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      ‘I Will Not Sit Quietly’: 3 Black Senators in Spotlight on Voting Rights

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      Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock brought vastly different perspectives to proceedings that highlighted the Senate’s striking lack of diversity.Senators Tim Scott and Cory Booker clashed over calling Republican-backed voting legislation “Jim Crow 2.0.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Senate has only three Black members, a paltry number that is unrepresentative of the country, so when the chamber took up a voting rights bill this week aimed at preventing the disenfranchisement of voters of color, Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock played an outsized role in the debate.During a more than 10-hour discourse on Wednesday that highlighted the Senate’s lack of diversity, the three men brought vastly different perspectives to an issue that each said had affected them in deeply personal ways, with the two Democrats — Mr. Warnock of Georgia and Mr. Booker of New Jersey — serving as self-described witnesses to Republican-engineered voter suppression, and Mr. Scott, Republican of South Carolina, countering that the real threat to democracy was coming from the left.The protracted proceedings underscored how heavily the white leaders of both parties lean on the few Black members of their rank-and-file when issues of race arise. When Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator from California who was the first Black woman to serve in that post, briefly presided over the debate on Wednesday night, nearly half of the 11 African Americans who have ever served in the Senate were present at once.But it also showed the power of representation and biography in a debate over policy.The moral force that the three senators could marshal to their causes was clear. The back-and-forth between Mr. Scott, the son of a struggling single mother in working-class North Charleston, S.C., and Mr. Booker, a former Rhodes Scholar and big-city mayor, provided a striking moment, as they fought over the meaning of Jim Crow in the present day.Mr. Scott used the elections of all three Black men — but especially himself and Mr. Warnock — to back up his case that America is a nation of expanding democratic opportunity, not voter suppression and inequity.“It’s hard to deny progress when two of the three come from the Southern states which people say are the places where African American votes are being suppressed,” he said.Mr. Warnock, who ministers from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the pulpit from which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, closed the debate with an appeal to every senator.“Let the message go out: You cannot honor Martin Luther King and work to dismantle his legacy at the same time,” Mr. Warnock said Wednesday night, two days after King’s holiday, when virtually every senator of every political stripe produced an obligatory tribute to the slain civil rights leader.“I will not sit quietly while some make Dr. King the victim of identity theft.”The groundbreaking positions of the men, no doubt, are at least part of the reason they were thrust onto center stage. Mr. Scott was the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Mr. Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate by a former state of the Confederacy. Mr. Booker is his state’s first Black senator.Donna Brazile, a Black Democratic strategist who headed Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, recalled watching Wednesday’s debate and “thinking, ‘I thank God we have in 2022 three Black members of the United States Senate, regardless of party affiliation,’ because they all spoke uniquely from their own experiences of the journey of Black Americans.”But it can be a bit overwhelming, said Carol Moseley Braun, who was the first Black woman to serve in the Senate and the only Black person in the entire chamber when she served.“If it had to do with women, I got trotted out. If it had to do with Black people, I got trotted out,” she recalled in an interview on Thursday. “I couldn’t win.”In the end, no amount of pressure from Mr. Warnock could sway a single Republican to back the voting rights and election protection bill, or persuade the two balking Democrats, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to support weakening the filibuster to advance it over G.O.P. opposition.Nor could Mr. Scott save his party from the fallout of defending voting restrictions passed by Republican legislatures that Democrats say are intended to disenfranchise minority voters. The South Carolina senator’s ardent defense of Georgia’s new voting law may have been lost amid the repercussions from a faux pas uttered on Wednesday by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.Asked about protests from voters of color over new restrictions, Mr. McConnell said, “The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Critics interpreted the comment as implying that either Black voters are not wholly American, or that the top Senate Republican considered “American” synonymous with white.Mr. Warnock is the obvious face of the Democratic cause, not because of his skin color but because his tight election victory in 2020 — along with an even tighter win by his colleague, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia — gave the party its Senate majority, and because Mr. Warnock must face Georgia voters again this November, now under new election rules signed into law by the state’s Republican governor.Indeed, in an evenly divided Senate where the net loss of a single seat would cost Democrats control, Mr. Warnock is perhaps the most endangered Democrat, and the party’s cause célèbre.“Reverend Warnock is the moral authority and conscience on this issue by virtue of his background, his election and his extraordinary rhetorical capabilities,” said Marc Elias, the party’s top election lawyer. “He speaks for so many people, and articulates what so many people feel in their hearts about the importance of voting rights.”Last year, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, but in the Senate on Wednesday, Georgia’s law was front and center.Mr. Scott fiercely defended the law — “supposedly the poster child of voter suppression” — as actually expanding access to the ballot, saying Democrats were distorting its effects to inject race into the voting rights fight when their real aim was political power.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia is perhaps the chamber’s most endangered Democrat.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesHe leaned in hard to his biography, which included a grandfather he escorted to the polls because he could not read, to burnish his credentials as he laid into the Democrats’ case for a far-reaching rewrite of election laws that have traditionally been the purview of state and local governments.Speaking for “Americans from the Deep South who happen to look like me,” the conservative Republican recounted the Jim Crow era that his grandfather had lived through, when literacy tests, job losses, beatings and lynchings kept Black Southerners from the polls. The Georgia law is nothing like the “Jim Crow 2.0” that President Biden and other Democrats have called it, he said.“To have a conversation and a narrative that is blatantly false is offensive, not just to me or Southern Americans but offensive to millions of Americans who fought, bled and died for the right to vote,” Mr. Scott said.That brought a sharp response from Mr. Booker. “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” he said, adding: “It is 2022 and they are blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented. I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”But it was Mr. Warnock who brought to the debate the names of his own constituents: a woman who has not been able to vote for a decade because of long lines and constantly moving polling places; a student who could not vote for him in 2020 because the epic waits near her college would have made her miss class; another who waited eight hours in the rain to cast her ballot.“One part of being a first of any kind is thinking, ‘How do I educate people?’” said Minyon Moore, who was a political director in the Clinton White House and a senior aide to Hillary Clinton. “I see that as a badge of honor, not a burden, and I know that Senators Warnock and Booker do, too. They have a responsibility to educate and explain. If they don’t do it, who will?”Mr. Warnock, too, brandished his biography, which included growing up in the Kayton Homes housing project in Savannah, Ga., the youngest of 12 children. His mother picked cotton in Waycross, Ga., as a child, he said, and “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton helped pick her youngest son as a United States senator” in 2021.It was difficult enough when he beat the incumbent Republican, Kelly Loeffler, by about 93,000 votes with a huge minority turnout; this November will be worse with the state’s new law, he said.Georgia’s legislators “have decided to punish their own citizens for having the audacity to show up,” Mr. Warnock said, adding, “Those are the fact of the laws that are being passed in Georgia and across the nation.”Democrats have been wowed by such rhetorical performances, but the senator’s first year in electoral politics has yielded little in the way of victories. The voting rights push that he has framed as a moral imperative has been blocked. Another effort, to secure health care for the working poor in states like Georgia that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, got a boost when it was included in the Build Back Better Act that passed the House. But that, too, has been stymied in the Senate.He was blunt on Wednesday, when he said during the voting rights debate that he believed in bipartisanship, but then asked, “Bipartisanship at what cost?”“Raphael Warnock feels that he went up there with this idea he can work with anyone,” said Jason Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter who was the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia in 2014 and speaks regularly to Mr. Warnock. “There may come a time where he throws up his hands and says we can’t get anything done. I haven’t heard the frustration boiling over yet.” More

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      Fact-Checking McConnell’s Comparison of Black Turnout Rates

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      The Republican leader’s claim about high voter turnout in previous elections wasn’t too far off base, but that doesn’t mean voting access is assured.Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.“In a recent survey, 94 percent of Americans thought it was easy to vote,” he continued. “This is not a problem. Turnout is up. Biggest turnout since 1900. It’s simply they’re being sold a bill of goods to support a Democratic effort to federalize elections.”Mr. McConnell’s remarks were roundly criticized by the Congressional Black Caucus, Democratic lawmakers and others. Some accused the senator of racism in appearing to imply that Black voters are not American.“After centuries of building this nation, Republicans still don’t consider Black voters to be Americans,” tweeted Representative Ayana S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We cannot pretend that the days of Jim Crow are behind us.”“Being Black doesn’t make you less of an American, no matter what this craven man thinks,” tweeted Charles Booker, a Kentucky Democrat running to unseat the state’s junior senator, Rand Paul.Still, Mr. McConnell’s comments raised questions about how turnout for Black voters compared with that of other demographic groups, and what that might say about voting access.In a statement provided to The New York Times on Thursday, Mr. McConnell sought to clarify his remarks, saying that he has “consistently pointed to the record-high turnout for all voters in the 2020 election, including African Americans.” A spokesman for Mr. McConnell also cited Census Bureau demographic data on voter turnout for the past four federal elections. In the 2020 election, for example, 62.6 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 66.8 percent of all eligible Americans, a difference of 4.2 percentage points. In the 2018, 2016 and 2014 elections, the gaps were even smaller, at about 2 percentage points.So while Black American voter turnout is not “just as high” as overall voter turnout, as Mr. McConnell said, it does seem comparable in several recent elections.But the disparity is more stark between Black and white voters. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Michael McDonald, a voter turnout expert at the University of Florida, Black Americans have almost always voted at lower rates than white Americans. The exceptions were in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Those were the only years in which Black turnout surpassed white turnout.The racial voting gap has fluctuated in recent decades. According to Mr. McDonald’s analysis, in the 1988 presidential election, 46.8 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 55.7 percent of eligible white Americans — a gap of 8.9 percentage points. That gap had shrunk by the 2016 presidential election to 4.8 percentage points, before increasing to 7 percentage points in 2020.But overall, the 2020 election attracted the highest voter turnout in more than a century. And in a Pew Research Center poll conducted just days after the election, 94 percent of those surveyed said it had been very or somewhat easy to vote, as Mr. McConnell said.However, high voter turnout and perceptions that voting was easy in past elections do not prove that concerns about voting access in future elections are “misplaced,” as Mr. McConnell suggested. At least 19 states passed laws in 2021 restricting voting access. Georgia’s efforts in particular may have an outsize impact on Black voters.And the high turnout in 2020 was fueled in part by unusually high voter engagement. In a Pew poll conducted in July and August 2020, 83 percent of respondents said it really matters who wins the presidency, the highest percentage to give that response in the survey’s 20-year history.“More people were voting in 2020 because more people were interested in voting. That is not a measure of how many were impacted because of voting restrictions,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It can’t be that we are satisfied with disenfranchising 10 percent of the population because 60 percent of the population showed up.” More

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      Biden and the Democratic Party Failed Us Badly on Voting Rights

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      It has been less than a week since President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris came to Atlanta and gave speeches supporting federal legislation to protect and ensure voting rights. Now the legislation is as good as dead. It happened that quickly, but many of us in Georgia saw it coming a long way off.African Americans, and most specifically faith leaders, have cried out during the last year, challenging various racist anti-voting bills — and we have heard virtually nothing from the White House or the Democratic Party.This lack of response, especially at the local level, has created concern within the Black community, as well as political apathy: In November’s governor’s race in Virginia, for instance, Black voters made up 16 percent of the electorate, compared with 20 percent four years earlier. In recent months, Georgia’s AME churches and other denominations have held virtual town halls of thousands of local faith leaders to discuss what is happening in Georgia. What we hear from our communities is clear: The late-to-the-game D.C.-focused strategy allowed extremists to march state to state and change our local election laws. It has been far too passive and does not represent the “good trouble” John Lewis preached.After all, it has been 10 long months since Georgia Republicans — following the historic victories of Joe Biden and Senate Democrats in the state — passed the “Election Integrity Act,” which will make it harder for many African Americans and people of color to vote. Among other things, it limits the ability to request absentee ballots and minimizes other voting opportunities. Last week, in their speeches, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris strongly and passionately denounced the law. But as they spoke, I kept asking myself where had that strength and passion been during the past 10 months? We saw the administration’s strong commitment on behalf of the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act, but not on voting rights. The White House slept on voting rights — and now our very democracy is at risk.Being a native Delawarean, I know Mr. Biden and worked on several of his campaigns for the U.S. Senate. No one should ever question his commitment to civil rights or the African American community. He is a genuine and great public servant.However, Mr. Biden, having been a member of the Senate for 36 years, wrongly thought the solution to ensuring voting rights lay in Washington, D.C. He expected elected officials would work across the aisle to pass meaningful legislation, as they often did when he was a senator. But, as so many of us have witnessed in recent years, Joe Biden’s Senate simply does not exist anymore. Instead, extremist Trump loyalists, desperate to keep their power, began an efficient and well-funded campaign to minimize Black and brown voters, first in Georgia, and then, in a domino effect, in state legislatures across the country.So what do we do now?First, President Biden must show his strength as a leader. The American people have little respect or patience for a weak leader, but they will support and stand with a strong one. Extreme Trump loyalists have been gutting voting rights with an ax, while Democrats have tried to defend them with a butter knife.It’s time for Mr. Biden to show the 50 senators who reliably back the Democratic agenda that the nation did not elect 51 presidents. He needs to use his powers as president to show that opposing him comes with consequences, not unlike how President Johnson played hardball during negotiations on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Neither friendships nor history with the Senate has worked, and inaction is unacceptable, so Mr. Biden must now draw a line in the sand. Our elected officials in Washington need the president to sign their bills, approve funding for their local projects, and secure their nominations for appointments. If senators are not going to support this top priority of the Biden administration, then the president needs to make clear that democracy will come first, before their own special projects, interests and priorities.Second, the White House and the Democratic Party need to create a massive education campaign on the changes that have been made to our local voting rights laws. The reality is that most people still do not know what’s happening. Building this narrative cannot be done with one trip to Georgia or with one speech, nor will it be done with overzealous rhetoric. This fight must be about educating and informing people, not politics as usual. Mr. Biden and his administration need to consistently share with the American people what these new pieces of anti-voting legislation across the country are doing to our democracy and to our people. He must share the stories of those who will now struggle to exercise their democratic right. The facts must be showcased until every American understands what has occurred over the past year.Third, the president needs to move the conversation on voting rights away from the failed Senate Democratic caucus and toward an energized voter registration effort that builds on what was achieved in Georgia, Arizona and other states in 2020. While there never is going to be a quick fix for what extremists have done to our democracy over the last year, we have to organize to counter the new roadblocks. Mr. Biden’s legislative efforts must transition to a nationwide campaign to register voters and help people make plans to vote. Unlike what happened during the last year, there needs to be much more consistent communication, coordination, engagement and support between the White House and those promoting and defending our democracy at the local level.Our collective history prepares Black and brown voters for potential voting battles on Election Day, and it’s imperative that our communities take on even greater responsibility in 2022. It is incumbent that African Americans not allow the events of the last year to create apathy in 2022. But the historic challenge we now face must also be extended to President Biden.As we observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday, let us remember his words, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Mr. President, at this historic moment, I have great confidence that you are strong enough, passionate enough and love this country enough to lead this army. But we need you to lead this fight as our president, not as a senator. This must not be the end of our fight; it needs to be our beginning. And to paraphrase King once again, please, listen to your conscience, and do what you know to be right. Lead us in the fight to save our great democracy — and we will follow.Bishop Reginald T. Jackson is presiding prelate of the 6th Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which comprises 534 Georgia churches, totaling more than 90,000 parishioners. He also directed Georgia’s “Operation Voter Turnout,” a nonpartisan, multi-faith coalition to support voting rights during the 2020 general and runoff elections.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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      What This Portrait of Mayor Adams's Mother Means to New Yorkers

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      Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter posed for a portrait at her 75th birthday party. Her image, floating in a brandy snifter, has a powerful resonance.On New Year’s Day, when Eric Adams was sworn in as the 110th mayor of New York City, in his right hand he raised high above his head a framed portrait of his mother, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, pictured in a brandy snifter. His left hand rested over her Bible, where she kept notes, letters and old pictures.“I was raising my right hand, lifting her up, as she lifted me up,” Mr. Adams said in an interview. “Who would think that eventually, because of what she instilled in her son, that he would be in Times Square, being sworn in as the mayor and holding up her photo?”The brandy snifter portrait is as American as hip-hop, acid-washed jeans and plastic-covered sofas. A photo in that style could conjure the same feelings that oversize shoulder pads or a Jheri curl would: cringe. In 2001, the motif was spoofed by “Saturday Night Live” in a skit that featured Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Fallon, called “Put It in a Brandy Snifter.”But in the 1980s and 1990s, the brandy snifter photo was an innovative, attainable luxury, and it became ubiquitous in some communities. Its cultural significance is closely tied to the ambitions of the American working class.Mr. Adams’s tribute to his mother also honored the countless other people who see that image and immediately recognize and identify with it, as I did. In 1995, my siblings and I had our own brandy snifter portraits taken at our local CTown supermarket on 135th Street and Broadway.I wore my peach Easter dress from earlier that year. My mother tied my hair in a ponytail and curled my bangs to the side. My siblings wore polo shirts. The day before, I had applied a glow-in-the-dark, temporary tattoo I got in a box of Rude Dudes bubble gum to my cheek. My face has never been scrubbed harder than Mom scrubbed it clean that day.We had to be spotless. The front of our CTown turned into a photo studio only once a year, from what I remember.The makeshift studio where a photographer from Sears took our portraits was in an entryway where the shopping carts were usually stored, my mother told me recently. The backdrop was light blue, and the area smelled like bread. When we got the photos back some time later, our small cherubic faces were trapped in brandy snifters and adhered onto a plaque made from a composite that resembled wood. Mom still keeps the plaque on her dresser.The writer, Sandra E. Garcia, was a little girl when a brandy snifter portrait of her was taken at a supermarket in Harlem.Photo illustration by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhile now it might seem crass to place the portrait of a child in an image of a brandy snifter, for my mother it was an opportunity to provide us with something that she never had: a photo shoot.I have never seen photos of my parents as children. During their youth, cameras and photos were not in reach for the poor in the Dominican Republic, where they were raised. It was important for my mother to capture us professionally in this way. The portraits were her aspirations for her children to have more than she did, manifested in a photo.It is the same ambition, that of Black and immigrant working-class communities, the heart of the Democratic base and New York City, that won Mr. Adams the mayoral election last year. The photo illustrates what he told voters during his victory speech: “I am you. After years of praying and hoping and struggling and working, we are headed to City Hall.”The choice to hold that photo while he was sworn in was more than a salute to his mother; it was a knowing nod to the communities that have been sometimes shut out by city government but continue to toil for progress.“I wanted everyone to look at that photo and think about their parents and see that we all want the same thing,” Mr. Adams said.Earlier this week, Mr. Adams was criticized for calling low-wage workers “low- skill workers.” The mayor later said that his critics had distorted his message. On Twitter, he reminded those who were offended by his comments that he was once a low-wage worker.“I was a cook. I was a dishwasher. If nobody came to my restaurant when I was in college, I wouldn’t have been able to survive,” he wrote.Mayor Adams carried his mother’s portrait as he voted on Election Day in November.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIt is that part of his identity that is connected to these simple, antiquated portraits. Brandy snifter photos were a special occasion, something to get dressed up for.At a celebration of her 75th birthday in 2013, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, then a retired housekeeper, arrived, dressed to the nines in a bone-colored blazer with a black trim and a silver tiara atop her head.Inside the Sugar Hill Restaurant & Supper Club on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, they served smothered chicken, ribs, cornbread, collard greens with smoked turkey and macaroni and cheese. The O’Jays played from speakers, according to Aaron Freeman, who now runs the restaurant that his father, Eddie Freeman, opened in 1942.“She welcomed everybody with open arms,” Aaron Freeman said. “As you can see, she’s just the rock of the family.”In her portrait, her smile, captured that evening, is one of delight.“I remember the day like yesterday,” Mr. Adams said. “She cleaned houses and did all sorts of work just to make sure she could provide for her children. To be able to take a day and do for her was a great moment.”Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More

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      Las frustraciones de Kamala Harris en la vicepresidencia

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      WASHINGTON — El presidente necesitaba al senador de Virginia Occidental de su lado, pero no estaba seguro de necesitar a su vicepresidenta para conseguirlo.Era verano, y el presidente de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, estaba bajo una inmensa presión para ganarse el apoyo del senador Joe Manchin, cuyo voto decisivo en una Cámara dividida en partes iguales lo convertía en el socio negociador más delicado del mandatario. Biden había invitado a Manchin al Despacho Oval para exponer en privado los argumentos a favor de su legislación de política interior más importante. Justo antes de que Manchin llegara, se dirigió a la vicepresidenta, Kamala Harris.Lo que necesitaba de ella no era una estrategia ni un consejo. Solo necesitaba que diera un saludo rápido, lo que ella hizo antes de dar media vuelta y abandonar la sala para ir a otra reunión.El momento, descrito como un intercambio de “breves cumplidos” por un alto funcionario de la Casa Blanca y confirmado por otras dos personas que fueron informadas al respecto, fue un vívido recordatorio de la complejidad del cargo que ocupa Harris: aunque la mayoría de los presidentes les prometen a sus vicepresidentes acceso e influencia, al final el poder y la responsabilidad no se reparten por igual, y Biden no siempre siente la necesidad de contar con la opinión de Harris a la hora de sortear algunas de sus relaciones más importantes.En el caso de Harris, ella llegó al puesto sin fuertes lazos con senadores clave; una persona informada sobre la reunión en el Despacho Oval dijo que sería más productivo que la charla entre Biden y Manchin se mantuviera en privado. Tampoco está claro que el presidente tuviera mucha influencia por sí solo, dada la decisión que tomó el senador la semana pasada de romper con la Casa Blanca en materia del proyecto de ley de política interior.Sin embargo, sin un papel protagónico en algunas de las decisiones más críticas que enfrenta la Casa Blanca, la vicepresidenta está atrapada entre las críticas de que se está quedando corta y el resentimiento entre los partidarios que sienten que está perdiendo terreno en el gobierno del que forma parte. Y a sus aliados les preocupa cada vez más que, aunque Biden se apoyó en ella para que le ayudara a ganar la Casa Blanca, no la necesita para gobernar.“Creo que fue una gran ayuda para la campaña”, dijo Mark Buell, uno de los primeros recaudadores de fondos de Harris desde su primera carrera para fiscala de distrito en San Francisco. “Me gustaría verla empleada de la misma manera, ahora que están implementando sus objetivos o metas”.La urgencia que rodea su posición está ligada a si el presidente, que a sus 79 años es la persona de mayor edad en ocupar el cargo, se presentará a la reelección en 2024. El miércoles de la semana pasada dijo a ABC News que se presentaría de nuevo si gozaba de buena salud. Pero las preguntas sobre la preparación de Harris para el puesto más alto están comenzando mucho antes de lo que es habitual para un gobierno en su primer año.Harris se negó a dar una entrevista, pero los funcionarios de la Casa Blanca dijeron que su relación con Biden es una asociación.“La vicepresidenta ha trabajado con diligencia junto al presidente, coordinándose con socios, aliados y miembros demócratas de la Cámara de Representantes y el Senado para promover los objetivos de este gobierno”, dijo Sabrina Singh, vicesecretaria de prensa de Harris.Harris, una de las primeras candidatas favoritas cuyas ambiciones presidenciales se desvanecieron en medio de una campaña disfuncional en 2020, se incorporó a la candidatura de Biden debido a sus prioridades políticas, que reflejaban en gran medida las de él, y a su capacidad, como mujer negra, de reforzar el apoyo de las coaliciones de votantes que él necesitaba para ganar la presidencia. Sin embargo, según las entrevistas realizadas a más de dos decenas de funcionarios de la Casa Blanca, aliados políticos y funcionarios públicos electos actuales y anteriores, Harris sigue luchando para definirse en la Casa Blanca de Biden o para corregir de forma significativa lo que ella y sus asesores consideran una percepción injusta de que está a la deriva en el puesto.Harris se incorporó a la candidatura de Biden por sus prioridades políticas, que reflejan en gran medida las de él, y después de que su campaña presidencial se truncara.Maddie McGarvey para The New York TimesAnte la caída de sus índices de aprobación, una notoria rotación de personal y las constantes críticas de los republicanos y los medios de comunicación conservadores, ha recurrido a confidentes poderosos, entre ellos Hillary Clinton, para que le ayuden a trazar un camino a seguir.Harris ha dicho en privado a sus aliados que la cobertura informativa sobre ella sería diferente si fuera cualquiera de sus 48 predecesores, a los que ha descrito como todos blancos y varones (Charles Curtis, quien fue vicepresidente con Hoover, habló con orgullo de su ascendencia indígena). También les ha confiado las dificultades a las que se enfrenta con los temas inextricables de su cartera, como el derecho al voto y las causas profundas de la migración. La Casa Blanca ha respondido a las críticas mordaces en ambos frentes, por lo que, según los activistas, es una falta de atención.“Creo que no es ningún secreto que las diferentes cosas que se le han pedido son increíblemente exigentes, no siempre bien entendidas públicamente y requieren mucho trabajo, así como mucha habilidad”, dijo el secretario de Transporte, Pete Buttigieg, en una entrevista. “Hay que hacer todo menos una cosa, que es atribuirse el mérito”.Incluso en los mejores tiempos, las limitaciones de ese trabajo hacen que el cargo vicepresidencial sea a menudo una idea de última hora, y no a todas las personas a las que se les pide, aceptan. (“No me propongo ser enterrado hasta que esté realmente muerto y en mi ataúd”, dijo en la década de 1840 Daniel Webster, antiguo secretario de Estado, al rechazar el cargo).A decir de todos, Harris y el presidente Biden tienen una relación cálida.Al Drago para The New York TimesSin embargo, la complejidad de los temas que se le han asignado y las soluciones a largo plazo que requieren, deberían haber impulsado al ala oeste de la Casa Blanca a defender a Harris de una manera más agresiva ante el público, señaló la representante demócrata por California Karen Bass, expresidenta del caucus de congresistas negros.“La Casa Blanca podría haber sido más clara en cuanto a las expectativas de lo que se suponía que iba a ocurrir bajo la supervisión de Harris”, dijo.Otros demócratas señalan que sus frustraciones son más profundas.Harris, quien pasó gran parte de sus cuatro años en el Senado como candidata a la presidencia, se enemistó con Manchin después de que ella concedió una serie de entrevistas en Virginia Occidental que él interpretó como una infracción no deseada en su territorio. Cuando se le preguntó sobre el encuentro en el Despacho Oval durante el verano, una vocera de Manchin dijo que el senador goza de “una relación de trabajo amistosa y respetuosa” con la vicepresidenta.Harris, quien pasó gran parte de sus cuatro años en el Senado postulando a la presidencia, no llegó a Washington con fuertes lazos con los legisladores, particularmente con los senadores cuyos votos han sido críticos para la agenda de política interior de Biden.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEl representante por Texas Henry Cuellar, moderado y una de las voces más destacadas del Partido Demócrata en cuestiones fronterizas, dijo que sus experiencias con el equipo de Harris habían sido decepcionantes. Cuando Cuellar se enteró de que Harris iba a viajar a la frontera en junio, hizo que su personal llamara a la oficina de la vicepresidenta para ofrecerle ayuda y asesoramiento para su visita. Nadie le regresó la llamada.“Digo esto con mucho respeto hacia ella: ya está olvidado”, dijo Cuellar. “A ella se le encargó ese trabajo, no parece que esté muy interesada en esto, así que vamos a ir con otros que trabajen en este tema”, agregó.En el futuro, Cuellar dijo que iría directamente al ala oeste con sus preocupaciones sobre la migración en lugar de a la oficina de la vicepresidenta.De la Casa Blanca, Cuellar dijo: “Al menos hablan contigo”.Los colaboradores de Harris han señalado su labor de presión sobre otros países y empresas para que se unan a Estados Unidos en un compromiso de inversión de unos 1200 millones de dólares para ampliar el acceso digital, la resiliencia climática y las oportunidades económicas en Centroamérica. Sin embargo, se ha avanzado poco en la lucha contra la corrupción en la región.En lo que respecta al derecho al voto, Harris, quien le pidió a Biden que le permitiera encabezar los esfuerzos de su gobierno en este tema, invitó a activistas a la Casa Blanca y pronunció discursos. Pero su oficina no ha desarrollado planes detallados para trabajar con los legisladores a fin de asegurarse de que dos proyectos de ley que reformarían el sistema sean aprobados por el Congreso, según un alto funcionario de su oficina.Desde que llegó a Washington, Harris ha buscado el consejo de otras mujeres —incluida Clinton, la primera candidata demócrata a la presidencia— que han logrado un éxito político histórico para que la ayuden a encontrar un camino.“Existe una doble moral; por desgracia, eso sigue presente y se hace notar”, dijo Clinton en una entrevista. “En realidad, influye en mucho de lo que se está utilizando para juzgarla, al igual que lo que se usó para juzgarme a mí, a las mujeres que se postularon en 2020 o a todas las demás”.Las dos hablan cada pocos meses por teléfono; en noviembre, Clinton visitó a Harris en su oficina del ala oeste.Harris y Biden tras ganar las elecciones del 7 de noviembre de 2020.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBass señaló que el doble rasero va más allá del género de Harris.“Sé, y todos lo sabíamos, que lo pasaría mal porque siempre que se es ‘la primera’, lo pasas mal”, dijo Bass. “Y ser la primera mujer vicepresidenta, ser la primera mujer negra y asiática, es un triple. Así que sabíamos que iba a ser duro, pero ha sido implacable, y creo que extremadamente injusto”.Antes de su viaje a Vietnam y Singapur en agosto, Harris llamó a Clinton y a varias ex secretarias de Estado, como Condoleezza Rice y Madeleine Albright. Ha mantenido varias conversaciones privadas con Angela Merkel, quien ha relatado los retos a los que se enfrentó como primera mujer canciller de Alemania.Para este artículo, la oficina de Harris proporcionó decenas de ejemplos de su trabajo. Fue enviada a Francia para seguir reparando las frías relaciones tras un embarazoso desencuentro diplomático, y la Casa Blanca consideró el viaje un éxito. Ha asistido a más de 30 eventos centrados en la promoción de la agenda doméstica del presidente, y su huella está en el proyecto final de la ley de infraestructuras en temas como la política de agua limpia, el acceso a la banda ancha y las inversiones para combatir los incendios forestales (el derecho al voto es otro).El presidente de Francia, Emmanuel Macron, recibió a Harris en el Palacio del Elíseo de París en noviembre.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesEl presidente también reconoció el interés de Harris en aliviar la deuda de los préstamos estudiantiles cuando acordó el 22 de diciembre la ampliación de una moratoria en los reembolsos de los préstamos federales hasta el 1 de mayo, una decisión que fue aclamada por activistas y legisladores demócratas que le han pedido al gobierno que haga más al respecto.Sin embargo, mientras la Casa Blanca se esfuerza por sacar adelante una legislación importante, Biden se ha apoyado en su propia experiencia —36 años en el Senado y ocho años en la vicepresidencia— para conseguir que Estados Unidos supere la pandemia de coronavirus y cumplir una serie de promesas económicas de gran importancia. Mientras tanto, Harris se enfrenta a preguntas sobre cómo encaja en las principales prioridades de la Casa Blanca.A decir de todos, ella y el presidente mantienen una relación cálida. En las reuniones, los dos suelen intercambiar opiniones y Biden le permite intervenir y hacer preguntas que van más allá de lo que él ha pedido; un asesor lo comparó con el juego del “policía bueno y el policía malo”. Al lado del presidente, Harris, exfiscala, ha interrogado a expertos en economía y funcionarios de inmigración, a veces pidiéndoles que expliquen mejor su razonamiento.Sin embargo, a sus aliados les preocupa que a la vicepresidenta en ocasiones se le dé un trato secundario.Cuando el presidente trabajó hasta altas horas de la noche de un viernes del mes pasado para conseguir la aprobación de los legisladores para su plan bipartidista de infraestructuras, un comunicado de la Casa Blanca solo decía que estaba trabajando con un grupo de asesores políticos y legislativos.El equipo de la vicepresidenta, sorprendido por la omisión de su nombre, informó a los medios de comunicación de que ella también había estado allí, realizando llamadas a los legisladores. Preguntado por la exclusión, un portavoz de la Casa Blanca dijo que el comunicado inicial emitido al público se basaba en la información recopilada antes de que la vicepresidenta llegara para reunirse con Biden y su personal de alto nivel. La Casa Blanca emitió un comunicado horas más tarde en el que señalaba la presencia de Harris.En las últimas semanas, ella ha visto una serie de salidas de la oficina de comunicaciones; otros funcionarios se marcharon a principios de este año.La urgencia que rodea a la posición de Harris está ligada a si el presidente, que a sus 79 años es la persona de más edad en ocupar el cargo, se presentará a la reelección en 2024.Tom Brenner para The New York TimesGil Duran, quien trabajó para Harris cuando era fiscala general de California en 2013, dijo que podía ser ofensiva y poco profesional. Duran dijo que renunció después de cinco meses en el trabajo cuando Harris se negó a asistir a una sesión informativa antes de una conferencia de prensa, pero luego reprendió a un miembro del personal hasta el punto de las lágrimas cuando sintió que no estaba preparada.“Muchos de nosotros seguiríamos con ella si fuera la Kamala Harris que pensamos que sería”, dijo Duran.La Casa Blanca no hizo ningún comentario cuando se le preguntó por el episodio.Consciente de las críticas que recibe, Harris se ha centrado en promover su propia agenda en una serie de entrevistas y apariciones.Pero Bass dijo que el desafío inmediato eran las elecciones intermedias del próximo año, cuando los republicanos podrían recuperar el control de la Cámara. ¿Y las ambiciones presidenciales de Harris?“Creo que es la favorita”, dijo Bass. “Creo que será la favorita”.Katie Rogers es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca y cubre la vida en la gestión de Joe Biden, la cultura de Washington y la política nacional. Se unió al Times en 2014. @katierogersZolan Kanno-Youngs es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca que cubre una variedad de temas nacionales e internacionales durante la gestión de Biden, incluida la seguridad nacional y el extremismo. Se unió al Times en 2019 como corresponsal de seguridad nacional. @KannoYoungs More

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      Winsome Sears Wants Black Voters to Rethink the G.O.P.

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      The incoming lieutenant governor of Virginia was an unlikely candidate: a deeply conservative Black woman, and an immigrant, who supports Donald Trump.RICHMOND, Va. — On a December afternoon, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, stood at the podium in the State Senate chamber where she will soon preside. It was empty but for a few clerks and staffers who were walking her through a practice session, making pretend motions and points of order. Ms. Sears followed along as the clerks explained arcane Senate protocols, though she occasionally raised matters that weren’t in the script.“What if they’re making a ruckus?” Ms. Sears asked her tutors.Then, a clerk said, pointing to the giant wooden gavel at Ms. Sears’s right hand, you bang that. Ms. Sears smiled.That she was standing here at all was an improbability built upon unlikelihoods. Her campaign was a long shot, late in starting, skimpily funded and repeatedly overhauled. The political trajectory that preceded it was hardly more auspicious: She appeared on the scene 20 years ago, winning a legislative seat in an upset, but after one term and a quixotic bid for Congress, disappeared from electoral politics. She briefly surfaced in 2018, announcing a write-in protest against Virginia’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, but this earned her little beyond a few curious mentions in the press.Yet just three years later she is the lieutenant governor-elect, having bested two veteran lawmakers for the Republican nomination and become the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history. She will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Ms. Sears during a campaign event for Glenn Youngkin in October. She became the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe focus on Ms. Sears’s triumph, in news profiles and in the post-election crowing of conservative pundits, has been on the rare combination of her biography and politics: a Black woman, an immigrant and an emphatically conservative, Trump-boosting Republican.“The message is important,” Ms. Sears, 57, said over a lunch of Jamaican oxtail with her transition team at a restaurant near the State Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”This is the question that Ms. Sears embodies: whether she is a singular figure who won a surprise victory or the vanguard of a major political realignment, dissolving longtime realities of race and partisan identification. Democrats say there is little evidence for the latter, and that Ms. Sears won with typical Republican voters in an especially Republican year. But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”Ms. Sears dates her own partisan epiphany to her early 20s. She already had plenty of life experience by that point: moving at the age of 6 from Jamaica to the Bronx to be with her father, who had come seeking work; joining the Marines as a lost teenager and learning to be a diesel mechanic; becoming a single mother at 21. When she listened to the 1988 presidential campaign, hearing the debates over abortion and welfare, she realized, to her surprise, that she was a Republican.More than a dozen years passed before Ms. Sears, then a married mother of three who had run a homeless shelter and gone to graduate school, began her political career. At the urging of local Republicans, she ran in 2001 for the House of Delegates in a majority Black district in Norfolk. The seat had been held by Billy Robinson Jr., a Democrat, for 20 years; his father had held it before him. Weeks before the election, Mr. Robinson spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge. Ms. Sears won in the surprise of the election season.Ms. Sears will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Steve Helber/Associated PressIn the Legislature, she adjusted to the political architecture and her unusual place in it: joining, then leaving, the legislative Black caucus; voting dependably as a Republican but calling earlier than many colleagues for the resignation of the Republican House speaker when news broke of his sexual harassment settlement.She did not run for re-election, instead launching an underdog campaign against Democratic U.S. Representative Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott returned to Congress, where he remains, and the House of Delegates seat returned to Democratic hands for good. Ms. Sears was “done with politics,” she said.Her family moved to the small city of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, where Ms. Sears and her husband ran a plumbing and electrical repair shop. She held a few posts — on the state board of education and on a committee at the Department of Veterans Affairs — and wrote a book, “Stop Being a Christian Wimp!” Much of her focus was on caring for a daughter struggling with mental illness. In 2012, the daughter, DeJon Williams, was killed in a car accident along with her two young children.While Ms. Sears was absent from politics, Barack Obama won the presidency, Trayvon Martin was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, Donald Trump was elected and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Sears’s political example, as a Black woman Republican representing a majority Black district in Virginia, went unrepeated.Republicans, she said, rarely even tried to sever the old ties between Black voters and the Democratic Party. This is partly why she decided to run this year.“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”Ms. Sears favors strict limits on abortion, supports vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and insists that gun control laws do not deter crime but that gun ownership does.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesShe stood to the right of much of the field and was arguably the furthest right of the three Republicans nominated for statewide office. She favors strict limits on abortion, calling Democratic abortion policies “wicked”; she is an advocate of vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and of tighter restrictions on voting; and she insists that gun control laws do not deter crime — gun ownership does. A photo that went viral last spring, showing her holding an AR-15 while wearing a blazer-and-dress outfit suitable for a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, propelled her as much as anything to the Republican nomination.Ms. Sears derides the left as too concerned with race but often explains her politics as rooted in Black history, stressing Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric on self-reliance as a Jamaican immigrant in Jim Crow America, emphasizing that Harriet Tubman carried a gun and referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in explaining her opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates. “If the Democrats are always going to talk about race, then let’s talk about it,” she said.She rejects the notion that the problems Republicans have attracting Black voters might run deeper than mere neglect. She was angered when Republicans nominated Corey Stewart, who had a history of associating with Neo-Confederates, for the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Virginia. But she said this didn’t give her qualms about the party. She remains a champion of Mr. Trump, who openly endorsed Mr. Stewart; indeed, she was the national chairwoman of a group called “Black Americans to Re-elect the President.”Jennifer McClellan, a Democratic state senator from Richmond, agreed that Democrats could not assume that Black people would show up for them at the polls, saying that Black voters, like any voters, choose candidates based on who they believe is going to help solve their problems. But, she continued, little that Ms. Sears has said suggests she would be that person in office.“The vast majority of Black voters disagree with her on abortion, on school choice, on guns,” Ms. McClellan said. “Those aren’t necessarily the issues driving Black voters anyway. It’s the economy, it’s health care, it’s broader access to education.”Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always eventually run for governor. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe evidence that this year’s elections scrambled the fundamentals of race and partisanship is mixed at most. If anything, some Republicans worried that Ms. Sears’s hard-right politics might jeopardize the campaign strategy of appealing to more moderate voters. This risk was largely mitigated, said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host, by the fact that Ms. Sears’s general election campaign, which he called “a train wreck from start to finish,” never raised enough money to really broadcast her politics.In any case, the attention was overwhelmingly directed to the top of the ticket.“The election this year was all about the gubernatorial candidates,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. There were few big surprises in the exit polls, several political experts said, and Ms. Sears won her race by a margin that would have been expected of just about any Republican this year.But there were some warning signs for Democrats, outlined in a postelection survey by the Democratic Governors Association. While Black Virginians overwhelmingly voted for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor, the analysis found a drop in Democratic support among Black men, compared with the 2020 presidential election. There was notable erosion in Democratic support among Asian and Latino voters as well.“We don’t need to be tied or beholden to one particular party,” said Wes Bellamy, a Black political activist and a former vice mayor of Charlottesville. He will be watching Ms. Sears closely, he said.Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always run for governor. If Ms. Sears advocates for policies that improve the day-to-day lives of Black people and, more crucially, if she can persuade her Republican colleagues to go along, Mr. Bellamy said, “I think she’s gold.” More

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      The Rise of Eric Adams and Black New York

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      It was winter in Black New York, and the last thing Eric Leroy Adams wanted to do was join the New York City Police Department.It was the early 1980s and waves of joblessness and crime were sweeping over working-class swaths of the city. In Black neighborhoods, the Police Department, still overwhelmingly white, had become an occupying force, deepening the misery and the injustice.Inside a Brooklyn church, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a veteran of the civil rights movement, told a young Mr. Adams, then a local college student, that it was time to join the N.Y.P.D. The community, Mr. Daughtry said, needed someone to make change from the inside.“You gotta be out of your mind,” Mr. Adams recalls telling Mr. Daughtry.On Jan. 1, when Mr. Adams, 61, is sworn in as mayor, Mr. Daughtry’s vision will be realized. Working-class Black New York, which makes up the heart of the Democratic base but has long been shut out of City Hall, will finally have its moment.To many, the future mayor is still an enigma. The Black Democrat talks of law and order, but also Black Lives Matter. He courts Wall Street, then travels to Ghana to be spiritually cleansed. He parties late into the night alongside the rapper Ja Rule and the former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt. His talent and intellect are obvious. But he sounds nothing like Barack Obama.What exactly Mr. Adams intends to do once at City Hall is unclear. What is certain for now is that Mr. Adams knows who sent him there.New York’s Black Democratic base had endured a plague and marched for Black lives. They had kept the city going, along with municipal workers of all backgrounds, while wealthier New Yorkers remained safely at home. They had felt the rise in violence in their neighborhoods, and seen the resurgence of white supremacy under President Donald Trump. Their choice for mayor was Eric Adams.In his victory speech in November, Mr. Adams said his election belonged to the city’s working poor. “I am you. I am you. After years of praying and hoping and struggling and working, we are headed to City Hall,” Mr. Adams boomed. “It is proof that people of this city will love you if you love them.”New York’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, died last year at the age of 93. A soft-spoken Marine, in his signature bow tie, he made plain he intended to serve the entire city, which he famously called a “gorgeous mosaic.” Mr. Dinkins served just one term in office after he was ousted by Rudy Giuliani in 1993 in an election fraught with racist backlash. It was a bitter defeat Black New York would never forget.Mr. Dinkins was part of a storied tradition of Black politicians from Harlem that included Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Charles Rangel, Percy Sutton, and Basil Paterson. The political club swung Black votes in the city for more than a generation.Mr. Adams’s pathway to Gracie Mansion runs through a different New York.He was born in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Later, the family moved to South Jamaica, a largely Black enclave in Queens. Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Adams grew up poor, the fourth of six children of Dorothy Mae Adams, a single mother who worked cleaning houses, and later, at a day care center.At 15, Mr. Adams was arrested on a criminal trespass charge for entering the home of an acquaintance. He has said he was beaten so severely by police officers that his urine was filled with blood for a week.Several years later, Mr. Adams met the Rev. Herbert Daughtry. The pastor was recruiting young Black New Yorkers to organize Brooklyn’s struggling communities as part of the National Black United Front, a Black empowerment group.“It was a tough time,” Mr. Daughtry, now 90 years old, said in a phone interview. Mr. Adams stood out. “He was rather precocious,” Mr. Daughtry said. “He didn’t just want a job. He was concerned about the lack of progress, the gang violence, the addiction.”Mr. Adams joined the N.Y.P.D. in 1984 and served in the Police Department for 22 years. He co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that protested police brutality. He also served as president of the Grand Council of Guardians, a statewide group of Black law enforcement officials.He was protesting police brutality in the late 1980s when he met the Rev. Al Sharpton. Both were the sons of single mothers who had arrived in New York from Alabama.And both men said they reveled in eschewing the snobbishness exuded by the Black elite: a small but dazzling world of the powerful — if not always wealthy — shaped by historic college fraternities and sororities, and exclusive societies like the Boulé (boo-lay) and The Links. The groups were created in the depths of segregation to help members network and uplift the Black community. Some of the organizations are over a century old.“Me and Eric used to tease each other,” Mr. Sharpton told me recently. “I used to say, ‘You’re the guy with the patrolman’s hat and I’m the guy with the conked hair style like James Brown, and we do not care if the bougies don’t like us,’” he said. “We used to laugh about that.”Mr. Dinkins was a member of Sigma Pi Phi, known as the Boulé. That fraternity, among the most exclusive of the bunch, counted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a member. Percy Sutton, once the highest ranking Black elected official in New York, belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi — one of the “Divine Nine” historically Black fraternities and sororities. Representative Hakeem Jeffries is also a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. Former Representative Charles Rangel is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha but only joined Boulé several years ago (“They never invited me” before that, he said). Vice President Kamala Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.“I’m not part of any of those things, you know what I’m saying?” Mr. Adams told me. “But the energy and spirit they bring, we need that.”By 2006, Mr. Adams had risen to the rank of captain, but his public advocacy had made him a thorn in the side of the N.Y.P.D.’s clubby, white male brass. He left the department and was quickly elected to the State Senate. In 2013, he was elected Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial role — but a good launching pad for a campaign for mayor.In the decades since David Dinkins had left office, the center of Black life and political power had shifted firmly from Harlem to Brooklyn. Letitia James, the state attorney general, is from Brooklyn. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, is also from Brooklyn. Representative Hakeem Jeffries represents part of the borough, as well as a part of Queens.Making the rise of these Black politicians possible was a decades-long shift to an increasingly diverse electorate from one that had once been dominated by white voters. Some white Democrats have proven more willing to vote for Black candidates. The changes have turned Brooklyn into a political powerhouse.In 2013, that Brooklyn coalition, led by Black voters, sent Mayor Bill de Blasio to Gracie Mansion.Then, in early 2020, the pandemic hit New York City, claiming tens of thousands of lives. It killed people from all walks of life, but hit especially hard in the minority and immigrant communities in the Democratic base. Every level of government, including City Hall, had failed them.A year later, the Democratic primary included three major Black candidates. One of them, Maya Wiley, a progressive, garnered significant support. But working-class Black New York went with Mr. Adams, handing him a narrow victory. Basil Smikle, director of the public policy program at Hunter College, said they wanted someone who understood their everyday lives. “The Dinkinses and the Obamas of the world, yes it’s aspirational, we’d all like our children to grow up to be them,” said Mr. Smikle, who is Black. “But to what extent do you know how people are living?”Mr. Adams’s political showmanship doesn’t hurt.In 2016, when Mr. Adams became a vegan, reversing a diabetes diagnosis, he touted the diet as a way to liberate Black Americans from the history of slavery and published a cookbook.Years earlier, in the State Senate, Mr. Adams produced a dramatized video from his office encouraging parents to search their children’s belongings for contraband. “You don’t know what your child may be hiding,” Mr. Adams tells the camera, pulling a gun out of a jewelry box. The political stunt left political insiders giggling. But it demonstrated how deeply connected Mr. Adams was to the voters he represented.“It is comical, but let me tell you, my mom would probably be nodding her head for the entire video,” said Zellnor Myrie, 35, who holds Mr. Adams’s former Senate seat, and was raised in the district by his mother.Much of what appears to be paradoxical about Mr. Adams is, to Black Americans, just familiar.“All of us have been at dinner with some uncle who talks about ‘Black on Black’ crime,” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “We know Eric Adams.”Yet, Mr. Adams is familiar to New Yorkers of many backgrounds. They recognize the swagger of the beat cop; the blunt cadence of southeast Queens, with its languorous vowels; the hustle and ambition found all over New York.Starting Jan. 1, he will be mayor for the entire city. His support is expansive and includes large numbers of Asian, Latino and Orthodox Jewish voters. If he can cement this coalition, he may become a formidable force nationally in a Democratic Party hungry for stars.Mr. Adams has also shown a savvy for courting The New York Post, announcing his pick for police commissioner — Nassau County chief of detectives Keechant Sewell, a Black Queens native — in the right-wing tabloid. Better to feed the beast, Mr. Adams understands, than let it maul you.At his inner circle, though, is a tight-knit group of Black New Yorkers who have waited a generation for their shot to run City Hall.Outside a public school in Brooklyn recently, Mr. Adams stood with David Banks, a veteran Black educator he tapped to serve as schools chancellor. “If 65 percent of white children were not reaching proficiency in this city, they would burn the city down,” Mr. Adams said to the enthusiastic, largely nonwhite crowd.From the moneyed corners of Manhattan to the gracious brownstones of Cobble Hill, there is a creeping sense of shock: The new mayor is not necessarily speaking to them. Power in America’s largest city has changed hands.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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      Map by Map, G.O.P. Chips Away at Black Democrats’ Power

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      Black elected officials in several states, from Congress down to the counties, have been drawn out of their districts this year or face headwinds to hold onto their seats.More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.Until this year.Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina said he was retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is 35 percent Black, from his district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAcross the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement. Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”In other states, mapmakers have declined to add new districts with majorities of people of color even though the populations of minority residents have boomed. In Texas, where the population has increased by four million since the 2010 redistricting cycle, people of color account for more than 95 percent of the growth, but the State Legislature drew two new congressional seats with majority-white populations.And in states like Alabama and South Carolina, Republican map drawers are continuing a decades-long tradition of packing nearly all of the Black voting-age population into a single congressional district, despite arguments from voters to create two separate districts. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled State Legislature should draw a second majority-Black House district.Allison Riggs, a co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group, said that the gerrymandering was “really an attack on Black voters, and the Black representatives are the visible outcome of that.”Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.Though the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More