Aurelia Butler

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    The Parents Who Helped Shape Zohran Mamdani’s Politics

    Zohran Mamdani’s parents, a filmmaker and a professor, gave him the foundation for his run for mayor of New York. But their own political views may open him up to attacks.When Zohran K. Mamdani took a commanding lead in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday, his parents were just as surprised as the party’s establishment. Both are accustomed to the spotlight — his mother as an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and his father as a Columbia University professor. Neither expected to be this close to the halls of power.Mr. Mamdani, 33, has credited his parents with providing him a “privileged upbringing” that included constant discussion of politics and global affairs. But at a moment of intense political fights over conflict in the Middle East, his parents’ critical views of Israel and his father’s academic work on settler colonialism and human rights could make them a target of attacks from the right.The concept of settler colonialism has become especially fraught during the war in Gaza, as some supporters of Palestinians have applied the term to Israel, which some critics say is unfair.“We hadn’t bargained for being parents of a prospective mayor,” Mahmood Mamdani, 79, the candidate’s father and a renowned professor of international affairs and anthropology, said in the couple’s Manhattan apartment the morning after the primary.Mira Nair, 67, Mr. Mamdani’s mother, directed “Salaam Bombay!,” “Mississippi Masala” and “Monsoon Wedding,” among other films. Over the past year, in between filmmaking, she has canvassed for her son and cooked biryani and chicken for him and his campaign staffers. Both parents emphasized that their son, a democratic socialist who could become the city’s first Muslim mayor, has not turned to them for political advice. But they may now find themselves drawn into the campaign nonetheless.Zohran Mamdani with Ms. Nair at his primary night celebration. Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had been leading in the polls, conceded the race as Mr. Mamdani stretched his lead in returns on Tuesday night.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWe 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

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    ‘Re-elect Eric’: Adams Kicks Off Bid to Oppose Mamdani for Mayor

    Just a few months ago, it appeared unlikely that Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who was facing federal corruption charges, would be in a position to seek a second term.With the political world in New York City and beyond still abuzz over Zohran Mamdani’s ascendance as the likely Democratic mayoral candidate, the current mayor, Eric Adams, held a news conference on Thursday to deliver a countermessage: Don’t forget about me.Mr. Adams appeared on the steps of City Hall to formally kick off an independent bid for re-election in November, with a crowd of supporters holding up “Re-elect Eric for Mayor” signs, echoing Mr. Mamdani’s campaign ads that primarily use his first name.The obstacles the mayor faces are substantial. His approval rating was at historic lows even before he was indicted last fall on charges of bribery and soliciting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals. He grew more unpopular after the charges were dropped by the Trump Justice Department, leading to accusations of a quid pro quo that Mr. Adams has denied.The mayor was denied public matching funds because of the charges of soliciting straw donations. His management of the city has been questioned. The diverse coalition he put together to win election in 2021 is completely fractured. And his third-party bid puts him at an immediate disadvantage in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.As evidence of his divisiveness, the mayor’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by protesters who called him a criminal and accused him of selling out the city to President Trump. Nearby in City Hall Park, protesters blew whistles and engaged in profane chants aimed at disrupting the announcement.At the news conference, the mayor seemed to sense the skepticism.“Why am I running for re-election?” Mr. Adams said, surrounded by supporters. “Because we’ve got more to do.”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

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    Lawyer Who Pushed Bogus Trump Elector Scheme Is Disbarred in New York

    Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to use phony slates of pro-Trump electors to overturn the 2020 election, was indefinitely barred from practicing in the state last year.Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who helped spearhead a brazen legal effort to use phony slates of pro-Trump electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was disbarred in New York on Thursday, cementing an indefinite ban issued last year.The decision by a New York State appellate court concluded a strange legal journey for a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked for former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida and later evolved into a supporter of President Trump.In a seven-page opinion, the court cited a criminal racketeering case centered on the fake electors in Georgia, where in 2023 Mr. Chesebro pleaded guilty.The New York court said Thursday that Mr. Chesebro’s “criminal conduct — conspiracy to commit filing false documents — is unquestionably serious” and that he had undercut “the very notion of our constitutional democracy that he, as an attorney, swore an oath to uphold.”Mr. Chesebro, 64, could not immediately be reached for comment, and lawyers who have represented him did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The decision came nearly eight months after Mr. Chesebro was indefinitely barred from practicing law in New York because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The theory that Mr. Chesebro pushed centered on the certification process carried out on Jan. 6, 2021. He posited that Mike Pence, then the vice president, could count bogus slates of electors for Mr. Trump rather than the real ones from states that backed Joseph R. Biden Jr., or otherwise use the existence of the pro-Trump electors to delay the process.In 2022, before Mr. Chesebro was indicted, he told Talking Points Memo that it was “the duty of any attorney to leave no stone unturned in examining the legal options that exist in a particular situation.”Other lawyers who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election have also faced consequences. In 2023, Sidney K. Powell and Jenna Ellis, two members of Mr. Trump’s legal team after the 2020 election, also pleaded guilty in election-interference cases in Georgia. Ms. Ellis’s license to practice law in Colorado was suspended last year.Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who became Mr. Trump’s legal browbeater, was barred from practicing in New York and in Washington, D.C.Mr. Chesebro was mentored at Harvard by Laurence H. Tribe, a leading liberal constitutional law scholar. With Mr. Tribe, Mr. Chesebro helped represent Mr. Gore, a Democrat, in the legal battle over the 2000 presidential election recount.Mr. Tribe said Thursday that Mr. Chesebro was particularly skilled at “coming up with arguments — sometimes too clever.”“He’s one of the few students who seriously disappointed me,” Mr. Tribe said, adding: “He’s a very smart person who learned how to manipulate and abuse the tools that the law gave him. And it was proved now that he can’t be trusted to use those tools at all.”Kitty Bennett More

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    How Brad Lander Helped Push Zohran Mamdani Toward Victory

    In New York’s mayoral primary, Andrew Cuomo was no match for the energy of progressive rivals who saw a virtue in unity.The night before Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York City, Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” bringing their progressive bromance to a national viewership. Ostensibly running against each other to be New York’s next mayor, their alliance showcased what parliamentary-style coalition politics could look like in the age of so much vitriol and polarization.Not long before early voting began, the candidates cross-endorsed each other in the name of an ideological victory and the defeat of the better-known, better-funded front-runner. “We both agree that corrupt, abusive Andrew Cuomo should not be allowed anywhere near City Hall,” Mr. Lander, the city’s comptroller, said on the show, as the studio audience cheered. And now it looks as if he won’t.Against the predictions of nearly all polling, Mr. Mamdani is on track for a decisive win — even before the tallying of several rounds of ranked-choice voting, assumed to be the only route to defeating an opponent with such an imposing advantage. Mr. Mamdani leads in the first round of counting by 7 percentage points, a margin significant enough that Mr. Cuomo quickly conceded on Tuesday night.The result could reasonably lead to the assumption that a still-novel method of ballot casting in New York had little to do with the outcome. But in fact, ranked-choice voting, now in place in at least 60 jurisdictions around the country, shaped the competition from the beginning.It rewards a campaign style that played to Mr. Mamdani’s strengths: ever-present, on-the-street, nonstop voter engagement. Mr. Mamdani was doing everything — even jumping into the freezing cold ocean to call attention to his proposal for a rent freeze — and his many thousands of campaign volunteers were everywhere.All of this stood in sharp contrast to Mr. Cuomo’s I’ve-got-this-locked-up strategy, one that relied heavily on big-money TV advertising, little noticed by voters under 70, and the conviction that there was no one well-known or formidable or experienced enough to beat him.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

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    Eric Adams Meets With Business Leaders Desperate to Stop Mamdani’s Rise

    Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund manager, and some other New York City business leaders are aghast at Zohran Mamdani’s success in the Democratic mayoral primary and are considering backing Mr. Adams in the general election.In a conference room in Manhattan on Wednesday night, Mayor Eric Adams and Daniel S. Loeb, the hedge fund manager, met with other business leaders and political brokers to discuss how to stop the rise of Zohran Mamdani and possibly bolster Mr. Adams’s re-election campaign.The business leaders were impressed that Mr. Adams was already staging a public fight against Mr. Mamdani, several people familiar with the meeting said. Earlier in the day, during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Adams called Mr. Mamdani a “snake-oil salesman.”Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman from Queens, on Tuesday shocked the New York political establishment by outperforming Andrew M. Cuomo, the former New York governor, in the Democratic primary for mayor. Mr. Cuomo is now considering whether to run as an independent in the general election, or end his campaign altogether.Should Mr. Cuomo withdraw, Mr. Mamdani is poised to face off against Mr. Adams, who is running as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels; and Jim Walden, a lawyer also running as an independent.The prospect of Mr. Mamdani’s campaigning as the Democratic standard-bearer in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one has sent shivers down the spines of many New York business leaders, who recoil at his plans for expansive new government programs funded with tax increases on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers. Some have quickly begun to throw their support behind the incumbent mayor, despite the scandals that have tarnished his tenure.Andrew Epstein, a spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, said the businessmen at the meeting were simply scared of “our plan to tax them a little bit more to fund an agenda to lower the cost of living and improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers.”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

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    Zohran Mamdani’s Winning Style

    In all the post-mortems that have appeared since Zohran Mamdani upset the political apple cart to potentially, if unofficially, clinch the Democratic nomination for New York mayor, one particular aspect of his appeal has been largely overlooked: not how Mr. Mamdani conducted his campaign but how he looked while conducting it.Put another way: Mr. Mamdani didn’t just record himself for his various social media platforms running into the freezing Atlantic on New Year’s Day to publicize his pledge to freeze rents; he recorded himself running into the freezing ocean not in a wet suit or a bathing suit, but in a suit and tie.Sure, it was funnier that way. But it was also tactical. For a 33-year-old progressive and democratic socialist trying to be the city’s first Muslim mayor, whose opponents are painting him as a “100 percent Communist lunatic” and a “radical leftie” (that from President Trump on Truth Social), not to mention trying to other him because of his racial and religious identity, dressing like an establishment guy offers a counterargument of its own.Leaving a Passover rally in April.Andres Kudacki for The New York TimesOn election night.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesAs Mr. Mamdani walks the tightrope between embodying change, generational and otherwise, and reassuring those who may be leery of such change, his clothes have played a not insignificant role. His mouth may be saying one thing, but very often his outfit is saying another.This is a man, after all, who appeared in Vogue India as long ago as 2020, when he won his seat in the State Assembly, and whose mother is the film director Mira Nair. He has long understood that costume is one way to convey character.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

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    If Everyone Had Voted, Kamala Harris Still Would Have Lost

    New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout.A voting line in Phoenix in November. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesIn the wake of last November’s election, many Democrats blamed low turnout for Kamala Harris’s defeat.It wasn’t entirely without reason, as turnout dropped in Democratic areas, but many months later it is clear the blame was misplaced. Newly available data, based on authoritative voter turnout records, suggests that if anything, President Trump would have done even better if everyone had voted.The new data, including a new study from Pew Research released Thursday, instead offers a more dispiriting explanation for Democrats: Young, nonwhite and irregular voters defected by the millions to Mr. Trump, costing Ms. Harris both the Electoral College and the popular vote.The findings suggest that Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism once again turned politics-as-usual upside down, as his gains among disengaged voters deprived Democrats of their traditional advantage with this group, who are disproportionately young and nonwhite.For a generation, the assumption that Democrats benefit from high turnout has underpinned the hopes and machinations of both parties, from Republican support for restrictive voting laws to Democratic hopes of mobilizing a new progressive coalition of young and nonwhite voters. It’s not clear whether Democrats will struggle with irregular voters in the future, but the data nonetheless essentially ends the debate about whether Ms. Harris lost because she alienated swing voters or because she failed to energize her base. In the end, Democrats alienated voters whose longtime support they might have taken for granted.The 2024 election may feel like old news, especially in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York City on Tuesday, but the best data on the outcome has only recently become available. Over the last two months, the last few states updated their official records of who did or did not vote in the election. These records unlock the most authoritative studies of the electorate, which link voter turnout records to high-quality surveys. More