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      Walter Mondale, Ex-Vice President Under Jimmy Carter, Dies

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      Under Jimmy Carter, he was the first V.P. to serve as a genuine partner of a president. His own run for the top position ended in a crushing defeat.Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and champion of liberal politics, activist government and civil rights who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1984, losing to President Ronald Reagan in a landslide, died on Monday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 93.Kathy Tunheim, a spokeswoman for the family, announced the death. She did not specify a cause.A son of a minister of modest means, Fritz Mondale, as he was widely known, led a rich public life that began in Minnesota under the tutelage of his state’s progressive pathfinder, Hubert H. Humphrey. He achieved his own historic firsts, especially with his selection of Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York as his running mate in 1984, the first woman to seek the vice presidency on a major national ticket.Under President Jimmy Carter, from 1977 to 1981, Mr. Mondale was the first vice president to serve as a genuine partner of a president, with full access to intelligence briefings, a weekly lunch with Mr. Carter, his own office near the president’s and his own staff integrated with Mr. Carter’s.In a statement released on Monday night, Mr. Carter wrote: “Today I mourn the passing of my dear friend Walter Mondale, who I consider the best vice president in our country’s history. During our administration, Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic, policy-driving force that had never been seen before and still exists today.”Throughout his career, Mr. Mondale advocated an assertive and interventionist role for the federal government, especially on behalf of the poor, minority groups and women.“I’m a liberal or a progressive,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2010. “I didn’t use the ‘liberal’ word much, because I thought it carried too much baggage. But my whole life, I worked on the idea that government can be an instrument for social progress. We need that progress. Fairness requires it.”He furthered that cause during his 12 years representing Minnesota in the United States Senate, where he was a strong supporter of civil rights, school aid, expansion of health care and child care, consumer protection, and many other liberal programs. In 1974, he briefly explored running for president.Mr. Mondale represented Minnesota for 12 years in the Senate. Mr. Mondale, second from right, was on hand when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an open housing bill in 1968.Associated PressTwo years later, Mr. Carter, a former Georgia governor, wanted someone experienced in Washington when he chose Mr. Mondale as his running mate. Before joining the ticket, Mr. Mondale got a promise that he would have a close working relationship with Mr. Carter, with influence on policy, noting that he had seen Mr. Humphrey marginalized in that post by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the turbulent 1960s. Mr. Humphrey, a political mentor and fellow Minnesotan, urged him to accept the offer.At the White House, Mr. Mondale was a leader of the administration’s liberal wing, frequently clashing with Southern conservatives as he argued for affirmative action and more help for the unemployed and other spending programs as the economy soured.He was sharply at odds with the president in 1979 as energy prices spiked and lines at gasoline stations stretched around the block. Mr. Carter had decided to address the turmoil in a televised speech to the nation from the Oval Office about what he perceived to be a “crisis of confidence” in the American spirit. Mr. Mondale not only advised against the speech; he was “distraught” when he heard the plans for it, Mr. Carter later wrote.In his memoir, “The Good Fight,” published in 2010, Mr. Mondale called the episode “the only serious falling out that Carter and I had in four years.” The address — known as the “malaise” speech, though that word was never used — was followed by the firing of several cabinet members and a plunge in Mr. Carter’s approval ratings, from which the president never recovered.The Carter administration used Mr. Mondale for foreign assignments and for building domestic support for its foreign policy initiatives. His rapport with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel helped bring about the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel negotiated by Mr. Carter at Camp David in 1978. Mr. Mondale then helped sell the treaty to the American Jewish community.He also generated support in Congress for the Panama Canal Treaty and for nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.“You can divide every vice president in American history into two categories: pre-Walter Mondale and post-Walter Mondale,” former Vice President Al Gore said.Mr. Carter chose Mr. Mondale as his running mate in 1976. He was the first vice president to serve as a genuine partner of a president.James Garrett/New York Daily News Archive, via Getty ImagesHaving lost some internal arguments on domestic matters, Mr. Mondale remained loyal and stumped the country for Mr. Carter against a liberal challenge for the party’s nomination in 1980 by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.Mr. Kennedy assailed the administration’s budget cuts and deregulation of energy prices, but Mr. Mondale argued that liberals and conservatives alike needed to face up to the dangers of mounting deficits, which many economists said were stoking inflation.He hammered the same theme running against Mr. Reagan in 1984, warning that deficits resulting from the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 also had to be reduced, in part by tax increases that he said were inevitable no matter who won.“Let’s tell the truth,” he declared in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, referring to the need to tackle deficits. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”The convention applauded his candor, but the Reagan camp pounced, gleefully portraying Mr. Mondale as favoring tax increases while the economy was surging. The Reagan campaign countered with an ad proclaiming that a new “morning in America” had dawned, and Mr. Reagan was swept back into office easily.Mr. Mondale got less than 41 percent of the popular vote and lost every state except his native Minnesota, adding only the District of Columbia to his win column. (After his re-election, Mr. Reagan did end up raising some taxes.)A rangy, square-built former college football player, roughly six feet tall, Mr. Mondale could appear formal and stiff in public. “I’m not good on TV,” he once said. “It’s just not a natural medium for me.”After Ronald Reagan defeated the Carter-Mondale ticket, Mr. Mondale turned to practicing law and preparing for a presidential run. Mr. Mondale and his wife, Joan, in 1984 at an election rally in Washington, D.C.Ira Schwarz/Associated PressBut in speeches he could lift his flat, nasal Minnesota voice to soaring tenor cadences. He was jocular and self-deprecating in private, even a bit off-color when making fun of himself, but he also showed a zest for combat and a love of political stories, which he told with relish while enjoying a cigar (though he never allowed himself to be photographed with one). He was a fan of the subversively zany comedy of Monty Python and the darkly satirical movies of Joel and Ethan Coen, Minnesota natives themselves.As vice president, Mr. Mondale and his wife, Joan Mondale, set an informal tone at the official residence. Trained in art history, Ms. Mondale, who died in 2014 at 83, was active in fund-raising for the arts, wrote a book on art for children and worked as a docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The couple’s marriage was considered one of the strongest in Washington.While savoring the life of a public man, Mr. Mondale loved to retreat by himself or with a friend to fish for trout or walleyed pike in Minnesota lakes reachable only by seaplane. In the winter, he would go off and chop holes in the ice and fish for days on end.His humor was dry. “I was once asked why I fished, and I said it was cheaper than a psychiatrist,” he said. In 1974, when he dropped his nascent presidential campaign, he said he did not wish to spend the next two years staying at Holiday Inns. Running for vice president two years later, he said he was amazed at how Holiday Inns had improved.No Lying, No BraggingWalter Frederick Mondale was born on Jan. 5, 1928, in the hamlet of Ceylon, in southern Minnesota, in a lake region less than five miles from the Iowa border. He was the second son of Claribel (Cowan) Mondale, a musician and piano teacher, and the Rev. Theodore S. Mondale, a farmer and Methodist minister.The family name was originally Mundal, after the small town in Norway from which Mr. Mondale’s paternal great-grandfather, Frederick, came to southern Minnesota in 1856. (Walter not only got his middle name in honor of his great-grandfather, but also inherited Frederick’s nickname, Fritz.)Mr. Mondale’s father lost a series of farms in the 1920s and moved from town to town, subsisting on meager earnings while Mr. Mondale’s mother gave music lessons and led the choir in each of Theodore’s parishes. His parents believed in helping the less fortunate and never making a show of it.Once asked whether he would be a good president, Mr. Mondale said: “I have trouble answering that. If my father had ever heard me tell him that I would make a good president, I would have been taken directly to the woodshed. In my family, the two things you were sure to get spanked for were lying or bragging about yourself.”Fritz Mondale was an average student but an enthusiastic football player; he broke his nose as a high school varsity halfback. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul before transferring to the University of Minnesota and graduating cum laude in 1951 with a degree in political science.Mr. Mondale, accompanied by his wife, Joan, was sworn in as Minnesota attorney general by Chief Justice Roger Dell of the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1960.Gene Herrick/Associated PressSteeped in the progressive political views of his father, Mr. Mondale joined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and became involved in its internal battle to oust Communists and their sympathizers. Mr. Humphrey, at the time the outspoken mayor of Minneapolis, led that fight, and in 1948 Mr. Mondale signed up for Mr. Humphrey’s first Senate campaign. Mr. Humphrey became a friend who would influence Mr. Mondale’s rise.Mr. Mondale worked at odd jobs during his college years, including inspecting peas for lice at a local cannery. (After becoming vice president he liked to say that he was “the only pea-lice inspector” to have risen to such high office.) He took a year off to run the student arm of Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal advocacy group.After graduation came two years in the Army, a return to the University of Minnesota for law school and marriage to Joan Adams, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. They had two sons and a daughter. Their daughter, Eleanor Mondale Poling, a television and radio personality, died of brain cancer in 2011 at age 51.Mr. Mondale’s survivors include his sons, Theodore, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Minnesota in 1998, and William, a lawyer; four grandchildren; and two step-granddaughters.Mr. Mondale practiced law in Minneapolis until 1960, when the state attorney general resigned and Gov. Orville L. Freeman, who had been a partner in Mr. Mondale’s law firm, appointed him, at 32, to fill the post. As a young law associate, Mr. Mondale had managed campaigns for Mr. Freeman, who was later secretary of agriculture under President John F. Kennedy.Mr. Mondale went on to win election twice in his own right. He joined 21 other attorneys general in signing a brief that helped persuade the United States Supreme Court to uphold the right of counsel for indigent defendants in the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.The following year he was thrust into national politics at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as head of the party’s credentials committee. In that post he helped Senator Humphrey broker a deal, at President Johnson’s behest, between segregated and integrated factions of delegates from Mississippi. The agreement produced rules banning segregated delegations in the future.Mr. Mondale was joined by his friend and mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey, at a parade in Minnesota in 1976.Associated PressA twist of fate — a vacancy, and then an appointment to fill it — had propelled Mr. Mondale into state politics. Now came another that would send him to Washington. When Johnson selected Mr. Humphrey as his running mate, Mr. Mondale was chosen to fill Mr. Humphrey’s Senate seat. He was sworn in by Mr. Humphrey at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, where Mr. Mondale had had an emergency appendectomy. He was later elected twice to the Senate with no difficulty.In the Senate, Mr. Mondale lined up in favor of Johnson’s Great Society legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and worked to enact fair housing laws against powerful opposition. He pressed for programs in education, child care, health care, jobs, desegregation and consumer protection.One of his proudest legislative achievements, he said, was his leadership role in making it easier for the Senate to cut off a filibuster with 60 votes, under a rule change, rather than a two-thirds vote, as was previously required. One of his biggest regrets, he said, was his delay, until 1969, in turning against the Vietnam War.By the 1970s Mr. Mondale’s name was on lists of possible candidates for national office. Dutifully, he wrote a campaign book, “The Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible Presidency” (1975), in which he criticized the “imperial presidency” of Richard M. Nixon, and then joined the race for the 1976 presidential nomination.The campaign went nowhere. “I remember that after a year I was running six points behind ‘Don’t Know,’” Mr. Mondale said in the 2010 interview. He ended the bid early, in 1974. In withdrawing, he said he lacked an “overwhelming desire to be president.” The comment would come to haunt him.No. 2 With a SayThe Democratic victor, Mr. Carter, a conservative Southerner, was looking for a liberal running mate from the North who could help him pick up support in the industrial states. Mr. Mondale was at the top of everybody’s list, but he had mixed feelings until he got an agreement from the nominee that he would have a full-fledged policy role, expanded from the largely ceremonial functions assigned to most vice presidents.Mr. Mondale’s chief of staff, Richard Moe, said Mr. Humphrey had been equally persuasive. “‘Fritz,’ he said, ‘if you have a chance to be vice president, you should take it,’” Mr. Moe recalled.In office, Mr. Carter was true to his word in giving him major responsibilities in the White House, Mr. Mondale said in 2010. “Carter did listen to me a lot, I think,” he said. “I tried to avoid giving a win-loss record. But he was marvelous to me and to Joan. They never insulted our independence or integrity or position.”Some in the president’s circle, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, later belittled Mr. Mondale’s input as consisting largely of political advice. In one instance, Mr. Mondale argued unsuccessfully against imposing a grain embargo on the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979.“Mr. President, we need to be strong and firm, but that doesn’t mean you have to commit political suicide,” he said, according to the memoirs of Hamilton Jordan, Mr. Carter’s chief of staff.Besides the Middle East peace negotiations and the Panama Canal treaty ratification, Mr. Mondale was involved in efforts to save the “boat people” refugees from the Vietnam War, some of whom resettled in Minnesota.He remained a favorite of Democratic core groups, including unions and teachers, and senior and Black communities. In support of affirmative action, he clashed with Attorney General Griffin B. Bell and other more conservative members of the Carter team.The Carter administration used Mr. Mondale for foreign assignments, and his rapport with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel helped bring about the historic 1978 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.Max Nash/Associated PressMr. Mondale’s liberal advocacy became more problematic as Mr. Carter cut spending and favored tighter monetary policy to control inflation after 1979. A breach with the president erupted that summer, when unemployment, double-digit inflation rates, soaring energy prices and lines at gas stations led to the biggest internal crisis of Mr. Carter’s presidency.To address the economic disorder, the president scheduled a speech, then canceled it, deciding abruptly instead to hold a “domestic summit” at Camp David with a parade of public figures and intellectuals. The White House’s 29-year-old pollster, Patrick Caddell, had counseled Mr. Carter to address what the pollster called a spiritual “malaise” enveloping the country, caused by the legacy of Vietnam and Watergate as well as the energy and economic situations.After the summit, Mr. Carter took Mr. Caddell’s advice over the objection of Mr. Mondale and others, emerging to proclaim in a nationally televised speech that a “crisis of confidence” was paralyzing the country and preventing action on energy.Mr. Mondale was “enraged and even vituperative” in arguing against the speech, according to a 2018 memoir by Stuart Eizenstat, Mr. Carter’s domestic policy adviser. The vice president argued that the president had succumbed to psychobabble from an inexperienced aide.“He was visibly upset, and his face became so red with anger that I feared for his health,” Mr. Eizenstat wrote.In his own presidential memoirs, Mr. Carter recalled that Mr. Mondale had been so “distraught” over plans for the speech that he adjourned a meeting at Camp David so that he could settle down his vice president as the two walked around the compound’s grounds.“You’re very tired and this is affecting your thinking,” Mr. Mondale told the president, according to Mr. Eizenstat. As Mr. Mondale later put it, “my position was that an administration that came in pledging to be as good as the American people should not change into one urging the people to be as good as the government.”Mr. Mondale with Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping of China at a welcoming dinner at the Great Hall of the People in 1979. Bob Daugherty/Associated PressThe speech boosted Mr. Carter’s approval ratings, but only temporarily. Within days, Mr. Carter had dismissed several cabinet members, an action intended to signal to Americans that he was in charge. The ousters backfired, however, as the public perceived that the president had, in fact, lost control of his government. Mr. Mondale, who was close to some of those fired, later acknowledged that he had contemplated resigning or at least refusing to run for re-election with Mr. Carter.Later in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages by Iranian revolutionaries at the United States Embassy in Tehran only deepened Mr. Carter’s troubles.Senator Kennedy’s challenge to Mr. Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination divided Democrats, but it also evidently stirred Mr. Mondale’s competitive instincts to protect the president. Though hailing from his party’s liberal wing, Mr. Mondale stood by the president, helping him turn back the Kennedy challenge. But the split in the party weakened the Carter presidency irreparably.On election night, as the magnitude of the Carter-Mondale defeat at the hands of Mr. Reagan sank in, some of the vice president’s staff began sporting new campaign buttons: “Mondale in ’84.” Mr. Mondale almost immediately started preparing for a run.Fighting ‘The Good Fight’Mr. Mondale also began making money for the first time, at the law firm of Winston and Strawn based in Chicago, helping clients with business opportunities in countries where he knew the leadership. Some said he had become another influence peddler.At first Mr. Mondale was an obvious front-runner in a field of Democratic candidates in which Senator Gary Hart of Colorado and the Rev. Jesse Jackson also looked strong. Mindful of his history as a dropout in 1974, he declared: “I know myself. I am ready. I am ready to be president of the United States.”As expected, Mr. Mondale initially raised more money, won more straw votes, did better in all the polls and received more endorsements than his opponents. Yet after an early victory in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign went into a tailspin, losing in the New Hampshire primary to the media-savvy Mr. Hart, who connected with voters by offering “new ideas” compared with he called the “established past” and special interests of Mr. Mondale.“Fritz, you cannot lead this country if you have promised everybody everything,” Mr. Hart said in a debate.“Correct, and I have not,” the former vice president replied, adding that his only promises were to workers, the poor and disaffected groups. “America is nothing if it isn’t promises,” he said. “That’s what America is about.”Mr. Mondale reignited his campaign by accusing Mr. Hart of lacking substance, memorably quoting a popular fast-food hamburger advertisement of the day when he asked in a debate, “Where’s the beef?”After securing the nomination in the summer, Mr. Mondale stunned the political establishment by selecting Representative Ferraro as his running mate. Women’s groups were elated, and the ticket got a burst of support. Mr. Mondale said it was one of his proudest achievements.Mr. Mondale and his running mate, Geraldine A. Ferraro, in Portland, Ore., in September 1984. Ms. Ferraro was the first woman to seek the vice presidency on a major national ticket.Jack Smith/Associated PressBut in the fall, Ms. Ferraro’s campaign foundered amid damaging disclosures about her family’s finances, and the overwhelming disadvantage of running against a popular president as the economy was rebounding became painfully evident.A momentary change in Mr. Mondale’s fortunes came at the first presidential debate, when a rambling summation by Mr. Reagan raised doubts about whether he was too old for the job. (He was 73 at the time.) At the next debate, however, Mr. Reagan defused the “age issue” by declaring: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”The audience burst into laughter, and so did Mr. Mondale (who was 56). “I think the campaign ended right there,” he said later.After his humbling defeat, Mr. Mondale went back to Minnesota to practice law, involve himself in public affairs and teach and write as a fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Then the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 opened a new chapter: The president sent Mr. Mondale to Japan as ambassador.His tenure in Tokyo, lasting until December 1996, was highlighted by his negotiation of an agreement to shrink and move American military bases in Okinawa, where the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen in 1995 had provoked outrage.In 1998, Mr. Clinton named Mr. Mondale as a special envoy to economically troubled Indonesia.In 2002, Mr. Mondale was drafted to run for his old Senate seat after the incumbent Democrat, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash. He lost to Norman Coleman, a Republican.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesBack in Minnesota, Mr. Mondale joined the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis, but his political career was still not finished. In 2002, at the age of 74, he was drafted to run for his old Senate seat after the incumbent Democrat, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash 11 days before the election.Mr. Mondale’s impromptu candidacy was undone, however, by a raucous and emotional memorial service for Mr. Wellstone featuring partisan speeches by his supporters. It turned voters off, and they elected Norman Coleman, a Republican.The race was Mr. Mondale’s last hurrah, though he continued to speak out and serve as a party elder statesmen. Associates said the Senate race defeat had actually energized him.“It allowed me to be the kind of liberal that I wanted to be,” Mr. Mondale said in the 2010 interview for this obituary. He said that in theory, running for the seat was “a really dumb thing to do,” but that he had no regrets.In 2018, Mr. Carter and leading political figures of the last half-century joined Mr. Mondale at the University of Minnesota to celebrate his 90th birthday, four years after he had recovered from triple bypass heart surgery. Indeed, the combined longevity of Mr. Mondale and Mr. Carter brought them a certain distinction worthy of a footnote in American history: In 2006, they surpassed John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as the president and vice president from the same administration who had lived the longest since leaving office. Mr. Carter is 96.“I once told the president, one thing I didn’t want to happen is I didn’t want to be embarrassed,” Mr. Mondale said. “In four years, I never was embarrassed, and I don’t think any other V.P. can make that statement.”Mr. Mondale at his home in Minneapolis in 2016. “You can divide every vice president in American history into two categories: pre-Walter Mondale and post-Walter Mondale,” Vice President Al Gore said of his predecessor.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesIn recent years, Mr. Mondale continued his active engagement in politics. He supported Senator Amy Klobuchar, a protégée who had interned for him in college and later worked with him in his law firm, frequently reaching out to check in and to offer advice in her unsuccessful campaign for president last year.“He never stopped believing in our country and in preparing a new generation of leaders to deal with the next set of problems,” she said in a phone interview on Sunday.In his 2010 memoir, Mr. Mondale acknowledged that in his later years “the nation was no longer listening” to the call for expanded government and social progress, but he still believed in liberal policies and the inspiration of the Apostle Paul.“I have fought the good fight,” he said in closing that book. “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”It was a sentiment he echoed on Saturday in a last email sent to his many former staff members, beginning with “Dear team.” “Well, my time has come,” he wrote. “I am eager to rejoin Joan and Eleanor. Before I go I wanted to let you know how much you mean to me. Never has a public servant had a better group of people working at their side! Together we have accomplished so much, and I know you will keep up the good fight.” More

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      The ‘New Redlining’ Is Deciding Who Lives in Your Neighborhood

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      If you care about social justice, you have to care about zoning.Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion race-to-the-top competitive grants program to spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.”Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.Economically discriminatory zoning policies — which say that you are not welcome in a community unless you can afford a single-family home, sometimes on a large plot of land — are not part of a distant, disgraceful past. In most American cities, zoning laws prohibit the construction of relatively affordable homes — duplexes, triplexes, quads and larger multifamily units — on three-quarters of residential land.In the 2020 race, Mr. Biden said he was running to “restore the soul of our nation,” which had been damaged by President Donald Trump’s embrace of racism. Removing exclusionary barriers that keep millions of Black and Hispanic people out of safe neighborhoods with strong schools is central to the goal of advancing racial justice. Over the past several decades, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, Black people have been integrated into the nation’s political life and the military, “but the civil-rights movement failed to integrate Black Americans into the private domain of American life.”Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.While exclusionary zoning laws are especially harmful to Black people, the discrimination is more broadly rooted in class snobbery — a second problem Mr. Biden highlighted in his campaign. As a proud product of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden said he would value the dignity of working people and not look down on anyone. The elitism Mr. Biden promised to reject helps explain why in virtually all-white communities like La Crosse, Wis., efforts to remedy economic segregation have received strong pushback from upper-income whites, and why middle-class Black communities have sometimes shown fierce resistance to low-income housing.If race were the only factor driving exclusionary zoning, one would expect to see such policies most extensively promoted in communities where racial intolerance is highest, but in fact the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities, where racial views are more progressive. As Harvard’s Michael Sandel has noted, social psychologists have found that highly-educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” Class discrimination helps explain why, despite a 25 percent decline in Black-white residential segregation since 1970, income segregation has more than doubled.By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from each other than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”It happened in 1968, when Mr. Biden’s hero Robert Kennedy brought together working-class Black, Latino and white constituencies in a presidential campaign that championed a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. It happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together to support (and then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin, despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades. And a similar coalition appears to be coming together in California, over the issue of exclusionary zoning. State Senator Scott Wiener, who has been trying to legalize multifamily living spaces, told me that Republican and Democratic legislators representing working-class communities have supported reform, while the opponents have one thing in common: They represent wealthier constituents who “wanted to keep certain people out of their community.” More

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      Yang Lands Last Place on Ballot: 5 Takeaways From the Mayor’s Race

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      The ballot order for the June 22 New York mayoral primary was decided by lottery, not alphabetical order, but Andrew Yang will still appear last.Much of the focus in the New York City mayoral race has been given to the eight best-known Democratic candidates, who lead in fund-raising and in early polling. But on the June 22 primary ballot, none of the eight will appear at the top; that honor will go to a more obscure candidate.For Republican voters, the ballot will be far less involved: There will only be two candidates, after a third dropped out of the race last week.The contest, after months of being largely conducted virtually through online forums and fund-raisers, has shifted to a more normal pace, with candidates hitting the campaign trail in earnest last week. But they can’t put away their laptops just yet — they would risk missing the next big televised debate in May.Here’s what you need to know about the race:12 Democrats will appear on the ballot. Who is first?In a crowded field, being at the top of the ballot could arguably be an advantage, and with a dozen Democrats in the mayor’s race, it is almost certainly better to be first than last.That theory may be tested this year: Aaron Foldenauer, one of the least-known Democrats running for mayor, won top billing in the Board of Elections lottery last week.A lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in Lower Manhattan in 2017, Mr. Foldenauer celebrated the news, tweaking Andrew Yang, who got the last spot.“I’m first on the ballot for mayor, Andrew Yang, and I had to look quite far down the list to find your name!” he said on Twitter.Mr. Yang, considered the current front-runner in the race, responded to his bad fortune with a smiley face: “This feels like grade school where I was always last alphabetically.”Here is the full lineup for Democrats, from top to bottom: Mr. Foldenauer; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive; Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller; Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive; Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio; Paperboy Prince, a rapper; Art Chang, a former executive at JPMorgan Chase; Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner; Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president; Isaac Wright Jr., a lawyer who was wrongfully convicted on drug charges; Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary; and Mr. Yang.On the Republican side, there are just two names: Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who is listed first, and Fernando Mateo, a restaurant operator who has led or founded Hispanics Across America, the state Federation of Taxi Drivers and United Bodegas of America.The only female Republican candidate exits the race.Sara Tirschwell dropped out of the Republican mayoral race after failing to get a sufficient number of petition signatures.Kholood Eid for The New York TimesSara Tirschwell, a former Wall Street executive and the only female candidate in the Republican field, ended her campaign last week after failing to gather enough signatures to make the ballot.“The common wisdom is that the Democratic primary is the de facto election, and that is going to turn out to be true without me in the race,” she said in an interview. “I truly believe that I was the only chance the Republican Party had in the general election.”She said that Mr. Yang, Mr. Adams or Ms. Wiley would be likely to win the Democratic primary and become the next mayor. And she offered to put her “financial acumen” to use for any of them.“I would serve in anybody’s administration — Republican or Democrat — except for Fernando Mateo,” she said, blaming one of Mr. Mateo’s allies for challenging her petitions during a pandemic.Her biggest lesson from the campaign? New Yorkers, she said, want city government to “get back to the basics — picking up the trash and filling potholes.”Ms. Tirschwell said she planned to vote for Mr. Sliwa, who had defended her and had said Mr. Mateo “should call off his henchmen and stop intimidating” her.The first major debate will not be in person.Maya Wiley called for three debates to be held in person.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesAs the mayor’s race grows increasingly contentious, a number of the campaigns found agreement around one idea last week: A series of official debates should be held in person.“This election will decide what kind of city we want to be and doing the debates on just another Zoom is not going to cut it,” Ms. Wiley wrote on Twitter as she called for the three primary debates affiliated with the city’s Campaign Finance Board to be held in person. “When I am mayor, I won’t be in a box on a screen, I will be out with New Yorkers and our debates should be the same.”Nearly instantly, many of the leading candidates and campaigns agreed. Many hope to engage with each other directly — and in person — in the homestretch of the race and see the upcoming debates as one of the few opportunities for breakout moments in the contest.But as of now, the first debate, scheduled for next month, is not expected to be held in person, a spokesman for the Campaign Finance Board said.“With the first debate on May 13 less than a month away, and more than 2,000 Covid-19 cases reported daily in New York City, an in-person debate is not possible at this time,” said Matt Sollars, a spokesman for the board.He added: “The board and our co-sponsors share the view that the best debates are in-person debates” and left that possibility open for future debates.“We have a history of holding debates in front of large, live audiences,” he said. “We are confident that the 2021 mayoral debates will match or exceed the quality of those events and allow city voters to learn about and compare the candidates.”Will Stringer’s big endorsement translate into votes?The Working Families Party endorsed Scott Stringer as its first choice.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesLeft-wing activists and leaders are growing increasingly worried as they contemplate the staying power of Mr. Yang, the former presidential candidate who embraces some progressive positions but is undoubtedly one of the more moderate contenders in the mayoral field.One major open question, though, is whether left-wing voters can coalesce around a candidate or slate of candidates to stop Mr. Yang’s momentum.The Working Families Party last week moved toward trying to facilitate a unified progressive front by issuing a ranked-choice endorsement: Mr. Stringer was endorsed as the party’s first choice, followed by Ms. Morales, the most left-wing candidate in the race, and Ms. Wiley.After months of struggling to break through the crowded mayoral field — and often being drowned out by Mr. Yang — Mr. Stringer received a dose of energy from the endorsement. But he already had the backing of many prominent progressives. His task is to turn those endorsements into enthusiasm on the ground.Some Democrats hope that if left-wing voters list the three Working Families-backed candidates first on their ballot, in any order, then one could come out on top under ranked-choice voting.That’s what Chas Stewart, a 30-year-old teacher, plans to do. He favors Ms. Morales first, then Mr. Stringer and Ms. Wiley.“It appears that her politics align most closely with mine,” he said of Ms. Morales, “especially regarding reining in the N.Y.P.D., and what else is the point of ranked-choice voting if I can’t rank that person No. 1?”Viral Yang video creates opening for opponentsMs. Wiley called Andrew Yang’s behavior “unacceptable.” Mr. Stringer released a statement from several women calling Mr. Yang’s behavior “disqualifying for someone who is seeking to be mayor of New York.”What led to their denunciations?In an encounter outside a comedy club captured on video and then broadcast on Twitter and TikTok, a comic, Lawrence Reese, asked Mr. Yang if a man could keep his Timberland boots on while having sex with women, using a coarse word for sex and a derogatory word for women.Mr. Yang patted Mr. Reese’s shoulder and suggested that “if your partner is cool with it,” that was fine. Then Mr. Reese asked if Mr. Yang choked women, again using the derogatory word for women. Mr. Yang laughed — too uproariously, his critics say — indicated that the conversation was over and walked away.Mr. Yang’s reaction — that laugh — created an immediate opening for his opponents, who have been eager to highlight his every gaffe as they look for ways to gain traction in the race.Ms. Wiley held a news conference condemning his behavior that featured the local president of the National Organization for Women, and Mr. Stringer’s allies tied Mr. Yang’s response to the allegations of “bro” culture that trailed his presidential campaign.Mr. Reese, who said he has no horse in this year’s mayoral race, suggested that Mr. Yang’s critics were just playing politics.“His opponents are going to go against him in any way they can,” he said.The 25-year-old comedian said he was merely performing one of his regular bits, where he asks people on the street random questions about their lives. In his own remarks, Mr. Yang suggested that his laugh expressed how shocked he was, and that he shut the discussion down as quickly as he could. He noted that his wife was the victim of sexual abuse.But that was not enough for some critics.Mr. Yang “should have been straight-faced and unequivocal in his reproach,” Charlotte Bennett, who has accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of sexual harassment, wrote in an op-ed on Saturday. “Failing that, even a simple ‘That’s not funny’ would have sufficed.” More

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      If You Care About Social Justice, You Have to Care About Zoning

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      The Biden administration is off to a good start on housing, but there is much more it could be doing.Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion race-to-the-top competitive grants program to spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.” Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.Economically discriminatory zoning policies — which say that you are not welcome in a community unless you can afford a single-family home, sometimes on a large plot of land — are not part of a distant, disgraceful past. In most American cities, zoning laws prohibit the construction of relatively affordable homes — duplexes, triplexes, quads and larger multifamily units — on three-quarters of residential land.In the 2020 race, Mr. Biden said he was running to “restore the soul of our nation,” which had been damaged by President Donald Trump’s embrace of racism. Removing exclusionary barriers that keep millions of Black and Hispanic people out of safe neighborhoods with strong schools is central to the goal of advancing racial justice. Over the past several decades, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, Black people have been integrated into the nation’s political life and the military, “but the civil-rights movement failed to integrate Black Americans into the private domain of American life.”Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.While exclusionary zoning laws are especially harmful to Black people, the discrimination is more broadly rooted in class snobbery — a second problem Mr. Biden highlighted in his campaign. As a proud product of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden said he would value the dignity of working people and not look down on anyone. The elitism Mr. Biden promised to reject helps explain why in virtually all-white communities like La Crosse, Wis., efforts to remedy economic segregation have received strong pushback from upper-income whites, and why middle-class Black communities have sometimes shown fierce resistance to low-income housing.If race were the only factor driving exclusionary zoning, one would expect to see such policies most extensively promoted in communities where racial intolerance is highest, but in fact the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities, where racial views are more progressive. As Harvard’s Michael Sandel has noted, social psychologists have found that highly-educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” Class discrimination helps explain why, despite a 25 percent decline in Black-white residential segregation since 1970, income segregation has more than doubled.By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”It happened in 1968, when Mr. Biden’s hero, Robert Kennedy, brought together working-class Black, Latino, and white constituencies in a presidential campaign that championed a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. It happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together to support (and then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin, despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades. And a similar coalition appears to be coming together in California, over the issue of exclusionary zoning. State Senator Scott Wiener, who has been trying to legalize multifamily living spaces, told me that Republican and Democratic legislators representing working-class communities have supported reform, while the opponents have one thing in common: They represent wealthier constituents who “wanted to keep certain people out of their community.”Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing affordability crisis and climate change. Economists from across the political spectrum agree that zoning laws that ban anything but single-family homes artificially drive up prices by limiting the supply of housing that can be built in a region. At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has left many Americans jobless and people are struggling to make rent or pay their mortgages, it is incomprehensible that ubiquitous government zoning policies would be permitted to make the housing affordability crisis worse by driving prices unnaturally higher. More

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      Ray McGuire Wants to Show He’s Not Just the Wall Street Candidate

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      Mr. McGuire has landed endorsements from Representative Gregory W. Meeks and three hip-hop giants as his campaign for New York mayor enters a crucial phase.In the intensifying race for mayor of New York City, numerous endorsements have trickled out, but few with the star power of the one jointly given to Raymond J. McGuire last week: Jay-Z, Diddy and Nas.For Mr. McGuire, one of the highest-ranking and longest-serving Black executives on Wall Street, the endorsement from the three entrepreneurial giants of the hip-hop world was meant to reinforce a message: He was not merely a candidate who emerged from, and was favored by, big business; he could be a mayor to heal New York from its financial crisis and its racial inequities.Six months ago, Mr. McGuire entered the crowded race for mayor at the urging of several top business leaders, who hoped that he could translate his success on Wall Street into a viable candidacy for mayor, and be a more business-friendly choice than most of the other major candidates. He quickly raised more than $7.4 million to fund his campaign, and a super PAC has raised another $4 million. He has also spent far more on political advertising than any other candidate: $1.2 million, with the super PAC spending another $1.7 million.On Sunday, Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, endorsed Mr. McGuire, in what some of his campaign aides are calling their “Clyburn moment,” a reference to an endorsement given by Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina to Joseph R. Biden; the endorsement is widely considered to have helped save Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign after his poor performances in two early primaries.But with two months until the June 22 primary, Mr. McGuire’s campaign has yet to catch fire, and his goal of becoming the city’s second Black mayor is entering a critical phase.There is no question that New York City faces a series of severe challenges as it emerges from the pandemic. But Mr. McGuire has so far been unable to persuade voters, according to early polling, that he is best suited to guide the city’s recovery.Mr. McGuire, right, visiting the First Baptist Church East Elmhurst in Queens. He has begun to step up his in-person campaigning.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesOther Democratic candidates have far more experience in city government, including the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer; the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams; the former sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia; and the former head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Maya Wiley.Mr. McGuire is essentially hoping to use his corporate background — much like the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg did in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attack — to convince New Yorkers that a different type of nonpolitical leadership is needed in a post-crisis city. At the same time, Mr. McGuire is trying to broaden his appeal beyond business leaders. Earlier this month, Mr. McGuire appeared in Minneapolis outside the courthouse where the former police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial in the killing of George Floyd, praying for justice with Mr. Floyd’s family. Last month, he signed a letter with dozens of the most prominent Black business executives in the country calling on companies to fight restrictive voting laws being pushed by Republicans in more than 40 states.“Now more than ever, we need a mayor who can unify, who can bring together every walk of life, every race, every community and every industry,” Mr. McGuire said on Sunday.Mr. McGuire, seen on the steps of Queens Borough Hall, is trying to broaden his appeal beyond business leaders. Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesHe used the language of New York’s first and only Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, calling the city a “beautiful mosaic” and promising to revive it.Mr. McGuire also referenced fellow candidates who had been “running for decades” or others who were “gimmicking as if this were a game show.”On the streets, Mr. McGuire, who is 6-foot-4, seems at ease, mixing jokes with passers-by with more substantive discussions with a community activist about his plans for young people.“All that has to happen between now and June is more people getting to know and meet Ray,” said Assemblyman Robert J. Rodriguez, a Democrat from East Harlem who has endorsed Mr. McGuire and joined him at campaign events. “Some of the other candidates like Yang had the benefit of a presidential campaign to help solve that problem. If that’s our biggest issue, then it’s just really a race against time.”Indeed, Mr. McGuire has begun to step up the pace of his in-person campaigning, following the example of Andrew Yang, the presumptive front-runner who has aggressively courted voters in person during the pandemic.But it is Mr. Meeks’s endorsement that may carry the most weight among engaged voters, particularly in the Black community, whose support he and Mr. Adams, a founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, are competing for. A group of 150 supporters from East Asian, South Asian and Black communities gathered on the steps of Queens Borough Hall for the endorsement.“Meeks represents Black homeowners who turn out to vote in primaries, have a nuanced understanding of policing and economics and a clear picture of what they want New York City and their community to look like,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are not looking for the most progressive candidate.”Asked about Mr. McGuire’s performance in early polls, Mr. Meeks said he was unconcerned because many voters remained undecided.“This is the beginning,” Mr. Meeks said. “I refer everyone back to eight years ago. At this time, Bill de Blasio was nowhere to be seen on a polling site.” Mr. de Blasio later staged a surprise victory.Unlike Mr. Adams and other candidates more established in New York politics, Mr. McGuire must “simultaneously introduce people to who he is and articulate his vision,” Professor Greer said, and he is trying to do so by using the “shortcut of celebrity to introduce himself and then talk about his policies.”He is also using television ads, spending far more than the rest of the field combined.Some ads relate Mr. McGuire’s rise from his childhood in Dayton, Ohio, where he was raised by a single mother. He would attend private school before going on to attain three degrees at Harvard University and launching a career in investment banking on Wall Street. Other ads emphasize that Mr. McGuire believes his management experience is what’s needed to help the city recover, but that he never forgot where he came from in spite of his wealth. The mayoral candidate speaking at Antioch Baptist Church of Corona in Queens. “We’ve got to come off Zoom and get into the streets,” Mr. McGuire’s campaign manager said.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesOther ads showcase his endorsement from Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, a man who died after being placed in a chokehold by the police on Staten Island in 2014, or highlight his “comeback plan” to create 500,000 jobs, support small and minority-owned businesses and promote early childhood education.The ads do not make much of his ties to his backers on Wall Street, or his relationships with various celebrities. At a virtual fund-raiser earlier this year, Mr. McGuire held court with Jeff Bewkes, the former chief executive of Time Warner; the actor and comedian Steve Martin; Peter Malkin, the developer whose family controls the Empire State Building; and Charles Oakley, the retired New York Knicks star.The road to the joint endorsement began when Jay-Z called Mr. McGuire last year to ask for help with starting a fund to benefit Black and Latino people. The rapper and entrepreneur wanted Mr. McGuire to head the enterprise.Mr. McGuire told Jay-Z that he had a different plan in mind, divulging his thoughts about running for mayor of New York City.“I was like, man, there goes that,” Jay-Z said in the video unveiling the endorsement.Steve Stoute, a former record executive who heads an ad agency, also endorsed Mr. McGuire on the video with Jay-Z, Diddy and Nas.“If we don’t get this right, we got problems,” Mr. Stoute said in an interview. “You need somebody to come in who’s been successful at building something before, at fixing a problem. Politicians manage the status quo.”Mr. Meeks, left, with Mr. McGuire, right, his wife, Crystal McCrary McGuire, and their son Leo in Queens on Sunday.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesFor now, Mr. McGuire is busy managing his image with average voters. Instead of doing his usual Friday night virtual chat from his home on Central Park West, Mr. McGuire held the forum from Jamaica, Queens, where he was greeting voters at the AirTrain.On Wednesday, he was supposed to spend the day with advisers and his finance team, but the campaign called a last-minute audible and sent the candidate up to Harlem for a rally to honor Betty Park, the owner of Manna’s soul food restaurant, and to call for an end to anti-Asian violence.Mr. McGuire wore a backpack and a face mask, and worked the crowd before the event handing out fliers. He talked about his plan to create affordable housing and keep the neighborhood safe after it experienced an increase in gun violence during the pandemic. With Mr. McGuire already standing on one side of Ms. Park, Mr. Adams suddenly appeared and stood on the other.Brian Benjamin, a state senator representing the area who is running for city comptroller, spoke at the rally and was surprised to see Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire.“I said, ‘What’s going on?’” Mr. Benjamin said. “It is very rare to have this kind of mayoral presence.”Mr. McGuire may have to continue to be visible at small community events over the next two months if he expects to win, according to Lloyd Williams, president of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce.“He has major corporate supporters and money. What he doesn’t have is a history of working closely with the communities he wants to represent,” said Mr. Williams, who hasn’t endorsed in the race. “That means he has to spend more time, but he’s running out of time.” More

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      Dark Money in the New York Mayor’s Race

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      This year’s election is shaping up to be the city’s first in which super PACs play a major role.The New York City mayor’s race already has a national-politics tinge thanks to one guy: the businessman Andrew Yang, whose long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination sputtered out early last year, but who is now seen as a front-runner in the city’s mayoral election. (That’s despite his knack for eliciting groans on Twitter.)But it’s not just the personalities that are bridging the divide between local and national politics. It’s also the money.This mayoral election is shaping up to be the city’s first in which super PACs — the dark-money groups that sprang up after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — play a major role.But it’s also the first race in which a number of candidates are taking advantage of a city policy that allows campaigns to gain access to more generous public matching funds, based upon their level of grass-roots support.With the potentially decisive Democratic primary just over two months away, our Metro reporters Dana Rubinstein and Jeffery C. Mays have written an article looking at how the hunt for super PAC cash is complicating the race — and raising ethical questions about some campaigns, including a few that are also receiving public matching funds. Dana took a moment out of her Friday afternoon to catch me up on where things stand.Hi Dana. So, the Citizens United decision was handed down in 2010. Yet it seems as if this is the first time we’re hearing about super PACs being used in a big way in the New York mayor’s race. How does this development interact with the city’s newly beefed-up matching-funds policy, which is aimed at encouraging small donations? Is this a case of contradictory policies — or, as a source in your story put it, “like patching one part of your roof and the water finds another way in”?There was some independent-expenditure (or “I.E.”) activity in the 2013 mayoral primary, but it wasn’t candidate specific — with one possible exception. There was a super PAC called New York City Is Not for Sale that was candidate specific, in the sense that it was targeting one candidate, Christine Quinn, and it got its funding from Bill de Blasio supporters. But this is really the first time we’ve seen candidate-specific I.E.s. As they’ve proliferated on the national level, New York City candidates have been taking their cues from the national scene.If you talk to folks at the Brennan Center, who are big advocates for the matching-funds program, they’ll point to it and say that voters should take heart, because in many ways it is proving itself to be a success. The six mayoral candidates who qualified for matching funds this year were the most ever. The matching funds are being doled out in accordance with how many voters from New York City are contributing to campaigns, and that means someone like Dianne Morales, who has no previous electoral history and was not at all a big player in the New York political scene before this election, is able to make a real case for the mayoralty. She is able to mount a real campaign. She got like $2 million in matching funds in this round.But then you have this parallel universe of super PAC money. And in some cases you have candidates who are getting matching funds — which are our taxpayer dollars — and benefiting from super PACs. Of course, super PACs are supposed to be independent and not coordinate with campaigns, but regardless, for some voters it’s hard to see that and think it’s an ideal scenario.Basically, what we have is two parallel fund-raising systems: One is almost completely ungoverned, and the other is very strictly regulated and involves taxpayer money.Who is leading the race for super PAC money in New York? And what’s the overall state of the race these days, money matters aside?Shaun Donovan, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, is participating in the matching-funds program, and he has a super PAC. Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, has a super PAC too — although a much less lucrative one — and is also taking matching funds. Andrew Yang has one super PAC that was formed by a longtime friend of his named David Rose; it’s raised a nominal amount of money, but no one is under the illusion that it won’t start raising a lot soon. And there’s this other super PAC connected to Yang that’s supposedly in the works, and that Lis Smith, who was involved in Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, is involved with.Then there is Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive and one of the highest-ranking African-American bank executives ever. He has a super PAC that has raised $4 million from all kinds of recognizable names. They’re spending a lot, with the goal to just sort of increase his name recognition.As far as the state of the race, we have no idea. As you can attest, there’s been virtually no credible polling here. In terms of the available polls, there is some uniformity to what they suggest: Yang has a lead, yet half of voters are undecided. You have Eric Adams, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley, and then the rest of the pack.It is both too soon to say and also alarmingly close to the actual primary election day, June 22. We really don’t have a sense of where things stand. When you add to this ranked-choice voting, which is new this year, it’s really an open question.Earlier you mentioned Shaun Donovan, whose story figures prominently into the article you and Jeff just wrote. Fill us in on what’s going on there.In addition to being the former housing secretary for Obama, he was the budget director. So he’s a very well-regarded technocrat — who also is the son of a wealthy ad-tech executive. Someone formed a super PAC to support his candidacy for mayor; that super PAC has raised a little over $2 million, and exactly $2 million of that sum was donated by his dad.It’s completely within the realm of possibility that his dad was like, “You know what, I really love my son, I think he’d be a great mayor, I’m going to fund his super PAC,” without any coordination about how that money would be used. But it’s hard for some people to imagine a scenario where a father and son don’t talk about this kind of thing. Or maybe it isn’t! The point is that it’s almost unknowable, isn’t it?There’s a lot of winking and nodding involved in this stuff, and you don’t necessarily need direct coordination in order to have what is effectively coordination.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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      How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden

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      A study by a liberal group found a reverse coattails effect in 2020: Down-ballot candidates may have helped elect President Biden, rather than the other way around.Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.But her run may have helped another candidate: Joseph R. Biden Jr.The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates. That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found. The analysis was carried out using available precinct-level data in eight states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and New York — and controlling for factors like education to create a comparison between contested and uncontested districts.The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.“The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.”The idea isn’t new, but it is the first time that a comprehensive study has been done on the possibility of such a reverse coattails effect, and it comes as the Democratic Party ramps up its strategizing for the midterm elections next year.In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts. The hope was that if there was at least one Democrat running in every county, it would help the party build a larger base for future elections. Mr. Dean was met with skepticism from national strategists who believed in a more conventional method of focusing limited campaign resources on swing districts. After his tenure, the strategy fell out of favor.What tends to derail any such 50-state, all-districts strategy are the limited resources that both parties have in any election, and the realpolitik considerations that inevitably lead them to pour disproportionate amounts of money into certain races seen as particularly important and winnable.“If you have candidates dedicated to ground game, then it could be helpful, but usually campaigns at the lower end of the spectrum don’t have that kind of money, and it’s certainly not done by parties as much anymore,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster. He said that one reason for this could be that controlling messaging down the ballot is hard to do when campaigns at the top of the ticket have different approaches to issues from those of local candidates.For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.Mr. Morales Rocketto expressed hope that the study would start a conversation among Democrats on how they invest in state and local races.During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic campaigns for the Senate, like Amy McGrath’s in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s in South Carolina, raised huge sums of money, in some cases topping $90 million for a single campaign. By comparison, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it raised $51 million for legislative races in 86 chambers across 44 states.“Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”And what those losses look like is already known, Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued.“When Republicans took control of 21 state legislative chambers in 2010, we lost control for a near decade to win the United States Congress,” she said. “We now have a challenge with keeping the United States Senate, and Republicans are eroding our voting rights in these state legislatures.”Since the presidential election, Republican-run legislatures across the country have been drafting bills to restrict voting access, prompting Democratic calls for additional local party infrastructure. The way to get that investment and attention from the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Morales Rocketto said, is to highlight how a bottom-up approach can help the party at the national level, too.Ms. Post echoed that sentiment. “So much of the building blocks of American democracy are truly built in the state,” she said.Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”Mr. Hobart said that both parties should want to have strong candidates running for office up and down the ballot, because parties never know what districts will become competitive. For Republicans in 2020, some of those surprise districts were along the southern border of Texas, which had previously been a relatively blue region.“It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”The new study will be just one consideration as the D.N.C. reviews its strategy for state legislative and other down-ballot races in the midterms. The committee is pledging to increase investment in such races, both to help win traditional battleground states and to grow more competitive in red-tinted states that are trending blue.Officials at the D.N.C., who declined to speak on the record about the study, pointed to Kansas, which has a Democratic governor but voted for former President Donald J. Trump by 15 percentage points, as an example of a state where they’d like to put the study’s findings into action.Democrats in the state are gearing up to try to re-elect Gov. Laura Kelly, and Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, said he hoped to test the theory. He said that having Democrats campaign in deep-red districts required a different type of field organizing.“There are some counties where if the state party can’t find a Democrat, we can’t have an organized county party, because the area is so red,” he said. “But if we can run even the lone Democrat we can find out there, and get a few of those votes to come out — you know the analogy: A rising tide lifts all Democratic ships.”Some Democratic strategists in Kansas noticed that phone-bank canvassers had more success with voters during the general election when they focused on congressional and local candidates, rather than headlining their calls with Mr. Biden. They’re hoping that building local connections in the state will help Ms. Kelly’s campaign.In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits. That was five percentage points better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016.Ms. Carter said she had tried to start grass-roots momentum in the district. “For me, running for office was never an ambition,” she said. “It was more so out of the necessity for where I live.”Ms. Carter’s district has grown exponentially during the last decade, bringing with it changing demographics and different approaches to politics. She knew through previous political organizing and her own campaigning that many people in her district, including friends and family, didn’t know when local elections were, why they were important or what liberal or conservative stances could look like at a local level.Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.“I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”Nick Corasaniti More