NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ independent spin a win for electoral choice

Mayor Adams’s decision to run as an independent in the November final election has been cast narrowly as nothing more than a clever ploy to increase his waning chance for re-election.

The Democratic Socialist  mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, an Assembly member from Queens, was typical in characterizing  Adams as a “self-interested, disgraced mayor who has and always will put his needs before their own.”

But the implications of Adams’ decision have been greatly under-appreciated in the week that has followed it, lost in a news cycle about tariffs wars and cast merely as personal. Adams, heretofore known as the first city chief executive to be indicted in office, has done something unprecedented and important.  

He will be the first incumbent mayor to bypass a party primary election completely. As a result, he has done far more than merely boost his own chances.

He is offering New York a political insurance policy against the threat of a far-left mayoralty that can result from the city’s flawed primary system, which locks out the second-largest group of voters — independents.

It’s a system that can allow a low-turnout election to saddle the city with a chief executive unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole.

In his announcement of his independent candidacy, Adams offered a shorthand version of those arguments. As he put it, his independent run would give him a chance to “appeal directly to all New Yorkers.”

That simple statement implies a much broader truth: New York City’s primary election system is an affront to democracy and lacks legitimacy. The city’s closed primary system, which shuts out independent voters, effectively disenfranchises the second-largest group of city voters from voting in elections with the greatest consequences.

These “non-affiliated voters” make up 23% of New York state’s 13 million registered voters.  More to the point, there are more than 1 million who are non-affiliated in the five boroughs. They get to vote in November, of course — where perennial sacrificial lamb Curtis Sliwa is expected to run on the Republican line. 

But they are locked out of the real election, the Democratic party’s June primary.  It’s a system that enables candidates to win — and go on to govern the city for multiple terms — thanks to first-time victories in low-turnout elections. 

That’s exactly the threat posed by Democratic socialist Mamdani. 

In a primary election in which progressives and union members turn out disproportionately, he will command a hardcore of loyal voters that could well lead him to victory over sound-alike, mushy, anti-Trump opponents such as Comptroller Brad Lander and his predecessor Scott Stringer.

He could even triumph over front-runner ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who may sink as voters are reminded of his pandemic-era decisions that led to thousands of nursing home deaths.

In the city’s ranked choice voting system, Mamdani could well be second or third on many ballots — and see votes transferred to him as other candidates are eliminated.

We’ve seen a prequel to this movie. It’s a new version of how Bill de Blasio became mayor for two terms — after winning his party’s primary with only 81,000 votes of a meager total of 198,000 cast, defeating the far more centrist and pragmatic then-City Council speaker Christine Quinn.

Indeed, Adams himself nearly fell victim to this system in 2021 when the far-left former de Blasio aide Maya Wiley outpolled everyone in the crowded field except Adams and second-place finisher Kathryn Garcia.

By guaranteeing himself a place on the ballot in November, Adams is offering the city a quality-of-life insurance policy, protecting against those who could use the low-turnout primary to hijack city government. Mamdani, notably, has ruled out hiring more NYPD officers.  

Adams, through the expedient of skipping the primary, has greatly increased the odds of a serious November race. 

He is arguing, in effect, that in an open primary, he’d be one of the final top two. It’s a self-serving assumption — but not an unreasonable one for a politician who first entered political life as a registered Republican.

At the very least, he has ensured that the November election will not be a cakewalk for a Democratic Socialist who manages to win the low-turnout June Democratic primary. 

Ideally, Adams’s party-swap should draw attention to the need to reform the city’s primary election system,  an outlier among big cities. 

They are the law in major Democratic strongholds, including Chicago and Boston. Such a shift would certainly be good politics for Adams — but also a civics lesson that New Yorkers should not be discounting or ignoring.

Adams is now ensuring serious competition in November, when far more voters come to the polls.  That should be New York’s norm, not an exception.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow for domestic policy at the American Enterprise Institute