Curtis Sliwa’s preferred campaign mode is riding the subway. He boards trains in the back car, then chats and handshakes his way forward, one by one, through the riders that he leaves just with a business card about his candidacy. He asks everyone where they grew up.
The responses are part minor celebrity sighting, part genuine affection. One man looked up from his book about the 1998 Yankees to say, “Oh, it’s you!” A Staten Island Ferry attendant held the boat for him, saying “We got you, Curtis.”
Every New Yorker he finds, Sliwa asks where they went to high school. To Danish tourists, he talked about the bathroom attendants at Copenhagen Central Station. To those with dogs, he reaches down to pet them. To one from Dorchester, Massachusetts: “I’m all about Boston, but I must tell you, I hate the Red Sox.” To a homeless woman sleeping on the train who started to sit up as he bent on a knee to gently offer a can of ginger ale: “You can lay back down.”
Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, an anti-crime patrol group started in the depths of the city’s worst years in the 1970s, and he has been known for his red beret long before launching what is now his second consecutive run as the Republican nominee for mayor. The never-ending weirdness of this mayor’s race has put Sliwa in a position to shape it – and to prove to many in his own party that they should take him seriously.
Sliwa has been a part of New Yorkers’ lives for so long that the comparatives stack up easily: For longer than many of the now-redeveloped neighborhoods across the five boroughs have had their foundations poured. For longer than Big Apple crime rates have been tracked by computer. For a decade and a half longer than Zohran Mamdani has been alive.
And for so long that he has a black-and-white photo of himself with Donald Trump from 1986, when they were both on the rise as tabloid favorites. Trump is in a tuxedo. Sliwa is in a Guardian Angels T-shirt and, naturally, his beret.
Times have changed. These days, as interested as the president is in the mayor’s race and stopping Mamdani from winning, Trump won’t back Sliwa.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time. He wants cats in Gracie Mansion,” the president said on Friday when asked about the race in an appearance on Fox News. “We don’t need to have thousands of cats.”
In the most splintered, unpredictable general election race in the history of a city where politics is always a circus, Sliwa has New York political observers wondering: Is his candidacy a missed opportunity to take advantage of a split among Democrats? Or is having a person with the notoriety and connections beyond the city’s long-withered Republican base the only longshot that could actually, maybe, somehow work?
“When they come up to me, they don’t say, ‘Oh, the Republican,’” Sliwa said in an interview in a tiled, not-too-dirty alcove of a subway station. “They don’t see me as a politician. They see me as one of them, which is rare.”
Even after a life that’s included four marriages and being shot five times in a taxi that he says was a hired hit from mob boss John Gotti, this year’s race has Sliwa falling back late at night and early in the morning on electronic dance music. The beats, he says, help him focus.
One of Curtis Sliwa’s cats is surrounded by campaign images in his apartment, during his 2021 mayoral run. – Mary Altaffer/AP/File
About the cats and Trump
Trump was referring to the story of Sliwa having, at one point, 17 cats in his small Upper West Side apartment. The candidate told CNN that was because he was taking cats in from people getting rid of their pets during the pandemic — and now he’s down to just six.
Sliwa did not respond to Trump on Friday. His sister, the media director of the campaign, instead sent a statement from his campaign manager that didn’t mention the president but went in depth about his long history of caring for pets and having a vision about animal welfare along with increasing affordability, being tough on crime and enhancing quality of life. In addition to being the Republican nominee, Sliwa is running this fall on a second, independent ballot line called “Protect Animals.”
The local and national conversation around the mayor’s race has focused on incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who met with a key Trump White House aide to discuss potential job offers if he were to drop out. Some want opposition to Mamdani to coalesce around Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary.
For now, Adams is staying in the race. Polls show Mamdani in a strong position ahead of the November election, with more establishment Democrats warming to him although top party leaders are still withholding endorsements.
Sliwa has been all but forgotten in the discussion – but he’s outpolling Adams. A poll from The New York Times and Siena College found Mamdani with 46% support and Cuomo at 24% support. Sliwa was at 15% and Adams at 9%.
Some believe that only an ingrained figure like Sliwa could attract enough Democrats in the last weeks of the campaign to have a chance. Others see his candidacy as a missed opportunity, wishing a more conventional Republican had been around to take advantage of the splintered mess of the Democratic candidates and spend more time talking about governing.
Sliwa pulled almost 28% as the Republican nominee for mayor four years ago, with 312,000 votes. Since then, Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in 2022, got 542,000 votes out of New York City, while Trump got 838,000 votes out of the city last year.
The other three candidates and many in their bases can’t stand each other. And there’s no ranked-choice voting in November like there was in the primary.
In other words: Though Zeldin and Trump each got only about 30% in New York City, in a splintered field with multiple viable candidates, being elected the next mayor could take far less than a majority.
But while billionaire John Catsimatidis has been trying to corral efforts to beat Mamdani, including his calls to the president, his longtime friend, he hasn’t been pushing for Sliwa. That’s despite Sliwa endorsing Catsimatidis in his own Republican run for mayor in 2013 and as the billionaire’s daughter, as the Manhattan Republican chair, is supporting Sliwa after declining calls to run for mayor herself.
“The world’s not going to come to an end if Curtis is mayor,” was how Catsimatidis put it in an interview with CNN, calling his one-time fellow local radio host “an entertainer.”
“He knows the city and wants to do the right thing,” he said. “He might have a shot.”
Sliwa dismissed Catsimatidis and other wealthy figures like billionaire investor Bill Ackman who are intensely opposed to Mamdani and democratic socialism but have never given him a real look.
“The billionaires have no influence in this campaign,” Sliwa said. “These billionaires know nothing about politics because they’re not in the streets.”
As for Trump, Sliwa previously told CNN he voted for the president for the first time last year and agrees with much of what he is doing, but they haven’t talked for years. Even before the president’s swipe at him on Friday, he insisted he wanted neither a job offer nor an endorsement.
He does like to talk about the first time their politics converged, though: the night that photo was taken, when they were both honored in 1986 by the state Conservative Party.
“He looks to me and he goes, ‘Curtis, what are we gonna do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Donald, you’re not a conservative, I’m not a conservative.’ He goes, ‘Let’s make the best of it,’” Sliwa recalled.
Curtis Sliwa holds a subway door for a passenger as he campaigns in the New York subway system, on August 18. – Richard Drew/AP
What Sliwa’s backers say
Sliwa has already been raising more money than Cuomo or Adams. He likes to point out he hasn’t even started advertising beyond the 100,000 New Yorkers he estimates he’s given one of his business cards to on the subway.
“Curtis is more than just a red beret and always has been. He works hard, he’s concerned about the policies. He knows New York City from the bottom up,” said New York State GOP chairman Ed Cox, who, in the tiny world of city GOP politics, is the son-in-law of Richard Nixon and whose son used to be married to Catsimatidis’ daughter. “You’ve got three very flawed Democrats—if those three split up the Democratic vote, guess what, with the Republican vote and the Trump vote, that’s a clear win for Curtis.”
How much Republican institutional support will be there for Sliwa, given city campaign finance laws limiting coordination as well as Trump and other Republicans’ machinations in favor of Cuomo, Cox would not say.
“He has spent four decades working on behalf of the city—but from his heart, not as a public servant,” said US Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and a part of Brooklyn and is the only Republican in the city’s congressional delegation.
A candidate who was “a little more polished,” Malliotakis said, “might be stronger, but when it comes down to actual experience and knowing the ins and outs of this city… that’s what we’re hoping happens here, that people recognize that like Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other.”
But Malliotakis is behind him. So is Elise Stefanik, the upstate congresswoman gearing up to run for governor next year, who has endorsed him and whose candidacy Sliwa says he could boost with a win of his own – just like when Rudy Giuliani was first elected in 1993 and a Republican beat Cuomo’s father, then the incumbent governor, the following year.
An aide to Stefanik, though, did not respond to multiple requests to interview the congresswoman about Sliwa.
Curtis Sliwa, wearing his signature red beret, is interviewed in a subway station on August 18. – Richard Drew/AP
A different kind of affordability message
“You don’t win with Republicans in New York City,” Sliwa said, arguing that of his 2021 vote share, “most of it was independents — double the number of Republicans — and moderate Democrats.”
Affordability concerns moved voters to Mamdani in the spring as those crime worries faded, but Sliwa believes they are spiking again. Even on affordability, Sliwa says his years watching projects and promises flounder across the city has left him with a more demanding perspective.
“All these candidates say, ‘Five years from now, 10 years from now, we’ll have 500,000 apartments here,’” Sliwa said. “What are we going to do now to create affordable housing, not then?”
As opposed to Mamdani, who is proposing tax hikes on the wealthy, Sliwa wants to cut income, property and corporate taxes, while shrinking city spending to attract new development.
For the Guardian Angel, the conversation always comes back to crime. Sliwa wants police officers off the subway platforms and patrolling the train cars in pairs.
“‘It’s really not bad in the subway,’” Sliwa said, mocking the way he says he hears the other mayoral candidates talking as he spoke to reporters outside a subway station last weekend. “Easy for them to say, like Eric Adams, because he’s never in the subways unless he has a total NYPD armed security team with him. You don’t see Zohran in the subway. And by the way, if they built a subway extension to the Hamptons, you might see Andy Cuomo out in the suburbs.”
Sliwa doesn’t spend much time thinking about what would happen if somehow he wins. But one thing he realized, as he stood there: he’d have to change his own subway routine to accept a police detail if he did.
“Well, that’s different. Obviously, that is almost mandated that you have to have a detail with you,” Sliwa said. “So, I’ll learn to live with it.”
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