It was primary night in New York City, with one of the weirdest Democratic mayoral contests in modern history hurtling to a close, and at the (presumed) victory party for front-runner Eric Adams, one of those beautiful strange political mixes was assembling inside a Brooklyn nightclub: Orthodox Jews in long black coats next to young women in low-cut dresses next to a Bronx Muslim political activist in a hijab next to shiny-suited real estate operators, all of them milling around under a giant disco ball. To one side of the dance floor stood Evan Thies, a top Adams adviser, predicting not simply a win for his client but instant national influence. “Eric is going to be great for the DNC heading into the midterms,” Thies says. “Because him winning will provide protection against the Republican attacks saying Democrats want to defund the police, and because Eric is saying the party should be listening to the voters who have sustained it—the working class of every race and background.”
Two days later Adams escalated the declaration of his own importance: “I am the face of the Democratic Party.” Three weeks later—emerging from a visit to the White House, which had invited Adams and other local leaders to discuss reducing gun violence—he nicknamed himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.” The president’s advisers welcomed Adams’s embrace, but at least one sounded skeptical about reading too much into the moment. “There’s no doubt crime is an issue, but the administration and Democrats are doing something about it while the Republicans are using it as a wedge issue,” says John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster. “But whether it’s there a year from now? The economic recovery and job creation and health care are still really the most salient issues.”
It’s easy to understand why Adams would want to claim that his win carries broader significance, especially when his final margin of victory turned out to be less than 1 percent, despite the fact that he enjoyed the backing of some of the city’s most powerful unions and outspent the second-place finisher—Kathryn Garcia, a neophyte candidate—by more than two to one. The larger meaning of the New York contest, though, is far more complicated, with at least one worrisome implication for Democrats.
Every mayoral race has its peculiarities, and this one was odder than most. The year 2020 saw the city ravaged by the COVID pandemic and struck by crackdowns on social justice protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The lame-duck mayor, Bill de Blasio, seemed unable or unwilling to keep the NYPD from beating up demonstrators, and the notion of electing an ex-cop to succeed him appeared far-fetched. Then, over the winter, the pandemic began to ebb while shootings and homicides soared. Because the eight major candidates running for mayor were largely confined to Zoom appearances well into the spring, Andrew Yang, boosted by high name recognition from his recent Democratic presidential run, appeared to be leading the pack. The glut of media coverage that focused on Yang had a collateral benefit for Adams, shielding him from sustained scrutiny until the final weeks—even though he is an eccentric personality whose fundraising practices had been investigated multiple times when he was in New York’s state senate, before becoming Brooklyn borough president. Adams ran a savvy, disciplined campaign, relentlessly repeating that “public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity.” As a Black man who said he joined the police department after being abused by cops when he was a teenager, Adams promised voters the chance to have it both ways: a mayor who could reduce crime and reform the NYPD at the same time.
Adams’s win should settle any questions about the primacy of older Black middle-class voters in a Democratic primary—that is, if anyone needed more evidence after older Black middle-class South Carolina voters saved Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid. The crucial weakness for Garcia, who is white, and Maya Wiley, who is Black and who finished third, was their inability to attract enough voters of color. Adams dominated in majority Black outer-borough districts, and he also did well with Latino voters. And, like Biden, Adams’s appeal was less racial than ideological, selling himself as a pragmatic centrist, particularly in contrast to the super-progressive Wiley. “There are about 18 cities in America—and when I say 18, I’m not talking about secondary tertiary cities, I’m talking Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, D.C., Denver, Baltimore, large cities—all now led by fairly moderate Black mayors,” says Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist who ran a PAC supporting Adams. “And in all of them we’ve seen the cohesion of Black voters in a way that we don’t with a lot of other voter cohorts. To me, that is the real story here. In New York, Wiley did really poorly among Black voters and Eric did very well.”
The race did less, however, to resolve the Democratic split over what to do about the police. Both Adams and Garcia favored gradually improving, not radically restructuring, the NYPD, and together they attracted about 70 percent of the vote. Yet Wiley, who advocated cutting the department’s budget by $1 billion, finished a strong third, just one point behind Garcia, despite starting the race unknown to much of the electorate and proving to be an awkward campaigner, because she ran well with younger lefty voters of all colors. “Democrats are still clearly struggling about how to frame and project this issue,” Kwatra says. “The circular firing squad right now is focused on being angry at the defund people, instead of recognizing that there is a real constituency for reform and for some kind of reallocation of the historic roles that the cops have played around issues like mental health.”
Then there’s the thoroughly New York embarrassment that could have wider political ramifications. For decades the city’s Board of Elections has been…what’s the word? Dysfunctional? Incompetent? For this mayoral race, the board was implementing ranked-choice voting for the first time, and it did not go smoothly. The first count it released included 135,000 phantom votes, because polling machines in Queens had not been flushed after a test run. The mistake was corrected by the next day, though not before Donald Trump Jr. had gleefully exploited the confusion, tweeting, “Let me get this straight? You can be off by 135,000 votes in a New York City mayoral primary alone, but if someone loses the White House by less than 45,000 across multiple states in a presidential election you can’t have any questions.”
Now, Junior is an idiot. And the botch was minor compared with aggressive Republican legislative efforts to suppress voting rights in Texas, Georgia, Michigan, and other states. But with the battle over who votes becoming as fierce as the elections themselves, the high-profile screwup sure didn’t help the fight against disinformation. “It was a terrible thing for Democrats, who are trying to show people they should have faith in the system,” says Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a progressive Democratic consultant who was a top adviser to de Blasio in 2013 and worked with Scott Stringer, another mayoral candidate, in 2021. “New York is playing into the hands of national Republicans.”
The 2022 midterms are shaping up to be extremely difficult for Democrats, who need to hang on to suburban swing voters as consumer prices rise and Republicans stoke the culture war. Biden has been down this road before: As a first-term vice president in 2010, he saw a Republican wave seize a majority in both houses of Congress. “I’m very pessimistic,” says Cornell Belcher, a strategist for both of Barack Obama’s presidential runs and a pollster for Wiley’s mayoral bid. “We’re about to have 2010 again. You can see the train wreck coming. And it’s analogous to the broader conversation about voting rights: Republicans have stopped playing by the rules, and Democrats for some reason pretend it isn’t happening.”
Perhaps Adams uses his combination of middle-class, multiracial electoral support and big-money backing to reform not only the NYPD but city schools and public housing—and in the process becomes an example for national Democrats looking to build a coalition that can withstand the Republican assault on voting rights. “The through line is economic, not racial,” Thies says. “What Eric is saying is that the party should be listening to the people who have sustained it, not getting lost in philosophical and ideological debates. That is how he won in New York. And that’s why we feel so strongly this is something that national Democrats should be paying attention to.” Or maybe, like his City Hall predecessors who have seen their national aspirations shrivel, Adams discovers that governing the five boroughs is a tough enough job all by itself.
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