Curtis Sliwa won the Republican primary in the New York mayor’s race on Tuesday, setting up a long-shot challenge in November to the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.
With a significant portion of votes counted, Mr. Sliwa was beating Fernando Mateo by over 40 percentage points, according to The Associated Press.
His victory capped a bitter campaign pitting onetime friends and first-time candidates against each other to become the standard-bearer of a party whose political power in New York has waned significantly since it vaulted consecutive mayors, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, to City Hall for a total of five terms.
With public attention on crime and safety increasing amid the city’s efforts to move past the coronavirus pandemic, both Republican candidates this year sought to claim the law-and-order mantle. But Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of self-appointed crime fighters, may have been especially well positioned to capitalize on the circumstances.
Juan Pagan, who was in the crowd at Mr. Sliwa’s primary night party at the Empire Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, said the candidate’s background had given him a clear edge in the race.
“He’s a hard-core New Yorker,” said Mr. Pagan, a 65-year-old retiree from the Lower East Side, speaking in room festooned with red and white balloons scraping the ceiling beneath a sparkling chandelier. “It’s in his veins, it’s in his blood.”
Ayton Eller, wearing a “Refund the Police” T-shirt and a “Trump 2020” yarmulke, echoed that sentiment.
“He knows New York inside and out, he’s been to all the diverse neighborhoods, Harlem, the Bronx,” said Mr. Eller, 41, an accountant who lives in Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood.
Mr. Giuliani, who endorsed Mr. Sliwa, was also in attendance. He said that Democrats discounted the Republican at their peril.
“People underestimate Curtis,” Mr. Giuliani said.
A radio host and longtime fixture in the New York media landscape who joined the Republican Party only last year, Mr. Sliwa first gained prominence in the 1980s for his creation of the crime-fighting group, whose members roamed the subway and streets in red berets, offering a sense of safety to some New Yorkers who felt especially jittery at a time when crime was far more rampant in the city than it is now.
The group earned its share of headlines, but Mr. Sliwa, a former McDonald’s night manager, later acknowledged that some of them were based on events that had been faked for the publicity.
Mr. Mateo, a restaurateur with ties to New York’s taxi industry, was born in the Dominican Republic and is a longtime Republican fund-raiser. He gained his own measure of notoriety when it emerged that he had acted as a middleman in fund-raising efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio that attracted scrutiny from investigators.
Republican leaders were divided over which candidate was the best option to vie for leadership of a city where Democrats hold an edge of more than six to one in registered voters. The Manhattan, Queens and Bronx Republican Parties endorsed Mr. Mateo; Mr. Sliwa had the backing of the Staten Island and Brooklyn parties.
The Republican nominating contest on Tuesday came as the party has grown increasingly irrelevant in the nation’s large cities, aligning itself firmly with rural, conservative voters since Donald J. Trump’s ascent.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
