Elections

Administration officials were determined to draft a response that would impose real costs on Moscow, as many previous rounds of sanctions have been shrugged off. More

Just like when Donald J. Trump was a candidate in 2016, rival Republicans are trying to avoid becoming the target of his attacks or directly confronting him, while hoping someone else will.It was a familiar scene on Sunday when Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, tried to avoid giving a direct answer about the caustic behavior of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump had called Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, “dumb” and used a coarse phrase to underscore it while speaking to hundreds of Republican National Committee donors on Saturday night. When Mr. Thune was asked by Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” to comment, he chuckled and tried to sidestep the question.“I think a lot of that rhetoric is — you know, it’s part of the style and tone that comes with the former president,” Mr. Thune said, before moving on to say Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell shared the goal of reclaiming congressional majorities in 2022.Mr. Thune was not the only Republican straining to stay on the right side of the former president. The day before Mr. Trump delivered his broadsides against Mr. McConnell, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, presented Mr. Trump with a newly created award for his leadership.And Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump who enraged him when she criticized his actions in connection to the Jan. 6 riot, and indicated the party needs to move on, has also been trying a delicate dance to work back into a more neutral territory.This week, she told The Associated Press that she would not run if Mr. Trump did, a display of deference that underscored the complications the former president represents to Republicans.Like many Republicans, Mr. Thune, Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley were navigating the impulses of a former president who talks privately about running again in 2024, and who is trying to bend the rest of the party to his will, even after the deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He retains a firm hold on a devoted group of Republican voters, and party leaders have discussed the need to continue appealing to the new voters Mr. Trump attracted over the past five years.To some extent, their posture recalls the waning days of Mr. Trump’s first primary candidacy, in 2015 and 2016. While Mr. McConnell and a few other Republicans have been directly critical of Mr. Trump’s conduct following the Capitol riot, most are trying to avoid alienating the former president, knowing he will set his sights on them for withering attacks, and hoping that someone or something else intervenes to hobble him.Even as Mr. Trump makes clear he will not leave the public stage, many Republicans have privately said they hope he will fade away, after a tenure in which the party lost both houses of Congress and the White House.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, was critical of Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot in January.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“It is Groundhog Day,” said Tim Miller, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, the only candidate to repeatedly challenge Mr. Trump during the early stages of the Republican presidential primaries in 2016.“I always thought that was like a rational choice in 2015,” Mr. Miller said, referring to the instinct to lay back and let someone else take on Mr. Trump. “But after we all saw how the strategy fails of just hoping and wishing for him to go away, nobody learned from it.”Throughout that campaign, one candidate after another in the crowded field tried to position themselves to be the last man standing on the assumption that Mr. Trump would self-destruct before making it to the finish line.It was wishful thinking. Mr. Trump attacked not only Mr. Bush but several other candidates in deeply personal terms, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Only Mr. Bush sustained a response, though he eventually left the race after failing to gain traction; Mr. Cruz, in particular, told donors during a private meeting in late 2015 that he was going to give Mr. Trump a “big bear hug” in order to hold onto his voters.They all tried to avoid being the target of his insults, while hoping that external events and news media coverage would ultimately lead to his downfall. Instead, Mr. Trump solidified his position as primary voting began.“He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly, much more than any other politician, yet somehow people crave his approval,” said Mike DuHaime, who advised former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in that primary race. Mr. DuHaime recalled Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush’s wife in one debate, only for Mr. Bush to reciprocate when Mr. Trump offered a hand-slap later in that same debate.“Trump did self-destruct eventually, after four years in office,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But he can still make or break others, and that makes him powerful and relevant.”Even John Boehner, the former speaker of the House whose criticisms of Mr. Trump in his memoir, “On the House,” have garnered national headlines, told Time magazine this week that he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — well after the former president had spent months falsely suggesting the election would be corrupt.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she will not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump does.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressIn his speech before R.N.C. donors on Saturday night, Mr. Trump, in addition to attacking Mr. McConnell, also criticized a host of perceived enemies from both parties; among them was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was in danger on Jan. 6 because he was in the Capitol to certify the electoral votes. Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Pence, who recently signed a book deal, should have had “the courage” to send the electoral vote tallies back to the states, despite the fact that the vice president had made clear that he did not think he had the authority to do so.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, disagreed with the comparison to 2015, saying that Mr. Trump had more dominance over the base of the Republican Party now than he did then, according to public polling, and a greater number of senior Republican officials speaking out against him five years ago.“In 2021, there are no candidates trying to take out President Trump, just some occasional sniping from menthol-infused nitwits like John Boehner,” he said.Still, Mr. Trump does not have the complete control over the party that he did during four years in office. His critics include leading Republicans like Mr. McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House. Asked on Fox News on Tuesday if she would vote for Mr. Trump if he ran in 2024 Ms. Cheney replied “I would not.’Ms. Cheney, whom Mr. Trump has threatened as a target of his anger, also said her fellow Republicans shouldn’t “embrace insurrection.”And not all Republicans think that ignoring Mr. Trump is a mistake. One senior party member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to engage in a lengthy back and forth with Mr. Trump, said that with the former president out of office and off Twitter, his reach is limited.The Republican said there had been anecdotal evidence from members of Congress during the recess that Mr. Trump was less omnipresent for voters in their districts than he had previously been.While Mr. Trump was ascendant in 2015 and 2016, said an adviser to another Republican who may run in 2024, that wasn’t the case now. And if party leaders fight with him publicly or try to take him on, it could only strengthen him, the Republican argued, giving him more prominence.What’s more, the first senior Republican argued, Republican lawmakers have found common cause not just in battling President Biden’s policies but in the backlash to the Georgia voting rights law. Those fights have continued without Mr. Trump, and will accelerate, the Republican said, without being driven by the cult of personality around the former president.Other Republicans are privately hopeful that the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business by the New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., will result in charges that hobble him from running again or even being a major figure within the party. People who have spoken with Mr. Trump say that he is agitated about the investigation.While all of that may represent just a slow turn away from Mr. Trump, those Republicans believe the turn has begun.David Kochel, a Republican strategist and supporter of Mr. Bush during the 2016 campaign, sounded less optimistic.He noted that even the horror of Jan. 6 did not break the hold Mr. Trump has on other elected officials, and that several anchors on Fox News — the largest conservative news outlet — had consistently downplayed the attack on air, numbing viewers to what took place as time passes.In an interview on Fox News with the host Laura Ingraham late last month, when asked about the security around the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “It was zero threat right from the start. It was zero threat.”He added: “Some of them went in and there they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in and then they walked in and they walked out.”Mr. Kochel said Jan. 6 was “being stuffed down the memory hole” with the help of Fox News, noting that the strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump and hoping he fades away has had a less-than-perfect history of being effective.“We’ve seen this movie before — a bunch of G.O.P. leaders all looking at each other, waiting to see who’s going to try and down Trump,” he said. More

He Has Trained to Be Mayor for Decades. Will Voters Be Persuaded?Scott Stringer’s deep experience in New York City politics has yet to translate into momentum in the mayor’s race. Could an endorsement from the Working Families Party help?Scott Stringer, center, hopes to use his eight years as city comptroller as a launchpad to the mayoralty.Benjamin Norman 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 second in a series of profiles of the major candidates.April 14, 2021On a late February morning in Tribeca, the most seasoned politician in the New York City mayor’s race was sitting outside, futzing with his fogging-up eyeglasses as he wrestled with an assessment of an election that appeared to be slipping from his grasp.For Scott M. Stringer, every chapter of his steady ascent through New York politics — serving on a community planning board as a teenager; becoming a protégé of Representative Jerrold Nadler; moving from district leader to state assemblyman, Manhattan borough president and finally, city comptroller — has laid the groundwork for a long-expected mayoral bid.He has deep experience, boasts a raft of endorsements and verges on jubilant when describing his passion for his hometown. For much of the mayoral campaign, none of that has been enough to generate a surge of enthusiasm around his candidacy, according to polling and interviews with more than 30 activists, lawmakers and other New York Democrats.Mr. Stringer is working hard to change that.“If I was a book, and you’re in a bookstore and you saw the cover of the book, you may say, ‘I’m not sure I want to read that,’” Mr. Stringer said, framing a picture of himself with his hands, reaching from his head to his midline.“What my job is, is to get people of all different backgrounds to take that book off the shelf, open up the book, look at the different chapters of my career and the issues I’ve championed.”While several major labor endorsements have eluded Mr. Stringer, he won the backing of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesMr. Stringer, 60, would appear to have the resources, the résumé and the name recognition to do just that, trailing only Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, in funds on hand so far.He is hoping that his carefully cultivated political network and a mood of citywide emergency will help him attract voters motivated by both his progressive pitch and his pledges of steady managerial competence.On Tuesday, Mr. Stringer was endorsed as the first choice of the Working Families Party, aiding his efforts to emerge as the race’s left-wing standard-bearer.Still, in recent months, it is Andrew Yang — embraced as a celebrity from the 2020 presidential race — who has led polls and infused significant energy into the mayoral campaign. Mr. Stringer, who began the race as a top candidate, has scrambled to brand Mr. Yang as an unserious purveyor of “half-baked ideas” even as he dominates news media coverage.Mr. Adams and Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, beat out Mr. Stringer for several major labor endorsements. Those candidates and others in the crowded field are also competing with Mr. Stringer for either the “government experience” mantle or the title of left-wing standard-bearer.And for all of his prominent supporters, detailed policy plans and ambitious ideas on issues like climate and post-pandemic education, Mr. Stringer is also a white man who spent his career rising through traditional political institutions. New York Democrats in several recent races have preferred to elevate candidates of color and political outsiders.Now he faces his most challenging balancing act to date, as he campaigns as a veteran government official while seeking to ally himself with the activist left.“He’s trying to thread this needle between new and old supporters,” said Susan Kang, a member of the steering committee of the New York City Democratic Socialists, in an interview late last month. “You know how if you try to make everybody happy, you don’t make anybody happy? That is something that has given people pause.”Yet with the Working Families Party’s endorsement, Mr. Stringer found new cause for optimism. It was a signal to deeply progressive voters that the group believes they should unite around supporting Mr. Stringer’s candidacy, at a time of growing left-wing concern about Mr. Yang.Mr. Stringer remains in contention for other major endorsements, including one from the United Federation of Teachers. And he is aware that many voters have just begun to pay attention. Major debates do not begin until May, and the race to the June 22 primary may not crystallize until more candidates hit the airwaves with television advertising in the final weeks of the race.Still, one supporter recently compared Mr. Stringer to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Mr. Stringer’s choice in the 2020 presidential primary. Like Ms. Warren, Mr. Stringer has a long list of policy plans and is thoughtful about governance. But Ms. Warren, the ally noted, did not win.Mr. Stringer said his campaign planned to be “very aggressive” in the coming weeks, “reminding people of my record and who I am and what I believe in and what I would do as mayor.”“I need a message moment,” he said.A political upbringingAs a state assemblyman, Mr. Stringer made an unsuccessful bid for New York City public advocate in 2001.Robert Rosamilio/New York Daily News Archive, via Getty ImagesAny book written about Mr. Stringer would have a common theme: He is a political animal.Mr. Stringer, born to a politically active Jewish family, was raised in Washington Heights. His father was counsel to Mayor Abraham Beame, his mother was elected to the City Council, and his stepfather also worked in city government.He made his campaign trail debut at age 12, volunteering for Representative Bella S. Abzug, his mother’s cousin, who went on to run for mayor.At 16, he was tapped for a community planning board position. His appointment made the front page of The New York Times, and while on the board, he honed a version of at least one line that he still uses today: that the A train was his “lifeline.” Soon he was working for Mr. Nadler, serving on his assembly staff.“He was a little cocky,” Mr. Nadler recalled. “He learned to restrain that and to work with people very carefully.”Mr. Stringer, who did a stint as a tenant organizer, also served as a Democratic district leader in the 1980s, building a base on the Upper West Side, where the political culture reflects a vibrant Jewish community.Longtime observers tend to reach for Yiddish phrases of affection and derision to describe him. Admirers call the affable Mr. Stringer, a married public-school father of two sons, a “mensch.” Detractors privately dismiss the nasal-voiced candidate as a “nebbish.”Mr. Stringer and his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, live in Manhattan with their two sons, who attend public school.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesNew York City voters have often embraced politicians with more boldly distinctive personas.Mr. Stringer, who once taught his parrot to say “Vote for Scott,” is working on it.Asked in a campaign video to share something about himself that might surprise others, Mr. Stringer insisted, “I really am funny.” After a reporter asked him to tell a joke, Mr. Stringer spent the rest of an hourlong interview sprinkling his remarks with wisecracks.“Scott, when he’s not doing his work politically, he’s actually quite funny, he’s got a great personality” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. “But I guess because of his years of experience, he’s guarded when he’s doing his governmental work.”Mr. Stringer was elected to the State Assembly in 1992, following failed efforts running bars. In Albany, he pressed for some reforms of the State Capitol’s insular political culture, including a requirement that lawmakers be present in order to cast their votes.In 2005, he won a nine-way primary race for Manhattan borough president.Over the years he forged a reputation as a liberal who supported marriage equality and tenants’ rights, was skeptical of stop-and-frisk policing tactics, and had strong relationships with labor leaders and some reform-minded candidates. And he sharpened his skills as a strong retail campaigner who delights in touring senior centers.Representative Jerrold Nadler, who served as a mentor to Mr. Stringer, said that over the years, his protégé “learned to work with people very carefully.”John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesHe mulled and abandoned several options for higher office, including a 2013 mayoral bid. Instead, he ran for city comptroller. In the greatest test of his career, he faced a late entry from Eliot Spitzer, the deep-pocketed and aggressive former governor who resigned after revelations of his involvement with a prostitution ring.Many had expected Mr. Spitzer to steamroll Mr. Stringer. For awhile, he seemed on track to do so. But Mr. Stringer held his own in a brutally personal race and overcame a polling deficit, though Mr. Spitzer beat Mr. Stringer with Black voters by significant margins.“We were not just behind early, we were behind at the end,” Mr. Stringer said. “I fought back through the debates, through the campaigning, and I won. So for me, this positioning is what I’m used to.”There are key differences, though: In 2013, Mr. Stringer had overwhelming support from unions and the political establishment. Now, labor endorsements are more scattered.And this race is unfolding in a pandemic. He had been cautious about in-person campaigning, after his mother died from Covid-related complications. Now vaccinated, he is seeking to match the more frenetic pace that some rivals, most notably Mr. Yang, have maintained for months.In 2013, Mr. Stringer won the Democratic primary for comptroller, holding off the former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, left, a late entry in the race.Angel Franco/The New York TimesAs comptroller, Mr. Stringer handled issues from housing authority audits to promoting kosher and halal food in public schools.He also supported closing Rikers Island and was a key part of the effort to divest $4 billion in city pension funds from fossil fuel companies; he cited that initiative when asked to name the proudest accomplishment of his career.People who have watched Mr. Stringer in the role say that he has been active in issuing audits and reports on issues vital to the city’s well-being, while embracing a time-honored comptroller tradition of tangling with the mayor.“Have there been contracts that have gone haywire? It doesn’t seem so,” said State Senator John C. Liu, who preceded Mr. Stringer as comptroller and has yet to endorse in the mayor’s race. “Has the office conducted audits that improved the performance of agencies? I believe there have been some.”On the whole, Mr. Liu ruled, “He has done a fine job as comptroller.”Kathryn S. Wylde, who heads the business-aligned Partnership for New York City, said that she believed Mr. Stringer had been “bold on corporate governance issues, he’s been bold in taking on the mayor.”Mr. Stringer has pressed for more disclosures about board diversity, and he has sharply criticized the de Blasio administration over issues ranging from affordable housing to its handling of prekindergarten contracts.“He’s done an aggressive job — and substantive — on all the key responsibilities of the comptroller,” Ms. Wylde said.To many New Yorkers, Mr. Stringer retains a reputation of being a traditional Democrat. He supported Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential race, and served as a delegate for Mrs. Clinton. In 2018, he supported Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over his progressive challenger, Cynthia Nixon.Mr. Stringer has since called for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation amid accusations of sexual harassment.A progressive wager Mr. Stringer has been willing to back progressive challengers in contested Democratic primaries, as he did with his support for Tiffany Cabán in the Queens district attorney’s race in 2019.Scott Heins/Getty ImagesLast September, a group of New York’s leading left-leaning lawmakers, many of them women and people of color, gathered at Inwood Hill Park to cheer on Mr. Stringer’s announcement for mayor.It was a scene years in the making.In early 2018, Alessandra Biaggi and Jessica Ramos were political unknowns, seeking to topple powerful moderate members of the State Senate. Mr. Stringer heard out Ms. Biaggi over a side of pickles at the Riverdale Diner; Ms. Ramos of Queens sought his support at drinks in Albany.He became an early champion of several insurgent progressives, cultivating genuine relationships over strategy sessions, phone calls and meals. Those endorsements were an uncertain political bet at the time.By last fall, they appeared to have paid off: As he announced his mayoral campaign, he was flanked by a diverse group of progressive lawmakers — including State Senators Biaggi and Ramos — who, to their admirers, represent the future of the party.It is less clear if their endorsements will translate into grass-roots enthusiasm for Mr. Stringer among voters who are skeptical of his left-wing bona fides.In his 2005 borough president race, a rival ran an ad criticizing Mr. Stringer for taking real estate developer money at a time when the city’s traditional power donors were looking for receptive politicians (the mayor at the time, the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, accepted no donations). It wasn’t until much more recently that he said he would stop taking cash from big developers, as prominent progressives highlighted the issue.He has become a sharp critic of segregated schools, saying definitively that he wants to eliminate the admissions exam that determines access to top city high schools, which some critics say perpetuates racial inequality. But he has not typically been associated with major integration efforts in past years.And he appears uncomfortable discussing aspects of the policing debate.Amid protests over the killing of George Floyd, Mr. Stringer declared that it was time to defund the police.But Mr. Stringer no longer emphasizes calls to “defund,” a term associated with a specific movement — another reminder that he is not fully part of the activist left. Pressed on whether he believed the phrase was divisive, Mr. Stringer would not answer directly.“I have used it,” he said. “I don’t think you should be judged based on, you know, one word or another word. And I do believe that when you’re going to talk about these issues, you have to be prepared to come forth with a plan.”He has proposed reallocating $1.1 billion in police funds over four years and has been more specific on the matter than some of his rivals, though Dianne Morales, perhaps the race’s most left-wing candidate, has pushed for far more, urging $3 billion in cuts from the police budget.At the height of the racial justice protests last year, Mr. Stringer said he supported defunding the police. Now he typically avoids the phrase.Jeenah Moon/Getty ImagesNo saga better illustrates Mr. Stringer’s political high-wire act than his 2019 endorsement in the Queens district attorney race. His embrace of Tiffany L. Cabán, the choice of the New York Democratic Socialists, over Melinda Katz, a colleague from his Assembly days who narrowly won, delighted progressive activists but stunned old allies.Critics who spoke with him at the time say Mr. Stringer had privately described New Yorkers as moving to the left, and they sensed that he wanted to embrace that shift. Mr. Stringer has said he believed Ms. Cabán, who is now running for City Council, was the more qualified candidate, but he also sounded testy when pressed on his decision in an interview with a Jewish outlet, to the irritation of some activists.“Scott, you know, seemed to have changed some of his positions over the years,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, the chairman of the Queens Democrats. “That has caused him, in Queens County at least, which I can speak to, to have some difficulty.”Competence over ideology?Mr. Stringer often says that he is prepared to “manage the hell out of the city” if elected mayor.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesFrom Mr. Stringer’s earliest days in politics, he learned to think strategically about relationships.He has maintained communication with business leaders, and his central message that he will be prepared from Day 1 to “manage the hell out of the city” is not ideological.Ms. Wylde said that some business leaders “know him as a steady hand.”“When I think he’s going totally off the deep end, we have a conversation,” she added.Ranked-choice voting, which enables voters to support up to five candidates, will test Mr. Stringer’s political skills like never before.Even if he is not the favorite of deeply progressive voters, he hopes to be their second choice. That could also work with moderates who see him as more of a manager than a firebrand. But first he must cement his standing as a leading candidate in the homestretch of the race.Mr. Stringer knows that he has significant work to do.In a campaign video he filmed to introduce himself to voters, he said that his favorite movie was “The Candidate,” a 1972 film that traced the arc of a dazzling young candidate, played by Robert Redford, who had little understanding of government process.He has little in common with Mr. Redford’s character. But Mr. Stringer, too, must prove that he can win. More

Es hora de bajarlos de sus pedestales.El domingo, los votantes de Ecuador eligieron a Guillermo Lasso, un exbanquero que está a favor de las políticas de libre mercado, como presidente. Votaron por él en lugar de por Andrés Arauz, un populista de izquierda. Algunos analistas lamentan el fin del progresismo, pero lo que realmente vimos fue un bienvenido golpe a una extraña forma de política del hombre fuerte: el fenómeno de expresidentes que buscan extender su control e influencia eligiendo y respaldando a sus “delfines” en elecciones nacionales.Arauz fue designado personalmente por el expresidente Rafael Correa, un economista semiautoritario que gobernó Ecuador de 2007 a 2017. La elección no fue solo un referendo sobre el papel del Estado en la economía, sino de manera más fundamental sobre la siguiente pregunta: ¿Qué papel deben desempeñar los expresidentes en la política, si es que acaso deben desempeñar alguno?En América Latina se ha vuelto normal que exmandatarios impulsen a candidatos sustitutos. Se trata de una forma extraña de caudillismo, o política del hombre fuerte, combinada con continuismo, o continuidad de linaje, pensada para mantener a los rivales al margen.Los expresidentes son los nuevos caudillos: pretenden extender su mandato a través de los herederos que escogen, algo llamado delfinismo, de “delfín”, el título dado al príncipe heredero al trono de Francia entre los siglos XIV y XIX.En la última década, al menos siete presidentes elegidos democráticamente en Latinoamérica fueron escogidos por su predecesor. El más reciente, Luis Arce, llegó al poder en Bolivia en 2020, patrocinado por el exmandatario Evo Morales. Estos candidatos sustitutos le deben mucho de su victoria a la bendición de su jefe, la cual tiene un precio: se espera que el nuevo presidente se mantenga leal a los deseos de su patrocinador.Esta práctica ata con esposas de oro a aquellos recién electos y socava la democracia en el proceso. Más que pasar la estafeta, los expresidentes emiten una especie de contrato de no competencia. En Argentina, una expresidenta, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, contendió como compañera de fórmula de su candidato presidencial escogido, Alberto Fernández.Después de ser la primera dama de Argentina y luego convertirse en presidenta, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a la derecha, se convirtió en vicepresidenta de su candidato elegido, Alberto Fernández, a la izquierda.Foto de consorcio de Natacha PisarenkoEste estilo actual de política caudillista es la actualización de una actualización. En la versión clásica de la política del hombre fuerte —que dominó la política latinoamericana tras las guerras de independencia del siglo XIX y hasta la década de los setenta— muchos caudillos buscaban mantener su poder al prohibir o amañar las elecciones una vez que llegaban a la presidencia, una maniobra que usó famosamente el dictador mexicano Porfirio Díaz, o simulando golpes de Estado si no podían ganar, una estrategia empleada por el dictador cubano Fulgencio Batista en 1952.Este modelo clásico de continuismo era traumático. En México y en Cuba, incitó ni más ni menos que dos revoluciones históricas que resonaron en el mundo entero.Latinoamérica actualizó este modelo de caudillismo. Los golpes de Estado y las prohibiciones de elecciones se volvieron obsoletos en la década de 1980 y, en lugar de abolir la democracia, se volvió usual que los líderes comenzaran a reescribir las constituciones y a manipular las instituciones para permitir la reelección. Comenzó el auge de las reelecciones. Desde Joaquín Balaguer en la República Dominicana en 1986 hasta Sebastián Piñera en Chile en 2017, Latinoamérica tuvo a 15 expresidentes que volvieron a la presidencia.No obstante, el modelo del continuismo a través de la reelección ha enfrentado obstáculos de manera reciente debido a que varios expresidentes se han visto envueltos en problemas legales.Tan solo en Centroamérica, 21 de 42 expresidentes han tenido problemas legales. En Perú, seis expresidentes de los últimos 30 años han enfrentado cargos de corrupción. En Ecuador, Correa fue sentenciado por recibir financiamiento para su campaña a cambio de contratos estatales. Él afirma que es una víctima de persecución política. Su respuesta fue usar la campaña de Arauz como boleto para recuperar su influencia. En cierto momento de la campaña, el candidato promovió la idea de que un voto por él era un voto por Correa.Durante la campaña presidencial de Ecuador, el candidato Andrés Arauz promovió la idea de que un voto por él era un voto por el expresidente Rafael Correa.Dolores Ochoa/Associated PressEstas complicaciones legales alientan a los expresidentes a tratar de respaldar a sustitutos que, como mínimo, podrían darles un indulto si resultan electos.Los expresidentes parecen pensar que la versión más reciente del caudillismo libera al país del trauma. El presidente Alberto Fernández aseguró que cuando su jefa, la expresidenta Fernández de Kirchner, lo eligió como su candidato porque, argumentó, el país no necesitaba a alguien como ella, “que divido”, sino a alguien como él, “que suma”. A su vez, Fernández de Kirchner fue elegida heredera por su difunto esposo, el expresidente Néstor Kirchner.No obstante, esta subrogación política difícilmente resuelve el trauma asociado con su continuismo inherente. De hecho, lo hace más tóxico. Con excepción de los simpatizantes del expresidente, el país ve el truco como lo que es: una tentativa evidente de restauración.Los problemas del delfinismo van más allá de intensificar la polarización al exacerbar el fanatismo político y puede conducir a consecuencias aún más graves. En el México de antes del año 2000, en el que los presidentes prácticamente escogían personalmente a sus sucesores, los exmandatarios solían seguir la norma de retirarse de la política, por lo que concedían suficiente autonomía al sucesor.Sin embargo, en la versión más reciente del delfinismo, los sucesores no son tan afortunados. Los expresidentes que los patrocinaron siguen entrometiéndose. Esta interferencia produce tensiones para gobernar. El mandatario en funciones pierde su relevancia de manera prematura, con todos los ojos puestos en las opiniones del presidente anterior, o en algún momento busca romper con su jefe. La separación puede detonar guerras civiles terribles.Estas rupturas a menudo son inevitables. Los delfines electos enfrentan nuevas realidades con las que sus impulsores nunca lidiaron. Además, con frecuencia tienen que arreglar el desastre que dejaron sus jefes.Lenín Moreno, el actual presidente de Ecuador, quien fue seleccionado por Correa, tuvo desacuerdos con él respecto a una serie de políticas autoritarias de izquierda impulsadas por revelaciones de corrupción. El resultado fue una lucha de poderes que dividió a la coalición gobernante y entorpeció la capacidad del gobierno de lidiar con la crisis económica y luego con la pandemia de la COVID-19.Una lucha similar ocurrió en Colombia cuando el entonces presidente Juan Manuel Santos, escogido por Álvaro Uribe, decidió llegar a un acuerdo de paz con las guerrillas, con lo que desafío la postura de Uribe. El resultado fue una especie de guerra civil entre ambos hombres que rivalizó en intensidad con la guerra contra las guerrillas a la que el gobierno intentaba poner fin.No hay una solución sencilla a este tipo de continuismo. Los partidos deben dejar de poner a sus expresidentes en un pedestal. Necesitan reformar las precandidaturas para asegurarse de que otros líderes, no solo los exmandatarios, tengan los medios para competir de manera interna. Los países latinoamericanos han hecho mucho para garantizar que haya una fuerte competencia entre partidos, pero mucho menos para garantizar la competencia dentro de los partidos.Nada huele más a oligarquía y corrupción que un expresidente que intenta mantenerse vigente a través de candidatos sustitutos. Y Ecuador ha demostrado que esta manipulación política puede acabar por empoderar precisamente a las mismas ideologías políticas que los expresidentes pretendían contener.Javier Corrales (@jcorrales2011) es escritor y profesor de Ciencias Políticas en Amherst College. Su obra más reciente es Fixing Democracy: Why Constitutional Change Often Fails to Enhance Democracy in Latin America. More

But the internal contradictions of “woke capitalism” are a mixed blessing for the Democratic Party.“Woke capitalism” has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the past decade. The muscle of the movement was evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.Much to the dismay of the right — a recent Fox News headline read “Corporations fear woke left minority more than silent majority” — the movement has been gaining momentum, obscuring classic partisan allegiances in corporate America.This drive has a fast-growing list of backers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, prepared to challenge Republican legislators across the nation.Right now, the focus of chief executives who are attempting to burnish their progressive credentials is on blocking legislation in 24 states that curtails access to the ballot box for racial and ethnic minorities — legislation that, among other things, reduces the number of days for advance voting, that requires photo ID to accompany absentee ballots and that limits or eliminates ballot drop boxes.Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them.The corporate embrace of these strategies has generally received favorable press, but there are some doubters.Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in “‘Woke Capital’ Doesn’t Exist” on April 6 that capital “pursues its financial interests in whatever political or social context it finds itself.”As Serwer puts it,For big firms, talk is very cheap. Similarly, the actions of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, and Delta reflect the political landscape in Georgia and its interaction with their bottom line, not the result of a deep ideological commitment to racial equality.Similarly, Matthew Walther argued in an August 2017 article in The Week, thatWe should not be looking to corporate America for moral instruction or making exemplars of its leaders or heaping approbation upon their bland, cynical consultant-designed utterances.Apple’s Tim Cook, Walther continued, “tells us that he is against racism. I believe it. Good on him.” As commendable as Cook may be for his antiracism, Walther writes, heis the C.E.O. of a corporation that has made profits on a scale hitherto unimaginable in human history by exploiting cheap labor in a poor country ruled by tyrants whose authority is perpetuated in no small part thanks to Apple’s own compliance in its silencing of dissent and hiring the smartest lawyers in the world to make their tax burden negligible.Companies leading the charge against laws promoted by Republican state legislators include Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, Merck & Co., Dell Technologies, Mars Inc., Nestlé USA, Unilever PLC and American Airlines.And just two days ago, 30 chief executives of Michigan’s largest companies, including Ford, General Motors and Quicken Loans, declared their opposition to similar changes in voting rules pending before the legislature.The headline on an April 10 Wall Street Journal story sums up the situation: “With Georgia Voting Law, the Business of Business Becomes Politics.” The law was described by USA Today on April 10 as one “that includes restrictions some activists say haven’t been seen since the Jim Crow era.”Last week, executives from over 100 companies held a video conference call to explore ways to voice their opposition to pending and enacted election legislation.For many Republicans, the future of their party’s dominance in such states as Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia rides on their ability to hold back the rising tide of minority voters.While Republicans are convinced of the effectiveness their legislative strategies, poll data from the 2020 election suggests they may be mistaken. Republicans made inroads last year among Black and Hispanic voters, the constituencies they would now suppress, while losing ground among white voters, their traditional base of support.Growing numbers of Republicans are refusing to buckle under pressure from the corporate establishment.For Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who rejected Donald Trump’s pleas to overturn the state’s presidential election results, the controversy offers the opportunity to claim populist credentials and perhaps to win back the support of Trump loyalists.“I will not be backing down from this fight,” Kemp declared at an April 3 news conference:This is a call to everyone, not only in Georgia but all across the country to wake up and get in the fight and help us in that fight. Because they are coming for you next.In Texas, where American Airlines, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Southwest Airlines have opposed laws under consideration by Republican state legislators, Republicans have been quick to go on the attack.“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, declared in a news release attacking liberalized voting protocols. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Other Republicans are explicitly warning business that it will pay a price if it goes too far. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, declared at an April 5 news conference. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.”In the past, the corporate community has been one of McConnell’s most steadfast allies and its current adversarial stance is a major loss.Alma Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, and three colleagues, analyzed campaign contributions made by 3,800 individuals who served as chief executive of large companies from 2000 to 2017 in their 2019 paper, “The Politics of C.E.O.s.” They found a decisive Republican tilt: “More than 57 percent of C.E.O.s are Republicans, 19 percent are Democrats and the rest are neutral.”I asked W. Bradford Wilcox, a conservative professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, for his assessment of the conflict between big business and Republicans. His reply suggested that Kemp’s defiant stance will resonate among Republican voters:The decades-long marriage between the G.O.P. and big business is clearly on the rocks. This is especially true because the G.O.P. is increasingly drawn to a pugnacious and populist cultural style that has more appeal to the working class, and Big Business is increasingly inclined to support the progressive cultural agenda popular among the highly educated.Taking on corporate America meshes with the goal of rebranding the Republican Party — from the party of Wall Street to the party of the working class.The response of the white working-class to the leftward shift on social issues by American businesses remains unpredictable.Democracy Corps, a liberal group, conducted focus groups of white Republicans in March and reached the conclusion that conservative voters are cross-pressured:The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.While anger is a powerful motivator of political engagement, despondency and the feeling of powerlessness often depress turnout and foster the belief that political participation is futile.Opinion on the motives of corporate leaders diverges widely among those who study the political evolution of American business.Scholars and strategists differ among themselves over how much the growth of activism is driven by market forces, by public opinion, by conviction and by the growing strength of Black and Hispanic Americans as consumers, employees and increasingly as corporate executives.James Davison Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, is interested in the psychology of those in the executive suite:At least on the surface, corporate America has accommodated progressive interests on these issues and others, including the larger agenda of Critical Race Theory, the Me-too movement, the gay and transgender rights, etc. There has been a shift leftward.The question he poses is why. His answer is complex:The idea, once held, that what was good for business was good for America is now a distant memory. A reputation, long in the making, for avoiding taxes and opposing unions all in pursuit of profit has done much to undermine the credibility of business as a force for the common good. Embracing the progressive agenda is a way to position itself as a “good” corporate citizen. Corporations gain legitimacy.The fluid ideological commitments of business should be seen in the larger context of American politics and culture, Hunter argues:Over the long haul, conservatives have fought the culture war politically. For them, it was the White House, the Senate and, above all, the Supreme Court that mattered. Political power was pre-eminent.Progressives have struggled in political combat, while in the nation’s cultural disputes, in Hunter’s view, the left has dominated:Even while progressives were losing elections, gay and transgender rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter and critical race perspectives were all gaining credibility — in important cultural institutions including journalism, academia, entertainment, advertising, public education, philanthropy, and elsewhere. Sooner or later, it was bound to influence corporate life, the military, and other so-called conservative institutions not least because there was no credible conservative alternative to these questions; only a defensive rejection.How will this play out?We will continue to see ugly political battles long into the future, but the culture wars are tilting definitively toward a progressive win and not least because they have a new patron in important corporations.Malia Lazu, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued in an email that the public’s slow but steady shift to the left on racial and social issues is driving corporate decision-making: “Corporations understand consumers want to see their commitment to environmental and social issues.”Lazu cited studies by Cone, a business consulting firm, “showing that 86 percent of Americans would support a brand aligned with their values and 75 percent would refuse to buy a product they saw as contrary to their beliefs.”Lazu contends that “there is a generational shift in America toward increasing justice and collective responsibility” and that as a result, “institutions, including corporations, will make incremental change.”John A. Haigh, co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, does not agree with those who see business motivated solely by potential profits, arguing instead that idealism has become a major force.“Corporations have an obligation to deliver high performance for their shareholders and other stakeholders — customers, employees, and suppliers,” Haigh wrote in an email. But, he continued, “corporations also have an obligation to do so with high integrity.”In the case of challenges to restrictive voting laws, Haigh believes thatthere is also a possibility that they are behaving with some sense of their moral obligation to society — with integrity. The right to vote could be seen as a pillar of our democratic system, and blatant attempts to suppress votes are offensive to our core values.Haigh says that he does not wantto sound Pollyannish — these are difficult trade-offs within corporations, and it is much more complicated than simply “doing good.” But there are thresholds for moral behavior, and companies do have an obligation to speak up. There is a long history in the U.S. around issues of civil rights and their suppression, and mixed engagement by companies in addressing these issues.Neal Hartman, a senior lecturer who is also at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued that in attacking voting rights, Republicans violated a tenet of American democracy important to voters of all stripes.Not only have the restrictive proposals in Georgia and other states awakened “strong levels of activism among many moderate-to-liberal voters,” Hartman wrote by email, butmany people in the United States — including a number of more conservative individuals — believe voting should be as simple and widespread as possible. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy.Corporations, Hartman continued,are responding to calls from the public, their shareholders, and their employees to respond to bills and laws deemed as being unfair.Hartman argues that “voting rights is front and center today,” butnot far behind will be efforts to thwart LGBTQI rights — bills targeting the transgender community are already being introduced and passed — as well as continuing battles regarding abortion and the rights of women to choose.There is some overlap between the thinking of Robert Livingston, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Haigh and Hartman:What we are seeing in Georgia is an affront to people’s basic sense of morality and decency. And people will sometimes subordinate their self-interest to cherished values and beliefs. Many of these companies have credos and core values that are internalized by their leadership and employees, and we see leaders becoming increasingly willing to express their disapproval of the reckless temerity of politically savvy but socially irresponsible politicians.Livingston acknowledges that many companies aremotivated by their own interests as well. Major League Baseball is an organization that depends on people of color. Nike tends to cater to an increasingly youthful and diverse customer base. So, there is something in it for them too.But, he continued, “I’ve worked with a lot of top leaders and can tell you that for many of them, it’s more a question of principle than politics.”Joseph Aldy, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, noted in an email that willingness to engage in controversial political issues is most evident in the case of climate change:The climate denial/climate skeptic attitude that characterizes many Republican elected officials is increasingly out of step with the majority of the American public and the American business community.Instead, Alby wrote,the continued focus on cultural issues among Republicans reflects a growing estrangement between the business community and the Republican Party.There are several possible scenarios of how these preoccupations and conflicts will evolve.Insofar as the split between American business and the Republican Party widens and companies begin to cut campaign contributions, the likely loser is Mitch McConnell, the leader of the party’s corporate wing. Any limit on McConnell’s ability to channel business money to campaigns would be a setback.Such a development would further empower the more extreme members of the Republican Party’s Trump wing and would embolden Republican officials to escalate their conflict with corporate America.For example, David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House — which has just passed a retaliatory bill penalizing Delta by eliminating a tax break on jet fuel — told reporters: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”Finally, for Democrats, the leftward shift of business is a mixed blessing.On the plus side, Democrats gain an ally in pressing a liberal agenda on social and racial issues.On the downside, the perception of the party as allied with corporate interests may take root and Democratic officials are very likely to face pressure to make concessions to their new allies on fundamental economic policies — bad for the party, in my view, and bad for the country.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

A blistering internal report by the US Capitol police describes a multitude of missteps that left the force unprepared for the 6 January insurrection – riot shields that shattered upon impact, expired weapons that couldn’t be used, inadequate training and an intelligence division that had few set standards.The watchdog report released internally last month, obtained by the Associated Press ahead of a congressional hearing on Thursday, adds to what is already known about broader security and intelligence failures that Congress has been investigating since hundreds of Donald Trump’s supporters laid siege to the Capitol.In an extensive and detailed timeline of that day, the report describes conversations between officials as they disagreed on whether national guard forces were necessary to back up the understaffed Capitol police force.It quotes an army official as telling then Capitol police chief, Steven Sund, that “we don’t like the optics of the national guard standing in a line at the Capitol” after the insurrectionists had already broken in.The inspector general, Michael Bolton, found that the department’s deficiencies were – and remain – widespread.Equipment was old and stored badly, leaders had failed to act on previous recommendations to improve intelligence, and there was a broad lack of current policies or procedures for the civil disturbance unit, a division that existed to ensure that legislative functions of Congress were not disrupted by civil unrest or protest activity.That was exactly what happened on 6 January as Trump’s supporters sought to overturn the election in his favor as Congress counted the electoral college votes.The report comes as the Capitol police force has plunging morale and has edged closer to crisis as many officers have been working extra shifts and forced overtime to protect the Capitol after the insurrection.The acting chief, Yogananda Pittman, received a vote of no confidence from the union in February, reflecting widespread distrust among the rank and file.The entire force is also grieving the deaths of two of their own, officer Brian Sicknick, who collapsed and died after engaging with protesters on January 6, and officer William “Billy” Evans, who was killed on 2 April when he was hit by a car that rammed into a barricade outside the Senate.Evans lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday.The Capitol police have so far refused to publicly release the report, marked throughout as “law enforcement sensitive”, despite congressional pressure to do so.The House administration committee chairwoman, Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, issued a statement in March that she had been briefed on the report, along with another internal document, and that it contained “detailed and disturbing findings and important recommendations”. Bolton was expected to testify before her panel on Thursday. More

Justice Democrats, a left-wing group that fueled the rise of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is backing Rana Abdelhamid’s primary bid.Nearly three years ago, a little-known left-wing organization helped engineer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock victory over Representative Joseph Crowley in a House primary. Last year, the group, Justice Democrats, aided Jamaal Bowman’s ouster of Representative Eliot Engel in another House primary.Now the group has found its next New York target: Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, 75, a Democrat first elected to Congress in 1992, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.Justice Democrats will throw its support behind Rana Abdelhamid, a community organizer and nonprofit founder, in her bid against Ms. Maloney, laying the groundwork for a generational, ideological and insider-versus-outsider battle that will test the power and energy of the left with President Donald J. Trump now out of office.Ms. Abdelhamid, a 27-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America who is keenly focused on matters of housing access and equity, intends to officially launch her candidacy for the 2022 primary on Wednesday.“We strongly believe in Rana’s leadership capabilities to build a coalition like we’ve been able to in some of our previous elections,” said Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, adding that she believed Ms. Abdelhamid could connect with younger voters, working-class voters of color, some older white liberals and those inspired by left-wing leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.Ms. Maloney’s district, the 12th District of New York, is home to wealthy, business-minded moderates along the East Side of Manhattan. But it also includes deeply progressive pockets of the city in western Queens and a corner of Brooklyn with a well-organized left-wing activist scene.There is great uncertainty around what the district will ultimately look like following an expected redistricting process, and Ms. Abdelhamid is not Ms. Maloney’s only likely challenger; Suraj Patel, who has unsuccessfully challenged Ms. Maloney twice, has indicated that he intends to run again.But for now, Ms. Abdelhamid’s candidacy will measure whether New Yorkers reeling from the pandemic and navigating economic recovery are skeptical of elevating another political outsider to steer the city forward — or if vast inequalities, which only worsened over the last year, have put the electorate in an anti-establishment mood.Ms. Abdelhamid, a daughter of Egyptian immigrants, is a 2015 graduate of Middlebury College and 2017 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, with a day job at Google. A first-degree black belt in karate, she founded a nonprofit called “Malikah” — “queen” in multiple languages — that offers self-defense training and other efforts to empower women, an initiative she launched after a man tried to yank off her hijab when she was a teenager.Ms. Abdelhamid, left, founded a nonprofit that offers self-defense training and other efforts to empower women.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesShe embraces her age as she casts herself as a change agent who keenly understands the challenges facing working-class and immigrant communities in the district: Her own family was priced out of the area.“Congresswoman Maloney has been in office for 28 years, for longer than I’ve been alive,” she said in an interview this week, sitting outside a restaurant on a crowded street in the Little Egypt enclave of Astoria, Queens. “Under her leadership, rent has only skyrocketed, our public schools have only gotten more segregated and more underfunded.“The progressive case against Carolyn Maloney,” she charged, “is that Carolyn Maloney is not a progressive.”Ms. Maloney describes herself as a “a recognized progressive national leader,” and her allies say that she has a long record of delivering for constituents — indeed, a map on her congressional website offers a detailed guide to the funding she says she has procured for projects across the district.“Carolyn is committed to running again regardless of who’s running against her, and she will wage an aggressive campaign as she always does,” said Jim Duffy, a partner at Putnam Partners, which works with Ms. Maloney’s campaigns. “She’s never lost a race before. She doesn’t intend to lose this one.”She was not made available for an interview on Tuesday.Ms. Abdelhamid unquestionably still faces an uphill battle against a seasoned, well-known congresswoman who is in a position to claim credit for tangible federal assistance for New York.“She’s an extremely hard worker, she delivers for her district, she works very hard on individual cases,” said George Arzt, a veteran political consultant who has advised Ms. Maloney. “Everyone in her district knows her.”And nationally, candidates backed by Justice Democrats have far from a perfect record of success.But the recent history of New York politics also shows why Ms. Abdelhamid’s entry into the race is likely to be taken very seriously.In 2018, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, then 28, defeated Mr. Crowley, who at the time was the No. 4 Democrat in the House. Last summer, Mr. Bowman beat Mr. Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.Strategists who worked with those campaigns see another opportunity for significant grass-roots engagement in 12th district, given the leftward shift of New York politics. “This is a place where our base is active, and a lot of voters and folks that power a lot of the most recent local campaigns over the past few years are here,” Ms. Rojas said.Ms. Maloney, a battle-tested candidate, won her primary contests in 2018 and 2020 — though last year, she only received 43 percent of the vote.Representative Carolyn Maloney, left, has long sought to be an advocate for women.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMs. Abdelhamid is running on a platform of housing affordability and a range of other left-wing priorities, including Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and a broadly anti-corporate message. She said she shared a number of goals and values with the Democratic Socialists, but that she was not especially active in a local chapter of the group.She also supports defunding the police, describing experiences with family members who were the subject of stop-and-frisk tactics and raising the issue of police surveillance of Muslim communities. As a victim of assault herself in the hijab incident, she said, she believed in directing more funds to community services, and she speaks passionately about racial justice.But she is likely to face intense scrutiny over her ability to navigate Washington. And she volunteered that she does not live in the district, living instead with her family, whom she says she is supporting financially, in a different part of Astoria — a fact that is almost certain to become an issue in the campaign.She did live in the district until high school, her team says, but her family moved because the area became too expensive. She sought to frame her current living situation as a reflection of how unaffordable the area has become under Ms. Maloney’s leadership. Ms. Abdelhamid, who is getting married, indicated that she plans to move back to the district in about three months.She still attends a mosque in the district and clearly has relationships there — a worker at Al-Sham Sweets & Pastries greeted her warmly as she ordered kenafeh, a Middle Eastern dessert, there this week.“My family is a working-class family that can’t afford to live in Little Egypt as an Egyptian family,” she said. “Because of gentrification. And this is a story that many working-class ethnic communities understand.” More

Joe Biden never captured the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama once did. But now that he is in office, he is drawing nearly universal approval from his party.The old cliché has it that when it comes to picking their presidential candidates, Democrats fall in love. But the party’s primary race last year was hardly a great political romance: Joseph R. Biden Jr. drew less than 21 percent of the Democratic vote in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and a dismal 8.4 percent in the New Hampshire primary.While Mr. Biden went on to win his party’s nomination, he was never widely seen as capturing the hearts of Democratic voters in the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton once did. For many of his supporters, he seemed simply like their best chance to defeat a president — Donald J. Trump — who inspired far more passion than he did.Yet in the first few months of his administration, Mr. Biden has garnered almost universal approval from members of his party, according to polls, emerging as a kind of man-for-all-Democrats after an election year riddled with intraparty squabbling.He began his term this winter with an approval rating of 98 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup. This represents a remarkable measure of partisan consensus — outpacing even the strongest moments of Republican unity during the presidency of Mr. Trump, whose political brand depended heavily on the devotion of his G.O.P. base.And as Mr. Biden nears his 100th day in office, most public polls have consistently shown him retaining the approval of more than nine in 10 Democrats nationwide.Pollsters and political observers mostly agree that Mr. Biden’s popularity among members of his party is driven by a combination of their gratitude to him for getting Mr. Trump out of office and their sense that Mr. Biden has refused to compromise on major Democratic priorities.“He has this ability to appeal to all factions of the party, which is no surprise to the centrists, but somewhat of a surprise to the progressives,” Patrick Murray, the director of polling at Monmouth University, said in an interview.During the primary, Mr. Biden was the establishment figure, a Washington centrist in a diverse field that included a number of younger and more progressive rivals. While he won a plurality of Democrats, he struggled to win support from the party’s younger and more liberal voters.But as president, he has been governing much like a progressive without abandoning his longtime public identity as a moderate.“He has found a winning formula, at least for now,” said David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama. “His tone and tenure reassure moderates and his agenda thrills progressives.”To that end, Mr. Biden has avoided taking up liberals’ most politically thorny proposals — like expanding the Supreme Court or canceling $1 trillion in student debt — while sticking to a public posture of bipartisan outreach and measured language. But his policy agenda has given progressives plenty to cheer, including the dozens of executive orders he has signed and the ambitious legislative agenda he has proposed, beginning with the passage of one of the largest economic stimulus packages in American history.Some progressives say the crises facing the country and the urgency of solving them have helped Mr. Biden, who was being evaluated against what Democrats saw as months of inaction by the previous administration.“Democrats were demanding shots in the arms and true economic help from the government,” said Faiz Shakir, who is a political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and managed Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “There was incredible unity in the Democratic Party of rising to the moment and acting quickly.”Mr. Shakir pointed to the passing of a popular $1.9 trillion relief package shortly after Mr. Biden took office, a bill he muscled through without any Republican support — opting for Democratic unity over bipartisan compromise. The president’s embrace of stimulus payments as part of that legislation — a policy that put money in the pockets of 127 million Americans — within weeks of taking office certainly didn’t hurt his standing, Mr. Shakir said.“It just had so many benefits for so many people,” he said.That bill was especially well liked within Mr. Biden’s party: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted just before it passed found that it enjoyed support from 97 percent of Democrats. As a result, the president has been able to unify his party around major initiatives tied to liberal investments in the social safety net.“The Democratic Party has shifted itself,” Mr. Murray said. “It has become more progressive, and you even have centrists who are on board with a few things that they wouldn’t have been happy with a few years ago.”But Mr. Biden may also be benefiting from some forms of progress that were not entirely of his own making. Millions of Americans are being vaccinated daily, moving the country closer to emerging from the coronavirus pandemic. As the United States moves slowly but steadily toward herd immunity, forecasters anticipate a quickly expanding economy, with even Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, predicting a financial boom that could last into 2023.Mr. Biden took steps to hasten virus vaccine production, but some of his political success on that front can be attributed to savvy public positioning. By tamping down expectations for vaccine distribution during his first weeks in office, when Mr. Biden beat his own expectations, his team conjured an image of a White House working overtime to leave the efforts of the previous administration in the dust.Though Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for widespread vaccine production with his Operation Warp Speed program, it is Mr. Biden who may be reaping the political benefit from that push — especially within his own party.Indeed, Democrats’ antipathy for Mr. Trump has a lot to do with their fondness for the new president, said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “Democrats utterly detested Donald Trump and Joe Biden saved them from Donald Trump, and so they love him,” Mr. Ayres said. “If you look at the overall job approval, not just among Democrats, Biden’s job approval is the inverse of Donald Trump’s.”Mr. Biden is hardly the first president to enjoy broad support from his party upon taking office. It is typical for commanders in chief to start their first term with a broadly positive approval rating, as Mr. Biden did, although that is always subject to the pull of gravity after the first few weeks are over.But in the history of Gallup polling going back to the mid-20th century, Mr. Biden is the first president to have started his term with the approval of more than 90 percent of partisans.To a degree, this reflects the fact that as the two major parties have grown more entrenched in their ideological identities, voters at the center have become slightly less likely to identify with either one. As a result, there has been a recent uptick in the share of Americans calling themselves political independents.“The partisan tribalism is such that you really are, in many ways, a true believer if you’re still going to call yourself a Democrat or a Republican,” Mr. Murray said. “What you’re left behind with is people who are going to be more staunch in their partisanship.”Just a few decades ago, a president with sky-high approval within his party would also be relatively popular outside it. But Mr. Biden’s approval rating, though positive over all, remains low among Republicans and stuck in the low-to-mid-50s among independents.“If you go back a generation and somebody has a 95 percent approval rating within their own party, that probably means they have about 50 percent approval among voters in the other party,” Mr. Murray said. “We don’t have that. We have this partisan split. His overall job rating is just above 50 percent. It’s still positive, but we would expect in former days that that would translate to a 60-percent approval rating.” More