Elections

new video loaded: More

House Republicans purged Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for her refusal to stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies, in a remarkable takedown of one of their own that reflected the party’s intolerance for dissent and unswerving fealty to the former president.The action came by voice vote during a brief but raucous closed-door meeting in an auditorium on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning, after Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech that drew boos from her colleagues.In her parting remarks, Ms. Cheney urged Republicans not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments who detailed them on condition of anonymity. Ms. Cheney warned that Republicans were going down a path that would bring their “destruction,” and “possibly the destruction of our country,” the person said, adding that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.Republicans did just that, after greeting her speech with boos, according to two people present, speaking on the condition on anonymity to discuss an internal discussion. They ultimately opted not to hold a recorded vote, after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said that they should vote by voice to show unity.Emerging from the meeting, Ms. Cheney remained unremorseful, and said she was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets near the Oval Office.”“We must go forward based on truth,” Ms. Cheney told reporters. “We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the Constitution.”The action came the day after Ms. Cheney had delivered a broadside on the House floor against Mr. Trump and the party leaders working to oust her, accusing them of being complicit in undermining the democratic system.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming said she would not sit quietly as the party abandoned the rule of law.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn a scathing speech, Ms. Cheney said that the country was facing a “never seen before” threat of a former president who provoked the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 and who had “resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”Mr. Trump weighed in on Wednesday morning as lawmakers were gathering to force Ms. Cheney out, saying he was looking forward to the ouster of a woman he called “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”Top Republicans have labored to avoid talking about the Capitol riot and have painted Ms. Cheney’s removal as a forward-looking move that would allow them to move past that day.“Each day spent relitigating the past is one day less we have to seize the future,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to party members on Monday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesInstead, the episode has only called attention to the party’s devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarianism, and internal divisions between more mainstream and conservative factions about how to win back the House in 2022. All of those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, thus undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.As a replacement for Ms. Cheney, Republican leaders have united behind Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a onetime moderate whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and backing for his false claims of election fraud have earned her broad support from the party’s rank and file that Ms. Cheney, a lifelong conservative, no longer commands. If Ms. Stefanik is elected this week to replace Ms. Cheney, as expected, the top three House Republican leadership posts will be held by lawmakers who voted not to certify President Biden’s victory in January. In recent days, however, some hard-right Republicans have attacked Ms. Stefanik as insufficiently conservative and suggested the party should consider someone else. More

When it comes to the fate of big cities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are two sets of overlapping economic and political consequences, but they are not necessarily what you might expect.Declining tax revenues, business closures, spiking rates of violent crime and an exodus to smaller communities have left major urban centers anxious about surviving the pandemic’s aftermath and returning to a new normal.But all is not lost.In a paper published earlier this month, “America’s Post-Pandemic Geography, two urbanists who come from very different political perspectives, Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, argue:Any shift away from superstar cities may augur a long-overdue and much-needed geographic recalibration of America’s innovation economy. High-tech industries have come to be massively concentrated — some would say overconcentrated — in coastal elite cities and tech hubs. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Acela Corridor (spanning Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.) have accounted for about three-quarters of all venture-capital investment in high-tech start-ups. In the decade and a half leading up to the pandemic, more than 90 percent of employment growth in America’s innovation economy was concentrated in just five major coastal metros: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston, according to the Brookings Institution.In addition, Florida and Kotkin write:The current shift to remote work makes geographic rebalancing of these industries more feasible, and a number of leading big tech companies have openly embraced it. Such a rebalancing might help not only smaller cities develop more robust economies but also take some pressure off the housing and real-estate markets of superstar cities and tech hubs, making them more affordable.In an email, Florida argued that a key motivating force driving many of the recent departures from big cities was the desire to be away from the pandemic, as well as from pandemic restraints imposed by local governments:More affluent people, especially risk-oriented entrepreneurial types are fleeing to less restrictive more open environments, where they choose to undertake their own risks and, if they have kids, to send them to school.There is also political fallout from the nation’s changing demography.Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford and the author of “Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide,” explained in an email how the geographic dispersion of Democratic voters may help slowly shift Republican and competitive districts in a leftward direction:Even before 2020, there was already a strong correlation between net county-level in-migration and increasing Democratic vote share. In 2020, this relationship was incredibly strong. All around the country, counties that experienced in-migration saw increases in Democratic vote share — in some cases very large increases — and places experiencing out-migration saw increases in the Republican vote share. These in-migration counties that trended Democratic were mostly suburban, and the out-migration counties that moved toward the Republicans were both urban core and rural counties.For decades, Rodden continued,Democrats have been excessively concentrated in urban centers, which makes it difficult for them to transform their votes into commensurate legislative seats. But as cities lose population, most of the growing suburban counties are either red counties that are trending purple, or purple counties that are trending blue, and very few are overwhelmingly Democratic.Democratic suburban gains were already evident in the 2018 and 2020 elections in states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina.At the same time, the movement of Democratic voters from urban centers is very likely to moderate the agenda-setting strength of progressive urban voters. This process will lessen an ideological problem that plagued Democratic congressional candidates.In “Why Cities Lose,” Rodden wrote:Voters in the urban core congressional districts are ideologically quite distinct from the rest of the country, and quite far away from the median district. And the most extremely conservative rural districts are actually not very far away from the pivotal districts around the median.Rodden continues:In most U.S. states then, urban districts are far more liberal than the rest of the state. As a result, Democrats face a difficult challenge in trying to manage their statewide party reputation. If it comes to be dominated by urban incumbents, they will find it hard to compete in the pivotal districts.In his email, Rodden argued that because Republicans control congressional redistricting in many more states than Democrats do, Democrats may not make immediate gains in the House as a result of these population shifts. But, he noted, as these trends continue, districts gerrymandered at the beginning of the decade may shift in a more progressive direction over time:Republican map-drawers will be working with a rapidly moving target, and the task of making projections for elections 6 or 8 years into the future in suburban and exurban areas might be difficult. The future political orientation of suburban areas depends, in part, on choices that will be made by both parties in the years ahead. Gerrymandering takes very little effort when your opponents are already geographically packed. As they spread out and mingle with your supporters, the job becomes more challenging.John Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center, pointed out in an email that “even before the pandemic, there were a growing number of exceptions to the seemingly inexorable march of a tech and knowledge economy to consolidate in handfuls of superstar global cities.” He cited as especially attractive those smaller cities with research universities, including Iowa City, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Mich.; State College, Pa.; and South Bend, Ind.“Many techies realize they can flee the costs, congestion and craziness of the coasts (like the Bay Area),” Austin said,and find a lot of people like them and robust culture and diverse community in the Nashvilles scattered across the county. This kind of tech-talent immigration only happens to places these folks perceive to be a place with lots of people like them and a rich culture mix — coastal techies now know Phoenix and Boulder fit the bill — but this is also a huge opportunity for places like Madison and Ann Arbor and the Marquettes and the Ashevilles, which do have a rich and diverse talent base, tech-scene, food and music and all that.Austin believes that the movement of high-tech workers to smaller, redder states will benefit the Democratic Party.As these areas gain knowledge workers, Austin wrote, they will see local politicsevolve to be more progressive, and better inoculated against the appeal of right wing populist demagogues like Trump. Local residents will become more optimistic and forward looking, not responding to the siren song of nationalism, nativism and pullback from the international order. Newcomers leaven the polity. This is clearly what we see in places like Grand Rapids in West Michigan and other smaller tier former manufacturing centers in the Midwest.Once a rock-ribbed Republican county, Grand Rapid’s Kent County voted for Biden over Trump 51.9 percent to 45 percent.In their March 2021 paper, “From L.A. to Boise: How Migration Has Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Peter Haslag and Daniel Weagley, professors at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, identified the highest percentage of movers from one state to another, topped by California residents going to Texas, then New York to Florida and Illinois to Florida.The geographic trends are striking. Of the top 20, 19 were from blue states to red states.Last year, Manhattan’s population fell by 20,337, the largest drop in 30 years, according to data compiled by William Frey, a Brookings senior fellow.Over the three decades from 1990 to 2020, Frey found that in large metropolitan counties, the population of inner and outer suburbs grew twice as much, at 38.7 million, as that of center cities, at 18.8 million, as shown in the accompanying graphic.Pandemic’s urban population loss nothing newPopulation growth in the urban cores of large metros has been dropping sharply since 2016, but only became a net loss in the last year. In those regions’ suburbs, growth has cooled, but still showed a net gain during the pandemic. More

Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressI asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.The takedown of Representative Cheney was not an “inflection point,” as some have called it. It was the opposite — the latest (but it won’t be the last) confirmation that the Republican Party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal, caught in the grip of what Ms. Cheney described in The Washington Post as the “anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney, unbroken and unbowed, said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.” Her Republican colleagues, cowardly and classless, cleared the chamber as she began her remarks. But they can’t escape her searing indictment.Declaring fealty to a lie has become the single most important test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party. Everyone recognizes this, but from time to time we need to stop to register its true significance.“It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level,” Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 10th Congressional District before Mr. Trump’s unpopularity in the suburbs sunk her chances in the 2018 election, told Lisa Lerer of The Times. “We’re just going to say that black is white now.”This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. For more than five years, the Republican Party and its leading media propagandists embraced and championed Mr. Trump’s mendacities, conspiracy theories and sociopathic tendencies. As a result, their brains became rewired, at least metaphorically speaking; the constant accommodation Republicans made to Mr. Trump caused significant cognitive distortions.As a result, they have detached themselves from reality. The expectation that once Mr. Trump left office the Republican Party would become a normal party again was wishful thinking from the beginning. There is no post-Trump fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party. At least for now, that battle has been decided.Liz Cheney understands that only a decisive break with Mr. Trump will stop the continuing moral ruination of the Republican Party. But her break with the former president, while courageous, came too late to change anything. She is trying to rally an army that doesn’t exist.It doesn’t exist for two reasons. The first is that many grass-roots Republicans, having been fed a steady diet of fabrications and disinformation for the last half-decade, are deluded. They believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories, in large measure because they want to believe them, and now they are addicted to them. And addictions are hard to break.The latest CNN/SSRS survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the false allegation that Joe Biden did not defeat Mr. Trump; a mere 23 percent said Mr. Biden won, despite the Trump administration’s admission that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history.”These Republicans believe they are truth-tellers and patriots, sentries at freedom’s gate. They are utterly sincere; they are also quite dangerous. They are taking a sledgehammer to pillars of American democracy: confidence in the legitimacy of our elections, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power.Most Republican members of Congress, on the other hand, don’t believe President Biden was illegitimately elected. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham aren’t deceived. They are play acting in ways that are unethical and cynical, but they are not stupid. They’re fully aware that the cancerous lies have metastasized — they each played a crucial role in spreading them, after all — and to refute those lies publicly would put targets on their backs.Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.So we have reached the point where a member of one of the Republican Party’s leading families, a person of unquestioned conservative credentials, is now less popular with the Republican base and more reviled by the House leadership than the onetime QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just before the Jan. 6 insurrection referred to that day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherToday, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership position.Her role in the party has increasingly become untenable for many. Ms. Cheney has continued to speak out in the starkest of terms against President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6 riots and the continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.In doing so, she has found herself on a lonely political island.We look at the factors behind her ouster and the new requirements for Republican leadership.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a reporter in The New York Times’s Washington bureau.Representative Liz Cheney’s leadership role is embattled despite her conservative voting record and her status as a member of a Republican dynasty. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBackground readingIn turning on Ms. Cheney, Republicans have bowed to Mr. Trump’s election lies.The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.“History is watching.” Here are five key arguments from Ms. Cheney’s Washington Post opinion essay this month.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

Three more mayoral candidates highlighted fresh plans to address a recent spate of shootings that has overtaken the contest just six weeks before the primary.One mayoral candidate, Kathryn Garcia, said that she would let New Yorkers trade in guns for $2,000 in cash.Another, Shaun Donovan, said he would demand the city’s five district attorneys fast-track gun cases.A third, Maya Wiley, considered one of the more left-leaning candidates in the race, stuck to her message, pledging to appoint a civilian police commissioner.Following a shooting in Times Square on Saturday that injured three bystanders, including a child and a tourist, nearly all of the leading mayoral candidates used campaign appearances this week to describe how they would reduce crime without discriminating against New Yorkers of color.The frenzy of barnstorming comes at a potentially pivotal moment in the most important New York mayor’s race in a generation. With just six weeks to go before the Democratic primary, New York is still facing an economic crisis and other fallout from the pandemic. Yet the city’s rising wave of shootings has taken center stage.It has transformed the race for Manhattan’s chief prosecutor, too, shifting a contest that in January was almost wholly focused on making the criminal justice system more fair.In recent weeks, some of the former prosecutors in the race have taken pains to emphasize the importance of public safety, and Liz Crotty, the most consistently safety-focused candidate, was endorsed by four different police unions and a former police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. Several candidates with non-prosecutorial backgrounds have scrambled to add plans for protecting the public and stemming the violence to their websites.An officer stands inside a blocked-off area in Times Square where three people, including a toddler, were shot on Saturday.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesAs of May 2, 463 New Yorkers have fallen victim to shootings, compared with 259 in the same period last year. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is now in his final year in office, routinely blames the rise in shootings on the mass unemployment wrought by the pandemic, and a coronavirus-related slowdown in court proceedings. His police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, has an alternate theory: that the criminal justice reforms recently enacted by the state government make it too hard to jail people suspected of crimes.Criminologists say that it is difficult to say with any precision what has led to the increase in gun violence, which has risen sharply in cities across the country.Several experts said that the surge in violence might be related to the pandemic. Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, said that specific Covid-related causes could include the lack of after-school programming and slowdowns in prosecutors’ and courts’ ability to process cases.Ray McGuire was one of three mayoral candidates to hold news conferences in Times Square following the shooting there on Saturday.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesRather than speculate on the cause for the shootings, the mayoral candidates criticized their opponents for not paying closer attention to the phenomenon.On Tuesday, Mr. Donovan, a former Obama administration housing secretary, invited reporters to join him in front of the station house for the 73rd Precinct, which includes Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that has had 26 shooting victims this year, compared with 12 in the same period last year.“A tragic shooting in Times Square should not wake candidates up for the first time on this issue,” Mr. Donovan said in an interview, echoing similar comments made earlier this week by Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president. “There was a man shot and killed on Church Avenue last week that didn’t get nearly the same amount of attention.”Mr. Donovan argued that as mayor, he would lean on the city’s five district attorneys, over whom he has no formal control, to fast-track felony gun cases, which he says take twice as long in New York City than in the rest of the state..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-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Donovan, who also worked in the Bloomberg administration, rarely mentions the former mayor on the trail, but on Tuesday he praised Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to stem gun violence, and said he would seek to emulate them.“We’re not manufacturing guns here in New York, we are not selling them at stores in our neighborhoods, they are coming from out of state,” Mr. Donovan said. “The only way to end the flow of illegal guns into the city is to build partnerships with President Biden with Attorney General Garland, with all our law enforcement agencies but also with mayors and governors across the region and across the country.”Across town, Ms. Wiley, a civil rights advocate, held forth outside of City Hall. After she left her position as counsel to Mr. de Blasio, he appointed her as chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which has some oversight of police disciplinary matters.Ms. Wiley, who is Black, said she knows what it means to both fear the police and to fear crime, and she decried the “false choice” between being “safe from crime” and being “safe from police violence.”She said that with her as mayor, the false choice would end. She would send more resources to the board she once chaired, and she would appoint a civilian police commissioner who did not rise “through a culture of silence” at the police department. She said she would appoint a commission to revise the police guide so that it clearly penalizes excessive force.And while she took pains to humanize police officers — “police officers are people,” she said — she also said the police force is far too large, and she would cancel two years of new police cadets.Back in Brooklyn, outside of the 90th Precinct station house in Williamsburg, Ms. Garcia, Mr. de Blasio’s former sanitation commissioner, said that her administration would make getting illegal guns off the street a priority. Among other things, she would expand the Police Department’s gun violence suppression division, which focuses on the trafficking of illegal guns, and induce New Yorkers to trade in guns by increasing the rebate per gun to $2,000 from $200.“We want New Yorkers to have the money to buy necessities and pay rent, not guns,” Ms. Garcia said.Three other candidates had held crime-related news conferences earlier this week. Two have not held events to discuss the issue: the New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive who has proposed to cut the Police Department’s operating budget by more than half.Alicka Ampry-Samuel, a councilwoman who represents the Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, said she endorsed Mr. Adams for mayor because he would amplify initiatives that were already underway to reduce gun violence, such as an experiment called the Brownsville Safety Alliance, in which police withdrew from a crime hot spot for five days and were replaced by groups that work to defuse gun and gang violence.“We do know when people get shot in Brownsville because they are always talking about it,” she said, taking issue with Mr. Donovan. “I would love for folks to talk about solutions.” More

Alvin Bragg has had encounters with the police both in the streets and in the courts. He wants to change the system from within.The first time Alvin Bragg began thinking about police accountability was not long after an officer put a gun to his head, when he was a 15-year-old in Harlem in the 1980s.Nearly 30 years later, as a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office in 2017, Mr. Bragg found himself confronting the same issue, overseeing the case against Officer Wayne Isaacs, who was off duty when he killed Delrawn Small in the early morning in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.The officer was charged with murder and manslaughter. Video of the shooting, prosecutors argued, appeared to contradict the officer’s account. The jury acquitted him anyway.“I felt dejected, demoralized, really upset for the family,” Mr. Bragg recalled. “I felt like our system had not worked.”Now, the issues of police accountability and public integrity that Mr. Bragg confronted as a prosecutor are at the center of his campaign to lead one of the most important district attorney’s offices in the country. Mr. Bragg, 47, a Democrat, is one of nine candidates vying for the office, and is among those seeking to balance concerns about public safety against a progressive push to make the criminal justice system less punitive.In seeking to position himself as the candidate most capable of changing the system from the inside, Mr. Bragg has leaned on his personal history — including both his street-corner and courtroom encounters with the police. And Mr. Bragg, who is the only Black candidate running, would be the first Black person to lead an office where, researchers have found, race continues to be a critical factor in nearly every part of the process.But his history leading the unit that tried Officer Isaacs — a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians — undermines a record that sounds better than it looks, his opponents and their supporters charge. Under Mr. Bragg, the unit, then called the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit, investigated 24 cases and brought back zero convictions. (It has not fared any better since he left, three years ago.)Officer Wayne Isaacs, center, was found not guilty after a 2017 trial; Mr. Bragg said the verdict still troubles him.  Dave Sanders for The New York Times“The Manhattan district attorney needs to be able to manage the most complicated and difficult cases, and that includes holding police accountable,” said Lucy Lang, another candidate in the race, who at a debate last week attacked Mr. Bragg’s record on police accountability. “Unfortunately, in the 24 cases of police killings that came before him, Alvin wasn’t able to hold a single officer accountable.”Mr. Bragg said that his record leading the unit, now called the Office of Special Investigation, showed only that the law makes it extremely difficult to successfully prosecute police officers.Experts agree. Though there are exceptions, including the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Mr. Bragg’s record with the unit at the attorney general’s office is not unusual. It remains extremely difficult to charge, let alone convict, police officers.Peter Neufeld, head of the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions, said that Mr. Bragg was fighting within a system that was heavily weighted against him. (Mr. Neufeld endorsed Mr. Bragg last month.)“It doesn’t make sense when looking at somebody who is taking on an adversary with both hands tied behind his back to measure his win-loss record,” he said.Close to homeMr. Bragg grew up on 139th Street in the heart of Harlem. Born in 1973, on the cusp of the city’s fiscal crisis, he said he learned at an early age which blocks were safe and which were not, the places he could go and the places that were best avoided.His mother, a math teacher, kept a close eye on him and made sure he focused on school, drilling him on his multiplication tables on the M10 bus and asking him to stay within the confines of their block. His father, who worked for the New York Urban League, regaled him with stories about the Willis Reed-era New York Knicks and encouraged him to get outside.There could be trouble, even close to home. When Mr. Bragg was 10 years old, he had a knife put to his neck by some teenagers in the middle of the day, in what he described as a “hazing,” but a very scary one.And then there were the police. About five years later, he was walking with a friend when an unmarked police car began driving the wrong way on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, he said. Three officers emerged from the car. One put a gun to Mr. Bragg’s head. They asked if he was dealing drugs and started going through his pockets.“You didn’t need to go to law school to know this was unlawful,” Mr. Bragg said. His interest in criminal justice started there.He went to Harvard and Harvard Law School and clerked for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he first began to see the way that prosecutors could work on behalf of public safety. After several years working as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, he became a prosecutor at the New York attorney general’s office, looking at public corruption and white- collar crime. He later worked under Preet Bharara, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District, as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, before returning to the attorney general’s office, where he focused on police misconduct.Mr. Bharara, who has endorsed Mr. Bragg, said that he had been set apart while a federal prosecutor by his concerns about police accountability and public corruption.“He’s not jumping on the bandwagon in connection with the race for office,” Mr. Bharara said. “He’s cared about these things for a long time.”Mr. Bragg, who met volunteers in Union Square this month, has sought to balance progressive ideas about the criminal justice system with public safety concerns.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesCivil Rights and Public SafetyMr. Bragg is one of nine candidates, eight Democrats and one Republican, running to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr. as the chief prosecutor in Manhattan, a position that carries immense power to affect the criminal justice system in New York City.He has said that his overall focus will be on decreasing the number of people behind bars, that he will create a new unit to investigate police misconduct, move resources toward prosecutors investigating economic crime and overhaul the sex crimes unit. He has proposed a plan that would work to stem the flow of guns into New York from out of state.Many of Mr. Bragg’s ideas reflect the move to the left in prosecutorial elections in cities around the country in recent years — a shift that has ushered in a new breed of progressive prosecutor.Initially the race in Manhattan seemed to follow that pattern, as the majority of the Democratic candidates promoted lenient approaches to certain low-level crimes.But in recent months, as gun violence has continued to rise in New York City and another leading Democratic candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has stressed the importance of prosecuting crime, tension has grown between those pushing for leniency and those emphasizing public safety. (As of January, Mr. Bragg had raised more money than anyone other than Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and on Saturday, a racial justice organization, Color of Change, said it would spend $1 million promoting his candidacy.)Mr. Bragg has found a synthesis, based on his biography, that he hopes will persuade voters.“People care about both,” he said. “They want civil rights and public safety. Being safe is your first civil right, and we can’t have safety without community trust, which is based on civil rights.”And so he relies on his record — even when his opponents say it is unflattering. Under pressure from Ms. Lang during last week’s debate, he called the unit that has garnered zero convictions “the most transformative, transparent unit in this space in the history of this country.”Mr. Bragg has argued that the way his office worked with the victims’ families marked the beginning of a productive alliance between prosecutors and protesters, both pushing for justice. The unit was created after Eric Garner’s death in police custody in 2014; Mr. Bragg has been endorsed by Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr.Mr. Small’s brother, Victor Dempsey, said that Mr. Bragg had consulted him throughout the case against Officer Isaacs. He has endorsed Mr. Bragg’s candidacy.“Alvin has been a tremendous part in my advocacy work and my family’s advocacy work because he kind of gave us the impetus to keep fighting,” he said.But not all of Mr. Small’s family has backed Mr. Bragg. Victoria Davis, his sister, has endorsed Ms. Lang, who worked as a prosecutor under Mr. Vance.In a recent conversation, Ms. Davis said that she did not feel Mr. Bragg had done everything he could for her brother, who she said was demonized during the officer’s trial because of a tattoo. “I think he wasn’t humanized,” she said of her brother.Mr. Bragg still dwells on the acquittal of Officer Isaacs. He agreed with Ms. Davis that the defense team had successfully dehumanized Mr. Small, transforming him into what Mr. Bragg called a “Black boogeyman,” a tactic that predated the modern criminal justice system.“The part that is sad is that it works,” he said. “That racial imagery is a tie that binds throughout our history. Ultimately that’s the original sin, and we’ve got to address that.” More

Shaun Donovan and Raymond J. McGuire, candidates for mayor of New York, were way, way off when asked to estimate the median home price in the borough.Do you know the median sales price for a home in Brooklyn?The question, which was recently posed to eight mayoral candidates by The New York Times editorial board, was not a trick. Brooklyn is a notoriously expensive borough in one of America’s most expensive cities, and New York City’s housing crisis promises to be a major issue in the coming years.Yet the range of responses given by two of the candidates — off by roughly an order of magnitude — has touched off incredulity among New Yorkers.“In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t for sure,” Shaun Donovan, who has touted his experience as housing secretary under President Barack Obama and housing commissioner under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, answered. “I would guess it is around $100,000.”The guess from Raymond J. McGuire, an investment banker and former executive at Citigroup who has sought to woo voters with his financial acumen, included similar numbers.“It’s got to be somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher,” he said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said he believed the number was about $550,000. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, guessed $1.8 million. Only Andrew Yang, who has been criticized in the past for seeming out of touch with the city’s issues, guessed correctly: $900,000.Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, guessed $800,000; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, $500,000; and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, $1 million.While Mr. Donovan and Mr. McGuire are not considered among the leading candidates in the race, it was their answers that drew the most attention, with many people suggesting that they did not have a grasp on the problems of working people. As several people pointed out on social media, among the things that can be purchased in Brooklyn for $100,000 or less, according to the website Zillow: a parking space and two vacant lots.“It’s hard to imagine these men solving a problem they don’t know exists,” said Monica Klein, a political consultant. The Working Families Party, which has endorsed two other candidates, Ms. Morales and Ms. Wiley, is a client of Ms. Klein’s firm, Seneca Strategies.“If you don’t spend your days refreshing StreetEasy and obsessing over apartments you will never afford, are you really a New Yorker?” Ms. Klein askedAccording to a note appended to a transcript of the editorial board’s interview with Mr. Donovan, he had sent an email several hours after the interview to say that his $100,000 answer referred to the assessed value of homes in Brooklyn, which tends to be much lower than their selling price.“I really don’t think you can buy a house in Brooklyn today for that little,” he wrote, according to the transcript.Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mr. Donovan, said Tuesday that Mr. Donovan “misinterpreted the question and made a mistake.”“He had been volunteering on a complex housing assessment lawsuit and just got the numbers mixed up,” Mr. Edwards said. “As Shaun says, he is a housing nerd and public servant who has dedicated 30 years of his life to solving the problems of housing affordability and homelessness, and the wrong number slipped out.”[Read the transcript of Mr. Donovan’s interview with the editorial board.]In an emailed response on Tuesday, Mr. McGuire said he “messed up when accounting for the cost of housing in Brooklyn.”“I am human,” he said. “But make no mistake, I care deeply about our city’s affordable housing crisis. I know what it’s like not being able to afford a home because it was my own experience. At the heart of my housing plan, which addresses the entire housing spectrum from homelessness to homeownership, are New Yorkers who want leadership that will bring creative, data-driven solutions to housing in New York City.”[Read the transcript of Mr. McGuire’s interview with the editorial board.]Brooklyn real estate values have soared, and the median price for a home in the borough is $900,000.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesNicole Gelinas, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute who is focused on urban economics and infrastructure, said the more inaccurate answers showed “a real sense of being out of touch with what’s going on in the city,” particularly regarding affordability..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-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}She said the last time the median home price in Brooklyn was around $100,000 may have been in the 1980s.“Buying salvaged houses in Bushwick when it was recovering from all of the fires of the 1970s — that was a unique period of time. You’re looking at 35 years or more since you could really buy anything below six figures, never mind seven figures,” she said.Of the eight candidates questioned, five — Mr. Adams, Ms. Wiley, Mr. Donovan, Ms. Morales and Ms. Garcia — live in Brooklyn.The candidates’ answers, Ms. Gelinas said, recalled a comment that George H.W. Bush made when he visited the National Grocers Association convention in Florida during the 1992 campaign. In an article that February, The New York Times reported that “a look of wonder flickered across his face” as he saw the price of a quart of milk, among other items, registered on a grocery store scanner — cementing the impression that he did not understand middle-class life. (Other media outlets have since suggested that the characterization was inaccurate.)“I think the candidate should at least have a number in the rough vicinity of what is the right number,” Ms. Gelinas said.She said that the candidates’ answers could hurt them politically, particularly as many voters in New York City seem to not be paying attention to the mayoral race and have, according to polls, not decided who they are voting for.“This is going to be the way that a lot of people are introduced to McGuire and Donovan,” she said.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More