Irrelevant Eric

Taking stock of the 110th mayor of New York City

Eric Adams has been the mayor of New York City for almost two and a half years. It has been a strange and chaotic time, with plenty of scandal and few policy accomplishments of note. Adams, unlike all of his modern predecessors, lacks a coherent vision for New York’s future. The machinery of government, under his watch, has withered. Patronage hires at key agencies like the Department of Transportation have slowed progress and repelled talent. The lone bright spot, perhaps, has been the Department of City Planning, where a former Manhattan city councilman named Dan Garodnick has been largely left alone to pursue an ambitious, much-needed rezoning of the five boroughs.

Adams is, by publicly available polling, the most unpopular mayor since at least the 1990s. Given his governing failures and inability to capitalize on good news, like the city’s falling crime rate, none of this is a surprise. What has been interesting to me, as a lifelong city resident, is the feeling that he increasingly doesn’t matter to the people who live here. And I mean this in the sense of fame, relevancy, and psychic space—he is an indelible New York character, reviled by a growing number of voters, and he’s receding. His press conferences don’t carry. His public statements get lost in the static of the metropolis. Pro-Palestine protesters decried him when his NYPD broke up the occupation of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, but then they moved on. Everyone, it seems, has bigger fish to fry than Eric Adams.

Is this the worst fate of all mayors? It is, by definition, a job that strokes an ego. The mayor of New York City commands a larger budget than most states’, a standing army in the NYPD, and the attention of a sprawling, hungry media market. Michael Bloomberg spent $100 million of his own money to remain mayor. Rudy Giuliani swaggered like a dark comic book prince. Ed Koch was, for a period, a pop culture icon. Perhaps it was Bill de Blasio, who accomplished plenty despite his substandard reputation, who began the diminishment of the office, who by dawdling at the Park Slope Y and knocking on doors like a grunt in Iowa shaved too much glamor off City Hall. Adams has made himself a nightlife staple, grinning with celebrities and partying at Zero Bond, but none of it seems to impress. He is not buoyant, he is not raffish; he has a serial inability to laugh at himself. He is somehow more thin-skinned than any of his very thin-skinned predecessors. Prior mayors, Koch and Giuliani in particular, delighted in combat, giddily tangling with political rivals and the media alike. De Blasio did not, but he eventually subjected himself to town halls, weekly radio interviews, and regular press conferences. Adams cowers behind his administration officials, openly fielding questions from reporters just once a week.

All of it feels weak. It offends my own outer borough sensibilities. There’s the old saw about boxers with glass jaws and Adams’ might be made out of construction paper. He is perpetually, it seems, seconds away from an outburst. He’s a master of cynical identity games. Having covered him, in some form, for over a decade now, none of this surprises me. He is unchanged from his days as Brooklyn Borough President. If there’s one way to understand his mayoralty, it’s that he’s treated it like a borough presidency. Borough presidents have little tangible power. They occupy ceremonial posts, vestiges of an era when the municipal laws were very different. A borough president does little more than allocate some public cash, attend ribbon cuttings, appoint community board members, and wait, if ambitious enough, for a promotion. Adams got his. What’s been interesting to me is how Adams has been unable to bluster and grind to a greater popularity, seemingly too frazzled to forge a connection with New Yorkers that could substitute, almost, for an inability to govern. In this case, substance has truly trumped style. Adams can’t swagger to better poll numbers.

All of this comes back to the only question most people, these days, care about: can Eric Adams get re-elected? It’s plausible. If Adams is never personally indicted or his close aides do not face an indictment, his odds of winning will be greater. If these indictments do come, he will be significantly damaged. Incumbent mayors typically do not lose. Adams will be the weakest incumbent mayor in several decades, since at least David Dinkins. But Dinkins, the first Black mayor, was not imperiled in the primary, and had to contend with the Republican Giuliani in a general election with a much greater white ethnic vote. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, will have to survive a ranked-choice voting primary where he will need to hope his 2021 coalition—working class Black and Latino voters, and just enough whites—saves him again. I do think Adams is in trouble. He is much diminished from 2021, when most of the media’s attention was trained on Andrew Yang and Adams was able to present himself as a tough-talking ex-police captain who could guide the city out of its Covid malaise. The city has recovered under Adams—this is inarguable—but he lacks the political skill to reap any benefits. If he wins, it will be for lack of strong opposition. Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller, is running against Adams again, and could pose a real threat. Stringer, though, will have to excite the electorate and offer a compelling alternative vision. Whether he can do this remains to be seen.

The wild card is Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor. Cuomo resigned in 2021 and plainly wants back in. He flirted with running for governor in 2022 but realized, likely, he couldn’t raise enough cash to be competitive with Kathy Hochul. The city’s public matching funds system offers him a better opportunity. Cuomo is much more likely to run if Adams is personally indicted. The catch, for Cuomo, is that he will seek to appeal to the same sort of voters as Adams—outer borough Black Democrats in particular—and he could face tremendous pushback from the Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx pastors he is quietly courting. Cuomo’s coalition would probably resemble Eliot Spitzer’s when he ran for city comptroller in 2013 and lost to Stringer. I am not overly bullish on Cuomo because his negatives remain high and an RCV election could present an opportunity for an anti-Cuomo vote to quickly coalesce. Under the old primary system—winner-take-all, with a runoff—Cuomo’s odds of success would be much higher. Cuomo would be formidable as a mayoral contender in 2025, though. His challenge is convincing enough Democrats to not drop him from their ballots altogether. The other challenge, for him, is the city’s growing college-educated and progressive Democratic vote, the sort that is slowly outvoting the working class. These voters, many of them white, are not going to receive Cuomo well unless the battle is truly between himself and Adams and they decide, reluctantly, Cuomo can govern the city. White voters were not forgiving of Spitzer in 2013. Stringer won whites in 2013 and his plan, in 2025, would probably be something similar: run up the score in vote-rich Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. Northern Brooklyn and western Queens, the gentrifying DSA belts, have become significant vote centers as well. Adams and Cuomo would each be deeply unpopular there.

What’s missing is any organized, serious challenge to Adams from the progressive and professional left, the alphabet organizations that gobble up plenty of media attention but have failed, in the Adams era, to exert genuine influence. The older version of the Working Families Party would have been laying the groundwork for a strong anti-Adams challenge next year. A long time ago, the WFP was disciplined enough to nudge John Liu into running for city comptroller and Bill de Blasio into running for public advocate so two of their close allies, come 2010, would occupy top posts in city government and be ready to oppose the Bloomberg administration. The WFP is now a national organization and an effective fundraising vehicle; what it isn’t is what it once was, a force for change in municipal and statewide politics. It was the WFP, once, that helped crown a City Council speaker, and weighed heavily on the early de Blasio agenda. Stringer was, until his MeToo scandal, a WFP candidate in 2021 but is unlikely to be one in 2025. The reality is that, almost one year out, no serious left candidate has emerged. There is still time, but not as much time as they may think. Running for mayor is very expensive. Conservative super PACs will try to sway the primary—either to defend Adams or even prop up Cuomo. Perhaps WFP and its allies all decide Stringer is worth another shot. Absent their own candidate, they might not have any other choice. And Adams, increasingly irrelevant, could muddle on. Never underestimate inertia in politics.