Give me candidacy or give me death: GOP nominee holds firm in NYC mayoral race
NEW YORK — “Remember the scene in Braveheart? Mel Gibson at the end? When the executioner was impaling him?”
It was shaping up to be another memorable interview with Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for New York City mayor, who has been facing calls from Republican poobahs and moderate Democrats alike to drop out of the race in the hopes of boosting the candidacy of Andrew Cuomo.
On Wednesday morning, the outspoken GOP hopeful invoked the Academy Award–winning epic to make clear he wasn’t interested in joining a potential Cuomo administration — an offer the former governor dangled earlier this week as a carrot for Sliwa to drop out of the race.
“If all of a sudden the executioner would have stopped, and I was on that gurney, and [he] said, ‘Hey, you can work for Mayor Andrew Cuomo,’ I would say: ‘Finish the job. Impale me.’ That will never happen,” Sliwa said during a radio interview on WABC’s conservative-leaning Sid & Friends.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/22/give-me-candidacy-or-give-me-death-gop-nominee-holds-firm-in-nyc-mayoral-race-00618615