Elections

The final debate in the New York City mayor’s race quickly turned rancorous, with Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa trading personal and political barbs.There was talk of schmoozing with murderous gang members, and accusations of hiding money to evade paying child support. Pagliacci, the tortured clown of the 19th-century opera, was name-checked. So was Miley Cyrus.All of this came up Tuesday night in an explosive second and final New York City mayoral debate between Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican.Mr. Adams is considered a prohibitive favorite in the race, and Mr. Sliwa has been trying to rattle him for weeks. Those efforts, including at the first debate, last week, had been unsuccessful.But on Tuesday, Mr. Sliwa’s repeated attacks seemed to crack Mr. Adams’s resolve to ignore a rival he has previously characterized as a clown.Mr. Sliwa began the one-hour debate by quizzing Mr. Adams relentlessly for saying he had met with gang leaders who “had bodies” — an apparent reference to murder victims. He continued to shout out questions until Mr. Adams grew visibly irritated and returned fire. The two were soon exchanging personal insults.“You are acting like my son when he was 4 years old,” Mr. Adams said. “Show some discipline so we can get to all of these issues. You’re interrupting and being disrespectful.”Mr. Sliwa expressed outrage when Mr. Adams criticized him for failing to pay child support.“That is scurrilous that you would say that,” he said, adding: “How dare you bring my family into this!”Mr. Sliwa’s fiery performance a week before Election Day was unlikely to change the dynamics of the race. Democrats have an overwhelming voting edge in New York City, and most of the real drama occurred four months earlier in the party’s bruising primary. Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, emerged as the Democratic nominee by a margin of fewer than 8,000 votes.Since the primary, Mr. Adams, 61, has acted like the mayor-elect, raising funds and planning his transition. He has mostly ignored Mr. Sliwa while providing glimpses of what his mayoralty could look like: attending glitzy events like the opening of a new Manhattan skyscraper as well as others focused on vulnerable New Yorkers, including one with homeless advocates in Brooklyn.Mr. Adams has been methodically plotting his path to City Hall for more than a decade, and the debate on Tuesday was one of his final hurdles. He tried to use the setting to return to his campaign message: His life story of rising from poverty is the “American dream.”“When I think about overcoming poverty, overcoming injustices, becoming a police officer, a state senator and now I’m Brooklyn borough president, I know and you know that far too many people leave the nightmarish realities of somewhere else to come here to experience that American dream,” he said in his closing remarks. .css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}For Mr. Sliwa, the debate, hosted by ​​WABC-TV, offered a last opportunity to try to damage Mr. Adams. Mr. Sliwa, 67, has sought to depict his opponent as being too focused on the city’s elite and out of touch with regular New Yorkers.He has also tried to tie Mr. Adams to Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term whose approval rating sagged after a failed presidential bid.Mr. Sliwa, asked to grade Mr. de Blasio as mayor, gave him an F and called him a “miserable failure” who has taken a “Miley Cyrus wrecking ball to a city we love.” Mr. Adams gave Mr. de Blasio a B-plus and said he could have done more to address the city’s homelessness crisis and to make city agencies leaner.“We are hemorrhaging too much money and I want to turn that around,” Mr. Adams said.The candidates also disagreed over allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections — an issue that the City Council is considering. Mr. Adams supports the idea; Mr. Sliwa opposes it and said that voting is a “privilege for American citizens.”During their exchange on the issue, Mr. Sliwa falsely claimed that Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat from Washington Heights who is originally from the Dominican Republic and a key ally of Mr. Adams’s, was not a U.S. citizen.Mr. Adams appeared calm and above the fray at the first debate and he tried to adopt that stance again on Tuesday. In a radio interview earlier in the day, he had said he would resist Mr. Sliwa’s efforts to “pull me into a slugfest” and repeated a memorable line from the first debate: that his opponent was engaged in “buffoonery.”But Mr. Sliwa set the tone for the second debate from the start, interrupting the moderators and asking Mr. Adams his own questions. He used a similar approach in a Republican primary debate with Fernando Mateo, a restaurateur, leading Mr. Mateo to threaten him: “I have enough dirt to cover your body 18 feet over.”Mr. Adams tried to maintain a smile during the debate Tuesday but he appeared frustrated at times. He talked about how Mr. Sliwa had confessed to making up crimes for publicity in the 1980s — an attack line from the first debate.“New Yorkers, understand this, it is a crime to fake a crime,” Mr. Adams said. “He faked a kidnap, he faked a robbery.”Then he went a step further and mentioned Mr. Sliwa’s child support issues. Mr. Sliwa pays child support for his three sons and had a messy divorce from his third wife that played out in the tabloids.When Mr. Sliwa raised his rival’s meetings with gang members, Mr. Adams said they had been part of his effort to improve public safety through intervention and prevention.“I’m speaking to those who have committed crimes to get them out of gangs,” Mr. Adams said.Given the opportunity to ask Mr. Sliwa a question late in the debate, Mr. Adams declined: “My goal today is to speak to the voters, and there is not one question I have for Curtis.”The tense debate ended on a positive note. Asked to say something nice about each other, Mr. Adams complimented Mr. Sliwa’s dedication to his 16 cats.“I take my hat off to Curtis — what he is doing with cats,” Mr. Adams said. “I think we need to be humane to all living beings and that includes animals.”Mr. Sliwa praised Mr. Adams’s vegan diet.“As someone who has been in the hospital many, many times, I hope one day to be a vegan,” he said. “I’m working on it.” More

In the final week of the mayoral campaign, Curtis Sliwa is courting Republicans, Democrats and animal lovers.His dedication to animal welfare is personal. Mr. Sliwa has given numerous media tours to introduce New Yorkers to the 16 cats living inside his 320-square-foot studio apartment.His feline collection began six years ago when he moved in with his fourth wife, Nancy Sliwa, in her apartment near Central Park. They took in rescue cats that were sick or abandoned.Now Mr. Sliwa is making animal welfare a central part of his campaign. He released a “13-Point Animal Welfare Plan” last week that includes creating a “no-kill” shelter system and ending the horse carriage industry.His first television ad featured him holding one of his cats, Tuna, and promising “compassionate solutions” as mayor.During a reporter’s visit to his home over the summer, the cats climbed onto the dining table, walked across a photographer’s lap and gathered in a front window to watch pigeons. The apartment did not smell bad.“You change the litter three times a day,” Mr. Sliwa said. More

More from our inbox:Facebook MisinformationErasing Older Women at the Art Institute of ChicagoA Conversation With VotersSam Anthony, left, with his birth father, Craig Nelson, at Mr. Anthony’s home in Falls Church, Va., in August.Debra Steidel WallTo the Editor:Re “With DNA and Friend’s Help, a Dying Son Finds His Father” (front page, Oct. 10):If we continue to keep the process of finding one’s birth family and opening birth records as difficult as possible, as with Sam Anthony, profiled in your article, we are preventing valuable family connections that should be a basic human right.Adoptees are often completely cut off from our birth families the second our adoption papers are finalized. If it weren’t for DNA testing I would never have discovered that two half-siblings of mine had been adopted into a different family a few states away.Adoptees should not have to go to great lengths to reconnect with their birth family. But, unfortunately, the complicated and often expensive process of DNA testing and hiring private investigators is often the only way to find biological relatives.When birth records are sealed, adoptees suffer in order to uphold an archaic standard that was meant to shroud adoptions in secrecy to prevent shame. We live in a different era now and, like Sam, deserve a right to our records.Melissa Guida-RichardsMilford, Pa.The writer is the author of “What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption.”To the Editor:This is the latest article in The Times exposing the egregious practice of denying adoptees the truth about their beginnings and hiding the babies’ fate from their birth parents.Steve Inskeep’s March 28 essay, “I Was Denied My Birth Story,” revealed his fury about not knowing “the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.”Lisa Belkin reviewed Gabrielle Glaser’s book “American Baby” (Book Review, Jan. 24), another tragic tale about when adoptions are closed.How many tragic tales do we have to hear to understand that birth parents, adoptive families and adoptees need to know one another? How many children must lie awake at night wondering why they were given away? How many adoptees do not know their genetic history?The solution is easy — open adoption in which birth parents and adoptive families choose each other and stay in touch through social media, texts, photos and visits.With Ancestry.com and 23andMe closed adoptions do not remain closed. Why not avoid the emotional pain by sharing the truth from the beginning?Nancy KorsWalnut Creek, Calif.The writer is an adoption facilitator.Facebook Misinformation  Illustration by Mel Haasch; Photograph by Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Misinformation Tripped Alarms Inside Facebook” (front page, Oct. 24):New disclosures that point to a disconnect between self-serving public statements of Facebook executives and the internal expressions of concern of lower-level employees surrounding the 2020 election paint a picture of a company policy that enables and protects misinformation.These revelations, especially those involving the Jan. 6 insurrection, suggest that management overlooks or even accepts incendiary content in its pursuit of profits — a practice that is often out of sync with the conscience of its employees and is at odds with the best interests of the public.Taken together with the recent testimony of the whistle-blower Frances Haugen, who detailed to Congress a corporate culture that places profits ahead of its users’ mental health, this new documentation clearly strengthens the case for congressional oversight and public awareness.Facebook’s reach and influence are so vast that its apparent unwillingness to filter misinformation exceeds the bounds of free speech, harming its users and putting democracy at risk. The company has had a good run, but the days of its free ride maybe numbered.Roger HirschbergSouth Burlington, Vt.Erasing Older Women at the Art Institute of Chicago  Art Institute of ChicagoTo the Editor:Re “Museum Ousts Volunteers in Diversity Push. Uproar Ensues.” (news article, Oct. 22):Alas, the invisible old woman! While your article on the Art Institute of Chicago’s decision to end the volunteer careers of 82 docents focused on the controversy over the racial makeup of the docents, it neglected to really deal with the overt age discrimination that such otherwise worthwhile pushes for greater diversity promote.Not all docents are older or female, but they tend to be. Largely, they can volunteer with such expertise and loyalty because after long careers and/or raising families, many finally have the time to turn to volunteering in their communities. Yet the museum — along with much of our society — invalidates these older women, erasing their presence.Dee BaerWilmington, Del.The writer is a senior guide at the Delaware Art Museum.A Conversation With Voters  Aaron Nesheim for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Anti-Robocall: Listening to Voters Talk” (news article, Oct. 21):This wonderful article identifies a way to improve the minimal communication that currently prevails among those holding different opinions regarding values and public policy.As psychologists and spiritual teachers have long observed, deep, nonjudgmental listening to others with diverse perspectives can increase compassion for one another and perhaps lead to compromise solutions to the serious problems afflicting our nation and the world.Would that our Congress might take heed and schedule such listening sessions about the national issues too often discussed secretly that leave the public uninformed. Broadcasting honest dialogues that state positions and not just attacks on the other side on TV and the internet would manifest a concern for an informed citizenry.Bruce KerievskyMonroe Township, N.J. More

When, in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, Congress finally certified the 2020 Electoral College count, more than 140 Republican members of Congress had voted, in one way or another, to reject the outcome. They had embraced the spirit of the mob that stormed the Capitol the day before, even if they had not physically joined it.With that said, there was a smaller number of congressional Republicans who may have gone further than simply casting a vote the way President Donald Trump wanted them to, in the days leading up to Jan. 6. According to a new report by Hunter Walker in Rolling Stone, “Multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.”Walker’s sources, two unnamed organizers who say they helped plan the rallies, claim that Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn and Louie Gohmert or members of their staffs spoke to or collaborated with pro-Trump activists in the days, weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol. Gosar, a staunch defender of the former president, reportedly told potential rally goers that Trump would give them a “blanket pardon” for their activities.Greene, Gohmert, Boebert, Brooks, Cawthorn and Biggs have all pushed back strongly on the Rolling Stone report, which appeared over the weekend. Gosar called it “categorically false and defamatory.”“There was a meeting at the White House about voter fraud and election theft activity,” Brooks said. “But I have no recollection of any kind of organizational activity regarding the speeches on Jan. 6.”For his part, Gohmert released a statement Monday: “No one in my office, including me, participated in the planning of the rally or in any criminal activity on Jan. 6. We did not attend or participate at all.”Boebert also issued a statement on Monday: “Let me be clear. I had no role in the planning or execution of any event that took place at the Capitol or anywhere in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6th.”The organizers who spoke to Rolling Stone apparently plan to testify before the Jan. 6 select committee to provide more details about what they say was collaboration between Republican lawmakers and the pro-Trump activists who planned the events that ultimately led to the attack.In the meantime, some Democrats are already calling for their removal from office.“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capitol must be expelled,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”Likewise, Representative Cori Bush of Missouri said on Twitter that the House must “investigate and expel members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol.”Bush had actually introduced a House resolution for this purpose just days after the attack. “There is no place in the people’s House for these heinous actions,” she said at the time, referring to “members who attempted to disenfranchise voters and incited this violence.”“I firmly believe,” she went on, “that these members are in breach of their sworn Oath of Office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They must be held accountable.”They weren’t. There was simply no appetite, among House leadership, for such drastic and decisive action. There still isn’t. But it was a serious demand, and we should take it seriously.Bush’s resolution rests on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which cleared Congress in 1866 and was ratified in 1868:No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.In plain English, Congress has the power and authority to expel from office any constitutional officer who engages in sedition and takes up arms against the Constitution of the United States.The original context for this, obviously, was the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. By the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, a conservative unionist from Tennessee, had taken charge of Reconstruction with a plan to restore the Southern states as equals, their political and constitutional status essentially unchanged from what it was before the war.Under Johnson’s arrangement, the former Confederate states could operate under their antebellum constitutions, the end of slavery notwithstanding. All-white electorates could elect all-white legislatures and send all-white delegations to Washington. Some of these men were, like Johnson, conservative unionists. Many more were former rebel leaders. Alexander Stephens — of the infamous Cornerstone Speech — was elected to represent Georgia in the Senate in 1866 after he was arrested and imprisoned as the former vice president of the Confederacy in 1865.Either way, neither group supported anything like fundamental change to the social and political fabric of the South. If seated, these delegations to Congress would stymie and block any Republican effort to reconstruct the South as an open society with free labor.Indeed, had every Southern representative been seated, Republicans would not have had the votes to get the 14th Amendment through Congress in the first place, on account of the two-thirds majority requirement for passage.Worse than potential obstruction was the real chance that the South would re-enter Congress with as much, or more, political power than it had before the war. The 13th Amendment had abolished chattel slavery, which effectively gutted the three-fifths compromise. And thanks to Johnson, recalcitrant Southern elites could form new governments without extending the vote to free and recently freed Blacks. When the 14th Amendment repealed the three-fifths compromise outright, the effect would be to give the South a considerable bonus in Congress.“Beginning with the reapportionment of 1870,” the legal scholar Garrett Epps writes in “The Antebellum Political Background of the Fourteenth Amendment,” “the Southern states would receive full representation for each freed slave rather than a mere sixty percent, a change that would give the region thirteen more House seats and electoral votes without the extension of minimal political rights, much less the franchise, to the freed slaves who formed the basis of the representation.”To head off this threat, Republicans took two steps. First, they refused to recognize, much less seat, members from the states readmitted under Johnson’s policies. And then, looking to the future, they wrote this prohibition on former Confederate leaders into the Constitution as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Republicans would prevent the re-ascendence of this “slave power” with a blockade of federal office deployed against Southern elites.If the ultimate goal of Section 3, in other words, was to preserve the integrity of Congress against those who would capture its power and plot against the constitutional order itself, then Representative Bush is right to cite the clause against any members of Congress who turn out to have collaborated with the plotters to overturn the election and whose allies are still fighting to “stop the steal.”There is a movement afoot to undermine electoral democracy for the sake of a would-be strongman. We have the tools to stop it. Congress, and by this I mean the Democratic majority, should use them.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

Documentos de la empresa revelan que en varias ocasiones trabajadores de la red social advirtieron de la difusión de desinformación y teorías de la conspiración antes y después de las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos.Dieciséis meses antes de las elecciones presidenciales celebradas en noviembre del año pasado, una investigadora de Facebook describió un acontecimiento alarmante. Una semana después de abrir una cuenta experimental, ya estaba recibiendo contenido sobre la teoría conspirativa de QAnon, según escribió en un informe interno.El 5 de noviembre, dos días después de las elecciones, otro empleado de Facebook escribió un mensaje para alertar a sus colegas sobre los comentarios con “desinformación electoral polémica” que se podían ver debajo de muchas publicaciones.Cuatro días después de eso, un científico de datos de la empresa escribió una nota para sus compañeros de trabajo en la que decía que el diez por ciento de todas las vistas de material político en Estados Unidos —una cifra sorprendentemente alta— eran publicaciones que alegaban un fraude electoral.En cada caso, los empleados de Facebook sonaron una alarma sobre desinformación y contenido inflamatorio en la plataforma e instaron a tomar medidas, pero la empresa no atendió los problemas o tuvo dificultades para hacerlo. La comunicación interna fue parte de un conjunto de documentos de Facebook que obtuvo The New York Times, que brindan nueva información sobre lo ocurrido dentro de la red social antes y después de las elecciones de noviembre, cuando a la empresa la tomaron desprevenida los usuarios que convirtieron la plataforma en un arma para difundir mentiras sobre la votación. More

Terry McAuliffe attacks Trump, but avoids talking about his Democratic ally in the White House — pointing up a vulnerability for the party next Tuesday, and beyond.RESTON, Va. — In Terry McAuliffe’s tough fight for a new term as Virginia’s governor, he has been striving to frame the election as a referendum on a president.Just not the one who is currently sitting in the Oval Office.For weeks, Mr. McAuliffe has made little mention of President Biden, instead using his campaign rallies, media interviews and millions of dollars in campaign advertising to make the race all about former President Donald J. Trump.In a way, Mr. Biden’s scheduled campaign stop with Mr. McAuliffe Tuesday evening, as part of a last-week effort to energize Democratic voters, highlights just how little he has been present in the race at all.The delicate distance Mr. McAuliffe has put between his campaign and the president, his friend of four decades — whom Mr. McAuliffe helped carry Virginia by 10 points just a year ago — underscores a difficult reality for Democrats looking anxiously ahead to the midterm elections next year. With his moderate, art-of-the-possible politics, Mr. Biden fails to rouse anywhere near the same passions as Mr. Trump, who spurred Democrats to the polls in record numbers throughout his four years in office. Nor has Mr. Biden’s administration given Mr. McAuliffe much to advertise, after months of Democratic infighting on Capitol Hill over the president’s dwindling domestic ambitions.Rather, in an off-year election with outsize national importance, Mr. Biden has loomed as the unnamed president just offstage: largely ignored in favor of his predecessor, though his own performance is a major factor in the closeness of the race and could play a big role in its outcome.Democrats reject the idea that the race is a referendum on Mr. Biden’s presidency, but there is widespread acquiescence to the idea that the party’s fortunes are yoked to his standing — a shift in strategy from the 2010 and 2014 midterms, when a number of Democratic candidates for competitive seats distanced themselves from former President Barack Obama. This, in turn, has sent waves of anxiety through Democratic circles, as lawmakers prepare for what are expected to be difficult congressional campaigns in 2022.“I don’t know if it’s a referendum on Biden, exactly — it’s just a general feeling of not understanding why nothing can get done,” said John Morgan, a Florida trial lawyer and top donor to both Mr. Biden and Mr. McAuliffe. He said he largely blamed congressional Democrats for the tightening of the Virginia race.“The party is single-handedly torpedoing Terry McAuliffe,” Mr. Morgan said. “And I think that if Terry loses, Democrats just need to grab a hold of themselves, because the midterms are going to be a blood bath.”Virginia’s off-year elections do not always accurately foreshadow the midterm results: Mr. McAuliffe won in 2013, defying the state’s pattern of electing a governor from the party that does not hold the White House, yet Republicans won the midterms the following year. And many fatigued Democratic voters now simply want to tune out national politics altogether.But strategists in both parties say Mr. Biden’s early struggles and the lack of enthusiasm around his presidency could be a decisive factor.“The overriding factor in the environment is not Donald Trump, it’s Biden’s approval rating,” said Tucker Martin, a Republican strategist in Richmond who voted for Mr. Biden but plans to support Glenn Youngkin, a Republican and former private equity executive, over Mr. McAuliffe. “Both these candidates, they’re really captive to the national political environment. That’s the reality.”Advisers to Mr. McAuliffe note that his contest with Mr. Youngkin tightened at the end of the summer, just as Mr. Biden’s approval rating began to fall, as the president’s promise of a return to normalcy faltered in the face of the Delta variant, chaos on the southern border and the tumultuous withdrawal from Afghanistan.But they see hopeful signs in the fact that Mr. McAuliffe’s support remains higher than Mr. Biden’s approval rating, which hovers in the low to mid-40s — lower than that of any president than Mr. Trump at this early stage.Mr. Biden, left, campaigned for Mr. McAuliffe in the summer around the time that the race tightened and Mr. Biden’s approval ratings fell.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s declining approval ratings among core Democratic constituencies, including young, Latino and Black voters, could inhibit turnout efforts for Mr. McAuliffe, complicating his path to victory in a race that could hinge on which candidate best mobilizes his base..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Swing voters in the suburbs have gotten over their early excitement about replacing Mr. Trump, said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who has run focus groups about the Virginia contest. While Mr. Biden’s victory at first inspired “ginormous relief,” she said, “Now, there’s a realization like, Oh, yeah, Biden’s not perfect, and things aren’t feeling enormously better.”Neither Mr. McAuliffe nor Mr. Youngkin has mentioned Mr. Biden in his ads, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign commercials, underscoring how little he motivates voters in either party — a striking change after many years in which sitting presidents routinely played starring roles in advertisements by candidates in both parties.In the closing weeks of the race, Mr. McAuliffe, who served a term as governor from 2014 to 2018 but was barred from a second consecutive term by Virginia law, has tried to put some daylight between his campaign and Mr. Biden’s administration. Though he never directly criticizes the president, Mr. McAuliffe has repeatedly highlighted the political risk posed by congressional inaction on the president’s legislative agenda. In private conversations with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House, allies of Mr. McAuliffe say he has argued that the souring national environment is hurting his chances.“We are facing a lot of headwinds from Washington,” Mr. McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said during a virtual call with supporters this month. “As you know, the president is unpopular today, unfortunately, here in Virginia, so we have got to plow through.”Mr. McAuliffe downplayed the remark, saying he was referring to a general sense of frustration with inaction in Washington. But it was a sharp departure from earlier in the race when Mr. McAuliffe predicted his state would “take off like a booster rocket” if he was elected governor and could work with Mr. Biden.The tonal shift is particularly striking, given the long friendship between the two men and the similarities in their political brands as experienced party insiders with centrist leanings. Mr. McAuliffe declined to run for president in April 2019 after a three-hour dinner with Mr. Biden during which the future president laid out his path to victory — one based on the same kind of consensus-oriented platform that Mr. McAuliffe had envisioned for himself.“I love the guy,” Mr. McAuliffe said of Mr. Biden at the time. “I’m a big fan.”Mr. Biden’s promises to move past polarizing politics helped him win the White House, offering a refuge for voters tired of the turbulence of the Trump era. Now, however, at a moment when Democrats need to marshal their forces, the prospect of calm leadership and a diminished agenda may not be so enticing to his Democratic base.Wes Bellamy, a co-chair of Our Black Party, which promotes the political priorities of Black voters, said Mr. Biden was not inspiring the same sort of loyalty from Black voters that Mr. Obama did.“Black folks came out in droves for the Biden administration,” said Mr. Bellamy, a former Charlottesville city councilman who was named to a statewide education post during Mr. McAuliffe’s first term. “And there has been a lot of people who really feel the administration hasn’t delivered on many of the things they wish they did.”To animate Democrats, Mr. McAuliffe has spent millions tying Mr. Youngkin to Mr. Trump, portraying the former president as a grave and continuing threat to democracy and to Democratic values like abortion rights.But some party strategists say it is not enough for Democrats to campaign on what they can block; with control of Congress and the White House, they need to be able to run on what they have accomplished.“The lack of base intensity is based on Democrats not delivering, after people spent four years resisting Trump and getting Democratic majorities,” said Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat who lost his seat in Congress after supporting Mr. Obama’s health care law in 2010 and blamed congressional moderates for stalling passage of Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda.Yet some Democrats worry that any distinction between the president and the party’s dueling factions in Congress will be lost on voters.“In America we’ve loved to shoot the messenger, and the messenger is always the president,” said Mr. Morgan, the Democratic donor. “We can’t shoot Trump. He’s gone. So you can either blame Biden or God.” More

Thomas Kenniff, who is facing Alvin Bragg in the Nov. 2 election, has focused his campaign on a recent increase in some types of crime.Thomas Kenniff believes that New York City is teetering on a precipice.Mr. Kenniff, the Republican candidate for Manhattan district attorney, is not referring to Covid-19 or climate-related disasters, like the flooding that killed 13 people in the city last month.No, it is crime that worries Mr. Kenniff — crime, and progressive policies that he believes have contributed to its rise, particularly the bail reform law that went into effect in January 2020, which stopped criminal courts from setting cash bail on most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.Though legal experts who have studied the matter say there is no clear connection between that law and the rise in some categories of violent crime, including murders and shootings, Mr. Kenniff, 46, is convinced that a link exists.“As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years,” he said in a recent debate with his Democratic opponent, Alvin Bragg. The election, on Nov. 2, will determine the leader of an office that handles tens of thousands of cases a year and conducts many high-profile investigations, including an ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, has an overwhelming advantage. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Manhattan by nearly eight to one, and residents of the borough — which Mr. Kenniff left for Long Island about four years ago — have not elected a Republican as their district attorney since 1937.Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney, supported the bail reform law that Mr. Kenniff has criticized.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kenniff, a major in the Army National Guard and veteran of the Iraq War, says he expects to compete with Mr. Bragg given the number of Manhattanites he hears from who are concerned about crime.“I do think there is something fermenting in response to what is happening on the street level that Alvin Bragg has not condemned in any meaningful way,” Mr. Kenniff said.Asked to respond, a spokesman for Mr. Bragg, Richard Fife, said that Mr. Kenniff had spent the campaign “making ridiculous attacks playing on people’s fears.”“Alvin Bragg understands from personal experience the safety concerns families face and the inequities embedded into our system,” Mr. Fife said.Mr. Kenniff has consistently asserted — as have other law enforcement figures, most prominently Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department — that the bail overhaul is partly behind the spike in certain categories of gun crime, which began in the summer of 2020.Experts disagree, and point toward similar spikes in murders and shootings in cities around the country, regardless of their bail laws.“There is no evidence linking the bail reforms to the uptick in shootings and homicides,” said Michael Rempel, the director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the mayor’s office, the state courts and other institutional players in the criminal justice system.Mr. Kenniff, who now works primarily as a defense lawyer, said that he sees a correlation and rejects arguments like Mr. Rempel’s.“I reject it based on what I’ve seen in my own practice and the people I’ve represented,” he said. “I reject it based on what I see on the streets.”From Long Island to IraqMr. Kenniff was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and grew up in Massapequa, in a waterfront house on the South Shore of Long Island. He attended the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. And he began to consider the possibility of being a lawyer, in part because of the unlikely influence of the actor Tom Cruise.“Whatever part he was playing, you wanted to do that,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I saw ‘Days of Thunder,’ I wanted to be a racecar driver. I saw ‘Cocktail,’ I wanted to become a bartender.”The movie that really influenced Mr. Kenniff was “A Few Good Men,” in which Mr. Cruise plays a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, military lawyers who prosecute and defend members of the armed services.After graduating from Hofstra’s law school, and spending several years at a law firm and the Westchester district attorney’s office, Mr. Kenniff began the commissioning process. In early 2005, he was deployed to a military base right outside of Tikrit, Iraq.While abroad, he defended soldiers who were charged with violations of military law and provided counsel to soldiers and civilians. He also sweated out a number of rocket attacks, said his roommate, Major Robert Kincaid, who added that Mr. Kenniff soon got used to the strikes.“We heard the alarms go off and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the shelter,’” Mr. Kincaid recalled. “And he looks at me and goes, ‘Are you going to do that? I think it’s safer in here.’”Mr. Kenniff returned to the United States toward the end of 2005 and after about six more months as a prosecutor in Westchester, he left the office to start a law firm with another veteran, Steven M. Raiser, where over the past 15 years he has done defense work for a wide range of clients.Mr. Kenniff spent long stretches of the pandemic housed at a hotel in Manhattan, like other service members, and on active duty at the Javits Center, which was transformed into a field hospital. During that time, Mr. Kenniff began following the nascent Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney and grew alarmed at what he was hearing.A Return to ‘Broken Windows’Eight candidates ran as Democrats to become Manhattan district attorney, including three without any prosecutorial experience.But as murders and shootings continued to rise in the early months of 2021, voters leaned toward more experienced contenders like Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Bragg won a close primary, leaving him poised to become the first Black Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Kenniff said he is concerned that Mr. Bragg — who supported the bail law and has pledged to dedicate new units in the office to hold the police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions — will implement lenient policies that will encourage crime.Asked about his own priorities, Mr. Kenniff said that he wanted to focus on reducing gun crime, which he believes means also cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.He said he believes in the merits of “broken windows” policing, the idea that actively policing and prosecuting petty crimes will have a healthy effect on the overall crime rate. The theory has been called into question by a number of criminologists and others, who say it naturally leads to discriminatory overpolicing.“I’m not trying to upend the whole concept of a prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I don’t need 20-page manifestoes about how I’m going to do this, this and that.”Mr. Kenniff has reserved much of his energy for criticizing the bail law, which was passed in an effort to ensure that poor people were not disproportionately penalized because they could not afford bail. The law effectively eliminated money bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but allowed for bail to be set on virtually all violent felonies.It was met with immediate resistance from opponents, who argued that it would lead to the release of dangerous criminals. In April 2020, the law was amended to allow judges more discretion to jail defendants. (It remains illegal in New York for judges to consider a defendant’s threat to public safety in setting bail, as it has been for the last 50 years.)The law remains a target of conservatives, including Mr. Kenniff, who says that along with the disbandment of the police’s anti-crime units and local politicians’ lack of support for the police, the law was key to rises in gun crime. He argues that the pretrial release of those charged with crimes like gun possession and misdemeanor assault has endangered communities.As of yet, there is no evidence of that. The mayor’s office of criminal justice has found that the bail law had no discernible effect on the rate of rearrest. And studies conducted in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which made similar changes, found that their rates of recidivism had not gone up.None of that carries weight with Mr. Kenniff.“The notion that these policies haven’t contributed to what is going on on the street is just utterly counterintuitive,” he said. “So would I be skeptical, am I skeptical, of studies and statistics that say otherwise? Sure.” More

A Secret Service agent gestures as Marine One takes off.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesGail Collins: Hey, Bret, the holiday season is almost upon us — if you presume we start off with Halloween, which is one of my favorites. Are you going to be dressing up as any famous person for parties?Bret Stephens: Well, I once went to a Halloween bash dressed as Picasso’s Blue Period — I’ll leave the details of the costume to your imagination — but that was in high school. I guess I could go as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” assuming you showed up as Kevin McCarthy.I’m referring, of course, to the House minority leader’s latest effort to make Liz Cheney’s life as unpleasant as possible.Gail: Yeah, the House Republicans are certainly going out of their way to try to torture her. I guess they’re shocked by her desire to actually investigate the folks who tried to attack the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6. Who’d have thought a member of their party would be so picky?Now she’s got a Trump-backed primary challenger. What do you think her prospects for political survival are at this point?Bret: My knowledge of Wyoming politics is, um, not great. But I’m guessing that Cheney’s re-election chances aren’t great, either. I think that, at best, she can lay down a marker for the future, proving that at least some Republicans refused to participate in the cult of Il Duce wannabes. Good for her, but what America really needs is another party that stands for classically liberal values like free speech, free markets and free societies.Gail: Bret, are you talking about a … third party? That would certainly give us opportunities for a lot of vigorous arguing.Bret: Well, the third party I have in mind would probably do more to split Republicans than Democrats, so maybe you might warm to it. I just want to wrest a remnant of thoughtful conservatism out of the maw of Trumpism. The alternative is that Donald Trump and his minions become the default every time Democrats stumble.Gail: People need to feel they’re voting for the best real option, not just registering their alienation. The problem with third parties is that terrible accidents can happen. Ralph Nader’s run in 2000 took the election away from Al Gore and gave it to George W. Bush. Which was not his intention, although possibly something you appreciated.Bret: Just as you no doubt appreciated Ross Perot taking a few million votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992.In the meantime, Gail, how are you feeling about the leaner Joe Biden — the one who looks like he went on the budgetary equivalent of the Jenny Craig diet by shedding about $1.6 trillion?Gail: About Bidenism-lite — you mean the new Sinema-Manchin version? I can see how Biden had to do something to get those two onboard, but the idea that Joe Manchin, servant of the coal industry, was dictating compromises on climate change, and the utterly compromised Kyrsten Sinema was torpedoing tax rate increases for corporations and the wealthy, is deeply depressing.Bret: The good news from your point of view is that the downsized plan appears to keep universal preschool education and national child care. The good news from my point of view is that it costs less and corporate taxes may not be raised. Democrats may also come to appreciate that getting rid of some of the climate provisions to force companies to move to clean energy sources may not be the worst thing, politically speaking, when energy prices are already going up, up, up.Gail: Well, politically speaking, you do have a point about the climate provisions’ chances. We’ll survive, but it’s going to leave future generations stuck with the weather that comes with global warming.Bret: There’s no good climate solution unless China and India step up. The best thing the United States can probably do right now is invest more in natural gas, which is much cleaner than coal and much more reliable than wind or solar.On the whole, I think the slimmed-down Biden package thing could be a winner all around. Here I return to my basic principle that the No. 1 priority is to keep Trump from ever returning to the White House, which first requires some legislative victories that are popular with the public.Gail: It’s a wonder what Trump has done to rational Republicans. If I’d showed you the Biden agenda 10 years ago, don’t imagine you’d have seen it as something you’d be rooting for in 2021.Bret: The things I never imagined a decade ago that I’d someday be rooting for could probably fill a book, starting with my vote for Hillary Clinton. Also didn’t imagine I’d be agreeing with a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor while worrying about a Supreme Court over-dominated by conservative justices.Gail: Do you think that Texas abortion law is going to last long? I’m hoping the Supreme Court, even in its current conservative condition, is going to be appalled by the part that has the general public doing the enforcement. Via do-it-yourself lawsuits against the abortion providers and anyone who helps them, down to drivers who bring the patients to clinics.I hear this kind of thing is a new conservative trend. Care to explain?Bret: There are two abortion laws at issue here. There’s the case out of Texas, regarding Senate Bill 8, which bans virtually all abortions after six weeks or so and delegates enforcement to private citizens rather than state officials. The bill was written that way because it was an attempt to get around judicial review, which typically requires a state official to be a defendant.Gail: I keep envisioning folks running into family planning clinics screaming “citizen’s arrest!”Bret: The court made a bad mistake by failing twice to enjoin the Texas law. But I’m betting it will still overturn it because the alternative is a license to vigilantes everywhere to deny people their constitutional rights, which could also include “conservative” rights like the right to bear arms — in a blue state.But then there’s another abortion case out of Mississippi, based on a law banning most abortions after 15 weeks. That’s a more clear challenge to Roe v. Wade, and it’s the one we should be really thinking about.Gail: You know, Texas politicians are great at doing spectacularly awful things that make headlines. But meanwhile, Mississippi always seems to be able to be much worse without anybody noticing.Bret: The conservatives on the court will do themselves and their cause irreparable harm if they uphold the Mississippi law and overturn Roe. There will be a renewed push to pack the court with new justices. It will turn access to abortion into a real force for Democrats in purple states and help them in the midterms. It will probably push Stephen Breyer to retire now to ensure he can be succeeded by a liberal justice. It will do a lot to help the Democratic ticket in 2024. And it will push Congress to seek legislative means to curb the court’s authority.Overturning Roe might wind up being conservatism’s biggest Pyrrhic victory since Richard Nixon’s re-election.Gail: Hey, we’ve been agreeing for a while now. Let’s get back to Biden. How did you like his town hall the other night?Bret: I felt like I was holding my breath half the time, hoping he’d be able to complete his sentences. Most of the time he did. But some of the lapses — like declaring that it was U.S. policy to come to Taiwan’s defense in case of attack, when it isn’t — were disturbing because they’re potentially so consequential.Gail: He did seem a bit lost toward the beginning, standing there with his fists clenched — he looked as if he was holding invisible ski poles. And he’s never going to be a wowser as a public speaker.But for the most part his answers all made sense, he was personable with the crowd, and, given the crazy scene he’s dealing with in Washington, I thought overall he made a good impression.Bret: The line that I keep hearing from people who have known Biden over the years is that he’s “lost a step.” The same could probably have been said about Ronald Reagan in his second term, and he still managed to have real successes, like comprehensive immigration reform, a major tax reform, better ties with the Soviet Union and the “Tear Down This Wall” speech in 1987, just two years before the Berlin Wall fell.Biden’s performance is still much preferable to Trump’s, who kept his step but lost his mind. Even so, it worries me. Voters notice, even if much of the press is too polite to mention it.Gail: Reagan’s second term was really scary. If Biden runs again, we’ll all have good reason to debate whether he’s too age-limited. But right now, he seems to be well in control, even if you don’t like all his policy choices.Love your Trump line, by the way.Bret: Thank you. And that reminds me: Please be sure to read The Times’s Book Review section celebrating its 125 birthday. My favorite feature is a sampling of letters to the editor, including one reader’s criticism of Henry James’s prose: “By bad,” the reader wrote, “I mean unnatural, impossible, overdrawn as to the characters, and written in a style which is positively irritating.”Gives me hope, Gail.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