NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams has enjoyed the upper hand in his cold war with progressives. Now that’s beginning to change.

The political left is ready to pounce on the moderate mayor, emboldened by a new poll that reveals Adams’ weaknesses.

Some liberals are casting about for a viable challenger to Adams in 2025. Others are preparing for the more immediate battle against his local budget cuts. Both groups see an opening.

“That opening has become wider and wider,” Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, said in an interview. “Back in early October, our thought was: This is still an incumbent, strong, popular enough. But the last several weeks have shown that this mayor is not only not strong and not popular, but he might not be the mayor for his whole term.”

The Quinnipiac University poll this week showed Adams’ job approval rating at an historically abysmal 28 percent following revelations of a federal investigation into whether Adams’ campaign colluded with foreign interests. Adams has not been charged in the probe.

The mayor finds himself weakened at a time when the left-leaning Working Families Party is reorganizing under new leaders Archila and Jasmine Gripper.

And any challenge from the left would seek to undermine a mayor who dubbed himself the new “face of the Democratic Party” upon winning election in 2021 — a dig at the progressive movement that never supported him but couldn’t figure out how to blunt his ascent. Adams said last February, “The numerical minority, they have hijacked the term progressive.”

The Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday also revealed that an overwhelming majority of city voters — more than eight in 10 — are worried about the budget cuts that Adams proposed to the NYPD, public libraries, city-funded pre-kindergarten and other municipal services to offset the cost of supporting migrants.

And affordable housing, according to the poll, is a top concern on par with crime.

While Adams, a former NYPD captain, has sought to prioritize crime-fighting during his tenure, left-leaning critics like City Council member Tiffany Cabán have condemned him over rising costs in the expensive city.

“One thing that is very clear is that the mayor is living in the conditions that he created,” Gripper of the Working Families Party said in an interview. “He promoted a narrative of high crime when the numbers didn’t show it. And now, he’s trying to convince New Yorkers that crime is low, and they don’t believe him, because he created a narrative that promoted so much fear.”

Indeed, City Hall cited those statistics as it questioned the validity of the numbers by the well-regarded Quinnipiac polling institution.

“Incorrect polls come out every day, but the real numbers cannot be questioned: Crime is down, jobs are up and we continue to deliver billions of dollars into the pockets of working people,” Deputy Mayor Fabien Levy said in a statement.

Adams, in Washington on Thursday to urge more federal aid for the migrant crisis, pointed the finger at President Joe Biden’s administration. Adams and Biden’s once warm relationship is now in a deep freeze as the mayor maintains the White House has left the city to handle the migrant surge on its own.

“It’s clear that you can just see the poll numbers,” Adams told reporters at the Capitol. “Our national government has taken a toll on New York City. New Yorkers are angry. I’ve joined that anger.”

The mayor’s representatives blasted a press release Thursday with 11 supportive statements from politicians, union and business leaders and the president of the NAACP’s New York State Conference.

“As our economy continues to rebuild and jobs are restored, Mayor Adams is the blue-collar champion our union members and working families across New York City elected him to be,” Rich Maroko, president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, said in a statement.

But Adams’ liberal critics want the blame for reduced city services pinned squarely on him as they coalesce to take him on.

“This is the moment for us to begin to hone in on our message, get really tight on our message,” City Council member Carmen De La Rosa said in an interview. “And I think that message is that these cuts are not only, in our opinion, going to be devastating [but] it’s also unnecessary to so deeply cut public education in New York City.”

The council’s Progressive Caucus — long a target of Adams’ ire — has scheduled an oversight hearing Monday that will challenge his approach to municipal services. City Council member Shahana Hanif said she plans to show exactly where and how the funding can be restored.

The renewed pressure from the left comes with an acknowledgment that the movement — which was ascendent with the election of former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2013 and again in 2018 with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory — has lost its way.

In 2021, the establishment left was divided among three mayoral candidates, diluting its power and helping Adams clinch victory with his working-class, multi-racial support.

Progressives now say they’ve learned their lesson from that race.

“We saw the left was very splintered and disorganized, and the Working Families Party will not allow that scenario to repeat itself,” Gripper said.

While the Working Families Party focuses on the 2024 House elections, the much smaller Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club has been recruiting for a 2025 challenger to Adams — an effort that its leader said has recently intensified.

“We’re talking to more people,” progressive activist Allen Roskoff said, “people that really weren’t considering running before.”

He floated former City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as potential candidates.

Left-leaning strategist Camille Rivera said ensuring a truly united front needs to be the first step in confronting Adams.

“You’re going to see a galvanizing of organizations, community groups, the party pushing back on the mayor,” she said, adding that the ideal candidate would know “it’s never a choice between cutting public schools and housing the homeless.”

PALO ALTO, California — Here’s a portrait of how Donald Trump reclaims power.

At a Hoover Institution conference here last week, former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — who in 2020 denounced the former president as a threat to the Constitution — said retired generals “need to go silent during elections” and argued that the “American people do not need military officers telling them how to vote.”

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) was on the same panel with Mattis and said afterward that the former president is dominating the lead-off Iowa caucuses: “It’s all Trump.” Yet Ernst explained she could not intervene to try to stop him in her home state because she’s concerned about “jeopardizing our first in the nation” nominating status.

Also at Stanford was New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. He told me he would back a Trump challenger in the next couple of weeks, but that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds didn’t give him a head’s up on her endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that he found her timing odd. (He was being polite: Sununu has privately been even more critical of Reynolds’ decision, I’m told.)

Sununu is widely expected to back Nikki Haley. But for all the movement toward Haley in recent weeks, it remains to be seen whether she has the political dexterity and bigness of spirit to forge the disparate coalition needed to even threaten Trump.

Speaking of being polite, I’ll get to the point. She’s yet to call her former South Carolina rival, Sen. Tim Scott, or approach Chris Christie, people familiar with the situation tell me. If Haley is serious about thwarting Trump, she needs to win the backing of her opponents and that means setting aside her resentment toward Scott — a perfunctory text isn’t sufficient — and having a serious conversation with Christie before they fracture the anti-Trump vote in New Hampshire.

In isolation, none of these events are hugely significant. Yet taken together, they illustrate why, as 2023 nears its close, the former president is poised to roll to the Republican nomination and could win back the White House. The Stop Trump effort has been abysmal.

He may never have been beatable. For all the obsessive coverage about who wealthy GOP donors fancy, it’s Republican primary voters without college degrees who are the defining bloc in this race. Trump’s enduring grip on them is why he’ll be so hard to defeat and why GOP leaders are so reluctant to cross him.

However, if one was to take brush to canvas for that impressionistic portrayal of how he did it, it would include the following.

The senior officials who worked in Trump’s administration would mute themselves, disagree on whether to go public with their fears about a restoration or just not work in the coordinated, strategic and relentless fashion that’s needed to get through to voters. (With apologies to John Kelly, a former general officer who is willing to speak out, a single and solo statement isn’t enough.)

Republican officials who have little appetite for Trump’s return would stay mum and enable Trump’s comeback, each of them finding a rationale for their silence, some more compelling than others.

Those GOP lawmakers who did step up to try to block Trump’s path wouldn’t coordinate their efforts, would disagree on who the best alternative is and thereby muddy their effort and undermine their mission.

And the lackluster field would, in the last full measure of their timidity, prove unable to rally to a single alternative because they were unwilling to summon the capaciousness necessary for the cause of stopping Trump.

Oh, and Trump’s top alternatives would bicker with one another in most every debate and spend their negative advertising dollars on attacking one another rather than on targeting the former president.

Disagree if you want, but, as the kids say, where’s the lie?

It’s just under a month until the Iowa caucuses and there’s a striking lack of urgency among Republicans who do not want to see Trump renominated. There’s resignation, rationalization, despair and even denial. Yet there’s little action.

Well, except for the capitulation from those who have misgivings about Trump but want to avoid the hassle of being pushed by his lieutenants, pressed by conservative media and harangued at their Lincoln Day dinners. A frustrated Sununu told me he knows even some of the governors “that are supporting [Trump] don’t want him to be the nominee.” To borrow a memorable line from Bill Clinton, these Republicans want to maintain their viability within the system.

But it’s the quiet from so many of the party’s lawmakers, former candidates and biggest names that’s most revealing.

It was easy to glimpse the future from George Stephanopoulos’ interview on ABC’s “This Week” with Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who repeatedly dodged questions about whether he’d back Trump by deferring to GOP primary voters.

Republicans like Lankford are plainly unenthusiastic about Trump but will avoid weighing in on the primary and then when he wins the nomination offer some version of saying they’ll support the party’s nominee because that’s who the voters selected. Then, should Trump be found guilty of crimes, the same Republicans will be asked if they still support the nominee now that said standard-bearer is a felon. Then the same question will be asked again if and when he’s sentenced to prison.

It will be a slow-rolling, Access Hollywood-style mess, pitting party leaders against their electoral base. Except this time it will be utterly predictable.

Unlike in 2016, however, those who feel strongest about the risk Trump poses may have the least ability to stop him. It’s a depressing indication of our polarized times that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) could only hurt DeSantis, Haley and Christie by publicly rallying to their side.

“If virtually all the GOP governors and senators were to say they would not support Trump, even in the general, I don’t think his poll numbers would be harmed, at all,” Romney told me. “They might even get better. I think the MAGA base dislikes our elected elites as much or more than they dislike Democrats.”

Before you write off Romney as hopelessly embittered, convinced his own party is beyond redemption, take note that he’s not fully convinced Trump is inevitable.

“Haley has a shot,” he said. “A long one.”

But if she or any other Trump alternative has a shot, I wondered in my conversation with Sununu, where’s the movement?

He conceded it was “delayed” but insisted there was time yet. More endorsements would mean more coverage which would beget more endorsements and then strong showings in early states.

“And I think when these dominoes start to go — that’s why I’m still very much a believer that Trump very well could lose New Hampshire — because I do see how the dominoes go and when they go they go fast,” he said. Then Sununu made like a machine gun staccato and sounded out dominoes falling: “Duh-duh-duh-duh.”

Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, also embracing the glass-is-half-full perspective, pointed out how many candidates have already dropped out.

“There does seem to be a consolidation happening more naturally then even before,” Cox told me. “It’s kind of a two-person race for that second spot.” And it happened “before we got a heavy hand pushing it,” he added.

The key, Cox said, will be Trump’s margins in the initial states. “Is there any vulnerability at all, is it close? Is it within 10 points?”

There is a model for how Trump could be toppled. It’s the way Biden claimed the Democratic nomination in 2020. The moment he won the South Carolina primary it sent an immediate message to Democrats hungry for a candidate who could defeat Trump (sound familiar?) that Biden was their man. With endorsements from his former foes and other party leaders, Biden rolled into Super Tuesday three days later with unstoppable momentum.

That said, there are some, well, very significant differences between then and now. For starters, today’s Democrats are a much more establishment-oriented party than today’s splintered GOP. What happened with Democrats in 2020 is how Republican primaries used to go. Further, Donald Trump is a far more formidable candidate than Bernie Sanders, whom Biden had to overcome.

Just as significant, Trump has a structural advantage this year because his lieutenants worked to frontload the primary calendar and pushed states toward winner-take-all delegate allocations. For all his unpredictable and impulsive tendencies, the former president trusted a trio of aides — Chris LaCivita, Susie Wiles and Brian Jack — to leverage his grassroots strength and reshape the nominating contest in a way that was anything but improvisational.

Which is why, for all of Sununu’s optimism about dominoes falling, some Republicans increasingly believe the only way to keep Trump from the nomination is for him to be convicted of felonies before next summer’s nominating convention

“Are we really going to bring this race down and out before Super Tuesday, when the guy goes on trial,” Christie told me, alluding to the March 4 start of Trump’s case on Jan. 6-related charges in Washington. “That’s why I’m sitting here saying: I’m in through the convention. It’s not that I’m delusional, it’s that nobody else is paying attention to what’s really happening.”

What’s happening, Christie explained, is that the judge presiding over Trump’s case in Washington has given no indication she’ll push back the trial and that former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows has signed an immunity deal with federal prosecutors to avoid charges in exchange for testifying that the former president committed crimes.

Christie isn’t the only person eying the potential March convergence of Trump’s trial and his effectively wrapping up the Republican nomination. No Labels chief Nancy Jacobson last week reached out to influential party figures to ask them if Haley could be persuaded to run on the third-party group’s line if and when Trump drives her out of the GOP primary, a person familiar with her told me.

Haley, still eying a future in Republican politics, has little interest in such a mission. In fact, she’s already planning for a showdown with Trump in South Carolina. Her campaign is planning a multi-city fundraising tour of California in February, by when, they assume, she’ll be in a head-to-head finale of sorts and can vacuum all the anti-Trump dollars out west.

For now, though, much of the party’s leadership class is falling in line with Trump or staying on the sidelines. Look no further than the sound of silence coming out of the winter meeting this week of the Republican Governors Association, a group that once rallied to their own (see George W. Bush in 2000) but is now divided. Reynolds, the group’s chair, is for DeSantis, other governors have backed Trump and others still are hanging back to see if Haley can emerge after the first two states.

Back at Stanford, former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who lost her seat in the 2018 suburban wave against Trump, said she had seen this movie before.

“Just like in ‘16, all these guys came around too late,” Comstock grumbled. “Like this should’ve been done six months ago. You didn’t know Trump was a threat? You didn’t know he was leading?”

Benjamin Johansen contributed to this report.

A Republican member of Congress is alleging that a former top aide spearheaded a “vindictive” threat to expose his daughter’s OnlyFans account.

Rep. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.) told POLITICO that his former chief of staff and former legislative director attempted to retaliate against him using his 27-year old daughter’s account on OnlyFans, a popular forum for people to charge for access to sexually explicit content.

According to Williams, the two former staffers, Michael Gordon and Ryan Sweeney, threatened to expose his daughter after Williams fired them.

Williams’ remarkable decision to go public about the feud is a bet that his political future will be improved by laying out its highly personal details. He spoke with POLITICO days after a Syracuse University student journalist shared a video of him in a profanity-laced confrontation with Gordon outside a holiday party in Washington.

Gordon was “trying to exert some leverage over me,” Williams said, “and I just simply won’t allow that to happen.”

Williams, a first-term member in a battleground seat, won his race year by one percentage point. He is one of House Democrats’ top targets to unseat in 2024.

Gordon said that “the allegations Congressman Williams has levied against me are categorically false” and declined to comment further. Sweeney said the “congressman’s allegations are completely false.”

The confrontation with Gordon, which Sweeney filmed, began causing political trouble for Williams soon after its release last week. On the day before indicted former Rep. George Santos was expelled from Congress for a litany of alleged criminal misdeeds — a move that Williams and other New York Republicans led the charge for — Santos called for a House Ethics Committee investigation of Williams because of his behavior in the video.

Williams is seen confronting Gordon outside the party, pointing his finger at Gordon and vowing that if “you f–k with my family, I’ll end every relationship you have.” In response to that on-camera threat, Gordon denied any knowledge of the unspecified allegations at issue.

Williams said that the clash stemmed from a pressure campaign that began after his decision to give Gordon 30 days to find new employment. The ousted aide responded by contacting a GOP campaign consultant close to the lawmaker.

That consultant, Aaron Evans, told POLITICO he went to Williams in recent weeks to relay Gordon’s warning: Before going through with the firing, Gordon said, the lawmaker should think about the potential embarrassment his family would experience if TMZ found out about his daughter’s OnlyFans account.

POLITICO is not publishing the name of Williams’ daughter to protect her privacy.

Williams said in the interview that, a few days prior to that altercation, other aides of his told him that Gordon had shared details of the OnlyFans account widely with other congressional staffers. Gordon was also “saying really rude things about [Williams’] wife,” the lawmaker recalled.

Gordon lived in Williams’ home during part of the latter’s campaign, the lawmaker recalled. But their relationship began unraveling over the course of their months living together and as they worked more closely together in D.C., according to Williams, who described his former chief of staff as “a deeply broken person.”

Williams declined to comment on the specifics behind the dismissals of Gordon and Sweeney. A person with direct knowledge of the personnel matter, granted anonymity to discuss internal office dynamics, said that Sweeney was fired for reasons related to job performance.

After Sweeney recorded the lawmaker during their argument outside the holiday party, Williams said the former aide delivered a personal jab at the lawmaker: “Hey, f–k you! Guess what, bitch? All I have to do is pay $7 to watch your daughter shove her phone up her p—y!”

One eyewitness of the skirmish, however, could not confirm that version of events and recalled seeing Williams leave the area right after knocking Sweeney’s phone out of his hands. This eyewitness, granted anonymity to share recollections of the tense moment, added that the scene was loud and crowded so a comment might have been missed.

Williams’ critics have noted that he has faced multiple staff departures beyond Gordon and Sweeney since taking office. According to the nonpartisan website Legistorm found that he has had three times more turnover than the average House member.

Williams argued that he reshaped his office culture after settling into Congress, removing hires that Gordon had initially made, and said he’s now surrounded by a team he is proud of.