New York City’s decline has a familiar ring, says Curtis Sliwa — one straight out of Hollywood.
“It’s ‘Escape From New York’ all over again,” the Republican mayoral hopeful told Fox News Digital, warning that progressive mismanagement, high taxes and rising crime are turning the nation’s largest city into a cautionary tale.
Sliwa – who was born in New York City, founded the Guardian Angels in 1979 and says he’ll “die in this city” – is the current underdog in the race for mayor. A recently released Quinnipiac University poll found that Democratic Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani leads with 46% of likely voters backing him, followed by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo with 33% and Sliwa with 15%.
“We may be looking at a sequel,” Sliwa said, invoking the 1981 dystopian classic. “Such a vast migration of people out because we don’t have the money to support the social service systems that Democratic Socialists like Zohran Mamdani, AOC and others want to basically dominate in New York City to be providers, not producers.”
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“The economy is in a severe decline,” he said. “It’s been a massive movement of equity and investment out of New York City … to Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Texas, Tennessee.”
Data supports some of Sliwa’s warning, showing that New York City’s population fell by roughly 4.5% between 2020 and 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as residents relocated to lower-cost states including Florida and Texas.
“They’ve given every reason in the world to push people out the door,” he added.
The sole Republican candidate offers a blunt assessment in his sweeping diagnosis of New York City’s decline, proposing a retention plan and a separate focus on economic relief for the city’s younger generations.
“My program is ‘improve, don’t move,’” Sliwa said. “We’ve got to create an economy here in which the private sector will stay because they provide most of the jobs.”
“We’re going to give them a five-year tax holiday on their income taxes,” he said, referring to graduates who stay and work in the Empire State. “You can’t live the American dream, buy a car, buy a house. So the next thing you’re looking toward is being recruited to a different location … We have a government that has a bloated budget of $118 billion … I’m the only candidate of the three running for mayoralty who says we gotta cut the taxes, we gotta cut the cost of government and we have to keep our millennial[s] and Gen Zers.”
“We can cut $10 billion just from the waste at the top,” Sliwa continued, blasting “deputy chancellors and department heads that nobody knows, nobody ever sees.”
Sliwa built his career by showing up where government sometimes fails, and his fiscal conservative centerpiece links public safety to financial recovery.
“You cannot have a good quality of life unless you have safety, and we need at least an additional 7,000 more police officers,” he explained. “Fear City exists in the subways, especially for women. They don’t feel comfortable. They’re being sexually harassed … [Women] are the number one members of our workforce in New York City.”
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“If we can establish public safety, everything else will fall in line. But we’re neglecting that, and we’ve actually become a city that’s best known around the world for locking up its toothpaste and not locking up its criminals,” Sliwa said.
He also aims to protect small businesses, which have been outspoken that New York City has become too expensive and bureaucratic to thrive.
“Small businesses are never given their due,” Sliwa said. “They hire a million people across the five boroughs.”
“We have something called congestion pricing. It has to be eliminated … other cities will follow by taxing blue-collar, working-class people who have to come to work in their vehicles … It’s nothing more than trying to offset the budget imbalances.”
“I operate on Republican principles – fiscally being alert to cutting the waste and cutting the taxes.”
Neither the Mamdani nor Cuomo campaigns responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
According to their public campaign platforms, Mamdani emphasizes housing affordability, expanded transit access and social investment, while Cuomo has pitched a centrist comeback focused on fiscal discipline and increased police funding.
Though New York has leaned blue for decades, Sliwa claimed a red-led state government isn’t impossible. He also shared a message for those who feel the city has lost the energy and opportunity that once defined it.
“That’s why I’m working so hard to get so many votes in this mayoral election, so that next year Elise Stefanik can topple Kathy Hochul out of Albany … and it will simulate exactly what happened back in 1993,” he said. “We had no chaos, no corruption, good quality of life, [a] good economy.”
But New York City hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since Michael Bloomberg’s 2005 re-election — and no candidate running solely as a Republican has won since Rudy Giuliani left office in 2001.
“The one thing people know about me is, I’ve been a part of New York City for 46 years … The ‘C’ in Curtis stands for consistency … In New York City, it has to be the merging of not just what government can do, but what volunteers can do to save this city that I love … I am the only real New Yorker running in this race.”
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