The campaigns of Andrew Yang and Eric Adams exchanged harsh attacks, and Carlos Menchaca, a city councilman from Brooklyn, dropped out of the race.For much of the 2021 New York City mayoral campaign, the major Democratic candidates have been polite and collegial, with few flash points of tension.Those days are over.The two leading candidates, Andrew Yang and Eric Adams, have gone from the occasional tepid squabble to a full boil.In recent days, Mr. Adams inaccurately said “people like Andrew Yang,” the former presidential hopeful, have never held a job. Mr. Yang’s campaign responded by accusing Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, of making “false and reprehensible attacks.”The Adams campaign shot back with a statement claiming the Yang campaign was “attempting to mislead people of color.”The attacks were a reflection of how the race seemed to be narrowing as the June 22 primary draws closer; indeed, the field grew thinner last week, as a council member from Brooklyn dropped out of the race.Here is what you need to know:The Adams-Yang rivalry comes into focusAlthough many voters are still undecided in the mayor’s race, one dynamic in the contest has become increasingly clear: the growing tension between Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang.Mr. Yang, with his high name recognition, celebrity status and intense in-person campaign schedule, has topped the sparse public polling, as well as some private polling; even detractors privately acknowledge he has injected energy into the race.Mr. Adams, with a Brooklyn base, several major union endorsements and strong ties to a range of key constituencies, has come in second — by varying margins — in several surveys.In the last week, the two campaigns engaged in their most significant clashes to date.The Eric Adams camp accused Mr. Yang of abandoning the city at “its darkest moment” during the pandemic.John Minchillo/Associated PressMr. Adams and his campaign ripped into Mr. Yang’s résumé and accused him of abandoning the city at “its darkest moment” during the pandemic, referring to Mr. Yang’s decision to relocate his family to the Hudson Valley for long stretches of last year.Mr. Yang’s campaign accused the Adams camp of launching attacks laced with “hate-filled vitriol” and sought to elevate Mr. Adams’s record on stop-and-frisk policing tactics as an issue in the race. Both campaigns suggested the other was acting in bad faith.The exchanges signaled just how personal, and ugly, the race could become — and offered a clear sign that the competition is intensifying.“I think it’s too early to say it’s a two-person race,” said Chris Coffey, a co-campaign manager for Mr. Yang, in a briefing with reporters on Friday. But, he went on, “Right now, I’d rather be Andrew and then I’d rather be Eric than anyone else.”Who has the most signatures to get on the ballot?Polls and fund-raising are not the only indicators of enthusiasm for candidates — there are also petition hauls required to get on the ballot.A mayoral candidate only needs 2,250 signatures to be on the ballot, but most garner far more, as a cushion to guard against invalidated signatures and for bragging rights.Mr. Yang arrived at the Board of Elections office in Lower Manhattan last week to file his 9,000 signatures, belting out his own petition-themed lyrics to the song “Seasons of Love” from the Broadway musical “Rent.”“How many signatures could you get in a year? Through Covid and clipboards and winter and cups of coffee,” he sang before trailing off.Mr. Adams’s campaign said it filed more than 20,000 signatures. Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, claimed 25,000.Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, said she had collected 13,000 signatures. In an email, her campaign thanked her purple-clad volunteers, including some who created colorful shoes in her honor reading “Mayorales” and “DM4NYC.”Menchaca exits the raceCarlos Menchaca’s moment of truth came in mid-March, when he looked at his comparatively meager fund-raising numbers and realized he would not become New York City’s next mayor after all.Mr. Menchaca, a councilman from Brooklyn, had by that point raised just $87,000 in a race featuring several multimillion-dollar campaign war chests and two super PACs dedicated to other candidates.And so on Wednesday, he announced on Twitter his decision to suspend his campaign.In an interview, Mr. Menchaca said he would rededicate himself to serving out his final year in the City Council, focusing on the same New Yorkers who were at the center of his campaign: essential workers, many of them immigrants.In particular, he wants to give noncitizens the power to vote in municipal elections, a position embraced by several of his competitors.Mr. Menchaca also plans to endorse a candidate in the mayoral race but has not identified his choice. At this point, he believes the race is wide open.“New Yorkers have yet to truly engage,” Mr. Menchaca said. That belief is supported by a recent poll finding half of likely Democratic voters have yet to decide on a mayoral candidate.Nor, he noted, have his allies in the progressive world coalesced behind a particular candidate. By not doing so, they have lost an opportunity to wield influence in city government, in his view.“The more time goes by, the less ability the noncandidate energy is going to have to impact the race,” he said.Will the next mayor expand preschool for all?Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week that he is expanding a 3-K program for 3-year-olds — the sequel to universal prekindergarten, his signature mayoral achievement — to roughly 40,000 total seats.This year’s candidates for mayor have their own education proposals, but how would they treat the prekindergarten program?At the mayor’s news conference, Laurie Cumbo, the majority leader of the City Council, said the next mayor should expand the program to 2-K for 2-year-olds. Most of the candidates agree, though they have different plans for doing it. Some want to focus on less wealthy families.Mr. Stringer said he supported the idea and pointed to his “NYC Under 3” plan to subsidize child-care costs for families making less than $100,000.“As mayor, I have a plan to go even bolder and ensure that every family has access to quality child care starting at birth,” he said.Mr. Yang said his family had benefited from universal prekindergarten.“We should not only expand existing 3-K services, but also work to create 2-K programs in the coming years,” he said in a statement.Mr. Adams’s campaign said his plan focuses on subsidies and tax breaks for parents and providing free space to child-care providers to bring down their costs.Others who support a 2-K expansion include Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive,; Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio; Shaun Donovan, a former Obama administration official; and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner. Ms. Garcia’s child-care plan focuses on families making less than $70,000 a year.Yang is criticized for ditching a forum focused on povertyRunning for mayor in the middle of a pandemic has meant a constant stream of virtual forums for the top-tier candidates, who sometimes attend multiple online events in the same day.Mr. Yang, citing forum fatigue, pulled out of a candidates’ forum last week focused on economic and housing security for poor and working-class New Yorkers — a move that disappointed the organizers, given that Mr. Yang is probably best known for proposing a universal basic income as a tool to fight poverty.“This was a forum that brought together groups who advocate on behalf of low-income New Yorkers and the working poor,” said Jeff Maclin, vice president for governmental and public relations for the Community Service Society, one of the forum’s sponsors. “We were a little surprised that he was passing up an opportunity to deliver a message to this community.”Several other top mayoral contenders attended the forum.Sasha Ahuja, Mr. Yang’s co-campaign manager, said in a statement that he attended three forums last week and had also participated in a Community Service Society forum on health care in January. Mr. Yang also spent time with The Amsterdam News, a co-sponsor of the forum, for a profile recently, “but there are far too many forums and we can’t do each one,” Ms. Ahuja said.Elinor R. Tatum, the editor in chief and publisher of The Amsterdam News, a New York-based Black newspaper, moderated the forum. She said Mr. Yang’s decision to not attend might hurt him among her readers.“He’s got a lot of name recognition, but our community doesn’t know him,” said Ms. Tatum. “We know him as a presidential candidate in name only. We know him from talking about national issues. We don’t know him as a New Yorker.” More

Is the world on the brink of chaos, or is the chaos already here? Some commentators view the presidential campaign as a referendum on chaos. “I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”— Taylor Swift, endorsing Kamala Harris Others predict that the election […] More

The sale of access to the president to investors in his memecoin has been assailed by Democrats and even some Republicans as unethical.A group of 220 cryptocurrency enthusiasts who won a dinner with President Trump by investing in his memecoin will gather tonight at his golf club in Virginia, an event that has sparked outrage from critics who call it an unethical sale of access to the presidency.Mr. Trump and his business partners in the venture announced the event last month, calling it the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION” in the world. They framed it as a contest: The top 220 buyers of the coin would dine with the president at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., while the top 25 would join him at a more intimate cocktail reception and go on a tour of the White House the next day.A leaderboard on the website of Mr. Trump’s memecoin, called $TRUMP, allowed crypto investors to see how much they needed to purchase to move up the rankings and win a spot.In effect, Mr. Trump was offering access to himself in exchange for an investment in his cryptocurrency, which he started selling just days before his inauguration in January. Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans have assailed the contest as an inappropriate use of presidential power. A protest outside the golf club is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or mascot; it typically has no function beyond speculation. But Mr. Trump’s coins have become a vehicle for investors, including some based overseas, to funnel money to his family.A business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Democrats and Republicans managed to come together to update the archaic Electoral Count Act after they recognized it could again be abused to subvert the presidential vote.WASHINGTON — Like most members of Congress, Senator Susan Collins was rocked by the events of Jan. 6, 2021, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and violently disrupted the ceremonial tally of presidential electoral votes.Almost exactly a year later, Ms. Collins, Republican of Maine, happened upon an article by a prominent Republican election law expert proposing changes in the way Congress counted electoral votes, in the hopes of preventing a recurrence. She headed into the regular private weekly party luncheon last Jan. 4 and spontaneously raised the idea of overhauling the antiquated 135-year-old law, the Electoral Count Act.She found a ready audience among some fellow Republicans who recognized the threat.“Our system was clearly at risk,” Ms. Collins said of the prospect that ambiguities in the archaic law could again be exploited to try to overturn a presidential election and halt the peaceful transfer of power.There was one significant problem. Senate Democrats had election-related goals of their own aimed at countering attempts at voter suppression in some Republican-led states. They saw the new proposal as a subterfuge intended to sabotage their much broader legislation.As word got out that Ms. Collins, with early encouragement from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and always a figure of suspicion among Democrats, was pursuing changes in the electoral count law, the Senate’s top Democrat objected sharply.“The McConnell plan, that’s what it is, is unacceptable, unacceptably insufficient and even offensive,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said as he blistered the “cynical” idea on the Senate floor on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault. “Score keeping matters little if the game is rigged.”Now, another year later, Congress is poised to approve changes to the law in an effort to better secure the presidential election system that was severely tested when President Donald J. Trump and his supporters sought to exploit uncertainty in the law to hold on to power.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.It took the efforts of a bipartisan group of 15 senators, months of intense negotiations, the endorsement of outside experts aligned with both parties and a stark realization that the outdated law could again be misused if changes weren’t made. And the results the next time could be worse.“It has been lying there like unexploded ordnance since 1887,” said Bob Bauer, an election law specialist who had served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, referring to the existing law. “It just cried out for attention.”It also required an acceptance by Democrats that the law needed to be strengthened even if they could not obtain much broader voter protections they were pursuing. Democrats failed in that push because of Republican resistance and a refusal by two Democrats to eliminate the filibuster to impose the voting changes.Congress is poised to approve changes to the law in an effort to assure that it cannot be used to subvert the counting of electoral votes.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“It finally got down to what can we do truly to address this horrific insurrection,” said Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Ms. Collins’s initial bipartisan partner in the effort. “How do we prevent this from ever happening again? And that’s really how we got down to the basics.”Under the legislation, which was deemed urgent enough to be added to the huge year-end spending bill now heading toward final approval, the role of the vice president in overseeing the quadrennial counting is spelled out as strictly ceremonial. That provision was a response to Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful effort to convince Vice President Mike Pence that the law gave him the power to reject electoral votes from some states and block or delay certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election.The new legislation also raises the threshold for objecting to a state’s electoral votes to one-fifth of both the House and Senate. Until now, just one House member and one senator could force the House and the Senate to consider objections, and members of both parties have raised objections over the years with little to no evidence to back them up. The legislation also seeks to prevent competing slates of electors from being presented to Congress.The article that spurred Ms. Collins was written by Ben Ginsberg, a well-known Republican election lawyer who served as counsel to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush and was deeply involved in the Florida recount.He argued in National Review that Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself should want the law rewritten because the Jan. 6 assault had essentially provided a “blueprint” for future efforts to undermine an election, noting that in 2024 a Democratic vice president would be presiding over the counting of the ballots.After opening the door to a potential rewrite, Ms. Collins immediately began meeting with a core group of senators who are typically part of bipartisan Senate efforts, including Mr. Manchin, the Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (now an independent), and the Republicans Mitt Romney of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.The group quickly expanded to include the Republicans Todd Young of Indiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, along with two more Democrats, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Warner of Virginia.As their work was proceeding behind the scenes, Democrats were pushing ahead with an ambitious plan to counter what they saw as a pervasive effort in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after an expansion of vote-by-mail efforts and other pandemic-releated changes led to Democratic victories in 2020. Democrats said the state voting law changes were aimed mainly at minorities, and President Biden infuriated Republicans when he referred to the new laws as “Jim Crow 2.0.”The Democratic legislation encountered united Republican opposition in the Senate and died after Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema refused to support a change in Senate rules to gut the filibuster. Mr. Manchin said he sought to incorporate some of the more general electoral provisions in the rewrite of the electoral count law but was rebuffed by Republicans.Ms. Collins said the bipartisan group needed to remain focused on the electoral count or risk a shattering of the coalition.“If we got sidetracked and started re-litigating the Voting Rights Act, we would lose the Republican support, and the effort would go nowhere,” she said in an interview. “And an opportunity to really make a difference in future presidential elections would be lost.”With Democrats unhappy about the fate of their broader bill, Ms. Shaheen encouraged Ms. Collins to add more Democrats to the group to increase chances that Democrats could ultimately be persuaded to back it. Senators Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut and Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, both Democrats, came aboard as Ms. Collins said she realized she needed to broaden the ideological base “beyond the usual suspects.”Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said he unsuccessfully sought to incorporate some of the more general voting rights provisions favored by his party in the rewrite of the electoral count law.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMs. Shaheen said she suggested “that having them involved from the beginning in the discussion would be very helpful in persuading the rest of the Democratic caucus that this was a serious effort and we needed to do this even though we couldn’t get some of the changes people wanted.”Members of the bipartisan group also kept in regular contact with the leaders of the Rules Committee, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the Democrat who leads the panel, and Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, its top Republican, to ease the way for the panel’s review of the legislation and avoid criticism they were operating outside of normal channels.Ms. Collins also briefed top White House officials on the legislation to assure them it was both in good faith and a necessary effort. And the group enlisted respected legal experts like Mr. Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a senior lawyer in the administration of George W. Bush, to advise the lawmakers and publicly back the legislation.The Rules Committee ultimately voted 14 to 1 on Sept. 27 to send the legislation to the floor with just Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, objecting and Mr. McConnell voting in favor. Even Mr. Schumer got on board despite his early skepticism.“I worked to get this legislation included in the omnibus because we must prevent the electoral count process from being used as a trigger point for insurrection again,” said Ms. Klobuchar, adding that Senate approval means “we are one step closer to protecting our country from the chaos we saw on Jan. 6.” More

The president commuted the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson. “For him to highlight me,” she says, “it makes me know he’s not only proud, he’s super proud.” Source: Elections – nytimes.com More