Zohran Mamdani is turning New York City Republican
Mamdani is the man of the moment, subject to endless national media attention as pundits weigh his prospects in New York's general mayoral election in November. New York leans decidedly Left, but for all the hagiography, it is far from guaranteed that Mamdani will be its next mayor. His win could, in fact, give the Republicans a real chance at the mayor's office for the first time since 2007, when Michael Bloomberg left the GOP to become an independent.
How could this be? The answer may well be in the maths. Mamdani must still contend with New York's incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who left the Democratic Party earlier this year to run for reelection as an independent. Cuomo, who has huge establishment backing, has also suggested he might run as an independent. If he follows through, New York's Leftist voters would divide among three candidates, all of whom have significant bases of support as well as substantial liabilities.
Mamdani's radical politics and anti-Israel politic s will inevitably cost him among swathes of the electorate. Adams suffers the distinction of being the first sitting New York mayor ever to be indicted, on charges that were recently dropped by President Donald Trump's Justice Department. Cuomo resigned as governor amid a humiliating sexual harassment scandal and is now accused of having implemented both no-bail policies that caused crime to skyrocket and pandemic-era public health directives that may have caused thousands of deaths among Covid-vulnerable elderly patients in care homes.
Both men trail Mamdani, but important elements of the city's terrified business community are rallying to them as potential safeguards against the radical frontrunner.
Republicans, on the other hand, are united behind one candidate, Curtis Sliwa, who ran unopposed for his party's nomination. Sliwa, who helped found the Guardian Angels to protect New Yorkers from crime in the 1970s and now hosts a radio talk show, has certain eccentricities. Even some Republicans – especially among the vanishing few who inhabit Manhattan's elite – believe he is a clown.
Nevertheless, his favouring a red beret and his love of cats pale in comparison to his opponents' deficiencies. In a city where a large majority of people believe crime is a serious problem, Sliwa unabashedly favours law-and-order crackdowns and the expansion of New York's police force.
In 2021, when Sliwa ran against Adams, who had no significant Left-wing opponents, he won just 27 per cent of the vote, mainly in working-class outer borough communities where Mamdani did less well in this year's Democratic primary.
But times and New York have changed. Four years ago, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, Sliwa talked like an anti-Trump Republican and had just returned to the GOP after years of affiliation with New York's centrist Reform Party. Now he sounds like a militant Trump loyalist in a city where the returning president almost doubled his support from 17 per cent in 2016 to 30 per cent in 2024. Trump even campaigned in the Bronx, a nominal Democratic stronghold, in events that made local people feel they mattered.
If Sliwa can win the 30 per cent whom Trump drew to the ballot box last November and capture even a small number of anti-crime Democrats and independents, he could well end up as mayor by a plurality – likely a low plurality, but a plurality nevertheless – as his Leftist opponents split the remaining vote three ways and fall short.
State voting trends also support the case for Sliwa. In 2022, Republican challenger Lee Zeldin came within six points of winning the state gubernatorial race, in the closest contest for its governor's office in decades. Republicans also picked up a handful of New York Congressional seats. In the 2024 presidential election, New York state showed the biggest swing toward Trump of any state in the nation, with over 43 per cent of the vote going to the returning president last year compared to 38 per cent in 2020 and 37 per cent in 2016. Neighbouring New Jersey showed the second largest state-wide shift to Trump, who lost it to Kamala Harris in 2024 by less than six points, compared to Trump's 16 points loss to Joe Biden there in 2020.
Much can still happen, and Sliwa must run a careful campaign, but Mamdani's victory could result in another shock. It might have been enough to put the Republicans in pole position to govern America's largest city.
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