It’s Cuomo or catastrophe for New York

I don’t know many people who have said or written nastier things about Andrew Cuomo than I have. Yet if I still lived in the city, I’d vote for him next month in a heartbeat. Doing otherwise would be grossly irresponsible for someone who’s called the Big Apple home most of his life.

I served as spokesman to two Republican gubernatorial challengers to Cuomo. I can’t count the number of causes and clients I’ve worked with who locked horns with the former governor. My p.r. firm successfully sued Cuomo’s infamous “J-Joke” ethics board on First Amendment grounds.

I even ran the largest GOP club in Manhattan and spent a week in the mid-1980s in the bowels of the Republican National Committee chasing down unsubstantiated mob rumors about Andrew’s mother’s family. Suffice to say, I am no Cuomophile.

And yet there is no choice. It’s Cuomo or Catastrophe. This mayoral race is binary, not trinary. Voters need to get that through their heads as early voting begins this weekend.

The Republican, Curtis Sliwa, can’t win. I know and respect Curtis and his campaign team, but he will not garner a plurality of votes in November. Not in this balkanized political environment. Either Cuomo or socialist wunderkind Zohran Mamdani will be Gotham’s next chief executive. Just a fact.

One can largely thank sophomoric Gen-X voters who flooded Brooklyn and Manhattan after Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg saved New York from liberalism for the rise of this young Marxist. They have no idea how bad the city can get. It almost buckled under liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s; imagine what Mamdani’s angry socialism could bring.

Some ostensibly rational voters will be voting for Mamdani only to stick it to President Trump. They want to support the leftest-of-the-left candidate to express outrage, a classic case of a nose spiting a face. It makes no sense.

There’s time to reconsider.

It’s worth remembering in years like this one that New York only got Giuliani and Bloomberg because moderate Democrats and independents crossed over to support them. Giuliani won four out of five boroughs in his 1997 re-election — including Brooklyn and Manhattan! — in a city that was less than 20% Republican. Moderate Democrats put the city above their party, and Republicans were grateful for it.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The relatively moderate Democrat in the race, if one can call Cuomo that, needs Republicans and independents to cross over to stop the Mamdani crazy train. Every one of them should be considering voting for the former governor on his independent line.

This is not the New York of the 1970s and ’80s. For all its faults and crises, the city was far stronger back then. Wall Street wasn’t going anywhere, and our manufacturing base still provided tens of thousands of decently paying jobs. It would take decades more of counterproductive public policies to bring us to where we are now.

Today, New York is in major trouble. We’re bleeding finance-industry jobs, our golden goose, to other states. Office real estate, another chief financial girder, may never fully recover from COVID workplace changes. Broadway can no longer fill seats.

The bottom line is tax-revenue-generating professionals don’t need to be in Manhattan anymore. Neither do Fortune 500 companies. That’s a major problem. We should be doing everything in our power to reverse the trend, not electing a socialist looking to dance on capitalism’s grave. 

There are colleagues on the right who believe a Mamdani victory would be a long-term good for the GOP. It would show voters just how far left the Democratic Party has become. There is logic in that argument, but the stakes are too high. If Mamdani wins, there may be nothing left of the city to fight for. Mamdani’s radical anti-cop policies could damage the five boroughs for decades.

I can’t tell anyone what to do, but if it were me, I’d hold my nose and vote for Cuomo. Then I’d spend the next four years holding his feet to the fire. 

William F. B. O’Reilly is a New York-based Republican consultant and a former Newsday columnist.