The number one thing everyone at the Curtis Sliwa election night watch party could agree on was loving Curtis Sliwa. The number two thing was hating Andrew Cuomo. Aside from that, it was kind of a mixed bag.
Last night, dozens of Sliwa supporters packed into the basement of Arte Cafe, an old-school Italian haunt on the Upper West Side, to mark the end of a historic New York City mayoral race. Sliwa—the cat-loving, red-beret-sporting Republican nominee for mayor, best known for founding the vigilante crime-fighting group the Guardian Angels in 1979—was always a long shot for Gracie Mansion. Still, he stayed in the race until the bitter end, resisting repeated calls (and, he claims, offers for up to $10 million) to drop out.
The day before the election, President Donald Trump urged his supporters to hold their nose and cast a ballot for former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, claiming that a vote for Sliwa was a vote for “Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani.”
Sliwa supporters in the room decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo.
Partygoers at Arte were unfazed by Trump’s Sliwa snub. Supporters bought “Our Heart Beats for Curtis” T-shirts at the merch table. Former Republican Gov. George Pataki showed up, swarmed by news crews and fans. And some danced jubilantly by the bar before the results rolled in. (Not everyone enjoyed this decision: “This is an election party, not a dancehall,” one onlooker grumbled.)
At first, the event felt like a portal to the recent past: an idealized vision of a big tent Republican Party, pre-MAGA takeover. A man in a navy suit tapped my arm to thank me for helping him identify Pataki. “Thanks to you, I was able to get a selfie with him,” he said. The man told me his name was George, and he’d canvassed for Sliwa in Queens.
George wasn’t concerned about his candidate’s likely loss, because, he said, he was a Christian and he voted his conscience. “We need to be concerned about the poor, the homeless, regular people—not just billionaires and millionaires,” he said.
George, like several people I chatted with at the party, wasn’t a fan of Trump.
“He’s doing bad shit, like shooting up boats that he says got drugs on them,” a man named Brad in a God Bless America baseball cap told me. “Like you can’t do that. What if they’re just fishermen or something?”
Others said that they didn’t like Mamdani but were disappointed by Trump’s last-minute endorsement; they could not fathom voting for “Killer Cuomo” who “lost his own primary.” (There were plenty of red berets, but not a red MAGA hat in sight.)
Still, some attendees sported idiosyncratic merch. I saw a shirt that said “Anti Mamdani Social Club” and a red yarmulke with Trump’s face on it. Akiva Mandel, a 30-year-old accountant from Beverly Hills who is now based on the Upper East Side, told me he’d purchased the latter item in Israel. He was “scared shitless” of Mamdani and his supposed threat to Jews in New York City, because the democratic socialist has said he’d arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he visits.
Mandel admitted that he did not know much about Sliwa’s policies. But his father, a native New Yorker, had instructed him to vote for anyone but Mamdani. Still, he just couldn’t bring himself to turn that into supporting Cuomo.
“One of my best friends happens to be an African American woman. Her father was in a nursing home,” Mandel said. “Her father was unfortunately literally killed because of Andrew Cuomo.” (Cuomo has maintained that he followed federal guidelines when responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. New York’s Attorney General found that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand.)
Mandel called himself a “die-hard” Trump fan, but said he would “call [Trump] out when [he doesn’t] like what he does”—like when the president said there were “some very fine people” on both sides of the white supremacist Unite the Rally in 2017.
I asked Mandel if he’d heard about Mamdani’s pledge to increase funding to combat hate crimes.
“Anti-hate? This dude is full of hate,” Mandel said. “He doesn’t like gay people. He doesn’t like Black people.”
I was confused. I asked Mandel what Mamdani had said about Black people. He turned to his friend, Russell Miley, who is Black. “You wanna get this one?” Mandel asked. “Because I don’t remember.”
Miley also didn’t remember.
“Okay, fine, never mind,” he said. “I’m not Black, so I can’t comment.”
I eventually pieced together that Mandel and Miley were part of a sizeable cohort of people at Sliwa’s watch party who knew each other from counterprotesting at pro-Palestine events and drag queen story hours. Some had been arrested alongside Sliwa at the anti-migrant shelter protests in 2023; Brad, who didn’t agree with the Venezuelan boat strikes, told me he’d tried to stop the migrant buses from arriving in New York City because they were filled with people who he believed to be rapists and criminals.
Many of the counterprotesters were introduced to each other through a woman named D’anna Morgan, who was at Sliwa’s event, too. When I met her, she enthusiastically complimented my bangs and I was later disturbed to discover that she’d been arrested in 2022 for breaking into the apartment building of a New York City councilmember and vandalizing his office building with homophobic messages.
As I spoke to supporters, a guy from Infowars circled the room like a vulture. I saw a man in a Hot Wheels baseball cap chat with a blonde woman wearing red leather fingerless gloves, blue eyeliner, and a fur-trimmed jacket. A second person complimented my (normally unremarkable) bangs. Then, I was suddenly pulled into a three-way conversation with Shery Olivo—director of membership of the Washington Heights–based Dominican American Republican Club—and an energy healer named Marilyn, who was holding a chihuahua in a little red coat.
Olivo told me she’d helped start the club to give a voice to the conservative members of her community and demonstrate, “You’re not born a Democrat or Republican. These are decisions you make based on your values.” I asked her to describe those values.
“First of all, we believe there’s two genders,” Olivo said. “We don’t believe in all these genderologies.” She told me she supports Trump because of his policies on immigration. “I won’t allow the Dominican Republic to open its borders to Haiti,” she said, by way of explanation. Then her brash demeanor shifted, becoming more somber. “I lost my nephew eight months ago to gun violence, due to illegal immigrants that crossed the border and are in New York,” she told me. “The people that killed him are out there committing other crimes, while my sister cries every day.”
In light of all this, I asked Olivo how she felt about Trump endorsing Cuomo. “At the end of the day, it’s all politics. Whatever the president does, why he betrayed his party, I have no idea,” Olivo told me, adding that, “Trump is smart, and instead of having a communist, he would’ve preferred Cuomo.” So, I pressed her on whether she ever considered voting for Cuomo herself, if she feared having a so-called communist in City Hall.
“Absolutely not. I am a woman that respects herself. I know my worth,” she said. Marilyn nodded along. “I would never vote for a man who disrespects women. I have no respect for a man who doesn’t know where his hands belong.”
I asked her about the allegations that Trump has also disrespected women—to put it lightly—and how she feels about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
“Those are all distractions,” Marilyn chimed in.
“Distractions from what?” I asked.
“Whatever the agenda is,” said Marilyn. “There’s forces behind Trump, and there’s forces behind Mamdani. These are just faces.”
“But what are the forces?” I asked.
Marilyn gave me a knowing look.
“At the end of the day, Trump’s agenda is a national agenda,” Olivo explained, and with that she stalked off in her eggshell pantsuit to strike up a conversation with someone else nearby.
In the end, Sliwa’s exit from the race looks like it would not have made up the difference. Mamdani defeated Cuomo by nearly nine points, and with more than 50 percent of the vote, in an election that saw the highest voter turnout since 1969.
Sliwa began his concession speech ahead of schedule, at 9:24 p.m., when most major news outlets had not yet called the race for Mamdani. During his address to us, he spoke highly of the record-breaking voter turnout and railed against unnamed figures for trying to bribe him out of the race.
“From the time I declared my candidacy, the masters of the universe—the billionaires—decided that I should not have the right to represent all of you,” a teary-eyed Sliwa proclaimed. He recounted how someone had told him, “‘C’mon Curtis, everyone has a price.’” But he reiterated his commitment to representing the people that make up his movement: First on the list were “animal lovers,” which were then followed by “people who’ve been disenfranchised, people who have been pushed to the side, whose voices have not been heard, the homeless, the emotionally disturbed, the veterans, the people who ride the subways.”
Here was his version of the Republican Party as a big tent.
It’s hard not to find Sliwa’s eccentric delivery, and his old-school New York bonafides, a little endearing. Sliwa did not name Mamdani, but he noted, “I wish him good luck, because if he does well, we do well.” Still, before I could start feeling too warm and fuzzy, Sliwa issued a warning: “If you try to implement socialism, if you try to render our police weak and impotent … we are mobilizing and we will become the mayor-elect and his supporters’ worst enemy.”
Those threatening words didn’t really match the vibe of many Sliwa supporters in the room, who decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo. Even Miley and Mandel, of the far-right counterprotest crew, conceded to me that Mamdani is “polished” and “a good-looking dude.”
“He dresses well, he’s slim. I’ll give him credit,” Mandel said. “But he’s an asshole and an antisemite.”
In the end, Mamdani told NY1 that he didn’t get a congratulatory call from either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams last night.
But he got one from Curtis Sliwa.
