Eric Adams was never popular. Even before his indictment for penny-ante corruption last month. Even before federal raids targeted his top aides and investigations so circled City Hall that his second police commissioner and even the schools chancellor resigned. Even before Adams registered the lowest approval rating for any New York City mayor in Quinnipiac polling history, last December, or saw support for his re-election fall to 16 percent in one poll this spring. Even before all of that, Adams only just squeaked into office, indeed with the help of publicly matched campaign funds investigators now allege were illegally obtained. But he did so amid a curious chorus of national praise that treated him like the new face of the Democratic Party and made him seem, as a result, like a much more consequential political figure than he ever really was.
In the first round of the 2021 primary, Adams won just over 30 percent of the vote, against roughly 20 percent each for Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, his two main Democratic challengers. In the runoff, he beat Garcia 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent — a margin of just over 7,000 New Yorkers, in a city of more than eight million. Close observers of New York’s local politics could tell themselves just-so stories about the robust-seeming Adams coalition — the city’s Black middle class and its homeowners, the police and business and labor — but his victory was the kind of wafer-thin win that might’ve dissolved with the arrival of a light drizzle.
Adams performed better in the general election over the stunt candidate Curtis Sliwa, but his margins of victory weren’t more impressive than those secured by his predecessor Bill de Blasio in either of his campaigns, each against more formidable opposition. As you may remember, de Blasio was treated right from the start as a joke mayor and a politically incompetent interloper, though in retrospect he is remembered somewhat more fondly and cuts a more impressive figure: He anticipated the emphasis on income inequality that would dominate the next decade of American politics, engineered a large social-welfare expansion in the form of universal prekindergarten and began the rollout of public “3-K for All” programs, and was, by some measures, no less popular even at the laughingstock end of his second term than Adams was in the flush period of his post-inauguration “honeymoon.”
New York City is hardly representative of national politics. And yet, the ascension of Adams was seen, by many inside the party and by commentators nominally outside it, as a sort of flare sent up from the Democratic future, a sign of some seismic backlash to the leftward drift of the party in the late Obama and Trump years — and a call for the party to follow Adams rightward, toward a “common sense” center defined in part by hostility toward strident progressivism.
Screenshots from those days have become a snarky left-wing social-media catnip lately, as first it became clear that the Adams administration was hardly thriving and more recently that Adams would become the first sitting mayor in New York history to face a federal indictment. The most infamous is a prediction by Nate Silver that Adams would be a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination at the next available opening, but Silver’s read of the political moment was actually not at all exceptional. The Bulwark proposed that Adams could be the party’s “next national star”; he even won the endorsement of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.
Adams himself warned that the party needed to heed the message of his election or face electoral consequences. (He gave the warning at a news conference where he declared himself the “future of the Democratic Party.”) Representative James Clyburn, the House majority whip at the time, struck a similar note, as did Joe Biden, in forging a high-profile alliance with Adams. (For a while, Adams took to referring to himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn,” though perhaps that was just a verbal tic.) Adams’s believers argued he would “save” New York and in doing so, show us how to save the rest of the party.
Three years later, that flurry of enthusiasm looks more like an expression of intraparty ideological conflict, with Adams celebrated less because he could bring about genuine policy progress than because he seemed well suited — and outwardly committed — to disarming and disowning the party’s activist flank.
Judged by many measures of civic health, the Adams era has been far from a catastrophe. At the time of his ascension, the city was still mired in familiar pandemic-era struggles, and in the years that followed, most improved, many of them significantly, as the city escaped the “doom loop” plenty of people believed was inevitable. There is promise in his “City of Yes” effort to clear obstacles to new housing, too, though even if realized, the program probably wouldn’t be all that transformative. But the ritualistic cuts to social spending and other progressive priorities have been painful: trying to undermine universal prekindergarten and public libraries, refusing to close Rikers Island and choosing to fearmonger about crime and immigration pressures more often than bragging about how well the city was handling them. The “quality of life” and “urban disorder” issues that would seem natural causes for a mayor of Adams’s ideological makeup are improving more slowly than harder problems like murder and subway ridership. And as a pure political experiment, Adams’s mayoralty has been an abject disaster — there is really no other word for it when a city in the midst of a meaningful recovery has a leader notching all-time-worst approval ratings.
By the time Adams stepped in front of reporters last month to defend the police who’d opened fire on a subway turnstile jumper, it seemed inevitable that footage would emerge to undermine his defense, as it quickly did. And when Devon Walker impersonated the mayor on “Saturday Night Live” on Sept. 28, it was a kind of confirmation that Adams had become, in the public eye, almost a cartoon — that he was not a promising ideological entrepreneur, tugging his party toward a more expansive national majority, but something like the opposite, a stock-character throwback, the pettily corrupt local politician imported from the machine era and melting under the glare of the stage lights.
Sixty-nine percent of New Yorkers now want Adams to resign, and his biggest defenders now seem to be right-wing grifters, their reflexive support suggesting the possibility of a Trumpward turn for the mayor. What happened to the swaggering superhero loaded with ideological kryptonite to ward off the toxic left? And why had so many people been so wrong about Adams in the first place?
The simplest answer is that they looked past the man himself, with all his obvious red flags — as far back as 2010 he was named in an inspector-general’s report on a casino bid-rigging scandal — forgetting that personality, strategic instinct and talent really matter in politics, out of excitement about the coming of what they believed to be a necessary ideological correction. Sometimes, they talked themselves into thinking that ideological correction was coming wrapped in human charisma, too, not just human weirdness. (It was taken as an amusing curiosity back then that Adams was a faltering vegan with a strain of Marianne Williamson in his plan to treat dyslexia and lower crime rates with a “plant-based approach,” and it was seen as a sign of some inherent star power that he seemed to spend every night at the Zero Bond private club.)
But as important as the blindness to Adams’s personal shortcomings was the blind excitement at the ideological turn he represented. You could tell this as a story about a particular place in time, with crime genuinely spiking from prepandemic lows and calls to defund the police echoing more loudly in the memories of many voters than they ever sounded from the lips of actual politicians — an environment you might expect to benefit a figure like Adams, who looked tough on crime but also boasted a history as a police reformer.
You could also tell it as a story of a time in a particular place, with New York City politics looking somewhat shapeless in the long wake of Michael Bloomberg’s exceptional mayoralty and the arrival of a new machine-politics power-broker seeming, as a result, like a potential break in that factional stalemate. Perhaps, if the Adams mayoralty yields to a snap election for a successor, it will be Andrew Cuomo’s lamentable return to office that breaks that stalemate. In the meantime, the Adams era looks less like the future of the Democratic Party than a reminder of the sad smallness of the city’s politics — three years of political struggle and minor or unfortunate policy shifts, ending perhaps prematurely in a scandal over airline tickets. His mayoralty hasn’t restored New York’s local politics to national importance; if anything, the city feels, for now, even more adrift.
And if there are national lessons to be drawn from the Adams era, they are not exactly the ones that seemed obvious at the outset. Immediately after the primary runoff, my colleague Nate Cohn emphasized that “The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Actual Democratic Electorate.” Three years later, it seems just as important to emphasize that the Democratic electorate isn’t made up of those people yelling at leftists on social media, either. Perhaps it’s hard to build a national majority around “the Maya Wiley brand of politics,” as Matthew Yglesias argued during the mayoral election. But the Eric Adams brand looks even more like a dead end. And it looked that way well before mocking magazine covers and gleeful tabulations of scandal.
On the national stage, eying a tight and enormously consequential race for the presidency, Democrats have spent the past year tacking to the center, stiff-arming the left and accepting much of the policy framing provided by the right — on immigration and on Israel, on cost of living and climate and energy, on permitting and regulation, on crypto and Covid and crime. This is all predictably “strategic,” in the frantic sprint of a general election campaign. But it also reflects a party reflexively comfortable in a defensive crouch, or operating in backlash mode, which you could also call Eric Adams mode.
There are other modes. The same year Adams took the mayoralty of New York, Michelle Wu was elected mayor of Boston, young at age 36 as well as the first woman and first nonwhite politician to hold the office. A protégé of Elizabeth Warren, Wu has in office embraced a local version of the Green New Deal and committed $2 billion to carry it out in the city schools; cut parking requirements and expedited permitting for new housing development and expanded public housing, and initiated a pilot program for free public transportation. Her mayoralty hasn’t been perfect or without its setbacks. But Boston’s murder rate has fallen by 78 percent just this year, after last year’s rate set a record low for the city. At 57 percent, her approval rating is more than twice as high as Adams’s. Boston isn’t exactly representative of the country, of course. But you get a very different lineup of political talent when you don’t require from rising stars, first, a happy-warrior hostility for the left. A different sense of the landscape of possibility, too.
( David Wallace-Wells is an opinion writer. Source: David Wallace-Wells Newsletter/ NYT)