Mayor Eric Adams raised just $36,100 for his re-election in the last two months, trailing all of his challengers and deepening doubts about whether he is running a serious campaign.
Adams’ campaign revealed its fundraising numbers between Jan. 12 and March 13 in a public filing Tuesday morning, making him the last of the 10 Democratic mayoral candidates to post a disclosure following a Monday deadline. The haul, which Adams raised from 38 donors, is a far cry from the $1.5 million taken in from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo or the $845,000 posted by Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
Adams’ latest donors include Jason Xia, a professional poker player; Barry Lipsitz, a real estate investor; and Wesley Jackson, president of the cultural group BRIC. But none of the bold-faced business figures that once populated the mayor’s filings is present.
The mayor has no visible campaign apparatus and has not appeared at forums with other candidates, citing advice from his lawyers that doing so could interfere with his legal case — which appears on the verge of being dismissed. Adams has insisted he is still running in the June 24 Democratic primary — but also did not deny a recent report that he might run instead as an independent.
“When I’m ready to roll out my official re-announcement and my plan, I will do so,” Adams said at a Monday press conference after being asked about an independent bid.
Adams now has $3 million cash on hand, more than most of his rivals — but that lead could soon vanish. Unlike the other leading mayoral candidates, he has been locked out of the city’s public matching funds program following a December decision by the city’s Campaign Finance Board, which cited prosecutors’ allegations that Adams had defrauded the program by soliciting bogus straw donations. That decision deprived the mayor of some $4 million he had expected to receive.
The latest spending by Adams’ campaign, also disclosed Tuesday, shows at least the traces of a typical campaign operation. He paid $27,000 to the marketing firm My Brnd, which is helping gather petitions to get Adams on the primary ballot; $27,500 to his compliance attorneys, Pitta LLP; and $20,000 to Brianna Suggs, his former fundraiser whose home was raided by federal agents at the outset of Adams’ legal woes, and who is continuing to work for him in an unspecified capacity.
Adams posted a record-low 20% approval rating in a Quinnipiac University poll released earlier this month. Given his dire political standing, the sitting mayor is seen increasingly as “not a factor,” according to a campaign strategy memo released Sunday by one of his rivals, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.
Mayor Adams faces mounting financial woes on top of his political struggles. A separate legal defense fund that he created to cover his attorneys’ costs was more than $700,000 in debt as of its latest filing, after the mayor paid upwards of $1 million to the two high-powered law firms representing him.
Former political and financial supporters of the mayor’s have largely abandoned him. Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party and a longtime Adams loyalist, endorsed ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday. And Cuomo received campaign donations in recent weeks from people who previously backed Mayor Adams — including real estate developer Jeffrey Gural and the former Trump White House official Anthony Scaramucci.
The mayor insisted Monday he was unbothered by the desertions.
“You don’t take any of this personal. Politics is not personal,” he said. “People are doing what they believe is the best equation for them.”
