Tusha Diaz was standing under a giant disco ball, waiting for Eric Adams. This was primary night, and the New York City polls had just closed; at the Adams party large TV screens were showing him jumping out to an early lead in the mayoral race. As Diaz waited for Adams to take the stage and speak, she kept one eye on her son, Hector Bonilla, a lanky 24-year-old wearing a suit and tie, fresh from his job in the financial industry. Diaz had raised Hector as a single mom in the Bronx while on welfare. She now runs two beauty spas in the borough and operates a food pantry. “The biggest problem in this city is education,” Diaz says. “The public schools in our neighborhood were a problem, so I sent Hector to Eagle Academy. That’s how I first learned about Eric Adams—he supported Eagle, and then during COVID, he was out in the community distributing food and PPE. He was the borough president in Brooklyn, but he had more impact in the Bronx than our own did.”
There are a whole bunch of horse race reasons Adams built his margin and will probably maintain it once all the ranked-choice votes are counted in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary over the next few weeks. The timing of his campaign message turned out to be impeccable: Adams, an ex-cop, was running just as crime—including a series of particularly gruesome shootings—was spiking. Adams promised a twofer: As a former police officer, he would make the city safer, but as a Black man with a history of speaking on reform, he would also make the NYPD less abusive. His message got loud reinforcement from the New York Post, which didn’t just endorse Adams on its editorial page but also promoted him in its news pages. Adams benefited from the large share of media attention devoted to Andrew Yang, and from the large field of mayoral competitors, both of which reduced the amount of space examining Adams’s complicated personal and political life. He got crucial behind-the-scenes backing from incumbent mayor Bill de Blasio, who in February steered labor unions into Adams’s camp. And the city’s younger, more progressive voters coalesced late behind Maya Wiley, but they seemed to turn out in numbers that were significantly smaller than those of New York’s consistently underestimated older, more moderate voters.
The most important factor fueling Adams’s apparent win, though, is harder to quantify, far less about ideology than roots—and exemplified by Diaz and her son. Yang soared to a lead in the spring on the virtue of the name recognition he carried over from his 2020 presidential bid, but it was a mile wide and an inch deep. Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, who is currently in third place, were first-time candidates who struggled to make themselves known to voters even into the final days of the campaign; the first few months of being confined to Zoom because of COVID certainly didn’t help introduce them to the masses. Adams, meanwhile, has eagerly sought out the New York spotlight since the mid-’90s, when he was an outspoken cop. Fifteen years as a sometimes controversial, sometimes goofy elected official—first in the state Senate, then as Brooklyn borough president—gave Adams a wide public platform and allowed him to cultivate deep relationships with community groups, like those that turned Diaz into a fan and a supporter. Unless you are Mike Bloomberg, able to spend tens of millions of dollars of your own money, it remains incredibly difficult to crack the city’s insular Democratic political culture. And the experience of hundreds of hours walking the streets—first as a cop, then trying to wrangle votes—is an invaluable foundation for a politician.
The flip side of all those runs for office, and all of Adams’s connections, was audible at his primary-night party on Tuesday. Suddenly the music was turned down and a voice came over the speakers: “We just need Frank Carone. Frank Carone, we need you by the DJ area, please.”
Perhaps he was paying for the microphone. Carone, the lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party, is one of the city’s most influential power brokers and fixers. He has helped Adams’s political career in a variety of ways, from fundraising to making calls to real estate interests to making office space available for Adams’s campaign without a formal rental agreement.
Adams showed an impressive, newfound discipline during most of the campaign, repeating his compelling life story and hammering home his promise to deliver both police reform and lower crime rates. Near the frenzied end he did veer into calling Yang a liar, claiming that a Garcia-Yang alliance was somehow racist, and appeared to retaliate against two reporters who had written tough stories about him. Maybe that growth will continue if Adams reaches City Hall, and he will truly be a mayor in touch with the neighborhoods. Or maybe the next four years will be scattershot, personal, and transactional.
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