As he made his return this week from a brief public hiatus, Mayor Eric Adams used his first speech to convey a message: He is being treated unfairly because of his background. He has delivered on his campaign promises. And he is not resigning.
“Every day they burn candles, they light incense, they say prayers, they do everything they can: Is he gone yet?” Mr. Adams said at an interfaith breakfast his office hosted. “No. He’s not.”
With the mayoral primary looming in June, Mr. Adams has been road-testing a message of resilience, portraying himself as a working-class Black native New Yorker running against people and institutions of privilege.
But if Mr. Adams hopes to win the heavily contested Democratic primary, he will need to persuade voters in the Black neighborhoods where he won broad support in 2021. Those voters also supported one of Mr. Adams’s presumed primary opponents, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
If they both run in the Democratic primary, they will test the allegiances of Black voters, a key constituency that accounts for nearly one-third of Democratic primary voters. They also risk splitting their support and hurting their political prospects in the process.
At the Cornbread soul food restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, two patrons recalled their pride in seeing a fellow Black New Yorker rise to the top of City Hall.
They both voted for Mr. Adams in 2021, seeing in his police background a shared appreciation for the work of civil servants and a willingness to curb rising crime in the city. But their feelings of good will had clearly evaporated.
“That was then,” said Patricia Brown, 68, a retired city worker and a longtime Democrat. “This is now.”
Her companion, Gregory Coston, 68, agreed. He said he did not plan to vote for Mr. Adams, and was strongly considering Mr. Cuomo.
“Even though he was arrogant and had his own way, I thought he ran the State of New York pretty well,” Mr. Coston said.
Mr. Adams’s record as mayor, along with his five-count federal indictment, has turned many New Yorkers against his re-election bid.
Mr. Adams denies wrongdoing, and has asserted that racial and political dynamics were behind his prosecution. And with Justice Department officials meeting in Washington on Friday with Manhattan federal prosecutors and Mr. Adams’s lawyers to discuss dropping the charges against him, the mayor’s assertion that the indictment was unjustified may be bolstered.
His argument will be tested in the majority-Black neighborhoods of his former State Senate district in Brooklyn, where he was listed first on the ranked-choice ballots of roughly seven in 10 voters during the 2021 mayoral primary, according to an analysis of voter data. He captured more than two-thirds of the first-choice vote in other heavily Black neighborhoods, including Canarsie and East New York in Brooklyn and South Jamaica in Queens.
Mr. Cuomo also performed well in these areas, and as he sought to repair his reputation after his resignation in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal, he spoke at several Black churches.
Mr. Adams has also maintained close relationships with Black leaders and visited Black churches across the city throughout his mayoral tenure. Many Black voters continued to support him after his federal indictment, saying they believed he was unfairly targeted.
Even now, the mayor has held on to much of his support from the city’s Black community leaders. Mr. Adams met with a handful of Black faith leaders after the prayer breakfast, said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a longtime civil rights leader and ally of the mayor. He said they made preliminary commitments to galvanize their congregations to re-elect the mayor in the months ahead.
“He’s going to need all the help he can get,” Mr. Daughtry said.
Representatives for Mr. Adams declined to comment.
The specter of a five-count federal indictment and wave of high-profile resignations from Mr. Adams’s office have alarmed some Black New Yorkers. Their frustrations have only been exacerbated by his recent meeting with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago and a last-minute trip to Washington to attend the president’s inauguration.
“I don’t think he has as much of a strong relationship with the Black community as we think,” said Rev. Rashad Raymond Moore, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Crown Heights, where Mr. Cuomo spoke last May. “I mean, he’s a Black Republican cop.”
Mr. Moore voted for Mr. Adams in 2021, he said, but did not plan to do so again. “You can’t lead a city when you are mired in your own scandals,” he said. “I mean, just get out of the way.”
Mr. Cuomo’s broad name recognition and the relationships with Black voters that he and his father built while serving as governor have baked in an early sense of trust. They have also led some to believe he would do more to lower the city’s crime rates and untenable high housing prices — issues that numerous Black voters pointed to as their top concerns.
But Mr. Cuomo would also face a torrent of attacks. In his first campaign for governor more than 20 years ago, he ran against H. Carl McCall, a popular Black candidate. His critics point to that race as an example of his mishandling of the racial politics of the day. The former governor will have to contend with the optics of challenging an incumbent Black leader in this race if he enters the fray.
In recent weeks, Mr. Cuomo has met with a handful of influential Black faith leaders and community organizers, suggesting some effort to shore up support among the key voting bloc.
Several of the mayoral candidates’ campaign attacks on Mr. Adams’s integrity have now extended to Mr. Cuomo, the presumed front-runner should he enter the race.
During a mayoral forum in late January, Zellnor Myrie, a mayoral candidate and state senator who represents Mr. Adams’s former central Brooklyn district, blamed the former governor for many of the challenges facing Black voters.
“Black New Yorkers bore the brunt of Albany’s failures,” he said before criticizing Mr. Cuomo’s involvement with the Independent Democratic Caucus, a group of Democrats who worked with Republicans in the Statehouse during Mr. Trump’s first term. “We realized there was one man who was behind these Trump Democrats: Andrew Cuomo, a governor many in my community had voted for — and whose father was revered.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the governor “had zero to do with the I.D.C.’s formation” and dismissed claims about his role in the caucus as “outdated, inaccurate, palace intrigue.”
He added that talk of Mr. Cuomo’s potential run was “premature” but said, “New Yorkers know Andrew Cuomo spent a lifetime delivering for them.”
The appeal of keeping a Black mayor in power in New York City, especially at a time when Black leadership in the state is ascendant, is not lost on many Black leaders. But Mr. Adams’s openness to engaging with the right has stress-tested the question of whether racial representation matters more than political capital.
“Of course, you want to stand with a Black leader, you do not want to speak out against, but you want to make sure that that Black leader is there supporting, working with, riding with and caring for the Black community,” said Jennifer Jones Austin, the chief executive of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.
“I can’t speak for all Black leaders,” she continued, “but I think that many would be rightfully concerned when we have a mayor who appears to be courting President Trump. And they have a right to legitimately question whether his motives in this moment are personal or city focused.”
Mr. Adams’s advisers speak confidently of his support from Black voters, but interviews with Black voters in and around Mr. Adams’s former state senate district and other predominantly Black corners of Brooklyn reveal that some in the mayor’s core constituency have grown disappointed with his record.
Althea Johnson, 52, the co-owner of TJ’s Tasty Corner in Brownsville, said she did not know much about any of Mr. Adams’s primary rivals but intended to start researching them. It is a position she didn’t want to be in, she said, making her admiration for Mr. Adams clear with a photo she took with him at a gala honoring local business owners and emergency medical workers in 2023.
“I believed in him at first,” she said, showing the photo of her beaming in a long dress alongside him. “I was there to support him. I was there. So I know what it is to see him disappoint me now.”
Of Mr. Cuomo, she said: “I would give him a chance. I would.”
The mayor’s running as a Black mayor, the second in the city, gave her some pride and influenced her vote in 2021, she said. But now, in light of her business’s struggles and his public scandals, that matters less.
“After people started struggling — all that he promised he didn’t fulfill and that made a turn for a lot of people like me,” she said. “So he’s in trouble with that. He needs to step up.”