This week, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander announced his run for the Democratic mayoral primary next year, joining a field that now includes State Sen. Zellnor Myrie and former comptroller Scott Stringer, who mounted a spirited campaign in 2021. They are challenging incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who’s been a polarizing figure in City Hall over the last few years.
In truth, though, Adams’ biggest electoral threat isn’t Lander or Stringer or Myrie or any other of a number of potential challengers, it’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has been investigating Adams’ 2021 campaign and the mayor’s allegedly improper entanglements with donors and the Turkish government for about a year. The investigation spilled out into the open last November as FBI agents raided the home of Brianna Suggs, Adams’ chief campaign fundraiser, and bits and pieces have trickled out since. For example, one avenue of inquiry is whether Adams helped keep NYC’s Turkish consulate open improperly after receiving donations funneled from the Turkish government.
Now, let’s just get this out of the way first: this is weird. If you had asked me a year ago what would have been the likeliest source of prosecutorial attention on Adams, I would have gone with a hundred things before “improper financial entanglements and favor-trading with the Turkish government.” But here we are, and the possibility of an Adams indictment could very easily derail his campaign. Of course, he’s not the first mayor to come under a cloud of legal scrutiny; in fact, direct predecessor Bill de Blasio came under his own federal campaign finance investigation, not to mention a state campaign finance investigation and a city conflict of interest investigation, rounding out the jurisdictional trifecta. As THE CITY reported, every single mayor for the last half century has come under corruption investigation.
But none have been charged. Despite appearing to come relatively close, to the point that the donors themselves pled guilty to charges, de Blasio himself was never indicted. You could argue at some point that this is hair-splitting — if you’re an unindicted co-conspirator, does that mean you can claim to have done nothing wrong? — but there are some practical considerations. An indicted mayor would have to go through a criminal trial, and would have the prospect of a conviction hanging over them. Even though Trump has retained some of his base’s core popularity despite his own criminal convictions, politically, NYC voters don’t seem too keen on a mayor under indictment.
In a poll released by the firm Slingshot Strategies late last year, 60% of the 600 registered voters polled said they believed Adams had done something either illegal or at least unethical, if not fully illegal. The big takeaway, though, was that 52% said he should resign as mayor if indicted — not just that he shouldn’t run for reelection, but should fully leave office. Even with a margin of error of plus or minus 4, that’s a pretty stark result. (I should note that the poll wasn’t commissioned by anyone per se, but there’s speculation it was spurred by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who also shakes out as the top candidate to replace Adams among the voters polled. That’s a can of worms I’ll open below.)
So if that indictment comes down, Adams is in pretty hot water. But who can really challenge him? In an election like the NYC Democratic mayoral primary, a lot of it comes down to name recognition, which is partly why Cuomo was on top in that poll. Before I go any further, just a word about Cuomo: there’s this kind of background sense that he was a good manager, borne out of his lengthy time as governor and practically being born into government, having become his father’s campaign manager at 25 years old.
He is undoubtedly a good self-promoter, proving this with his pandemic-era press conferences and a book that projected competence while behind the scenes his executive staff was working on the book instead of their jobs and his decisions on nursing home admissions were leading to potentially thousands of preventable deaths. Remember all that? While it was the sexual harassment allegations that eventually toppled him, he was embroiled in a series of scandals at the same time. I’m not going to tell you who to vote or not vote for, but looking back at things with rose-tinted glasses is not going to help anyone.
Anyway, technically Cuomo didn’t get the highest percentage in that poll, he just got the highest percentage among the listed candidates. The top percentage went to “not sure,” which at 35%beat Cuomo by 13 points. This is encouraging news for a candidate like Lander, whose main issue is simply that voters don’t know who he is (39% of the voters in that poll said they had never heard his name, and another 23% weren’t sure whether they liked him or not). This poll was now some nine months ago, and Lander has certainly spent the intervening time building up some profile. He’s clashed with the Adams administration over things like migrant support spending, and recently unveiled headline-grabbing lawsuits against Gov. Kathy Hochul over her decision to stop the implementation of congestion pricing.
I’ve heard Lander previously describe himself as somewhat boring, and while that’s typically not an adjective you associate with successful politicians, I would imagine that he would make this part of his appeal; he won’t be hitting the clubs until late or getting tangled up with crypto billionaires like Adams, but will focus on deliverables like funding parks and increasing affordable housing. In this way, the run seems to have some parallel to Biden’s first campaign against Trump, which in many ways boiled down to “tired of this guy’s big personality yet? I’m normal, and you won’t have to think that much about me.”
Of course, Stringer already seems geared to make something of a similar argument, and both he, Myrie, and Lander are all running to the progressive left of Adams, which makes that a bit of a crowded arena. Myrie’s arguably the most left-leaning, a legislator who’s sponsored a number of hard-hitting progressive bills like the Clean Slate Act. But it’s not that clear to me how exactly they are going to differentiate themselves from each other. In one scenario, they could all strive for the left flank and leave Adams on the tiller at the center, though the fact that we now have ranked choice voting means they can’t really act as spoilers for each other. If Cuomo jumps in, well, I don’t know, he might win on strength of name alone. But the big wild card is the FBI.
