As Eric Adams’s one-term mayoralty draws to a close, many New Yorkers are filled with dread about the incoming Zohran Mamdani administration. As Adams departs, it’s worth looking back at his tenure to understand why he failed to win over New Yorkers—and how he opened the door for a staunchly anti-Israel police critic to take the reins as the city’s next mayor.
Adams came to power after seizing the centrist lane in the 2021 Democratic primary. His rival candidates jockeyed for the farthest-left position, but Adams smartly ran to the middle, showing his understanding of the political moment. In the general election, Adams won about two-thirds of the vote despite being an odd duck, with his quirky tales of youthful notebooks full of political observations and a bizarre affinity for ghosts.
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As mayor, though, Adams seemed to lose his political sense, only beginning to reclaim it when it was too late. He exits politics bedeviled by corruption charges—with a sense that he beat the rap only by cooperating with Donald Trump—and deeply unpopular in the Big Blue Apple.
Adams, a former NYPD captain, was elected to bring down crime and make New Yorkers feel safe. He capitalized on that theme in his campaign. In one ad, he insisted that New York should be a place where “our kids could play without being hit by a stray bullet.”
Under Adams’s mayoralty, the worst violent crimes—murders and shootings—fell. But major felony offenses remain well above pre-pandemic levels. Adams insisted that rising subway crime was a popular “perception” not rooted in statistical reality. But several high-profile public-transit crimes—such as the late 2022 murder of Tommy Bailey—undermined that claim. Adams and New York governor Kathy Hochul added 300 transit police officers at the beginning of 2025.
His best decision on policing and crime—and best move, period—was his appointment of Jessica Tisch as police commissioner in November 2024. Adams’s fourth police commissioner, Tisch quickly won acclaim as a competent manager serious about combating crime. She was so popular that even police critic Mamdani agreed to retain her as commissioner.
On fiscal issues, Adams was a standard liberal Democrat. His fiscal 2026 budget, for example, totaled $115.1 billion—the city’s largest ever, surpassing the record of $112 billion from the previous year. Adams’s budget, like those of his predecessors, devoted massive resources to education, city employees’ pension benefits, and social services.
He marketed his budgets as vague laundry lists. His office touted a $1.4 billion outlay “to protect and lift up critical programs” that would “make lives better for families across all five boroughs,” and “nearly $200 million for education programs that were once paid for by pandemic-era stimulus funding.” His spending resembled the famous pudding of which Churchill said, “it has no theme.” Nor did Adams’s mayoralty.
New York City’s economy was stagnant during his tenure. Unusually for Gotham, it lagged the nation in growth. While Adams bragged about creating 500,000 new jobs, many of them, like Joe Biden’s job gains, came from government-subsidized sectors, such as home health-care aides. This emphasis has created the risk that as Trump’s spending cuts, particularly to Medicaid, take effect in the next few years, New York will see a slowdown in job growth.
On housing reform, Adams bucked the standard liberal line. In 2024, he signed the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity amendments, a zoning-reform package that sought to create 80,000 housing units over the next 15 years. It was no silver bullet. As Forbes’s Richard McGahey notes, 80,000 units is nowhere near sufficient to solve New York’s housing shortage. Adams himself estimated that New York needs 50,000 new units per year—far more than the 5,300 annually that City of Yes might create. New York joked that the package should be dubbed the “City of Yes-ish.”
Still, the changes were a good start. The city’s restrictive zoning rules had changed little in over 60 years. More housing is better than less. But passing even these minor reforms proved extremely difficult, indicating a long road ahead for housing advocates in Gotham.
Adams was stout in his defense of Jews and Israel in the frightening days after October 7, 2023. Not long after the attack, he told the Jewish community:
Your fight is our fight. And right here in New York we have the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. This is the place that our voices must raise and cascade throughout the entire country. We will not be all right until every person responsible for this act is held accountable.
These admirable words, in line with those of most New York mayors since Israel’s creation, stand in stark contrast to the adamantly anti-Israel rhetoric of the city’s incoming mayor.
Adams’s biggest break from progressive orthodoxy came on the issue of immigration. Under President Biden, America dramatically scaled back immigration enforcement. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas bragged about overturning “so many” Trump-era enforcement initiatives. As a result, hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants flooded New York City, costing an estimated $7.5 billion between mid-2022 and early 2025. Most Democratic politicians stayed silent, but Adams spoke out, complaining that “the president and the White House have failed this city.” Adams argued that the migrant influx put severe pressure on Gotham’s budget, leading to across-the-board cuts.
Adams’s outspokenness would have significant implications. It hurt the Biden team, as illegal immigration dragged down the president’s reelection bid. It also damaged Kamala Harris, who, as vice president, was tagged by critics as the White House’s failed “border czar.” After she replaced Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket, Harris failed to separate herself from the administration’s immigration policies.
But Adams also suffered. In 2023, Biden took Adams off a campaign advisory board. More importantly, Biden’s Justice Department announced a five-count indictment against the New York mayor for significant but relatively low-dollar bribery charges. He was accused of accepting favors, mostly in the form of travel benefits, from Turkish officials in exchange for preferential treatment.
The charges were serious and might have been brought regardless of Adams’s immigration stance, but Justice Departments have overlooked cases against political allies before. After his criticism of Biden, Adams would get no such consideration.
Adams’s defection from Biden on immigration continued to have consequences in the Trump administration—this time partly to Adams’s benefit. Trump’s Justice Department dropped the charges against the mayor, but this created the perception that Adams had made a deal with Trump, who is unpopular in New York City. The whole imbroglio made Adams politically unviable; he announced that he would skip the party primary in June and run for reelection in November as an independent. The tainted and unpopular former governor Andrew Cuomo emerged as the only alternative to the surging Mamdani in the Democrats’ June primary. The self-described democratic socialist beat Cuomo in June and repeated the feat in November, by which time Adams had withdrawn from the race. Things might have played out differently had the mayor not been so weakened by the corruption scandal.
Adams might have survived his alleged corruption scandal, especially after the appointment of Tisch allowed him to present a more competent NYPD to the public. But he couldn’t survive the “deal” with Trump, seemingly made in exchange for Adams’s cooperation on immigration enforcement. New Yorkers sometimes shrug off corruption; they couldn’t excuse cooperation with Trump. Adams became the first incumbent Democratic mayor of New York not to win his primary since Ed Koch in 1989.
In the end, Adams’s failures opened the path to a Mamdani administration. At this point, he seems likely to be best remembered as Mamdani’s predecessor. That would be a sobering legacy for a leader who, with better decision-making, might have proved a serviceable two-term mayor of New York.
Photo by Manoli Figetakis/Getty Images