Running for NYC Mayor Through a Fog

The vibes in the city are anxious and unsettled, and the mayor’s race is feeling the same way — and, once again, a little adrift from reality.

It’s getting late early ahead of the primary in June that will almost certainly commit the city to a leader and a path over the unstable and precarious years to come. 

Three sons of Queens — each presenting themselves as a different sort of common-sense tough guy who gets things done — account for a lot of this uncertainty. 

There’s President Donald Trump, of course, whose second administration is off to a wrecking-ball start that’s already hammering the city where he was once a developer. 

It’s not “just” the ICE raids and the attack on sanctuary cities. It’s the uncertainty about federal funds New York has banked on to this point, and the heavy new fiscal pressures already being brought to bear on the city and its institutions, including congestion pricing. 

Historically unpopular Mayor Eric Adams, who spent much of his childhood in Jamaica, has been cozying up to Donald Trump in the hopes of getting off of the legal hook in his upcoming corruption trial.

A talented politician and hard-working campaigner and fundraiser whose ideas are broadly in line with popular opinion, Adams quickly hemorrhaged popular support as mayor and painted himself into this corner because he couldn’t see the loaf for the crumbs.

He’s almost certainly not going to be mayor in 2026 and might not even be on the ballot, but his job is what’s keeping him in the game as he’s running out of cards to play and short on table stakes. As a recent headline memorably put it, Being Mayor Is Eric Adams' Reelection Campaign Strategy. 

Adams’ weakness, in turn, is why former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — itching for a political comeback just three years after stepping down in disgrace  — has been circling the race, with polling showing that he’d start as the clear front-runner, with only a few months for anyone to close that gap.

But Cuomo, the second-generation three-term governor of New York State who swiftly fell from COVID resistance “hero” to resigning over sexual harassment accusations (though he now prefers to claim he was pushed out) in not even a year, likely has just one shot at a comeback and plainly would prefer to win back his old job. 

He doesn’t need to blow that on a divisive run against the city’s second Black mayor — one who hasn’t been shy about accusing opponents and critics of conspiring against him on the basis of his race.

While Cuomo waits and looms, New Yorkers are holding their collective breath to find out how the Trump presidency will keep impacting the city, and whether the mayor’s race will be a referendum on the Democratic mayor who says he’s being railroaded by the Biden Justice Department, or a referendum on the former Democratic governor who says he was railroaded by New York Attorney General Letitia James and Albany lawmakers. 

All this uncertainty — about the new president, the beleaguered mayor and the former governor — has left Gotham’s more ideologically inclined or party-aligned Democrats currently running against Adams, whose platform remains popular even as he is not, struggling to find their footing in this shifting and treacherous terrain. And they’re short on time to define themselves and make their cases ahead of the party primary in June that will likely decide the city’s next mayor, as it has in every election since 2013.

Adams eked out a win in 2021’s first-ever ranked-choice mayoral primary, with the last leftist standing, Maya Wiley, finishing a distant third in the final count, behind both Adams and former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and just ahead of a faded Andrew Yang.

It was four years ago this month that Yang surged to the top of a crowded field just after his surprise late entry shook up what had been a stale race between small-time city Democrats to replace a term-limited and totally spent Mayor Bill de Blasio. Previously one of those middling local office-holders himself, de Blasio claimed the big job in a primary where he’d been running in fourth place just weeks out in an election where the rise and fall of Anthony Weiner had dominated coverage. 

Yang, a charismatic “empty vessel” selling a camera-ready optimistic future to a shutdown-staggered city as other candidates were reduced to Zoom squares, immediately struck a chord with New Yorkers who were ready for a less grim post-COVID vibe but feared the city’s new normal wasn’t going to be so normal or so good. 

As opponents aimed their fire at the surprise frontrunner who’d made a name for himself disrupting the presidential primary the year before talking about the threat of automation and promising a universal basic income, the city’s Democrats eventually soured on a candidate who hadn’t even bothered voting in the city himself before running — opening up the space for ex-cop Eric Adams’ incredibly narrow win.

He then cruised through a totally non-competitive general election in what’s again been a one-party town following the 20-year Giuliani-Bloomberg interregnum, and claimed a sweeping mandate to get stuff done and to seat his “perfectly imperfect” crew at the table. 

Nearly four years later, Yang has ditched the party altogether and Adams, whose approval numbers plummeted just months into his term as he did more swaggering than getting stuff done, has the lowest approval rating ever recorded by a New York City mayor. 

The underlying voter dynamics that got Adams over the top in 2021 are still there, and — as Trump’s gains in New York City in 2024 suggest — perhaps continuing to slowly move rightward. Even among the Democrats who show up to vote in city primaries, there’s only been so much appetite for more radical candidates, and Adams has made a career in large part on running against the far left or at least his caricature of it.

That’s a challenge for the party regulars already running to replace Adams — along with how many of them there are and how, even in a ranked-choice election, that makes it harder for any of them to stand out.

To quickly and a little crudely run through: There are two political outsiders making their first run, businessman Whitney Tillson and former prosecutor Jim Walden, political moderates who are still working to introduce themselves to the public. Tilson and Walden have both had fundraising success, and Walden is making moves to also or additionally run as an Independent or Republican in the general election in November. Neither one has registered much success yet, though, in introducing themselves to voters, let alone breaking through. 

The other two white men over 50 in the race are the former and current city comptrollers, Scott Stringer and Brad Lander, who are both playing down some of their progressive ties while competing with each other to emerge as the more competent and less corrupt alternative to Adams (or the more serious and city-based alternative to Cuomo, if he big-foots in), rather than offering a fundamentally different vision for the city.

Finally, there are state lawmakers running, which is a little easier for them given that their seats in the legislature aren’t on the ballot until next year, so that, unlike Lander, they’re not risking the public position they already have to run for mayor. 

They’re all younger, in their thirties, and immigrants or children of immigrants. 

State Sen. Jessica Ramos of Queens, the only woman in the race and the daughter of Colombia immigrants, is struggling so far to get traction as the organized-labor-aligned leftist in the race.

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn, the son of Costa Rican immigrants, is also trying to build name recognition and support as he hopes to emerge as the younger, representative option in the more-serious-and-less-corrupt lane.

That leaves the other Z.M. in a race that somehow has two of them, Socialist Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, a young and preternaturally gifted communicator on screen and in person who’s been generating buzz despite his with very limited political accomplishments while running as a messenger of the DSA and as much to build its capacity and perhaps also his own reputation as to actually win and govern. 

It’s a nothing-to-lose position in the race that’s liberated him to make big if not always credible promises for free buses citywide, a pricey plan for the city to build 200,000 new “affordable” homes and much more.

A Cuomo proxy this week dismissed the challengers collectively as “the seven dwarves,” and mayoral candidates almost inevitably feel small-time because they’ve either come up within the rickety party establishment in half-bogus offices like “borough president”, or else they haven’t proven themselves within the party. Governor aside, there aren‘t many jobs that fully prepare you to be mayor. 

The trouble for Adams, politically speaking, has been his policy execution and his personal issues rather than his political positions, but that’s made the race feel mechanical as candidate after candidate introduced themselves with what felt like poll-tested versions of the same basic message and visuals, followed by ambitious but sometimes overlapping plans for improving affordability and public safety. 

Four years ago, COVID made the race feel disconnected from reality, both because it seemed to be taking place in a virtual screen world as much as in our physical city and also because New Yorkers were sick of talking about the pandemic — and the candidates largely followed suit. 

This time the conspicuous absence is Trump, and what his administration could mean for New York City. Challengers are taking shots at Adams for cozying up to him, but no one is talking about what they would cut if federal aid dries up, as seems very likely. 

There’s still time, just barely, for a current or new contender in the race to offer optimism, honesty and pragmatism.