Zellnor Myrie, an Afro-Latino state senator from Brooklyn known for backing progressive causes, will announce on Wednesday that he is moving to challenge Mayor Eric Adams in next year’s Democratic primary in New York City.
Mr. Myrie’s announcement is further indication that Mr. Adams’s path to re-election is expected to be more challenging than is typical for Democratic mayors in New York. Mr. Adams, who faces record low poll numbers and a federal investigation into his campaign fund-raising, now must contend with at least two challenges from his own party.
In an interview, Mr. Myrie said that the mayor had shown a “failure of competence” and that his administration did not have a “full grasp of the nuts and bolts of how city government should work.” He also criticized the mayor’s cuts to libraries, parks and schools, arguing that they were driving families out of the city.
“For too many New Yorkers that I speak to, they’re tired of the showmanship,” he said. “What people want to see are results. They want to see their government working relentlessly to make this city affordable, to make this city safe, to make it livable.”
Mr. Myrie, 37, will open an exploratory committee and begin raising money for his campaign on Wednesday.
He is part of a new generation of leaders who ousted moderate Democratic incumbents in Albany in 2018. His Senate district is the same one Mr. Adams once represented, but the men have different political stances.
Mr. Myrie pointed to his record in the State Senate of building coalitions to pass laws, including the Clean Slate Act, which sealed many criminal records to help formerly incarcerated people access jobs and housing.
But one of his greatest challenges is a lack of name recognition outside his district in Crown Heights and Park Slope. When Mr. Myrie visited Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in March — an important stop for any politician of color seeking citywide office — the minister introduced Mr. Myrie as “Zenor Marhee.”
Other Democratic candidates have been eyeing the mayoral race, including Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller who formed his own exploratory committee in January; Jessica Ramos, a progressive state senator from Queens; and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who appears eager to make a political comeback.
But Mr. Adams has some key advantages, including a huge campaign war chest and strong support from key unions and power brokers.
Mr. Adams, a former police officer who won a close race in 2021 in part by embracing a tough-on-crime message, has increasingly been in campaign mode, with many of his public appearances highlighting a campaign-like mantra, “Crime is down, jobs are up.”
But there are signs that Mr. Adams’s base is fraying. In a Quinnipiac University poll from December, the mayor scored the lowest rating since the poll began surveying the city in 1996. He also lost support among Black and Latino voters: 38 percent of Black voters disapproved of the mayor’s job performance, an increase from 29 percent last February; 65 percent of Latino voters disapproved of the mayor’s handling of his job, the highest among all racial and ethnic groups.
The dissatisfaction over Mr. Adams’s performance, as well as his more conservative stances on criminal justice issues, has prompted left-leaning Democrats to search for a candidate who might be best positioned to defeat the mayor in the June primary.
Mr. Myrie might check some boxes for left-leaning voters. While Mr. Adams has received criticism over his cuts to prekindergarten, Mr. Myrie has embraced “universal after-school” as a signature issue. His plan calls for offering free after-school programs to all families, starting with the poorest school district in each borough.
Yet Mr. Myrie said he was less interested in running as a progressive candidate and more focused on how he could improve upon the mayor’s management of the city. He said that when Mr. Adams proposed cuts to the budget some of which he eventually restored, he created a sense of “instability” among the voters he’s spoken with. He also criticized the mayor’s “mismanagement” of the city’s response to the influx of more than 190,000 asylum seekers, Mr. Myrie said, leading him to issue some of his own recommendations.
At his appearance at Abyssinian Baptist Church, Mr. Myrie spoke about how his mother, an immigrant from Costa Rica, took him to vote for the first time for Barack Obama in 2008, using the anecdote in stirring remarks about voter suppression.
“Sometimes we think voter suppression is a relic of the South, that it just happens elsewhere,” Mr. Myrie said to nods of approval. “Church, let me tell you, right here in New York, they purge voter rolls for people that look like us.”
Mr. Myrie’s advisers took the positive response from congregants at the church (the mispronunciation of his name not withstanding) as a positive sign that his appeal would stretch beyond Brooklyn and into the neighborhoods where he would need to dig into Mr. Adams’s base of Black and Latino working- and middle-class voters.
Mr. Myrie, a lawyer and a longtime advocate for affordable housing and gun control, has made headlines recently for trying to prevent SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn from closing; appearing at a rally with the Rev. Al Sharpton in February; and for his support of criminal justice reforms, including bail reform efforts that Mr. Adams has opposed.
Last year, Mr. Myrie married Diana Richardson, a former state assemblywoman. The pair sued the Police Department in 2021 after they were beaten with bicycles and pepper-sprayed by the police during a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn.
The couple are renters, Mr. Myrie said, and they are worried that they might not be able to afford to buy a home. He said he wanted the next generation of New Yorkers to live in a more affordable and climate-resilient city with the “best subway system in the world.”
“That is the heart to me of why we are running — to provide opportunities for families for safety and for flourishing and I hope to bring that as the next mayor,” he said.
