With NYC mayoral campaign in free fall, Scott Stringer visits Brooklyn churches
City Comptroller Scott Stringer sought deliverance for his flailing mayoral campaign during a series of speeches to Sunday worshipers.
The stumping came after a number of high-profile Democrats took back their endorsements of Stringer due to bombshell allegations of sexual misconduct.
The latest blow came late Saturday, when longtime Stringer ally Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-Manhattan, Bronx) withdrew his support.
Stringer tried to take the painful reversal in stride.
“Look, you win some, you lose some. You have old friends — now you got to make new friends,” he told the Daily News after popping in to St. Paul Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn.
Inside the predominantly Black house of worship, he said he was committed to staying in the race while avoiding direct mention of the accusations from Jean Kim — who said Wednesday he’d kissed and groped her without her consent and made unwanted sexual advances when she volunteered for his 2001 public advocate campaign. Stringer denied the allegations.
“I got knocked down this week, but I’m up. And I want to be heard. And I want to earn your vote,” Stringer said.
He decried racial disparities in the impact of COVID, discussed his mother’s death due to the virus and drew some applause for talking about job development.
Earlier Sunday, he visited two other Brooklyn churches and appeared in a WABC interview, in which video of Kim appearing to joke about her allegations against Stringer during an online comedy forum left him stone-faced.
“I had to #MeToo one of the politicians I used to work with because he couldn’t keep his thing in his pants,” she said with a laugh, drawing loud “oohs!” from others in the virtual room.
Asked for his reaction, Stringer said, “I’m certainly not going to comment on the things that are coming out.”
Kim’s accusations have prompted some of Stringer’s closest allies to ditch him.
“We rescind our endorsement of Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign,” Espaillat and several other upper Manhattan pols said in a terse statement released Saturday.
They were following in the footsteps of the Working Families Party, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-Bronx, Westchester) and a number of other high-profile progressives who said they could no longer support Stringer.
The allegations came just as it appeared Stringer, one of the most progressive candidates in the race, was starting to pick up momentum for the June 22 Democratic primary. He’d clinched a coveted endorsement from the United Federation of Teachers and was starting to gain ground in the polls.
During a Sunday interview, Stringer tried to cast his campaign as a comeback story on par with that of the city as a whole.
“Just like this city will have its greatest comeback, I’m going to have my greatest comeback, too,” he told a NY1 reporter.
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