Curtis Sliwa, the Republican Party’s candidate for New York City mayor, has vowed to stay in the race, despite mounting calls urging him to quit just days before early voting begins.
“Let’s be very clear: I am not dropping out—under no circumstances,” Sliwa told reporters on Tuesday outside a Manhattan subway station. “I’ve already been offered money to drop out, I said no.”
Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels, a volunteer neighborhood watch group that patrols the city’s subways and streets, emphasized his grassroots ties and urged New Yorkers to vote for a candidate who represents ordinary residents rather than wealthy interests.
“The billionaires are not picking the mayor. They’ve been wrong every step of the way,” he said.
Sliwa’s comments came a day after billionaire businessman and Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis publicly called for him to withdraw from the race and unite behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic Party’s nomination to Zohran Mamdani.
Catsimatidis, who previously backed Mayor Eric Adams’s now-suspended reelection campaign, has become a vocal advocate for consolidating moderate and conservative voters behind a single anti-Mamdani candidate. Speaking Monday on “Sid & Friends in the Morning,” a talk show on his 77 WABC Radio network, Catsimatidis said that Sliwa’s exit was necessary to prevent a Mamdani victory.
“Curtis has to realize that he should love New York more than anything else. It certainly looks like Curtis should pull out right now,” Catsimatidis told host Sid Rosenberg, adding that Sliwa, at 71, still has plenty of political life ahead of him. “He could win the next election because people will be proud of him for doing the right thing for New York City, instead of the wrong thing.”
“We cannot take a chance on Zohran winning—and every commonsense New Yorker feels the same way,” Catsimatidis said.
Calls for Sliwa to quit have intensified over the past weeks as multiple polls show that Mamdani maintains a comfortable double-digit lead over both Cuomo and Sliwa, and that the gap between Mamdani and Cuomo would narrow significantly if Sliwa were to withdraw.
With all three candidates still in the race, however, Mamdani remains the frontrunner with 43.2 percent support, followed by Cuomo at 28.9 percent and Sliwa at 19.4 percent, according to the poll.
Despite the pressure, Sliwa continues to enjoy backing from some prominent figures in the Republican Party, including former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Gov. George Pataki, and Catsimatidis’s daughter Andrea, who chairs the New York County Republican Committee.
“Republican voters are not going to vote for Andrew Cuomo. He lost his own party’s primary, badly, and is not even appearing on the ballot on a major party line. Republicans should not have to clean up the mess Andrew Cuomo and the Democrats created, and we will not allow the political class to interfere with voters or hijack our ballot.”
Mamdani, meanwhile, has encouraged Sliwa to stay in the race.
“I never thought I would say this, but here we are—the only two candidates that agree that billionaires shouldn’t determine the future of this city are the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee,” Mamdani, a self-styled democratic socialist who has vowed to raise taxes on the city’s top earners to fund his affordability agenda, told reporters in Manhattan on Monday.
“We know that New Yorkers, no matter what they think about our politics, want to make their own decisions, and that is one place where Curtis and I agree, which is that it’s time for New Yorkers to make this decision, not for billionaire donors to decide who gets to run this city.
“My advice to him is to continue to make his own case.”
All the back and forth comes less than a week before the Nov. 4 election’s early voting begins on Saturday, Oct. 25.
