and the leaders of the Assembly and Senate — she remains untested as a majority leader.

Not only will she have to navigate negotiations with Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie, she must also wrangle the views of more than three dozen Democratic senators — more than a third of whom are newly elected.

Of those, several are first-time state lawmakers from New York City who have said they would push Albany aggressively left.

Stewart-Cousins has acknowledged the unpredictability of what the majority will bring, albeit with her usual air of imperturbability; when a reporter asked how her presence would change Albany’s closed-door negotiations, she replied with a smile, “Well, you know, I’ve not been in the room.”

But past interactions offer a sense of her approach.

The 2017 meeting with Cuomo was precipitated by several unsuccessful efforts by the Senate Democrats to disband the IDC.

The IDC was Stewart-Cousins’ chief antagonist as Democratic leader. Her allies argued that the rogue Democrats were the only barrier to Stewart-Cousins helming the majority. Her detractors said her inability to coax them back showed a lack of leadership.

In early 2017, criticism peaked after three more Senate Democrats joined the IDC. Rumors swirled about who would be next to go.

Stewart-Cousins quietly met with senators individually. She acknowledged having little to offer by way of stipends or committee chairs — all the prerogative of the majority. But she made a case for why they should stay.

With some, she appealed to cherished progressive ideals. With others, she made clear that she and her deputy, state Sen. Michael Gianaris of Queens, had begun talking to grassroots progressives about their antipathy to the IDC, and how that might play out in the primaries.

While she did not make threats, she also did not mince words, Gianaris said.

“I think it’s a matter of saying, ‘Hey, Donald Trump is president now, people are not screwing around — is this really something you want to be doing, jumping to the side of the line with him?'” Gianaris recalled. “And making that point less diplomatically.”

No other senators broke off. The IDC disbanded in April, and Democratic primary voters ousted many former members in September.

Many Democrats considered those private conversations a turning point. Stewart-Cousins’ penchant for listening, they said, made it possible.

“My members, for the most part, I know each and every one of them,” Stewart-Cousins said. “And I know what’s important to them.”

That approach has made her an outlier in Albany, where predecessors often have burnished the capital’s cutthroat reputation.

When she first ran for the state Senate, in 2004, allies of her opponent — Nick Spano, a powerful 18-year Republican incumbent — were complacent, according to his brother, Michael Spano, now the mayor of Yonkers.

“We weren’t worried,” Spano said. “And that was a mistake.”

Stewart-Cousins lost by only 18 votes. Two years later, she captured the seat.

Nick Spano acknowledged the power of Stewart-Cousins’ approach. “That style is disarming.”

Indeed, Stewart-Cousins is collaborative, sometimes to the point of self-effacement, which has earned her the fierce loyalty of her senators. After Cuomo brokered the long-awaited dissolution of the IDC, Stewart-Cousins declined to accept a reunification deal on the spot, telling the governor that she would need to consult her conference.

She ducks questions about a specific agenda for next year, and she demurred when asked if she wanted to advance any issues particularly dear to her.

“I will always want to hear what the conference cares about,” she said.

Sen. Liz Krueger, of Manhattan, said critics often mistakenly interpret Stewart-Cousins’ brand of leadership for a lack of having any.

“Andrea probably wouldn’t be defined as a political animal, where everything’s a political move,” Krueger said. But, she continued, “I think we’re all starting to learn that she knows how to play the politics game also, even if it means finding the right people to do those pieces for you.”

Sen. Brian A. Benjamin, D-Harlem, said Stewart-Cousins’ leadership style seemed born of her experiences as a black woman.

“I would imagine that she has had some familiarity with being undercounted, underestimated,” he said. “I see her, as she leads, making sure that people are heard. That her members have a say. That no one’s overlooked.”

Still, Stewart-Cousins rarely refers to those stories.

She speaks readily and sweepingly of her devotion to progressive causes — women’s rights, voting rights, housing justice — but doesn’t usually say whether those views might have been shaped by her parents’ experiences with job discrimination, her childhood in public housing or by becoming a single mother at 19.

Stewart-Cousins also does not often bring up the story about her ubiquitous colorful scarf, which she started wearing so that people would be able to tell her apart from the other black female elected official in Yonkers.

In an interview, she said she had not built her political career around her identity as an African-American woman, in part, because it would have been a mismatch for her district.

As she did with Cuomo last year, she more often emphasizes her geographic roots rather than her race or gender. (Dani Lever, a spokeswoman for Cuomo, said that no one was offended at the meeting.)

If Stewart-Cousins wanted to seize on identity politics, an opportune time arose last year, when Daniel S. Loeb, a billionaire political donor, likened Stewart-Cousins’ opposition to increased charter school funding as doing as much harm to black people as the Ku Klux Klan.

While some, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, said Loeb should resign from the board of a charter school group, Stewart-Cousins stopped short of echoing that call.

Yet at certain moments, in front of certain audiences — a women’s business group, a Black Westchester Magazine radio show — she acknowledges her own story. And it becomes clear that it is never far from her mind.

“People assume that we’ve had a certain consciousness for a very, very long time, and the reality is that we have not,” she said of the recent importance of diversity in public life. “We have constantly had to assert our version of the dream for ourselves.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.