“It gets dark early here.”
That’s what the philosopher Yogi Berra supposedly said about the old Yankee Stadium. It’s feeling true for the whole city these days.
Donald Trump’s new administration is already stress-testing big blue cities and states, with much more to come, months ahead of a relative handful of voters deciding who’s going to lead NYC through this gauntlet.
Eric Adams, rolling over and showing his belly to Trump, isn’t going to beat himself.
He also isn’t going to be New York City’s mayor in 2026.
Adams has the lowest approval rating ever recorded here, and it started plummeting during his first year in office.
That was long before a seemingly endless series of FBI raids and then historic criminal charges against New York City’s sitting mayor in a corruption trial scheduled to begin in April, if Hizzoner can’t convince Trump to order his Justice Department to drop the case.
That would be two months before the Democratic primary that’s only open to party members and will very likely decide the city’s next mayor.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been looming over the race, while many other Democrats have already stepped up to challenge their party’s incumbent mayor.
Adams, for his part, has tried to ignore them while not really campaigning so much as using his public office as his reelection strategy and his bargaining chip with Trump.
The result is a contest that feels disconnected from the moment as New York City isn’t in crisis, yet, but is staggering in the dark.
Adams’ declared challengers are appearing, minus the mayor, at all sorts of forums, issuing plans and answering questions.
But time is running out for someone to speak clearly about how they’d govern as federal funds dry up and the screws get put to the city to comply with the guy from Queens or pay the price.
Or else New Yorkers can pay little attention, roll the dice and hope for the best.
That’s how mayors have been elected since Democrats re-emerged as the only game in town after 20 years in the wilderness under Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.
In 2013, a disgraced Anthony Weiner’s rise and fall opened up the path Bill de Blasio shot through in the primary’s closing weeks, turning a quarter-million votes there into eight years running a city of more than 8 million people and spending nearly a trillion dollars in public money.
In 2021, with an unpopular de Blasio term limited-out, empty vessel Andrew Yang almost immediately shot to the top of the polls with his surprise entry into the Democratic primary on a shallow appeal to make a COVID-drained city feel happy again.
When Yang withered under the spotlight he’d claimed, Adams seized the lead and never quite gave it up.
The ex-cop and former Republican was effectively elected mayor as a bit more than 400,000 voters ended up backing him in the city’s first-ever ranked-choice primary that he won by barely 7,000 votes. Here we are.
Another philosopher, Robert M. Pirsig, wrote that “New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.”
That’s because, he continued, “When something new and Dynamic wants to come into the world it often looks like hell, but it can get born in New York. It can happen. It seems like it could happen anywhere but that’s not so. There has to be a certain kind of people who can look at it and say ‘Hey, wait a second! That’s good!’ without having to look over their shoulder to see if somebody else is saying the same thing. That’s rare. This is one of the few places in the world where people don’t ask whether something’s been approved somewhere else.”
And, for that reason, “things keep happening here all the time that have this Dynamic sparkle that saves it all. In the midst of everything that’s wrong, it sparkles.”
Amen! But like the fine print says: Past performance does not guarantee future results.
The city could use a candidate right now who’s not looking over their shoulder, and who’s ready to meet this moment and sparkle.
Or we can have another crapshoot contest and hope for the best.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
