How Adams Lost His Coalition and Became an Also-Ran

In the summer of 2021, Black and working-class New York Democrats exhausted by the pandemic and increasingly worried about crime embraced Eric Adams, a former police captain who made public safety the centerpiece of his mayoral primary campaign.

By that fall, a broader swath of New Yorkers — including the more affluent and educated Manhattanites who had been skeptical of him in the primary — decided to take a chance on Mr. Adams, with some embracing his up-by-the-bootstraps biographic claims and pledges to combat both crime and police brutality. And as he took office, even many Republicans in the city voiced optimism for his time as mayor.

But it didn’t take long for that sense of good will to erode. And by the time Mr. Adams abandoned his re-election campaign on Sunday, the man who once trumpeted his “historic, diverse, five-borough coalition” was getting trounced in every borough and with every demographic. The multiracial coalition he had once assembled — from East New York to East Tremont — was in tatters.

In that 2021 primary race, results sometimes broke down along geographic lines. Across parts of Crown Heights, for instance, ​​Eastern Parkway marked the divide between the older, working-class voters of color who preferred Mr. Adams, and the young professionals who embraced his chief progressive rival at the time, Maya Wiley.