Where's Eric? Tracking NY politicians' public schedules

Note: I had mostly finished this project last weekend, before Eric Adams dropped out of the mayoral race. While Adams will still be the mayor until January, this project made more sense while he was an active candidate.

WHERE'S ERIC? provides a compilation and visualization of when Eric Adams and other New York officials have failed to make their public schedule available in advance, as reported by Politico.

As the New York City mayor's race escalates, I've been paying closer attention to the local politics-focused media outlets, including reading Politico's "New York Playbook" regularly. Aside from the actual news, they have a brief section where they ask: "Where's Kathy?" and "Where's Eric?", and summarize what their public schedules for the day are.

That is, if they receive them. Lately Adams' entry has been some variant of "Schedule unavailable as of 10 p.m. [previous night]".

I was curious what this actually meant in the long-term; was I coincidentally just reading Playbook on days he didn't provide his schedule? Or has he always been bad about providing his public schedule? Are other politicans any better?

Of course, the best way to answer this question was to look at literally the entire history of New York Playbook, so I processed the entire archive dating back to 2016 to get a more complete picture. The first Playbook issue that contained then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio's schedules was February 21, 2017: de Blasio had events in Manhattan and The Bronx while Cuomo had no public schedule.

Moving forward to 2025, I was mildly surprised to learn that Adams was actually perfect in providing his public schedule for the first three years of his term. Then on Friday, March 21, his first ever "Schedule unavailable as of 10 p.m. Thursday." appeared.

In April, he didn't provide his public schedule more often than he did. Over the past 8 weeks, his schedule has been unavailable 65% of the time.

This is...not great.

Knowing what our public officials are up to is a standard form of transparency that enables the press to document their actions so the public can hold them accountable. Not being up front with what you're doing undermines public trust, and while this might feel like a small thing, I think it's a decent indicator for how public officials respect the public and the press in general.

Given how chaotic the last few months of the Adams administration have been, part of me is curious whether this is due to incompetence or malice. We know quite well that Adams acts maliciously when it comes to the city hall press corps.

Where's Cuomo?#

And yet as bad as Adams is at this, he is still better than Andrew Cuomo, who, out of the four officials reported by Politico, is the worst.

WHERE'S ANDREW? shows how his record was consistently spotty since early 2017, but dramatically worsened in May 2020. Admittedly that was a pretty chaotic time for everyone, but this the same person who wanted us to celebrate his leadership during that time period.

Where's Bill and where's Kathy?#

During that same time periods Adams and Cuomo were failing at providing their public schedules, WHERE'S BILL? and WHERE'S KATHY? show in stark contrast that it was completely feasible to regularly provide their schedules.

Both provided their schedule to Politico 99% of the time, which I think shows that this is not a difficult task, and makes Adams' and Cuomo's failure to do so even more inadequate and unacceptable.

Methodology#

After scraping Politico's archive, the "Where's {name}?" fields were extracted into a database (raw data), with special handling for some edge cases. For example, on January 6, 2022, Politico had an joint item, "Where are Kathy and Eric?".

Also for about two weeks, Politico spelled it as "BlLL" (that's a lowercase L instead of an I). Oops.

A regular expression was used to identify days when the schedule was unavailable, specifically matching the phrases:

• schedule unavailable
• not available
• schedule not available
• schedule not released
• unavailable as of
• not released
• by press time
• schedule yet
• no public schedule released as of
• no public schedule available as of
• as of {number}

Notably this does not match when a schedule was provided but there were no public events.

I performed a spot check against most of the unavailable dates and far fewer of the available ones, erring on the side of identifying false positives. If you do find an error, please contact me.

Major credit and thanks to the Politico reporters for collecting and reporting this data for nearly a decade.