Recognizing the reality of a poor fourth place finish, Eric Adams has quit his hopeless reelection bid. Curtis Sliwa must now do the same, as he also has zero chance of victory and leave the field to Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani. One of them, and only one of them, will be the mayor on Jan. 1 and as we said in June, it should not be Mamdani, who has shown through this campaign that his inexperience and extreme far left positions would make him a terrible mayor.
As in the Democratic primary, it is a two-man race, with the same two contenders and voters deserve a clear choice and the winning candidate — the next mayor — deserves the support of a majority of New Yorkers who cast ballots.
Sliwa says he cares about the city, but staying in the race tips it towards Mamdani, who will hurt New York. Is that what Sliwa wants?
Adams, weighed down by his now-dismissed federal corruption case and a bevy of his former aides in their own trouble with the law, had no chance to be competitive in the Democratic primary and dropped out. He’s now done the same thing for the general election. Adams guided the city’s recovery from COVID and successfully brought down crimes, but Donald Trump making the criminal charges vanish fatally wounded him. There will be time ahead to more fully assess his single four-year term, but not now.
Now the imperative is for Sliwa to also make the hard choice and withdraw. Running as a Republican, he scored only 28% against Adams four years ago and this year he would be lucky to get even half of that against Cuomo and Mamdani. In the 2021 two-man race Sliwa was a very weak competitor; in a 2025 three-man contest Sliwa would be a decisive spoiler, throwing the election to Mandami, the democratic socialist antithetical to Republicans.
Mandami would wreck the city’s hard-earned financial stability and bring us back to the municipal bankruptcy that we saw 50 years ago. He wants to raise billions in taxes for his schemes and would pressure the Legislature in Albany to go along or face primaries by his allies.
He has never managed anything of note, but should he win, over the next four years he would be in charge of close to a half trillion dollars in city spending. He would go from an Assembly office with a handful of aides to one of the biggest enterprises in the country, with more than 300,000 employees.
His views on policing are laughable and dangerous, calling for defunding the NYPD, which he called “racist.” He has recanted on defunding and promised an apology for that slur to the police officers who protect us, including the detectives on his own personal detail, but it hasn’t come.
Freezing rent on regulated apartments won’t create new housing. A few government grocery stores won’t lower the cost of food. Promising universal free child care and no way to pay for it is playing tricks on parents.
He is a current sponsor a bill to decriminalize most prostitution and he said that “sex work is work.” It is not. It is degrading and barbaric exploitation of vulnerable women and men trapped by pimps into victimhood.
He wants to get rid of mayoral control of the schools, a retreat on decades of progress. And Mamdani retains his virulent hatred of Israel, despite weakly trying to soften it.
Ego is very real and it kept Adams, an incumbent with some real achievements in the race, always hoping that things would turn his way. It is an identical situation for Sliwa. He can’t win. The race is between Cuomo and Mamdani. Sliwa says that they are both no good and only he has the correct vision. That’s what Adams thought, until Sunday. Sliwa and the people around him need to come to the identical conclusion: He can’t win and must get out of the way.
Just as baseball now enters the playoffs with the poor-faring teams eliminated and done for the season, the poor-faring candidates, like Adams and Jim Walden, took themselves out. The last holdout of these guaranteed losers is Sliwa. His withdrawal will not decide the election between the seasoned moderate and centrist Cuomo and the callow and rigidly ideological Mamdani, but his continuation will immensely aid the leftist and his damaging ideas.
A splintered field produces a muddle result, which is why we wish ranked choice voting applied in the general election. But it doesn’t. Curtis Sliwa has been a character on the New York stage for nearly a half century. He has a difficult choice to make and there is only one correct answer. He should say that he loves this city and put the future of his 8 million fellow New Yorkers before his own personal pride. It is not shameful to admit defeat and withdraw. In this case, it is the noble thing for the sake of New York.
Curtis, take your red beret and make your bow and the city will salute you.
