After progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani won Tuesday’s New York City mayoral election, Republicans wasted little time in turning on their nominee Curtis Sliwa for refusing to drop out and splitting the conservative vote.
With 90.5 percent of ballots counted at the time of writing, Mamdani was found to have sailed to victory with 50.4 percent of the vote, making the 34-year-old Queens assemblyman the first Muslim to lead the Big Apple.
Independent Andrew Cuomo, the scandal-hit former state governor whom Mamdani had already trounced in the Democratic primary, was placed second with 41.6 percent while Sliwa was a distant third on 7.1 percent.
While the combined totals of the two runners-up would still only have made 48.7 percent, not enough to beat Mamdani, the right remained furious over what they saw as Sliwa’s obstinacy in refusing to suspend his campaign before Election Day to allow Cuomo, whom they acknowledged had the better chance of seeing off the left-leaning front-runner, a more straightforward path to victory.
None was more upset than George Santos, the disgraced former GOP congressman recently pardoned and freed from jail by President Donald Trump, who rebuked the Guardian Angels founder in a series of angry posts on X.
“I hope the idiot in the red beret is happy,” Santos wrote, posting an earlier snapshot of the incoming results.
“F*** you, Curtis Sliwa, I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours, and all your f***ing cats!” he fumed in a follow-up, alluding to Sliwa’s extensive collection of pet felines.
In other posts, he called Sliwa a “clown,” posted a video of Cuomo voter David Rem calling him a “f***ing scumbag” and expressing the hope that “every single New Yorker spits in your f***ing face every single day” and accused him of being in the pocket of his campaign adviser Rob Cole, demanding an audit of the Republican’s finances.
Trump himself responded to the results of Tuesday’s elections, which also saw Democrats pick up wins in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and California pass a redistricting plan to their advantage, by shirking the blame and posting ominously in all-caps: “...AND SO IT BEGINS!”
A call for calm and sanity came from an unexpected place, Newsmax, whose political analyst, Rob Astorino, said on Greg Kelly Reports that the real problem was not Sliwa but that Democrats were “energized” while Republican voters did not come out in force to rally behind Cuomo as the anti-Mamdani choice.
“I know what people are thinking,” Astorino said. “You’re doing simple math here – [Cuomo’s] 42 plus eight equals 50, and that would tie Mamdani, right?
“Wrong. You can’t think of it that way, because Cuomo probably got as many Republican votes as he would have.”
The pundit said that Sliwa’s support consisted of “solid, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans that would never vote for [Cuomo] anyway.”
“Even if he got some of it, it wouldn’t all go to Cuomo,” he said. “So Sliwa is not the spoiler. Andrew Cuomo couldn’t get to where he needed to get, and the energy is on the far left.”
Astorino went on to argue that street-level organizing had been the key to Mamdani’s triumph, crediting him with whipping up “an army of volunteers” with positivity and enthusiasm, which his rivals could not match.
”Cuomo had a ton of money, but he didn’t have the foot soldiers – and that’s what cost him this race,” he said.
