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      Biden’s Honeymoon Is Over, and He Knows It

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      The first seven months of the Biden presidency have been easy compared with what’s coming down the pike.Key provisions of Covid relief legislation came to an end on Aug. 1, with more set to follow — including a cessation of moratoriums on evictions and mortgage foreclosures, termination of extended unemployment benefits (which carried $300-a-week supplemental payments) and a stop to enhanced food stamp subsidies and student loan forbearance.The prospect of millions of families forced from their homes as Covid variants infect growing numbers of people provoked frenzied attempts by the White House and congressional Democrats to take emergency steps to halt or ameliorate the potential chaos and a possible tragedy of national proportions.On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a 60-day freeze on evictions — although the order faces possible rejection by the courts.“Any call for a moratorium, based on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, is likely to face obstacles,” Biden told reporters, adding that the “bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”In a June report, the Census Bureau found that 1,401,801 people 18 and older living in rental housing were “very likely” to be evicted and 2,248,120 were “somewhat likely.” In addition, 345,556 people were “very likely” to lose their homes through mortgage foreclosure, and 746,030 were “somewhat likely” to face foreclosure and the loss of their homes. The combined total was 4.7 million adults.The eviction crisis has come at a time when an additional series of potentially damaging developments have come to the fore.The rate of inflation has been rising at its fastest pace in over a decade — to 5.4 percent in June, from 1.4 percent in January when Biden took office, with no end in sight. The number of homicides grew by 25 percent from 2019 to 2020, and the 2021 rate, 6.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, is on track to become, according to The Washington Post, “the highest recorded in the United States in more than 20 years.”The number of illegal border crossings has more than doubled during Biden’s seven months in office, raising the potential for immigration to become a central campaign issue once again, both next year and in 2024.U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that in June of this year the enforcement agency “encountered 188,829 persons attempting entry along the Southwest Border,” a 142 percent increase from the 78,000 in January 2021 when Biden assumed the presidency.As the 2022 and 2024 elections get closer, Biden is in a race to keep public attention on policies and initiatives favorable to the Democratic Party and its candidates against the continuing threat that inflation, crime, urban disorder and illegal immigration — all issues that favor the Republican Party — take center stage.The danger for Biden if crime and immigration become a primary focus of public attention is clear in polling data. The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent polls shows Biden’s favorability at plus 7.5 points (51.1 positive and 43.6 negative) and that the public generally approves of his handling of the Covid pandemic, of jobs, of the economy and of the environment.Regarding Biden’s handling of crime and immigration, however, the numbers go negative. In the July 17-20 Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of voters approved of his handling of crime, and 45 percent disapproved. In the Economist/YouGov poll taken a week later, Biden’s numbers on immigration were worse: 35 approving, 50 disapproving.The Biden administration has initiated a set of programs designed to “stem the flow of guns into the hands of those responsible for violence” — the centerpiece of its anti-crime program — but the Economist/YouGov poll found in its July 24-27 survey that 30 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of gun issues while 48 percent disapproveWhat does this all portend? Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:The Biden administration has done a good job so far avoiding hard-to-defend, controversial positions on Republican hot button issues. That is really all they need to do. It is more likely that Covid and economic conditions will matter more in determining the Democratic Party’s fate in November.Cain argues thatthe best defense for the Democrats is to go on the offense in 2022 and remind voters about who Trump is and what the Republican Party has become. The resistance to supporting vaccination among Trumpist Republican officials could hurt the party’s national image substantially in 2022 if the unvaccinated are to blame for our inability to put this issue behind us.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, has a very different take. In an email he wrote:The Democrats have lost a great deal of credibility when it comes to crime and policing by thoughtlessly adopting slogans like ‘defund the police’ without considering what the phrase means, how policies based on the idea might lead to surges in crime, or how the slogan might backfire in the face of rising crime and lawlessness.Biden, Westwood continued,was smart to distance himself from these factions, but many of those he needs in Congress and in state houses have been much less careful. Without a serious repositioning on criminal justice policies, the Democrats face the midterms with a gaping self-inflicted wound.Biden received a lift last week in keeping a bread-and-butter agenda front and center from an unexpected source, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. McConnell abandoned his Dr. No stance toward all things Democratic and joined 16 fellow Republicans in support of a key motion to take up a $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill. If enacted into law, the measure would legitimize Biden’s claim that he is capable of restoring a semblance of bipartisanship in the nation’s capital.McConnell has not fully explained his political reasoning, but his tactical shift suggests that he thinks the wind remains at Biden’s back, making the Republican strategy of destruction a much riskier proposition, at least for the moment.Early indicators suggest that in some ways Biden has yet to face the kind of voter opposition that characterized the administrations of his predecessors from both parties at this stage in their presidencies.Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, tweeted on Aug. 2:Still no sign of strong grassroots or conservative media opposition focused on Biden or congressional agenda At this point in Obama admin, it was clear August congressional recess would be full of boisterous town halls. Infrastructure doesn’t get base animated.Similarly, G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist for The Economist, wrote on Aug. 1 that there is a long-term “trend by which the people react in a thermostatic manner against the party in power,” with the public mood shifting to the right during Democratic presidencies and to the left during Republican presidencies.So far during the Biden presidency, Morris wrote, the expected tilt toward conservatism has not materialized:Where we go from here is a big question. As stated, the thermostatic model would predict a reversion in 2021 in the conservative direction. But the issue remains open; the public has not appeared very thermostatic on, say, immigration policy over the last year, and their demand for public spending is still very high.The trickiest issues facing the Biden administration are crime and urban disorder because these are issues that play to the advantage of conservatives, who have demonstrated expertise in weaponizing them.The June 29-July 6 USA Today/Ipsos poll found that “concerns about crime and gun violence have surged to the top of issues that worry Americans” and, in an ominous note for the Biden administration,Crime and public safety is the issue on which the Republican Party now holds its strongest advantage. By 32 percent to 24 percent, those polled said the G.O.P. was better at handling crime.There is considerable disagreement over the optimal strategy for Democrats to adopt when addressing crime — along with widespread concern over the party’s credibility on the issue itself.Rebecca Goldstein, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, emailed to say that she believes “the Biden Administration has correctly read the political winds by doubling the amount they are requesting for police hiring grants in 2022 compared to the 2021 appropriation, and also requesting eight-figure sums for police training and body-worn cameras.”These initiatives, Goldstein continued, are “not the outcome that any of last summer’s activists would have wanted. But the Biden Administration has realized that some of those proposals, particularly defunding or abolishing police agencies, were politically dead on arrival.”The crucial question, in Goldstein’s view, iswhether the administration will be able to convincingly advertise its support for police, and for police oversight and reform, while neither alienating some of the activists who mobilized to help Biden win in 2020 and might be put off from putting in the same sweat equity in 2022 or 2024, nor succumbing to the longstanding critique from the right that Democrats are “soft on crime.” This is a tightrope that even the most skilled politician might not be able to walk.Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, argued in an email that trying to engage voters on crime and other issues that have worked to the advantage of the Republican Party in the past is a fool’s errand:The Democratic Party has been losing voters who want economic benefits from the federal government but who are supporting Republican candidates because of their conservative positions on social and cultural issues. Biden can’t win back voters by engaging on these issues. Any positions he takes will raise the salience of these issues and that’s not helpful for him.Crime and policing, Feldman noted,are largely local concerns. Immigration is a potential minefield so the best he can do is to try to keep it from becoming a major media story. Given his limited options, any attempt to address these concerns would just give Republicans an opportunity to portray him in an unfavorable light. Providing concrete economic benefits to people while reducing the volume on social/cultural issues is the best way forward in 2022 and 2024.Aaron Chalfin, a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that engaging the debate over crime is inherently risky for Democrats:In my view, the political liabilities for the Democrats are probably fairly substantial. The surge in violence is rapid and has reversed 20 years of progress in just 18 short months. While I think the cause of the violence has little to do with Democratic political priorities at the national level, it seems likely that the Democrats will be held to account given the rhetoric around “Defund” that is associated with the left wing of the party.Lawrence Sherman, director of the Cambridge Center for Evidence-Based Policing at the University of Cambridge, agrees that “the greatest threat to Biden on policing and disorder comes from the left,” but he differs from some of his colleagues in arguing that Biden should take the issues of crime and urban dysfunction head on.Sherman contends that public anxieties over crime are just one part of a larger, more comprehensive “fear of chaos.” In that more expansive context, Sherman continued, Biden has strengthened his credentials as an adversary of disorder through his workon Covid and the economy, for which his competence grows more impressive daily in comparison to Trump’s. Climate change will also become a bigger issue (favoring Biden) for the swing vote, with smoke, heat and floods proving more scary than an unprecedented spike in murders. In a politics of fear, the targets of fear become identified with different candidates, and Biden’s fears now seem paramount: Covid, Climate and Chaos.Trump’s actions leading up to and during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump loyalists seeking to disrupt the vote count have opened the door for Biden to take the initiative on law and order and, in doing so, to counter the image of the Democratic Party as soft on crime, Sherman argued:“After what Trump did on Jan. 6, Biden has been able to stress his own historic support for the police as emblematic of his opposition to chaos,” Sherman wrote in an email:The “defund the police” movement probably did help to lose Dem seats in the House in 2020, and may increasingly be blamed for the huge spike in violent crime. But as long as Biden remains strong in his position that policing “works” to prevent crime, and that it is essential to saving Black lives, he will attract the suburban swing vote.Biden should take the initiative, Sherman argues, with “a major policing initiative,” and that initiative should stress “hot spots policing,” the focusing of police resources on small sections of urban areas, “under 5 percent of land in most cities,” while “pulling way back on stop and frisk everywhere else, especially suburban traffic stops, like the late Sandra Bland.”Biden goes into battle with one crucial advantage: He, his appointees and his advisers have more experience in the trenches of elections, legislative fights and bureaucratic maneuvering than the top personnel of any recent administration.On the other hand, if what his voters need is equality — that is, resource redistribution — experienced advisers may not be enough.Mart Trasberg and Hector Bahamonde, of Wake Forest University and the Universidad de O’Higgins in Chile, authors of “Inclusive institutions, unequal outcomes: Democracy, state capacity, and income inequality,” pointed out in an email that redistribution is exceptionally hard to achieve in an advanced democracy like the one in operation in the United States:The increase in inequality through market processes puts pressure on fiscal policy, making it difficult to increase redistribution via taxes and transfers. With increasing foreign investment flows and more developed financial sectors, domestic and international corporate and financial elites become stronger actors in domestic politics. Given that these changes are slow-moving and incremental, disorganized voters are not able to vote for a higher taxation of income-concentrating elites. Of course, other mechanisms are likely at play: political elites trick voters to vote on identity issues that do not concern socio-economic redistribution.In the end, much of the dynamism that powers today’s political competition comes back to — or down to — racial and cultural conflict. Can Biden find a redistributive workaround — and protect voting rights at the same time? The fate of the Democratic Party depends 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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      in Elections

      ‘New York City Is a World Unto Itself.’ But It May Tell Us Where Democrats Are Headed.

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      On the Democratic side of the New York mayoral contest, Eric Adams, the African-American former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, continues to hold a lead over Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. From a national vantage point, the most significant element of Adams’s campaign so far lies in his across-the-board success with working class voters of all races and ethnicities.Before we turn to the possible national implications of the race, we have to understand the extent of Adams’s victory, at least as far as first-choice balloting went. In census tracts with a majority or plurality of whites without college degrees, Adams — who repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety” — led after stage one of the New York City Democratic primary last week, according to data provided to The Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the Graduate Center for Urban Research at C.U.N.Y.Adams took 28.5 percent of the first-choice ballots among these white voters, compared with the 17.1 percent that went to Garcia, who is white and has served as both sanitation commissioner and interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the 15.4 percent that went to Wiley, an African- American who has been both legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a New York Police Department watchdog.Adams’s strength in non-college white tracts shows that his campaign made substantially larger inroads than either Garcia or Wiley among white working class voters, a constituency in which the national Democratic Party has suffered sustained losses.On Staten Island, the most conservative of the five boroughs, Adams led the first-choice voting with 31 percent to Garcia’s 20 percent and Wiley’s 17 percent. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Staten Island with 61.6 percent of the vote.Adams’s biggest margins were in Black majority non-college tracts, where he won with 59.2 percent to Wiley’s 24.4 percent and Garcia’s 4.7 percent. In Black majority college-educated tracts, Adams won a plurality, 37.5 percent, to Wiley’s 32.5 percent and Garcia’s 13.0 percent.Counting all the census tracts with a majority or plurality of adult voters who do not have college degrees, Adams won decisively with 42.1 percent — compared with Wiley’s 19.7 percent and Garcia’s 10.3 percent. Both Wiley and Garcia continue to pose a threat to Adams because they have more support among college educated voters, who make up roughly 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. According to Mollenkopf’s data, in census tracts with a majority of college-educated adults, Adams’s support fell to 14.7 percent, Wiley’s rose to 26.2 percent and Garcia won a plurality at 34.9 percent.If elected in November, either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman to serve as mayor of New York — the first Black woman in Wiley’s case. In the first round, Garcia was strongest among college-educated whites, among whom she was the biggest vote-getter, while Wiley’s winning constituencies were college-educated Black and Hispanic voters.Mark Peterson/ReduxGrowing public anxiety over the sharp increase in gun violence in New York proved crucial to Adams’s success, although it was not the whole story. A May Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos NYC Mayoral Primary Poll of 3,249 New Yorkers found that crime and violence topped the list of concerns, outpacing affordable housing, Covid and racial injustice. Through June 6 of this year, 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire in the city, the highest number for that period since 2000.The results in the mayoral primary so far are evidence of the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left. The results also suggest that Adams’s strategy of taking a strong stand on public safety in support of the police, combined with a call to end abusive police practices, is an effective way for the party to counter the small but significant Black and Hispanic defections to the Republican Party that began to emerge in the 2020 presidential election.I posed a series of questions about the implications of the still-unresolved New York City Democratic Primary to a group of scholars and analysts.Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, argues that the initial tally affirmed a basic but often overlooked truth about the Democratic Party nationwide:The outcomes are more evidence of an innumerate punditry that conflates the share of educated, professional voters who support the Democratic Party with their electoral clout. It remains true that a majority of Democratic voters are working class without college degrees. So it is the same dynamic in New York that played out in the presidential race. While other candidates battled over of the support of the highly educated segments (of all races), Biden understood where the votes were.While most of the national attention has focused on levels of education in shaping the partisanship of white voters — with the more educated moving left and the less well educated moving right — a parallel split has been quietly developing within the multiracial Democratic coalition. Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, elaborated in his reply to my email:There has been a growing education and age divide in the Democratic Party beyond racial divisions. Additionally, Adams tapped into an N.Y.C. pattern of politicians winning with strong “outer borough” ethnic support. In the past it was white ethnics — Italians, Irish and Poles living in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — who supported the Tammany-style politicians. Today it is Hispanics and Blacks from different parts of the diaspora supporting Adams, who leveraged his shared background with voters, with ties to powerful political institutions (e.g., municipal unions) much like Tammany.Older Black voters, La Raja continued,will continue to be a moderating force in the Democratic Party. They deliver votes and they are pragmatic in their vote choices. They bear the traces of New Deal liberalism with bread-and-butter concerns about jobs, education and safe neighborhoods to raise families.There are significant differences between the values and agendas that shape the voting decisions of the Garcia constituency, of the Wiley electorate, and of those Black voters who were the core of Adams’s support, La Raja notes:Garcia won the good government progressives and liberals south of 110th street in Manhattan, who are more likely to be executives at major institutions of finance, technology, entertainment and fashion. These voters want a livable city to support their institutions. They — like The New York Times editorial board — believe Garcia is the most credible on managing city operations. Wiley, in contrast, gets the young progressives just across the river in Brooklyn and Queens who haven’t quite made it up the career ladder yet. They have fewer institutional responsibilities. They are less likely to vote out of a desire to get well-functioning government and more based on their personal values.Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard and the author of “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism,” had more to say in his reply:The local discussion of crime gets entangled in the national culture war within the Democratic Party and within “liberalism.” As with “limousine liberalism” before it, what some dub “woke” liberalism flourishes in the zones of the educated and often affluent whose lives, neighborhoods and moral understandings differ from those of working and middle class people.Because of this, Rieder contends, the party remains caught in what has become a 50-year “battle between what used to be called ‘lunch-pail’ Democrats and more righteous ones, between James Clyburn and AOC.”Rieder argues thatFor all the gradual shrinkage of white non-college voters, the Democrats still require a multicultural middle to include non-affluent and lesser educated whites in their majority coalition. And that will be hard to secure if the party is identified with ceding the border, lawlessness, ignoring less privileged whites, exclusionary versions of anti-racist diversity that smack of thought reform, phrasing like Latinx that large numbers of Latinos find off-putting, esoteric or perplexing, and so much more.Taking a more optimistic stance, Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, acknowledges that the primary “reflected these intraparty divisions along lines of race, income and education,” but, he argues,What was more surprising was the level of cohesion. Candidates from a wide range of backgrounds ran and, overall, there was remarkably little race-baiting rhetoric. In the final high-pressure days of the campaign, calls to vote along racial or ethnic lines did increase but, given the high level of diversity in the candidate pool and in New York City more broadly, the relatively limited presence of appeals to in-group solidarity or out-group antipathy was remarkable. While some of this behavior is specific to New York, it also likely reflects a strong norm among elite Democrats more generally that certain kinds of ethnic threat and resentment politics are off-limits.Wasow agrees that Black voters have become a moderating force in Democratic politics:Put simply, direct experiences of racism and dreams deferred appears to have forged a more moderate or pragmatic politics among African Americans. Where the whiter, more liberal wing of the Democratic Party was considerably more optimistic about the country’s willingness to elect a woman, a democratic socialist or a person of color, African Americans exhibited far more skepticism. Given the narrow margins with which President Biden won, the Black assessment of national white voting behavior does seem to have been more accurate.For two generations, Wasow continued, “Democrats have struggled to articulate a response to attacks that they’re ‘soft on crime.’ Some candidates co-opted toughness and others emphasized ‘root causes’ but ‘law and order’ kept winning.”In this context, according to Wasow, “Adams’s activism as a cop against police abuse is a powerful embodiment of the position that recognizes both demand for reform and desire for public safety.”Adams affirmed this two-pronged stance toward policing and crime on his website:Our city faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to undo the progress we have made against crime. Gun arrests, shootings and hate crimes are up; people do not feel safe in their homes or on the street. As a police officer who patrolled the streets in a bulletproof vest in the 1990s, I watched lawlessness spread through our city, infecting communities with the same terrible swiftness of Covid-19.At the same time, Adams declared,We face a crisis of confidence in our police. I understand that mistrust because as a young man, police beat my brother and I at a precinct house — and we still carry the pain of that. I called out racism in the NYPD as an officer and helped push through reforms, including the successful effort to stop the unlawful use of Stop-and-Frisk. The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better.The strong appeal to Black voters of a candidate like Adams who combines calls to reform police behavior while simultaneously pushing for aggressive enforcement to increase public safety can be seen in the results of a survey Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, conducted with colleagues during the week after George Floyd’s murder.Specifically, Weaver found that:40.5 percent of Black respondents (compared to just 16.7 percent of whites) strongly agreed with this statement: “I have rights as a matter of law, but not in reality.” 60 percent of Black Americans agreed ‘The Constitution doesn’t really protect us from the police’ (compared to 32 percent of whites). Similar breakdowns occurred on “the official rules say the police can’t do certain things but in reality, they can do whatever they want.”Weaver summed up her findings:The responses show some alarming divergences in how Americans of different racial positions understand their citizenship, the logic of governing authority, and whether the law applies to everyone equally.Jim Sleeper, the author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York,” wrote me (citing his friend Curtis Arluck, a Democratic district leader in Manhattan):Garcia ran better than Wylie among older white voters, even those who skew pretty far left. So she did much better on the Upper West Side, the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope than in the East Village, Astoria or Williamsburg. And Wylie performed much better among younger and more affluent Black voters than those who were older and more working class. Both older white liberal voters and older less affluent Black voters saw Wiley as too “woke.”If Garcia has more second place votes to be allocated from lesser candidates, Sleeper notes, she “could well overtake Wylie for second place.” That may not be enough for Garcia to capture first place, according to Sleeper’s reckoning. If Wiley is dropped reducing the final count to Adams versus Garcia, “enough Wylie votes will go for Adams second, so that Adams should prevail.”Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, who founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture with her husband Peter Steinfels, argues that Adams’s lead rests on four factors:(A) the “crime wave” that became the hot issue in the campaign; (B) on Adams’s story of experiencing police abuse and then being in the police; (C) on the emerging sense that Black voters are “moderates” — pace the views of progressives and young B.L.M. advocates (Black and white) — that N.Y.C. is a union city and that Adams had important endorsements; (D) Adams was pretty clearly the “working class” candidate and he campaigned in relevant districts. Defunding the police, which Adams opposes, is not a winning policy as Biden’s announcements on crime this past week underlined.Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, wrote to me to say that:The New York voting clearly undermines progressives’ claims that a bold agenda on issues like policing is the best way to bring out the Democratic base. That certainly was not the case with New York Latinos and Blacks.Recognition of these patterns is crucial for Democrats seeking to maintain high levels of minority support, Suro continued:The same differences among Latinos in New York plays out nationally. Older, working class Latinos shifted to the Republicans across the country last November amid Trump’s claims that Democrats are dangerously radical. The New York results suggests that segment of the Latino electorate might be susceptible to Republican campaigns next year, painting Democrats as anti-police.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, put it succinctly: “Black voters are a moderating force and should tell the party to focus on economic, health care, and equality issues, and less on culture war issues.”Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, disputed the argument that Black voters have become a moderating force within the Democratic Party:The pre-election polling data suggests that Maya Wiley is the second choice candidate among African-American voters, despite having a political message that is far more progressive on the issues than a number of other candidates, notably on police reform. That ought to push back against a narrative that Black voters are necessarily more moderate than the rest of the party. Wiley is a very progressive candidate and has ample support from African- Americans, losing only to a more moderate Democrat, and outdistancing a number of more conservative Democrats.“New York City is a world unto itself, making it hard to discern national trends from its voting patterns,” cautioned Doug Massey, a Princeton sociologist who has written extensively about urban America.“That said,” Massey continued,The election results would seem to confirm that Black and Hispanic voters form the core of the Democratic Party’s base. They appear to be strongly motivated by racial justice and progressive economics as well as public safety, but lean toward candidates who have experience and insider knowledge rather than flashy liberals from outside the system who are proclaiming dreamy agendas.Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, in Massey’s view,are insiders to N.Y.C. politics and the bureaucracy with reputations for getting things done, and Wiley appealed to better educated young people and Blacks in Brooklyn, while Garcia appealed to better educated white and Latino Manhattanites. But it was the strong support of working class voters across all the boroughs that has carried the day so far for Adams, with particular strength among Blacks and Latinos but seemingly with some popularity even among blue-collar whites on Staten Island.For all the potential embodied in Adams’ candidacy, there are deep concerns that, if he wins, he could disappoint.Adams is a hardened player in the rough and tumble of New York. I asked Rieder if Adams represents a resolution of the difficulty of developing a credible but nonracist approach to crime and public safety. Rieder replied: “I think he’s such a flawed incarnation of the stance — his history of corruption, his race-baiting — it’s too early to say. Alas.”Adams himself is not given to false modesty. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he declared last week. “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.”While the unresolved primary fight has come down to a contest between Adams, Garcia and Wiley, it is effectively the contest for mayor because the Republican Party has shrunk to insignificance in the city, despite holding the mayoralty for decades not that long ago. Whichever one of the trio comes out ahead, he or she is very likely to run far ahead of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Ranked-choice voting — which despite its virtues remains poorly understood by many voters — means we won’t know who the next mayor will be for some time. What we do know is that whoever wins will have a very tough row to hoe.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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      Top US general got into shouting match with Trump over race protests – report

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      Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, reportedly “yelled” at Donald Trump that he was not and would not be in charge of the federal response to protests for racial justice, prompting the then president to yell back: “You can’t fucking talk to me like that!”The shouting match in the White House situation room was reported on Monday by Axios, in another trail of a much-trailed book: Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter.Bender’s book will be published in August but it has been extensively previewed.Milley made headlines last week when he clashed with Republicans over teaching concerning America’s history of racism – and for his pains was called “stupid” and a “pig” by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.A previous excerpt of Bender’s work showed Milley resisting Trump’s urges to “crack skulls” and “just shoot” protesters marching for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.The exchange reported by Axios concerned command authority. Milley, Bender writes, told Trump he was an adviser but could not command the response.“I said you’re in fucking charge!” Trump reportedly shouted.“Well, I’m not in charge!” Milley is said to have “yelled” back.“You can’t fucking talk to me like that!” Trump reportedly shouted.Bender reports that Milley told advisers gathered in the situation room: “Goddamnit. There’s a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?”William Barr, then attorney general, is said to have backed Milley up.Trump denied the exchange, a spokesman calling it “fake news” and saying Bender, who like scores of other authors interviewed the former president for his book, “never asked me about it and it’s totally fake news”.“If Gen Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him,” Trump said.It has been widely reported that Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act, a historic piece of legislation to deal with domestic unrest most recently used during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was not invoked but the New York Times has reported that aides drafted an order. Milley reportedly opposed use of the act.On 1 June last year, Trump raged at governors on a conference call, telling them to “toughen up” in response to protests which sometimes turned violent.“If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re going to walk away with you,” Trump said. “In Washington we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”Milley and other aides subsequently accompanied Trump on a controversial walk across Lafayette Square outside the White House, which had been violently cleared of protesters, to stage a photo-op at a church.The general later apologised.“I should not have been there,” he told students at National Defense University. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” More

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      in Elections

      Policing and the New York Mayoral Race

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      Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the New York City mayoral race began, two issues dominated: the pandemic and the police. The city saw enormous protests last summer that prompted calls to rethink or defund the police department. In the last few months, however, the progressive consensus has unraveled. While overall crime was down at the end of 2020, acts of violence were on the incline: Murders were up 45 percent in New York, and shootings had increased by 97 percent. A central question of the contest has become: Is New York safer with more or fewer police officers?Today, we see this tension play out in a single household: Yumi Mannarelli and her mother, Misako Shimada.Ms. Mannarelli took part in the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and is an ardent supporter of defunding the police. Ms. Shimada, who was born in Japan, is unconvinced. The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes has meant she feels safer with a police presence. On today’s episodeMisako Shimada and Yumi Mannarelli, a mother and daughter who live in New York City. Early voting Sunday morning at Saratoga Village in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is the first year that New York City voters have been able to vote early in a mayoral election.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBackground reading The New York City mayoral race has been fluid, but the centrality of crime and policing has remained constant. There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo and Rob Szypko.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Theo Balcomb, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman and Wendy Dorr. More

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      Los Angeles Just Elected a Liberal D.A. He’s Already Facing a Recall Effort.

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      George Gascón is facing an intense backlash for enacting the sorts of policies demanded by protesters after the killing of George Floyd.LOS ANGELES — From inside the walls of Folsom State Prison, the two inmates, one a convicted murderer, clinked their cups of prison moonshine in a toast to the new district attorney of Los Angeles, George Gascón.A video of the celebration was released earlier this year by Mr. Gascón’s opponents — and there are many — who used it to attack what is perhaps the most far-reaching plank of his progressive agenda: the review of nearly 20,000 old prison sentences, many for violent crimes like murder, for possible early releases.Mr. Gascón, a Democrat, has brushed off the video as nothing more than a Willie Horton-style attack by get-tough-on-crime proponents that “plays well on Fox News.” But he doesn’t shy away from his belief that even those convicted of violent crimes deserve a chance at redemption.“There’s no way we can get to meaningful prison reduction in this country without looking at more serious crimes,” Mr. Gascón, who also supports ending cash bail and eliminating the prosecution of juveniles as adults, said in an interview. “The public stories you hear are the really scary stuff. You’re talking about the violent sexual predator. You’re talking about some sadistic murderer. The reality is those are really a small number of the prison population and violent crime.”But the prospect of convicted murderers getting out early, or getting lighter sentences than they would have received in a previous era, has fueled an effort to force a recall election next year and remove Mr. Gascón from office. More than a thousand volunteers, as well as dozens of paid workers, are collecting signatures for the recall at gun stores, bail bonds offices, and even outside Mr. Gascón’s home.A rally in support of Mr. Gascón on Friday in Los Angeles.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesAnd inside courtrooms, some prosecutors who believe Mr. Gascón’s policies will harm public safety are openly working against him by attempting to sabotage his directives to pursue lesser sentences and not seek cash bail.Mr. Gascón, 67, who was propelled into office by grass-roots activists in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, is one of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors in one of America’s most liberal cities, and yet he is facing an intense backlash in enacting the sorts of policies demanded by protesters last year and aimed at reducing the vast racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions.The pushback is a sign of the many challenges liberal district attorneys in big cities are facing, at a time when Republicans are increasingly trying to portray Democrats as soft on crime, amid a rise in gun violence and homicides across the nation that began during the pandemic and has continued into 2021. In Los Angeles, for instance, murders increased 36 percent last year.Mr. Gascón’s approach, and whether he can be successful, is being closely watched by activists who have led a national movement in recent years to elect prosecutors who promise to send fewer people to prison. They achieved early victories in 2016 in St. Louis and Chicago, and earned another one the next year with the election of Larry Krasner, a former civil rights attorney, as the district attorney of Philadelphia. (Mr. Krasner, who shares many of Mr. Gascón’s views, recently cemented his power by winning the Democratic primary by an overwhelming margin, all but ensuring another term in office.) But their most important victory has been Mr. Gascón’s election in Los Angeles, because of its size and its history of high incarceration rates.While in all of those places the newcomers faced intense resistance when they took office, perhaps none of them has faced as much pushback as Mr. Gascón, who has been hampered by Civil Service protections that largely prevent him from firing prosecutors and bringing in like-minded deputies.The recall campaign is supported by high profile figures like Sheriff Alex Villanueva and Steve Cooley, a former Los Angeles district attorney, as well as some victims of crime, including Desiree Andrade, whose son was killed in 2018 when he was beaten and thrown from a cliff after a drug deal. Some of the men charged in her son’s killing now face lesser sentences under Mr. Gascón’s policies — but still face decades in prison — and Ms. Andrade, at a recent news conference, described Mr. Gascon as pushing a “radical, pro-criminal agenda.”The recall push, which is funded in part by Geoff Palmer, a real estate developer and Republican megadonor who raised millions for former President Donald J. Trump, is still a long shot. Supporters need to collect nearly 600,000 signatures by late October to force a new election, and recalls are easy to start in California, but rarely lead to an officeholder’s ouster.A booth to collect petition signatures for the recall of Mr. Gascón at a farmers market in San Dimas, Calif.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesMr. Gascón said the efforts against him reflect the polarization of America’s politics, and underscores that California, while deeply blue, is not monolithic. “We have some counties that you could pluck them up and put them in the middle of Texas or Arizona and you wouldn’t see the difference,” he said.A Cuban émigré who moved to Los Angeles as a boy, Mr. Gascón started as a beat cop in South Los Angeles in the turbulent 1980s, a time of gang warfare and a crack epidemic. He went on to be the police chief in San Francisco, before being appointed district attorney there in 2011 to replace Kamala Harris, who had become California’s attorney general. He was elected to the job twice, and reduced the number of people San Francisco sent to state prison.Los Angeles, under Mr. Gascón’s predecessor, Jackie Lacey, maintained a more punitive approach to crime, and in recent years sent people to state prison at four times the rate of San Francisco.Mr. Gascón, who won the office from Ms. Lacey by a wide margin in November, speaks often about how, as an officer, he found himself locking up multiple generations of Black men from the same family. Over time, his views on crime and punishment changed, and he said he sees it as his job as district attorney to undo the damage of that time, especially for Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles.“Those days continue to haunt me,” he said of his time as an officer, in his inauguration speech.Mr. Gascón points to data that shows lengthy sentences increase recidivism and thus make the public less safe — a direct rebuttal to those supporting the recall in the name of public safety. He believes that most people, even some that have been convicted of violent crimes and especially those who committed their crimes when they were young, deserve second chances. He has also promised to do more to hold the police accountable for on-duty shootings, and is reviewing old cases in which Ms. Lacey declined to prosecute.Mr. Gascón said that his office will carefully weigh whether a person is suitable for release, either because of advanced age or because they are model inmates, and that people still believed to be dangerous to the public will not be let out early. And judges and parole boards would have the final say.Already, in his first three months in office, prosecutors have sought roughly 8,000 fewer years in prison compared to the same period a year ago through eliminating many so-called enhancements — special circumstances such as the use of a gun in a crime, or gang affiliations or prior felonies under the “three strikes law,” a pillar of an earlier era’s war on crime — that can add years to a sentence.The elimination of enhancements has perhaps provoked the most anger from his own prosecutors, who form the largest office in the country. A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney’s Association resulted in a judge ruling largely in favor of the union, saying that in most active cases underway before Mr. Gascón took office he cannot order prosecutors to eliminate the enhancements.Richard Ceballos, a longtime deputy district attorney who prosecutes gang cases, said he was outraged when he was ordered by the new administration to remove a gang enhancement in a case in which an alleged MS-13 gang member was accused of stabbing a transgender woman in MacArthur Park. He briefly ran for the top job before exiting the race in 2020, and endorsed Mr. Gascón.“I so regret endorsing him or giving him any money,” he said. “I’m a progressive prosecutor. I don’t think he’s progressive. He’s reckless and dangerous.”Mr. Ceballos said he and other prosecutors opposed to Mr. Gascón are “smart enough” to figure out how to carry out his directives in ways that are not directly insubordinate but are unsuccessful in the courtroom. He said though he can no longer ask for gang enhancements, he can make it clear in court that he believes a suspect is a gang member, and leave it for the judge to decide. At the same time, while Mr. Gascon has directed prosecutors not to seek cash bail, Mr. Ceballos asks detectives to ask for bail on court documents.“We look for loopholes, just like any lawyer,” he said.The fact that inmates have taken notice of Mr. Gascón’s initiatives has been seized upon by those who believe the changes underway in Los Angeles are a threat to public safety.The California District Attorneys Association pointed to the prison video as evidence that “violent criminals” will be the biggest beneficiaries of Mr. Gascón’s “radical policies.”“We have multiple incidences of convicted murderers who are very aware of Gascón’s directives and are trying to take advantage,” said Vern Pierson, the president of the association.Mr. Gascón was embraced by a supporter after a rally in Los Angeles on Friday.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesFor the activists who helped elect Mr. Gascón, this is only the beginning of what they hope is a sustained push to transform criminal justice in Los Angeles. They say he is doing everything he said he would, and are rallying around him to oppose the recall. Ivette Alé, an organizer with Dignity and Power Now who advised Mr. Gascón, said the elimination of gang enhancements was something she had long pushed for, because they have led to severe racial disparities in sentencing.“That is huge,” she said. “That policy would do so much for racial and economic justice.”On Friday morning, allies of Mr. Gascón, including union leaders, faith leaders, Black Lives Matter activists and formerly incarcerated people, rallied in downtown Los Angeles. Robert Carson pointed to himself as an example of someone who changed in prison, and said he hopes others will get the same chance. “I did everything necessary to rehabilitate myself,” said Mr. Carson, 56, who left prison in February after serving 23 years for murder.If Mr. Gascón survives the recall and is able to push through his agenda, his goal over the long term is ambitious: that California can eventually close two or three state prisons by dramatically reducing sentences, especially for those who were young when they committed crimes.“I don’t think any of us would want to be judged by one of the dumbest things that we did, especially when it’s a young person,” Mr. Gascón said. More

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      Eric Adams Is Awful. I’m Putting Him on My Ballot.

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      A primary aim of American progressive politics is assembling multiracial working-class coalitions. One candidate in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary appears to be doing that. He is, unfortunately for the left, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, an ex-cop and former Republican who defends the use of stop-and-frisk, supports charter schools and is endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. More

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      St. Louis Couple Who Aimed Guns at Protesters Plead Guilty to Misdemeanors

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      Mark McCloskey and Patricia McCloskey of Missouri will pay a total of nearly $3,000 in fines and give up the weapons used in the confrontation.A St. Louis couple who gained national notoriety last year after they were filmed pointing guns at demonstrators walking near their home each pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge on Thursday and agreed to pay a total of nearly $3,000 in fines. The couple, both lawyers, also agreed to give up the guns they had brandished in the confrontation.Patricia McCloskey pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment and will pay a $2,000 fine. Her husband, Mark, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat from Missouri, pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault and will pay a $750 fine.As part of the plea deal, Ms. McCloskey gave up the Bryco handgun she brandished during the June 2020 confrontation, and Mr. McCloskey agreed to relinquish ownership of the weapon he used, an AR-15 rifle. Neither will face jail time under the plea deal.In a brief interview, Joel J. Schwartz, a lawyer for the McCloskeys, said, “They are very happy with the disposition of the case and will have the fine paid as early as possible and look forward with moving on with their life and focusing on his campaign for the U.S. Senate.”Outside the courthouse, Mr. McCloskey agreed with prosecutors that he had put the protesters in danger. “That’s what the guns were there for, and I’d do it again anytime the mob approaches me,” he said.Patricia McCloskey and her husband, Mark, aimed firearms at protesters who marched through their neighborhood last June.Lawrence Bryant/ReutersRichard Callahan, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, said in a statement that the plea agreement was reasonable, in part, because no shots had been fired, nobody had been injured and the McCloskeys had called the police. “The protesters, on the other hand, were a racially mixed and peaceful group, including women and children, who simply made a wrong turn on their way to protest in front of the mayor’s house,” Mr. Callahan said.On June 28, 2020, protesters, many of whom were Black, marched past the McCloskeys’ home, which is on a private street, on their way to the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, a Democrat, who lives nearby. Ms. Krewson had angered local residents after she went on Facebook Live and read the names and addresses of people who had said the police should be defunded.The McCloskeys said they had felt they were in imminent danger from the protesters. Images of the couple pointing their weapons at protesters circulated widely, garnering national attention.The day after the protest, President Donald J. Trump retweeted a video of the gun-toting couple. In July, the Circuit Attorney’s Office in St. Louis filed felony charges against them. In August, they spoke at the Republican National Convention.The couple maintained that they had acted in self-defense, in order to prevent the demonstrators from entering their home and harming them. “I really thought it was storming the Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it,” Mr. McCloskey told KSDK, a local television station, last year. In an interview on Fox News, Mr. McCloskey said, “We chose to stop them from coming in.” Mr. McCloskey also told KSDK, “My wife doesn’t know anything about guns” but had felt compelled to defend their home.Republicans and conservatives rallied to the couple’s defense. Mr. Trump later said the prosecution of the couple was “a disgrace.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, had said the case against the McCloskeys “is a politically motivated attempt to punish this family for exercising their Second Amendment rights.”The attention helped catapult Mr. McCloskey into politics. Last month he announced he would run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Roy Blunt, a Republican, who earlier announced he would not seek re-election next year. More

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      Has New York Hit a Progressive Plateau? The Mayor’s Race Is a Key Test.

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      Concerns about crime are dominating the Democratic primary, and the party’s left wing has just started to coalesce.A year ago, the left wing of New York’s Democratic Party was ascendant. Deeply progressive candidates triumphed in state legislative primaries and won a congressional upset, activists fueled a movement to rein in the power of the police, and Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to cut the Police Department budget.But for most of the Democratic primary season this spring, nearly every available metric has suggested that the political energy has shifted. The question is, by how much.The June 22 primary contests for mayor and other city offices are critical, if imperfect, tests of the mood of Democratic voters on the cusp of a summer that many experts believe will be marked by high rates of gun violence in cities across the United States.The Democratic race for mayor has in some ways reflected national tensions within the party over how far to the left its leaders should tack, after President Biden won the party’s nomination on the strength of moderate Black voters and older Americans, and Republicans secured surprising down-ballot general election victories.Now, a version of that debate is playing out even in overwhelmingly liberal New York City, where the Democratic primary winner will almost certainly become the next mayor. The primary underscores how the battle for the party’s direction extends far beyond concerns over defeating Republicans.Polls have increasingly shown that combating crime is the top priority among New York Democrats, a sentiment that was evident in interviews with voters across the city in recent months, from Harlem to Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. The debate over what role the police should play in maintaining public safety has become the biggest wedge issue in the mayoral campaign.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and former police captain who has recently led in the few available public polls, is a relative moderate on questions of policing and charter schools and in his posture toward business and the real estate industry.In other major contests — most notably, the Manhattan district attorney’s race — there are signs that the contenders who are furthest to the left are struggling to capture the same traction that propelled like-minded candidates in recent years.“The political class, I think, thought that the party, that the voters, had moved very, very far to the left,” Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner and another leading mayoral candidate, said in an interview last month. “That they were at a moment where they wanted to do radical, radical change. I just never believed that that was true.”The party’s left wing still holds extraordinary sway and the mayor’s race, which will be decided by ranked-choice voting, is far from the only test of its power. Progressive lawmakers are a force in the State Legislature and have already triumphed by passing a far-reaching budget agreement. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has stayed out of the mayor’s race, is focusing instead on City Council primaries.Some activists say that if the trajectory of the mayor’s race has sometimes been worrisome, it has more to do with controversies surrounding individual candidates than with New Yorkers’ attitudes.“It’s a little taxing with all the drama that has been happening,” said Liat Olenick, a leader of the progressive group Indivisible Nation Brooklyn. “Coalescing is happening. It is really late, so we’ll have to see.”Indeed, even with the primary just over a week away, there is time for progressive leaders to consolidate their support. Maya Wiley is increasingly seen as the left-leaning candidate with the best chance of winning, and many progressives are moving urgently to support her, which could reshape the race in the final stretch.In the last several election cycles, New York Democrats have undeniably moved to the left, galvanized in part by outrage over former President Donald J. Trump. But with Mr. Trump out of office, voters have become more focused on recovering from the pandemic than on politics.And while many Americans consider New York synonymous with coastal liberalism, the city’s voters also elected Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, mayor twice, and the moderate Michael R. Bloomberg three times before electing Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is much more progressive.It was always going to be harder for progressive activists to replicate their legislative victories in a vast metropolis that includes some of the most left-wing voters in the country, but also many moderates.On issues including homelessness, education and especially policing, the most progressive prescriptions have not always been popular, even in heavily Democratic neighborhoods.“More police need to be out here,” Linda Acosta, 50, said as she walked into the Bronx Night Market off Fordham Road on a recent Saturday. “Not to harass. To do their job.”Ms. Wiley, Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, have supported cuts to the police budget. They argue that adding more officers to patrol the subway would not meaningfully reduce violence. Ms. Wiley and others have promoted alternatives, including investments in mental health professionals and in schools.Those positions have been central to a broader competition among the candidates seeking to be the left-wing standard-bearer, even as Mr. Stringer and Ms. Morales have struggled with campaign controversies.Last Saturday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Ms. Wiley for mayor, a potentially race-altering move. The same day, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a left-wing Democrat who beat the longtime incumbent Eliot Engel last summer, said he was supporting Ms. Wiley as well.On Wednesday, Jumaane D. Williams, the city’s public advocate, also endorsed Ms. Wiley.“This moment is being dominated by a loud discussion of whether New York will return to the bad old days,” Mr. Williams said. “For so many of us, those ‘bad old days’ run through Bloomberg and Giuliani” and “the abuses of stop-and-frisk and surveillance.”Eric Adams, a relative centrist among the leading candidates, has led the field in recent polling.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Adams has led the mayor’s race in recent surveys, often followed by Andrew Yang and Ms. Garcia, two other relatively centrist candidates. Many strategists said Mr. Adams’s rise was tied to public safety concerns, even as he has begun to attract more scrutiny.All of the leading contenders stress that public safety is not at odds with racial justice, another vital priority for New York Democrats. The candidates who are considered more centrist support reining in officers’ misconduct and making changes to the Police Department, and Mr. Adams worked on those issues as a police officer..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}But they are also openly skeptical of the “defund the police” movement, and have emphasized a need for more police on the subway. Those views have resonated with some voters.“My No. 1 is safety in the subway,” said Jane Arrendell, 52, after an Adams campaign event in Washington Heights. “I hate working at home but I feel safer.”There was much more violent crime in New York in earlier decades than there is today. But the city has been experiencing a spike in gun violence, along with jarring crimes on the subway and in bias attacks against Asians, Asian-Americans and Jews.The candidates’ talk about crime “has almost driven discussion about any other issues to the back burner,” said Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which is polling the race. “I find that surprising given where New York is coming off of Covid.”“For the other candidates,” he added, “that really cedes that discussion to Adams.”An NY1-Ipsos poll released on Monday found that 46 percent of likely Democratic voters viewed crime and public safety as the top priority for the next mayor. A staggering 72 percent said they somewhat or strongly agreed that the Police Department should put more officers on the street.A quarter of likely voters polled for the survey identified themselves as more progressive than the Democratic Party. Nearly an equal share, 22 percent, said they were more centrist or conservative. Just over half called themselves “generally in line with the Democratic Party,” which has shifted significantly to the left as a whole in recent years.Whatever the primary results, party strategists warn against drawing sweeping conclusions from a post-pandemic Democratic municipal contest that is likely to be a low-turnout affair.Still, city elections in recent years have been important barometers of grass-roots energy, including the 2019 race for Queens district attorney, where Tiffany L. Cabán, who ran as a Democratic Socialist, nearly defeated Melinda Katz, a veteran of New York politics.In this year’s race for Manhattan district attorney, at least three contenders have sought to emulate Ms. Cabán. But the three — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — have struggled to win support. A more moderate candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has led in fund-raising, including $8.2 million in contributions that she recently made to her own campaign, and the few available polls.Tensions on the left burst into public view when Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for governor in 2014, argued on Twitter that Mr. Quart, Ms. Orlins and Ms. Aboushi had no path to victory.That drew a sharp response from Cynthia Nixon, who challenged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the left in the 2018 primary and supports Ms. Aboushi. (Ms. Teachout supports Alvin Bragg, a former prosecutor who has also won the backing of progressive groups.)“Your point of view is myopic, privileged, and just plain wrong,” Ms. Nixon wrote.In an interview, Ms. Nixon argued that Ms. Aboushi, who was endorsed on Wednesday by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was the candidate of the left movement and that others should recognize that.“It’s really nice that the movement has all these people in it and we welcome them and we need them,” she said. “But there’s only going to be one Manhattan D.A.” More