“Everyone in this room is delusional.”
Tom, an Arte Cafe regular who claims he snuck into the private party being held there Tuesday night, is fighting for purchase around the packed bar. “It’s the Disneyland of delusion to be a Sliwa victory party,” he adds.
The crowd packed into the Upper West Side Italian restaurant on election night to celebrate Curtis Sliwa — a conservative, tough-on-crime fixture in New York City for decades, and the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor — is a comical mix of New Yorkers. Members of The Guardian Angels (Sliwa’s controversial volunteer crime prevention group) mingle in their red berets and blazers. Attendees sporting the jerseys of various New York sports franchises eye each other from across the room. Twenty-somethings who look like they may have lost their way on the way to a DSA victory party mingle near the door. A man in a “TRUMP” sweater and a cowboy hat floats through the throng. George Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, is there, too. At one point, attendees started dancing to reggaeton so loud it drowned out most conversations.
Everyone knows their candidate is not going to win. Yes, the televisions above the bar are broadcasting news coverage of the election results, but no one is really watching. Sliwa will not be delivering his victory speech tonight, and perhaps that’s why there doesn’t seem to be even an ounce of anxiety amid the revelry. Appetizers and small bites abound (“The meatballs are two for one!” one attendee jokes when a server approaches), and everyone is behaving like they’ve consumed more than their allotted drink tickets.
The energy in the room matches the candidate himself: irreverent, loud, earnest perhaps to a fault. The scene feels like a parody of a campaign and candidate transplanted out of a sitcom — but that nevertheless felt critical to a landmark mayoral race that would either usher in a new era of young, progressive leadership in the nation’s largest city, or double-down on scandal, and the establishment, by installing the state’s disgraced former governor..
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Supporters dance at the election party for Curtis Sliwa at Arte Cafe on Nov. 4, 2025 in New York City.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
The race for City Hall was bizarre and heated, with many believing Sliwa’s presence would tank any chance Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary, had of defeating Zohran Mamdani. Sliwa was of course running to win, but he was also running on principle. He and Mamdani were the only two of the three main candidates to actually be nominated for the job by their respective parties. He wasn’t going to bow out on behalf of the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary.
Cuomo chose to remain in the race with the backing of ultra-wealthy donors, and his strategy relied heavily on demanding that Sliwa leave the race. In September, the cat-loving, ball-busting Republican claimed he had received at least “seven offers so far to give me more money than my father and I ever made in a lifetime of work,” in order to drop out.
“Cuomo already lost the nomination,” one young attendee at Sliwa’s election party tells me, adding that while they ideally would have liked Sliwa to win, they could respect that — like the people of New York — “Mamdani and Curtis [both] acknowledge that Cuomo isn’t the right leader for New York City.”
Sliwa remained steadfast in his commitment to remain in the race, to mixed reactions from even his own supporters. Two attendees described themselves as “Curtis supporters who voted for Cuomo.” He had “no chance,” one says. “Nobody on the face of the Earth thought he was going to win,” the other adds. In their view, the defection was justified over the need to “defeat Mamdani at any cost.”
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In a more bizarre exchange, a young man insists to me that “Mamdani is a harbinger of something terrifying in American politics,” who “takes advantage of the contempt people have for white people and white civilization.”
“I might be a white guy, but I didn’t ask to be put in this position,” he adds. Another guest caught in the gaggle peeks over my shoulder and chuckles, slightly aghast, “You’re writing this all down?”
Others feel Sliwa’s campaign had more in common with the Mamdani platform than Cuomo’s — and a better memory about the former governor’s time in office than his supporters. Perhaps the most sober attendee I encounter the entire night looks me dead in the eye and says that he would take practically anyone over Cuomo, who “killed more people during Covid than Hamas did on October 7.”
Campaign signs sit in the corner at the watch party for Curtis Sliwa at Arte Cafe on Nov. 4, 2025 in New York City.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Cuomo, like Sliwa, lost. With far less grace. At his own election watch party, the former governor’s supporters chanted “shame on Sliwa” when the race was called. Cuomo supporters can be upset with Sliwa, but it doesn’t seem like it mattered. Mamdani won over 50 percent of the vote. Cuomo would have lost even if all of Sliwa’s voters went his way. Mamdani told NY1 on Wednesday that he did not receive a congratulatory call from either Cuomo or Mayor Eric Adams, but that Sliwa did ring him up on election night.
During his concession speech on Tuesday — given before most major outlets had even called the race for Mamdani — a teary eyed Sliwa, accompanied by his wife Nancy Regula, spoke to the crowd as if he’d suffered only the narrowest, most contested of losses — not a blowout for third.
He blasted the “billionaire” class that backed Cuomo and “decided” he had no right to run his campaign.
“Let me warn our new leader: If you try to implement socialism, if you try to render our police weak and impotent, if you forsake the people’s public safety, we’re not only organizing, but we are mobilizing,” he said. “We will become the mayor-elect and his supporters’ worst enemy.
“Good luck,” he offered Mamdani, amid chants of “fight, fight, fight,” from his supporters.
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“If he does well, we do well.”
Sliwa then retreated, and the party raged on.
