The case for Adrienne Adams’s bid to become mayor of New York City began in the parking lot of a suburban hospital where she last saw her father alive.
More than five years ago, in March 2020, Ms. Adams and her sister drove their father, who was infected with Covid-19, to Long Island Jewish Medical Center as the pandemic grew. He had been turned away at the overcrowded and understaffed Elmhurst Hospital, which was closer to his home.
With restrictions in place that prevented visitors, Ms. Adams, then a city councilwoman, gave her father a hug before he was wheeled into the hospital on Long Island. He succumbed to the disease eight weeks later.
On Thursday, the fifth anniversary of her father’s death, Ms. Adams will deliver a campaign speech at Elmhurst Hospital that will draw a line between her family’s tragedy and what she will describe as mismanagement by the state’s governor at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo, now the leading candidate in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Ms. Adams will say in the speech that her father, an Air Force veteran, “served his government with pride. But when he needed his government to serve him, it failed him. And it didn’t fail him by accident. It failed him by design.”
Ms. Adams, now the City Council speaker, was a last-minute entrant to New York’s Democratic mayoral primary after urging from influential supporters that included the state attorney general, Letitia James, who has since endorsed her.
Allies describe her as a common-sense, “no-drama” candidate who can compete with Mr. Cuomo for the critical base of Black voters that may be abandoning Mayor Eric Adams, who plans to run in the November general election as an independent.
Since starting her campaign in March, Ms. Adams, who is not related to the mayor, has struggled to build name recognition and raise funds, despite her City Council perch and deep ties to some of the city’s other influential Black leaders.
But Ms. Adams seems to be on the rise. Though she was polling in the single digits in early polls, she placed third in a poll released last week by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. She received the support of 11 percent of likely Democratic voters, behind Mr. Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Queens assemblyman.
On Wednesday, her campaign announced that she had surpassed the minimum threshold to qualify for public matching funds, an eight-to-one match for many of the contributions received so far and a major lifeline in the final weeks of the campaign. Her fund-raising efforts were unexpectedly aided by Mr. Mamdani, who had appealed to his supporters to donate to Ms. Adams.
Mr. Mamdani has characterized his gesture as part of a unified effort by Mr. Cuomo’s rivals to keep him from being elected mayor, a strategy that depends, in part, on Ms. Adams’s ability to siphon Black primary voters away from him.
Under New York’s ranked-choice voting system, voters will be able to select up to five of their preferred candidates. A large number of Black voters have signaled support for Mr. Cuomo.
Ms. Adams intends to do so by attacking Mr. Cuomo’s record on delivering for Black New Yorkers. She said in the early days of the pandemic, she and her Council colleagues had trouble getting masks and other personal protective equipment to constituents, even though she asserted that communities outside the city encountered less difficulty.
She is among several mayoral candidates who have suggested that the deaths of more than 15,000 people in New York nursing homes and subsequent delays in allocating resources to hospitals fighting the virus was proof of Mr. Cuomo’s management failures. In April 2020, the city’s health department reported that Black New Yorkers were dying of Covid at twice the rate of white New Yorkers.
“There really is a stark difference in what some people remember as being the man who delivered the news every day on TV and gave statistics with regard to Covid and Covid deaths, and things surrounding the pandemic itself,” she said in an interview.
“We can contrast that with the leader — the person who was governor — who seemingly slow-walked P.P.E. and hand sanitizer and vaccines into Black and brown communities who needed him to stand up and help at the most difficult, darkest time in this history of our city.”
Esther Jensen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign, rejected Ms. Adams’s characterization of how Mr. Cuomo managed the pandemic.
“We have more respect for New Yorkers than Speaker Adams does,” Ms. Jensen said. “We know they aren’t stupid and won’t be fooled by politicians attempting to rewrite history in a transparent and disparate bid for attention.”
The Cuomo campaign also provided a response from Bishop Orlando Findlayter, pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship in Brooklyn, who has endorsed Mr. Cuomo.
“Governor Cuomo stood with the Black community during our most difficult days, in ways few elected officials ever have,” he said. “It is deeply troubling when any leader chooses to mislead our community for political gain.”
Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic is sure to be a contested issue in the five weeks until Primary Day. Voters often fondly recall his televised daily news conferences about the virus’s spread, and his campaign’s first television ad sought to reinforce that image.
“It was the greatest health crisis in our history,” the ad’s narrator says. “And when New Yorkers were desperate for leadership, Andrew Cuomo delivered.”
A day after the ad was released, The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Cuomo lied to Congress about his handling of the pandemic. A spokesman for the governor accused the Justice Department of abusing its power.
Ms. Adams’s criticisms of Mr. Cuomo are not limited to the pandemic. Speaking on Monday at a virtual town hall for the Working Families Party, which endorsed Ms. Adams as part of a slate of candidates designed to defeat Mr. Cuomo, she called the former governor a “coward” for refusing to attend mayoral forums where all the candidates were on the stage at the same time to answer questions about his record.
“We’ve got scandal running out of the front door of City Hall and we’ve got scandal wanting to run into the back door of City Hall,” Ms. Adams said. “Andrew Cuomo is hiding.”
Her campaign hopes that Ms. Adams can use these attacks to turn voters against Mr. Cuomo, and bring them to her side once they become more familiar with her personal story.
She grew up in a middle-class, union household and pursued careers as a flight attendant and corporate trainer. She began serving on local community boards in Queens, and eventually ran for public office. By 2022, she overcame steep odds to become the first Black person to lead the Council.
Much of that back story was detailed in a three-minute campaign ad released last week that highlighted Ms. Adams’s roots and her family. She is shown at a family gathering in her backyard with her children, grandchildren and husband. In another scene, she is singing “To God be the Glory” in church.
But with less than a month until early voting begins in the primary, her pitch might not be enough to overcome Mr. Cuomo’s stature and fund-raising edge. History is also not on her side: She is the fifth council speaker to run for mayor, and one has yet to succeed.
Adding to Ms. Adams’s challenges is the task of balancing her City Hall responsibilities with the demands of running a catch-up mayoral campaign. In recent weeks, shed has held few public campaign events as she focused on raising money. But she has kept a largely full public schedule as Council speaker, working to push through the municipal budget while hosting and attending city events.
Her work has made her a powerful figure in City Hall, even if it carries no assurance that it will deliver her the mayoralty.
“Being speaker is almost the greatest job you could have, second only to mayor,” said Christine Quinn, a former Council speaker who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2013. “As my father once said in The New York Times, if you run half the place, why couldn’t you run all of it?”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.
Maya King is a Times reporter covering New York politics.
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
The post Adrienne Adams, Invoking Father’s Death, Says Cuomo Mismanaged Pandemic appeared first on New York Times.
