The Lessons of Losers Past
Remembering De Blasio and Adams's Most Unpopular Traits
The Onion, like other Bush-era political satire institutions, has lost some of its fastball in the Trump era, as the political world becomes increasingly absurd and cartoonish. Still, every once in a while, they publish a joke that takes on a life of its own and becomes a recurring motif in all of my politics-adjacent social media feeds. Their most famous example is their mass shooting article “‘No Way to Prevent This’ says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” which they’ve published 38 times since its debut in 2014, and which has been the subject of so so many think pieces from non satirical news publications. But the one that appears in my feed of NYC politics nerd even more (in fairness my feed is probably not representative of much) is a picture of former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio, grinning and holding up his right hand as he gesticulates passionately. The caption reads “De Blasio: ‘Well Well Well, Not So Easy To Find A Mayor Who Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?” It was first published in June of 2021, the week Eric Adams won the primary election that effectively anointed him the next mayor. Mayor Adams has given the Onion and other commentators occasion to repost it many times since.
Adams and de Blasio both started their mayoralties riding high, with big popular mandates from decisive victories in their hotly contested elections. But neither could keep the positive vibes for long. While de Blasio coasted to re-election in 2017, by 2021 he was fiercely unpopular, with only a 37% approval rating, getting heartily booed at every public event he attended. Four years later, Adams has sunk even lower. He currently sports a 20% approval rating, while 56% of New Yorkers believe he should resign. And while he hasn’t gotten booed as much, that’s only because he knows better than to show his face to a crowd.
What brought these men down? Well, a bunch of things, but my unified theory of New Yorkers and their mayors is that we’re a city of winners, and we hate losers.
De Blasio began 2019, his fifth year as mayor and the second of his second term, in okay standing. In a December 2018 poll, 3% more New Yorkers approved of him than disapproved, 43%-40%. The reasons for the 40% disapproval were varied: criminal justice reform advocates had lost faith in de Blasio for not suspending the officer who killed Eric Garner, while cops despised him after the NYPD union leaders accused de Blasio of having “blood on his hands” for his “divisive anti-cop rhetoric” during that time. Some rich people hated him for his fiery “tale of two cities” class politics, and de Blasio seemed to relish this, for instance by publicly spurning the Met Gala, or by redistributing the premium snow removal service that his predecessor Michael Bloomberg lavished upon the Upper East Side. “The whole cocktail party circuit loathes Bill de Blasio, and he takes so much pleasure in that,” his former advisor Rebecca Katz told Vox around this time.
And everyone seemed to agree by this point that de Blasio was kind of cringe and unappealing, chronically late to everything, constantly squabbling with the press, or with his de facto boss Governor Andrew Cuomo, dropping lame slogans on Trump, napping in his City Hall office, and of course, commuting eleven miles every morning from Gracie Mansion to workout in the very lovely Prospect Park YMCA in Park Slope, which I, unlike literally every other New Yorker at the time, find completely sympathetic.
Nevertheless, he had real accomplishments from his first term, most notably the successful creation of the universal pre-K program. And his popularity was split dramatically across racial lines. While a majority of white New Yorkers disapproved of his performance, Black New Yorkers supported him at more than a 2-to-1 ratio.
All this changed in May of 2019 when de Blasio announced that he was running for president, something that more than three-quarters of the voters in his own city did not want him to do. He was the 23rd candidate to enter the race, and he faced two problems right out of the gate: national Democrats didn’t like him (he was the only candidate to enter the race with a net-negative approval rating), and crucially, no one believed he could win. Donors did not believe he could win, which resulted in a complete failure to fundraise in the “invisible primary” weeks before his announcement. His campaign staff did not believe he could win: he hired Mike Casca, former Bernie Sanders 2016 staffer and current chief of staff to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, to run comms for the de Blasio exploratory committee, and Casca quit two weeks before the campaign launch after telling the mayor that “he came to the conclusion that the mayor should not run for president.” His allies in the city government did not believe he could win, and when Politico asked thirty-five of them about his run, only two supported it. All the others happily went on the record to publicly call their boss’s ambitions “fucking insane,” and “idiotic.” His own wife did not believe he could win, admitting on a podcast that “the timing isn’t exactly right,” perhaps foreshadowing their icky, public separation. And most humiliatingly, his would-be opponent Donald Trump did not believe he could win, gleefully tweeting that “Bill de Blasio is the worst Mayor in the history of New York City – he won’t last long!”
Trump’s forecast proved accurate; de Blasio spent the summer repeatedly humiliating himself, consistently polling at zero (which meant that he was positioned at the very edge of the stage for the two televised debates qualified for, a pathetic visual), posting ludicrously cringy fake texts with his son to seem relatable to young voters, quoting Che Guevara to Cuban expats in Miami, campaigning in Iowa while the city suffered a major blackout, and just generally looking like a loser on a national stage. By September of 2019, de Blasio sported an approval rating of 33%, compared to a whopping 58% disapproval rating, among New York City voters. He never recovered for the rest of his second term.
His successor Eric Adams thus far has not run for president, but has found other ways to look like a loser, and New Yorkers have adjusted their opinion of him accordingly, as he sinks to levels of disapproval that neither de Blasio nor any other NYC mayor had faced in the past three decades. His specific variety of losing is probably fresher on your mind than de Blasio’s, so I won’t go into too much detail, but here’s a quick rundown:
Starting in 2023, people repeatedly told pollsters that they hated Adams’s savage, arbitrary budget cuts to popular government services like libraries and parks.
Towards the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, it became clear that pretty much everyone in Adams’s inner circle was under criminal investigation. First, the FBI raided his chief fundraiser Brianna Suggs’s home. Over the course of the next year, raids or arrests came for First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, her longtime boyfriend and NYC Education Chancellor David Banks, David’s younger brother, the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phillip Banks, Department of Buildings Commissioner Eric Ulrich, Chief Advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin, senior advisor Timothy Pearson, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, NYPD chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey, and eventually, for Mayor Eric Adams himself. The thing to remember is that these were all for DIFFERENT THINGS!!! Adams was indicted for receiving bribes from the Turkish government, Lewis-Martin was indicted for allegedly taking completely separate bribes, others were investigated for flagrant campaign finance violations, Maddrey for workplace sexual harassment. It is not that everyone in Adams’s circle worked together to commit a clever criminal conspiracy. They were just all doing lots of different crimes in parallel to one another. All of this further hurt his already standing with New Yorkers, or at least with the ones who respond to polls.
When indicted, rather than succumb to the intense pressure from the feds and from the public to resign, Adams stuck it out in office, hid from the public for months, and accused the Biden Administration of maliciously prosecuting him because he criticized their border policies.
Eventually, Adams cozied up to Trump, and successfully negotiated the dismissal of his charges. In exchange, Adams has appointed a Trump-friendly Guliani aide as Deputy Mayor, praised FBI director’s Kash Patel’s batshit insane book, helped ICE try to open up an office on Rikers Island, etc etc..
The thing about having a loser as mayor is that it’s contagious. The mayor represents the city, and if they are a loser, then on some level, so are we. So as we consider who their next mayor should be, I’d urge my fellow New Yorkers to think about each candidate, and imagine the loser-ish tendencies they might display if elected. Would this candidate, we should ask, surround himself with criminals? Would they let their office become a hotbed of corruption and sexual harassment? Would they face criminal charges personally, and give the Trump Administration permanent leverage over their governing decisions? Would they make arbitrary cuts to popular social services, and in particular, demonstrate scorn for libraries?
And in the interest of not letting de Blasio off the hook, we should also ask, would this candidate decide to pack up and head to Iowa halfway through his term as mayor to launch an embarrassing, delusional, ego-driven, no-shot run for President? Are they, two and a half years out from the 2028 Iowa Caucuses, currently leaking rumors to anyone who will print them that they are interested in such an endeavor?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, (recent, so excruciatingly recent) history tells us this candidate might end up looking like a loser if elected mayor, and with an approval rating in the 20s by their third year. Just something to keep in mind.
Bonus Content: Mayoral Candidates React To Jalen Brunson’s Game Winning Three:
