Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in the Democratic primary in June, an acknowledgment of the growing backlash against his embrace of President Trump and his record-low approval ratings.
Mr. Adams said he would instead run as an independent in the general election in November — an uphill battle in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one.
His announcement comes a day after the five-count federal corruption indictment that he faced was dismissed by a judge, following the Trump Justice Department’s decision to abandon the prosecution.
Mr. Adams released a six-minute video saying that the case had made it difficult for him to run in the June 24 primary. He said that he was still a Democrat but that he would “appeal directly to all New Yorkers” as an independent in the general election.
In the video, Mr. Adams again denied the corruption allegations, but acknowledged that he had made mistakes.
“I know that the accusations leveled against me may have shaken your confidence in me and that you may rightly have questions about my conduct,” he said. “Let me be clear, although the charges against me were false, I trusted people that I should not have and I regret that.”
The collapse of the mayor’s primary campaign was a stunning setback for a charismatic leader who once called himself the “future of the Democratic Party.” But in recent months, as Mr. Adams publicly avoided criticizing Mr. Trump, he began to distance himself from party orthodoxy.
“People often say, ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat. You seem to have left the party,’” Mr. Adams said in a January interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”
The decision by Mr. Adams to abandon his bid for the Democratic ballot line, which was first reported by Politico, would seem to significantly dampen his hopes for a second term.