The Mayoral Race Has Begun. Everyone Is Frozen.
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The race to be the next mayor of New York City kicked off on a Saturday morning in the South Bronx. It was late October, ten days before a presidential election that was by universal claim one with apocalyptic stakes, but that didn’t stop five of the major declared contenders seeking to succeed Eric Adams from going to the Bronx Christian Charismatic Prayer Fellowship, a ramshackle house of worship on Morris Avenue, to make their pitch. There was hardly anyone in the pews save for a couple of reporters and a handful of early-hire campaign hands. A teen brother-sister hip-hop duo performed. Kirsten John Foy, a rabble-rousing activist and the host of the forum, gave an introduction that served as an oblique warning to the two biggest players in the race, neither of whom were onstage that morning: Mayor Eric Adams, he of the five-count criminal indictment and the submergent approval rating, and former governor Andrew Cuomo, who had been quietly indulging a will-he-or-won’t-he comeback attempt after resigning from office in a sexual-harassment scandal.
“There will be some who show up later,” said Foy, “claiming they want to be your mayor.” Then the pastor of the church delivered a blessing: “Lord Jesus, you know what direction we need to go in, in these perilous times, Father, in these very confusing political times.”
And so the five candidates who had bothered to show up for the first real event of the mayoral campaign bowed their heads and raised their arms in prayer.
They had good reason to pray. That morning, a New York Times–Siena poll had come out showing Cuomo, who is still not officially running for mayor, in the lead with 22 percent support. Second was Attorney General Letitia James, who is also not running. Adams, who insists that he is running despite grave doubts that such a thing is even possible given all his troubles, was third with 12 percent. The five people with their heads bowed at the Christian Charismatic Prayer Fellowship scarcely ranked. Comptroller Brad Lander, a citywide elected official who holds the second-most powerful office behind Adams on the municipal-government org chart, had only single-digit support. Scott Stringer, the previous comptroller who ran for mayor four years ago, came in at just 2 percent, as did Jessica Ramos, a left-leaning state lawmaker. State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, a further-left-leaning lawmaker, wasn’t even included in the poll; State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who first emerged when he defeated Adams’s handpicked successor for his old seat in the Legislature, got only half a percentage point.
In the weeks since, the five single-digit candidates have crisscrossed the city, making their cases at mayoral forums sponsored by civic groups, including the United Auto Workers, Housing Conservation Coordinators, and public-transportation advocacy outfit Riders Alliance, that didn’t have the nerve to host one before the presidential election was decided. Some even-more-extremely long-shot candidates have entered the race. Whispered-about possible contenders Cuomo and James have been joined on the rumor circuit by former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former Sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who came within a whisker of beating Adams in 2021.
It remains a race that is largely in suspended animation, waiting on what happens with Mayor Adams’s legal situation and then on whether Cuomo or any other big-name candidates decide to run. Adams became the first New York City mayor to be criminally indicted after federal prosecutors charged him with trading government favors for travel upgrades and hotel rooms sponsored by the government of Turkey. (He has pleaded not guilty.) His political peril is stark: The trial is set to take place in April, just as the late-June Democratic-primary race — which almost certainly will determine who wins in November — will be heating up. His legal fees are astronomical, his fundraising has dried up, and the campaign-finance board has denied him the city’s generous matching funds owing to the ongoing questions about his fundraising practices. In recent polls, only a quarter of voters approved of the job he was doing, and more than half thought he should resign, while every week seems to bring another scandal or news of a new investigation of a member of his inner circle.
Before the Adams indictment landed in September, Cuomo had suggested to power brokers that he would run only if Adams did not. The logic of that was clear enough: Victory for either would depend on the same pool of moderate voters. More recently, though, Cuomo has started to sound like a candidate who will be running regardless.
“There had been an assumption among insiders pre–presidential election that Eric Adams would not run or that, if he did, he would not be a relevant factor in 2025,” says Chris Coffey, a well-wired Democratic strategist. “I think that assumption is being challenged right now. He is clearly going to run, and I am sure he will be a factor. But I don’t think we yet know how that will affect the makeup of the field. Is Andrew Cuomo running? That is the biggest unknown.”
Ever since Cuomo was forced out of office in 2021, the most popular theory has been that he would prefer to have his old job in Albany back — in part for the redemptive arc and in part because New York governors have the ability to make life miserable for New York City mayors, something Cuomo knows better than anyone. (Just ask Bill de Blasio.) Plus Cuomo is said to be keenly aware of the fact that he has just one shot at a comeback. But his preferences may be evolving. Friends say that running the city appeals to him more now than running the state, where he would have to wrestle with the Legislature that nearly impeached him four years ago.
People who have spoken with the former governor in December say he is doing everything someone who is planning to run would do — including meeting with donors and labor and city leaders. “When you do ranked-choice voting with Governor Cuomo in the race, he prevails and it is not even close,” his close adviser and former top aide Melissa DeRosa said. “There is a lot of hunger for him to get into the race. And this isn’t women’s intuition. If he runs, based on the numbers I have seen, he wins.”
All three of Cuomo’s gubernatorial-primary wins relied on strong support from Black voters — that is, Adams’s base. In an ideal world for Cuomo, he wouldn’t face competition from Adams for those voters. But his allies believe that he can win over moderates who voted for Adams in 2021 and garner as much as a third of the Black vote, even with Adams in the race. They argue the rest in the field have records too far left for mainstream voters in a city that has moved sharply to the right.
For now, though, the former governor is in no hurry to make any big moves. He has money and appears content to see how the politics shake out over the next several weeks, if not months. Candidates need to submit nominating signatures in April, and Cuomo could wait until just before then, jolting a race that has operated in his shadow.
While Adams might be in trouble, the election of Donald Trump — with the city voting redder than in any presidential election since 1988 — was a beacon of hope for him. Adams was a registered Republican during the Giuliani era and switched parties five years before mounting his first run for office in 2006. In this Democrat-dominated city, he has tested the limits for governing like a Republican mayor: putting more cops on the street, clearing homeless encampments, highlighting the share of taxes paid by the wealthy, and attacking the Biden administration over immigration policy.
Since the indictment, Adams has embodied what the kids mean by thirsty. He has maintained that all of the bribery accusations were simply payback from the Biden administration for his criticisms of its handling of the migrant crisis. After the election, he wrapped his arms around Trump as a fellow victim of a supposedly politicized Justice Department and pushed back on those who claim that the president-elect is a fascist, proclaiming, “I’m not going to be warring with this administration. I’m going to be working with this administration.” He sidled up when Trump went to Madison Square Garden for a UFC fight, pledged to end the city’s decades-old sanctuary laws after meeting with Trump border czar Tom Homan, refused to criticize the doomed pick of Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and declined to rule out the possibility of switching parties. In mid-December, he was expected to speak at the winter gala of the New York Young Republican Club, an annual gathering of the MAGA faithful, until a few hours beforehand, when his closest aide resigned in the wake of an expected indictment in a separate bribery investigation. (An Adams spokesperson denies that the mayor ever had any plans to attend the gala; the aide has pleaded not guilty.)
Trump has expressed sympathy for Adams in what he describes as their shared plight, telling the former mayor on the dais at the Al Smith Dinner in October, “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders. We were persecuted, Eric.” At his first post-election news conference, Trump said that Adams was “treated pretty unfairly.”
The possibility of Adams’s switching parties feels, for now at least, unlikely. In New York’s byzantine political system, doing so is only possible if the destination party’s county leaders agree to it. Adams’s approval rating among Republicans is even worse than it is among Democrats, and GOP insiders tell me they don’t appreciate being the political party of last resort for a mayor beset by scandal. Plus, they said, Adams would likely lose a Republican primary to Curtis Sliwa, a tracksuit-and-beret-wearing radio personality, even though Sliwa lost to Adams in the 2021 general election by almost 40 points.
If the president doesn’t issue Adams a preemptive pardon and his handpicked U.S. Attorney for Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, goes forward with the case, people close to the mayor expect him to take a page from Trump’s campaign playbook and make the fact that he is on trial a political virtue. “You are going to see him run like Trump ran,” says one Democratic operative. “He is going to try to make himself the martyr against a corrupt justice system.”
It’s a strategy that has at least a puncher’s chance of working. The 2021 Democratic primary revealed a city with five distinct blocs. There are the “Bernie bro” leftists who cluster in an almost unbroken string of neighborhoods by the outer-borough waterfront, from Astoria, Queens, to Red Hook, Brooklyn; there are the liberals (think your Elizabeth Warren, or maybe Pete Buttigieg, voters) in Manhattan or the Brownstone Belt in Brooklyn; Orthodox Jewish and outer-outer-borough white voters who may still maintain a Democratic Party registration but are basically Republicans by this point; Asian voters, who have voted in the last couple of mayoral elections for Asian candidates if there are any and whose votes are up for grabs if there aren’t; and Black and Hispanic voters, who have been in an uneasy coalition for decades now.
Adams won because he romped among those last three groups, but it was only enough for a 7,000-vote victory over Garcia. In this tribal, deeply segregated city, ethnic affiliation has tended to trump most other considerations, and Adams evidently expects the Black voters who make up nearly a third of the electorate to return to him by Election Day, especially against the current crop of declared candidates, almost all of whom have at various times called for substantial police reforms, if not outright defunding, and are competing to win over liberal and leftist voters.
In theory, the candidates who could best cut into Adams’s base while grabbing a substantial share of left-wing and liberal votes are State Senators Myrie and Ramos. Myrie was raised in Flatbush by Costa Rican parents and led the fight in Albany to pass the Clean Slate Act, which seals some conviction records, helping formerly incarcerated people find jobs and housing. Ramos, whose parents are from Colombia, has passed legislation to increase the minimum wage and is a favorite of organized labor. But no one has gone directly from the State Senate to the mayor’s office in a century, and both have struggled to raise either money or their profile.
Nearly every comptroller in the past 50 years has sought the mayor’s office, and nearly all have failed. This race has two. Stringer was a champion of the left when he ran in 2021, but his campaign was derailed when a two-decades-ago sexual-harassment allegation, which he has denied, was leveled against him. (Another, even older sexual-misconduct allegation followed.) It is the opinion of the Lander campaign that given a choice between two wonky, Jewish middle-aged progressive comptrollers, voters will choose the one who has no such baggage; it is the opinion of the Stringer campaign that those allegations have been refuted and that even though Lander is just two ticks to the left of Stringer on the ideological scale, it is two ticks too many to make him electable. In December, Stringer became the only candidate to qualify for matching funds, while Lander failed to fill out the necessary paperwork — a sign, Lander’s rivals say, that he is hedging on actually running for mayor. (Lander insists it was an oversight and that he is in the race to stay.)
All four are warily eyeing Mamdani, the leftist son of filmmaker Mira Nair and a Columbia professor. The charismatic 33-year-old is a Bowdoin- and Bronx Science–educated democratic socialist running a race centered on rent freezes and free transit and that hopes to tap the energy of the Gaza protests. He’s got some social-media chops: a video of him interviewing New Yorkers on the street about why they voted for Trump has nearly 3 million views. He is seen as a long shot but also the kind of candidate who will keep the other four from drifting closer to the center.
In the city’s ranked-choice voting system, these five candidates are essentially in a genteel race against one another, hoping to be the second choice for enough voters to advance to a final round — perhaps against Adams. The mayor seems to believe that no matter what his poll numbers say now, no rival will be able to make substantial gains with the moderate voters who came out for him four years ago — and that the more he cozies up to Trump, the more it will bring out the crazy in his challengers. If he partners with Trump to end New York’s sanctuary city policy, for example, he hopes his rivals will be forced to defend the likes of street gang Tren de Aragua in response.
Which brings us back to Cuomo. (The other not-in-yet candidates — James, Garcia, and Quinn — are ultimately unlikely to run.) The former governor has kept a respectful distance from Adams’s travails in part out of their personal relationship and in part because Cuomo, who ran for governor the first time against Carl McCall, a Black Democrat who was the party favorite, and ran the second time after edging out David Paterson, a Black Democrat who was the sitting governor, doesn’t want to be seen as pushing aside the city’s second Black mayor. But he is putting in an awful lot of effort for someone who isn’t running for mayor, going to Black churches, meeting with Orthodox Jewish leaders, and posting about it all on social media.
The current dynamic — a field of challengers who aren’t getting much attention, a flailing mayor without a campaign chest, and a former governor waiting patiently — seems to suit Cuomo just fine. It is less helpful to Adams: His impending trial means that donors will remain as reluctant to give money as unions and civic groups will be to offer endorsements. That will make for a long and cold winter of waiting and a race that will probably remain frozen until spring.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Housing Conservation Coordinators sponsors the West Side Tenants Conference.
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