Even in defeat, New York Mayor Eric Adams may still be Democrats’ future | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Eric Adams' scandals and policy record sank his campaign despite establishment praise.
- Zohran Mamdani built a multiracial coalition and beat Adams on cost of living and housing.
- Party leaders ignore Mamdani’s working-class appeal despite electoral risk.
Eric Adams, the almost-former mayor of New York City, is often wrong. Wrong to (allegedly) take those bribes from the Turkish government. Wrong to back a secretive police unit notorious for brutalizing the people it promised to serve and protect. Wrong to aggressively hike rent for millions of rent-burdened tenants and pursue devastating budget cuts to public schools and libraries. Wrong to hand powerful, well-compensated city government roles to his friends and family.
Wrong to get baptized — yes, like, head submerged under water in public devotion to Jesus — at one of America’s most infamous jails by Al Sharpton. Wrong to doctor a photo of a slain cop to fabricate evidence supporting his tall tale. Wrong to deny the genocide happening before our eyes and praise a war criminal for “defending the Western world.” Wrong to scoot past a press gaggle by driving his car on a Brooklyn sidewalk.
And as his flailing independent campaign, which he suspended Sunday, confirmed, Adams was wrong for New York.
But had you heard the announcement from the country’s second-highest-ranking Democrat, you would not have known Adams was exiting in disgrace. You wouldn’t even know Adams had left the Democratic Party!
“Eric Adams has served courageously and authentically for decades as a Member of the N.Y.P.D., the New York State Senate, in Brooklyn Borough Hall and as our 110th Mayor,” said House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, honoring Adams “for [his] service to our City.”
Why would Jeffries celebrate a man mired in corruption who explicitly challenged the notion of his authenticity? Why spend precious oxygen serenading a corpse? Perhaps the answer is found in a much-ridiculed Adams quote from 2021 that I find unintentionally prophetic:
“Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party,” Adams declared. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.”
If you squint your eyes hard enough to make your lids bleed, Adams embodied an ideal that the party continues to chase, projecting a relatable image accompanied by an inspiring backstory that promised to unlock the secret to preserving Democratic viability with the working class.
Just as Democrats retreated from any association with reducing police budgets to invest in housing, education or any other service that keeps cities strong, Adams asserted dual credibility on public safety and racial justice through his past as a police officer. Raised in poor and working-class neighborhoods, his manner of speech is charismatically non-professorial. His thick Queens accent never left him during his ascent into public life, and he is never at a loss for alliterative rhymes.
He presented himself as a business-forward mayor, who aggressively courted everything from casinos to crypto. He even received his first few mayoral paychecks in Bitcoin and Etherium. None of that prevented Adams’ career from crashing faster than a memecoin.
About as many Americans trust crypto (5% in one major poll) as New Yorkers trust Adams (9%) enough to vote for him. His extreme defense of law enforcement, even when officers appeared to fail to uphold the law while battering student protesters or provoking subway shootings, failed to create an enduring multi-racial coalition. Even his signature mayoral accomplishment on housing — Adams’ City of Yes successfully relaxed zoning rules to boost the infamously unaffordable city’s housing production — failed to eclipse the bolder suite of economic policies from the presumptive favorite, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. Cost-of-living issues were a vulnerability for Adams that Mamdani, a democratic socialist, relentlessly attacked from the moment he announced his campaign.
All those blights, and we haven’t even talked Turkey. The Department of Justice investigation into well-substantiated allegations of foreign payments led to Adams’ worst sin of all — compromising with President Donald Trump with a sudden reversal of his formerly strident tone right around the same time a potential pardon, pending the results of the investigation, would have been in play.
After Trump’s inauguration, which Adams attended, the DOJ wouldn’t let it get that far, dropping its criminal probe into Adams entirely. The move was widely perceived as a quid pro quo favor by Trump in exchange for Adams’ newfound willingness to defend the president’s agenda.
How can the Democratic Party credibly claim it opposes Trump when its leaders are so reluctant to condemn his ally?
Meanwhile, the young Democrat who put the final nail in the coffin containing Adams’ political career seems to be reversing disastrous rightward shifts among Latinos and white men. Further, Mamdani, a vocal critic of Israel and passionate supporter of Palestinian human rights, defied conventional wisdom by winning a plurality of Jewish voters in the primary. His margins greatly exceeded Adams’ narrow 2021 win. Now, a 33-year-old quasi-celebrity is all but assured a mayoral victory that comes with access to one of the nation’s loudest microphones.
This could be an opportunity for Democrats. Maybe even a gift.
Unless, of course, Mamdani isn’t the future that Jeffries and too many of the minority leader’s colleagues envisioned. Adams’ personal failings may have fallen short of his theoretical image; that idealized image may have fallen short of its theoretical impact. But that image remains the preferred future of establishment Democrats, no matter how electorally shaky it might be. Just this one time, Adams was right.
This story was originally published October 1, 2025 at 1:28 PM with the headline "Even in defeat, New York Mayor Eric Adams may still be Democrats’ future | Opinion."
