The Billionaire Hamptons Plot to Beat Zohran Mamdani
Mamdani doesn’t think billionaires should exist, but they do, and they provide jobs and tax revenue that funds city services. Now, they want to mobilize the anti-Mamdani vote.
At 75 Main in Southampton on Saturday, billionaires and millionaires commiserated over burrata salads and crab cakes and debated how to prevent Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani from occupying Gracie Mansion.
Grocery store magnate and former Republican candidate for New York City mayor, John Catsimatidis, stood up to speak at the back of the restaurant, telling the crowd that he is backing Mayor Eric Adams but that the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, is refusing to bow out of the race — at least for now.
Pressure is mounting on the red beret-wearing 71-year-old Guardian Angels founder, Sliwa. Business leaders, moderate Democrats, independents, and Republicans are plotting ways to consolidate the crowded mayoral general election field so as not to divide the anti-Mamdani vote. Otherwise, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and unapologetic socialist will win the November election with 40 percent or less of the vote.
The general election, as it now stands, will be a five-person race. Mamdani is running on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines. Sliwa is running as a Republican. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo missed the deadline on Friday to remove his name from the ballot on an independent line he created, “Fight and Deliver,” though it’s unclear if he will actively campaign. Former U.S. attorney Jim Walden is running as an independent.
Adams, the incumbent Democratic mayor, declined to run in the primary after facing federal corruption charges and allegations of a quid pro quo with President Trump to get those charges dropped. He is instead running for reelection on two independent lines he created, “End Antisemitism” and “Safe & Affordable.”
Mamdani’s upset win last Tuesday in the Democratic primary was all anyone talked about in the Hamptons last weekend, a source told me. A real estate executive told me Monday night he plans to call a hedge funder connected to Bill Ackman and will be reaching out to executives at the largest real estate holding companies in the city, SL Green and Vornado.
“Everybody right now is in panic mode,” the president of Empire State Properties, Suzanne Miller, told me. “I think that all the money is going to start pouring in for Eric Adams.”
The problem is Adams can’t win with Sliwa and Cuomo in the race, and maybe not even on his own. This is hail Mary kind of thinking.
And Sliwa is defiant. “I’m not getting out of this race unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under,” he told Politico last week. He joked on Fox News on Saturday that “absolutely” he would join forces with Adams, if he could take the day shift and Adams clock in at night. He calls Adams the “swagger man” and “nightlife mayor,” referencing Adams’ fondness for clubs and hookah.
Sliwa sent out a press release email Monday criticizing Adams for allowing drug users to take over the NOHO neighborhood of Manhattan. “The current administration under Eric Adams has let things spiral,” he said. He doesn’t sound like a man dropping out.
Sliwa has been campaigning for mayor for more than four years. He was the Republican nominee in 2021, losing to Adams with only 27 percent of the vote. In a phone conversation a couple months ago, Sliwa told me he’s grown his base since then. But New York is a difficult city for Republicans to win, Sliwa has no executive experience, and the few general election polls released show him doing worse this cycle.
A Honan Strategy Group poll released Thursday — the first post-primary poll (and very favorable to Cuomo) — shows Sliwa getting only 7 percent in a five-way race and 10 percent in a four-way race. A Manhattan Institute poll released before Mamdani won the primary shows Sliwa earning 13 or 16 percent of the vote depending on the field. If Adams, though, earned Sliwa’s votes in this latter poll, he could beat Mamdani.
This is all a big IF. The chairman of the Kings County Republican Party — aka Brooklyn — Richie Barsamian tells me he has the utmost respect for Sliwa and is not pressuring him to stay in or drop out. He says he expects Sliwa to make an announcement in the next “couple days.”
“We stand behind Curtis,” Barsamian says, referring to himself and the Republican Party chairs of the other four boroughs. “Whatever that decision is, we’ll know shortly, and I’ll support Curtis Sliwa no matter what he says. I know Curtis always wants to do the right thing. That’s just who he is. He loves this city.”
Catsimatidis, though, could have more sway on Sliwa than first meets the eye. Sliwa has a 30-year contract as a host with WABC radio, a station owned by Catsimatidis. I don’t know what the details of that contract are, but Sliwa lives in a 325-square-foot apartment on the Upper West Side. I think it’s fair to assume he needs employment after the election.
More importantly, Catsimatidis has considerable sway in the state GOP. His daughter is chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party, and she was married to the son of the chairman of the New York Republican Party, Ed Cox. Let’s just say the five NYC county chairs are going to pick up Catsimatidis’ calls. Sliwa has only raised $300,000 this election. He has $54,408 in the bank.
All this plotting may sound like some rich man’s cabal trying to influence the outcome of the mayor’s race — a stereotype the Democratic Socialists of America both relish and condemn — and in many ways it is. The only thing missing is the cigar smoke. But these real estate and business owners, investors and bankers pay a majority of the city’s income tax revenue that funds city services and provide jobs to thousands — and downstream jobs to millions.
The worried New Yorkers are, of course, mostly not billionaires or millionaires. These are just the people with the money to fund a campaign and door knocking operation. There are also plenty of middle- and lower-income New Yorkers who worry about subway crime rising if social workers instead of cops are patrolling the cars. They worry about their jobs leaving the city. Catsimatidis threatened before the primary to sell his grocery store chain and move his other businesses out of the city if Mamdani is elected.
And for the record, the far-left has their own big donors and bundlers as well. This is part of the game.
Mamdani is promising free buses, free childcare, city-owned grocery stores, and a rent freeze on stabilized apartments. About 44 percent of the city’s rental housing stock — or more than 1 million apartments — is stabilized. He says he will pay for all this by “taxing the rich.”
Mamdani thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist. “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, because frankly it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality,” he told NBC News on Sunday. He told CNN that he doesn’t like capitalism.
The problem is many of these rich people will move to Florida or Texas or to the suburbs. An executive at a major residential real estate company told me the banks and hedge funds can move employees out of the city, but the real estate people are screwed. The state already strengthened rent stabilized protections in 2019, in a bill signed by then-Governor Cuomo, that prevents landlords from renovating vacated stabilized apartments and converting them to market rate. Instead of re-renting these stabilized apartments at a loss, landlords are leaving them vacant.
If an apartment sits vacant, the sheet rockers and painters and plumbers who would have renovated that apartment now don’t get the job. The hardware store on the corner loses revenue from the odd part purchases these men would have made. The restaurant where the crew would have bought their lunch loses out. There are tons of unseen downstream effects. And contrary to the image painted by the left, many landlords are not fatcats — they own a building or house that they live in and have one or two apartments to rent.
The left says that “housing is a human right” and shouldn’t be a for-profit venture. What’s the model then — NYCHA? Just google “New York City Housing Authority problems” to get a taste of what these NYCHA buildings are like.
In many ways, Mamdani sounds like a Bill DeBlasio 2.0, but with one critical difference: DeBlasio hired Rudy Giuliani’s former NYPD commissioner, Bill Bratton, when he took office and treated crime seriously. Mamdani may be backing away from his “defund the police” remarks and tweets like "Queer liberation means defund the police," but he’s advocating a “public health approach to safety” — a sort of wishy-washy platform of slogans on mental healthcare instead of prison. It didn’t work for San Francisco, and it’s unlikely to work for New York.
Mamdani sounds a lot like I did in my 20s. I went to Brown. He went to Bowdoin and majored in Africana Studies. He probably got a lot of Marxist theory and oppressor-oppressed versions of history — and not much economics. I could say the same about my education or that of much of his college-educated white and Asian base. Hell, I probably would have voted for him and even door-knocked in my 20s.
There have been a lot of post-primary analyses of how Mamdani won. His social media team knocked it out of the park. He’s likeable, attractive, and speaks well off the cuff. He campaigned on the street and took even a street ambush by Crackhead Barney in stride. Part of this is his youth, but it’s also undeniable that he’s a political talent, no matter what you think of his policies.
Mamdani also campaigned with a clear message: I am going to make New York affordable. That message resonates with me, even though I don’t think his policies will achieve that. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New York is $5400. That’s not for just the upscale areas — that’s the average. It’s hard to raise a family here.
Mamdani won renters. He won middle-income New Yorkers. He won new voters. He won in areas that Adams swept in 2021. He won the neighborhoods where I used to live in the so-called “Commie Corridor” of Brooklyn and the East Village.
Mamdani also made it cool to support him. The DSA held packed parties. They had signature yellow bandanas and “Hot Girls for Zohran” t-shirts. They got model Emily Ratajkowski’s endorsement, but other than that, let’s just say they’re not sending their best.
The one DSA party I attended reminded me of an Oberlin College five- or 10-year reunion. Politics was an identity, like punk or goth used to be. No one would speak to me because I was a reporter. They followed the DSA rules like obedient apparatchiks. It was a conformism, just to a different set of rules.
What the primary last week showed was that money can’t buy an election. Cuomo far outspent Mamdani and got trounced. At a DSA election debrief Zoom call Monday night, party leaders went over the Mamdani campaign stats: 1.6 million door knock attempt; 2.3 million phone dials; 30,000 active volunteers.
“Another big meta takeaway is that campaigns still really matter,” political strategist Michael Lange said on the Zoom call.
If Catsimatidis — or even President Trump — can push Sliwa to drop out of the race, the moderate coalition will need to bring this same level of energy, manpower, and message discipline to the Adams campaign if they have any hope of winning. That means fewer 75 Main and Fifth Avenue meetings and more boots on the ground.
Election Day is four months away. They better get moving.