This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, would thrive. Buildings rarely exceed three stories, and the streets are lined with repair garages, laundromats, and mid-price food stores. It’s more blue-collar, Catholic, and Trumpy than the rest of the city, where Latino immigrants mix with older white-ethnic families with surnames like Temkin and Kowalski. 

In his trademark red beret and a crisp blue suit, Sliwa looks rather tame compared to those standing next to him: a KFC chicken, two baby dinosaurs, one ghost, and several Minions. In some ways, though, the scene is the perfect encapsulation of his campaign: comical, attention-grabbing, even endearing, — but fundamentally unserious. Even so, to dismiss his bid as a sideshow ignores the very real effect he has had on this race. 

Crucially, he has thrust issues like subway safety and public order into the spotlight, giving voice to outer-borough New Yorkers disillusioned by the choice between a socialist newcomer and a disgraced former governor. And by rebuffing former mayors, hedge-fund billionaires, and establishment Democrats who have been calling on him to step aside, he’s also exposed the anti-democratic maneuverings of the city’s elites, winning him respect on both sides of the aisle. 

Critics argue that by refusing to drop out, Sliwa has paved the way for New York’s first socialist mayor. But as I trailed Sliwa last weekend — from the GOP’s HQ in deep Staten Island to Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and then Astoria, Queens — many of the people I spoke with had no intention of backing either Cuomo or Mamdani, regardless of whether Sliwa remained on the ticket. Few said that they could bring themselves to vote for a governor who supported cashless bail, took away qualified immunity for cops, and undercounted nursing-home deaths during the pandemic. For them, it’s Sliwa or nothing.

“I have the same net favorability as Barack Obama,” Sliwa tells me after the Halloween parade. “Obama was loved by Democrats — and I’m loved in New York.” At six feet, the square-jawed 71-year-old still cuts an imposing figure, even if the costumed children playing nearby somewhat undermine that image.

“I’ve been shot, stabbed, and beaten on these streets, but the people love me,” he adds. “It’s like the TV program Everybody Loves Raymond, except it’s called Everybody Loves Curtis.” 

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A lot of people do love Curtis — and have done for many decades. Sliwa first caught the public eye in 1970, when, as a 16-year-old paperboy delivering the Daily News to his neighbors in Brooklyn, he spotted a building on fire. Without hesitation, he rushed inside and rescued several people, a feat that earned him an “International Newspaperboy” award — and even a visit to the White House. 

That early brush with heroism gave Sliwa his first taste of public adoration and a lasting commitment to civic engagement, which eventually led him to establish the Guardian Angels at age 23. The group, originally known as the “Magnificent 13,” was formed in response to New York City’s soaring murder and crime rates in the 1970s. They would patrol the subways to promote public safety, acting as unarmed civilian watchdogs to prevent crime.

They didn’t have much of an impact on the city’s crime levels, but their distinctive red berets and bomber jackets provided a sense of security to New Yorkers. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo was a fan, remarking at the time that the Guardian Angels were a “better expression of morality than our city deserves” — a comment his son may not appreciate today.  

Members of the group, mostly Latino and African-American, were unarmed but trained in karate. Sometimes, however, the bigger threat came not from would-be criminals, but the police. NYPD officers didn’t take kindly to these wannabe-cops patrolling their streets, and often there were clashes between the two groups. In 1981, a police officer fatally shot a Guardian Angel after mistakenly seeing a threat in him unzipping his jacket to show the group’s emblem. 

Yet nothing did quite as much to damage the group’s credibility as when the founder, Sliwa, confessed that many of the Guardians’ tales of heroism proved to be untrue. “I was wrong, but we were in a sprint for survival,” Sliwa claimed in 1992. “We were just little people trying to get recognition for doing good work. In a sense it was like being Don Quixote.” The Guardian Angels are still around, but their visibility has waned since those reputational hits.

Sliwa’s supporters remember those days fondly. It’s the reason so many of them support him now. “He protected the people when the city wouldn’t do anything,” said one Glendale resident. “His heart has always been in the right place.” Even in deep-blue Manhattan, Sliwa was treated more like a beloved court jester than a political enemy. “I don’t support Sliwa or any of his policies,” said one resident. “But he is entertaining.”

Sliwa acknowledges that the “love” he gets hasn’t yet turned into votes. The latest RealClearPolitics poll of polls has him at 17% — the lowest vote share of any Republican mayoral nominee in 40 years — and nearly 20 points behind Mamdani in first place. “There is fear and fright hanging over this election,” he says in his gruff Brooklyn accent. “This is the most dystopian election I’ve ever seen. … Cuomo’s an angry curmudgeon predicting the end of the world, which guilts people into voting for him.” 

This race is Sliwa’s second bite at the cherry. In 2021, Eric Adams, a former cop and a Democrat, trounced him by nearly half a million votes. Dogged by corruption allegations, Adams has dropped out and endorsed Cuomo. Pressure on Sliwa to follow suit has come from the soon-to-be-former-mayor, billionaires like Bill Ackman and John Katsimatides, several local newspapers, and Cuomo himself.

Sliwa has — thus far — refused to back down, saying that he would only exit the race if “they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” In Sliwa’s mind, he is a Republican standing on the Republican ticket. If anyone should drop out, it should be Cuomo, who, after all, lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani and chose to run as an independent. “Cuomo would put the last nail in the coffin of New York City like he did in destroying New York state,” he tells me. “Then he fled, fearing impeachment from his own Democrats, and then hung out with his billionaire friends in the Hamptons until he decided to somehow revive his career by trying to be mayor.”

Nevertheless, if Sliwa were to drop out, his chunk of votes might put Cuomo within striking distance of Mamdani, who is running a campaign far to the Left of either candidate. Public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, universal childcare, and free public buses make Mamdani’s proposals more radical than either Cuomo’s or Sliwa’s — but the need to save Cuomo doesn’t seem to trouble the Republican’s supporters. “He’s a lifelong New Yorker; he lives, breathes, and loves New York,” says Richard Huber, a Queens local. “Choosing between Cuomo and Mamdani is like choosing between cyanide and death by hanging.”

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To his detractors, though, this stubbornness is vintage Sliwa, a character streak (or flaw) that has stuck with him since high school. Even then, he clashed with authority: he was expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school, for refusing to fulfill the school’s jacket-and-tie requirement. He then dropped out of his next school, Canarsie High School, because all the kids were “doing acid and smoking reefer.”  

In adult life, this intractability has led to more serious, nearly lethal, consequences. During his career as a popular New York radio host in the 1980s and ’90s, Sliwa regularly attacked mobsters like John Gotti, who went to trial for charges including racketeering and murder in 1992. After Gotti’s conviction, three men jumped Sliwa outside his apartment, breaking his wrist and elbow. The next morning, he was back on air, adding Gotti’s son to his list of polemical targets. 

But that meant the next punishment was more severe: two months later, he climbed into a cab near his home — only for a gunman to spring from the front seat and shoot him in the groin and legs. Sliwa hurled himself out the window of the moving car, later recalling the sting of “pebbles shooting into my face off the tires.” Compared to that, Sliwa tells me, “a mayoral race ain’t so bad.”

When the cameras are off, Sliwa seems frail. His head swivels like a restless figurine, and his hands tremble. A sharp tan line from his beret cuts across his forehead, lending it a weathered, sun-beaten look. All this was on view moments before Sliwa appeared on stage at the GOP Staten Island rally. But once the show started, the radio persona emerged. “Cuomo’s like the grim reaper — he’s so cold-hearted,” he warned. “He’s a dirtbag.” 

Sliwa clearly relishes his time in the limelight. Over the course of the campaign, he’s delivered some of the most memorable lines — Cuomo “slapping fannies and killing grannies,” in reference to the nursing-homes scandal and sexual-abuse allegations — and telling Mamdani, in Gen Z-speak, to stop “glazing him.” This is why Sliwa has won himself a cult following online, some of it driven by Mamdani’s supporters. 

But on a deeper level, Sliwa’s attacks on the Democratic establishment and the donor class have tapped into a very real anger that many New Yorkers feel toward the city’s elites. Amid record inequality and a persistent affordability crisis, that resentment helped fuel support for President Trump in the 2024 election. It’s a sentiment Mamdani has also capitalized on, despite sharing almost no ideological ground with the former president.

Ironically, Sliwa takes inspiration from Mamdani for his own campaign. Despite struggling to pronounce his first name (Zor-han instead of Zoh-ran), he commends Mamdani for coming from “almost zero” in the Democratic primary to beating Cuomo. “That’s why I say you can’t believe the polls,” he says. Many of his voters seem to agree, as does another well-known Republican, Rudy Giuliani. 

At the Staten Island rally, Giuliani appeared by Zoom to say, “When I first ran for mayor, I lost by 1% when the polls had me down by 12. And the second time, I was down by six and I won,” said Giuliani. “So don’t give up! Curtis is the best candidate by far.” The speech, however, had a slightly tragicomic quality to it, reminiscent of when Giuliani ended up hosting a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of the hotel after Trump’s 2020 loss. A combination of patchy connection and poor audio forced Sliwa’s handlers to hold a laptop up to a microphone so people could hear the former mayor speak.

Giuliani, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki, is Sliwa’s role model. As mayor, Giuliani revitalized the city and presided over a significant drop in crime. He was also fairly liberal on social issues like gay marriage and gun rights. Sliwa, for his part, has run a conventional conservative campaign focused on public safety and promising more police officers on the streets. The only difference is that he’s also running on an anti-animal-cruelty platform, which includes a ban on kill shelters. 

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I ask Sliwa whether he should be following in Giuliani’s footsteps to broaden his appeal to New York’s liberals. “I am very liberal!” he exclaims. “Well, not a liberal, but I’m liberal in some things, like gay marriage and gun rights. I also don’t like Medicaid and food stamps being cut back. There are poor people who will be hurt by this.”

Sliwa has also criticized his own party for vilifying Muslims. With the likes of Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and even the president himself fretting about the Islamization of New York (Mamdani is a Shiite Muslim), Sliwa defends the city’s almost million-strong Muslim community. “I condemned the national Republicans early on,” he says. “I told them: you’re attacking the Muslim religion and the way the culture is, like, eating with your fingers. I told them to back off, because Muslims are very conservative. They’re even way too conservative for me!”

Labeling himself a “populist but not MAGA,” Sliwa believes that one of the reasons Trump has not endorsed him is because he can’t be put in a “cookie-cutter box.” “You never know the position I’m going to take because I’m open-minded,” he says. I ask him what, if any, issue he has changed his mind on. He takes a long pause. “Well, there’s still some issues I haven’t quite come to grips with. Obviously, I don’t want sex-change surgery for teenagers,” he says. “But for adults, I haven’t come to a conclusion yet. I’m not opposed to it, but I really think it’s really more of a private concern.” 

A large number of New Yorkers may never forgive Sliwa for staying in the race. But as the Republican nominee, why should he? It isn’t his responsibility to champion a Democrat, let alone one accused of sexual abuse by multiple women. And unlike Cuomo, Sliwa actually won his party’s primary.

There is also something oddly endearing about this aging street tough. He is a classic New York eccentric, the last of a dying breed of why-I-outta fighters with a surprisingly big heart (at one point, he was fostering 16 cats). He’s shown a willingness to buck the Republican line on a range of issues and cares a great deal about the city he’s spent his whole life in. After Tuesday’s election, the Everybody Loves Curtis show will be over, and with it, an older New York will fade away — for good and ill. 

Cuomo has his problems, and we don’t need to hear about them one final time. No matter whom they choose, however, voters deserve a fair chance to consider the positive case for Andrew Cuomo. So here it is.

First, in an increasingly Left-wing city, Cuomo is the proven progressive option. That’s not a positive or a negative statement — it’s just a neutral fact. If you like higher taxes on the rich, Cuomo is your guy: during his final months as governor, he raised the rate on millionaire earners by nearly a full percentage point, to just under 10 percent. He also created two new, even higher tax brackets on personal income above $5 million, and a higher business-tax rate, all raising about $4.3 billion annually. Even earlier, he significantly boosted the minimum wage.

The obvious riposte here is that Cuomo didn’t want to hike taxes. Worried about a future primary challenge, he caved to pressure from progressive lawmakers, whose power was growing during President Trump’s first term. True enough, but an elected official being responsive to political pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, from many liberal New Yorkers’ perspective. Cuomo, if elected mayor, isn’t going to govern as some sort of crypto-conservative or even moderate autocrat. He will have to deal with the liberal and progressive City Council and the liberal and progressive state legislature.

After a close election, a Mayor Cuomo would presumably be concerned about another future challenge from the Left, and would accordingly maintain and enact progressive policies to head off that challenge.

A Left voter might reasonably think, “If I want a progressive, I’ll just vote for Mamdani.” But the more moderate among them might consider that checks and balances in a democracy are good. Cuomo failed to counteract the state legislature on several issues, from the tax hike to the details of eliminating and reducing cash bail. But at least he tried. When it comes to negotiating budgets with the council or tax policy with the state legislature, a Mayor Mamdani wouldn’t even try.

Cuomo’s well-known political flexibility isn’t a bad thing, if the result of that flexibility is to give voters a real choice when it matters. Cuomo is explicitly running against Mamdani’s proposed $9 billion annual tax hikes on New York City’s wealthy earners and corporations now. “You keep taxing businesses and wealthy people in New York City, there will be nobody left,” he told Fox News earlier in October.

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Yes, that’s an exaggeration — except the city (and state) are losing their fair share of millionaires, with the share of American millionaire earners in New York City falling to 4.2% in 2022, down from 6.5% to and 2010, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, echoing the analyst E.J. McMahon’s earlier research.

Voters without the ability to create a perfectly consistent mayor from scratch must ask themselves: are they going to punish Cuomo for being wrong back then, even if he is right, right now, and even if it means punishing themselves? Cuomo may have no strong ideological impulse either to raise or lower taxes, but, whether out of real conviction or political expediency, he is providing a critical contrast to Mamdani now, in saying that now is not the time for another increase.

Moreover, voters attracted to Mamdani because they want New York City to be more affordable should realize one big difference between Mamdani’s plans and Cuomo’s: Cuomo’s experience makes him a natural pragmatist, which makes it more likely that his affordability initiatives would succeed.

To wit: Cuomo would target his affordability plans to poorer people and people on the lower end of the middle class, whereas Mamdani would offer his subsidies to everybody. That’s an important distinction, because Gotham has finite funds; benefits that go to everyone, by definition, are benefits that can’t go to the people who most need them. For instance, Mamdani would make city buses free for everyone, whereas Cuomo would target families earning under $48,000 a year for free-transit subsidies, including subway subsidies. Similarly, Cuomo would increase benefits to lower-income New Yorkers to purchase food, whereas Mamdani would open five city-run grocery stores to cut food prices for everyone.

There are flaws in Cuomo’s affordability plans, sure. But in a choice between two transit plans — one that offers targeted subsidies and doesn’t favor only one type of transit, and one that offers a massive new universal entitlement but only on one type of mass transit — the latter is the more flawed. Similarly, in a choice between two grocery plans, Cuomo’s is superior because targeted to those who need help the most.

Further, a big piece of New York’s affordability problem is education and childcare. One fact that came across in the two general-election debates in October is that Mamdani isn’t interested in K-12 education; it’s just not one of his issues. He’s so uninterested in the topic, in fact, that he’d even give up mayoral control of the 900,000-student school system. Cuomo, on the other hand, has a straightforward and implementable plan for parents trying to get their kids into a rigorous school in the higher grades: double the number of schools for which an entrance exam is required to meet the high demand.

As for childcare: Mamdani’s marquee plan for “no-cost” universal care, beginning with babies 5 weeks old, is perfect because it is nonexistent. He offers no timeline and no hint of how this would work: babies aren’t 4-year-olds. Would parents have to commit to sending infants and toddlers to “school” five days a week, for example, as pre-K works, or would they have emergency drop-off and part-time and nighttime options?

Cuomo, by contrast, commits to expanding guaranteed pre-K to 3-year-olds, which is where it makes sense to start, as it’s easier. On early childcare, he shows an interest, saying he’d “pioneer [a] new model to co-locate early childhood development services in public schools.” But he doesn’t promise too much — which is a good thing in the context of an idea that is both expensive and logistically hard, because of the higher ratio of adult minders to babies and toddlers required.

On criminal justice, Cuomo is most vulnerable to voters inclined to vote for Sliwa. After all, he is the governor who signed into law leniency on bail, discovery laws, and juvenile crimes. Despite tweaks by his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, over the past four years, this leniency continues to contribute to New York’s persistently higher crime rate, post-2020.

Again, though, the relevant question isn’t what he did then, but where we go from here. Voters can consider a key difference between Cuomo and Mamdani. Cuomo has, if rather belatedly, repudiated the city’s unworkable plan to close the jails on Rikers Island by 2027 and rebuild four much smaller jails in four of the city’s five boroughs. To replace the close-Rikers plan, Cuomo says that he would gradually rebuild new jails at Rikers and provide better transportation for family members to visit the island. Mamdani, instead, only repeats the empty vow that he’ll do everything “in my power” to close Rikers within two years.

This distinction is critical, because it will determine the Big Apple’s ability to cut crime by incapacitating criminal suspects. The close-Rikers plan is unworkable in part because the four-borough jail plan would cap inmate capacity at just above half the current population, about 7,373. This abrupt decrease in capacity would require the release of thousands of violent suspects.

Moreover, Cuomo’s recent criminal-justice legacy may work in the city’s favor: as mayor, he would be under intense centrist and conservative pressure to accelerate the modest crime declines that the Eric Adams administration has achieved.

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Mamdani, conversely, would face no such pressure from his own base. He predicates the ability of his new “department of community safety” to cut crime and disorder on “creating economic stability” and ensuring “that no New Yorker falls through the cracks of our social safety net.” Crime, then, wouldn’t be evidence of policing failures, but of Mamdani’s inability, constrained by the state government’s control of much of the city’s budget, to implement socialist policies fully. No matter how bad things get under Mamdani’s vision of public safety, he can’t be accountable — because full democratic socialism has never been tried. Or something.

One final issue looms: personality. Many people look at Andrew Cuomo and feel repulsion at the shape-shifting and other defects, fearing the lack of a core. Maybe so. But Mamdani, too, is showing the same capacity to shape-shift. Just five years ago, Mamdani wanted to defund the police; he has now fully denounced that position. Mamdani says that he’d like to retain Jessica Tisch, Adams’s appointee, as police commissioner, without explaining how he’d square her proactive approach to policing, including toward disturbed people in the subways, with his preferred reliance on social-service civilians.

Mamdani is not without his own personality flaws: a good anti-capitalist socialist really shouldn’t own investment property in a poor country (in Mamdani’s case, Uganda).

Sliwa’s potential voters, on the other hand, are rightly comfortable with his personality. The Guardian Angels co-founder and longtime civic activist has demonstrated a remarkable consistency in his professional values and goals over several decades.

But Sliwa also lacks part of what New Yorkers want from Mamdani, and could partially get from Cuomo: a nuanced, if last-minute, focus on affordability. And yes, Sliwa, a Republican in a Democratic town, is simply unlikely to win, unless all polls are wildly off. Though New Yorkers who prize pure principle over practicality and pragmatism should stick to their vote, in a race that may be closer than voters think, they are indeed helping to split the more centrist and conservative vote against one socialist candidate.

As it enters its final day, this race is between a man who has probably already made most of his mistakes and revealed his flaws — and one about to begin making and revealing his own.