Mayor Eric Adams, reeling from a criminal investigation into his campaign and with historically low approval ratings, now has a serious primary challenger.
Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller who ran against Adams in 2021, announced this morning he would run for mayor again, setting up a direct clash with a political rival who has seen his standing erode in recent months.
“This ship is heading toward an iceberg if we don’t take concrete action,” Stringer told me. “We either have to smash through it or we gotta work around it, but we can’t just let the ship sail into the night, wandering, wondering where we’re all going to end up.”
Stringer, 63, brings notable strengths and obvious weaknesses to the Democratic primary that would be held in June 2025. He has won tough citywide races, attracted support from large labor unions, and still boasts a vote-rich base on Manhattan’s West Side that would, in a campaign against Adams, stay loyal to him. He would be a formidable fundraiser, able to potentially reach the public-matching-funds limit and spend millions against Adams, who has seen his fundraising slow as he focuses on rounding up cash for his legal defense fund.
Thanks to his prior campaign, one weakness is already clear. In 2021, Stringer was accused of sexual misconduct by two different women, including Jean Kim, a lobbyist who said he repeatedly groped her in 2001, when she worked for one of his campaigns. Stringer strenuously denied the allegations and later sued Kim for defamation. (The suit was eventually dismissed owing to the statute of limitations.)
Kim had come forward in April 2021, just as Stringer, then one of the top contenders for mayor, appeared to be gaining momentum. Shortly after Kim leveled her accusations, prominent endorsers fled and Stringer plummeted in the polls. Kathryn Garcia, then a long-shot candidate, vaulted past him, gobbling up votes from many of the same Manhattanites who seemed poised to back him. Garcia was endorsed by the New York Times editorial board, while another progressive rival, Maya Wiley, won the coveted support of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There was a time in the campaign, before Kim’s allegations became public, when it appeared Stringer could have been the choice of the Times editorial board and AOC, charging onward as the sort of well-wired progressive who could have beaten Adams in June.
Instead, Stringer’s endorsers peeled away and his campaign collapsed. He finished with less than 6 percent of the vote. His political career seemed over.
The question now is whether Stringer, who once bested another scandal-scarred Democrat of some prominence, Eliot Spitzer, can complete what would be a remarkable comeback. “Every New Yorker I’ve met knows that was a political hit job. I think New Yorkers want a person who can restore our city, and I’ll leave it at that,” Stringer argued.
Adams, meanwhile, has struggled to find his footing in a city that no longer seems enamored with his curious quips and evident swagger. The mayor proposed cutting the city’s budget, angering many left-leaning critics who argued the cuts weren’t necessary, before partially reversing himself. Homelessness has not abated. Rents remain stubbornly high as his administration, bleeding talent, builds far fewer affordable housing units than its predecessors. Patronage hires have damaged famed agencies like the Department of Transportation. When it comes to the issue of crime, which the former police captain campaigned heavily on, it’s clear declines in shootings and murders have been offset, in the view of voters at least, by spikes in robberies, rapes, and felony assaults. The White House has frozen Adams out, irked by his relentless criticisms of President Biden’s handling of the migrant influx.
“The administration never really had the capacity to build out a plan to truly bring the city back to where it could be, pre-COVID. Over two years and virtually no affordable housing has been built, when, perhaps, we could have had the most expansive housing program ever in this city,” Stringer said, promising the revival of a Mitchell-Lama-style housing initiative. “We need to make sure we have a consistent and a strong policy on migrants. You can’t hate migrants on Monday and love them on Wednesday and then blame them for the fiscal ills of the city and then it turns out that we actually don’t have the crisis he says we have.”
Polling on the 2025 mayoral race has been scant so far out, but one recent poll tested a hypothetical ranked-choice special-election race where Adams doesn’t run in the event he resigns following indictment. It showed Stringer at 6 percent, tied with Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who has mulled a mayoral bid and once backed Stringer before rescinding her endorsement after Kim’s accusation. Garcia, who came within 10,000 votes of beating Adams, was only at 7 percent, while Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who resigned in disgrace in 2021, polled highest at 24 percent, defeating Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who drew 14 percent.
How well Stringer would poll, one-on-one, in a Democratic primary against Adams remains to be seen.
“I ran against Eliot Spitzer. I was 20 points behind until I wasn’t. I ran against Eva Moskowitz — I started out way behind,” Stringer said. “I ran in a very difficult mayor’s race. I am used to tough races, you know?”
While political insiders have long speculated about a special election, the odds of one occurring remain remote. No sitting New York mayor has ever been indicted. Adams has not been accused of a crime. Most likely, still, is a 2025 Democratic primary with Adams, Stringer, and a number of other candidates, including the aforementioned Ramos. Both Cuomo and Williams have said they would not directly challenge Adams. Brad Lander, the current city comptroller, would probably not risk his post to enter such a volatile race.
If Stringer remains the most high-profile candidate to challenge Adams, the primary would inevitably be racially polarized. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, has never hesitated to accuse his political opponents of racism, and he’d gleefully lash Stringer, a white bespectacled Democrat from Manhattan. Just as West Side and downtown liberals, along with progressives in brownstone Brooklyn, would prefer Stringer, Adams could run up huge margins in Southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn, home to the working- and middle-class Black neighborhoods that have swayed many Democratic primaries. If Stringer is somehow able to fuse together the Garcia and Wiley voter bases — Democrats in the liberal and socialist precincts of Brooklyn and Queens along with wealthier white moderates — he could pull off the upset.
Stringer’s ultimate case against Adams will be rather straightforward: that he’s a progressive who can also manage the city. If his detractors can readily point out he has been a political creature for more than three decades, Stringer’s bet is that his exhaustive CV — comptroller, Manhattan borough president, assemblymember — will appeal to a beleaguered electorate longing for some technocracy.
Stringer’s campaign, for clear enough reasons, will be different this time around. It will be harder to score endorsements from state legislators and various liberal interest groups, such as the Working Families Party. The United Federation of Teachers supported him last time and is wary of Adams, but it’s always tough to get unions to buck an incumbent. If Adams does recover his standing, and no indictments ever come, millionaire and billionaire real-estate developers and financiers could fund super-PACs to defend him.
For now, Stringer says he’s excited to hit the trail, court voters, and even raise cash. “Nobody is gonna say I’m not qualified,” he said.
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