Eric Adams, a former police captain and an open opponent of the movement to defund law enforcement, has won the Democratic primary in the race to become New York mayor, the latest vote tallies show.
The Associated Press declared Adams the victor on Tuesday night, with results showing him leading former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by more than 1%, or nearly 8,500 votes.
“While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York,” Adams said in a statement.
He later added in a Twitter thread that his election bid “wasn’t simply a campaign, it was a five-borough movement of working-class New Yorkers coming together for a safer, stronger, healthier city.”
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this wasn't simply a campaign, it was a five-borough movement of working-class New Yorkers coming together for a safer, stronger, healthier City. And our strength and message is why we won. pic.twitter.com/O55fTDVm6D
While early results of the June 22 primary put Adams in the lead, the vote count was disrupted after election officials accidentally included 135,000 test ballots in the tally, leading them to temporarily scrub data from the Board of Elections website.
Though he was then in first place, Adams nonetheless sued over the botched vote count, saying he wanted to “ensure a fair and transparent election process.” Other candidates filed similar suits, however Adams was the only to face major criticism over the move, as detractors suggested his skepticism in the results were akin to ex-President Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
A moderate Democrat who worked in law enforcement for more than two decades, Adams has vocally denounced those seeking to defund police departments across the US.
“We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” he said in May, following a fatal shooting in Times Square, adding “If black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse. It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities.”
With New York having elected only four Republican mayors over the last 100 years, Adams’ primary win all but seals his victory in the upcoming general race in November. He will run against Republican Curtis Silwa, a radio host and the founder of a high-profile volunteer crime watch group, the Guardian Angels.
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