If there’s big news (i.e. Mayor Eric Adams announced he would not seek reelection and, oh, the federal government just shut down), you know we turn to our civics expert Felipe De La Hoz for some answers. Team Epicenter asked him the following barrage of questions. Edited excerpts:
Let’s start with the why? Why did Mayor Adams drop out?
It’s just a question of math, really. We’ve reached the point where calling Adams even an underdog sounds like an understatement. This might be the worst an incumbent mayor has ever polled in a reelection campaign, with the mayor bringing in single-digit support not just in a one-off poll but consistently over weeks. Frankly, it’s embarrassing; he’s behind even Curtis Sliwa, a candidate widely considered to be a joke.
As the mayor also alluded to in his video address announcing his withdrawal, he was denied public matching funds recently, which compounds the damage from the collapse in donor support for him more broadly. Earlier in the summer, in the immediate aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s primary election victory, Adams enjoyed a brief burst of donor enthusiasm for the simple reason that Andrew Cuomo had just been humiliated in a double-digit loss after raising and spending millions, and it suddenly seemed like Adams was the only viable avatar left for the anti-Mamdani big-money energy that had earlier coalesced around Cuomo.
This money was predicated not on the donors liking Adams but disliking Mamdani, meaning that it goes wherever the donors think it’s going to be maximized in defeating the Democratic socialist, and that’s Cuomo (again), who is running as an independent. Making up this comical polling disadvantage would be a Herculean task in perfectly ideal circumstances, but it is practically impossible without huge infusions of cash that Adams simply does not have; like it or not, our contemporary politics depends on money, and if you don’t have it, you can’t compete.
To be clear, this is pretty embarrassing for Adams, who is dropping out weeks after splashily announcing that he was seeing things through and definitely not dropping out, but I think his assessment was that ultimately it would be less of a humiliation to bow out now instead of putting up single digits in the final result as the incumbent. Sort of a “you can’t fire me, I quit” type of situation.
What happens now? And I mean on two fronts: first, the election… who’s left and what are their chances?
Adams pointedly did not endorse any remaining candidates, though the obvious result here is that Cuomo has a clearer path to victory (the reason he didn’t just take that final step, I think, is he genuinely detests Cuomo and blames the former governor for essentially edging him out of the Democratic primary in the first place, which Adams probably believes he’d have had a better shot of winning otherwise).
That’s not to say this puts things into a dead heat. The polls have consistently shown a much tighter race in a head-to-head between Cuomo and Mamdani, but Mamdani almost invariably still edges out the former governor, and his support seems to have only solidified further in the months since the primary. As far as I can tell, Cuomo is generating very little actual enthusiasm; he is essentially acting as a vessel for panic and discontent at the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty, and I’m just not sure that’s enough, especially as Mamdani has bolstered his name recognition and racked up some establishment endorsements (though as I noted recently, certainly not all the typical ones) since June.
In any case, Sliwa remains in the race, and even if he gets just 8 or 9 percent of the ultimate vote count, that would almost certainly siphon off enough otherwise Cuomo votes (remember, there’s no ranked-choice in the general election) to basically doom Cuomo’s odds of getting within striking distance. My view, Mamdani wins by double digits.
What happens to the city? It feels like this might not be the time to have a lame duck or weak leader in office …
It’s hard to say. I think one concern is that Adams no longer really has to put much distance between himself and an authoritarian president who’s massively unpopular in NYC because he’s no longer trying to win any elections here. Adams is probably now toggling to thinking about what’s next, and whatever that is won’t, for the first time in decades, be elected office. There were some rumors about the Trump administration considering offering him a position to get him out of the race; that’s obviously not necessary anymore, but I wouldn’t be shocked if this is still in the mix as a possible future for Adams.
My sense is that this has kept the administration from coming down too hard on NYC, as it has in other cities, but the flip side of that coin is that it probably keeps Adams from being a particularly zealous advocate for some of the city’s needs, particularly when they might conflict with the Trump administration’s priorities. Even as the threat of a government shutdown became a near-inevitability with the latest failure of MAGA Republicans to secure Democratic support for their funding bill, Adams stayed relatively mum. My sense is he’ll ride out the rest of his term making his classic bizarre pronouncements (we’ll never forget “make my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success”) and trying not to generate too much controversy either with domestic or national politics.
Of course, things are all moving pretty quickly at the federal level. Just this week, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned every general and flag officer in the entire U.S. military to a base in Virginia to have, among other things, Trump tell them to prepare to deploy in U.S. cities to combat the “enemy from within.” That language is sounding a lot like they really do want to crush political dissent in big blue cities, and if they deploy the military — or very aggressively deploy teams of federal agents — here as they have elsewhere, I’m not sure what Adams would do, though I think he’d be a lot more deferential than counterparts elsewhere.
What happens to all the funds Adams raised for his campaign?
City & State has a pretty good write-up here, but basically he could pay down remaining campaign-related expenses, use the funds in a future city electoral campaign (seems unlikely) or try to transfer them to a campaign account, which could potentially allow him to try to use them to pay down some legal costs. It’s also likely that the city’s Campaign Finance Board will try to claw back some of the funds to compensate for some of Adams’ campaign finance irregularities, which you might recall included some straw donor scandals (easy to forget in the sea of other scandals).
There’s a federal shutdown! How could Adams’ last months in office impact city services and budgets? And how will the shutdown impact New Yorkers?
I think there are some related but separate issues here. Shutdowns don’t necessarily impact funds coming from the federal government to municipalities — in the past, they haven’t had any particular impact on city services or the city workforce, as these are already-appropriated funds. Trump is still using the opportunity and the current budget chaos to separately move to cancel billions in spending for NYC infrastructure projects, ostensibly as a result of the city’s refusal to comply with Trump priorities on “DEI” and immigration, though it seems pretty clear he lacks the legal authority to do so. A federal judge has already blocked efforts to cancel millions in federal counter-terror grants under the same rationale.
The reason for the shutdown does matter, though, in that Republicans are refusing to agree to Democratic demands to maintain important healthcare subsidies, which otherwise will expire in ways that will impact healthcare costs for New Yorkers. Other than that, there are tens of thousands of federal workers around the city and the state that are going to be either fully furloughed or be working without pay, which has reverberations throughout the local economy. As Time Out also delineated, there are a number of museums and parks that will close for the duration.
And remind us: what happens to the corruption charges?
The corruption charges are dead. When federal Judge Dale Ho dismissed them earlier this year, he did so with prejudice, meaning they can’t be easily refiled. He did this to prevent the Trump administration’s explicit effort to use the threat of charges as a tether to keep Adams in line, which was probably a good thing, but it means that Adams basically won’t face these charges (not that Trump prosecutors would pursue them anyway).
It’s easy to forget this given everything else that’s been going on, but the Adams prosecution debacle essentially collapsed the entire Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, not to mention torpedoing the legendary independence of the Southern District of New York, one of if not the most powerful prosecutorial office in the country. This whole sequence of events is about the mayor, yes, but it’s also more broadly a huge blow to the ability to pursue public corruption in the United States.
What will the final months look like? For example, Mayor Bill de Blasio did a budget update; do we anticipate the same from Mayor Adams?
I highly doubt there are going to be any big ticket items coming down the pike in the waning months of Adams’ term. He does not enjoy particularly robust support in the Council nor do I think he has the type of political capital necessary to really push through anything substantial. The budget is done, “City of Yes,” a rezoning plan to increase housing supply, passed; the one area I can imagine him still being an active political player on is the ballot questions that will appear in the November ballot (which, incidentally, he will also appear on despite now having suspended his race).
We are dealing with a lot of cuts and threats right now affecting nonprofits and organizations across the city. One theory is that New Yorkers are more pissed at Mayor Adams for his failure to respond or send help or spend city money/emergency funds more readily than the corruption charges. Thoughts?
I’m not so sure. To be perfectly frank, I wonder the extent to which the average New Yorker really knows about or understands these funding dynamics impacting community organizations and nonprofits. People are generally pretty upset about rising costs writ large, which is something that Mamdani is certainly capitalizing on with his campaign, and are probably upset about certain reductions in city services, such as last year’s wind down of some library services (as well as some issues he’s not really responsible for, like the MTA).
What does a transition look like with Adams to Mamdani or Adams to Cuomo? Will this be peaceful?
Peaceful, for sure. Not sure if you mean that Adams could pull a Trump and hang on to power or something, but that’s not going to happen. He’s going out with his tail between his legs. Contentious, though, probably yes. I would imagine pretty much the whole upper echelon of the administration is out; some appointments are in particular contention, with plenty of ink spilled over whether Mamdani would retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch or replace her with someone closer to his particular viewpoint on public safety. Either candidate would likely want to shape the administration in his own way.
What do you think Eric Adams’ legacy will be?
He will be remembered as a corrupt mayor that presided over a scandal-scarred administration and ultimately could not jettison the practices of his much lower-profile earlier offices, including the largely ceremonial Brooklyn Borough President’s office. Not to say it’s been all bad; “City of Yes” I think didn’t go far enough but was an undeniable step towards remedying the city’s most fundamental long-term problem. Crime is down, which I’m loath to attribute to any given mayoral action — I will die on the hill that our attempts to neatly explain crime rising and falling via short-term municipal decision-making is pointless and often counterproductive — but people will remember that.
Adams liked the trappings of the office and liked having his own people around, and that was ultimately his downfall. I think Adams will want himself remembered as a Dinkins-like figure — a Black and independent mayor that was ultimately drummed out by nefarious special interests and racism, but I really don’t think that’s how most people will recall the Adams era, and I think he brought that on himself.
