Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday boldly pledged to register one million new voters for the general election as part of his independent bid to overcome Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani — who won the primary in part by registering tens of thousands of new voters.
Adams said he can win his tough general re-election battle, after sitting out the Democratic primary, by essentially mimicking Mamdani’s turnout strategy, which helped the democratic socialist Assembly member beat the presumed primary frontrunner — former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The mayor charged that Cuomo lost the primary because he “underestimated the unregistered voter.”
“We’re going to register a million new voters,” Adams said during a Tuesday morning Fox Business interview. “We’re going to allow the 91% of New Yorkers to come out and voice what they want our city to look like. Only 9% voted in the primary, 91% have yet to communicate.”
The mayor appeared to be referring to the relatively small number of registered voters who cast ballots in a city of nearly 8.5 million people.
But registering one million new voters is quite a tall order given that only about that many — roughly 23% of the city’s registered voters — voted in the 2021 general election.
Over one million voters participated in this year’s mayoral Democratic primary, the most in any such contest since 1989. Furthermore, Mamdani defeated Cuomo by over 116,000 votes, far more than Adams’ razor-thin 7,000-vote win over former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia in 2021.
Adams faces steep reelection odds, weighed down by historically low approval ratings, minimal backing from fellow elected officials, ongoing corruption investigations, and a friendly rapport with President Trump — a liability in a city that overwhelmingly leans Democratic.
The mayor said he plans to turn out new voters by employing “direct to consumer communication.” Adams claimed that just as Mamdani was buoyed by the excitement surrounding his populist focus on making the city less expensive, there is an equally animated group of people ready to block the lawmaker from City Hall.
“They’re missing the excitement that’s being shown, those who are saying ‘We want our city not to be moving in the wrong direction,'” Adams said. “There’s some unbelievable energy out there. I’ve never witnessed it before in politics. It was almost an alarm clock went off on primary day and people said, ‘We must be involved in this pursuit of what’s happened in November.'”
Adams and Cuomo, who also holds an independent ballot line, are currently vying to push one another out of the race to have a better shot at defeating Mamdani. Republican Curtis Sliwa and Jim Walden, an attorney also running as an independent, are on the ballot as well.
Former Gov. David Paterson on Monday gathered with other civic and business leaders concerned about the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty to call on the other four general election candidates to line up behind one of them. Paterson proposed setting up a process led by those in the city’s political and business spheres to identify which candidate would be best equipped to defeat the Democratic nominee in November.
A Cuomo spokesperson said he embraced an idea floated by Jim Walden to conduct an independent poll in order to identify which candidates should step aside. But Adams’ has reportedly already shot down that proposal.
