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      The N.Y.C. Elections Board Is a Disaster. This Is the Last Straw.

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      New Yorkers have endured the incompetence of the city’s Board of Elections for so long that complaints on the subject blend into the background noise of life in a megalopolis, alongside gripes about overstuffed subway cars and putrid piles of sidewalk trash.This page called the board “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism” — and that was 50 years ago.Nary an election passes without another reminder of how much contempt the agency has for the city’s vast, diverse electorate. Accidentally purged voter rolls, misaddressed absentee ballots, intolerably long lines. The catalog of dysfunction and neglect seems endless.Yet somehow the board found a new way to humiliate itself and the city, one week after 800,000 New Yorkers went to the polls to cast ballots in the most consequential mayoral primaries in a generation. Or was it 940,000 New Yorkers? Good question. For several bewildering hours on Tuesday, no one had an answer.The first number, which the board reported shortly after polls closed on June 22, reflected the first-place votes cast in person during early voting and on Election Day, and showed Eric Adams with a commanding lead in the Democratic primary. The second number included the full ranked-choice tallies of those same ballots and, to the shock of the political establishment, appeared to show Kathryn Garcia vaulting from third place into a near tie with Mr. Adams. But political observers across the city soon flagged the vote-total discrepancy. So did Mr. Adams, who rightly demanded an explanation for the “irregularities.”By late afternoon, the board had removed the new results from its website. A few hours later, the explanation came out, and it was a doozy, even by the board’s degraded standards: 135,000 “votes” included in Tuesday’s tally were in fact not real votes, but part of a test run that the board had failed to clear from a computer before posting the numbers to the public.In a tweet, the board pleaded with the public and the candidates for patience. No, patience is something you earn through transparency and competence, two qualities the New York City elections board does not possess. A particularly toxic, century-old vestige of the city’s patronage system, it is run by friends and relatives of political power brokers from both parties, who seem to care for nothing as much as their own incumbency. The board’s 10 commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican from each borough, get their paychecks despite not being trained in election administration — or, it appears, any other civic-minded pursuit.The board’s commissioners fight sensible efforts to make voting more accessible and reject money — most recently, $20 million from Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016 — that could help make the operation more competent.City investigations have for decades documented the board’s tribulations in depressingly repetitive language: “inefficiency, laxity and waste”; “illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations.” The board’s own staff — who try to do their job with professionalism and honesty — have called it “chronically dysfunctional” and an “insane asylum.”Last fall, as the country geared up for a presidential election amid a pandemic, the city’s comptroller, Scott Stringer, who is now on the mayoral ballot, said of the board, “We shouldn’t have to hold our breath because of their gross incompetence.” Still the board manages to take our breath away.This latest blunder comes at an especially bad time, in the middle of the city’s first mayoral election to use ranked-choice voting, a smart electoral innovation that many other cities have adopted without major trouble.Some have jumped to blame the new voting method for Tuesday’s mess, but the real culprit is the same old one: a decrepit, self-dealing political machine that refuses to release its stranglehold on the city’s elections.The fiasco is all the worse given the fragile state of American democracy in the wake of the Trump presidency. The need for public confidence in election procedures has never been higher. A functioning board would have eased voters’ concerns about the new system; this one exacerbated them, and the damage could take years to repair.Last fall, after the board sent out mislabeled and misaddressed ballots, Donald Trump tweeted, “Big Fraud, Unfixable!” He was partly right. The board can’t be fixed; it can only be dismantled and rebuilt as the professional, nonpartisan agency that New Yorkers deserve.This means amending the state Constitution, which should happen as soon as possible. Lawmakers in search of a new model can take a cue from Los Angeles, where elections are run by trained officials who seemingly care about getting things right and serving the citizens who pay their salaries.If this latest disaster is to have any silver lining, it will be as the catalyst for a comprehensive reform that should have happened decades ago.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Pulls Back Results

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      The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty.The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale, and skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process despite its successful use in other cities.Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.The Board of Elections released preliminary, unofficial ranked-choice tabulations on Tuesday afternoon, showing that Mr. Adams — who had held a significant advantage on primary night — was narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia in the ballots cast in person during early voting or on Primary Day. Maya D. Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, was close behind in third place.A few hours later, the board disclosed its unspecified discrepancy, and it was not at all clear Tuesday night how accurate the most recent tally was, or if it was accurate at all.The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.New York Primary Election ResultsSee full results and maps from the New York City mayoral race and other primaries.Some Democrats, bracing for an acrimonious new chapter in the race, are concerned that the incremental release of results by the Board of Elections — and the discovery of a possible error — may stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and sow divisions along racial and class lines when the outcome is ultimately announced.In a tweet on Tuesday evening, Mr. Adams sought to project assuredness.“Earlier today, the Board of Elections released a ranked choice voting simulation based on last week’s election results that they have since acknowledged include ‘discrepancies,’” Mr. Adams wrote. “We are waiting for an explanation and still confident in our lead.”If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers; Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a “person of color” from winning the race.In the final days of the race, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang campaigned together across the city, especially in neighborhoods that are home to sizable Asian American communities, and appeared together on campaign literature.To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. Mr. Adams has said that he would accept the results of the election, even as he and his allies have long been critical of ranked-choice voting.But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it. By Tuesday night, though, it was the Board of Elections that was attracting ire from seemingly all corners.Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s former public advocate who now runs Citizens Union, a good-government group, said “the entire country is watching” the Board of Elections. “New Yorkers deserve elections, and election administrators, that they can have the utmost faith in,” Ms. Gotbaum added.Kathryn Garcia, one of Mr. Adams’s chief rivals, said it was important to ensure “that New York City’s voices are heard.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhile it is difficult, it is not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise.After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.6 percentage points. Asked if she had been in touch with Ms. Wiley’s team, Ms. Garcia suggested there had been staff-level conversations.“The campaigns have been speaking to each other,” Ms. Garcia said in a phone call on Tuesday afternoon, saying the two candidates had not yet spoken directly. “Hopefully we don’t have to step in with attorneys. But it is about really ensuring that New York City’s voices are heard.”Maya Wiley, another top contender, renewed her call to “count every vote.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMs. Wiley ran well to the left of Ms. Garcia on a number of vital policy matters, including around policing and on some education questions. Either candidate would be the first woman elected mayor of New York, and Ms. Wiley would be the city’s first Black female mayor.“I said on election night, we must allow the democratic process to continue and count every vote so that New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and government,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement on Tuesday. “And we must all support its results.”Mr. Adams, a former police captain and a relative moderate on several key issues, was a non-starter for many progressive voters who may have preferred Ms. Garcia and her focus on competence over any especially ideological message.But early results suggested that Mr. Adams had significant strength among working-class voters of color, and some traction among white voters with moderate views.City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, an Adams supporter who is pressing for a new referendum on ranked-choice voting, suggested in a text message on Tuesday that the system had opened the door to “an attempt to eliminate the candidate of moderate working people and traditionally marginalized communities,” as he implicitly criticized the Yang-Garcia alliance.“It is incumbent on us now to address the issue of ranked voting and how it is being weaponized against a wide portion of the public,” said Mr. Miller, the co-chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus on the City Council.Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.“There is real danger that voters will come to believe a set of facts about the race that will be disproven when all votes are in,” said Ben Greenfield, a senior survey data analyst at Change Research, which conducted polling for a pro-Garcia PAC. “The risk is that this could take a system that’s already new and confusing and increase people’s sense of mistrust.”Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays, Anne Barnard, Andy Newman and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting. More

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      What to Expect as Early Ranked-Choice Results Are Released in New York

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      Absentee ballots won’t be included, but data to be released Tuesday could signal the way vote totals will shift as the field is officially winnowed.New Yorkers will get one step closer on Tuesday to learning who their next mayor is likely to be.Because an initial count of ballots showed that none of the Democratic candidates got more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes cast by those who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period, the city’s new ranked-choice system has kicked in.Voters could rank up to five candidates in the mayor’s race, and the Democratic nominee, who is almost certain to be next mayor, will now be decided through a process of elimination that begins on Tuesday.Here’s what you need to know:How will the ranked-choice system play out on Tuesday?The city’s Board of Elections is set to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, which will give a fuller, if still incomplete, picture of how the vote totals are shaking out.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted, and he was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 percentage points.A winner will not be certified on Tuesday, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included in the preliminary tally. It is also difficult, but mathematically possible, for either Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia to catch Mr. Adams.The elimination rounds work like this: The candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that reallocation is then eliminated, with their votes reallocated to second choices, and so on, until two candidates remain. The one with the most votes is the winner.Voters casting their ballots on Primary Day at a public school in Upper Manhattan. An initial ranked-choice tally to be released on Tuesday could indicate which candidates had the broadest appeal.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesAre the elimination-round results final?Not yet.What will happen on Tuesday is essentially an exercise: It will show only who would win based on votes that have already been tallied — that is, who would win if, hypothetically, there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of elimination rounds — the real ones, for the final result.The initial ranked-choice tally may still offer an important snapshot of which candidates had the broadest appeal, as well as insight into how voters grouped, or excluded, certain candidates.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might still trickle in until the deadline on Tuesday.On July 6, there will be a fresh round of results that is expected to include some absentee ballots, and a more complete set of results is expected the following week.What other ranked-choice voting results will be released on Tuesday?The tally will include results for all races in which ranked-choice voting was used, including mayor, comptroller and City Council.In the Democratic primary for comptroller, Brad Lander, a councilman from Brooklyn, leads Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, by almost 9 percentage points. Mr. Lander has said he looks forward to seeing the tabulation process play out.“Democracy is worth waiting for and we’re looking forward to seeing the ranked vote tabulation tomorrow,” Mr. Lander said.Jumaane Williams has been declared the winner in the public advocate primary.No winner has been declared in the six competitive primaries — five Democratic, one Republican — for borough president, but several candidates received close to, or more than, 40 percent of first-choice votes. Dozens of Democratic City Council primary races also remain undecided.Kathryn Garcia’s campaign expects to gain ground when absentee ballots are counted.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMaya Wiley trailed Mr. Adams by 9.4 percentage points after the first tally of votes.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesDoes Eric Adams have an insurmountable lead?In most ranked-choice elections in the United States, whoever wins the most first-place votes ends up the final winner. But it is not unprecedented for a candidate trailing in first-place votes after an initial tally to get enough second- and third-place votes to surmount the gap.In a 2018 congressional race in Maine, a Democrat, Jared Golden, defeated a Republican front-runner after votes for independent candidates were reallocated to him. And in a mayoral race in Oakland in 2010, the front-running incumbent lost after the elimination rounds reallocated votes to the eventual winner, Jean Quan.In any case, the New York City mayor’s race is not over. A range of political observers say the final difference between the top two finishers will likely be closer than Mr. Adams’s 9-point lead after the first round of counting.The campaigns of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley have been busy with calculators, maps of voter-turnout results and various polls hinting at what share of other candidates’ votes will go to each of them and to Mr. Adams.The data, they have said, suggests the race is tighter than it looks after the initial ballot tally, and that one of them could still win.A new study by the group Data For Progress suggests that Ms. Garcia can still beat Mr. Adams, and that the gap between him and Ms. Wiley could be within the study’s margin of error.The study sought to combine voters’ professed ranking patterns with their actual first-choice votes: Pollsters asked 601 likely voters on Primary Day how they planned to rank, or had ranked, candidates and then weighted the results to the first-place votes counted so far.Ms. Garcia’s campaign, according to a memo shared last week, expects her to gain considerable ground in the absentee ballot count, because those ballots have been received in higher numbers in districts where she beat both Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley — districts where in-person turnout was also very high.Campaign advisers for Ms. Wiley last week mapped out how she could prevail in the elimination rounds. Their path to victory, essentially, requires Ms. Garcia to get many of Andrew Yang’s second-choice votes, and Ms. Wiley to get many of Ms. Garcia’s.As Ms. Wiley’s advisers saw it: The top three rivals and Mr. Yang would split the lower-ranking candidates’ votes, with Ms. Wiley picking up a large share from Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller. Once Mr. Yang is eliminated, Ms. Wiley would get few of his votes, but Ms. Garcia, they believed, would get many, especially in the heavily Asian American districts where she campaigned with Mr. Yang in the final days. If Ms. Wiley then led Ms. Garcia, she might inherit enough of her votes to take the lead.The conclusion, as one Wiley adviser, Jon Paul Lupo, put it, was that “we’re in a nail-biter.”So when will we know the results of the mayor’s race?The Board of Elections is confident that it will be able to certify the results of the entire election, including ranked-choice voting contests and non-ranked contests like races for district attorney and judges, starting the week of July 12.Under changes to election rules that were passed last year, voters are allowed to “cure” or correct errors with mail-in ballot envelopes that might prevent their ballots from being counted. The deadline for receiving cured ballots is July 9.After the board receives those ballots, they will run the ranked-choice voting software again the week of July 12. The results will be used to create the official report for certification.The Associated Press will be closely watching the results that the board releases, said David Scott, the organization’s vice president and managing editor.“Our standard is the same as in any election,” he said in an interview. “We will call it when we are confident the trailing candidates can’t catch up.” More

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      Time to Get Some Ranked-Choice Voting Results

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Sunny early, then cloudier in the afternoon, with scattered thunderstorms. High in the mid-90s, but because of the humidity it will seem like 100 or more. Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sunday (Independence Day). Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesPrimary Day may have been one week ago. But many races across the city — including the Democratic primary for mayor — are not finished because of ranked-choice voting. Today, elections officials are expected to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, bringing New Yorkers one step closer to knowing who is most likely to become mayor, among other races.[Eric Adams received the most first-choice in-person votes last week. It is difficult, but mathematically possible, for two other candidates to catch up to him.]What happens today?Elections officials will run through the ranked-choice ballots for all votes cast in person on Primary Day and during early voting, offering a fuller (but incomplete) picture of how votes are adding up.A process of elimination will take place that works like this: The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that is then eliminated, with the votes reallocated to each voter’s next choice, and so on, until two candidates remain. The candidate with the most votes would be the winner.In the Democratic race for mayor, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted. Mr. Adams was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 points.After running through the ranked-choice votes, those numbers might change.What happens next?The results to be announced on Tuesday won’t be final, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included.The results will show only who would win if there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, elections officials will run a new set of elimination rounds for the final result, which may take at least two more weeks.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might trickle in before the deadline today.From The TimesLawmakers Sue N.Y.P.D., Saying They Were Beaten With Bicycles at ProtestPolice Officers Will ‘Flood’ Times Square After Another Bystander Is ShotTrump’s Lawyers Make Late Bid to Fend Off Charges Against His BusinessNew York and New Jersey Need an $11B Tunnel. Will Biden Make It Happen?Liquor Laws Once Targeted Gay Bars. Now, One State Is Apologizing.Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingIn last week’s citywide primary election, voter turnout fell in some areas that were hard-hit by Covid-19. [The City]Several people were arrested when police officers clashed with people celebrating Pride in Washington Square Park. [Gothamist]A police officer was injured after being shot with a BB gun on Staten Island, officials said. [N.Y. Post]And finally: A vibrant Pride weekend The Times’s Julia Carmel writes:New York’s Pride celebrations and protests came back with a vengeance over the weekend, after a muted celebration last year because of the pandemic.Tens of thousands of people took over the streets of Greenwich Village on Sunday, starting impromptu dance parties and embracing the freedom of being together again.Ahlasia Hunter, 23, who was attending her first Pride, danced and cheered from atop a traffic barricade on Sunday afternoon.“Bro, the energy is amazing,” Ms. Hunter said. “If you don’t have a bucket list, you need to start a bucket list — you’ve got to come to Pride.”Last year, as people were encouraged to stay home because of the pandemic, the Pride March, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary, was reduced to a procession of several dozen people with no in-person audience.Though the final weekend of June usually boasts hundreds of Pride events and draws millions of visitors to New York, the largest Pride event in 2020 was the second annual Queer Liberation March — an event that has drawn support for being an anti-police and anti-corporate alternative to more commercial gatherings.Pride also arrived last year during the Black Lives Matter marches and demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd. The groundswell prompted popular events like the Dyke March to redirect supporters to Black-led marches and rallies.This year, though the Pride March was virtual once again, thousands of people streamed down Fifth Avenue on Saturday for the Dyke March, while the Queer Liberation March, held for the third time, brought thousands more to the streets on Sunday afternoon.“I’ve been stuck inside for the past year,” said Amaris Cook, 19, who traveled from Springfield, Mass., to attend the Queer Liberation March. “It’s just great to be out again and see other people.”It’s Tuesday — dance in the streets.Metropolitan Diary: Spare tissue Dear Diary:My wife and I were on an escalator at the Port Authority Terminal, on our way home from the theater. I asked my wife, who was two steps ahead of me, if she had a tissue.She said yes and that she would give me one when we reached the top.Suddenly, a hand holding a small pack of tissues reached over my shoulder. I turned to see a woman standing behind me with a smile on her face.“Here you go,” she said, “and keep the package.”— Stuart SchwartzNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More

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      The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.Of course while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.Nothing is for sure yet in the city — thanks to our new preferential voting system New Yorkers may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.But go on.Bret: My bottom line is that “democratic socialism” might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hooray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics — Trump’s been off the trail since January when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Pence.Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice,” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh, while he also lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than you ought to.Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-siring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, who tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?Gail: Oh God. What a combo. l hear there’s a “Ron Be Gone” movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a “Tim, Don’t Get In.” Or just: “Not Scott.”Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m-still-standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket he could also peel off some of the Black vote, or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.Of course none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be, and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any non-vaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      An Accusation Blew Up a Campaign. The Media Didn’t Know What to Do.

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      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      What Does Eric Adams, Working-Class Champion, Mean for the Democrats?

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      Mr. Adams, who ran a campaign focused on appealing to blue-collar Black and Latino voters, said America does not want “fancy candidates.”He bluntly challenged left-wing leaders in his party over matters of policing and public safety. He campaigned heavily in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, often ignoring Manhattan neighborhoods besides Harlem and Washington Heights. And he branded himself a blue-collar candidate with a keen personal understanding of the challenges and concerns facing working-class New Yorkers of color.With his substantial early lead in the Democratic mayoral primary when votes were counted Tuesday night, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, demonstrated the enduring power of a candidate who can connect to working- and middle-class Black and Latino voters, while also appealing to some white voters with moderate views.Mr. Adams is not yet assured of victory. But if he prevails, it would be a triumph for a campaign that focused more heavily on those constituencies than any other winning New York City mayoral candidate in recent history.As the national Democratic Party navigates debates over identity and ideology, the mayoral primary in the largest city in the United States is highlighting critical questions about which voters make up the party’s base in the Biden era, and who best speaks for them.Barely a year has passed since President Biden clinched the Democratic nomination, defeating several more progressive rivals on the strength of support from Black voters and older moderate voters across the board, and running as a blue-collar candidate himself. But Democrats are now straining to hold together a coalition that includes college-educated liberals and centrists, young left-wing activists and working-class voters of color.“America is saying, we want to have justice and safety and end inequalities,” Mr. Adams declared at a news conference on Thursday, offering his take on the party’s direction. “And we don’t want fancy candidates.”Mr. Adams’s allies and advisers say that from the start, he based his campaign strategy on connecting with working- and middle-class voters of color.“Over the last few cycles, the winners of the mayor’s race have started with a whiter, wealthier base generally, and then expanded out,” said Evan Thies, an Adams spokesman and adviser. Mr. Adams’s campaign, he said, started “with low-income, middle-income, Black, Latino, immigrant communities, and then reached into middle-income communities.”Mr. Adams would be New York’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Mr. Dinkins, who described the city as a “gorgeous mosaic,” was more focused than Mr. Adams on trying to win over liberal white voters.Mr. Adams was the first choice of about 32 percent of New York Democrats who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and a progressive favorite, pulled in about 22 percent of that vote. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who touted her managerial experience, got 19.5 percent.Under the city’s new ranked-choice system, in which voters could rank up to five candidates, the Democratic nominee will now be determined through a process of elimination. Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley could ultimately surpass Mr. Adams, although that appears to be an uphill battle, and a final winner may not be determined for weeks.Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, is in third place after the initial, Primary Day counting of votes.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIf Mr. Adams does win, it will be partly because he had major institutional advantages.He was well financed and spent heavily on advertising. He received the support of several of the city’s most influential labor unions, which represent many Black and Latino New Yorkers. His name was also well known after years in city politics, including as a state senator.And although some of the most prominent members of New York’s congressional delegation supported Ms. Wiley as their first choice, Mr. Adams landed other important endorsements, including those of the Queens and Bronx borough presidents and Representative Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican-American member of Congress, and a powerful figure in Washington Heights.Just as importantly, in his supporters’ eyes, Mr. Adams was perceived as having credibility on what emerged as the most consequential, and divisive, issue in the race: public safety.Mr. Adams, who experienced economic hardship as a child and has said he was once beaten by police officers, grew up to join the Police Department, rising to captain. Critics within the department saw him as something of a rabble-rouser, while many progressive voters now think his answers to complex problems too often involve an emphasis on law enforcement.But to some voters, he long ago cemented a reputation as someone who challenged misconduct from within the system, giving him authority to talk about bringing down crime.“He was in the police force, he knows what they represent,” said Gloria Dees, 63, a Brooklyn resident who voted for Mr. Adams and described being deeply concerned about both rising crime and police violence against people of color. “You have to understand something in order to make it work better.”Polls this spring showed public safety increasingly becoming the most important issue to Democratic voters amid random subway attacks, a spate of bias crimes and a spike in shootings. On the Sunday before the primary, Mr. Adams’s campaign staff said that a volunteer had been stabbed in the Bronx.“Being an ex-cop, being able to have safety and justice at the same time, was a message that resonated with folks in the Bronx,” said Assemblywoman Karines Reyes, a Democrat who represents parts of the borough and who did not endorse anyone in the race. Mr. Adams won the Bronx overwhelmingly in the first vote tally. “They’re looking for somebody to address the crime.”Voters cast ballots in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood on Primary Day. Public safety emerged as the dominant issue in the race. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe rate of violent crime in the city is far below where it was decades ago, but shootings have been up in some neighborhoods, and among older voters especially, there is a visceral fear of returning to the “bad old days.”Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president and a supporter of Mr. Adams, cited the recent fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy in the Rockaways as something that hit home for many people in the area.“We’re nowhere near where we were in the ’80s or ’70s,” he said. But, he added, “when you see a shooting in front of you, no one cares about statistics.”Interviews on Thursday with voters on either side of Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway illustrated vividly Mr. Adams’s appeal and limitations. In parts of Crown Heights, the parkway was a physical dividing line, early results show, between voters who went for Ms. Wiley and those who preferred Mr. Adams.Among older, working-class voters of color who live south of the parkway, Mr. Adams held a commanding lead. “He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” said one, Janice Brathwaite, 66, who is disabled and said she had voted for Mr. Adams.“He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” Janice Brathwaite, who lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said of Mr. Adams. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMs. Brathwaite ruled out Ms. Wiley after hearing her plans for overhauling the Police Department, including a reallocation of $1 billion from the police budget to social service programs and anti-violence measures.“She is someone who is against the policeman who is protecting me, making sure nobody is shooting me,” Ms. Brathwaite said.Ms. Wiley has said there are times when armed officers are needed, but she has also argued that in some instances, mental health experts can halt crime more effectively.That approach appealed to Allison Behringer, 31, an audio journalist and podcast producer who lives north of the parkway, where Mr. Adams’s challenges were on display among some of the young professionals who live in the area.“She was the best progressive candidate,” Ms. Behringer said of Ms. Wiley, whom she ranked as her first choice. “She talked about reimagining what public safety is, that really resonated with me.”Ms. Behringer alluded to concerns about ethical issues that have been raised about Mr. Adams. He has faced scrutiny over his taxes, real estate holdings, fund-raising practices and residency.A fresh round of voting results to be released on Tuesday will provide further clarity about the race. They may show whether those issues hurt Mr. Adams among some highly engaged voters in Manhattan and elsewhere. The new results could also indicate whether Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia had sufficiently broad appeal to cut into his lead.As in Brooklyn, there was a clear geographic divide among voters in Manhattan: East 96th Street, with those who ranked Ms. Garcia first mostly to the south, and those who favored Mr. Adams or Ms. Wiley further uptown.Ms. Garcia, a relatively moderate technocrat who was endorsed by The New York Times’s editorial board, among others, won Manhattan handily. Like Ms. Wiley, she hopes to beat Mr. Adams by being many voters’ second choice, and with the benefit of absentee votes that have not been counted.Maya Wiley, center, ranked second in first-choice votes in the initial count of in-person ballots.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesIn Harlem one afternoon this month, Carmen Flores had just cast her early vote for Mr. Adams when she came across one of his rallies. She said she found his trajectory inspiring.“He’s coming from the bottom up,” she said, adding, “He’s been in every facet of life.”Whatever the final vote tally, Democratic strategists caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a post-pandemic, municipal election held in June. If Mr. Adams becomes mayor, as the Democratic nominee almost certainly will, progressive leaders can still point to signs of strength in other city races and elsewhere in the state.Asked about the mayor’s race, Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the left-wing organization Justice Democrats, said, “fear-mongering works when crime is rising,” while noting that several left-wing candidates in the city were leading their races. He also argued that some people who supported Mr. Adams could have done so for reasons that were not ideological.“There might be some voters who voted for Eric Adams based on his policy platform,” Mr. Shahid said. “But there are probably many more voters who voted for Eric Adams based on how they felt about him. It’s often whether they identify with a candidate.”Nate Schweber contributed reporting. More

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      Progressives’ Urgent Question: How to Win Over Voters of Color

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      A yearslong challenge for the left was starkly illustrated this week as its hopes faded in the New York mayor’s race.Can progressives win broad numbers of the Black and brown voters they say their policies will benefit most?That provocative question is one that a lot of Democrats find themselves asking after seeing the early results from New York City’s mayoral primary this past week.In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of “Black and brown babies” and were being pushed by “a lot of young, white, affluent people.” A retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. Though the official winner may not be known for weeks because of the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams holds a commanding edge in the race that will be difficult for his rivals to overcome.His appeal adds evidence to an emerging trend in Democratic politics: a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.“Black people talk about politics in more practical and everyday terms,” said Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who studies the political views of Black people. “What makes more sense for people who are often distrustful of broad political claims is something that’s more in the middle.”He added: “The median Black voter is not A.O.C. and is actually closer to Eric Adams.”In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders struggled to win over voters of color. Four years later, Black voters helped lift President Biden to victory in the Democratic primary, forming the backbone of the coalition that helped him defeat liberal rivals including Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren.In the general election, Donald J. Trump made gains with nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos, as Democrats saw a drop-off in support that cost the party key congressional seats, according to a postelection autopsy by Democratic interest groups. In the 2020 election, Mr. Trump made larger gains among all Black and Latino voters than he did among white voters without a college degree, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.On issues beyond criminal justice, data indicates that Black and Latino voters are less likely to identify as liberal than white voters. An analysis by Gallup found that the share of white Democrats who identify as liberal had risen by 20 percentage points since the early 2000s. Over the same period, the polling firm found a nine-point rise in liberal identification among Latino Democrats and an eight-point increase among Black Democrats.As votes were being tabulated in New York, Mr. Adams tried to capitalize on that tension between progressives and more moderate voters of color, casting himself as the future of Democratic politics and his campaign as a template for the party.“I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said at his first news conference after primary night. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”Extrapolating national trends from the idiosyncratic politics of New York is a bit like ordering a bagel with schmear in Des Moines. You’ll probably get a piece of bread, but the similarities may end there.Liberal activists argue that they’ve made important breakthroughs among nonwhite voters in recent years, pointing to Mr. Sanders’s gains among Latinos and younger voters of color over the course of his two presidential bids. Progressive congressional candidates, like the members of the so-called Squad, have won several heavily Democratic House districts with meaningful support from nonwhite voters.And of course, Black and Latino voters, like any demographic group, are hardly a monolith. Younger voters and those with college degrees are more likely to trend left than their older parents.Still, the traction some more conservative Democratic candidates like Mr. Adams have gained in Black and Latino communities threatens to undercut a central tenet of the party’s political thinking for decades: demographics as destiny.For years, Democrats have argued that as the country grew more diverse and more urban, their party would be able to marshal a near-permanent majority with a rising coalition of voters of color. By turning out that base, Democrats could win without needing to appeal affluent suburbanites, who are traditionally more moderate on fiscal issues, or white working-class voters, who tend to hold more conservative views on race and immigration.But a growing body of evidence indicates that large numbers of Black and Latino voters may simply take a more centrist view on the very issues — race and criminal justice — that progressives assumed would rally voters of color to their side.The New York mayoral primary provided a particularly interesting test case of that kind of thinking. As crime and gun violence rise in New York, polls showed that crime and public safety were the most important issues to voters in the mayoral race.The limited public polling available showed nuanced opinions among voters of color on policing. A poll conducted for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that just 17 percent of Black voters and 18 percent of Latinos wanted to decrease the number of police officers in their neighborhoods. But 62 percent of Black voters and 49 percent of Latino voters said they supported “defunding” the New York Police Department and spending the money on social workers instead, the poll found.Other surveys found that Black and Latino voters were more likely than white voters to say that the number of uniformed police officers should be increased in the subways and that they felt unsafe from crime in their neighborhoods. Fears of violent crime led some leaders in predominantly Black neighborhoods to reject efforts to defund the police.Progressive activists who backed Maya Wiley, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, accused Mr. Adams of “fear-mongering” over rising crime rates in the city.“Voters were offered a false dichotomy between justice and public safety by the Adams rhetoric,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party. “We worked hard to dismantle that framework, but that dog-whistling does strike the real fear that people have when our streets are increasingly unsafe. It’s a very human experience.”Yet Mr. Adams’s personal history may offer particular appeal to voters with complicated views on criminal justice. A former police officer, he built his political brand on criticizing the police, speaking out against police brutality, and, later, the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. After years in New York politics, he’s a member of the party establishment, enjoying the advantages of name recognition and decades-old relationships with community leaders.It’s the kind of biographical narrative likely to appeal to voters more likely to have intimate personal experiences with policing, who tend to live in neighborhoods that may have more crime but where people are also are more likely to face violence or abuse from officers.Some scholars and strategists argue that Black and Latino voters are more likely to center their political beliefs on those kinds of experiences in their own lives, taking a pragmatic approach to politics that’s rooted less in ideology and more in a historical distrust of government and the ability of politicians to deliver on sweeping promises.“These standard ways of thinking about ideology fall apart for Black Americans,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The idea of liberalism and conservatism just falls to the wayside.”He added, “It’s just not the language Black folks are using to organize their politics.”Nate Cohn contributed reporting. More