Eric Adams Ends His Re-Election Campaign (Will It Be Enough to Stop Mamdani?)

There have been hints circulating for weeks that Mayor Eric Adams was considering abandoning his run for re-election. Yesterday he finally pulled the trigger.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City announced on Sunday that he would abandon his foundering campaign for a second term, upending the race to lead the nation’s largest city just five weeks before Election Day.

In a nearly nine-minute video message that began with Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” the mayor conceded that despite his best efforts, he could no longer see a path to re-election and would conclude his tumultuous mayoralty at year’s end.

He blamed “continued media speculation about my departure” and a decision by the city’s Campaign Finance Board to deny him public matching funds for his campaign, which has flagged amid anemic poll numbers and a cloud of scandal around City Hall.

“Despite all we’ve achieved,” he said, “I cannot continue my re-election campaign.”

Mayor Adams didn’t mention his rivals by name but he did offer a hint about who he does not support.

“Major change is welcome and necessary,” Mr. Adams said. “But beware of those who claim the answer is to destroy the very system we built together over generations.”

His prepared remarks also included some criticism of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but those remarks were removed in the final video.

So the obvious question now is does this change the dynamic of the race? The short answer is probably not. Adams polling was already so low that even handing all of his voters to Cuomo won’t be enough to stop Mamdami.

Before his Sunday announcement, Adams was polling in the high single digits — not enough alone to change the trajectory of the race, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist University Institute for Public Opinion.

The mayor received 9% support in Marist’s poll released earlier this month, a distant fourth behind Mamdani, Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.

There are too few Adams voters to shift elsewhere to make a dramatic difference.

“It gives Cuomo a boost — but it’s not enough,” Miringoff told The Post.

The simplest explanation is that NY Democrats have made up their mind they want a dose of far-left populism and nothing seems likely to change their minds. Coincidentally, there’s an opinion piece in the NY Times today arguing that “eat-the-rich populism” is Democrats’ best hope for returning to power.

For close to a year, Democrats have been locked in debate over their path out of the wilderness. In party retreats and private Slack channels, along with testy exchanges on social media and strategic leaks to reporters, Democratic insiders have wrestled over the mistakes of the Biden administration and the shortcomings of the Harris campaign…

A few campaigns have bucked those trends. The problem for Democrats is that the best examples come from candidates running against the Democratic Party…

Now, think about the biggest story of the 2025 election season, Zohran Mamdani’s come-from-nowhere victory in the New York City mayoral primary. From the start, Mr. Mamdani positioned himself as a fresh face confronting a dysfunctional system on behalf of ordinary New Yorkers struggling to pay their bills. He’s the happy class warrior blessed with Andrew Cuomo as his foil, a convenient stand-in for a corrupt and clueless establishment…

It’s a simple recipe, really: a scorching economic message delivered by political outsiders standing up to the powerful. The villains in this narrative — and it’s essential to have villains — are the elites at the top of a broken system.

Mamdani has sidestepped many of the left’s culture war issues and is instead claiming he can fix all of the city’s economic problems with his socialist policies. He’s offering to expand rent control, to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, free childcare and government-run grocery stores. The scale of the giveaway is pretty staggering.

All of these plans are likely to make things much worse in the long run. Rent control will limit new building, creating a greater rise in prices in the long term. Higher wages will create job losses and inflation. Free childcare could cost taxpayers $10 billion a year. And government-run grocery stores are likely to fail and hurt real grocery stores in the meantime. But none of this will be visible to voters in this election. Democrats have a very short memory for the failures of socialism. All they see is the promise of more money and cheaper childcare, food and rent.

Sooner or later, NYC will run out of other people’s money but for now, Mamdani just has to sell the socialist fantasy in which some rich person somewhere else is going to pay for all of this.

Here’s Mayor Adams announcement that he is leaving the race.

Only in America. Only in New York.
Thank you for making my story a reality. pic.twitter.com/efHuyBnITJ

— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) September 28, 2025

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