Adrienne Adams Did Not Fall Out Of A Coconut Tree
Adrienne Adams Brings Back the Vibes of 2024, and the Rhetoric of 2020
“I enjoyed the speech,” New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told reporter Ben Max on his podcast Max Politics Tuesday, about City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’s “State of the City” address. “It sounded like someone who can run the city.” Williams then clarified that he has already endorsed Brad Lander, but that his “main focus is the DREAM. Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor. Gotta make the DREAM happen, and I think she can be a part of that.”
Whether he’s aware or not, Jumaane is echoing my (not particularly original) analysis from last week’s blog, which is that Adrienne Adams is basically the only one who can stop Cuomo. The math is simple. To a crude first approximation, the primary-voting Democrats of the city are divided into two coalitions of roughly equal sizes: the highly educated elites of Manhattan and Brownstown Brooklyn, and the outer-borough blocs of Black homeowners and ethnic enclaves. In 2021, the former eventually broke for Kathryn Garcia, after some ranked choice vote redirects from Maya Wiley and Andrew Yang. The latter stood resolutely behind Eric Adams, and their superior organization and turnout allowed him to eke out a 7000-vote (.8%) victory. Before Cuomo’s entrance, a progressive candidate like Brad Lander could have plausibly won by reassembling the Garcia coalition, putting in a tiny bit more juice into turnout, and taking advantage of gentrification and outmigration that may have slightly shrunk the relative population of the outer-borough blocs since 2021.
As of last week, this path was gone. Unless a certain punchy, horrifyingly-formatted slide deck managed to get some serious traction in the group chats, Cuomo seemed poised to pick up a significant chunk of first or second place votes from the educated liberal elites of the Garcia coalition. And Cuomo could expect to run up gaudy numbers with the outer-borough blocs, historically his loyal base. For Jumaane’s DREAM to be realized, and for Lander or another progressive to come through, someone would have to wrest some of these blocs from Cuomo’s grip. But with Eric Adams imploding, and the only other outer-borough candidate in the race, Zellnor Myrie, struggling to both gain name-recognition (“A lot of people are like who?”) and to get away from his reputation as a progressive firebrand rather than a machine loyalist, there seemed to be no one in the race who could either compete for these votes, or credibly attack Cuomo’s many vulnerabilities from within his base.
Enter Adrienne Adams, the emergency, Kamala Harris-style savior, called in by the party elites at the last second to swoop in and stop the bad man from coasting to victory unimpeded. Speaker Adams enters the race with the blessing of her mentor, Cuomo foe, Brooklyn native, and sitting New York State Attorney General Leticia James. A product of the Queens Democratic Party machine, she has close ties to the borough’s US Representative Greg Meeks, DA Melinda Katz, and Borough President Donovan Richards. She hails from the predominantly black neighborhood of Southeastern Queens, and her city council district, which encompasses South Jamaica, Ozone Park, and Rochdale, broke for Eric Adams by more than fifty points in 2021. A former corporate executive trainer, daughter of a corrections officer, and former community liaison to the state’s Jamaica Downtown Revitalization Initiative, Adrienne Adams has run as a pro-business moderate (as you have to do in the Queens Machine) in all of her city council races.
And yet her current opposition to the Mayor, her Bayside High School classmate, did not fall out of a coconut tree. Three years ago, the newly elected Mayor Adams pushed hard for his close ally, Queens councilmember Francisco Moya, to be the City Council’s next speaker. But Moya was not well-liked among his colleagues in the council, and the intensity of Eric Adams’s advocacy, in a race that the Mayor’s office is nominally supposed to stay out of, backfired. Eager to curtail his overreach, progressive Speaker candidates Justin Brannan, Carlina Rivera, Diana Ayala, Gale Brewer, and Keith Powers all agreed to step aside and endorse a compromise candidate, if they could find one. Someone who could win support with Adams’s outer-borough base, but also remain palatable to progressives, and who would be willing to stand up to the Mayor from time to time. And preferably someone from Queens, who could appease some of Moya’s local supporters, and wrest away the coveted Greg Meeks endorsement. In quick succession, all five progressive speaker candidates dropped out and endorsed the only returning councilmember who fit the bill: Adrienne Adams. Her ability to balance her allegiance to her outer-borough base, with her outreach to the more progressive members of the city council, remaining palatable among both the Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia coalitions, is why she became Speaker, and why she represents a credible threat to Cuomo today.
Attempts to strike that balance were on full display during the State of the City speech that Jumaane praised. Here are three themes that she kept returning to during this fiery, hour-long valedictory address, themes which to my eye are aimed less at the outer-borough machine types and more at the liberal educated elite parents of Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, the ones who with any luck might be reading this right now.
Our Diversity is Our Strength, and That Strength Will Prevail Over Trump
“The Administration’s attempted erasure of LGBTQIA+ communities, Black, Latino, and Indigenous histories, of the very people who built this country, is meant to sever the bonds between us,” she said ruefully, in an opening section about the threat of the Trump Administration. “In his quest for power, Trump is willing to burn everything in his way. But a house built on ashes will fall. We’ve been through the fire before. We’ll make it through again by defending our city and fighting for each other.” She echoed this sentiment later on, assuring the council that “Our African, Asian, Caribbean, European, Latino, and Middle Eastern communities are woven into the fabric of our neighborhoods. Trust that we will protect them.” And in the closing section, she connected it back to her own experience. “Three years ago, I became the first Black Speaker, mother, and grandmother to lead the New York City Council. I was proud to break open that door and lead the first women-majority, and most diverse Council that our city had ever seen. It meant that for the first time, our city’s lawmaking body reflected the rich diversity of our communities, making decisions from the perspectives of women who sit at the intersection of our city’s greatest challenges.” The strength in the diversity of the council, she argued, was a metaphor for the strength in the diversity of the city as a whole.
Incremental Solutions and Expansions of Worthy Programs
“We have focused on fixing the inefficiencies in our city’s services, like the barriers that keep New Yorkers from accessing CityFHEPS housing vouchers,” Adams proclaimed. A few minutes later, in a similar vein, she bragged that she “was proud to establish and fund CUNY Reconnect, a program that helps working-age New Yorkers return to college, graduate, and advance their potential… Its overwhelming success demands that we make the program permanent by baselining it in the budget.” And she pointed to new areas of incremental reform, such as protection of library funding, support for Gale Brewer’s proposal to make school playgrounds public on weekends, and legislation to “require payment of awarded funds to nonprofits earlier in the process.” The last item received a standing ovation from the crowd at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which was likely full of employees of nonprofits with city contracts. In a race where one candidate wants to build a million new homes and create universal after-school programming, and another wants to make all the buses free, Speaker Adams’s achievements and aims may seem relatively modest, but she has a record of championing social service development and expansion, something that liberals love.
Fighting Systems of Oppression
“Imagine a young woman of color who is barely making enough to survive in New York City,” Speaker Adams implored the audience during her section on the city’s maternal mortality services. “The compounding stressors from the inequities of poverty, racism, and sexism are already working against her every single day… and the disparities in maternal mortality are a product of medical and structural racism that make access to adequate health care and stability out of reach.” From about 2019 to 2021, issues like this one were at the forefront of the political discourse, and politicians from all parts of the Democratic Party spoke about them using language like this. They don’t seem to be anymore, but if there’s any group of Democrat voters that are nostalgic for those politics, it’s the professors, schoolteachers, and librarians of Park Slope and the Upper West Side, who would have put up the “In This House We Believe” signs in their front lawns if their apartments had front lawns. In another section, Speaker Adams embraced the 2020-era push to “Support Black-owned Businesses”: “There are around 20,000 Black-and Latino-owned businesses across the five boroughs, but too few ever grow into medium-sized or large-scale businesses. With a little help from the city, we can change that. I’m announcing a plan to create the NYC Minority Business Accelerator, to provide strong, individualized business strategy and improve access to capital.”
For now, Adrienne Adams must tread lightly, and there are already signs that she may have pivoted too hard. “Speaker Adams Pushes Lefty Agenda in Muted Address,” cracked the New York Post on Wednesday, perhaps auguring a more adversarial relationship than she would like at this stage. The Post has real sway in the outer-boroughs, and campaigned hard for Eric Adams in 2021 and throughout the first few years of his term. So far, they have savaged Cuomo, and openly begged brand-new NYPD police chief Jessica Tisch to run, and save the city from “a cadre of far-leftists hell-bent on making the city’s problems worse, led by city Comptroller Brad Lander, an avowed socialist,” and “Andrew Cuomo — who has some claim to being a moderate but in his final years as governor let the left wreak havoc” (oops).
Tisch isn’t running, and if those are truly the only two options, the Post will grit their teeth and get behind Cuomo, who will sprint as far to the center or right as he needs to in order to win their support. Speaker Adams needs to make herself seem like a viable alternative for the outer-borough blocs, if not for the Post, and she needs to do it quickly. Every day Cuomo stays ahead by 20 points in polls, another local official or union leader will succumb to the pressure and get on board. She needs some polls to drop that show her in double digits, enough to credibly compete for some of these endorsements. And eventually, to open the door for herself, or for one of the cadre of far-leftists hellbend on making the city’s problems worse, she needs to attack Cuomo in a way that damages him not just in Southeastern Queens, but in the Bronx, and in Brownsville, Bensonhurst, and other parts of Carribean Brooklyn, so much so that some of those voters don’t rank him at all.
Nevertheless, it must feel nice, as a liberal elite parent in Manhattan or brownstone Brooklyn, to know that Speaker Adrienne Adams wants your vote too. If you want a moderate coalition-builder with experience implementing incremental reform, who will stand up energetically to Trump, and who will echo the politics of a more comfortable age when people seemed to care about diversity and social justice, you could do a lot worse. At least tell a pollster you’re thinking about it.
Correction: In the paragraph describing Adrienne Adams’s path to the Speakership, I mistakenly listed Carly Fiorina as one of the progressive City Council members who dropped out of the race and endorsed Adams. Carly Fiorina is a white Republican from Austin, Texas, who ran unsuccessfully for President in 2016 after a career as a CEO. I meant to list Carlina Rivera, the Lower East Side native of Puerto Rican descent, who currently represents City Council District 2. I regret the error, especially because I lived in that district for two years and saw Carlina speak live multiple times.