Mayor Eric Adams got his best case scenario on Wednesday, when Judge Dale E. Ho dismissed his federal corruption indictment.
In the stroke of a pen, the prospect of a trial-turned-media circus had been eliminated, along with the prospect of prison time. And because the indictment was dismissed with prejudice, prosecutors can no longer revisit the charges after the November mayoral election.
But that does not mean Mr. Adams’s path to winning a second term this year will be any easier.
In the roughly six months since a grand jury indicted him, Mr. Adams has seen his fund-raising crater and a platoon of contenders join the Democratic primary, including several who are well-positioned to win the support of Black voters outside Manhattan who make up Mr. Adams’s base.
Despite the headwinds and the absence of a discernible campaign infrastructure, Mr. Adams insists that he is still running for a second term. He has also left open the door to running as an independent, possibly forgoing a bruising Democratic primary battle in June and enabling him to build up and conserve his campaign funds for the general election.
And even though his case has been dismissed, how it played out did him no favors with voters. Mr. Adams has had to watch as the Trump administration’s effort to quash his case devolved into a sordid soap opera, with respected federal prosecutors in Manhattan forfeiting their jobs rather than carry out orders that they considered corrupt.
Mr. Adams, the outgoing interim U.S. attorney argued, had effectively offered to exchange his freedom from prosecution for his help administering the president’s deportation agenda.
Although the mayor routinely denies this, the judge overseeing the case, Judge Ho, wrote in his ruling: “Everything here smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
Mr. Adams has also had to witness his case mushroom into a national symbol of President Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department, with several officials at the agency in Washington also choosing to resign rather than move to dismiss his charges.
The spectacle of it all has perhaps irreparably damaged Mr. Adams’s standing with New Yorkers, most of whom are not particularly fond of Mr. Trump.
“You can’t un-ring the bell,” said Basil Smikle, the former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party. “Any concerns that voters had about Eric Adams being able to serve the city with the investigation continuing and a potential trial only get amplified by their dismissal.”
Mr. Adams has steadily lost the confidence of New York City’s voters. In December 2023, well before he was indicted, only 28 percent of them approved of his job performance. At the time, it was the lowest approval rating for any New York City mayor in the nearly 30 years that Quinnipiac University has polled New York City voters.
After Mr. Adams’s indictment in September, he fell below his own polling nadir: Only 20 percent of New York City voters approved of his job performance, according to a poll Quinnipiac released last month.
“Eric Adams is politically toast,” said David Schwartz, who worked as the Jewish community outreach coordinator for Andrew Yang, a 2021 mayoral candidate. He added that the dismissal of charges “doesn’t matter” at this point.
If Mr. Adams stays in the Democratic primary, the city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference, may benefit him.
If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked that eliminated candidate first, now give their votes to the candidate they ranked second. The process repeats itself until there are only two candidates left. The candidate with the most votes then wins.
“The mayor could go across the city and say: ‘Look, I know you may be looking at someone else. Vote me No. 2,’” Mr. Smikle said. “If he can rake up enough No. 2s, it actually may be helpful to him.”
He could be, Mr. Smikle continued, “the common backup” for candidates as varied as the former comptroller Scott Stringer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, or State Senator Zellnor Myrie.
And much as voters may be willing to overlook the sexual harassment allegations that prompted Mr. Cuomo to resign from the governorship in 2021, some may also be willing to overlook Mr. Adams’s scandal-ridden tenure. They may be susceptible to the candidates’ shared argument, one also voiced by Mr. Trump, that they were victims of a politicized justice system.
“There are a lot of voters that have a real distrust in the criminal justice system,” Mr. Smikle said. “That explains partly some of Trump’s support among Black and brown voters.”
And Mr. Adams may be able to frame Judge Ho’s dismissal as evidence that the charges were weak, a contention that some voters may already believe.
“I don’t think the political winds necessarily favor Eric Adams, but he’s not dead politically,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University.
“He is wounded, he is definitely behind the eight ball, he is in a less-than-ideal position as an incumbent. But in a ranked-choice, low-voting, low-information election” nearly three months from now, she continued, “I would not discount him completely.”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times. More about Dana Rubinstein
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