The Left Can’t Find Anyone to Challenge Eric Adams

Shahana Hanif, co-chair of the City Council’s progressive caucus, calls Mayor Eric Adams “xenophobic” and a “misogynist” who disrespects women of color like her who push back against him.

Democrat Antonio Reynoso, Adams’s successor as Brooklyn borough president, recently assailed the mayor outside City Hall for “a lack of leadership in this city.”

Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, said on MSNBC that “Mayor Adams needs to be primaried.”

Progressives might agree on the problem, but with just over a year and a half until the 2025 Democratic primary, they’re nowhere near figuring out who should actually run against Adams. Conversations with 20 elected officials, aides, advocates, and strategists show that New York’s left is in the midst of a crisis that might allow the centrist mayor to go practically unchallenged in his reelection campaign. Despite widespread disapproval of Adams across the progressive and liberal left, there is significant skepticism about finding and unifying behind a candidate who is capable of beating the incumbent. There’s even a degree of doubt about whether to primary him at all.

The hunger for a challenge has only intensified in recent months as the mayor continued to lash out over the migrant crisis, saying in widely condemned remarks that it “will destroy New York City,” and ordered several new rounds of potential budget cuts across city agencies while new data shows many agencies already struggling to perform key services, like food-stamp processing. There’s also the drip-drip-drip of scandal, including Adams’s former senior adviser turned buildings commissioner getting indicted for allegedly accepting bribes from Adams donors he connected the would-be mayor with.

“Progressives have a tight needle to thread,” Tyrone Stevens, a Democratic strategist who worked on Scott Stringer’s 2021 mayoral campaign, told me. “To wage a viable challenge instead of a sacrificial protest campaign, they need to find someone who has strong progressive credentials, can appeal to more mainstream Democrats, and can stand next to Eric Adams as the adult in the room. They need to win Manhattan and the Times endorsement while holding their own in the outer-boroughs. That type of candidate doesn’t grow on trees.”

It’s a political playing field unseen in the city’s history: a moderate Black Democrat mayor facing a potentially robust primary challenge from the left and virtually no threat of a Republican general-election victory.

The mayor’s political standing is somewhat hard to diagnose and could change between now and the primary. His poll numbers are middling, not terrible, but he is now dogged by the migrant crisis and his uneven handling of it, with criticism coming from virtually every direction and Adams unable to project calm. Though there are signs of early erosion, he still seems to have most of the electoral support he rode into office with from a coalition of many Black, Latino, Asian, and moderate-to-conservative white voters, including significant backing from organized labor that has only strengthened as his administration inks union contracts. Importantly, crime and economic trends look like they will be in his favor, but his record of specific major-policy accomplishments is likely to be thin. Barring seismic shifts (a major ethics scandal is far from unimaginable), going into reelection Adams will still be the favorite, backed by the immense power of incumbency, maxed out in allowable fundraising, and helped again by generous outside spending from wealthy individuals and top union allies.

But on an electoral playing field anything similar to 2021, Adams could be vulnerable: He received 30.7 percent of the first-place votes in the crowded Democratic primary and only defeated Kathryn Garcia by 7,200 votes in the final ranked-choice tally. (The general election against Republican Curtis Sliwa, who is planning another bid, was a blowout.) This time, Adams will be running as the incumbent who can be held responsible for everything from the migrant crisis to the city’s crushing lack of affordability.

“There are a lot of people who hate the guy and believe he’s governed in a truly damaging way,” one progressive leader told me. “And we’re starting to see his vulnerabilities. He’s rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but he still has a strong electoral coalition and will have gobs of money.”

Naturally, people are looking to the left-wing Working Families Party to lead the charge against Adams. “If the WFP can’t put up a primary to this mayor with his vulnerabilities, then what’s their purpose?” asked one Democratic strategist. The last time the WFP tried to unseat an incumbent Democrat, the effort failed miserably: Jumaane Williams’s 2022 primary challenge against Governor Kathy Hochul went nowhere. The party’s endorsements in the 2021 mayoral race crashed and burned. More recently, the WFP has been consumed with retaining its ballot line while trying to recruit Democratic candidates to win back the House. After six months without a state leader, the WFP recently announced Jasmine Gripper and Ana Maria Archila will be New York’s co–executive directors. “We can’t predict what happens between now and 2025, or how the political landscape changes,” WFP national director Maurice Mitchell said in a statement, while assailing Adams for putting the wealthy elite over working families and struggling New Yorkers. “What we do know is that working New Yorkers deserve better than crumbs.”

Still, there’s something of a chicken-and-the-egg dynamic between progressives organizing to defeat Adams and a strong challenger actually running against him. While some potential candidates are laying rhetorical groundwork, others are hesitant, and there’s no obvious mantle-holder to take on Adams and the task of uniting a broad coalition of progressives and more technocratic-minded liberals.

Williams has become increasingly critical of the mayor’s leadership in recent months, but he told me he plans to run for reelection as public advocate. There are ongoing efforts to recruit Reynoso, who said he’s not running after the New York Times reported he was the guest of honor at a July dinner of progressives starting to plot for 2025. Though he’s since significantly upped his own public criticism of the mayor, Reynoso told me again in early October that he is not running against Adams. Representative Jamaal Bowman, who lives in Yonkers, has also publicly declined despite being high on some progressives’ wish list.

There has been a lot of speculation about Brad Lander, who has not ruled out a run and is perhaps the most powerful Adams foe in the city thanks to his position as comptroller. His win in the 2021 primary provides a blueprint of sorts for a mayoral campaign: With a political base in high-turnout Park Slope, the Times endorsement, and a unified left behind him, Lander won many areas of the city that went for Garcia or Maya Wiley in the mayor’s race, when liberal and progressive voters were split among multiple candidates. A regular Adams critic, Lander has been making the case for “competent, compassionate government” that may appeal to those looking for a well-run city government centered on progressive principles. But, like most other city officeholders, Lander would have to give up his current seat to take the long shot against Adams.

There is one issue that inevitably comes up in conversations about Lander challenging the city’s second-ever Black mayor: race. Nearly every progressive elected official and advocate I spoke with said that while they love Lander’s politics, they do not like the racial dynamics of running a white man to unseat the city’s second Black mayor. Not only are the optics simply uncomfortable, many people I spoke with noted, but such a campaign could in some ways make the left look hypocritical given its broad mission to empower communities of color and foster diverse representation. They worry about building an electoral coalition with limited numbers of Black, Latino, and Asian working- and middle-class voters, whom they most aim to serve through their policies. And some fear Adams would quickly brand as racist any white challenger and the movement behind them, however multicultural it may be, helping the incumbent rally his base.

That fear extends to Adams defining a candidate of color as an avatar for white progressives looking to take him out. While many of Adams’s most vocal critics in city politics are people of color, the concern about how much Adams will racialize any primary challenge is part of why many believe any challenger to Adams that the left unifies behind must be a person of color. Still, three sitting elected officials of color and others I spoke with told me that the race of the challenger isn’t nearly as important as offering a contrasting vision to Adams.

Ramos has discussed running, and some believe she as a Latina would have an advantage to potentially cut into Adams’s base, but political strategists and others I spoke with repeatedly noted divisions between Ramos and fellow progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as skepticism about running a state legislator with little name recognition and a small base of voters. There’s increasing buzz about Zellnor Myrie, a Black state senator representing some of the city’s most voter-rich neighborhoods in Brooklyn. He told me he’s “wholly focused on running for reelection and helping Democrats take back the House and expand our majorities up and down the ballot,” but went on to leave the 2025 door wide open: “I was born and raised in the city, love this city, and think that the challenges we are facing at this moment require bold and visionary leadership.”

Many other names are tossed around, including Garcia, though she’s no darling of the left; State Senator John Liu of Queens, a former city comptroller who ran for mayor in 2013; Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who has recently spoken out against the mayor’s migrant rhetoric; and City Councilmember Carlina Rivera of Manhattan, who is facing term limits and most recently ran in the primary for the new Brooklyn-Manhattan 10th Congressional District seat, where the left again failed to unify behind one candidate and lost to moderate Dan Goldman. The list goes on. All are unlikely to run.

“The names that have been mentioned are not strong enough to challenge him,” said strategist George Arzt, who works closely with the mayor’s allies at the Brooklyn Democratic Party. No one on the horizon is likely able to present a better case to voters of their ability to handle the migrant crisis and overall public safety, Arzt said, calling the mayor “charismatic” and “unafraid,” willing even to be “outspoken against his own national party on the migrants.”

A moderate Democrat elected official who is no fan of Adams is skeptical of the left’s prospects.

“Someone needs to challenge him; the question is who,” said the official. “All the obvious candidates — Brad, Jumaane, the borough presidents — they’d all rather wait their turn than stick their necks out now and buck the Establishment. That means Eric could be left to face a challenge from a real lefty bomb-thrower with nothing to lose, and in a New York City primary, hey, you never know.”

The past few weeks show how quickly the ground can shift: The Israel-Hamas war has split the left across the country and in the city, exemplified by the blowback the Democratic Socialists of America got for boosting an anti-Israel rally.

“It’s a moment of slight disarray on the left,” one progressive strategist said, capturing the assessment of virtually everyone I spoke with. But many on the left are working to shore things up ahead of a potential 2025 campaign. Allen Roskoff, a longtime activist, recently announced the launch of the “Coalition for a Mayoral Choice” focused on opposing Adams in the next election and urging progressives to unite behind a single mayoral candidate.

“It’s really critical that there is an oppositional message, force, campaign that embodies bringing the city in a different direction,” Tiffany Cabán, a Queens city councilmember, told me, contrasting Adams’s leadership style with new Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive who replaced a centrist and, she says, focuses on unity and hope.

Some say it may not make sense to challenge Adams. The mayor, after all, would be term-limited after a second four years; there’s movement building to do and policy goals to achieve even with Adams in office, other crucial elections to win. There’s also the concern that a failed Adams challenge could simply push the mayor further to the right during a second term.

“In my opinion, the progressive left should be laser-focused on being strong enough to deliver on our ideas and goals despite a mayor like Adams,” said Sandy Nurse, a Democratic city councilmember from Brooklyn. “Sure, having a progressive mayor would be easier, but more than anything we need unity, discipline, and an operation that can completely define the terms for any mayor come January 2026.”