Okay, welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. My name is Raphael Menguel, and I'll be your host for the day. And I am joined by my brilliant colleagues, John Tetchum, Rob Henderson, and Nicole Jelineus. It is Monday morning in New York

City, which means that we have a little bit of breaking news from over the weekend, which is that

Mayor Eric Adams has officially announced his suspension of his mayoral campaign, leaving

Zohraamam Dani, Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Lewa,

sort of the main players left in the field.

I'd like to just start with what you all make of that.

I mean, this is a pretty big deal, Nicole?

Yeah, it's a big deal.

It's been a long time coming.

Adams is pulling in the single digits,

actually behind the Republican candidate, Curtis Lira, which is a pretty big deal in such a heavily five, six to one Democratic city.

And, you know, this is, Adams has always been a weird person, but his principles, not necessarily his personal principles, I'm sure we'll get into

some of the corruption issues, but his public political principles that he ran and won on

four years ago, reducing crime after the big crime spike that we saw in 2020 and 2021, reducing

public disorder, and pushing for personal and family

responsibility. You know, he spent much of his dropping out speech thanking his mother for

instilling values of personal responsibility. These are values that broadly the public holds.

There's a reason that Adams won four years ago.

It's just that he could never get out of his own way of very bad personal habits that he developed in a long time in Brooklyn politics.

And he could never execute these ideas. So he's actually not that far away from what the public has long wanted. And the

real question is him having failed to deliver that, did he leave a vacuum for something that comes next?

And we don't quite know what that is yet. Yeah. John, I mean, I want to get your sort of take on this as well,

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