The Eric Adams Withdrawal

It is far too early to know how Mayor Eric Adams’s withdrawal this past Sunday from the 2025 mayoralty election in November will affect the results. Will it, as many who encouraged Adams to abandon his reelection campaign hope, significantly increase the votes of either Republican Curtis Sliwa or Independent Andrew Cuomo? Or will the number not be enough to defeat the current frontrunner, the Democratic candidate and self-described Socialist Zohran Mamdani?

But Adams’s exit speech plainly crystallized what is at stake in the election. To be sure, as The New York Times reported he did the expected. He said he could no longer see a path to reelection. He blamed “continued media speculation about [his] departure” and a decision by the city’s Campaign Finance Board to deny him public matching funds for his campaign.

And then he waxed almost statesman-like. Without endorsing either Cuomo or Sliwa or specifically naming Mamdani, he offered voters what appeared to be a veiled caution about Mamdani and what he characterized as growing extremism in politics.

He spoke of “insidious forces” pushing “divisive agendas” in city politics and warned that “our children are being radicalized to hate our city and country.... Major change is welcome and necessary. But beware of those who claim the answer is to destroy the very system we built together over generations.”

Adams’s admonition, of course, comes on top of Mamdani’s platform of higher taxes, a rent freeze, government grocery stores and soft-on-crime policies. His anti-Israel outrages including sympathy for Hamas are in a special category and a special concern for our community.

It’s time we all wake up to what would be coming with a Mamdani victory.