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Eric Adams isn’t going away.
That was the message the mayor delivered in a sober but defiant five-minute midday address from City Hall on Tuesday, all but comparing Donald Trump’s Justice Department to the Almighty after Washington directed the Southern District of New York to dismiss the corruption charges against him.
“Psalms 34:1 says, ‘I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth.’ So I thank the Justice Department for its honesty,” the mayor said. “Now we can put this cruel episode behind us and focus entirely on the future of our city. It’s time to move forward.”
Forward means running in a Democratic primary just over four months from now. In surveys, Adams trails Andrew Cuomo, the front-runner who is officially an undeclared candidate, by more than 20 points. Only late last month, political circles were convulsed with rumors that Adams would step down and not even finish his term. After staying out of the public eye for several days while reports of his demise circulated, he returned with a fiery address to faith leaders in midtown Manhattan in which he accused those protesting his policies of protesting the fact that a Black man is running the city.
“Let me tell you why people are angry. Because finally one of you is in charge of the city,” he told the multiracial audience. “Finally. This is why they’re angry. Nothing special about me. There’s nothing great about me. I’m an ordinary, dyslexic, hardworking, blue-collar mayor, and those who have been in power for years, that denied you, have to deal with the fact we are now in charge. And every day, they burn candles, they light incense, they say prayers, they do everything they can. Is he gone yet? No, he’s not.”
On Tuesday, Adams doubled down on his appeal to his blue-collar Black and Hispanic base, placing his own struggles with the legal system alongside their own. “If you want to know who I am, all you have to know about me is where I am from,” Adams said. “Who I am is not in the headlines. It is in my history. It’s the same place as you: working class, struggling to survive, in love with this city even when it lets us down. I grew up in a place where justice always seemed out of reach. My family was betrayed by a city that didn’t care enough about us, and that’s why I fought for you and will keep fighting for you. Because I am you, and that is why you can trust me to keep moving this city forward.”
Black political leaders have been gingerly stepping away from Adams after he brazenly cozied up to Trump to make his legal troubles disappear, a ploy that Trump’s Justice Department seems to have rewarded with a memo explicitly stating that Adams must be free of the charges against him so he can pursue the White House agenda on immigration and crime. The memo also states that the case could be picked up again at any time.
“It certainly sounds like President Trump is holding the mayor hostage. This is simply not fair to the City of New York,” said the Reverend Al Sharpton in a statement, adding that he would host a meeting with elected officials and clergy to figure out how to proceed, having previously helped spare Adams following his indictment. “We have clearly crossed the Rubicon,” Sharpton said.
The mayor’s 2021 primary victory was powered by his strong showing among voters of color in the outer boroughs after he accused two of his rivals, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia, of conspiring together to keep him out of office, and a third, Maya Wiley, a Black law professor, of not understanding the struggles of working-class New Yorkers. It was enough to eke out a one-point victory over Garcia, and Adams is set to reprise the strategy this spring.
“Mayor Adams won because of what he said on the campaign trail, that he would be the mayor for people on Social Security, not for people on social media,” said Stu Loeser, a longtime Democratic strategist unaffiliated in this race. “He has a theory of what matters to New Yorkers, and he should keep at it.” Longtime Adams advisers believe that despite his dismal poll numbers, the late-June primary gives the mayor plenty of time to recover his political footing, especially among his base. (One recent survey had him at just 9 percent, tied with Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens serving his third term in the Assembly.) The mayor’s rivals are bracing for him to double down on his strategy from four years ago, making nakedly identity-based appeals to Black voters; reminding them that he is only the second Black mayor in the city’s history after the first one, David Dinkins, was tossed out after a single term; and accusing the justice system of trying to keep him out of power.
It’s a strategy that complicates the path of Cuomo, who has likewise been counting on the support of voters of color. Black and especially Hispanic voters currently prefer the former governor, but whether they will after Adams mounts a full-throated campaign to win them back remains an open question.
This assumes Adams can actually mount a real campaign. He has over $3 million in his bank account but is on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and has been denied matching funds by the city’s Campaign Finance Board. His fundraising slowed in the wake of his indictment, and he has only the barest bones of a campaign operation at the moment.
Some in the Cuomo camp believe the prospect of Mayor Adams running for reelection will actually help the former governor; Adams can take some of the incoming from the half-dozen other candidates in the race, and Cuomo will be able to contrast his ability to stand up to Trump with Adams’s acquiescence toward the president, something strategists for several campaigns say is a major priority for Democratic-primary voters. But for the rest of the field, the prospect of Adams and Cuomo locked in a cage match over a voting bloc central to both of their paths to victory is nothing short of delicious.
“We are all on a text chain,” said a strategist for one candidate in the race, referring to the strategists for the other campaigns. “And everyone was popping Champagne last night. We are all fucking stoked.”