Elections

Sounding even more confident the morning after than she did on primary night, Maya Wiley declared Wednesday that she can pull off an upset victory over Eric Adams, the front-runner in the New York mayor’s race, despite his nearly 10-point lead.“We have every reason to believe we can win this race,” Ms. Wiley told campaign supporters and journalists in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.She explained that she expects to significantly outpace Mr. Adams in collecting second- and third-choice votes, and she added: “We’re going to wait til every vote is counted, so every New Yorker counts.”As of Wednesday afternoon, with 83 percent of votes counted, Ms. Wiley, a civil-rights lawyer and former City Hall counsel, had 22 percent to Mr. Adams’s 32 percent. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was running third, with 20 percent. The rest is divided between Andrew Yang, who has already conceded, and nine other candidates.Ms. Wiley’s advisers said she would keep calling for patience and thoroughness, “over and over,” in the coming weeks to ensure that Mr. Adams, a retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, does not try to claim victory before the end of the complex counting process.This is New York’s first citywide ballot using ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference.If anything, Ms. Wiley’s advisers said, hopes are rising as vote counts and turnout data trickle in. They said her strategy has long relied on second-choice votes from a wide range of New Yorkers, but she has already won more first-place votes than they said they expected.More important, based on turnout and polling trends, they believe Ms. Wiley and Mr. Adams will be the last candidates standing, narrowly dividing the total vote.“I think we’re in a nail-biter,” Jon Paul Lupo, a senior adviser, said as Ms. Wiley hugged supporters on a busy sidewalk outside the Parkside subway station.That analysis explained Ms. Wiley’s answer when a reporter asked if, with 22 percent of votes in the first round, she was considering conceding.“No,” she said with an mildly outraged laugh. “Because I’m winning.” More

The report, produced by a G.O.P.-led committee in the State Senate, exposes false claims made about the 2020 election by Trump allies in Michigan and other states.A committee led by Michigan Republicans on Wednesday published an extraordinary debunking of voter fraud claims in the state, delivering a comprehensive rebuke to a litany of accusations about improprieties in the 2020 election and its aftermath.The 55-page report, produced by a Michigan State Senate committee of three Republicans and one Democrat, is a systematic rebuttal to an array of false claims about the election from supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. The authors focus overwhelmingly on Michigan, but they also expose lies perpetuated about the vote-counting process in Georgia.The report is unsparing in its criticism of those who have promoted false theories about the election. It debunks claims from Trump allies including Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former president’s lawyer; and Mr. Trump himself.Yet while the report eviscerates claims about election fraud, its authors also use the allegations to urge their legislative colleagues to change Michigan’s voting laws to make absentee voting harder and limit the availability of drop boxes for absentee ballots, as Republicans have done in other swing states as they try to limit voting.“This committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” the authors wrote, before adding: “It is the opinion of this committee that the Legislature has a duty to make statutory improvements to our elections system.”Michigan Republicans, who control the state’s Legislature, have for weeks debated a series of new voting restrictions. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has said she will veto the legislation, but Michigan law allows citizens to circumvent the governor by collecting 340,047 signatures.Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that she hoped Republican lawmakers would use the report to “cease their attempts to deceive citizens with misinformation and abandon legislation based on the lies that undermine our democracy.”Here are some of the conclusions from the Michigan report that debunked Trump allies’ claims about the election:Referring to Antrim County in Northern Michigan — where local election officials briefly and inadvertently transposed voting numbers before correcting them, leading to false conspiracy theories about voting machines — the report suggests that Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, should “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” It adds that anyone who promoted the Antrim County theories as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election had left “all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.”The Voter Integrity Project, a right-wing group, has said that 289,866 “illegal votes” were cast in Michigan. The report’s authors called 40 people from the group’s list of supposed voters who received absentee ballots without requesting them and found just two who said they had been sent unrequested ballots. One was on the state’s permanent absentee voter list. The other voted absentee in the 2020 primary election and may have forgotten about checking a box then to request an absentee ballot in the general election.The report found that the chaos that unfolded after Election Day as votes were counted at the TCF Center in Detroit was the fault of Republican operatives who called on supporters to protest the count. “The Wayne County Republican Party and other, independent organizations, ought to issue a repudiation of the actions of certain individuals that created a panic and had untrained and unnumbered persons descend on the TCF Center,” the report states.Claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan and other states had been hacked to change results were false, the report said. The committee’s chairman, State Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican, called Georgia officials to investigate claims made by Jovan Pulitzer, who said he had access to manipulate vote counts. Mr. Pulitzer’s testimony “has been demonstrated to be untrue and a complete fabrication,” the report said. “He did not, at any time, have access to data or votes, let alone have the ability to manipulate the counts directly or by the introduction of malicious software to the tabulators. Nor could he spot fraudulent ballots from non-fraudulent ones.”Of Mr. Lindell’s wide-ranging claims of fraud and impropriety in vote-counting systems, the report states that “this narrative is ignorant of multiple levels of the actual election process,” before embarking on a lengthy debunking of his claims.While Mr. Trump claimed that more votes had been cast in Detroit than people who live there, the report found that turnout in the city was under 50 percent of eligible voters and about 37 percent of its population.No ballots were secretly “dumped” at the Detroit vote-counting center. “A widely circulated picture in media and online reports allegedly showed ballots secretly being delivered late at night but, in reality, it was a photo of a WXYZ-TV photographer hauling his equipment,” the report states. More

Mr. Adams, a moderate Democrat whose campaign focused on crime and public safety, has a long history in New York politics and has faced scrutiny over his ethics.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had a solid advantage on Wednesday in the Democratic primary for New York mayor, leading his closest competitors, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, by a sizable margin.Mr. Adams’s lead is not decisive, and the returns so far only factor in first-choice votes cast under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. It will be some time before an official winner is declared, both because absentee ballots are still outstanding and voters’ subsequent rankings will come into play. Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia still have paths to victory.But many New Yorkers are looking to learn more about Mr. Adams, the candidate who currently seems best positioned to win the primary.Mr. Adams himself was already looking to City Hall as he spoke to supporters on election night. “Tonight we took a huge step forward,” he said on Tuesday, before outlining his vision of the city in a speech that was at turns buoyant and defiant.A campaign focused on crime and public safetyDuring the campaign, Mr. Adams carved out a lane as one of the more moderate candidates in the Democratic primary race. He did so in large part by drawing a contrast between his views on policing and crime, and those of left-leaning rivals like Ms. Wiley and Dianne Morales.As public safety became a major issue in the race, following a rise in violent crime in the city, Mr. Adams tried to strike a tricky balance.He trumpeted his credentials as a former police officer and said they gave him the experience needed to address a rise in violent crime, but he also billed himself as a reformer who had taken on police misconduct.“I don’t hate police departments — I hate abusive policing, and that’s what people mix up,” Mr. Adams told The New York Times. In his campaign’s closing weeks, he seemed to bet that voters would understand that distinction.But Mr. Adams, who grew up in Queens, also stressed his working-class background, calling himself a blue-collar candidate who would fight for New Yorkers struggling to make ends meet in an expensive city that had left them behind.He also counted on his ability to court working-class and older minority voters outside Manhattan. The early returns suggest those groups supported him at the polls.Mr. Adams held a news conference over the weekend at the site of a shooting in the Bronx. He has said his experience as a former police officer would help him address rising crime.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesA rise through the ranksMr. Adams spent more than 20 years as a New York City police officer before entering politics. He has said that he was motivated in part to join the force after he was beaten by the police at age 15. Mr. Adams believed that he could change the culture of policing from within.During his time in the department, Mr. Adams was a strong advocate for Black officers. Through his involvement in Black police fraternal organizations — the Grand Council of Guardians and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that he co-founded — Mr. Adams questioned his superiors publicly, speaking out against discrimination, police brutality and the department’s excessive use of stop-and-frisk tactics.The latter issue, in particular, illustrated the precarious tightrope that Mr. Adams walked during the campaign: Though he once fought the stop-and-frisk policing strategy, which was used disproportionately in New York against Black and Latino men and is reviled by the left, he has also supported its limited use.Some who knew Mr. Adams during his time as a police officer thought even then that his challenges to Police Department leadership were meant to position him for public office. As early as 1994, he had determined he wanted to be mayor, he told The New York Times.In 2006, Mr. Adams retired from policing to run for the State Senate. He won and represented parts of central Brooklyn in Albany until 2013, when he became the first Black person elected Brooklyn’s borough president.Over the years, he cultivated relationships with union leaders and other elected officials, many of whom endorsed his mayoral bid. He also built ties to wealthy donors, who boosted his campaign war chest, and to the lobbyists and party machine that helped him get out the vote on Tuesday.A complex historyMr. Adams’s time in politics also left a track record and a paper trail that made him vulnerable to attacks from his rivals over issues of transparency and ethics.His relationships with lobbyists, donors and developers have come under scrutiny throughout his career, in some cases prompting investigations.Mr. Adams has never been formally accused of misconduct, but a review by The New York Times found that he at times pushed the boundaries of ethics and campaign-finance laws.As a state senator, he was accused of “exceedingly poor judgment” by an investigator who found that he and others had improper links to a company that was trying to become the purveyor of video slot machines at Aqueduct Racetrack. Mr. Adams was the chair of the Senate’s racing and gaming committee at the time.As borough president, he started a nonprofit group that took donations from developers who sought his support for projects or zoning changes, prompting a probe into whether he violated conflict of interest regulations.Mr. Adams said in a statement that he and his campaigns had never been charged “with a serious fund-raising violation, and no contribution has ever affected my decision-making as a public official.”He also accused those questioning his ethics of holding him to a higher standard because he is Black and from a lower-income background.Whether accusations about Mr. Adams’s conduct eroded support for him remains unclear, though ranked-choice voting results to come may offer a fuller picture.But questions about his honesty reached a kind of fever pitch in the final stretch of the campaign after Politico New York reported that Mr. Adams had used conflicting addresses in public records and that he was spending nights at Borough Hall.Other candidates began to question whether Mr. Adams really lived in a townhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn that he has said is his primary residence.Andrew Yang, in particular, accused Mr. Adams of living in a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., that he owns with his partner. A report from The City found that Mr. Adams did not disclose his ownership of that co-op when he ran for State Senate in 2005.Mr. Adams dismissed the controversy about his residency as a politically motivated effort to shake him from the front-runner status he comfortably occupied in the race’s closing weeks. More

New York City voters cast their ballots for mayor on Tuesday, and it became clear that the competitive Democratic race would be decided by the city’s new ranked-choice system. It is likely to be weeks before a winner is known. The map below shows the latest unofficial results for the first round of votes, which […] More

The For the People Act had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Oddly, it was so far from passage that it may provide some hope, because so many avenues remain to be pursued.The demise of the For the People Act — the far-reaching voting rights bill that Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday — will come as a crushing blow to progressives and reformers, who have portrayed the law as an essential tool for saving democracy.But it was a flawed bill that had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Voting rights activists and Democratic lawmakers may even find that the collapse of this law opens up more plausible, if still highly unlikely, paths to reform.The law, known as H.R. 1 or S. 1, was full of hot-button measures — from public financing of elections to national mail voting — that were only tangentially related to safeguarding democracy, and all but ensured its failure in the Senate. Its supporters insisted the law should set the floor for voting rights; in truth, it set the floor at the ceiling, by guaranteeing a level of voting access that would be difficult to surpass.At the same time, reformers did not add provisions to tackle the most insidious and serious threat to democracy: election subversion, where partisan election officials might use their powers to overturn electoral outcomes.Instead, it focused on the serious but less urgent issues that animated reformers at the time the bill was first proposed in 2019: allegations of corruption in the Trump administration, the rise of so-called dark money in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, or the spate of voter identification laws passed in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election victories.Even a cursory look at the effort by former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the 2020 election revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the electoral system, from the risk that a partisan election administrator might simply refuse to certify an unfavorable election result to the possibility that a vice president might choose not to count a certified electoral slate. None of those vulnerabilities were addressed.Those concerns have only escalated over the last several months as Republicans have advanced bills that not only imposed new limits on voting, but also afforded the G.O.P. greater control over election administration. The new powers include the ability to strip secretaries of state of some of their authority and remove members of local election boards. The New York Times reported over the weekend how some Democrats on local boards in Georgia, including people of color, were losing their positions.Senate Republicans used the filibuster on Tuesday to block debate on an ambitious Democratic bill aimed at countering a wave of ballot restrictions in G.O.P.-controlled states.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIt’s true that the 2020 election and Mr. Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine it revealed the fragility of American democracy in different and more fundamental ways than even the most perspicacious legislator could have anticipated. Originally, the bill was seen as a “political statement,” a progressive “wish list” or a “messaging bill,” not as the basis for a realistic legislative effort.It was not designed to appeal to the moderate Senate Democrats, who progressives nonetheless hoped would eliminate the filibuster even as they insisted on different proposals and a bipartisan approach.Yet oddly, the bill was so far from passage that reformers still have cause for some semblance of hope. Nearly every stone was left unturned.As a result, many other avenues for reform remain to be pursued. None seem likely to be enacted in today’s political climate. All are more plausible than the bill that died in the Senate on Tuesday.One of those avenues emerged in the final days of the push for H.R. 1: a grand bargain, like the one recently suggested by Joe Manchin III, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia who provoked outrage among progressives when he said he would oppose the bill in its current form.Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed the voting bill in its current form but proposed several compromises that gained favor with advocates. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe Manchin compromise resembles H.R. 1 in crucial ways. It does not address election subversion any more than H.R. 1 does. And it still seeks sweeping changes to voting, ethics, campaign finance and redistricting law. But it offers Republicans a national voter identification requirement, while relenting on many of the provisions that provoke the most intense Republican opposition.Mr. Manchin’s proposal nonetheless provoked intense Republican opposition. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri derided it as a “Stacey Abrams” bill. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, appeared to suggest that no federal election law would earn his support.More generally, it is hard to imagine how Republicans could be enticed to accept stringent limits on gerrymandering, given the lopsided partisan consequences of such a ban.But the strategy behind the Manchin proposal could nonetheless serve as a basis for serious legislative efforts: Democrats can offer Republicans provisions they actually want on voting, like new photo identification requirements, and see what that buys them.The willingness of Ms. Abrams, who leads the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight, to support the Manchin compromise, despite its embrace of voter ID measures — an archetypal voter suppression provision — suggests that there may be room to explore options that might attract support from Republicans and haven’t previously been 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Another avenue is a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would again subject Southern states to obtain federal clearance before making changes to their voting system — a requirement that a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted.Restoring the preclearance condition is of considerable symbolic significance, but it offers far less to reformers than the Manchin compromise. It does nothing to address the laws that Republicans have enacted this year. It would do little to protect against election subversion. It does not check Republican efforts outside the South. And it relies on the federal court system, which has a more limited view of the Voting Rights Act than reformers would like.But unlike H.R. 1, restoring federal preclearance does have the support of Mr. Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Mr. Manchin also seemed willing to embrace a variety of largely unspecified changes that might make preclearance somewhat more amenable to the Republicans, including an objective test to determine whether jurisdictions should be subjected to or relieved from preclearance and limits on the power of the attorney general. It remains doubtful that any changes would attract significant Republican support, but it also remains untested.A final avenue is an even narrower bill, comprising only provisions that attract bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether even a single idea falls into this category. But many of the hypothesized proposals for addressing election subversion might have some chance to find Republican support, like reforms to the rules for counting electoral votes, and funding for election administration.Other potential areas of agreement are a requirement for paper ballots; ballot chain-of-custody requirements; standards for certification of federal elections and establishing voter eligibility; and clarifying whether and when judges or local officials can defy a state legislature.None of these proposals necessarily advantage either political party. All would have a chance to avoid the central, politicized debate over voter suppression and voting rights.Realistically, even the most innocuous proposals would have a challenging path to passage. The window for bipartisan cooperation on these issues may have closed several months ago, as memories of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters were supplanted by politically charged fights over voting rights and voter suppression. Republicans have few incentives to support a bill, even if watered down considerably.Yet all of these new avenues for reformers have something simple in common: They involve an earnest attempt to win 60 votes in the Senate, something that H.R. 1 did not. Many progressives scoff at the idea, but if moderate Democrats can be taken at their word, then reformers never had a choice but to at least try to find Republican support.Voting rights activists on Tuesday called for a new push to ensure voting rights, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader from New York, pledged to keep fighting, calling the Senate vote “the starting gun, not the finish line.”Perhaps reformers will surprise themselves and pull off a rare legislative win. More likely, their effort will fail and they can hope that their failure will demonstrate the impossibility of bipartisanship to Senate moderates, perhaps reopening the conversation about eliminating the filibuster.Wherever the effort might end, a more realistic legislative push begins with an earnest effort to write a bill that is more responsive to the current threats to the system and is designed to win enough votes to pass. More

Alvin Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, maintained a four-point lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein. If elected, he would the first Black person to hold the office.Alvin Bragg was leading in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney as returns came in Tuesday night, maintaining a steady margin of about four percentage points over Tali Farhadian Weinstein in a race likely to determine who heads the most prominent local prosecutor’s office in the country.The winner of the primary will be heavily favored to win the general election in November and would lead an office that prosecutes tens of thousands of cases a year and is running a high-profile inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had long been seen as front-runners in the race, and they proved it on Primary Day, beating six other candidates by double-digit margins with nearly all of the in-person returns in on Tuesday night.A sizable number of absentee ballots — as many as 59,000, according to The Associated Press — had not yet been counted. As of midnight, Mr. Bragg’s lead stood at about 7,000 votes in the only major race on the ballot that did not make use of ranked-choice voting.The returns Tuesday showed Mr. Bragg performing particularly well on the Upper West Side and in his home neighborhood of Harlem, and he performed solidly throughout the borough with strong showings in every district. While many of his proposed policies and priorities align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorneys’ offices around the country in recent years, Mr. Bragg defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experiences growing up. If elected, he would be the first Black person to hold the office.“We are going to demand and deliver on both safety and fairness,” Mr. Bragg said in a speech at his election party in Harlem in which he acknowledged that there were votes still to be counted but declared victory and spoke as if he had already won. He pledged to help end racial disparities in the justice system​ and to run an office informed by his and his supporters’ life experiences.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a statement that the race was far from over.“We all knew going into today that this race was not going to be decided tonight, and it has not been,” the statement said. “We have to be patient.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who would be the first woman to hold the office, ran a more moderate campaign than most of the field, declining to join some other candidates in saying that she would not prosecute certain categories of crime under any circumstances. She raced ahead of the other contenders in fund-raising, bringing in at least $12.8 million, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign — causing her competitors and some observers to accuse her of trying to buy the race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters on Tuesday from backing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.“Please do not support multimillionaires and billionaires who are just trying to buy elections and not supporting policies that will help us,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s focus on public safety separated her from most of the other candidates, whose strategies to make the criminal legal system less punitive may have made it difficult for voters to differentiate among them.The one exception was Liz Crotty, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who won the endorsement of several police unions and talked about the importance of public safety throughout the race.Three candidates without prosecutorial experience — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — ran to the left of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and Mr. Bragg, arguing that the office required fundamental change that no candidate with prosecutorial experience could deliver. That position ran counter to the messaging of Mr. Bragg, as well as a fellow former prosecutor, Lucy Lang, who also ran on the idea that she had the knowledge and experience to improve the office’s treatment of everyone it comes into contact with, including defendants.Ms. Aboushi, who was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, outperformed the other five candidates throughout the night, trailing only Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.If Mr. Bragg ultimately wins the nomination, he will be overwhelmingly favored in the general election against the Republican nominee, Thomas Kenniff, who ran uncontested. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said that the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order, and in recent weeks, had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein by name, calling her “soft on crime” and saying on Twitter that her platform “promises to be the last nail in NYC’s coffin.”Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein both have substantive legal pedigrees. Mr. Bragg graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge in New York and worked as a defense and civil rights lawyer. He first worked as a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and then returned to the attorney general’s office, where starting in 2013, he led a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.Erin E. Murphy, a law professor at New York University who supports Mr. Bragg, said that the combination of the candidate’s policies and his racial identity was key to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety that exist in our communities but also that they understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein graduated from Yale Law School, clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court, served as counsel to the former United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and after a stint as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn was on the leadership team in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.The district attorney’s office has had only two leaders in close to 50 years, and the current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has held his seat for more than a decade. He was considered one of the most progressive prosecutors in the United States when he was first elected in 2009. But since he took office, a wave of prosecutors have won elections by pledging to make their offices less punitive and less racist, a trend that has changed the way that such races are run.In the opening months of this year, it looked as if the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney would follow suit, with Ms. Aboushi, Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart tipping the balance of the race toward the left. But as Ms. Farhadian Weinstein emerged as a financial powerhouse and gun violence rose in certain areas of the city, the focus of the race changed, and she and Mr. Bragg began to be seen as front-runners. More

Tom Perez, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, on Wednesday began a campaign for governor of Maryland on a platform largely tied to his experience working in President Barack Obama’s administration.“I’m the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, I could have never dreamed the president of the United States would give me the chance to make a difference,” Mr. Perez said in a video announcing his candidacy. “But there’s a lot left to do, and that’s why I’m running for governor.”Mr. Perez, 59, served in the Justice Department and as labor secretary before Mr. Obama backed him to run the D.N.C. in 2017. He has teased a run for governor since his term as party chairman ended in January. The video is heavy on footage of the former president praising Mr. Perez, calling him “one of the best secretaries of labor in our history.”He joins a crowded field of candidates to replace Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who is barred by term limits from seeking a third term in office, that includes eight Democrats and two Republicans.Though Mr. Perez has deep connections to national Democratic officials and donors, others in the race have far more recent experience in Maryland politics, including Peter Franchot, the state comptroller, and Rushern Baker, the former Prince George’s County executive, who placed second in Maryland’s 2018 Democratic primary for governor. Mr. Perez was elected to the Montgomery County Council in 2002 and served as Maryland’s labor secretary from 2007 to 2009.Mr. Perez, in the video announcing his campaign, stood before his home in suburban Washington and promoted his connections to the state. Yet at the end of the video he is shown wearing a Washington Nationals jersey — a rival of Maryland’s baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles. More

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a strong lead on Wednesday, the day after the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City — but the race was far from over.Mr. Adams gave a triumphant speech on Tuesday night and thanked a long list of supporters who were part of a coalition that included Black and Latino voters, unions and a broad swath of the city outside Manhattan.He had more than 31 percent of first-choice votes among the nearly 800,000 Democratic votes reported so far. In cities with ranked-choice elections, the candidate who is leading in the first round of voting usually prevails.The Most Detailed Map of New York City Mayoral Primary ResultsSee neighborhood-level election results from the first round of the mayoral race.But his closest competitors, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, had their own corridors of support. Ms. Wiley performed well in some predominately Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and in Astoria and Long Island City in Queens. Ms. Garcia had strong support in Manhattan and parts of Brownstone Brooklyn.If Mr. Adams wins in the coming weeks after absentee ballots and ranked choices are tabulated, his victory could challenge the momentum of the progressive movement in New York City and reinforce the notion that public safety has become the top issue for voters.“Adams used his approach on policing of saying we need justice and safety simultaneously to fuse together that traditional coalition,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist.Ms. Wiley told her supporters on Tuesday night that the race was not over.“Fifty percent of the votes are about to be recalculated,” she said to cheers.Indeed, many voters ranked Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia in the first two spots on their ballots, and it is possible that one of them could capture many of the other’s supporters. They are both vying to be the city’s first female mayor, and that was a central message of their campaigns.Mr. Adams ran as a working-class underdog and focused on communities that were hit hard by the pandemic — a message he touched on during his election night speech, said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University.“There are so many communities feeling left out and Adams, as his authentic self, seemed just as angry and hurt and inspired as those communities,” Ms. Greer said. More