A Place Worth Winning
New York elects a Republican roughly once a generation. The moment is approaching and nobody on the right is ready.
It was evident before the last New York mayoral election that it was already lost. The next one doesn’t have to be—but it will be, unless conservatives stop treating the city like a horrifying novelty and start treating it like a place worth winning.
Curtis Sliwa got seven percent. In a race where nearly half the electorate was so desperate for an alternative that they voted for Andrew Cuomo (a man who resigned in disgrace, ran on no discernible message beyond “stop the socialist,” and still pulled 42 percent as a third-party candidate) the Republican nominee couldn’t crack double digits. The appetite for a credible opposition was enormous, yet the supply was nonexistent.
And nothing has changed. The national GOP has decided Mamdani is useful as a prop and not a problem to be solved. The NRCC is blasting emails linking vulnerable House Democrats to the scary socialist mayor. Congressional Republicans spent the transition period trying to strip him of his citizenship. There is a lot of activity but very little of it is serious—Republicans would rather watch New York City like some kind of cable news segment than invest in winning it in any meaningful way.
Mamdani’s inauguration speech promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Three weeks later, over a dozen New Yorkers were found dead on the street during a brutal cold snap.
One of his first actions as mayor was to halt the encampment sweeps that had been standard practice for ushering the homeless indoors during cold weather. He declared that forced removal would be used “as a last resort.” Then people died. When the winter storm hit on top of the cold weather, streets remained unplowed nearly a week later, garbage piled up across the city and the sanitation department announced “limited collection” with “slight delays.” By mid-February, Mamdani quietly reversed course and reinstated the sweeps. Behold, the warmth of collectivism.
The fiscal picture is somehow worse: Mamdani inherited a $12 billion budget deficit from Eric Adams, and his proposed solution—tax hikes—requires Albany’s cooperation that Governor Hochul has been understandably reluctant to acquiesce to. His fallback is the city’s first property tax increase in years, landing squarely on middle-class homeowners. His preliminary budget already breaks his campaign promises and beyond the budget, the full Mamdani agenda constitutes the most ambitious expansion of municipal government since John Lindsay. Lindsay’s ambitions nearly bankrupted the city.
Mamdani was polling at 1% fourteen months before the election. He won because he had extraordinary political magnetism, weak opposition, and the correct read on what working-class New Yorkers were hungry to hear. That’s enough to win an election but it has never been enough to run the most complicated city on earth.
This city elects Republicans. Not often, but it does.
New York tolerates Democratic mismanagement until the dysfunction becomes intolerable, then turns sharply to an outsider who promises competence, public safety, and fiscal discipline. La Guardia. Giuliani. Bloomberg. Each governed for at least eight years.
Bloomberg left in 2013. Since then: twelve years of Democrats. De Blasio governed like he was building a national brand. Adams governed like he was above the law. Mamdani governs like the problem with New York is that it hasn’t tried socialism yet. We are twelve years into the cycle. The conditions that historically trigger a Republican correction are assembling fast.
But the pattern isn’t automatic. It requires someone to walk through the door. Right now, there’s no one even standing outside.
New York City has the greatest concentration of talent in the world, and Republicans can’t produce a mayoral candidate who clears single digits. The citywide party apparatus is a shell. There is no serious political operation to speak of. Republicans hold five City Council seats out of fifty-one, down from six after losing their lone Bronx seat last November. Five out of fifty-one.
What New York’s conservatives need right now, not in 2028, is someone who was already there. Someone doing the unglamorous work: running a campaign for city council even though they’ll lose. Organizing on the ground. Showing up to community board meetings. Not someone who needed a Democratic Socialist as mayor to convince them the city was worth fighting for.
Bill Ackman and his cohort spent enormous social and financial capital trying to stop Mamdani last fall and accomplished nothing. If even a fraction of that energy had been channeled into something politically productive over the preceding decade, the landscape would look completely different. Instead, the money class showed up at the last minute to panic, which is what the money class always does.
If conservatives keep writing off the cities, instead of treating New York as someone else’s problem, we are ceding the commanding heights of American economic and cultural life to people who think collectivism is a good thing. Mamdani is not going to be mayor forever. If his agenda crashes into reality, the political environment in a few years could look radically different. But it will only benefit the right if someone has spent the intervening years building something real. Not tweeting. Not fundraising off the spectacle. Building.
Once a generation, New York opens the door. The question is whether anyone will be ready to walk through it or whether we’ll be standing around bashing the next Curtis Sliwa on Twitter.