{"id":17540,"date":"2025-10-26T19:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/17540\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T19:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T19:59:07","slug":"its-cuomo-or-catastrophe-for-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/17540\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Cuomo or catastrophe for New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know many people who have said or written nastier things about Andrew Cuomo<\/a> than I have. Yet if I still lived in the city, I\u2019d vote for him next month in a heartbeat. Doing otherwise would be grossly irresponsible for someone who\u2019s called the Big Apple home most of his life.<\/p>\n

I served as spokesman to two Republican gubernatorial challengers to Cuomo. I can\u2019t count the number of causes and clients I\u2019ve worked with who locked horns with the former governor. My p.r. firm successfully sued Cuomo\u2019s infamous \u201cJ-Joke\u201d ethics board <\/a>on First Amendment grounds.<\/p>\n

Independent candidate former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a mayoral debate on Oct. 16. AP<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mother\u2019s family. Suffice to say, I am no Cuomophile.<\/p>\n

And yet there is no choice. It\u2019s Cuomo or Catastrophe. This mayoral race is binary, not trinary. Voters need to get that through their heads as early voting begins this weekend.<\/p>\n

William F. B. O\u2019Reilly, a New York-based Republican consultant and a former Newsday columnist, believes Cuomo is the best suited of the three candidates to be New York\u2019s next mayor.\u00a0 Courtesy of Bill O’Reilly<\/p>\n

The Republican, Curtis Sliwa<\/a>, can\u2019t 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\u2019s next chief executive. Just a fact.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s angry socialism could bring.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s time to reconsider.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 \u2014 including Brooklyn and Manhattan! \u2014 in a city that was less than 20% Republican. Moderate Democrats put the city above their party, and Republicans were grateful for it.<\/p>\n

New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) shakes hands with Mayoral candidate Mike Bloomberg in 2001. REUTERS<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This is not the New York of the 1970s and \u201980s. For all its faults and crises, the city was far stronger back then. Wall Street wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Today, New York is in major trouble. We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Independent candidate former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani participate in a mayoral debate on October 16. via REUTERS<\/p>\n

The bottom line is tax-revenue-generating professionals don\u2019t need to be in Manhattan anymore. Neither do Fortune 500 companies. That\u2019s a major problem. We should be doing everything in our power to reverse the trend, not electing a socialist looking to dance on capitalism\u2019s grave.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s radical anti-cop policies<\/a> could damage the five boroughs for decades.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t tell anyone what to do, but if it were me, I\u2019d hold my nose and vote for Cuomo. Then I\u2019d spend the next four years holding his feet to the fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

William F. B. O\u2019Reilly is a New York-based Republican consultant and a former Newsday columnist.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t know many people who have said or written nastier things about Andrew Cuomo than I have.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[80,9175,9,24,55,54,56,563,299,11831,82],"class_list":["post-17540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-andrew-cuomo","tag-curtis-silwa","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-nyc-mayoral-election-2025","tag-opinion","tag-postscript","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}