Ex-cop Eric Adams poised to become New York City’s next mayor
- Eric Adams on track to become the second black mayor in Big Apple history
- Republican challenger is the founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams won the Democratic nomination for New York mayor on Tuesday, positioning the former police captain who stressed enhancing public safety to become the next leader of America’s largest city.
Updated vote tallies posted online on Tuesday evening based on the city’s new ranked-choice voting system showed Adams with what appeared to be an insurmountable lead over his nearest rivals, two weeks after Election Day.
With fewer than 8,000 postal votes left to count, Adams was ahead of the city’s former sanitation chief, Kathryn Garcia, by 1 percentage point, or 8,426 votes. The Associated Press called the race for Adams soon after the results were released.
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Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former MSNBC analyst, was in third place, without an obvious path to victory.
The field of more than a dozen Democratic candidates was historically diverse. If elected, Adams would be the city’s second black mayor. Either Garcia or Wiley, who is black, would have been the first woman to hold the office.
The new results came one week after the city’s Board of Elections – which has faced accusations of mismanagement for years – botched its initial tabulation of ranked-choice ballots, posting and then removing erroneous totals after mistakenly including test ballots.
It is not due to release final official results until the middle of this month.
Adams acknowledged some votes remained to be counted before looking ahead to November’s election, when he will be heavily favoured over Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol, who has vowed to run on a “law-and-order” platform.
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Registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in the city by more than a 6-to-1 margin.
“While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York,” Adams said in a statement.
The next mayor will oversee a still-nascent recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and will also confront several deep challenges, including a spike in shootings, persistent wealth inequality, a troubled public-school system and a lack of affordable housing.
The election offered an early look at how national Democrats may approach the fraught issue of policing in next year’s congressional elections.
Adams, 60, centred his campaign on improving public safety. Decrying the “defund the police” movement that has gained traction among some liberals, the moderate Adams sought to strike a balance between addressing rising crime rates and eliminating racial bias from the department.
The incumbent mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, was unable to run for re-election due to term limits.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
