The mayor has chosen not to run in the Democratic primary in June but says he’ll seek re-election as an independent. His base may move on to other candidates.
The mayor has chosen not to run in the Democratic primary in June but says he’ll seek re-election as an independent. His base may move on to other candidates.
The mayor has chosen not to run in the Democratic primary in June but says he’ll seek re-election as an independent. His base may move on to other candidates.
Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at Mayor Eric Adams’s decision to run for re-election as an independent. We’ll also look at why swastikas carved on Teslas present a quandary for law enforcement officials.
Riding high four years ago, Eric Adams described himself as “the face of the new Democratic Party.”
He no longer is. Although he says he is still a Democrat, he plans to skip the Democratic primary in June and run as an independent candidate for mayor in November.
Dropping out of the primary may be the embattled mayor’s best option. Adams said the federal corruption case against him had “dragged on too long,” preventing him from campaigning. His re-election effort was barely visible as he waited for a federal judge to decide whether his trial on corruption charges would begin on April 21, little more than two months before the primary.
On Wednesday the judge, Dale Ho, gave Adams what he wanted, a dismissal of the charges.
That was also what the Trump administration wanted, though it preferred that the charges be dismissed with the right to bring them back, which the judge refused. That — and Adams’s apparent chumminess with the president — made some Democrats wonder exactly what a Democrat is in 2025, as their party searches for identity and traction.
Some decided that Adams no longer held out the possibilities they imagined in 2021. The estrangement was mutual. “People often say, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat — you seem to have left the party,’” the mayor said during an interview with the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in January. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”