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      Georgia and Voting Rights: Deep Distrust Over a Plan to Close Polling Places

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      As legislation to expand voting rights was blocked in Washington, local residents debate a plan from officials in Lincoln County, Ga., who say they want to streamline and modernize their system.LINCOLN COUNTY, Ga. — The showdown over voting rights in the U.S. Senate may be over for now. But the issue is still smoldering in a stretch of Northeast Georgia countryside where local officials recently introduced a plan to close seven polling sites and consolidate them into one.The proposal in Lincoln County has attracted the attention and ire of major voting rights groups and suspicion among some Black residents who say the effort is just the latest example of voter suppression in a state where Republicans recently passed a restrictive new law. Hundreds of upset residents have filed protest petitions that could cause local officials to scale it back.But local officials say the current polling spots are in need of modernization — and that in a county where about two-thirds of the 7,700 residents are white, the plan is simply an effort to make it easier to manage elections. The remaining site would be located close to the polling place that currently serves the county’s one majority-Black precinct.“They seem to think that I’m trying to stop Black people from voting,” said the elections director, an African American woman named Lilvender Bolton. She would administer the plan that was under consideration last week by a mostly Republican-appointed board of two Black members and three white ones.In Georgia, a state where razor-thin voting margins have helped swing the White House and control of the Senate, any effort to change the process of voting has become fiercely contested. And after recent efforts by Republicans in Georgia and around the country to restrict voting, suspicions are high.Lilvender Bolton, who leads the Board of Elections, supports a plan to consolidate voting into one location.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesFor decades, a proposal like Lincoln County’s would have been subject to review from the Department of Justice to determine whether it was discriminatory, a step mandated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and often referred to as “preclearance.” But this system was effectively gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, and has not returned since, despite efforts to revive it like last week’s Senate debate.David J. Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the failure to reinstitute preclearance this year was a missed opportunity.Mr. Becker was careful to note that he could not tell whether Lincoln County’s consolidation plan was politically motivated or well-intentioned. But with preclearance, he said, residents of areas like Lincoln County would at least have had a sense that a third party had taken a hard look at whether a proposed change to voting in their community would make it harder for minority groups to vote.“Preclearance was a stamp of approval that elections officials could use to tamp down exactly this kind of divisive rhetoric that’s going around,” he said.In 2019, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights nonprofit based in Washington, issued a report analyzing the areas formerly subject to federal review and found a loss of 1,173 polling places between the 2014 and the 2018 midterm elections.Fully understanding the “potentially discriminatory impact of these closures,” the report’s authors wrote, would require “precisely the kind” of analysis “that the DOJ conducted under preclearance.”Even voting rights groups acknowledge that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for closing polling places: Populations shift, and sometimes the way people cast their vote changes, too. More voters may begin choosing to vote by mail or at early voting locations rather than their precinct.Officials want all voting to take place in Lincolnton, the county seat.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn Lincoln County, Ms. Bolton, the county elections director, argues that the change would make it easier for her to manage Election Day. Her tiny staff is stressed, she said, by the responsibility of setting up and breaking down the complicated electronic voting machines in seven locations spread around the county’s 257 square miles.The failure of the voting overhaul effort in Washington comes after Republican state lawmakers, in the wake of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020, have moved to overhaul election systems in dozens of states, including Georgia, often in the name of protecting against dubious allegations of voter fraud promulgated by Mr. Trump and his allies.The Georgia legislature has also handed control of some or all appointments to local election boards in six counties to conservative judges or Republican-controlled county commissions.Given these recent developments, and the long history of racist disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South, some Lincoln County voters say they would be foolish not to suspect that they are being targeted.“How could you not see it as a pattern?” said Charlie Murray, 68, a Black resident who votes at a nearby church far from the county seat.“They’re making it harder for people to vote,” said another Black resident, Franklin Sherman, 29, a truck driver who usually votes in the same spot.Franklin Sherman, 29, opposes consolidating the precincts: “They’re making it harder for people to vote.”Nicole Craine for The New York TimesLincoln County was among the six Georgia counties in which the rules for selecting members of the local elections board were recently changed by the state legislature.County officials originally asked legislators for the change because they wanted to be able to stagger the members’ terms, said Walker T. Norman, the longtime chair of the county commission and a Republican.Another change — ending the tradition of letting the Democratic and Republican Parties each choose one board member — was prompted by a State Supreme Court ruling, which has been interpreted to hold that private entities cannot appoint members to government bodies, he said.The legislation mandating the changes was sponsored by State Senator Lee Anderson, a Republican who co-sponsored last year’s restrictive Georgia voting bill. He also publicly supported a baseless and unsuccessful U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and three other states. In a recent interview, Mr. Anderson said that in making the changes to the local elections board, he was simply responding to the wishes of Lincoln County officials.Mr. Norman is something of a legend in the county: The community gym proposed as the sole new voting site bears his name — “I got a road named after me too,” he said — and two years ago he changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican because he said it had become too hard to get elected as a Democrat. In an interview, he dismissed the idea that Black voters would be discriminated against by a consolidation. He noted that in all but one precinct, white voters outnumber Black ones.“You can see that they’re not for all the people,” Charlie Murray, 68, said of Lincoln County officials.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“So if we’re suppressing anybody, I’m afraid we’re suppressing the white vote,” he said. “But that’s not our intent, to suppress any vote.”Mr. Norman said that in recent elections, a majority of participants have voted early at a centralized location in Lincolnton. He also described a litany of problems with the current system: Three polling places are within about two and a half miles of one another. Some of the facilities are antiquated. Consolidation, he said, will require less equipment. “We don’t have to use but about half of the voting machines,” he said.But opponents, both Black and white, expressed more concern for the convenience of voters than for that of the voting officials and poll workers.Racy Smith, 56, the owner of a Lincolnton antique and curio shop, said it seemed “ridiculous” to close rural polling places in a county with limited public transportation. “My 86-year-old mom can still drive,” said Mr. Smith, who is white, “but there are so many that aren’t that active who live out in the county.”The Rev. Denise Freeman, a former member of the school board and an activist leading the fight against the consolidation, expressed skepticism about the board’s true motivation. “I think it’s the good ol’ boys flexing their muscle for more power and more control,” she said.On Thursday, Ms. Freeman gave a tour of some of the more remote areas of the county, a few miles from the J. Strom Thurmond reservoir, named for the Republican senator who was known as a segregationist but ended up voting to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.Ms. Freeman talked about her role in the other major racially charged issue that rocked the county in recent decades: an allegation, in the early 1990s, that Black children had been told to sit in the back of a school bus by a driver.The Rev. Denise Freeman, a local activist, outside the proposed site for the new polling station, a gymnasium named after the longtime chair of the county commission. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBlack parents discussed keeping their children out of school. Ms. Freeman spoke up about this issue and other perceived injustices, earning her share of enemies.Eventually, she said, an outside group came in to broker a sort of peace: the Department of Justice.Three decades later, the residents of Lincoln County will most likely need to sort out their disagreement over polling places on their own. On Tuesday, Ms. Bolton’s office was in the process of verifying hundreds of protest petitions from voters in two precincts. Under Georgia law, those two polling places will have to stay open if the petitioners amount to 20 percent or more of the total electors in each precinct.But Jim Allen, a board member, does not believe that the plan is dead. Some form of consolidation, he said, was likely to be considered eventually.Michael Wines More

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      Stay Woke. The Right Can Be Illiberal, Too.

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      Those of us who sustainedly criticize the excesses of the Great Awokening are often told that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill. That the real problem is censorship not from the left but from the right. That censorship from the left is largely a matter of pile-ons by anonymous Twitter denizens or college kids expressing themselves, while censorship from the right involves menacing officials dedicated to eliminating, for instance, discussion of race in schools.The characterization of the problem on the left strikes me as somewhere between uninformed and willfully blind. Yes, left-leaning students might demonstrate their free-speech intolerance within the cozy confines of their campuses, but one day they graduate into the real world and take that rehearsed intolerance with them. Superprogressive views may predominate in certain settings, but the presumption, held by too many, that their woke outlook doesn’t even warrant intellectual challenge in the public square is an extension of the broader “dis-enlightenment” I described back in October.That said, I’m genuinely open to the idea that censorship from the right is more of a problem than I have acknowledged. The truth may be, as it so often is, in the middle, and a legal case from the past week has made me think about it.Making sense of things requires synthesis, identifying what explains a lot rather than perceiving a buzzing chaos of people suddenly crazed, which is an implausible and even effort-light approach to things. In that vein, our problem today is illiberalism on both sides.We will salute, then, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker, who last week ruled, in a 74-page opinion, in favor of six professors at the University of Florida who were barred by school officials from acting as expert witnesses in cases challenging state policy on issues ranging from restrictive voting laws to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to withhold funds from schools with mask mandates. (There are also recent reports that U.F. faculty members have been cautioned against using the words “critical” and “race” in the same sentence to describe the curriculums they teach, apparently to head off discussion of critical race theory and its effects on education in a way that might draw a backlash from state legislators or others in the Florida government.)Judge Walker analogized the actions of University of Florida officials to the removal in December of a statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre from the campus of the University of Hong Kong. He echoed the plaintiffs’ argument that “in an apparent act of vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or anticipatory obedience, “U.F. has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party” — admonishing the defendants in a footnote that “if those in U.F.’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”The judge summed up by noting that “the Supreme Court of the United States has long regarded teachers, from the primary grades to the university level, as critical to a healthy democracy.” He added, “Plaintiffs’ academic inquiry ‘is necessary to informed political debate’ and ‘is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,’” emphasizing that “when such critical inquiry is stifled, democracy suffers.”Let’s not forget, either, what happened to the schoolteacher Matthew Hawn last summer: He was fired by school administrators in Tennessee for leading classroom discussions with high school juniors and seniors (in a course called Contemporary Studies; it’s not as if this had been a chemistry lab) on concepts such as white privilege and implicit bias, not long after passage in the state of a ban on teaching critical race theory. As I’ve argued, ideas rooted in that theory do, in refracted form, make their way into how some schoolteachers teach, and it’s legitimate to question the extent of this. But that hardly justifies Hawn’s getting canned for things such as assigning a widely read article by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hawn is pursuing an appeal of his dismissal, and if justice is on his side, he should win it.I’m not doing a 180 here or letting those I term the Elect off the hook. The illiberal tendency on the left is just as oppressive and requires equal pushback: The University of North Texas music professor Timothy Jackson, a founder of his school’s Center for Schenkerian Studies, studies the work of the German Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose early-20th-century work figures prominently in music theory. In a 2019 speech to the Society for Music Theory, Philip Ewell, a Black music professor at Hunter College characterized Schenker as a racist and wrote in a 2020 article for Music Theory Online (a publication of the Society for Music Theory) that “Schenker’s racist views infected his music theoretical arguments,” that “there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized” and that by extension, music theory and even the academic field of musicology are racialized, if not racist.In 2020, Jackson led the publication of an issue of The Journal of Schenkerian Studies dedicated to addressing Ewell’s case, publishing five articles defending Ewell’s case and 10 critiquing it. As The Times reported last year, Jackson was hardly gentle in his pushback, arguing that Ewell’s “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black antisemitism” and partly attributing the dearth of Black classical musicians to fewer Black people who “grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued” and that fostering music education in public schools is the proper remedy.The result was, by today’s standards, predictable: Hundreds of students and scholars signed a letter condemning the issue. After an investigation, the university relieved Jackson of his supervision of the journal and, according to Times reporting, didn’t rule out further disciplinary action.The point here is less whether Jackson’s argument and the issue it appeared in were the quintessence of tact on race issues than whether he deserves to lose his career status and reputation because of them. Nor is the point whether Ewell’s argument was enlightened; one is (or should be) free to subscribe to it. Or not. My view is that while the field of musicology is correct, generally, in examining itself for remnants of racist bias, Ewell’s specific take is flawed.No, the point is that the through line between Jackson’s treatment at North Texas and the treatment of the Florida law professors is that instead of their views being addressed as one side of heated, complex debates, their views were squelched as unutterable heresies.Jackson has sued, and if justice is on his side, he should win. I could cite a great many cases similar to his.To many, I suspect, what happened to the University of Florida professors and to Hawn is more frightful than what happened to Jackson. However, that sentiment is a matter of one’s priorities, not a neutral conception of what justice consists of. Too many of us suppose that people should not be allowed to express opinions they deem unpleasant or dangerous and are given to demonizing those who have such opinions as threats to our moral order.On the right, even if you’re wary of critical race theory’s effect on the way many kids are taught, it is both backward and unnecessary to institutionalize the sense that discussing race at all is merely unwelcome pot stirring (and if that’s not what you mean, then you need to make it clear). On the left, illiberalism does not become insight just because some think they are speaking truth to power. Resistance to this kind of perspective is vital, no matter where it comes from on the political spectrum.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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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