Pressure is building on Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa to drop his long-shot quest for Gracie Mansion.
A stream of prominent Big Apple conservatives — including The Post’s editorial board and Sliwa’s own radio boss, John Catsimatidis — have sagely implored him to step aside and endorse Andrew Cuomo.
The absurdity of that sentence underscores the stakes.
Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s ideas are so backward — and represent such a grave threat to the livelihoods and lives of New Yorkers, and to their city’s moral standing — that an alliance with Cuomo is not just conceivable for many Republicans, but imperative.
Polling indicates the former governor is the only one with any chance of sending Mamdani packing — and only if Sliwa drops out.
But the Guardian Angels founder stubbornly insists he has no intention of doing so.
And although he’s terribly, even disastrously wrong about the wisdom of carrying on his quixotic campaign, Sliwa’s diagnosis of Cuomo’s maladies is spot-on.
“I know you think you’re the toughest guy alive,” he told Cuomo at last week’s debate, “but . . . you lost your own primary, right? You were rejected by your own Democrats.”
Later, an interviewer asked Sliwa directly whether he would be responsible for a Mamdani mayoralty.
“Andrew Cuomo failed everybody in that [Democratic] primary. He even admitted it,” replied Sliwa.
“Now he’s basically saying, ‘I can’t win without Sliwa votes.’ Where are your votes?”
Where, indeed.
Despite Cuomo’s universal name recognition and reputation as the kind of human bulldozer that might find success in City Hall, Mamdani soundly defeated the supposed Democratic savior in June.
Why? Because voters had already sniffed out his lack of conviction.
There was never any great hunger for a Cuomo comeback after sexual misconduct and pandemic mismanagement scandals ended his run in Albany.
Not from anyone but the political scion himself.
And while Cuomo has pinned his June loss on his admittedly bumbling, social media-poor primary strategy, the more glaring reason for it was his lack of purpose.
Candidates need a raison d’être to win, and Cuomo didn’t have one — aside from the need to feed his own ego.
His efforts to step back into the national spotlight may have meaning now that he’s the only thing standing in the way of a catastrophic Mamdani mayoralty — but that was a gift borne of his own failure.
In the Donald Trump era, authenticity and clarity of vision rule the day.
Cuomo’s inability to muster either is how New York City ended up in this predicament in the first place.
This indisputable fact of modern American politics is readily observable elsewhere.
Trump has steamrolled his way into the White House — twice — by running unconventional campaigns that resonated with voters because they reflected the indomitable personality and unique views of its principal.
Proud socialist and USSR honeymooner Bernie Sanders took two Democratic nomination fights down to the wire — at a time when the label was still toxic.
And his spiritual successor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could well play the role of Reagan to his Goldwater in 2028.
All three have built endlessly loyal followings because they boast the courage of their convictions, and appear to be fighting for something more than themselves.
There are, of course, pitfalls associated with placing ideological fervor above all else.
Cuomo on Monday observed that there’s an “ongoing civil war” inside the Democratic Party, pitting relative moderates like himself against the “extreme, radical left” represented by the likes of Mamdani, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
They may prevail in the civil war, but the mutineers would most assuredly steer the ship into the rocks.
And on the right, Republicans have found time and again that Trump’s most brazen imitators, who habitually lose winnable races as they try to grift off of his aura, cannot be trusted.
But authenticity remains a necessary if insufficient condition of victory for both parties, as the struggles of two Democratic moderates — Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey — demonstrate.
Both appeared perfectly cast to win off-year elections with a Republican in the White House, but Spanberger’s soulless debate performance and Sherrill’s half-hearted campaign efforts have put their GOP opponents within spitting distance.
Once again, hollowness is the kiss of political death.
God willing, Sliwa will see reason, voters will reject Mamdani’s anti-American platform, and Cuomo will pull off a miraculous upset.
But whatever the outcome in New York, one thing is now abundantly clear: The age of the empty yet ambitious political suit is over.
Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.