It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. As we continue our coverage of the New York

City mayoral race, we have our latest candidate interview to begin the show today

with Republican Curtis Slewa. As many of you know, he founded the private citizens anti-crime

Patrol group, The Guardian Angels in the 1970s. He's been a long time radio talk show host, mostly on

WABC, also for about a year in the 90s here on WNYC, and he was the Republican nominee for mayor

in 2021, losing to Eric Adams. This year he was unopposed for the Republican nomination, and he did get

about 28% of the vote in the general election the last time out, which could be just enough to get

elected this year, given the five-way

race. So far, Sliwa has refused to join with Andrew Cuomo and Jim Walden in pledging to support

whichever candidate other than Democrats are on Mamdani is leading in the polls. As we're doing in this

round, we will talk to the candidate for about 20 minutes, then do some

analysis of the interview and other campaign news with our political reporter, Liz Kim.

Curtis, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNIC.

My pleasure, Brian, and I remember it was months ago. I was, I think, looking at New York

magazine, you did a piece with

Errol Lewis of Spectrum. And you came up with a conclusion that in a four-person race for the

mayoralty, it was a possibility that Curtis Levo being the Republican candidate, unlike the

others who are Democrats, could potentially be elected

the mayor. And I want to credit you because in the most recent poll, that was the conclusion

of this poll, is that it was too close to call between Mandami, obviously, the leader so far,

Cuomo, Sliwa, and the mayor, Eric Adams, who doesn't seem to be able to get any

traction in the most recent polls whatsoever. Yeah, that was in the New Yorker, and I did say that,

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