NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s Approval Rating Plummets as Crime Concerns Persist
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New York City mayor Eric Adams’s approval rating has fallen to a record-low as concerns over rising crime linger six months into his tenure.
Just 29 percent of voters feel Adams is doing an “excellent or good job” as mayor of America’s largest city, according to a recent Sienna College poll. By contrast, 64 percent believe he is doing a “fair or poor job.” The low approval rating is broadly consistent across all five boroughs, with Adams receiving the highest rating in the Bronx (33 percent) and the lowest in Staten Island (25 percent).
The numbers reflect a significant drop in recent weeks: Adams’s approval rating stood at 43 percent as recently as May. The approval rating is also far below that of the unpopular former Mayor Bill de Blasio – who, at a similar point in his mayoralty in 2014, enjoyed a 51 percent approval rating among New Yorkers. By the time he left office in 2021, de Blasio’s approval rating was 25 percent – among the lowest levels in the recorded history of the city – merely 4 points below Adams at present.
On individual issues, Adams scored even worse than his overall approval rating. Respondents gave him the lowest score – 16 percent – on “tackling issues of safety at Rikers Island,” the city’s distressed prison complex notorious for its violence and allegations of corruption among staff. Adams had promised to close the complex during his 2020 mayoral campaign. He was also poorly rated by New Yorkers on addressing homelessness (18 percent), fighting crime (21 percent), and running the city’s public schools (29 percent). Meanwhile, just 32 percent approved of his plans to lead and transform the New York Police Department.
The poll was conducted between May 22 and June 1 by telephone calls in English and Spanish to 1,000 New York City residents and has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
The data comes as New York City, like major cities across the country, struggles with a significant increase in violent crime. The number of shootings in the city rose to nearly 300 during the first quarter of the year, while a series of high-profile violent attacks have occurred in succession. These include the shooting death of NYPD officer Jason Rivera by a gunman in Harlem and the attack on the New York City subway on April 12 by a racially motivated gunman, which injured ten travelers. NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell has said these incidents form a trend of “continuing and completely unacceptable violence in our streets.”
The transit system itself has also been the focus of much controversy, as several woman have been pushed onto subway tracks by mentally ill men. The death of Michelle Go, 40, provoked outrage across the city. She was randomly pushed onto the tracks of the Times Square subway station in January as a train arrived. On Sunday, another 52-year-old woman was shoved onto the tracks of a Bronx station, breaking her collarbone and suffering cuts all over her body. Meanwhile, on Tuesday evening, a bus driver in Brooklyn was stabbed, slashed over the eye, and spit on by three different men on an overnight shift.
The poll confirmed New Yorkers’ anxiety over crime, with 70 percent saying they felt more unsafe now than before the Covid-19 pandemic. Seventy-six percent feared they could personally be the victim of a crime, and 85 percent wanted to see “more NYPD officers in the subways.” Commenting on the results, Don Levy, Director of the Siena College Research Institute, said that “Half of New Yorkers say they’ve changed their daily routine to feel safer…in every borough, gender, age, race, party, or income level.”
After the release of the numbers on Tuesday, many of Adams’s aides questioned the survey’s methodology. His press secretary, Fabien Levy, tweeted that the poll was “misleading and manipulable,” while Evan Thies, one of Adams’s political strategists claimed that the mayor’s approval rating was actually “64 percent” and accused the media of being “factually incorrect” for reporting the story.
"Misleading and manipulable" — remember that, @NY1.
Thank you, @RitchieTorres, for pointing out the biased framing here.
I don't care about polls, but if you're going to use them this one actually says almost 2/3 of New Yorkers stand with @NYCMayor. https://t.co/xH9uJW9BBT
— Fabien Levy (@Fabien_Levy) June 7, 2022
Overall, 56 percent said that New York was headed in the “wrong direction.” To this, Levy said, “If New Yorkers had a honeymoon with Mayor Adams, it was brief and it’s clearly over.”
