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      Why America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More

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      Can the Senate Be Saved? Ben Nelson, the Manchin of Yesteryear, Has Doubts

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      A former Democratic centrist senator says too many lawmakers come to Washington to obstruct rather than be constructive.WASHINGTON — The senator adamantly insisted on bipartisanship. As his fellow Democrats enthusiastically embraced major priorities of the new president, he threatened to withhold his crucial vote unless changes were made and Republicans brought on board. He was statistically the Democrat most likely to break with his party.His name was Ben Nelson, and he was the Joe Manchin of his day in 2009, when the incoming administration of Barack Obama was being tested by Republicans and could not succeed without the vote of the Democratic centrist from Nebraska.“In a way, I think I was,” said Mr. Nelson, accepting the comparison with Mr. Manchin, the high-profile but hard-to-nail-down senator from West Virginia whose vote is pivotal to advancing the agenda of President Biden and congressional Democrats. “Though probably not with quite as much publicity about it.”Mr. Nelson, like Mr. Manchin a popular former governor, was elected to the Senate in 2000. He retired after two terms in 2012, but has kept an eye on Washington and has become discouraged by what he sees.His coming memoir is titled “Death of the Senate,” and although Mr. Nelson concedes that the institution still has a pulse, he sees it as gasping for breath even as Mr. Biden and some current centrist members struggle to produce a semblance of bipartisanship.One main problem, Mr. Nelson suggests, is that too many members of Congress come to Washington determined to stop things from happening, rather than finding ways to make things happen while extracting benefits for their constituents and, hopefully, the nation as a whole.“I wanted to get something done; therefore, by bringing some people together or through my vote, I was able to get something done more than to stop things,” said Mr. Nelson, who was also in the middle of a 2005 effort to prevent Republicans from eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominees. “Everybody wanted to get something done. Maybe they had different ideas about what should be done or how you should do it. But it wasn’t just obstructionists.”That is a big difference from the current climate, he said, where a significant number of Republicans are committed to yielding no ground to Democrats.“It is not a governable situation in D.C. right now for the president or for Congress, because you have the commitment of the Republican leader to block everything and let nothing get through,” he said.Mr. Nelson is referring, of course, to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, whose determination to blockade Mr. Obama beginning in 2009 empowered Mr. Nelson in his dealings with the Obama administration.The dynamic is similar today, as Mr. McConnell’s zeal for stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda is giving leverage to Mr. Manchin and a few other Democrats. Mr. McConnell comes in for some tough criticism in Mr. Nelson’s book, which refers to the Republican leader as someone whose main interest is to “maintain a grip on political power and partisan advantage, come hell or high water.”Mr. Nelson, a Democrat, worked with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, to bring down the cost of the stimulus bill in 2009.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesIn Mr. Nelson’s day, the situation was slightly different. Rather than the 50-50 split of today, Democrats controlled 57 votes in early 2009 — later to reach a filibuster-proof 60 for a brief period. And while Mr. Nelson was a constant target, the pool of centrists in both parties was larger then as congressional leaders and the White House sought to round up 60 votes to push through measures like an economic stimulus package and later the health care overhaul.Yet some aspects have remained remarkably similar. Then as now, Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Mr. Manchin, whose politics and constituents are more conservative than the rest of their party, come under withering pressure to drop their reservations and simply vote with the team. They also hold outsize sway, with the power to force their own leaders to jettison some priorities to accomplish major goals, and are by nature reluctant to reflexively side with their party even when the stakes are highest.As they look back on 2009, some progressive Democrats have been critical of their leaders’ willingness to bow to demands from Mr. Nelson and other moderates, saying it constrained the Obama administration. They worry that Mr. Biden is making a similar mistake in trying to bargain with Republicans and mollify Mr. Manchin.But Mr. Nelson said there was never really another option for getting things done.“It was either what we achieved as a compromise or perhaps nothing at all,” Mr. Nelson said. More expansive Obama-era proposals, he added, “didn’t have the votes. When people forget about vote-counting, you can be in La La Land all you want.”That is also true of Mr. Biden’s top priorities, nearly all of which lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and cannot garner even a simple majority if Mr. Manchin refuses to sign on.Mr. Nelson balked at the initial stimulus proposal put forward by the Obama administration, writing in his book that the “House, under leadership from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, basically grabbed everything off the shelves that might be deemed economic stimulus and lumped it into an $819 billion package.”Working with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and an occasional collaborator, Mr. Nelson organized a group — a gang, as they were known at the time — to press for the cost of the stimulus to be pared down and devote more to projects guaranteed to create jobs, eliminating some of the party’s priorities. It passed with the support of all Democrats and three Republicans, and has been criticized ever since for being inadequate.Mr. Nelson then played a major role in shaping and finally approving the Affordable Care Act, holding out over a provision that he said would put an undue burden on states by requiring them to expand Medicaid.Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader who was pulling out all the stops to pass the measure, suggested that the bill include $100 million to cover the costs to Nebraska. Republicans, even some Mr. Nelson had worked closely with, quickly derided it as the “Cornhusker kickback,” and the name stuck. Mr. Nelson said that the proposal was misconstrued and was simply a place-holder as the administration worked out a more permanent solution and options for states.“For my part, I had faced a critical choice,” Mr. Nelson writes, “to legislate or to vacate. I chose to legislate. Had I chosen the path taken by the Republicans, I could have just sailed along say no, no no.”“The political consequences in my largely red state would be considerably less for vacating than the benefits accrued for legislating,” he said. “But I couldn’t have lived with myself.”Mr. Nelson supported the bill, becoming the 60th vote for its approval. But the political damage was done as the news coverage of the special provision caused his popularity to drop back home. At the same time, the health care debate was fueling the Tea Party and made the bipartisanship that drove Mr. Nelson a dirty word.“There was a new element in Congress, a kind of political virus that would virtually kill bipartisanship,” he writes in his book. “There was a restive mood emerging in the conservative areas of the country, a movement of small-government, or antigovernment activists who had been, since the TARP bailout, demanding that their elected representatives stop working on a bipartisan basis with Democrats.”Despite the gridlock and combative partisanship that has swept the Senate, Mr. Nelson said he opposed eliminating the filibuster. In fact, he would like to see the 60-vote threshold restored for executive branch nominees.He acknowledged that the push for bipartisanship can be time-consuming and frustrating, but that he believed that the Senate was still capable of a change in culture.“It doesn’t happen at all if you just quit and say, ‘I’m not trying,’” he said.But if the people in the Senate cannot change, he said, it will be up to voters to change the Senate.“The change is going to come most likely from people back home saying enough is enough,” he said. “I hope the people back home begin to ask the question of anybody running for the House and the Senate: ‘Are you going to put the county and your state ahead of party? Are you going to be a patriot or are you just going to be partisan?’ Because they aren’t equivalent.” More

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      Democrats Face High New Bar in Opposing Voting Laws

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      Democrats and voting rights groups say they can no longer count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.The 6-to-3 decision by the Supreme Court on Thursday that upheld voting restrictions in Arizona has effectively left voting rights advocates with a higher bar for bringing federal cases under the Voting Rights Act: proving discriminatory intent.That burden is prompting civil rights and voting groups to recalibrate their approach to challenging in court the raft of new restrictions that Republican-controlled legislatures have passed this year in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s election loss in November. No longer, they say, can they count on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to serve as a backstop for preventing racially discriminatory voting restrictions.“We have to remember that the Supreme Court is not going to save us — it’s not going to protect our democracy in these moments when it is most necessary that it does so,” Sam Spital, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Friday.The high court gutted the central protection of the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 decision, and on Thursday the court further limited the act’s reach in combating discriminatory laws, establishing strict new guidelines for proving the laws’ effects on voters of color and thus requiring litigants to clear the much higher bar of proving purposeful intent to discriminate.Mr. Spital said his group would have to carefully assess its next moves and “think very carefully” before bringing new cases that, if defeated, could set damaging new precedents. The Arizona case, filed in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, was considered a weak vehicle for challenging new voting laws; even the Biden administration acknowledged that the Arizona law was not discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. Choosing the wrong cases, in the wrong jurisdictions, could lead to further setbacks, Mr. Spital and other voting rights advocates said.At the same time, Mr. Spital said, it is imperative that voting restrictions enacted by Republicans not go unchallenged.“It will force us to work even harder in the cases that we do bring,” he said. “Once the rules of the game are set, even if they are tilted against us, we have the resources — we have extraordinary lawyers, extraordinary clients, and we have the facts on our side.”Thursday’s ruling also laid bare an uncomfortable new reality for Democrats and voting activists: that under existing law, they can expect little help from the federal courts on election laws that are passed on a partisan basis by the party that controls a state government. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida and Iowa have moved aggressively to push through voting laws, brushing aside protests from Democrats, voting rights groups and even major corporations.Arizona Republicans were candid about the partisan nature of their efforts when the Supreme Court heard the case in March. A lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party told the justices that the restrictions were needed because without them, Republicans in the state would be “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”“It’s much harder to prove these things — it takes a lot more evidence,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in voting rights and redistricting cases. “Courts are often reluctant to label legislators racist. That’s why the effects standard was added in 1982.”The high court’s decision also raises the stakes for 2022 contests for governor in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Democratic governors are poised to block measures proposed by Republican-controlled legislatures. If a Republican won the governor’s seat in any of those states, the legislature would have a clear path to pushing through new voting laws.Republicans on Friday lauded the Supreme Court ruling, calling it a validation of the need to combat voter fraud — though no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in President Biden’s victory.Justin Riemer, the chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, argued that the new “guideposts” set by Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, were welcome and would force a recognition of the broader options for voting available in a state.“It reaffirms, for example, that states have an incredibly important interest in protecting against voter fraud and promoting voter confidence,” Mr. Riemer said. “When the court looked at Arizona’s laws, it noted how generous the voting provisions were.”Mr. Riemer noted that Democrats would also have a harder time in meeting new standards for showing that laws impose unreasonable burdens on voters.“I don’t want to say completely shuts them out of Section 2, but it’s going to make it very difficult for them to strike down laws that are really minimally, if at all, burdensome,” Mr. Riemer said, referring to the section of the Voting Rights Act that addresses racially discriminatory practices.Major Supreme Court decisions affirming a new restriction on voting have historically been followed by waves of new state-level legislation. In 2011, 34 states introduced some form of new voter identification legislation after the court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law in 2008.The first immediate test of a newly emboldened legislature will come next week in Texas, where lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene for a special session, in a second attempt by Republicans to pass an election overhaul bill. The first attempt failed after Democrats in the State Legislature staged a contentious late-night walkout, temporarily halting proposals that were among the most restrictive in the country.Those proposals included bans on new methods of voting, a reduction in Sunday voting hours and provisions that would make it easier to overturn elections and would greatly empower partisan poll watchers.The uncertain legal fights will play out in a federal judiciary remade during Mr. Trump’s administration, and Democrats in Congress have failed to enact federal voter protections.The legal defense fund that Mr. Spital represents sued Georgia in May over its new voting laws, arguing that the laws would have a discriminatory effect. Other lawsuits, including one the Department of Justice filed last week, argue that Georgia acted with intent to discriminate against voters of color.But some Democrats, while lamenting the decision by the Supreme Court, noted that they still had plenty of constitutional tools to challenge repressive voting laws.“Obviously, it is now going to be more difficult to litigate,” said Aneesa McMillan, a deputy executive director at the super PAC Priorities USA, who oversees the organization’s voting rights efforts. “But most of our cases that we challenge, we challenge based on the First, the 14th and the 15th amendments of the Constitution.”Among the guideposts Justice Alito articulated is an assessment of “the standard practice” of voting in 1982, when Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was amended.“It is relevant that in 1982 States typically required nearly all voters to cast their ballots in person on election day and allowed only narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee ballots,” Justice Alito wrote.Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling established a series of guideposts for determining whether merely the effect of a voting law is discriminatory, rather than the intent.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe court did not address the purpose clause of Section 2. But those cases often rely on racist statements by lawmakers or irregularities in the legislative process — trickier elements of a legal case to prove than the effects.“You’re not going to get that smoking gun kind of evidence,” said Sophia Lakin, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s pulling together a lot of circumstantial pieces to show the purpose is to take away the rights of voters of color.”People protested voting restrictions outside the Texas Capitol in Austin in May.Mikala Compton/ReutersIn Texas, some Democrats in the Legislature had been hoping that they could work toward a more moderate version of the bill in the special session that starts next week; it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court decision will induce Republicans to favor an even more restrictive bill.Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and State Representative Briscoe Cain, both Republicans, did not respond to requests for comment. Speaker Dan Phelan and State Senator Bryan Hughes, both Republicans, declined to comment.But whether the Supreme Court decision will open the floodgates for more restrictive voting legislation in other states remains an open question; more than 30 state legislatures have adjourned for the year, and others have already passed their voting laws.“It’s hard to imagine what a spike in voting restrictions would look like now, because we are already seeing such a dramatic surge, more than at any time since Reconstruction,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute. “But passing new waves of legislation has certainly been the response in recent years.”Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin is one of the Democratic governors who are holding off voting measures passed by Republican-led legislatures. On Wednesday, he vetoed the first of several pieces of Republican legislation on the electoral process.In an interview, he said Republicans’ monthslong effort to relitigate the 2020 election had had the effect of placing voting rights on the level of health care and education among the top priorities of Wisconsin voters.“It’s rising up as far as people’s recognizing that it’s an important issue,” Mr. Evers said. “They brought it on themselves, frankly, the Republicans have. I don’t think the people of Wisconsin thought the election was stolen. They understand that it was a fair election. And so the Republicans’ inability to accept Donald Trump’s loss is making it more of a bread-and-butter issue here.” More

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      In Chaotic Mayor’s Race, It’s All Down to the Absentee Ballots

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      The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, now a tight race among Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, will be decided by absentee ballots.Fresh off a vote-counting debacle that caught national attention, the chaotic New York City Democratic mayoral primary is moving into a new phase: the wait for absentee ballots.A preliminary, nonbinding tally of ranked-choice votes on Wednesday showed a highly competitive race, with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holding a lead of about two percentage points over Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner. Under the ranked-choice elimination-round process, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, finished just behind Ms. Garcia, trailing by fewer than 350 votes.But those results do not account for the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots submitted, and the race might look different once all eligible ballots have been accounted for.No one knows with any certainty how the absentee ballots will shape the outcome, though many political junkies and campaign officials are trying to game that out. Here is a look at what the data suggests, and a guide to what to watch for as New York moves closer to determining the Democratic nominee.When will we know who won?Final results are expected to arrive the week of July 12.Before that happens, the Board of Elections needs to finish counting the absentee ballots, a process that began on Monday. Those ballots that have been counted by July 6 will then be factored into a new ranked-choice tally that will be released on that date.The city’s new ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. Because Mr. Adams did not receive more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the winner must be decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated in separate rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.The board must also consider absentee ballots that were initially deemed invalid, as well as affidavit ballots that were filed on Primary Day by voters who were told they were ineligible, but cast provisional ballots that would be counted if they were later deemed eligible.So is it officially a two-person race?No. While Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia were the last two candidates standing in the latest round of results released on Wednesday, those numbers were preliminary and could change as more absentee ballots are accounted for. Ms. Wiley remains in the mix.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Kathryn Garcia took slightly more of Andrew Yang’s redistributed votes than Eric Adams.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesDid the campaigns push absentee voting?Yes.Advisers for all three of the leading campaigns said that they engaged in so-called ballot-chasing efforts: direct follow-ups with voters who had requested absentee ballots, reminding those voters to return the ballots. The results in coming weeks will offer a sense of who ran the most sophisticated campaign on that front.As voters requested absentee ballots, the Adams campaign sent them personalized letters — regardless of whether they believed those voters were ranking Mr. Adams as their first choice — and added those voters to their broader communications strategy, following up by email and phone, as well as by mail.Mr. Adams may also benefit from his significant institutional support. He was backed by several major labor unions, an often-important dynamic in turnout efforts, and his consulting firm has particular experience with absentee ballots: It assisted the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, in her 2019 race against Tiffany Cabán — a contest decided by absentee votes.The Wiley campaign used phone-banking and texting to urge Democrats who requested absentee ballots to send them in, focusing on absentee voters who they believed might support Ms. Wiley.The Garcia campaign also sought names of voters who requested absentee ballots and followed up with them by mail and phone. Absentee voting was also a factor in shaping the timing of outreach strategies like digital engagement, a Garcia adviser said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a lead of about two percentage points over Ms. Garcia after a preliminary, nonbinding ranked-choice tally.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesCould Mr. Adams still lose?In the first round of votes, among people who voted in-person early and on Primary Day, Mr. Adams was in first place, leading Ms. Wiley by 9.6 percentage points, and Ms. Garcia by 12.5 points. But when the preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted, Ms. Garcia narrowly moved into second place and trailed Mr. Adams by only two points.It seems clear that the race is still an open three-way contest, but a final ranked-choice contest between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia, compared with Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley, might play out very differently.Sparse polls and interviews with party strategists and voters have suggested that Ms. Wiley’s voters — especially in places like Brownstone Brooklyn — often ranked Ms. Garcia on their ballots. But Ms. Garcia’s voters, especially the more moderate ones, were not always inclined to rank Ms. Wiley as high. That dynamic, if it holds, could make it more challenging for Ms. Wiley to pull ahead of Mr. Adams, even if she did surpass Ms. Garcia.Ms. Wiley, who emerged as the favorite of younger left-wing voters, may have also found it more difficult to connect with some who vote by mail, a group that has traditionally included older voters.Still, she had a burst of momentum in the final weeks of the race, and the absentee ballots from her strongholds could help boost her numbers. While Ms. Garcia was the favorite in vote-rich Manhattan, Ms. Wiley came in second in the first round of votes, and could see her numbers rise in some neighborhoods as absentee ballots come in.She emphasized that the contest was far from over.“It is a wide-open race,” she said on Thursday. “We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day, and it remains a deeply competitive race.”“We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day,” Maya Wiley said on Thursday. Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesManhattan had the most absentee ballots. Whom does that help?Many of those ballots are likely to benefit Ms. Garcia, who, in the first round of voting, was dominant in Manhattan.For example, many people voted by mail in the affluent, well-educated neighborhoods that border Central Park — and among in-person returns, Ms. Garcia pulled off strong showings in those areas. Ms. Garcia, with her emphasis on competence over any ideological message, may have also been an especially strong fit for some types of absentee voters.“Historically, absentee ballots have tended to come from older, more highly educated, more affluent voters,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist who has closely studied the city’s electorate. He pointed to Garcia-friendly neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. “Those are the kinds of voters who, particularly in Manhattan but also in the Brownstone belt, places like Riverdale, seem to have favored Garcia.”But on the first round of voting, Mr. Adams appeared to be the clear favorite in neighborhoods where many working-class Black and Latino voters live, and he also demonstrated some ability to connect with white voters with more moderate views.His allies argue that Ms. Garcia would have to pull in significant margins in Manhattan to cut into his expected lead in other parts of the city. The assembly districts where Mr. Adams had his strongest showings did cast fewer absentee ballots. But he led in more districts, and by higher margins, than Ms. Garcia overall.“It’s a fairly narrow path, and she would really have to overperform even in districts where she did well, in Queens and Brooklyn, and really run up the score in Manhattan,” said Neal Kwatra, who led a pro-Adams independent expenditure effort associated with a union representing hotel workers.Is there another key battleground?The second-largest number of absentee ballots were cast in Queens, where several candidates showed strength in the first round of voting.Mr. Adams, who won every borough but Manhattan in the first round, is likely to benefit from absentee ballots cast by Black homeowners in Southeast Queens, who tend to be more moderate. Ms. Wiley, who came in second place in Queens in the first round, was strong in Western Queens in particular, where many younger left-wing voters live; Ms. Garcia did well in places that are home to many white voters with more moderate views.Here is where ranked-choice voting may come into play.Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate who has since dropped out of the race, did especially well in Asian American neighborhoods in Queens and elsewhere in the city. He spent the last days of the race campaigning with Ms. Garcia — but some voters may have cast their absentee ballots before that apparent alliance was struck.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Ms. Garcia took slightly more of Mr. Yang’s redistributed votes than Mr. Adams. Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wiley’s voters when her votes were reallocated.If those circumstances play out again, does that help Ms. Garcia significantly in Queens as well as in Brooklyn, where many absentee ballots are outstanding and where Ms. Wiley came out ahead of Ms. Garcia on the tally of first-place votes?“Queens seems to favor Adams, Manhattan favors Garcia — we don’t know who that balance is going to ultimately benefit,” Mr. Gyory said, allowing for the possibility that Ms. Wiley could pull ahead, too. Until the absentee ballots are “processed, opened and fully counted, I don’t think anybody should presume how they’re going to vote,” he added.Charlie Smart, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting. More

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      The Rest of the World Is Worried About America

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      This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle. More

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      N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Remains Tight With Adams Leading in Revised Tally

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      Eric Adams kept his lead in a new tally of ranked-choice preferences, after the Board of Elections scrapped the results of an earlier count.A day after New York City’s Board of Elections sowed confusion in the Democratic mayoral primary by releasing new tallies and then retracting them, it issued a new preliminary tally of votes suggesting that the race between Eric Adams, the primary night leader, and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.According to Wednesday’s nonbinding tally, Mr. Adams led Kathryn Garcia by just 14,755 votes, a margin of around 2 percentage points, in the final round. Maya Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, barely trailed Ms. Garcia after the preliminary elimination rounds were completed: Fewer than 350 votes separated the two.But in reality, all of those candidates remain in contention, and those numbers could be scrambled again as the city’s Board of Elections tabulates ranked-choice outcomes that will include roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots, with a fuller result not expected until mid-July.While campaign officials and some New Yorkers were engrossed in the emerging results, the count was nearly overshadowed by the vote-tallying debacle that drew national attention and stoked concerns about whether voters will have faith in the city’s electoral process.The fiasco stemmed from an egregious error by the Board of Elections: Roughly 135,000 sample ballots, used to test the city’s new ranked-choice system, had been mistakenly counted. The board was forced to retract the results from a tabulation of ranked-choice preferences, just hours after it had published them on Tuesday.The board on Wednesday eventually released the results of a second tally of ranked-choice preferences among Democrats who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period.Those results, which do not account for the tens of thousands of absentee ballots, echoed the findings briefly released on Tuesday: Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a much narrower lead than the one he held on primary night, when only the first-choice preferences were counted.Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, voters can rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated one by one in separate rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.History suggests it is very difficult, but not impossible, for a candidate who trails in an initial round to ultimately win a ranked-choice race.Eric Adams retained his first-place primary night position, but two of his nearest rivals narrowed the gap.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe new numbers offered a snapshot of the kinds of coalitions the contenders were able to build.Ms. Garcia, who spent the final days of the race campaigning with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, clearly benefited when he was eliminated in the ranked-choice exercise. She moved from third place into second, edging past Ms. Wiley, though Mr. Adams benefited when Mr. Yang was eliminated as well.Mr. Yang had made clear that Ms. Garcia was his second choice, and the two had formed an apparent alliance, appearing together on campaign literature and in public, particularly in neighborhoods with significant Asian American populations.Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wiley’s votes when Ms. Wiley was eliminated in the exercise. Either candidate would be the city’s first female mayor.They and Mr. Adams stressed the importance of ensuring that voters can maintain faith in the city’s electoral process as the Board of Elections tabulates the results. The candidates also noted the importance of the coming absentee ballot tabulations.“With more than 120,000 absentee ballots left to count — in addition to provisional ballots and potential recanvassing of results — this election is still wide open,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement. “That’s why following yesterday’s embarrassing debacle, the Board of Elections must count every vote in an open way so that New Yorkers can have confidence that their votes are being counted accurately.”Even before the chaotic display on Tuesday, the elections board had already faced criticism over its decision to reveal some ranked-choice results without factoring in absentee votes.A number of strategists and officials warned that such a move could fuel voter confusion, especially if there is a different winner once absentee ballots are added in. Results will not be certified until all ballots, including absentee votes, are accounted for, a process that is expected to stretch well into next month.“While we remain confident in our path to victory, we are taking nothing for granted and encourage everyone to patiently wait for over 124,000 absentee ballots to be counted and included in the ranked choice voting tabulation,” Ms. Garcia said in a statement. “Every candidate should respect the democratic process and be committed to supporting whomever the voters have selected to be the Democratic nominee for mayor.”Mr. Adams’s campaign struck a similar note, saying in a statement that there were “still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric — and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied.”Tuesday’s extraordinary counting error comes not long after a 2020 presidential campaign in which Republicans sought to sow unfounded doubts about the integrity of the election and promoted false claims of voter fraud.And the confusion surrounding the primary results in New York prompted former President Donald J. Trump to weigh in, claiming without evidence that “nobody will ever know who really won.”Mr. Adams shot back on Twitter: “As always, Trump gets it wrong.”“Yesterday, the results released by the B.O.E. had discrepancies which are being addressed,” he said. “There were NO similar issues in November. Neither of these elections were a hoax or a scam. We need to count every vote. That takes time, and that’s OK.”In a statement Wednesday evening, the commissioners of the board apologized for the uncertainty and noted new tabulation safeguards, while stressing that the problems were not tied to the ranked-choice process.“We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward,” the statement said.The statement acknowledged that the board “must regain the trust of New Yorkers.”“We will continue to hold ourselves accountable and apologize to New York City voters for any confusion,” it stated.Still, Tuesday’s developments gave more impetus to long-stalled efforts to bring meaningful reforms to the Board of Elections. The State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said in a statement that the legislative body should move urgently to pass voting reforms.“The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” said Ms. Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”A spokeswoman for Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, the chairwoman of the Committee on Election Law, said that the committee would be holding a hearing on ranked-choice voting.Maya Wiley characterized the Board of Elections’ mistake as an “embarrassing debacle.” Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe counting error was the latest episode in a long series of blunders and other dysfunction at the Board of Elections, and the recriminations began nearly instantly.Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday called for a total overhaul of the body.“Yet again, the fundamental structural flaws of the Board of Elections are on display,” he said in a statement, also calling for “an immediate, complete recanvass” of the vote count and “a clear explanation of what went wrong.”“Going forward,” he said, “there must be a complete structural rebuild of the board.”And Mr. Adams’s campaign announced that it had filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.“Today we petitioned the court to preserve our right to a fair election process and to have a judge oversee and review ballots, if necessary,” the campaign said in a statement. “We invite the other campaigns to join us and petition the court as we all seek a clear and trusted conclusion to this election.”Ms. Garcia’s campaign indicated in a statement that it was filing in court as well, to preserve “our rights under election law to protect the canvass and provide for court supervision of the vote count if needed.”The Wiley campaign declined to comment on any potential legal proceedings.Separately, Mr. Adams and some of his allies have long expressed concerns about the ranked-choice voting process, which voters approved in a 2019 ballot measure. Some of Mr. Adams’s surrogates have cast ranked choice as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, a characterization that supporters of the process strongly reject.But the bulk of the critical focus on Wednesday fell on the Board of Elections, as new details emerged about the circumstances that led to what the board insists was a human error.For example, the supplier of the software that New York City used to tabulate votes repeatedly offered its assistance to the board, according to Christopher W. Hughes, the policy director at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, which provided the open-source software.He did not hear back.Dana Rubinstein, Ed Shanahan and Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting. More

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      Biden Gained With Moderate and Conservative Voting Groups, New Data Shows

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      President Biden cut into Donald Trump’s margins with married men and veteran households, a Pew survey shows. But there was a far deeper well of support for Mr. Trump than many progressives had imagined.Married men and veteran households were probably not the demographic groups that Democrats assumed would carry the party to victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election.But Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s apparent strength among traditionally moderate or even conservative constituencies, and especially men, is emerging as one of the hallmarks of his victory, according to new data from Pew Research.Mr. Trump won married men by just a 54 to 44 percent margin — a net 20 point decline from his 62 to 32 percent victory in 2016. He won veteran households by a similar 55 to 43 percent margin, down a net 14 points from his 61 to 35 percent victory.In both cases, the size of Mr. Biden’s gains among these relatively conservative groups rivals Mr. Trump’s far more publicized surge among Latino voters. Each group represents a larger share of the electorate than Latinos, as well.The Pew data, released on Wednesday, is the latest and perhaps the last major tranche of high-quality data on voter preference and turnout in the 2020 election, bringing analysts close to a final, if still imperfect, account of the outcome.The data suggests that the progressive vision of winning a presidential election simply by mobilizing strong support from Democratic constituencies simply did not materialize for Mr. Biden. While many Democrats had hoped to overwhelm Mr. Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters, the new data confirms that neither candidate claimed a decisive advantage in the highest turnout election since 1900.Instead, Mr. Trump enjoyed a turnout advantage fairly similar to his edge in 2016, when many Democrats blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on a failure to mobilize young and nonwhite voters. If anything, Mr. Trump enjoyed an even larger turnout edge while Mr. Biden lost ground among nearly every Democratic base constituency. Only his gains among moderate to conservative voting groups allowed him to prevail.The Pew data represents the only large, traditional “gold standard” survey linked to voter registration files. The files reveal exactly who voted in the election, offering an authoritative evaluation of the role of turnout; but they become available only months after the election.In previous cycles, the higher-quality data released months or years after the election has complicated or even overturned the narratives that emerge on election night. For this cycle, the Pew data — and other late analyses, like a study from the Democratic data firm Catalist — has largely confirmed what analysts gleaned from the vote tallies in the days after the election.If anything, the newest data depicts a more pronounced version of the early analysis.The Pew data, for instance, shows Mr. Trump faring even better among Latino voters than any previous estimate, with Mr. Biden winning the group by a 59 to 38 percent margin — a net 17 point decline from Hillary Clinton’s 66 to 28 percent victory in the same survey four years ago.Mr. Trump’s breakthrough among Latino voters was the most extreme example of the broader inroads he made among Democratic constituencies. According to the data, Mr. Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that backed Mrs. Clinton in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas. Often, Mr. Trump improved over his 2016 performance, even though he was largely seen as trying to appeal to his own base.Higher turnout did not reshape the electorate to the favor of Democrats, either. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many Democrats blamed Mrs. Clinton’s defeat on low turnout and support from young and nonwhite voters. Many progressives even believed that mobilizing Democratic constituencies alone could oust the president, based in part on the assumption that Mr. Trump had all but maxed-out his support among white, rural voters without a degree.At the same time, Democrats supposed that higher turnout would draw more young and nonwhite voters to the polls, bolstering the party.Overall, 73 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters voted in the 2020 election compared with 68 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters. In comparison, Mr. Trump’s supporters were only 2 percentage points more likely to vote than Mrs. Clinton’s in 2016, according to the Pew data.New voters, who did not participate in 2016 or 2018, split about evenly between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, with Mr. Biden winning 49 percent of new voters to 47 percent for Mr. Trump.In the end, there was a far deeper well of support and enthusiasm for Mr. Trump than many progressives had imagined. An additional 13 million people voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Voter records in states with party registration — like Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona — suggest that registered Republicans continued to turn out at a higher rate than registered Democrats, and in some cases even expanded their turnout advantage over the 2016 cycle.There was a far deeper well of support and enthusiasm for former President Donald J. Trump than many progressives had imagined.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNationwide, Catalist found that the turnout among ‘historical’ Republican and Democratic voters both increased by 3 percentage points, leaving the basic turnout pattern of the 2016 election intact.Whether the Democratic turnout should be considered strong or weak has been a matter of some consternation for Democrats, who are understandably reluctant to diminish the contributions their base made in ousting Mr. Trump. And of course, Mr. Biden absolutely could not have won the election if Democratic turnout did not rise to at least keep pace with that of Republicans.Perhaps another Democrat would have mobilized voters more decisively. But the strong turnout for Mr. Trump implies that it would have been very challenging for any Democrat to win simply by outmuscling the other side.Instead, Mr. Biden prevailed by making significant inroads among moderate or conservative constituencies.Mr. Biden’s strength among these groups was not obvious on election night. His gains were largest in suburban areas, which are so heterogenous that it’s often hard to say exactly what kinds of voters might explain his inroads.Mr. Biden’s weakness among Hispanic voters, in contrast, was obvious in overwhelmingly Hispanic areas like Miami-Dade County or the Rio Grande Valley.But according to Pew Research, Mr. Biden made larger gains among married men than any other demographic group analyzed in the survey. He won 44 percent of married men, up from 32 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. It’s an even larger surge for Mr. Biden than Pew showed Mr. Trump making among Latino voters, even though they do not stand out on the electoral map.In a similar analysis, Catalist also showed that Mr. Biden made his largest inroads among married white men, though they showed smaller gains for Mr. Biden than Pew Research.Mr. Biden also made significant, double-digit gains among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, a persuadable but somewhat conservative voting bloc. He won 16 percent of moderate to liberal Republicans, up from 9 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. And Mr. Biden gained among men, even while making no ground or, according to Pew, losing ground, among women. As a result, the gender gap was cut in half over the last four years, to 13 points from 26 points in 2016.The shrunken gender gap in 2020 defies the pre-election conventional wisdom and polling, which predicted that a record gender gap would propel Mr. Biden to victory. The Pew findings offer no insight into why the gender gap may have decreased; any number of interpretations are possible. In this case, it is possible that attitudes about Mrs. Clinton may be a more important factor than attitudes about either of the 2020 election candidates. More

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      ‘New York City Is a World Unto Itself.’ But It May Tell Us Where Democrats Are Headed.

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      On the Democratic side of the New York mayoral contest, Eric Adams, the African-American former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, continues to hold a lead over Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. From a national vantage point, the most significant element of Adams’s campaign so far lies in his across-the-board success with working class voters of all races and ethnicities.Before we turn to the possible national implications of the race, we have to understand the extent of Adams’s victory, at least as far as first-choice balloting went. In census tracts with a majority or plurality of whites without college degrees, Adams — who repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety” — led after stage one of the New York City Democratic primary last week, according to data provided to The Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the Graduate Center for Urban Research at C.U.N.Y.Adams took 28.5 percent of the first-choice ballots among these white voters, compared with the 17.1 percent that went to Garcia, who is white and has served as both sanitation commissioner and interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the 15.4 percent that went to Wiley, an African- American who has been both legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a New York Police Department watchdog.Adams’s strength in non-college white tracts shows that his campaign made substantially larger inroads than either Garcia or Wiley among white working class voters, a constituency in which the national Democratic Party has suffered sustained losses.On Staten Island, the most conservative of the five boroughs, Adams led the first-choice voting with 31 percent to Garcia’s 20 percent and Wiley’s 17 percent. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Staten Island with 61.6 percent of the vote.Adams’s biggest margins were in Black majority non-college tracts, where he won with 59.2 percent to Wiley’s 24.4 percent and Garcia’s 4.7 percent. In Black majority college-educated tracts, Adams won a plurality, 37.5 percent, to Wiley’s 32.5 percent and Garcia’s 13.0 percent.Counting all the census tracts with a majority or plurality of adult voters who do not have college degrees, Adams won decisively with 42.1 percent — compared with Wiley’s 19.7 percent and Garcia’s 10.3 percent. Both Wiley and Garcia continue to pose a threat to Adams because they have more support among college educated voters, who make up roughly 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. According to Mollenkopf’s data, in census tracts with a majority of college-educated adults, Adams’s support fell to 14.7 percent, Wiley’s rose to 26.2 percent and Garcia won a plurality at 34.9 percent.If elected in November, either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman to serve as mayor of New York — the first Black woman in Wiley’s case. In the first round, Garcia was strongest among college-educated whites, among whom she was the biggest vote-getter, while Wiley’s winning constituencies were college-educated Black and Hispanic voters.Mark Peterson/ReduxGrowing public anxiety over the sharp increase in gun violence in New York proved crucial to Adams’s success, although it was not the whole story. A May Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos NYC Mayoral Primary Poll of 3,249 New Yorkers found that crime and violence topped the list of concerns, outpacing affordable housing, Covid and racial injustice. Through June 6 of this year, 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire in the city, the highest number for that period since 2000.The results in the mayoral primary so far are evidence of the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left. The results also suggest that Adams’s strategy of taking a strong stand on public safety in support of the police, combined with a call to end abusive police practices, is an effective way for the party to counter the small but significant Black and Hispanic defections to the Republican Party that began to emerge in the 2020 presidential election.I posed a series of questions about the implications of the still-unresolved New York City Democratic Primary to a group of scholars and analysts.Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, argues that the initial tally affirmed a basic but often overlooked truth about the Democratic Party nationwide:The outcomes are more evidence of an innumerate punditry that conflates the share of educated, professional voters who support the Democratic Party with their electoral clout. It remains true that a majority of Democratic voters are working class without college degrees. So it is the same dynamic in New York that played out in the presidential race. While other candidates battled over of the support of the highly educated segments (of all races), Biden understood where the votes were.While most of the national attention has focused on levels of education in shaping the partisanship of white voters — with the more educated moving left and the less well educated moving right — a parallel split has been quietly developing within the multiracial Democratic coalition. Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, elaborated in his reply to my email:There has been a growing education and age divide in the Democratic Party beyond racial divisions. Additionally, Adams tapped into an N.Y.C. pattern of politicians winning with strong “outer borough” ethnic support. In the past it was white ethnics — Italians, Irish and Poles living in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — who supported the Tammany-style politicians. Today it is Hispanics and Blacks from different parts of the diaspora supporting Adams, who leveraged his shared background with voters, with ties to powerful political institutions (e.g., municipal unions) much like Tammany.Older Black voters, La Raja continued,will continue to be a moderating force in the Democratic Party. They deliver votes and they are pragmatic in their vote choices. They bear the traces of New Deal liberalism with bread-and-butter concerns about jobs, education and safe neighborhoods to raise families.There are significant differences between the values and agendas that shape the voting decisions of the Garcia constituency, of the Wiley electorate, and of those Black voters who were the core of Adams’s support, La Raja notes:Garcia won the good government progressives and liberals south of 110th street in Manhattan, who are more likely to be executives at major institutions of finance, technology, entertainment and fashion. These voters want a livable city to support their institutions. They — like The New York Times editorial board — believe Garcia is the most credible on managing city operations. Wiley, in contrast, gets the young progressives just across the river in Brooklyn and Queens who haven’t quite made it up the career ladder yet. They have fewer institutional responsibilities. They are less likely to vote out of a desire to get well-functioning government and more based on their personal values.Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard and the author of “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism,” had more to say in his reply:The local discussion of crime gets entangled in the national culture war within the Democratic Party and within “liberalism.” As with “limousine liberalism” before it, what some dub “woke” liberalism flourishes in the zones of the educated and often affluent whose lives, neighborhoods and moral understandings differ from those of working and middle class people.Because of this, Rieder contends, the party remains caught in what has become a 50-year “battle between what used to be called ‘lunch-pail’ Democrats and more righteous ones, between James Clyburn and AOC.”Rieder argues thatFor all the gradual shrinkage of white non-college voters, the Democrats still require a multicultural middle to include non-affluent and lesser educated whites in their majority coalition. And that will be hard to secure if the party is identified with ceding the border, lawlessness, ignoring less privileged whites, exclusionary versions of anti-racist diversity that smack of thought reform, phrasing like Latinx that large numbers of Latinos find off-putting, esoteric or perplexing, and so much more.Taking a more optimistic stance, Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, acknowledges that the primary “reflected these intraparty divisions along lines of race, income and education,” but, he argues,What was more surprising was the level of cohesion. Candidates from a wide range of backgrounds ran and, overall, there was remarkably little race-baiting rhetoric. In the final high-pressure days of the campaign, calls to vote along racial or ethnic lines did increase but, given the high level of diversity in the candidate pool and in New York City more broadly, the relatively limited presence of appeals to in-group solidarity or out-group antipathy was remarkable. While some of this behavior is specific to New York, it also likely reflects a strong norm among elite Democrats more generally that certain kinds of ethnic threat and resentment politics are off-limits.Wasow agrees that Black voters have become a moderating force in Democratic politics:Put simply, direct experiences of racism and dreams deferred appears to have forged a more moderate or pragmatic politics among African Americans. Where the whiter, more liberal wing of the Democratic Party was considerably more optimistic about the country’s willingness to elect a woman, a democratic socialist or a person of color, African Americans exhibited far more skepticism. Given the narrow margins with which President Biden won, the Black assessment of national white voting behavior does seem to have been more accurate.For two generations, Wasow continued, “Democrats have struggled to articulate a response to attacks that they’re ‘soft on crime.’ Some candidates co-opted toughness and others emphasized ‘root causes’ but ‘law and order’ kept winning.”In this context, according to Wasow, “Adams’s activism as a cop against police abuse is a powerful embodiment of the position that recognizes both demand for reform and desire for public safety.”Adams affirmed this two-pronged stance toward policing and crime on his website:Our city faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to undo the progress we have made against crime. Gun arrests, shootings and hate crimes are up; people do not feel safe in their homes or on the street. As a police officer who patrolled the streets in a bulletproof vest in the 1990s, I watched lawlessness spread through our city, infecting communities with the same terrible swiftness of Covid-19.At the same time, Adams declared,We face a crisis of confidence in our police. I understand that mistrust because as a young man, police beat my brother and I at a precinct house — and we still carry the pain of that. I called out racism in the NYPD as an officer and helped push through reforms, including the successful effort to stop the unlawful use of Stop-and-Frisk. The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better.The strong appeal to Black voters of a candidate like Adams who combines calls to reform police behavior while simultaneously pushing for aggressive enforcement to increase public safety can be seen in the results of a survey Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, conducted with colleagues during the week after George Floyd’s murder.Specifically, Weaver found that:40.5 percent of Black respondents (compared to just 16.7 percent of whites) strongly agreed with this statement: “I have rights as a matter of law, but not in reality.” 60 percent of Black Americans agreed ‘The Constitution doesn’t really protect us from the police’ (compared to 32 percent of whites). Similar breakdowns occurred on “the official rules say the police can’t do certain things but in reality, they can do whatever they want.”Weaver summed up her findings:The responses show some alarming divergences in how Americans of different racial positions understand their citizenship, the logic of governing authority, and whether the law applies to everyone equally.Jim Sleeper, the author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York,” wrote me (citing his friend Curtis Arluck, a Democratic district leader in Manhattan):Garcia ran better than Wylie among older white voters, even those who skew pretty far left. So she did much better on the Upper West Side, the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope than in the East Village, Astoria or Williamsburg. And Wylie performed much better among younger and more affluent Black voters than those who were older and more working class. Both older white liberal voters and older less affluent Black voters saw Wiley as too “woke.”If Garcia has more second place votes to be allocated from lesser candidates, Sleeper notes, she “could well overtake Wylie for second place.” That may not be enough for Garcia to capture first place, according to Sleeper’s reckoning. If Wiley is dropped reducing the final count to Adams versus Garcia, “enough Wylie votes will go for Adams second, so that Adams should prevail.”Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, who founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture with her husband Peter Steinfels, argues that Adams’s lead rests on four factors:(A) the “crime wave” that became the hot issue in the campaign; (B) on Adams’s story of experiencing police abuse and then being in the police; (C) on the emerging sense that Black voters are “moderates” — pace the views of progressives and young B.L.M. advocates (Black and white) — that N.Y.C. is a union city and that Adams had important endorsements; (D) Adams was pretty clearly the “working class” candidate and he campaigned in relevant districts. Defunding the police, which Adams opposes, is not a winning policy as Biden’s announcements on crime this past week underlined.Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, wrote to me to say that:The New York voting clearly undermines progressives’ claims that a bold agenda on issues like policing is the best way to bring out the Democratic base. That certainly was not the case with New York Latinos and Blacks.Recognition of these patterns is crucial for Democrats seeking to maintain high levels of minority support, Suro continued:The same differences among Latinos in New York plays out nationally. Older, working class Latinos shifted to the Republicans across the country last November amid Trump’s claims that Democrats are dangerously radical. The New York results suggests that segment of the Latino electorate might be susceptible to Republican campaigns next year, painting Democrats as anti-police.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, put it succinctly: “Black voters are a moderating force and should tell the party to focus on economic, health care, and equality issues, and less on culture war issues.”Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, disputed the argument that Black voters have become a moderating force within the Democratic Party:The pre-election polling data suggests that Maya Wiley is the second choice candidate among African-American voters, despite having a political message that is far more progressive on the issues than a number of other candidates, notably on police reform. That ought to push back against a narrative that Black voters are necessarily more moderate than the rest of the party. Wiley is a very progressive candidate and has ample support from African- Americans, losing only to a more moderate Democrat, and outdistancing a number of more conservative Democrats.“New York City is a world unto itself, making it hard to discern national trends from its voting patterns,” cautioned Doug Massey, a Princeton sociologist who has written extensively about urban America.“That said,” Massey continued,The election results would seem to confirm that Black and Hispanic voters form the core of the Democratic Party’s base. They appear to be strongly motivated by racial justice and progressive economics as well as public safety, but lean toward candidates who have experience and insider knowledge rather than flashy liberals from outside the system who are proclaiming dreamy agendas.Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, in Massey’s view,are insiders to N.Y.C. politics and the bureaucracy with reputations for getting things done, and Wiley appealed to better educated young people and Blacks in Brooklyn, while Garcia appealed to better educated white and Latino Manhattanites. But it was the strong support of working class voters across all the boroughs that has carried the day so far for Adams, with particular strength among Blacks and Latinos but seemingly with some popularity even among blue-collar whites on Staten Island.For all the potential embodied in Adams’ candidacy, there are deep concerns that, if he wins, he could disappoint.Adams is a hardened player in the rough and tumble of New York. I asked Rieder if Adams represents a resolution of the difficulty of developing a credible but nonracist approach to crime and public safety. Rieder replied: “I think he’s such a flawed incarnation of the stance — his history of corruption, his race-baiting — it’s too early to say. Alas.”Adams himself is not given to false modesty. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he declared last week. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”While the unresolved primary fight has come down to a contest between Adams, Garcia and Wiley, it is effectively the contest for mayor because the Republican Party has shrunk to insignificance in the city, despite holding the mayoralty for decades not that long ago. Whichever one of the trio comes out ahead, he or she is very likely to run far ahead of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Ranked-choice voting — which despite its virtues remains poorly understood by many voters — means we won’t know who the next mayor will be for some time. What we do know is that whoever wins will have a very tough row to hoe.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