On Wednesday the judge, Dale Ho, gave Adams what he wanted, a dismissal of the charges.
That was also what the Trump administration wanted, though it preferred that the charges be dismissed with the right to bring them back, which the judge refused. That — and Adams’s apparent chumminess with the president — made some Democrats wonder exactly what a Democrat is in 2025, as their party searches for identity and traction.
Some decided that Adams no longer held out the possibilities they imagined in 2021. The estrangement was mutual. “People often say, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat — you seem to have left the party,’” the mayor said during an interview with the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in January. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”
Will Adams’s core supporters follow him? Ester Fuchs, a political science professor at Columbia University and a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said they were more likely to vote for Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, who announced her candidacy last month, than for Andrew Cuomo.
“I don’t believe there’s anybody left in Eric Adams’s coalition,” she told me after saying that “Eric Adams is toxic right now.” She also said that it would be almost impossible for Adams to win as an independent candidate. “Adams is finished with electoral politics in New York,” she said.
The alliances have been shifting. Last month Adams lost one of his strongest supporters when Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the chairwoman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, endorsed Cuomo. Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs of Manhattan, who had been an Adams ally, is also backing Cuomo, as is Ruben Diaz Jr., the former Bronx borough president.