Evan Thies

There are few people who have played a more important role in Eric Adams’s rise than Evan Thies, a political consultant and one of the main architects of Adams’s election as mayor. According to the New York Times, Thies, Adams, political strategist Nathan Smith, and Adams’s longtime aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin began plotting his path to City Hall when Adams was a state senator. Thies counseled Adams for years on how to line up the necessary funding and political support for a mayoral run, before eventually turning to what the campaign should actually, you know, be about. “The message conversation really starts once you’re about to declare,” he told the New Yorker. Thies shaped Adams’s platform, co-authoring his 100-Point Plan for improving the city according to the Times.

When Adams won the Democratic Party primary in the summer of 2021 and became a shoo-in for mayor, Thies and Nathan Smith took a victory lap, co-authoring an article urging other Democrats to learn from what they considered their winning formula with Adams, one that coupled what they described as his “unassailable authenticity” as a Black man from a working-class background with his “practical, not ideological” campaign. Unlike other Democrats, they wrote, Adams was unafraid of “triggering the loud minority of ‘defund’ [the police] supporters.” To Thies, Adams’s victory in New York City put him on the national stage, and showed that Democrats could win through a combination of appeals to working-class identity and moderate policy. “Eric is going to be great for the DNC heading into the midterms,” Thies said at the Adams’s election night party. “Because him winning will provide protection against the Republican attacks saying Democrats want to defund the police, and because Eric is saying the party should be listening to the voters who have sustained it—the working class of every race and background.” Adams was more direct: “I am the face of the Democratic Party,” he said.

In his victory speech, Adams called Thies “the man that captured my voice” and “my brother.” Thies takes credit for helping persuade the mayor to relax his impenetrable cop persona and to make political hay out of the more vulnerable parts of his biography. If you’ve ever been struck by Adams’s preoccupation with presenting himself as a sort of identitarian personification of working-class New York City (“I know what it is to go to school at night,” he told voters on the campaign trail. “I didn’t go to Harvard and Yale, I went to CUNY and jail”), you can thank Thiel for making “I am you” a central part of the Adams campaign. If you’ve ever noted Adams’s reliance on sharing striking anecdotes of his humble origins—carrying his belongings to school in a garbage bag in case his family was evicted during the school day, hoping for snow so his family could melt it for drinking water when their utilities were cut off—that’s also partly his influence. “Eric, I know your family struggled when you were growing up. Tell me stories,” Thies told the New Yorker he asked Adams, and when Adams divulged the garbage bag story, Thies and Smith knew what to do with it. “Nathan and I were, like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s a striking visual.’ And it went into the stump speech,” Thies said. 

Partly on the strength of his work for Adams, Thies and his company, Pythia Public (which also helped elect one of Adams’s rivals in City government, Comptroller Brad Lander) were named number one on City and State’s 2022 “PR Power” list. Thies also has continued to do lobbying work. In 2019, 2020, and 2023, according to City records, he lobbied City government on behalf of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids to push through a ban on flavored vapes.  He lobbied on behalf of the Hotel Association of New York City on property taxes in 2021 and 2022. Further back, in 2018, he lobbied City Councilmembers on behalf of the Williams Companies, an Oklahoma natural gas giant, as part of a “grassroots education campaign” concerning a “state-related energy issue.” At the time, Williams was trying to build support for a new fracked gas line in New York Harbor.

After Adams’s election, Thies helped him with his transition but stayed out of City government, instead functioning as a spokesperson for the campaign side of Adams’s operation. In July, when the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced indictments in a straw donor scheme involving the campaign, and again in November when the FBI raided the home of Adams’s chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, Thies was the man giving comment to reporters. 

But if Thies was happy to hitch his star to Adams on his way up, more recently, he has been putting some distance between himself and the increasingly beleaguered mayor. At the end of November, he told one reporter he wouldn’t be answering any more questions about Adams’s reelection campaign. “I have never,” he wrote, “been a spokesperson for the 2025 campaign.”

(Thies, who still had “TeamAdamsNYC” in his Twitter bio, did not respond to questions from Hell Gate.)