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      Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

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      The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Cuomo and Adams Make First Appearance Since Primary Win

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      Eric Adams’s appearance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, like his visit to the White House on Monday, was centered on combating gun violence.The contours of the most important, complex and delicate relationship in New York politics began to take shape inside a Brooklyn church on Wednesday, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, made their first public appearance together since Mr. Adams secured the Democratic nomination last week.In a news conference that spanned around 40 minutes, Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo sought to highlight areas of common ground — namely, promoting public safety while claiming the mantle of progressivism — amid an undercurrent of uncertainty around Mr. Cuomo’s future as he awaits investigations into his conduct as governor.“Eric and I come from the same political philosophy,” Mr. Cuomo declared. “We are progressive Democrats. And we have the same definition of what it means to be a progressive Democrat.”The appearance marked the second time this week that Mr. Adams moved to cement his relationships with the forces that will have extraordinary sway over his ability to govern — the federal and state governments — as he embraces the role of mayor-in-waiting ahead of a November general election that he is almost certain to win.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, outlined plans on Wednesday for reducing gun violence, calling the matter an epidemic.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesOn Monday, he visited the White House in Washington, meeting with President Biden and later appearing in a White House-promoted video to discuss public safety and justice. And Mr. Adams’s joint appearance with Mr. Cuomo underscored an effort to improve the relationship between the offices of governor and mayor of New York; the current occupant of Gracie Mansion, Mayor Bill de Blasio, has had a notoriously toxic dynamic with Mr. Cuomo and was absent from both the Washington and Brooklyn meetings.Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo are not thought to have any deep personal bonds, but Mr. Adams’s familiarity with Albany — the two overlapped briefly while he was a state senator — may ease the early stages of their new relationship, and could help Mr. Adams as he seeks to build allies in the Legislature.Mr. Cuomo, for his part, is heavily reliant on support from Black voters, and a strong relationship with Mr. Adams, who is poised to be the second Black mayor in New York City’s history, may also be in Mr. Cuomo’s political interests as he heads into an election year.Of course, Mr. Cuomo also greeted Mr. de Blasio warmly when he was the Democratic nominee in 2013, but that relationship deteriorated quickly — and Albany still has so much control over major municipal issues that it is nearly impossible that the next mayor and governor would not clash, as mayors and governors often have throughout history.But on Wednesday in Brooklyn, Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo alternated between speaking from behind a lectern, and listening to each other from the side.The two men both prevailed in their most recent elections over skeptical left-wing forces in the party. They appeared at their most simpatico on Wednesday when speaking about the urgent need for improved public safety and quality of life — reaching for strikingly grim, sometimes hyperbolic terms to describe life in America’s largest cities — while taking veiled swipes at those who deal in “theoretical progress,” as Mr. Cuomo framed it, rather than the difficult realities facing New York City.A progressive, Mr. Cuomo claimed, is one “who actually makes progress for people.” “I’m happy that you touched on ‘progressive,’ what it means to be progressive,” a slightly hoarse Mr. Adams said as he began his introductory remarks following Mr. Cuomo, who smiled as Mr. Adams started in. “We’ve allowed the term ‘being progressive’ to be hijacked by those who do not have a track record of putting in place real progressive changes. And I am not going to surrender my progressive credentials.”Their policy focus was gun violence and combating a spike in shootings that has rattled neighborhoods across the city. Mr. Cuomo recently declared a gun violence emergency in the state, and on Wednesday he called the violence a “civil rights issue,” noting that victims in New York have disproportionately been Black and Latino residents. Mr. Adams stressed the importance of combating handgun violence, and urged a “holistic” approach to promoting public safety, rather than one rooted in “heavy-handed policing”— though he supported a more expansive role for the police than some of his primary opponents did. As he has done before, he linked combating crime to the city’s economic recovery. Throughout their appearance, there were plenty of united-front moments. Mr. Cuomo, who made references to their shared roots in boroughs outside of Manhattan, appeared to murmur his assent as Mr. Adams warned of high-income New Yorkers fleeing to Miami if they felt the city was too unsafe — though rates of violent crime today are far lower than in earlier eras in New York. Mr. Adams, as he noted their efforts to enact marriage equality in the state, turned to face Mr. Cuomo, demanding, “Did people forget? That was our bill.”And when a journalist remarked that it sounded like Mr. Adams wanted to put more people in jail, Mr. Adams rejected that characterization — and Mr. Cuomo then leapt to the lectern to criticize the question.But there were also reminders of potential tensions to come at a time of deep uncertainty in Mr. Cuomo’s political career.“I said it then and I’ll say it again,” Mr. Adams said as Mr. Cuomo, a leader of the National Governors Association, looked on. “I am the face of the Democratic Party.”Until recently, Mr. Cuomo was a national celebrity following his prolific public appearances during the early months of the pandemic, and at one point some Democrats dreamed of putting him on the presidential ticket.But he now faces a moment of grave political peril, amid the threat of impeachment and still-outstanding investigations, including a closely watched report from the state attorney general, Letitia James, that is set to examine harassment allegations.His appearance with Mr. Adams, and a later news conference that included state lawmakers — some of whom have been sharply critical of Mr. Cuomo, but flanked him to discuss combating gun violence on Wednesday — appeared designed to send a message that he remains firmly in command of the most pressing problems facing the state, despite significant questions about his political future.Most of the state’s top Democrats have called on Mr. Cuomo to resign, but he has refused. Instead, he has spent the last few months seeking to rehabilitate his image after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment; standing side by side with the presumed next mayor of New York City was seen as part and parcel of Mr. Cuomo’s larger effort to assert his leadership and portray a semblance of normalcy. For his part, Mr. Adams was one of the few Democratic mayoral candidates who did not call on Mr. Cuomo to immediately resign and he said during the primary campaign that he would accept an endorsement from the governor — though during a June debate, he did not raise his hand when the contenders were asked if they would want Mr. Cuomo’s endorsement. Mr. Adams has also said he supports an independent investigation into the harassment allegations and believes in due process, even as he has said “swift action must be taken” against powerful men who prey on women.At the news conference, a reporter pressed Mr. Adams on that dynamic ahead of Ms. James’s report, one that may set the terms for how Mr. Cuomo’s re-election prospects will unfold.“The governor said that he would work with me,” Mr. Adams said. “I’m sure he would have worked with any mayor that is in office.” “Let the investigation go to its outcome,” he continued. “I mean, that’s the system of justice that I protected in the city and will continue to do so. And the system of an investigation will determine the outcome.”Luis Ferré-Sadurní More

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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      Biden Speaks on Voting Rights in Philadelphia

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      WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Tuesday that the fight against restrictive voting laws was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” and called Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election “a big lie.”In an impassioned speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden tried to reinvigorate the stalled Democratic effort to pass federal voting rights legislation and called on Republicans “in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up, for God’s sake.”“Help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” the president said in remarks at the National Constitution Center. “Have you no shame?”But his words collided with reality: Even as Republican-led bills meant to restrict voting access make their way through statehouses across the country, two bills aiming to expand voting rights nationwide are languishing in Congress. And Mr. Biden has bucked increasing pressure from Democrats to support pushing the legislation through the Senate by eliminating the filibuster, no matter the political cost.In fact, the president seemed to acknowledge that the legislation had little hope of passing as he shifted his focus to the midterm elections.“We’re going to face another test in 2022,” Mr. Biden said. “A new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”He said he would start an effort “to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote and then get the vote out.”The partisan fight over voting rights was playing out even as the president spoke, with a group of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass new voting restrictions there.In his speech, Mr. Biden characterized the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — hatched and spread by his predecessor, Mr. Trump — as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name but warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” had posed an existential threat to democracy.“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”About a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this spring to restrict voting or significantly change election rules, in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 results.Republicans, who have called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic, argue that laws are needed to tamp down on voter fraud, despite evidence that it is not a widespread problem. They have mounted an aggressive campaign to portray Mr. Biden’s voting-rights efforts as self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats.The president’s speech, delivered against the backdrop of the birthplace of American democracy, was intended to present the right to vote as a shared ideal, despite the realities of a deeply fractured political landscape.Democratic efforts to pass voting rights legislation in Washington have stalled in the evenly divided Senate. Last month, Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act, and they are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure — the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named for a former Georgia congressman and civil rights icon — which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.In a statement, Danielle Álvarez, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that Mr. Biden’s speech amounted to “lies and theatrics.” Republicans had unanimously rejected the For the People Act as a Democratic attempt to “pass their federal takeover of our elections,” she said.There were also concerns among more moderate members of Mr. Biden’s party that the legislation was too partisan. Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have publicly said they would not support rolling back the filibuster to enact it.But other Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight encroachments on voting rights.A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said last year that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities after taking office; but on Tuesday, he sought to shift responsibility to lawmakers.“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” the president said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and want the whole world to see it.”His rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task: Neither bill currently has a path to his desk.Activists who had wondered whether Mr. Biden would stake out a public position on the filibuster got their answer on Tuesday: “I’m not filibustering now,” the president told reporters who shouted questions after his speech.“It was strange to hear,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said after watching the speech. “He did a great job of laying out the problem, but then stopped short of talking about the actual solution that would be needed to passing legislation to address the problem.”As Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia, the group of Texas Democrats had traveled to Washington, where they were trying to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures.Representative Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas, speaking at a press conference with Democratic members of the Texas Legislature on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBoth measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending absentee ballot applications to voters who had not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit the types of assistance that can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.In Austin, Republicans vented their anger at the fleeing group, and Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill passed. The handful of Democratic lawmakers who did not go to Washington were rounded up and ordered onto the Statehouse floor. Shawn Thierry, a Democratic state representative from Houston, posted to Twitter a video of a Statehouse sergeant-at-arms and a state trooper entering her office to order her to be locked in the House chamber.“This is not an issue about Democrats or Republicans,” Vice President Kamala Harris told the Texas lawmakers when she met with them on Tuesday. “This is about Americans and how Americans are experiencing this issue.”James Talarico, 32, the youngest member of the Texas Legislature, said the group of Democrats had gone to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.“We can’t listen to more speeches,” Mr. Talarico said. “I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office. But protecting our democracy should have been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”The restrictions in the Texas bills mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed this year in Georgia, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the party to suspend county election officials. In June, the Justice Department sued Georgia over the law, the Biden administration’s first significant move to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.“The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” Mr. Biden said as he listed the details of the Texas bills. “It’s unrelenting, and we are going to challenge it vigorously.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs 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 Big Question of the 2022 Midterms: How Will the Suburbs Swing?

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      Democrats and Republicans are already jockeying for a crucial voting bloc that soured on Donald Trump, tilted to Joe Biden and now holds the key to the second half of the president’s term.PAPILLION, Neb. — Pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure deal and trumpeting a revived economy and progress against the pandemic, President Biden is trying to persuade the nation that Democrats are the party that gets things done. His message is aimed at holding on to a set of voters in next year’s midterms who could determine the fate of his agenda: suburbanites who abandoned former President Donald Trump in droves.More than any other group, those independent-minded voters put Mr. Biden in the White House. Whether they remain in the Democratic coalition is the most urgent question facing the party as it tries to keep its razor-thin advantage in the House and the Senate next year. Mr. Biden made his pitch again on Friday when he signed an executive order intended to protect consumers from the anti-competitive practices of large businesses. But Republicans are also going to war for suburban votes. The party is painting the six-month-old Biden administration as a failure, one that has lost control of the Southwestern border, is presiding over soaring crime rates and rising prices and is on the wrong side of a culture clash over how schools teach the history of racism in America.Whoever wins this messaging battle will have the power to determine the outcome of the rest of Mr. Biden’s term, setting the stage for either two more years of Democrats driving their policies forward or a new period of gridlock in a divided Washington.Both parties are targeting voters like Jay Jackson, a retired career Air Force officer who is now a reservist in the Omaha suburbs. Mr. Jackson had lawn signs last year for Republicans running for Congress, but also for Mr. Biden. He thought that Mr. Trump had failed to empathize with military duty and regularly lied to Americans, and did not deserve re-election.“I’m a classic RINO,” Mr. Jackson said with a laugh, accepting the right’s favorite insult for voters like him: Republicans in Name Only. In a guest column in The Omaha World-Herald, Mr. Jackson, a 39-year-old lawyer, explained his view: “We Republicans need to turn away from Trump and back to our values and the principles of patriotism and conservatism.”Mr. Biden won 54 percent of voters from the country’s suburbs last year, a significant improvement over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s expansion of his own margins in rural and urban areas, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Suburbanites made up 55 percent of the Biden coalition, compared with 48 percent of Clinton voters.Jay Jackson encouraged fellow Republican voters to “turn away from Trump.”Walker Pickering for The New York TimesLia Post voted routinely for Republicans but supported Mr. Biden last year.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesThe authoritative Pew study, which echoed other recent surveys, also showed that Mr. Biden failed to increase his share of the Democratic base from 2016, including among young people and voters of color. It found, however, that his support surged among independents, veterans and married men — voters like Mr. Jackson.But even as Mr. Jackson crossed party lines for Mr. Biden, he supported Representative Don Bacon, a Republican who won re-election in Nebraska’s Second District, which Mr. Biden himself carried. Mr. Jackson said that he was pleased so far with the Biden administration — especially its “putting the accelerator to the floor on Covid” — but that he would very likely vote again for Mr. Bacon.It shows that in 2022, Democrats will need to count on more than the revolt of suburbia against Mr. Trump’s norm-smashing presidency to motivate their voters.The limits of the anti-Trump vote were already glimpsed last year, when half of the 14 House seats that Democrats lost, to their shock, were in suburban or exurban districts. The party also failed to defeat vulnerable Republicans in districts Mr. Biden won, such as Nebraska’s Second.For 2022, Democrats’ congressional finance committee has identified 24 “frontline” incumbents in swing districts, some two-thirds of them in suburban areas.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chair of the Democrats’ election arm, aims to fuse Republican candidates with Mr. Trump’s divisiveness and with the party’s obstruction of gun restrictions, expanding health care access and fighting climate change.“The post-Trump Republican brand is bad politics in the suburbs,” he said in an interview. “They have embraced dangerous conspiracy theories, flat-out white supremacists and a level of harshness and ugliness that is not appealing to suburban voters.”Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who leads the G.O.P. campaign arm, said Republicans would attack Democrats over a set of “incredibly toxic” issues for the suburbs. He listed them as crime, tax increases, border security and the latest flash point of the culture wars, critical race theory — the idea that racism is woven into American institutions, which Republicans have seized on in suburban school districts.Sarpy County is the fastest-growing county in Nebraska, with young newcomers drawn to jobs in tech or in Omaha’s insurance industry, and to the exploding housing market.Walker Pickering for The New York Times“It’s going to be a big issue in 2022,” Mr. Emmer said.He added that while Democrats “seem to be focused on a personality in the past” — Mr. Trump — “we’re focused on issues.”House Democrats also face structural and historical obstacles to retaining their slender nine-seat majority. In the modern era, a president’s party has lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections. Redistricting will place nearly all members of the chamber in redrawn seats, with Republicans wielding more power to gerrymander than Democrats.National polling shows Mr. Biden’s job approval consistently above 50 percent. But some recent surveys of swing House districts suggest that the president is less popular on specific issues. A survey in May of 37 competitive House districts by a Democratic group, Future Majority, found that more voters disliked than liked Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, climate policy and foreign affairs. He was especially unpopular over the U.S.-Mexico border and relations with China.But Val Arkoosh, a Democratic official in the Philadelphia suburbs who is running for the Senate in 2022, said that issues that rally Democrats, like voting rights and health care, would still be on the ballot, even if Mr. Trump — who drove furious opponents to the polls last year — is not. “Yes, the former occupant of the White House is gone, but we continue to see a significant amount of obstruction in Washington around issues people here care deeply about,” she said.While suburbs across the country vary demographically and politically, the independent voters of suburban Omaha present a snapshot of the terrain where both parties will be fighting their hardest.Nebraska is one of just two states to award a share of its electoral votes by congressional district. Mr. Biden’s success in carrying the Second District, which includes Omaha and much of its suburbs, went beyond the single electoral vote he picked up. He flipped the district by 8.75 percentage points after Mr. Trump had won it in 2016 — a larger swing than in any individual battleground state.The suburban part of the district is mostly in western Sarpy County south of Omaha. It is the fastest-growing county in Nebraska, with young newcomers drawn to jobs in tech or in Omaha’s insurance industry, and to the exploding housing market.Corbin Delgado, the secretary of his party’s state Latinx Caucus, said his top issue was immigration reform.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesJen Day won a State Senate race as a Democrat, though many of her voters supported a Republican candidate for Congress.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesFields of corn race up hillsides and yield suddenly to home developments with names like the Mansions at Granite Falls. A vast Amazon distribution center that will employ 1,000 workers is under construction. A sign at another building site promises the “Future Home of Lamb of God Lutheran Church.”Older towns in the county command hilltops, their water towers visible from afar like medieval castles.Last year, Sarpy County, like most places, had higher turnout by both parties and independents compared with 2016. But the surge especially among independents probably accounts for Mr. Biden’s winning 13,000 more votes in the county than Mrs. Clinton did. (Mr. Trump’s votes increased by only about 7,000.)“We have a lot of younger families moving in,” said Charlene Ligon, an Air Force retiree who leads the county Democrats. “They may be conservative, but they’re more centrist, with younger attitudes.”Jen Day, a small-business owner in her 30s, won a State Senate race as a Democrat in November, the first time in memory the party had captured a seat in western Sarpy County.Ms. Day said many of her supporters had also voted for Mr. Bacon, the Republican congressman. “From discussions I’ve had with people in the district, I don’t think they’re pledging allegiance to either party at this point,” she said.Jeff Slobotski, a suburban father of five who changed his registration from Republican to independent, said the Bacon seat was “absolutely winnable” for Democrats in 2022. A Trump supporter in 2016, Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Biden last year.Mr. Slobotski, 43, is an executive for a company that brings tech start-ups and arts groups to an emerging neighborhood in the city. He spoke over lunch last week at a downtown Omaha restaurant, the Kitchen Table. The restaurant windows displayed posters for Black Lives Matter and for a young state senator, Tony Vargas, who has been mentioned as a possible Democratic nominee to take on Mr. Bacon.Fields of corn race up hillsides and yield suddenly to home developments.Walker Pickering for The New York TimesAlthough Mr. Slobotski voted for Mr. Bacon, he said he would support Mr. Vargas if he ran for the seat. “He’s just a young visionary, somebody with leadership ability, more of a pragmatist,” he said of Mr. Vargas, a former Omaha school board member. The Democrats’ 2020 nominee, Kara Eastman, was considered by many to be too progressive for the District.Later that day, at a restaurant in Papillion, a group of three other 2020 ticket-splitting voters sipped iced coffees as they assessed Washington under unified Democratic control.All three had voted for Mr. Biden, but none supported the drive by many congressional Democrats to blow up the filibuster to pass Mr. Biden’s most ambitious agenda items.These voters preferred a scaled-back infrastructure package that, even if it left major spending on education and climate on the table, could pass with bipartisan support and represent a show of unity. “It’s one of those things that kind of builds relationships to get things going,” said Michael Stark, 30, an independent.The filibuster is “there for a purpose and I am terrified of what would happen if it went away,” said Corbin Delgado, 26, a Democrat who works for a nonprofit group and is the secretary of his party’s state Latinx Caucus. He said his top issue was immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. He voted for Mr. Bacon last year, he said, because the Republican had modified his opposition to some immigration changes after meeting with activists. “I’m a big believer that when a politician actually listens and changes, that should be rewarded,” he said.But he would leap at the chance to vote in 2022 for Mr. Vargas, who represents a district with a large Hispanic population.Lia Post, 54, grew up in a conservative religious family and voted routinely for Republicans. An activist for legalizing medical marijuana, she supported Mr. Biden last year. She said that more than anything else, she was relieved by the absence of perpetual chaos in Washington.“I don’t feel so stressed out all the time,” she said. “I just feel now I have a president that I can just breathe,” she added, and not worry, “‘Oh, God, what’s the next thing?’” More

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      Glass Ceiling Persists for Women in Mayor’s Race

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      Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley placed second and third in the Democratic mayoral primary. Many New Yorkers hoped the glass ceiling would finally be broken.It was a constant refrain for the two leading female candidates running for mayor of New York City: The city has had 109 mayors, and all of them were men. It was finally time for a woman.The two candidates, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, had experience in government. They had major endorsements from unions, elected officials and newspaper editorial boards. They raised millions of dollars and gained momentum in the final weeks of the campaign.But Ms. Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, still fell short, placing second and third in the Democratic primary behind Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.New York is one of a handful of major cities where voters have yet to elect a woman as mayor, along with Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. Boston recently got its first female mayor, and women currently run more than 30 of the nation’s 100 largest cities.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia won more than 380,000 first-choice votes between them, or nearly 41 percent of the votes. Ms. Garcia finished just one percentage point behind Mr. Adams under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.But their loss felt like a missed opportunity for those who believed that New York would at long last elect a woman.“I’m disappointed and sad,” said Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker who ran for mayor in 2013. “I give a lot of credit to Eric Adams, but I want a woman to be mayor of New York. It is truly, truly disheartening.”Maya Wiley garnered the second highest number of first-place votes, but finished in third place under the ranked-choice voting system.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe Democratic primary field was the most diverse ever: Four women were on the ballot including Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Joycelyn Taylor, a businesswoman. A fifth, Loree Sutton, a retired Army brigadier general, dropped out of the race in March. Of 13 candidates on the ballot, only three were white men; if he is elected in November, Mr. Adams will be the city’s second Black mayor.This was the first time New York City used ranked-choice voting in a citywide election, allowing voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference. In other cities, candidates have often formed alliances to boost their chances.While Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley each ran strong campaigns that embraced the notion that it was time for a woman to lead the nation’s largest city, they did so independently.The two campaigns had discussions about Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley campaigning together and Ms. Garcia wanted to do it, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions.But Ms. Wiley appeared to have reservations on a policy level; Ms. Garcia was more conservative on policing, for instance, and was one of three candidates favored by the union that represents police officers. Ms. Wiley wanted to cut the police budget by $1 billion a year.Observers also suggested Ms. Garcia may have had more to gain from an alliance than Ms. Wiley. Some of Ms. Garcia’s moderate voters, for instance, might not have voted for Ms. Wiley even if the candidates campaigned together.Ms. Garcia instead struck a late alliance with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, and that helped win over some of his supporters.Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she did not have any regrets over her decision not to campaign with other candidates.“We stood as a campaign on principle, and we stood with everyone who met our principles,” she said.Nearly 130,000 of Ms. Wiley’s votes — roughly half of her total support — were reallocated to Ms. Garcia under ranked-choice voting once Ms. Wiley was eliminated; Mr. Adams received nearly 20 percent of Ms. Wiley’s votes. The rest of the ballots were “exhausted” or eliminated in the final round because the voters did not rank either finalist. In the end, Ms. Garcia lost to Mr. Adams by less than 8,500 votes. Ester Fuchs, a political science professor at Columbia University, said it would have been a smart strategy for Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley to endorse each other, despite their differences, to give each a better chance at beating Mr. Adams.“Why did Adams start panicking when Yang and Garcia campaigned for one day together?” she said. “Garcia did get quite a few of Yang’s voters. That’s how ranked-choice voting can work.”The new voting system also could have hurt Ms. Wiley’s chances in a less obvious way: Under the old system, Ms. Wiley — who finished with the second-most number of first-place votes — would have moved on to face Mr. Adams in a head-to-head runoff election.Women are expected to make gains in the City Council, which could have a majority of female members for the first time next year. But the major citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and public advocate — will be occupied by men, and potentially four of the five borough presidents will be men as well.Still, Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she and Ms. Garcia had made significant strides for women in the city.“We did shatter the glass ceiling,” she said. “The glass ceiling that said that women could not be top-tier candidates. The glass ceiling that said women would be discounted. The glass ceiling that said we can’t be seen as leaders, and I think we demonstrated that is not true.”Ms. Garcia also referred to the glass ceiling in her concession speech, delivered in front of a women’s suffrage monument in Central Park featuring Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Ms. Wiley had held a major event earlier in the campaign in front of the statue, appearing alongside Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon.“This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor,” Ms. Garcia said. “We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken.”While some voters were excited simply to vote for a woman, many others were focused on ideology or experience, and were drawn to Ms. Garcia’s experience as a manager or Ms. Wiley’s progressive values. Michele Bogart, an art history professor in her 60s who lives in Brooklyn, ranked Ms. Garcia first and left Ms. Wiley off her ballot.“She increasingly struck me as a solid, can-do sort of official,” she said of Ms. Garcia.Catt Small, 31, a designer in Brooklyn, voted for Ms. Wiley first and also ranked Ms. Morales and Ms. Taylor on her ballot. After Mr. Adams won, Ms. Small was rethinking whether she should have ranked Ms. Garcia fifth to try and block him.“I ranked so many women and so many women of color on my ballot,” she said. “I was really hopeful that this was going to be the time.”Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley both faced an array of challenges during the campaign. They had some institutional support, but less than Mr. Adams did. They were also not viewed as seriously early on as Mr. Yang, even though he had less experience than they did, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which analyzes women’s political participation.Some voters also have reservations about electing women to executive jobs like mayor or president, Ms. Walsh said, and those may have come into play. These voters tend to be more comfortable seeing women in legislative roles.“When they’re trying for that top job where the buck stops, there are still gender stereotypes about who can lead,” she said.Voters might also have believed that a male candidate would be tougher on crime. The city has never had a female police commissioner, for instance, though Mr. Adams says he wants to change that. During the campaign, Mr. Adams focused intensely on public safety — the top issue for many voters — and highlighted his experience as a former police captain. And although Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia both surged toward the end of the campaign, the momentum came too late to lift them to victory.Ms. Wiley, for example, won early support from the powerful 1199 SEIU union, but progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse her until June. Ms. Garcia did not register high in the polls until she secured endorsements from The New York Times and the New York Daily News in May.Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley faced less overt sexism during the campaign than Ms. Quinn, who lost to Mr. de Blasio in 2013 and was criticized for being unlikable, dowdy and not feminine enough. Ruth W. Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president, faced similar attacks over her appearance when she was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997.One notable difference was that more female reporters were covering the race than in the past and they covered gender with more nuance, Ms. Fuchs said.“Gender did not hurt them for the first time in my lifetime,” Ms. Fuchs said of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley. “The media did not weaponize gender in this race.”The candidates did call out examples of what they viewed as sexism on the campaign trail. Ms. Garcia grew frustrated when Mr. Yang repeatedly said that he wanted to hire her for his administration; she insisted that she wanted to be the mayor, not work for one. Ms. Wiley argued that she was receiving unfair criticism over her ties to Mr. de Blasio instead of being judged on her own record.Ms. Quinn said she thought both women were held to a higher standard than their male rivals. “They had to be more substantive and more competent than the men to even be considered on par,” she said.And ultimately, she suggested, some New Yorkers may simply not have been comfortable voting for a woman.“I don’t know if voters are even aware of it,” Ms. Quinn said. “I think it is for many voters ingrained in their being from having lived in such a sexist society for their entire lives.”But Ms. Sutton, who endorsed Ms. Garcia after she dropped out of the race, said that while she was sad about the outcome, she was confident that a woman would be elected mayor soon.“She was one percentage point away — it’s heartbreaking yet it’s also exhilarating,” she said. “It should make New York power brokers pay attention.”Michael Gold contributed reporting. More