The Mayor of New York Is Surrounded by Scandal. Will Voters Really Care?

Corruption has been a mark of municipal politics for hundreds of years. Tolerance for it has been high.

In April, the Manhattan Institute polled 700 New Yorkers across political affiliations and demographics — people who were likely to vote in next year’s mayoral race — asking them about elected officials, crime, immigration and the state of the city. Only 16 percent said that they would choose to re-elect Eric Adams as mayor. Of course, a poll is just a snapshot. A lot can happen in the course of a few months. And it has.

Last week, several high-ranking members of the Adams administration were subject to raids by federal investigators looking into at least one possible bribery scheme. Perhaps surprisingly, none of this seemed to have anything to do with a separate investigation, which came to light last year, into whether Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign received illegal donations from the Turkish government.

Neither the mayor, who has repeatedly said that his administration is cooperating with investigators, nor any of his top officials have been charged with a crime. But the optics of this latest sweep are not easily dismissed. If nothing else, the apparent ambush has underscored a tangled kind of nepotism rooted at the center of city governance.

Among the phones seized were those belonging to the schools chancellor, David C. Banks; his girlfriend, Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor; and his brother Philip B. Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety. A third Banks brother — Terence Banks — who runs a consultancy focused on bridging the gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape,” was also relieved of his phone. Other targets of the probe included the police commissioner, Edward Caban, who announced his resignation on Thursday, and his twin brother, James Caban, who according to one report may have sold security favors to nightclubs.

Even amid the distracting tensions of the presidential race, it is hard not to wonder how all of this will affect Mr. Adams’s prospects for re-election, especially given that three high-profile Democratic challengers — Zellnor Myrie, a state senator; Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller; and Scott Stringer, the previous comptroller — are set to run against him.

With the mayoral primary still months away, no significant polling has been conducted that might reflect the current situation. But years of research by political scientists has suggested that the electoral punishment for actual corruption — leaving aside the semblance of it — is, as one meta-analysis put it, often “rather mild.” One reason that voters tolerate it is that corruption, in all of its shadowy intricacy and need for graphs and bullet points and explainers, frequently seems to elude ordinary understanding. Another, the research tells us, is that voters might prefer a tainted candidate whom they find ideologically compatible to a “clean” one whom they don’t.