Copyright motherjones
When Curtis Sliwa called me on Wednesday afternoon, the failed New York City Republican mayoral candidate sounded chipper, even a bit boastful. “Everybody loves Curtis,” Sliwa told me. “It’s just a question of getting them to vote for you.” But everybody does not, in fact, love the red beret–wearing subway vigilante turned mayoral candidate. His unusually optimistic stance, despite his resounding loss to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, came amid a sustained fury against him from those who see Sliwa as directly responsible for Andrew Cuomo’s loss. That includes Republicans turned reluctant supporters of the former New York governor and conservatives who claim Sliwa siphoned votes from Cuomo. There was disgraced ex-Rep. and recently commutated felon George Santos, who wrote on X: “Fuck you [Sliwa] I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!” “You fucking sold out like fucking Judas sold out fucking Jesus,” David Rem, former failed mayoral and congressional candidate and a self-described “childhood friend” of President Donald Trump, was also recorded shouting at the Cuomo watch party. But Sliwa is, in a word, unbothered. He dismissed Santos as “the most corrupt of all of our recent electeds—and that’s saying a lot.” As for the allegations that he split the anti-Mamdani vote, Sliwa resents the implication he should have stepped aside for the man he repeatedly called “the Prince of Darkness.” When I asked if he really believed he had a chance at winning, Sliwa replied emphatically: “Of course!” As Sliwa, who took home about 146,000 votes, compared to Cuomo’s approximately 855,000, and many political pundits have pointed out, even if he had dropped out and all his votes went to Cuomo—an unlikely prospect in itself—the tally would still fall at least 35,000 votes short of Mamdani’s 1,036,000. To Sliwa, that’s because Cuomo ran a minimal ground game. “He was entitled, and he didn’t run a race,” Sliwa said. “He doesn’t run races, do retail politics. I treat the public like a mosh pit. I was down in the subway every day.” “Friends or foes, I love people,” he continued. “I’m a happy warrior. Cuomo thinks he’s above it all.” For Sliwa, such pompous thinking could be attributed to Cuomo’s heavy backing by “the most powerful people in the world”—namely, the billionaire Bill Ackman, who reportedly backed Cuomo to the tune of nearly $2 million as of late last month. “He’s a hedge fund guy,” Sliwa said, referring to Ackman. “They always hedge. This guy lives in Chappaqua. He doesn’t know anything about the streets.” Then, there are the wealthy Cuomo backers whom we don’t know. When I asked about his previous claim to the New Yorker that he had received seven bribes trying to get him to drop out, Sliwa painted a picture of a rather dramatic bidding war. “Each offer would be topped by another offer until it capped out at 10 million, and that’s when I basically put everybody on blast and said, ‘This better stop, because this sounds criminal to me.'” Sliwa still refuses to identify who offered the alleged bribes—”I’m a man of honor…they spoke to me in confidence”—but he claimed that they were from childhood friends dispatched by the Cuomo campaign. “This is classic Cuomo,” Sliwa said. “He is a muckraker. He is nefarious.” In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi called Sliwa “a liar, a fool, and a clown. New Yorkers saw it for themselves, which is why his voters deserted him in droves.” So, what does Sliwa think comes next for Cuomo? “He is like Napoleon. He will return to his island of Elba, called the Hamptons, to his billionaire friends, and he will spend every day plotting a return one way or the other. That’s all he does.” As for Mamdani, Sliwa says he plans to be “the loyal opposition.” “The problem that I know is going to come about is the fantasy of everything he advocated,” he said. “All sounds good, but the money ain’t there.” For now, though, Sliwa plans to lie low. “Every mayor is entitled to a grace period.” Mamdani, he added, “won a mandate.” (Sliwa was the only candidate to call Mamdani to concede, the mayor-elect said.) But for all his critiques of Mamdani, Sliwa can’t help but sound like him sometimes. “I’m a populist Republican representing the working-class people,” he continued. “This was people power, democracy in full effect. The people united will not be defeated. You don’t hear those words from a Trump Republican.”
