One of the stranger New York City mayoral primaries in modern memory ended, for me, with being barred from the election night party of Eric Adams, the Democratic frontrunner.

The Adams campaign stopped me, along with a New York magazine reporter, at the front door of the swank Williamsburg nightclub where the party was held, insisting with no further explanation that we were not “on the list” despite both of us having RSVP’d. Our educated guess was that the denials had to do with some of the reporting we have done on Adams’s dubious political history.

This anecdote may be a self-indulgent tidbit to relay, but it’s a revealing detail: Adams, who is fond of issuing slashing criticisms of the media, was telegraphing that he doesn’t really need us, the nattering press corps. He is a machine mayor who is on the verge of assembling his own victorious coalition: working-class whites, blacks, and Latinos, along with the wheezing outer borough Democratic organizations and the oligarch cash raining down from the real estate and finance lobbies.