Congratulations are in order for New York’s mayor-elect, Eric Adams, who has won a famous victory on a campaign to move the city’s mayoralty back toward the political center, to bring an end to the crime wave that has wracked the metropolis, and to stem the outflow of wealthy New Yorkers who fear the city has become hostile to them. He has an enormous challenge ahead, but will be aided by much bipartisan good will — and a rare gift.

The gift is the epic failure of his predecessor. Anyone who became mayor in the wake of Bill de Blasio would have, at least in the comparative sense, the wind at his back. There’s nowhere to go but up. We note that not to discount the impressive political chops that the President of Brooklyn showed in the campaign he has just won. The fact is that even many Republicans understood that he would be a radical improvement.

His most effective supporter, in our estimation, has been the New York Post, which, in an early strategic bet, endorsed him back in May. It followed with a stream of powerful editorials. It no doubt caused many New Yorkers, who might have been leaning toward whoever was on the Republican line (in the event, Curtis Sliwa), to take a serious look at Mr. Adams, who repaid the bet with a fine platform.

At top of his agenda is crime, where Mr. Adams has — with some benefit of the doubt — a particularly strong resume. That is, he is a former police captain who has long agitated for police reform. Yet he is on the conservative side of a political party that, in the Democrats, stood largely useless as rioters coursed through the city in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Mr. Adams opposed defunding the police.

Even so, we maintain a certain reserve in respect of Mr. Adams’ record. He was a demagogic critic of Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose campaign against crime in the city was defeated by a lawsuit against the tactic known as “stop, question, and frisk.” City Journal has cautioned that defeating the current crime wave would require standing up against the very charges of disparate impact in policing to which Mr. Adams resorted.

Yet, in a mark of the seriousness of the city’s current plight, even City Journal, in an article in June by Heather Mac Donald, expressed a guarded optimism about apparent change of heart. We share the sentiment, particularly given Mr. Adams’ turn to the right in this campaign on another urgent issue — the flight of capital in the face of crime — and on the hostility to capital in the Democratic Party. Defeating a Republican might well be the easy part.

There still remains an ideological battle to be fought within the Democratic Party. Mr. Adams gave some glimpses during the campaign that he has the grit for that fray, criticizing, say, the Bronx socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for wearing to the Met Gala a dress emblazoned with the slogan “tax the rich.” Mr. Adams warned that 65,000 wealthy New Yorkers pay 51% of the city’s income taxes.

Mr. Adams, a four-term state senator, should be well-equipped to fight these battles in Albany, though that is only one of the theaters in which this campaign will have to be waged. During the campaign, Mr. Adams signaled that he would defend the gifted and talented education programs in the city. We hope he’ll end the campaign to remove from our city’s public spaces statues of our great founders and other controversial figures.

Those are only a few of the gestures he could make to help turn around the mood in this city. Rarely, in any event, has a new mayor been handed such an opportunity for a historic mayoralty as New Yorkers have just given Mr. Adams. He’ll have a role to play not only here but also in a national Democratic Party that is facing its own crisis. It’s a promising moment in which the Sun joins the millions of New Yorkers wishing him success.