Eric Adams was never popular. Even before his indictment for penny-ante corruption last month. Even before federal raids targeted his top aides and investigations so circled City Hall that his second police commissioner and even the schools chancellor resigned. Even before Adams registered the lowest approval rating for any New York City mayor in Quinnipiac polling history, last December, or saw support for his re-election fall to 16 percent in one poll this spring. Even before all of that, Adams only just squeaked into office, indeed with the help of publicly matched campaign funds investigators now allege were illegally obtained. But he did so amid a curious chorus of national praise that treated him like the new face of the Democratic Party and made him seem, as a result, like a much more consequential political figure than he ever really was.

In the first round of the 2021 primary, Adams won just over 30 percent of the vote, against roughly 20 percent each for Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, his two main Democratic challengers. In the runoff, he beat Garcia 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent — a margin of just over 7,000 New Yorkers, in a city of more than eight million. Close observers of New York’s local politics could tell themselves just-so stories about the robust-seeming Adams coalition — the city’s Black middle class and its homeowners, the police and business and labor — but his victory was the kind of wafer-thin win that might’ve dissolved with the arrival of a light drizzle.

Adams performed better in the general election over the stunt candidate Curtis Sliwa, but his margins of victory weren’t more impressive than those secured by his predecessor Bill de Blasio in either of his campaigns, each against more formidable opposition. As you may remember, de Blasio was treated right from the start as a joke mayor and a politically incompetent interloper, though in retrospect he is remembered somewhat more fondly and cuts a more impressive figure: He anticipated the emphasis on income inequality that would dominate the next decade of American politics, engineered a large social-welfare expansion in the form of universal prekindergarten and began the rollout of public “3-K for All” programs, and was, by some measures, no less popular even at the laughingstock end of his second term than Adams was in the flush period of his post-inauguration “honeymoon.”

New York City is hardly representative of national politics. And yet, the ascension of Adams was seen, by many inside the party and by commentators nominally outside it, as a sort of flare sent up from the Democratic future, a sign of some seismic backlash to the leftward drift of the party in the late Obama and Trump years — and a call for the party to follow Adams rightward, toward a “common sense” center defined in part by hostility toward strident progressivism.

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Screenshots from those days have become a snarky left-wing social-media catnip lately, as first it became clear that the Adams administration was hardly thriving and more recently that Adams would become the first sitting mayor in New York history to face a federal indictment. The most infamous is a prediction by Nate Silver that Adams would be a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination at the next available opening, but Silver’s read of the political moment was actually not at all exceptional. The Bulwark proposed that Adams could be the party’s “next national star”; he even won the endorsement of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.

Adams himself warned that the party needed to heed the message of his election or face electoral consequences. (He gave the warning at a news conference where he declared himself the “future of the Democratic Party.”) Representative James Clyburn, the House majority whip at the time, struck a similar note, as did Joe Biden, in forging a high-profile alliance with Adams. (For a while, Adams took to referring to himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn,” though perhaps that was just a verbal tic.) Adams’s believers argued he would “save” New York and in doing so, show us how to save the rest of the party.

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