By Jeffrey C. Mays
Adrienne Adams, the first Black leader of the New York City Council, said Wednesday that she would join the already crowded race for mayor with less than four months before the June primary.
She is hoping to position herself as a principled and scandal-free alternative to the incumbent, Eric Adams, and the race’s presumptive favorite, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
With little name recognition outside of New York’s political circles and an unproven ability to raise large sums of money quickly, Adrienne Adams is already at a disadvantage.
But numerous Democratic leaders, including the state attorney general, Letitia James, urged her to run. The pressure from the group of Black women, labor and civic leaders grew as Eric Adams’ legal and ethical troubles mounted and it became clear that Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace after a series of sexual harassment allegations, was about to enter the race.
“New Yorkers can’t afford to live here, City Hall is in chaos, and Donald Trump is corrupting our city’s independence. It’s time to stand up,” Adrienne Adams said in a statement announcing her candidacy. “I never planned to run for mayor, but I’m not giving up on New York City. Our city deserves a leader that serves its people first and always, not someone focused on themselves and their own political interests.”
Adams, who represents a section of southeast Queens, will kick her candidacy off Saturday afternoon at Rochdale Village, a sprawling middle-class co-op complex in Jamaica, Queens. The choice of locale is representative of how Adams will try to build her base, hoping to target Black and Latino women.
If she were to win, Adams would make history not only as the first female mayor, but also as the first person to successfully make the transition from council speaker — leading the city’s legislative branch — to becoming its chief executive. Her entry into the race was reported by Politico.
As council speaker, Adams, who is considered a moderate Democrat, has earned a reputation for being able to work with the most ideologically diverse council in recent memory.
She will try to use that to her advantage in the ranked-choice voting system, where as many as five candidates can be listed in order of preference. Her moderate views and scandal-free record could draw voters from Cuomo and Eric Adams, while left-leaning Democrats could view her as a palatable third- or fourth-choice candidate.
In her State of the City speech Tuesday, Adrienne Adams eschewed political labels and said her “focus has always been public service, which has no political label.” She added that “policy solutions should be based on their effectiveness in improving the lives of New Yorkers.”
Adams can also position herself, as Eric Adams frequently has, as a product of the city’s Black working class who understands their problems. James, in an earlier interview, said that part of the appeal of Adams over other moderate candidates was that she was free of scandal.
Part of her pitch for mayor is that she would not be afraid to stand up to Trump and would defend the city from federal policies that could hurt immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community, among others.
Adams, who is not related to the mayor, is one of nine major Democratic candidates to challenge Eric Adams in the June primary.
When she was chosen as speaker in 2022, Adrienne Adams was considered a compromise candidate who could work with the mayor but not be beholden to him, even though they had a shared background: She and the mayor attended high school together in Queens.
In spite of their familiarity with one another, she quickly became one of the mayor’s strongest adversaries. She questioned the mayor’s management of the budget and called his handling of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the city inhumane.
Under Adrienne Adams’ leadership, the City Council overrode two of the mayor’s vetoes last year — only the second time in two decades that the council had done so.
“I’m a public servant, mother, Queens girl and I’m running for mayor,” she said. “No drama, no nonsense. Just my commitment to leading with competence and integrity.”
Adams, who often mentions that she is the first mother and grandmother to be speaker, said she was headed to retirement and more time with her family until the mayor’s legal troubles made her reconsider.
The deciding factor was when four top deputy mayors announced their resignations after the Justice Department moved to dismiss Eric Adams’ five-count federal indictment. The mayor was accused of offering to use his position to aid Trump’s immigration agenda in exchange for a dismissal of his case.
The chaos surrounding his administration has caused Eric Adams to hit a low point in his tenure. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found that only 20% of voters approved of the job he was doing and that more than half thought he should resign.
Cuomo was leading the Quinnipiac poll with the support of 31% of respondents, followed by Adams with 11%. Adrienne Adams trailed with 4%, but the poll was taken last week before she entered the race, placing her above some candidates who have been running for months.
