This past week, New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running in the June Democratic primary for this year’s mayoral election, received the endorsement of four of the city’s largest unions ( including the 200,000-member DC 37) and of popular State Attorney General Letitia James, one of President Donald Trump’s most enduring and effective antagonists. This was big news in the ongoing parallel race over endorsements from the city’s civic organizations, unions, political clubs, and elected officials in what is so far a pretty uncertain race.
Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, fresh off a federal judge dismissing corruption charges against him (specifically because such charges were used as part of a deal for his cooperation with the Trump administration), has toggled to skipping the primary and instead running as an independent in November and so far seems to have racked up zero major endorsements.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo has stacked an array of other big-name unions like 32BJ SEIU and 1199SEIU, as well as local electeds like Rep. Ritchie Torres. Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has locked up a lot of progressive-leaning groups like New York Communities for Change and New York City Democratic Socialists of America, while Comptroller Brad Lander has nabbed others like the New York Progressive Action Network; each have several officials under their belt as well. The remaining candidates are effectively fighting over the remainder.
There’s a sort of conventional wisdom these days that endorsements are a kind of anachronism from an earlier era when voters had less access to information and cared much more about what, for example, a local political group or a newspaper thought. I think this is broadly true, but as with much in the political realm, the laws of electoral gravity shift a little bit once we get down to the local or hyperlocal level, the same way that quantum physics just doesn’t agree with Newtonian principles.
I’ve said this before, but New York City elections are so low turnout and the ranked choice system makes every last ranking so significant that even relatively small groups of voters, activated by a local political club or their union, can really swing races in particular directions. That’s especially the case in a field like the New York City Democratic primary, where candidates are effectively duking it out over name recognition primarily, facing up against undisputed heavy hitter Andrew Cuomo.
Even if voters are generally dimly aware of who the actual candidates are, I think most would be hard-pressed to enunciate specific policy differences between, for example, Brad Lander and Zellnor Myrie. Hell, gun to my head I could probably delineate some distinctions, but I can’t say that there are enormous policy distinctions between most of the current crop of topline Democratic candidates. They all think Eric Adams has done a terrible job and have ideas of how to more effectively use a bloated public safety budget and so on, but are mostly running on managerial and personal distinctions versus policy. In this environment, it’s not hard to see how the bump of an endorsement from a trusted source can be a determinative factor, especially if those endorsements stack up.
From the other side of things, we have to remember that political groups and publications are to some extent making their own endorsement decisions strategically. Beyond trying to tell voters who to vote for (or rank, as the case may be) endorsements have some other impacts. It’s not unheard of that while an endorsement can help a particular candidate among a certain demographic, it can hurt them among others. Progressives are unlikely to look particularly kindly on an endorsement from the police union, while moderate Democrats might raise an eyebrow at a candidate that has been supported by the local Democratic Socialists of America.
Groups that issue endorsements also know that they want to throw support behind candidates that have a real shot at winning. The ranked choice system has made it such that organizations can plausibly endorse a slate of candidates with a ranking preference, but this subtracts from the potency of a single endorsement because multiple candidates can all tout that they have received it. Cuomo himself is also a perfect example of the potential dangers of putting your money on the wrong person, as the former governor was famously a grudge holder who would use his power to punish political enemies that had supported opponents.
All this is to say that the endorsement game is one of triangulation as much as it is a pure expression of political preferences (and, for readers that don’t know, I say this as a member of the New York Daily News editorial board, which will be conducting candidate interviews, and, in all likelihood, issuing an endorsement at some point in the near term). The city is definitely in a bit of an odd political moment right now. As has been widely reported, multiple precincts, including heavily immigrant and working class areas in the outer boroughs, swung towards Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
That wasn’t so much a greater outpouring of support for the Republicans as it was a collapse of turnout for Democrats for reasons that are still being hotly debated, but which probably have at least something to do with a global turn against incumbency due to frustrations over inflation, and, locally, the convoluted effects of the so-called “migrant crisis.“ There’s some sense that the New York City electorate is seeking a measure of moderation, though that criticism is undercut somewhat by the approval ratings of Adams – the consummate centrist Democrat, who is now relatively aligned with a right-wing administration – plummeting like a stone.
It comes down, as it always does, to a question of narrative. I maintain that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott executed one of the most successful political maneuvers of the century with his chaotic busing operation of migrants to New York City and elsewhere. Through this inhuman utilization of asylum-seekers as political pawns, he effectively single-handedly created the narrative of crisis, which was potent even as it remained, in my view, essentially a manufactured one. There was, for a long time, a migrant shelter about three blocks from my apartment, and I didn’t even notice until it had already been there for months. I would imagine that a very tiny percent of New Yorkers faced any sort of direct impact from the arrival of what was effectively a small sliver (1%) of the city’s population, but politics is about messaging and that “crisis“ has been morphed into a general feeling of chaos and insecurity.
That’s perhaps best exemplified by the recent kerfuffles over street vending in Queens and prostitution on Roosevelt Avenue. The fact, though, that this situation was essentially engendered by a republican governor Abbott and presided over in the city by a former-cop mayor (Adams) might take some of the bite out of the perspective that it’s downstream of some progressives-gone-wild action. In this regard, I think there’s an ample lane for a candidate like Speaker Adams, who has real progressive bona fides and legislative experience, but is not running as an openly left-wing candidate, which seems to be the calculus of a lot of her endorsements.
Nationally, the buoyancy of a second Trump term seems to have collapsed entirely, as public polling shows the president sharply down across pretty much all fronts, including his once strongest suit of immigration. This is I think the natural result of an administration whose incompetence and authoritarian tendencies are no longer theoretical, but being inflicted upon the American public and economy. Obviously, tariffs are now very credibly threatening to take what was an on-paper recovering economy out back and shoot it in the head over what seem like ever-shifting objectives, and even voters who tended to think that immigration was a dire problem to be controlled are not on board with taking legal residents off the street and putting them into detention for transgressions of speech.
In one of The New York Times’ focus groups, moderated by longtime pollster Frank Luntz, a group of Democrats-turned-Trump voters got into a tiff over the immigration issue in particular, with one telling incredulous others that citizens and legal residents were being arrested. Samantha, a 54-year-old white New York teacher, encapsulated some of the discomfort in saying “it’s fine to have opinions on immigration. I believe in good Republican politics. Taking people idly off the street because you think they might be a gang member doesn’t fly with me.”
My sense is that this is a relatively common view, which I think clears the ground for local candidates to run on a platform of explicitly opposing the Trump administration and defending the city’s bedrock democratic principles. Nonetheless, if there’s one thing that we’ve learned over the past few years of American politics, it’s that things can really change on a dime.
