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

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

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      Mr. Adams, who leads the Democratic mayoral primary, said a rise in gun violence and the ongoing pandemic should speed up the transition to before the November general election.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and the leading vote-getter in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, said on Friday that the city could not afford to wait until after the general election in November for the next administration to get started. Instead, he added, Mayor Bill de Blasio should begin the transition as soon as the winner in the Democratic primary is announced in mid-July.Mr. Adams, 60, who holds a nine-point lead over Maya Wiley, Mr. de Blasio’s former counsel, also announced that he would be traveling around the city to discuss his vision on pressing issues such as tackling a rise in gun violence, even as the city continues to tabulate votes in its first ranked-choice election.As proof of his commitment, Mr. Adams pointed to his new footwear.“That’s why I traded my shoes for my sneakers,” he said, looking down at the white sneakers he wore with his dress pants and white dress shirt.A campaign source suggests they may be Steve Maddens, but it’s a basic design. Sperry? Keds? Vans? https://t.co/XwrvZtTbDY pic.twitter.com/Bb4pUggwyH— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 25, 2021
      The usual process calls for the next mayor to be determined by voters in November and then take office on Jan. 1. This year’s primary was held about three months earlier than in past elections, extending the period between the declaration of a primary winner and the actual inauguration.But because there are many more Democrats than Republicans in the city, the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to win the general election on Nov. 2. Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, has already been declared the winner of the Republican primary. Mr. Adams suggested that Mr. de Blasio meet with both nominees, an idea that Mr. Sliwa rejected.“He knows if I am invited to City Hall I’ll be out near the bathroom and it would be a sit down between two best friends,” Mr. Sliwa said.Though Mr. Adams at times sounded like a mayor-elect, he insisted that he will respect the process — but also that he had a responsibility to move ahead on the city’s challenges.“We know the votes must be counted. We know there’s a process. We’re going to follow that process,” said Mr. Adams, speaking before members of 32BJ S.E.I.U., a New York local of the Service Employees International Union. “But while that process is playing out we’re going to send a signal to New Yorkers.”Mr. Adams said November was too long to wait to begin a transition given the economic and gun violence problems the city is facing. He has already called on Mr. de Blasio to adopt his plan to address gun violence.“July 12 the results should be known. July 13 there should be an immediate sit down, build out a real transition team, build out a meeting with all the commissioners,” for both the Democratic and Republican nominees, Mr. Adams said. “We can’t say let’s start from scratch on Jan 1. That’s unfair to New Yorkers.”Mr. Adams said he wanted to make sure that federal stimulus money as part of pandemic relief was used to address the rise in violent crime and that he planned to reach out to City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and other City Council leaders. The deadline to approve the city’s $99 billion proposed budget is June 30.“We need to use the money smartly to ensure that we can deal with the inequalities that I believe produce the violence, but there are some things that we should be doing immediately to go after the violence we see on our streets,” Mr. Adams said.The city will receive at least $14 billion in pandemic-related aid over the next few years.Mr. de Blasio was noncommittal in response to Mr. Adams’s proposal to accelerate the transition process.There will be “informal conversations with winning campaigns following the primary and a formal transition process following the general election,” said Bill Neidhardt, the mayor’s press secretary. “In the meantime, the mayor is focused on our recovery.”Ms. Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, who is in third place after the first ballot, took issue with Mr. Adams stance.A spokesman for Ms. Wiley said it was “premature and disrespectful to discuss transitions when we have not yet come close to counting all the votes yet.”Annika Reno, a spokeswoman for Ms. Garcia, said the “Democratic Primary for mayor is not over,” noting that there were still first-place absentee votes and ranked-choice votes to be tabulated.“All candidates should respect the Democratic process and wait until all of the votes are counted before getting ahead of themselves on transition,” Ms. Reno added.Mr. Adams has already begun to move ahead in crafting the outline of his administration, consulting with people like David C. Banks, the president and chief executive of the Eagle Academy Foundation, a network of prep schools; Sheena Wright, president and chief executive of United Way of New York City; and Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group.“It’s really smart to lay out a vision for moving the city forward because we are in the midst of a crisis of gun violence and the economic crisis is affecting the city,” said Juanita Scarlett, a democratic strategist who helped Mr. Adams create his 100 point plan for the city. “It shows he’s listening to everyday New Yorkers.” More

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      They Seemed Like Democratic Activists. They Were Secretly Conservative Spies.

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      CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The young couple posing in front of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas fit right in, two people in a sea of idealistic Democrats who had arrived in the city in February 2020 for a Democratic primary debate.Large donations to the Democratic National Committee — $10,000 each — had bought Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca tickets to the debate. During a cocktail reception beforehand, they worked the room of party officials, rainbow donkey pins affixed to their lapels.In fact, much about them was a lie. Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca were part of an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle, according to interviews and documents.Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump.At the center of the scheme was an unusual cast: a former British spy connected to the security contractor Erik Prince, a wealthy heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune and undercover operatives like Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca who used Wyoming as a base to insinuate themselves into the political fabric of this state and at least two others, Colorado and Arizona.In more than two dozen interviews and a review of federal election records, The New York Times reconstructed many of the operatives’ interactions in Wyoming and other states — mapping out their associations and likely targets — and spoke to people with whom they discussed details of their spying operation. Publicly available documents in Wyoming also tied Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca to an address in Cody used by the former spy, Richard Seddon.What the effort accomplished — and how much information Mr. Seddon’s operatives gathered — is unclear. Sometimes, their tactics were bumbling and amateurish. But the operation’s use of spycraft to manipulate the politics of several states over years greatly exceeds the tactics of more traditional political dirty tricks operations.It is also a sign of how ultraconservative Republicans see a deep need to install allies in various positions at the state level to gain an advantage on the electoral map. Secretaries of state, for example, play a crucial role in certifying election results every two years, and some became targets of Mr. Trump and his allies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Sofia LaRocca and Beau Maier were in Las Vegas last year for the Democratic primary debate. They had insinuated themselves into the fabric of progressive movements in the West.The campaign followed another effort engineered by Mr. Seddon. He aided a network of conservative activists trying to discredit perceived enemies of Mr. Trump inside the government, including a planned sting operation in 2018 against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and helping set up secret surveillance of F.B.I. employees and other government officials.Mr. Prince had set Mr. Seddon’s work in motion, recruiting him around the beginning of the Trump administration to hire former spies to train conservative activists in the basics of espionage, and send them on political sabotage missions.By the end of 2018, Mr. Seddon secured funding from the Wyoming heiress, Susan Gore, according to people familiar with her role. He recruited several former operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas, where he had worked previously, to set up the political infiltration operation in the West.Project Veritas has a history of using operatives with fake names to target liberal organizations and make secret recordings to embarrass them.The endeavor in the West appears to have had two primary goals: penetrate local and eventually national Democratic political circles for long-term intelligence gathering, and collect dirt on moderate Republicans that could be used against them in the internecine party battles being waged by Mr. Trump and his allies.Nate Martin, the head of Better Wyoming, a progressive group that was one of the operation’s targets, said he suspected that its aim was to “dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody.”Toward the first goal, operatives concocted cover stories and made large campaign donations to gain entree to Democratic events such as the Las Vegas debate and a Washington fund-raiser attended by Democratic lawmakers.They also took aim at the administration of the Republican governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon, whom hard-right conservatives considered far too moderate and whose candidacy Ms. Gore had opposed in 2018. They targeted a Republican state representative, now the Wyoming speaker of the house, because of his openness to liberalizing marijuana laws — a position Ms. Gore vigorously opposes.Using her Democratic cover identity, Ms. LaRocca got a job working for a consortium of wealthy liberal donors in Wyoming — the Wyoming Investor Network, or WIN — that had decided to back some moderate Republicans. The job gave her access to valuable information.“Getting the WIN stuff is really damaging,” said Chris Bell, who worked as a political consultant for the consortium. “It’s the entire strategy. Where the money is going. What we’re doing long term.”Mr. Seddon, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca did not respond to requests for comment about the operation or the campaign contributions. Cassie Craven, a lawyer for Ms. Gore, also did not respond to emails or a voice mail message seeking comment about the operation, nor did Ms. Gore herself.When The Times reached out to political activists and politicians who had come to know Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca, informing them of the couple’s true agenda, some said the news confirmed their own suspicions that the pair might not have been on the level. Others were stunned and said they regretted any part they had played in helping them gain entree to political circles in the West.George Durazzo Jr., a Colorado businessman and fund-raiser who coaxed the large donations from Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca and shepherded them around Las Vegas before the debate, said he was both angry and embarrassed. He had planned, he said, to take them to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee before the pandemic turned it into a virtual event.“If they are indeed Benedict Arnold and Mata Hari,” he said, “I was the one who was fooled.”Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca volunteered at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Old Wilson Schoolhouse near Jackson, Wyo., in August 2019.Ryan Dorgan for The New York TimesSetting Up in WyomingMs. LaRocca first met Mr. Seddon in 2017, when he ran training for Project Veritas operatives at Mr. Prince’s family ranch in Wapiti, Wyo. Mr. Seddon taught them how to work undercover, build aliases and recruit sources. Mr. Prince, who had recruited Mr. Seddon, is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary.Mr. Maier, 36, a brawny and tattooed veteran of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division who fought in Iraq, also trained at the Prince ranch that year. His mother is a baker and was the cook at the ranch, and he is the nephew of Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator. At one point, Ms. Gore came to watch the training at the ranch.The next year, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca lived in a luxury house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington that Project Veritas rented for undercover sting operations against government officials that tried to expose “deep state” bias against Mr. Trump.The Women’s March in Cheyenne in 2019.Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle, via Associated PressPeople who worked for the conservative group identified the couple and linked them to the Georgetown house. Others confirmed Ms. LaRocca was pictured on the website Project Veritas Exposed, where she was identified as “Maria.”Mr. Seddon left Project Veritas in the summer of 2018. He lured Mr. Maier, Ms. LaRocca and others to work with him in Wyoming on a new venture — one that would more closely model his time as a British intelligence officer working overseas. Mr. Seddon wanted to run a classic espionage operation in which undercover agents would burrow into organizations and potentially recruit others to help collect information. As in his days at MI-6, the goal was to spy on potential adversaries or targets without getting caught and then quietly use the information to gain an advantage. If conducted correctly, such operations can last for years.And he found someone to pay for it: Ms. Gore, the Gore-Tex heiress who for years had supported conservative and libertarian causes.Hints of Mr. Seddon’s project surfaced recently in a memoir by Cassandra Spencer, a onetime Project Veritas operative. In the book, she describes being called in June 2018 by an associate of her former colleague, Richard, who was trying to secure funding for a new initiative. The man, whom she calls Ken, told her it was a “pay for play” operation — where clients would put up money for an undercover effort.Ms. LaRocca, 28, first approached the Wyoming Democratic Party in January 2019, fresh off her attendance at the Women’s March in Cheyenne, with an offer to help raise money. Her goal, she told people, was ambitious: help “flip” one of America’s most conservative states into a reliable victory for Democratic presidential candidates — as Colorado had become over the past two decades.Mr. Seddon appears to have directed Ms. LaRocca’s outreach to the Wyoming Democratic Party as a safe first step toward building up her bona fides for future operations. Democrats in the state are vastly outnumbered, have little political clout and are eager for volunteers. Ms. LaRocca quickly declared her candidacy for vice chairwoman of the Wyoming Young Democrats, obtained a contract position at the party as a fund-raiser paid by commission and had meetings with the state party’s top two officials, Joe Barbuto and Sarah Hunt.Sarah Hunt, the executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party.Chet Strange for The New York TimesHer behavior raised some suspicion. Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier lived in Fort Collins, Colo., only about 45 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital, but their residence prompted some Democrats to ask how they planned to organize a grass-roots campaign to flip the state while living in Colorado. Ms. LaRocca told others she could not rent a home in Cheyenne because she had a dog, an implausible explanation.Ms. LaRocca had also introduced herself to party officials as Cat Debreau. She eventually told a story about why she later went by the name Sofia LaRocca: She had been the victim of an online stalker, she said, but decided to once again use her original name because the police had told her that her stalker had reformed.“Her story from the start rang very untrue,” said Nina Hebert, who at the time was the digital director for the Wyoming Democratic Party. “The police don’t call you and say, ‘Hey, your stalker is better.’”Ms. Hebert said she began to restrict Ms. LaRocca’s access to the party’s email system in the summer of 2019.At the same time, Mr. Maier was making connections of his own around the state, meeting with Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the medicinal use of marijuana, which he said was particularly valuable for war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.In August 2019, the couple volunteered at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Old Wilson Schoolhouse, a community center in the shadow of the Teton mountain range near Jackson. Ms. LaRocca had her picture taken with the event’s headline guest: Tom Perez, the former labor secretary and then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.Months later, Ms. LaRocca secured a spot in a program training young progressives in the state on the basics of political and community organizing. She dashed off an email to Mr. Martin, the head of the group running the program, saying how thrilled she was to be receiving the training.During the course, she paired up with Marcie Kindred, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Wyoming Legislature; Ms. LaRocca later gave $250 to her campaign. Ms. LaRocca used a picture they took together for her Facebook profile.Ms. LaRocca, left, used a picture with Marcie Kindred as her Facebook profile photo. Ms. Kindred lost a bid for a seat in the Wyoming Legislature.“It was kind of odd she put it on Facebook,” Ms. Kindred said. “We weren’t really that close. Now it makes total sense. She was playing the long game, trying to be my friend in the hopes of me getting into the legislature.”Ms. LaRocca also told Ms. Kindred that she wanted to work on the campaign of Karlee Provenza, a police reform advocate who ultimately won a seat in the legislature in one of a few Democratic districts in the state.She and Mr. Maier eventually began going on double dates with Ms. Provenza and Mr. Martin, the head of Better Wyoming who was then her fiancé and is now her husband.Over dinner one night at Sushi Jeju in Fort Collins, Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier made a big announcement: They, too, were engaged. Ms. LaRocca flashed a large diamond ring. Mr. Maier paid for dinner.But the relationship began taking strange turns. Months later, meeting with Ms. Provenza and Mr. Martin in Laramie, Mr. Maier told them to turn off their phones.He then proposed a plan to target Republicans — using some of his contacts who could befriend politicians and dig up dirt on them. Mr. Maier said he had friends in military intelligence who could run background checks on people and suggested he had been on a “kill squad” while serving in Iraq.“This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they can do,” Mr. Martin recalled Mr. Maier saying, adding that the conversation danced around who would fund the operation.A Wyoming state representative, Karlee Provenza, and her husband, Nate Martin, went on double dates with Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier.Chet Strange for The New York TimesDuring the meeting, Mr. Maier described the purpose of the operation, saying they would collect the damaging material and hold it quietly until the person they targeted mattered — a philosophy that seemed to reflect Mr. Seddon’s view on long-term infiltration efforts.Mr. Maier had brought intelligence reports that appeared to be drawn mostly from public records. One was about the Wyoming attorney general, Bridget Hill, Mr. Martin said.Why Mr. Maier proposed this operation is unclear.“We knew something was fishy, but we couldn’t prove it,” Mr. Martin said.Weeks later, Mr. Martin and a colleague hosted an advocacy training event at a library in Laramie County. Mr. Martin was secretly videotaped, in what appears to be a sting operation tied to Mr. Seddon’s project.Shortly afterward, a video clip appeared on a now-defunct website, showing Mr. Martin declaring that he had voted in the Republican primary race. The video’s publication served as an attempt to expose alliances between progressives and moderate Republicans.Mr. Martin said he immediately suspected it was recorded by a woman who had attended the event and approached him afterward, claiming that her name was Beth Price and that she was from Michigan. The woman, whose real name is Alexandra Pollack of Grand Ledge, Mich., acknowledged in a brief interview that she was in Wyoming at the time but declined to answer questions about what she was doing there, saying she had a nondisclosure agreement. Ms. Kindred, who had attended the Laramie event, recognized Ms. Pollack from a photo on her LinkedIn profile.Ms. Pollack lived not far from Ms. LaRocca in Maryland when they were younger, and both are around the same age. She did not respond to an email asking whether she knew Ms. LaRocca.Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier attended the debate in Las Vegas in February 2020.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesDonations, Then AccessDemocrats across the country began 2020 with twin goals: ensuring that Mr. Trump was defeated, and pouring energy into key congressional races that could flip the Senate and keep the House in Democratic hands.Achieving those goals meant raising millions of dollars, and the large checks written by Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca opened doors for them into elite political circles.In February, Mr. Durazzo, the Colorado fund-raiser, secured a pledge of $10,000 each from the couple to the Democratic National Committee. “We are all vulnerable to charm and hefty contributions,” he said later. “Ten thousand bucks, you definitely have me by the ears.”Within days, they were in Las Vegas for the Democratic presidential debate, schmoozing with committee staff members and other donors during a party beforehand.Before submitting their names to be cleared by security for the Democratic National Committee events in Las Vegas, Mr. Durazzo said he asked Mr. Maier whether any “surprises” might come up. Mr. Maier revealed that he was the nephew of Mr. Beck but said he did not share his uncle’s politics.He said: “I’m a supporter of your causes,” Mr. Durazzo recalled.George Durazzo Jr., a Colorado businessman and fund-raiser, secured a pledge of $10,000 each from the couple to the Democratic National Committee. Chet Strange for The New York TimesSeparately, Mr. Maier gave $1,250 to the campaign of Jena Griswold, a rising Democratic star in Colorado, for her re-election bid as secretary of state. The donation gained him and Ms. LaRocca an invitation to a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser, where they met Ms. Griswold.A $2,000 donation to the campaign of Mark Kelly, then a candidate in Arizona for a U.S. Senate seat, got the couple on a committee for an April fund-raiser. The next month, Mr. Maier gave $6,000 to the Wyoming Democratic Party.It was not clear where they got the money to make a flurry of generous campaign donations. Under federal law, it is illegal to make campaign donations at the behest of another person, then get reimbursed. So-called straw donations have been at the center of numerous federal investigations.“Sometimes when you’re looking at patterns of contributions, you start to see people with relatively limited resources making sizable political contributions,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center and an expert on campaign finance law. “That can be a red flag.”The operatives also took aim at Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, whom hard-right conservatives considered too moderate.Josh Galemore/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated PressA Wealthy Conservative DonorWyoming is a rural state with a small population, a place where cities are separated by hours of open highway, vast prairies and jagged mountains. Statewide political campaigns can be won on a shoestring budget.In this political environment, Ms. Gore has long been a mysterious yet influential figure — quietly using her large fortune to ensure the supremacy of conservative causes.She was one of several children to inherit the wealth of her father, who helped invent the waterproof fabric that came to be known as Gore-Tex.After getting a divorce in 1981, she joined the Transcendental Meditation movement, according to court documents in Delaware, but she became gravely ill and left the movement to convalesce in monasteries for three years. In a bizarre turn two decades later, she tried to adopt her former husband in an attempt to increase their children’s share of the family inheritance.Susan Gore, an heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, has backed conservative causes and been a force in Wyoming politics since she moved to the state in the 1990s.Dan Cepeda/Casper Star-TribuneShe has been a force in Wyoming politics since she moved to the state in the 1990s. In 2008, she established Wyoming Liberty Group, a nonprofit in Cheyenne that pushes libertarian and conservative causes.In 2018, Ms. Gore opposed the candidacy of Mr. Gordon to become Wyoming governor. His main opponent in the Republican primary was Mr. Friess, the wealthy investor who was also a Project Veritas donor. Both Mr. Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had endorsed Mr. Friess, with the president posting on Twitter that “he will be a fantastic Governor! Strong on Crime, Borders & 2nd Amendment.”Mr. Friess lost, in part because a large number of Democrats switched parties to vote for Mr. Gordon. The outcome embittered Mr. Friess and his allies, who saw Mr. Gordon’s victory as part of a worrying trend of creeping progressivism in the state — and believed too many Republicans were part of that trend.Mr. Friess died last month at age 81.2020 StrategyWith months to go before the 2020 election, the biggest political fights in Wyoming were in the Republican Party, between hard-right candidates and more moderate politicians battling to represent the party in November.Mr. Trump was eager to make all elections something of a referendum on his leadership, and in Wyoming, the battle lines hardened between the Trump loyalists and the candidates the right wing of the party derided as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only.”Given the barren political landscape for Democrats, a consortium of wealthy liberal donors — the Wyoming Investor Network — made the strategic decision to quietly support certain Republican moderates. One regular donor to WIN is Elizabeth Storer, a Jackson millionaire and granddaughter of George Storer, who amassed a fortune in the radio and television industry.By hiring Ms. LaRocca, the consortium put her in a position that gave her valuable intelligence about which Republican candidates the group was supporting with independent advertising. She took notes during a board meeting and had access to the complete list of the candidates WIN supported.Mr. Maier began making contacts in the offices of moderate Republican legislators and befriended Eric Barlow, now the Wyoming speaker of the house. He told Mr. Barlow that he was passionate about the medicinal uses of marijuana, and the men met several times — including once when Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca had dinner at Mr. Barlow’s ranch.In an interview, Mr. Barlow, a retired veterinarian who said he was open to decriminalizing marijuana and allowing it for medical use, labeled himself a “practical Republican.”“For some people, that’s a RINO,” he said.Mr. Barlow said that he believed he had met Ms. Gore only once, but that she usually gave money to his Republican primary opponents every election cycle.Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier at a fund-raiser.Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca often told her colleagues that they were committed to upending the political dynamics in the Mountain West — saying that even a deeply conservative state like Wyoming could eventually turn liberal. Ms. LaRocca said she wanted to continue working at the Wyoming Investor Network and other progressive groups.But then, right before the November election, Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca disappeared. On Oct. 21, she wrote an email to her boss saying that she had to leave the country. “I have a family emergency and am going to Venezuela as my grandmother is gravely ill,” she wrote.Others she had worked with — and befriended — over two years said they had not heard from her in months.“She kind of dropped off the face of the earth,” said Ms. Hunt, the executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party.In fact, the couple never left the area. Mr. Maier and Mr. Seddon have also been working together on a business venture importing ammunition from overseas, according to a business document linking the two men that was obtained by The Times.Last week, Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier married in Big Horn, Wyo. Mr. Beck, the conservative commentator and Mr. Maier’s uncle, delivered a wedding toast.Kitty Bennett More

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      How Did a Socialist Triumph in Buffalo?

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      On Tuesday night, just after the polls closed, The Buffalo News ran an update about the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, which pit the four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, against a socialist challenger, India Walton. “Those handicapping the race are not betting whether Brown will win, but by how much,” the paper said. “Will a 10-point landslide suffice? Or could he post a larger tally?” More

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

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

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      Brad Lander Unites Progressives to Lead Comptroller’s Race

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      Brad Lander holds a lead over Corey Johnson, the speaker of the City Council, after the first ranked-choice voting ballot.As Maya Wiley fought to unite progressives to catch the presumed front-runner, Eric Adams, in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor, Brad Lander was doing the same in another citywide contest, for comptroller.Members of the city’s progressive movement have had success in capturing City Council, state legislative and congressional seats over the past few years, but they have struggled to stretch that influence across the five boroughs in citywide races.As Primary Day approached, that trend seemed to apply to the comptroller race: A recent poll showed Mr. Lander, a councilman from Brooklyn, trailing Corey Johnson, the speaker of the City Council and a late entrant into the race, by nine percentage points; 44 percent of likely voters, however, were undecided.But after the first round of first-place votes was counted on Tuesday night, Mr. Lander had an almost nine-point lead over Mr. Johnson. Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC anchor, was in third, another nine points behind Mr. Johnson, with seven other candidates finishing in the single digits.Mr. Lander had the support of the city’s progressive movement, with endorsements from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Jumaane Williams, the public advocate; and Tiffany Cabán, a former candidate for Queens district attorney who is currently leading in her race for a City Council seat.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez also endorsed Ms. Wiley late in the mayoral race, well after she had endorsed Mr. Lander. He was also supported by other prominent progressive leaders like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, enabling him to firmly establish himself on the left — unlike Ms. Wiley, who vied for that status with other candidates.Mr. Johnson was supported by several labor unions, which usually translates into on-the-ground support and money for advertisements. But Mr. Lander had one of the more memorable campaign ads of the race, featuring his daughter making fun of him for being a “policy nerd.”Mr. Johnson led the Primary Night vote count in Staten Island and the Bronx; Mr. Lander leads in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn.Ms. Cabán said that progressive groups had campaigned aggressively for Mr. Lander and that he had returned the favor, endorsing 12 progressive candidates for City Council and campaigning with them.“It’s a huge deal,” Ms. Cabán said. “His campaign and the execution and the outcome is a beautiful model of how progressive movements can build power.”The race for comptroller, one of only three citywide elected positions, flew under the radar at a moment when the position has never been more important.As the city’s chief financial officer, the comptroller is the primary auditor and fiscal watchdog, and will help oversee New York’s record-high $99 billion budget as deficits loom in the coming years, as well as at least $14 billion in federal aid coming because of the coronavirus pandemic. The comptroller is also responsible for $250 billion in pension funds covering 620,000 people.Mr. Johnson was a late entrant to the comptroller contest after he dropped out of the race for mayor, citing his mental health.While Mr. Lander proposed being more of an activist comptroller, Mr. Johnson was proposing a “thoughtful, strategic and prudent” comptroller to focus on the city’s finances. He cited his experience shepherding three $90 billion budgets during his time as speaker as an example of his experience and leadership.Anthony Perez, Mr. Johnson’s campaign manager, said they were in a “strong position” as the vote count continued.“We’ve built a broad, diverse coalition with support from communities of color and organized labor, as well as second-choice endorsements from dozens of elected officials and community groups in Brooklyn and Queens, putting us on the path to consolidate support in future rounds of ranked-choice voting,” Mr. Perez said.Mr. Lander said he felt good about his position but that he was a strong proponent of ranked-choice voting, and urged people to wait until all the votes were tabulated.“This is not a race that people paid a lot of attention to, and that left room to be out communicating with voters,” Mr. Lander said. “We had a strong ground game. We were out there.” More

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      What We Know (So Far) About New York’s Altered Political Landscape

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      As Eric Adams has moderate Democrats feeling bullish, the City Council appears to be shifting leftward.In the end, the Yang Gang went bust.Andrew Yang entered the race for New York mayor in January as the front-runner, but his happy-go-lucky, antipolitical style of campaigning left him unable to hold onto voters’ confidence. As early results came in for the Democratic primary after polls closed on Tuesday, Mr. Yang was on track to finish in a distant fourth place. He’s since conceded.Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that New Yorkers wanted a boldly ideological candidate either — or one with a wonky political approach. Eric Adams, a longtime Brooklyn politician and a former Republican, whose docket of endorsements and donors arguably looked more similar to Mr. Yang’s than any other candidate’s did and who similarly positioned himself as a no-nonsense Everyman, held a wide lead as early returns arrived.With 83 percent of precinct results in, Mr. Adams currently has 31.7 percent of the first-choice votes. He’s far from the certain winner: New York City elections are using a ranked-choice system this year for the first time, so it’ll probably take weeks to know who will be the Democratic nominee (a.k.a., the next mayor, almost guaranteed).But Mr. Adams is in a very strong position, meaning that even as the New York City Council has drifted leftward in recent years, its voters may choose a mayor with more moderate — and in some cases, even conservative-leaning — politics.“We always say people like divided government, and if you think of the Democratic Party as a very large and diverse party, we can see an element of divided government here,” said Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University and host of “FAQ NYC,” a podcast about New York City politics.Maya Wiley, the leading progressive candidate in the race and Mr. Adams’s closest runner-up, is currently at 22.3 percent — just shy of 10 points behind Mr. Adams. Many elections experts consider a 10-point divide to be the threshold beyond which it becomes virtually impossible for a candidate to overtake the leader in subsequent rounds.If Mr. Adams’s numbers hold, he will outperform his already-strong showing in pre-election polls, demonstrating that he gained momentum only in the last days of the campaign, as Mr. Yang was losing his. Many lapsed Mr. Yang supporters appear to have gone for Mr. Adams instead.“We know that there’s going to be twos and threes and fours,” Mr. Adams told his supporters during a wide-ranging speech on Tuesday night. “But there’s something else we know. We know that New York City said, ‘Our first choice is Eric Adams.’”In the speech, Mr. Adams picked up on the major themes of his campaign, particularly public safety. Just a year after the City Council responded to activists by passing a budget that made major changes to police funding, Mr. Adams ran his campaign in direct opposition to the “defund” narrative.He insisted on both “prevention and intervention,” in campaign speeches, emphasizing his past as a police officer and his support for law enforcement, while also nodding to liberals’ demand for youth programs and other root-cause approaches to crime prevention. On education and business regulation, he has sounded many moderate-to-conservative notes, including robust support for charter schools. His campaign’s ties to conservative and business-friendly groups have drawn scrutiny.But Dr. Greer said that his authenticity and his direct appeals to working-class New Yorkers had seemingly gone a long way. “With eight years of Bill de Blasio and 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, I think people felt left out and ignored,” she said, making a particular note of Mr. Adams’s support outside Manhattan. “I think Adams really tapped into that effectively.”What we know, and when we’ll know morePartly in response to the coronavirus pandemic, election officials allowed any voter to request an absentee ballot in the primary, and about 220,000 New Yorkers did. The deadline for those ballots to be received at election offices isn’t until next week, and then the process of curing ballots will begin.Since election officials can’t move past tallying the first round until all ballots have been counted, there’s no way for them to release more than first-round results until July 9.From there, the complex but ruthlessly simple math of ranked-preference tallying will be executed swiftly, and the winner will be declared.Possibly working in Mr. Adams’s favor is the fact that very few other candidates banded together in strategic coalitions. The one exception is the 11th-hour pact made by Mr. Yang and Kathryn Garcia, who is currently just behind Ms. Wiley, at 19.5 percent. In the final weeks of the race, when Mr. Adams was seen as the front-runner, some progressives mounted an “anyone but Adams” campaign, but the other candidates didn’t formally get behind it. At this point, he would have to have performed dismally in second-choice tallies and lower to lose the election.Is the City Council tilting further left?Put together, Mr. Yang, Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia — the most prominent centrist candidates — accounted for more than 60 percent of voters’ first-choice picks. Ms. Wiley, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, the three progressives, received a combined total of closer to 30 percent.Still, whoever enters Gracie Mansion will have to contend with a New York City Council that appears to be on a leftward trajectory. Progressives gained significant clout during Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor, and Tuesday’s primary may have pushed it even further in that direction.Most races remain uncalled, but an array of progressive candidates appeared to be strongly positioned as results came in. Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost a closely watched race in 2019 for Queens district attorney, had a wide lead in the race for a council seat that includes the Astoria neighborhood.With Corey Johnson, the speaker, barred by term limits from running for re-election, the council will vote early next year to choose its speaker, in what will be a measure of progressives’ influence under the new mayor.Other New York racesProgressives scored victories in other, slightly less-high-profile elections across the state.Brad Lander, a member of the City Council whose campaign was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders and other left-wing figures, earned the most first-place votes in the race for New York City comptroller.Mr. Johnson, the council speaker, whose efforts to find compromise on police reform last year left him at odds with many on the party’s left wing, is in second place. The results for that race also won’t be fully known until July 9 at the earliest.The Manhattan district attorney’s race is technically a statewide position, meaning the race did not use a ranked-choice system. Alvin Bragg — who ran on fighting mass incarceration and racism in policing — appears most likely to win outright, even though he held only a three-percentage-point lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein, his main rival.In Buffalo, the state’s second-largest city, India Walton — a 38-year-old nurse and democratic socialist organizer — won the Democratic nomination for mayor, defeating a four-term incumbent with close ties to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.If she wins the general election, Ms. Walton would become the first self-described socialist to run a major city since 1960 (because, no, the tiny city of Burlington doesn’t count).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