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.
In a statement to amNewYork Metro, the speaker said that she “didn’t seek out running for mayor” but is now starting to give it “increasingly serious consideration” as “more and more serious stakeholders in our city have urged me to consider serving the city in this way.”
“The urgency of this moment and the need for dignified and steady leadership that puts New Yorkers first and fights for the soul of our city is something we need now more than ever,” Speaker Adams said. “There is an opportunity to build a diverse coalition of New Yorkers who want leadership that restores effective management and trust to deliver results that make the city safer, more affordable, and better protected from the chaos of the Trump Administration.”
According to sources, the speaker has been mulling a run for a little over a week since big-name Democrats, including state Attorney General Letitia James, began reaching out to her and asking her to consider jumping into the already crowded Democratic primary field.
They want her to enter the contest because they see her as a credible challenger to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is expected to declare his own candidacy as soon as this weekend, and embattled Mayor Eric Adams, who bears no relation to the speaker.
Speaker Adams is still on the fence about whether she will actually run and plans to make a final decision after her State of the City speech on March 4, the source confirmed. She is weighing what leadership the city needs at the moment and whether she is ready to step into the role.
Nevertheless, the speaker and those around her are preparing for a run, given that petitioning to get on the ballot is already underway, the source said. She’s also assembling a campaign team and an apparatus to gather petitions.
“We are taking the steps to prepare a robust campaign should I decide to seek to become the first woman to be mayor of New York City,” the speaker said in her statement.
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 moves toward launching a campaign come as Mayor Adams’ 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.
