Those of us who don’t want to see Zohran Mamdani become the next mayor of New York could call on incumbent mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, to drop out of the race. But considering how Adams is polling at around 7 to 9 percentage points, even if Adams did drop out, reallocating his share of the vote wouldn’t put Andrew Cuomo or Curtis Sliwa ahead.
Apparently, Cuomo thinks he can get Donald Trump to endorse him and force Sliwa out of the race.
Andrew Cuomo’s counting on President Donald Trump and top Republicans to tell the party faithful to vote for Cuomo for mayor if they want to stop Zohran Mamdani, and not to vote for GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.
“We can minimize (the Sliwa) vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate,” Cuomo told the crowd at a Hamptons fundraiser Saturday, according to audio obtained by Playbook. “And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa. So I feel good about that.”
Is Curtis Sliwa really not a serious candidate? One recent poll has Cuomo at 23 percent and Sliwa at 17 percent; another one has Cuomo at 21 percent and Sliwa at 18 percent. Their levels of support aren’t that far apart.
Look, Sliwa isn’t a perfect candidate; it would be preferable if the Republican option wasn’t the guy who ran last time and got under 28 percent of the vote.
But you know what Sliwa hasn’t done? Killed a bunch of senior citizens by locking them in retirement homes during the Covid pandemic. Sliwa has never groped a New York state trooper. Sliwa has not written a self-aggrandizing memoir and gotten paid $5.1 million for it. Nor, as Sliwa pithily summarized the Cuomo years, has he spent the past decade “slapping fannies and killing grannies.”
Compared to Cuomo, Sliwa looks like a beret-wearing, karate-chopping saint.
Cuomo’s already had his shot to beat Mamdani and he blew it. Why on earth should New York Republicans give up their vote for a guy who’s an actual Republican, and shift their support to the sleaziest and most egomaniacal narcissistic Democrat to come along since Eliot Spitzer?