The moderate New York City mayor said he wants to stop Zohran Mamdani from winning in November.
NEW YORK — Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams endorsed Andrew Cuomo — a man he recently called a snake and a liar — in the heated race for New York City mayor Thursday.
The about-face comes after the beleaguered city executive ended his own campaign last month. With less than two weeks left until Election Day, Adams said he plans to campaign for his former nemesis in areas where the incumbent remains popular in the hopes of defeating front-runner Zohran Mamdani, who is a democratic socialist.
“Am I angry that I’m not the one taking down Zohran the socialist and the communist?” Adams said during a joint press conference in East Harlem. “You’re darn right I am. But you know what? The city means more to me than anything, and it is time for us as a family to come together.”
Cuomo said he and Adams had more in common than not, owing to their shared animosity toward the left and their commitment to upholding historically Democratic values — despite Mamdani overwhelmingly winning the Democratic primary in June.
“We’ve known each other a long time. The mayor served in the Senate. I was governor. We worked together for many years. We are from the same family. We are Democrats,” Cuomo said. “And we’ve been Democrats all our lives. My father was a Democrat. This is a Democratic city with a Democratic tradition, and Zohran is not a Democrat.”
It’s unclear how much Adams’ nod will move the needle.
Cuomo has been consistently trailing Mamdani by double digits after losing in the Democratic primary.
Adams, meanwhile, had been polling at less than 10 percent and has been bogged down by record-low approval ratings. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that, with Adams out of the race, Cuomo’s share of the vote jumped 10 percent. However, that survey omitted Adams’ name altogether, even though the mayor dropped out too late to get his name off the ballot.
More broadly, Adams spent months painting Cuomo as a racist opportunist — charges Cuomo denied — to the very people he now needs to convince otherwise.
When asked about his change of heart Thursday, Adams brushed off his prior criticism.
“Andrew’s a brother and I had three of them and brothers fight,” the mayor said. “But when families attack, brothers come together. They understand that you have to protect the family.”
The acrimony between the two runs deep and is rooted in a shared base of middle-class Black voters.
In April, after the mayor dropped out of the Democratic primary to run on an independent line and after President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice successfully moved to dismiss Adams’ federal bribery case, a newly unencumbered mayor began firing off attacks at Cuomo, who was then leading in the polls.
Two months later, Cuomo would suffer a bruising loss to Mamdani in the Democratic primary and, like Adams, mount a general election run as an independent. That’s when Adams’ attacks grew more bitter.
The mayor accused Cuomo of historically undermining the campaigns of Black officials, of ushering in high crime by signing bail reform laws in 2019 and of mishandling the pandemic — all charges Team Cuomo denied. And the mayor took personal offense to constant speculation he would drop out of the race, which he blamed on the former governor’s team, a charge they also pushed back on.
“Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar,” Adams said during a Sept. 5 press conference insisting he was still running for reelection. “I am in this race, and I’m the only one that can beat Mamdani.”
Adams could not, however, outrun political reality.
The mayor’s poll numbers were first pulled to record lows in December 2023 owing to unpopular budget cuts. And there they remained as a parade of scandals, FBI raids and indictments battered his inner circle.
Adams himself was indicted in a five-count federal bribery case. The unusual nature of its dismissal and Adams’ cozy relationship with Trump proved so off-putting that it prompted an exodus of deputy mayors and helped sink his poll numbers into the single digits.
It is that same unpopularity that makes the outcome of Adams’ endorsement of Cuomo an unpredictable one. On Thursday, however, Cuomo was confident that the additional support would be a boon to his campaign.
“The mayor put his own ambition aside because he cares more about New York City, and he believes Zohran is an existential threat in New York City, and we all have to do our best to make sure that Zohran does not become the next mayor,” Cuomo said.