Mayor Eric Adams’ decision to skip the June Democratic primary and make an independent run for re-election could set the stage for a wild general election — if he can dig himself out of his current low standing in the polls.
The mayor says he’ll take his “appeal directly to all New Yorkers” on a public-safety focused ballot line; the next few weeks will show if he can re-establish his viability — a la John Lindsay’s successful third-party re-elex run in 1969.
Adams isn’t wrong to plead that it was “impossible to mount a primary campaign while these false accusations were held over me” right up until this week’s dismissal of the federal corruption charges.
Fact is, the Democratic Party’s lurch left on illegal immigration, criminal justice and public safety had stranded Adams on “moderate island,” even though most of the city agrees with him.
In speaking up on how the Biden open-borders policy flooded the city with tens of thousands of “asylum seekers,” Adams put people over party.
In pushing Albany Democrats for changes in the bail, discovery and other criminal-justice reforms that drove crime up across the city, Adams put New Yorkers’ safety above party.
And it cost him.
And if liberation from the party lets the mayor get his groove back, all bets are off.
The fall campaign could see four major candidates, since the far-left Working Families Party will surely be tempted to field its own candidate should, say, arch-nemesis Andrew Cuomo win the Democratic primary.
Stock up on the popcorn.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
