From the outside, the Democratic primary for Governor in New York looks like a cakewalk: Cuomo versus an actress. Cuomo with a 40-point lead in the polls. Unions lining up to support the man who controls their funding.

But here is a curiosity: to date, not a single Democratic member of the Legislature has endorsed the Governor in his bid for a third term. The endorsements will come, no doubt, but at the moment the silence is deafening from these 133 elected officials in the State Senate and House.

Why? Cuomo has stiffed his own party, repeatedly. The leader of the Senate Democrats is an African American woman from Westchester County, and she has been left out in the cold by Cuomo’s tacit alliance with Senate Republicans and the eight Democrats (the so-called IDC) who caucus with the Republicans to keep them in power.

”The Legislature is tired of Cuomo’s business as usual. First, lawmakers are no doubt angered by Cuomo’s repeated exclusion of the chosen leader of the Senate Democrats, Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, from budget negotiations and policy pushes. Never has this been more glaring than this year, when he publicly promised to seek her feedback on sexual harassment laws, and then reneged — but kept Senator Jeffrey Klein in these negotiations despite the accusations of sexual assault recently leveled against him. In a year where the #MeToo movement has flexed its considerable political power, Cuomo underestimated the impact of excluding women from negotiations (resulting in a sexual harassment package, and budget, that is not even close to as strong as it could have been).

“Second, Cuomo has mismanaged his preferred mechanism for excluding Senator Stewart-Cousins from the leadership, otherwise known as the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC). Albany’s worst-kept secret is that this rogue group of senators, Democrats who have empowered Senate Republicans to run the State Senate since 2011, has been supported by Cuomo. Seven years ago, Cuomo could get away with this. Now, in the age of Trump, enabling Republicans is untenable.

“It took Cuomo too long to realize his support of the IDC hurts him at the polls, as it has with fellow Democratic elected officials. In fact, in a miscalculation of epic proportions, he kept the IDC on during budget negotiations. He could have had a trifecta of Democrats (himself, Carl Heastie and Sen. Stewart-Cousins) build the budget, achieved if he had called special elections earlier in the year. Instead, he waited, calling them for April 24 so he could keep Sens. Jeff Klein and John Flanagan in budget negotiations with him instead. As a result, the budget left out major planks of the Democrats’ progressive platform, like early voting, the Child Victims Act, criminal justice reforms, and more. New Yorkers noticed. In particular, many Westchester voters (those suburban voters that Cuomo so eagerly courts) noticed because they went unrepresented in budget negotiations, and their empty Senate seat could have tipped the balance of the upper chamber to the Democrats.”

Now begins the frantic lobbying to corral the endorsements. They will come, in time, slowly. With pressure, threats and promises. But not with enthusiasm.