The NYC mayoral election will likely go between Zohran Mamdani and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams ended his mayoral election campaign Sunday, a stunning move that comes after President Trump’s team and New York business leaders have pressured him to get out of the race to help block Democratic front-runner Zohran Mamdani from taking over the reins at City Hall.
Adams, who has been running for a second term as an independent candidate in November’s mayoral election, made the blockbuster announcement in a video to be released shortly by his campaign.
Adams — the city’s second Black mayor who was elected in 2021 on a pledge to make the five boroughs safer — took the extraordinary step as sources say intermediaries for the mayor have for weeks been in talks with Trump advisers about him dropping out in exchange for a post in the president’s administration.
New York business leaders, who are sharply opposed to Mamdani’s plans to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy city residents, have also engaged in conversations about potentially offering Adams a private sector job in return for a suspension of his reelection bid, sources have told the News.
The effort to sideline Adams, sources say, is designed to boost the chances of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s also running as an independent in November’s mayoral race and polls show will be a bigger threat to Mamdani with Adams out of the picture.
Adams drops out of NYC mayoral race
A flurry of polls over the last few weeks has shown Adams consistently running fourth, trailing not only Mamdani and Cuomo, but Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa as well. A head-to-head contest between Cuomo and Mamdani would be a tighter contest, the polls show, though Sliwa has said he is staying in the race no matter what.
Despite the swirl of rumors, Adams insisted for weeks he was staying in the race and accused the media of hampering his campaign by reporting on the talks about his potential exit. Adams’ name will by all indications remain on the November ballot, as a deadline to remove it has passed.
Frank Carone, Adams’ top political adviser who has been heading his reelection campaign, said the mayor’s announcement “isn’t the end but a pivot.”
“I will continue to use all of my effort and energy to defeat the existential attack on our way of life and believe that socialism and all of its lies, must be given no quarter and be defeated completely,
along with whoever promotes or endorses it,” Carone said.
Concerns on multiple fronts about Mamdani, a democratic socialist, fueled the effort to dislodge Adams.
Trump has claimed Mamdani is a “communist” — he actually identifies as a democratic socialist — who would “destroy” New York with his tax-the-rich agenda. Polls have consistently showed Mamdani as the favorite to win the mayoral contest, with Cuomo as the runner-up.
Adams’ reelection campaign suspension, which comes even though he has insisted for months he wouldn’t drop out of the race under any circumstance, means his tenure as the city’s 110th mayor comes to an end at the end of this year.
His exit from November’s election comes after a first term at City Hall marred by a number of high-profile corruption scandals, including his own indictment last year on federal bribery and campaign finance fraud charges. His indictment was dismissed by Trump’s Justice Department this spring as part of a controversial arrangement many believe has left Adams beholden to the president.
In addition to urging Adams to step out of the race, Trump’s team has prodded Sliwa to also drop his campaign in order to maximize Cuomo’s chances to beat Mamdani. Sliwa has maintained he won’t leave the race unless he’s dead.
The termination of Adams’ campaign comes as Trump has made clear publicly he’d like the mayoral field to be narrowed down so it’s one candidate facing off against Mamdani on Nov. 4.
“I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one on one,” Trump said earlier this month. “I think that’s a race that could be won.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Adams has a Trump administration job lined up now that he’s out of the race.
In polls of the mayoral race, Adams consistently placed at the back of the back, clinching single digits of support as he remains deeply unpopular in the city amid continued fallout from his corruption indictment and surrounding controversies. Without Adams in the race, it has been speculated Cuomo will be able to attract some of the embattled incumbent’s base, though there’s no certainty of that.
Cuomo has maintained he won’t accept any endorsement or support from Trump, who remains deeply unpopular with New York City voters. Still, Trump’s apparent preference for Cuomo in the race is likely to provide fodder for attacks from Mamdani.
Adams launched his bid for reelection on an independent line after his corruption charges were dropped by Trump’s Department of Justice in April. In kicking off his independent bid, Adams said the controversial dismissal of his corruption case impeded his ability to mount a serious campaign in the
June Democratic primary that Mamdani went on to win.
For months, Adams insisted he would not drop out of the race, vowing just in late August he would run for a second term “no matter what.” His reelection campaign slogan was “Always delivers, never quits.”
Other candidates in the race, including Cuomo and Jim Walden, who himself stepped out of the race on Sept. 2, had previously advocated for consolidating behind the candidate polling the best in the fall in order to set up a one-on-one competition against Mamdani.
Adams struggled to pull together a competitive reelection campaign, as he and members of his inner circle have been under intense scrutiny for the past year.
Adams became the first sitting mayor in modern New York history to face criminal charges when Manhattan federal prosecutors indicted him in September 2024 for allegedly taking illegal campaign cash and bribes in the form of luxury travel perks from Turkish government operatives in exchange for political
favors.
Many of his top advisers, including longtime confidante Ingrid Lewis-Martin and City Hall aide Winnie Greco, have also been indicted or probed by federal and state investigators over the past year.
In the months after his indictment, Adams firmed up his relationship with Trump, traveling to Florida and Washington, DC to meet with him.
The president’s DOJ then intervened in February to halt his prosecution, and his case was ultimately dropped at a Trump appointee’s direction in April — not on the merits of the charges, but on the grounds that they would impede Adams’ ability to help Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
The end of his reelection campaign against that backdrop marks a remarkable turnaround for Adams, who after his win in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary said his victory showed New Yorkers were hungry for a centrist style of politics focused on law-and-order.
“I am the face of the new Democratic party,” Adams said at the time.