JNS
“You let the chips fall where they may,” New York voter Jay Etzel told JNS at Sliwa’s Election Night watch party. “But at least you had the hero ready. Heroes don’t back out.”
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate in Tuesday’s New York City mayoral race, did not congratulate Zohran Mamdani on a hard-fought campaign when he took to the microphone in front of a crowd of a few dozen supporters at about 9:30 p.m. He did not even say Mamdani’s name.
“So we have a mayor-elect,” Sliwa, 71, told his supporters flatly at Arte Cafe, an Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Obviously, I wish him good luck, because if he does well, we do well.”
Barely 30 minutes after polls closed in the city, television screens around the densely packed room, in which several supporters donned Sliwa’s signature red beret, were showing that Mamdani, the 34-year-old self-described socialist from Queens, was soon to be elected the next mayor of the Big Apple.
“Let me warn our new leader. If you try to implement socialism, if you try to render our police weak and impotent, if you forsake the people’s public safety, we’re not only organizing, we are mobilizing,” Sliwa said. “We will become the mayor-elect and his supporters’ worst enemy.”
The words landed heavy in a room that had been buzzing just minutes earlier, filled with fried calamari, blaring hip-hop music and talk of a comeback. The campaign was over. The fight was not, Sliwa promised.
“Fight, fight, fight!” Sliwa and his supporters shouted. He and they, many sporting merchandise proclaiming that their “heart beats for Curtis,” pumped their fists in the air.
“Tonight, those people who think they are powerful and think we are powerless will understand that the people have spoken,” Sliwa said, appearing to tear up. “We will hold the mayor-elect to make sure that he serves all the people and that socialism does not replace capitalism.”
Sliwa had spent most of his campaign polling a distant third. A lifelong New Yorker, who previously ran for mayor in 2021 and lost to incumbent Eric Adams, he faced mounting pressure to withdraw, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, amid claims that his candidacy siphoned votes from independent candidate and former governor Andrew Cuomo, who has received 41.6% of the vote so far, compared to Mamdani’s 50.4%.
Many of Sliwa’s supporters bragged about making the “moral” choice by siding with the candidate who took 7.1% of the vote. It didn’t seem to matter to his supporters whether Sliwa’s dropping out would have made a difference in the outcome of the race.
“You’ve got to go with your best,” Jay Etzel, a voter from Westchester, N.Y., told JNS. “A brilliant, wonderful leader and a hero don’t come along often, and when he does, you’d better not say, ‘Well, we’re worried we’re going to lose if we vote for you.’ You vote for the man.”
“You let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “But at least you had the hero ready. Heroes don’t back out.”
Former New York governor George Pataki talks to reporters at an election night watch event for Republican nominee for New York City mayor Curtis Sliwa at Arte Cafe in Manhattan, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo by Rikki Zagelbaum.
Minutes before polls closed at 9 p.m., former New York governor George Pataki, who had stuck by Sliwa throughout the campaign, made an unannounced appearance at the watch party. The Republican governor told reporters that Trump had made the wrong decision in endorsing Cuomo.
“There is always an excuse when someone hasn’t won,” Pataki said. “You can always blame it on someone else. But ultimately, my experience is to look in the mirror.”
Akiva Mandel, an Orthodox Jew living in Manhattan, told JNS that he backed Sliwa, “because he supports me and the Jewish community, of course.”
Mandel was frightened by Mamdani’s anti-Israel rhetoric, including his refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and his past remarks that he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the premier came to New York City.
Mandel said his father, a rabbi and native New Yorker, told him that he had never heard a mayor espouse such rhetoric in his 26 years living in the city.
“A vote for Mamdani is a vote for antisemitism and Nazism,” said Mandel, a Yeshiva University alumnus. “I mean, not literally Nazism, but for Islamic terrorism.”
Some attendees said that they believe the election was rigged.
“I’m disappointed,” Bradford Solomon, a Jewish member of the Guardian Angels, told JNS.
“Honestly, I was hoping—like, I wasn’t expecting Curtis to win—but to only get 7%? You know, I question these voting machines,” he said. “They could be hacked. We can’t trust it.”
Solomon told JNS that Sliwa had more people at his debate rally than Mamdani or Cuomo did. “He had four times the people that Cuomo had,” he said. “Nobody cares about Cuomo. And then, all of a sudden, these results? It’s very fishy.”
As JNS spoke with Solomon, another attendee shouted that he doesn’t support Mamdani, because the mayor-elect “low-key supports Israel,” and “he supports Israel’s right to exist.” Solomon also told JNS that AIPAC has an outsized influence and that “Israel controls our politicians.”
Sliwa told the audience that his work will continue despite losing the election.
“We could have saved the city,” he said. “We will continue our mission. That’s right. We are not leaving for Florida or Georgia, North Carolina or South Carolina, Texas or Tennessee. We stand. We fight for war.”
“We’ve got to get together and figure this out,” Bobby, of Brooklyn, told JNS. “Because let me tell you something. What’s about to come is going to get real ugly, especially for anyone who works for a living or was born here. It’s gonna get bad, real quick.”
“Whether it’s a civil war or whatever it may be, hopefully not, we can still fight this politically, economically and nonviolently,” said the Brooklynite, who didn’t share a last name. “As much as some of us would love to take our frustrations out physically, we’re better than that. We’re not animals.”
“We’re not the left,” he said. “They’re the ones who do the violence. We don’t. Only the left does that.”
‘It has to change now’
Eduardo Berroa-Wisky, part of Sliwa’s Bronx canvassing committee, told JNS that he is “extremely tired of the false promises made by the Democratic Party.”
“New York City has been under one-party rule for too long. It has to stop. It has to change now,” he said. “Curtis is the man of the people. He’s out there every day in New York like the rest of us. He’s a real New Yorker, the kind of leader this city needs.”
Sliwa “knows all the ZIP codes, all the subway lines. He’s fed up with the chaos and the crime that have taken over the city,” Berroa-Wisky said. “That’s why he founded the Guardian Angels back in 1979 to protect people, to bring safety to our communities and to stand up for ordinary New Yorkers.”
“That’s what we need—a man like Curtis Sliwa who will hold people in power accountable, end corruption and restore law and order,” he said. “Because here’s the truth. When you have more public safety, you have more business. When there’s less safety, businesses move out. It’s that simple. Curtis understands that. He’s the one who can turn it around.”
