In 2022, New York City’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams wanted to talk about crime. To anyone who would listen, he repeated again and again that crime in the city was rampant, unchecked, out of control. “I have never in my professional career—I have never witnessed crime at this level,” he said last year, echoing his campaign trail refrain that crime had reverted to 1990s levels. “We”—he said on the stump, implying the Democrat-controlled local government, “are waving a big white flag of surrender.”
That rhetoric may have helped Adams win a crowded, low-turnout Democratic mayoral primary in 2021, but there were problems. For one thing, his hyperbole was plainly counterfactual. As the writer Ross Barkan pointed out in New York magazine, crime was up slightly over 2019 levels, sure, but homicides were down 75 percent since the early ’90s. Adams, his mind made up that “crime” was politically expedient for him, continued braying about it through the 2022 midterm election cycle. Who it was actually expedient for was New York Republicans, who were borderline giddy about the mayor’s gambit. Borrowing from his unequivocally false pronouncements about crime being rampant and uncontained, they campaigned hard on that same talking point and crushed New York congressional Democrats in November’s election, putting up the GOP’s best statewide overperformance in the country. Eric Adams drew up the blueprint for Republicans, and they followed it to a tiny but meaningful House majority.
Since then, Adams has been undone, in part, by his own tactic. The problem with creating the impression of a nonexistent problem is that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, and Adams’ favorability, for that and a whole host of other reasons, has plummeted.
No longer as eager to talk about crime, he has settled on a new boogeyman as the 2024 election cycle heats up: the migrant crisis. “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City,” he said of the famed city of immigrants in public comments made last week. “They’re destroying us … the city we knew, we’re about to lose.”
The comments were headline-grabbing for how blunt they were—and for the fact that that sentiment was coming from an elected Democrat—but Adams has in fact been preaching this exact message to anyone who would listen since at least April.
For years, Republicans have been desperately trying to sell the American public on a migrant crisis. In 2018, they spent the last days before the November midterms prophesying an incoming migrant wave, and expected it to save their House majority (it profoundly did not). Since 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have gone to extreme lengths to bus migrants from their home states to the bluer locales of New York, Los Angeles, and Massachusetts, hoping that those kind of stunts—which may yet yield criminal charges—would make the issue a permanent fixture in the news.
Abbott’s office, in particular, has boasted that his state has bused more than 13,000 migrants to New York City in a little over a year. And yet, that got less press than Adams’ theatrics, which have, in the words of the New York Times, given the GOP the “border crisis it wanted.”
There are, in fact, a large number of migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past 12 months, more than 110,000 in total, according to the New York Times. Some have family ties to the city, while others are seeking asylum in a city with a reputation for welcoming immigrants, a legacy Adams has been eager to disavow. Many of these migrants are coming from places facing economic collapse, like Venezuela, as well as parts of western Africa; others have fled the war in Ukraine. They are indeed a strain on some of the city’s resources and finances, especially as they wait to have their cases processed.
This is all to say: How best to address the migration issue is an important consideration. But Adams is not only bungling the response, he’s actively choosing to politicize it in a way that helps Republicans. He chose to give a no-bid $432 million contract to house and provide medical treatment for migrants to a company called DocGo that has zero experience furnishing those sorts of services. The company was already under investigation by the state attorney general’s office when he handed over the contract. In a stunt straight out of late-night television, he circulated fliers at the Mexican border saying New York is too expensive, hoping to discourage migrants from coming. The urgency of his rhetoric is nowhere in his actual actions.
And Republican groups of all makes and models are delighted with that. Speaker Kevin McCarthy quoted Adams in public remarks and praised him openly. Far-right New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino celebrated the mayor’s comments so heartily she nearly accused him of plagiarism, saying she “met privately with Mayor Adams shortly before” the event where he said migrants would destroy the city and that she had “communicated these exact sentiments to him in no uncertain terms.” The Daily Stormer, the prominent neo-Nazi blog, praised the mayor’s remarks as “based” and “insightful.”
The White House, in turn, has been eager to distance itself from the exceptionally unpopular mayor, cutting him out of a presidential advisory team in May after announcing that he would be consulting for the president just two months earlier.
But that’s a relatively recent development, and for the majority of Adams’ term, Democratic leadership has championed him and worked to incorporate him in a leadership role in the national party. In May 2022, while Adams was pushing Republican-style talking points on crime to the press, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then–Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney invited Adams to be a featured speaker at the DCCC’s Chairman’s Issues Conference and Weekend, according to reporting in Politico.
There, Adams directed an audience of 200 top Democrats to work on their storytelling chops. Incredibly, the meeting was “very much about helping the Democrats get control of their messaging challenges,” someone in attendance relayed to Politico. Of course, as election day got closer, it became clear that many of those messaging challenges were in fact being created by Adams himself. In a twist of incredible irony, Maloney, who ran not just that event but the whole DCCC, went on to lose his own reelection in a district Biden won by double digits, to a Republican opponent who went after him using the exact same tactic of fearmongering on crime that Adams had made commonplace in New York.
It turns out that it’s never really possible to beat Republicans on their own talking points. But it is possible to get more money from Republican donors with Republican talking points.
As the publication The City reported, Adams enjoyed major financial support, in the form of donations to super PACs supporting his candidacy, from hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, a top Ron DeSantis and Republican megadonor, and Daniel Loeb, a fellow billionaire financier and top Republican benefactor. Adams, of course, was a registered Republican himself from 1995 through 2002.
Finally, Adams has even more self-serving motivations for playing up the migrant crisis, beyond simply hurting his fellow (or not-so-fellow) Democrats. In the same breath as his migrants-are-destroying-New-York speech, the mayor announced a stunning citywide budget cut, blaming the decision on the migrants. To call that framing dishonest barely does it justice. Adams, perhaps owing to his Republican roots, has been clamoring to enact deep, devastating budget cuts since he arrived in office, despite the fact that the Independent Budget Office identified a massive budget surplus in 2023 and forecast another surplus in 2024. Adams has warred with the City Council over his plans to slash everything from preschool to library funding. His latest announcement of profound cuts is being justified by his office’s eyebrow-raising projection that migrant services will cost $12 billion over three years; to that estimate, he is seeking 5 percent cuts from every city agency now, in January, and again in April. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute, these cuts would far exceed the costs his office has predicted needing across three years to address the migrant crisis. Some of these are the same cuts Adams has been pursuing since before the “migrant crisis” became his top concern.
Meanwhile, national Democrats who invited the wolf into the henhouse can only hope that Adams has not yet again created a winning blueprint for Republicans to overperform in this coming election cycle. In New York, in particular, where the party has designs on five separate House seats and has already pledged tens of millions of dollars, the entire House majority hangs in the balance.
Adams, who will certainly face some sort of primary challenge, will remain immovable until least 2025 when his first term runs up. The electoral advantage for Democrats of having him out of office is inarguable, though it’s unlikely any of their money will be put behind his eventual primary opponent. For a mayor who has accomplished little, kneecapping Democrats in two critical election cycles may well prove to be his legacy.
