On the menu today: Checking the status of GOP hopes in the three big off-year elections, and one more thought on the Nazi tattoo of Graham Platner.
You Don’t Often Hear ‘Impale Me’ in a Mayoral Race Discussion
I wish I could disagree with President Trump, but I think his perception of the New York City mayoral race, reported by the Wall Street Journal, is an accurate one:
President Trump has privately told allies he believes Democrat Zohran Mamdani is unbeatable in the New York City mayor’s race, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump and his team are convinced the 34-year-old democratic socialist will defeat Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent Andrew Cuomo on Nov. 4, according to those people, including a senior White House official.
In the last few days, we’ve seen increased public pressure on Curtis Sliwa to drop out, which strikes me as A) extremely unlikely to persuade Sliwa and B) unlikely to lead to a Cuomo victory over Mamdani anyway.
And if you’re wondering whether Cuomo could persuade Sliwa to drop out by offering him a job in a future administration, Sliwa shut down that talk in the most graphic way possible:
“Remember that scene in ‘Braveheart?’” Sliwa asked. “Mel Gibson at the end, when the executioner was impaling him? If all of a sudden, the executioner would’ve stopped, and I was on that gurney, and said, ‘Hey, you can work for Mayor Andrew Cuomo,’ I would say, ‘Finish the job. Impale me.’”
Say, fellas, I don’t think Sliwa is interested in the offer.
When the year began, Cuomo had an overwhelming lead in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The first Emerson College Polling/PIX11/The Hill survey of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in February found Cuomo at 33 percent and Mamdani at 1 percent. Cuomo had about as big an advantage in name ID and fundraising as you could possibly want. The former governor had the best possible shot to shut down the socialist pro-intifada smiling extremist before Mamdani got any traction. And Cuomo turned in a performance on par with this year’s edition of the New York Jets. He fumbled. He blew his best shot.
As I asked last night . . . does it feel like Andrew Cuomo is campaigning like this is his last chance for a career in politics? Is he going all-out, out-hustling Mamdani, burning the candle at both ends? Or is it the same entitled plod that he showed when he blew his considerable lead in the Democratic primary?
In a recent interview with Nate Friedman, Sliwa fairly asked why Republicans are the ones who are responsible for stopping the communist monster that the New York City Democratic Party created:
Who created Zohran Mandami? Who embraced him? Who nourished him? Who supported him? And how dare you, people who know nothing about politics, suggest that everybody who’s going to vote for me is suddenly going to be reborn — ‘We love Andrew Cuomo!’ He killed all these elderly. He’s a sexual harasser. He told conservatives and Republicans in 2014, if you’re a conservative and you believe in right to life and the Second Amendment, you have no place in New York. You need to leave.
Sliwa is remembering and characterizing Cuomo’s comments accurately. January 21, 2014:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has caused a firestorm in the Empire State for declaring to a talk radio host that conservatives who are pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay marriage “have no place in the State of New York.” Said Cuomo of conservatives: “Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are. . . . Moderate Republicans have a place in this state.”
Eleven years after contending conservatives should be expelled from his state, now the disgraced Cuomo wants right-of-center New Yorkers to come riding to his rescue?
Sliwa continued:
This is the result of the Democrat self-destruction. So, I’m supposed to help them. How come they don’t help themselves? Andrew Cuomo failed everybody in that primary. He even admitted it. Now, he’s basically saying, “I can’t win without Sliwa votes. Where are your votes? Why don’t you spend your money?” And they got millions from the billionaires. Millions. Go out, get your own votes. Convert Sliwa voters. But for me to drop out? I represent a major party line. I have people running under me, council people, judges. They put their heart and soul into it. They support me. I have more donations than Andrew Cuomo does, matching funds. So, you know something, this is called voting. Since when do we not let people vote?
What the heck did Andrew Cuomo ever do to deserve such a large and benevolent sacrifice on the part of right-of-center New Yorkers?
You noticed that incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropping out of the race had no significant effect on the polling numbers, right?
If you’re a conservative, one of the most ominous developments of 2025 is that Mamdani won the Democratic primary, and since then he’s been one of the most-discussed figures in American politics, with gallons of ink and airtime spilled on why his ideas are extreme and unworkable. And there’s not much sign that any of the anti-Mamdani arguments made much of a difference at all.
Turning further south . . .
So Far, the Garden State Electorate Remains a GOP Jersey Barrier
The good news for Democrats is that Mikie Sherrill has led every poll in the New Jersey governor’s race. The bad news is those leads have been pretty small sometimes; she currently leads Republican Jack Ciattarelli, 48.1 percent to 44 percent, in the RealClearPolitics average.
(An ominous sign for Sherrill now: The final RCP average in this state’s governor race in 2021 had incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy ahead by almost eight percentage points; a comparable underperformance by the Democratic nominee this time around might put Ciattarelli in the governor’s mansion.)
Michael Kruse of Politico did a deep dive into this race about a week ago and put his finger on why a narrow Sherrill win would be an ominous sign for Democrats nationwide in next year’s midterms. For starters, New Jersey was a deep blue state for a generation, beyond Chris Christie’s two wins. Then in 2021, Murphy won reelection by a surprisingly narrow margin against Ciattarelli, 51.2 percent to 48 percent.
And then last year, Kamala Harris won the Garden State by a surprisingly narrow margin, 51.9 percent to 46 percent, the closest a Republican has come to winning the state in a presidential election since 1992. So, New Jersey is still a blue state . . . but it’s a lighter shade of blue.
But even more significantly, Sherrill was supposed to be the safe, high-floor pick — a suburban moderate, a veteran, running on soft-focus themes in a state where Democrats almost always have the wind at their backs. And as Kruse observes, the results are pretty tepid:
This arranged setting made for an especially apropos event for this campaign — an effort that’s been something of a statewide reprise of her initial run for Congress some seven years back. By the relative rules of politics when she got into the game, Sherill should be winning this race going away — and she’s not. She’s been up in most polls, but not all polls, and not always by a lot, and Democrats in New Jersey and around the country are increasingly ill at ease. Progressives are calling her “milquetoast,” moderates are granting it’s tight, and the just-the-facts Associated Press is declaring the party “wary” that her “support may be sliding among typically loyal voters” — union voters, Black voters, brown voters, all blocs of voters that have moved toward Donald Trump and that the Trump-endorsed GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli is making every effort to woo.
And when the Morning Joe panel on MSNBC looks at Sherrill, and Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger, and laments that they’re not further ahead and blames it on the sexism of the electorate . . . well, I can’t begrudge any viewer for interpreting that as preemptive excuse-making for a surprised defeat by either candidate.
Turning even further south . . .
The Campaign for Virginia
I would not interpret former President Barack Obama campaigning for Spanberger in Norfolk on November 1 as a sign of Democratic panic. Obama campaigned for Terry McAuliffe in this state in 2021, Obama campaigned for the either Klan-hood-or-blackface-wearing Ralph Northam in 2017, Obama campaigned for McAuliffe in 2013, and Obama campaigned for Creigh Deeds in 2009. Heck, even before he was president, Obama did a rally for Tim Kaine in 2005.
Right now, Spanberger enjoys a healthy lead of anywhere from three to ten percentage points over Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears in most recent polling.
Maybe it’s where I live in Fairfax County, or my media consumption habits, but I feel like I see Spanberger ads everywhere, and a decent number of commercials for GOP attorney general Jason Miyares, but almost no Sears ads. Yes, northern Virginia is the most heavily Democratic part of the state, but Fairfax County has more than 751,000 registered voters, and about 181,000 people who voted for Donald Trump last year. Four years ago, 151,000 Fairfax County voters cast ballots for Republican Glenn Youngkin. A GOP gubernatorial candidate won’t win here, but you’ve got to try to keep the margin as small as possible.
The outlook for the gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial races is tough for the GOP, but Miyares is enjoying a small but consistent lead. There’s a good chance that Democrats will be kicking themselves and wondering why the heck they ever nominated a psycho like Jay Jones for state attorney general.
ADDENDUM: Readers, how many times have you gotten into a political argument and ended up getting called a Nazi? My guess is your answer is similar to the one from my guest co-host on the Three Martini Lunch podcast Craig Collins yesterday: “More times than I’d like.” Certain readers over in the comments section at that other Washington publication call me a Nazi on a regular basis, and we celebrate Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Hanukah in my house. It’s more than a little insulting.
Anyway, here’s Krystal Ball — yes, that is her real name; she was once a Democratic congressional candidate and had a show on MSNBC — on Graham Platner: “For me personally I’ll take a candidate with a regrettable tattoo over one who has steadfastly supported a genocide.”
Got that? The tattoo of the skull and crossbones of the Nazi SS is regrettable.
[Norm MacDonald voice] Now, I don’t know if you’re a history buff, but the Nazis did have a pretty clear policy on genocide, and they did not oppose it.
As the good Stephen Miller observes, Krystal Ball was among those who called Elon Musk a Nazi for his awkward wave.
The chances are pretty good that at some point in your life, you’ve been called a “Nazi” by someone who recklessly and obnoxiously used it as a catch-all-term for anyone they disagreed with politically. My guess is you may have been called a Nazi for wanting a smaller government and lower taxes, or for wanting border security, or for being pro-life, even though the Nazis were fairly well known for wanting an all-powerful totalitarian state, expanding their own national borders outward, and being pro-death in a whole bunch of contexts. You may well have even been called a Nazi for standing up for Christian values, even though the Nazis were deep into the occult and pagan beliefs.
But in certain progressive eyes, getting the Schutzstaffel Totenkopf tattoo on your chest and keeping it for 18 years doesn’t make you a Nazi.
If you can blithely hand-wave away a self-professed military history buff getting this tattoo, and reportedly calling it his “Totenkopf,” I think you are not as consistently opposed to Nazis as you think you are.