Elections

Did Democrats take the Hispanic vote for granted in 2020? Some in the party think they did, and can’t afford the same mistakes going forward.Alejandra Gomez was surprised, but pleased, by a flurry of phone calls from the White House in the spring, offering updates on its efforts toward an immigration overhaul. Officials also asked what her Arizona-based advocacy group thought of its work on voting rights and how the pandemic relief package was affecting the state.“It’s absolutely different than what we’ve seen before,” Ms. Gomez said, comparing the efforts to those of previous Democratic administrations, which typically waited to reach out only during re-election campaigns.She wasn’t alone. Leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials were taken aback when both the president and vice president committed to speaking at their conference in June, the first time in the event’s decades-long history that the top two White House officials had agreed to speak in a non-election year.And in Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera, a group that represents low-wage immigrant workers, was thrilled when the White House reached out to arrange a conversation between their members and Marty Walsh, the secretary of labor, during a swing he made through Milwaukee.“We had an opportunity for all our members to come listen to him and for him to listen to us,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the executive director of the organization. “That’s a good cue that they haven’t forgotten us after the elections.”For years, Latino activists and organizers complained that Democratic efforts to woo their community often seemed like an afterthought, a motley collection of Spanish-language advertisements, haphazardly translated campaign literature and a handful of outreach staff members tacked on to campaigns.But after last year’s election, when Republicans peeled away significant amounts of Latino support across the country, Democratic leaders are trying a more aggressive approach.Led by a White House that recruited top Latino organizers to high-level staff positions, and with the first lady, Jill Biden, taking a particular interest in reaching out to Latino voters, the new effort bridges the party, encompassing policy, communications and political organizing. The outreach encompasses a broad number of community leaders and social media stars, such as Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican comedian, and meetings with Hispanic faith leaders.The efforts reflect how vital Latino voters are to the party’s success, but also the extent of the work needed to win back a group that makes up nearly 20 percent of the population. Democrats have long viewed these voters — a diverse group that includes dozens of countries of origin and a wide range of socioeconomic status — as a mostly monolithic bloc that could be taken for granted, operating as though the most important factor was simply turnout; if Latino voters cast ballots, the reasoning went, they will vote Democratic.But 2020, with a record 18.7 millions ballots cast by Latino voters, proved just how wrong that theory was. Though roughly 60 percent chose President Biden, the movement toward Donald J. Trump plunged Democrats into a period of soul-searching.While there has not been a conclusive detailed analysis, exit polling and focus groups from both parties show that Mr. Trump won over Hispanic voters without a college degree who were critical of shutdown orders amid the pandemic and believed the former president would be a better steward of the economy. Republicans also did well with Cubans, Venezuelans and Colombians in South Florida who viewed Democrats as sympathetic to socialism, as well as Mexican Americans in South Texas and other regions who backed his border policies. Evangelicals made up a sizable portion of Latino Trump supporters based on their opposition to abortion.The Democratic Party is now trying to use data to better understand Latino voters, and to try to develop a more granular understanding of how different national backgrounds, economic status and other factors change voting behavior.As a candidate and president-elect, Mr. Biden has had uneven success with Hispanic outreach. In early 2020 primaries, he trailed his rival Bernie Sanders among Latino voters. Top Latino officials were frustrated during his campaign last year by the absence of Hispanic officials in his inner circle.Some activists are quietly criticizing the new efforts as lackluster, and point out that while outreach has increased, there has not been a major policy victory on a critical issue like an immigration overhaul. But they acknowledge that there is a growing recognition that winning over Latino voters will take more than stops at taco shops and inserting mangled Spanish slogans into stump speeches.“In terms of their engagement, they are doing a much better job at this point than during the first Obama administration,” said Arturo Vargas, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, who recently briefed White House staff members on the organization’s policy priorities. “We didn’t get this kind of outreach under Obama.”“I would hope the lesson has been learned that you cannot take the Latino vote for granted,” Mr. Vargas added. “We’ve been saying that for decades, and I think that has now fallen on ears that are open.”Democrats’ efforts are also geared toward persuading voters to see benefits of the party’s policies, particularly in key places like South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where more defections could cost them congressional seats.Arturo Vargas, chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, said the Biden administration’s outreach so far was an improvement over President Barack Obama’s first term. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesSince Mr. Biden entered office, the White House has held dozens of meetings, many of them virtually, with leaders across the country. It is also finding ways to reach out directly to Latino voters and not rely solely on advocacy groups.The administration has blanketed Spanish-language television and reached out to Spanish and English language publications read by Latino voters — even in often overlooked pockets in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Minnesota. A senior administration official appears on “Al Punto,” the Sunday morning show hosted by Jorge Ramos, twice a month.Encouraged by her Latino chief of staff to step up her involvement, Dr. Biden made her first morning television appearance on Hoy Día, a Telemundo news show, and a series of stops in Latino neighborhoods from Salt Lake City to Osceola, Fla.There are biweekly calls with Latino organizations on vaccination efforts and economic policies, as well as one-on-one meetings and briefings on more specific issues. Officials responsible for hiring held months of weekly calls with outside organizations to help develop a pipeline of Latino candidates for administration posts. The effort has been successful: A number of Latino organizers and strategists now hold high-level posts in the White House and the cabinet.White House aides say that many of the top policy priorities will benefit Latino voters significantly; the child tax credit, for instance, could have an outsize impact on a Latino population that is disproportionately young. In private polling of Latino voters shared with The New York Times, Building Back Together, a group run by Biden allies, found that economic concerns and public health were the top-ranking issues, with immigration ranking third.Top aides said they were particularly pleased that their efforts on vaccination had appeared to pay off, as the gap between Latino and white Americans receiving vaccinations has narrowed. Latinos have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, in part because they make up a disproportional number of essential workers, and have seen life expectancy decrease significantly.“It’s definitely by design,” said Emmy Ruiz, the White House director of political strategy, “In everything that we do, there’s a Latino frame to it.”It’s an approach that differs from the past. During the Obama administration, much of the outreach came after the midterms and was focused largely on health care legislation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allowed young undocumented immigrants to legally live and work in the United States.Still, the effort falls short of what many Latino leaders hope to see, particularly in the wake of last year’s election, when the Hispanic vote caught many Democratic officials by surprise.“This moment requires a full-court press,” said Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Labs, a research group that has spent the last several months examining the shifts among Latino voters during the last election cycle. “My concern is that there is a belief that last year was an anomaly, and that it is just going to go back to normal. That’s especially troubling if Republicans go back to campaigning for those votes.”Some of the push is pre-emptive, designed to ensure that Latino voters recognize that Democrats are at least trying to pass an immigration overhaul.There is widespread support for legislation to grant Dreamers a path to citizenship, including among Latino Republicans. Even among Latino voters who do not view immigration as their top issue, the majority say they would not vote for a candidate who opposes such legislation, according to polling from Building Back Together.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump cheered in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami in November. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAmong Latino Democrats, there is a widespread belief that the country is improving, including for Latinos themselves. But Hispanic Republicans say the situation in the United States has worsened in the last year, according to recent polling from the Pew Research Center.“Democrats are at code red — they see it, they get it and they are scrambling to get all hands on deck,” said Daniel Garza, the executive director of Libre, a conservative Latino group. Still grappling with the 2020 results, Democratic strategists have blamed several factors for the losses: concern about crime, fears of socialism stoked by the Trump campaign, and even the “machismo” of Latino men.To try to avoid another drop in support during the midterms, Democratic campaign committees are already investing millions to install organizers in heavily Latino districts in Florida, Texas, Arizona and Georgia.“When you have a group that is so new, so big and is growing at such high rates, it requires constant conversation,” said Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster who has focused on Latino voters for decades and is involved in the Building Back Together efforts. “We want to have years of conversation so that when a campaign comes, we’re not trying to scream at people.” More

Fiame Naomi Mata’afa is scheduled to take office as the Pacific Island nation’s first female prime minister.A three-month constitutional crisis that had convulsed the Pacific Island nation of Samoa ended on Monday as its long-serving leader finally conceded an election defeat, making way for the first female prime minister in the country’s 56-year history.The incoming leader, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, is scheduled to take office on Tuesday. The critical breakthrough in Samoa’s political stalemate came four days earlier, when the Court of Appeals ruled that a makeshift swearing-in ceremony that Ms. Fiame’s party had held in May after being locked out of Parliament was constitutional.“FAST here is the government,” the departing prime minister, Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, said of Ms. Fiame’s party as he vowed to supporters on Monday that he would lead a worthy opposition. “We will be present in every Parliament sitting, so we can uphold the duties we were called to do by our constituencies.”Mr. Tuilaepa, 76, who has been the country’s leader for 22 years, had fought bitterly to hold on to his office since the April 9 election ended in a dead heat. After a final undecided lawmaker threw his support behind Ms. Fiame, giving her party a slim parliamentary majority, Mr. Tuilaepa refused to accept his loss, claiming that he had been “appointed by God” to lead the country.In the months of political back and forth that followed the election, both parties declared that a coup had taken place, dividing families and resulting in dozens of court challenges.At one point, the country’s election commission intervened, blocking the ascension of Ms. Fiame, paradoxically, by invoking a law meant to ensure greater female representation in Parliament.Under that law, women must hold at least 10 percent of the seats. The election had produced a count of 9.8 percent, and the commission refused to round up. So it appointed a female member of Mr. Tuilaepa’s party to Parliament, temporarily handing him a majority.The judiciary went on to deliver a series of victories to Ms. Fiame, reversing the election commission’s move and declaring her the winner. But the country’s head of state — who holds an ordinarily ceremonial position — absconded to a remote village rather than preside over her swearing-in ceremony. Ms. Fiame’s party held its own ceremony under a tent near the beehive-shaped Parliament.She took the oath of office as the sun descended, flanked by members of her party dressed in cardinal-red blazers and traditional men’s wraparound skirts known as ie faitaga.The departing prime minister, Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, conceded defeat after fighting the election results for three months.Kevin Hagen/Associated PressMr. Tuilaepa emerged later that day, saying he would not recognize Ms. Fiame’s appointment and calling her swearing-in an act of “treason.”“Leave it to us to handle this situation,” he had said, promising action against what he called “the highest form of illegal conduct.”Samoa, a normally peaceful nation with no military of its own, has seldom known political volatility, albeit at the cost of being a virtual one-party state. Ms. Fiame, 64, formerly Mr. Tuilaepa’s deputy, was a well-established political figure in her own right before forming her own party last year.“We’ve never seen this kind of rift before in our country,” said Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, a scholar and journalist based in Samoa. “I’ve never experienced this before in my whole life. Lines have been crossed. It’s very much akin to what happened in the U.S. with Trump.”After the months of political intrigue, analysts heralded the court’s ruling as a victory for the rule of law.“This situation has tested Samoa’s Constitution, its political system and especially the judiciary,” said Kerryn Baker, an expert on the region at the Australian National University. “I think Samoans will take heart in the fact that their systems are strong.”Ms. Fiame, making her first public appearance after the ruling, acknowledged the difficulty of the previous months.“It is a new day,” she said. “I offer my deepest gratitude to you, the people of Samoa, and in particular acknowledge the dignity with which you have waited with patience and forbearance, peacefully and respectfully, for the court process to be concluded.” More

Even if you don’t live in California, you’ve probably seen the pictures of tents lining Venice Beach. Or maybe you’ve seen photographs of Oakland’s sprawling homeless encampments, or the crowds of people living on the street in Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood. Those images, while stark, do not come close to capturing the scope of the state’s homelessness crisis.Numbers come a little closer. California is home to nearly 12 percent of the country’s total population but, as of January 2020, 28 percent of its unhoused population, according to federal statistics. More than half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population resides in California. All told, the federal government’s most recent point-in-time count tells us that roughly 161,548 Californians were homeless as of just one night in early 2020, 113,660 of whom were unsheltered — and this was before Covid-19 plunged the United States into crisis.The political implications of mass homelessness cut deep, cut to the very foundations of our democratic system, in fact. Widespread homelessness is both a symptom of democratic decline and a harbinger of worse to come.It should never have gotten this bad. Homelessness is solvable. Its primary driver is housing unaffordability (not a sudden recent increase in mental illness or substance use disorder, despite claims to the contrary), and so the solution has always been more housing, particularly for those who don’t currently have it. But California has allowed homelessness to metastasize over the past few decades. As the humanitarian crisis has gotten worse, it has become a political crisis. Homelessness is one of the major themes in this year’s campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a growing number of commentators have cited it as evidence that the “California dream” is dying.But to eulogize the California dream or fret over the governor’s electoral prospects is to miss the larger picture.The structural factors that threaten U.S. democracy have directly contributed to homelessness in California. Take structural racism. In his landmark book “The Color of Law,” Richard Rothstein outlined how the government spent decades segregating neighborhoods as a matter of public policy, stifling Black homeownership and pushing Black Americans and other people of color into zones of concentrated urban poverty.California was an early innovator in racist housing policies: Berkeley was most likely the birthplace of single-family zoning, which constricts housing supply and pushes up the cost of housing. This policy puts it out of reach for low-income households, in particular the people of color it was intended to keep out.More than a century after it was first enacted, Berkeley is now in the process of undoing single-family zoning. But at both the city and the state level, other racist policies remain on the books. Some of them are baked into the state’s Constitution, which the voters amended in 1950 to restrict development of low-income public housing. And California’s decades-long effort to keep low-income Black residents out of adequate housing continues to bear fruit: today, Black people make up 6.5 percent of the state’s overall population, but 40 percent of its homeless population.Similarly, as economic inequality has threatened the nation’s political system, it has most likely exacerbated homelessness in California. In a recent paper, researchers presented evidence that income inequality may fuel homelessness in regions where housing supply fails to keep up with demand. The authors theorized that this may be because the wealthiest households in an unequal city bid up the cost of housing for everyone else, making it increasingly unaffordable to lower-income residents. This appears to be exactly what happened in the Bay Area, where the unfathomable wealth generated by the tech boom has been mostly captured by those at the top of the income distribution.Because Bay Area cities have failed to produce enough supply to keep up with population increases, lower and middle-income residents now have to compete for housing with the super-wealthy, whose ability to outbid everyone else continually forces prices up. As a result, homes in Berkeley sold for about 19 percent above asking price on average in the first three months of this year, the highest citywide average in the nation.Building more housing would break this dynamic. But much like federal efforts to expand voting rights, California’s fight to expand housing supply has been stymied by what I consider vetocracy. I alluded to one example of this vetocracy earlier: Article 34 of the state Constitution, which requires voter approval for any low-income public housing project to be built in a community. Another oft-cited example is the state’s California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which, generally, requires environmental impact assessments of new developments. “Not In My Back Yarders” have capitalized on this prima facie reasonable requirement, burying proposed developments in CEQA litigation that can slow projects to a crawl, or kill them entirely.Even as the homelessness crisis has grown out of the same factors as the crisis of democracy, it has directly contributed to democratic decay. California’s continual failure to make inroads against widespread homelessness risks fomenting anger, cynicism and disaffection with the state’s political system. A state that appears powerless to address fundamental problems does not make a very persuasive case for its own survival. As such, state and local policymakers need to take homelessness seriously as not only a humanitarian disaster, but a threat to liberal democracy.Taking the threat seriously does not mean doubling down on cruel and ineffective policies, such as the criminalizing of homelessness or relying on temporary shelters to keep the unhoused out of sight. It means spending political capital to ensure that, long term, California can dramatically increase its housing supply. And it means offering immediate Housing First services to those who have already been pushed into homelessness.Housing First policies start with the premise — validated by a wealth of empirical research (including from my employer, University of California, San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative) — that people who are homeless need stable housing in order to benefit from the other services, such as behavioral health care and substance use treatment, that will put them on a path to full recovery.This month, California took an important step in the right direction. The most recent budget signed by Governor Newsom includes $12 billion earmarked for combating homelessness, primarily through Housing First-aligned efforts. This amount, while significant, still represents only an initial step. Homelessness has become so dire in large part because the state allowed it to fester for years. It will require years more work, planning, public investment and legal reform, to undo the results. The cost will be high, but the cost of inaction is far higher.Ned Resnikoff is policy manager for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.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

Some prominent Democrats think their party’s nominee for mayor of New York offers a template for how to address issues of public safety.When Eric Adams won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, his supporters in Congress were bombarded with questions about him from colleagues representing districts in Michigan and Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles.When a national group of Irish American Democrats gathered in Manhattan recently to toast President Biden’s victory, Mr. Adams was there too, touting his admiration for Irish American former co-workers in the Police Department.And in the span of a week, Mr. Adams met with Mr. Biden at the White House and with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Capitol Hill. He appeared with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to discuss combating gun violence. And he stood with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, endorsing her proposal for federal gun trafficking legislation.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has been his party’s mayoral nominee for less than three weeks. But already, many national Democrats appear eager to elevate the former New York police captain, as gun violence shatters parts of major American cities and Republicans seek to caricature their opponents as naïve about crime.Mr. Adams, for his part, is seizing the mayoral bully pulpit, moving to cement a national reputation as a Democrat who speaks with uncommon authority about both public safety and police reform.“Every year, you have these different playbooks,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee who recently encountered Mr. Adams on the set of ABC’s “This Week.”“He has the commanding playbook for the moment,” she said.In some ways, it is a difficult playbook to replicate. Mr. Adams, who will be New York’s second Black mayor if he wins in November, as expected, grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by police officers before joining the force himself.He spent years drawing attention for challenging police misconduct, only to emerge as the most public safety-minded candidate in this year’s mayoral primary. His striking trajectory and promises to combat inequality helped him connect with a broad swath of Black and Latino voters and with some white working-class New Yorkers. And the buzz around him now is due in part to interest in the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city.But some party officials and lawmakers also say that Mr. Adams offers a template for how to discuss matters of crime and justice, urgent issues for Democratic candidates across the country as the early contours of the 2022 midterm campaigns take shape.“He’s a unique messenger carrying a message that we should all be carrying,” said Representative Thomas Suozzi, Democrat of New York.Whether party leaders are ultimately comfortable with Mr. Adams as a national standard-bearer will hinge on how he governs, should he win, following a primary campaign in which he faced significant scrutiny over issues of transparency and ethics tied to tax and real estate disclosures, his fund-raising practices and even issues of residency. But for now, many Democrats seem ready to promote Mr. Adams, whose primary win has fueled fresh intraparty debates about which kinds of candidates best represent the base of the Democratic Party. And the good relations Mr. Adams is working on building with Democratic leaders could yield help from Washington — where the city already has powerful representation — as New York emerges from the pandemic.Some argue that Mr. Adams’s victory is a potent reminder that many Black and Latino voters object to the most far-reaching efforts to curtail the power of the police, even as those same voters revile police misconduct.Mr. Adams insists that those views are not inherently in conflict, and he has not shied away from bluntly challenging left-wing Democrats on the subject. Last fall, a conference call of House Democrats devolved into an emotional brawl over key issues, including whether the “defund the police” movement had damaged their candidates — a subject that remains deeply divisive within the party in New York and nationally.David Axelrod, the veteran political strategist, said Democrats who believe that “the policing issue was a negative in 2020 for Democratic candidates” appear especially interested in Mr. Adams’s pitch.“Whether they’re in love with him or not, they seem to be in love with his message,” he said. “Adams gives you a way to talk about crime and civil and human rights in the same sentence.”Mr. Adams met with President Biden at the White House and with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, on Capitol Hill. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Suozzi said that colleagues from other states have taken note of Mr. Adams’s primary victory and peppered him with questions about the candidate. Representative Adriano Espaillat, another New York Democrat who backed Mr. Adams, said he has had similar experiences — and added that strong relationships between the federal government and the city’s next mayor have tangible implications for New Yorkers.“We’re joined at the hip,” he said. “I’m sure he recognizes that and he’ll try to make his voice be heard here.”Mr. Adams is engaged on his local agenda, including weighing his transition, he has said. But he also has federal priorities, including a focus on what the current infrastructure negotiations and federal resources to combat gun violence mean for New York.“Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.But given Mr. Adams’s message around public safety, justice and combating inequality, Mr. Thies said there may also be opportunities “to talk to mayors who are struggling with the same problems across the country, and members of Congress who are facing tough re-elections or candidates who are running for office outside of New York.”In recent weeks, Mr. Adams has appeared to relish his turn on the national stage, declaring himself the “face of the new Democratic Party” before he had even won the nomination.Celinda Lake, who was one of Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign pollsters, said national Democrats have so far been taken by Mr. Adams’s life story and the diverse coalition he built, adding that some believe he offers a vital new perspective on policing issues ahead of the midterm elections.“A lot of Democrats are really nervous about that issue and are really, really intrigued by the idea of having such a great new voice,” she said.On the day before Primary Day, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, endorsed Mr. Adams. Less than a week after he emerged as the winner, Mr. Adams, rather than the current mayor of New York City, was at the White House discussing ways to combat gun violence, and soon after the administration featured him in an Instagram video. Mr. Adams also posed right next to Mr. Biden in a photo from the White House.“If he can show that you can be both pro-law enforcement and pro-reasonable reforms, then he will greatly help the perception of Democrats when it comes to criminal justice,” said Representative Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania, an early Biden endorser.Still, many Democrats caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a pandemic-era municipal primary that was decided by fewer than 7,200 votes. Mr. Espaillat suggested that applying lessons from deep-blue New York City to the midterms landscape has limitations, noting that “it’s a whole different ballgame internally in every district.”And while Mr. Adams prevailed at the top of the ticket, candidates with more left-wing messages won elsewhere on the ballot.“It’s about having a strong message and actually working hard, and what a lot of people are taking from this election is the split between what happened at the highest level and what happened everywhere else,” said City Councilman Antonio Reynoso, who won the primary for Brooklyn borough president.Mr. Adams is hardly the first mayoral nominee to be embraced by the national party early, reflecting the stature of New York City.Mayor Bill de Blasio was initially celebrated by many Democrats as a champion of economic equity and police reform, with glossy national coverage of his family.But as he faced the challenging realities of governing and his administration experienced numerous controversies, his star faded.Mr. Adams met recently with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a Brooklyn church. “Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesStill, there is no question that Mr. Adams has quickly made a national splash.Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, the president of the United States Conference of Mayors, has been texting with Mr. Adams and intends to speak with him soon, she said. She plans to invite him to the Conference’s annual meeting, slated for Austin toward the end of the summer.Mr. Adams is also navigating critical relationships closer to home. He met with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, over the weekend. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, among others, has also reached out.And then there is his dynamic with the governor, historically a fraught relationship for mayors to manage.Ahead of the joint appearance with Mr. Cuomo, the governor’s team said that the attire for the event involved ties, according to someone familiar with the conversation. (Mr. Thies declined to comment. “We made no requests, but we told them what others were wearing to inform their own decisions,” said Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.)When the two men appeared together at a Brooklyn church, Mr. Cuomo was indeed in a suit and tie. Mr. Adams had decided to chart his own course.“I said it then and I’ll say it again,” declared a tieless Mr. Adams. “I am the face of the Democratic Party.” More

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Her shift reflects how rank-and-file Republicans — even those who may disagree with him — have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge former President Donald J. Trump.MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — Representative Nancy Mace had just delivered the kind of red-meat remarks that would ordinarily thrill the Republican voters in attendance here on a recent sweltering evening, casually comparing liberal Democrats to terrorists — the “Hamas squad,” she called them — and railing against their “socialist” spending plans.But asked to give an assessment of her congresswoman, Mara Brockbank, a former leader of the Charleston County Republican Party who previously endorsed Ms. Mace, was less than enthusiastic.“I didn’t like that she back-stabbed Trump,” Ms. Brockbank said. “We have to realize that she got in because of Trump. Even if you do have something against your leaders, keep them to yourself.”Ms. Brockbank was referring to Ms. Mace’s first weeks in office immediately after the Jan. 6 riot, as the stench of tear gas lingered in the halls of the Capitol and some top Republicans were quietly weighing a break with President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Mace, a freshman congresswoman, placed herself at the forefront of a group of Republicans denouncing Mr. Trump’s lies of a stolen election that had fueled the assault and appeared to be establishing herself as a compelling new voice urging her party to change its ways.But these days, as Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they have no intention of turning against Mr. Trump, Ms. Mace has quietly backpedaled into the party’s fold. Having once given more than a dozen interviews in a single day to condemn Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on the party, Ms. Mace now studiously avoids the subject, rarely if ever mentioning his name and saying it is time for Republicans to “stop fighting with each other in public.”After setting herself apart from her party during her first week in office by opposing its effort to overturn President Biden’s victory, Ms. Mace has swung back into line. She joined the vast majority of Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney from leadership for denouncing Mr. Trump and his election lies. She also voted against forming an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot.And rather than continuing to challenge party orthodoxy, Ms. Mace has leaned in to the most combative Republican talking points, castigating Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top health official who is a favorite boogeyman of the right, accusing Democrats of forcing critical race theory on children, and publicly feuding with progressives.Her pivot helps explain why the Republican Party’s embrace of Mr. Trump and his brand of politics is more absolute than ever. It is not only the small but vocal group of hard-right loyalists of the former president who are driving the alliance, but also the scores of rank-and-file Republicans — even those who may disagree with him, as Ms. Mace has — who have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge him.“She’s a little bit like a new sailor; she tried to get her sea legs, but she’s also looking out over the horizon, and what she saw was a storm coming in from the right,” said Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in South Carolina. “So she immediately started paddling in another direction. The problem is, is that everything you say and do, there’s a record of it.”Ms. Mace declined through a spokeswoman to be made available for an interview, but said in a statement that “you can be conservative and you can be a Republican and be pissed off and vocal about what happened on Jan. 6.” (Ms. Mace’s most recent statements regarding the Capitol attack have been explanations of why she opposed commissions to investigate it.)“You can agree with Donald Trump’s policies and be pissed off about what happened on Jan. 6,” Ms. Mace said. “You can think Pelosi is putting on a sideshow with the Jan. 6 commission and still be pissed off about Jan. 6. These things are not mutually exclusive.”Ms. Mace is facing a particularly difficult political dynamic in her swing district centered in Charleston, which she won narrowly last year when she defeated Joe Cunningham, a Democrat. Her immediate problem is regaining the trust of the rock-ribbed conservatives who make up her base. It is all the more pressing because political observers expect Republicans to try to redraw Ms. Mace’s district to become more conservative, and possible primary challengers still have a year to decide whether to throw their hats in the ring.Her predicament bubbled below the surface on a recent evening here at a pork-themed “End Washington Waste” reception overlooking the Charleston Harbor and the docked Yorktown, a decommissioned Navy aircraft carrier. Voters signed the hocks of a paper pig urging Democrats to cut extraneous spending from the infrastructure bill and exchanged printed-out “Biden bucks” for cocktails, as some reflected on Ms. Mace’s balancing act.Ms. Mace campaigning in Mount Pleasant, S.C., in November. She is facing a difficult political dynamic in her swing district centered in Charleston.Mic Smith/FR2 AP, via Associated PressFrancis and Clea Sherman, a married couple who braved the 90-degree heat to attend, praised her for being “unafraid to speak out” and “tackling tough issues.”“We absolutely think that is the most horrifying thing — not to ever happen, but certainly one of them,” Ms. Sherman said of the Capitol breach, quickly adding that she was just as outraged by racial justice protests around the country that had grown violent. “All those riots that went along in all those cities — they’ve got to stop.”Mr. Sherman, a Korean War veteran, nodded along. “It was a shame it had to happen,” he said of the Jan. 6 assault, adding that he used to “get very upset” with some of Mr. Trump’s remarks.But the former president had been effective, he said. “In my whole life I’ve never been able to see someone accomplish so much,” Mr. Sherman added, citing low unemployment rates and a strong economy. “The bottom line was, did he get the job done?”Penny Ford, a Mount Pleasant resident who attended the event with her husband, Jim Ford, gave a more grudging assessment, explaining that they had winced at Ms. Mace’s comments about the former president. Still, she said, the congresswoman was “the best we have at the moment.”Ms. Ford said they would prefer to be represented by someone like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — a staunch Trump loyalist who helped plan the challenge to Mr. Biden’s election in the House — or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — who led the effort to invalidate it in the Senate — and said they would consider voting against Ms. Mace next year “if I had a choice for someone else.”The first woman to graduate from the Citadel, Ms. Mace based her winning 2020 campaign on her up-from-the-bootstraps biography, detailing her journey from scrappy Waffle House waitress to statehouse representative. She bested Mr. Cunningham, who had been the first Democrat to hold the seat in nearly four decades, by just over a percentage point.On the campaign trail, Ms. Mace walked a careful line, balancing her libertarian streak with a more pragmatic approach, playing up a history of “speaking up against members” of her own party and “reaching across the aisle.”And in the days after the Jan. 6 attack, she was unsparing in her language. What was necessary, Ms. Mace said then, was nothing short of a comprehensive rebuilding of the party. It was a time for Republicans to be honest with their voters, she said: “Regardless of the political consequences, I’m going to tell the truth.”She could not stay silent, Ms. Mace insisted.“This is a moment in history, a turning point where because of my passion for our country, for our Constitution, for the future of my children — I don’t have that option anymore,” she said in an interview the day after the attack. “I can pick up the mantle and try to lead us out of this crisis, or I can sit idly by and watch our country go to waste. And I refuse to do the latter.”Ms. Mace in 1997, during her freshman year at the Citadel, where she became the first woman to graduate two years later.Paula Illingworth/Associated PressLess than a week later, her tone abruptly changed. After joining Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, in a bipartisan request to provide congressional staff aides with more resources to cope with the “trauma” of the Jan. 6 attack, she criticized her colleague for recounting how she feared that rioters had broken into her office building.“No insurrectionists stormed our hallway,” Ms. Mace wrote on Twitter, touching off a heated back-and-forth.She then fund-raised off the feud, arguing that “the actions of the out-of-control mob who forced their way into the Capitol” were “terrifying” and “immediately condemned by the left and right,” but that “the left,” particularly Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, had “run wild because they will never let a crisis go to waste.”More recently, when she voted against the formation of the proposed bipartisan Jan. 6 inquiry, Ms. Mace called the endeavor a “partisan, duplicate effort by Speaker Pelosi to divide our nation.”And after initially refusing to tell reporters whether she voted to oust Ms. Cheney, of Wyoming, from her No. 3 leadership post, Ms. Mace’s team issued a statement affirming that she had, saying that Republicans “should be working together and not against one another during some of the most serious socialist challenges our nation has ever faced.”Ms. Mace has, in some ways, retained her independent streak. She verbally slapped down Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, for comparing mask mandates to Nazism. And she has continued to work across the aisle with Democrats on issues like presidential war powers and cybersecurity.Her still-frequent appearances on television, though — now mostly on a variety of Fox News shows, as well as the conservative networks OAN and Newsmax — tend to stick to some of the party’s most well-tread political messages. In a recent interview on Fox News, she asserted that strident liberals had seized control of the Democratic Party.“They’re in charge,” she said, “which is why we’re seeing what we thought would be a moderate administration take a sharp left turn all of a sudden.” More

Elected leaders and voters in New York remain split over the ranked-choice system, but officials in Washington and elsewhere like the results. The most high-profile experiment in ranked-choice voting in U.S. history just took place in New York City. The reviews are mixed.Hundreds of thousands of voters ranked up to five candidates on their ballots in the Democratic primary for mayor, and many were glad to have that option. Others found the system confusing or wished they had been more strategic in making their choices.Some elected officials want to scrap the system because they believe it may disenfranchise Black voters, among others. But for now, it appears, ranked-choice voting is here to stay. Eric Adams, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary, saw his lead over the second-place candidate shrink from 75,000 votes to only 7,197 after ranked-choices were counted, and he attacked two of his rivals for campaigning together in the race’s final days to try to beat him. One of Mr. Adams’s allies, Councilman I. Daneek Miller of Queens, is promoting a bill that would let New Yorkers decide whether they want to keep ranked-choice voting, although there does not appear to be enough support among his colleagues for it to be approved.“You see these large leads dwindle because of voter rankings,” Mr. Miller said. “Is this an exercise in mediocrity? Do we want fourth- and fifth-place votes deciding leadership?”This year’s primary was the first time New York had used ranked-choice voting in a citywide race. The system is used in other countries and in cities like San Francisco, but it had never been attempted in a larger American city. Other places, including Washington D.C., the Seattle area and Lansing, Mich., could move to adopt the system. Christina Henderson, a member of Washington’s city council and a supporter of a bill that would bring ranked-choice there, said the New York election showed the system’s benefits, including the diversity of winning candidates like Mr. Adams, who is likely to become the city’s second Black mayor.“Races are more dynamic and collegial with genuine policy debates supplanting negative campaign tactics,” Ms. Henderson said.The new system changed how some candidates campaigned for mayor, encouraging them to appeal to their rivals’ supporters to earn a spot on their ballots. By striking a late alliance with Andrew Yang, for example, Kathryn Garcia won over many of his voters.But a major snafu by the city’s perennially dysfunctional Board of Elections — accidentally releasing an inaccurate vote count — could undermine confidence in the system. And although Mr. Adams won the primary, his allies have raised concerns that ranked-choice voting could hurt Black voters who might choose only one candidate. Some Black leaders sued last year to try to stop the system from being introduced.Mr. Adams himself has criticized how ranked-choice voting was rolled out, but he does not want to eliminate it. He said it was an obstacle for some voters and called for more education about it. “Your New York Times readers, your Wall Street Journal readers and all of those that had the ability to analyze all this information, it’s fine for them,” Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on WNYC this week. “But that’s not the reality when English is a second language, that’s not the reality for 85- and 90-year-old voters who are trying to navigate the process. Every new barrier you put in place, you’re going to lose voters in the process.”The system’s supporters have defended it vigorously, arguing that voters did understand how to use it. Maya Wiley, who finished third in the Democratic mayoral primary, wrote a piece for The Washington Post in support of the system despite losing. Ranked-choice advocates say the system helped improve the fortunes of female and minority candidates. The City Council appears poised to have its first-ever female majority, and women finished second and third in the mayoral primary. “We won’t let anyone take away the people’s voice and go back to the old system where costly, low-turn out runoff elections actually disenfranchised people,” said Debbie Louis, the lead organizer for Rank the Vote NYC, a group that supports the voting system. Some voters did not like the new approach. Rebecca Yhisreal, 61, who lives in West Harlem, said she voted for Mr. Adams first and ranked three other candidates on her ballot. But she said she preferred the old system, under which New Yorkers voted for one candidate and if no one got more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff. “It was kind of confusing,” she said. “I would rather it go back to how it was.”William Brown, a retiree who lives in Harlem, said the crowded mayoral ballot, which had 13 Democrats, had made it difficult for him to make sense of each candidate’s positions and to determine how to rank those he liked best. He said he had ranked Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, first, and had forgotten how many other candidates he ranked.“It’s unfair,” he said. “You have to take the time to understand it, but there’s too many candidates. It’s detrimental.”Mr. Miller, who is in his final year in the City Council and testified at a State Assembly hearing this week with other critics of ranked-choice voting, said residents in his Southeast Queens district had complained to him about the new system. It encouraged voters to focus on the horse race between candidates rather than on issues, he said.Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes on an initial tally, the process moves to an elimination-round method. The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidates those voters ranked next. The process continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.Some voters expressed regret that they had not been more shrewd by picking between Mr. Adams or Ms. Garcia so that their ballot helped decide the winner. More than 140,000 ballots were “exhausted,” meaning they did not name either finalist and were therefore thrown out. Those ballots represented nearly 15 percent of the 940,000 votes cast, a higher rate than in some other ranked-choice elections. In London Breed’s 2018 mayoral victory in San Francisco, about 8.5 percent of ballots were exhausted. Advocates for ranked-choice voting say the share of exhausted ballots should decrease as New Yorkers become more familiar with the system.Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, said he wanted to see more detailed voter data before deciding whether the system was a success. He said he would be concerned if the data showed wealthy voters ranking five candidates and poorer ones not doing so.“What I don’t want to see is a system that enfranchises some people and not others and we need the research to really tell what happened here,” Mr. de Blasio said.The city’s Board of Elections is planning to release detailed ballot information in the coming weeks that will reveal which neighborhoods took full advantage of ranked-choice voting. The information, known as the cast-vote record, will not be made public until recounts are completed in two unresolved City Council races. Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, does not appear to favor doing away with ranked-choice voting. Asked about his position on Mr. Miller’s bill, Mr. Johnson’s spokeswoman said in a statement that New Yorkers had voted to create the system in 2019.“Nearly three-quarters of voters approved the new system,” the spokeswoman, Jennifer Fermino, said. “The mission now should be to help provide more education on this important change to our elections.”Many voters liked ranked-choice voting. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Andrew Wilkes, 35, a pastor and policy director for Generation Citizen, a nonprofit civic-education group, said he felt the system gave voters more choices and made it easier for candidates of color to enter the race. He ranked Ms. Wiley first among the five candidates he listed for mayor.“I found it pretty intuitive,” Mr. Wilkes said. More

President Biden made a gleeful return to the campaign trail on Friday evening, joining former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who is seeking to regain his old job in November, for his first campaign event since his inauguration.In a park in Arlington County, a short drive from Washington, Mr. Biden appeared to be back in his electoral element, shedding his necktie, whipping up the crowd and repeatedly casting Mr. McAuliffe as a crucial ally in his fight for a sprawling agenda to remake American capitalism.“I need him,” Mr. Biden said as Mr. McAuliffe beamed behind him. “I need him.”Mr. McAuliffe easily won the Democratic nomination for the Virginia governor’s race in June, hoping to return to the office four years after he served his term. The state does not permit governors to run for consecutive terms.Mr. Biden won Virginia handily last year on his way to the White House, but some Democrats are worried about Mr. McAuliffe’s prospects this year against the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, a political newcomer and former private equity executive. Mr. Youngkin has the ability to spend millions of dollars of his own money to help make the race competitive.Trading his more serene presidential demeanor for a fiery campaign one, Mr. Biden sought to tie the coming elections to his own political project. Instead of his typical practice in White House speeches of leaning into the microphone and whispering to emphasize his points, the president leaned in and shouted.“We’re going to have to go out and win, win this thing, win races up and down the ticket,” he implored the crowd.Mr. Biden repeatedly praised his coronavirus relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, including the direct checks that were sent to low- and middle-income workers. He also pitched his suite of proposals to overhaul American capitalism, including reducing prescription drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and making two years of community college free for all students, paid for by raising taxes on corporations and high earners.In each case, Mr. Biden called Mr. McAuliffe a partner in his vision. “Terry and I share the same basic truth,” Mr. Biden said. “Trickle-down economies never work.”He leaned on policy to draw contrasts with Republicans. “In this election and in 2022, the question the American people are going to be asking is whether or not we’re helping them and their families,” Mr. Biden said. He added: “We have to show we do understand, and we’re delivering for them. And we’re keeping our promises.”Republicans sought to criticize Mr. McAuliffe over the visit. In a news release on Friday, the Republican National Committee called Mr. Biden and Mr. McAuliffe “swampy career politicians with failed records who are now tripping over themselves to embrace the radical left as quickly as possible.”Mr. McAuliffe, who mulled a presidential run in 2020 but passed and endorsed Mr. Biden, has sought to make the race a referendum on former President Donald J. Trump, who has backed Mr. Youngkin enthusiastically. Mr. Trump remains popular with Republicans in the state’s rural areas but has alienated moderates in the Washington suburbs.Mr. McAuliffe has sought to tether Mr. Youngkin to Mr. Trump, joking that he would pay for the fuel for Mr. Trump to visit the state and campaign for Mr. Youngkin. And the former governor has embraced Mr. Biden, expressing hope that the president will campaign for him multiple times before November.In his speech introducing Mr. Biden, Mr. McAuliffe accused Mr. Youngkin of founding his campaign “on an election integrity plan that was based on Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory about the 2020 election, and for five months that is the only plan that he had on his website.”“Let me clear it up for you,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “Joe Biden won that election.”Mr. McAuliffe later drew cheers for vowing to raise Virginia’s minimum wage to $15 an hour within the next three years, an echo of Mr. Biden’s unsuccessful attempts to raise the federal minimum wage to that level.Then he yielded to Mr. Biden, who commanded the stage for almost exactly a half-hour. When the president finished — with a more energetic-than-normal version of his typical request for God to bless America and its troops — he turned to embrace Mr. McAuliffe, then wheeled back to the crowd, smiling and waving. More