Mayor Adams Ramps Up Campaign as He Vies To Be the Anti-Mamdani Choice of Business Leaders

The Hamptons may be a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan, but in the struggle to winnow the general election field to prevent a Mayor Zohran Mamdani, it can feel like the center of Gotham.Mayor Adams and Governor Cuomo traveled — separately — to the Hamptons over July 4 weekend to fundraise and schmooze with New Yorkers of influence in their summer habitat. A real estate power couple, Kenneth and Maria Fishel, hosted a fundraiser for the mayor on Saturday.A grocery store and media magnate, John Catsimatidis, hosted a “Hamptons Business Power Breakfast” for Mr. Adams at the billionaire’s usual Saturday Southampton haunt, 75 Main. Mr. Cuomo also reportedly dined at 75 Main on Saturday evening, though he missed his rival.These jaunts out east come less than two weeks after Mr. Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York mayor by 12 points, in a major upset to Mr. Cuomo. The problem now is that real estate and business leaders know none of the moderate candidates, or just simply the ones who aren’t avowed socialists — the bar is low — can beat Mr. Mamdani unless the field winnows to a one-on-one contest. Yet neither money nor political pressure seems to be enough to move the mayor, Mr. Cuomo, the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, or an independent candidate Jim Walden. And these power players don’t yet seem to agree on a strategy to beat the 33-year-old state assemblyman and his army of Democratic Socialists of America volunteers.“I think everybody’s cautious. We call it the ABZ — anybody but Zohran,” the president of Empire State Properties, Suzanne Miller, tells The New York Sun. “Everybody’s neutral as to who’s going to win, and they’re going to wait and see. But where everybody’s on the same page is that we’re trying desperately to unite Curtis, Andrew, and Eric.”This neutrality seems like something of a shift from the all-in-for-Adams prognostications of just a week ago. A pro-Adams poll released last week shows Mr. Mamdani beating Messrs. Cuomo and Adams in a five-way race, with Mr. Adams trailing Mr. Cuomo by 10 points. If either Mr. Adams or Mr. Cuomo drops out and all their votes to go to the other, one could be competitive with Mr. Mamdani. The poll, though, may have given some Adams supporters pause.Mr. Catsimatidis is backing the current mayor. A billionaire hedge funder, Bill Ackman, met last week with both Mr. Adams and the former Empire State governor, to whose primary campaign he donated half a million dollars. He came out of those meetings saying he is backing Mr. Adams.“My takeaway is that Adams can win the upcoming election and that the Governor should step aside to maximize Adams’ probability of success,” Mr. Ackman posted to X. He said Mr. Cuomo “is not up for the fight.”Another former New York governor, David Paterson, held a press conference in Midtown on Monday to call for the independent candidates in the race to come together and for only one of them to challenge Mr. Mamdani in November. Mr. Paterson endorsed Mr. Cuomo in the primary, but he did not say which candidate he thinks should stay in the race now. He is an old friend of Mr. Adams, is employed by Mr. Catsimatidis, and is married to Mr. Sliwa’s ex-wife. As Cindy Adams would say, “Only in New York, kids.”Mr. Adams is ramping up his independent campaign and targeting his bases of support: African Americans, Jews, moderates, working class voters in the boroughs other than Manhattan, and the business elite. He held an event at Gracie Mansion for the Jewish community on Tuesday night, imploring those in attendance not to flee New York over fears of rising antisemitism and a frontrunner in the mayor’s race who refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”“We will stay and fight for the city that we love,” Mr. Adams said. The crowd erupted in chants of “four more years.”Mr. Adams is also touting significant reductions in crime this year under his new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. He recently hired a former Giuliani deputy mayor and chief of staff, Randy Mastro, a Democrat, to be his first deputy mayor. Yet the corruption allegations from his first slate of crony political appointees are dogging him.Four new lawsuits filed Monday in Manhattan supreme court accuse Mr. Adams’s first police commissioner, Edward Caban, and former deputy mayor of public safety, Phil Banks, of selling promotions, covering up malfeasance, and forcing those who complained out of the police department. The taint of corruption and allegations Mr. Adams entered into a quid pro quo with President Trump to get his federal corruption charges dropped are the mayor’s Achilles heel. “The timing is suspicious at best,” a Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, tells the Sun of the new lawsuits. He says it wouldn’t shock him if the Cuomo campaign is behind these suits, though there is no evidence of that.“He would save New York by dropping out and saying Adams is the man,” Mr. Sheinkopf says of Mr. Cuomo. “He will be remembered in history as the man who delivered the city, if he stays in, to a socialist antisemite who supports global intifada.”Mr. Adams is also seemingly trying to take a page out of the Mamdani playbook by posting more video to social media. He posted a “Morning routine” video to Instagram last month that shows him shaving, ironing his suit, and making a smoothie in the Gracie Mansion kitchen. The only problem is that the time listed on the video for smoothie making is 8:33 a.m., while the clock on the wall reads 11 a.m. This only reinforced Mr. Adams’s reputation as a “nightlife mayor.”The general election is in four months. Mr. Sliwa, the 71-year-old Guardian Angels founder, told the Sun last week that there’s no way he’s dropping out and that four months is “a lifetime in politics.”Mr. Adams told CNBC on Monday that Mr. Cuomo called him to ask him to drop out. “I said, ‘Andrew, are you that level of arrogance?’” Mr. Adams said. “’I’m the sitting mayor of the city of New York and you expect me to step aside when you just lost to Zohran by 12 points.’”An independent candidate and former United States attorney, Jim Walden, who is polling between zero percent and the low single digits, suggested last week that an independent poll be taken in September and that the “free market” candidates agree ahead of time that only the top candidate in the poll stay in the race.Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, sent out a statement on Monday saying that the former governor will review the Walden proposal and “we call on other candidates to do the same.” He also used the statement to criticize the mayor, saying, “We do not see any path to victory for Mayor Adams.”Mr. Adams told Fox Business on Tuesday that he doesn’t see Mr. Mamdani’s victory in the primary as a mandate because, despite historically high turnout, only 565,000 New Yorkers in a city of eight million ranked the state assemblyman on their ballots. Mr. Adams said he plans to register one million new voters.Mr. Mamdani’s campaign knocked on one million doors and made two million phone calls, mobilizing new voters to the polls last month with the help of 30,000 Democratic Socialists of America volunteers. None of the moderate candidates has this vast pool of apparatchik at their disposal.In the Hamptons, those with the money to fund a serious ground game haven’t agreed on which candidate to back or how to entice the others in the field to drop out, if they can. It’s a big if.

Mayor Adams Ramps Up Campaign as He Vies To Be the Anti-Mamdani Choice of Business Leaders

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