New York City politics has always been a theater of contradictions. It is the most Democratic city in America, yet Republicans still dutifully put forward candidates for mayor. Every four years a familiar ritual unfolds. A Republican standard bearer is chosen, the race is hyped, and then it ends the same way, with a lopsided Democratic victory.
In 2025, the play feels especially surreal. The GOP has settled once again on Curtis Sliwa, the red beret wearing founder of the Guardian Angels and a perennial candidate. He is colorful, quotable, and always ready with a stunt or soundbite, but he is almost certainly doomed to lose. Which forces a deeper, stranger question. Why would the party embrace a candidate it knows cannot win? The answer is not incompetence but strategy. By fielding Sliwa, Republicans are, intentionally or not, helping to clear the path for Zohran Mamdani, the left wing Democrat who stunned the establishment by winning his party’s primary.
To grasp this strategy, one has to start with the peculiar landscape of 2025. Mamdani is the Democratic nominee. Andrew Cuomo, the scandal scarred former governor, is running as an independent. Eric Adams, the embattled mayor, is also attempting to hold on as an independent. And then there is Sliwa, carrying the Republican line. The mechanics of the general election are simple but decisive. New York City does not use ranked choice in November. Whoever gets the most votes, no matter how fractured the field, wins. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, the GOP knows full well their candidate cannot cobble together a winning plurality, let alone a majority. Yet the Sliwa candidacy has value precisely because it drains oxygen from the moderates, and by doing so, it strengthens Mamdani’s chances of emerging on top.
When seen through the larger chessboard of American politics, the choice of Sliwa looks less baffling. National Republicans do not actually want a competitive mayoral candidate in New York City. What they want is a symbol. If Mamdani wins, New York will have its first openly socialist mayor, a progressive whose platform reads like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America. For Republicans across the country, that outcome is a gift. They will point to New York as proof of what Democrats really are, an image they can wield in swing states and suburban districts. Sliwa’s defeat becomes not a humiliation but a setup. He is the foil that allows Mamdani to ascend, and his ascension becomes a talking point that Republicans can use far beyond the five boroughs.
There is also the dynamic inside the Democratic Party itself. Adams and Cuomo represent the moderate wing, the machine politics that have traditionally ruled New York. Mamdani represents the insurgent left. If Republicans were serious about winning, they would seek to boost the moderate vote in order to block Mamdani. Instead, they are doing the opposite, allowing their ballot line to be occupied by a candidate with no path to crossover appeal. This weakens Adams and Cuomo indirectly, since some outer borough moderates who might otherwise have leaned toward them will default to Sliwa. The more the field fragments, the more Mamdani benefits. In this sense, Republicans are not neutral actors, they are silent allies of the progressive insurgent.
Sliwa himself plays into this arrangement perfectly. He is a convenient sacrificial lamb, a man with name recognition, endless energy, and a flair for self promotion. He requires no introduction to voters, he costs little to maintain, and he can stage enough street theater to give the illusion of a real race. County party leaders prefer this arrangement because it spares them the burden of building a new candidate from scratch. They get the benefits of fundraising lists and ballot line continuity without the risk of accidentally empowering a moderate who might split Mamdani’s opposition more effectively. In practice, this is not a campaign designed to win, it is a campaign designed to frame the outcome.
From ground level, the Sliwa campaign looks like a sideshow. From thirty thousand feet, it looks like a deliberate pawn sacrifice. Republicans want New York City to be a laboratory for progressive governance because they believe it will implode under the weight of its own ambitions. High rents, strained budgets, migrant shelters, and public safety anxieties are already the defining issues. A Mamdani mayoralty, they calculate, will intensify the city’s contradictions. And when that happens, the GOP will be ready to say, “Look what happens when you put socialists in charge.” That is not a local pitch, it is a national one, and it is worth far more than a futile mayoral bid.
New Yorkers are left in a peculiar position. On the surface, they see a raucous four way contest, with familiar names battling for the city’s future. Beneath the surface, the game is already rigged. Democrats are split, Republicans are playing to lose, and Mamdani is the one who gains. Sliwa’s role is not to win votes but to guarantee that the right votes do not coalesce around anyone who could block the left. It is a paradoxical dance, one in which the GOP and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are, for a moment, moving in rhythm.
The story of Curtis Sliwa’s 2025 run is not about the delusion of a man who thinks he can be mayor. It is about the calculation of a party that understands it cannot win in New York but can win elsewhere by letting New York go further left. That is the hidden logic of this year’s mayoral race. By choosing a candidate they know will lose, Republicans are quietly helping Mamdani, and in doing so, setting the stage for the battles they care about far more than who runs City Hall.
The illusion of two parties
To understand why this gambit works, one has to peel back the veil of American politics itself. We are told, endlessly, that two great forces are locked in combat. Democrats versus Republicans, blue versus red, liberal versus conservative. The reality is less dramatic and far more depressing. There is only one party, the party of money, and it speaks with two dialects. Both factions kneel to landlords, corporations, and donors who view the city not as a community but as an asset. Theatrics keep voters entertained, but behind the curtain the script never changes.
New York offers the clearest proof of this illusion. Each mayor comes in promising change, and each mayor leaves having presided over a deeper entrenchment of the same power structure. Bloomberg called himself an independent, but his tenure delivered the most aggressive expansion of developer giveaways in a century. De Blasio styled himself as progressive, yet he fueled rezoning schemes that enriched luxury builders while displacing working families. Eric Adams campaigned as a man of the people, then opened the door wider to real estate donors than anyone before him. The shape of the rhetoric varies, the accent changes, but the loyalty remains the same.
Landlords run New York because housing is the city’s bloodstream. If you control rent, you control livelihoods, small businesses, family stability, even schools. Corporations run New York because capital dictates the terms of employment, public investment, and infrastructure priorities. Every campaign donation, every real estate tax abatement, every corporate subsidy is a bribe disguised as policy. When we say Democrat or Republican in New York, what we really mean is which faction of the landlord corporate bloc will manage the city for the next four years.
The tragedy is not that Curtis Sliwa cannot win. The tragedy is that it does not matter who wins. Whether it is Adams or Mamdani or Cuomo or Sliwa, the developers will still build towers no one can afford, the hedge funds will still treat the skyline like a balance sheet, and the ordinary New Yorker will still be asked to pay more for less.
The algorithm of extinction
Project the city forward without intervention, and the outcome resembles an equation. New York’s future follows a program, step by step, each variable compounding the next.
The first phase is gentrification, a word that once described a neighborhood or two, now a force that remakes boroughs wholesale. Artists, immigrants, and workers build culture, landlords spot an opportunity, developers move in, and the cycle ends with glass condos and chain stores. Williamsburg was the model, Harlem the warning, and now Queens neighborhoods once considered untouchable are well along the path.
The second phase is speculation. Towers rise not because the city needs them, but because investors in Shanghai, Dubai, or Zurich want a safe deposit box in the sky. Apartments stand empty, lights off at night, yet prices climb as if demand were infinite. The city becomes less a home than a trading floor, with housing as the commodity.
The third phase is exclusion. Families that once defined neighborhoods are pushed further out. Teachers, firefighters, subway workers, and restaurant staff cannot afford to live in the city they serve. Young people arrive with student debt and depart when the rent doubles. The population becomes transient, composed of those who can endure the costs temporarily, until they retreat to somewhere sustainable.
The fourth and final phase is ossification. The city ceases to be alive in the way it once was. Culture becomes imported entertainment rather than lived expression. Streets fill with luxury storefronts indistinguishable from Miami or Los Angeles. Towers are thrown up cheaply but rented dearly, monuments to profit rather than architecture. The myth of New York as the city of strivers collapses into the reality of New York as a theme park for wealth.
This extinction is not sudden, it is incremental. A bodega closes here, a community theater shutters there, a block of row houses is replaced by a sterile tower, a rent stabilized building is quietly emptied and flipped. Each act is small, but together they change the DNA of the city. The New Yorker, once defined by grit, pride, and permanence, becomes a relic. In their place are transplants who see the city as a stepping stone, not a destiny.
If nothing interrupts this algorithm, New York will survive on maps but die in essence. It will be crowded but hollow, affluent but fragile, expensive yet cheap in spirit. The extinction of New York as we know it will not come from a single disaster but from the accumulation of thousands of unremarkable policy decisions, each one favoring landlords and corporations over the people who once made the city extraordinary.
The choice that remains
What lies ahead for New York is not destiny but decision. The illusion of two parties, the puppet show of Democrats and Republicans sparring while serving the same landlords, can only continue if voters consent to it. If people accept Curtis Sliwa as a clownish diversion, Mamdani as a novelty act, Cuomo as a ghost of power past, and Adams as a caretaker for the donor class, then nothing will change. The algorithm will run its course. The city will be emptied of its essence, reduced to towers and transplants, a luxury brand that markets itself as New York while erasing the New Yorker.
But illusions lose power when they are named. If New Yorkers recognize that every election is choreographed, that the real party in charge is money, then the stage begins to crack. If the public refuses to be satisfied with temporary fixes and celebrity candidates, if it demands housing that is affordable, wages that match reality, and a government that serves residents rather than landlords, the algorithm can be interrupted. The city has reinvented itself before. It has risen from bankruptcy, crime waves, blackouts, and recessions. It can do so again, but only if the people who live here stop waiting for salvation from the actors on stage and begin to demand it themselves.
The extinction of New York is not inevitable, but neither is its survival. It depends on whether its people still believe that being a New Yorker means something worth defending. If they do, then the story can end differently. If they do not, then the skyline will stand tall while the soul of the city quietly disappears.
This piece is opinion and analysis, not a statement of fact. It reflects an interpretation of political dynamics in NYC’s 2025 mayoral race.
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