On November 2, 2021, the New York City mayoral general election between Democratic nominee Eric Adams and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa was decided by a wide outer-borough margin after Sliwa failed to win a majority in four of the five boroughs. According to the Statement and Return Report for Certification ratified by the Board of Elections in the City of New York on November 30, 2021, Eric L. Adams won 753,801 votes (67.0% of the 1,125,258 recorded votes for mayor), while Curtis A. Sliwa received a combined 312,385 votes (27.8%) across the Republican (302,680) and Independent (9,705) ballot lines. Adams succeeded term-limited Mayor Bill de Blasio on January 1, 2022, becoming the city’s 110th mayor and its second Black mayor after David Dinkins, who served from 1990 through 1993.
The 2021 contest paired two figures whose public reputations had been forged in New York City’s late-twentieth-century debates over street safety, transit policing, and neighborhood governance. Adams entered the campaign as a retired 22-year New York City Police Department (NYPD) captain, four-term state senator, and two-term Brooklyn borough president. Sliwa ran as a populist outer-borough broadcaster and founder of the Guardian Angels, the unarmed volunteer subway and street patrol organization established in 1979.
Candidate Profiles and Pre-2021 Public Careers
| Attribute | Eric L. Adams | Curtis A. Sliwa |
|---|---|---|
| Birth Year & Early Roots | Born 1960 in Brownsville, Brooklyn; raised in Brooklyn and South Jamaica, Queens | Born 1954 in Canarsie, Brooklyn |
| Pre-Election Career | NYPD officer, sergeant, lieutenant, and captain (1984–2006); co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care | Founder of the Guardian Angels volunteer patrol group (1979); New York talk radio host |
| Prior Elected Offices | New York State Senator, 20th District (2007–2013); Brooklyn Borough President (2014–2021) | None prior to the 2021 mayoral campaign |
| June 22, 2021 Primary Result | Won Democratic primary in Round 8 with 404,513 votes (50.4%) over Kathryn A. Garcia (397,316; 49.6%) | Won Republican primary in Round 1 with 40,794 votes (67.9%) over Fernando Mateo (16,721; 27.8%) |
| General Election Ballot Lines | Democratic | Republican and Independent |
| Certified Nov. 2, 2021 Vote | 753,801 votes (67.0% of recorded votes) | 312,385 combined votes (302,680 Republican + 9,705 Independent; 27.8% of recorded votes) |
Eric L. Adams: From the NYPD to Brooklyn Borough Hall
Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1960 and raised in a working-class household by his mother, a house cleaner, Adams frequently anchored his 2021 campaign biography in an arrest at age 15 during which he and his brother were beaten by police officers in the basement of a precinct house. Rather than remaining outside law enforcement, Adams joined the New York City Transit Police in 1984 and continued in the NYPD after the transit force merged into the municipal department. Over a 22-year police career, he rose through the civil service ranks to captain, overseeing precinct operations and computer-stat tracking while co-founding the advocacy organization 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care to press for accountability and internal reform.
Upon retiring from the NYPD in 2006, Adams won election to the New York State Senate representing central Brooklyn’s 20th Senate District. He served four terms in Albany from 2007 through 2013 before winning the Brooklyn borough presidency in November 2013 and securing re-election in 2017. That combination of rank-and-file police credentials and borough-wide executive office allowed Adams to assemble a coalition of outer-borough homeowners, municipal labor unions, and Black and Latino working-class voters during the 2021 cycle.
Curtis A. Sliwa: The Guardian Angels and Talk Radio
Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Curtis Sliwa first gained citywide prominence in 1979 while managing a McDonald’s restaurant in the Bronx, when he organized the Magnificent 13—a group of unarmed citizen volunteers who patrolled the New York City subway system in red berets and white T-shirts to deter muggings and violent crime. Renamed the Guardian Angels, the organization expanded to chapters in dozens of cities while remaining closely identified with New York’s late-1970s and 1980s public-safety debates.
Starting in the 1990s, Sliwa built a second career in New York talk radio, notably through a long-running stint on WABC-AM. Entering the 2021 race without having held elective office, Sliwa campaigned in his signature red beret across subway stations and outer-borough commercial corridors. His platform emphasized expanding the uniformed headcount of the NYPD, opposing property-tax increases, auditing municipal homeless spending, and converting city animal shelters to no-kill facilities.
The June 22, 2021 Primaries and Ranked-Choice Voting
The 2021 election cycle marked the first time New York City used ranked-choice voting (RCV) in a citywide mayoral primary following a 2019 charter amendment approved by voters. Under the city’s system, primary voters could rank up to five candidates in order of preference; if no candidate crossed 50% of first-choice votes in the initial count, the last-place candidate was eliminated in successive rounds and those ballots were transferred to the voters’ next active preferences.
The Eight-Round Democratic Primary
Thirteen candidates appeared on the June 22, 2021 Democratic primary ballot during a period when New York City was emerging from COVID-19 restrictions and confronting a pandemic-era rise in gun violence. Adams positioned himself as a centrist Democrat who opposed the “defund the police” slogan while promising to curb stop-and-frisk abuses and gun crime. His chief rivals included civil rights attorney and former counsel to the mayor Maya D. Wiley, former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn A. Garcia, and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
According to the Board of Elections’ certified 2021 Primary Official Ranked Choice Rounds — DEM Mayor Citywide report (attested July 20, 2021), Adams led the initial round of first-choice votes with 289,403 ballots (30.7%), followed by Wiley with 201,127 (21.4%), Garcia with 184,463 (19.6%), Yang with 115,130 (12.2%), and City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer with 51,778 (5.5%). Because no candidate won an outright majority in Round 1, tabulation proceeded through eight elimination rounds:
- Rounds 1–5 (Initial Eliminations): Lower-polling candidates—including Isaac Wright Jr., Paperboy Love Prince, Joycelyn Taylor, Art Chang, Quanda S. Francis, Aaron S. Foldenauer, Shaun Donovan, Raymond J. McGuire, Dianne Morales, and Scott M. Stringer—were eliminated sequentially, consolidating the field to four contenders by Round 6.
- Round 6 (Elimination of Andrew Yang): With Adams at 317,092 votes (34.6%), Wiley at 239,174 (26.1%), and Garcia at 223,634 (24.4%), fourth-place finisher Andrew Yang (135,686 votes; 14.8%) was eliminated. A substantial share of Yang’s ballots transferred to Garcia, who had campaigned jointly with Yang in the final days before the primary.
- Round 7 (Elimination of Maya D. Wiley): Garcia’s transfer surge moved her into second place with 266,932 votes (30.5%), behind Adams at 354,657 (40.5%) and ahead of Wiley at 254,728 (29.1%). Wiley was eliminated at the close of Round 7.
- Round 8 (Final Certified Count): In the final head-to-head tally certified on July 20, 2021, Adams prevailed with 404,513 votes (50.4%) to Garcia’s 397,316 votes (49.6%)—a certified margin of 7,197 votes, with 140,202 ballots exhausted as inactive. When the Associated Press initially called the race on July 6–7 based on preliminary absentee counts, Adams led by 8,426 votes before the final cure and canvas of absentee ballots narrowed the margin to 7,197.
The Republican Primary
The June 22, 2021 Republican primary pitted Sliwa against businessman and livery-cab advocate Fernando Mateo, with segments of the borough Republican organizations split between the two candidates. In contrast to the eight-round Democratic contest, the Republican primary was decided in the first round. Under the Board of Elections’ certified 2021 Primary Official Ranked Choice Rounds — REP Mayor Citywide report (attested August 24, 2021), Sliwa captured 40,794 first-choice votes (67.9%), defeating Mateo’s 16,721 votes (27.8%), while write-in ballots accounted for 2,536 votes (4.2%).
The Fall 2021 General Election Campaign
In a city where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by roughly seven to one in 2021, Adams entered the autumn campaign as the heavy favorite. Both candidates participated in the New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB) voluntary public matching program, which matched small-dollar contributions from city residents at an $8-to-$1 rate on the first $250 contributed. In its final pre-election payment announcement on October 28, 2021, the CFB approved $60,506 in public funds for Adams and $933,425 for Sliwa, contributing to $2,938,408 distributed across 26 municipal campaigns in that disbursement.
As noted in contemporary election-night reporting by The Guardian, the two nominees held two televised debates in October 2021 that centered on post-pandemic economic recovery, public-sector COVID-19 vaccine mandates, policing tactics, and the condition of the subway system. Adams pledged to reinstate a plainclothes anti-gun unit within the NYPD while maintaining civilian oversight, and he courted corporate employers in Manhattan alongside service-sector workers in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Sliwa attacked municipal COVID-19 mandates on city workers and argued that one-party Democratic control at City Hall and in Albany had weakened street-level enforcement.
Certified November 2, 2021 General Election Results
The Board of Elections in the City of New York printed its final Statement and Return Report for Certification for the citywide mayoral race on November 29, 2021, and formally certified the returns on November 30, 2021. Across all five boroughs, 1,149,172 applicable ballots were cast—comprising 1,056,765 public-counter voting machine ballots, 85,175 absentee and military ballots, 7,209 affidavit ballots, and 23 manually counted emergency ballots. Of those applicable ballots, 1,125,258 recorded a valid vote for mayor and 23,914 were unrecorded.
| Borough (County) | Applicable Ballots | Eric L. Adams (Democratic) | Curtis A. Sliwa (Republican) | Curtis A. Sliwa (Independent) | Sliwa Combined Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn (Kings) | 346,203 | 239,999 | 75,758 | 2,005 | 77,763 |
| Queens (Queens) | 287,514 | 168,451 | 97,111 | 3,076 | 100,187 |
| Manhattan (New York) | 279,217 | 219,045 | 36,601 | 2,067 | 38,668 |
| The Bronx (Bronx) | 129,075 | 96,080 | 24,769 | 1,074 | 25,843 |
| Staten Island (Richmond) | 107,163 | 30,226 | 68,441 | 1,483 | 69,924 |
| Citywide Total | 1,149,172 | 753,801 | 302,680 | 9,705 | 312,385 |
Adams carried four of the five boroughs—Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx—amassing his largest raw vote total in his home borough of Brooklyn (239,999 votes) and his highest borough vote share in Manhattan and the Bronx. Sliwa carried Staten Island (Richmond County) with 69,924 combined votes (68,441 Republican and 1,483 Independent) to Adams’s 30,226 votes, and he drew 100,187 combined votes in Queens.
Seven minor-party and independent candidates also appeared on the November 2, 2021 general election ballot:
- Catherine Rojas (Party for Socialism and Liberation): 27,982 votes (2.5% of recorded votes)
- William A. Pepitone (Conservative Party): 12,575 votes (1.1%)
- Quanda S. Francis (Empowerment Party): 3,792 votes (0.3%)
- Stacey H. Prussman (Libertarian Party): 3,189 votes (0.3%)
- Raja Michael Flores (Humanity United): 2,387 votes (0.2%)
- Fernando Mateo (Save Our City): 1,870 votes (0.2%)
- Skiboky Stora (Out Lawbreaker): 264 votes (<0.1%)
Write-in votes across hundreds of named individuals and unattributable write-in lines accounted for the remaining recorded ballots. Adams was sworn in shortly after midnight on January 1, 2022, in Times Square, initiating his term at City Hall.
About This Historical Review
This entry is maintained in the Historical Archive Reviews collection on BPositiveNow to preserve a verified factual record for readers following historical citations to https://ethiopia.bpositivenow.com/who-are-eric-adams-and-curtis-sliwa/. Rather than republishing unverified legacy text, this review reconstructs the 2021 New York City mayoral election from certified tabulations issued by the Board of Elections in the City of New York, public matching fund records from the New York City Campaign Finance Board, and contemporary November 2021 reporting. For related archival reconstructions of 2021 public-policy and regulatory events, see our review of the August 2021 D.C. Circuit ruling on Viasat’s challenge to Starlink’s orbital modification and our Editorial Policy.
