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      A Bustling New York Mayoral Race Reaches a Pivotal Moment

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      The New York Times’s City Hall bureau chief preps us for the Democratic primary.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary is a pivotal marker in the race to lead New York City.One candidate who is polling well, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, 67, would be the oldest elected mayor in the city’s modern history. Another front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, 33, a state lawmaker, would be the youngest in a century. Mr. Cuomo has a long track record laid with a style of governance that rubs many the wrong way. Mr. Mamdani was unknown to most people before his media-savvy campaign.There are other prominent candidates who are trailing in the polls but who may still affect the outcome as voters use a ranked-choice ballot system for the second time.In an interview with Times Insider, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, the city hall bureau chief for the Metro desk at The New York Times, explained the contours of the race. This conversation has been edited.One of your colleagues described the final weeks of the race as “chaotic.” How so?First, the race is close. Different polls say different things, but Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, has been leading for months. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist lawmaker from Queens, has been rising in the polls. The current mayor, Eric Adams, decided not to run in the Democratic primary and is running as an independent in the November general election.The race has gotten pretty nasty in the final weeks. Cuomo is attacking Mamdani; a super PAC that is supporting Cuomo is running millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements calling Mamdani radical, and some people believe those advertisements are Islamophobic because Mamdani is Muslim. Mamdani is hitting Cuomo pretty hard, saying he’s the candidate of the billionaire class and that he’s a disgraced former politician who doesn’t deserve a second chance.A year ago, for different reasons, it seemed unlikely that Mamdani and Cuomo would be in the positions they are in today. How did they get here?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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      As Black New Yorkers Move Out, N.Y.C. Politics May Be Reshaped

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      Housing affordability and quality-of-life concerns are pushing longtime Black New Yorkers out of the city, underscoring Democrats’ challenges with their base ahead of the mayoral election.For the better part of the 35 years that she lived in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, Dorinda Pannell made affordable housing her top — if not only — mission.A lifelong Democrat, tenant leader with East Brooklyn Congregations and avid voter, Ms. Pannell, 75, known to her neighbors in the Linden Houses as “Miss P,” spent years organizing her fellow residents to push for better housing conditions. She even took her fight to City Hall to give a speech about it.Now she is following New York’s mayoral primary closely, hopeful that the city’s next leader will do more for the millions of New Yorkers experiencing housing insecurity, particularly longtime Black and Latino residents who say that good-quality, affordable places to live are more and more elusive.But she will not be voting in the primary or be able to see for herself how the next mayoral administration affects her community. For the last five years, Ms. Pannell has lived in Hampton, Va., where she can be closer to her son, obtain better health care and enjoy what she believes is a higher quality of life and lower cost of living.“I’m still sad that I had to leave, you know?” she said, pointing to the organizing work she felt she had to put on hold. When it came time to move, she added, “I never cried so hard.”Ms. Pannell is one of the hundreds of thousands of Black New Yorkers who over the last decade have made the excruciating choice to leave the city they’ve called home for generations.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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      Big Names, Bigger Money and Global Themes Color the N.Y.C. Council Races

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      All 51 seats are up for election this year, and the Democratic primary battles feature crowded fields, moneyed interests and some recognizable figures.The ballots feature political figures who resigned in disgrace. Global story lines related to Israel and President Trump have defined contests. And millions of dollars from corporate interests have been injected to sway outcomes.Even as most of New York City’s political attention is focused on Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, this year’s races for City Council have also drawn widespread interest and money.Two names well known in New York congressional circles will grace the ballots in Manhattan: Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who spent about a year and a half in prison and much longer in public exile; and Virginia Maloney, whose mother, Carolyn Maloney, was a longtime congresswoman. Each is running to fill an open seat.All 51 Council seats will be up for election in November, and eight have no incumbent. But with most districts heavily Democratic, the primary on Tuesday has become the real race.Super PACs backed by companies, unions and housing advocacy groups, many with interests before the Council, have spent about $13.4 million to influence the contests, $6.8 million more than in 2021.Some of the races have been defined by local issues. In Lower Manhattan, for example, candidates have sparred over the fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden, where a long-gestating plan to build affordable housing for older New Yorkers has been put on hold.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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      Bill Clinton Endorses Andrew Cuomo for NYC Mayor

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      The former president’s endorsement came as Letitia James, the state attorney general who supports Andrew M. Cuomo’s mayoral rivals, criticized the former governor over harassment allegations.Former President Bill Clinton endorsed former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race on Sunday, giving a last-minute boost of support to Mr. Cuomo, as he urged supporters to head to the polls for the last day of early voting.Mr. Cuomo worked in the Clinton administration as the housing secretary. The backing of the former president, as well as a taped robocall providing his support, could help turn out older voters in the tightening Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday.Mr. Clinton said in the robocall that he had hired Mr. Cuomo “because he knew how to get things done” and that he believed he would “stand up and protect the people of this city” from President Trump.Mr. Clinton, 78, who lives in a Westchester County suburb north of New York, has not often weighed in on city primary races. His endorsement is another indication that some establishment Democrats prefer Mr. Cuomo to Zohran Mamdani, a state lawmaker and Democratic Socialist who is second in the polls.The endorsement came as Mr. Cuomo and his rivals attended campaign events across the city, trying to convert undecided voters and to ensure that their supporters showed up at the polls. The push appeared more urgent this weekend, with a forecast heat wave potentially depressing turnout on Primary Day.By the end of the early voting period on Sunday, 384,000 Democrats had voted in the primary. That was nearly twice as many people as voted during the same period four years ago, when the coronavirus pandemic was still raging and many New Yorkers voters cast ballots by mail.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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      How Hugo Aguilar Ortiz Became Mexico’s Most Powerful Indigenous Lawyer

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      In the far-flung hamlet in southern Mexico where he grew up, Hugo Aguilar Ortiz’s boyhood job was to herd goats. Nearly everyone around him on the mist-shrouded slopes of Oaxaca persisted in speaking Tu’un Savi, known as the language of the rain, even centuries after the Spanish conquest.“I thought the world ended at the mountains,” said Mr. Aguilar Ortiz, now 52 and the newly elected chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court. “I never thought about becoming a lawyer.”Dealing a jolt to Mexico’s legal establishment, he won his seat in the country’s first judicial elections, part of a sweeping redesign of the judiciary by the leftist governing party, Morena. It rewrote the Constitution to let voters directly elect thousands of judges around Mexico, ending the previous appointment-based system.Feuding over the judicial overhaul has consumed Mexico for the past year. Critics say it erodes the last major check on the power of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s party, which already controls the executive branch, both houses of Congress and most statehouses across Mexico.But Morena’s supporters contend that the changes were needed not only to root out the judicial system’s corruption and nepotism, but also to make judgeships attainable to those traditionally excluded from positions of power. Mr. Aguilar Ortiz’s metamorphosis from goatherd to chief justice bolsters such ambitions.“Things can change now that we have Hugo there,” said Alejandro Marreros Lobato, a Nahua human rights activist, who drew on Mr. Aguilar Ortiz’s support in a legal battle against a Canadian open-pit mining project near his Nahua community. “It makes me feel that we can finally start talking about justice.”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 Democrats Need Their Own Trump

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      We are more than 1,200 days away from the 2028 presidential election, but the Democratic presidential primary is already well underway. The likely candidates are fund-raising, hosting campaign rallies, starting podcasts and staking out ideological lanes.Candidates will try to carve out distinct political identities, but one challenge unites them all: Their party is historically unpopular. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is 22 percentage points underwater — 60 percent of respondents view it unfavorably, 38 favorably. Apart from the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency, that is by far the lowest it’s been during the more than 30 years Pew Research has collected data.The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps, moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition — one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause — the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump.To be clear, the blueprint I refer to is not the one Mr. Trump has used to violate democratic norms and destabilize American institutions, but rather the one for resetting how Americans view a party and its leaders.In January 2013, at the time of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were deeply unpopular. Conservative thought leaders like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove advocated comprehensive immigration reform as a pathway back to a majority. By the summer, the base’s backlash to the idea was itself so comprehensive that many of them were forced to retreat.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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      The Closing Arguments of the N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates

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      Ahead of the June 24 primary, The New York Times analyzed the closing campaign speeches of the four leading Democrats running for mayor.The leading candidates for New York City mayor, clockwise from top left: Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani; Brad Lander, the city comptroller; and Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker. Nicole Craine, Scott Heins and Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWith the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City looming on Tuesday, the candidates are making their closing arguments to voters.The New York Times analyzed excerpts from recent speeches by the top four candidates in the polls — Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander and Adrienne Adams — to highlight and explain their central campaign messages.Andrew M. CuomoAndrew Cuomo has won endorsements from some of the city’s most influential labor unions.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Cuomo, 67, is trying to make a comeback four years after resigning as New York’s governor amid a sexual harassment scandal. He denies wrongdoing and has run as a moderate who has the most experience and fortitude to stand up to President Trump.The setting: Union Square in Manhattan, one week before Primary Day, with labor leaders who endorsed him and hundreds of union members.The goal: Mr. Cuomo sought to portray himself as the candidate of working-class New Yorkers who are eager to reorient the Democratic Party nationally after its 2024 losses.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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      G.O.P. Can’t Include Limits on Trump Lawsuits in Megabill, Senate Parliamentarian Rules

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      The Senate parliamentarian rejected a measure in Republicans’ domestic policy bill that could limit lawsuits seeking to block presidential orders.A Senate official rejected on Sunday a measure in Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy bill that could limit lawsuits seeking to block President Trump’s executive actions.The measure would target the preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders issued by federal judges on Mr. Trump’s directives. Those rulings have halted or delayed orders on a host of policies, including efforts to carry out mass firings of federal workers and to withhold funds from states that do not comply with demands on immigration enforcement.The G.O.P. proposal would require parties suing over federal policies to post a bond covering the government’s potential costs and damages from an injunction if the judge’s order were found later to have been wrongly granted.“Individual district judges — who don’t even have authority over any of the other 92 district courts — are single-handedly vetoing policies the American people elected President Trump to implement,” Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in announcing the proposal in March.Republicans are pushing their bill to carry out President Trump’s agenda through Congress using special rules that shield legislation from a filibuster, depriving Democrats of the ability to block it. But to qualify for that protection, the legislation must only include proposals that directly change federal spending and not add to long-term deficits.The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, makes such judgments. She ruled that the measure did not meet the requirements, according to Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader.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