Elections

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There’s been a lot of discussion this election cycle about what the vice president will mean to the next administration and beyond. Kamala Harris and Mike Pence have just wrapped up their one and only debate. Who do you think made the biggest impact on voters? Which moments were most revealing to you? Please answer the questions below. We’ll publish a selection of responses on Thursday.Tell us what you thought of the vice-presidential debate

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“The progress that we have made in a cleaner environment has been happening precisely because we have a strong, free-market economy. You know, what’s remarkable is the United States has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord, but we’ve done it through innovation. And we’ve done it through natural gas and fracking — which, Senator, the American people can go look at the record. I know Joe Biden says otherwise now, as you do, but the both of you repeatedly committed to abolishing fossil fuel and banning fracking.” “So, first of all, I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact. I will repeat that Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs, which is why he will not increase taxes for anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year. Joe Biden’s economic plan — Moody’s, which is a reputable Wall Street firm, has said, will create 7 million more jobs than Donald Trump’s. And part of those jobs that will be created by Joe Biden are going to be about clean energy and renewable energy.” More

Maya D. Wiley, a former top lawyer for Mayor Bill de Blasio who has gained a national following as a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, announced her run for mayor of New York City on Wednesday night and immediately sought to distance herself from her former boss.In a campaign launch video, Ms. Wiley, a political novice, pointedly did not mention Mr. de Blasio by name, but invoked his tenure as she pointed to a “crisis of confidence in our city’s leadership.”“Some will say I don’t sound like past mayors or look like them or think like them, and I say yes, I don’t — that is the point,” said Ms. Wiley, who is Black. “I am not a conventional candidate. But changing it up isn’t the risk. Electing the same kinds of people, bringing the same old broken promises over and over again and expecting things will be different — that’s the risk we can’t afford right now.”Her announcement had been expected for months after Ms. Wiley left her role at MSNBC in July to explore a run. The mayor’s race next year has been reshaped by the pandemic and by massive Black Lives Matter protests in the city.By urging voters to support her “if you’re tired of the same old thing,” Ms. Wiley cast herself as an outsider, despite her affiliation with the de Blasio administration, a strategy that would distinguish her from two leading Democratic candidates — Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller — who are longtime public servants.Ms. Wiley will have to explain how she is different from Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second and final term, who is not well liked among voters. As a lawyer for the mayor, Ms. Wiley famously argued that his email communications with outside advisers were private because the advisers were acting as “agents of the city.” Those emails were eventually released in what became an embarrassing episode for the mayor.Ms. Wiley plans to formally begin her campaign on Thursday at an event outside the Brooklyn Museum with her family and supporters, including Michael Gianaris, a powerful Democratic state senator from Queens known most for his successful efforts to disrupt Amazon’s deal for a headquarters in his borough.A civil rights lawyer who lives in Brooklyn, Ms. Wiley served for roughly a year as chairwoman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Since then, she worked as a professor at The New School and regularly appeared on MSNBC, becoming a popular figure among its left-leaning viewers. Her father, George A. Wiley, was a prominent civil rights leader.But Ms. Wiley has never held public office or staged an expensive political campaign, and she will have to quickly establish herself as a capable leader and persuade voters — including the business community — that she is the best person to lead the city out of the pandemic.Her campaign said Ms. Wiley planned to focus on racial justice, affordable housing and educational inequality, among other issues.One of her first public events was outside The Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last month, where advocates urged Mr. de Blasio not to kick homeless men out of the hotel. Some neighbors had complained after the men moved there during the pandemic.“The men of The Lucerne are us,” Ms. Wiley said. “We are all New Yorkers. They must stay.”Fans who recognized Ms. Wiley from television — even though she wore a blue face mask — asked for selfies after the event.The mayor’s race has been in flux in recent weeks. The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, dropped out of the race, and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation commissioner, said she might enter it.Mr. de Blasio must step down because of term limits. The 2021 Democratic primary is in June, and the general election follows in November.Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, has highlighted his endorsements from younger progressive leaders like Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, and Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic congressional candidate.Ms. Wiley is charismatic and has a compelling background on criminal justice issues, but she has to find her voter base, said Susan Kang, a political-science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.“Scott Stringer has done a good job of coalescing a lot of support with establishment progressives,” Professor Kang said. “How is she going to put together her coalition?”The mayor said recently that Ms. Wiley “did a great job serving in this administration,” and that her interest in becoming mayor — along with expected bids from Ms. Garcia and another former city commissioner, Loree K. Sutton — was “good for New York City.”But on Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio was asked in jest if another Democrat secretly wanted his job: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, his frequent adversary.“I wouldn’t urge anyone to want to be mayor of New York City,” he said. “It is a very, very challenging moment.” More

President Trump claimed on Wednesday that catching the coronavirus was “a blessing from God” and portrayed as a miracle cure the unproven therapeutic drug he was given after testing positive last week for the virus.Mr. Trump said he planned to make the antibody cocktail being developed by the drug maker Regeneron, which does not yet have government approval, free to anyone who needs it. He did not explain how he would do it, although on Wednesday night, Regeneron said it had submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency approval.The president’s statement, in a video released early Wednesday evening by the White House, was his latest effort to repair the political damage he has suffered after months of trying to minimize the effects of a pandemic that has killed more than 211,000 Americans.In remarks he made while he was at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was taken by helicopter on Friday night, and then when he returned to the White House on Monday, Mr. Trump did his best to play down the virus’s effects, telling Americans, “Don’t be afraid of it,” and saying that he felt “better than 20 years ago.”But in the video released Wednesday night, Mr. Trump, whose skin appeared darkened by makeup and who appeared to struggle to get air at times, seemed to be saying that he had discovered, without evidence, a new drug that suddenly made him feel better and could do the same for everyone else with Covid-19.“I call that a cure,” said Mr. Trump, adding that everyone should have access to the not-yet-approved drug for “free” and that he would make sure it was in every hospital as soon as possible.Just hours after the video was released, Regeneron said it was asking the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to make the drug available. The company has received more than $500 million from the federal government to develop and manufacture its experimental treatment as part of “Operation Warp Speed,” the federal effort to come up with viable vaccines and treatments for the virus, in order to help distribute it once it is available.But although Mr. Trump had said hundreds of thousands of patients would soon have access to the cocktail, Regeneron said in a statement that it would initially have only enough doses for 50,000 people. It hopes to have enough for 300,000 people by the end of the year, and the medication is expected to be provided to Americans for free.“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it,” Mr. Trump said, apparently referring to the fact that he had learned about the benefits of the drug as a result of becoming ill.It was the first time that Mr. Trump tacitly acknowledged another appearance problem — that he has received the kind of intensive and costly medical care for coronavirus that is not available to any member of the general public.In an interview on Wednesday before the company made its announcement, Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s president and chief scientific officer, said it was possible that Mr. Trump responded to the treatment and that the level of virus had declined. “That’s a logical conclusion,” Dr. Yancopoulos said. “Based on his symptomology, that has to have happened.”But neither Dr. Yancopoulos nor Mr. Trump can definitively say whether the treatment worked because any drug must be proved in large clinical trials that compare the outcomes of people who got the product with those who received a placebo. Those trials have not yet been completed.Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at U.C.S.F. Health in San Francisco, said in his opinion, there was “one million percent no” chance that the Regeneron treatment could have cured Mr. Trump in 24 hours, as the president claimed.Another explanation, he said, is that the president is experiencing the effects of the steroid dexamethasone, which he has been receiving since Saturday, which is known to reduce fever and can create feelings of well-being and euphoria in patients. “This is all in keeping with the dexamethasone speaking,” Dr. Chin-Hong said.The president has been desperate to announce some kind of definitive treatment, or a vaccine, ahead of the election on Nov. 3, in which nearly all polls show him trailing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, nationally and in key states.Mr. Trump has also been looking for a type of miracle cure for the virus for months, initially seizing on hydroxychloroquine as an answer before health experts raised concerns about its use. But his disdain for those experts has been consistent with his general refusal to believe in science, a refusal that led The New England Journal of Medicine, in an editorial published on Wednesday, to say the Trump administration had responded so poorly to the coronavirus pandemic that it had “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”The journal did not explicitly endorse former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, but that was the only possible inference, other scientists noted.The New England Journal of Medicine’s editors join those of another influential journal, Scientific American, who last month endorsed Mr. Biden.Election 2020 More