Our administration’s greater willingness to work with disgraced Democrats over its own party’s nominee is alienating.
Early voting began this morning for New York City’s mayoral election and will remain open through November 5th. The most recent Fox News poll shows democratic socialist Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani comfortably leading the race at 52%, with former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa behind at 28% and 14%, respectively.
These numbers may lead one to think that Sliwa and Cuomo are splitting the vote against one another, greasing the pan for a socialist cakewalk. Accordingly, several influential figures have called on Sliwa to suspend his campaign, believing that only Cuomo can stop the perceived radical change that a Mamdani mayoralty might bring.
Sliwa’s own employer, WABC CEO John Catsimatidis, asserted, “Curtis should pull out right now. We cannot take a chance on Zohran winning.” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has gone further, accusing Sliwa of “car[ing] more about being in the spotlight for two and a half weeks than he does about New York City.” President Donald Trump himself has refused to endorse Sliwa, implying that the Republican nominee should let Cuomo face Mamdani one-on-one. “I’d rather have a Democrat than a communist as mayor of New York,” he stated last week. President Trump has also mocked Sliwa as “not exactly primetime,” while just a week ago praising disgraced former Mayor Eric Adams, calling him “a very good person.” Adams has been charged with corruption involving more than $100,000 in luxury perks and $10 million in illicit campaign donations.
Many see Sliwa as a spoiler, a candidate with no realistic chance of winning the race who only serves to draw votes away from the former Governor. However, history has shown time and time again that the “spoiler effect” is dubious at best. In 2000, critics blamed Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s campaign for Al Gore’s defeat against Bush. Nader and Gore shared beliefs on environmentalism, and many saw Nader’s campaign as stealing Gore voters, allowing for the not-so-environmentalist Bush to win. However, exit polls indicated that less than 47% of Nader’s Florida voters, not nearly enough to cover the gap, would have chosen Gore over Bush, with the rest either abstaining or voting for Bush. The outcome, Nader or no Nader, would have been the same: a Bush victory.
Similarly, in 2016, critics pointed to Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson as spoilers for Hillary Clinton in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. While Stein and Johnson’s combined vote totals exceeded the difference between the number of votes Clinton and Trump received, studies again showed that only about 14.4% of Stein or Johnson voters would have supported Clinton had both candidates dropped out.
There’s insufficient evidence to support that Sliwa’s supporters, or the supporters of any so-called “spoiler candidate,” would uniformly back Cuomo, or any frontrunner, if Sliwa were to drop out. Sliwa himself scoffed at the idea, saying, “Everybody who’s going to vote for me is suddenly going to be reborn and say, ‘We love Andrew Cuomo?’
Again, Sliwa or no Sliwa, the outcome will likely be the same.
In the second Mayoral debate, the three candidates were asked how they would vote in a hypothetical ranked-choice voting scenario. Mamdani said he’d rank Sliwa second over Cuomo, whom he wouldn’t rank at all. It is clear that the rift between Mamdani and Sliwa does not necessarily cut deeper than the one between Cuomo and Sliwa. If Sliwa were to suspend his campaign, his would-be voters would not perfectly shift to Cuomo. If anything, some Sliwa voters might even prefer Mamdani’s outsider status over Cuomo’s establishment record, especially when Sliwa himself believes that “we’ve had socialists in elective office in New York. . . our society has survived. . . look at Fiorello La Guardia.”
To say that the over 500,000 registered Republicans, and the many more voters of New York City, who are increasingly shifting towards the right, will fall for the Democratic establishment’s red-baiting and flock to Cuomo would call into question their rationality.
Three-way polls, while a useful tool in their own right, do not tell the full story on Sliwa’s chances. In a one-on-one matchup, the latest Victory Insight Polls show Sliwa trailing Mamdani by just 8 points, compared with Cuomo’s 10-point deficit. Sliwa, not Cuomo, has a slightly better shot against Mamdani when only two can play at the game. Where are the calls on Cuomo to drop out of the race?
Sliwa is often dismissed as an “eccentric street vigilante” or a “perennial gadfly.” President Trump makes Sliwa out to be a man “who wants thousands of cats… in Gracie Mansion.”
This caricature ignores Sliwa’s accomplishments as a lifelong Brooklynite. Forty-eight years ago, long before Mamdani was born and Cuomo entered politics, Sliwa founded the Magnificent Thirteen, a volunteer safety patrol. The organization has since grown to become the Guardian Angels, expanding to over 130 cities and 12 counties. While they have admitted to dramatizing accomplishments in their earlier days, the Guardian Angels have made a significant effort to deter crime in New York City. Composed mostly of young men of color, they patrolled subway cars and high-crime neighborhoods across the five boroughs, unarmed, through the worst decade of crime. They have earned formal endorsement from former mayor Ed Koch, as well as praise from former Gov. Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo’s own father, who called it “a better expression of morality than our city deserves.”
In a comment upvoted over 140 times, a Redditor explained, “When I was a kid, I lived in a VERY poor and shady apartment complex. Some Guardian Angels folks stayed there for over a year and helped by walking the complex and chasing thieves, I recall. A lot less crime and broken-into apartment[s] because of their presence.” Another post with 1,500 upvotes reads, “I lived in NYC as a little kid in the 70s & 80s. S____ was wild…Curtis Sliwa started The Guardian Angels to keep regular people safe in the streets, on subways, etc. he’s been taking care of people since then. I don’t know his political stance. . . but he’s not a phony.”
While there are no exact statistics on how much crime the Guardian Angels deterred decades ago, other than the NCJRS’s estimate of 104 potential crimes, Sliwa was considered enough of a threat by the mob that they tried to assassinate him. On June 19, 1992, Sliwa was ambushed and shot five times while riding in a stolen yellow cab hijacked by Gambino crime family associates. Sliwa survived but required years of recovery and later testified against Gotti Jr. in a 2005 federal trial, where the latter admitted that the Guardian Angels’ patrols disrupted the family’s extortion rackets in the Bronx.
Sliwa’s grassroots support is not that of a mere perennial candidate: he has raised $423,770. While below Cuomo’s $541,000, the average contribution to Sliwa is only $125, several times below Cuomo’s $646 average. Sliwa’s funding reflects that of everyday New Yorkers, and not only wealthy or corporate donors, some of whom are not even based in the state, let alone the five boroughs.
Sliwa aside, the claim that Cuomo is a “lesser evil” for conservative voters is not necessarily true. Infighting within the Democratic Party does not change the fact that both Cuomo and Mamdani support progressive Democratic policies, and that their records and platforms show they are not very different from one another. Cuomo and Mamdani both agree on keeping safe injection sites, despite 55% of New Yorkers opposing their funding. Sliwa was the only man on the debate stage who vowed to “shut them down.” The same is true for congestion pricing, a practice that Mamdani and Cuomo support against the will of 64% of New Yorkers, while Sliwa stands alone in opposing them. As Mamdani aims to delegate law enforcement to social workers and Cuomo distances himself from his own records on cashless bail, Sliwa is also the only candidate vowing to significantly increase the number of NYPD officers, a move that 70% of New Yorkers support.
Despite Cuomo’s centrist branding, his policies are not much different from Mamdani’s, and it is clear that a Cuomo mayoralty would not be any less against the interests of conservative New Yorkers than a Mamdani mayoralty would be.
There is, however, something much more important than statistics or policy: character. Cuomo has faced well-substantiated allegations from 13 women who detailed nonconsensual touching, groping, and forced kisses. While Cuomo now denies all wrongdoing, the voter must remember that bipartisan leaders, including former President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, demanded his resignation, and that the State Assembly launched impeachment proceedings. Cuomo spent between $57.6 million and $60 million in taxpayer funds on legal defenses to file scorched-earth suits against his victims, including demanding their gynecological records during discovery.
In addition, the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Cuomo for allegedly underrepresenting coronavirus deaths by over 50%under oath.
President Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, said, “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.” President Teddy Roosevelt echoed this sentiment: “No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.” The Republican movement, from its very beginnings, held that integrity must precede ambition.
When GOP leaders encourage their fellow Republicans to bend the knee for Cuomo or Adams to cut losses, they surrender the very values that distinguish their movement from the opportunism they condemn. To reiterate, Trump’s praise of Adams as “a very good person” ignores his $10M illicit donations and perks that defined his tenure, and his willingness to work with a so-called “Democrat” over a “socialist” ignores the serious allegations against and the coverups of Cuomo, all because of one mayoral election.
Sliwa’s chances may be slim, but he’s not a spoiler. Asking a man who said he would rather be “impaled” than work for Cuomo, a man who has refused to suspend his campaign despite offers of over $10 million from seven different billionaires, and a man who campaigns on the streets twenty out of twenty-four hours a day to drop out alienates the hundreds of thousands of hard-working conservative, libertarian, populist, and independent New Yorkers.
Curtis Sliwa must stay in the race.
Republicans should stand their ground, not concede to either equal, not lesser, evil.
