Eric Adams and the future of the Democratic Party
He used to be the future. Now Kamala Harris carries the torch
One of the things about American politics that can be hard to wrap your head around is the sheer amount of money it involves. A mayoral election in a city like New York can easily see more campaign spending than gets expended in an entire general election in Britain. Combine this with America’s federal system - lots of power in the hands of city and state officials - and you have the perfect opportunity for corruption. Candidates need money, and rich people need favors from powerful officeholders. It’s a story that never gets old. Just look at Illinois, where four of the state’s previous ten governors have wound up in prison.
The latest (alleged!) powerful figure to be looking at some hard time is New York Mayor Eric Adams, who has just been charged after a lengthy corruption investigation. As in so many other such cases, the details are grubby and prosaic - almost laughably so. Allegedly, Adams conspired with Turkish government officials to receive illegal campaign donations and other perks, and in return he pressured the New York City Fire Department to approve the opening of a new Turkish consulate in Manhattan despite concerns that it didn’t meet the fire safety code.
(You have to wonder how these kinds of arrangements come about. Did Turkish officials get together one day and say “Well, we really want to avoid meeting the fire code in our new consulate, so let’s slip Eric Adams a few million”? How did Eric Adams explain his intense interest in the fire safety of a random consulate to the Fire Department?)
Maybe one day we’ll find out. Adams is strenuously denying the charges and still running for re-election in 2025. There’s no requirement that he resign after being indicted, and maybe he’ll end up cleared. New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez beat a corruption rap and was subsequently re-elected (although when the Feds later literally found gold bars in his house, the game was up.)
But these charges are probably the final nail in the coffin of the reputation of a figure once heralded as “the future of the Democratic Party”. And okay, the person who heralded him as that was… himself. But back in 2021, there were plenty of other people ready to believe it. Nobody was saying that anymore, even before his indictment on these weird charges.
Why not?
The Biden of Brooklyn
When Adams was first elected as mayor in 2021, he fit perfectly into the moment. Joe Biden had just won the 2020 election, beating out not only Donald Trump in the general election but also Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of his own party in the Democratic primary earlier that year. Biden’s moderate politics and old-timey aesthetic had won back a crucial slice of white voters in the Midwest. Democrats were distancing themselves from “defund the police” and other artefacts of the post-George Floyd summer of 2020. If Biden had a problem, it was that he was too old to credibly pose as the future of the party, and too white to have some of his message comfortably received by part of the party’s base.
This was where Eric Adams came in. By the standards of America’s gerontocracy, he was relatively young - about 60. As both an African-American and a former police officer, he was able to deliver a tough on crime message in a way which it was hard for white progressives to criticize. Whereas Biden mostly avoided engaging in the struggle over “wokeness” entirely, Adams criticized it directly - but then preached working-class Democratic values like health care and expanded economic opportunities in the next breath. On top of it all, he was elected to office by a coalition of Hispanic, African-America and low income voters at a time when Democrats were seeing their support among minorities decaying. It all added up to an intriguing prospect for Democratic centrists.
No wonder that as well as calling himself the future of the Democratic Party, he also calls himself the “Biden of Brooklyn”.
The Trump of Brooklyn?
But there is another side to Adams, one which is distinctly un-Biden-like. If Biden’s signature mood is somnolence, Adams’ is a kind of manic energy. And that energy often gets directed in questionable ways.
Adams is an inveterate talker and socializer who sometimes seems like he’s trying to embody everything about New York all at once. He brags, he parties, he rubs shoulders with the rich and famous, and he talks - always talks. Stories about his questionable connections have dogged him for years. The mayor’s close friends include a number of people with criminal histories, including for domestic violence and money laundering. ("I’m perfectly imperfect, and this is a city made up of perfectly imperfect people,” Adams says). His flashy and expensive lifestyle might not seem out of place in Manhattan, but it doesn’t sit too well in more staid quarters of the Democratic Party. (“This is a city of nightlife. I must test the product,” Adams says).
Of course, Adams wasn’t the first self-aggrandizing New York mayor to have national political ambitions - but of all of them, his political antennae seemed particularly badly tuned. He didn’t just tread a moderate path carefully, but became increasingly flamboyant in both his personal lifestyle and his disregard for the sensibilities not just of the woke but, well, anyone. This included a 2022 decision to give a job to a pastor who had previously traveled to Uganda and praised its anti-gay laws, which contained the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”.
This side of Adams - the flamboyance and outspokenness - was more Trump than Biden. Combined with whispers about the facts that would eventually become part of this federal investigation, it was enough for prominent Democrats to start distancing themselves from him. Over time, the actual Biden became less keen to associate himself with the Biden of Brooklyn. A major spat over immigration policy was the nail in the coffin of the relationship, and the two reportedly haven’t spoken in two years.
The Biden of San Francisco?
But here’s the thing. Just as Eric Adams’ star has fallen, someone much more suited to the niche that he was trying to fill has seen her’s rise. And that person is Kamala Harris.
Like Adams, Harris is a former prosecutor and African-American who can wrap a law and order message in an coating acceptable to white progressives. Like him, she treads a moderate path carefully, letting her background do the speaking on identity issues rather than addressing them directly. Like him, she learned pragmatism and deal-making on the lower rungs of city and state politics. It’s no coincidence they both cut their teeth in deep blue states in which intra-factional disputes in the Democratic Party were much more important than red-blue dividing lines.
But unlike Adams, Harris has what it takes to have a shot at the top - and maybe make it. She’s much more disciplined and focused, she doesn’t keep questionable associates, and she knows how not to put her foot in her mouth. As a woman rather than a brash man, she’s also much better equipped to speak to and mobilize women, a huge and growing part of the Democratic coalition.
Adams was in a sense right when he called people like him the future of the Democratic Party. Politicians with moderate positions but also life experiences and backgrounds which allow them to speak to a diverse coalition are exactly the party’s sweet spot, both in terms of balancing its internal dynamics and appealing to a wide coalition of outsiders. The only part where Adams was wrong was in thinking that he personally would be the one to carry this torch. Now, it looks like it’s going to be taken up by someone else.