Elections

Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, became the latest Democrat to enter the 2022 race for governor.On a weekend swing through Southern California, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, wooed corporate donors to join a new fund-raising initiative aimed at helping her become the nation’s first Black female governor.Closer to home, Gov. Kathy Hochul — her campaign accounts already swelling with more than $11 million — waded into Ms. James’s political backyard on Sunday, preaching from the pulpits of Black churches in vote-rich Brooklyn and Queens about the scourges of the coronavirus and gun violence.Two days later, Jumaane D. Williams of Brooklyn, New York City’s public advocate, formalized his bid for governor, using a campaign launch video to position himself as an activist with the most authoritative claim to the race’s increasingly crowded left lane.“Without courageous progressive leadership, the way things have always been will stand in the way of what they can be,” he said in the video.Three months after Ms. Hochul’s unexpected ascension as the state’s first female governor, next year’s Democratic primary contest is now veering toward something New York has not seen in decades: a freewheeling intraparty battle among some of the state’s best-known political figures.The race, which has played out in recent weeks from the beaches of Puerto Rico to West Hollywood, Calif., and will culminate in June, will test traditional racial, geographic and ideological coalitions in a liberal stronghold, setting up one of the most high-profile Democratic primary battles in the nation as a midterm election year arrives.“Like me, so many people are going to grapple with this really, really hard,” said Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president.The melee in the making has already inspired a mix of anticipation and wariness among party leaders.For some left-wing officials and activists, the profusion of possible nominees has stirred memories of this year’s mayoral primary, when they struggled to coalesce around one candidate, and Eric Adams, a relative moderate, triumphed. This time around there is a real commitment, officials say, to unite behind one contender early — most likely Ms. James or Mr. Williams — though that may be easier said than done.Mr. Williams, the New York City public advocate, lost to Ms. Hochul in 2018 in a race for lieutenant governor.Anna Watts for The New York TimesMore moderate leaders are voicing worries, too, warning that after this month’s stinging electoral losses for Democrats in New York and across the country, nominating someone seen as too far to the left could put the party’s hold on Albany at risk. Some have pointed to the losses to argue for their own brands of politics.Steven Bellone, the Suffolk County executive who is thought to be considering a number of statewide offices, said the drubbing his party took on Long Island “was a message to the Democratic Party.” He added: “If our party is not sounding the alarm now, in advance of the midterms, I think we’re in for a very tough time ahead.”The tensions were on vivid display just after Election Day as New York’s political elite — including every potential candidate but Mr. Williams — decamped to the humid, booze-filled beaches of Puerto Rico for an annual postelection junket of lobbying, politicking and partying.After months of shadowboxing, it proved to be a surreal campaign in miniature, as Ms. Hochul, Ms. James, and Mr. Bellone schmoozed under palm trees alongside two more potential Democratic candidates: Mayor Bill de Blasio and Representative Thomas Suozzi. Contenders met surreptitiously with City Council members, party activists and union leaders in what amounted to high-powered focus groups fueled by piña coladas.Ms. James, for her part, offered fresh indications in Puerto Rico that she intends to run to the left of Ms. Hochul while building a base that, her allies hope, will be broader than that of Mr. Williams.She referred to herself as “the face of the Working Families Party,” New York’s leftist alternative to the Democratic line. She literally dropped a mic after a stem-winding campaign appeal to Bronx Democrats gathered in a makeshift club, who roared their approval. And the next morning, Ms. James turned a breakfast hosted by labor unions into a de facto campaign rally.“Join the O.G. team,” Ms. James said at a Working Families Party gathering. “Her name is Tish James.”Ms. Hochul showed her political power in other ways. She threw a lavish soiree in a ballroom overlooking the ocean, where labor leaders and business lobbyists fought for the governor’s ear between bites of passed hors d’oeuvres, and Mr. Adams showed up, a few days after Ms. Hochul made a cameo at his victory party.In an interview in a private room at a beachfront hotel — which was briefly interrupted when Ms. James walked in — Ms. Hochul warned that the general election in the governor’s race could be competitive; Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island is considered the leading Republican candidate. She urged her party to focus on matters of public safety and economic growth, among other priorities, after Democrats lost badly across New York.Governor Hochul announced that her campaign had raised $11 million in her bid for a full four-year term. Stephanie Keith for The New York Times“They have concerns about where our party’s headed,” she said. “They want to make sure that the mainstream principles of our party prevail.”For now, though, it is the left-leaning and Brooklyn-area lanes of the primary that appear most crowded. As many as three candidates — Ms. James, Mr. Williams and Mr. de Blasio — could ultimately run: all boasting of deep ties to the progressive-left movement, and all from that borough.“I’m supporting Jumaane because I think he has real potential to fire people up,” said Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller-elect. Calling both Mr. Williams and Ms. James “really compelling leaders,” he also emphasized that “it’s important for progressives to get on the same page in the governor’s race and to rally around one candidate.” Allies of Ms. James had hoped that Mr. Williams, who garnered 47 percent of the vote running against Ms. Hochul as lieutenant governor in 2018, would skip the race, wary that the two candidates would siphon votes from one another.An in-person meeting between Ms. James and Mr. Williams to discuss the race last month, before either had formally entered, ended with both still moving toward a run, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting. Representatives for both candidates declined to comment on the meeting, which was first reported by City and State.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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Neither race received much national attention, but there’s a long history of special election results foreshadowing the next general election.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.A lot seems to be going poorly for Democrats right now, including President Biden’s sinking approval ratings and the results of this month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey.But two obscure special elections in Ohio’s 11th and 15th congressional districts, where Democrats and Republicans each retained long-held seats, revealed a possible bright spot for Democrats and faintly signaled that political conditions may not be as dire for Democrats as they seem.Neither race received much national attention. Neither race was especially competitive. And neither had a high turnout. But unlike in the flashier races for Virginia and New Jersey governor, the two Democratic candidates in the Ohio congressional races ran about as well as Democrats usually do. They ran far closer to the party’s recent benchmarks, including Mr. Biden’s showing in the last presidential election, than Democrats did in Virginia, where Terry McAuliffe lost to the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, and in New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, won by a slim margin.While it would be a mistake to read too much into these two low-profile affairs, it would also be a mistake to ignore them. The two House races didn’t receive much attention for a simple reason: Neither party had any reason to contest them. Ohio’s 11th District is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the 15th is firmly Republican.Yet in both races, the Democratic House candidates ran only three percentage points behind Biden’s showing against former President Donald Trump in last year’s election. The margin is nothing for Democrats to brag about, but it’s simply not the same as what they experienced in Virginia and New Jersey, where the Republican candidates ran 12 and 13 points ahead of Mr. Trump.Of the two districts, Ohio’s 15th is more competitive — and the most representative of next year’s battlegrounds. It stretches from the suburbs around Columbus to the conservative working-class countryside of south-central Ohio. Unlike the House battlegrounds, this is not a district where Democrats have a chance to prevail, even under favorable circumstances: Mr. Trump won the district by 14 points while the incumbent Republican, Steve Stivers, won it by 27 points last November.But despite a more favorable national political environment, Mike Carey, a Trump-endorsed Republican and coal lobbyist, defeated Allison Russo, a Democratic state representative, by a fairly typical 17-point margin — a bit better than Trump, and quite a bit worse than Mr. Stivers.While the results of the Virginia election spurred talk that the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch on race and cultural issues might be hurting the Democrats in the suburbs, Ms. Russo won 55 percent of the vote in the Franklin County portion of the district, home to the Columbus suburbs, nearly matching the 56 percent won by Mr. Biden.Ohio’s 11th District is even less competitive. The majority-Black district, which snakes from Cleveland to Akron, favored Mr. Biden by a whopping 61 points last November. The previous Democratic representative, Marcia Fudge, who is now the secretary of housing and urban development, won by 60 points. The result was similar this time: Shontel Brown, the establishment-backed Democrat who narrowly defeated the progressive favorite Nina Turner in an August primary, won by 58 points.It might seem odd to draw attention to the results of uncompetitive races, but special congressional election results often do a decent job of foreshadowing the outcome of the next midterm elections. Four years ago, special elections were one of the first signs of Democratic strength after Mr. Trump was elected president. So far this cycle, other special election results have tended to resemble the modest Republican gains in Ohio more than the significant G.O.P. swings in Virginia and New Jersey.Another reason to pay attention is that the special congressional elections are contests for federal office, not state or local government.While politics has become increasingly nationalized in recent years, it remains quite common for voters to split their tickets and back the other party in down-ballot races for governor or other local offices. Maryland and Massachusetts elected Republican governors in 2018, despite the so-called blue wave that year. Local issues, like education or property taxes, naturally play a much bigger role than they do in federal contests. And it is much easier for a relatively moderate candidate for local office to shed the baggage of the national party. After all, a vote for Youngkin as governor of Virginia is not a vote to make Kevin McCarthy the House speaker or Mitch McConnell the Senate majority leader.Democrats and Republicans were deadlocked on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking whether voters would back a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Historically, the measure tracks well with the eventual House national vote. On average, Republicans lead by less than a percentage point, according to FiveThirtyEight — they took the lead while I wrote this newsletter.A roughly tied House national vote would most likely mean clear Republican control of the chamber, thanks to partisan gerrymandering and the tendency for Democrats to win lopsided margins in reliably Democratic areas. But it would be a much closer race than one might guess based on Virginia and New Jersey.And it would be roughly in line with the results in Ohio: a four-point shift to the Republicans, compared to Biden’s four-point win in the national vote.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

Mnuchin and Pompeo discussed removing Trump after Capitol attack, book claimsTwo cabinet members considered invoking the 25th amendment, new book by the ABC White House correspondent says Donald Trump’s secretary of state and treasury secretary discussed removing him from power after the deadly Capitol attack by invoking the 25th amendment, according to a new book.‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attackRead moreThe amendment, added to the constitution after the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, provides for the removal of an incapacitated president, potentially on grounds of mental as well as physical fitness. It has never been used.According to Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, by the ABC Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, talked to other cabinet members about using the amendment on the night of 6 January, the day of the attack, and the following day.Removing Trump via the amendment would have required a majority vote in the cabinet. Karl reports that Mnuchin spoke to Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and an avowed loyalist.Mnuchin did not comment for Karl’s book, which is published on Tuesday. Karl writes that Pompeo responded only after Karl told Trump the former secretary of state had not done so.“Pompeo through a spokesman denied there have ever been conversations around invoking the 25th amendment,” Karl writes. “The spokesman declined to put his name to the statement.”Karl also reports that Pompeo asked for a legal analysis of the process for invoking the 25th amendment.“The analysis determined that it would take too much time,” Karl writes, “considering that Trump only had 14 days left in office and any attempt to forcefully remove him would be subject to legal challenge.”Karl says Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, and Elaine Chao, transportation, might have supported invoking the 25th amendment but both resigned after the Capitol attack.Chao is married to the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell – who broke with Trump over the Capitol riot.Karl also says that “while the discussions did happen, the idea that Trump’s cabinet would vote to remove him was, in fact, ludicrous”.Pompeo is among Republicans jostling for position ahead of the 2024 presidential primary but that is a process which demands demonstrations of fealty to Trump, who continues to dominate the party in part by toying with another White House run.Trump is free to do so because he was acquitted at his second Senate impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the Capitol insurrection.At a rally near the White House on 6 January, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, by blocking certification of electoral college results. Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, eventually declined to weaponise his role overseeing the vote count, as Trump demanded he should.Karl reports that in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, around which five people died, “at least two cabinet secretaries” asked Pence, who had been holed up at the Capitol as rioters chanted for his hanging, to convene a cabinet meeting.Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguishedRead morePence did not do so, Karl writes, adding that there is no evidence to suggest Pence was involved in 25th amendment discussions.On 7 January, Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, formally asked Pence to invoke the 25th amendment. Pence waited five days, then refused.Pence is also a potential candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024.TopicsDonald TrumpMike PompeoTrump administrationUS politicsMike PenceUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

Washington-aligned countries backslid at nearly double the rate of non-allies, data shows, complicating long-held assumptions about American influence.The United States and its allies accounted for a significantly outsize share of global democratic backsliding in the last decade, according to a new analysis.American allies remain, on average, more democratic than the rest of the world. But nearly all have suffered a degree of democratic erosion since 2010, meaning that core elements like election fairness or judicial independence have weakened, and at rates far outpacing average declines among other countries.With few exceptions, U.S.-aligned countries saw almost no democratic growth in that period, even as many beyond Washington’s orbit did.The findings are reflected in data recorded by V-Dem, a Sweden-based nonprofit that tracks countries’ level of democracy across a host of indicators, and analyzed by The New York Times.The revelations cast democracy’s travails, a defining trend of the current era, in a sharp light. They suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances.In many cases, democracies like France or Slovenia saw institutions degrade, if only slightly, amid politics of backlash and distrust. In others, dictatorships like Bahrain curtailed already-modest freedoms. But, often, the trend was driven by a shift toward illiberal democracy.In that form of government, elected leaders behave more like strongmen and political institutions are eroded, but personal rights mostly remain (except, often, for minorities).U.S. allies often led this trend. Turkey, Hungary, Israel and the Philippines are all examples. A number of more established democracies have taken half-steps in their direction, too, including the United States, where voting rights, the politicization of courts, and other factors are considered cause for concern by many democracy scholars.The findings also undercut American assumptions, widely held in both parties, that U.S. power is an innately democratizing force in the world.Washington has long sold itself as a global champion for democracy. The reality has always been more complicated. But enough of its allies have moved toward that system to create an impression that American influence brings about American-style freedoms. These trends suggest that may no longer be true — if it ever was.“It would be too easy to say this can all be explained by Trump,” cautioned Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist who studies how great powers influence democracies. Data indicates that the trend accelerated during his presidency but predated it.Rather, scholars say this change is likely driven by longer-term forces. Declining faith in the United States as a model to aspire to. Declining faith in democracy itself, whose image has been tarnished by a series of 21st century shocks. Decades of American policy prioritizing near-term issues like counterterrorism. And growing enthusiasm for illiberal politics.With the American-aligned world now a leader in the decline of a system it once pledged to promote, Dr. Gunitsky said, “The international consensus for democratization has shifted.”Inmates in an overcrowded jail in 2016 in Quezon City, in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte oversaw a brutal crackdown on drug users.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesA Global CrisisSince the Cold War’s end, American-aligned countries have shifted toward democracy only slowly but, until the 2010s, mostly avoided backsliding.In the 1990s, for instance, 19 allies grew more democratic, including Turkey and South Korea. Only six, like Jordan, became more autocratic, but all by very small amounts.That’s according to V-Dem’s liberal democracy index, which factors dozens of metrics into a score from 0 to 1. Its methodology is transparent and considered highly rigorous. South Korea’s, for example, rose from 0.517 to 0.768 in that decade, amid a transition to full civilian rule. Most shifts are smaller, reflecting, say, an incremental advance in press freedom or slight step back in judicial independence.During the 1990s, the United States and its allies accounted for 9 percent of the overall increases in democracy scores worldwide, according to the figures. In other words, they were responsible for 9 percent of global democratic growth. This is better than it sounds: Many were already highly democratic.Also that decade, allied countries accounted for only 5 percent of global decreases — they backslid very little.Those numbers worsened a little in the 2000s. Then, in the 2010s, they became disastrous. The U.S. and its allies accounted for only 5 percent of worldwide increases in democracy. But a staggering 36 percent of all backsliding occurred in U.S.-aligned countries.On average, allied countries saw the quality of their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies, according to V-Dem’s figures.The analysis defines “ally” as a country with which the United States has a formal or implied mutual defense commitment, of which there are 41. While “ally” could be plausibly defined in several different ways, all produce largely similar results.This shift comes amid a period of turmoil for democracy, which is retrenching worldwide.The data contradicts assumptions in Washington that this trend is driven by Russia and China, whose neighbors and partners have seen their scores change very little, or by Mr. Trump, who entered office when the shift was well underway.Rather, backsliding is endemic across emerging and even established democracies, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a University of Gothenburg political scientist who helps oversee V-Dem. And such countries tend to be American-aligned.This does not mean Washington is exactly causing their retrenchment, Dr. Lindberg stressed. But it isn’t irrelevant, either.An American flag used for a photo-op between President Biden and Mr. Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Rome last month.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAmerican Influence, for Better or WorseDespite decades of Cold War messaging calling American alliances a force for democratization, this has never really been true, said Thomas Carothers, who studies democracy promotion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.While Washington encouraged democracy in Western Europe as an ideological counterweight to the Soviet Union, it suppressed its spread in much of the rest of the world.It backed or installed dictators, encouraged violent repression of left-wing elements, and sponsored anti-democratic armed groups. Often, this was conducted in allied countries in cooperation with the local government. The Soviets did the same.As a result, when the Cold War ended in 1989 and great power meddling receded, societies became freer to democratize and, in large numbers, they did.“A lot of people came of age in those years and thought that was normal,” Mr. Carothers said, mistaking the 1990s wave as both the natural state of things and, because the United States was global hegemon, America’s doing.“But then the war on terror hit in 2001,” he said, and Washington again pressed for pliant autocrats and curbs on democratization, this time in societies where Islam is predominant.The result has been decades of weakening the foundations of democracy in allied countries. At the same time, American-led pressures in favor of democracy have begun falling away.“Democratic hegemony is good for democratization, but not through the mechanisms that people usually think about, like democracy promotion,” said Dr. Gunitsky, the scholar of great power politics.Rather than alliances or presidents demanding that dictators liberalize, neither of which have much of a track record, he said, “The U.S. influence, where it’s strongest, is an indirect influence, as an example to emulate.”His research has found that the United States spurs democratization when other countries’ leaders, citizens or both see American-style governance as promising benefits like prosperity or freedom. Some may see adopting it, even superficially, as a way to win American support.But once-positive impressions of American democracy have been rapidly declining.“Very few in any public surveyed think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow,” a recent Pew Research Center study found. On average, only 17 percent of people in surveyed countries called U.S. democracy worth emulating, while 23 percent said it had never offered a good example.American prosperity may no longer look so appealing either, because of growing problems, like inequality, as well as the rise of China as an alternate economic model.And awareness of the United States’ domestic problems — mass shootings, polarization, racial injustice — has greatly affected perceptions.It may be more precise to think of what’s happening now as the rise of illiberal democracy as an alternate model. That system appears to be increasingly popular. Fuller democracy, with its protections for minorities and reliance on establishment institutions, is becoming less so. But even people who want illiberal democracy for their country tend to find it unappealing in others, thanks to its nationalist tendencies. As impressions of U.S. democracy as a global model degrade, so does democracy itself.“A lot of the appeal of democracy around the world is tied to appeal of the U.S. as a regime type,” Dr. Gunitsky said. “When one of those things decline, the other will decline.” More

In my political circles, the socialist and activist left, the recent defeat of India Walton, a democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, seemed all too familiar, even if she lost in an unusual way to the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron Brown. Ms. Walton prevailed against Mr. Brown in the Democratic primary, but for the general election, he ran a write-in campaign to retain his position.That outcome saddens and disappoints me. Like many admirers of Ms. Walton, I believe she was terribly mistreated by the New York Democratic Party, which largely fell in line behind Mr. Brown, even though he was not running as a Democrat. It’s not fair that Ms. Walton had to run against him twice, with the weight of a lot of centrist Democrats and Republicans behind him in the general election, and that he enjoyed the support of several prominent labor unions and much of the city’s and state’s larger party infrastructure. (Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand did endorse Ms. Walton.)Nevertheless, I am willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly (the race is not officially over but stands at roughly 59 percent for Mr. Brown to 41 percent for Ms. Walton); it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.They frequently claim that Americans want socialist policies and socialist politicians but are prevented from voting for them by the system. Or they argue that most American voters have no deeply held economic beliefs at all and are ready to be rallied to the socialist cause by a charismatic candidate.This attitude toward Ms. Walton’s defeat specifically and toward the political landscape more broadly is part and parcel of a problem that has deepened in the past five years: So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.As New York magazine’s Sarah Jones put it over the summer, “Should Democrats mount a cohesive critique of capitalism, they’ll meet many Americans where they are.” We are held back, the thinking frequently goes, not by the popularity of our ideas but by the forces of reaction marshaled against us.But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us. Bernie Sanders’s two noble failures in Democratic presidential primaries galvanized young progressives and helped create political structures that have pulled the party left. They also helped convince many of a socialist bent that only dirty tricks can defeat us. In the 2016 primary, the superdelegate system demonstrated how undemocratic the Democratic Party can be. Mr. Sanders won every county in West Virginia, for example, but the system at the time ensured that Mr. Sanders did not receive superdelegates in proportion to his vote totals (many superdelegates defied the wishes of the voters and supported Mrs. Clinton). In 2020, it was widely reported that after Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada, former President Barack Obama had an indirect role as the minor candidates in the primary rallied behind Joe Biden to defeat the socialist threat. There is little doubt that the establishment worked overtime to prevent a Sanders nomination.But the inconvenient fact is that Mr. Sanders received far fewer primary votes than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. He failed to make major inroads among the moderate Black voters whom many see as the heart of the Democratic Party. What’s more, he failed to turn out the youth vote in the way that his supporters insisted he would.Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves.The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous, because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the “emerging Democratic majority” myth became mainstream. Socialists can take some heart in public polling that shows Americans warming to the abstract idea of socialism. But “socialism” is an abstraction that means little without a winning candidate. And too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.Fredrik deBoer is the author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice” and publishes a daily newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

By the looks of his formidable résumé, the veteran Beltway journalist Jonathan Karl shouldn’t startle all that easily. “Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the State Department,” his author bio notes, “and has reported from the White House under four presidents and 14 press secretaries.” Until recently he was the chief White House correspondent for ABC News — a perch that placed him, as he put it in the title of his previous book, “Front Row at the Trump Show.”Yet in his new book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Karl comes across as almost poignantly ingenuous and polite to a fault, repeatedly flummoxed by what he saw in the last year of the Trump administration. “Front Row,” which had the unfortunate timing of being published in March 2020, before the consequences of Trump’s governance were fully laid bare, began with a solemn tribute to “objectivity and balance” and a complaint that “the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is relentlessly and exhaustively negative.” Just a year-and-a-half later, after 750,000 American Covid deaths and an attack on the Capitol, Karl allows that the “Trump show” may have in fact been more sinister than mere theatrics after all.“I have never wavered from my belief that journalists are not the opposition party and should not act like we are,” Karl maintains in “Betrayal.” “But the first obligation of a journalist is to pursue truth and accuracy. And the simple truth about the last year of the Trump presidency is that his lies turned deadly and shook the foundations of our democracy.”“Betrayal” is presented as an inside look at what happened in the last months of the Trump White House, beginning on Feb. 10, 2020. At the time, news about a novel coronavirus in China was percolating throughout the United States, but staffers in the White House seemed more immediately threatened by Johnny McEntee, a 29-year-old former college quarterback who went from carrying President Trump’s bags to becoming the director of the Presidential Personnel Office — “responsible for the hiring and firing of more than 4,000 political appointees across the federal government.”McEntee saw it as his duty to purge from the executive branch anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to the president; less than a year later, on Jan. 1, McEntee would send a text message to Mike Pence’s chief of staff insisting that the vice president had the authority to overturn the results of the November election. He pointed speciously to an episode involving Thomas Jefferson as an example.The full (and absurd) text of the memo is one of several scoops Karl offers in this book, along with another memo from McEntee’s office, sent less than a month before the election, outlining why Defense Secretary Mark Esper should be fired. (Esper’s supposed transgressions included focusing the department on Russia and “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion.’”) Karl also says that Trump threatened to create his own political party, backing down only when Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, countered by threatening to give away the valuable email list of his 40 million supporters for free — “effectively making it impossible for Trump to make money by renting it out.”Jonathan Karl, the author of “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.”ABC NewsMcDaniel and Trump have since denied any such standoff — Trump even denied it to Karl’s face, in one of the last interviews he granted for “Betrayal.” During the same interview, Trump reminisced about the speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the attack on the Capitol, calling it “a very beautiful time with extremely loving and friendly people.” Karl, at least inwardly, was aghast. “I was taken aback by how fondly he remembers a day I will always remember as one of the darkest I have ever witnessed,” he writes, adding that Trump seemed to justify the death threats made against his own vice president. “It boggled my mind,” Karl says.It did? The author’s expressions of surprise are so frequent and over-the-top that they are perhaps the most surprising parts of this book. “Betrayal” is less insightful about the Trump White House and more revealing of Karl’s own gradual, extremely belated awareness that something in the White House might in fact be awry. Events strike him as “wacky,” “crazy,” “nuts.” He delves into the outlandish conspiracy theories around the presidential election, earnestly explaining why each of them is wrong. He scores a number of on-the-record interviews with Trumpworld insiders — nearly all of whom insist that even as they publicly sided with Trump, they were bravely telling the president some very tough truths in private.Karl recalls Sept. 10, 2020, as a turning point for him: the day he asked “the most forcefully confrontational question I had ever asked of a president — or any other political leader.” By that point Trump had been playing down the pandemic for half a year, insisting the coronavirus “affects virtually no one.” Karl, who until that moment had “cringed” when he heard other reporters use the word “lie,” was sitting in his front-row seat at a briefing and moved to press Trump: “Why did you lie to the American people, and why should we trust anything you have to say now?”Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

US president Joe Biden has told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he hoped to have a candid conversation about human rights and security issues as the two began a meeting meant to lower tensions between the two global superpowers. Biden added that the two leaders must make sure their relations do not veer into open conflict, including by installing ‘common sense’ guardrails. Biden spoke with Xi over a video conference as the two leaders engaged in their most extensive talks since Biden became president in January. Xi said the two sides must increase communication and cooperation to solve the many challenges they face.

Biden-Xi virtual summit: US president warns nations must not ‘veer into open conflict’ More