Eric Adams Calls Himself ‘Dinkins 2.’ Can It Get Him Re-Elected?

Mayor Eric Adams began his monthly Q. and A. radio program with an unusual self-introduction.

“I’m your mayor, Eric Adams,” he said recently on WBLS-FM, a popular R&B station in New York City. “David Dinkins 2, I like to say.”

Two days later, Mr. Adams reinforced the message. At an event celebrating Haitian heritage, he again portrayed himself as a sequel to Mr. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. He repeated the line the next day, at a gathering of older New Yorkers in East Harlem.

Invoking Mr. Dinkins, and his history as a one-term mayor, has become a central theme in Mr. Adams’s re-election strategy. At every event where the mayor has an audience with his base — town halls with older adults, ethnic heritage celebrations, guest appearances on Black radio — Mr. Adams has argued that his accomplishments are being dismissed because of his race.

The mayor has urged his supporters to respond by re-electing him to the second term that Mr. Dinkins was denied — a call that has resonated among some voters.

Jackie L. Wilson, 78, a retired Army sergeant major who lives in southeast Queens and attended one of the mayor’s town halls, said he recalled how Rudolph W. Giuliani turned voters against Mr. Dinkins, diminishing his accomplishments and portraying him as ineffectual.

“The more he does,” Mr. Wilson said, referring to a Black mayor like Mr. Dinkins or Mr. Adams, “the more they say he didn’t do.”