New York
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Curtis Sliwa’s most well-liked marketing campaign mode is using the subway. He boards trains in the again automobile, then chats and handshakes his method ahead, one after the other, via the riders that he leaves simply with a enterprise card about his candidacy. He asks everybody the place they grew up.
The responses are half minor celeb sighting, half real affection. One man seemed up from his guide 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 the place they went to highschool. To Danish vacationers, he talked about the toilet attendants at Copenhagen Central Station. To these with canines, he reaches all the way 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 lady sleeping on the prepare who began to sit down up as he bent on a knee to softly provide a can of ginger ale: “You can lay back down.”
Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, an anti-crime patrol group began in the depths of the metropolis’s worst years in the Seventies, and he has been recognized for his red beret lengthy earlier than launching what’s now his second consecutive run as the Republican nominee for mayor. The unending weirdness of this mayor’s race has put Sliwa in a place to form it – and to show to many in his personal social gathering that they need to take him severely.
Sliwa has been a half of New Yorkers’ lives for therefore lengthy that the comparatives stack up simply: For longer than many of the now-redeveloped neighborhoods throughout the 5 boroughs have had their foundations poured. For longer than Big Apple crime charges have been tracked by pc. For a decade and a half longer than Zohran Mamdani has been alive.
And for therefore lengthy that he has a black-and-white photograph of himself with Donald Trump from 1986, once they had been each 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 modified. These days, as as the president is in the mayor’s race and stopping Mamdani from successful, Trump received’t again Sliwa.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time. He wants cats in Gracie Mansion,” the president stated on Friday when requested about the race in an look on Fox News. “We don’t need to have thousands of cats.”
In the most splintered, unpredictable normal election race in the historical past of a metropolis the place politics is at all times a circus, Sliwa has New York political observers questioning: Is his candidacy a missed alternative to take benefit of a cut up amongst Democrats? Or is having a particular person with the notoriety and connections past the metropolis’s long-withered Republican base the solely longshot that would really, perhaps, one way or the other work?
“When they come up to me, they don’t say, ‘Oh, the Republican,’” Sliwa stated 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 4 marriages and being shot 5 occasions in a taxi that he says was a employed hit from mob boss John Gotti, this 12 months’s race has Sliwa falling again late at evening and early in the morning on digital dance music. The beats, he says, assist him focus.
About the cats and Trump
Trump was referring to the story of Sliwa having, at one level, 17 cats in his small Upper West Side condominium. The candidate instructed NCS that was as a result of he was taking cats in from folks getting rid of their pets throughout the pandemic — and now he’s down to only six.
Sliwa didn’t reply to Trump on Friday. His sister, the media director of the marketing campaign, as an alternative despatched a assertion from his marketing campaign supervisor that didn’t point out the president however went in depth about his lengthy historical past of caring for pets and having a imaginative and prescient about animal welfare together with growing affordability, being robust on crime and enhancing high quality of life. In addition to being the Republican nominee, Sliwa is working this fall on a second, unbiased poll line known as “Protect Animals.”
The native and nationwide dialog round the mayor’s race has targeted on incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who met with a key Trump White House aide to debate potential job gives if he had been to drop out. Some need opposition to Mamdani to coalesce round Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor working as an unbiased after dropping to Mamdani in the Democratic major.
For now, Adams is staying in the race. Polls present Mamdani in a sturdy place forward of the November election, with extra institution Democrats warming to him though prime social gathering leaders are still withholding endorsements.
Sliwa has been all however forgotten in the dialogue – however he’s outpolling Adams. A ballot from The New York Times and Siena College discovered Mamdani with 46% help and Cuomo at 24% help. Sliwa was at 15% and Adams at 9%.
Some imagine that solely an ingrained determine like Sliwa may appeal to sufficient Democrats in the final weeks of the marketing campaign to have a likelihood. Others see his candidacy as a missed alternative, wishing a extra typical Republican had been round to take benefit of the splintered mess of the Democratic candidates and spend extra time speaking about governing.
Sliwa pulled virtually 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, received 542,000 votes out of New York City, whereas Trump received 838,000 votes out of the metropolis final 12 months.
The different three candidates and many of their bases can’t stand one another. And there’s no ranked-choice voting in November like there was in the major.
In different phrases: Though Zeldin and Trump every received solely about 30% in New York City, in a splintered discipline with a number of viable candidates, being elected the subsequent mayor may take far lower than a majority.
But whereas billionaire John Catsimatidis has been attempting to corral efforts to beat Mamdani, together with his calls to the president, his longtime buddy, he hasn’t been pushing for Sliwa. That’s regardless of Sliwa endorsing Catsimatidis in his personal 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 NCS, calling his one-time fellow native radio host “an entertainer.”
“He knows the city and wants to do the right thing,” he stated. “He might have a shot.”
Sliwa dismissed Catsimatidis and different rich figures like billionaire investor Bill Ackman who’re intensely against Mamdani and democratic socialism however have by no means given him a actual look.
“The billionaires have no influence in this campaign,” Sliwa stated. “These billionaires know nothing about politics because they’re not in the streets.”
As for Trump, Sliwa beforehand instructed NCS he voted for the president for the first time final 12 months and agrees with a lot of what he’s doing, however they haven’t talked for years. Even earlier than the president’s swipe at him on Friday, he insisted he wished neither a job provide nor an endorsement.
He does like to speak about the first time their politics converged, although: the evening that photograph was taken, once they had been each 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.
Sliwa has already been elevating extra money than Cuomo or Adams. He likes to level out he hasn’t even began promoting past the 100,000 New Yorkers he estimates he’s given one of his enterprise playing 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,” stated New York State GOP chairman Ed Cox, who, in the tiny world of metropolis GOP politics, is the son-in-law of Richard Nixon and whose son was once 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 a lot Republican institutional help will probably be there for Sliwa, given metropolis marketing campaign finance legal guidelines limiting coordination in addition to Trump and different Republicans’ machinations in favor of Cuomo, Cox wouldn’t say.
“He has spent four decades working on behalf of the city—but from his heart, not as a public servant,” stated US Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island and a half of Brooklyn and is the solely Republican in the metropolis’s congressional delegation.
A candidate who was “a little more polished,” Malliotakis stated, “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 as much as run for governor subsequent 12 months, who has endorsed him and whose candidacy Sliwa says he may increase with a win of his personal – similar to when Rudy Giuliani was first elected in 1993 and a Republican beat Cuomo’s father, then the incumbent governor, the following 12 months.
An aide to Stefanik, although, didn’t reply to a number of requests to interview the congresswoman about Sliwa.
“You don’t win with Republicans in New York City,” Sliwa stated, arguing that of his 2021 vote share, “most of it was independents — double the number of Republicans — and moderate Democrats.”
Affordability considerations moved voters to Mamdani in the spring as these crime worries light, however Sliwa believes they’re spiking once more. Even on affordability, Sliwa says his years watching tasks and guarantees flounder throughout the metropolis has left him with a extra demanding perspective.
“All these candidates say, ‘Five years from now, 10 years from now, we’ll have 500,000 apartments here,’” Sliwa stated. “What are we going to do now to create affordable housing, not then?”
As against Mamdani, who’s proposing tax hikes on the rich, Sliwa desires to chop revenue, property and company taxes, whereas shrinking metropolis spending to draw new improvement.
For the Guardian Angel, the dialog at all times comes again to crime. Sliwa desires law enforcement officials off the subway platforms and patrolling the prepare automobiles in pairs.
“‘It’s really not bad in the subway,’” Sliwa stated, mocking the method he says he hears the different mayoral candidates speaking as he spoke to reporters outdoors a subway station final 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 a lot time serious about what would occur if one way or the other he wins. But one factor he realized, as he stood there: he’d have to alter his personal subway routine to simply accept a police element if he did.
“Well, that’s different. Obviously, that is almost mandated that you have to have a detail with you,” Sliwa stated. “So, I’ll learn to live with it.”