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      Why Top Democrats Are Listening to Eric Adams Right Now

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      Some prominent Democrats think their party’s nominee for mayor of New York offers a template for how to address issues of public safety.When Eric Adams won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, his supporters in Congress were bombarded with questions about him from colleagues representing districts in Michigan and Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles.When a national group of Irish American Democrats gathered in Manhattan recently to toast President Biden’s victory, Mr. Adams was there too, touting his admiration for Irish American former co-workers in the Police Department.And in the span of a week, Mr. Adams met with Mr. Biden at the White House and with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Capitol Hill. He appeared with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to discuss combating gun violence. And he stood with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, endorsing her proposal for federal gun trafficking legislation.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has been his party’s mayoral nominee for less than three weeks. But already, many national Democrats appear eager to elevate the former New York police captain, as gun violence shatters parts of major American cities and Republicans seek to caricature their opponents as naïve about crime.Mr. Adams, for his part, is seizing the mayoral bully pulpit, moving to cement a national reputation as a Democrat who speaks with uncommon authority about both public safety and police reform.“Every year, you have these different playbooks,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee who recently encountered Mr. Adams on the set of ABC’s “This Week.”“He has the commanding playbook for the moment,” she said.In some ways, it is a difficult playbook to replicate. Mr. Adams, who will be New York’s second Black mayor if he wins in November, as expected, grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by police officers before joining the force himself.He spent years drawing attention for challenging police misconduct, only to emerge as the most public safety-minded candidate in this year’s mayoral primary. His striking trajectory and promises to combat inequality helped him connect with a broad swath of Black and Latino voters and with some white working-class New Yorkers. And the buzz around him now is due in part to interest in the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city.But some party officials and lawmakers also say that Mr. Adams offers a template for how to discuss matters of crime and justice, urgent issues for Democratic candidates across the country as the early contours of the 2022 midterm campaigns take shape.“He’s a unique messenger carrying a message that we should all be carrying,” said Representative Thomas Suozzi, Democrat of New York.Whether party leaders are ultimately comfortable with Mr. Adams as a national standard-bearer will hinge on how he governs, should he win, following a primary campaign in which he faced significant scrutiny over issues of transparency and ethics tied to tax and real estate disclosures, his fund-raising practices and even issues of residency. But for now, many Democrats seem ready to promote Mr. Adams, whose primary win has fueled fresh intraparty debates about which kinds of candidates best represent the base of the Democratic Party. And the good relations Mr. Adams is working on building with Democratic leaders could yield help from Washington — where the city already has powerful representation — as New York emerges from the pandemic.Some argue that Mr. Adams’s victory is a potent reminder that many Black and Latino voters object to the most far-reaching efforts to curtail the power of the police, even as those same voters revile police misconduct.Mr. Adams insists that those views are not inherently in conflict, and he has not shied away from bluntly challenging left-wing Democrats on the subject. Last fall, a conference call of House Democrats devolved into an emotional brawl over key issues, including whether the “defund the police” movement had damaged their candidates — a subject that remains deeply divisive within the party in New York and nationally.David Axelrod, the veteran political strategist, said Democrats who believe that “the policing issue was a negative in 2020 for Democratic candidates” appear especially interested in Mr. Adams’s pitch.“Whether they’re in love with him or not, they seem to be in love with his message,” he said. “Adams gives you a way to talk about crime and civil and human rights in the same sentence.”Mr. Adams met with President Biden at the White House and with Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, on Capitol Hill. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Suozzi said that colleagues from other states have taken note of Mr. Adams’s primary victory and peppered him with questions about the candidate. Representative Adriano Espaillat, another New York Democrat who backed Mr. Adams, said he has had similar experiences — and added that strong relationships between the federal government and the city’s next mayor have tangible implications for New Yorkers.“We’re joined at the hip,” he said. “I’m sure he recognizes that and he’ll try to make his voice be heard here.”Mr. Adams is engaged on his local agenda, including weighing his transition, he has said. But he also has federal priorities, including a focus on what the current infrastructure negotiations and federal resources to combat gun violence mean for New York.“Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.But given Mr. Adams’s message around public safety, justice and combating inequality, Mr. Thies said there may also be opportunities “to talk to mayors who are struggling with the same problems across the country, and members of Congress who are facing tough re-elections or candidates who are running for office outside of New York.”In recent weeks, Mr. Adams has appeared to relish his turn on the national stage, declaring himself the “face of the new Democratic Party” before he had even won the nomination.Celinda Lake, who was one of Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign pollsters, said national Democrats have so far been taken by Mr. Adams’s life story and the diverse coalition he built, adding that some believe he offers a vital new perspective on policing issues ahead of the midterm elections.“A lot of Democrats are really nervous about that issue and are really, really intrigued by the idea of having such a great new voice,” she said.On the day before Primary Day, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, endorsed Mr. Adams. Less than a week after he emerged as the winner, Mr. Adams, rather than the current mayor of New York City, was at the White House discussing ways to combat gun violence, and soon after the administration featured him in an Instagram video. Mr. Adams also posed right next to Mr. Biden in a photo from the White House.“If he can show that you can be both pro-law enforcement and pro-reasonable reforms, then he will greatly help the perception of Democrats when it comes to criminal justice,” said Representative Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania, an early Biden endorser.Still, many Democrats caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a pandemic-era municipal primary that was decided by fewer than 7,200 votes. Mr. Espaillat suggested that applying lessons from deep-blue New York City to the midterms landscape has limitations, noting that “it’s a whole different ballgame internally in every district.”And while Mr. Adams prevailed at the top of the ticket, candidates with more left-wing messages won elsewhere on the ballot.“It’s about having a strong message and actually working hard, and what a lot of people are taking from this election is the split between what happened at the highest level and what happened everywhere else,” said City Councilman Antonio Reynoso, who won the primary for Brooklyn borough president.Mr. Adams is hardly the first mayoral nominee to be embraced by the national party early, reflecting the stature of New York City.Mayor Bill de Blasio was initially celebrated by many Democrats as a champion of economic equity and police reform, with glossy national coverage of his family.But as he faced the challenging realities of governing and his administration experienced numerous controversies, his star faded.Mr. Adams met recently with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at a Brooklyn church. “Eric is always going to leverage whatever political capital he has on behalf of the city,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesStill, there is no question that Mr. Adams has quickly made a national splash.Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, the president of the United States Conference of Mayors, has been texting with Mr. Adams and intends to speak with him soon, she said. She plans to invite him to the Conference’s annual meeting, slated for Austin toward the end of the summer.Mr. Adams is also navigating critical relationships closer to home. He met with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, over the weekend. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, among others, has also reached out.And then there is his dynamic with the governor, historically a fraught relationship for mayors to manage.Ahead of the joint appearance with Mr. Cuomo, the governor’s team said that the attire for the event involved ties, according to someone familiar with the conversation. (Mr. Thies declined to comment. “We made no requests, but we told them what others were wearing to inform their own decisions,” said Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.)When the two men appeared together at a Brooklyn church, Mr. Cuomo was indeed in a suit and tie. Mr. Adams had decided to chart his own course.“I said it then and I’ll say it again,” declared a tieless Mr. Adams. “I am the face of the Democratic Party.” More

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      Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York

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      Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York. More

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      How The Cleveland House Race Between Turner and Brown Captures Democrats' Generational Divide

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      Nina Turner’s move from Bernie Sanders’s campaign co-chairwoman to House candidate has highlighted a Democratic divide between impatient young activists and cautious older voters.WARRENSVILLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — Nina Turner had just belted out a short address to God’s Tabernacle of Faith Church in the cadences and tremulous volumes of a preacher when the Rev. Timothy Eppinger called on the whole congregation to lay hands on the woman seeking the House seat of greater Cleveland.“She’s gone through hell and high water,” the pastor said to nods and assents. “This is her season to live, and not to die.”On Aug. 3, the voters of Ohio’s 11th District will render that judgment and with it, some indication of the direction the Democratic Party is heading: toward the defiant and progressive approach Ms. Turner embodies or the reserved mold of its leaders in Washington, shaped more by the establishment than the ferment stirring its grass roots.Democrats say there is little broader significance to this individual House primary contest, one that pits two Black women against each other in a safe Democratic district that had been represented by Marcia Fudge before she was confirmed as President Biden’s secretary of housing and urban development.Yet in the final weeks of the campaign, the party establishment is throwing copious amounts of time and money into an effort to stop Ms. Turner, a fiery former Cleveland councilwoman and Ohio state senator known beyond this district as the face and spirit of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, a co-chairwoman in 2020 and a ubiquitous surrogate for the socialist senator.That suggests leaders understand that the outcome of the race will be read as a signal about the party’s future. It has already rekindled old rivalries. The Congressional Black Caucus’s political action committee has endorsed Ms. Turner’s main rival, Shontel Brown, the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party chairwoman. So have Hillary Clinton and the highest-ranking Black member of the House, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, who will be campaigning here this weekend for Ms. Brown. They argue that Ms. Brown is the better candidate, with a unifying message after four divisive years of Donald J. Trump.Ms. Brown sees herself as liberal, but she would move step by step, for instance embracing Mr. Biden’s call for adding a “public option” to the Affordable Care Act before jumping straight to the single-payer Medicare-for-all health care system Ms. Turner wants.“I’m not one to shy away from a challenge or conflict; I just don’t seek it out,” said Ms. Brown, who sees the differences as more style than substance. “And that’s the major difference: I’m not looking for headlines. I’m looking to make headway.”In turn, liberal activists around the country have rushed to Ms. Turner’s defense, with money, volunteers and reinforcements. Her campaign has raised $4.5 million for a primary, $1.3 million in the last month. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York will be knocking on doors for her the same weekend Mr. Clyburn will be in town. Mr. Sanders will join the fray in person the last weekend before Election Day.“She would be a real asset for the House,” Mr. Sanders said. “She is a very, very strong progressive, and I hope very much she is going to win.”Supporters of Shontel Brown say she presents a more unifying message after four years of the Trump administration.Mike Cardew/Akron Beakon Journal, via USA Today NetworkThe race has captured less an ideological divide than a generational split, pitting older voters turned off by the liberal insurgency’s disparagement of Democratic leaders and brash demands for rapid change against younger voters’ sense of urgency and anger about the trajectory of the country and world being left to them.At every turn here, Ms. Turner hits on the struggles of her city, the poorest large municipality in the country, but also America’s mountain of student debt, its inequity in health care and a climate crisis that has left the West parched and burning, the ice caps melting and Europe digging out from a deluge.Cleveland’s mayor, Frank Jackson, has endorsed Ms. Turner, as has The Plain Dealer. But Ms. Brown has the most reliable voters, many of them older, more affluent and white.For Ms. Turner to win, she needs people like Dewayne Williams, 31 and formerly incarcerated, who came out in the rain on Saturday to the Gas on God Community Giveaway, for $10 worth of free gas in one of Cleveland’s most dangerous neighborhoods.“I’m just young, don’t know much about politics, but I know she’s a good woman,” Mr. Williams said, growing emotional after Ms. Turner leaned into his car to give him a hug. Given his experience in the prison system, he said, “the changes she’s trying to do — to even care a little bit about that situation — I definitely appreciate.”“Oh man,” Mr. Williams added, “you’ve got to have a loud voice. You’ve got to be loud so people can hear.”The outcome of the special election could reverberate through the party. Progressive primary challengers have already declared — and are raising impressive sums, far more than previous challengers — to take on Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney in New York, Danny K. Davis in Chicago, John Yarmuth in Louisville and Jim Cooper in Nashville. They are hoping to build on the successes of Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman in New York, Ayanna S. Pressley in Boston, Marie Newman in Chicago and Cori Bush in St. Louis — all of whom have knocked off Democratic incumbents since 2018.All of them face opposition from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Congressional Black Caucus and a new political action committee, Team Blue, started by Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic Caucus chairman; Josh Gottheimer, a moderate from New Jersey; and Terri A. Sewell, a Black Caucus member from Alabama.“It speaks volumes to where they want us to be going as a party,” said Kina Collins, who is challenging Mr. Davis. “The message is, ‘You’re not welcome, and if you try to come in, we’re going to pony up the resources to silence you.’”Ms. Turner spoke with voters at a Gas on God Community Giveaway in Cleveland on Saturday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMs. Turner said she wanted the race to be about her issues: single-payer Medicare for all, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, canceling student loan debt and other centerpieces of the Sanders movement she helped create. She said she had been warned from the beginning of her candidacy that Washington Democrats would unite around an “anyone but Nina” candidate.But on Sunday, even she seemed surprised by the bitter turn the contest had taken. The Congressional Black Caucus PAC’s intervention particularly rankled. With the rise of liberal groups like Justice Democrats dedicated to unseating entrenched Democrats in safe seats, the caucus has emerged as something of an incumbent protection service.It backed Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. of Missouri, a caucus member, in his unsuccessful bid to stave off a Black challenger, Ms. Bush, last year, and Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, now the chairwoman of the caucus, in her successful bid to beat a Justice Democrat.But the PAC also backed Representative Eliot Engel of New York, who is white, last year against his progressive challenger, Mr. Bowman, who is Black.And now, inexplicably to Ms. Turner and her allies, the powerful Black establishment is intervening in an open-seat race between two Black candidates.“I don’t begrudge anybody wanting to get involved in the race,” Ms. Turner said, “but the entire Congressional Black Caucus PAC? That’s sending another message: Progressives need not apply.”Mr. Clyburn’s high-profile intervention is especially striking. In endorsing Ms. Brown, Mr. Clyburn said he was choosing the candidate he liked best, not opposing Ms. Turner. But he did speak out against the “sloganeering” of the party’s left wing.Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black Democrat in the House, has endorsed Ms. Brown.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn Cleveland, not everyone appreciated the distinction.“They want somebody they can control, and they want somebody to fall in line,” said State Representative Juanita Brent, who backs Ms. Turner. She said she had a message for Mr. Clyburn: “Congressman, with all due respect, stay out of our district.”Ms. Brown, younger than Ms. Turner, with an easygoing demeanor that does not match the Turner campaign’s description of her negative campaigning, pushed back hard against the characterization of her as a Washington puppet.Her campaign is staffed by help from SKDK, a powerhouse Democratic political firm stocked with old hands from the Clinton and Obama days. Her endorsements include moderate House Democrats like Mr. Gottheimer, many of whom are motivated by Ms. Turner’s favorable statements on Palestinian rights.But Ms. Brown insists she is no pawn for establishment Democrats.“You should ask the people who have tried to control me,” she said. “You will find that I am an independent thinker. I am one that likes to gather all of the facts and make an informed decision.”At Alfred Grant’s motorcycle shop in Bedford, Ohio, where Ms. Brown was dropping by a show of motorcycle muscle on Saturday night, older Black voters backed her campaign’s assessment of Ms. Turner: You either love her or you really don’t.“It seems to me that Nina tends to work for herself more than working together,” Roberta Reed said. “I mean, I need people who are going to work together to make it all whole.”“She’s going to help the Biden-Harris agenda; that means a lot,” Denise Grant, Mr. Grant’s wife, said of Ms. Brown, hitting on her biggest talking point. “We don’t need anybody fighting with Biden there.”Her husband jumped in, expressing weariness of the kind of confrontational politics that Ms. Turner embraced. “We did four years of foolishness,” he said. “Now it’s calmed down. That’s how politics should be. I don’t have to look at you every day.”Ms. Turner does not back down from that critique. Voters can take it or leave it.“My ancestors would have never been set free but for somebody bumping up against the status quo and saying, ‘You will not enslave us anymore,’” she said.Parishioners prayed over Ms. Turner at God’s Tabernacle of Faith Church on Sunday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“Martin Luther King, Minister Malcolm X, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer — I’m just giving examples of people who I’m sure folks who believe in the status quo wish had been nicer,” she said.At God’s Tabernacle of Faith, Pastor Eppinger teed up Ms. Turner with a rousing sermon inspired by the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.“How long will you walk through dead schools, dead communities, dead governments?” he thundered. “Can these dry bones live?”Ms. Turner, in a bright yellow dress, removed her matching, bright yellow mask, and answered, “All Sister Turner is saying is, we need somebody to speak life into the dry bones of City Hall, the dry bones in Congress, and if God blesses me to go to that next place, I am going to continue to stand for the poor, the working poor and the barely middle class. Can these dry bones live?”To that, the 50 or so parishioners gave an amen. More

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      Republicans Now Have Two Ways to Threaten Elections

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      The story of voting rights in the United States looks less like a graph of exponential growth and more like a sine wave; there are highs and lows, peaks and plateaus.President Biden captured this reality in his address on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where he spoke on the gathering threat to our democracy from the Republican Party’s twin efforts to suppress rival constituencies and seize control of state voting apparatuses.“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” Biden said. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”Biden is right. Americans today are witness to a ferocious attack on voting rights and majority rule. And as he points out, it is as focused on “who gets to count the vote” as it is on “who gets to vote.”Biden is also right to say, as he did throughout the speech, that these attacks are “not unprecedented.” He points to Jim Crow and the “poll taxes and literacy tests and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s.”For obvious reasons, Jim Crow takes center stage in these discussions. But we should remember that it was part of a wave of suffrage restrictions aimed at working-class groups across the country: Black people in the South, Chinese Americans in the West and European immigrants in the North.“The tide of democratic faith was at low ebb on all American shores after the Grant administration, and it would be a mistake to fix upon a reactionary temper in the South as a sectional peculiarity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913.”For as much as Jim Crow dominates our collective memory of voting restrictions, it is the attack on suffrage in the North in those last decades of the 19th century that might actually be more relevant to our present situation.The current assault on voting is a backlash, in part, to the greater access that marked the 2020 presidential election. More mail-in and greater early voting helped push turnout to modern highs. In the same way, the turn against universal manhood suffrage came after its expansion in the wake of the Civil War.A growing number of voters were foreign-born, the result of mass immigration and the rapid growth of an immigrant working class in the industrial centers of the North. “Between 1865 and World War I,” writes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” “nearly twenty-five million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nation’s World War I population of roughly one hundred million.”A vast majority arrived without property or the means to acquire it. Some were the Irish and Germans of previous waves of immigration, but many more were eastern and southern Europeans, with alien languages, exotic customs and unfamiliar faiths.“By 1910,” notes Keyssar, “most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nation’s huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents, or Black.”To Americans of older stock, this was a disaster in waiting. And it fueled, among them, a backlash to the democratic expansion that followed the Civil War.“A New England village of the olden time — that is to say, of some forty years ago — would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it,” Francis Parkman, a prominent historian and a member in good standing of the Boston elite, wrote in an 1878 essay called “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.”Parkman went on:but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.In “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910,” the historian J. Morgan Kousser takes note of William L. Scruggs, a turn-of-the-century scholar and diplomat who gave a similarly colorful assessment of universal suffrage in an 1884 article, “Restriction of the Suffrage”:The idea of unqualified or “tramp” suffrage, like communism, with which it is closely allied, seems to be of modern origin; and, like that and kindred isms, it usually finds advocates and apologists in the ranks of the discontented, improvident, ignorant, vicious, depraved, and dangerous classes of society. It is not indigenous to the soil of the United States. It originated in the slums of European cities, and, like the viper in the fable, has been nurtured into formidable activity in this country by misdirected kindness.Beyond their presumed immorality and vice, the problem with new immigrant voters — from the perspective of these elites — was that they undermined so-called good government. “There is not the slightest doubt in my own mind that our prodigality with the suffrage has been the chief source of the corruption of our elections,” wrote the Progressive-era political scientist John W. Burgess in an 1895 article titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth.”This claim, that Black and immigrant voters were venal and corrupt — that they voted either illegally or irresponsibly — was common.Here’s Keyssar:Charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly: electoral outcomes were twisted by “naturalization mills” that, with the aid of “professional perjurers and political manipulators,” transformed thousands of immigrants into citizens in the weeks before elections.Out of this furious attack on universal male suffrage (and also, in other corners, the rising call for women’s suffrage) came a host of efforts to purify the electorate, spearheaded by progressive reformers in both parties. Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed “pauper exclusions” that disqualified from voting any men who received public relief on the day of the election. Republican lawmakers in New Jersey, targeting immigrant-dominated urban political machines in the state, required naturalized citizens to show naturalization documents to election officials before voting, intentionally burdening immigrants who did not have their papers or could not find them.Lawmakers in Connecticut endorsed an English literacy requirement, and California voters amended their state Constitution to disenfranchise any person “who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his name,” a move meant to keep Chinese and Mexican Americans from the ballot box. The introduction of the secret ballot and the polling booth made voting less communal and put an additional premium on literacy — if you couldn’t read the ballot, and if no one was allowed to assist, then how were you supposed to make a choice?If suffrage restriction in the South was a blunt weapon meant to cleave entire communities from the body politic, then suffrage restriction in the North was a twisting maze of obstacles meant to block anyone without the means or education to overcome them.There were opponents of this effort to shrink democracy. They lost. Voter turnout crashed in the first decades of the 20th century. Just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election, an all-time low. “There were fewer Republicans in the South because of Jim Crow voter suppression, and fewer Democrats in the North because of the active discouragement of working-class urban immigrant voters,” the historian Jon Grinspan notes in “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.” “The efforts of fifty years of restrainers had succeeded. A new political culture had been born: one that had been cleaned and calmed, stifled and squelched.”It would take decades, and an epochal movement for civil rights, before the United States even came close to the democratic highs it reached in the years after Appomattox.With all of that in mind, let’s return to Biden’s speech.There was an urgency in what the president said in defense of voting rights, a sense that now is the only time left to act. “Look how close it came,” he said in reference to the attack on Congress on Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the election. “We’re going to face another test in 2022: a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”Right now, of course, there is no path to passage for a voting bill that could address the challenges ahead. Not every Democrat feels the same sense of urgency as the president, and key Democrats aren’t willing to change the rules of the Senate in order to send a bill to Biden’s desk.It is possible that this is the right call, that there are other ways to block this assault on the franchise and that the attack on free and fair elections will stay confined to Republican-controlled states — meaning Democrats would need only a strategy of containment and not a plan to roll back the assault. But as we’ve seen, there is a certain momentum to political life and no guarantee of a stable equilibrium. The assault on voting might stay behind a partisan border or it might not.In other words, to borrow a turn of phrase from Abraham Lincoln on the question of democracy, this government will either become all of one thing or all of the other.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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      Eric Adams’s Win Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Black Leaders in New York

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      Black candidates are poised to occupy some of New York’s top elected offices, including those of mayor, public advocate and two of the city’s five district attorneys.A cascade of victories for Black candidates in the New York City Democratic primaries — highlighted by Eric Adams’s win in the mayoral race — is redefining the flow of political power in the nation’s largest city.For just the second time in its history, New York City is on track to have a Black mayor. For the first time ever, the Manhattan district attorney is set to be a Black man, after Alvin Bragg won the Democratic nomination. The city’s public advocate, who is Black, cruised to victory in last month’s primary. As many as three of the five city borough presidents may be people of color, and the City Council is poised to be notably diverse.“This is a mission-driven movement,” Mr. Adams said in Harlem last weekend, at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters. “If you don’t sit back and rejoice in this moment, shame on you. Shame on you. One of your own is going to move to become the mayor of the most important city in the most important country on the globe.”If Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg win their general elections as expected, they will become among the most influential elected Black officials in the state, joining the state attorney general, Letitia James; the State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins; and Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie.Black Democrats also claimed two new congressional wins last year in New York City: Representatives Ritchie Torres, who identifies as Afro-Latino, in the South Bronx; and Jamaal Bowman, who defeated the longtime congressman Eliot Engel, in a district covering parts of the Bronx and Westchester County.Their success was repeated by Black candidates across the highest levels of city government this year, who were often propelled in part by strong support among Black voters.“Twitter has its place in modern-day campaigning — however, if you’re more comfortable online than in a Black church on Sunday morning, that says something about your likelihood of success,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s highest-ranking House Democrat, who may become the first Black speaker of the House.“Black New Yorkers are under siege by rising crime and intense housing displacement,” Mr. Jeffries said. “Our community is closest to the pain, and therefore Black candidates are uniquely positioned to speak powerfully to the needs of working-class New Yorkers.”Mr. Adams focused his mayoral campaign on combating inequality and promoting public safety.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesMr. Adams won on the strength of more moderate, working-class Black and Latino voters, as well as some centrist white voters outside of Manhattan, with assists from labor unions, his own strong fund-raising and super PAC spending. He ran on a message focused on combating inequality and promoting public safety, and he supported a more expansive role for the police than some of his rivals did.Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president who is narrowly leading in his re-election battle, called Mr. Adams’s primary victory and those of other Black candidates a “watershed moment” — one that will help determine whether issues of improving infrastructure, public safety and schools can be achieved equitably in a city shaped by deep racial and socioeconomic disparities.“We had a Black president before we had our second Black mayor, so it’s our time,” Mr. Richards said, recalling the excitement he felt as an elementary school student when David N. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, was elected more than three decades ago.Other diverse American cities, from Detroit to Kansas City, Mo., have elected more Black mayors than New York City has, while cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta are led by Black women. Los Angeles, like New York, has had just one Black mayor.But the results in New York this summer, especially at the top of the ticket, underscored the central role Black voters play both in city politics and in the national Democratic Party, less than a year after Black Americans played decisive roles in electing President Biden and flipping the Senate to the Democrats. Some have likened Mr. Adams’s coalition, at least in part, to the one that propelled Mr. Biden to the presidency, a comparison both Mr. Adams and the White House chief of staff have embraced.Black voters were also vital to the Democratic efforts to reclaim the Senate, a goal that came down to two victories in Georgia. And in New York, Black voters played a significant role in electing Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2013 (though his coalition also included far more white progressives than Mr. Adams’s did).There was little exit polling available on the New York City mayor’s race, but surveys from other years showed that Black voters were not the majority of the electorate. Still, Black voters are among the most reliable voters in the Democratic Party, and the sparse polling data that was available during the primary showed that Mr. Adams was the overwhelming favorite of those voters — meaning that they packed a more unified electoral punch than other constituencies whose preferences were spread more evenly among several contenders.“The Democratic Party can’t win anything of significance without Black voters,” said Leah Daughtry, a longtime party strategist. “You have, with every passing cycle, an increasing awareness and acceptance that we make a difference.”She suggested that Mr. Adams’s victory — which disappointed the most left-wing forces in the city — may prompt a reassessment of what it means to be “progressive” in New York.“Is it that Black and brown people are not as progressive as some people want to say they are, or does the definition of ‘progressive’ need to be looked at?” said Ms. Daughtry, whose father, the Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry, was an early mentor of Mr. Adams’s.Mr. Adams’s relatively moderate message on policing was plainly a significant factor with a substantial number of voters. But his win was driven by dynamics that go well beyond ideology, including a sense among some New Yorkers that Mr. Adams not only felt their pain, but had lived it.The slate of other Black candidates who won their primaries represents considerable generational and political diversity. Jumaane D. Williams, the city’s public advocate and one of New York’s most prominent younger left-wing leaders, stressed that those results show that voters of color “aren’t a monolith.”“Voters of all hues want to be respected for their lived experiences and their traumas,” said Mr. Williams, who easily won his primary last month, and may be considering a run for higher office. “They want to feel safe and have all of the access to as good a life as they can and they want to see this city reopened with justice and equity.”Mr. Torres, who backed Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign, supported Mr. Adams as his second pick under the city’s ranked-choice voting system. He said the success of ideologically diverse Black contenders was a function of candidate quality, highlighting the deep and growing bench of candidates of color across the city.“That’s the only variable that explains the widely varied ideological results of the 2021 election cycle,” the congressman said. “It speaks to the caliber of the next generation of Black public figures.”Another through line for several of the successful contenders was their ability to connect their personal stories to some of the most searing challenges facing Black New Yorkers. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg speak in strikingly personal terms about the need to combat both police brutality and gun violence that has disproportionately affected neighborhoods with many Black and Latino residents.Mr. Adams has said he was beaten by police as a teenager. He later joined the police force, pushing to combat misconduct from within the system. Mr. Bragg has described a police officer putting a gun to his head when he was a teenager — and he cast himself as the candidate best positioned to tackle criminal justice reform from the powerful prosecutor’s office.“It’s not just having a first Black district attorney in Manhattan, but the experiences that for me have gone along with that,” Mr. Bragg said in an interview, ticking through his own encounters with the law enforcement system. Despite the historic results, racial tensions seeped into some of the contests. Mr. Adams’s allies claimed without evidence that an alliance between Mr. Yang and Kathryn Garcia, who finished second to Mr. Adams by one point, could amount to suppression of Black and Latino voters. And as ballots were being counted for the Queens borough presidency, Mr. Richards wrote on Twitter that his chief rival, Elizabeth Crowley, was “racist.”“Throughout this campaign I faced the dog whistles and microaggressions and I couldn’t talk about it because people would say I was trying to use race to my advantage in the race,” Mr. Richards later said.In a statement posted on Twitter, Ms. Crowley decried “slanderous and untruthful remarks made by one of my opponents” and said she was “proud of the campaign of inclusion and optimism that we ran.”Whatever the result in that race, Mr. Richards and others said that while they were buoyed by Mr. Adams’s victory, his path — he was the first choice of every borough but Manhattan — illustrated stark divides in the city.After a count of absentee ballots, Mr. Adams prevailed over Kathryn Garcia by one percentage point.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times“If you look at the demographic maps from this election it paints a very scary story,” Mr. Richards said, adding, “As diverse as we are, we are still a divided city.”For many Black leaders, Mr. Adams’s election is both a vindication and cause to wonder what might have been.Keith L.T. Wright, the chair of New York County Democrats, worked for Mr. Dinkins when he was the Manhattan borough president. For decades, Mr. Wright has harbored “extreme resentment” that Mr. Dinkins did not win a second term.“Can you imagine if David had two terms? The gentrification problem would not be as serious,” Mr. Wright said. “If he had gotten his hands on the Board of Education we would not have the educational inequality problem we have right now.”Maya Wiley — who would have been the city’s first Black female mayor, but came in third — has said that the diversity of the mayoral field, as well as Mr. Adams’s win, would have implications for shaping perceptions of a suitable leader.“It shows that we have a pipeline of people of color, particularly Black people, who can run and contest effectively in our important executive offices,” she said. “I don’t think this is a one-time phenomenon. This is really about our democratic process opening up.” More

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      The Voter Fraud Fraud

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      It was March 3, 2020, the day of the Democratic primary in Texas, and Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man, was intent on making his voice heard at the ballot box. He arrived at the polling place around 7 p.m. and joined the line. More

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      Eric Adams, Once a Political Outsider, Conquers the Inside Game

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      Mr. Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City by portraying himself as a working-class politician who understood the concerns of average New Yorkers.The morning after winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, Eric L. Adams on Wednesday asserted that he had won a mandate to address the urgent struggles of America’s urban working class.As he appeared at a parade celebrating essential workers and toured morning television news shows, Mr. Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, sought to cement his image as a man who understands what it is to fear both gun violence and police misconduct. It was one thing to theorize about solving problems of injustice and inequality, he suggested. It was another to experience them as a working-class person of color in New York.“Finally one of your own is going to understand,” Mr. Adams said to a throng of health care workers at a parade.If Mr. Adams sounded, in that moment, like a political outsider, it is because for many years, he was more iconoclast than institutionalist.Mr. Adams was the rebel police officer who agitated against police misconduct from within the force, eventually rising to captain. He was the borough president who attracted more attention for quirky stunts — displaying drowned rats at a news conference to draw attention to a vermin problem, for instance — than for his record on land use policy. And he was the Brooklyn mayoral candidate who lost out on first-place endorsements from prominent Brooklyn-area members of the New York congressional delegation.But in other ways, Mr. Adams emerged in the mayoral contest as something of an establishment figure, earning the support of leading labor unions, locking down key party officials including two fellow borough presidents, and building an old-school Democratic coalition that attracted working-class Black, Latino and some moderate white voters.He was among the most message-disciplined candidates in the race, repeatedly declaring that public safety was the “prerequisite” to prosperity, a pitch that became increasingly resonant amid a spike in violent crime. And he used his personal story of overcoming poverty and police violence to emerge as a credible messenger on urgent issues of safety, justice and inequality.“We don’t live in theory,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who has known Mr. Adams for decades, pointing to the rise in shootings in cities across the country. “This is not an ivory tower exercise and that’s what worked for Eric.”Despite all of that institutional support and his ultimate victory, Mr. Adams defeated his nearest rival, Kathryn Garcia, by just one percentage point, according to the latest tally of ballots on Tuesday. Ms. Garcia conceded to Mr. Adams on Wednesday, as did the third-place finisher, Maya Wiley, the most left-leaning candidate in the field among the top tier of contenders.He still faces a general election campaign against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, but is expected to win easily because of the city’s overwhelming Democratic tilt — allowing him to already talk of an early transition as he moves toward assembling a government, and to contemplate the significant policy and political challenges that await.Mr. Adams’s victory was, in some ways, a repudiation of the most left-wing forces in the city, even as deeply progressive candidates scored other victories elsewhere on the ballot.A year after the rise of a powerful defund-the-police movement in New York, Mr. Adams won on a message that put public safety at the center of his platform, and he explicitly called for more police in certain scenarios: He supported adding more police to patrol the subways, for example, and backs reconstituting a reformed plainclothes anti-crime squad, even as he has been a vocal critic, for decades, of police abuse.He ran as a business-friendly candidate who did not demonize real estate; on the contrary, Mr. Adams, who owns property himself, once declared, “I am real estate.” And he is supportive of charter schools in some circumstances.But he is not especially ideological and on some social safety net issues, he has taken a much more liberal approach. For instance, he supports an ambitious expansion of the earned-income tax credit.Mr. Adams faces skepticism from the left over his politics, but as he assumes the nomination, he also faces doubts from some Democrats across the ideological spectrum over questions of transparency and ethics.In 2010, when he was a state senator and the chairman of the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, a state inspector general report suggested that Mr. Adams had given the “appearance of impropriety” by getting close to a group seeking a casino contract at Aqueduct Racetrack.A review of his fund-raising practices by The New York Times earlier this year showed that he has pushed the boundaries of campaign-finance and ethics laws, though he has not been formally accused of wrongdoing. And the last month of the campaign saw controversies over transparency issues play out concerning his tax and real estate disclosures and even questions of residency, culminating in an extraordinary moment in which Mr. Adams offered journalists a tour of the apartment where he said he lived.Mr. Adams’s formative years in the public eye were spent in the Police Department, where he helped found an organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. His efforts inspired some and rankled other colleagues on the force who describe a career trajectory that was more complex than Mr. Adams sometimes suggests.But to this day, some voters remember Mr. Adams from those efforts, which helped him dispatch arguments from opponents that he was overly inclined to embrace policing as an answer to the city’s challenges.“My admiration for him really started when he was a policeman talking about police brutality, and a captain talking about police officers not fulfilling their oath,” said Charles B. Rangel, the former New York congressman, who endorsed Mr. Adams.As an outspoken police officer, Mr. Adams had his share of controversies, too, aligning himself at various times with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has repeatedly promoted anti-Semitism, and the ex-boxer Mike Tyson after his 1992 rape conviction. Mr. Adams lost a 1994 congressional run, and he was also a registered Republican for a period of time in the 1990s.In 2006, he was elected to the State Senate as a Democrat, part of a wave of Central Brooklyn politicians who came up from outside the party, and in 2013, won an election to be Brooklyn borough president. Mr. Adams, who became an evangelist for veganism after he says he reversed his diabetes by reforming his diet and exercise routines, became known for preparing vegan meals at Borough Hall, and he developed a reputation as a splashy New York character prone to making unexpected remarks and appearances. There was the gruesome rat-related news conference, for instance, or Mr. Adams’s announcement that he, as a former law enforcement officer, would begin bringing a gun to houses of worship after a massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue. “In order to get a message across in New York City, first you have to get people’s attention,” said Evan Thies, an Adams spokesman. “People might look at the spectacle of dead rats at a press conference and be turned off by that, but they’re paying attention, and they’re paying attention to a critical health issue to lower-income people. Why was it on the news? Because Eric forced people to look at something they didn’t want to look at.”There is no question that Mr. Adams has an idiosyncratic streak. But his decades in public life suggest that the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city also has shrewd instincts and an ability to navigate a politically eclectic set of relationships.Mr. Sharpton noted that Mr. Adams was “literally a founding member” of the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton’s organization.“At the same time, he was a policeman, able to be friendly with more conservative elements that were not supportive of me,” Mr. Sharpton continued. “He has a way of working with people who don’t work with each other.”In his current role, Mr. Adams has been an enthusiastic promoter of his borough, building deep relationships there with diverse constituencies including Black voters and Orthodox Jewish leaders.But Representative Nydia Velázquez, who backed two of Mr. Adams’s rivals under the city’s ranked-choice voting system, noted that he was not the first choice of the members of Congress who represent much of Brooklyn (though Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking House member in the New York delegation, backed Mr. Adams as his second choice).“He will have a honeymoon with voters, but then people want to know how his administration — what does it mean for them, the ascension of Eric Adams to City Hall?” said Ms. Velázquez, who said she hoped Mr. Adams could have a “more productive” relationship with the delegation moving forward. “That will be measured by the agenda he will be able to tackle.”Mr. Adams’s team is especially focused on ways to use newly available state and federal resources to combat gun violence, and his campaign plans to offer more details on dealing with violence tied to handguns in coming weeks.Mr. Adams said on “Good Day New York” that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made it easier to fight crime with his recent emergency declaration concerning gun violence.“We have to look at the feeders of crime,” he said. “My team is going to sit down and look at the common denominators of those who are committing crimes. If you don’t start targeting what’s feeding crime then we are going to throw good money into a bad scenario.”Mr. Adams said he would go after gang violence in the city, but that he also wants to help crisis management teams and youth organizations trying to prevent violence.He is aware of the skepticism he faces from some on the left. Mr. Adams reached for conciliatory notes on Wednesday, urging New Yorkers to “get over the philosophical differences we have.”“Let’s decide that we must live in a safe city where we educate our children and make sure everyone has an opportunity to prosper in this great city,” he added.Plus, he said, the ride could be fun.“You all would be bored if those other candidates were mayor,” he said. “You guys are going to have so much fun over the next four years.”Almost as to offer proof, Mr. Adams ended his day by fulfilling a rather unorthodox campaign promise he had made to a group of young New Yorkers: He had his left ear pierced. More

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      Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

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      In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me thatapproximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.Trump Support Rises With AnimusA study found that animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party. More