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      What Does Eric Adams, Working-Class Champion, Mean for the Democrats?

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      Mr. Adams, who ran a campaign focused on appealing to blue-collar Black and Latino voters, said America does not want “fancy candidates.”He bluntly challenged left-wing leaders in his party over matters of policing and public safety. He campaigned heavily in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, often ignoring Manhattan neighborhoods besides Harlem and Washington Heights. And he branded himself a blue-collar candidate with a keen personal understanding of the challenges and concerns facing working-class New Yorkers of color.With his substantial early lead in the Democratic mayoral primary when votes were counted Tuesday night, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, demonstrated the enduring power of a candidate who can connect to working- and middle-class Black and Latino voters, while also appealing to some white voters with moderate views.Mr. Adams is not yet assured of victory. But if he prevails, it would be a triumph for a campaign that focused more heavily on those constituencies than any other winning New York City mayoral candidate in recent history.As the national Democratic Party navigates debates over identity and ideology, the mayoral primary in the largest city in the United States is highlighting critical questions about which voters make up the party’s base in the Biden era, and who best speaks for them.Barely a year has passed since President Biden clinched the Democratic nomination, defeating several more progressive rivals on the strength of support from Black voters and older moderate voters across the board, and running as a blue-collar candidate himself. But Democrats are now straining to hold together a coalition that includes college-educated liberals and centrists, young left-wing activists and working-class voters of color.“America is saying, we want to have justice and safety and end inequalities,” Mr. Adams declared at a news conference on Thursday, offering his take on the party’s direction. “And we don’t want fancy candidates.”Mr. Adams’s allies and advisers say that from the start, he based his campaign strategy on connecting with working- and middle-class voters of color.“Over the last few cycles, the winners of the mayor’s race have started with a whiter, wealthier base generally, and then expanded out,” said Evan Thies, an Adams spokesman and adviser. Mr. Adams’s campaign, he said, started “with low-income, middle-income, Black, Latino, immigrant communities, and then reached into middle-income communities.”Mr. Adams would be New York’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Mr. Dinkins, who described the city as a “gorgeous mosaic,” was more focused than Mr. Adams on trying to win over liberal white voters.Mr. Adams was the first choice of about 32 percent of New York Democrats who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and a progressive favorite, pulled in about 22 percent of that vote. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who touted her managerial experience, got 19.5 percent.Under the city’s new ranked-choice system, in which voters could rank up to five candidates, the Democratic nominee will now be determined through a process of elimination. Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley could ultimately surpass Mr. Adams, although that appears to be an uphill battle, and a final winner may not be determined for weeks.Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, is in third place after the initial, Primary Day counting of votes.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIf Mr. Adams does win, it will be partly because he had major institutional advantages.He was well financed and spent heavily on advertising. He received the support of several of the city’s most influential labor unions, which represent many Black and Latino New Yorkers. His name was also well known after years in city politics, including as a state senator.And although some of the most prominent members of New York’s congressional delegation supported Ms. Wiley as their first choice, Mr. Adams landed other important endorsements, including those of the Queens and Bronx borough presidents and Representative Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican-American member of Congress, and a powerful figure in Washington Heights.Just as importantly, in his supporters’ eyes, Mr. Adams was perceived as having credibility on what emerged as the most consequential, and divisive, issue in the race: public safety.Mr. Adams, who experienced economic hardship as a child and has said he was once beaten by police officers, grew up to join the Police Department, rising to captain. Critics within the department saw him as something of a rabble-rouser, while many progressive voters now think his answers to complex problems too often involve an emphasis on law enforcement.But to some voters, he long ago cemented a reputation as someone who challenged misconduct from within the system, giving him authority to talk about bringing down crime.“He was in the police force, he knows what they represent,” said Gloria Dees, 63, a Brooklyn resident who voted for Mr. Adams and described being deeply concerned about both rising crime and police violence against people of color. “You have to understand something in order to make it work better.”Polls this spring showed public safety increasingly becoming the most important issue to Democratic voters amid random subway attacks, a spate of bias crimes and a spike in shootings. On the Sunday before the primary, Mr. Adams’s campaign staff said that a volunteer had been stabbed in the Bronx.“Being an ex-cop, being able to have safety and justice at the same time, was a message that resonated with folks in the Bronx,” said Assemblywoman Karines Reyes, a Democrat who represents parts of the borough and who did not endorse anyone in the race. Mr. Adams won the Bronx overwhelmingly in the first vote tally. “They’re looking for somebody to address the crime.”Voters cast ballots in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood on Primary Day. Public safety emerged as the dominant issue in the race. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe rate of violent crime in the city is far below where it was decades ago, but shootings have been up in some neighborhoods, and among older voters especially, there is a visceral fear of returning to the “bad old days.”Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president and a supporter of Mr. Adams, cited the recent fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy in the Rockaways as something that hit home for many people in the area.“We’re nowhere near where we were in the ’80s or ’70s,” he said. But, he added, “when you see a shooting in front of you, no one cares about statistics.”Interviews on Thursday with voters on either side of Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway illustrated vividly Mr. Adams’s appeal and limitations. In parts of Crown Heights, the parkway was a physical dividing line, early results show, between voters who went for Ms. Wiley and those who preferred Mr. Adams.Among older, working-class voters of color who live south of the parkway, Mr. Adams held a commanding lead. “He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” said one, Janice Brathwaite, 66, who is disabled and said she had voted for Mr. Adams.“He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” Janice Brathwaite, who lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said of Mr. Adams. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMs. Brathwaite ruled out Ms. Wiley after hearing her plans for overhauling the Police Department, including a reallocation of $1 billion from the police budget to social service programs and anti-violence measures.“She is someone who is against the policeman who is protecting me, making sure nobody is shooting me,” Ms. Brathwaite said.Ms. Wiley has said there are times when armed officers are needed, but she has also argued that in some instances, mental health experts can halt crime more effectively.That approach appealed to Allison Behringer, 31, an audio journalist and podcast producer who lives north of the parkway, where Mr. Adams’s challenges were on display among some of the young professionals who live in the area.“She was the best progressive candidate,” Ms. Behringer said of Ms. Wiley, whom she ranked as her first choice. “She talked about reimagining what public safety is, that really resonated with me.”Ms. Behringer alluded to concerns about ethical issues that have been raised about Mr. Adams. He has faced scrutiny over his taxes, real estate holdings, fund-raising practices and residency.A fresh round of voting results to be released on Tuesday will provide further clarity about the race. They may show whether those issues hurt Mr. Adams among some highly engaged voters in Manhattan and elsewhere. The new results could also indicate whether Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia had sufficiently broad appeal to cut into his lead.As in Brooklyn, there was a clear geographic divide among voters in Manhattan: East 96th Street, with those who ranked Ms. Garcia first mostly to the south, and those who favored Mr. Adams or Ms. Wiley further uptown.Ms. Garcia, a relatively moderate technocrat who was endorsed by The New York Times’s editorial board, among others, won Manhattan handily. Like Ms. Wiley, she hopes to beat Mr. Adams by being many voters’ second choice, and with the benefit of absentee votes that have not been counted.Maya Wiley, center, ranked second in first-choice votes in the initial count of in-person ballots.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesIn Harlem one afternoon this month, Carmen Flores had just cast her early vote for Mr. Adams when she came across one of his rallies. She said she found his trajectory inspiring.“He’s coming from the bottom up,” she said, adding, “He’s been in every facet of life.”Whatever the final vote tally, Democratic strategists caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a post-pandemic, municipal election held in June. If Mr. Adams becomes mayor, as the Democratic nominee almost certainly will, progressive leaders can still point to signs of strength in other city races and elsewhere in the state.Asked about the mayor’s race, Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the left-wing organization Justice Democrats, said, “fear-mongering works when crime is rising,” while noting that several left-wing candidates in the city were leading their races. He also argued that some people who supported Mr. Adams could have done so for reasons that were not ideological.“There might be some voters who voted for Eric Adams based on his policy platform,” Mr. Shahid said. “But there are probably many more voters who voted for Eric Adams based on how they felt about him. It’s often whether they identify with a candidate.”Nate Schweber contributed reporting. More

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      Progressives’ Urgent Question: How to Win Over Voters of Color

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      A yearslong challenge for the left was starkly illustrated this week as its hopes faded in the New York mayor’s race.Can progressives win broad numbers of the Black and brown voters they say their policies will benefit most?That provocative question is one that a lot of Democrats find themselves asking after seeing the early results from New York City’s mayoral primary this past week.In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of “Black and brown babies” and were being pushed by “a lot of young, white, affluent people.” A retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. Though the official winner may not be known for weeks because of the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams holds a commanding edge in the race that will be difficult for his rivals to overcome.His appeal adds evidence to an emerging trend in Democratic politics: a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.“Black people talk about politics in more practical and everyday terms,” said Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who studies the political views of Black people. “What makes more sense for people who are often distrustful of broad political claims is something that’s more in the middle.”He added: “The median Black voter is not A.O.C. and is actually closer to Eric Adams.”In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders struggled to win over voters of color. Four years later, Black voters helped lift President Biden to victory in the Democratic primary, forming the backbone of the coalition that helped him defeat liberal rivals including Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren.In the general election, Donald J. Trump made gains with nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos, as Democrats saw a drop-off in support that cost the party key congressional seats, according to a postelection autopsy by Democratic interest groups. In the 2020 election, Mr. Trump made larger gains among all Black and Latino voters than he did among white voters without a college degree, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.On issues beyond criminal justice, data indicates that Black and Latino voters are less likely to identify as liberal than white voters. An analysis by Gallup found that the share of white Democrats who identify as liberal had risen by 20 percentage points since the early 2000s. Over the same period, the polling firm found a nine-point rise in liberal identification among Latino Democrats and an eight-point increase among Black Democrats.As votes were being tabulated in New York, Mr. Adams tried to capitalize on that tension between progressives and more moderate voters of color, casting himself as the future of Democratic politics and his campaign as a template for the party.“I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said at his first news conference after primary night. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”Extrapolating national trends from the idiosyncratic politics of New York is a bit like ordering a bagel with schmear in Des Moines. You’ll probably get a piece of bread, but the similarities may end there.Liberal activists argue that they’ve made important breakthroughs among nonwhite voters in recent years, pointing to Mr. Sanders’s gains among Latinos and younger voters of color over the course of his two presidential bids. Progressive congressional candidates, like the members of the so-called Squad, have won several heavily Democratic House districts with meaningful support from nonwhite voters.And of course, Black and Latino voters, like any demographic group, are hardly a monolith. Younger voters and those with college degrees are more likely to trend left than their older parents.Still, the traction some more conservative Democratic candidates like Mr. Adams have gained in Black and Latino communities threatens to undercut a central tenet of the party’s political thinking for decades: demographics as destiny.For years, Democrats have argued that as the country grew more diverse and more urban, their party would be able to marshal a near-permanent majority with a rising coalition of voters of color. By turning out that base, Democrats could win without needing to appeal affluent suburbanites, who are traditionally more moderate on fiscal issues, or white working-class voters, who tend to hold more conservative views on race and immigration.But a growing body of evidence indicates that large numbers of Black and Latino voters may simply take a more centrist view on the very issues — race and criminal justice — that progressives assumed would rally voters of color to their side.The New York mayoral primary provided a particularly interesting test case of that kind of thinking. As crime and gun violence rise in New York, polls showed that crime and public safety were the most important issues to voters in the mayoral race.The limited public polling available showed nuanced opinions among voters of color on policing. A poll conducted for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that just 17 percent of Black voters and 18 percent of Latinos wanted to decrease the number of police officers in their neighborhoods. But 62 percent of Black voters and 49 percent of Latino voters said they supported “defunding” the New York Police Department and spending the money on social workers instead, the poll found.Other surveys found that Black and Latino voters were more likely than white voters to say that the number of uniformed police officers should be increased in the subways and that they felt unsafe from crime in their neighborhoods. Fears of violent crime led some leaders in predominantly Black neighborhoods to reject efforts to defund the police.Progressive activists who backed Maya Wiley, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, accused Mr. Adams of “fear-mongering” over rising crime rates in the city.“Voters were offered a false dichotomy between justice and public safety by the Adams rhetoric,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party. “We worked hard to dismantle that framework, but that dog-whistling does strike the real fear that people have when our streets are increasingly unsafe. It’s a very human experience.”Yet Mr. Adams’s personal history may offer particular appeal to voters with complicated views on criminal justice. A former police officer, he built his political brand on criticizing the police, speaking out against police brutality, and, later, the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. After years in New York politics, he’s a member of the party establishment, enjoying the advantages of name recognition and decades-old relationships with community leaders.It’s the kind of biographical narrative likely to appeal to voters more likely to have intimate personal experiences with policing, who tend to live in neighborhoods that may have more crime but where people are also are more likely to face violence or abuse from officers.Some scholars and strategists argue that Black and Latino voters are more likely to center their political beliefs on those kinds of experiences in their own lives, taking a pragmatic approach to politics that’s rooted less in ideology and more in a historical distrust of government and the ability of politicians to deliver on sweeping promises.“These standard ways of thinking about ideology fall apart for Black Americans,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The idea of liberalism and conservatism just falls to the wayside.”He added, “It’s just not the language Black folks are using to organize their politics.”Nate Cohn contributed reporting. 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      Justice Dept. Sues Georgia Over Voting Restrictions Law

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      The lawsuit came after Republicans blocked ambitious federal legislation this week to protect voting rights.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Georgia on Friday over a sweeping voting law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature, the first significant move by the Biden administration to challenge state-level ballot restrictions enacted since the 2020 election.“The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a news conference at the Justice Department. “They are the rights from which all other rights ultimately flow.”The complaint accuses the Georgia law of effectively discriminating against Black voters and seeks to show that state lawmakers intended to violate their rights. It says that several of the law’s provisions “were passed with a discriminatory purpose,” Kristen Clarke, the head of the department’s civil rights division, said at the news conference.The lawsuit, particularly its attempt to prove lawmakers’ intent, is among the most aggressive efforts to expand or preserve voter protections in years. The Supreme Court in 2013 had overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had allowed the Justice Department to stop states from passing laws viewed as facilitating voter discrimination.It comes days after congressional Republicans blocked the most ambitious federal voting rights legislation in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ efforts to preserve voting rights. President Biden and Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to steer federal voting rights legislation into law and to escalate pressure on states and Republicans, with Mr. Biden planning speeches in key states warning against a threat to the democratic process he has compared to Jim Crow.The complaint also shows that the Biden administration intends to invoke the remaining tools the Justice Department has to aggressively fight state actions that it sees as potentially disenfranchising minority voters. “The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said on Friday in a news conference at the Justice Department on Friday.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images“This lawsuit is the first of many steps we are taking to ensure that all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted and that every voter has access to accurate information,” Mr. Garland said, calling on Congress to give the department more help.The Justice Department is also moving to stem increased threats to election officials and poll workers, he said, including creating a task force to investigate and prosecute such cases.The voting lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, will almost certainly take years to resolve, while Republican-led state legislatures continue to seek new voting restrictions.Republicans in Georgia cast the suit as political. “The D.O.J. lawsuit announced today is legally and constitutionally dead wrong,” Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said on Friday in a news conference in Savannah, Ga. “Their false and baseless accusations are quite honestly disgusting,”Georgia was the center of President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong effort to overturn the election results. He seized on false conspiracy theories about the outcome there, insisting falsely that it was rife with fraud even as three recounts and audits — including one conducted by hand — reaffirmed the tally.Mr. Kemp, who is trying to stave off a Republican primary challenger after refusing to acquiesce to Mr. Trump’s demands to overturn the election results, tried to use the lawsuit to animate the Republican base.“They are coming for you next,” he said. “They’re coming for your state, your ballgame, your election laws, your business and your way of life.”Some voting rights experts expressed confidence in the Justice Department’s chances of rolling back Georgia’s voting restrictions, noting its strong record on cases that focus on lawmakers’ intent.“When the Department of Justice undertakes a case of this nature, it’s done its homework and is familiar with facts that are not even usually publicly reported,” said Chad Dunn, the legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. “So I believe when the Department of Justice brings a case like this, it has what it needs to meet its evidentiary burden.”But others expressed caution, pointing to the current conservative makeup of the federal judiciary.“It will be an uphill battle,” said Allison Riggs, the director of the voting rights program at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “But I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s a no-go because I think the Georgia bill was bad and there is less justification than ever before for some of these changes.”Passed in March, the Georgia law ushered in a raft of restrictions to voting access and gave the state legislature more power over election administration. It sought to place strict constraints on ballot drop boxes, bar election officials from sending absentee ballot applications to voters, reduce the time to request absentee ballots and add identification requirements for voting by mail.A ballot recount of Fulton County in Atlanta in November. President Donald J. Trump seized on numerous false conspiracy theories about the election results in Georgia.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIt followed an election in which Georgia, a once reliably conservative state, turned blue for the second time in 40 years in the presidential race and in runoffs that flipped its Senate seats from Republican to Democratic. The law changed elements of voting that had contributed to those Democratic victories: All were close victories attributable in part to Black voter turnout and the state’s voting options. The law has an outsize effect on Black voters, who make up about one-third of Georgia’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.“These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population in Georgia continues to steadily increase, and after a historic election that saw record voter turnout across the state, particularly for absentee voting, which Black voters are now more likely to use than white voters,” Ms. Clarke said.Critics denounced the law as rooted in Mr. Trump’s falsehoods and accused state Republicans of seeking to undo the Democratic wave in Georgia. Mr. Biden called it an “un-American” attack on voter rights that amounted to “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and had promised the Justice Department would examine it.Democrats in Washington are struggling to find an effective strategy for countering laws like Georgia’s that are advancing this year through more than a dozen Republican-led state legislatures. Party activists and policymakers have mostly pinned their hopes on narrow majorities in Congress, where Democratic leaders have insisted they will work through the summer to try to mass a meaningful expansion of voting rights and protections against election subversion tactics by partisan state officials.Democrats have framed the battle as existential, and progressives are plotting a pressure campaign this summer to try to persuade senators to eliminate the legislative filibuster to allow them to act without Republican support. In the meantime, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, plans to take her influential Rules Committee to Georgia in the coming weeks to convene a field hearing homing in on criticism of the new law there.A rally in Washington this week demanding the passage of ambitious federal voting rights legislation, known as the For the People Act. Republicans used the filibuster to block the measure.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThis fall, lawmakers also plan to push to pass federal legislation to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. It would reinstate the provision struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, which requires states with a history of discrimination to clear any voting changes with the Justice Department. The bill is likely to face opposition by congressional Republicans, who argue that discrimination is no longer a factor in voting..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The eventual resolution of the Justice Department lawsuit will likely also affect state lawmakers’ future attempts to pass new voting laws.“State legislatures may well take their cue based on what happens,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer.Mr. Greenbaum added that a wave of voter identification laws followed a Supreme Court decision in 2008 that upheld new identification requirements in Indiana. But while that law withstood a legal challenge, he said, similar efforts in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas initially wilted in court.The lawsuit reflects a Justice Department effort to push back on voter restrictions. It began in the spring under Mr. Garland; the associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta; and Pamela Karlan, who ran the civil rights division until Ms. Clarke was confirmed last month and is now the No. 2 official in that office.Mr. Garland also announced that the division was “taking proactive measures to help states understand federal law and best practices,” and that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, will lead the task force aimed at protecting election workers.“Election officials must be permitted to do their jobs free from improper partisan influence, physical threats or any other conduct designed to intimidate,” she wrote in a memo to federal prosecutors and the F.B.I.According to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than 272,000 Georgians do not have on file with state election officials the kind of identification to vote that the new law requires. More than 55 percent of them are Black, while Black voters make up only about a third of the voting-age population in Georgia.The law also banned mobile voter units and put stricter requirements on provisional ballots, which are votes cast in person when there are open questions about a voter’s eligibility. The ballot ensures that if the questions are resolved, the vote can still be counted.Any provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct in Georgia before 5 p.m. on Election Day now requires the voter to instead travel to the correct one or risk being disenfranchised. Showing up at the wrong precinct was by far the most common reason for voting provisionally in 2020 in Georgia, accounting for about 44 percent of provisional ballots, according to the office of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state. Of the 11,120 provisional ballots counted in the presidential election, Mr. Biden won 64 percent and Mr. Trump 34 percent.And in a section that Democrats, civil rights groups and voting rights groups described as simply cruel, the new law banned handing out food and water to voters waiting in line. Georgia has for years been notorious for its exceptionally long lines on Election Day, especially in communities of color. More

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      Eric Adams Promises to ‘Show America How to Run a City’

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      Mr. Adams, who is leading in the mayoral primary, laid out a middle road between progressive and conservative approaches to policing.Two days after Eric Adams emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, he made it clear that he would revamp New York’s approach to dealing with crime and suggested that other big cities and the national Democratic Party would be wise to follow suit.Speaking in the tones of a mayor-elect, Mr. Adams laid out a middle road between progressives and conservatives: Fight racism in policing, but step back from a progressive movement that has seen cities slash police budgets, ban police chokeholds and allow more people charged with crimes to be released without bail.On gun control, he called for changing the national focus from assault rifles — which capture attention for their use in mass shootings, especially in suburban schools — to handguns. They are the main weapons in shootings in cities from New York to Atlanta and Detroit, he said, but because most of the victims, like most of the shooters, are “Black and brown, we’ve decided it’s not an issue.”“If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections, and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference outside Brooklyn Borough Hall.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holds a commanding lead in the race for the Democratic nomination; after a count of most ballots cast in person, he had nearly 32 percent of first-place votes. He led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by nine points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12 points.The final outcome awaits the city’s new system of ranked-choice voting, where voters select as many as five candidates in order of preference. Thousands of votes will be shifted among the candidates before a final winner is declared. Tens of thousands of absentee ballots must also be counted, and the entire process may take until July 12.But Mr. Adams spent Thursday on a semi-victory lap, taking a bike ride across Brooklyn and using a series of television interviews to lay out his vision for New York and beyond.“I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said to cheers from several Black civil servants who were on the way to work in Downtown Brooklyn, and to friendly horn toots from a passing city bus. “I’m going to show America how to run a city.”Much of Mr. Adams’s campaign has been centered on public safety, and he continued to focus on that theme on Thursday.He said he planned to choose a woman as police commissioner, adding that he had already talked to three candidates. He said he would judge candidates by “character” and by their willingness to “create new incentives” for precinct commanders, to promote not based on how many arrests they make, but “how many crimes they prevent.”He urged people to consider what he called “shades of gray” on several contentious policing issues, including a policy change last year in New York that barred judges, in most cases, from requiring cash bail payments. That let more people charged with crimes go free until trial.The current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, has blamed the city’s spike in violent crime on that shift, without concrete evidence. Mr. Adams said on MSNBC that while some judges have kept people needlessly behind bars, “too many people are being released that are dangerous.”With a first-time firearms-possession arrest, he said, there may be a way to “put this person on the right pathway” without jail, but someone with several such arrests needs to do prison time, he said.Mr. Adams, a former police captain, also took a nuanced position on police chokeholds; a City Council bill banning the use of the practice was recently overturned in State Supreme Court because the wording of the legislation was vague, the court found.He said that he was opposed to the use of chokeholds because of cases of people being killed by police using the tactic. But he said the City Council bill banning the practice was “not realistic” because it did not take into account the times when an officer might be “fighting for life and death” or to protect civilians.“I know what it is to try to wrestle a knife out of someone’s hand,” said Mr. Adams, adding that he was in favor of revising the law.Even as he rejected some progressive-branded policies, Mr. Adams also embraced some ideas popular with the young, multiracial constituency that supported candidates like Ms. Wiley and Dianne Morales and their call for using strategies outside policing, like improving mental health and social services, to prevent crimes.“We need to change the ecosystem of public safety,” he said, with layered strategies of “prevention, a long-term plan and an intervention” to deal with the current spike in crime. He made it clear that he believed that he could marry the two ideals of safety and ensuring social justice.“America is saying, we want to have justice, and safety, and end inequality,” he said. Mr. Adams acknowledged that that message alone was not enough to win the votes of a majority of New Yorkers; even though he held a significant lead, nearly 70 percent of voters ranked other candidates as their first choice. Still, in four of the city’s five boroughs, he collected the most in-person votes, trailing Ms. Garcia only in Manhattan.Mr. Adams said the discrepancy showed that voters in wealthier, whiter districts saw the public safety crisis through a different lens.“It’s unfortunate that I think a numerical minority that live, basically, they live in safe spaces, don’t understand what’s happening in this city,” Mr. Adams said. If elected mayor, Mr. Adams will no doubt face challenges from the City Council, which is facing a complete overhaul next year: All 51 seats are up for election, and a new officeholder is guaranteed in 32 of them. The turnover is expected to shift the Council, which already favored more aggressive policing reform, even more to the left. “It’s not going to be a repeat of the Giuliani years,” said Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The City Council is not going to just say whatever you say.”The mayoral race is not over. Both Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia believe they have paths to victory. Ms. Garcia’s campaign shared a memo saying they expected her to cut into Mr. Adams’s lead after the absentee ballots — slightly more than 100,000 had been received from Democratic voters — are counted. Many of those received by the Board of Elections have come from areas like Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Ms. Garcia did well.Ms. Wiley’s advisers said they expect her to outperform Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia in second- and third-choice votes. All three candidates have said that they support ranked-choice voting and will respect the outcome, including Mr. Adams, who has retreated from his and allies’ earlier suggestion that his rivals’ ranked-choice campaign tactics were an effort to suppress Black and Latino votes. More

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      How India Walton Pulled It Off in the Buffalo Mayoral Primary

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      Ms. Walton, 38, a democratic socialist who has never held political office, defeated Byron Brown, a four-term incumbent.India B. Walton knew her bid to unseat the entrenched 16-year mayor of Buffalo was a long shot.A registered nurse and community activist, Ms. Walton’s life was defined by hardship: a teenage single mother at the age of 14, a high school dropout, resident of a group home and a victim of domestic violence.A self-described democratic socialist, Ms. Walton, 38, has never held political office, and she was challenging Mayor Byron Brown, 62, who was seeking a fifth term, had served as chair of the state Democratic Party and was once was mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Few people thought she could win. Mr. Brown mostly tried to ignore her campaign.But on Tuesday, Ms. Walton defeated Mr. Brown in the city’s Democratic primary, making it almost certain that she will become not only the first woman elected mayor in New York State’s second-largest city, but also the first socialist at the helm of a large American city in decades.Her upset on Wednesday shocked Buffalo and the nation’s Democratic establishment as most of the political world was more intensely focused on the initial results of the still-undecided mayoral primary in New York City. Her win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.If Ms. Walton wins in the general election in November — a likely result in a city that leans heavily Democratic — she would join the growing ranks of Black female mayors elected to lead other major U.S. cities, including Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Kim Janey in Boston and London Breed in San Francisco.“I don’t think reality has completely sunk in yet,” Ms. Walton said on Wednesday in a phone interview shortly after receiving a congratulatory call from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.“I’m India from down the way, little poor Black girl who, statistically speaking, shouldn’t have amounted to much, yet here I am,” she added. “This is proof that Black women and women belong everywhere in positions of power and positions of leadership, and I’m just super-excited.”Ms. Walton, whose campaign was backed by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, said she preferred not to get caught up in the semantics of labels — describing her ideology as focused on “putting people first.”The last time a socialist was the mayor of a large American city was 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. And it was more than a century ago when a socialist won a mayoral race in New York: In 1911, George R. Lunn, of the Socialist Party of America, was elected mayor of Schenectady, according to Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant.While rare, socialist mayors are not unheard-of: Bernie Sanders took office in 1981 as mayor of Burlington, Vt., a city one-sixth the size of Buffalo, before being elected to Congress nearly a decade later.Ms. Walton ran an unabashedly progressive campaign in a Democratic city of about 250,000 people — about 37 percent of them Black — that had elected mostly white men as mayors for nearly two centuries. (Mr. Brown became the city’s first Black mayor in 2006.)She said she supported implementing rent control protections. She pledged to declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. And she vowed to reform the city’s Police Department, arguing in favor of an independent civilian oversight board and changing the way police officers respond to mental health calls.“Our police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and crime is also up, so something is not working,” she said.There were a number of factors that both Ms. Walton’s supporters and critics agree helped catapult her to victory: Turnout among Democratic voters in Buffalo was very low, about 20 percent, and Ms. Walton raised money and organized effectively to build a multiracial coalition, including Black voters that would have typically voted for Mr. Brown.Mr. Brown’s actions suggested that he did not take Ms. Walton’s challenge seriously. He refused to debate her — “Maybe he believed pretending I didn’t exist was going to make the race go away,” Ms. Walton said — and he did not campaign vigorously, failing to fund-raise as aggressively as he had in previous primaries or spend on ad buys until late in the race.“I think it was almost a perfect storm that was working against the mayor in this case, but it was brought about by his nonchalance in this race,” said Len Lenihan, the former Erie County Democratic chairman.On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the state’s Democratic Party and is a longtime ally of Mr. Brown — he picked him to chair the state party in 2016 — seemed to agree with that analysis.“His campaign strategy, as I understand it, was to avoid engaging in a campaign,” Mr. Cuomo said during a Manhattan news conference, adding, “We’ve seen that movie before.”The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday after all the in-person votes had been counted and Ms. Walton led by seven percentage points. Mr. Brown refused to immediately concede on Tuesday night, saying absentee ballots still needed to be counted; his campaign did not make him available for an interview on Wednesday.But Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party, said he had spoken to Mr. Brown on Wednesday and that the mayor may be considering a write-in campaign in the November general election. Mr. Zellner, however, said he informed Mr. Brown that he had pledged his support to Ms. Walton.Under Mr. Brown, Buffalo, in western New York, has undergone a resurgence in recent years with the construction of major projects in the downtown area. But the city’s poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and its unemployment rate, while improving, has not fully recovered to prepandemic levels.Indeed, there was a sense among some residents who voted for Ms. Walton that low-income communities were not reaping the benefits of downtown development.“Buffalo is super-stagnant,” said Anthony Henry, 29, a musician and student. “We try to talk like there’s a lot of progress going on, with recent developments along the waterfront, but nothing has moved.”That stagnation included Mr. Brown, some voters said. “I’m a firm believer that people shouldn’t be in power too long, we need to have fluidity in government,” said George Olmsted, 59, a middle-school teacher. “A lot of people throw this word ‘socialism’ out there like a weapon, but hello, we have Social Security, we have public-funded education in America.”Upstate New York has large swaths of rural and conservative areas, but many of its cities are reliable Democratic strongholds with large minority communities that left-wing activists see as fertile ground to replicate the upsets they have staged downstate. So far, democratic socialists have picked up seats in the House, the State Legislature and the New York City Council, but Ms. Walton’s win would mark the first time a D.S.A.-backed candidate won a citywide election in New York.Ms. Walton’s win was also buttressed by extensive support from the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed Mr. Brown. The party helped her campaign set up an online fund-raising operation, a large field program with hundreds of volunteers and a text message and phone bank operation that made 19,000 calls on the night before the election — in a contest where fewer than 25,000 voters cast ballots.She proved to be a formidable fund-raiser, garnering more than $150,000 in campaign contributions, a respectable haul for a first-time candidate who had little name recognition at the beginning of the race.Charlie Blaettler, the elections director at the statewide Working Families Party, said that Ms. Walton’s deep relationships in the community made her the right candidate to run against an entrenched incumbent.“This race is a testament to India as a person and the moral clarity with which she speaks,” Mr. Blaettler said. “It shows how important it is for the left to run people who are not just saying the right things, but who have been there for years, doing the work, organizing on the ground.”Ms. Walton made a name for herself as the executive director of a community land trust in a neighborhood of the low-income East Side near downtown Buffalo that has seen an influx in development, leading to a sense among African-Americans that their community was threatened by gentrification.As the middle child to a single mother, Ms. Walton looked after her younger siblings growing up. At 14, she became pregnant and went to live at a group home for young mothers for two years before moving with her young son to her own apartment.She later got married and, at 19, gave birth to twin boys who were born prematurely and had to spend six months in the hospital. That experience inspired Ms. Walton to become a nurse before becoming a community leader and organizer.“I’ve gone through a lot of challenges, from being a teen single mother to overcoming domestic violence. I believe that every challenge that I have faced in life has prepared me to be able to reach back and help someone else,” Ms. Walton said. “This campaign is really centered on the principle of lifting as we climb.”Ms. Walton is an organizer for activist groups that supported the state’s bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. Last summer, she gained exposure marching against police brutality in the protests following George Floyd’s death.She ultimately decided to run, she said, because Mr. Brown had failed to implement meaningful reforms at the Buffalo Police Department and because of what she saw as his poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.“It was, like, why not?” she said. “Someone has to do it.”Michael D. Regan contributed reporting. More

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      Policing and the New York Mayoral Race

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

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      Major Moments From the Final Democratic Mayoral Debate

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Thursday. Weather: Sunny again, with a high close to 80. Alternate-side parking: In effect through tomorrow. Suspended on Saturday for Juneteenth. WNBC-TV and NYC Campaign Finance BoardFive days of campaigning left.With Tuesday’s primary fast approaching, Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City sparred over matters of public safety, schooling and homelessness last night as they shared their closing arguments in the final debate before the vote closes.The early voting period lasts through Sunday, and the ranked-choice system has injected a large degree of unpredictability into the race. Still, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, remains a consistent front-runner in the sparse available polling.[Read more about the debate and the candidates’ visions for New York.]Here are a few of the standout moments:Attacks flew over an endorsementThis week, Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, received the endorsement of the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents police captains. When asked at the debate to explain why he was the candidate best equipped to tackle a rise in shootings, Mr. Yang pointed to the endorsement.“The people you should ask about this are Eric’s former colleagues in the police captains’ union,” Mr. Yang said.Mr. Adams tried to dismiss the endorsement, suggesting that he had not even asked for it. Mr. Yang accused him of lying.The discussion about homelessness became heatedMr. Yang sounded alarms around matters of mental health and homelessness, saying that the issues were impeding the city’s recovery and that homeless people needed to be introduced to a “better environment.” He said he would rebuild “the stock of psych beds in our city.”Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, shot back: “That is the greatest non-answer I’ve ever heard,” he said, discussing a need to create tens of thousands of units of “truly affordable housing.”‘The worst idea you’ve heard from another candidate?’The question encouraged contenders to sling a little mud, and Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams again targeted each other. Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, ripped the “defund the police” movement. Maya Wiley challenged Mr. Adams on policing.“The worst idea I’ve ever heard is bringing back stop and frisk and the anti-crime unit from Eric Adams,” said Ms. Wiley, a civil rights lawyer. “Which, one, is racist; two, is unconstitutional; and, three, didn’t stop any crime; and, four, it will not happen in a Maya Wiley administration.”Mr. Adams responded that, if he was elected, the abuses of stop and frisk would not return.From The TimesMaya Wiley Takes Credit for Daniel Pantaleo’s Firing. Is That Justified?Barred From Her Own Home: How a Tool for Fighting Domestic Abuse FailsWhy New York Progressives Are Pinning Their Hopes on the City CouncilGoogle to Open Physical Store in New YorkNew York City Gets Another Major Marathon, in BrooklynSummer is here and New York City is reopening. Stay up to date on the best things to do, see and eat this season. Take a look at our latest newsletter on upcoming Juneteenth celebrations, and sign up here.Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingHow one after-school program in Brooklyn transformed into a neighborhood support system during the pandemic. [Chalkbeat New York]The mayor announced that a parade next month would be held in recognition of essential workers during the pandemic. But one group was disappointed not to be mentioned. [Gothamist]The annual Queens World Film Festival is returning to the borough next week. Here are more details on what it will look like. [QNS]And finally: Renaming 16 parks for Black historyA Black feminist writer from Harlem. The first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. An actress and singer who lived in Manhattan and broke ground for Black performers..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}New York City officials announced on Wednesday that 16 parks across the five boroughs would be named for those figures and other Black leaders who made significant contributions in areas from education and entertainment to civil rights and community relations.“Our goal is to represent the culture and diversity of New York City,” the city’s parks commissioner, Mitchell J. Silver, said at a news conference at Mullaly Park in the Bronx. The roughly 15-acre park in the Concourse neighborhood of the borough was a focus of local activism as protests arose to push for officials to change its title, citing concerns about the record of its namesake, who published attacks on the Emancipation Proclamation.“For years, the community has expressed discontent and a desire to rename this beloved green space,” Mr. Silver said. A new name that honors the Rev. Wendell Foster, the first Black elected city official in the Bronx, will be adopted in September 2022, he said.The move comes amid a larger push to change some names of monuments and landmarks in New York and elsewhere, sometimes to leave behind references to figures with racist pasts and at other times to honor Black New Yorkers. Several top Democratic mayoral candidates have suggested they would support renaming sites including streets named for slaveholders.As for park spaces, those that will take on new names include the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn (changing to Lena Horne Bandshell); Hell’s Kitchen Park in Manhattan (to become Lorraine Hansberry Park); and St. Albans Oval in Queens (to be renamed Musicians Oval in honor of influential Black jazz musicians).It’s Thursday — get outside.Metropolitan Diary: Waiting for Denzel Dear Diary:My mother loves Denzel Washington. So it was only natural that we would go see him in the “The Iceman Cometh” when she visited a few years ago.My legs were stiff and my mouth was dry after the four-hour production ended, and I was ready to go home. But my mother loves Denzel Washington. So we waited outside the stage door for the cast to emerge.My mother was easily the oldest person there, but she was grinning like a teenager about to meet her hero.“Do you have a pen?” she asked me nervously.“These actors always carry pens,” I said with confidence. “Don’t worry.”Soon, though, I was frantically asking everyone around us for a pen while my mother continued to wait for the star to emerge.When I got back to where she was standing, I overheard her chatting with other members of the cast.Denzel Washington never came out that night, but my mother still proudly tells everyone back home how she invited half the cast of a Broadway show to visit her in Colorado.I’m glad I didn’t have a pen.— Sid GopinathNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More

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      Battle for Black Voters in N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Centers on Policing

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      As New York’s Democratic primary nears, Black voters appear torn between Eric Adams and Maya Wiley and their divergent views on balancing public safety and civil rights.With concerns rising over violent crime in New York City, the Rev. Al Sharpton posed a sensitive question to several mayoral candidates at a recent forum in Harlem: Would they consider embracing the stop-and-frisk policing tactic as part of their public safety strategy?“Is that a serious question, Rev.?” said Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer. “We are not going backward to what beat us, what broke our ankles, busted our jaws and put our kids in jail for poverty.”But Eric Adams, a former police officer who, like Ms. Wiley, is Black, saw the issue differently.“It’s a constitutional policy given to law enforcement officers,” he said, while quickly acknowledging that the police had been allowed to abuse it by stopping people without probable cause.The sharp increase in shootings and homicides in New York has made crime the No. 1 issue for voters this year, polls show, but that concern is being felt even more deeply in predominantly Black neighborhoods that have struggled with both gun violence and the effects of overly aggressive policing.Black voters, who make up more than a quarter of the city’s electorate, are a valuable constituency: Their support played an instrumental role in the 1989 election of David N. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, and in the 2013 win by Bill de Blasio, who is finishing up his second and final term.All 13 Democratic candidates for mayor have courted votes in Black neighborhoods and churches. But according to polls and interviews across the city, Black voters seem to be zeroing in on two of the seven Black candidates: Mr. Adams, who has led recent polls, and, to a lesser extent, Ms. Wiley.Their very different approaches to public safety and criminal justice concerns have become central to their attempts to win over Black voters, roughly a year after national protests against police brutality erupted after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.“Parallel with our concern about police violence is our concern about gun violence,” Mr. Sharpton said. “You have Black people that live in neighborhoods where we are afraid of the cops and the robbers.”At an early polling site at the Bronx County Courthouse, Zuri Washington, 30, said she ranked Ms. Wiley first and left Mr. Adams off her ballot because of their stances on policing and public safety.“I know that crime is up in the city, I understand that. But that doesn’t mean we need more police,” Ms. Washington, an actress, said after casting her ballot on Saturday. “There needs to be different strategies for moving forward, and Eric Adams is not that person.”But other early voters cited the rising crime numbers: As of June 6, shootings in New York City had risen by 68 percent from last year; homicides had risen by 12 percent over the same period.Fears of violent crime have led some leaders in predominantly Black neighborhoods to reject efforts to defund the police, highlighting a divide that cuts across racial, ideological and generational lines. “I would like to feel safe walking down the street,” said Barbara Mack, a retired guidance counselor who voted for Mr. Adams on Saturday in South Jamaica, Queens.“He’s been a police officer,” Ms. Mack said. “He’s supervised police. He’s tough. I don’t think he’ll accept garbage.”In the 2013 mayoral campaign, Mr. de Blasio seized on the Police Department’s overreliance on stop-and-frisk tactics, where officers stopped and questioned thousands of mostly Black and Latino men, the overwhelming majority of whom were found to have done nothing wrong.Mr. de Blasio aggressively opposed the police tactic, and was able to defeat a handful of more established Democratic rivals, including William C. Thompson, the former city comptroller who was the lone Black candidate that year.This year, four of the eight main candidates in the Democratic primary are Black: Mr. Adams; Ms. Wiley; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive; and Raymond J. McGuire, a former vice chairman at Citi.Their positions on policing and public safety offer some clear distinctions, with Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales on the left and Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire toward the political center.Ms. Morales, who identifies as Afro-Latina, has embraced the defund the police movement by promising to cut $3 billion from the police budget and put the money toward social services.Mr. McGuire formerly served on the New York City Police Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the Police Department, and has come out firmly against the defund movement but said he will not increase the use of stop and frisk.Neither has made an impact in the limited public polling available, including among Black voters. In a poll released on Monday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, 43 percent of likely Black primary voters said they planned to rank Mr. Adams first; Ms. Wiley was a distant second with 11 percent.But Ms. Wiley has gained momentum, winning endorsements in recent weeks from influential left-leaning politicians like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate.She has pledged to cut $1 billion from the police budget, cancel two classes of incoming police cadets and end the use of taxpayer money to defend officers in “egregious” instances of misconduct.“Stop and frisk is not coming back in a Maya Wiley administration, nor is the anti-crime unit,” Ms. Wiley said recently after greeting voters outside Yankee Stadium, referencing plainclothes units of officers that were focused on violent crime and were involved in a high number of shootings. They were disbanded last year but Mr. Adams has proposed bringing them back.Earlier this month, Ms. Wiley released an ad criticizing the Police Department’s response to the protests over the murder of Mr. Floyd. “They rammed into peaceful protesters, beat others to the ground and New York’s leaders defended it,” Ms. Wiley said in the ad.That same day, Mr. Adams also released an ad, titled “Safer,” which focused on how he plans to help New Yorkers “feel safe and secure” so that children could play “without getting hit by a stray bullet.”Maya Wiley, who has recently won endorsements from influential left-leaning politicians, argues that increasing policing is not the way to improve safety.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesFurther contrasts were clear after the shooting death of Justin Wallace, 10, in Queens. Ms. Wiley noted on Twitter that the “N.Y.P.D. couldn’t protect” the child, but it could “march through a park in riot gear, terrorizing people to enforce an arbitrary curfew,” referring to tactics employed at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.Mr. Adams said: “You can’t have a city where 10-year-old babies are shot.”Throughout the campaign, Mr. Adams has highlighted his background as a transit officer and as a Police Department captain who spoke out against discriminatory policies from within the agency. Mr. Adams’s testimony in 2013 helped a federal judge rule that the way the Police Department was using stop and frisk was unconstitutional..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}After a shooting in Times Square last month that injured several tourists, Mr. Adams held two crime-related news conferences within 24 hours, and renewed calls to reinstitute the plainclothes anti-crime unit to focus on guns and gangs. He proposed a 511 hotline for gun tips following a weekend in May when the police said more than two dozen people were shot across the city, and he has denounced graffiti, ATVs and dirt bikes as signs of lawlessness.And after several instances of violence on the subway, Mr. Adams rode the train to Brooklyn from Manhattan with members of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 to call for more police officers to patrol the system.“It’s really wild out here,” said Cassandra Solomon, 55, a legal administrative assistant from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, who spoke with Mr. Adams on the subway platform at West 4th Street. “I know the whole climate with the police and our young Black men, but we still need some kind of protection.”Mr. Adams has tried to moderate his message on policing by saying that he would improve police training and speed up the disciplinary process to remove abusive officers.Early voters in Southeast Queens over the weekend cited Mr. Adams’s familiarity with how both crime and police brutality can affect a neighborhood. Gail Whiteman, a fraud investigator with the city, and Karen DeGannes, a retired city police officer, said they both voted for Mr. Adams because of “the police situation,” as Ms. Whiteman called it.The two Black women said they believed Mr. Adams, as a former officer, was best suited to change police culture and reduce police brutality.Criminal justice reform advocates, however, say that Mr. Adams’s positions do not track with how the defund movement has shifted the conversation away from policing as the main source of public safety.“In the ’90s, the city saw the problems of joblessness and homelessness and the lack of mental health care, and the police were brought in to meet that need,” said Anthonine Pierre, a spokeswoman for the Communities United for Police Reform Action Fund. “That resulted in Black people being railroaded out of communities and into jail.”All four of the leading Black candidates say they would look for ways to move money from the police budget to schools, mental health and social services either through wholesale cuts or by cutting inefficiencies.But Mr. Adams is the only major Democratic candidate who has said that stop-and-frisk tactics should be used, as long as the interactions were analyzed to make sure officers are complying with the law.He has said he would protect officers who follow the rules, “but if you are abusive in my city you are going to be out of the department.” He has pledged to name a woman as police commissioner and said that he would give civilian panels the power to choose their precinct commanders.Yet even some Black legislators who have endorsed Mr. Adams disagree with his stance on stop and frisk.“I’m not a proponent of stop and frisk because it’s a net negative on Black and brown individuals, especially Black and brown youth,” said State Senator Jamaal Bailey, the chairman of the Bronx Democratic Party, even as his party endorsed Mr. Adams earlier this month. “But we can learn from someone who has had actual policing experience.”As the primary season entered its final days, Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley have focused their attention on traditionally Black areas like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Southeast Queens and Harlem.On a recent Sunday, Mr. Adams held a rally with Black educators in front of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. A few weeks earlier he gathered with a group of mostly Black male supporters at Frederick Douglass Circle.When Ms. Wiley received an endorsement from Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the state’s highest-ranking House Democrat, she did so at Restoration Plaza, a community anchor in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Community Voices Heard Power, a group focused on racial, social and economic justice, half of whose members are Black women, endorsed her at the Harriet Tubman Memorial in Harlem.“I am here to tell you that we will no longer allow the powers that be in this city to talk about us without answering to us,” said Afua Atta-Mensah, the group’s executive director, her voice rising as if she was drawing vitality from the towering 10-foot-tall bronze statue behind her. “It’s our time now.”Sean Piccoli contributed reporting. More