Adams welcomes comparison to Fetterman

NEW YORK — One's a Black former NYPD captain and mayor of a city of over 8 million who favors bespoke suit jackets. The other is a cargo shorts-wearing white onetime AmeriCorps volunteer who was mayor of a Pittsburgh suburb of under 2,000.

Still, New York City Mayor Eric Adams agreed Thursday that he was cut from an equally idiosyncratic political cloth as Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman.

"People want to classify me as a conservative or liberal, I just don’t fall in those lines," Adams said on CNN's "New Day."

The host had asked Adams about a recent New York Times article that said Fetterman, who won the state's Democratic Senate primary earlier this week, shared some of his same traits, namely that they seem to be "simultaneously progressive, moderate and conservative," in the words of Fordham University political science professor Christina Greer.

"People are going to try to classify me and that’s just not who I am," Adams said, echoing Fetterman, who notes in his campaign biography that he doesn't "look or talk like a typical politician."

Like Adams, Fetterman plays up his working-class roots and unique background as someone who looks like a biker with his shaved head and goatee but has a Harvard degree.

"I'm a blue collar, ex-law enforcement officer that struggled with dyslexia, had my encounters with law enforcement," Adams said on CNN Thursday. "And I know that what I went through in my life, New Yorkers and Americans are going through right now and we need answers and solutions."

Both men like to say they were progressives before progressivism was en vogue.

And they've both been hailed as the future of the Democratic Party — Fetterman in the opinion section of The New York Times this week, and Adams in his own words a day after winning the mayoral primary last year.