Thursday, June 12, 2025
How Adrienne Adams got the coveted Hasidic nod Andrew Cuomo longed for
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has secured more than two dozen coveted Hasidic endorsements, making her the dark horse to watch in what has been a tumultuous mayoral race.
Late on Monday, Speaker Adams received the backing of 25 Hasidic sects and schools in Borough Park, part of an influential voting bloc that helped swing the 2021 mayoral race for incumbent Eric Adams. The two Adamses are not related.
The twist: the endorsements for Adrienne Adams ahead of the June 24 Democratic primary appear to be part of a strategy to help the embattled mayor, who has quit the Democrats and is running in the general election on an independent "End Antisemitism" line.
The speaker's announcement is a setback for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the front-runner who had been actively courting Hasidic support and hoped to consolidate the Orthodox groups behind his candidacy.
Orthodox voters favor Mayor Adams, but his status as an Independent has led the leadership to explore an array of candidates in the primary.
The endorsements come at a critical moment in the mayoral race. Recent polls show a close race between Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and a vocal critic of Israel who identifies as anti-Zionist.
Cuomo, who has made fighting antisemitism central to his candidacy, leads with 41% among Orthodox voters in the primary, according to a recent survey, and secured the backing of the largest Hasidic sects, the two Satmar sects in Williamsburg and Bobov in Boro Park. However, he failed in his bid to secure the unified front he was counting on to stop Mamdani's insurgency.
Even among Cuomo's Hasidic supporters, there are signs that the endorsements are not rock solid.
Moshe Indig, the political leader of the Satmar sect led by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, told The New York Times he may add Mamdani to his slate of endorsements. Ultimately, he said, he wants to see Mayor Adams re-elected with Orthodox support.
Two leaders involved in the outreach effort, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal discussions, said that Cuomo met with just a handful of Hasidic leaders and neglected deeper outreach to the broader network of schools and administrators who manage turnout operations.
In these private meetings, and in carefully crafted interviews with online publications, Cuomo reportedly "expressed deep regret" for singling out Hasidic communities for enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One longtime Hasidic operative predicted that at least 20% of voters who belong to the groups who endorsed Cuomo are "soft votes" open to persuasion.
New York City's 700,000 Jewish adults, who have made up about 16% of the Democratic primary vote in past elections, could comprise as much as 20% of turnout in the primary because of growing concern over antisemitism and expected lower turnout citywide.
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