{"id":127,"date":"2023-11-16T15:55:54","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T15:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/table-of-success.local\/?p=127"},"modified":"2023-12-20T21:28:45","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:28:45","slug":"evan-thies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tableofsuccess.mysites.io\/evan-thies\/","title":{"rendered":"Evan Thies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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<\/a> of Adams’s election as mayor. According to the New York Times<\/a>, Thies, Adams, political strategist Nathan Smith, and Adams’s longtime aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin<\/a> 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. \u201cThe message conversation really starts once you\u2019re about to declare,” he told the New Yorker<\/a>. Thies shaped Adams’s platform, co-authoring his 100-Point Plan<\/a> for improving the city according to the Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> 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,\u201d Thies said<\/a> at the Adams’s election night party. \u201cBecause 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\u2014the working class of every race and background.” Adams was more direct: “I am the face of the Democratic Party,” he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his victory speech, Adams called Thies<\/a> “the man that captured my voice” and “my brother.” Thies takes credit<\/a> 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 (\u201cI 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\u2014carrying his belongings to school in a garbage bag<\/a> in case his family was evicted during the school day, hoping for snow so his family could melt it for drinking water<\/a> when their utilities were cut off\u2014that’s also partly his influence. “Eric, I know your family struggled when you were growing up. Tell me stories,” Thies told the New Yorker<\/a> 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\u2019s a striking visual.’ And it went into the stump speech,” Thies said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n