‘This city is made up of workers. This is not a start-up’: Eric Adams blasts rival Andrew Yang as NYC mayoral race heats up
The gloves are off!
While accepting a mayoral endorsement from New York City’s largest municipal labor union, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams touted himself as the only blue-collar candidate running for the city’s top post and blasted a rival for never holding a job in “his entire life.”
Adams, who appeared Wednesday with DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido in Queens, launched the broadside against entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang a day after a new poll showed Yang maintaining a lead in the race for City Hall.
“This city is made up of workers. This is not a startup,” Adams said in a dig clearly directed at Yang. “This is a city where the leader must have been a worker. People like Andrew Yang never held a job in his entire life. And you’re not going to come to this city and think you’re going to disregard the people who make this city work. That’s not going to happen.”
The attack against Yang, who has in fact held several jobs, comes days after Yang criticized the teachers union for delaying school reopenings.
In announcing DC 37′s endorsement Wednesday, Garrido pointed to how Adams aligned with “the values” of the union, and Adams, a former NYPD captain, attempted to hammer that point home.
He talked about working a low-wage mailroom job, getting arrested and beaten by cops as a kid and taking night classes.
“I didn’t go to Harvard and Yale. I went to CUNY and jail,” he said. “But I worked my way through. I am you.”
Yang is a graduate of Brown University.
Yang’s campaign co-manager Chris Coffey defended the former presidential hopeful, painting Adams’ rhetoric as divisive and inaccurate.
“Andrew Yang has started and managed a business, created thousands of jobs, and unlike Eric, run something larger than a small political office,” Coffey wrote in a text. “Adams can keep trying to divide. We’ll keep trying to unify, and we’ll see which one New Yorkers choose.”
Coffey later suggested on Twitter that Adams had engaged in hate speech and, by using the phrase “people like,” was underhandedly trashing Asian-Americans, who’ve been the target of hate crimes in recent months.
“This kind of hate has no place in our politics,” Coffey said. “It’s reprehensible, more so given hate crimes.”
Adams’ spokesman Evan Thies shot back, saying Adams’ original statement referred to people who fled the city during the pandemic — a frequent criticism that’s been aimed at Yang, who had decamped to upstate New Paltz before announcing his mayoral bid in January.
“This is about the people who have lived the struggle of COVID and inequality in this city versus people like Yang who fled the city at its darkest moment and now are attacking the very working people who stayed here to keep it running,” he said. “Shame on them for inferring otherwise.”
Wednesday’s skirmish between Adams and Yang was probably the most heated one so far in a campaign season that’s had its share of flareups between candidates, but has been largely devoid of outright hostility.
Adams didn’t focus the entirety of his time Wednesday directly attacking Yang, though. While speaking in Jamaica, Queens, where his mother, a DC 37 member, raised him and his five siblings, he also attempted to paint himself as the only candidate in the race to emerge from the city’s working class.
“I know she would love to be right here with me today,” he said. “We need a blue-collar mayor to run a blue-collar city.”
DC 37 is one of the most politically powerful unions in the city. It boasts a membership of about 150,000 current workers and 60,000 retirees — a veritable army of potential Adams’ supporters, many of whom almost certainly will volunteer to help him get out the vote for the June 22 Democratic primary.
Adams so far has scored endorsements from three of the city’s five most politically potent labor unions. Along with DC 37, the Hotel Trades Council of New York and Local 32 BJ of the Service Employees International, which represents about 85,000 members in the city, are also backing Adams’ run.
The United Federation of Teachers has not yet endorsed a candidate. And Local 1199 of SEIU, which represents health care workers and is the largest union in the city, has endorsed Maya Wiley, Mayor de Blasio’s former legal counsel.
Yang has received support from labor as well, but not nearly at the same level. The Freelancers Union endorsed both him and Wiley two weeks ago, but it has much less political muscle than unions like 1199 or DC 37.
Garrido promised that DC 37 would undertake “a member-to-member campaign, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this union and in this city before.”
“We also provide services to their families. That totals almost 400,000 people whose lives we touch,” he said. “Our intent is to talk to every single one of them, to reach out to them multiple times, to make sure that we turn out the vote.”
Unlike in past years when a pandemic was not a grave concern, this year’s efforts will not involve door-knocking potential voters, but instead will focus on “a massive social media campaign,” Garrido said.
“We’re going to stick to a message,” he said. “You have an opportunity to elect your boss. You have an opportunity to elect the person who’s going to lead this city and who will have the pulse on the future of the city. And we want to make sure that that person is the right person and that that person is Eric Adams.”
