The ‘Hard Part’ Is Here for Mayor Adams

Early in Eric Adams’s tenure as mayor of New York City, he was known for asking, “When does the hard part start?” That’s how he once put it to The New York Sun when he was asked how he was doing early in his mayoralty. Well, it looks like the hard part has arrived.Mr. Adams is facing a convergence of events — from the deepening migrant crisis to criticism for closing public libraries to a budding corruption scandal at his re-election campaign and even an accusation, which he denies, of sexual assault — and it’s taking a toll on New Yorkers’ opinions of their mayor.A new survey from Marist Poll finds that a majority of New York City residents, 54 percent, now disapprove of Mr. Adams’s job as mayor, while 37 percent of respondents approve. This is a collapse from a relative high for Mr. Adams in March 2022, when the same pollster found that 61 percent of city residents who responded to the poll approved of the mayor’s performance and 24 percent disapproved.This reversal comes as criticism mounts from the mayor’s opponents and law enforcement scrutiny of the mayor’s campaign increases. At a press conference earlier this week, the mayor’s administration found itself in hot water for the remark: “We’re going to be leaning into parents and parent groups to do some volunteerism.”That was in reference to 250 school safety agents being cut recently. “We’re going to get to our crisis management team,” Mr. Adams said of his apparent plan to have parents volunteer to police schools. “We are going to be straining at a very high level to get this done correctly.”Other budget cuts are being felt by New Yorkers. Earlier this month, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queens Public Library announced they “must eliminate seven-day service across the city” due to “mid-year budget cuts.”“We also will be reducing spending on library materials, programming, and building maintenance and repairs,” the libraries said in a statement. “Without sufficient funding, we cannot sustain our current levels of service, and any further cuts to Libraries’ budgets will, unfortunately, result in deeper service impacts.”Even on the mayor’s marquee issue, policing, he’s getting slammed by political opponents. A conservative talk show host and 2021 GOP mayoral candidate, Curtis Sliwa, has been criticizing the police robots that the city is rolling out amid budget cuts.“NYPD is reporting a police shortage, with less than 30,000 police covering the 5 boroughs. Meanwhile, Eric Adams is paying for robots that require police protection from vandalism and being pushed onto tracks. Adams is not serious about public safety” Mr. Silwa said in a post.Mr. Adams has blamed the budget cuts on having to cover the costs of paying for housing for migrants being bussed to New York City from border states. He has tried to blame leaders at Washington for the cuts. “D.C. has abandoned us, and they need to be paying their cost to this national problem,” Mr. Adams said at a town hall in Brooklyn.Mr. Adams was scheduled to participate in a long-awaited meeting with White House staffers at Washington earlier this month in order to address migrant crisis. He aborted the meeting as soon as he landed at the capital in order to return to New York to address the FBI raid on the home of a top fundraiser for his re-election campaign, Brianna Suggs.Since then, the investigation seems to have widened to potentially implicate Mr. Adams himself, with the FBI seizing Mr. Adams’s cell phone and other devices. While it’s not clear whether Mr. Adams was personally involved, the New York Times first reported that the FBI is investigating a straw donor scheme allegedly involving Mr. Adams’s campaign, a Brooklyn construction company, and the Turkish government.On Thursday Mr. Adams denied the sexual misconduct accusation, made in a civil court filing by a woman who contends she was “sexually assaulted by Defendant Eric Adams in New York, New York in 1993 while they both worked for the City of New York,” the Associated Press reported.“It absolutely did not happen,” Mr. Adams said in response to questions from reporters. “I don’t recall ever meeting this person and I would never harm anyone in that magnitude. It did not happen.”Against the backdrop of flagging public support for the mayor, reports are swirling in publications like Vanity Fair and Politico that Governor Cuomo might be angling for his job, should he have to leave before the end of his term.A former executive director for the state Democratic Committee, Basil Smikle, told Politico that he thinks Mr. Cuomo could make a comeback as mayor of New York City “if the mayor’s legal problems or the quality of life and crime issues that a lot of people are concerned about worsen.”“Though difficult, he could still be competitive,” Mr. Smikle said. “He does have support in African-American and Latino communities. He does have the support of more moderate voters.”In response to a request for comment from the Sun, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Richard Azzopardi, said that “the future is the future and he gets these questions often.”“I think [the questions] are fueled by the fact that many people are facing a crisis in confidence in government at many levels and now view the circumstances in which he left office as the political railroading that it was,” Mr. Azzopardi tells the Sun.A political scientist at John Jay College, Susan Kang, tells the Sun she doesn’t think Governor Hochul, who is the only person who could remove Mr. Adams would do so, meaning the only reason he would leave office early is in the event of a conviction.In terms of a comeback from Mr. Cuomo, she says the city would be a tough venue for Mr. Cuomo because he’s lived his entire adult life outside the city. He’s also lost some of his close affiliation with the national Democratic Party.“Old Cuomo had close relationships with national Democratic leaders,” Ms. Kang says, adding that New York City voters are not Mr. Cuomo’s natural constituency. “There’s a rich bench of Democratic talent.”Ms. Kang also thought that, even if Mr. Adams did leave office early, it likely would only create an opening for a Republican if he was already the mayoral nominee when he was forced to leave.“It’s little bits of movement here and there and it’s not clear how much of that is tied to people liking Trump versus party affiliation,” Ms. Kang says of gains Republicans made in New York City in the past few years.The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Sun.

The ‘Hard Part’ Is Here for Mayor Adams

The ‘Hard Part’ Is Here for Mayor Adams

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