Subway stakes

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, has responded in various colourful ways to suggestions he should get out of the race so former Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo can go head to head with Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani.

“Men have died in battle for the right to vote, and not so that billionaires or landed gentry or the professional political class will pick the next mayor,” Sliwa announced at a press conference in September.

In October he said the “only way” he’d drop out is if “a Mack truck hits me and I get turned into a speed bump, and they can’t recover me in the I.C.U.”

And two weeks ago he had two simple words for Fox News: “Impale me.”

In most polls, Sliwa’s vote share is greater than the margin between Cuomo and Mamdani - in other words, Sliwa dropping out is probably the only way that Cuomo beats Mamdani. He’s been described by NewsWeek as “the most important man in New York.”

But when I caught up with him in the labyrinthine 14th St subway station in Manhattan on Halloween, he had a suitably themed critique of Cuomo.

“He's a zombie,” Sliwa told me. “He's a political zombie. He destroyed the state. Now he wants to come back and put the final nail in the coffin of the city.”

Sliwa’s red beret is a year round uniform for him, but this year it’s also a popular Halloween costume for other New Yorkers. And in this election, judging by the photo requests he got on the F train platform, he has won a lot of fans.

Sliwa does seem genuinely connected to the city, and has a history of fighting for it, especially underground. In the 1970s he founded a vigilante group dubbed the Guardian Angels to patrol the subway in red berets to fight crime and protect travellers. It’s unclear how effective they were, given that Sliwa later admitted that much of the group’s early crimestopping, including several alleged kidnapping attempts on members including Sliwa, were fake publicity stunts. He has always insisted that his alleged shooting in the back of a New York cab was a genuine assassination attempt by the mafia.

More recently, Sliwa has worked as a conservative radio host (and in 2021, he ran and lost to current mayor Eric Adams by a large margin.) On air in 2022, while Andrew Cuomo was visiting the Manhattan radio station to discuss a potential show of his own, Sliwa called out the former governor for Covid policies critics say killed thousands of elderly New Yorkers. Cuomo, reportedly furious, walked out and never got the gig. 

Sliwa’s view doesn’t seem to have softened. “Cuomo had his shot in the Democratic primary,” he told me. “He's one and done. He didn't even campaign. How do you run a campaign if you're not in the streets?”

He dismissed as “nonsense” the suggestion that he should drop out now. “Every day that Cuomo moans and groans that “I can't win unless Curtis drops out” is a great day for Zohran Mamdani - because then he doesn't have to talk about his issues, which are fantasy.”

He clearly holds Cuomo in contempt, and claims that former mayor Bill de Blasio spent most of his time “smoking Hindu Kush on the back porch at Gracie Mansion”, but appears to have more respect for his official Democratic opponent. “Zohran doesn’t do that. That’s why he's more dangerous. He'd be out there destroying the city 20 hours a day.”

As for why he’s running, Sliwa’s vision for the mayoralty is inspired by the last Republican to do the job.

“Back to the old basics of Rudy Giuliani: law and order, public safety, quality of life,” he tells me.

“We’ve got to take care of our homeless and emotionally destitute. We have veterans who sleep in the subways. It's time we start taking care of our own.”

Sliwa, who has more than a dozen cats in the apartment he lives in with his wife, has also made animal protection a central part of his pitch to voters. But if it doesn’t come off on election night, and Mamdani becomes mayor, Sliwa isn’t going to be blaming himself.

“I'm going to turn to the Democrats and say: ‘This is your problem. You let the fox into the chicken coop, the socialists. They took over your party and you didn't have the ability to fight, fight, fight for your party.’”

“I stay, I fight for what I know is right. I'll be the mayor in exile. I improve, I don't move. I will become Zohran Mamdani's worst nightmare. And he knows it…You do not want to mess with Curtis Sliwa.”

This piece was co-published with Crikey.