Without Adams, Should Mamdani Be Worried?
Eric Adams, as was becoming apparent for many months, will be a one-term mayor.
Adams, who announced he was dropping his reelection bid on Sunday, has long been politically doomed. Multiple corruption scandals have embroiled his administration, and he and his closest aides were indicted. Even before the indictments arrived, he was bleeding out support. Adams was not a mayor devoid of accomplishments, but he had fewer of them than his predecessors and rarely seemed to be engaged with the mechanics of governing. New Yorkers wearied of his act, and it became clear, more than a year ago, he had no serious path to a second term. The last incumbent mayor to fail to win another term, David Dinkins in 1993, at least went down fighting in a narrow loss to Rudy Giuliani. Adams will slink out of Gracie Mansion with barely a whimper.
The last questions hanging over the general election are if all the Adams supporters will defect to Andrew Cuomo and if this will be enough for the former governor, who resigned in disgrace four years ago, to save his campaign. Adams was polling in the single digits, fourth behind Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate. (It’s too late for Adams’s name to be struck from the ballot.) The mayor’s base of outer-borough Black and Latino Democrats, as well as Orthodox Jews, are, in theory, Cuomo’s for the taking.
What complicates Cuomo’s path are his own significant weaknesses as a candidate. He is a lackluster campaigner with a thin field operation. The scandals of his administration — nursing-home deaths in the pandemic, sexual-harassment allegations that drove him from office — are well remembered. In the primary, he was able to benefit from enormous super-PAC spending and the backing of many politicians and labor unions, only to finish a distant second. Though front-runner Zohran Mamdani has struggled to unify the full Democratic Establishment behind him owing to his socialist politics, he has far more support than he did in June. Many large labor unions have abandoned Cuomo to coalesce behind him, and enough top Democrats, including Governor Kathy Hochul, have offered endorsements, though Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been stubbornly neutral. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
What matters more, though, is that Cuomo won’t have such a sizable super-PAC behind him and institutional Democrats would rather stay on the sidelines than support him. The city’s wealthiest donors, meanwhile, are mostly keeping their powder dry, waiting to see if Cuomo gains momentum or Mamdani runs away from the rest of the field. There’s also no guarantee all of Adams’ vote heads to Cuomo. There are Adams supporters, Black voters especially, who regularly back Democrats and could be courted by Mamdani because he is the Democratic nominee. Cuomo, as an independent, is at a significant disadvantage.
Orthodox Jews are another wild card. Adams maintained strong relationships with Orthodox leaders in Brooklyn and Queens. These voters despise Mamdani, who is pro-Palestine, but they are largely wary of Cuomo because he was the governor who imposed COVID lockdowns on their neighborhoods. In the primary, they reluctantly supported him, and they may just prefer Sliwa now, since many do vote Republican in general elections. Certain Hasidic leaders, especially in Williamsburg, may even be open to backing Mamdani, since they are both anti-Zionist and will want to cultivate ties with a Mamdani City Hall.
What will matter, if Mamdani wins, is what margin he finishes with. No mayor in the modern era has won with less than a majority of the vote in the general election. Sliwa has said he’ll stay in the race, despite pressure from Donald Trump to drop out, and this will aid Mamdani much more than Cuomo. Adams’s decision to abandon his bid will complicate Mamdani’s path to 50 percent and could, if the democratic socialist finishes with a plurality, sap political momentum. The caveat is that polls in the primary underestimated Mamdani: None showed him anywhere near his margin of victory, which was 13 points. His vote skews younger and is harder to catch through traditional polling means. Cuomo’s support could collapse in the home stretch, and Mamdani, despite a campaign that has lacked some of the energy of the primary, could secure his strong majority. The battle, in the home stretch, will be intense and inevitably bitter.