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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
He wears a red beret everywhere and once had 17 cats. Now he’s the
wildcard of the NYC mayoral race
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
Updated:
8:00 AM EDT, Sun September 14, 2025
Source: CNN
Curtis Sliwa’s preferred campaign mode is riding the subway. He
boards trains in the back car, then chats and handshakes his way
forward, one by one, through the riders that he leaves just with a
business card about his candidacy. He asks everyone where they grew up.
The responses are part minor celebrity sighting, part genuine
affection. One man looked up from his book about the 1998 Yankees to
say, “Oh, it’s you!” A Staten Island Ferry attendant held the
boat for him, saying “We got you, Curtis.”
Every New Yorker he finds, Sliwa asks where they went to high school.
To Danish tourists, he talked about the bathroom attendants at
Copenhagen Central Station. To those with dogs, he reaches down to pet
them. To one from Dorchester, Massachusetts: “I’m all about Boston,
but I must tell you, I hate the Red Sox.” To a homeless woman
sleeping on the train who started to sit up as he bent on a knee to
gently offer a can of ginger ale: “You can lay back down.”
Sliwa is the founder of the , an anti-crime patrol group started in the
depths of the city’s worst years in the 1970s, and he has been known
for his red beret long before launching what is now his second
consecutive run as the Republican nominee for mayor. The never-ending
weirdness of this mayor’s race has put Sliwa in a position to shape
it – and to prove to many in his own party that they should take him
seriously.
Sliwa has been a part of New Yorkers’ lives for so long that the
comparatives stack up easily: For longer than many of the
now-redeveloped neighborhoods across the five boroughs have had their
foundations poured. For longer than Big Apple crime rates have been
tracked by computer. For a decade and a half longer than Zohran Mamdani
has been alive.
And for so long that he has a black-and-white photo of himself with
Donald Trump from 1986, when they were both on the rise as tabloid
favorites. Trump is in a tuxedo. Sliwa is in a Guardian Angels T-shirt
and, naturally, his beret.
Times have changed. These days, as interested as the president is in
the mayor’s race and stopping Mamdani from winning, Trump won’t
back Sliwa.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time. He wants
cats in Gracie Mansion,” the president said on Friday when asked
about the race in an appearance on Fox News. “We don’t need to have
thousands of cats.”
In the most splintered, unpredictable general election race in the
history of a city where politics is always a circus, Sliwa has New York
political observers wondering: Is his candidacy a missed opportunity to
take advantage of a split among Democrats? Or is having a person with
the notoriety and connections beyond the city’s long-withered
Republican base the only longshot that could actually, maybe, somehow
work?
“When they come up to me, they don’t say, ‘Oh, the
Republican,’” Sliwa said in an interview in a tiled, not-too-dirty
alcove of a subway station. “They don’t see me as a politician.
They see me as one of them, which is rare.”
Even after a life that’s included four marriages and being shot five
times in a taxi that he says was a hired hit from mob boss John Gotti,
this year’s race has Sliwa falling back late at night and early in
the morning on electronic dance music. The beats, he says, help him
focus.
About the cats and Trump
Trump was referring to the story of Sliwa having, at one point, 17 cats
in his small Upper West Side apartment. The candidate told CNN that was
because he was taking cats in from people getting rid of their pets
during the pandemic — and now he’s down to just six.
Sliwa did not respond to Trump on Friday. His sister, the media
director of the campaign, instead sent a statement from his campaign
manager that didn’t mention the president but went in depth about his
long history of caring for pets and having a vision about animal
welfare along with increasing affordability, being tough on crime and
enhancing quality of life. In addition to being the Republican nominee,
Sliwa is running this fall on a second, independent ballot line called
“Protect Animals.”
The local and national conversation around the mayor’s race has
focused on incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who to discuss potential job
offers if he were to drop out. Some want opposition to Mamdani to
coalesce around Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor running as
an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary.
For now, Adams is . Polls show Mamdani in a strong position ahead of
the November election, with more establishment Democrats warming to him
although top party leaders are .
Sliwa has been all but forgotten in the discussion – but he’s
outpolling Adams. A poll from found Mamdani with 46% support and Cuomo
at 24% support. Sliwa was at 15% and Adams at 9%.
Some believe that only an ingrained figure like Sliwa could attract
enough Democrats in the last weeks of the campaign to have a chance.
Others see his candidacy as a missed opportunity, wishing a more
conventional Republican had been around to take advantage of the
splintered mess of the Democratic candidates and spend more time
talking about governing.
Sliwa pulled almost 28% as the , with 312,000 votes. Since then, Lee
Zeldin, the in 2022, got 542,000 votes out of New York City, while
Trump got 838,000 votes out of the city last year.
The other three candidates and many in their bases can’t stand each
other. And there’s no ranked-choice voting in November like there was
in the primary.
In other words: Though Zeldin and Trump each got only about 30% in New
York City, in a splintered field with multiple viable candidates, being
elected the next mayor could take far less than a majority.
But while billionaire John Catsimatidis has been trying to corral
efforts to beat Mamdani, including his calls to the president, his
longtime friend, he hasn’t been pushing for Sliwa. That’s despite
Sliwa endorsing Catsimatidis in his own Republican run for mayor in
2013 and as the billionaire’s daughter, as the Manhattan Republican
chair, is supporting Sliwa after declining calls to run for mayor
herself.
“The world’s not going to come to an end if Curtis is mayor,” was
how Catsimatidis put it in an interview with CNN, calling his one-time
fellow local radio host “an entertainer.”
“He knows the city and wants to do the right thing,” he said. “He
might have a shot.”
Sliwa dismissed Catsimatidis and other wealthy figures like billionaire
investor Bill Ackman who are intensely opposed to Mamdani and
democratic socialism but have never given him a real look.
“The billionaires have no influence in this campaign,” Sliwa said.
“These billionaires know nothing about politics because they’re not
in the streets.”
As for Trump, Sliwa previously told CNN he voted for the president for
the first time last year and agrees with much of what he is doing, but
they haven’t talked for years. Even before the president’s swipe at
him on Friday, he insisted he wanted neither a job offer nor an
endorsement.
He does like to talk about the first time their politics converged,
though: the night that photo was taken, when they were both honored in
1986 by the state Conservative Party.
“He looks to me and he goes, ‘Curtis, what are we gonna do?’ I
said, ‘I don’t know, Donald, you’re not a conservative, I’m not
a conservative.’ He goes, ‘Let’s make the best of it,’” Sliwa
recalled.
What Sliwa’s backers say
Sliwa has already been raising more money than Cuomo or Adams. He likes
to point out he hasn’t even started advertising beyond the 100,000
New Yorkers he estimates he’s given one of his business cards to on
the subway.
“Curtis is more than just a red beret and always has been. He works
hard, he’s concerned about the policies. He knows New York City from
the bottom up,” said New York State GOP chairman Ed Cox, who, in the
tiny world of city GOP politics, is the son-in-law of Richard Nixon and
whose son used to be married to Catsimatidis’ daughter. “You’ve
got three very flawed Democrats—if those three split up the
Democratic vote, guess what, with the Republican vote and the Trump
vote, that’s a clear win for Curtis.”
How much Republican institutional support will be there for Sliwa,
given city campaign finance laws limiting coordination as well as Trump
and other Republicans’ machinations in favor of Cuomo, Cox would not
say.
“He has spent four decades working on behalf of the city—but from
his heart, not as a public servant,” said US Rep. Nicole Malliotakis,
who represents Staten Island and a part of Brooklyn and is the only
Republican in the city’s congressional delegation.
A candidate who was “a little more polished,” Malliotakis said,
“might be stronger, but when it comes down to actual experience and
knowing the ins and outs of this city… that’s what we’re hoping
happens here, that people recognize that like Sesame Street, one of
these things is not like the other.”
But Malliotakis is behind him. So is Elise Stefanik, the upstate
congresswoman gearing up to run for governor next year, who has
endorsed him and whose candidacy Sliwa says he could boost with a win
of his own – just like when Rudy Giuliani was first elected in 1993
and a Republican beat Cuomo’s father, then the incumbent governor,
the following year.
An aide to Stefanik, though, did not respond to multiple requests to
interview the congresswoman about Sliwa.
A different kind of affordability message
“You don’t win with Republicans in New York City,” Sliwa said,
arguing that of his 2021 vote share, “most of it was independents —
double the number of Republicans — and moderate Democrats.”
Affordability concerns moved voters to Mamdani in the spring as those
crime worries faded, but Sliwa believes they are spiking again. Even on
affordability, Sliwa says his years watching projects and promises
flounder across the city has left him with a more demanding
perspective.
“All these candidates say, ‘Five years from now, 10 years from now,
we’ll have 500,000 apartments here,’” Sliwa said. “What are we
going to do now to create affordable housing, not then?”
As opposed to Mamdani, who is proposing tax hikes on the wealthy, Sliwa
wants to cut income, property and corporate taxes, while shrinking city
spending to attract new development.
For the Guardian Angel, the conversation always comes back to crime.
Sliwa wants police officers off the subway platforms and patrolling the
train cars in pairs.
“‘It’s really not bad in the subway,’” Sliwa said, mocking
the way he says he hears the other mayoral candidates talking as he
spoke to reporters outside a subway station last weekend. “Easy for
them to say, like Eric Adams, because he’s never in the subways
unless he has a total NYPD armed security team with him. You don’t
see Zohran in the subway. And by the way, if they built a subway
extension to the Hamptons, you might see Andy Cuomo out in the
suburbs.”
Sliwa doesn’t spend much time thinking about what would happen if
somehow he wins. But one thing he realized, as he stood there: he’d
have to change his own subway routine to accept a police detail if he
did.
“Well, that’s different. Obviously, that is almost mandated that
you have to have a detail with you,” Sliwa said. “So, I’ll learn
to live with it.”
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