Curtis Sliwa didn’t mince words on Fox’s Big Weekend Show, painting Andrew Cuomo as “the architect of our destruction” and casting Zohran Mamdani as the brazen apprentice of a failed Democratic experiment. His blistering take landed squarely on the widespread frustration of everyday New Yorkers who’ve watched the city unravel under soft-on-crime, soft-on-spending leadership.
Cuomo, not content to sit on the political sidelines after his scandal-plagued exit from Albany, has tried to recast himself as the only bulwark against Mamdani and has openly urged Republicans to abandon Sliwa and consolidate behind him. That desperate plea only exposes Cuomo’s own weakness — and his willingness to play political games rather than address why his party lost control of its base.
The math in the polls makes this drama even more dangerous for sensible voters: Mamdani has vaulted into a commanding lead in multiple surveys, often sitting above 40–50 percent while Cuomo and Sliwa split the rest of the anti-socialist vote. This isn’t abstract theory — it’s the hard reality of a split field that plays right into the hands of anybody promising radical change without accountability.
Sliwa has refused to be bullied into surrender, and rightly so; Democrats and wealthy donors who spent the primary tearing each other apart own a big share of responsibility for the chaos they helped create. He’s argued — loudly and plainly — that if Democrats want to stop socialism, they should learn to win their own voters instead of begging Republicans to bail them out. That is a principled stand, not vanity, and it’s a stance many conservative voters respect.
Let’s be clear about what’s at stake: Mamdani’s proposals echo the same big-government, anti-growth prescriptions that hollow out opportunity and reward political class theatrics over real public safety or fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile Cuomo’s legacy of scandals and policy failures should disqualify him from lecturing anyone on who’s fit to run a city. Conservatives have a duty to call out both the radical left and the crony opportunists who enable them.
Early voting opens later this month with Election Day set for November 4, and time is running out for principled Republicans, independents, and good-faith Democrats to make their voices heard. Every conservative in this city needs to get off the sidelines, turn out, and decide whether they’ll stand for common-sense governance or let a left-wing experiment be foisted on 8.5 million people.
Curtis Sliwa may be a longshot in a city dominated by Democrats, but his fight represents something bigger than any one campaign: a defense of order, free enterprise, and the rule of law. If conservatives organize, turn out, and stop trading integrity for a false promise of compromise with the old guard, they can still steer New York away from the dangerous path Cuomo and his enablers helped lay.
