Photo: Kylie Cooper/Reuters

Here is Andrew Cuomo’s exquisite dilemma as the mayor’s race careers toward its conclusion: New York is a Democratic town, one where Republicans are outnumbered six-to-one by their Democratic counterparts. It is also a city in which Cuomo is not the Democratic nominee but Zohran Mamdani is, even though Cuomo has one of the most famous names in the party and some of Mamdani’s left-of-the-left politics has caused some party leaders to keep their distance.

Cuomo’s uphill path to City Hall should be fairly straightforward: peel off a few Democrats uncomfortable with the 33-year-old upstart and then consolidate the Republicans and independents who are fearful of what Mamdani would mean for the city and see Cuomo as the most viable alternative.

But ever since the primary, Cuomo has been dogged by allegations from Mamdani that he is something of a secret Republican plant conspiring with Donald Trump to snatch the victory that eluded him in June. So any efforts Cuomo makes to move Republican voters away from Curtis Sliwa, the GOP nominee currently polling in a distant third place, risk alienating the much larger group of Democrats whose loathing of Trump is their political North Star and whom Cuomo absolutely needs to win.

Normally at this point in the election cycle, candidates reach out across the aisle to broaden their coalition. Mamdani is doing that with his regular meetings with business groups. Four years ago, Eric Adams had already received the endorsement of a handful of Republican lawmakers and donors and was courting Mike Bloomberg, the last citywide elected official to have won on the Republican line.

So while Cuomo is actively trying to marginalize Sliwa and turn the race into a two-person contest, he is making no active effort to build a “Republicans for Cuomo” coalition. “In fact, they are aggressively tamping it down,” said one top Republican who supports the former governor. Instead, the Cuomo camp is hoping its Republican support grows on its own.

Slowly, that’s happening.

Soon after the primary, Al D’Amato, the former Republican senator and longtime GOP power broker in the state, wrote a Daily News op-ed urging voters to back Cuomo to keep Mamdani out of City Hall. Last month, George J. Marlin, the former head of the Port Authority who ran for mayor on the Conservative Party line in 1993, did the same, suggesting his fellow Republicans play “kingmaker” by providing the decisive margin of votes to Cuomo. Doing so, he said, would ensure that “Cuomo governs as a centrist and stands against the worst of the progressive tide.” The actual Republican in the race, Sliwa, is doomed to “lose in a blowout,” he wrote, and option B for the GOP is “nothing except embarrassment and total irrelevancy.” Last week, Michael J. Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush, wrote in the Staten Island Advance — the hometown paper of New York’s most Republican borough — that New York would “be put at risk of irreversible damage” if Mamdani were elected and that “Cuomo is the most viable alternative to Mamdani, particularly after Adams has withdrawn.”

None of these efforts was pushed by the Cuomo campaign, but they have been welcomed nonetheless.

“Curtis has a month to get himself in second place. But I am telling people that I am voting for whoever is in second place on the day I go vote. Lord knows, I have not been a big supporter of Andrew Cuomo’s for most of my professional life, but Mamdani’s policies are just a bit hard to digest,” said Joe Borelli, a former minority leader of the New York City Council and a staunch supporter of Donald Trump’s. “I look at Andrew Cuomo’s campaign schedule and it’s clear to me that they are trying to encourage people in the political middle who might have reservations about him to reconsider their opinion.”

In the past several weeks, Cuomo has made several appearances on Fox News, Fox Business, Fox’s local New York affiliate, and CNBC and has slammed Mamdani for his stances on public safety and gifted-and-talented programs in city schools, all issues with appeal outside the left wing of the electorate. Cuomo has talked about cutting income taxes and capping property taxes and has proposed ending taxes on tips, one of the centerpieces of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

With Adams now out of the race, the Cuomo campaign is pushing the narrative that the former governor is the only option for voters concerned about Mamdani and that a vote for Sliwa is wasted on someone who has been a talk-radio sideshow for most of his public career.

But many Republicans aren’t buying it, in part because while polls show Sliwa somewhere in the mid-teens, those same polls put Cuomo only in the mid-20s, often trailing Mamdani by 20 points.

“Republicans, if anything, are hunkering down,” said O’Brien Murray, a strategist who has worked on Republican and Democratic campaigns. “There is a sense that Cuomo can’t win anyway, so if anything, the conversation is about doubling down on Curtis and figuring what can be done to boost his numbers up.”

Sliwa has given no indication that he will cede the territory to Cuomo, and many Republican leaders say they hope Sliwa remains in the race, if for no other reason than to boost down-ballot Republicans running for City Council and other races.

“If there was polling that could convince people that Cuomo was the only person that could beat Mamdani, and if there were polls that showed him winning head-to-head, that would be one thing,” said another senior GOP official. “But there is nothing showing anything like that — so why bother? Cuomo needs to show with real evidence that he can beat Mamdani, but right now the only thing they are proving is that he had a ceiling in the primary and that he has a ceiling in the general.”

Even polls taken during the primary that showed Cuomo with a substantial lead showed he also had an unfavorability rating above 50 percent. This is why Jerry Kassar, the Conservative Party chair for New York State, said he was sticking with Sliwa despite his third-place showing. “What is the available vote? There isn’t much of one for Andrew Cuomo because his numbers are so negative.”

By the Cuomo camp’s internal calculations, Democrats will make up close to 65 percent of the electorate in November. Mamdani is currently polling in the mid-40s among all voters while winning nearly 60 percent of Democrats, and Cuomo hopes to get close to a third of the Democratic vote. If Cuomo grabs two-thirds of independents — polls show him currently trailing among them — he would need to split the remaining Republican vote with Sliwa to win.

But if Cuomo isn’t explicitly making a play for that last group, it may come down to regular Republicans to do it on his behalf.

“You are seeing more rank-and-file Republicans talking about it. There is a sense that there is a binary choice and it’s too risky to let Mamdani get in,” said William F.B. O’Reilly, a GOP strategist. “For years, Republicans asked moderate Democrats to come over to our side and vote Republican for the good of the state, and now we have to do the opposite: vote for Andrew Cuomo to save New York City from socialism.”

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