Queens candidates loom large in mayor’s race

Mayor Eric Adams, former Governor Andrew Cuomo and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams – all Queens natives – loom large over the race for New York City mayor.  File photos by Benny Polatseck, Mayoral Photography Office/Cliff Owen, AP/John McCarten, NYC Council Media Unit

By Jacob Kaye

Queens candidates – both those who have declared their candidacy and those who are expected to – are likely to loom large over the race for New York City mayor.

The incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams, spent most of his childhood in Queens. So did former Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose expected entrance into the race in the coming days is likely to reshape the mayoral field entirely.

And this week, another Queens native said they were laying the groundwork for a potential run for Gracie Mansion – City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. The speaker opened a campaign account with the city’s Campaign Finance Board, the first step toward launching a bid for the seat. While considered a longshot for the mayor’s office, the speaker, who is not related to the mayor, could very well emerge as a dark horse candidate in the race, political observers say.

And while they all may share a home borough, each of the candidates from Queens has drastically different strategies for running to lead New York City for the next four years.

“Eric Adams, Adrienne Adams and Cuomo have three very different approaches,” Democratic strategist Trip Yang, who is not working with any candidate in the mayor’s race, told the Eagle.

While Mayor Adams may be the incumbent in the race, which currently features a little less than a dozen Democratic candidates, he’s about as weak as any incumbent can be, political analysts say. The fallout from the bribery and corruption case brought against him last fall has been enough to make his bid for reelection a true longshot.

But despite dreary poll numbers, a lack of institutional support, major fundraising difficulties and not much of a campaign staff, Adams insists he’s running for office.

“I'm running,” the mayor said earlier this week. “Petitions will be in the streets. So please, if you see one with my name on it, please sign it.”

Even with his apparent commitment to the reelection bid, he remains in a difficult position, Yang said.

“He's got no shot right now of winning reelection for mayor,” Yang said.

Cuomo’s candidacy is something like the inverse of the mayor’s, according to Yang

The Archbishop Molloy High School grad, should he formally enter the race, would technically be an insurgent candidate. However, Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused by over a dozen women of sexual harassment, would launch his bid with a lot of the benefits of an incumbent.

Cuomo has strong name recognition and has consistently topped mayoral polls. He also has spent months building a campaign and gathering support from elected leaders, unions and other influential groups.

“Andrew Cuomo’s campaign has been working hard, meticulously behind the scenes to come out with a very large campaign infrastructure,” Yang said. “He's going to come out as the front runner.”

“It's the complete opposite of Eric Adams, who keeps putting himself in front of the cameras as the sitting mayor and keeps saying he's running, but there is almost no campaign activity, almost no campaign infrastructure,” he added.

Not only will Cuomo likely get to enjoy the benefits of running a race as an “incumbent,” but he’ll also likely be free of the cons of doing so.

Political strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who is not working for any candidate in the mayor’s race, told the Eagle that both the mayor and the speaker will have to answer for whatever issues voters say have plagued the city over the past years, be it crime, affordability or something else. But Cuomo, who largely disappeared from public view over the past four years, won’t have to.

“He has all the advantages of being a Cuomo, being a former governor, without being responsible for the things that have occurred in New York City over the last four years,” Sheinkopf said.

“[The speaker] is going to have to explain why we have less cops, why we have less school safety agents, why we have chaos,” he added. “She's responsible for that. [The mayor] is responsible for that and he's going to have to answer that. But Cuomo doesn't.”

Cuomo will, however, still likely have to face questions about his record. Not only did he resign in scandal – Cuomo has denied all of the allegations made against him – but he also faced criticism as governor for his handling of COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes and was wrapped up in an ethics probe concerning a book he wrote about his handling of the pandemic.

“His unfavorables are high, which means he can be brought down with a lot of concentrated spending,” Yang said.

It’s Cuomo’s vulnerabilities that reportedly are behind the speaker’s potential entrance into the race.

Speaker Adams, who will be term-limited out of office by the end of the year, allegedly was pushed to consider running by Attorney General Letitia James, a longtime Cuomo foe who led the probe into the sexual harassment allegations against the former governor, and other leaders afraid of a Cuomo mayorality.

“I didn’t seek this,” the speaker, who attended Bayside High School with the mayor, said on Thursday. “It wasn’t in my plans.”

The Southeast Queens representative would face a number of major hurdles were she to formally launch a mayoral campaign.

To start, she’d likely be the last person to enter the race and currently has little campaign infrastructure to speak of. She also doesn’t have great name recognition, having only ever held elected office representing her Council district.

She’d also be battling the weight of history. While City Council speakers may have enjoyed support during their time leading the Council, no speaker has ever successfully run for mayor.

The Council’s first speaker, Queens Councilmember Peter Vallone, ran for governor and mayor, losing both races. His successor, Gillford Miller, unsuccessfully challenged Michael Bloomberg in 2005. Former Speaker Christine Quinn entered the 2013 mayoral Democratic primary as the frontrunner, but finished third in the primary won by Bill de Blasio. Melissa Mark-Viverito, Quinn’s successor, didn’t run for mayor but instead mounted a failed bid for public advocate. Speaker Adams’ predecessor, Corey Johnson, launched a brief bid for mayor before pulling out of the race. He later ran unsuccessfully for comptroller.

But Yang said it would be a mistake to fully count the speaker out.

“If she puts a very strong, dynamic campaign operation together, you could see her developing into a more formidable campaign,” Yang said.

Should the mayor, the speaker and the former governor all launch competitive campaigns, they’d join Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jessica Ramos as mayoral candidates from the World’s Borough. No other borough would be more represented in the mayoral race.