Is Republican Nominee Curtis Sliwa a Spoiler in NYC?

Covering third-party politics for a quarter-century accustoms one to the accusation that such-and-such marginal electoral candidate is a “spoiler,” queering what would be the results of a one-on-one contest between the front-runners. What’s new in New York City this fall is that the putative turd in this mayoral punch bowl is not some splinter/indie rando but the Republican, Curtis Sliwa.

“Just Walk Away, Beret!” thundered the cover editorial in Tuesday’s New York Post, nodding both to the candidate’s trademark haberdashery and the age demographic of those panicking over democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Sliwa’s longtime boss at WABC Radio, the politically influential Red Apple Media CEO John Catsimatidis, declared Monday that while “Curtis would make the best mayor of all the candidates,” his third-place ranking in the polls means he “has to realize that he should love New York more than anything else.” Former New York GOP finance chair Arcadio Casillas told The New York Sun this week that some of the party’s biggest donors are threatening to cut off future funding unless the nominee withdraws.

Billionaire busybody Bill Ackman, whose sophistication in politics rivals mine with hedge fund management, cited a single unnamed source Wednesday to assert that Sliwa won’t drop out because his “wife, friends and others are on the campaign payroll, and he and they are enjoying living off the city taxpayers who are funding his race/lifestyle.”

“Follow the money,” the Pershing Square Capital Management CEO tweeted. “When I asked why he doesn’t care about NYC? my source said: ‘He doesn’t give a sh-t.'”

You can accuse Curtis Sliwa of many, many things (while sourcing it straight from the horse’s mouth, too). But not giving a s-h-i-t about New York? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Not to be outdone, hedge fund smart-aleck Cliff Asness, who unlike Ackman at least has a visible sense of humor, accused me this week of murdering Gotham: “The beret itself should’ve been disqualifying but at this point it’s anyone voting for him, and automatically electing the Jihad-loving real-life communist (not the ‘we like Denmark and Sweden’ type liberals) who are responsible for killing this city.”

Leaving aside the old-timey notion that any candidate’s quirks can be “disqualifying” in the age of Donald Trump, let us take seriously the question of responsibility. I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican. However, as a moderately aware voter in this great and terrible city, I have known for years that the Democratic mayoral nominee would be awful, and not just as the default party setting.

At this time last year, the betting money for the Dem nomination was either on the laughably corrupt incumbent Eric Adams or the repellent City Comptroller Brad Lander—a character who should have been very well known to Wall Street, given his serial advancement of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activism while managing the city’s vast pension funds.

In other words, the time to get “serious” about a quality Republican challenger was at the very latest 2024, long before Mamdani began haunting the nightmares of us non-socialists. So who did our political gadflies put up against Sliwa’s silly beret?

Nobody. He ran unopposed.

OK, a more humble interlocutor may retort, but we thought (disgraced former governor) Andrew Cuomo had the thing locked up! First of all, being OK with the nursing-home malefactor suggests a level of constituent forgiveness that I’m unable to muster. Second, the last 18 years have been absolutely brutal for candidates who mistakenly thought their name-recognition alone entitled them to political victory (see Clinton, Hillary). Most pertinently, as Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa acted upon this spring, all it took to get an insurance-policy ballot line for November was the collection of 3,750 valid petition signatures by May 27. You could have freaked out at the sound of the socialist’s footsteps on May Day, and still had plenty of time to ballot-qualify…well, who, exactly?

This is where the vote-for-Cuomo-instead-of-the-commie coalition really loses the plot, at least when it comes to declaring Sliwa as disqualifyingly frivolous. The locally ubiquitous radio host and Guardian Angels founder, who won an actually competitive GOP primary for mayor in 2021, did better in that general election (losing by a mere 39 percentage points) than did in 2013 the most normal and competent local Republican politician I have seen in my tenure here, Joe Lhota.

At a moment when voting even in local elections is all too often an opportunity to express how much you hate the other major party in Washington, it’s damnably difficult to find the non-Democratic candidate around these parties with enough name recognition and political charisma to break this dullard cycle. Campaign strategizing in such an environment takes more than just a few months of expressed irritability on Twitter, or idle pining for some fantasy centrist.

The “spoiler” sobriquet toward Sliwa, which is being slung around by the nominee of the (checks notes) Fight and Deliver Party, runs up against the same logical obstacle as does its traditional deployment against third-party and independent candidates: One contender’s votes do not automatically map onto a higher-polling competitor. Voting preferences are a bit weirder than all that, and always (in the case of marginal candidates) include a large percentage of people who, if deprived of their first choice, just wouldn’t vote.

As a sample size of one (albeit with a couple of other friends who think similarly), I intend to vote for Sliwa, because I would rather slurp sludge from the Gowanus than vote either for a socialist or an entitled retread who has already misgoverned me. Does this make me and my cohort responsible for the DSA hell coming next?

Voting rationales are like sphincters: Everyone’s got one, and they all stink. If I had cash on hand equal to my antipathy for statism, maybe I’d spend some of it on producing better anti-statist candidates, rather than berating the guy who has competed in and won two successive major-party primaries. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the admittedly limited satisfaction of voting against whichever asshole comes next.