After a hilariously inept attempt to push New York Democrats to a more moderate place in the city’s mayoral election, Republicans are leaning in on the upsides of having Zoran Mamdani, a loud-and-proud socialist, in charge of America’s largest city.

Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race on Sunday, a month after apparently failing to reach a deal with Trump World to leave the race in exchange for a sweet sinecure in the administration.

Had Adams left back in August, it wouldn’t have been enough to make a front-runner out of Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat now running as an independent after losing his party primary. But a high-profile departure by the incumbent might have provided some momentum for the former governor as the race was coming into focus.

For a guy who needed the president to intervene to save him from bribery charges, Adams sure seems bad at the whole payola thing. He leaves the race broke, without a cushy landing spot and without much help to Cuomo, who will have to scrap with Republican Curtis Sliwa for the sliver of voters who had been sticking with hizzoner.

That’s not to say that Cuomo won’t win, though. For all of Mamdani’s big leads in polls, he hasn’t cracked 50 percent once.

In an average of the five most recent high-quality surveys of New York voters, it’s Mamdani with 45 percent support, the other three with a combined 47 percent and 8 percent undecided. And because New York has ranked-choice voting, if Cuomo can just get to be the second choice for almost all of the Sliwa voters, it could still be a very close race.

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