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      Hanif Wins Re-election in Council Contest Defined by Israel and Gaza

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      Shahana Hanif defeated Maya Kornberg, a first-time candidate, in an acrimonious race for a City Council seat in Brooklyn.Shahana Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council in New York City, has held onto her seat in Tuesday’s Democratic primary contest, which had turned into a tense race where the politics of the Middle East became a focal point.Ms. Hanif, who represents Brooklyn neighborhoods including Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington, defeated her challenger, Maya Kornberg, a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, according to The Associated Press.Ms. Kornberg, 33, said she decided to challenge Ms. Hanif, 34, who was elected in 2021, because of the councilwoman’s focus on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, and she regularly characterized her as being insufficiently concerned with the needs of the district.“The Council member’s disproportionate focus on that issue and taking public divisive stances on that issue, instead of focusing on the local issues facing our district — on fixing potholes and planting trees — is precisely the progressive attitude we need to change,” Ms. Kornberg said in a recent television interview.The race was animated this winter by the vandalism of an Israeli restaurant in Park Slope. Ms. Hanif condemned it, but some constituents felt she had not been vocal enough in calling out the vandalism as antisemitic. In an interview before the primary, Ms. Hanif said her opponents had tried and failed to belittle her efforts to bring more housing to Brooklyn, among other priorities.She cited as an example her efforts to rezone the site of the Arrow Linen & Uniform Supply Company in Windsor Terrace for housing. Many community members opposed the redevelopment, which passed the City Council earlier this year. Before it did, Ms. Hanif worked to scale it down and to ensure that more affordable units were included.“My campaign has been a multiracial and intergenerational coalition of people who want to build bridges,” said Ms. Hanif, who was supported by and campaigned aggressively with the progressive mayoral candidates Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and Comptroller Brad Lander.“If you look at the other side, you’re not going to see anything close to that sort of coalition.”In the end, Ms. Hanif, who grew up in the district in Kensington, prevailed in part because of her grass-roots outreach in immigrant communities. The efforts helped her withstand about $400,000 in super PAC spending from, among others, Uber and companies associated with Madison Square Garden, deployed to boost Ms. Kornberg’s campaign and attack Ms. Hanif. More

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      A Heat Wave Hits New York Earlier Than Usual for a Second Year in a Row

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      Climate change is increasingly making weather extremes more common.Scorching, record-breaking temperatures on Tuesday kept many people indoors throughout the metropolitan region, strained the electrical grid and stoked concerns among those who are the most vulnerable to the heat, including older New Yorkers and the very young.It was 99 degrees in Central Park this afternoon, the hottest June 24 temperature since records started there in 1869. Kennedy Airport recorded the hottest June day since the site was built in 1948, at 102 degrees.It is the second year in a row that a heat wave has hit the New York City region earlier than usual, as global warming is projected to worsen heat waves and make them more frequent, climate experts say.“Our warming climate underlies everything,” said David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist and a geography professor at Rutgers University. “It’s not about the highest temperature; it’s about how long it stays hot and the area of coverage of that heat. It’s 100 up in New England today and down here as well.”Of the 69 weather stations in New Jersey, Mr. Robinson said, over 30 hit 100 degrees. He added that the 10 hottest summers on record for the state had all occurred since 2005.As climate change wreaks havoc with the traditional calendar, the familiar rhythms of the seasons have begun to shift. New York City pools, for example, are not scheduled to open for the summer until Friday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Hours Left in the Primary, the Stars Come Out for Mamdani

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      Celebrities like Lorde, Emily Ratajkowski, Cynthia Nixon and Bowen Yang have expressed support for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor’s race.State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, whose insurgent candidacy in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary was defined in part by an adept use of social media, has received a veritable buffet of endorsements in the race’s final days from celebrities with large online followings.The latest nod came from Emily Ratajkowski, a model and actress with more than 29 million followers on Instagram, who posted a video Tuesday with Mr. Mamdani. Wearing a “Hot Girls For Zohran” shirt, Ms. Ratajkowski, a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders, reminded New Yorkers of the tight margins that decided the last Democratic primary, in 2021. She added that younger voters would be pivotal in Tuesday’s outcome and encouraged her New York City followers to go to the polls“We know it’s hot, but the time is now,” she said.Like Mr. Sanders, who recently endorsed him, Mr. Mamdani has benefited from being perceived as the candidate of New York’s cool kids, who have embraced his message that government must urgently address the city’s affordability crisis. The backing of stars like the pop star Lorde and the “Saturday Night Live” cast members Sarah Sherman and Bowen Yang has excited Mr. Mamdani’s supporters as the candidate has surged to a close second place in the polls behind former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a moderate.On Tuesday, Ms. Sherman participated in a phone bank for Mr. Mamdani along with Cynthia Nixon, the actress and former candidate for New York governor. Ms. Nixon has held fund-raisers for Mr. Mamdani and has regularly slammed Mr. Cuomo, whom she ran against in 2018.Other high-profile figures who have backed Mr. Mamdani include the singer Maggie Rogers, the actress and activist Laverne Cox, the comedian John Early and the leftist podcaster Stavros Halkias, who lives in Astoria, Queens, which is part of Mr. Mamdani’s Assembly district.Whether these endorsements will translate to votes is unclear. At the very least, they serve as a stark reminder of the generational divide that has played out in the race, as Mr. Mamdani, 33, has fired up young progressives while Mr. Cuomo, 67, seeks to hold onto the support of older voters. Several notable older New Yorkers have backed Mr. Cuomo, including the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, the singer Billy Joel and the fashion designers Michael Kors and Tory Burch. More

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      Anthony Weiner Hopes Voters Have Forgiven or Forgotten

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      Mr. Weiner returned from a prison term to launch an unlikely campaign for the City Council. Outside a polling place on Tuesday, it was hot, mostly friendly and a little awkward.Anthony Weiner, posted on a sunbaked corner of the East Village on Tuesday, had stooped to hear an older woman tell him that she had just voted for him when a much younger woman stopped, took a quick selfie in front of the candidate and muttered “pedophile.”“What did she say?” the older woman asked.“Supports another candidate,” Mr. Weiner deadpanned.That he is himself a candidate is a plot twist in a story that many believed had ended badly. Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 following a sexting scandal. A second sexting scandal cost him a run for mayor in 2013. Four years later, he was convicted of a felony and served 18 months in prison for sharing sexually explicit photos and texts with a 15-year-old girl.He is now seeking an improbable comeback, running for a City Council seat in Lower Manhattan, asking voters to return him to an office he first won in 1991, in his mid-20s, in a Brooklyn district.During his campaign, he has owned those dark episodes without, as he put it, “wallowing” in them — “contrition, but not scraping.” He hopes his practical, street-level ideas to fix what ails the city — hire more police officers, find proper care for the mentally ill and homeless living in parks — attract voters ready to set aside his past.“I can’t think of another political campaign that’s quite like this,” he said.One thing that is undeniable, watching him greet person after person under a punishing midday sun that reduced his pole-thin shadow to a sliver, is that Mr. Weiner loves this part of the game. He is a tireless retail politician.“You guys vote yet?” he asked a passing couple.“We’re not from here.”“Maybe someday!” he replied.He recalls running for the Council in 1991 and has pictures of himself that year, looking gaunt and strung out.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Manhattan Democrats Will Weigh Tenure of District Attorney in Primary

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      Patrick Timmins, who is challenging Alvin L. Bragg, says the groundbreaking felony conviction of President Trump is irrelevant. He promises to tackle crime in the subway.While New Yorkers have been inundated with news about the Democratic primary for mayor, voters in Manhattan on Tuesday will also decide whether to re-elect their top prosecutor.Alvin L. Bragg, the Democrat who has been Manhattan’s district attorney since 2022, is facing a sole primary challenger in the race to lead one of the country’s largest prosecutors’ offices.His challenger, Patrick Timmins, a civil litigator who served in the Bronx district attorney’s office in the late 1990s, has said Mr. Bragg ushered in an increase in crime in Manhattan, especially in the subway.Mr. Timmins, 69, said that he has heard a desire for new leadership during his conversations with Manhattanites in recent months.“They fear crime, they fear where Manhattan is going, and so they want a change,” Mr. Timmins said. “They want a change from Alvin Bragg.”Mr. Bragg’s campaign rejected the assertion that crime has risen. In Manhattan, the seven felony crimes that the New York Police Department uses as benchmarks — murders, rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and grand larcenies of automobiles — are overall 13 percent lower this year compared with the same period in 2022, when Mr. Bragg took office, according to police data.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Ranked-Choice Voting Could Have a Pivotal Effect on the Mayor’s Race

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      The candidates have struck alliances and made cross-endorsements to take advantage of the ranked-choice voting system.This year’s Democratic primary will be only the second time New York City has used ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference — to select a nominee for mayor.The campaigns have worked hard to educate voters about how to make the most of their rankings, and some candidates have struck alliances to improve their chances of winning.A critical partnership emerged the day before early voting began this month when two progressive candidates — Zohran Mamdani, a state lawmaker, and Brad Lander, the city comptroller — cross-endorsed each other in an effort to beat the front-runner, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.The two candidates’ hope is that if most of their supporters rank them in the top two spots on their ballots — and leave Mr. Cuomo off — they can combine their share of the vote and overtake Mr. Cuomo.Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist who is not working on any of the mayoral campaigns, said that it was a smart move by Mr. Mamdani, who has been second in the polls and catching up to Mr. Cuomo.“Given how close the polls are, and the likelihood that Lander will be the last candidate eliminated before the Cuomo-Zohran climax, the X-factor is how overwhelmingly Lander’s votes go to Zohran,” he said.If 65 to 70 percent of Mr. Lander’s votes go to Mr. Mamdani, “then we might have our first Muslim, socialist mayor,” Mr. Yang said.Under the ranked-choice system, if a voter’s top choice is eliminated, their vote is transferred to the next candidate on their ballot, and so on.Before the city began using ranked-choice voting in citywide elections in the 2021 primary, New Yorkers would cast their votes for only one candidate. If no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff. The ranked-choice system amounts to an instant runoff.Mr. Cuomo led in the polls for months, but Mr. Mamdani has generated momentum and the race narrowed considerably. Mr. Cuomo has struck his own alliances, but has not made a cross-endorsement with another candidate.Mr. Cuomo was endorsed by Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who is running for mayor and who had reservations about Mr. Mamdani. Another candidate, Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund executive, also opposes Mr. Mamdani and said he would rank Mr. Cuomo second on his ballot.The left-leaning Working Families Party endorsed a slate of four candidates, including Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Lander, and held a rally on Sunday to show unity against Mr. Cuomo.Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker who is part of the slate, said she supported the group, but chose not to make a cross-endorsement with Mr. Mamdani.Mr. Mamdani and Michael Blake, a former state lawmaker from the Bronx, also cross-endorsed each other. Mr. Blake has trailed the others in polls, but had a strong debate performance. More

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      Democrats Are Getting Richer. It’s Not Helping.

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      There have been endless laments for the white working-class voters the Democratic Party lost over the past few decades, particularly during the 10 years of the Trump era. But detailed 2024 election analyses also make it clear that upper-income white voters have become a much more powerful force in the party than they ever were before. These upscale white voters are driving the transformation of the Democratic Party away from its role as the representative of working-class America and closer to its nascent incarnation as the party of the well-to-do.A detailed analysis of data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study shows that in 2024, 46.8 percent of white Kamala Harris voters had annual household incomes over $80,000, while 53.2 percent earned less than that. In fact, according to data analysis by Caroline Soler, a research analyst for the Cooperative Election Study, the single largest bloc of white Democratic voters in 2024 — 27.5 percent — had incomes of $120,000 or more.Along similar lines, Tom Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University, provided The Times with figures from the American National Election Studies for 2020, the most recent year for which data is available. The numbers show that white voters in the 68th to 100th income percentiles — the top third — cast 49.05 percent of their ballots for Joe Biden and 50.95 for Donald Trump. White voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted 52.9 percent for Biden and 47.1 percent for Trump.These figures stand in sharp contrast to election results as recent as those of 2008. Among white voters in the top third of the income distribution that year, John McCain, the Republican nominee, beat Barack Obama 67.1 percent to 32.9 percent.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, responded by email to my inquiries about this phenomenon: “An objective look at both party’s coalitions in the mass electorate would have to acknowledge that neither Republicans nor Democrats are the ‘party of the working class.’”Instead, Lee argued:Both parties are vulnerable to charges of elitism. Republicans really do push for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. Democrats, meanwhile, take stances on social issues that appeal to socioeconomic elites.The underlying truth, Lee continued, “is that the major parties in the U.S. today are not primarily organized around a social-class cleavage.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With $25 Million, Pro-Cuomo Super PAC Shatters Outside Spending Records

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      Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s candidacy has been bankrolled by the largest super PAC ever created in a New York City mayoral campaign.Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has modeled himself as the candidate of working New Yorkers, but his candidacy has largely been funded by record donations from billionaires and other wealthy business interests.Fix the City, a super PAC led by one of Mr. Cuomo’s closest advisers, has raised $25 million to boost his comeback bid for mayor and bury Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, his chief rival, in withering attack ads.The group is the largest super PAC ever created in a New York City mayoral campaign, a financial juggernaut on track to spend three times as much as Mr. Cuomo’s actual campaign legally can. The group has hired canvassers to take Mr. Cuomo’s message directly to voters, and one of its ads calling Mr. Mamdani a radical has been aired more than any other in the race.As of Monday, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg alone had given the group $8.3 million. DoorDash, the food delivery company, had given another $1 million; and Bill Ackman, an investor and supporter of President Trump, had donated $500,000.Some were motivated by Mr. Cuomo’s record, others more out of fear how Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who wants to raise taxes on businesses and the rich, would change the city if elected.Mr. Mamdani has denounced the outside spending and has tried to incorporate it into his critique of Mr. Cuomo. He argues that the former governor is in the pocket of corporate interests and shares donors with Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More