Longtime LGBTQ Political Club Seeks Adams Challenger: Report
"We deserve better; we deserve a choice," said Allen Roskoff, a longtime gay rights activist and recent critic of Mayor Eric Adams.
WEST VILLAGE, NY — The founder of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club is looking for a new mayor.
Allen Roskoff, a longtime gay rights activist and recent critic of Mayor Eric Adams, is launching an effort to recruit a progressive Democrat to run against Adams in the 2025 party primary, according to the Daily News.
"We want to make it clear that our intention is to promote a progressive perspective in addressing the fundamental needs of our city," Roskoff told The News.
While the city faces major challenges, from affordable housing to cost of living and the migrant crisis, Roskoff told The News, "regrettably, the discourse around these topics, propagated by Mayor Adams, has been marked by anger, vitriol and right-wing talking points. Instead of welcoming our new neighbors, the mayor has castigated them."
The effort, coordinated by the Jim Owles club and dubbed the “Coalition for Mayoral Choice,” faces major financial and historical headwinds.
Adams has already raised more than $2.7 million for his 2025 run, according to his latest financial disclosure, in what would typically be an uncontested primary.
And this isn't the first time Roskoff has tried to mount a progressive insurgency against a conservative-leaning mayor.
In 1981, Roskoff and others recruited a liberal Assembly Member to challenge Mayor Ed Koch, who outspent them by huge margins and readily won his re-election, according to The News.
Roskoff told The News that this new effort is partially inspired by his last try, and that New Yorkers need to be presented with more than one option in the next election.
"We deserve better; we deserve a choice," he told The News. "We urge the progressive community to unite behind a single mayoral candidate and outline how they intend to address our unique requirements while upholding our core principles."
Formerly a friend of Adams, Roskoff has been fiercely critical of the Mayor after he made political appointments of multiple people with known histories of making anti-LGBTQ remarks, like Fernando Cabrera, who once praised Uganda's brutally draconian homophobic laws during a visit to the country nearly a decade ago.
"Eric Adams has given us the middle finger," Roskoff said at a February 2022 protest outside of City Hall, before extending his own towards the historic building and saying "to Mayor Adams — here's my middle finger."
This marks the first official challenge to Adams' re-election in the Democratic primary after months of speculation over if someone would engage in a primary fight with Adams.
Some names that have been floated around as possible challengers to Adams — who won the 2021 primary by about 8,000 votes against Kathryn Garcia in ranked-choice voting — include Queens State Senator Jessica Ramos, Brooklyn State Senator Zellnor Myrie, city Comptroller Brad Lander, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and former City Council speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn.