The Democratic primary campaign season for New York City mayor is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at Mayor Eric Adams.
On Monday, the city’s Campaign Finance Board released candidates’ fundraising disclosures for January 11 through March 13. Andrew Cuomo leads the pack with an impressive $1.52 million raised from 2,704 donors in less than two weeks of campaigning, a figure which is essentially doubled when factoring in money from a political action committee that has thrown its support behind the former governor. He is followed by Democratic Socialist State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani at $845,000, whose grassroots campaign has drawn in donations from more than 16,000 New Yorkers to date. The incumbent Mayor Adams only brought in a little over $36,000 in the same period, and after refunds and outstanding advances, his haul is a paltry $19,000, placing him dead last among major candidates.
In Adams’ defense, he does not appear to have devoted much time or attention to the race, having neglected to create a website or beef up what amounts to a skeleton crew of a campaign staff. Even as longtime ally and Kings County Democratic Committee Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn has endorsed Andrew Cuomo, he has taken what others might consider to be a betrayal with unexpected equanimity. “My relationship with Rodneyse is not political, it’s personal,” he told reporters on Monday. “So, when she makes decisions, that doesn’t bother me.”
While the Democratic mayor is well-positioned in some aspects of his campaign (despite taking in so little in the most recent fundraising cycle, Adams is sitting on around $3 million), recent polling ranks him third, trailing the darkhorse Mamdani by a couple of points and Cuomo by twenty. Another poll found that his overall approval rating as mayor has dropped to 20%, a 30-year low for the office.
And yet, Adams’ tone and attitude have at times bordered on philosophical when confronted with the increasingly stiff competition from the nine other candidates in the Democratic primary: “I’m not running against candidates, I’m running against myself.” In another press conference a week earlier, Adams even claimed that he had stopped reading the news for the past month, claiming that tuning it out has made him “sleep so much better.”
The best way to understand Adams’ unusually distanced stance from what should be the next step in his political career is to take it at face value: Eric Adams is seriously considering – if he has not decided already privately – to not run in the Democratic primary for the mayoral election. At other points in Monday’s press conference, he made his misgivings with the party clear. “The Democratic party left me, like many other working people,” he said when asked about Bichotte Hermelyn’s Brooklyn Dems going with Cuomo. He also refused to close the door on an independent run when asked about the possibility: “when I am ready to roll out my official re-announcement and my plan, I will do so. I’m going to make sure you are all invited.”
Whatever Adams decides, he cannot play coy for long. Democratic primary campaigns are currently petitioning for the necessary 3,750 signatures needed from registered voters by April 3rd, with Adams confirming that his is participating as well at the end of February. Whether that remains the case or not, the petitioning deadline for Independent candidates is Memorial Day, a month before the Democratic primary on June 24th. In other words, Adams does not have the option of running as a Democrat and then deciding to switch to Independent if it does not go his way. In the meantime, rather than be upfront with the public about his designs, Adams appears to prefer telling reporters to sit tight for big news: “you are going to be shocked at how much this is going to change.”
