For Zohran Mamdani, Eric Adams is a different kind of rival

The Eric Adams who was elected to be New York City’s second Black mayor in 2021 delivered a general election victory speech not so dissimilar from the one Zohran Mamdani gave last month. Both spoke of unity, hope and healing, of shared victories, building bridges and the collective power of New Yorkers.

“Tonight is not just a victory over adversity, it is a vindication of faith. It is a proof that people of this city will love you if you love them,” Adams said, speaking from the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. “It is the proof that the forgotten can be the future. It is the proof that this city can live up to its promise.”

“We have given our city permission to believe again,” Mamdani said less than four years later. “We will remake this great city not in my image but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle. In our New York, the power belongs to the people.”

In this year’s Democratic primary, Mamdani’s nonstop exuberance stood in stark contrast to his main opponent Andrew Cuomo, who despite his devastating primary loss is still trying to make a case for himself as an independent candidate in the general election. While the former governor largely ducked press questions and made few if any uncontrolled appearances to speak with New Yorkers, Mamdani seemed to relish each interaction. “Andrew Cuomo just got back here from the suburbs,” Mamdani told City & State in April – repeating a frequent line of attack. “I think spending more than 20 years outside might color your vision of the city and how it works.” Those weaknesses are not ones Adams shares.

If there’s a time for Adams – beleaguered by record-low approval ratings and an association with an unpopular Republican president – to shine, it’s on the campaign trail.

“Eric Adams is never more in his element than when he’s shaking hands with people and pressing the flesh and kissing babies,” said Democratic communications consultant John DeSio. “That’s where Eric Adams wants to be.”

But for all the built-in advantages of incumbency – a perch at City Hall, an open invitation to Sunday morning shows and a captive audience of New Yorkers – Adams is the underdog in this general election fight. Recent polls show him trailing behind not just Mamdani, but Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani, meanwhile, faces a cohort of apoplectic business leaders and moderates scrambling to find a path to defeat him. But with as many as three independent candidates – Adams, Cuomo and attorney Jim Walden – still running, that scrambling has yet to materialize into an actual strategy.

As the race’s Democratic nominee, Mamdani holds an undeniable upper hand in a New York City general election. Labor is already rallying around him. Some of the party establishment is reluctantly embracing him. He’s also backed by an unprecedented coalition of young and diverse voters. He won by connecting with disengaged and disillusioned New Yorkers with the help of a massive volunteer team, a disciplined focus on affordability and bottled-lightning viral videos.

Adams, from a working-class Black family in Brownsville, built a public identity as a political outsider – a police officer who wanted to reform the department’s sins from within, a moderate Democrat briefly turned Republican. Mamdani is the son of Indian and Indian-Ugandan immigrants – a filmmaker and academic – and the beneficiary of an elite education, who was elected to the state Legislature in a leftist wave and has held firm in his identity as a democratic socialist.

“As the kids would say, they both have aura, but it’s very different. Eric is much more machismo, ‘Look at me, I’m going to take my shirt off and do a polar bear plunge, look at my big biceps.’ That is a very big, tough guy, old-school type of personality,” Democratic strategist Trip Yang said. “Zohran is a rizzler. He’s the most charismatic politician since Barack Obama.”

For all their differences, the two candidates share a comfort and ease with one of the most difficult to teach building blocks of a successful politician. To be great at retail politics, you have to enjoy it. Cuomo appears to hate it. In contrast, in the city with the biggest media market in the world, both Mamdani and Adams, with their megawatt smiles, off-the-cuff charm and tirelessness, seem hell-bent on making this an election you have no choice but to watch.

Mayor Adams and candidate Adams

Over the Fourth of July weekend, Adams spent a little time in the Bronx, a borough he won handily in the 2021 Democratic primary. In a video posted to his campaign X account, the mayor, donning his “Mayor Adams” cap and “Office of the Mayor” polo, is embraced as if that victory occurred just days before.

“I fuck with Adams,” one man says – three times – to camera.

“Shake the mayor’s hand,” another woman tells a toddler, walking the boy to Adams. Adams, grinning ear-to-ear, is in his element.

The Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised mayor was propelled to a slim victory in the spring of 2021 on a public safety-centered campaign at a time of heightened concerns about crime. He appealed to working-class Black and Latino New Yorkers in the outer boroughs – where he performed best – as someone who shared their actual experiences, and spent time in less frequently visited ethnic enclaves. All while receiving a generous welcome, and even more generous donations, from business and real estate leaders.

“He’s always been viewed, and viewed himself, as an outsider,” said Basil Smikle, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, who has been acquainted with Adams since the days of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care – an organization founded by Adams and other NYPD officers in the mid-1990s to advocate for racial justice from inside the department. Frequently described in the media in those days as a “gadfly,” Adams developed a reputation for being outspoken – not only as a police officer, but in his nascent political career. The trait earned him attention and, at times, backlash – a pattern that continued through the 2021 campaign and his mayoralty.

There’s a certain kind of political candidate who stiffens before approaching a would-be voter. They shuffle uncertainly around the subway stop where they’re canvassing, or visibly lighten when the cameras go down and they can climb into a car. For a candidate, that awkwardness can be hard to shake.

Adams doesn’t have it. “That is Eric Adams’ strength. To be a man who New Yorkers can identify with,” said Democratic consultant Yvette Buckner.

This year, as he tries to thread an independent mayoral bid through the eye of a needle, Adams’ campaign team intends to continue putting him in a position to flex his retail prowess. “The campaign will be high energy. And he is going to really electrify those audiences that he gets in front of,” said campaign Chair Frank Carone. (So far, the audiences Adams has been getting in front of include Fox News viewers and wealthy Hamptons weekenders.)

But going out on the streets comes with risks for any incumbent mayor – a magnet for every complaint of uncollected garbage and unanswered 311 call – let alone one who has recorded record-low approval ratings, lower even than the unpopular Republican administration that saved him from a corruption indictment. Just now ramping up his reelection campaign, it’s still unclear how Adams will interact with voters in a race where he is not, by all signs, favored.

And though Adams and Mamdani share strengths on the campaign trail, Adams lacks both Mamdani’s volunteer army and more traditional validators.

“There’s a need to engage voters, but you’re going to want to do it in a way that actually helps you promote your record rather than undermine it,” Smikle said of the delicate balance Adams will have to strike on the campaign trail. Adams can, and likely will, point to businesses reopening after COVID-19, a landmark housing rezoning and a decline in some major crimes as part of that record. But there’s plenty else for voters to question – among them, a turbulent NYPD, an inner circle dogged by criminal inquiries and his alignment with Donald Trump.

Coalition building

Both Adams and Mamdani pulled together unique winning coalitions. Adams won the 2021 primary without winning Manhattan. Mamdani went beyond the usual pool of Democratic “triple prime” voters who participated in the last three primaries – generally, older, middle-class, college-educated, white and Black voter groups.

Adams succeeded with working-class voters in Southeast Queens, Central Brooklyn and the Bronx. Mamdani meanwhile dominated Cuomo with historic turnout from young voters, South Asians and Muslims, swept progressive strongholds like Astoria and Williamsburg, and overperformed expectations in many of the multiethnic, working-class neighborhoods Adams won in 2021.

They’ll need to continue building these coalitions as the November election looms. Wind at his back, that task will be far easier for Mamdani.

“He earned his place by putting in the work,” Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn said of Mamdani. “He was the people’s pick. I like that. I like the fact that he’s not playing by the old political rules, he’s actually rewriting it.” A longtime friend and ally of Adams, she had endorsed Cuomo in the Democratic primary. Mere hours after it became clear Mamdani had won though, she flipped to the victor.

Still, Mamdani failed to turn out a reliable faction of the Democratic electorate: older Black voters in the outer boroughs, who largely went for Cuomo in the primary.

Adams meanwhile will struggle to rebuild his winning 2021 coalition. Set aside the Democratic base that will vote for their party’s nominee. Set aside the voters Adams has lost over the past four years. Even set aside the fact that he’ll have to fight for moderate and conservative voters who rail against Mamdani with two other independent candidates and a Republican. There’s still the problem of trying to stitch together what factions of support might remain – particularly if that means uniting Trump-hating true blue Democrats with conservatives who respond positively to Adams’ alignment with Trump on issues including immigration enforcement. When pressed over positions he has taken to the right of many in his party on issues like involuntary commitment and his embrace of Trump, Adams has shrugged off the criticism, arguing it’s his job as mayor to represent all New Yorkers regardless of their political leanings. He also points to lawsuits against the Trump administration that the city has joined. “Adams is trying to assemble an almost impossible coalition in the current political environment,” said pollster and Democratic strategist Evan Roth Smith, describing it as “some sort of unholy or at least unlikely” marriage between Black and Hispanic Democratic voters and Republicans.

Mamdani has also sought dialogue with Trump voters, while being much quicker to criticize the president himself. Just one week after the 2024 presidential election, he went to Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx – neighborhoods that shifted dramatically to the right – to speak with New Yorkers who voted for Trump. “What would it take for you to vote for a Democrat in the future?” Mamdani asked. Seven months after filming that video, Mamdani won 30% of the primary election districts that Trump won in 2024, according to a Gothamist analysis.

Mamdani momentum

The Friday night before primary day, Mamdani traded in his dress shoes for a pair of sneakers to walk the length of Manhattan – a final grand play to get New Yorkers’ attention. As he made the roughly 13-mile trek from Inwood Hill to Battery Park, a steady stream of New Yorkers greeted him. Footage from that night, including a video from Mamdani’s campaign, showed a diverse spectrum of people approaching to snap a photo, shake his hand and express their support. Cars honked. Some people joined in the walk. “We’re outside because New Yorkers deserve a mayor that they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” Mamdani said, addressing the camera as he set out.

Mamdani ran his campaign like it was a sprint. Over the course of eight months, he attended hundreds of events, shaking hands and paying tribute to political leaders who had yet to embrace him, did dozens of high-profile interviews, took to the streets repeatedly to speak with New Yorkers, rallied alongside Democratic heavyweights Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state Attorney General Letitia James, visited mosques and other houses of worship, assembled an army of volunteers and reached the fundraising limit with lots of small donations. Looking to court voters from a variety of cultural backgrounds – even those from groups with little history of voting in local elections – his campaign had literature and videos translated in Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, Bangla, Hindi, Mandarin, Haitian Creole, Korean, Portuguese, Uzbek, Cantonese and Nepalese.

“These are powerful cultural devices that establish a personal and credible relationship between the candidate and the electorate,” said Democratic strategist and government veteran Amit Singh Bagga, pointing to Mamdani’s demonstration of cultural competency through his “halalflation” social media video or his explanation of ranked choice voting in Hindi using cups of mango lassi. “That is something that Zohran is preternaturally gifted at doing.”

As members of the Democratic Party want to combat Trump while also feeling some disillusionment with party leadership, some see Mamdani as a potential standard-bearer, someone whose populist economic focus and upbeat messaging could help move the party forward.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote that Democrats should look to the Assembly member’s campaign as proof candidates must “bring forth a positive vision and an analysis of why things are the way they are” – not just simply criticize Trump. Rep. Jerry Nadler called Mamdani’s victory a “seismic election for the Democratic Party,” comparing it to Obama’s historic 2008 win. No doubt, more bold hope-drenched declarations about the Democratic nominee will follow in the weeks to come. Of course, predictions are never a guarantee. Leading the city of New York is a thankless, demanding, nearly impossible job. How often the luster of a rising political star tarnishes. Just look at Adams.

It’s easy to forget that when he won in 2021 he’d also been heralded by some as the future of the Democratic Party. A Black moderate with a law enforcement background and working-class roots keenly focused on public safety, Adams offered Democrats a playbook for how to discuss crime and justice as the 2022 midterms loomed. Analyst Nate Silver infamously predicted he’d soon be a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Bulwark mused over whether Adams could have national appeal. A Wall Street Journal columnist asked whether “Manchin-Adams” was “the future of the Democratic Party.” The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens penned a piece attesting “Eric Adams is going to save New York.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruited Adams to speak at a conference about messaging. Adams himself seemed to relish the mantle, declaring that he was the “future of the Democratic Party” even before officially securing the nomination.

Still, hope can be infectious – that goes for both candidates and their supporters. As narrow as a path he has, Adams is certainly attempting to project it. The April morning after Trump’s Department of Justice succeeded in dropping the corruption charges against Adams was unseasonably bright and sunny. Adams had withstood immense pressure to resign, and he seemed light on his feet. “I’m running for reelection,” he said, pausing on the stairs leading back into Gracie Mansion to answer a single question lobbed his way. “And you know what? I’m going to win.” But in a race that has already been full of surprises, at least one thing is certain, bluster and will alone won’t be enough to defeat the movement Mamdani created.

State Sen. Jabari Brisbort, a friend and colleague of Mamdani’s, recalled a conversation he had with a young woman at a polling site several weeks ago. She said, “We deserve at least one good thing.”

“That was her hope in Zohran Mamdani,” Brisport said. “I think that’s true of a lot of people. They deserve to be hopeful, they deserve to believe that the future can be brighter if we band together.”