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      Supreme Court Case Throws Abortion Into 2022 Election Picture

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      Supporters and opponents of abortion rights say a major ruling just before the midterm elections could upend political calculations for the two parties.WASHINGTON — Within hours of the Supreme Court accepting a case that could lead it to overturn or scale back a landmark abortion rights ruling, Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat facing re-election next year, issued a dire warning to supporters: The fate of Roe v Wade is on the line.“We cannot move backwards,” Mr. Bennet said in a campaign statement. “Colorado was a leader in legalizing abortion — six years before Roe v Wade. I will always fight for reproductive justice and to ensure everyone has safe and legal access to the health care they need.”His declaration was among the first in a quickly intensifying clash over abortion, long a defining issue to many voters but one likely to gain additional prominence as the court weighs the possibility of rolling back the constitutional protections it provided to abortion rights in Roe 48 years ago.Motivated in part by a belief that the Supreme Court will give them new latitude to restrict access, Republican-dominated states continue to adopt strict new legislation, with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signing into law on Wednesday a prohibition on abortions after as early as six weeks. The law, sure to face legal challenges, is one of more than 60 new state-level restrictions enacted this year, with many more pending.With the Supreme Court ruling likely to come next year — less than six months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and the future of President Biden’s agenda — the court’s expanded conservative majority has injected new volatility into an already turbulent political atmosphere, leaving both parties to game out the potential consequences.Republicans had already shown that they intended to take aim at Democrats over social issues, and abortion will only amplify the culture wars.Nearly all agree that the latest fight over Roe, which has been building for years, is certain to have significant political repercussions. Conservative voters are traditionally more energized than liberals about the abortion debate, and for many of them it has been the single issue spurring voter turnout.But Democrats, likely to be on the defensive given their current hold on the White House and Congress, say a ruling broadly restricting abortion rights by a court whose ideological makeup has been altered by three Trump-era appointees could backfire on Republicans and galvanize women.“Outlawing Roe would create a backlash that would have critical unintended consequences for those who would like to repeal it,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire and a leading voice in Congress for abortion rights. “The women of the country would be very upset, particularly young women, that there would be such a deliberate effort to limit women’s access to reproductive choices.”Those on the right, already anticipating a favorable ruling given the conservative tilt of the 6-3 court, say they expect liberals to seize on the issue to try to “scare” voters. But they believe they can make a case for “reasonable” abortion limits.“This is clearly going to invigorate people on both sides of the debate, but this is a winning issue for pro-life candidates,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative nonprofit.She said she did not expect conservative voting enthusiasm to ebb if the right triumphed at the Supreme Court, an outcome that would bring to fruition years of emphasis on electing anti-abortion lawmakers at the federal and state levels and working aggressively to confirm conservative judges.“What happened on Monday is evidence that elections have consequences,” Ms. Quigley said, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to take a case about a Mississippi law that seeks to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — about two months earlier than Roe and subsequent decisions allow.Anti-abortion activists in the Texas State Capitol in Austin in March.  Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed into law one of the country’s most restrictive abortion measures.Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated PressThe Supreme Court action may have political ramifications before next year. The case is likely to be argued weeks before Virginia voters head to the polls in November to elect a new governor in a race often seen as a midterm bellwether. Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and most likely the Democratic nominee, is eager for another political battle over abortion rights, rattling off his record protecting clinics in the state and vetoing legislation that would impose restrictions.“This is going to be a huge motivator,” he said in an interview. “In 2013, I promised women I would be a brick wall to protect their rights. And I will be a brick wall again.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, downplayed the potential effect of the court ruling, though he said that as an abortion opponent he welcomed the court taking up the case. But Mr. Scott said he believed voters would be more persuaded by what he described as the Biden administration’s failings on issues such as immigration, the economy, taxes, inflation and more.While the lines have always been starkly drawn on abortion into the pro and anti camps, public opinion has proved more nuanced, with a clear majority backing Roe but majorities also favoring some limits. How the Supreme Court comes down on the fine points of abortion law could determine how the issue plays in the elections.“Considering the decision will likely be made five months ahead of the election, and depending on the decision itself, it’s too early to measure its ultimate impact on the midterms,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections. Mr. Gonazales said it could conceivably energize Republicans but also pay benefits for Democrats — a view shared by others.President Donald J. Trump helped inspire record turnout last year from Democratic voters, who were eager to reject his administration. With Mr. Trump no longer on the ballot, many Democrats say the Supreme Court case could provide crucial midterm motivation, particularly for suburban women in swing districts who were instrumental in Democratic wins last year.Katie Paris, the founder of Red, Wine and Blue, a group focused on organizing suburban female voters for Democrats across the country, said the Supreme Court news immediately touched off alarm on the Facebook groups and other social media channels run by her organization.“When the news came out that this was going to be taken up, it was like, ‘Everybody get ready. This is real,’” she said. “We know what this court could do, and if they do it, the backlash will be severe.”Tresa Undem, a pollster who specializes in surveys on gender issues, said that abortion rights would continue to be an effective cause for Democrats because voters link it to larger concerns about power and control that motivated female voters during the Trump administration.“Democrats and independents have felt a loss of control and power from people at the top,” said Ms. Undem, who has conducted polling for several abortion rights organizations. “Now you have six individuals who are going to make these decisions about your body in this personal area that will affect the rest of your life.”Mr. Bennet said he could not predict the political implications of the court taking on abortion, but he wanted to alert his supporters that something of consequence was at hand.“There are a lot of people who have worked for a long time to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that is what is at stake,” he said. “I think people needed to hear that in the wake of the Supreme Court taking this case from Mississippi.” More

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      Ahead of 2022, House Democrats Aim to Fix Their Polling Problem

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      This time, party leaders hope, they won’t be stunned by Republican voters coming out of the woodwork.Democrats control both houses of Congress — but just barely.Cast your mind back to October 2020, and you might remember expecting things to turn out a bit different. Polls suggested that Democratic House candidates were on track to nearly match their historic margins in the 2018 midterms. But that didn’t happen.For the second presidential cycle in a row, Democrats were stunned by the number of voters who came out in support of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies down the ballot.This week, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, presented the results of an inquiry into the 2020 election, aimed at understanding what had gone askew for the party — and why, after the corrections that pollsters made in the wake of 2016, surveys were still missing the mark.The report came to two interrelated conclusions, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the campaign committee chairman, said in a phone interview today. One is that Trump voters are disproportionately likely to refuse to take a poll, a conclusion echoed in other post-mortem reports that have recently been released by private Democratic pollsters. The other is that Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot appears to have driven up turnout among the Republican base.“In 2020, what we realized is that the polling error really equaled Trump turnout,” Mr. Maloney said. “So in polling, you’ve got this mistake in the assumption about what the electorate will look like.”Because support for Mr. Trump lines up with a relative unwillingness to be polled, survey researchers may think they’ve reached the right share of, say, rural-dwelling, white men without college degrees. But in fact what they’ve reached is often a Democratic-skewing segment of that demographic.In 2018, when polls were relatively accurate, this didn’t factor in as much, presumably because the most anti-institutional and anti-polling voters were also those who were likely to turn out only if Mr. Trump himself was on the ballot.In 2020, Mr. Trump’s popularity with a typically low-turnout base meant that an upsurge in turnout actually helped Republicans more than Democrats — a rare occurrence. “Because low-propensity voters turned out for Trump in much higher numbers than our low-propensity voters turned out for us, it ripples through the data and has a big effect,” Mr. Maloney said.He has been through this process before: In 2017, after Mr. Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, the congressman, then in his third term, led an inquiry into what had gone wrong for the Democrats. That work helped put him in position for his current role as the head of the party’s House campaign arm.This time around, he put together a team including campaign consultants, academics and other Democratic members of Congress, and they assembled what he called “a first-of-its-kind national polling database,” drawing from over 600 polls of House races, as well as voter-file and other local-level data.Last year, because Democrats underestimated the extent to which Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot would drive up Republican turnout, their strategists mistakenly thought that a number of seats that had flipped blue in the 2018 midterms would remain safe in 2020. Six Democrats who had won for the first time in 2018 lost their 2020 races by less than two percentage points.Mr. Maloney said he was only half-swayed by arguments that ascribed a lot of impact to Republican attacks on the “defund the police” movement and “democratic socialism.” He said that the messenger had been far more important than the message.“What you realize is that it is true that the lies and distortions about socialism and ‘defund’ carried a punch — no argument from me,” Mr. Maloney said.“But I think the power of those lies has been exaggerated when you understand that Trump,” he added, was responsible for turning out “a bunch of people who were going into the voting booth.”In next year’s midterms, he said that Republicans would be running a risk if they were counting on Trump-level engagement from base voters, given that his name wouldn’t be on the ballot.“It leads you to ask: Will this post-Trump toxicity of QAnon and conspiracy theories and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the attack on the Capitol — will that message work without Trump’s turnout?” Mr. Maloney said. “The research suggests that they have taken too much comfort in the power of messages that were effective, yes, but that were enormously helped by Trump’s power to turn out voters.”Still, he cautioned against taking comfort in the results of the report, which at the end of the day serves as a reminder of just how out-of-reach an entire swath of the population remains — for mainstream pollsters and Democratic candidates alike.On the tactics front, the report concluded that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic spending had been heavily tilted away from grass-roots campaigning and toward TV ads, which mostly ran late in the campaign and ended up doing little to tip things in the party’s favor.Going forward, Mr. Maloney said, he plans to keep the 600-poll database in use. The D.C.C.C. has already been using it in special elections this year to analyze messages for effectiveness.“We think there’s a lot to learn, we’re going to learn as we go, and you’re always building the ship as you’re sailing it,” he said. “In this case it’s important that we apply what we’ve learned to as many contexts as we can.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      An ‘Army of 16-Year-Olds’ Takes On the Democrats

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      Young progressives are an unpredictable new factor in Massachusetts elections. They’re ardent, and organized, and they don’t take orders.BOSTON — Dana Depelteau, a hotel manager, had just gone public with a long-shot candidacy for mayor in Boston when he noticed that someone in city politics was going after him online.The effect of this attack, he said, was lightning-fast and pervasive. The morning after he announced his candidacy on Twitter, he showed up at his local barbershop and, while staring at himself in the mirror, overheard a customer describing his views as white supremacist.“I’m thinking, ‘Man, politics is dirty,’” recalled Mr. Depelteau. He rushed home to fire back at his critic, a sharp-edged progressive who had dug up some of Mr. Depelteau’s old social media posts and was recirculating them online. But that, he discovered, was a big mistake.“I didn’t know how old she was,” he explained. “I just knew she was a prominent person.”That is how he became aware of Calla Walsh, a leader in the group of activists known here as the Markeyverse. Ms. Walsh, a 16-year-old high school junior, has many of the attributes of Generation Z: She likes to refer to people (like the president) as “bestie.” She occasionally gets called away from political events to babysit her little brother. She is slightly in the doghouse, parent-wise, for getting a C+ in precalculus.She is also representative of an influential new force in Democratic politics, activists who cut their teeth on the presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.The full strength of these activists — many of whom are not old enough to vote — did not become clear until last fall, when they were key to one of the year’s most surprising upsets, helping Senator Edward J. Markey defeat a primary challenge from Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, who had been heavily favored to win.In conversation, Ms. Walsh tends to downplay her movement, describing them as “Markey teens” and “theater kids” who “formerly ran, like, Taylor Swift or K-pop stan accounts.”Canvassers for Ms. Wu in May. One test of the young progressives’ clout will come in the upcoming Boston mayoral race.Philip Keith for The New York TimesYoung progressive people are an unpredictable new factor in Massachusetts elections.Philip Keith for The New York TimesBut the Markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of Senator Markey as a left-wing icon and Representative Kennedy as challenging him from the right. They carried out ambitious digital organizing, using social media to conjure up an in-person work force — “an army of 16-year-olds,” as one political veteran put it, who can “do anything on the internet.”They are viewed apprehensively by many in Massachusetts’ Democratic establishment, who say that they smear their opponents and are never held accountable; that they turn on their allies at the first whiff of a scandal; and that they are attacking Democrats in a coordinated effort to push the whole party to the left, much as the Tea Party did, on the right, to the Republicans.Ms. Walsh, for one, is cheerfully aware of all those critiques.In a podcast this spring, she recalled the day last summer when the Kennedy campaign singled her out in a statement, charging that negative campaigning online had created a vicious, dangerous atmosphere.“I won’t lie, I was terrified,” she said. But then, she said, the fear evaporated.“That’s when I realized I had a stake in this game: They are scared of me, a random teenager on the internet who just happened to be doing some organizing with her friends,” she said. “I think that made us all think, ‘Hey, they’re scared of us. We have power over them.’”The next roundAfter Mr. Markey beat Mr. Kennedy in the primary, Ms. Walsh taped a copy of his victory speech to the wall of her bedroom in Cambridge and turned her attention to down-ballot races.In his speech, Senator Markey had specifically thanked the Markeyverse for helping him beat Representative Kennedy. During a cycle in which campaigning moved almost entirely online, the young activists had done more than rebrand the candidate.They seemed to have affected long-established voting patterns: In Massachusetts, the turnout among registered voters between 18 to 24 had shot up to 20.9 percent in the 2020 primary from 6.7 percent in 2018, and 2.1 percent in 2016, according to Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.The race had left them with a heady sense of power. Tristan Niedzielski, 17, a high school senior from Marlborough, decided to skip Model U.N. this year and instead signed up to work on two campaigns, one for a seat in the state House of Representatives, and one for a regional school committee.He applied digital approaches he had picked up in the Markeyverse, using chat groups, direct messages and texts to convert friend networks into a volunteer work force. Both of his candidates lost, but narrowly, and he said he had learned something bigger: Outside of major cities, Massachusetts Democrats are not running sophisticated grass-roots campaigns.Tristan Niedzielski, 17, at rally in Boston on Saturday. Mr. Niedzielski, a high school senior from Marlborough, decided to skip Model U.N. this year and instead signed up to work on two campaigns.Philip Keith for The New York Times“It’s this lax culture of ‘Who do you know?,’” he said. “A lot of the state has never really seen any type of campaign political structure.”Some of what the young progressives have done can best be described as opposition research, targeting Democrats whom they consider too far right.In December, Ms. Walsh dug up off-color Twitter posts by Valentino Capobianco, a Kennedy supporter and candidate for a State House seat. (A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct emerged against Mr. Capobianco, who would not comment for this article. He lost the support of leading Democrats, and won 8 percent of the vote.)Then she went after Mr. Depelteau, 36, a self-described “centrist Democrat,” recirculating social media posts he had made criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. (Mr. Depelteau, who withdrew from the race in April, said it was not because of Ms. Walsh’s criticisms. He then left Twitter, which he called “toxic.”)She maintains a detailed spreadsheet on the declared candidates for mayor in Boston, monitoring donations from developers, police and energy companies. She runs trainings for young activists, entertaining her Twitter audience with juicy nuggets from campaign finance records, like a state representative who used campaign funds to expense AirPods.Her father, Chris Walsh, the director of Boston University’s college writing program, said her political enthusiasms have drifted over the last few years, from the existential cause of climate change to an exceedingly detailed focus on government and policy.Plus, he said, “Calla is also a 16-year-old. Like most, and maybe more than most, she’s not particularly communicative.”“Some of what I say is informed by looking at her Twitter,” he said.Senator Ed Markey during a news conference held to reintroduce the Green New Deal at the Capitol in April. Progressives embraced his candidacy, which focused heavily on his record on climate.Sarah Silbiger/Getty ImagesThe surge of grass-roots activism has come as a jolt in Massachusetts, which, because it is so firmly in the grip of one party, does not have a history of competitive primaries.“The old guard, the consulting class, hasn’t figured out a way of combating it,” said Jordan Meehan, 29, who turned to Ms. Walsh to organize digital outreach for a campaign last year, when he challenged a 34-year incumbent for a State House seat. He lost, but credits Ms. Walsh with devising a creative approach, reaching out individually to his social media followers and recruiting them for events and volunteer shifts.“It really does threaten the whole consultant-industrial complex,” he said.Numerous political strategists in Massachusetts refused to comment for this article. This is in part because, as one of them put it, “I don’t want to be bashing high schoolers on the record,” but equally, perhaps, because they are wary of becoming targets online.The Kennedy-Markey race left a bitter aftertaste for much of the state’s political class, who say the young activists overlooked much of Mr. Markey’s 44-year congressional record and unnecessarily vilified Mr. Kennedy.“Either Kennedy or Markey would have been good for the things they care most about,” said Matt Bennett, the co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank based in Washington, D.C. “The idea that Joe Kennedy wouldn’t have been good on climate change is ridiculous. The notion that he wasn’t pure enough is a thing we have to be careful about.”And he warned against overestimating the power of the Markeyverse, noting that since that primary, many challenges to moderate Democrats have fallen short. Even in Massachusetts, he noted, Joe Biden won the presidential primary, beating out Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren.“Everyone pays far too much attention to Twitter,” he said. “It’s a fun-house mirror. It’s not real. It’s why so many journalists fell into the Bernie-is-inevitable trap. This is not where Democratic voters are.”One test of the young activists’ clout will come in the upcoming Boston mayoral race, in which many former Markey volunteers have thrown their support behind Michelle Wu, a Warren ally who has proposed major changes to policy on climate, transportation and housing. City elections in Boston have, traditionally, been decided by middle-aged and elderly voters. But the surge of youth activism has thrown all those assumptions into the air.Michelle Wu, a mayoral candidate, gathered with teenage canvassers in Copley Square in Boston earlier this month.Philip Keith for The New York Times“It’s energy from the bottom up, it’s not some Watertown committee chair telling people how to vote,” said the political strategist Doug Rubin, who is advising the campaign of Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey. “Previously, all the insiders used to find out who was going to win, and then they would want to be with the winners.”He said he welcomed the change. If it makes consultants nervous, Mr. Rubin added, it’s meant to.“People who say, ‘I can’t control it, I don’t understand it,’ well, that’s the whole point — you can’t control it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If you’re good on the issues they care about, they’re going to be with you. If you’re not, they’re not.”Markeyverse vs. MarkeyThat became clear last week when the Markeyverse went on the offensive.Their target, this time, was Mr. Markey himself, who on Tuesday had put out a carefully worded Twitter thread on the mounting violence in Israel, apportioning some blame on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.This was a disappointment for many of the young progressives, who had been hoping for a sharp rebuke of Israel, like the ones that came from Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, or from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Though Mr. Markey’s voting record on foreign policy was no secret — he voted to authorize the occupation of Iraq in 2002, for example — it had faded into the background in their embrace of his candidacy, which focused heavily on his record on climate. Now, the group chats and Slack channels that comprise the Markeyverse were flooded with emotion, disappointment and betrayal.“It’s horrible to watch, and it’s disappointing,” said Emerson Toomey, 21, one of the authors of Ed’s Reply Guys, a Twitter account that helped establish Mr. Markey as a progressive star.Ms. Toomey, a senior at Northeastern University, was computing, with some bitterness, the “hundreds of thousands of hours” of unpaid labor she and her friends had provided to the senator. It made her question the compact she had assumed existed, that, in exchange for their support, he would accommodate their views on the issues that mattered.“Maybe he just said those things to us to get elected,” she said.Ms. Walsh, for her part, had shifted into full organizational mode, circulating a letter of protest that, she hoped, could induce Senator Markey to revisit his positions on the conflict.“He owes us much of his victory,” she said, “so we do have leverage over him.”Over the days that followed, Mr. Markey’s office was buffeted with calls from young volunteers. Twitter was brutal. John Walsh, who had been Mr. Markey’s campaign manager and is now his chief of staff, said he understood that they were disappointed and sounded regretful. (He is no relation to Calla.)Some of what the young progressives have done can best be described as opposition research, targeting Democrats whom they consider too far right.Philip Keith for The New York Times“I can tell you, Senator Markey loves these people,” he said of the young organizers. “He fought very hard for everything he told them he would fight for.”The Markeyverse, he said, now faced a key moment in their movement, determining whether they were willing to bend to preserve a relationship with an ally.“If compromising is not in your toolbox, that’s a hard thing,” he said. “Finding that balance is something, I think, anybody who stays at this for a long period of time figures out.”Late on Friday evening, Mr. Markey’s office offered a second statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This time, it called on Israel to seek an immediate cease-fire, and invoked “defenseless Palestinian families who are already living in fear for their lives and the lives of their children.” Mr. Walsh said the statement was a response to Israel’s plans to deploy ground troops.It could have been recorded as a win for the Markeyverse, a sign that the senator had to pay attention to their views. But Ms. Walsh wanted to push further, pointing to a list of four policy demands that volunteers had sent to the senator’s office. The moment had become about proving something different: that the young progressives care more about issues than alliances. She concluded that they had been somewhat naïve last year. “We were politically infatuated with Ed during the campaign, which caused us to have those blind spots,” she said. “Looking back, I think we should not have developed those blind spots.”She said that, in the future, she would probably never support another candidate whose views on the Middle East did not line up with hers. Then she ticked off a laundry list of legislation she would be happy to work on with Senator Markey, like climate change and universal health care.She sounded, for better or for worse, like an experienced political hand.“It was never about him as an individual,” she said. “We will always have this community, whether or not he is the figurehead. We have moved beyond this being about one candidate.” More

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      How the Storming of the Capitol Became a ‘Normal Tourist Visit’

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      It is no wonder that Republican leaders in the House do not want to convene a truth and reconciliation commission to scrutinize the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The more attention drawn to the events of that day, the more their party has to lose.Immediately after the riot, support for President Donald Trump fell sharply among Republicans, according to surveys conducted by Kevin Arceneaux of Sciences Po Paris and Rory Truex of Princeton.The drop signaled that Republicans would have to pay a price for the Trump-inspired insurrection, the violent spirit of which was captured vividly by Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise of The Times:The pure savagery of the mob that rampaged through the Capitol that day was breathtaking, as cataloged by the injuries inflicted on those who tried to guard the nation’s elected lawmakers. One police officer lost an eye, another the tip of his finger. Still another was shocked so many times with a Taser gun that he had a heart attack. They suffered cracked ribs, two smashed spinal disks and multiple concussions. At least 81 members of the Capitol force and 65 members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured.Republican revulsion toward the riot was, however, short-lived.Arceneaux and Truex, in their paper “Donald Trump and the Lie,” point out that Republican voter identification with Trump had “rebounded to pre-election levels” by Jan. 13. The authors measured identification with Trump by responses to two questions: “When people criticize Donald Trump, it feels like a personal insult,” and “When people praise Donald Trump, it makes me feel good.”The same pattern emerged in the Republican Party’s favorability ratings, which dropped by 13 points between the beginning and the end of January, but gained 11 points back by April, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys.Mitch McConnell himself was outraged. In a Feb. 13 speech on the Senate floor he said:January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.Memorably, McConnell went on:There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.McConnell’s indignation was also short-lived. Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 25, McConnell told Fox News that if Trump were the nominee in 2024, he would “absolutely” support the former president.Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia nearly matched McConnell’s turn-on-a-dime. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday,Clyde last week downplayed the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, comparing the mob’s breaching of the building to a “normal tourist visit.” But photos from that day show the congressman, mouth agape, rushing toward the doors to the House gallery and helping barricade them to prevent rioters from entering.McConnell and Clyde’s turnabouts came as no surprise to students of the Senate minority leader or scholars of American politics.Gary Jacobson of the University of California-San Diego wrote in an email that “the public’s reaction to the riot, like everything else these days, is getting assimilated into the existing polarized configuration of political attitudes and opinions.”Jacobson added:Such things as the absurd spectacle (of the vote recount) in Arizona, Trump’s delusory rantings, the antics of the House crackpot caucus, and the downplaying of the riot in the face of what everyone saw on TV, may weigh on the Republican brand, marginally eroding the party’s national stature over time. But never underestimate the power of motivated reasoning, negative partisanship and selective attention to congenial news sources to keep unwelcome realities at bay.Along similar lines, Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, suggested that voters have developed a form of scandal fatigue:At a certain point, the scandals start to blur together — Democrats have scandals, Republicans have scandals, no one is seemingly above or below such behavior. One of the reason’s President Trump survived all his scandals and shortcomings is because the public had seen so many of these before and has reached the point of a certain amount of immunity to being surprised.While this mass amnesia seem incomprehensible to some, an August 2019 paper, “Tribalism Is Human Nature,” by Cory Jane Clark, executive director the Adversarial Collaboration Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and three fellow psychologists, provides fundamental insight into the evanescing impact of Jan. 6 on the electorate and on Republicans in particular:Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other.The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.Within this framework, there are two crucial reasons that politics is “one of the most fertile grounds for bias,” Clark and her co-authors write:Political contests are highly consequential because they determine how society will allocate coveted resources such as wealth, power, and prestige. Winners gain control of cultural narratives and the mechanisms of government and can use them to benefit their coalition, often at the expense of losers ….We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis, and recent research has supported it.Clark argues further, in an email, that rising influence of “tribalism” in politics results in part from the growing “clarity and homogeneity of the Democrat and Republican coalitions,” with the result that “people are better able to find their people, sort into their ideological bubbles, find their preferred news sources, identify their preferred political elites and follow them, and signal their political allegiance to fellow group members (and attain friends and status that way).”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, adds some detail:My sense is that the move by Republican office holders to muddy the waters over what happened at the Capitol (and Trump’s role instigating the events) likely contributes to the waning of G.O.P. voters’ concerns. We heard a burst of these efforts to rewrite the history this past week during the House oversight hearing, but keep in mind that those efforts came on the heels of earlier efforts to downplay the violence, whitewash Trump’s role, and to cast doubt on the identities of the insurrectionists. No doubt, House G.O.P. leaders’ stalling of Democrats’ effort to create a “9/11 type” commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6 has also helped to diffuse G.O.P. interest and to keep the issue out of the headlines. No bipartisan inquiry, no media spotlight to keep the issue alive.In this context, Kevin McCarthy’s announcement on May 18 that the House Republican leadership opposes the creation of a Jan. 6 commission is of a piece with the ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference, according to Binder.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt the end of the day, Binder continued,We probably shouldn’t be surprised that public criticism of the Jan. 6 events only briefly looked bipartisan in the wake of the violence. G.O.P. elites’ decision to make loyalty to Trump a party litmus test (e.g., booting Rep. Cheney from her leadership post) demands that Republicans downplay and whitewash Trump’s role, the violence that day, and the identity of those who stormed the Capitol. Very little of American political life can escape being viewed in a partisan lens.Alexander G. Theodoridis of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst wrote in an email that “the half-life of Jan. 6 memory has proven remarkably short given the objectively shocking nature of what took place at the Capitol that day.” This results in part from the fact thatthere is now seemingly no limit to the ability of partisans to see the world through thick, nearly opaque red and blue colored lenses. In this case, that has Republicans latching onto a narrative that downplays the severity of the Capitol insurrection, attributes blame everywhere but where it belongs, and endorses the Big Lie that stoked the pro-Trump mob that day.A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists. The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.The refusal of Republicans to explore the takeover of the Capitol reflects a form of biased reasoning that is not limited to the right or the left, but may be more dangerous on the right.Ariel Malka, a professor at Yeshiva University and an author of “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:There is convincing evidence that cultural conservatives are reliably more open to authoritarian and democracy-degrading action than cultural liberals within Western democracies, including the United States. Because the Democratic Party is the party of American cultural liberals, I believe it would be far more difficult for a Democratic politician who favors overtly anti-democratic action, like nullifying elections, to have political success.These differences are “transforming the Republican Party into an anti-democratic institution,” according to Malka:What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.In the paper, Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker and Eliyahu Spivack, of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Amsterdam and Yeshiva University, ask: “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”Their answer is twofold.First,Westerners with a broad culturally conservative worldview are especially open to authoritarian governance. For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.Second,Westerners who hold a protection-based attitude package — combining a conservative cultural orientation with redistributive and interventionist economic views — are often the most open to authoritarian governance. Notably, it was the English-speaking democracies where this combination of attitudes most consistently predicted openness to authoritarian governance.Julie Wronski of the University of Mississippi replied to my inquiry about Jan. 6 suggesting that Democrats appear to have made a strategic decision against pressing the issue too hard:If voters’ concerns over Jan. 6 are fading, it is because political elites and the media are not making this issue salient. I suspect that Democrats have not made the issue salient recently in order to avoid antagonizing Republicans and exacerbating existing divides. Democrats’ focus seems more on collective action goals related to Covid-19 vaccine rollout and economic infrastructure.Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).In a twist, Wronski suggests that it may be to Democrats’ advantage to stay out of the Jan. 6 debate in order to let it fester within Republican ranks:Not all Republican identifiers are strong partisans. Some people may align with the party for specific issue, policy reasons. Their identity is not as tied up in partisanship that an electoral loss becomes a loss to self-identity. This means there are intraparty fractures in the Republican Party regarding the big lie.Republican leaners “seem to be moving away from the party when hearing about intraparty conflict regarding the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win,” Wronski wrote, citing a May 14 paper by Katherine Clayton, a graduate student in political science at Stanford.Clayton finds thatthose who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.Wronski writes thatthe implication of these results would be for the Democratic Party to do nothing with regards to their messaging of January 6 and let the internal Republican conflict work to their benefit. In a two-party system, voters who do not espouse the big lie and are anti-Trump would eventually align with the Democratic Party.Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, takes an opposing position in his May 12 article, “A G.O.P. Civil War? Don’t Bet On It”:It’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grass roots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total.More significant, Greenfield continued,History is littered with times that critics on the left, and in the pundit class, were positive the Republican Party was setting itself up for defeat by embracing its extremes, only to watch the party comfortably surge into power.Despite Trump’s overt attempt to subvert the election, Greenfield observes, anddespite his feeding the flames that nearly led to a physical assault of the vice president and speaker of the House, the Republican Party has, after a few complaints and speed bumps, firmly rallied behind Trump’s argument that he was robbed of a second term.The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.The advent of Trump Republicans poses an unprecedented strategic quandary for Democrats, a quandary they have not resolved and that may not lend itself to resolution.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Maya Wiley Has ‘50 Ideas’ and One Goal: To Make History as Mayor

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      Maya Wiley Has ‘50 Ideas’ and One Goal: To Make History as MayorMs. Wiley has unveiled an array of policies to fight inequality as she seeks to become the first woman elected mayor of New York. Can she break out of the pack?Maya Wiley, at a vaccine sign-up in Brooklyn last month, is a civil rights lawyer who has focused her mayoral campaign on addressing inequality and systemic racism.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the fourth in a series of profiles of the major candidates.May 19, 2021If there was a single moment that captured the essence of Maya Wiley’s campaign for New York City mayor, the Women for Maya launch was it.She sat on a folding chair in Central Park at the event earlier this month, at the foot of a statue depicting three historical figures of women’s suffrage. To her immediate right was Representative Nydia Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress; to her left was Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon.Since entering the mayor’s race last year, Ms. Wiley had underscored how it was time for a woman — a Black woman — to finally lead New York, someone who understood the concerns of those who struggled even before the pandemic and who are worried that the recovery is leaving them behind.“You will no longer tell us we are not qualified,” Ms. Wiley said, before starting to chant “We lead!” with a crowd of supporters who gathered at the event.Ms. Wiley, 57, offers a mix of experience — she served as a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and led the Civilian Complaint Review Board — and a dose of celebrity: As a prominent analyst for MSNBC, she won the attention of its left-leaning viewership and sparked enthusiasm that she could become the standard-bearer for New York’s progressive left.Her comfort level with the on-the-fly jousting seen on cable news shows seemed to give her an advantage last week in the first official Democratic debate, as she repeatedly challenged Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who is one of the contest’s front-runners.Three days later, she landed a key endorsement from Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the state’s highest-ranking House member. His support is expected to help Ms. Wiley with a key constituency Mr. Adams is also vying for: Black voters, especially from central Brooklyn.Ms. Wiley was endorsed by 1199 S.E.I.U., the city’s largest labor union, which represents health care workers, many of whom are women of color. She speaks often about making sure women are not left behind in the recovery.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIf Ms. Wiley has a path to victory in the June 22 primary, it will also largely be paved by women. She has the support of the city’s largest labor union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 200,000 health care workers, many of whom are women of color. And she has the backing of Ms. Velázquez and Representative Yvette Clarke, two powerful congressional leaders in Brooklyn.She hopes to capitalize on the sexual misconduct allegations that were recently lodged against her chief rival for progressive voters in the Democratic primary, Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller; Ms. Wiley called on Mr. Stringer to withdraw from the race, and she has picked up some of the endorsements he has lost.Her campaign is centered on a series of policy proposals that reflect her progressive values. She wants to cut $1 billion from the police budget and trim at least 2,250 officers. She wants to help poor families pay for child care by offering $5,000 grants to caregivers and building community centers with free child care. And she wants to create a $10 billion Works Progress Administration-style jobs program that funds infrastructure repairs and other projects.But she has yet to fully energize the left-wing of the party that she is trying to win over; she upset some activists by distancing herself from the defund the police slogan; she can also sound at times like her former boss, Mr. de Blasio, whose popularity has fallen sharply in his second and final term.Unlike Mr. Stringer and Mr. Adams, who have said they had always wanted to be mayor, Ms. Wiley readily acknowledges that running for office was never a lifelong ambition. She says she long believed she was more effective, and more natural, at pressuring elected officials from the outside.“I literally never thought I would run for public office, and I mean never,” she said in an interview. “It was not on my bucket list. I’ve been a civil rights lawyer and advocate my whole career, and politics is not appealing. What I wanted to make was change.”She said that her outlook began to shift several years ago, when her teenage daughter came to her almost in tears, worried she would be unable to pay rent in New York City while pursuing a career as a graphic novelist and illustrator. Ms. Wiley said the exchange brought home how increasingly unaffordable the city had become.“That was an emotional gut-punch moment that really stayed with me,” she said.While politics was not necessarily in Ms. Wiley’s blood, a commitment to social justice was.Ms. Wiley worked as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s counsel and served as chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Her father, a prominent civil rights leader, founded the National Welfare Rights Organization.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesAt the event in Central Park, Ms. Steinem spoke about working with Ms. Wiley’s father, George Wiley, a prominent civil rights activist, in the 1970s.He founded the National Welfare Rights Organization and paid attention to “women in poverty as the single most important indicator of the country’s welfare when no other male spokesperson was doing that,” Ms. Steinem said.“I’m so sorry that Maya lost him young, but his spirit is in her,” she said.‘We had to find a way to live’The sudden death of Ms. Wiley’s father was especially traumatic.Mr. Wiley had taken his two children, Daniel and Maya, sailing off Chesapeake Beach, Md., on a summer day in 1973. The winds and seas were rough, and Mr. Wiley fell from the 23-foot pleasure craft into the Chesapeake Bay.His children threw him a line, but the tides and wind pulled him away, according to an Associated Press account of the episode. Days later, memorial services for Mr. Wiley, 42, were held across the nation.Ms. Wiley often speaks of her father’s death as a formative experience that shaped her and taught her a hard lesson in grief and perseverance. At her campaign kick-off event on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum in October, Ms. Wiley compared her loss to families who had watched a relative die from the coronavirus and could not hold them one last time.“My brother and I — two little kids, 9 and 10 years old — alone on a boat after watching the waves wash away our father, we had to find a way to live,” she said.She described how they found their way to the shore, and how the white beachgoers they encountered did not help them. They went from house to house asking for help until someone called the police.The seeming indifference from the people on the beach stayed with her. The experience, she told Bloomberg Opinion, made her realize that “racism is a deep illness.”Other parts of her biography often come up on the campaign trail. Ms. Wiley’s mother, Wretha, grew up in Abilene, Texas, and came to New York to attend Union Theological Seminary. Her parents met at Syracuse University and moved to the Lower East Side, where Ms. Wiley lived briefly as a baby, before they left for Washington.When she talks about education, Ms. Wiley notes that attending a segregated school as a child informed her thinking on the issue. She led a high-profile school diversity panel that in 2019 called for integrating city schools by eliminating gifted and talented programs.Yet when she is asked about fixing the city’s segregated school system, she has been vague at times, seeming cautious and political. Asked if she was afraid of talking about a combustible issue, Ms. Wiley pushed back.“I’m a kid who went to a segregated Black elementary school when I was young and was two years behind grade level despite the fact that my parents had collectively over eight years of graduate education between them,” she said.“I’m not afraid of third rails,” she added. “I wouldn’t be running for mayor if I was.”After her father’s death, Ms. Wiley moved to a private school where she caught up with her peers. She graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia Law School. As a young lawyer, she worked as a staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for two years, as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for three years and at the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a fellowship.The job she held the longest was at the Center for Social Inclusion, a nonprofit she founded after the Sept. 11 attacks as a young mother “sitting in my living room with a baby in a bouncy seat.” She built it into a national organization dedicated to addressing racial inequity, with a $3 million annual budget and 13 employees.“As she came into her own, she opted not to go to a big private law firm, but to commit herself to public service,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who expressed admiration for Ms. Wiley’s dedication to social justice when she could have taken a different path. “She was progressive before the term was fashionable.”Ms. Wiley was in the running to lead the N.A.A.C.P., but withdrew from contention after joining Mr. de Blasio’s administration.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesA rocky experience inside city governmentMs. Wiley had never met Mr. de Blasio when she wrote a piece for The Nation magazine about broadband internet access that caught his attention. He invited her to three long get-to-know-you meetings at City Hall.She had been in the running to lead the N.A.A.C.P., but agreed to join Mr. de Blasio’s administration in 2014 as his chief legal adviser. She was proud to be the first Black woman to hold the job, and joked early on that her main goal was to “keep him out of jail.”Ms. Wiley, even in jest, was somewhat prescient: Mr. de Blasio was investigated for questionable fund-raising practices, leading Ms. Wiley to help craft the administration’s legal response. She also became known for her role in what became known as the “agents of the city” controversy, when she argued unsuccessfully in 2016 that Mr. de Blasio’s emails with outside advisers should be private.Ms. Wiley helped form Mr. de Blasio’s argument that communications with outside advisers should be as immune from public scrutiny as those of any city employee, even though many of the advisers also represented clients with business before the city.John Kaehny, executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany, said the efforts to hide the mayor’s emails were “desperate, doomed and destructive” and undermined Freedom of Information laws and ethics rules.“Agents of the city was a giant blunder by her and de Blasio and hopefully she learned from her mistakes,” he said.Ms. Wiley has gone to great lengths to say that her administration would be more transparent than Mr. de Blasio’s. She says that it was her job to provide the mayor with legal advice and it was his decision whether to follow that advice..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Those emails would have been public if I was the decision maker,” she said at a mayoral forum.Not long after the episode, Ms. Wiley resigned and became chairwoman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the agency that investigates police misconduct.While Ms. Wiley points to her time there as valuable experience in learning how to tackle police reform, groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union say she was too secretive about the disciplinary process and too sluggish in confronting the Police Department. The current chairman, the Rev. Fred Davie, has been more outspoken on issues like repealing 50-a, a law that until recently kept officer disciplinary records secret.Her experience at City Hall and the watchdog agency has enabled Ms. Wiley to argue that she knows city government, but it also ties her to Mr. de Blasio.As counsel to Mr. de Blasio, Ms. Wiley was known for her role in the “agents of the city” battle, when she tried to keep the mayor’s emails with outside advisers private.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesMs. Wiley, like Mr. de Blasio, has been known to speak about inequality in broad terms. When she described homelessness as a public safety issue during a recent appearance on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show, Mr. Lehrer shared a response from a listener: “de Blasio 2.0.”Ms. Wiley argues that women should not be judged by the men they worked for. She praised Mr. de Blasio’s achievements like universal prekindergarten and criticized him over his handling of the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014.“Women should not be defined by anything other than their record,” she said. “I’m not running against Bill de Blasio.”A push to ‘reimagine’ New YorkAs protests over police brutality rocked the nation last summer, Ms. Wiley gained attention on MSNBC for her clearheaded explanations of why some activists wanted to defund the police.Her national exposure created excitement when she entered the race, but also the expectation that she would catch fire as the leading progressive candidate. That has not happened for a variety of reasons.“This is a race that has a lot of progressive options,” said Eric Phillips, a former press secretary for Mr. de Blasio. “I think it’s natural that there would be real competition and one candidate wouldn’t automatically own that lane.”Ms. Wiley must prove that she can energize the left-wing of the party and be the most viable candidate to take on the two more moderate front-runners, Andrew Yang, the former presidential hopeful, and Mr. Adams. She is often in third or fourth place in the polls, along with Mr. Stringer.Ms. Wiley would cut $1 billion from the police budget, and hire a police commissioner from outside the department.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesBut the accusations lodged against Mr. Stringer have created some room for momentum: The powerful Working Families Party had named Mr. Stringer as its first choice for mayor, but withdrew the endorsement after the sexual misconduct allegations. The group is now supporting Ms. Wiley and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive and the most left-leaning candidate in the race.Still, Mr. Stringer has a major fund-raising advantage: He has more than $7 million to pour into television ads. Ms. Wiley has about $2.5 million on hand.Mr. Sharpton said he believed that Ms. Wiley could make a “late surge” once more voters start tuning into the race. He is considering endorsing one of several of the candidates trying to become the city’s second Black mayor — Ms. Wiley, Mr. Adams, or Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive — if Mr. Sharpton believes he could help one of them win, according to a person who is familiar with his thinking.To differentiate herself from some of her rivals, Ms. Wiley has been rolling out her “50 Ideas for NYC,” a new plan every day focused on issues like reducing the Black maternal mortality rate. Her most ambitious proposal is called “New Deal New York,” which involves spending $10 billion to help the city recover from the pandemic and to create 100,000 jobs. Her universal community care plan would make 100,000 families eligible for a $5,000 annual grant to care for children and older people. She also wants to hire 2,500 new teachers to lower class sizes.As concerns have grown about violent crime, she released a policing and public safety plan that includes hiring a civilian police commissioner and creating a new commission to decide whether to fire officers accused of misconduct. She was early in urging Mr. de Blasio to fire his police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, after his aggressive response to last year’s protests.Yet she has also distanced herself from the defund slogan, saying the term “means different things to different people.” In contrast, Ms. Morales has embraced the movement and pledged to slash the $6 billion police budget in half — a stance that has endeared her to left-leaning voters, less so to more moderate ones.At the same time, some business and civic leaders fear that Ms. Wiley is too liberal; in a poll of business leaders, Ms. Wiley was near last place with just 3 percent. They also question whether Ms. Wiley has enough experience as a manager to run a sprawling bureaucracy with a $98 billion budget.“Maya is terrific, but business is looking for a manager, not an advocate,” said Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a prominent business group.At the moment, Ms. Wiley is simply looking to connect to as many voters as she can, in person and on social media, where she posts campaign diaries recorded at home.She lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with her partner, Harlan Mandel, in an elegant house built in the Prairie School architectural style made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright. They have two daughters, Naja, 20, and Kai, 17. Ms. Wiley is Christian and Mr. Mandel is Jewish, and they belong to Kolot Chayeinu, a reform congregation in Park Slope.The last woman who came close to being mayor, Christine Quinn, a former City Council speaker, said she regretted that she tried to soften her hard-charging personality during her campaign. Her advice for Ms. Wiley was to be herself.“The thing voters hate the most is someone who is not authentic,” Ms. Quinn said. “Maya needs to be exactly who she is.”Who Ms. Wiley is, she said in an interview, is the daughter of civil rights activists who will fight to make the city more fair.“I have been someone committed to racial justice and transformation my entire career,” Ms. Wiley said. “And that means bringing us all back, every single one of us, and not just back to January 2020, but to reimagine this city.” More

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      Philadelphia’s Progressive District Attorney Fends Off Democratic Challenger

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      Larry Krasner, part of a new breed of prosecutors, easily defeated Carlos Vega in Tuesday’s primary in spite of a rise in gun crime.Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, won the Democratic nomination in his re-election campaign on Tuesday, easily fending off a challenge from a former prosecutor who had argued that Mr. Krasner was making the city less safe.Voters were unconvinced by that argument. When The Associated Press called the race late Tuesday night, Mr. Krasner was ahead of his rival, Carlos Vega, by almost 40,000 votes.Throughout his campaign, Mr. Krasner argued that a 40 percent increase in homicides in Philadelphia last year had nothing to do with his progressive policies, pointing to cities with more traditional prosecutors that had experienced similar trends during the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Krasner does not prosecute some low-level offenses, such as drug possession and prostitution, and has sought more lenient sentences than his predecessors.In a speech to supporters on Tuesday night at a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, Mr. Krasner said he had been re-elected because he had kept his promises, and he claimed a mandate from the voters most affected by serious crime.“We in this movement for criminal justice reform just won a big one,” he said.Mr. Krasner’s convincing victory, achieved in spite of a sharp increase in gun crime in Philadelphia over the past two years, may indicate that the appeal of progressive prosecutors will hold steady for voters even as public safety becomes a more pressing issue.Mr. Krasner acknowledged that in his victory remarks.“We hear all this talk about how somehow progressive prosecution can’t survive,” he said. “That’s not what I see. What I see is that traditional prosecution can’t survive.”Mr. Vega acknowledged his loss in a tweet shortly before midnight on Tuesday, saying, “It looks like tonight we did not get the result we wanted, but even in defeat we have grace & we smile.”He thanked his supporters and expressed his own support for the victims of crimes. A spokesman for his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.As in his first campaign, in which he ran against six other candidates, Mr. Krasner, 60, won significant support from Black voters in the northern and western parts of the city. Those neighborhoods have been the most affected by gun violence, and were places where Mr. Vega, 64, had hoped to make inroads.“Black voters — and not just Black voters — believe that change is necessary and that the direction that Larry Krasner is taking is the right direction,” said State Senator Vincent J. Hughes, who represents several of those neighborhoods. “This is not a close victory. It is an affirmation that we have to go in a different direction in the pursuit of justice.”Enthusiasm for what used to be a low-turnout race remained high. When all the votes are counted, including mail-in ballots, turnout will almost certainly be higher than it was four years ago, when 155,000 people voted in the Democratic primary.Mr. Vega, a longtime homicide prosecutor, was among the first employees whom Mr. Krasner fired after taking over the district attorney’s office in 2018. Mr. Vega argued that the leniency of Mr. Krasner’s policies had led to the increase in crime.Criminologists said there would be no way to prove Mr. Vega’s assertions. David S. Abrams, a professor of law and economics at the University of Pennsylvania who has tracked crime statistics across the country over the past year, said any theory would have to take into account both the rise in homicides and shootings and the overall decline in crime, at least through 2020.“It’s a mystery,” he said. “There are a ton of theories, almost none of which fit all the facts.”Mr. Vega received ample support from the police, whose powerful union poured tens of thousands of dollars into his campaign and tarred Mr. Krasner as soft on crime at every opportunity.Mr. Krasner won office four years ago as part of a new breed of progressive prosecutors. In addition to upholding his campaign pledge not to prosecute low-level crimes, he lowered the number of people in the city’s jail by more than 30 percent.That approach won him approval from voters but also a significant amount of criticism, particularly from former prosecutors and even some of his own employees. Thomas Mandracchia, who worked for Mr. Krasner for about two years, said the district attorney’s insistence on firing so many experienced lawyers had contributed to an office plagued by disorganization. But none of those criticisms appeared to put a dent in Mr. Krasner’s support on Tuesday.In November’s general election, Mr. Krasner will face Charles Peruto Jr., a Republican defense lawyer who has campaigned on a strong message of public safety, saying that it is more important than civil rights. Mr. Peruto has called Mr. Krasner’s tenure “a disgrace” and said he would drop out of the race if Mr. Vega won. More

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      We Interviewed the N.Y.C. Mayor Candidates. Here’s What We Learned.

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      We asked the eight leading Democrats running for mayor of New York City about the pandemic, policing and where they like to go out to eat. Here’s an overview.We interviewed the leading Democratic candidates running for mayor about the most pressing concerns facing New York City as it recovers from the pandemic.We also asked them about their favorite restaurants and their sports allegiances.Voters are still getting to know the crowded field of candidates ahead of the June 22 primary. They come from unique backgrounds and have differing visions for the city on issues that include policing, transit, climate and education.Here’s a glimpse of what we learned (and you can view the full videos here):1. They are keenly focused on leading the city’s economic recovery.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAs the end of the pandemic comes into focus, many of the mayoral candidates are centering their pitch around the idea that they can lead New York into a period of greater equity and prosperity than the city experienced before the shutdown.For some of the candidates, that means a focus on small businesses and ensuring that the institutions that make New York so culturally vibrant — restaurants and Broadway, for example — have sufficient support to reopen.“The first thing I would do to help New York City recover from the pandemic is really make sure we are investing in our small businesses and that we are bringing back the things that differentiate us from the rest of the country,” said Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner. “Art, culture, restaurants. When they’re strong, that means offices are strong and that means that tourism comes back.”That view was echoed by several of the contenders. Some also emphasized the importance of reopening the city quickly and safely.“We should get our artists, our musicians, our restaurants, filling our vacant storefronts, filling our public spaces,” said Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary, “and make sure every New Yorker and the world knows that we’re alive and fun and the city to be in again.”Or as Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, put it: “The first thing we have to do to help New York City recover is let people know that New York City is open for business.”2. Surprise! No one named Bill de Blasio as the best mayor in their lifetime.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMany New Yorkers will not miss Mayor Bill de Blasio when he leaves office early next year.None of the candidates named him as the best mayor in their lifetime. Instead, many pointed to Michael R. Bloomberg and David N. Dinkins.Ms. Garcia named Mr. Bloomberg, citing “his focus on the data.” Maya Wiley, a former civil rights lawyer, said Mr. Dinkins, who died last year, “was my hero” and cared about all New Yorkers.Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, named both: Mr. Dinkins for bringing the city together as a “gorgeous mosaic,” and Mr. Bloomberg who was “effective at leading and managing the city,” though Mr. McGuire criticized his focus on stop-and-frisk policing.Mr. Yang named Ed Koch, citing “his optimism and spirit,” while Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, cited both Mr. Koch and Mr. Dinkins.3. Only one candidate supports the slogan “defund the police.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesDianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, is the only candidate who fully embraced the “defund the police” movement.Ms. Morales described how her children were pepper sprayed by the police at a protest at Barclays Center last summer and how her son was physically assaulted. She suggested that she supports an eventual goal of abolishing the police.“We know that policing does not equal public safety — that communities that are most heavily policed are in fact the most at risk and the most harmed,” she said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said the term defund was not helpful and could “stop the forward movement we’re looking for.”Mr. Yang said the slogan “unfortunately seems very absolutist,” but he does support channeling more resources to mental-health response teams.Other candidates called for cuts to the police budget and other reforms: Ms. Wiley said the police department should have fewer officers; Mr. Stringer said officers should not handle 911 calls for mental health emergencies.4. Left-wing vs. centrist, insider vs. outsiderTony Cenicola/The New York TimesOn any number of key matters, the candidates were in broad agreement: The city, in their view, does have an important role to play in confronting systemic racism; combating issues including traffic congestion and climate change should be top priorities for the next mayor; the city must reopen quickly and safely, and for some contenders, there are growing concerns around crime.But real differences were also evident, both in terms of management style and ideology. Ms. Morales emerged as the most left-wing candidate in the field, on issues including public safety and “austerity,” warning against it as she sketched out an expansive public infrastructure program. Mr. Stringer and Ms. Wiley often took positions that also aligned them further to the left of other candidates.Mr. Yang, Ms. Garcia, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire tended toward the more centrist side of the spectrum in discussing policing and economic development.But for many of the candidates, the sharpest contrasts had less to do with politics than with experience. Ms. Garcia, Mr. Donovan and Mr. Stringer in particular are running as résumé candidates, citing their deep experience in government — at the city level for Ms. Garcia and Mr. Stringer and at the federal level for Mr. Donovan.To varying degrees, Mr. Yang, Ms. Wiley, Mr. McGuire and Ms. Morales are seeking to run as less traditional candidates who emphasize their experiences outside of government, while Mr. Adams highlights both his experience in government and his work as a police officer..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The race will test both the city’s ideological mood, and whether voters want a seasoned government insider or someone promising to shake up the system as an outsider.5. Some avoided picking a second-choice candidate.Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York TimesNew Yorkers will use ranked-choice voting in the mayoral election for the first time this year, ranking up to five candidates in their order of preference.That could lead to alliances among the candidates, though some were not ready to reveal whom they might rank second.Ms. Wiley named Ms. Morales as her second choice, citing her “real lived experience” as a person of color in New York City.Mr. Yang named Ms. Garcia and described her as a “disciplined operator with great experience,” and said he would like to work with her in his administration — comments that he has made before and that have frustrated Ms. Garcia, who says she wants the top job.“Kathryn, if you’re watching this, Kathryn, let’s team up,” Mr. Yang said laughing.Mr. Adams said he liked several candidates and was talking to them about a pact to rank each other second.“That is a secret,” he said with a smile.6. Three candidates would accept Governor Cuomo’s endorsement.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesGov. Andrew M. Cuomo has faced calls to resign over allegations of sexual harassment and his handling of nursing home deaths during the pandemic.Still, Mr. Adams, Mr. Yang and Mr. McGuire said they would accept his endorsement.“I believe strongly in the due process system,” Mr. Adams said, adding that if leaders sidestep that process then “we are on a slippery slope.”Mr. Yang said that the governor’s endorsement would be “positive for New York City” and “a clear signal that the city and state’s interests are aligned.”Ms. Wiley said she was not seeking the governor’s support.“I stand by my request that Governor Cuomo step down and resign because we can’t afford any of our people to doubt the integrity of our public servants,” she said.7. The candidates have bold policies. They also have some restaurant recommendations.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe contenders sketched out extensive, sometimes sharply divergent, policy visions on issues including how to balance economic development with community concerns and the best ways to address educational losses from the pandemic.But they also showed how they would use the bully pulpit of the mayoralty to root for New York City culture, parks and nightlife, ticking through their favorite restaurants, Broadway shows, city green spaces (a Central Park-versus-Prospect Park battle line emerged) and sports teams.From sushi at Amber on the Upper West Side (Mr. Stringer’s favorite) to “a little hole in the wall in Fort Greene” called Dino (Ms. Morales’s choice); pizza at Corner Slice in Hell’s Kitchen for Mr. Yang or a meal at Red Rooster in Harlem for Mr. McGuire, they all appeared eager for a less wonky, but vitally important aspect of the job: cheerleading for the city. More