Posted on Wednesday, October 22, 2025
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by Shane Harris
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New polling showing that former Governor Andrew Cuomo has cut slightly into socialist Zohran Mamdani’s lead in the race for New York City mayor has led to a flurry of calls from both sides of the aisle this week for Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa to drop out of the race. But Republicans shouldn’t be asked to surrender to clean up Democrats’ messes.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, Mamdani now leads Cuomo by 17.1 points, 45.3 percent to 27.9 percent, with Sliwa trailing in a distant third at 14.1 percent. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race in September, but his name will still appear on the ballot, and he enjoys 6.6 percent support.
Most surveys show that if the election were a choice between just Mamdani and Cuomo, Mamdani’s lead would shrink to single digits – perhaps giving Cuomo a path to victory. This has created a flood of pressure on Sliwa to withdraw from the contest and throw his support behind Cuomo to defeat the dreaded Mamdani.
“Swallow the bitter pill, Curtis Sliwa – quit the race to stop Zohran Mamdani,” The New York Post Editorial Board demanded on Monday. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and grocery store magnate John Catsimatidis have also urged Sliwa to drop out, as has Cuomo himself and other Mamdani opponents in New York Democrat circles.
So far, however, Sliwa has refused to withdraw. “It’s the Democrats who created Mamdani and who embraced him and who nourished him, who supported him,” Sliwa argued during an appearance on Nate Friedman’s show late last week. “How dare you people who know nothing about politics suggest that everybody who’s going to vote for me is suddenly going to be reborn and say, ‘we love Andrew Cuomo.’”
As Sliwa also correctly pointed out, Cuomo has plenty of baggage of his own that would alienate voters of all political persuasions, including putting COVID-positive seniors in nursing homes, sexual assault allegations, and past comments telling those with conservative views that they aren’t welcome in New York. Now, Sliwa is supposed to lie down and tell Republican voters to hold their noses and vote for someone who openly despises them.
“This is the result of the Democrats’ self-destruction, so I’m supposed to help them?” Sliwa asked. “How come they don’t help themselves? Andrew Cuomo failed everybody in that primary, he even admitted it. Now he’s basically saying, ‘I can’t win without Sliwa votes’ – where are your votes? I represent a major party line, I have people running under me, council people, judges, they put their heart and soul into it.”
The idea that voters are some kind of programmable bloc – robots who will automatically follow orders from elites – is as arrogant as it is false. The notion that one candidate can simply drop out and hand their supporters over to another is an insult to the intelligence and independence of voters. If every Sliwa voter is supposedly destined to switch their allegiance to Cuomo, then why doesn’t Cuomo instead tell his voters to back Sliwa? The absurdity of that hypothetical reveals just how hollow this entire argument is.
Many of Sliwa’s supporters would undoubtedly simply stay home before voting for a man like Andrew Cuomo – and who could blame them? Voters are not obligated to choose between the lesser of two evils, especially when both options are products of the same corrupt political machine. Cuomo is not offering to represent their interests; he’s offering to exploit their frustration for his own comeback.
And even if every Sliwa voter suddenly became a Cuomo fanatic, there’s still no guarantee it would be enough to overcome Mamdani’s lead. A Republican endorsing Cuomo could further drive turnout for Mamdani or lead to defections from Cuomo’s current base of support.
This whole episode reeks of the condescension that defines politics in one-party cities and states like New York. The establishment believes Republican voters are too naïve to understand “strategic voting,” so they must be denied even the right to express themselves on the ballot. It’s the same paternalistic logic that drives every failed top-down decision in New York, with bureaucrats and billionaires telling everyday people what’s good for them. To them, democracy only works when it produces their preferred outcome.
Meanwhile, Democrats are desperate to make Sliwa the scapegoat for their own implosion. They’re the ones who allowed radicals like Zohran Mamdani to rise through their ranks unchecked. Where were the calls for unity when Mamdani was hijacking their party from within? Where was the pressure on Kathy Hochul, Chuck Schumer, or Kirsten Gillibrand to take a stand against socialism before it metastasized? The silence was deafening, and then they all got in line and endorsed Mamdani anyway.
Curtis Sliwa is right: Democrats built this monster, and now they have to live with it. If voters choose a radical who wants to abolish the police, freeze rents, and turn New York City into a Marxist experiment, then they’ll reap what they’ve sown. Republicans owe them nothing. Asking Sliwa to fall on his sword to preserve a political order that despises him and his supporters is not compromise or pragmatism – it’s cowardice that betrays everything America stands for.
New Yorkers deserve a real choice, not another rigged coronation designed to protect the powerful from their own failures.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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