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      On Race, Herschel Walker’s Offer of Absolution Divides Georgia Voters

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      MACON, Ga. — Herschel Walker, the former football star leading Georgia’s Republican primary for Senate, had a mixed message about racial issues for 70 or so supporters, mainly white, who came to hear his stump speech this week at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.He started with a joking aside — “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m Black” — before asking, “Where is this racism thing coming from?” Accusations of bigotry, he suggested, are often thrown around as a way to silence people like those in the crowd.He did say that he had recently been called a racial slur, repeating the word and adding, “Can you believe that?” But, he went on, that was OK, because raccoons are smart animals, and the Bible does not talk about Black and white, just believers and nonbelievers.The white members of the audience cheered. The few Black onlookers had a different reaction, wondering what race-blind Georgia he seemed to be referring to.As Mr. Walker nears his coronation on Tuesday as the Republican nominee for one of Georgia’s Senate seats, it is clear that racial issues will be a major factor this fall, when he is all but certain to face Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Democrat.The contest between Mr. Warnock, a longtime civil rights champion, and Mr. Walker, whose ambivalence on the issue has long dogged him, is expected to be tight. Either way, Georgia will still have a Black senator. But just because both men are Black doesn’t mean race will be nullified as a factor.“If anything, it could be put on steroids,” said Kevin Harris, an African American Democratic strategist active in Southern campaigns.Mr. Walker is clearly sensitive about the subject. Asked how he would distinguish himself from Mr. Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, Mr. Walker snapped: “Don’t say that. He’s running on separation.” He has struck similar themes in the past, arguing that civil rights leaders want the races divided.White Republicans here welcomed Mr. Walker’s assurances that accusations of racism and injustice are all about division, when the nation needs unity.George Jackson, who grew up in Mr. Walker’s hometown, Wrightsville, Ga., and went to high school with the candidate’s older brother, reassured his friends after the speech, “Herschel is not racist” — a signal that for some voters, racism by Black Americans, not by white ones, is the problem.“Christ doesn’t look at race,” Kathy Peterson, 60, of Perry, Ga., who is white, said approvingly after the speech. “We’re all the same. We’ve been divided by the leadership we have now for too long.”The few Black members of the audience, however, saw Mr. Walker’s longtime ties to Donald J. Trump — and the former president’s endorsement of him — as a red flag, and an indication that Mr. Walker was merely a vessel for the G.O.P. and Mr. Trump’s ambitions.“I can’t get a brother from Wrightsville, Ga., jumping on the Trump campaign, you know?” Roderick McGee, 54, said at the Hall of Fame. “I can’t wrap my mind around that.”He added, “He’s a puppet on a string, and somebody’s pulling those strings really good.”Roderick McGee, who attended Mr. Walker’s campaign event in Macon, was skeptical of Mr. Walker because of the candidate’s ties to former President Donald J. Trump.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Walker’s early years are a major part of his appeal. He loves to recount his days as a shy, bullied, “big-boned” — “which meant I was fat” — kid with a speech impediment, who took it upon himself to grow supremely athletic so he could stand up for himself.He often riffs about what he calls an agonizing choice between joining the Marines or playing college football, then choosing a college as the most recruited high school athlete in the country.Left unmentioned is another event from those days that Mr. Jackson readily offered up, a civil rights showdown in 1980 in little Wrightsville between the Black community and local law enforcement that brought Black leaders like Hosea Williams to town from Greater Atlanta, as well as Ku Klux Klansmen like J.B. Stoner.Black local leaders wanted their most celebrated athlete to weigh in, but barely 18 and a high school senior debating his college choices, Mr. Walker stayed away.“He said: ‘I don’t believe in race. I believe in right and wrong,’” Mr. Jackson, who is white, said approvingly.George Jackson grew up in Wrightsville, Ga., Mr. Walker’s hometown.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesDarrell Robinson said the Senate race between Mr. Walker and Senator Raphael Warnock would be pivotal.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesRepublicans hope Mr. Walker will peel away just enough Black votes from Mr. Warnock to take back a coveted seat in a Senate now divided 50-50. Driven by Mr. Trump’s quick endorsement, many in the party have looked past the football star’s history of domestic violence, his admitted struggles with mental illness, and his lack of political experience to chant his slogan: “Run, Herschel, run.”Voters, Black and white, appeared aware of the stakes.“This Senate race right here is going to be the most important race of them all,” said Darrell Robinson, 54, a Black man from Macon who attended the Walker event.But it may not work the way the Republican establishment hopes. After the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Ga., 170 miles southeast of Macon, many Black voters are in no mood for the broad absolution of white people that Mr. Walker appears to be offering.“People need to stop being afraid to have these hard conversations,” said LaTanja Taylor, 45, who was walking with a friend through downtown Macon. “That’s the only way we’re going to heal.”As for Mr. Walker’s confidence that racism is not a problem, she quipped: “He’s blind. Something’s wrong with him.”Celebrity might also not be the draw some think. Georgia’s booming population is young and includes many new arrivals to the state. To them, Mr. Walker’s Heisman Trophy in 1982 is ancient history. “I wasn’t even born then,” said Tiffany Clark, 38, Ms. Taylor’s friend, who laughed as she confessed she was not a sports fan and did not know who Mr. Walker was.Ms. Clark, who is Black, said that her concern was health care for her aging parents, and that she liked Mr. Warnock’s efforts to expand the reach of health insurance in Georgia, despite successive Republican governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. He has her vote, she said.Mr. Warnock has been outspoken on racial issues, especially on voting rights. He castigated a restrictive voting law passed last year by Georgia’s Republican-led legislature, calling it racism in action.Mr. Warnock has often connected the issues of race and voting rights, and has denounced Georgia’s recently passed voting restrictions.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” he declared in a March 2021 Senate speech that ran through his state’s history of violent racial repression and its breakthrough civil rights moments.Mr. Walker has taken a different path. At a hearing last year on reparations for the descendants of enslaved African Americans, he appeared remotely at the behest of Republicans.He lamented, “We use Black power to create white guilt. My approach is biblical: How can I ask my heavenly father to forgive me if I can’t forgive my brother?” He continued: “My religion teaches togetherness. Reparations teach separation.”At a rally in September with Mr. Trump in Perry, Ga., Mr. Walker told the crowd: “I’m going to tell you a secret. Don’t let the left try to fool you with this racism thing, that this country is racist.”To some supporters, such assurances evince a warmth and understanding that could counter Mr. Warnock’s famous charisma. Phil Schaefer, a longtime football broadcaster at the University of Georgia, Mr. Walker’s alma mater, said: “I always felt there was something special in Herschel. There was a depth there that is now coming out.”Mr. Walker with supporters in Macon, where he spoke at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBut Democrats see in Mr. Walker a political neophyte who is unprepared for the general election. In a difficult political year for Democrats, he could be a perfect foil for Mr. Warnock.Mr. Harris, who helped engineer President Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia, said Republicans were so intent on recruiting a Black Senate candidate that they latched onto a man whose views on race will only alienate the Black voters they seek.“He’s a flawed messenger,” Mr. Harris said, “but this is what you get when you’re not willing to do the work, and they don’t do the work on equity and inclusion. So they get Herschel Walker.” More

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      Jeffries Fights New York District Maps: ‘Enough to Make Jim Crow Blush’

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      Hakeem Jeffries hopes to pressure New York’s court-appointed special master to change congressional maps that split historically Black communities.Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the second-highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress, has launched an aggressive effort to discredit a proposed congressional map that would divide historically Black neighborhoods in New York, likening its configurations to Jim Crow tactics.Mr. Jeffries is spending tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising as part of a scorched-earth campaign to try to stop New York’s courts from making the new map final without changes later this week.As construed, the map would split Bedford-Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn into two districts and Co-Op City in the Bronx into three, for example, while placing Black incumbents in the same districts — changes that Mr. Jeffries argues violate the State Constitution.“We find ourselves in an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Mr. Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, said in an interview on Thursday. In the most recent ad, he says the changes took “a sledgehammer to Black districts. It’s enough to make Jim Crow blush.”Mr. Jeffries may be laying the groundwork for an eventual legal challenge, but his more immediate aim was to pressure Jonathan R. Cervas, New York’s court-appointed special master, to change congressional and State Senate maps that he first proposed on Monday before he presents final plans to a state court judge for approval on Friday.The stakes could scarcely be higher. After New York’s highest court struck down Democrat-friendly maps drawn by the State Legislature as unconstitutional last month, the judges have vested near total power in Mr. Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow from Carnegie Mellon, to lay lines that will govern elections for a decade to come.Mr. Cervas’s initial proposal unwound a map gerrymandered by the Democratic-led State Legislature, creating new pickup opportunities for Republicans. But it also significantly altered the shapes of districts in New York City — carefully drawn a decade earlier by another court — that reflected a patchwork of racial, geographic and economic divides.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Mr. Jeffries was far from alone in lodging last-ditch appeals. The court was inundated with hundreds of comments suggesting revisions from Democrats and Republicans alike — from party lawyers pressing for more politically favorable lines to an analysis of the differences between Jewish families on the East and West Sides of Manhattan.A broad coalition of public interest and minority advocacy groups told Mr. Cervas this week that his changes would risk diluting the power of historically marginalized communities. They included Common Cause New York and the United Map Coalition, an influential group of Latino, Black and Asian American legal groups.The proposed map would divide Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville — culturally significant Black communities in Brooklyn — between the 8th and 9th Congressional Districts. Each neighborhood currently falls in one or the other.The northeast Bronx, another predominantly Black area that includes Co-Op City and falls within Representative Jamaal Bowman’s district, would be split among three different districts.The groups have raised similar concerns about Mr. Cervas’s proposal to separate Manhattan’s Chinatown and Sunset Park, home to large Asian American populations, into two districts for the first time in decades. Other Jewish groups have made related appeals for their community in Brooklyn.Most of the changes are likely to have little impact on the partisan makeup of the districts, which are safely Democratic. But Lurie Daniel Favors, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, said that cutting through existing communities would further dilute the political power of historically marginalized groups.“Now, when Bedford-Stuyvesant wants to organize and petition at the congressional level, they have to split their efforts and go to two separate representatives,” she said.The maps would also push four of the state’s seven Black representatives into two districts, forcing them to compete with one another or run in a district where they do not live. Under the special master’s plan, Mr. Jeffries and Representative Yvette Clark would live in the same central Brooklyn district, and Mr. Bowman and Mondaire Jones would reside in the same Westchester County seat.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Is John Fetterman the Future of the Democratic Party?

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      John Fetterman’s resounding victory in the Democratic Pennsylvania Senate primary was not surprising, but it was uncharacteristic.Pennsylvania Democrats do not ordinarily veer too far from the center lane, and they are cautious about whom they send forward from their primary elections to take on Republicans in general elections. They’re not gamblers, and given the state’s perennially up-for-grabs status and its unforgiving electoral math, you could argue they shouldn’t be.But on Tuesday, Democrats made Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, their nominee to compete for the seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Pat Toomey. (They did it despite Mr. Fetterman’s recent health scare; last week he suffered a stroke, but he said that he was on his way to “a full recovery.”)Conor Lamb, 37, a Pittsburgh-area congressman, would have been a more conventional choice. His House voting record tracks to the center, and he has been compared to the state’s three-term Democratic senator, Bob Casey, a moderate and the son of a former Pennsylvania governor.Mr. Fetterman, 52, offers something different, a new model for Pennsylvania. It is built on quirky personal and political appeal rather than the caution of a traditional Democrat in the Keystone State. With over 80 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Fetterman was more than doubling the total of Mr. Lamb, whose campaign, despite winning many more endorsements from party leaders, never gained momentum.For Democrats, the stakes are high: The outcome may well determine the balance of the evenly divided U.S. Senate, future votes to confirm Supreme Court nominees and much else in our bitterly divided nation.Nearly every story about Mr. Fetterman points out his 6-foot-8 frame, shaved head, tattoos and preferred attire — work clothes from Carhartt, a brand long favored by construction workers and miners and more recently by hip-hop artists. He sometimes attends public events in baggy gym shorts.It is all part of a style that has won him passionate followers among progressive Democrats. Mr. Fetterman has been a frequent presence on MSNBC and is a skilled social media practitioner, with over 400,000 Twitter followers. (His dogs, Levi and Artie, have their own Twitter account and more than 25,000 followers.) It can sometimes seem that he skirts the line between being a traditional candidate and an internet influencer.“Fetterman doesn’t have supporters so much as full-on fans,” The Philadelphia Inquirer noted during the campaign. “Fans who write songs about him, buy his merch and know his life story.”Mr. Fetterman has served as lieutenant governor since 2019 and, before that, for four terms was the mayor of Braddock, a town east of Pittsburgh with just over 1,700 residents. He vows to conduct a “67-county campaign” — the whole of Pennsylvania.Rebecca Katz, his senior political adviser, told me that she believes the campaign’s mantra of “every county, every vote” is being received with too much skepticism and said that people “haven’t seen what kind of map he can run on in Pennsylvania.”But he still must solve the math of an evenly divided state: A Democrat hoping to win in Pennsylvania has to thread an electoral needle.Mr. Fetterman will face either the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz or the financier David McCormick.In the fall, Mr. Fetterman will need to pile up huge winning margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and win by healthy margins in their suburbs and the state’s few other pockets of blue in order to withstand the lopsided totals that Republicans win nearly everywhere else.In less populous counties, as recently as 2008, Barack Obama took 40 percent of the vote or more, but as polarization has increased, Democrats have struggled to get even 25 percent.State Democrats hoped that Joe Biden, a Pennsylvania native and senator from neighboring Delaware — and a white septuagenarian running in a state that is whiter and older than the national average — could reverse that trend. But he did only marginally better than Hillary Clinton four years earlier, cutting the margins by a couple of percentage points but hardly reversing the trend of Democrats being routed in the smaller counties.That Mr. Biden could not do better outside the cities and close-in suburbs has made many Democrats pessimistic about what’s possible in those areas. Mr. Fetterman’s background, his attention to the state’s rural communities and his manner — the work clothes, a straightforward speaking style — could make some difference. In the winning Fetterman model, he narrows the massive margins that have been run up by Republicans.His positions do not differ that much from more traditional Democrats’, but some of his central concerns do set him apart. A signature issue has been the legalization of marijuana — “legal weed,” as he calls it. He has flown a flag displaying cannabis leaves from the official lieutenant governor’s office, alongside a rainbow-colored L.G.B.T.Q. banner.The advocacy of legal marijuana may be the rare issue that draws support from unpredictable corners and crosses all kinds of lines — including urban and rural.The lieutenant governor in Pennsylvania has few defined duties, but as chairman of the Board of Pardons, Mr. Fetterman modernized an outdated system and granted clemency in cases where it was long overdue.Mr. Fetterman’s one glaring departure from progressive causes, and a nod to Pennsylvania realpolitik, is that he does not support a ban on fracking, the environmentally questionable hydraulic extraction of natural gas. Tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians have benefited financially from it by selling drilling rights on their land, working in the industry or both.Mr. Fetterman’s most worrisome vulnerability is his appeal to his party’s most dependable voting bloc: Black voters in Philadelphia and the state’s other urban centers, the places where any Democrat running statewide must mine the largest trove of votes. Only about 10 percent of the state’s voters are Black, but they are an essential component of the margins that the party runs up in the cities.Mr. Fetterman’s challenge stems in large part from a 2013 incident in Braddock, when he used his shotgun to stop a Black jogger and detained him until police arrived. Mr. Fetterman, who was mayor at the time, told police he had heard gunshots in the area and suspected the jogger. Police searched the man down and released him after they found no weapon.The incident has come up during the campaign, and Mr. Fetterman’s responses have been awkward, at best.“He has said he did not actually point the gun, but what difference does that make?” said Mark Kelly Tyler, the pastor of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s oldest A.M.E. churches. “Even if he admitted that it was from his implicit bias and says that he has learned from it, that would actually be better. It would be accepted.”Mr. Tyler said that if Mr. Fetterman does not do a better job of explaining it, the incident will be “weaponized on Black talk radio and elsewhere” and used by his opponent in the fall to depress turnout.Mr. Fetterman won by huge margins all across Pennsylvania, with one notable exception: Philadelphia. There, it was a close race against a third Democratic primary candidate, Malcolm Kenyatta, a city resident and the first Black openly gay L.G.B.T.Q. member of the state legislature.With the primary complete, everything is reset. In a big state with six television markets, the candidates will likely combine to spend $200 million or more — much of it, undoubtedly, in an attempt to label each other as too extreme for middle-of-the-road Pennsylvania.Mr. Fetterman’s progressive politics and persona appeal to younger people. They lean to the left and are always potentially influential in any election. But they are also traditionally the least reliable voters, especially in nonpresidential years.In Pennsylvania and all other battleground states, it always comes down to the math. The state’s graying electorate does not always like new things or ideas.Mr. Fetterman is ultimately going to have to go where the votes are. And if he has a problem with Black voters, he will have to solve it.Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town and the Magic of Theater,” which is set in his hometown, Levittown, Pa.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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      A Minnesota Candidate Went Into Labor During Her Convention Speech

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      The pause, three minutes into a candidate’s speech about the toll of climate change, the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, was not just for rhetorical effect.Erin Maye Quade had been making her case for why she should receive her party’s endorsement to represent the Minneapolis suburbs in the State Senate when she started having contractions.“Excuse me,” said Ms. Maye Quade, grimacing as she put her hand on her belly. She had opened her speech with the disclosure: “So they broke the news that I’m in labor, yeah?”Ms. Maye Quade completed her convention floor speech and a question-and-answer session that followed. She was trailing after the first round of voting and she withdrew from the proceedings to seek medical care. The convention, held by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party on April 23 in Rosemount, Minn., carried on without Ms. Maye Quade, 36, a former state representative.The party’s treatment of Ms. Maye Quade, who gave birth to a girl about 10 days before her scheduled due date, drew intense criticism as several videos of Ms. Maye Quade’s speech ricocheted across the internet.Those seeking to empower female candidates faulted party officials and Ms. Maye Quade’s male opponent, Justin Emmerich, for not suspending the proceedings — a move that Mr. Emmerich told The Star Tribune he would have supported.He declined a request for comment on Friday, and Ms. Maye Quade wasn’t available for an interview. Reached briefly by phone, she said she had just returned home from the hospital.Emma McBride, a political director of Women Winning, a Minnesota campaign organization that endorsed Ms. Maye Quade, said in an interview on Friday that she was troubled by the scene.“While we were in awe of her strength, it was horrifying to watch a woman go through this vulnerable experience while nobody with the power to do so stepped in to put an end to it,” Ms. McBride said.Ms. Maye Quade, who had been seeking to become the first Black woman and first openly gay woman elected to the State Senate in Minnesota, hasn’t said whether she will run in a primary against Mr. Emmerich in August. The candidates who receive their party’s endorsement during the convention in the spring — marathon proceedings decided by party stalwarts — typically gain an upper hand for the primaries, when nominations are at stake. There is no requirement for candidates to be present while voting takes place on an endorsement, according to the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.The party referred questions on the matter on Friday to local convention officials, who said in a statement that they put the endorsement session for Senate earlier on the schedule at Ms. Maye Quade’s request.“For reasons of fairness, our convention chairs cannot unilaterally close or delay the endorsement process,” the statement said. “If a delegate had wanted to postpone the endorsement, they could have made a motion for postponement, which the convention would have then voted on. No such motion was made.”Created in the 1940s when the Minnesota Democrats merged with the Farmer-Labor Party, the party said it was “committed to ensuring as many people as possible can participate in our convention and endorsement process.”At the end of Ms. Maye Quade’s eight-minute speech, it took another 20 minutes to get through a question-and-answer session and an additional 30 minutes to finish the first round of voting, Ms. McBride said. When it became clear that Mr. Emmerich was leading but had not reached the 60 percent threshold required to clinch the party’s endorsement, Ms. McBride said, Ms. Maye Quade asked to suspend the proceedings and move to a primary.“Erin was expected to grin and bear it, as Black women are so often expected to do in the face of injustice,” Ms. McBride said, adding: “That sends a direct message to women and particularly women of color of where they fall on the priority list.” More

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      Florida Senate Passes Congressional Map Giving G.O.P. a Big Edge

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      The map, proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, would most likely add four Republican districts while eliminating three held by Democrats.Florida Republicans are poised to adopt one of the nation’s most aggressive congressional maps, pressing forward with a proposal from Gov. Ron DeSantis that would most likely add four congressional districts for the party while eliminating three held by Democrats.The map, which the Florida Senate approved by a party-line vote of 24 to 15 on Wednesday during a special session of the Legislature, was put forward by Mr. DeSantis after he vetoed a version approved in March by state legislators that would have added two Republican seats and subtracted one from the Democrats.The new proposal would create 20 seats that favor Republicans and just eight that tilt toward Democrats, meaning that the G.O.P. would be likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Former President Donald J. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.The Florida map would erase some of the gains Democrats have made in this year’s national redistricting process. The 2022 map had been poised to be balanced between the two major parties for the first time in generations, with a nearly equal number of House districts that are expected to lean Democratic and Republican for the first time in more than 50 years.The map would also serve as a high-profile, if possibly temporary, victory for Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s leading figures and has not ruled out challenging Mr. Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. The Florida House is expected to pass the map on Thursday, and Mr. DeSantis is certain to sign it.“I think they are good maps that will be able to be upheld,” said Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator who is the chairman of the state Republican Party.If it is adopted into law, the Florida map would face legal challenges from Democrats, who clashed with Republicans on Tuesday over whether the proposal violated the state’s Constitution and the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“It does appear to be politically motivated, and it does not take seriously the hard-working Black people in the state,” said Rosalind Osgood, a state senator from Broward County in South Florida.Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said that the proposed map complied with the state Constitution “while remaining faithful to the U.S. Constitution and the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.”Some Democrats predicted that the DeSantis map would ultimately not pass legal muster — though any successful challenge would probably not arrive in time for the November elections. In addition to the Florida dispute, Democrats are locked in a court battle over a political gerrymander of their own in New York, where a judge last month invalidated Democratic-drawn maps.The Florida map would end the congressional career of Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat from Jacksonville, by carving up a district that stretches across North Florida to combine Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.It would also eliminate an Orlando district held by Representative Val Demings, a Democrat, and pack Black voters from two districts in Tampa and St. Petersburg into one, creating a second district certain to be won by a Republican. Ms. Demings is vacating her seat to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.If the new map becomes law, Representative Val Demings’s congressional district in Orlando would be eliminated. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Lawson’s district has been held by a Black Democrat since 1993, when former Representative Corrine Brown first took office.Mr. DeSantis’s map-drawer, Alex Kelly, said at a Florida Senate committee hearing on Tuesday that he could not draw a compact majority-Black district based in Jacksonville.“I determined that was not possible to check all those boxes,” he said.But Democrats argued that the map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.“Governor DeSantis is bullying the Legislature into drawing Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage in the congressional map, and he’s doing it at the expense of Black voters in Florida,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. “This blatant gerrymander will not go unchallenged.”Democrats’ objections to the DeSantis map focused in part on a state constitutional amendment enacted by Florida voters in 2010 that set new standards for the redistricting process by requiring compact districts that did not favor one political party. A state court ordered Florida’s entire congressional map to be redrawn before the 2016 elections.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Jackson Confirmation Aside, G.O.P. Sees an Opening With Black Voters

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      With inflation, war and the pandemic looming larger, Democrats who hope that the browbeating of Ketanji Brown Jackson will rally Black voters behind their candidates may be disappointed.The spectacle created by Republican senators with presidential ambitions as they browbeat the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court — after which 47 Republicans voted against her on Thursday — might have seemed like glaring evidence that the G.O.P. had written off the Black vote this November.Far from it. In rising inflation, stratospheric gas prices, lingering frustrations over Covid and new anxieties over the war in Ukraine, Republicans see a fresh opening, after the Obama and Trump eras, to peel away some Black voters who polls show are increasingly disenchanted with the Biden administration.Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans need not win over too many Black voters to affect a handful of races, and dozens of Black Republican House candidates — a record number of them — are reshaping the party’s pitch.If anything, the G.O.P.’s treatment of the Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, was a testimony to the party’s confidence that amid so many more powerful political forces and more consuming objects of public attention, their handling of her confirmation simply didn’t matter much.“I think the Black people that this would turn off weren’t voting for Republicans anyway, no matter what,” said Wesley Hunt, a Black Army veteran and a Republican newcomer to politics who is running for a deep-red Texas House seat.Senate Republican leaders had warned colleagues before the confirmation fight to keep the proceedings civil and cordial, clearly worried that the sight of a phalanx of white Republican inquisitors would turn voters off in an election year. But if Democrats still believe that Judge Jackson’s rough treatment will energize Black voters to come out this November and vote Democratic in big numbers, it appears likely that they will be disappointed.For frustrated voters of all colors who are struggling to pay their bills and fill their tanks, November’s vote may simply be a chance to vote against the party in power.“We are not a monolith,” said Jennifer-Ruth Green, a Black Air Force veteran who is running for Congress in Northwestern Indiana as a Republican. “We see inflation and gas prices. Voters are not stupid.”In Gary, Ind., Roshaun Knowles, 42, a cosmetologist taking a break at the Billco Barber Shop, summed up how the confirmation hearings would play as she considered her vote this fall. She said she had felt despair as an accomplished Black woman was interrogated by white senators who, she believed, lacked Judge Jackson’s intellect and poise.Roshaun Knowles said she had felt despair at the grilling of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by Republican senators but was unhappy with President Biden. “He hasn’t been doing anything,” she said. “What has he done?Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times“To be in a room full of white people asking her questions about where she learned what she learned and what she is capable of — you know, it didn’t sit well with me,” Ms. Knowles said. “She should have been treated as a white man would have been treated,” she added.But, she said, vaccine mandates cost her a job as a property manager for a housing authority after she refused to get the shot. Stimulus checks kept too many people out of the work force. And President Biden? “He hasn’t been doing anything,” she said. “What has he done?”Ms. Knowles said she was leaning toward voting Republican this fall, as she did in 2020, when she voted for Donald J. Trump, after voting for Hillary Clinton four years before and for Barack Obama twice.Republicans on the campaign trail and over the airwaves are pressing the image of a faltering Democratic leadership that has no clue how to handle economic uncertainty, the persistent pandemic and rising crime. When Republican officials are asked about the party’s strategy toward Black voters, they invariably call on the few Black Republican elected officials and candidates to make the pitch. But tellingly, Black Republican candidates such as Ms. Green and John James, who is running for a Michigan House seat, are not advertising their party affiliations, just their biographies — a sign that the G.O.P. brand remains toxic in some corners.And Republican outreach efforts amount to little more than seizing on Black disaffection with Democrats.Paris Dennard, director of Black media affairs for the Republican National Committee, said the party had opened eight community centers nationwide to engage Black voters. Candidates like Mr. Hunt are proof that the party’s message is inspiring Black Republicans to run, he said.But a message focused on Democrats’ shortcomings deprives Black voters of hearing about policies they actually want, said Leah Wright Rigueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.”“It’s an incredibly effective strategy, but it’s also insidious,” said Dr. Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “It only works when there’s that dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.”It does work, however, even with Black voters who during the Obama and Trump years were remarkably united behind the Democratic Party.“I don’t think Biden’s really even in office,” Robert Sanders scoffed as he cut hair in Gary, echoing criticism from the political right about the 79-year-old president. “I think he’s being escorted through office.”The softening of Mr. Biden’s approval among Black voters is a clear warning to Democrats. Approval of the president among Black registered voters slid to 62 percent in March from 83 percent last summer in an NBC News poll and was not affected by the Supreme Court fight, said Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that conducted the survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research.The percentage of Black voters in the poll who said they strongly approved of the president’s performance fell to 28 percent last month, from 46 percent between April and August of last year. And intensity of support predicts turnout in elections.Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who is Black, said polls were picking up a reversion to the days before Mr. Obama energized Black voters positively and Mr. Trump then energized them negatively. Before 2008, he noted, it was normal for 12 percent to 14 percent of the Black electorate to vote Republican.“What is more problematic is the lack of energy levels among younger voters, particularly younger African Americans,” Mr. Belcher said, noting that young voters of color in 2018 had delivered Democrats the House. “It’s a not-excited, disenchanted, frustrated, younger electorate right now, more like the electorate of 2014 and 2010 than 2018 — and that’s disastrous.”Democratic officials say they are responding with Black voter mobilization projects that have started earlier than in previous midterm cycles. Last spring, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hired organizers in five battleground states to focus on key Democratic constituencies. On Thursday, the committee announced a new round of ad purchases with Black news outlets.Chris Taylor, a committee spokesman, said efforts by Republicans to court Black voters were disingenuous given the voting records among those in the party on pandemic relief, criminal justice reform and clean air and water legislation.“Nearly every Republican in Congress opposed our priorities,” said Mr. Taylor, who is Black.Because of gerrymandered district lines, most Republican candidates for the House do not need many — if any — Black voters. But in districts like Indiana’s First, with its narrow Democratic lean and a Republican target on its back, a Republican challenger will need to make inroads with Black voters, or at least hope for soft turnout for Democrats.Mr. Cruz talking with Senator Josh Hawley and Senator Marsha Blackburn during a break in the confirmation hearing for Judge Jackson last month.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJudge Jackson’s rough reception does not appear to be a threat to that hope. Even Black voters who watched the hearings attentively were surprisingly forgiving of her Republican inquisitors.“I don’t think she was treated fairly,” said Greg Fleming, 72, a financial adviser in Gary. “But that’s the way things are in this country. In today’s climate, unfortunately, it’s to be expected.”Like Indiana’s First, Georgia’s Second District still leans Democratic, but if a candidate can chip into its rural Black vote, he has a strong chance. For Jeremy Hunt, an Army veteran and Black candidate running in the Republican primary to challenge Representative Sanford Bishop, a long-serving Democrat who is also Black, the Supreme Court is not part of his calculus.“We can talk about Republicans versus Democrats, but ultimately, that’s not what voters want to hear from us as leaders,” Mr. Hunt said. “There is a huge temptation to get into national-level stuff and make it about what’s going on, you know, on different levels, but a big part of our campaign is keeping it local.”Still, when he talks about what is afflicting local farmers and truckers, Mr. Hunt said, he invariably comes back around to the economy, gas prices and inflation.Black voters were the most likely to say they were personally falling behind because of inflation, according to the NBC News poll. And that is producing anxieties that Republicans are eager to exploit.Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, one of two Black Republicans in the House, said Republicans had nothing to apologize for in the Jackson confirmation process.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesRepresentative Byron Donalds of Florida, one of two Black Republicans in the House, said: “We’ve got rich Black people. We’ve got rich white people. We have poor Black people. We have poor white people. If you’re poor in the United States, you’re feeling the effects of $4.30 gasoline. You’re feeling the effects of home heating oil prices that have gone up 60 percent. You’re feeling the impacts of meat and bread and milk, all going up dramatically.”Mr. Donalds said he had watched most of Judge Jackson’s hearings and had seen nothing that Republicans needed to apologize for.“Never once did they go into her personal life,” he said. “Never once did they go into her personal background. Never once were their accusations about her character.”With Democrats disappointing and Republicans offering a weak alternative, some Black voters said they didn’t know where to turn politically.In Gary, Mr. Fleming said he worried about the rising power of the Democratic left wing. But until more Republicans drop their “conspiracy theories” and extreme comments, he said, they weren’t much of an option.“I mean, they thought everything that happened on Jan. 6 was AOK? That’s crazy,” Mr. Fleming said. “If a Mitt Romney-type Republican ran, I could go for that. But Republicans, they’re on another planet right now. I can’t even call them far right. They’re defying gravity.” More

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      Herschel Walker, the Worst Candidate, Trump-Approved

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      Let’s just be blunt. No one, and I mean not one person, would seriously believe that Herschel Walker, the former football star and current leading contender for the Republican Senate nomination in Georgia, was at the top of his class at the University of Georgia.Yet Walker has claimed just that for years, saying multiple times that he graduated in the top 1 percent of his class.As CNN reported Friday, Walker never graduated from college. He left to play professional football. Furthermore, according to CNN: “A profile of Walker from 1982 in The Christian-Science Monitor and an article in The New York Times said he maintained a B average at the school. Walker himself told The Chicago Tribune in 1985 he maintained a 3.0 before his grades dropped.”But wait, that wasn’t the only problematic boast Walker made about his grades.In his 2008 book about suffering from dissociative identity disorder, Walker says that he grew up as a “fat kid” who stuttered (twin “sins” in his judgment), that his teachers looked through him as if he hadn’t been there and that the older children ridiculed him as “stupid.”But, Walker wrote: “If I’m proud of anything I did in my high school career, it’s what I did in the classroom that I reflect on and relish the most. I did more than just shed the ‘stupid’ label placed on me as a result of my speech impediment. I shed it, erased it and rewrote it with the titles: Beta Club president and class valedictorian.”CNN’s KFile reviewed Walker’s high school yearbooks and coverage of him in local newspapers at the time and could find no evidence to support the claim that he was a high school valedictorian.No one wants to be insensitive about a speech impediment or any other disorder, but exaggerating is exaggerating, and lying is lying. It goes to the character of the man much more than any physical or psychological condition.His consistent record of inflating his academic credentials isn’t the only thing to suggest that he’s highly problematic.He has also been accused by his ex-wife of making multiple threats against her life. In 2005 she secured an order of protection against him.As The Associated Press reported: “When his book was released, she told ABC News that at one point during their marriage, her husband pointed a pistol at her head and said, ‘I’m going to blow your f’ing brains out.’ She filed for divorce in 2001, citing ‘physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.’”Now, after months of not seriously challenging Walker, some Georgia Republicans are waking up to the reality that they may have made a grave mistake and that he is likely to lose if he advances to the general election.And they have only Donald Trump to blame. Walker’s campaign was all Trump’s doing and at Trump’s urging.Raphael Warnock became the first Black senator in Georgia’s history, as well as the first popularly elected Black Democratic senator from the South, because of Black voters, who voted him into office just one day before rioters stormed the Capitol. In fact, Black voters were the majority of the coalition that elected him, according to exit polls — the first time that was the case for any Black senator.The results of Warnock’s race, along with Jon Ossoff’s simultaneous runoff election, tipped the balance of the Senate and sent shock waves through Georgia’s political establishment.Within months, state Republicans were speculating about Walker challenging Warnock in 2022.As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote last summer about what then was still a potential run by Walker: “Herschel Walker hasn’t lived in Georgia for decades. He’s never held public office, doesn’t attend the sort of Republican events that are mainstays on the political calendar and has bypassed the backslapping fund-raising circuit that helps decide winners and losers in the state’s premier races.”But none of those obstacles got in the way. Trump weighed in last March, writing in a statement: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” The statement continued, “He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the N.F.L. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”Trump kept up the pressure. He told the “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” in June that Walker had told him he was going to run, and Trump thought he would. The former president said, “I had dinner with him a week ago. He’s a great guy. He’s a patriot. He’s a very loyal person.”But why? Why Walker? Sure, he was an old Trump friend and ally, but he wasn’t a politician and hadn’t publicly expressed a desire to become one.Well, there were a few reasons, all of them part of a callous racial calculus, one in which Trump is well trained. First and foremost, Walker is Black. To many in the G.O.P., his race blunts the idea that Republicans are appealing to racists, relieves the pressure on Trump supporters for supporting a racist and gives them a shot at winning more of Georgia’s Black voters.Walker could be a tool and a weapon. But no weapon — at least not this weapon — formed by Trump shall prosper.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Will Kathy Hochul Earn Black Voters’ Support?

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      Black political leaders support the governor, but there are signs of a lack of fervor and lingering support for Andrew Cuomo among Black voters.From the moment she took office, Gov. Kathy Hochul set out to shore up her standing with an important constituency.She named Brian A. Benjamin, a Black Democratic state senator from Harlem, as her lieutenant governor, and held a celebratory news conference on 125th Street in Harlem to announce it. She spoke from the pulpits of Black churches around the city, including Abyssinian Baptist Church.The strategy seemed to work: Ms. Hochul, a white moderate from Buffalo, picked up early support from a wide range of Black leaders.Yet nearly seven months into her tenure, some New York Democrats are concerned that she has not been able to use those endorsements to generate much enthusiasm among Black voters, a key voting bloc.Ms. Hochul could win the primary even with a muted showing from Black voters, but if they don’t turn out in November to support her, the race for governor could be tighter, and problems could emerge for other Democrats down the ballot.A Siena College poll released Monday found that if Ms. Hochul’s predecessor, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, entered the primary race, he would lead her among Black voters by 50 percent to 23 percent, although she leads him overall among registered Democrats by eight points, the poll found.But the poll found that if Mr. Cuomo stayed out, Ms. Hochul led a Black candidate, Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, among Black voters by a margin of 39 percent to 17 percent — a reversal from a February Siena poll in which she trailed Mr. Williams.Jefrey Pollock, Ms. Hochul’s pollster, said the governor was still getting familiar with voters in the city, a hurdle faced by all statewide candidates not from New York City.“What you can see from data is that the governor wasn’t known before, and she’s just getting known to voters now,” Mr. Pollock said. Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, is running to Ms. Hochul’s left in the Democratic primary.Seth Wenig/Associated PressBut Mr. Williams predicted that the governor would not draw out the Black vote. “I think the Hochul campaign and administration are really trying to do the basics and wait everyone out,” Mr. Williams said. “That’s not going to excite the base.”Indeed, Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice, said that in recent trips to Western New York and Long Island, he has seen “no Democratic enthusiasm anywhere,” particularly from Black voters.Mr. Foy, who is Black, said that the common perception was that Ms. Hochul had “yet to articulate an agenda for the Black community.”To add to the governor’s difficulties, her lieutenant governor choice, Mr. Benjamin, is now the focus of an investigation by federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. into whether he played a role in an effort to funnel fraudulent campaign contributions to his unsuccessful 2021 campaign for New York City comptroller. He has not been accused of wrongdoing.Jerrel Harvey, a campaign spokesman for Ms. Hochul, said that as New Yorkers “meet her and experience her leadership, the governor’s support grows rapidly, especially in the Black community.“The governor won’t take any community for granted, and will continue meeting voters where they are, to share her vision for New York to have safer streets, stronger schools and to be more affordable for everyone,” he said.Democrats across the country are worried about an “enthusiasm gap” and low turnout in the midterm elections, with no Donald J. Trump on the ballot and public safety emerging as a major issue.Hazel N. Dukes, the president of the New York State chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said she was particularly concerned that the 2022 elections in New York might be an extension of last year’s results in Nassau County, where Republicans were able to flip three major seats in the Long Island suburbs, in part by using changes to the state’s bail laws as a wedge issue. Two Long Island hopefuls for governor, Representative Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, the leading Republican nominee, have focused on Democratic-supported bail reform as the cause of an uptick in violent crime, though there is no statistical evidence to support their contention.“I’m worried about the general election,” Ms. Dukes said. “If Republicans use false narratives about criminal justice, and we don’t turn out like we’re supposed to, that’s how they win.”Ms. Hochul recently proposed changes to the bail law that would give judges more discretion to account for criminal history and potential dangerousness in deciding bail.Speaking to reporters in Albany last week, Ms. Hochul defended her proposals, which she called “a balanced, reasonable approach that continues to respect the rights of the accused.”But participants in a rally in Harlem on Friday criticized the governor for her proposal to change the Raise the Age statute to make it easier for teenagers to be prosecuted in adult criminal court for gun possession. They noted that young Black people would likely be most affected by the shift.State Senator Cordell Cleare of Harlem said her constituents had thought issues like bail reform and Raise the Age were settled.“I want my governor to stand up for my community that has long been marginalized, victimized, overpoliced and unfairly punished,” Ms. Cleare said in an interview. “We don’t want to be political ping-pongs on either side of the net.”A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 5A crowded field. More