{"id":24900,"date":"2025-06-29T16:17:18","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T16:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/24900\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T16:17:18","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T16:17:18","slug":"how-eric-adams-can-get-a-second-chance-and-beat-mamdani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/24900\/","title":{"rendered":"How Eric Adams can get a second chance \u2014 and beat Mamdani"},"content":{"rendered":"

After laying low during primary-campaign season, Mayor Eric Adams is once again the most important man in New York City<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He may have also been the second-happiest person to see Tuesday\u2019s shock primary-election results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Faced with the very real possibility of avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani<\/a> taking the reins of the nation\u2019s biggest city, Adams knows that a broad swath of voters will give him a second look \u2014 and maybe, after a bumpy term in office, a second chance.<\/p>\n

For all of Mamdani\u2019s impressive success, he collected 432,305 of the primary\u2019s first-rank choices (with 93% of the vote counted).<\/p>\n

But the city has 5.1 million registered voters \u2014\u00a0and 1.78 million of them couldn\u2019t vote in Tuesday\u2019s Democratic contest at all.<\/p>\n

Winning under 10% of the total electorate doesn\u2019t necessarily translate to a ringing mandate, or a general-election landslide.<\/p>\n

In launching his re-election bid, Adams is making the case that he\u2019s accomplished more than he\u2019s gotten credit for in a distracted media environment.<\/p>\n

He has a point.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the vigilance and competence of his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the city\u2019s murders are down about\u00a027%<\/a>\u00a0so far in 2025. <\/p>\n

If the trend holds up, this year will break records for the fewest homicides in New York\u2019s recorded history. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Subway murders, too, have dropped to just one so far this year, with total major transit felonies down nearly 4%\u00a0through May.<\/p>\n

Adams can also point to some bad hands he was dealt early on, situations that are now mostly gone.<\/p>\n

He took office amid the COVID-19\u00a0pandemic, and just a few months into his administration, busloads of migrants began arriving from the Southern border.<\/p>\n

New York City\u2019s right-to-shelter law \u2014 grounded in a 44-year-old consent decree \u2014 meant Adams had to find beds for all of them, ultimately costing the city over\u00a0$7 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He couldn\u2019t just wave that law away. Modifying it would have required lengthy negotiations and court approval.<\/p>\n

Should he have done more to challenge the decree in court, given the unprecedented circumstances? Sure. Did he rely too much on questionable\u00a0emergency contracts<\/a>? Yes.<\/p>\n

But the law\u2019s the law. Finding shelter beds for thousands of people a week would prove challenging and expensive for even the most able administrator.<\/p>\n

Adams also managed to secure a key\u00a0concession<\/a>:\u00a0limiting single adult migrants to a 30-day stay, which helped bring down the shelter population from its peak of over 69,000 to about\u00a037,000\u00a0today.<\/p>\n

On housing, the mayor\u2019s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity plan, passed by the City Council in December, was the biggest change to the city\u2019s land-use rules since 1961.<\/p>\n

It opens opportunities for the private market to build new housing across the city, which will gradually result in\u00a082,000 new units\u00a0over 15 years.<\/p>\n

So Adams has a shot in November\u2019s general election. After all, he\u2019s won before \u2014\u00a0and he still has the mayor\u2019s bully pulpit.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s going to need to form a new coalition that builds on his success in 2021, when he brought outer-borough black and Hispanic workers together with union workers and moderates worried about crime.<\/p>\n

Despite Mamdani\u2019s emphasis on affordability, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo won the low-income vote Tuesday. Most of those voters will likely migrate to Adams.<\/p>\n

The mayor will also need to ring up huge numbers in\u00a0Orthodox Jewish<\/a>\u00a0neighborhoods \u2014 which supported Cuomo by margins as high as\u00a080%\u00a0\u2014 whose residents are alarmed by the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty.<\/p>\n

Adams can point to his\u00a0new\u00a0Mayor\u2019s Office to Combat Antisemitism as proof he\u2019s standing up to protect the city\u2019s Jews, using a power only a sitting mayor has.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019d have to whip up enthusiasm among Asian voters threatened by Mamdani\u2019s support for eliminating\u00a0the SHSAT<\/a>, the screening exam for the city\u2019s specialized high schools.<\/p>\n

Adams, by contrast, has protected those elite schools<\/a> and other\u00a0opportunities\u00a0for accelerated learning.<\/p>\n

Yet hurdles remain. Even voters concerned about Mamdani\u2019s inexperience and antisemitism may find it hard to forget Adams\u2019 federal indictment and the corruption scandals that engulfed his top aides.<\/p>\n

And the most likely path to victory for Adams relies on other candidates exiting the field so as not to split the moderate vote \u2014 which so far is not happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That means Cuomo would have to refrain from running <\/a>on his independent ballot line \u2014 and Republican Curtis Sliwa, whose prospects are slim despite his personal likability and crime-fighting integrity, would also have to give up his campaign<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How? They could move out of the city and declare a new domicile, theoretically disqualifying them under the election law\u2019s residency requirement. <\/p>\n

Gov. Kathy Hochul might also offer Cuomo an interim judicial appointment to clear him from the race.<\/p>\n

Then it will be up to New Yorkers to decide: Does Eric Adams deserve a second term \u2014 or is the city truly ready for socialism?<\/p>\n

John Ketcham\u00a0is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. All views expressed are those of the author and not the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After laying low during primary-campaign season, Mayor Eric Adams is once again the most important man in New…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,5297,5340,5289,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,5341,1269,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-24900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-andrew-cuomo","10":"tag-curtis-sliwa","11":"tag-eric-adams","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-nyc-mayoral-election-2025","19":"tag-opinion","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-usa","26":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114767557077602789","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}