A Tale of Two Mayors Offers a Startling Contrast in Big City Governance

Both Mayor Adams and the mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, lead large cities, are African-American, and share the same first name. Today that’s where the similarities end. Mr. Johnson is switching parties, writing that when his “career in elected office ends in 2027,” he will “leave office as a Republican.”

Hizzoner acknowledges that his switch will likely come as a surprise. He served, after all, in the GOP-dominated Texas state legislature for a decade as a Democrat. He acceded to the mayoralty of the nation’s ninth-largest city under the Democratic Party’s banner, though the position is officially non-partisan. 

Mr. Johnson says he sees our cities as desperately in need of leaders who champion law and order and who embrace fiscal conservatism, defining hallmarks, he says, of the GOP. “In other words, American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities,” the mayor writes with the passion of the newly-converted.

How right he is. Mr. Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York, embraced some of those sentiments when he campaigned in 2021.  He eschewed the anti-business, tax the rich, soft-on-crime policies of his predecessor, Bill DeBlasio. A former cop, candidate Adams dared to laud law enforcement.

Hizzoner also had the gumption to suggest that financially-strapped New York needs high-income residents, a cohort that Mr. DeBlasio dismissed as “fair-weather friends” as they decamped en masse to Florida. After the death of George Floyd, Mr. Adams ran against the progressive campaigns to “defund the police.”

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Published in the New York Sun