Mayor Eric Adams of New York City plans to announce on Sunday that he will abandon his foundering campaign for a second term, upending the race to lead the nation’s largest city just five weeks before Election Day, according to two people briefed on his plans.
Mr. Adams had publicly insisted that he would see his campaign through despite dismal poll numbers. But behind the scenes, he was exploring potential exit ramps to avoid an embarrassing finish, with his advisers at one point engaging in negotiations with President Trump’s about an ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia.
Those talks fell apart, and on Sunday, Mr. Adams intended to call it quits in a lengthy video message posted to social media. He gave no indication that he had a specific job lined up after he leaves office.
Instead, in remarks prepared for delivery, the mayor conceded that despite his best efforts, he could not see a path to a second term. He blamed “repeated rumors of my departure” and a decision by the city’s Campaign Finance Board to deny him public matching funds for throttling his campaign.
Rather than endorsing one of his rivals, Mr. Adams will urge voters to view both Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and front-runner, and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-party candidate, with suspicion.
Without naming Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, the mayor warned in prepared remarks that “insidious forces” were pushing “radical, divisive agendas” in city politics.
“New Yorkers should be suspicious of any politician or political movement that claims we must wholesale destroy the systems we created together over generations in order to usher in a new, untested order led by self-styled saviors,” he said.
He does not name Mr. Cuomo either, but vented in familiar terms against a man he has repeatedly said tried to push him aside and spent years waffling on key issues, like public safety.
Politicians like that “cannot be trusted,” Mr. Adams said. He added: “They do not value you or your future. They are out for themselves, not you.”
The mayor plans to say he will serve out the remainder of his term. His name will remain on November’s ballot because the deadline to change it has passed.
The decision appeared to mark a remarkable end to a decades-long political career that was in turns exhilarating and unlikely, taking a working-class son of Queens, who said he was beaten by police as a teenager, to the highest office in New York City government. At one point, he was seriously discussed as a future national Democratic candidate, before accusations of corruption undid him.
The electoral effect of Mr. Adams’s exit may take some time to come into focus.
Polls have consistently put him in the single digits, suggesting that the number of votes he will free up for other candidates will be limited. Nevertheless, the mayor’s exit could give a fresh jolt of momentum to Mr. Cuomo, who, like Mr. Adams, is a moderate Democrat running on a third-party line.
Mr. Cuomo has been working frantically to try to shrink Mr. Mamdani’s sizable lead. The former governor and Mr. Trump had both been openly agitating for Mr. Adams to quit the race in an extraordinary attempt to consolidate opposition to Mr. Mamdani. Now, Mr. Cuomo believes he has the potential to pick up votes from Black and Orthodox Jewish voters who had supported Mr. Adams, and to unlock large contributions from business leaders opposed to Mr. Mamdani.
But with so little time left, catching Mr. Mamdani will be no easy feat. Even if Mr. Cuomo won over a significant share of the mayor’s supporters, a survey by The New York Times and Siena University suggested Mr. Mamdani would still have a comfortable lead.
Mr. Cuomo could get closer if he and his allies can persuade Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, to also drop out of the race. But unlike the mayor, Mr. Sliwa has refused all entreaties to suspend his bid, even from Mr. Trump, the leader of his party, who publicly dismissed his candidacy as unserious.
Mr. Adams, 65, had fought on for months, through federal corruption charges, a public courtship of a deeply unpopular president that culminated in the Justice Department’s abandonment of those charges, sagging poll numbers and an unrelenting drumbeat of scandal around City Hall.
For a time, he believed he had an opening for a comeback after the June Democratic primary, in which Mr. Cuomo, the presumed favorite, finished a distant second to Mr. Mamdani. (Mr. Adams skipped that contest to run as an independent, in apparent recognition of his profound unpopularity in his party.)
But Mr. Adams’s campaign was also hampered by its inability to access public matching funds.
In recent days, Mr. Adams had begun to workshop a new narrative, one that pinned the blame for the demise of his campaign on forces beyond his control.
The reporting about his ongoing deliberations — which he mis-characterized and then denounced as inaccurate, has “undermined” his campaign, he said Monday morning on PIX11.
“You know what that does for my fund-raising?” he said. “I’m not only running against Curtis, Zohran and Andrew, I’m running against you guys.”
Frank Carone, the mayor’s chief of staff in his first year in office who was overseeing his campaign, praised his accomplishments and said in a statement that he supported the decision.
“I had no doubt that the mayor would win and deserved another term.” he said. “However, for many reasons outside of our control, that seemed unlikely at this point.” Mr. Carone suggested that the move “isn’t the end, but a pivot” to defeat Mr. Mamdani.
For Mr. Adams, a former police officer who spent decades methodically working his way to City Hall, Sunday's announcement was nothing short of a defeat.
He stormed into City Hall four years ago with ambitious promises to rein in crime and restore the city after the Covid pandemic’s deep disruptions. And by many measures, he succeeded, presiding over both a resurgent economy and falling crime rates.
But New Yorkers, struggling with fast-rising costs, quickly tired of his bluster and the constant drip of corruption allegations that surrounded his administration.
His decision to suspend his campaign all but guarantees that Mr. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, will be the first New York City leader to serve just one term since David N. Dinkins lost his re-election bid in the 1990s.
Mr. Adams had, in recent weeks, briefly entertained the possibility of accepting a job from Mr. Trump to soften his exit. The president had already helped the mayor once before, when his Justice Department agreed to abandon federal corruption charges against Mr. Adams earlier this year so he could help with Mr. Trump’s deportation agenda. Both the prosecutors overseeing the case and the judge who dismissed it described as an apparent quid pro quo.
Mr. Adams flew to Florida in early September to meet with Steve Witkoff, a billionaire New York investor and adviser to the president, and intermediaries worked to hash out a potential nomination as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. But as details of the talks leaked, they fell apart and Mr. Trump never extended a job offer.
Business executives in New York also discussed potential positions they could offer Mr. Adams in the private sector to induce him to drop his campaign. It was unclear whether any offers were formally extended to the mayor, or whether he had reached an understanding to accept a position after he leaves office.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.