This is a brief update on the New York City mayoral election. There’s not a lot of good reason why this should be big news or a big story outside of the tristate area. But since politically obsessed people are pretty obsessed with it, I wanted to discuss a couple specific points about Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement that he’s leaving the race.
I had meant to do a post on Mamdani’s lead for a few weeks but I hadn’t gotten around to it. The gist of it is that there are actually vulnerabilities for Mamdani that a lot of the meta-debate about this race has missed. A month or two ago, a much more left-wing friend who has informally campaigned on behalf of Mamdani asked me what I thought of his chances of winning. I told her it was hard to imagine a scenario, short of some massive scandal, that would keep him from winning. I still think it’s highly likely he will. But note something about the polls.
Mamdani has never durably been able to get above 50%. That’s not so bad since that’s pretty hard in a four-person race. But it’s notable because he is the best-liked of the candidates by a significant measure. And even a significant number of voters who aren’t voting for him admire many of his qualities. But what got my attention were the recent polls which asked respondents about not just a four-person race but a hypothetical one in which Adams or Adams and Curtis Sliwa (the Republican) left the race. My assumption had been that Andrew Cuomo (running as an independent) would get most of those votes but not all of them. That would push Mamdani comfortably over 50% since he’s already pretty close. What the polls have shown, though, is that Mamdani picks up very, very few of the new votes in a head-to-head, two-person race. That’s a real warning sign — not a warning sign that he’s going to lose but that he could lose if both Adams and Sliwa got out.
But again, understand the prism through which I’m discussing this. I’m not saying he’s in trouble, necessarily. I’m saying early polls made me think his victory was almost guaranteed. But there are plausible scenarios where it could be much more competitive with Cuomo at least having a chance.
Two examples are a Marist poll from earlier in the month, which had Mamdani vs. Cuomo going from 45% to 24% in a four-person race to 49% to 39% in a two-person one. A Times poll from the beginning of the month showed the pattern even more clearly, going from 46% to 24% in a four-way to 48% to 44% in a two-way race.
But here’s why Adams’ departure in itself doesn’t matter that much: Adams is not just running behind Mamdani and Cuomo. He’s running significantly behind Sliwa as well. As long as Sliwa is in the race, Cuomo just doesn’t get close.
So maybe Sliwa gets out of the race too? Obviously anything is possible. He’s clearly not going to win. But here’s where Sliwa’s personality comes into the mix. Sliwa has been emphatic that he’s not dropping out of the race. He’s been very direct that he doesn’t like the idea of insiders buying or leveraging people out of the race. He’s really locked himself pretty tight on that front. He has been generally hostile to Donald Trump, which makes a sweetheart deal seem unlikely. The other part of this is Sliwa himself. You may remember Sliwa as the founder of the Guardian Angels. Then, for years, he was a talk radio guy in New York City, sort of populist (in the old sense) right wing vs. a liberal cohost.
So again … personality. In his later years Sliwa has become sort of an eccentric character. He seems to be running short of fucks left to give. This is his second time running as the GOP’s mayor nominee with essentially zero hope of winning. His main focuses in life seem to be living with cats and cat-centric public policy. And, interestingly, he’s not been very critical of Mamdani. You could say that’s because they’re not really competing for the same voters. So there’s no point. But the texture of his remarks give me the sense that he’s not terribly worried about Mamdani becoming mayor.
Adams may not care that much either. But he’s purely transactional and happy to be bought or simply rented. Adams made clear that he’d depart the race in exchange for staying out of jail or a generous Venmo payment.
