As Democrats are lining up to run against him, don’t shortchange the reelection prospects of Mayor Adams.
Sure, he hit a record-low 28% approval rating and appears to be the subject of two separate federal investigations that prosecutors will have to ramp up or wind down pretty soon to avoid interfering with next June’s primary.
But the lifelong New Yorker who says God picked him to be mayor was the top pick of just 30.7% of Democrats in the city’s first-ever ranked-choice primary in 2021, that proved to be just enough in the crowded, COVID-complicated and often incoherent contest that was clearly going to determine who would replace lame duck Bill de Blasio.
While Adams’ 289,403 first-ballot votes put him nearly 105,000 ahead of eventual second-place finisher Kathryn Garcia, it turned out that a lot of Democrats who weren’t with Adams in the first place didn’t rank him at all.
As candidates were eliminated and their votes moved to their supporters’ next pick, Adams lead was finally whittled down to 8,000 votes — 405,513 to 397,316 — and from more than 11 percentage points in the first round to not even one point in the final count.
That’s an awfully small margin of error — and an awfully small number of votes to effectively claim control of a city of about eight and a half million.
But that’s how it works in New York, where general elections are often irrelevant, people keep checking out of voting and the gap between the city’s elected leaders and its residents keeps widening.
The three Democrats — all men so far — who’ve started running against Adams have all often been situated somewhere to his left but are pitching themselves to voters now as more competent and dignified alternatives to Hizzoner of Swagger and His Motley Cop Boss Crew.
We’ll see who else gets in the race, and if the socialists who’ve been picking up political power more quickly than popular support manage to unite their resources behind a candidate.
The mayor loves running against a far-left that’s out of alignment with public opinion, but it’s not hard to see the race boiling down to a referendum on an unpopular incumbent.
A former Republican who once supported nonpartisan primaries — a great idea for bringing in more voters that’s anathema to politicians who’ve won their power in the current, closed system — Adams made it plain in 2021 that he’s not a fan of ranked-choice voting, even likening a late alliance between Garcia and Andrew Yang to a Jim Crow poll tax.
While ranked choice makes it harder for an incumbent to divide and conquer, the power of his office is a big advantage as the race plays out largely behind the scenes through the end of this year with rivals sometimes gesturing to the public but mostly lining up cash and institutional support.
The city’s second Black mayor has been delivering a refrain lately about the first one, and how “we can’t allow people to do what they did to David Dinkins.”
It’s a striking difference in tone from Dinkins, the regal and soft-spoken Marine who won office as the city’s groundbreaking 106th mayor while rhetorically tamping down the tribal passions that Adams, the 110th mayor, sometimes stokes.
About 1.8 million people voted in the 1989 election where Dinkins narrowly beat Rudy Giuliani and again in the 1993 rematch Dinkins narrowly lost. About 1.1 million people voted in Adams’ cakewalk over Curtis Sliwa in 2021 — a 700,000 voter drop-off even as the city’s population increased by about 1.5 million.
The 1.1 million voters on Election Day in 2021 basically matched the number of Democrats who turned out in September of 1989 in Dinkins’ primary upset of three-term-mayor Ed Koch. Just 800,000 Democrats voted in the wide-open, highly competitive 2021 primary.
While the city swelled, its civic life shriveled.
Even if 2025 delivers the city’s first competitive primary against a Democratic incumbent in 36 years, the odds are that the mayor will be decided by a relative handful of voters and within the confines of the Democratic Party.
Though it’s possible, as Ben Max observed the other day, that Adams could lose a primary but compete in or even win a general election against that Democrat.
Strap in, and stay tuned.
“Sure, he’s a jerk,” a New Yorker said of Adams the other day, “but they’ve all been jerks except for Abe Beame and David Dinkins.”
Wouldn’t you know? Those are the two mayors in living memory voters rejected after just one term.
Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
