City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams moved significantly closer to entering the 2025 NYC mayoral race by filing paperwork with the city Campaign Finance Board on Wednesday.
The speaker, during a Thursday afternoon news conference, said she has taken “some initial steps to advance a campaign if and when I decide to run.”
“I didn’t seek this; it wasn’t in my plans, but as more serious stakeholders in our city have indeed urged me to consider serving the city in this capacity, I’ve given it much more serious consideration,” the speaker said. “We have an urgency in this moment. The need for dignified, steady leadership that puts New Yorkers first and fights for our city is something that we need more than ever before.”
The “urgency” the speaker referred to includes a need to push back on Republican President Trump and restore stability to the chaos that has engulfed Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. She blasted the current mayor for not taking a strong enough stance against Trump’s moves to reshape the federal government and cut funding to localities like New York since he took office.
“I don’t hear that coming across from the voice of New York, from the leader of this city,” Speaker Adams said. “Somebody has to be the voice of the soul of the city.”
However, she is still thinking about whether to jump into the race and will make a final decision after her March 4 State of the City speech, a source confirmed to amNewYork Metro.
While she has not made a final decision, Speaker Adams said she is preparing for a run, given that petitioning to get on the ballot is already underway. The initial steps she is taking include assembling a campaign team, building an apparatus to gather petition signatures, and participating in endorsement meetings with stakeholder groups.
The speaker confirmed that, as amNewYork Metro has previously reported, state Attorney General Letitia James and leaders with the influential municipal union District Council 37 have urged her to run.
Sources said they want her to enter the contest because they see her as a credible challenger to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is expected to declare his own candidacy as soon as this weekend, and embattled Mayor Adams, who bears no relation to the speaker, is also expected to do so.
The speaker said she has been mulling a run for “quite a while.” She framed it as a response to the difficult working relationship that the council has had with Mayor Adams’ administration over the past couple of years.
“It’s been because of the work that this council has put forward, the hard work that we have wanted to work in collaboration with this administration that quite frankly…has been difficult,” the speaker said. “It’s been something in the back of my mind for quite a while. How to make things right. What does a relationship with the City Council look like with a true collaborative partner?”
If she enters the mayor’s race, Speaker Adams should have a war chest of about $211,000 on hand, based on a review of her campaign contributions and expenditures on the city Campaign Finance Board’s “Follow the Money” database.
The speaker’s move toward launching a campaign comes as Mayor Adams’s political future is in limbo. The mayor says he is running for reelection, but he has barely any campaign apparatus to speak of, and abruptly pulled out of attending a candidate’s forum hosted by District Council 37 — the city’s largest municipal workers union — on Wednesday.
The mayor is politically wounded after weeks of negative headlines stemming from President Trump’s Justice Department moving to drop his corruption case. He is facing growing calls to step aside or be forced out of office after a former Manhattan federal prosecutor alleged that his lawyer engaged in a quid pro quo with the DOJ — allegations Justice Department officials and Adams’ attorney have denied.
Speaker Adams is one of the many officials who have urged the mayor to resign over the past couple of weeks — calls he has resisted. She said Thursday that the “stakes are too high for us to have a diminished administration.”
