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\n Photo: Jeenah Moon\/Reuters\n <\/p>\n
It was well past midnight on Sunday when Eric Adams<\/a> finally walked down the echoing stairs of Gracie Mansion and, carrying a blown-up portrait of his mother, sat on a bottom step and looked into a camera to finally tell New Yorkers that he was dropping out of the mayoral race.<\/p>\n The late hour was reflective of a mayor who always kept odd hours, but also of someone who was, aides and allies say, genuinely torn over whether or not he should keep campaigning, losing sleep and unable to come to a final decision.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was just really struggling, really doing some soul-searching,\u201d says John Catsimatidis, the supermarket magnate and a longtime Adams ally. \u201cHe just finally reached a \u2018fuck you\u2019 level and realized that he couldn\u2019t turn it around.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, there was no one moment that made the mayor finally wake up and see what everyone else has seen for a long time: that he has no better chance of being reelected than I do, or you do, or the ghost of Abe Beame does. Nearly every day brought a new round of rumors that his exit was imminent; the mayor dug his heels in farther, continuing to insist that he wasn\u2019t going anywhere. Even as donors and allies privately prodded him to leave the race, Adams seemed to believe that once New Yorkers heard his story, compared his record on crime and the economy to anyone else\u2019s, they would come around.<\/p>\n But as September came to a close, Adams ceased campaigning. When asked on Saturday by Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC if there weren\u2019t any circumstances upon which he would drop out, Adams for the first time demurred: \u201cNo, I can\u2019t say that,\u201d he told Sharpton, whose daughter endorsed Adams four years ago. \u201cI\u2019ve been sitting down with my team, having our pathways, finding out how we get the money into the coffers to do the commercials, to do the mailers, to pay for our team and staff,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to make the right decision. I\u2019ll make the right decision for the city of New York, a city I love.\u201d<\/p>\n There had been a moment when it looked as if Adams could have been a serious contender in this campaign. Just after the June primary, money was pouring into his campaign coffers as it looked unlikely that Andrew Cuomo<\/a> could mount a comeback after his disastrous 13-point loss to Zohran Mamdani<\/a>. There was talk in elite business circles of making a hostile takeover of the Adams operation, installing professional-grade political operatives and rallying Republicans and Democratic moderates around the mayor as the best \u201cStop Mamdani\u201d option.<\/p>\n