Adams exits race head held high and primed to call out ‘insidious’ extremist Mamdani

Mayor Eric Adams did the right thing, and a very hard thing, in dropping his re-election bid Sunday; we expect he’ll devote his final months in office to some crucial final services to the public as New York City’s chief executive.

With competing in November off the table, he’s liberated to do what he’s always done best: Stand up as the voice of principled, moderate Democrats — a true progressive who can call out the destructive extremism of the frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani.

Adams will go down in history as a far better mayor than his recent poll ratings suggest: He took over with the city still in lockdown, and led us out of COVID and back into economic growth — then got hit with a migrant crisis made in Washington.

Made by a national administration that saw him as uppity for calling out the madness, and moved to destroy him because of it.

Yes, he left himself vulnerable to that lawfare, with unwise choices of top staff and advisers; it took him years too long to build the strong team he should’ve had on Day One.

Yet he still managed vital changes — new housing policies that will pay off for a generation or more; a crucial reorientation of city reading instruction toward proven methods; a necessary shift to confronting serious mental illness rather than enabling it; restoring the NYPD’s emphasis on neighborhood safety first.

Last month saw the fewest city shootings since modern records began in 1993, continuing a months-long trend with six of the seven major felony categories seeing marked declines this year.

The NYPD has undone the COVID era crime spike and continued to make further progress — despite being handicapped by the no-bail law and other demented state “reforms” as well as crime-coddling judges and prosecutors — thanks to the leadership of Adams and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

Adams gets the big things right.

Above all, he spoke for the best of New York in times of crisis — most notably in standing up to the pro-terrorist demonstrations in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, but also in regularly pointing out the dire need to repair the state’s misbegotten criminal-justice “reforms.”

We have to think that his refusal to roll over for the hard left goes a long way to explaining the decision of the imperious, unaccountable Campaign Finance Board to kneecap his re-election campaign by denying it any matching funds.

Yet now he’s free to keep speaking the truth anyway, warning as he did in his withdrawal announcement of the “insidious forces” out to “use local government to advance divisive agendas with little regard for how it hurts everyday New Yorkers,” denouncing “those who claim the answer is to destroy the very system we built together, over  generations” and urging “New Yorkers to choose leaders not by what they promise, but by what they have delivered.”

We expect he’ll keep pounding that bully pulpit all the way to Nov. 4 — while also using his final months in office to lock in as many of his achievements as possible, by codifying housing and land-use reforms, carefully adjusting the city’s spending commitments and so on.

Even with Adams dropping out, Zohran Mamdani remains the odds-on favorite to win, and he knows it — so much so that he refuses to condemn his fellow Democratic Socialists even when they celebrate a cop-killer.

The hard left and its water-carriers in government and the media made it impossible for Eric Adams to win a second term as mayor; he has every right and duty to spend the next six weeks calling out the folly of letting these vipers take over City Hall.