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      Peter Thiel to Exit Meta’s Board to Support Trump-Aligned Candidates

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      The tech billionaire, who has been on the board of the company formerly known as Facebook since 2005, is backing numerous politicians in the midterm elections.Peter Thiel, one of the longest-serving board members of Meta, the parent of Facebook, plans to step down, the company said on Monday.Mr. Thiel, 54, wants to focus on influencing November’s midterm elections, said a person with knowledge of Mr. Thiel’s thinking who declined to be identified. Mr. Thiel sees the midterms as crucial to changing the direction of the country, this person said, and he is backing candidates who support the agenda of former President Donald J. Trump.Over the last year, Mr. Thiel, who has a net worth estimated at $2.6 billion by Forbes, has become one of the Republican’s Party’s largest donors. He gave $10 million each last year to the campaigns of two protégés, Blake Masters, who is running for a Senate seat in Arizona, and J.D. Vance, who is running for Senate in Ohio.Mr. Thiel has been on Meta’s board since 2005, when Facebook was a tiny start-up and he was one of its first institutional investors. But scrutiny of Mr. Thiel’s position on the board has steadily increased as the company was embroiled in political controversies, including barring Mr. Trump from the platform, and as the venture capitalist has become more politically active.The departure means Meta loses its board’s most prominent conservative voice. The 10-member board has undergone significant changes in recent years, as many of its members have left and been replaced, often with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Drew Houston, the chief executive of Dropbox, joined Facebook’s board in 2020, and Tony Xu, the founder of DoorDash, joined it last month. Meta didn’t address whether it intends to replace Mr. Thiel.The company, which recently marked its 18th birthday, is undertaking a shift toward the so-called metaverse, which its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, believes is the next generation of the internet. Last week, Meta reported spending more than $10 billion on the effort in 2021, along with mixed financial results. That wiped more than $230 billion off the company’s market value.“Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he’s done for our company,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Peter is truly an original thinker who you can bring your hardest problems and get unique suggestions.”A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Thiel said: “It has been a privilege to work with one of the great entrepreneurs of our time. Mark Zuckerberg’s intelligence, energy and conscientiousness are tremendous. His talents will serve Meta well as he leads the company into a new era.”Mr. Thiel first met Mr. Zuckerberg 18 years ago when he provided the entrepreneur with $500,000 in capital for Facebook, valuing the company at $4.9 million. That gave Mr. Thiel, who with his venture firm Founders Fund controlled a 10 percent stake in the social network, a seat on its board of directors.Since then, Mr. Thiel has become a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg. He counseled the company through its early years of rapid user growth, and through its difficulties shifting its business to mobile phones around the time of its 2012 initial public offering.He has also been seen as the contrarian who has Mr. Zuckerberg’s ear, championing unfettered speech across digital platforms when it suited him. His conservative views also gave Facebook’s board what Mr. Zuckerberg saw as ideological diversity.In 2019 and 2020, as Facebook grappled with how to deal with political speech and claims made in political advertising, Mr. Thiel urged Mr. Zuckerberg to withstand the public pressure to take down those ads, even as other executives and board members thought the company should change its position. Mr. Zuckerberg sided with Mr. Thiel.But Mr. Thiel’s views on speech were at times contradictory. He funded a secret war against the media website Gawker, eventually resulting in the site’s bankruptcy.Mr. Thiel’s political influence and ties to key Republicans and conservatives have also offered a crucial gateway into Washington for Mr. Zuckerberg, especially during the Trump administration. In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Thiel had a private dinner with President Trump.Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have long taken heat for Mr. Thiel’s presence on the board. In 2016, Mr. Thiel was one of the few tech titans in largely liberal Silicon Valley to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.In 2020, when Mr. Trump’s incendiary Facebook posts were put under the microscope, critics cited Mr. Thiel’s board seat as a reason for Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Mr. Trump’s posts be left standing.Facebook banned Mr. Trump’s account last year after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, saying his messages incited violence. The episode became a key rallying point for conservatives who say mainstream social platforms have censored them.Mr. Vance, who used to work at one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds, and Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s family office, have railed against Facebook. In October, the two Senate candidates argued in an opinion piece in The New York Post that Mr. Zuckerberg’s $400 million in donations to local election offices in 2020 amounted to “election meddling” that should be investigated.Recently, Mr. Thiel has publicly voiced his disagreement with content moderation decisions at Facebook and other major social media platforms. In October at a Miami event organized by a conservative technology association, he said he would “take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth.”Mr. Thiel’s investing has also clashed with his membership on Meta’s board. He invested in the company that became Clearview AI, a facial recognition start-up that scraped billions of photos from Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms in violation of their terms of service. Founders Fund also invested in Boldend, a cyberweapons company that claimed it had found a way to hack WhatsApp, the Meta-owned messaging platform.Meta declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s investments.In the past year, Mr. Thiel, who also is chairman of the software company Palantir, has increased his political giving to Republican candidates. Ahead of the midterms, he is backing four Senate candidates and 12 House candidates. Among those House candidates are three people running primary challenges to Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for the events of Jan. 6. More

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      Clyburn Pushes Childs for Supreme Court, Testing Sway With Biden

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      The highest-ranking Black member of Congress is credited with helping resurrect the president’s 2020 campaign at a critical point. Now he is calling in a favor.WASHINGTON — Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina was already picturing Judge J. Michelle Childs sitting on the Supreme Court bench in early 2020 when he suggested Joseph R. Biden Jr. could revive his faltering presidential campaign by pledging to nominate the first Black woman to serve there.Mr. Biden did so, paving the way for an endorsement from Mr. Clyburn ahead of the South Carolina primary that was a critical turning point in the race. In the months since the election, Mr. Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, has not been shy about taking his share of credit for Mr. Biden’s victory and trying to exert influence on the president’s policy and personnel choices.Now, Mr. Clyburn is mounting an aggressive campaign to persuade Mr. Biden to nominate Judge Childs, a district court judge in his home state of South Carolina, to succeed Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who is retiring. It is a blatant effort to call in a political favor in the form of a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court and, perhaps, the most consequential test yet of the Biden-Clyburn relationship.“I make my case, I share my views, sometimes my feelings, and then I go on,” Mr. Clyburn, 81, said in a recent interview, describing how he uses his sway with Mr. Biden. This time, he is going all out, and irking some of the president’s allies in the process.Within hours of Mr. Breyer’s retirement announcement, Mr. Clyburn held a conference call with South Carolina reporters, stating that Judge Childs’s humble background — she attended large public universities on scholarships, earning her undergraduate degree at the University of South Florida and law and business degrees at the University of South Carolina — would better represent the country than another justice with an Ivy League pedigree. (Ketanji Brown Jackson, another top contender, has two degrees from Harvard, while a third, Leondra R. Kruger, has one from Harvard and one from Yale.)Allies in South Carolina immediately began emailing talking points to potentially helpful surrogates, noting that Judge Childs was “rooted in the African American community,” a member of Delta Sigma Theta, the prestigious Black sorority, and a member of the oldest Black Catholic church in Columbia.Over the past week, Mr. Clyburn has plugged her case on television and noted that she had the backing of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. On Wednesday, he and Mr. Graham had breakfast in the Senate dining room with Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, to discuss, among other issues, Judge Childs and how to make a bipartisan case for her nomination. Mr. Graham posted a picture on Twitter of the three men smiling.“It’s good for the country to have the court look more like America,” Mr. Graham said afterward. He said he had told the White House that Judge Childs, who is regarded as more moderate than other candidates Mr. Biden is thought to be considering, “would draw some Republican support.”At the White House, Mr. Clyburn has been talking her up to the president since a few days after Inauguration Day, although he said he had not spoken to Mr. Biden about Judge Childs since Mr. Breyer’s retirement announcement. It was Mr. Clyburn who urged the president to nominate her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considered a feeder to the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden announced in December that he would do so.“He’s just determined,” said Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, said of Mr. Clyburn. “He wants a pick who is racially and geographically diverse, whose views reflect the mainstream of the American people.”The result has been the kind of pressure campaign that longtime Biden aides say can sometimes backfire. Mr. Biden recoils at being lobbied through the television. And there is sensitivity among some of his allies and former aides that his selection must look like the president’s own historic pick, not like a political chit he owes to Mr. Clyburn.Mr. Clyburn, left, received his diploma from Mr. Biden at the South Carolina State University’s commencement ceremony in December.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesBut for Mr. Biden, a believer in sticking with the people who helped him get to where he is, Mr. Clyburn, a friend of many decades, still enjoys a special status.“I’d almost walk to South Carolina to be able to do that for Jim,” Mr. Biden said when he visited South Carolina in December to give the commencement speech at his alma mater, South Carolina State University. Mr. Clyburn, who received his diploma by mail when he graduated in 1961, walked with the graduates and received his diploma from Mr. Biden.“When it comes to the Black community in general, Jim Clyburn is on that short list of people he will always call,” Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said.Mr. Clyburn is an old-school Southern politician perhaps better known for his annual fish fry, which draws most of the Democratic presidential candidates every four years, than he is for his role as House whip. He is a natural political operator who cultivates press coverage, values loyalty and understands how to press an advantage when he can.Over the decades when they overlapped in Congress, Mr. Biden and Mr. Clyburn often played golf and appeared together on Charlie Rose’s talk show. They first bonded over the fact that one of the cases in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that held that segregating schools was unconstitutional, was from South Carolina and another was from Mr. Biden’s home state of Delaware.“We spent time talking about the similarities of these cases,” Mr. Clyburn recalled of their early conversations.When Mr. Biden drew criticism during the 2020 campaign for boasting of his work with segregationist Democrats in the 1970s, Mr. Clyburn was there to defend him.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said that Mr. Clyburn’s advocacy must be looked at in light of how he “basically resurrected” Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign.“I think Joe Biden has to listen to him,” he said.The White House has downplayed the influence of any single voice in the selection of a nominee, but has confirmed that Judge Childs is being considered.“The president’s focus is not on gaming out the process; it’s on picking the right candidate,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing this week when asked about Mr. Clyburn and Mr. Graham’s coordinated campaign.Mr. Clyburn said he was aware that the administration would not always heed his advice. But that has not deterred him from pushing.He lobbied successfully for his longtime friend Marcia L. Fudge to join the president’s cabinet, for Shalanda Young to be chosen as director of the Office of Management and Budget and for Jaime Harrison, a former South Carolina representative, to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.He has also tried to expand his role as a kingmaker, inserting himself into a party primary in Ohio to boost a more moderate candidate over a progressive acolyte of Senator Bernie Sanders. His chosen candidate won, but his involvement angered some on the left, underscoring the ideological divide among Democrats between establishment veterans in Congress and a progressive new generation that is increasingly challenging them.Judge Childs’s potential nomination has also drawn pushback from some progressives and labor activists, who have flagged her work as a lawyer representing employers opposing unionization drives.In terms of policy, he and his congressional allies credit Mr. Clyburn with pushing for the “10-20-30 formula,” which directs investments to poverty-stricken communities, to be included in the president’s budget request. They also give him credit for pressing for more money for broadband in the infrastructure law.Mr. Clyburn, never a shrinking violet, goes further.“It was yours truly who made broadband an infrastructure issue,” he said. “The White House has supported me with all these issues.”Judge Childs with Mr. Clyburn, who has said her background would better represent the country than another justice with an Ivy League pedigree.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImageMr. Clyburn also takes credit for Mr. Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, though others say he played only a partial role.“I decided that Joe Biden needed to do something that would demonstrate a high level of respect for Black women,” he said. “What higher level of respect can there be?”Biden campaign aides recall things slightly differently. It was Ms. Fudge, they said, who first raised the issue of making the pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court during a meeting Mr. Biden held with members of the Congressional Black Caucus aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown in Charleston, S.C.During the meeting, the group, which included Mr. Clyburn, had a frank conversation with Mr. Biden about the state of his campaign.“We said, ‘If you really want to be the nominee, you’re going to have to do something dramatic,’” Mr. Thompson recalled. “If you don’t win the debate, and ultimately the Saturday primary, it’s over.”Ms. Fudge then told Mr. Biden he needed to find a forum where he would pledge to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court. Mr. Clyburn and Mr. Thompson agreed.“We left there with the impression that he was going to do it,” Mr. Thompson said.Some of Mr. Biden’s advisers, however, thought making such a pledge on the debate stage would be viewed as pandering to Black voters. In a debate preparation session, Symone D. Sanders, a former top aide who is Black, said she did not think it was a good idea.But Mr. Biden ultimately made the pledge, and Mr. Clyburn’s endorsement soon followed.The White House has not always accommodated his requests. He originally pushed for Ms. Fudge to be nominated as agriculture secretary, but she ended up as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development.Mr. Clyburn remains optimistic that Mr. Biden will choose Judge Childs and that he will have had a hand in the selection of a groundbreaking Supreme Court nominee.But even if Judge Childs does not get the nod, Mr. Clyburn’s allies said he had already made his mark on the process.“At 81, as his career nears an end, his legacy is for the most part written, but you can always add accouterments,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist and former member of the South Carolina legislature. “You can’t mention the first Black female on the Supreme Court without mentioning the name Jim Clyburn.” More

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      Kamala Harris’s Allies Express Concern: Is She an Afterthought?

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      WASHINGTON — The president needed the senator from West Virginia on his side, but he wasn’t sure he needed his vice president to get him there.It was summertime, and President Biden was under immense pressure to win the support of Senator Joe Manchin III, whose decisive vote in a 50-50 chamber made him the president’s most delicate negotiating partner. Mr. Biden had invited Mr. Manchin to the Oval Office to privately make the case for his marquee domestic policy legislation. Just before Mr. Manchin arrived, he turned to Vice President Kamala Harris.What he needed from her was not strategy or advice. He needed her to only say a quick hello, which she did before turning on her heel and leaving the room.The moment, described as an exchange of “brief pleasantries” by a senior White House official and confirmed by two other people who were briefed on it, was a vivid reminder of the complexity of the job held by Ms. Harris: While most presidents promise their vice presidents access and influence, at the end of the day, power and responsibility are not shared equally, and Mr. Biden does not always feel a need for input from Ms. Harris as he navigates some of his most important relationships.In Ms. Harris’s case, she came to the job without strong ties to key senators; one person briefed on the Oval Office meeting said it would be more productive if the discussion between Mr. Biden and Mr. Manchin remained private. It is unclear that the president had much sway on his own, either, given the senator’s decision this week to break with the White House over the domestic policy bill.But without a headlining role in some of the most critical decisions facing the White House, the vice president is caught between criticism that she is falling short and resentment among supporters who feel she is being undercut by the administration she serves. And her allies increasingly are concerned that while Mr. Biden relied on her to help him win the White House, he does not need her to govern.“I think she was an enormous help to the ticket during the campaign,” said Mark Buell, one of Ms. Harris’s earliest fund-raisers since her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. “I would like to see her employed in the same way, now that they’re implementing their objectives or goals.”The urgency surrounding her position is tied to whether the president, who at 79 is the oldest person to hold the office, will run for re-election in 2024. He told ABC News on Wednesday that he would run again if he was in good health. But questions about Ms. Harris’s readiness for the top job are starting far earlier than is usual for an administration in its first year.Ms. Harris declined requests for an interview, but White House officials said that her relationship with Mr. Biden is a partnership.“The vice president has diligently worked alongside the president coordinating with partners, allies and Democratic members of the House and Senate to advance the goals of this administration,” said Sabrina Singh, Ms. Harris’s deputy press secretary.An early front-runner whose presidential ambitions fizzled amid a dysfunctional 2020 campaign, Ms. Harris was pulled onto the Biden ticket for her policy priorities that largely mirrored his, and her ability as a Black woman to bolster support with coalitions of voters he needed to win the presidency. But according to interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, political allies, elected officials and former aides, Ms. Harris is still struggling to define herself in the Biden White House or meaningfully correct what she and her aides feel is an unfair perception that she is adrift in the job.Ms. Harris was pulled onto the Biden ticket for her policy priorities that largely mirrored his, and after her presidential campaign fizzled.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesFaced with declining approval ratings, a series of staff departures and a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and the conservative news media, she has turned to powerful confidantes, including Hillary Clinton, to help plot a path forward.Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male. She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration. The White House has pushed back against scathing criticism on both fronts, for what activists say is a lack of attention.“I think it’s no secret that the different things she has been asked to take on are incredibly demanding, not always well understood publicly and take a lot of work as well as a lot of skill,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview. “You have to do everything except one thing, which is take credit.”Even in the best of times, the constraints of the job often make the vice president an afterthought, and not everyone asked to serve accepts it. (“I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin,” Daniel Webster, a former secretary of state, said in the 1840s about declining the job.)By all accounts, Ms. Harris and President Biden have a warm relationship.Al Drago for The New York TimesBut the complexity of the issues she has been assigned, and the long-term solutions they require, should have prompted the West Wing to defend Ms. Harris more aggressively to the public, said Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California and the former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.“What the White House could’ve done is been clearer with the expectations of what was supposed to happen under her watch,” she said.Other Democrats say their frustrations run deeper.Ms. Harris, who spent much of her four years in the Senate running for the presidency, was at odds with Mr. Manchin after she gave a series of interviews in West Virginia that he interpreted as unwelcome infringement on his home turf. Asked about the meeting in the Oval Office over the summer, a spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin said that the senator enjoys “a friendly and respectful working relationship” with the vice president.Ms. Harris, who spent much of her four years in the Senate running for the presidency, did not come to Washington with strong ties to lawmakers, particularly the senators whose votes have been critical to Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative Henry Cuellar, a moderate from Texas and one of the more prominent voices on border issues in the Democratic Party, said his experiences with Ms. Harris’s team had been disappointing. When Mr. Cuellar heard Ms. Harris was traveling to the border in June, he had his staff call her office to offer help and advice for her visit. He never received a call back.“I say this very respectfully to her: I moved on,” Mr. Cuellar said. “She was tasked with that job, it doesn’t look like she’s very interested in this, so we are going to move on to other folks that work on this issue.”In the future, Mr. Cuellar said he would go straight to the West Wing with his concerns on migration rather than the vice president’s office.Of the White House, Mr. Cuellar said, “at least they talk to you.”Ms. Harris’s aides have pointed to her work lobbying other countries and companies to join the United States in a commitment to invest about $1.2 billion to expand digital access, climate resilience and economic opportunity in Central America. But little progress has been made on curbing corruption in the region.On voting rights, Ms. Harris, who asked Mr. Biden if she could lead the administration’s efforts on the issue, has invited activists to the White House and delivered speeches. But her office has not developed detailed plans to work with lawmakers to make sure that two bills that would reform the system will pass Congress, according to a senior official in her office.Since arriving in Washington, Ms. Harris has sought the counsel of other women — including Mrs. Clinton, the first female Democratic presidential nominee — who have achieved historical political success to help her find a path.“There is a double standard; it’s sadly alive and well,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “A lot of what is being used to judge her, just like it was to judge me, or the women who ran in 2020, or everybody else, is really colored by that.”The two speak every few months on the phone; in November, Mrs. Clinton visited Ms. Harris in her West Wing office.Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden speaking after winning the election on Nov. 7, 2020.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMs. Bass pointed out that the double standard goes beyond Ms. Harris’s gender.“I know, and we all knew, that she would have a difficult time because anytime you’re a ‘first,’ you do,’” Ms. Bass said. “And to be the first woman vice president, to be the first Black, Asian woman, that’s a triple. So we knew it was going to be rough, but it has been relentless, and I think extremely unfair.”Before her trip to Vietnam and Singapore in August, Ms. Harris called Mrs. Clinton and several former female secretaries of state, including Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright. She has had several private conversations with Angela Merkel, who has recounted the challenges she faced as the first female chancellor of Germany.For this article, Ms. Harris’s office supplied dozens of examples of her work. She was sent to France to further repair frosty relations after an embarrassing diplomatic spat, a trip that the White House has hailed as a success. She has attended over 30 events focused on promoting the president’s domestic agenda, and her mark is on the final infrastructure bill on issues like clean water policy, broadband access and investments to combat wildfires. (Voting rights is another.)President Emmanuel Macron of France greeted Ms. Harris at the Élysée Palace in Paris in November.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe president also gave Ms. Harris credit for her interest in relieving student loan debt as he agreed on Wednesday to extend a moratorium on federal loan repayments until May 1, a decision that was hailed by activists and Democratic lawmakers who have pleaded with the administration to do more.And yet, as the White House struggles to push through major legislation, Mr. Biden has relied on his own experience — 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president — to try to pull the United States out of the coronavirus pandemic and deliver on a towering set of economic promises. And Ms. Harris is facing questions about where she fits into the White House’s biggest priorities.By all accounts, she and the president have a warm relationship. In meetings, the two often play off each other, with Mr. Biden allowing her to jump in and ask questions that go beyond what he has asked for; one adviser likened it to them playing “good cop, bad cop.” Alongside the president, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, has quizzed economic experts and immigration officials, at times asking them to better explain their reasoning.Still, her allies are concerned that she is sometimes treated as an afterthought.When the president worked late hours on a Friday night last month to win approval from lawmakers for his bipartisan infrastructure plan, a White House statement said only that he was working with a group of policy and legislative aides.The vice president’s team, surprised her name had been omitted, informed the news media that she had also been there, placing calls to lawmakers. Asked about the exclusion, a White House spokesman said the initial statement issued to the public was based on information gathered before the vice president had arrived to join Mr. Biden and his senior staff. The White House issued a statement hours later noting Ms. Harris’s presence.In recent weeks, she has seen a string of departures from the communications office; a number of other officials departed earlier this year.The urgency surrounding Ms. Harris’s position is tied to whether the president, who at 79 is the oldest person to hold the office, will run for re-election in 2024.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesGil Duran, who worked for Ms. Harris when she was California attorney general in 2013, said she could be insulting and unprofessional. Mr. Duran said he quit after five months on the job when Ms. Harris declined to attend a briefing before a news conference, but then berated a staff member to the point of tears when she felt unprepared.“A lot of us would still be with her if she was the Kamala Harris we thought she would be,” Mr. Duran said.The White House had no comment when asked about the episode.Aware of the criticism of her, Ms. Harris has been focused on promoting her own agenda in a series of interviews and appearances.But Ms. Bass said the immediate challenge was the midterm elections next year, when Republicans could take back control of the House. But as for Ms. Harris’s presidential ambitions?“I think she is the front-runner,” Ms. Bass said. “I think she’ll be the front-runner.” More

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      After Success in Seating Federal Judges, Biden Hits Resistance

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      Senate Democrats vow to keep pressing forward with nominees, but they may face obstacles in states represented by Republicans.WASHINGTON — After early success in nominating and confirming federal judges, President Biden and Senate Democrats have begun to encounter stiffer Republican resistance to their efforts to reshape the courts.Tennessee Republicans have raised objections to Mr. Biden’s pick for an influential appeals court there — the administration’s first judicial nominee from a state represented by two Republican senators — and a circuit court candidate is likely to need every Democratic vote to win confirmation in a coming floor showdown.The obstacles threaten to slow or halt a little-noticed winning streak for the Biden administration on Capitol Hill, where the White House has set a rapid pace in filling vacancies on the federal bench, even surpassing the rate of the Trump era, when Republicans were focused almost single-mindedly on confirming judges.In contrast to the administration’s struggle on its legislative agenda, the lower-profile judicial push has been one of the highlights of the first year of the Biden presidency. Democrats say they intend to aggressively press forward to counter the Trump judicial juggernaut of the previous four years, and they may have limited time to do so, given the possibility of losing control of the Senate in next year’s midterm elections.“We are taking this seriously,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the Judiciary Committee chairman, who plans to advance nominees through the end of the year and beyond. “We are going to move everything we can legally move.”Mr. Biden, a former Judiciary Committee chairman with deep expertise on the confirmation process, has sent the Senate 64 judicial nominations, including 16 appeals court picks and 46 district court nominees. That is the most at this point of any recent presidential term dating to Ronald Reagan. Twenty-eight nominees have been confirmed — nine appeals court judges and 19 district court judges.By comparison, Mr. Trump had sent the Senate 57 judicial nominees, 13 of whom were confirmed, by mid-November 2017. At the end of four years, Mr. Trump had won confirmation of three Supreme Court justices, 54 appeals court judges and 174 district court judges.Mr. Biden’s nominees are extraordinarily diverse in both legal background and ethnicity. The White House and liberal interest groups have been promoting public defenders and civil rights lawyers in addition to the more traditional choices of prosecutors and corporate lawyers. According to the White House, 47 of the 64 nominees are women and 41 of them identify as people of color, allowing the administration to record many firsts across the judiciary.“The diversity is really greater than anyone could have hoped for,” said Russ Feingold, a former senator and the head of the American Constitution Society, a progressive group that has been active in recommending nominees to the White House. “People are ecstatic.”The vast majority of the Biden nominees so far have been put forward for appeals and district court seats in states represented by two Democratic senators, in close consultation with those lawmakers, smoothing the way to confirmation. They are replacing mainly judges appointed by Democratic presidents.“He is picking the low-hanging fruit,” said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a longtime expert in tracking judicial nominations.According to figures from Mr. Wheeler and the White House, 15 of Mr. Biden’s 16 appeals court nominees were for vacancies in the District of Columbia or in states represented by two Democratic senators. Forty-three of the 46 district court nominees were for seats in states represented by two Democrats or the District of Columbia. Three others were in Ohio, which is represented by a senator from each party, and received the support of the Republican, Senator Rob Portman.But Mr. Biden will need to venture into more challenging territory if he wants to sustain his drive by producing nominees in states represented by Republicans. Most Republicans are likely to be tough sells when it comes to their home turf.After the White House on Nov. 17 nominated Andre B. Mathis, a Memphis lawyer, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, complained that the administration had not “substantively” consulted with them on the selection. One person familiar with the process said that the two had backed an experienced Black judge with Democratic ties for the opening but that the person was passed over for Mr. Mathis, who is also Black.“We attempted to work in good faith with the White House in identifying qualified candidates for this position, but ultimately the White House simply informed us of its choice,” the senators said in a statement.In nominating Mr. Mathis, the White House noted he would be the first Black man from Tennessee to sit on the Sixth Circuit and the first Black nominee for the court in 24 years. Administration officials said his combination of civil and criminal experience was a plus.“We were grateful to discuss potential candidates from the Sixth Circuit with both Tennessee senators’ offices starting several months ago, and we are enthusiastic about Andre Mathis’s historic nomination,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.In the past, senators’ opposition to a judicial nominee from their state would be enough to derail the confirmation. Under an arcane Judiciary Committee practice, the two senators would either return what is known as a “blue slip” — a piece of paper signifying that they had been consulted about the nomination, in line with the Constitution’s requirement for the president to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent” — or withhold it, effectively blocking the selection.But Republicans ended that tradition during the Trump era and Democrats are unlikely to restore it, freeing the White House to go its own way if it chooses, though administration officials say they intend to confer in good faith with Republican senators.While Republicans can slow the process and try to put up other roadblocks, changes in Senate rules mean that Democrats can advance and confirm judges with a simple majority vote. But doing so requires Democrats, who control the 50-50 Senate through Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking power, to hold together and be willing to devote floor time to a nominee.Democrats summoned Ms. Harris last month to break a tie to allow another nominee, Jennifer Sung, to clear the Judiciary Committee after the panel deadlocked on her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Republicans criticized Ms. Sung over a blistering letter she signed in 2018 opposing the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.The letter from Yale Law School students, alumni and educators called Justice Kavanaugh an “intellectually and morally bankrupt ideologue intent on rolling back our rights and the rights of our clients.” Ms. Sung apologized for the letter during her confirmation hearing in September and conceded it was overheated. Republicans still unanimously opposed her nomination, making her the first Biden nominee to require a floor vote.Republicans have objected to many of the president’s judicial picks, calling them too liberal and insufficiently grounded in the Constitution. But most of the nominees have drawn at least a smattering of Republican support for confirmation — though in the past, judicial candidates often did not require roll call votes at all.Republicans have offered Mr. Biden and Democrats grudging praise for their efforts, comparing it favorably with the sluggish pace of the Democratic-held Senate in confirming judges selected by the Obama administration when Mr. Biden was vice president.“Obviously, we made a priority of it and I think Democrats realize they missed an opportunity during the Obama administration,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a senior Republican member of the Judiciary Committee.One reason for the shift is that Democrats are well aware they may have a limited window.Their control of the Senate is at real risk next year, and a Republican takeover would drastically impede Mr. Biden’s ability to install judges over the final two years of his term. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and now the minority leader, showed how that could work beginning in 2015, when Republicans gained the majority and slow-walked Obama administration nominees, refusing even a hearing for a Supreme Court pick.“They realize they might not be filling any vacancies come January 2023,” Mr. Wheeler said. More

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      Teamsters Vote for Sean O'Brien, a Hoffa Critic, as President

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      Sean O’Brien scored a decisive victory among union members after criticizing the current leadership as too timid in UPS talks and Amazon organizing.Sean O’Brien was a rising star in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 2017 when the union’s longtime president, James P. Hoffa, effectively cast him aside.But that move appears to have set Mr. O’Brien, a fourth-generation Teamster and head of a Boston local, on a course to succeed Mr. Hoffa as the union’s president and one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country.A Teamsters vice president who urged a more assertive stand toward employers like the United Parcel Service — as well as an aggressive drive to organize workers at Amazon — Mr. O’Brien has declared victory in his bid to lead the nearly 1.4 million-member union.According to a tally reported late Thursday on an election supervisor’s website, he won about two-thirds of the votes cast in a race against the Hoffa-endorsed candidate, Steve Vairma, another vice president. He will assume the presidency in March.The result appears to reflect frustration over the most recent UPS contract and growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Hoffa, who has headed the union for more than two decades and whose father did from 1957 to 1971. The younger Mr. Hoffa did not seek another five-year term.In an interview, Mr. O’Brien said success in organizing Amazon workers — a stated goal of the Teamsters — would require the union to show the fruits of its efforts elsewhere.“We’ve got to negotiate the strongest contracts possible so that we can take it to workers at Amazon and point to it and say this is the benefit you get of being in a union,” he said.David Witwer, an expert on the Teamsters at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, said it was very rare for the Teamsters to elect a president who was not an incumbent or backed by the incumbent and who was sharply critical of his predecessor, as Mr. O’Brien was of Mr. Hoffa.Since the union’s official founding in 1903, Dr. Witwer said in an email, “there have been only two national union elections that have seen an outside reformer candidate win election as president.”During the campaign, Mr. O’Brien, 49, railed against the contract that the union negotiated with UPS for allowing the company to create a category of employees who work on weekends and top out at a lower wage, among other perceived flaws.“If we’re negotiating concessionary contracts and we’re negotiating substandard agreements, why would any member, why would any person want to join the Teamsters union?” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidate forum in September in which he frequently tied his opponent to Mr. Hoffa.Mr. O’Brien has also criticized his predecessor’s approach to Amazon, which many in the labor movement regard as an existential threat. Although the union approved a resolution at its recent convention pledging to “supply all resources necessary” to unionize Amazon workers and eventually create a division overseeing that organizing, Mr. O’Brien said the efforts were too late in coming.“That plan should have been in place under our warehouse director 10 years ago,” he said in the interview, alluding to the position of warehouse division director that his opponent, Mr. Vairma, has held since 2012.The outcome appears to reflect frustration over the union’s growing dissatisfaction with the tenure of James P. Hoffa.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesIn an interview, Mr. Hoffa said that the union was broke and divided when he took over and that he was leaving it “financially strong and strong in every which way.”He said he was proud of the recent UPS contract, calling it “the richest contract ever negotiated” and pointing out that it allows many full-time drivers to make nearly $40 an hour.He said Mr. O’Brien’s critique of the union’s efforts on Amazon was unfair. “No one was doing it a decade ago,” Mr. Hoffa said. “It’s more complex than just going out and organizing 20 people at a grocery store. He sounds like it’s so simple.”Mr. O’Brien did not elaborate on his own plans for organizing Amazon, saying he wanted to solicit more input from Teamsters locals, but suggested that they would include bringing political and economic pressure to bear on the company in cities and towns around the country. The union has taken part in efforts to deny Amazon a tax abatement in Indiana and to reject a delivery station in Colorado.Mr. O’Brien, who once worked as a rigger, transporting heavy equipment to construction sites, was elected president of a large Boston local in 2006. Within a few years, he appeared to be ensconced in the union’s establishment wing.In a 2013 incident that led to a 14-day unpaid suspension, Mr. O’Brien threatened members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform group, who were taking on an ally of his in Rhode Island. “They’ll never be our friends,” he said of the challengers. “They need to be punished.”Mr. O’Brien has apologized for the comments and points out that the reform advocate who led the challenge in Rhode Island, Matt Taibi, is now a supporter who ran on his slate in the recent election.The break with Mr. Hoffa came in 2017. Early that year, the longtime Teamsters president appointed Mr. O’Brien to a position whose responsibilities included overseeing the union’s contract negotiation with UPS, where more than 300,000 Teamsters now work.Understand Amazon’s Employment SystemCard 1 of 6A look inside Amazon. More

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      Eric Adams Is Elected Mayor of New York City

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      Mr. Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, will be the second Black mayor in the city’s history.Eric Leroy Adams, a former New York City police captain whose attention-grabbing persona and keen focus on racial justice fueled a decades-long career in public life, was elected on Tuesday as the 110th mayor of New York and the second Black mayor in the city’s history.Mr. Adams, who will take office on Jan. 1, faces a staggering set of challenges as the nation’s largest city grapples with the enduring consequences of the pandemic, including a precarious and unequal economic recovery and continuing concerns about crime and the quality of city life, all shaped by stark political divisions over how New York should move forward.His victory signals the start of a more center-left Democratic leadership that, he has promised, will reflect the needs of the working- and middle-class voters of color who delivered him the party’s nomination and were vital to his general election coalition.Yet it seems likely that many of the officials Mr. Adams must work with closely — prominent City Council members, the public advocate and other Democrats who were favored to win on Tuesday — may be substantially to Mr. Adams’s left.Mr. Adams, whose win over his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, appeared to be resounding, will begin the job with significant political leverage.He assembled a broad coalition, and was embraced by both Mayor Bill de Blasio, who sought to chart more of a left-wing course for New York, and by centrist leaders like Michael R. Bloomberg, Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor. Mr. Adams was the favored candidate of labor unions and wealthy donors. And he and Gov. Kathy Hochul have made clear that they intend to have a more productive relationship than Mr. de Blasio had with Andrew M. Cuomo when he was governor.The Associated Press called Mr. Adams’s victory 10 minutes after polls closed, reflecting the overwhelming edge Democrats have in New York City even amid signs of low turnout. Minutes later, the A.P. declared Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, the winner of the Manhattan district attorney’s race. The calls came before those in closely watched governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia.Observers of New York politics were awaiting results in two Long Island races for district attorney that tested suburban attitudes about the state’s recent criminal justice reforms. And in Buffalo, a fiercely contested matchup between India B. Walton, a democratic socialist and the Democratic nominee, and the incumbent mayor, Byron W. Brown, was getting national attention. The race was not expected to be decided on election night, in part because Mr. Brown waged a write-in campaign, and his votes were likely to require more scrutiny.In New York City, the difficulties that Mr. Adams, 61, will encounter were apparent even as he celebrated his victory.In one of the world’s financial capitals, workers are barely trickling back to their Midtown Manhattan offices. The tourism industry is suffering. Many of the city’s beloved restaurants and other businesses have closed for good. And even as Wall Street profits soar, the city’s unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent in September, with job growth lagging behind the pace that some economists had predicted last spring.Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, sought to attack his rival on matters of transparency and the Democat’s legal residence.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Adams will also inherit a budget gap of about $5 billion that will require immediate action, said Andrew S. Rein, president of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. There will be contracts to negotiate with city workers and, eventually, the federal aid that helped pay for some city priorities will dwindle.“Every decision has long-run implications,” Mr. Rein said. “If you start sooner, you can take care of it. When you’re in an emergency situation, it’s hard to make good decisions that are not painful.”Mr. Adams has stressed that he plans to focus on rooting out inefficiency, but the scope of the fiscal challenges will most likely require more difficult choices.He has made it clear that big business has a role to play in shepherding the city’s recovery, and there are indications that he may have a far warmer relationship with business leaders than Mr. de Blasio, who was elected on a fiery populist platform.“He’s restored confidence that the city is a place where business can thrive,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, who leads the business-aligned Partnership for New York City. “He’s demonstrated that he has the courage to, basically, be politically incorrect when it comes to dealing with the demonization of wealth and business.”There is no issue the next mayor has discussed more than public safety.Mr. Adams grew up poor in Queens and Brooklyn and says he was once a victim of police brutality. He spent his early years in public life as a transit police officer and, later, a captain who pushed, sometimes provocatively, for changes from within the system. That experience cemented his credibility with many older voters of color, some of whom mistrust the police while also worrying about crime.During the primary, amid a spike in gun violence and jarring attacks on the subway that fueled public fears about crime, Mr. Adams emerged as one of his party’s most unflinching advocates for the police maintaining a robust role in preserving public safety. He often clashed with those who sought to scale back law enforcement’s power in favor of promoting greater investments in mental health and other social services.Mr. Adams, who has said he has no tolerance for abusive officers, supports the restoration of a reformed plainclothes anti-crime unit. He opposes the abuse of stop-and-frisk policing tactics but sees a role for the practice in some circumstances. And he has called for a more visible police presence on the subways.The public safety issue remained on the minds of some voters on Tuesday.“Hopefully, since he used to be in N.Y.P.D., he could get everything amicable again with the city and the N.Y.P.D., because it’s been very dangerous out here,” said Esmirna Flores, 38, as she prepared to vote for Mr. Adams in the Bronx.Yet other voters said Mr. Adams’s emphasis on policing stoked misgivings. And he will certainly face resistance on the subject from some incoming City Council members.Tiffany Cabán, a prominent new member who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, said that on many issues, such as expanding bus and bike lanes, she was “ready to be collaborative.”“Then you’ll see that there are times where there will be tension,” Ms. Cabán said. After emphasizing potential areas of common ground on public safety matters, she pointed to the prospect of Mr. Adams’s more assertive policing policies and added: “We’re going to be ready for a fight on those things.”On the other side of the political spectrum, there are continuing tensions over vaccine mandates. Mr. Sliwa highlighted the issue, which has been difficult for labor leaders to navigate, and it appeared to fire up voters in conservative corners of the city in the race’s final days. The matter may be resolved by the time Mr. Adams takes office, but it underscores the extraordinary challenges that come with governing through a lingering pandemic.There may also be battles over education. Mr. de Blasio recently vowed to begin phasing out the gifted program in the city’s schools, which puts children on different academic tracks and has been criticized for exacerbating segregation. The issue inspires strong passions among parents.Mr. Adams has indicated that he wants to keep and expand access to the program, while also creating more opportunities for students who have learning disabilities, as he did. Mr. Adams, who speaks often about his own struggles with a learning disability, is a proponent of universal screening for dyslexia.More immediately, he faces the task of filling out his government.Throughout the campaign, Mr. Adams faced significant questions from Mr. Sliwa — and the news media — over matters of transparency, residency and his own financial dealings. The people he hires for his administration will play a significant role in setting the tone on issues of ethics and competence.Asked what he was looking for in the powerful position of first deputy mayor, Mr. Adams said on Tuesday that his “No. 1 criteria” was “emotional intelligence.”“If you don’t understand going through Covid, losing your home, living in a shelter, maybe losing your job, going through a health care crisis, if you don’t empathize with that person, you will never give them the services that they need,” he said.For some voters who went to the polls on Tuesday, it was Mr. Adams’s own life experience that compelled them to turn out.Mark Godfrey, a 65-year-old Black man, said Mr. Adams’s rise showed that “there are subtle changes that are occurring in the U.S.” related to racial equity and representation.“He’s been on both sides,” Mr. Godfrey said of Mr. Adams’s experiences with law enforcement. “He’s been a survivor, and he’s been part of the change.”Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Fandos, Nicole Hong, Jeffery C. Mays, Julianne McShane and James Thomas. More

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      Japan Faces Big Problems. Its Next Leader Offers Few Bold Solutions.

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      The country’s governing party, with a stranglehold on power, bucked the wishes of the public to select a moderate mainstay.TOKYO — With the world’s oldest population, rapidly declining births, gargantuan public debt and increasingly damaging natural disasters fueled by climate change, Japan faces deep-rooted challenges that the longstanding governing party has failed to tackle.Yet in choosing a new prime minister on Wednesday, the Liberal Democratic Party elected the candidate least likely to offer bold solutions.The party’s elite power brokers chose Fumio Kishida, 64, a stalwart moderate, in a runoff election for the leadership, seeming to disregard the public’s preference for a maverick challenger. In doing so, they anointed a politician with little to distinguish him from the unpopular departing leader, Yoshihide Suga, or his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.Elders in the party, which has had a near monopoly on power in the decades since World War II, made their choice confident that, with a weak political opposition and low voter turnout, they would face little chance of losing a general election later this year. So, largely insulated from voter pressure, they opted for a predictable former foreign minister who has learned to control any impulse to stray from the mainstream party platform.“In a sense, you are ignoring the voice of the rank and file in order to get somebody the party bosses are more comfortable with,” said Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo.The final results of the leadership runoff election between Mr. Kishida and Taro Kono on Wednesday.Pool photo by Carl CourtBut choosing a leader who lacks popular support carries the risk of a backlash that leaves the party weaker after the election and makes Mr. Kishida’s job harder as the country slowly emerges from six months of pandemic restrictions that have battered the economy.Mr. Kishida will need to win the public’s trust to show that he is not just a party insider, said Kristi Govella, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.“If challenges start to arise,” she said, “we could see his approval ratings decrease very quickly because he is starting from a point of relatively modest support.”Mr. Kishida was one of four candidates who vied for the leadership post in an unusually close race that went to a runoff between him and Taro Kono, an outspoken nonconformist whose common touch has made him popular with the public and with rank-and-file party members. Mr. Kishida prevailed in the second round of voting, in which ballots cast by members of Parliament held greater weight.He will become prime minister when Parliament holds a special session next week, and will then lead the party into the general election, which must be held by November.In his victory speech on Wednesday, Mr. Kishida acknowledged the challenges he faces. “We have mountains of important issues that lie ahead in Japan’s future,” he said.They loom both at home and abroad. Mr. Kishida faces mounting tensions in the region as China has grown increasingly aggressive and North Korea has started testing ballistic missiles again. Taiwan is seeking membership in a multilateral trade pact that Japan helped negotiate, and Mr. Kishida may have to help finesse a decision on how to accept the self-governed island into the group without angering China.As a former foreign minister, Mr. Kishida may have an easier time managing his international portfolio. Most analysts expect that he will maintain a strong relationship with the United States and continue to build on alliances with Australia and India to create a bulwark against China.“We have mountains of important issues that lie ahead in Japan’s future,” Mr. Kishida said after his election on Wednesday.Pool photo by Du XiaoyiBut on the domestic front, he is mostly offering a continuation of Mr. Abe’s economic policies, which have failed to cure the country’s stagnation. Income inequality is rising as fewer workers benefit from Japan’s vaunted system of lifetime employment — a reality reflected in Mr. Kishida’s campaign promise of a “new capitalism” that encourages companies to share more profits with middle-class workers.“Japan’s accumulated debt is growing, and the gap between rich and poor is growing,” said Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo. “I don’t think even a genius can tackle this.”On the pandemic, Mr. Kishida may initially escape some of the pressures that felled Mr. Suga, as the vaccine rollout has gathered momentum and close to 60 percent of the public is now inoculated. But Mr. Kishida has offered few concrete policies to address other issues like aging, population decline or climate change.In a magazine questionnaire, he said that he needed “scientific verification” that human activities were causing global warming, saying, “I think that’s the case to some extent.”Given the enduring power of the right flank of the Liberal Democratic Party, despite its minority standing in the party, Mr. Kishida closed what daylight he had with these power brokers during the campaign.He had previously gained a reputation as being more dovish than the influential right wing led by Mr. Abe, but during the leadership race, he expressed a hawkish stance toward China. As a parliamentary representative from Hiroshima, Mr. Kishida has opposed nuclear weapons, but he has made clear his support for restarting Japan’s nuclear power plants, which have been idled since the triple meltdown in Fukushima 10 years ago.And he toned down his support for overhauling a law requiring married couples to share a surname for legal purposes and declared that he would not endorse same-sex marriage, going against public sentiment but hewing to the views of the party’s conservative elite.“I think Kishida knows how he won, and it was not by appealing to the general public, it was not by running as a liberal, but courting support to his right,” said Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “So what that’s going to mean for the composition of his cabinet and his priorities, and what his party’s platform ends up looking like, means he could end up being pulled in a few different directions.”Fumio Kishida, second from the right in the back row, in 1965 at the elementary school he attended in Queens.The Office of Fumio Kishida.In many respects, Wednesday’s election represented a referendum on the lasting clout of Mr. Abe, who resigned last fall because of ill health. He had led the party for eight consecutive years, a remarkable stint given Japan’s history of revolving-door prime ministers. When he stepped down, the party chose Mr. Suga, who had served as Mr. Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, to extend his boss’s legacy.But over the past year, the public grew increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Suga, who lacked charisma and failed to connect with average voters. Although Mr. Abe backed Sanae Takaichi — a hard-line conservative who was seeking to become Japan’s first female prime minister — to revitalize his base in the party’s far right, analysts and other lawmakers said he helped steer support to Mr. Kishida in the runoff.As a result, Mr. Kishida may end up beholden to his predecessor.“Kishida cannot go against what Abe wants,” said Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister who challenged Mr. Abe for the party leadership twice and withdrew from running in the leadership election this month to support Mr. Kono.“I am not sure I would use the word ‘puppet,’ but maybe he is a puppet?” Mr. Ishiba added. “What is clear is he depends on Abe’s influence.”The Japan News printed an extra edition on Wednesday after the election of Mr. Kishida.Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDuring the campaign for the party leadership, Mr. Kishida appeared to acknowledge some dissatisfaction with the Abe era with his talk of a “new capitalism.” In doing so, he followed a familiar template within the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been adept at adopting policies first introduced by the opposition in order to keep voters assuaged.“That’s one of the reasons why they have maintained such longevity as a party,” said Saori N. Katada, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. “Kishida is definitely taking that card and running with it.”Makiko Inoue More

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      Do Germany’s Election Results Signal a Left Turn for Europe?

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      It is too early to tell, but the results certainly illustrate a fragmentation in politics and the growing influence of personalities.Sunday’s election in Germany ended in victory for the country’s Social Democratic Party and its candidate, Olaf Scholz. It was a remarkable comeback for a center-left party, which like many of its counterparts across Europe has been bleeding support at the ballot box for the past decade or more.So the question immediately arises whether Mr. Scholz’s victory in Germany may be a harbinger of revival more broadly for the center-left parties that were once mainstays of the continent’s politics.Inside Germany, Mr. Scholz is preparing for negotiations to form a left-leaning coalition government with the Greens and the libertarian Free Democrats. After his centrist campaign, just how left-leaning remains an open question. And nothing is guaranteed: His conservative rival, who lost by just 1.6 percentage points, has not conceded and also wants to try to form a coalition.Though the results have thrown Mr. Scholz’s conservative opponents into disarray, the landscape for the center left also remains challenging. Elsewhere in Europe, many center-left parties have watched their share of votes erode as their traditional base among unionized, industrial workers disappears and as political blocs splinter into an array of smaller parties.But after a surge among right-wing populists in recent years, there are some signs that the political pendulum may be poised to swing back. Here is a look at the factors that will influence whether a center-left revival is possible.Big-tent parties on both sides have shrunk.The German elections have cast in sharp relief the continuation of a trend that was already visible across the continent: fragmentation and volatility in political support.Only three decades ago, Germany’s two leading parties garnered over 80 percent of the vote in a national election. On Sunday, the Social Democrats received just 25.7 percent, while the Christian Democrats, together with their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, received 24.1 percent — calling into question their legitimacy as “Volkspartei” or big-tent parties that represent all elements of society.Inside a polling station, a gym at a secondary school in Berlin Neukölln, on Sunday.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesThe votes being lost by the once-dominant parties are going to parties with more narrowly defined positions — whether the Greens, animated by environmental issues, or the libertarian Free Democratic Party. If the German vote were broken down by traditional notions of “right” and “left,” it would be nearly evenly divided, with some 45 percent on each side.On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of 14 European Union countries in 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that few voters expressed positive views of political parties. Only six out of nearly 60 were seen favorably by more than 50 percent of the populations in their countries. Populist parties across Europe also received largely poor reviews.The left has a lot of recovering to do.It remains to be seen whether the Social Democrats in Germany will be able to lead a governing coalition. But if they do, they will join a relatively small club.Of the 27 member states in the European Union, only Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Malta have distinctly center-left governments.The old voting coalitions that empowered the center-left across the continent after 1945 included industrial workers, public sector employees and urban professionals. But those groups, driven primarily by class and economic needs, have fragmented.Two decades ago, Tony Blair’s Labour Party cruised to re-election in Britain, promoting center-left policies similar to those of President Bill Clinton. Now, Labour has been out of power for more than a decade, and in recent elections it has suffered stinging losses in working-class parts of England where its support once ran deep.In France, the center-left Socialist Party has never recovered from the unpopular presidency of François Hollande and its disastrous performance in the subsequent elections. Since then, France has moved increasingly to the right, with support for the Socialists and other left-leaning parties shrinking.With an eye toward presidential elections next April, President Emmanuel Macron, who ran as a centrist in 2017, has been courting voters on the right. Polls show that he and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, are the two favorites to make it out of the first round and meet in a runoff.President Emmanuel Macron of France speaking at a police academy in Roubaix this month.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, has been losing support since declaring her candidacy early this month. According to a poll released last Thursday, only 4 percent of potential voters said they would support her in the first round next April.And ‘left’ is not what it used to be.In the aftermath of World War II, as money flooded into Europe through the Marshall Plan and industry boomed, those who opposed Communism but were worried that capitalism could stoke instability and inequality came together under a broad umbrella of center-left parties.They favored strong trade unions and welfare states with generous education and health care systems.In Germany, as in other countries, the lines between the center left and the center right began to fade some time ago.But if there is one animating issue for many voters on the left and the right, it is the role that the European Union should play in the governance of nations.Many far-right parties have won support by casting Brussels as a regulatory overlord stripping sovereignty from the union’s member states. Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, by contrast, are very pro-European Union — yet have been wary of deepening some fiscal ties inside the bloc. Many Social Democrats argue, however, that the European Union must be strengthened through deeper integration.Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the top E.U. official Ursula von der Leyen and Mr. Macron during economic rescue discussions in Brussels in 2020.Pool photo by Francisco SecoEurope’s bonds were tested in the pandemic, and that process may have ultimately helped the Social Democrats as Germany set aside its traditional abhorrence of shared E.U. debt to unleash emergency spending.It was a plan that Mr. Scholz, who is Germany’s finance minister, drew up with his French counterpart. Ms. Merkel, who approved the deal, has since repeatedly pointed out was a one-off.Mr. Scholz’s central role in crafting the deal put him squarely on the side of Germans in favor of ever-tighter connections with their European neighbors.Personality counts for more than ever.Another common denominator in the fragmented European political landscape is that personalities seem to be far more important to voters than traditional parties and the issues they represent.There have always been outsized personalities on the European political stage. But whether it was Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl or Willy Brandt, they were more often than not guided by a set of ideological principles.The failure of the leading political parties to address the problems confronting voters has led to a new generation of leaders who position themselves as iconoclasts. Mr. Macron in France and Boris Johnson in Britain could hardly be more different. But both are opportunistic, flout convention and have crafted larger-than-life personas to command public attention. So far, voters have rewarded them.Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozAngela Merkel was their polar opposite, a study in staid reticence who transcended ideological differences by exuding stability. Her party’s candidate, Armin Laschet, couldn’t convince voters that he was her natural heir, which opened the door to Mr. Scholz, who managed to cast himself as the most Merkel-like candidate — despite being in another party.Norimitsu Onishi More