What’s Next As Eric Adams Suspends Race for Mayor?

Trailing badly in the polls and barred from obtaining matching funds, Mayor Eric Adams made the bombshell announcement he is suspending his re-election bid. He made the announcement on a video showing him sitting on a staircase in the mayoral manse, Gracie Mansion.

“Four years ago, Gracie Mansion became my home,” said Adams, looking relaxed at the start of the nine-minute video sitting next to a life-size portrait of his late mother. “Who would have thought that a kid from south Jamaica, Queens, growing up with learning disabilities, would one day become the mayor of the greatest city in the world?”

His term was a tumultuous four years. He weathered the migrant crisis that cost the city $7 billion, and started to drive down serious crime in the post-COVID era, and managed to get a sweeping housing-reform bill called City of Yes passed. Employment numbers slowly rose as the city recovered from the pandemic.

But he also faced corruption claims that caused huge staff turnover of top aides as he became the first mayor in city history to face a criminal indictment. The U.S.Department of Justice, just over a year ago in September 2024, filed a five-count criminal corruption charge against Adams that consumed much of his attention for months. That was until April when the Trump DOJ quashed the indictment, prompting seven of the DOJ attorneys who worked on it to resign in protest. Trump appointed a personal White House attorney to the DOJ who said the government was not going to pursue the case, and a judge had little choice but to toss it. That allowed Adams to skate on a criminal trial, but five key aides were snagged in their own criminal investigations and others had their homes raided to collect evidence. More than two dozen deputy mayors exited, some in protest over Adams’s decisions and some because they had become targets themselves.

Adams, a former NYPD captain, is on his fourth police commissioner in just over 3 1/2 years.

Still, Adams, decked out in a comfortable white shirt in the video appeared far more relaxed than he had in recent weeks as rumors swirled about would he or would he not bow out of the race. It appeared to be tipping toward “out” over past the two weeks as he huddled with aides and stopped campaign events and even began skipping parades.

”Despite all we achieved, I cannot continue my re-election campaign,” he announced in the nine minute video. “The constant media speculation about my future and the Campaign Finance Board’s decision to withhold millions of dollars have undermined my ability to raise the funds needed for a serious campaign.”

Adams’s name remains on the Nov. 4 ballot on two independent lines, and he will continue to fulfill the final three months of his term of office.

Observers predict former governor Andrew Cuomo will benefit the most from Adams's decision, but it’s anyone’s guess if it will generate lasting Stop Mamdani momentum. Mamdani was leading the pack with 45 percent of preferred votes in the most recent Suffolk University poll. Cuomo was second, trailing by about 20 points in the latest poll, though one recent poll projected that in a two-man race Cuomo would beat Mamdani. But in most hypothetical matchups in a three-person race, which includes Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, even adding Adams’s 8 percent of the prospective vote to Cuomo’s 25 percent or 26 percent, Cuomo would still trail Mamdani by a wide margin.

President Trump has also weighed in and said it would be better if it were a two-man race and several weeks ago was said to be dangling an ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia to Adams if he stepped down. But nothing materialized. After Trump was re-elected, Adams rarely criticized him, and since Trump is wildly unpopular in New York, his presidential shadow certainly hurt Adams with voters.

Republican candidate Sliwa, who was preferred by 8.6 percent in the latest Suffolk University poll, said last week he had no intention of dropping out. He also leveled a bombshell claim last week that “emissaries” from Cuomo had approached him at least seven times, dangling millions of dollars in bribes for him to drop out. And he said he suspected people had made the same approach to Adams. Sliwa said he always countered, “Curtis Sliwa is not for sale.”

A spokesman for Cuomo at the time dismissed the claims. “Curtis Sliwa is a liar and a fraudster who has admitted to faking crimes for publicity. . . . This is more of the same.”

Before the bombshell announcement by Adams on Sunday, the campaigns appeared poised to become increasingly nasty down the homestretch. The New York Times was reporting that the pro-Cuomo super PAC Fix the City is joining forces with Protect the Protectors and New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor 25, creating an anti-Mamdani coalition.

Adams made no endorsement in his farewell address but seemed to take an anonymous potshot at Mamdani, a far-left Democratic Socialist. “Extremism is growing in our politics,” Adams said. He warned, “Too often insidious forces use local government to advance a vicious agenda with little regard to how it hurts average New Yorkers.” He issued a warning against “divisive agendas.”

“Whoever follows me at City Hall must continue the work we started: lowering the cost of living, investing in quality of life, and staying laser-focused on reducing crime and disorder,” he said.

“Although this is the end of my re-election campaign,” Adams added, “it is not the end of my service to the city.”

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