Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pleaded with Republicans on Friday to abandon Curtis Sliwa, their nominee for mayor, and said it would be “very, very, very hard mathematically” for him to mount a last-minute comeback as long as the Republican remained in the race.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat running on a third-party line, stopped just short of demanding Mr. Sliwa quit. But he called him “unqualified” and “a spoiler” whose continued presence in the race would only help elect Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front-runner.
“He cannot win,” Mr. Cuomo said, referring to Mr. Sliwa. “You vote for Curtis, save yourself the time, and vote for Mamdani. That’s what this is.”
The morning after Thursday night’s first general election debate, Mr. Cuomo took his case directly to WABC, the conservative talk radio station where Mr. Sliwa has long worked as a host.
The venue and timing of the call underscored the urgency of his position. With less than three weeks before Election Day, polls show Mr. Cuomo, 67, stuck in a distant second place and running out of opportunities to gain momentum.
On air with Sid Rosenberg, the host of WABC’s morning show and an ally of President Trump, Mr. Cuomo said Mr. Sliwa’s presence on the debate stage had been a distraction and made it harder for him to land all the blows he wanted against Mr. Mamdani. While Mr. Sliwa, 71, did criticize the front-runner, too, he directed some of his sharpest attacks at the former governor.
Mr. Cuomo touted his own moderate credentials during the interview and suggested he would approach the job of mayor far less ideologically than Mr. Mamdani, 33, a democratic socialist assemblyman.
And Mr. Cuomo explicitly tried to drive a wedge between Republican voters and their nominee, arguing that Mr. Sliwa had been put up by party “bosses” who cared more about having Mr. Mamdani as a foil than protecting the interests of New York City. (Mr. Sliwa, who was also Republicans’ 2021 nominee, ran unopposed in his party primary this year and entered the race before Mr. Mamdani’s rise.)
“Yes, it’s good Republican politics for Mamdani to win,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It’s death for New York City, so pick it.”
In a phone interview afterward, Mr. Sliwa said he was not only staying in the race but felt emboldened by the warm response he had received to his debate performance. He called Mr. Cuomo, his decades-long rival, a “curmudgeon” with a “defeatist attitude” seeking to justify a poor debate performance and a lackluster campaign.
“It’s like he always has an excuse,” Mr. Sliwa said. “He doesn’t understand that all this baggage he carries into this race haunts him every step of the way.”
Mr. Sliwa repeated his call for Mr. Cuomo to drop out instead. “Go hang out with your billionaires in the Hamptons,” he said. “Leave the streets to me and battling the Zohranistas.”
Mr. Mamdani, for his part, hosted what his campaign was billing as a “reverse town hall” on Friday with union members. Afterward, he said he agreed with Mr. Cuomo’s assessment about his narrow path to victory, and noted that he, too, would be competing for Republican votes.
“What New Yorkers saw is the fact that it’s more of the same with Andrew Cuomo,” Mr. Mamdani said of the debate. “More of the same with the affordability crisis, more of the same style of politics.”
Mr. Cuomo’s comments were part of a concerted effort in the run-up to Election Day to try to peel away a significant portion of Mr. Sliwa’s support, in hopes of building a coalition of moderate Democrats, independents and Republicans large enough to defeat Mr. Mamdani.
He is increasingly getting outside help. Two billionaire donors with ties to Mr. Trump have together poured $3.5 million into super PACs this week that are working to damage Mr. Mamdani. The groups are also seeking to persuade Republican voters to ditch Mr. Sliwa for Mr. Cuomo.
Mr. Cuomo faces an arduous task in a city like New York, where Democrats have a significant numerical advantage and Mr. Trump is overwhelmingly unpopular. If he tacks to the right, he risks alienating as many voters as he picks up.
After decades in public life, Mr. Cuomo has also alienated large swaths of voters. Republicans view him as a father of the city’s congestion pricing plan and an expansion of cashless bail. Some remember when he said in 2014 that conservative Republicans who opposed abortions rights, same-sex marriage and gun control measures “have no place in the state of New York.” Others remain put off by the sexual harassment accusations that ended his governorship (he denies wrongdoing).
But after losing June’s Democratic primary badly to Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Cuomo is unlikely to amass enough Democratic support to win without the backing of Republicans too.
Mr. Sliwa, the iconoclastic founder of the Guardian Angels, a crime patrol group, has faced calls to suspend his campaign for months, including from Mr. Trump. The president said Mr. Sliwa was “not exactly prime time” and mocked him for rescuing so many cats.
But Mr. Sliwa has long marched to the beat of his own political drum. He is the rare Republican in the country to not only resist Mr. Trump’s wishes but openly criticize him. And while he has strong support from local New York Republican leaders, he has little loyalty to the wealthy donor class that helped push Mayor Eric Adams to suspend his foundering re-election campaign last month.
His unique outlook and colorful approach were on display Thursday. Stepping onstage without his signature red beret, Mr. Sliwa declared that he “looks very mayoral tonight.”
He described Mr. Mamdani’s plan to have mental health workers help law enforcement respond to certain 911 calls as “another fantasy” and hit him on his anti-Israel views.
But Mr. Sliwa reserved his sharpest barbs for Mr. Cuomo. He called out the sexual harassment allegations, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the tens of millions of dollars New York State taxpayers have spent on his legal fees.
At one point, Mr. Sliwa even compared Mr. Cuomo unfavorably with his late father, the three-term governor Mario Cuomo.
“I knew Mario Cuomo,” he said. “You’re no Mario Cuomo.”
Mr. Cuomo’s allies have held out hope that John Catsimatidis, the billionaire grocery and oil refining magnate who owns WABC, might be able to use his financial leverage over Mr. Sliwa to push him out of the race. But so far, it has not happened.
In an interview Friday morning, Mr. Catsimatidis praised Mr. Sliwa and said “there is nobody who knows the five boroughs better.” But the businessman said he was “very, very disappointed” that Mr. Sliwa had chosen to use so much airtime during the debate attacking Mr. Cuomo.
“Why the hell are you attacking Cuomo versus attacking Mamdani, who is the real enemy,” he said. He believes Mr. Mamdani is an extremist whose proposals to open city-owned grocery stories and shift some responsibility away from the Police Department will make the city unsafe and unaffordable.
Mr. Catsimatidis, a Republican who has donated prolifically to Mr. Cuomo over the years, said that given New York’s overwhelming Democratic majority, Mr. Cuomo would do well to try “to convince the Democratic Party that he is the real Democrat.”
And he urged Mr. Sliwa to think seriously about whether he really had a path to victory.
“If he stays in, he’s going to hurt New York City,” he said. “If what he says is he loves New York City, then he should probably bow out.”
In the interview, Mr. Sliwa shot back that he was not “John’s candidate” or “controlled by billionaires.”
“John can do what he does,” he said. “I am running my campaign.”
Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
The post Cuomo Ramps Up Attacks on Sliwa as He Hunts for Republican Votes appeared first on New York Times.
