Early on Cuomo looked and sounded good.
I watched some of his pressers and commented on them here and credited him at the time for trying to rally his troops, so to speak. I'm no fan of Cuomo, but I had to credit him for that.
I'm talking early days now, when NYC was the epicenter of this and people were utterly freaking out.
He did play the role well and I said it here then. Early days IMHO, he looked good, sounded good, gave effective pressers and so people believed him as they needed something to cling to.
We do have to be fair, also, however, in that he was a media darling because he was a dem and fighting with Trump, so he got a lot of press out of that conflict, portraying him as the knight in shining armor battling the evil orange man, which I don't think that had much truth to it at all, but people are gullible and some wanted to believe that anyhow as they hated Trump, so they positioned him as the anti-Trump for their own mental comfort.
Of course, since, it has been found he's got some very serious dirt on his hands and we have to get to the bottom of that, but early days I can see why people gravitated to him.