Eric Adams, invoking Trump, puts NYC mayoral race in national terms and the need to heal
Looking for a landslide, Eric Adams put New York City’s mayoral race in national terms on Thursday afternoon, as he delivered a speech to a crew of supporters and surrogates that included Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).
“I believe what we do here is going to cascade throughout this entire country,” said Adams, the Democratic mayoral nominee and current Brooklyn borough president. “We are going to get it right for America on how do we deal with the healing process that’s coming after the terrible years of Donald Trump.”
The invocation of the Queens-born Republican president — a political bogeyman to many New Yorkers — seemed an attempt by Adams to activate voters who have so far tuned out the Nov. 2 mayoral election.
Despite the slapstick antics of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, the race has drawn limited attention. Adams is widely expected to win after building an outer-borough coalition of working- and middle-class voters in the city’s June primary.
Buoyed by a friendly relationship with the city’s business community, Adams has built a war chest of more than $7 million, dwarfing his opponent’s. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, also faces a more than 6-to-1 deficit in New Yorkers registered to his party.
Adams has taken steps to run up the score in recent days, hoping to notch a resounding mandate after his razor-thin primary win.
The former NYPD captain released his first TV ad of the general election on Tuesday. And in a sun-splashed rally on Thursday outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, he soaked in support from Nadler and local politicians like state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens).
Nadler painted Adams’ campaign as part of a “Democratic renaissance” while arguing that Republicans are trying to “destroy democracy in this country” by restricting voting rights.
“Eric’s election is a large part of making sure that New York remains a bastion against these attempts,” Nadler said.
Speakers stressed Democratic unity after the bruising spring primary. Liu, who endorsed Andrew Yang in the Democratic race, crowed that Adams “left no neighborhood, no community unturned” on the campaign trail. (Yang left the Democratic Party after the race.)
“It’s time for an Asian-American at City Hall, and Eric is going to be the first Asian-American mayor!” Liu said to laughs.
Adams spent a portion of his remarks promising a mayoralty devoted to New Yorkers of all financial stripes, perhaps in response to the streetwise Sliwa, who depicts his Democratic rival as compromised by wealthy donors.
“I am your servant. This is not about lifting me up,” said Adams, who grew up poor in Queens but has drawn criticism for lavish travels. “This is about the everyday people.”
“Those who watch me: When I walk into a hotel, I stop, and I speak to the doorman,” Adams added. “When I’m in a building, I stop and speak to the people who clean the floors, and the people who serve the coffees.”
But Adams, who has called himself the “face of the new Democratic Party,” circled back to his national narrative.
“This is the only country on the globe where ‘dream’ is attached to our name,” he said. “And people who come from nightmarish realities should not relive those nightmares. This is a place where 10 million dreams are waiting to wake up.”
The rally itself ultimately ended on a slightly nightmarish note. A hostile anti-mask, anti-vaccine protester wearing a black baseball cap stormed into the crowd, shouting that the assembled politicians and reporters were “tyrants” and “treasonous terrorists.”
“I love New York,” Adams said with a laugh, before wrapping up the conference. “We understand people are feeling pain.”
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