Eric Adams Couldn’t Sleep on It Any Longer

It was well past midnight on Sunday when Eric Adams finally walked down the echoing stairs of Gracie Mansion and, carrying a blown-up portrait of his mother, sat on a bottom step and looked into a camera to finally tell New Yorkers that he was dropping out of the mayoral race.

The late hour was reflective of a mayor who always kept odd hours, but also of someone who was, aides and allies say, genuinely torn over whether or not he should keep campaigning, losing sleep and unable to come to a final decision.

“He was just really struggling, really doing some soul-searching,” says John Catsimatidis, the supermarket magnate and a longtime Adams ally. “He just finally reached a ‘fuck you’ level and realized that he couldn’t turn it around.”

In the end, there was no one moment that made the mayor finally wake up and see what everyone else has seen for a long time: that he has no better chance of being reelected than I do, or you do, or the ghost of Abe Beame does. Nearly every day brought a new round of rumors that his exit was imminent; the mayor dug his heels in farther, continuing to insist that he wasn’t going anywhere. Even as donors and allies privately prodded him to leave the race, Adams seemed to believe that once New Yorkers heard his story, compared his record on crime and the economy to anyone else’s, they would come around.

But as September came to a close, Adams ceased campaigning. When asked on Saturday by Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC if there weren’t any circumstances upon which he would drop out, Adams for the first time demurred: “No, I can’t say that,” he told Sharpton, whose daughter endorsed Adams four years ago. “I’ve been sitting down with my team, having our pathways, finding out how we get the money into the coffers to do the commercials, to do the mailers, to pay for our team and staff,” he said. “We’ve got to make the right decision. I’ll make the right decision for the city of New York, a city I love.”

There had been a moment when it looked as if Adams could have been a serious contender in this campaign. Just after the June primary, money was pouring into his campaign coffers as it looked unlikely that Andrew Cuomo could mount a comeback after his disastrous 13-point loss to Zohran Mamdani. There was talk in elite business circles of making a hostile takeover of the Adams operation, installing professional-grade political operatives and rallying Republicans and Democratic moderates around the mayor as the best “Stop Mamdani” option.

But none of that came to pass. Eugene Noh, a political operative with a history of controversial behavior who had been removed from social media for inflammatory and racially inflected posts, was named campaign manager, and the rest of the operation remained bare-bones. Former staffers say that Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff and the official campaign chairman, was never much involved. Adams was denied matching funds by the city’s Campaign Finance Board ever since he was indicted on corruption charges last year, and he never seemed to want to spend the money he did have. Talks about joining the Trump administration in exchange for quitting the race went nowhere.

Adams has been polling in the single digits throughout the campaign. He never hired his own pollster and maintained that public polls showing him in a distant fourth were rigged against him by pollsters secretly working for Cuomo. He believed that his numbers would change in August and September, but just as the campaign was preparing for a last push, longtime ally Ingrid Lewis-Martin was indicted in a lurid bribery scandal that involved allegedly trading away traffic-calming measures for a brief cameo in a Hulu TV show. Winnie Greco, another longtime aide, was busted for handing a reporter cash inside a potato-chip bag. “Everything was just a mess,” says one Adams campaign staffer. “The chaos kept on coming and coming, and there was no way to get past it.”

It remains an open question how much Adams’s exit will impact the contours of the race. Private polling for the Cuomo campaign has shown that Adams supporters break 80 percent for the former governor, with the remaining going to Republican Curtis Sliwa, but public polling shows Cuomo getting closer to half of the Adams vote and the remaining going to Sliwa, Mamdani, or undecided. Wealthy donors who have largely sat out the campaign until now are expected to come out in a major way for Cuomo in the coming days. And a race that has been consumed by the question of “Is the mayor in or out?” now has space for other media narratives.

Meanwhile, remaining Adams loyalists consider yesterday’s announcement to be not so much a retirement” but, as one aide put it, “a reset.” They believe the mayor’s record will look better in four years, especially if a Mayor Mamdani tries to bring his brand of democratic socialism to the capital of capitalism.

“Look at Donald Trump,” says one aide. “He left in disgrace, and four years later, he is president of the United States. Anything can happen. This isn’t the end of Eric Adams.”