Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa are both familiar figures to New York City television viewers. Adams is now on the brink of becoming mayor of the nation’s largest city and financial capital.
Adams is the Democratic nominee for Tuesday’s mayoral election in a city that overwhelmingly favors his party. The Brooklyn borough president and former state senator first rose to prominence during his more than 20 years as a city police officer. Before retiring as a captain in 2006, Adams frequently appeared on New York City television shows to critique policing policies and other public issues.
Sliwa, the Republican mayoral nominee, had a public persona years before. Sliwa is the founder and CEO of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit organization for unarmed crime prevention. Sliwa and the group first rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s when crime was rampant in New York, providing a volunteer protection force of sorts at a time police were often deemed ineffectual.
Adams holds a wide lead over Sliwa, who, in addition to having founded the Guardian Angels subway patrol group, is a former conservative radio host.
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A recent poll by PIX11, NewsNation, and Emerson College found Adams leading Sliwa 61% to 25% among likely voters, with 14% undecided. When undecided voters were asked who they are more likely to support, 70% said Adams, and 30% chose Sliwa.
Camille Mumford with the Emerson College polling team told PIX11 that Adams will likely be the next mayor of New York City.
“At this point, this late in the election, there’s a very slim chance Curtis could pull this off,” Mumford said. “We can say with about 95% confidence, with the poll outside the margin of error, Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York.”
The poll found that voters’ top concern is crime, at 34%. Voters also said homelessness (19%), jobs (11%), Covid-19 (8%), healthcare (8%), the environment (5%), schools (4%), and transportation (4%). A majority of Sliwa supporters, 58%, said crime, while nearly equal shares of Adams voters said crime (24%) and homelessness (23%).
With such a wide lead, Adams has largely treated the race as a foregone conclusion since emerging from the Democratic primary, already fundraising for his transition to the mayor’s office. But the race has included a number of personal attacks on both sides: Adams has called Sliwa racist, described him as a “Mini-Me of Donald Trump,” and said his campaign consists of “buffoonery.” Sliwa has called Adams an elitist and compared him to Bill de Blasio, calling him “Bill de Blasio 2.0,” the city’s outgoing and unpopular mayor. De Blasio did not fare well in the same Emerson College poll: 57% of voters said the city is headed in the wrong direction, while 61% said they disapprove of de Blasio’s job performance.
Adams has long eyed the mayor’s office and told voters at a recent forum that his life is an example of “the American dream.”
“When I think about overcoming poverty, overcoming injustices, becoming a police officer, a state senator and now I’m Brooklyn borough president, I know and you know that far too many people leave the nightmarish realities of somewhere else to come here to experience that American dream,” he said.
Sliwa has sought to draw comparisons between Adams and de Blasio, who he said has taken a “Miley Cyrus wrecking ball to a city we love.”
The candidates’ personal lives have become campaign fodder as well, from Adams’s vegan diet to Sliwa’s 16 cats.
But despite the long odds for his candidacy, Sliwa seemed undeterred in an interview with Bloomberg this week, where he said his anti-crime message has appealed to independents and that he has made an effort to reach out to groups that don’t often hear from Republican candidates in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 7-to-1.
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“My secret has been, as a Republican and Independent candidate, to go into neighborhoods where the only Republican they’ve ever seen is Abraham Lincoln on a five-dollar bill,” Sliwa said. “These are areas predominantly Democrat but where I’ve been received well.”
