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      Bowman and Latimer Use Final Debate to Air Differences on Israel and Race

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      Fighting for his political life ahead of next week’s New York primary, Representative Jamaal Bowman took broad swipes on Tuesday at his opponent in the contest’s final debate, accusing him of failing Black constituents and selling his campaign out to a pro-Israel super PAC.Mr. Bowman, who is Black, charged that George Latimer, his white challenger, had slow-walked desegregation as Westchester County executive and had done too little to close the wealth gap between Black and white families.He repeatedly sought to portray Mr. Latimer as a lackey of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the bipartisan pro-Israel lobby that has spent a record-shattering $14 million trying to defeat Mr. Bowman over his criticisms of Israel.“He claims to be a Democrat, but he is supported by racist MAGA Republicans who support taking your voting rights — gutting your abortion rights,” Mr. Bowman, 48, said, referring to some of the group’s conservative donors.Mr. Latimer, 70, was having none of it. He forcefully denied each claim, saying that Mr. Bowman was “cornering the market on lies” in a desperate attempt to reverse a race that polls indicate he is losing. He trumpeted his own record producing affordable housing and investing in communities of color.“This is an example of using race as a weapon,” Mr. Latimer said at one point. “What we need to do is bring people together.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Suhas Subramanyam Wins Democratic House Primary in Virginia

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      Suhas Subramanyam, a state senator in suburban Loudoun County, Va., narrowly won the Democratic primary in a House district in Northern Virginia on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, after perhaps the ugliest primary of the 2024 election season so far.Mr. Subramanyam’s victory over 11 other Democratic candidates in the contest to succeed a retiring Democratic representative, Jennifer Wexton, is likely to be a relief for national Democrats who had watched anxiously as another front-runner in the race, State Representative Dan Helmer, faced calls to drop out over an accusation of sexual harassment.The district had been trending away from Republicans since 2018, when Ms. Wexton flipped it to her party after nearly 40 years of Republican control. Neither party had considered Virginia’s 10th District to be part of the 2024 battlefield until an anonymous Democratic official in the district, speaking through her lawyer, accused Mr. Helmer of groping her and later making sexually crude remarks.Mr. Helmer refused to depart the race and denounced the “baseless charges” leveled “a week before an election by people who have endorsed my opponents.”Mr. Subramanyam tried to stay above the fray, banking on his name recognition, record as a state senator, and the endorsement of Ms. Wexton, who announced her retirement last year after being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder, progressive supranuclear palsy, for which there is no effective treatment.But in a primary marked by mudslinging and late attacks, he had to beat back a report that he had improperly put employees of his State Senate staff on his campaign payroll, an accusation he says is categorically false.A House Republican leadership aide had said officials at the National Republican Congressional Committee would assess the district if Mr. Helmer was the Democrats’ candidate. Mr. Subramanyam’s victory could keep the district off the battlefield this fall.He will face Republican Mike Clancy, a lawyer and business executive. More

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      Eugene Vindman, Key Trump Whistle-Blower, Wins House Primary in Virginia

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      Yevgeny Vindman, who along with his twin brother helped expose then-President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to strong-arm Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joseph R. Biden Jr., won his Democratic primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. He will run in the fall to represent the Virginia district of Representative Abigail Spanberger, who is retiring.Mr. Vindman, who goes by Eugene, had no governing experience, a point his Democratic competitors made in the primary for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. But his name recognition, along with that of his identical twin, Alexander Vindman, helped him raise over $5 million, more than the rest of the field combined.And his message that democracy is at stake in 2024 proved more persuasive than the push of Democratic competitors — such as two Prince William County supervisors, Andrea Bailey and Margaret Franklin — for governing experience.Two other races featuring “Save Democracy” candidates went the opposite way. Harry Dunn, who rose to prominence as a Capitol Police officer who waged pitched battles with Mr. Trump’s supporters during and after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, lost his Maryland House primary last month to Sarah Elfreth, a state senator who ran on her legislative record.Mike O’Brien, a former Marine Corps officer and fighter pilot who made the preservation of democracy central to his candidacy, lost a Pennsylvania Democratic primary in April to a newscaster, Janelle Stelson, who used issues like abortion access and the price of gasoline and groceries to win the right to challenge a fierce Trump Republican ally, Representative Scott Perry.In 2018, the Vindman brothers, both lieutenant colonels in the Army and aides on the White House National Security Council at the time, raised internal alarms about a phone call in which Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce an investigation into the business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter in his country.At the time, Mr. Biden was widely expected to be Mr. Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. The call was central to the first of Mr. Trump’s two impeachments, and it vaulted both Vindmans to prominence in liberal circles, though Alexander Vindman was the only brother who testified as part of the impeachment proceedings. Eugene Vindman, who was dismissed from the White House early in 2020, he says as improper retaliation for his whistle-blowing actions, raised a remarkable sum of money for a first-time candidate.“I sacrificed my military career to expose Trump’s corruption,” Eugene Vindman said in one of his campaign ads.His election to the House is not guaranteed. Ms. Spanberger, a Democrat who is retiring to run for governor, won the newly drawn district, which runs from Washington’s far-southern suburbs into the countryside north of Richmond, by 4.6 percentage points in 2022. But Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won the district the year before by 4.9 points en route to winning the governor’s mansion. More

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      After Delay, Top Democrats in Congress Sign Off on Sale of F-15 Jets to Israel

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      Senior Democrats who had taken the unusual step of holding out relented to pressure from the Biden administration and allowed a multibillion-dollar sale of weapons to move ahead.A Biden administration plan to sell $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Israel is moving forward after two top Democratic holdouts in Congress signed off on the deal, according to multiple people familiar with the sale.Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, who had publicly opposed the transfer by citing Israel’s tactics during its campaign in Gaza, has lifted his hold on the deal, one of the largest U.S. arms sales to Israel in years. Mr. Meeks said that the sale would take years to deliver and that he supported the Biden administration’s plans to hold up the sale of other munitions.“I have been in close touch with the White House and National Security Council about this and other arms cases for Israel, and have repeatedly urged the administration to continue pushing Israel to make significant and concrete improvements on all fronts when it comes to humanitarian efforts and limiting civilian casualties,” Mr. Meeks said in a statement.Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who had delayed signing off but never publicly said he was blocking the deal, also agreed to allow it to go forward, joining top Republicans who had agreed to the plan months ago.Closing out the informal consultation process with Congress allows the State Department to move forward on officially notifying Congress of the sale, the final step before sealing the deal and one that has almost always been a foregone conclusion when it comes to Israel. That changed in recent months amid mounting concern in the United States about Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, and as Democrats in Congress have increasingly hinted that they might use their leverage over weapons transfers to demand that Israel change its tactics.The decision to relent to pressure from the Biden administration was a stark reversal for Mr. Meeks, who had been outspoken about his opposition to the deal, signaling his frustration with Israel’s actions in the war, which have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties and helped to create a hunger crisis in Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a ‘Committed Partisan Warrior’ Came to Rethink the Political Wars

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      Bob Bauer, the personal attorney for President Biden and former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is now wrestling with the win-at-all-costs nature of American politics.Once, after he executed a particularly tough-minded legal attack on Republicans, Bob Bauer remembers, a conservative magazine called him an “evil genius.” He took it as a compliment. “I was very proud of that,” he said. “I thought, That’s cool.”For decades, Democrats have turned to him as their lawyer to wage battles against the opposition. Reverse a House race they seemingly lost? Accuse the other side of criminal activity? Go to court to cut off Republican money flows? Find a legal justification for an ethically iffy strategy? Mr. Bauer was their man.But now Mr. Bauer, the personal attorney for President Biden and previously the White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is looking back and rethinking all that. Maybe, he says, that win-at-all-costs approach to politics is not really conducive to a healthy, functioning democracy. Maybe, in taking the “genius” part to heart, he should have been more concerned about the “evil” part.In a new book, “The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis,” to be published on Tuesday, Mr. Bauer takes stock of what he sees as the coarsening of American politics and examines the tension between ethical decisions and the “warrior mentality” that dominates the worlds of government and campaigns today. And in the process of thinking about what went wrong, Mr. Bauer, who calls himself a “committed partisan warrior,” has stopped to wrestle with his own role in the wars.“I tell stories that go from sort of youthful peccadilloes to more significant mistakes I think that I made as I thought about what it meant to win a policy or win an election, about how far you go to do that,” he said on a recent evening at the New-York Historical Society, where he discussed the book.“How do we make the politics better?” he asked. “How do we uphold our democratic norms by focusing on choices that people in positions of public responsibility have to make? And how do we make them in a way that is respectful of those norms and respectful of those institutions — as opposed to politics as blood sport, whatever it takes?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Health Secretary Goes West With a Focus on Reproductive Rights

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      Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, said on Friday that he would begin a national tour next week to promote the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve and expand access to abortion.The tour, which Mr. Becerra will begin on Tuesday in Washington, will take him to states across the West, including Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico. Mr. Becerra plans to attend round-table discussions with health care providers, family-planning groups and families who have been affected by restrictive state abortion laws.In an interview, Mr. Becerra said he would be traveling with good news after the Supreme Court this week unanimously rejected a bid to sharply curtail access to mifepristone, a widely available abortion pill. But, he added, his message would be no less urgent.“A lot of women are still confused — can they get an abortion?” he said, describing the tour as way to ensure that people have clear and accurate information. “How long are they able to do so? Who can provide it? We want women to know that women still have a lot of rights.”Mr. Becerra’s tour is not on behalf of President Biden’s re-election campaign. But he will be talking about reproductive rights in states with key races on the ballot in November.Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the issue has become central to elections, and Democrats are betting abortion rights will help them drive voters to the polls. In Southwestern swing states with large Latino populations, like Arizona and Nevada, they are looking to motivate Latina voters in particular.Former President Donald J. Trump has said abortion access should be left to the states, and several Republican candidates in swing-state races have aligned himself with him, avoiding mention of a national ban and laying bare the party’s rift over the issue.The White House has given Mr. Becerra the task of helping to protect access to reproductive care since Democrats and reproductive rights advocates first pressured Mr. Biden to act in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. In 2022, his agency pledged to work with the Justice Department to ensure access to abortion pills. He has been meeting with patients and providers across the country since then, including stops at Planned Parenthood clinics in St. Louis and Minneapolis.In the interview on Friday, Mr. Becerra said that many women across the country were still being turned away from emergency rooms, had been forced to go to court to plead for care or had needed to travel hundreds of miles for treatment. Antiabortion activists are still seeking to curb access to contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.“So many people are confused or afraid right now, and it is tough to make good decisions when you are confused or afraid,” he said. More

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      Western Governors Give Bipartisanship a Try. At Least for a Few Days.

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      The bipartisan boat ride on Lake Tahoe was scrapped because of scheduling issues. At least three of the participating Republicans were suing the administration of one of the Democrats.At the opening reception, Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, a conservative in cowboy boots, turned to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a liberal in sunglasses and a ball cap, and joked, “You and I shouldn’t be seen together.”Not everybody laughed.As the Western Governors’ Association marked its 40th anniversary this week in Olympic Valley, Calif., the organization did its best to maintain a tradition that has long been its hallmark: the increasingly lost art of governing across party lines.Under sunny skies and a snowcapped Sierra Nevada, experts from the private sector to members of the Biden administration presented on disaster management, opioids and carbon capture. Aides rushed between meeting rooms. Eight governors appeared on a panel examining the organization’s longstanding culture of consensus — but seven of them were no longer in office.“We used to have this bumper sticker — ‘Bipartisanship Happens,’” Steve Bullock, the former Democratic governor of Montana, said. “But bipartisanship doesn’t just happen. It takes work.”Mr. Newsom welcomed the 300 or so attendees to the meeting, but he did not stay for the full conference.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Senate Democrats Are Outperforming Biden in Key States

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      Democratic candidates have leads in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Arizona — but strategists aligned with both parties caution that the battle for Senate control is just starting.It was a Pride Weekend in Wisconsin, a natural time for the state’s pathbreaking, openly gay senator to rally her Democratic base, but on Sunday, Tammy Baldwin was far away from the parades and gatherings in Madison and Milwaukee — at a dairy farm in Republican Richland County.“I’ll show up in deep-red counties. and they’ll be like, ‘I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen a sitting U.S. senator here, especially not a Democrat,’” said Ms. Baldwin, an hour into her unassuming work of handing out plastic silverware at an annual dairy breakfast, and five months before Wisconsin voters will decide whether to give her a third term. “I think that begins to break through.”Wisconsin is one of seven states that will determine the presidency this November, but it will also help determine which party controls the Senate. President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are running neck-and-neck in the state, which Mr. Trump narrowly won in 2016 and Mr. Biden took back in 2020.Ms. Baldwin, by contrast, is running well ahead of the president and her presumed Republican opponent, the wealthy banker Eric Hovde. Polls released early last month by The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found Ms. Baldwin holding a lead of 49 percent to 40 percent over Mr. Hovde. In late May, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report put the spread even wider, 12 percentage points.That down-ballot Democratic strength is not isolated to Wisconsin. Senate Democratic candidates also hold leads in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. A Marist Poll released Tuesday said Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden in Ohio by seven percentage points, but Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leads his challenger, Bernie Moreno, by five percentage points, a 12-point swing.The Huff-Nel-Sons Farm in Richmond Center, Wis., hosted the annual dairy breakfast on Sunday.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More