Will Eric Adams Win Reelection?

It seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened

NYC Mayor Eric Adams gives a thumbs-up on the day of his arraignment. Photo by SWinxy

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New York City’s mayor is, not to put too fine a point on it, incredibly unpopular. In the latest poll I could find reporting on, from back in early March, Eric Adams registered an abysmally low 20% approval. He has a deserved reputation for being both disengaged from governance and for being flagrantly corrupt. When Trump dropped all the charges against him—the first levied against a sitting mayor—New Yorkers reacted with overwhelming disgust to what they reasonably assumed was an even more corrupt bargain with a president they abhor. Adams bailed on a Democratic Party primary that he was doomed to lose, among other things because since former governor Andrew Cuomo entered the race there’s been someone with universal name recognition whom normie Democrats can support instead of him. How on earth could he win reelection as a wildly-unpopular Trump-aligned Independent in overwhelmingly Trump-hating Democratic New York?

Here’s how.

First of all, Adams isn’t the only unpopular candidate in the race. Cuomo, the clear favorite to win the Democratic primary, also has distinctly high negatives. To the extent that his profile has improved statewide since his departure from office, that’s primarily because Republicans have warmed to him slightly as they focus their loathing on Democrats who are actually in power. Meanwhile, all the other candidates in the Democratic primary know that Cuomo is the 800-pound gorilla in the race, and while they haven’t managed to concentrate their fire on him effectively yet, they all know that’s what they have to do to have any chance at winning.

That’s particularly the case because of NYC’s ranked-choice voting system. In a normal primary, whoever got a plurality would win—or maybe you’d have a runoff between the top two finishers. In the latest poll, Cuomo leads the race by nearly 20% on the first ballot, with 37% of the vote; the far-left Zohran Mamdani is in second place with 18%, nearly 10% ahead of Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander, who are effectively tied for third. So if this were a normal primary, yes everyone would be gunning for Cuomo, but they’d be trying at least as hard to push each other out and be the survivor to challenge Cuomo in a narrowed field.

In a ranked-choice situation, though, you don’t have to narrow the field; to consolidate, you just have to become everybody’s second choice. That doesn’t require attacking each other so much as distinguishing yourself, which Mamdani has done by promising voters a magical unicorn in every pot. In that same poll, if you don’t count undecideds, Cuomo starts with 44%. He barely consolidates at all in the first few ballots, though, doesn’t crack 50% until the fifth round, and ultimately wins only 60% to 40% against his far-left opponent. 40% is a surprisingly high total for someone as extreme as Mamdani, which strongly suggests that if there were more votes to work with, consolidating the neither-Cuomo-nor-Mamdani vote to come from behind and be the dark-horse winner—as Kathryn Garcia nearly was in the last mayoral race—could work. But because Cuomo is starting so high, that possibility depends on first taking Cuomo down a peg. So for the next six weeks, that’s what I expect everyone in the field to do.

Will they be able to wound Cuomo enough to cause him to lose, either to Mamdani or to some other candidate? I doubt it. If they do defeat Cuomo, then who actually wins matters enormously. If it’s Mamdani, I think Adams would be strongly favored to be reelected simply because Mamdani’s positions are so extreme left. If one of the other candidates somehow pulls it out, they are probably heavily favored to win the general election if only because of the magnitude of that achievement. But if Cuomo wins, but only after a campaign where basically everyone else in the race attacks him relentlessly—and in which he treats them in turn with his trademark sneering contempt—then what does the general election look like?

Maybe it just looks like a depressing slog at the end of which New Yorkers reluctantly vote for Cuomo as the guy they hate less. But is Cuomo definitely that guy? When the mayor unleashes his own negative campaign against the former governor—attacking him for signing a hated bail reform, for his disastrous management of nursing homes during the pandemic, and for his own host of scandals—he’ll remind normie New Yorkers that it isn’t just leftists who, before they hated Adams, hated Cuomo. Adams can muddy the waters not only over who is more corrupt but over who has more Trump-linked support. Most intriguingly, Adams could credibly present himself to the city as the more reformist, more dynamic, more hopeful choice. After all, he’s already got Matt Yglesias’s vote:

Cuomo could wind up getting hit by Adams from the left, right and center, and discover that his core supporters backed him not so much to replace Adams as to make sure he wasn’t replaced by a further-left candidate.

Will all of that be enough to win? Probably not. New York remains a very Democratic town, and Adams has been a failure and an embarrassment; in a two-person race, Cuomo surely has the edge. But what if it isn’t a two-person race? An angry left-wing candidate could well decide to run in the general election on the Working Families Party line, and if Cuomo’s primary win was ugly enough he could cut meaningfully into Cuomo’s left flank. Meanwhile, Adams could consolidate New York’s Republican vote so that, whether Curtis Sliwa bothers to run or not, he isn’t a factor. Would that be enough to put Adams over the top?

Maybe! Remember that New York doesn’t use ranked-choice voting for general elections, only for primaries. In a three-way race (or five-way, counting Sliwa and Jim Walden as well as the hypothetical WFP candidate), Adams only has to get a plurality. That’s a lot more plausible than being a majority’s second choice.

The smart money is surely still on Adams losing and Cuomo being the next mayor of New York City. But that prospect is depressing for a reason. And when they don’t like the choices they are given, the voters sometimes surprise us by not doing what they are “supposed” to do.