Vice President Biden is due Monday to begin giving briefings on the coronavirus crisis so as to appear like a shadow president. There’s just one problem. Sleepy Joe, as President Trump likes to call him, has been upstaged by none other than Andrew Cuomo. It seems the doughty Democratic governor of New York has emerged as a star, while Mr. Biden is still getting a studio set up in his home.

Maybe Mr. Cuomo is the one whom the Democrats should run against Mr. Trump. He has been out there every day of late with detailed updates, wise asides, references to his time in Washington, and commentary on the Constitution. He’s proving he can work with a Republican president. No less a sage than Bob McManus of the New York Post is likening him to Mayor Giuliani after 9/11.

Mr. Cuomo has easily taken command of the war against the coronavirus in the Empire State. He’s eclipsed Mayor de Blasio of New York City. “De Blasio Scares, Cuomo Soothes,” is the headline the Wall Street Journal put over an editorial that began “Thank you, Andrew Cuomo.” It praised the governor’s move to block Mr. de Blasio’s calls for New Yorkers to shelter at home. Mr. Cuomo then issued stay-at-home rules — on his terms.

The most amazing part of the story is that Mr. Cuomo has managed to do this while praising the performance of President Trump as “fully-engaged” and “very creative and energetic.” Mr. Trump has returned the compliments. When Mayor de Blasio carped about Mr. Trump, the President responded that he’s “not dealing with” Mr. de Blasio. “I’m dealing with the governor,” Mr. Trump growled. “The governor agrees with me, and I agree with him.”

We wouldn’t want to make too much of this strange bedfellowship. There are plenty of things on which the President and the liberal governor disagree. It turns out, though, that they are both can-do, executive personalities. One is running a vast, almost military effort by the federal government. The other is trying to keep the country’s coronavirus epicenter from becoming an abyss. It’s a remarkable political drama.

And where does it leave Sleepy Joe Biden? He has been reduced to carping about the President from the sidelines. He is not yet officially the Democratic nominee. Senator Sanders appears all but certain to lose, but Mr. Biden has yet to emerge formally as the Democrats’ nominee. He seems somehow to be more a creature of the Senate, in which, after all, he served almost all his life (and of which all vice presidents are, constitutionally, a part).

It’s not our intent here to predict that Mr. Cuomo will enter the race for the Democratic nomination this year. It’s hard to see how that could happen without a brokered convention, a prospect that is fading with every primary Mr. Biden wins. The Battle of the Coronavirus hasn’t been won by anyone yet. It’s not too soon, though, to mark that a battle of the septuagenarians might not be the only option for the Democrats. The current crisis is handing up to the national stage a powerful new star.