Andrew Cuomo, the former governor running as an independent for mayor, is one step closer to a head-to-head matchup with Zohran Mamdani after Mayor Eric Adams announced Sunday he was ending his longshot reelection campaign.
Now, anti-Mamdani forces are expected to pressure Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, to also drop out of the race. By Sunday night, those efforts were underway, at least on social media.
“Thank you [Eric Adams] for your service for our city and for stepping aside when the time was right!” billionaire hedge fund investor Bill Ackman tweeted. “[Curtis Sliwa], you should follow Eric’s lead for the good of NYC.”
Chien Kwok, cofounder of the public school parent advocacy group PLACE NYC, also chimed in.
“Curtis, you’re a good man who loves NYC. You’ve been protecting us since 1970s. Now it’s time to defend us by dropping out of the race so Maodani can’t hurt NYC beyond recognition. We can only defeat Maodani if we unite behind one candidate, Cuomo. Please drop out now,” he said on X.
Mamdani has held a double-digit lead over Cuomo in polls, with Sliwa coming in a distant third. But Cuomo’s margin would shrink under a hypothetical contest between just him and Mamdani. A Siena University-New York Times survey this month found Mamdani leading with 48% support among likely voters compared to Cuomo with 44% in a one-on-one election.
Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels patrol group, has shown no willingness to indulge Cuomo’s strategy. His campaign remained defiant Sunday, saying, “Curtis Sliwa is the only candidate who can defeat Mamdani.”
Sliwa’s campaign currently has $3.4 million in cash on hand, according to campaign finance records, while Cuomo’s has $1.6 million. Mamdani announced earlier this month his campaign had hit the fundraising cap of $8 million.
Sliwa — whose disclosures show he earns between $250,000 and $500,000 a year — recently claimed billionaires close to Cuomo had bribed him with money and job offers to withdraw from the race. Cuomo’s campaign responded by calling Sliwa, who admitted to staging crimes in the 1970s to win publicity, “a liar and a fraudster.”
Most political experts said Sunday they saw no reason for the red-beret-wearing fixture of city politics to bow out. The Republican won more than 27% of the vote in the 2021 election. Still, he has been ridiculed by President Donald Trump for his love of cats.
“Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said earlier this month. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion … the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. Gracie Mansion to me is like a fabled place if you’re in New York. Now, we don’t need to have thousands of cats.”
Sliwa once kept at least 16 felines in his Upper West Side apartment.
While such criticism from Trump would typically hobble a Republican campaign, Sliwa was the choice of 15% of likely voters in the recent Siena poll.
“He is not beholden to Trump and he seems to prefer running longshot campaigns rather than listening to job offers,” Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist, said.
Pollster Adam Carlson pointed to data he had crunched showing 71% of Sliwa voters would not consider voting for Cuomo if the Republican withdrew.
“Are they scared enough of Mamdani to hold their nose and vote for a guy they don’t like at all?” Carlson said.
He added that polling in coming weeks will show whether voter sentiment changes following the Adams’ exit from the race.
An influx of money could also reshape voters’ perceptions. Unlike the primary, anti-Mamdani interest groups have struggled to fundraise. Fix the City, a pro-Cuomo super PAC that raised $25 million in the primary, has since raised about $3 million, although it and other groups have begun buying attack ads, according to the New York Times.
John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican who is supporting Cuomo, seemed to hold out hope that Sliwa might change his mind.
“Let’s wait a week,” he told Gothamist in a phone interview Sunday.
Catsimatidis owns the radio station WABC, which has employed Sliwa as a host for years. His campaign has said he took a leave from his job to campaign.
Asked if there was room to change Sliwa’s mind, Catsimatidis responded, “I think there’s always room to change one’s mind. But it’s up to him.”
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