Elections

Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill on Monday requiring that all registered voters receive mail-in ballots. His decision contrasted with Republican-led efforts to restrict voting rights in several states.Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont signed legislation on Monday that requires all registered voters in the state to receive mail-in ballots, an expansion of voting rights that counters a movement among Republicans in other states to restrict them.Mr. Scott, a Republican, signed the bill nearly four weeks after the Vermont General Assembly approved the legislation, which also allows voters to fix, or “cure,” a ballot that was deemed defective if it was filled out or mailed incorrectly.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Scott said he had signed the bill “because I believe making sure voting is easy and accessible, and increasing voter participation, is important.”He added that he would push lawmakers to expand the provision beyond statewide general elections, “which already have the highest voter turnout.”“For greater consistency and to expand access further,” he said, “I am asking the General Assembly to extend the provisions of this bill to primary elections, local elections and school budget votes when they return to session in January.”Last year, during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Vermont officials agreed to send out mail-in ballots to voters so they could cast their votes safely.The measure was extremely popular. More than 75 percent of registered voters cast ballots early or by mail, according to the office of Jim Condos, Vermont’s secretary of state. Voter turnout was high, with more than 73 percent of the state’s 506,000 registered voters casting ballots in November, according to the state’s election results.Among registered voters in Vermont, 68 percent wanted to keep the policy of giving every registered voter a mail-in ballot while 29 percent opposed it, according to a poll conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies, a survey group. Seventy-eight percent of residents also supported giving voters a chance to fix, or “cure,” ballots with small errors.Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to sign the Vermont bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights.Wilson Ring/Associated PressVermont’s Senate approved the measure in March. The legislation passed in the General Assembly with bipartisan support, in a 119-to-30 vote, though some Republican lawmakers had resisted the push for mail-in ballots, arguing that they could allow for voter fraud.Independent studies and government reviews have found that voter fraud is extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.“We should be proud of our brave state,” Mr. Condos, a Democrat, said in a statement last month. Though he did not name states where lawmakers have worked to restrict voting rights — Florida, Georgia and Texas among them — Mr. Condos contrasted those Republican-led efforts with the measure in Vermont, where the Republican governor had expressed support for a bipartisan bill.“While others are working to make it harder to vote, in Vermont we are working to remove barriers to the ballot box for all eligible voters, while strengthening the security and integrity of the voting process,” Mr. Condos said.Mr. Condos, who noted that mail-in ballots had been available to American voters since before the Civil War, said in his statement that ballots would be mailed only to active registered voters and would not be forwarded to people who had changed their addresses.Ballots must include a signed affidavit from voters identifying themselves, and each envelope will contain voter data such as a unique identification number and a bar code, Mr. Condos said.The law will give municipalities the option to send mail-in ballots for local races and allow voters to cast their ballots at drive-in polling places, said State Senator Cheryl Hooker, a Democrat, who was a sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.Becca Balint, the president pro tempore of the State Senate, said in a statement that the approval of the bill “stands in stark contrast to legislatures across the country who continue voter suppression efforts, targeting practices like mail-in voting that have correlated with higher turnout among people of color.”Ms. Balint, a Democrat, said Mr. Scott’s signature “represents bipartisan agreement that our democracy, and our state, are strengthened when we make elections more accessible to all.”Both chambers of Vermont’s General Assembly are controlled by Democrats, and Mr. Scott has said he voted for President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. After casting his ballot in November, Mr. Scott told reporters that it was the first time in his life that he had voted for a Democrat. Mr. Biden won 66 percent of the vote in Vermont.Mr. Scott’s decision to sign the bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights. Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor but which former President Donald J. Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, is the only state with a Republican-controlled legislature that has significantly expanded voting rights.“Amid a scourge of anti-voter bills being proposed and signed into law in the states, it’s encouraging to see Vermont moving in the opposite direction,” Josh Silver, chief executive of RepresentUs, a bipartisan voting rights advocacy group, said in a statement.Mr. Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost and his monthslong campaign to delegitimize the results have gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system and led to baseless claims about the integrity of the election.In their public comments, lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in the electoral system to justify pushing for bills that restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times.States such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa have already passed laws restricting the ability of voters to cast ballots. In Texas, Democrats stalled legislation that has been viewed by many voting rights groups as perhaps the harshest of all.Christine Hauser More

Durante la presidencia de Daniel Ortega, el país está a un paso de convertirse en un Estado de partido único. Las acusaciones de lavado de dinero contra su principal rival agudizan las preocupaciones.MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Los candidatos de la oposición han sido detenidos. Las protestas se han prohibido. Y los partidos políticos han sido descalificados.A meses de postular a la reelección, el presidente de Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, deja al país a un paso de convertirse en un Estado de partido único, al tomar medidas drásticas contra la oposición a un grado que no se ha visto desde la brutal represión de las protestas antigubernamentales de 2018, dicen los expertos.Las medidas agresivas de Ortega son un inesperado desafío para la gestión de Biden, que ha hecho del fortalecimiento a las democracias centroamericanas un pilar de su política exterior en la región.La mano dura de Ortega alcanzó un punto de inflexión el miércoles, luego de que su gobierno acusó a Cristiana Chamorro, una de las principales candidatas de oposición, de lavado de dinero y “falsedad ideológica” y la puso bajo arresto domiciliario horas después de anunciar sus planes de postular a la presidencia en las elecciones del 7 de noviembre. Otro candidato, Arturo Cruz, fue detenido el sábado por la policía por supuestamente “conspirar contra la sociedad nicaragüense”.La policía ha confinado a sus hogares a otros tres aspirantes presidenciales, que no han sido acusados formalmente de ningún cargo, lo que en la práctica impide que realicen campañas electorales.“Ortega está a punto de acabar con toda la competencia política en el país”, comentó Eliseo Núñez, un analista político y activista opositor nicaragüense. “Estamos muy cerca de llamar a esto de una dictadura”.La velocidad con que Nicaragua se ha precipitado hacia el autoritarismo ha tomado por sorpresa incluso a muchos de los oponentes de Ortega.Ortega, otrora líder de la junta revolucionaria de Nicaragua, ha desmantelado gradualmente las instituciones democráticas del país y sofocado la disidencia desde que regresó al poder en 2007 tras ganar unas elecciones democráticas. Más de 320 personas, en su mayoría manifestantes, murieron en protestas contra su gobierno en 2018, lo que la convierte en la peor ola de violencia política en América Latina en tres décadas.Las protestas ayudaron a sumir a uno de los países más pobres de la región en una recesión económica prolongada y condujeron a la imposición de sanciones estadounidenses contra los principales funcionarios de Ortega, incluida su esposa, Rosario Murillo, quien es la vicepresidenta y su portavoz.Ortega, intentando aliviar la presión económica e internacional, inició un diálogo con la oposición tras las protestas y estableció un plazo con la Organización de Estados Americanos el año pasado para lograr que el sistema electoral nicaragüense sea más justo.Pero al acercarse el plazo para la reforma, Ortega viró radicalmente hacia la represión. Ha nombrado a sus partidarios al consejo supremo electoral. Introdujo una serie de leyes que permiten a sus funcionarios detener o descalificar a cualquier ciudadano que haya expresado críticas al presidente, incluidos periodistas y políticos.“Ortega hizo todo lo contrario de lo que se esperaba”, observó Carlos Tünnerman, un ex alto funcionario del gobierno revolucionario de Ortega en los años ochenta. “Ha demostrado que está listo para hacer cualquier cosa para mantenerse en el poder”.La medida más audaz del gobierno hasta ahora ha sido el arresto sorpresivo de Cristiana Chamorro, heredera de una de las familias más ricas e influyentes de Nicaragua y cuya madre derrotó a Ortega en las elecciones de 1990. Hasta hace poco, Chamorro dirigía una fundación que capacitaba a periodistas independientes de Nicaragua con fondos recibidos parcialmente de Estados Unidos, lo que llevó al gobierno a acusarla de lavado de dinero y subversión.Cristiana Chamorro, al centro, candidata líder de la oposición, en Managua la semana pasada.Inti Ocon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEn la actualidad solo un grupo creíble de la oposición tiene la posibilidad legal de participar en las elecciones de noviembre y representa la última esperanza para los opositores de Ortega. La agrupación, llamada Ciudadanos por la Libertad, está en el proceso de elegir a su candidato presidencial, quien se convertiría de hecho en estandarte de una oposición por lo general indisciplinada.Los analistas políticos indican que un candidato serio de Ciudadanos por la Libertad tendría buenas oportunidades de movilizar al grueso de los votantes nicaragüenses que no apoyan al gobierno y presentar una amenaza electoral de importancia al partido gobernante.Ortega parece no estar dispuesto a permitirlo. El viernes, la junta electoral, aliada del gobierno, hizo una amenaza velada de prohibir a cualquier candidato que no cumpla con las nuevas leyes que criminalizan la disidencia política.Los líderes opositores comentaron que la nueva directriz permite que los funcionarios electorales tengan el poder de suspender a cualquier candidato que represente una amenaza seria para Ortega o el candidato de su elección para que en la práctica no enfrente oposición.“Están claramente abiertos a dar ese último paso”, dijo Félix Maradiaga, uno de los finalistas en la carrera por la nominación de Ciudadanos por la Libertad a candidato presidencial.El mismo Maradiaga ha estado periódicamente en arresto domiciliario desde noviembre sin que se le hayan presentado cargos.La vocera de Ortega, Murillo, no respondió a un pedido de comentarios sobre las detenciones de los candidatos de la oposición.El rápido deterioro de las protecciones democráticas de Nicaragua ha presentado un desafío para la gestión de Biden, que ya estaba teniendo dificultades para detener el creciente autoritarismo en Centroamérica.Funcionarios y congresistas estadounidenses respondieron a la detención de Chamorro con amenazas de imponer nuevas sanciones contra Ortega.“Definitivamente estamos viendo qué acciones vamos a tomar para responder” a la represión política, dijo el sábado a la Voice of America el principal asesor de la Casa Blanca para América Latina, Juan González.La fuerte dependencia de Nicaragua de las exportaciones preferentes a Estados Unidos y los créditos de prestamistas internacionales financiados por Estados Unidos significa que las sanciones son una seria amenaza económica para Ortega, dijo Tiziano Breda, analista centroamericano de International Crisis Group.Pero la introducción de sanciones de importancia podrían conducir a la ya contraída economía de Nicaragua a una crisis, impulsando un nuevo éxodo de migrantes de la región hacia Estados Unidos.“Ortega ya ha presidido una economía de guerra; está demostrando que está dispuesto a repetir la historia”, comentó Breda. “La pregunta es: ¿Estados Unidos está dispuesto a afrontar las consecuencias de sus acciones?”Yubelka Mendoza More

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO — Con casi medio millón de muertes en exceso por la pandemia, un estimado de hasta 10 millones de pobres adicionales, pocos avances tangibles en la lucha anticorrupción y una violencia criminal que no cede, la elección intermedia de México debiera haber sido un fuerte golpe a Morena, el partido del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador. No lo fue.Los primeros conteos rápidos —que aún son preliminares— muestran que, si bien la coalición de Morena no tendrá los diputados necesarios para cambiar la Constitución (más de 333), continuará teniendo la mayoría absoluta para cambiar la legislación en el Congreso. Su coalición perderá curules (de tener 308 curules, que había ganado en la elección de 2018, ahora solo tendrá 279). Sin embargo, esta reducción es mucho menor que el promedio de 47 escaños que típicamente pierde el partido en la presidencia en una contienda intermedia.Incluso, Morena, como partido independiente, aumentará sus curules con respecto a la elección de 2018. Entonces logró obtener 191 escaños y ahorase estima que gane entre 190 y 203. Por lo tanto, probablemente Morena tenga más diputados que antes. Ningún partido en el poder en la historia democrática de México ha logrado aumentar su número de curules en una intermedia.Es por ello que, la principal lección de estos comicios es muy clara y es para los partidos de la oposición: esta es una victoria muy magra comparada con la que se debió haber tenido. Y esto se debe, en buena medida, a que la oposición ha creado una plataforma cuya única propuesta tangible es combatir a López Obrador.Pero estas elecciones son también un fuerte llamado de atención para Morena: el electorado está decepcionado de los errores de López Obrador y su partido ahora dependerá de sus aliados para aprobar modificaciones a la Constitución y perdió apoyo en Ciudad de México, uno de los grandes bastiones del obradorismo. Los votantes no les están dando un cheque en blanco.Esto, sin embargo, no debe ser motivo de triunfalismo para los grandes partidos tradicionales (PRI y PAN), que están capitalizando menos los fallos del gobierno de lo que debieran. Y la razón es una tremenda falta de propuestas.México necesita una oposición coherente, con propuestas específicas para empezar a solucionar los problemas de fondo que siguen sin solucionarse. Si en los próximos tres años que le quedan a López Obrador no lo consiguen, aumentará el malestar social que impera y no habrá ningún partido o candidatos que aprovechen los errores del gobierno de la llamada cuarta transformación. México quedará, de nuevo, sin alternativas de representación que nos ayuden a corregir el rumbo de uno de los países más desiguales y violentos del mundo.La oposición es necesaria en cualquier democracia. Y más aún con un gobierno, como el de López Obrador, que se ha mostrado muy poco abierto a hacer concesiones y a cambiar estrategias que no han funcionado (como el plan de seguridad o sus medidas económicas). Con una oposición socialmente sensible, este sexenio mejoraría: lo forzaría a gobernar para todos los mexicanos, lo obligaría a institucionalizar sus políticas y a debatir sus puntos de vista.Así que es indispensable que la oposición esté a la altura de las circunstancias. Quienes la lideren deben eliminar dejos racistas y clasistas de sus programas y agendas. Sus integrantes deben hacer política más allá de las élites y los grupos empresariales. Los resultados muestran que para que exista esa oposición, los partidos deben dejar de pretender que el votante tiene amnesia y votará por cualquier partido que se oponga a López Obrador por el simple hecho de hacerlo.Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersLa prueba de que solo aliarse contra López Obrador no funciona es el fracaso de la alianza PRI-PAN-PRD en los estados. La alianza contendió en 10 de 15 estados bajo el argumento de que solo uniendo fuerzas se podría derrotar a Morena. Fue exactamente al revés. Según la información preliminar, Morena derrotó a la alianza en los estados en los que esta contendió.Este rechazo a la alianza debería ser una señal para que los partidos eviten formar coaliciones desdibujadas en asociaciones sin fundamentos programáticos o ideológicos. De hecho, fue una alianza similar a la del PRI-PAN-PRD, la alianza del Pacto por México durante el sexenio de Enrique Peña Nieto, la que en parte originó el surgimiento de Morena. El movimiento de López Obrador se consolidó en rechazo a esa unión para la aprobación de las reformas estructurales del peñanietismo, diluyendo sus posiciones ideológicas.Otra prueba fehaciente de que la alianza PRI-PAN-PRD no puede tener por estrategia solo el rechazo a López Obrador es la gran fuerza que están cobrando los partidos considerados pequeños. Todo parece indicar que Movimiento Ciudadano gobernará en Nuevo León y el Partido Verde en San Luis Potosí.Estos partidos están logrando posicionarse precisamente porque proponen tanto una alternativa a Morena como al PRI-PAN.Independientemente de lo anterior, un aspecto prometendor de esta contienda ha sido el aumento de liderazgos de mujeres en la política. Hasta antes de esta elección solo había habido ocho gobernadoras en la historia de México. Todo parece indicar que esta elección nos dejará con entre cuatro y seis más, un incremento notable en tan solo un año. Es un avance importante porque muestra que la razón por la que no había más gobernadoras en México no era que el electorado no tuviera interés en votar por ellas, sino que los partidos no les daban oportunidad. Este año, la oportunidad se dio porque el Instituto Nacional Electoral exigió que cada partido registrara al menos siete candidatas a gobernadora.Es tiempo de nuevos liderazgos en México, de más mujeres y más políticos jóvenes, de más personas con una agenda social pero con una plataforma clara y no solo reducida a la confrontación con Morena y el presidente. Ese atajo de la oposición, comprobamos ahora, no es suficientemente efectivo. Los partidos políticos deben ponerse a trabajar más seriamente y de maneras más creativas. Es hora.Viri Ríos (@Viri_Rios) es analista política. More

Republicans in Texas celebrated on Monday after winning two closely watched mayoral elections in the state on Saturday, taking control of cities in Democratic counties.The party was particularly buoyed by its performance in McAllen, a border city of 143,000 that is 85 percent Hispanic, where Javier Villalobos, a former chairman of the local Republican Party, defeated a candidate backed by local Democrats by 206 votes out of 9,282 cast.Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, hailed Mr. Villalobos’s victory as part of a larger political realignment of Hispanic voters that revealed itself in the 2020 election, when President Biden drastically underperformed against expectations, and previous Democratic margins, in several Texas border counties with large numbers of Hispanic voters.Mr. Biden won Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, by 17 percentage points. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton carried the county by 40 points.Mr. Villalobos, a local lawyer who is a city commissioner, celebrated his victory by riding a bicycle built for two with Jim Darling, McAllen’s departing mayor. Mr. Darling did not seek re-election after eight years in office.In Fort Worth, Democrats had hoped Deborah Peoples, a former Tarrant County Democratic Party chairwoman, could win an open-seat mayoral race. Ms. Peoples had endorsements from Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro, high-profile Texas Democrats who ran for president in 2020.But Ms. Peoples lost to Mattie Parker, a former chief of staff to Fort Worth’s departing mayor, retaining Republican control of the largest city in Tarrant County, which flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020 after decades of backing Republican presidential candidates.Though both municipal contests were officially nonpartisan, Ms. Parker and Mr. Villalobos each identified as Republicans while their defeated opponents said they were Democrats. More

The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, a company hired by the Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate to review the state’s 2020 election results, moving supplies last month at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.Courtney Pedroza for The New York Times“I would not have voted to certify Jan. 6, not without more questions,” said Sam Peters, a Nevada Republican who is campaigning for a Las Vegas-area House seat. He said he was not sure that Mr. Biden had legitimately won Nevada, even though the president did so by more than 33,000 votes.It’s unclear how long the reluctance to accept unfavorable electoral outcomes will remain a central focus of the party, and to what degree Republicans might support widespread election challenges up and down the ballot in the future.But Republicans’ unwavering fealty to the voter fraud myth underscores an emerging dynamic of party politics: To build a campaign in the modern G.O.P., most candidates must embrace — or at least not openly deny — conspiracy theories and election lies, and they must commit to a mission of imposing greater voting restrictions and making it easier to challenge or even overturn an election’s results. The prevalence of such candidates in the nascent stages of the party primaries highlights how Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace far-flung falsehoods has elevated fringe ideas to the mainstream of his party.Over a year before the midterm elections, many of the fledgling primary races remain in flux, with scores of potential candidates still weighing bids. The Census Bureau’s delays in producing detailed population data have pushed the redistricting process back until at least September, which has impeded the recruitment of candidates for both parties.The result is that Republicans who have jumped into campaigns early tend to be those most loyal to Mr. Trump and the party base. Several among this new class of Republicans are likely to win their races, helped by historical trends favoring the party out of the White House, and a head start on fund-raising and meeting potential voters.Victories by these Republicans would expand the number of congressional lawmakers who have supported overturning the 2020 results, raising new doubts about whether Americans can still count on the routine, nonpartisan certification of free and fair elections.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman, is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump. Mr. Richardson said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMr. Peters already has a list of questions he would ask before voting to certify the 2024 election results, should he be in Congress then.“I’ll want to know that the elections have been transparent and that the states that have certified their elections did not have significant issues and questions that still haven’t been answered,” he said in a recent interview. “I want to know that the states have certified them properly.”Mr. Trump and his allies remain relentlessly focused on the false claims about the election. Steve Bannon, the on-and-off Trump adviser, said in an interview late last month with NBC News that challenging the results of the 2020 election was a “litmus test” for Republican candidates running in 2022 primary races. The former president has been pushing reviews of last year’s results, like a widely criticized Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona, and he continued his effort in a speech in North Carolina last weekend.Some party strategists fear that the denials of the election outcome could hurt candidates who progress to the general election in the crucial swing districts Republicans must win to take control of Congress.Polling shows a significant disconnect between Republicans and independent voters. A recent survey from Quinnipiac University found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate, an opinion shared by just 28 percent of independent voters.“It’s one of those things that is in the water with these very online, very loud and very active primary voters,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist and veteran of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns. “It’s a problem and it’s dangerous for the party to continue to flirt with this conspiracy theory, but I don’t think Republicans are really paying a price for it.”The election-skeptical Republicans span safe districts and battlegrounds. Derrick Van Orden, running for a second time in a Democratic-held district in western Wisconsin that Mr. Trump carried in 2020, published an op-ed article defending his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally near the Capitol, saying he had gone to “stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”A “Stop the Steal” demonstrator outside the Capitol on Jan. 3 as members of the new Congress were sworn in. Three days later, rioting Trump supporters broke into the building.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMany Republicans are simply trying to deflect the question of Mr. Biden’s legitimacy with pledges to crack down on voter fraud, rebuild “election integrity” and support more voting restrictions.In December, State Senator Jen Kiggans of Virginia, campaigning for a competitive U.S. House seat based around Norfolk, issued a nearly 900-word statement on Facebook detailing her commitment to restoring “voter confidence” but making no mention of Mr. Biden or whether she disputed the 2020 results. (Her primary opponent, Jarome Bell, said during an interview with Mr. Bannon that people involved in election fraud should be sentenced “to death.”)“I agree with you 100% that it is right to question the electoral process and to hold those accountable who are responsible for ensuring our elections are conducted fairly with the utmost integrity,” Ms. Kiggans wrote in her statement.Even Republican candidates who acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimate winner say potential fraud needs to be addressed. Mary Ann Hanusa, a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is running for Congress in Iowa, said she would have voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, but she added that because of the coronavirus, changes to voting practices in several states “were made outside of law and when you do that, it really opens up the door to fraud.”Senate primaries so far seem to be competitions to decide which candidates can cast themselves as the strongest allies of Mr. Trump and his quixotic quest to overturn the election results.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who spoke at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, is seeking a promotion to the Senate. Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, whom Mr. Trump endorsed during his speech on Saturday night, introduced his Senate campaign with a video promising to “make sure our elections are fair” — a barely coded reference to Mr. Trump’s claims.In Ohio, a super PAC called the USA Freedom Fund is attacking official and prospective candidates for being insufficiently loyal to the former president and “America First” principles, while backing Josh Mandel, the Republican former Ohio state treasurer.“I am the only candidate in Ohio who gets up wherever he speaks around the state and has the guts to say this election was stolen from Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Mandel said last month on a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.Perhaps no 2022 House candidate embodies the new Republican ethos more than Loren Culp, a former one-man police department from rural Republic, Wash., who made his name by refusing to enforce a new state gun law in 2018. He spent weeks refusing to concede the governor’s race last year, and he sued state officials before dropping his lawsuit in January under pressure from the state attorney general.In an interview last week, Mr. Culp said he believed fraud had cost him the election, despite his loss by more than half a million votes to Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.Now Mr. Culp is running to unseat Representative Dan Newhouse, a four-term Republican from a conservative and largely rural central Washington district who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January. Mr. Culp said that he had a better chance of winning a House election than a statewide one because, he argued, Washington’s all-mail election system makes fraud too easy to perpetuate in the Seattle area.Loren Culp, right, Republicans’ nominee for governor of Washington last year, at a rally in Mount Vernon in August. He spent weeks refusing to concede the race and sued state officials.Elaine Thompson/Associated Press“I don’t believe that a real conservative will win a statewide race in Washington until we go back to in-person voting,” Mr. Culp said, echoing the skepticism of mail voting that Mr. Trump pushed for months leading into November. “Congressional districts are smaller geographical areas with less people dealing with the ballots. So it’s a whole lot easier to keep tabs on things.”Republican candidates’ 2020 skepticism comes as the party’s base voters, moving in near-lockstep with Mr. Trump and influential voices in the conservative media, have told pollsters that they, too, believe Mr. Biden was not the legitimate winner. G.O.P. candidates say it does not take much for their constituents to raise questions about the election to them.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman who is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, said his events were regularly delayed because voters inundated him with questions about the election.“When I go to give a speech, it takes 10 to 15 minutes before I can start, because the election is the first thing anybody wants to talk about,” Mr. Richardson, who said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election, said in a recent interview. “I go ahead and let them get it out of their system and then I can get started.”“There’s definitely a reason to doubt,” he added. “There’s doubt out there.”And then there is Audra Johnson, who became briefly famous in 2019 after wearing a “Make America Great Again” wedding dress created by Andre Soriano, a conservative fashion designer.Ms. Johnson is now running against Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, a Republican who supported impeachment. She believes Mr. Trump was the rightful winner last year and said that, if elected, she would work to audit voting machines, enact a national voter identification law and create more “transparency” in election results.“It’s coming down to the point where anybody can vote in our elections,” she said. “That’s not how the system is supposed to be set up.” More

Experts call it a circus. Polls say it will hurt the G.O.P. in 2022. But Republicans are on board in Arizona and elsewhere, despite warnings of lasting damage to the political system.SURPRISE, Ariz. — Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line.“There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded purchases into his vehicle outside a Home Depot. “I don’t think there was any fraud. My opinion of this is that it’s a big lie.”Mr. Goins is flesh-and-blood evidence of what political analysts here are all but shouting: The Republican State Senate’s autopsy of the 2020 vote, broadly seen as a shambolic, partisan effort to nurse grievances about Donald J. Trump’s loss here in November, risks driving away some of the very people the party needs to win statewide elections in 2022.That Arizona Republicans are ignoring that message — and that Republicans in other states are now trying to mount their own Arizona-style audits — raises worrisome questions not just about their strategy, but about its impact on an American democracy facing fundamental threats.Now in its seventh week, the review of 2.1 million votes in Arizona’s most populous county has ballooned not just into a national political spectacle, but also a political wind sock for the Republican Party — an early test of how its renewed subservience to Mr. Trump would play with voters.The returns to date are not encouraging for the party. A late-May poll of 400 Arizonans by the respected consulting firm HighGround Inc. found that more than 55 percent of respondents opposed the vote review, most of them strongly. Fewer than 41 percent approved of it. By about 45 to 33 percent, respondents said they were less likely — much less, most said — to vote for a Republican candidate who supported the review.Workers recounting 2020 general election ballots in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe review itself, troubled by procedural blunders and defections, has largely sacrificed any claim to impartiality. The Pennsylvania computer forensics firm that was conducting the hand recount of ballots quit without a clear explanation this month, adding further chaos to a count that election authorities and other critics say has been making up its rules as it went along.“If they were voting on it again today, they would have withheld doing this, because it’s been nothing but a headache,” Jim Kolbe, a Republican congressman from southeast Arizona from 1985 to 2003, said of the Republican state senators who are backing the review. “It’s a black mark on Arizona’s reputation.”Instead, the Republicans in the Arizona Senate have doubled down. And as the review’s notoriety has grown, pro-Trump Republicans in other states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have begun to promote their own plans to investigate the November vote, even though — as in Arizona — elections in those states have been certified as accurate and free from any fraud that could have affected the outcome.The sudden interest in exhuming the November election is explained by another number from the poll in Arizona: While only about 41 percent of all 400 respondents said they supported the Maricopa audit, almost 77 percent of Republican respondents did.Among the Trump supporters who dominate the Republican Party, skepticism about the election results, fueled almost entirely by Mr. Trump’s lies, remains unshaken, and catering to it is politically profitable. Leslie S. Minkus, 77, is a business consultant in Chandler, another Republican stronghold just southeast of Phoenix. His wife, Phyllis, serves on the local Republican legislative district committee. “The majority of voters here in Arizona know that this election was stolen,” he said in an interview. “It’s pretty obvious that our alleged president is not more popular than previous presidents, and still wound up getting a majority of the vote.”Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Goodyear, Ariz., last year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOpposition to the review by Democrats and some Republicans — including the Republican-run county board of supervisors and the Republican who is the chief county election officer — only shows that they have something to hide, Mr. Minkus added. And as for previous checks of ballots and voting equipment that showed no sign of fraud, he said, “I don’t think anybody would agree that the audits done in the past were independent.”In conversations with a range of Phoenix-area residents, many who supported the review were more equivocal than Mr. Minkus. “I think there was fraud going on. I mean, every election, there’s fraud,” said Eric M. Fauls, a 56-year-old California expatriate who moved to a golfing community in Surprise three years ago. “California — it was really bad — but I mean, California is never going to go Republican. With a swing state, it’s really important, so I think it’s worth doing an audit.”Still, he said, “I don’t know if there’s enough evidence either way to make it legitimate.”Most of the review’s critics, on the other hand, left little doubt of their feelings. “It’s a threat to our democracy. I think there’s no doubt about that,” said Dan Harlan, a defense-industry employee who changed his lifelong Republican registration to Democrat last year so he could help pick Mr. Trump’s opponent. “This audit is being conducted because the Republican Party refuses to look at long-term demographics and realize they can no longer be the party of the white male. And they’re doing everything they can to maintain power.“It’s not about democracy; it’s about winning,” he said. “And when any organization becomes more concerned with maintaining itself, losing its core values is no longer important.”Jane Davis, an 89-year-old retired nurse, was a Republican for 40 years before she re-registered as an independent and voted last year for Mr. Biden. The State Senate Republicans have backed an audit, she said, “to cause problems.”“I think it’s ridiculous, and I object to their spending any taxpayer money” on the review, she said.Protesters last month outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where ballots from the 2020 general election were being recounted. Courtney Pedroza/Getty ImagesChuck Coughlin, the Phoenix pollster who conducted the Arizona survey, said people like the Minkuses were in firm control of the state Republican Party in no small part because they are the ones who vote. Four in five Republican primary-election voters, he said, are 50 or older.By itself, that white-hot core is not large enough to wield power in statewide elections, Mr. Coughlin said. But it is plenty large enough to advance Mr. Trump’s narrative of a corrupt elite that is stealing power from the nation’s true patriots, particularly when it is stoked by politicians.“Historically on these big issues, you have a lively public discussion and then it goes away; the issue moves on to something else,” he said. “But this is an issue that we’re dwelling on because it’s to Trump’s advantage that the party continues to dwell on it — on his loss, and his victimhood and his identity.“I feel legitimately bad for these people that they’re so wounded that they are willing to take their party and a heretofore vibrant democracy down with it.”Indeed, some elections experts say that’s why the politics of the “audit,” as extravagantly flawed as it is, may be more complex than meets the eye. If it is about winning elections and building a majority, it looks like a political loser. If it’s about permanent grievance and undermining faith in the democratic system for political gain, maybe not.Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate president, and other Republicans have insisted that their election review is not intended to contest Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but to address voters’ concerns that the election had been stolen. In practice, those experts say, the review keeps the stolen-election narrative front and center in the state’s politics, slowly eroding faith in representative government.Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate last year. She said the purpose of the review was to address concerns of Trump voters that the election had been stolen. Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press“The problem is that Americans have a real lack of trust in institutions these days,” said William Mishler, a longtime expert on democratic institutions at the University of Arizona. And even many who regard the Arizona election review as a discredited, amateur exercise “fear the mischief that’s likely to come out of this in the form of some further undermining of confidence in the election outcome.”Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime student of the American political system, said the Arizona election review highlighted a seismic shift in the rules of American democracy. In years past, political parties were forces for moderation, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible. Now, he said, one of the two major parties was taking precisely the opposite tack.“We’ve had crazies in public life before,” he said. “We’ve had demagogues speaking out and sometimes winning high office. The difference this time is that they’re being encouraged rather than constrained by party and election officials.” Without some check on radicalism, he said, “our whole system breaks down.”Mr. Mishler concurred. “What worries me is not that there’s a minority of crazies in the party,” he said of the Republicans. “It’s that there’s a majority of the crazies.”That said, election inquiries only count votes. Mr. Mishler, Mr. Mann and Mr. Kolbe, the former representative, all said that a more imminent threat to democracy was what they called an effort by some Republicans to disregard votes entirely. They cited changes in state laws that could make challenging or nullifying election results easier, and a burst of candidacies by stolen-election advocates for crucial election posts such as secretary of state offices.Arizona is among the latter. The race to replace Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who s week that she was running for governor, already has attracted one Republican legislator who is an election conspiracy theorist and another who is perhaps the legislature’s leading supporter of restrictions on the right to vote.“These are perilous times,” Mr. Mann said. “Arizona is just demonstrating it.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

Kathryn Garcia Doesn’t Want to Be Anyone’s No. 2Ms. Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was regarded as New York City’s problem solver. Now she faces her own challenge: persuading voters to elect a newcomer to politics.Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, is seeking to become the first woman to be elected mayor of New York City.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the seventh in a series of profiles of the major candidates.June 7, 2021Even for a New York City mayoral candidate who seemed like a long shot, the event early last month had a desperate quality to it.Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, had agreed to a “pie-off” charity appearance with Paperboy Love Prince, an artist also running for mayor. Before they threw pies in each other’s faces, they had a dance-off, and she joked on Twitter that she would soon be “having a word with my staff.”A couple of days later, Ms. Garcia began airing her first television campaign ad. It, too, might have been described as being somewhat out of the box — but she actually stands inside the box, a giant red cube labeled “in case of emergency break glass.” She dons a pair of safety glasses and a leather jacket, and we see the glass shatter.The messages seemed clear: Sometimes you have to throw some pies and break some glass to draw attention and — to paraphrase a profane campaign slogan of hers — to get stuff done.For most of the mayoral race, Ms. Garcia, 51, had seemed hampered by a lack of resources and name recognition. Her fellow Democrats praised her experience in city government, where she held leadership positions at the city’s sanitation, environmental and public housing agencies.Yet at the time of the pie-off, Ms. Garcia was regarded so benignly that Andrew Yang parried critiques of his own government inexperience with promises to hire Ms. Garcia if elected. According to Ms. Garcia, Eric Adams, a former state senator now serving as Brooklyn borough president, had privately said he would seek to hire her, too. A spokesman for Mr. Adams declined to comment.Their gambit, Ms. Garcia said, was sexist. It may also have proven counterproductive: Voters began to focus on her qualifications. Editorial board endorsements came from The New York Times and The Daily News. Donations rolled in. Supporters started a super PAC to bolster her campaign.A late surge by Ms. Garcia has elevated her candidacy for the Democratic nomination.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWith two weeks left before the primary, which is all but certain to determine the next mayor in this heavily Democratic city, some of the race’s limited polling puts Ms. Garcia in the top three, alongside Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams. A fourth candidate, Maya Wiley, could be buoyed by recent endorsements from left-leaning Democrats, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.If Ms. Garcia becomes mayor, she says she will mandate curbside composting, a now-voluntary program started in the Bloomberg administration that she expanded. She wants to fill a jail-free Rikers Island with renewable energy capacity, including solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicle charging stations.She says she would spend $630 million a year to provide free child care for young children in families making less than $70,000 a year — to be funded largely by finding cost savings elsewhere in government — and guarantee housing for every foster care child until they are 26 years old.She would be New York City’s first female mayor. But there are hurdles that she must surmount first.She is by many accounts an even-keeled colleague who is cool under pressure. But she lacks the performative, charismatic qualities that so often animate politicians, to the frustration of some of her supporters. And though her more than six years in the de Blasio administration were well regarded, they have still given opponents ammunition to tie her to a mayor who is unpopular with some portions of the primary electorate.As sanitation commissioner, Ms. Garcia redesigned the city’s snow plow routes to improve efficiency.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“Why is ability not wholly the conversation?” she asked recently. “Shouldn’t that be what we’re looking for in our next mayor? That you can actually do the job, that you know how to do the job, that there’s some track record that says you would be effective at this?”Adventures after babysittingWhen Bruce and Ann McIver picked up their first child, Kathryn, from the adoption agency, she was just days old, the biological child of two graduate students.They promptly moved into a four-story house on First Street in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from Prospect Park. With its roots planted in Park Slope, the family grew to include five children — Black and white, biological and adopted, including one longtime ward of the foster system.Ms. Garcia was what her father calls an easy child. She saved her money. She attended the elite Stuyvesant High School. Her younger brother, Matt, described her as a “planner” and “very rigid.” She kept her bedroom neat, adorning its walls with the lyrics to Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and an advertisement for Soloflex, a workout device whose marketing campaign featured a man’s chiseled abs.The family recalled that her most extreme act of youthful rebellion occurred when she was a teenager and desperate to see Prince during his Purple Rain tour at Nassau Coliseum. She and a friend lined up overnight in Manhattan to buy tickets, only for their fathers to show up and drive them home. (They ended up seeing the show anyway.)Mr. McIver, a Montana native, served as Mayor Edward I. Koch’s chief labor negotiator. His wife, Ann McIver, was an English professor at Medgar Evers College who became executive director of the Morningside Area Alliance, a Manhattan nonprofit.Growing up, Ms. Garcia babysat for the children of Robert W. Linn, who would become Mr. de Blasio’s chief labor negotiator, and Emily Lloyd, who would go on to run the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.That connection would eventually pay off. Ms. Lloyd recruited Ms. Garcia to work as an unpaid intern at the Department of Sanitation after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Years later, Ms. Lloyd would appoint Ms. Garcia as her chief of staff at the Department of Environmental Protection. And it was Ms. Lloyd who later suggested to Anthony Shorris — Mr. de Blasio’s first deputy mayor — that he hire Ms. Garcia as sanitation commissioner.During her stint in the Department of Environmental Protection, Ms. Garcia often responded to crises, including the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAlong the way, Ms. Garcia worked for the Department of Finance and for Appleseed, a consulting firm where she conducted economic analyses for clients like Columbia University.She began to build a reputation as a reliable leader amid crisis. At the Department of Environmental Protection, where she eventually became chief operating officer, Ms. Garcia helped restart the city’s pumping stations after Hurricane Sandy and brought crews adept with chain saws down from the city’s upstate watershed to clear fallen trees.As sanitation commissioner, Ms. Garcia redesigned the city’s snow plow routes to improve efficiency and to avoid the type of winter catastrophe that has given mayors headaches, and occasionally cost them their jobs.The McIver children are still close. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the family gathered for bagels at Ms. Garcia’s sisters’ house in Brooklyn.Ms. Garcia, with her brother, Matt McIver, and sister Melanie McIver, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives not far from her family’s home.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe sisters milled about, as did their brother, Matt, their mother, Ann, and Ms. Garcia’s nieces, Lily and Penelope. There were also two dogs and a garter snake named Checkers.Lily, who is 6, went to the breakfast table to slice a bagel. Ms. Garcia leapt off the couch to intervene.“I’ve done it before,” Lily protested.Running clear of Bill de BlasioMs. Garcia is running as a moderate in the Democratic primary, much like Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams, who lead most polls. She rejects the defund the police movement, but would seek to require new officers to live in the five boroughs to better integrate the police force with the communities they serve, and would raise the recruitment age from 21 to 25.She has also proposed creating 50,000 units of what she calls “deeply affordable” housing, while legalizing more basement and single-room occupancy apartments. She supports allowing more charter schools to open and creating more dedicated bus lanes.But above all, she is running on her reputation for competence, one she honed while working for Mr. de Blasio.After the mayor in 2019 signed on to a controversial deal ceding some authority over the New York City Housing Authority to the federal government, the interim chair, Stanley Brezenoff, quit. Mr. de Blasio asked Ms. Garcia to step in until a new chair could be found.“They needed somebody credible, somebody with a demonstrable track record, someone who wouldn’t be immediately overwhelmed by the problems and the challenges of the task at hand,” Mr. Brezenoff said. “So she went from a palace where she reigned supreme and took this on. That’s my definition virtually of being a good soldier in the interests of the public and the city.”Ms. Garcia spent about four months leading the housing authority. Victor Bach, the senior housing policy analyst for the Community Service Society of New York, said he was “impressed with her skills as an administrator, particularly as a pinch-hitter NYCHA chair, transiting from sanitation to a strange new NYCHA universe.”But Daniel Barber, the head of the citywide council of tenant representatives, faulted her for not doing enough to effect change.“Although Kathryn Garcia was the commissioner of sanitation, NYCHA was still faced with major garbage issues,” said Mr. Barber, who has endorsed Raymond J. McGuire for mayor. “You can still see them today.”Mr. de Blasio also gave Ms. Garcia the task of coordinating city efforts to reduce childhood lead exposure. And when the coronavirus pandemic threw one million New Yorkers out of work, he asked her to create an emergency food network. At its peak, it distributed 1.5 million meals a day across the five boroughs.Ms. Garcia’s distribution system was not without flaws, which her opponents have recently seized upon to cast doubt on her management skills.But Joel Berg, the chief executive of Hunger Free America, who has worked to fight hunger for decades, marveled that Ms. Garcia’s team had managed to set up a program in a matter of weeks that would normally have taken the government years.“Some of my colleagues were quibbling some of the meals weren’t perfect, some of the deliveries got botched, there wasn’t perfect sourcing of organic fruits from local farmers,” Mr. Berg said. “I get all that. But what they did in a short period of time was pretty darn amazing.”Ms. Garcia began her career in government as an unpaid intern at the city’s department of sanitation. Decades later, she became its commissioner.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMs. Garcia’s central brief in the de Blasio administration was the normally unglamorous work of managing New York City’s trash and its snow. It is typically one of the more thankless jobs in government, one that draws media attention only when the commissioner fails. But Ms. Garcia managed to thrive there and earn widespread praise.Antonio Reynoso, the city councilman whose Sanitation Committee had oversight of the Sanitation Department, described Ms. Garcia as “absolutely amazing.”.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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.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;}With Mr. Reynoso, Ms. Garcia helped pass a waste equity bill that aimed to more fairly distribute private waste transfer stations around the city. The two also helped spearhead the reform of the notoriously dangerous commercial carting industry.The city is now establishing a zoned system, and private carting companies will have to compete to handle the private trash in those zones. The initiative is expected to reduce truck traffic in New York City by 18 million miles a year.Ms. Garcia won over the department’s rank and file. Four unions representing sanitation workers and supervisors in the public and private sectors, as well as one association representing sanitation chiefs, have endorsed her candidacy.“I honestly feel she is the person to run the city right now,” said Harry Nespoli, the president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, which represents the bulk of the department’s workers. “I’ve seen her work, I’ve worked with her, I’ve seen her turn around and take on issues that other people wouldn’t take on, and she gave it everything she had.”Jimmy Oddo, the Staten Island borough president and a Republican, said he had several friends running in the mayor’s race, but that a “big part” of him — the frustrated 30-year government employee, as he put it — was “probably rooting for Kathryn the hardest.”Mr. de Blasio thought so highly of Ms. Garcia that he asked her to be his deputy mayor for operations, she confirmed. But her accomplishments in his administration are also being used by her opponents on the campaign trail.Ms. Garcia seems aware of the potential de Blasio effect. She turned down the deputy mayor offer, and when she ultimately resigned from the administration in advance of her run for mayor, she criticized Mr. de Blasio for making cuts to the Sanitation Department during the pandemic, causing trash to pile up on city streets.Mayor Bill de Blasio, who chose Ms. Garcia as sanitation commissioner in 2014, put her in charge of creating an emergency food network during the pandemic.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesShe has recently broadened her criticism of Mr. de Blasio, saying that he could be too much of a micromanager, with no apparent interest in asking his commissioners what he could do to help them achieve policy goals. She has said Mr. de Blasio’s new $100 billion budget, by creating new programs even as the city is facing budget gaps, reflected “poor decision-making,” and she has promised to recast the costly signature mental health initiative, Thrive — created by the mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray — to focus more on people with the most severe mental health challenges.At the second official Democratic debate on Wednesday, seven of the eight candidates said they did not want Mr. de Blasio’s endorsement. The one exception was Mr. Yang.The next morning, a reporter asked Mr. de Blasio to comment on the efforts by two of his former aides — Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley, who served as his counsel — to distance themselves from him while running for mayor.“It just proves they’re politicians now,” he said.A practitioner, not a practiced politicoIf Ms. Garcia does reach City Hall, she is unlikely to forget her roots and what got her there. She still talks to her father every day — she from the campaign trail; he from the Hell’s Kitchen apartment building that he said Mr. Yang lived in before moving into another building nearby.Her two children are grown; her son lives nearby. She travels between her Park Slope home and the Staten Island home of her boyfriend, Andy Metz, who manages residential construction projects.Until she got divorced in 2016, Ms. Garcia was married to Jerry Garcia, a banker of Puerto Rican descent. Her surname may help her with Latino voters, who are expected to make up about 20 percent of primary voters.Ms. Garcia will not have a “first gentleman” if she makes it to Gracie Mansion. And her boyfriend, she said, will not live with her.“We don’t live together now,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going to change.”Ms. Garcia described most of her rivals as politicians, a characterization that she argued did not apply to herself.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesLast week, Ms. Garcia sat at her kitchen table in the blue Park Slope rowhouse where she and her ex-husband raised their family, not far from where she grew up. She had just gotten back from a meeting with Jewish leaders in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and was about to do an Instagram interview with the “Broad City” star Ilana Glazer. By that evening, she would be in Rockaway Beach in Queens, meeting voters.She was doing all of the things that a politician should do to win office. But still, she refused to assume the mantle of “politician.”“The usual person who runs is a politician, and I would actually put many of the people who are running in that category,” Ms. Garcia said. “And that is clearly not me.”If voters do in fact swing like pendulums — with every cycle turning away from the outgoing mayor toward what seems like a foil — it is possible that New Yorkers hungry for the perception of competence at a time of crisis will propel Ms. Garcia to victory.It is also possible that Ms. Garcia will benefit from the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the first-choice vote, the last-place finisher is eliminated. Voters who picked the eliminated candidate as their first choice will have their second-choice votes counted instead. The process continues until there is a winner.A recent poll commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute showed Ms. Garcia’s percentage of the vote rising as Dianne Morales, Mr. McGuire and Scott Stringer were eliminated in the mock ranked-choice tabulations.Ms. Garcia is circumspect about when she decided to run. But one of her earlier employers, Hugh O’Neill, the Appleseed president, said he remembered the first time he heard the idea floated.In 2016, Ms. Garcia did a presentation for the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog organization. Several people were impressed and approached Mr. O’Neill to ask if he thought she might consider running for mayor.He discussed the idea with Ms. Lloyd and then a couple of times with Ms. Garcia herself.“She made clear that she thought that she could do it, but she didn’t think that was where her future was,” he said. “And then, she called me, probably late last summer, and said, ‘I think I’m running for mayor.’ I said, ‘I’m glad to hear it.’” More

With just two weeks to go before the primary, Maya Wiley is consolidating support from the left wing of the Democratic Party.With two weeks to go before the Democratic primary, the progressive left has seemed to have coalesced around a single candidate, relying on a time-honored technique: self-elimination.The candidate is Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Her rise to the top of the progressive pile did not come easily. To get there, her two rivals first had to see their campaigns implode.First to take himself out was Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller. He was an original progressive favorite, until two women came forward with decades-old allegations of inappropriate sexual advances, causing many progressives leaders to withdraw their support.Next to run into trouble was Dianne Morales, the former nonprofit executive whose campaign mutinied, tried to unionize and then accused her of union-busting. It was a bad look for a woman who has run on empowering the grass roots.Support for Morales collapsesFour progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, have rescinded their endorsements for Ms. Morales. All are now endorsing Ms. Wiley, joining Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who endorsed her over the weekend.And three of the city’s major progressives groups, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, the Jewish Vote and New York Progressive Action Network, have all moved from Ms. Morales to Ms. Wiley.“As Eric Adams and Andrew Yang continue to push dangerous pro-corporate, pro-carceral agendas, it’s more important than ever that we consolidate progressive strength to ensure a working people’s champion wins this year,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York State director of the Working Families Party. “Maya Wiley has the momentum, platform and growing diverse coalition to win this race.”The rescinded endorsements follow news last week that Ms. Morales’s top adviser, Ifeoma Ike, has also defected to Ms. Wiley’s team.Although many of these groups are switching to Ms. Wiley, Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary who has remained in the second tier of top candidates, is trying to take advantage of Ms. Morales’s misfortune by poaching her supporters.His campaign has sent texts to Ms. Morales’s backers highlighting his support for ending solitary confinement in prisons and removing metal detectors from schools.“Shaun is the only candidate, aside from Dianne, who has called for $3 billion to be reallocated from the police and corrections budget toward community-based public safety and racial justice initiatives,” said Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mr. Donovan.A.O.C. backs list of progressives for City CouncilAlthough Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Ms. Wiley on Saturday made headlines, she also took a stand on the City Council race, throwing support to 60 candidates running in 31 districts.They had all signed a 30-point pledge aligned with the vision of her PAC, Courage to Change, promising to support policies like a Green New Deal, moving money from the police to social services, investing in public transit and rejecting donations from the fossil-fuel and real-estate industries.The message: Lasting movements are built from the ground up, and the fight for the bottom of the ticket is at least as important as the top-billed mayoral race.“We are advancing and making sure that we are coming together as a movement,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, standing before rows of candidates holding purple Courage to Change signs. She urged New Yorkers in their 31 districts to vote for them.The list includes all six candidates on the Democratic Socialists of America slate: Brandon West, Michael Hollingsworth and Alexa Avilés in Brooklyn; Tiffany Cabán and Jaslin Kaur in Queens; and Adolfo Abreu in the Bronx. Those candidates are emphasizing climate and environmental-justice policies such as building publicly owned renewable-energy infrastructure and banning new fossil-fuel infrastructure like gas power plants and pipelines.In districts with several candidates from her list, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez picked top choices on the basis of their support from grass-roots groups focused on public housing, climate action and immigrant and labor rights. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that to keep its momentum, the progressive movement needs to build a bloc in the City Council to help a Mayor Wiley shift policy to the left.“We have a candidate that grass-roots movements can work with, can influence, can shape,” she said. Trump looms over the Republican primaryThe shadow of one of the most prominent former New Yorkers loomed large over the Republican mayoral primary last week.On Thursday morning, Fernando Mateo, a restaurant owner, announced an endorsement from Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald J. Trump.Hours later, Mr. Mateo announced at a debate with his opponent, Curtis Sliwa, that he had met with Mr. Trump that same day to discuss the state of New York City.“He is very saddened by the state of this city,” Mr. Mateo said of the former president, who was a lifelong New Yorker until he changed his primary residence to Florida in 2019. “President Trump has compassion for New York and New Yorkers.”A representative for Mr. Trump, who has not made an endorsement in the race, confirmed the meeting.Mr. Mateo has repeatedly voiced his support for the former president, who is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney.Throughout his campaign, Mr. Mateo has criticized Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels who only became a Republican last year, for not supporting or voting for Mr. Trump, who remains popular with Republicans..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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.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;}The two have also sparred over the lie that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election — Mr. Sliwa says he did not — which has become a litmus test for conservative candidates across the country.Mr. Flynn, a former general who became one of the most ardent voices in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election and recently suggested at conference organized by adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory that he would support a military coup, cited Mr. Mateo’s embrace of the former president as the reason for his endorsement.“He understands, supports and embraces President Trump’s America First agenda,” Mr. Flynn said.McGuire’s wife cuts an adMr. Yang’s wife, Evelyn, rode the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island, Brooklyn, with him in his first advertisement.Mr. Stringer’s wife, Elyse Buxbaum, appears with him in an ad showing the couple getting their two sons ready for school.Now, as the former Wall Street executive Raymond J. McGuire continues to struggle in the polls, his wife, Crystal McCrary McGuire, a lawyer and filmmaker, is appearing solo in an ad set to launch on Tuesday.The ad shows Ms. McCrary McGuire with Mr. McGuire and their 8-year-old son, Leo, and talks about his work behind the scenes helping New Yorkers as a “private public servant,” including on the board of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.“There are literally hundreds of stories about how Ray has been serving the community of New York City for three decades, but he hasn’t been putting out press releases about it,” Ms. McCrary McGuire said in an interview.Mr. McGuire entered the race with strong support from the business community. He has raised more than $9 million and has a super PAC supporting his campaign, but he has not been able to break through with voters, according to available polling.Yang takes on de BlasioFor weeks, Andrew Yang has been treated by the other mayoral candidates as a front-runner, drawing sustained attacks at debates and on the campaign trail. Yet Mr. Yang is sharpening his attacks on someone who is not even running against him: Mr. de Blasio.On Tuesday, Mr. Yang delivered what his campaign called a “closing message,” blaming Mr. de Blasio and his administration for problems associated with crime and quality of life.Then on Thursday, Mr. Yang showed up outside a Y.M.C.A. in Park Slope, Brooklyn — a gym famously frequented by Mr. de Blasio — where he planned to talk about how best to “turn the page on the de Blasio administration.” (Mr. Yang was heckled by protesters and forced to leave.)It has been a shift in tone for Mr. Yang, who had for months positioned himself as an exuberant, optimistic political outsider.But the attacks serve several functions. By targeting Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Yang is seeking to cement his position as a reform candidate. He is also implicitly drawing a contrast with some of his top rivals in the race.He has cast Eric Adams, who is vying with Mr. Yang for moderate Democrats, as an ally of Mr. de Blasio. And two other rivals worked for Mr. de Blasio — Ms. Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, who served as sanitation commissioner — making criticisms of the mayor’s record a form of proxy attack against them. More