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After laying low during primary-campaign season, Mayor Eric Adams is once again the most important man in New York City.
He may have also been the second-happiest person to see Tuesday’s shock primary-election results.
Faced with the very real possibility of avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani taking the reins of the nation’s biggest city, Adams knows that a broad swath of voters will give him a second look — and maybe, after a bumpy term in office, a second chance.
For all of Mamdani’s impressive success, he collected 432,305 of the primary’s first-rank choices (with 93% of the vote counted).
But the city has 5.1 million registered voters — and 1.78 million of them couldn’t vote in Tuesday’s Democratic contest at all.
Winning under 10% of the total electorate doesn’t necessarily translate to a ringing mandate, or a general-election landslide.
In launching his re-election bid, Adams is making the case that he’s accomplished more than he’s gotten credit for in a distracted media environment.
He has a point.
Thanks to the vigilance and competence of his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the city’s murders are down about 27% so far in 2025.
If the trend holds up, this year will break records for the fewest homicides in New York’s recorded history.
Subway murders, too, have dropped to just one so far this year, with total major transit felonies down nearly 4% through May.
Adams can also point to some bad hands he was dealt early on, situations that are now mostly gone.
He took office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and just a few months into his administration, busloads of migrants began arriving from the Southern border.
New York City’s right-to-shelter law — grounded in a 44-year-old consent decree — meant Adams had to find beds for all of them, ultimately costing the city over $7 billion.
He couldn’t just wave that law away. Modifying it would have required lengthy negotiations and court approval.
Should he have done more to challenge the decree in court, given the unprecedented circumstances? Sure. Did he rely too much on questionable emergency contracts? Yes.
But the law’s the law. Finding shelter beds for thousands of people a week would prove challenging and expensive for even the most able administrator.
Adams also managed to secure a key concession: limiting single adult migrants to a 30-day stay, which helped bring down the shelter population from its peak of over 69,000 to about 37,000 today.
On housing, the mayor’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan, passed by the City Council in December, was the biggest change to the city’s land-use rules since 1961.
It opens opportunities for the private market to build new housing across the city, which will gradually result in 82,000 new units over 15 years.
So Adams has a shot in November’s general election. After all, he’s won before — and he still has the mayor’s bully pulpit.
But he’s going to need to form a new coalition that builds on his success in 2021, when he brought outer-borough black and Hispanic workers together with union workers and moderates worried about crime.
Despite Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo won the low-income vote Tuesday. Most of those voters will likely migrate to Adams.
The mayor will also need to ring up huge numbers in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods — which supported Cuomo by margins as high as 80% — whose residents are alarmed by the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty.
Adams can point to his new Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism as proof he’s standing up to protect the city’s Jews, using a power only a sitting mayor has.
And he’d have to whip up enthusiasm among Asian voters threatened by Mamdani’s support for eliminating the SHSAT, the screening exam for the city’s specialized high schools.
Adams, by contrast, has protected those elite schools and other opportunities for accelerated learning.
Yet hurdles remain. Even voters concerned about Mamdani’s inexperience and antisemitism may find it hard to forget Adams’ federal indictment and the corruption scandals that engulfed his top aides.
And the most likely path to victory for Adams relies on other candidates exiting the field so as not to split the moderate vote — which so far is not happening.
That means Cuomo would have to refrain from running on his independent ballot line — and Republican Curtis Sliwa, whose prospects are slim despite his personal likability and crime-fighting integrity, would also have to give up his campaign.
How? They could move out of the city and declare a new domicile, theoretically disqualifying them under the election law’s residency requirement.
Gov. Kathy Hochul might also offer Cuomo an interim judicial appointment to clear him from the race.
Then it will be up to New Yorkers to decide: Does Eric Adams deserve a second term — or is the city truly ready for socialism?
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. All views expressed are those of the author and not the Manhattan Institute.
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