The one time Eric Adams went on the “FAQ NYC” podcast, he said something dumb. This was early 2020, when Adams was soft-launching his 2021 mayoral campaign. Harry Siegel, one of the show’s hosts, asked Adams if he planned to carry a gun while serving as mayor. “Yes, I will,” Adams said, proudly. Adams, who spent twenty-two years in the N.Y.P.D., also suggested that he’d fire the mayoral security team. “If the city’s safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail,” he said. “He should be walking the street by himself.” These comments made news. Adams’s opponents argued that they showed he was weird, overconfident, and out of touch. Adams has not returned to the “FAQ NYC” podcast since.
“FAQ NYC” is a talk show about New York City hosted by Siegel and Katie Honan, two veteran local journalists, and Christina Greer, a political scientist who studies Black ethnic and urban politics. New episodes usually drop once or twice a week; listenership for each usually numbers in the thousands. Among those tuning in are local elected officials, bureaucrats, aides, reporters, flacks, and political operatives. Siegel is an editor at the City, a nonprofit news site, and a columnist at the Daily News. Honan is a senior reporter for the City who largely covers City Hall; she often posts TMZ-style videos of herself asking Adams questions from between three and twenty feet away. (“Mayor Adams, do you want to respond to the government’s criticism of New York’s handling of the migrant crisis?”) Greer teaches at Fordham University. “We come from different avenues, which I think people appreciate,” she said. “I’m not a journalist. I’m a political scientist. I’m also a Black woman in New York City.” The show often ends up interrogating the assumptions and enthusiasms of the city’s political observers. “All you New Yorker-reading, New York Times-reading schmucks,” Siegel told me, in his mellifluous old New York baritone. “No offense,” he added.
This past week, the hosts of “FAQ NYC” gathered on a Zoom call to discuss a topic that has come up frequently in recent episodes: Adams’s reëlection prospects in 2025. Even as the 2024 Presidential race is being roiled weekly by unprecedented historical events, the 2025 New York City mayoral race has not-so-quietly kicked off. In July, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller—its second-highest-ranking elected official—officially announced his intent to challenge Adams in the Democratic Party’s mayoral primary, next June. Zellnor Myrie, a thirty-seven-year-old state senator from Brooklyn, has also moved to enter the race, implicitly making a case for the need for generational change. The previous comptroller, Scott Stringer, who came in fifth in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, wants another shot with the city’s voters. There are persistent rumors that disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo is eying the race, “eager to make a political comeback,” as the Times put it. Other names floated include the progressive state senator Jessica Ramos and the state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
These candidates and potential candidates are responding to the widespread feeling in New York City political circles that Adams is fatally unpopular, perhaps as electorally vulnerable as any incumbent mayor has been in a generation. His approval numbers have dropped to levels usually reserved for Presidents who botch hurricane-relief efforts. What achievements he’s had have been overshadowed by the city’s uneven response to the migrant crisis—Lander’s office has spent much of the past year investigating lucrative contracts that Adams administered to companies running migrant shelters—and by multiple federal investigations into his 2021 campaign fund-raising. And yet Greer has argued on the show that Adams’s critics are underestimating him. “Are his approval ratings twenty-eight per cent? Yeah,” she said. “Is he an incredibly gifted politician? Yes.”
Honan, as a reporter, is careful to avoid giving too much of her opinion, but she pointed to the calendar. “There’s a lot of stuff we’re waiting on before the primary,” she said. Every mayoral race in New York City takes place in the shadow of a Presidential race. And even Adams would probably agree that his prospects will change if he or his aides are indicted. But so far the Mayor has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, and the investigations have stretched for months without charges. (“Winnie’s back at work,” Honan remarked, about Winnie Greco, an Adams aide whose properties were raided by the F.B.I.) Siegel doubts it will be enough for Adams’s primary challengers to simply argue that they’d be “more competent managers and dignified people” than the current mayor. “They all have the same basic idea,” he said. Greer pointed out, “What’s the difference between Brad Lander and Scott Stringer? What’s the difference between what they’re going to talk about, to the left of Adams, without it feeling like a remix of Bill de Blasio, who many people still have strong feelings about?”
Adams has made no secret about how he plans to defend himself and his record: the race will be about race. “As soon as Brad Lander formally announced, the Mayor was attacking him, saying why, instead of trying to take down the city’s second Black mayor, why wasn’t he trying to elect the country’s second Black President?” Honan said. “We’re going to see a lot more of that before June. . . . It’s a lot of us versus them.” In 2021, Adams relied on middle-class and working-class Black voters in the outer boroughs to put him over the top in a crowded primary. There are reasons to think those voters will show up for him again. Last month, Reverend Al Sharpton wrote an op-ed for the Daily News titled “Eric Adams’ critics sound like Dinkins”—both defending Adams and reminding readers that David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, lost reëlection in 1993, after a single term, in large part because of white racial grievances stirred up by Rudy Giuliani. The “FAQ NYC” hosts considered the Sharpton op-ed a huge deal, a sign of strength in Adams’s coalition from a key city power broker. At City Hall, Adams’s aides had printed out copies of the op-ed and distributed them to Honan and other reporters.
On the show recently, Honan and Greer had a debate over the City Hall press corps’s treatment of Adams, which the Mayor has complained about since taking office. “They’re mad at a predominantly white press,” Honan said. “I always point out that the Mayor’s press office is predominantly white.” Honan feels that the Mayor and his team dismiss any negative coverage as unfair. “We’re not supposed to cover F.B.I. raids?” she asked. Greer, who is currently writing a history of Black women in American politics, said a double standard is inescapable. “It can be both/and, right?” she said. “I think the Mayor can be super petty. But also a lot of City Hall reporters didn’t live New York City history the way Adams and his inner circle have. There are a lot of people who weren’t around during the Dinkins era. They don’t understand the racial climate, and the race-baiting of Rudy Giuliani and all that history. So when we say ‘them,’ a lot of Black people do know what ‘them’ means.” Greer keeps a mental list of the New Yorkers that she thinks most understand the workings of the city as a whole. Sharpton is on it. So are Brian Lehrer, the WNYC host, and Errol Louis, the NY1 anchor. So is Adams. “He understands there are five boroughs in this city, not just the Upper West Side and the five neighborhoods in Brooklyn that everybody clamors over,” she said.
Siegel recently wrote an essay for Vital City, a New York-based public-policy journal, bemoaning the reduced influence and power of big-city newspaper columnists, who gave “voice” to a community’s characters and made “some sense of its plot.” Adams’s prospects are difficult to project, he said, because mayoral politics for the largest city in the country are squeezed into Democratic Party primaries that take place in June, on off years. “The fact is, nobody shows up at these things. Participation has died,” he said. “It speaks to a weird Democratic Party that wants to hold on to its own power, and be, like, ‘Everything’s working great,’ when things just clearly don’t seem to be working to lots of boring-ass New Yorkers.” Greer agreed. “There’s so many different shades of blue in New York,” she said. “We just assume we’re just a liberal bastion. We are not. We vote for Democrats, but the types of Democrats are really complicated. Homeowners versus non-homeowners, for example. The people who are, like, I don’t want kids getting stopped and frisked on the way to school, but also I don’t like this riffraff sitting on the stoop.” These dynamics played to Adams’s advantage in 2021, when he faced a crowded field of people who mostly wanted to run to his left. “Adams is aware of this,” Siegel said. “He’s going to try to make it clear: your choice is me or all of this.” ♦