For Adams, independence is no guarantee

It’s no secret that in New York City the most important qualification for getting elected mayor is being a Democrat. It does not even require a candidate to be a good Democrat. Since the five boroughs merged in 1898, some of the worst mayors have been Democrats — Robert Van Wyck, Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Abraham Beame and Bill de Blasio. Both Walker and O’Dwyer resigned in disgrace and for a while it looked like Eric Adams would have to do the same, but he dodged a bullet and will at least finish out his term.

To be fair, John Lindsay won as a Republican, but he was so bad even the Republicans abandoned him when he ran for reelection. When it became apparent that the Democrats were going to do the same thing to Adams, he decided he was going to abandon them first and take his chances running as an Independent. History, however, is not on his side.

Independent candidates are usually supported by an amalgamation of fringe political parties and disgruntled voters on what is called a fusion ticket. For a fusion candidate to win, the incumbent mayor has to be extremely unpopular. In 1897, Seth Low ran as a Republican and lost to Democrat Van Wyck to become the first mayor of the Greater City of New York. 

At the time, mayors were restricted to a single four-year term. A lot of voters would probably like that today. Van Wyck was so bad that the city charter was changed to limit the mayoral term to just two years and give the public an opportunity to replace a bad mayor sooner rather than later. Seth Low won the mayoralty as a fusion candidate and served from 1902 and 1903. But two years to accomplish the reforms he promised was not enough. The Democrats defeated him next time around and then changed the city charter back to four-year mayoral terms. It also allowed incumbents to remain in office for as long as they were reelected. 

Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Wagner both served three terms under that provision. The city charter was changed a third time, restricting the winner to two terms, but Michael Bloomberg, running as an independent, got around that. It turned out bad for him. His third term tainted any chance he had for higher office.

Adams’ main problem is that his first term has been nothing to brag about. He has made some inroads in the fight against crime, but little else. His favorability record is very low and several of his appointed officials have tarnished his administration, so he can’t campaign as an independent on the incompetence of the previous mayor in the way that both Low and Vincent Impellitteri, who won a special election in 1950 without Democrat support after O’Dwyer resigned in disgrace, did.

Adams will have to come up with another formula if he is to defeat the current presumptive Democratic Party nominee, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ironically, also resigned from office in disgrace. Fortunately for Cuomo, New Yorkers have short memories when it comes to electing their mayors, otherwise they would not keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

Lastly, Adams is unlikely to siphon enough Democratic voters away from Cuomo to make a difference. Even ranked-choice voting will not help him, because if he’s not a voter’s first choice, the question becomes, what has he done to deserve to be a voter’s second choice to win reelection? One thing is for certain, blaming Cuomo for taking votes away from him is not the best way to ingratiate himself to the voters.