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    Biden Campaign Elevates a New Super PAC to Help 2024 Re-election Bid

    The president and his advisers are elevating a new super PAC, Future Forward, as their leading outside group to rake in cash from his wealthiest benefactors.President Biden and his advisers are elevating a new outside group as the leading super PAC to help re-elect him in 2024, making it the top destination for large sums of cash from supportive billionaires and multimillionaires.The blessing of the group, Future Forward, is a changing of the guard in the important world of big-money Democratic politics. Since the 2012 election, a different group, Priorities USA, has been the leading super PAC for Democratic presidential candidates.“In 2020, when they really appeared from nowhere and started placing advertising, the Biden campaign was impressed by the effectiveness of the ads and the overall rigorous testing that had clearly gone into the entire project,” Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser to Mr. Biden, said of Future Forward. The group, she added, had “really earned its place as the pre-eminent super PAC supporting the Biden-Harris agenda and 2024 efforts.”On Friday, Mr. Biden’s campaign also announced a combined fund-raising total of more than $72 million for the second quarter alongside the Democratic National Committee and their joint fund-raising committee, a figure far greater than what Donald J. Trump raised. Future Forward has raised $50 million so far this year, the group said.Federal candidates cannot legally coordinate campaign strategy with super PACs, but officials in both parties have signaled their preferred entities for a decade. Super PACs can accept donations of unlimited size, unlike federal candidates, who must abide by contribution limits.Future Forward, which is led by Chauncey McLean, a former official on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, has kept a remarkably low profile for a super PAC that, along with an affiliated nonprofit arm, has raised nearly $400 million in the last five years.The group maintains a sparse website. Mr. McLean said that Future Forward had never sent out a news release trumpeting its activity, which has included producing more than 400 advertisements.“We keep a low profile because we’re just not the story, we’re just not important,” Mr. McLean said in a rare interview. “I just don’t see any reason for popping our head up. That’s not going to change.”The super PAC spent more than $130 million on what are known as independent expenditure ads in the 2020 race between Mr. Biden and Donald J. Trump. It was also a major spender in the midterm elections in three crucial battlegrounds: Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Mr. McLean, who is based in Seattle, said that the group planned to run “the largest presidential I.E. in history” and that his fund-raising goal was to collect “as much as humanly possible.”Ms. Dunn served as a consultant for Future Forward after Mr. Biden was inaugurated, according to her personal financial disclosure form. But she said she saw a key role in 2024 for other super PACs, including American Bridge, the party’s clearinghouse for opposition research, which also runs television ads.Ms. Dunn and other White House officials have attended American Bridge donor conferences this year. The shift away from Priorities USA has been telegraphed to donors for months, since before the group’s longtime leader, Guy Cecil, announced in March that he was stepping away. Priorities this spring announced a goal to spent $74 million on digital advertising in 2024.In a statement, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign manager, said Future Forward had been “critical” in 2020 and would “again play a key role” in 2024.Unlike super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates that have built on-the-ground organizations in early presidential nominating states, Future Forward will have a narrow focus on “research and advertising,” Mr. McLean said.Mr. Biden is dispatching Katie Petrelius, the finance director on his 2020 campaign and recently a White House aide, to Future Forward to help the group raise money.There are no immediate plans for Mr. Biden to headline any fund-raising events for the super PAC, but Ms. Dunn said such gatherings could occur in the future.Mr. Biden, like many Democrats in the party’s crowded 2020 presidential primary, initially resisted soliciting the support of a super PAC but backtracked in the fall of 2019, when his campaign was short on cash and needed more presence on the airwaves. (“To speak to the middle class, we need to reject the super PAC system,” Mr. Biden had said that April.)Both super PACs and nonprofit groups can accept unlimited donations, but only super PACs must disclose the names of their contributors. Future Forward’s largest disclosed contributor has been Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder, who has given more than $50 million to the group since 2020.The group has also received millions of dollars from Stephen F. Mandel Jr., a Connecticut hedge fund manager; Karla Jurvetson, a California philanthropist; Eric Schmidt, the former Google executive; and Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder, who gave $5 million in October 2020.Mr. McLean said Future Forward would be “giving back any money associated with” Mr. Bankman-Fried. The group said it had also received $1.65 million from Mr. Bankman-Fried in its nonprofit arm. More

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    Biden and D.N.C. Announce $72 Million in Fund-Raising, a Substantial Haul

    The figure far surpasses what Donald Trump raised, though it is well short of what Mr. Trump and his allies collected during the same period in the 2020 election cycle.President Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a combined fund-raising haul of more than $72 million from April through June alongside the Democratic National Committee and a joint fund-raising committee, a figure that far surpasses what former President Donald J. Trump and other leading Republican presidential candidates have announced.The campaign said that along with the D.N.C. and the committee, it had a combined $77 million in cash on hand at the end of the reporting period. It did not disclose how that money was divided between the campaign and the committees.“While Republicans are burning through resources in a divisive primary focused on who can take the most extreme MAGA positions, we are significantly outraising every single one of them,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager.While the fund-raising total is well short of the $105 million Mr. Trump and his allies collected during the same period in his 2020 re-election campaign, it is likely to serve as a salve for Democrats who have been privately gloomy about Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings. The finance numbers prove that whatever private misgivings Democrats have about Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, the party’s donor class is fully on board.“This is proof positive that this party and its people and the country believe in Joe Biden and the accomplishments of this administration,” said Henry R. Muñoz III, a former Democratic National Committee finance chairman. “This reaffirms Joe Biden’s appeal to the working people and everyday heroes of this country.”At the dawn of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, he and the D.N.C. raised a combined $86 million between April and June 2011.Comparisons to Mr. Obama’s fund-raising efforts for the 2012 campaign are imprecise, however, because a 2014 Supreme Court decision and other legal changes allowed candidates and parties to form joint fund-raising committees that can accept single donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars.And in Mr. Trump’s re-election bid, he had a significant head start over Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump formally announced and began fund-raising for the 2020 race on the day he was inaugurated in 2017, while Mr. Biden, who at the end of March had $1.36 million left over in his campaign account, did not actively solicit money for his campaign until he made his run official in April.Mr. Biden began his 2024 campaign on April 25 — nearly a month after the fund-raising quarter began. His first major fund-raising event was in mid-May in New York, and he did not do any significant fund-raising himself during the heat of negotiations over extending the federal debt ceiling in late May.In June, Mr. Biden traveled to San Francisco and Chicago to meet with major donors before the close of the fund-raising period.Though the Biden campaign did not reveal many relevant details about its finances on Friday, it highlighted more than 394,000 donors and pointed to the success of online advertising programs during notable moments in the Republican primary campaign, like Mr. Trump’s televised town-hall event in May and the campaign announcement of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Half of the merchandise sold at the Biden campaign’s online store, the campaign said, features the “Dark Brandon” theme.Mr. Biden was never a prolific fund-raiser before he became the party’s de facto presidential nominee in the spring of 2020. Three other Democratic candidates raised more money than he did during the third quarter of 2019, well before his resurgence as the primary season unfolded.But once Democrats unified around Mr. Biden and against Mr. Trump while the pandemic gripped the country, Mr. Biden emerged as a magnet for donors large and small.“Just like 2020 was a record year, I imagine 2024 is going to be a record year,” said Alex Lasry, a former Senate candidate and D.N.C. member from Wisconsin who is the co-treasurer for the Democratic Governors Association.The Republicans vying to replace Mr. Biden will not have the benefit of raising money through their national committee until one emerges as the party’s nominee. Mr. Biden and supportive Democrats also have the advantage of not having to spend much money to get through what for the Republicans is expected to be a rough-and-tumble primary campaign.Mr. Trump said his campaign and his joint fund-raising committee had raised $35 million in the second quarter. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced he had raised about $20 million. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, raised $4.3 million for her campaign and an additional $3 million for her affiliated committees. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said his campaign had raised $6.1 million.Other Republican presidential candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman, have not released their fund-raising totals for the second quarter.Full reports on all federal candidates’ campaign finances, which will include spending and an indication of how much of their money has come from small donors, are due on Saturday to the Federal Election Commission.Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

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    Republican Midterm Turnout Is a Warning for Democrats in 2024, Report Finds

    Even though Democrats held the Senate and other key offices, Republican turnout was more robust, and the party showed strength among women, Latinos and rural voters, a new report found.Even though Democrats held off a widely expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, Republican turnout was in fact stronger, and the party energized key demographic groups including women, Latinos and rural voters, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.And for all the Democratic emphasis on finding Republican voters who could be persuaded to buck their party in the Trump era, Pew found that a vast majority of voters stuck with the same party through the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections. Just 6 percent of voters cast ballots for more than one party over those three elections — and those voters were more likely to be Democrats flipping to Republican candidates than Republicans to Democratic candidates.“An eternal debate among political analysts after each election is what was a bigger factor in the outcome — persuading voters to switch their allegiance, or getting more of their core party loyalists to vote,” said Hannah Hartig, one of the authors of the Pew report.Voters who cast a ballot in 2018 but skipped the 2022 midterms had favored Democrats by two to one in the 2018 election.Democrats tried last year to energize these voters, seeking to inflate Mr. Trump’s profile and tie other Republicans to him. Mr. Biden coined the phrase “ultra-MAGA” to describe Republicans in an effort to engage Democratic voters.In the end, what most likely drove Democrats to the polls was less about Mr. Biden’s actions than a broader reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Dan Sena, a former executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the Pew results suggested that the key to 2024 would be persuading independent and moderate Republican voters who dislike both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to support Democrats. Abortion rights, he said, is the issue most likely to do so.“There is a group of persuadable Republicans that the Democrats were able to win over,” Mr. Sena said. “Those voters align very closely with those who see choice and personal freedom on health care in alignment.”Pew’s analysis is based on a panel of over 7,000 Americans whose attitudes and voting behavior the group has tracked through multiple election cycles. Pew also compared voters to state voting rolls to verify that they actually cast ballots in 2022. Taken together, this provides a portrait of the 2022 electorate.In most midterm years, the party that is not in the White House fares well. And while Republicans enjoyed a turnout advantage in 2022, they nevertheless fell short of expectations and did not match Democrats’ turnout advantage in 2018, the first midterm election after Mr. Trump took office.Still, midterm voters historically skew older and whiter than voters in presidential years, a phenomenon that tends to benefit Republicans. The 2018 midterms were, in many ways, the exception to that rule, with increased turnout across age groups, but especially among young people. The 2022 electorate was more in line with historical trends.Much of the narrative around the 2022 election has centered on Democratic energy after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. And while that played out in key governor’s races in states where abortion was on the ballot, nationally, Democrats appear to have lost ground with a crucial group: women.In the 2018 election cycle, when increased activism — including the Women’s March — fueled record turnout among women, Democrats had an advantage of 18 percentage points. That edge shrunk to just three points in 2022, Pew found.However, the study found that few women actually switched the party they were supporting. Instead, most of the drop for Democrats stemmed from the fact that Republican women voted at a higher rate than Democratic women.Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats overall, but by a much smaller margin than four years earlier. In 2018, Democrats won 72 percent of Hispanic voters, but in 2022 they won only 60 percent. The decline began in 2020, when Democrats also won about 60 percent of Hispanic voters.And Republicans also continued to increase their support from rural voters. The party made gains with them not only through increased turnout, but also among rural voters who had voted for Democrats in the past but cast ballots for Republicans in 2022.“The Trump base continues to be motivated,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who ran the party’s House super PAC in 2018.Yet, Mr. Bliss added, “In a handful of races that really matter, we had bad candidates, and in all the races that matter, we were dramatically outspent.” More

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    This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off

    In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

    Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week, I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that … wow.Bret Stephens: “Wow” just about covers it.Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was very clearly supposed to make viewers … hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that “literally threaten trans existence.” Followed by a super-duper weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Trojan-warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightning flashes coming out of his eyes.Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden’s secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.”Any thoughts?Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool. Not what I would have expected out of the Florida governor six months ago, but here’s where I confess: You were right about him, and I was wrong.Gail: My other takeaway is that Republicans are focusing more on L.G.B.T.Q. issues now that they’ve come to understand that attacking abortion isn’t a national winner — or even a state winner in most places.In the long run, stomping on gay rights isn’t going to do it either, because such a huge number of people — even conservative Republicans — have friends, family, colleagues who are gay. May take a while to come to grips with that, but once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive.Just recalling how my conservative Catholic mother wound up, in old age, riding on a float in Cincinnati’s Gay Pride parade.Bret: As you mentioned last year in that wonderful column you wrote about Allen Ginsberg.Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. But a lot of people — including many Democrats and independents — have honest and serious concerns about some aspects of the trans issue, especially as it concerns the integrity of women’s sports, the morality of drastic medical interventions in teenagers and the anti-scientific denial of basic biology when it comes to questions of sex. I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian.DeSantis could have addressed these issues in a sober and nuanced way. Instead, he went full Trojan, and I suspect his campaign will meet a similar fate to Troy’s.Gail: Full Trojan? Just like Brad Pitt in that ad!Bret: Switching topics, Gail, can we talk about homelessness? The problem just keeps getting worse, particularly out west, and it’s doing real damage to urban life. Your thoughts on what does and does not work?Gail: What works is pretty simple: more housing and outreach for the mentally ill. Both are difficult, of course, ranging from pretty darned to stupendously.Bret: What also works are ordinances forbidding “camping” on public lands so that homeless people are required to use shelter beds, which some liberal judges have blocked cities from doing. One of the problems of our public discussion of the issue is that we treat homelessness as a problem of the homeless only. It’s also a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. People ought to have a right to walk down urban sidewalks that haven’t been turned into tent cities and open-air toilets.Gail: New York is still dealing with a flood of new migrants, mainly from Latin America, who have been coming in huge numbers for more than a year. Most of them are ambitious and hopeful, and they could be a great shot to our local economy — if they had permanent places to stay.Bret: Completely agree. I also think the migrant problem is qualitatively different from the kind of homelessness issues that cities like San Francisco or Portland, Ore., are experiencing. Migrants are struggling with poverty but not, generally, mental health or drug-dependency issues. What migrants typically need is a room and a job.Gail: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has talked about finding some of them homes in the suburbs, where there’s obviously more room and housing prices are sometimes a lot lower. Said suburbs rose up in rage to stop an incursion of needy people. It’s so irritating, although I have to admit that my liberal Manhattan neighborhood — which has plenty of programs for the homeless — consistently rebels against talk of any big new housing projects for any income group.Your turn.Bret: I’m skeptical of the theory that we could solve the crisis just by building a lot more housing. First, because we can’t build quickly and cheaply enough to keep up with the growing number of homeless people. Second, because even when the homeless are housed, they often fall back into the kinds of behaviors that ultimately lead them to return to the streets.My own view is that people living on the street should be required to go into shelters, which can be built much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, be required to get mental health screenings and be required to be treated if they have drug or alcohol dependencies.Gail: Well, if the mental health treatments were great, that might be an argument. But they often aren’t — just because there’s a terrific shortage of personnel.And the shelters are no picnic either. A lot of the people you see on the street have been, at one time or another, threatened by a mentally troubled co-resident, gotten into a fight as a result of shared emotional problems or in some other way come to feel that living on the street is safer.Bret: The other big story from last week, Gail, is the ruling by a federal judge that forbade the Biden administration to work with social media companies to remove content it didn’t like, mainly connected to alleged Covid misinformation. What the administration was doing seems to me like a serious infringement on people’s freedom of speech, but I’d like to know your view.Gail: Gee, I was under the impression one of the jobs of the executive branch was to make sure people were getting the right information about health issues. And it’s not as if the Biden folks marched in and removed a bunch of posts themselves. Conferring with the social media companies seems like something they ought to do.Bret: One good way of thinking about the issue is putting the shoe on the other foot. For instance, we now know that the Steele dossier was malicious partisan misinformation, secretly and illicitly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that some of its most salacious allegations, like the pee-tape stuff, were false. How would you react if you had learned that the Trump administration had been putting heavy pressure on executives at MSNBC to forbid Rachel Maddow from ever mentioning it back when she had her show?Gail: Hey, it’s hot and humid outside. No fair trying to take me down the Hillary Clinton road. Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.Bret: I’m pretty sure we could get the word out that milk is generally fine for babies or vaccines are generally safe without setting a precedent that the federal government can work with Big Tech to censor individual speech.Gail: Of course I agree with you about freedom of expression. But in the process of protecting it, it’s natural to argue about specific cases with particular details. We will pursue this again soon. Well, forever probably.But let me be boring for a second and ask you about Congress. Just got through that deficit crisis, and another one will be coming around the bend this summer. What’s your long-term advice? Spend less? Tax more? Ignore the whole thing and figure it’ll work out somehow like it always does?Bret: My advice: Talk less, smile more. Seriously, what we need from Congress and the president is to get through the next 18 months without another manufactured domestic crisis. Between the war in Ukraine, Iran’s creeping nuclearization and China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, we have more than enough to worry about abroad.Gail: Hmm. One writer’s manufactured domestic crisis is maybe another’s reasonable disagreement. And while Congress isn’t always fascinating, it’s at the top of the critical-if-possibly-boring ladder.Bret: Before we go, Gail, I have to put in a word for Penelope Green’s funny, fabulous obituary in The Times of Sue Johanson, a Canadian sex educator who died last month at 92. It has the single most memorable paragraph to appear in the paper for at least a month, if not a year. I have to quote it in full:Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.I mean, after that, what else is there to say?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Hill Harper, ‘Good Doctor’ Actor, Enters Senate Race in Michigan

    Mr. Harper is challenging Representative Elissa Slotkin from the left and will have an uphill climb in a heated Democratic primary race in a 2024 presidential swing state.Hill Harper, an author and actor, on Monday entered Michigan’s 2024 Senate race, pledging to run to the left of Representative Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat, in what is expected to be one of the most closely watched Democratic primary races in a 2024 presidential battleground state.Mr. Harper, a first-time candidate known for his roles on “CSI: NY” and “The Good Doctor,” began his campaign with a message focused on expanding Social Security and access to affordable health care, as well as tackling income inequality and student debt. In an interview, he said he planned to position himself as “the most progressive candidate” in the race and would work to bring jaded and unheard voters back into the Democratic fold.“It became clear to me that folks across Michigan don’t feel like they are being represented in Washington, D.C.,” he said, describing his conversations with people at farmers’ markets and union halls as he weighed his decision to run. The state’s Democratic leadership, which holds the governor’s office and both chambers of the Michigan Statehouse, he added, has “done a lot to move the state forward, but Washington is still broken.”The Democratic primary is likely to be followed by a heated general election against a tense backdrop. Donald J. Trump won this industrial Midwestern state by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016, and lost it to Joseph R. Biden Jr. by more than 150,000 votes in his 2020 re-election bid. Mr. Trump focused on the voting in Michigan in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.As they head into the 2024 presidential cycle, Democrats will be concentrating on holding on to their midterm victories in Michigan in 2022, when protecting abortion rights galvanized the party nationwide.Mr. Harper’s supporters believe that, as a Black progressive, he will be able to draw a coalition of liberal and Black voters. His campaign could particularly resonate with Black voters in a state where the debate over race and representation has raged in some corners: The 2022 midterm election left Detroit, the nation’s largest majority Black city, without Black representation in Congress for the first time in decades.But Mr. Harper will face an uphill climb against Ms. Slotkin, a former C.I.A. analyst and three-term congresswoman who has built a track record as a seasoned campaigner and prolific fund-raiser. She has won three tough races for her House seat in a central Michigan district, which encompasses Lansing. Ms. Slotkin had more than $2.3 million cash in hand at the end of March, and is running on a platform focused on jobs and economic issues.She was the first in her party to declare her candidacy for the seat being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat, and has the solid backing of establishment Democrats at the state and national level.That hasn’t dissuaded Mr. Harper and a handful of Democrats from jumping in, including Leslie Love, a former state lawmaker, and Pamela Pugh, who serves as president of the Michigan State Board of Education.For the Republicans, Nikki Snyder, a member of the State Board of Education, and Ezra Scott, a former Berrien County commissioner, are vying for the seat. More

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    Biden esquiva el rótulo de progresista a ultranza

    A pesar de su alianza con los partidarios del derecho al aborto y los defensores LGBTQ, el presidente ha evitado hábilmente verse envuelto en batallas sobre temas sociales muy controvertidos.Hace más de una década, el presidente Joe Biden se adelantó de manera memorable a Barack Obama en cuanto al apoyo al matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo, pero en un evento para recaudar fondos en junio, cerca de San Francisco, no pudo recordar las letras LGBTQ.Aunque el Partido Demócrata ha hecho que la lucha por el derecho al aborto sea central en su mensaje político, Biden se declaró como “no muy partidario del aborto” la semana pasada.En un momento en el que los partidos políticos estadounidenses intercambian disparos feroces desde las trincheras de una guerra por las políticas sociales y culturales, el mandatario se mantiene al margen.Biden, un hombre blanco de 80 años que no está muy actualizado con el lenguaje de la izquierda, ha evitado en gran medida involucrarse en las batallas contemporáneas sobre el género, el aborto y otros temas sociales muy controvertidos, incluso cuando hace cosas como albergar lo que llamó “la celebración más grande del Mes del Orgullo jamás organizada en la Casa Blanca”.Los republicanos han tratado de empujarlo hacia esa batalla, pero parecen reconocer la dificultad: cuando los candidatos presidenciales del Partido Republicano prometen ponerle fin a lo que califican burlonamente como la cultura “woke”, a menudo apuntan sus dardos no directamente a Biden sino a las grandes corporaciones como Disney y BlackRock o al enorme “Estado administrativo” del gobierno federal. Los estrategas republicanos afirman que la mayor parte del mensaje de su partido sobre el aborto y las personas transgénero está dirigido a los votantes de las primarias, mientras que en las elecciones presidenciales se considera que Biden es mucho más vulnerable en temas relacionados con la economía, el crimen y la inmigración.La protección de Biden contra los ataques culturales podría parecer improbable para un presidente que ha defendido firmemente los derechos de la comunidad LGBTQ, y que es el líder de un partido que saca ventaja de la ola de políticas sobre el aborto y un hombre que le debe su presidencia al apoyo inquebrantable de los votantes negros de las primarias demócratas.A pesar de que a lo largo de los años ha adoptado posiciones que impulsaron a los demócratas —y luego al país— a adoptar actitudes más liberales en temas sociales, Biden se ha mantenido algo distante de los elementos de su partido que podrían plantearle problemas políticos. En junio, la Casa Blanca declaró que le había prohibido la entrada a una activista transgénero que había mostrado su pecho desnudo en su evento del Mes del Orgullo.Y aunque la edad de Biden se ha convertido en una de sus principales debilidades políticas, tanto sus aliados como sus adversarios dicen que también lo protege de los ataques culturales de los republicanos.Biden celebró el Mes del Orgullo en el jardín sur de la Casa Blanca el mes pasado.Pete Marovich para The New York Times“Todo el mundo quiere hablar de la edad que tiene Joe Biden, pero la verdad es que es su edad y su experiencia lo que le permite ser quien es y le permite decir las cosas y ayudar a las personas de una manera que nadie más puede”, afirmó Henry R. Muñoz III, exdirector de finanzas del Comité Nacional Demócrata. En 2017, en la boda de Muñoz, que es gay, Biden fue el oficiante de la ceremonia.Gran parte de la lealtad hacia Biden por parte de los demócratas de la comunidad LGBTQ proviene de su respaldo en 2012 a los matrimonios entre personas del mismo sexo, cuando Obama todavía se oponía oficialmente a eso. La posición de Biden se consideró políticamente arriesgada en ese momento, antes de que la Corte Suprema reconociera en 2015 el derecho de las parejas del mismo sexo a casarse, pero se ha convertido en algo de lo que se jactó durante su campaña de 2020.Biden también ha estado a la vanguardia en el reconocimiento de los derechos de las personas transgénero. En su primera semana en el cargo puso fin a la medida de la era de Donald Trump de prohibir la presencia de soldados transgénero en el Ejército. En diciembre, promulgó protecciones federales para los matrimonios entre personas del mismo sexo.Al mismo tiempo, Biden no ha adoptado la terminología de los activistas progresistas ni se ha dejado involucrar en debates públicos que podrían dejarlo fuera de la corriente política tradicional. El jueves, después del importante fallo de la Corte Suprema que puso fin a la acción afirmativa en las admisiones universitarias, una periodista le preguntó: “¿Esta es una corte rebelde?”Tras una breve pausa para pensar, Biden respondió: “Esta no es una corte normal”.Biden tampoco recuerda las palabras que la mayoría de los políticos estadounidenses utilizan para describir a la comunidad LGBTQ. En el evento de recaudación de fondos cerca de San Francisco el mes pasado, Biden lamentó la decisión de la Corte Suprema que el año pasado puso fin al derecho nacional al aborto y sugirió que ahora el objetivo de la corte serían los derechos de la comunidad gay.Manifestantes pro-LGBTQ protestaban ante una reunión del grupo conservador Moms for Liberty el viernes en Filadelfia.Haiyun Jiang para The New York TimesParafraseando a dos de los jueces conservadores, Biden afirmó: “No hay ningún derecho constitucional en las leyes para H, B… disculpen, para los gays, lesbianas, ya saben, para todo, todo el grupo. No hay protección constitucional”.Durante una parada en la Feria Estatal de Iowa durante su campaña de 2020, un agitador conservador que seguía a los candidatos presidenciales demócratas le preguntó a Biden: “¿Cuántos géneros existen?”.Biden respondió: “Hay al menos tres. No intentes jugar conmigo, chico”.Luego, tal vez sin darse cuenta de que su inquisidor era un activista de derecha, Biden agregó: “Por cierto, el primero en declararse a favor del matrimonio fui yo”.Sarah McBride, una senadora del estado de Delaware que recientemente comenzó una campaña para convertirse en el primer miembro transgénero del Congreso, afirmó que el lenguaje de Biden le había permitido solidificar a los demócratas en una agenda social progresista y “llegar a comunidades y grupos demográficos que aún no están completamente en la coalición”.“No se deja atrapar por una retórica que no sea comprensible para un votante intermedio”, afirmó McBride.McBride también señaló que la edad de Biden es útil para defender los argumentos de los demócratas sobre temas sociales sin alienar a los votantes escépticos.“Su experiencia le permite decir cosas que creo que se escucharían como más radicales si las dijera un político más joven”, afirmó McBride.Como la mayoría de los estadounidenses han aceptado el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo, los conservadores sociales han hecho de la oposición a los derechos de las personas transgénero un pilar de su política. Además, los republicanos que se postulan para remplazar a Biden tienden a centrarse en animar a los votantes de las primarias republicanas en vez de intentar convertir al presidente en un villano.“Es difícil retratar a un hombre blanco de 80 años como un férreo guerrero concienciado”, dijo Whit Ayres, encuestador de los candidatos republicanos desde hace mucho tiempo.El gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, es quizás el principal proveedor del mensaje antiprogresista de los republicanos, lanzando improperios tanto en internet como en discursos. El último viernes de julio, su campaña incluso tachó a Trump de ser demasiado liberal en temas LGBTQ en un video controversial publicado en Twitter.En un mitin celebrado en junio en Tulsa, Oklahoma, DeSantis describió cómo se le acercaban veteranos militares que no querían que sus hijos y nietos se alistaran en las fuerzas armadas debido a los cambios políticos liberales instituidos por los demócratas, aunque el gobernador culpó a Obama tanto como a Biden.“Un ejército progre no será un ejército fuerte”, dijo DeSantis. “Hay que eliminar la politización. Y, en el primer día, arrancaremos todas las políticas de Obama-Biden para volver progre a las fuerzas armadas”.Biden nunca se ha presentado como un guerrero cultural de izquierda. Católico, hace mucho tiempo ha sido cauteloso con lanzarse de cabeza a las disputas por el derecho al aborto. Incluso cuando su campaña y su partido se preparan para hacer de su apuesta a la reelección un referendo sobre los esfuerzos republicanos para restringir aún más el aborto, Biden proclamó ante una multitud de donantes en los suburbios de Washington que él mismo no estaba muy ansioso por hacerlo.“¿Saben?, soy católico practicante”, dijo Biden la semana pasada. “No soy muy partidario del aborto. Pero ¿saben qué? Roe contra Wade estaba en lo correcto”.Durante mucho tiempo esa postura ha causado cierta consternación entre los demócratas. Hubo que esperar hasta junio de 2019, semanas después de comenzar su campaña de 2020 y bajo la inmensa presión de los aliados de su partido, para que Biden renunciara a su apoyo de larga data a la prohibición de la financiación federal de los abortos.Renee Bracey Sherman, fundadora de We Testify, un grupo que comparte historias de mujeres que han abortado, dijo que Biden tendría que adoptar una posición más enérgica a favor del derecho al aborto para animar a los votantes liberales en 2024. Sugirió que, de la misma manera que Biden recibe a equipos deportivos de campeonato en la Casa Blanca, debería invitar a mujeres que han abortado para vayan y cuenten sus historias.“Las elecciones de mitad de mandato muestran que los estadounidenses están con el aborto”, dijo Bracey Sherman. “El aborto tiene un índice de aprobación más alto que él. Debería subirse a la ola del aborto”.Kristi Eaton More

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    For Yusef Salaam, a Landslide Just Might Be the Best Revenge

    After his wrongful conviction as one of the Central Park Five was overturned, Mr. Salaam found it hard to rebuild his life. Now he stands to take office next year.This week, 34 years after he and four other teenage boys who barely knew one another were bound together by notorious failures of justice, Yusef Salaam was officially declared the winner in the Democratic primary for a seat in New York’s City Council, having received almost 64 percent of the vote. Given that more than three-quarters of voters in the district identify as Democrats, we can assume that beginning in January, he will represent Harlem, where he grew up, was arrested and returned after serving nearly seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit.The crime — the rape and near-fatal beating of a 28-year-old investment banker who was jogging in Central Park one night in April 1989 — came to define a late-20th century city plagued by entwined crises of violence, ferocious racial polarization and worsening inequity. The boys, known as the Central Park Five, were convicted on the grounds of coerced false confessions. In Mr. Salaam’s case, there wasn’t even recorded evidence of an admission of guilt. No DNA evidence linked any of the accused assailants to the victim; they were exonerated in 2002 only after the actual offender, an imprisoned serial rapist, came forward and provided forensic evidence that proved his culpability.Mr. Salaam’s electoral victory is as much a poetic correction as it is a political success. It signals not only a triumph over an entrenched political establishment — his rivals were longtime elected officials in their 60s and 70s — but also over an idealistic brand of progressivism embodied by the incumbent councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, whose popularity fell off quickly. A young Democratic Socialist elected two years ago on a platform of “radical love” and police abolitionism, Ms. Jordan dropped out of the race in May when her defeat seemed certain.From the vantage of middle age — Mr. Salaam is now 49 — he can reflect and say that Harlem has been poorly governed for a long time. “When I look at 125th Street, I see rats, drugs, empty lots, the need for wraparound services,” he said during a conversation a few days before the race was called. “We’ve had legends here, but we have not had the full investment our tax dollars require.”Six years ago, Mr. Salaam moved to Georgia; Harlem had become so expensive. He returned at the end of last year. He sees the lack of affordable housing as the area’s chief concern, and he is committed to working with developers to create more. The problem, as he sees it, is that too often when “developers are coming into a community to develop, we are usually called to the meeting after they have decided to do whatever they are going to do.”Ms. Jordan did not show the same kind of flexibility. One reason she fell into disfavor with Harlemites was that she effectively killed a project on 145th Street that would have delivered hundreds of apartments at below-market rates; she insisted there were not enough for those in the lowest income brackets. Ultimately, the developer used the land for a truck depot.Mr. Salaam’s ascent suggests the political appeal of lived experience over the attraction of outlier ideologies that have been cultivated at a privileged distance. Ms. Jordan is also from Harlem, but she is the daughter of doctors, a graduate of the Calhoun School (a private school on the Upper West Side) and Brown, a poet and an independent publisher focused on the work of literary activists. After the murder of George Floyd, much of the rhetoric around defunding police seemed intentionally hyperbolic, a means to an end of reducing, not eliminating the presence of police. Ms. Jordan, though, held a literal, more absolutist view.“I actually believe in moving toward a world without cops,” she told The Nation in a 2021 interview. Not long after she was elected to the council, two police officers were killed in her district during a domestic violence call, and she found herself widely criticized for expressing sympathy not just for the slain men but also for the person accused of killing them. Despite what he suffered at the hands of a warped system, Mr. Salaam maintains a position on policing that is comparatively moderate, calling for better and more sensitive policing, not a world without it.One of his political supporters is a former corrections officer who first encountered Mr. Salaam in a Lower Manhattan courthouse in the early stages of his long ordeal. The officer, Derrick Taitt, believed in the innocence of the five teenagers from the outset. He recalled seeing them in court for the first time. “It’s just an experience I’ll never forget — going home that day,” he said. “I walked from Centre Street to 14th. I couldn’t get on the train because my head hurt so badly.” As the president of the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Mr. Taitt, who is now 68, has witnessed an unsettling resurgence of crack in the area recently, and he maintains that Mr. Salaam could not have built a viable campaign on anti-law-enforcement sentiment.When I spoke with Mr. Salaam, he ended our conversation for afternoon prayer. He has been a practicing Muslim for most of his life, and the notion of a career in political leadership was born, against all odds, not long after he was arrested. He could not help but see uncanny similarities between his own story and that of his namesake, the prophet Yusef, in the Quran who was thrown into a well, sold into slavery, wrongly accused of rape and imprisoned. Ultimately he rose to a position of authority in his kingdom.“I was just blown away,” Mr. Salaam told me. “For me reading that as a young person, it was a seed that was planted.”After his conviction was overturned, he re-entered the world at 23, to endure the predictable indignities common to those who have been incarcerated. One of his first jobs after prison was working construction at a Mitchell-Lama apartment complex on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. When the company he was working for found out who he was, he said, he was fired. The experience provided a terrible insight. “Prison is about continuous punishment,” he said. “But if you survive prison, every single door for success will be shut in your face.”Many people in the community supported him when he was released, Mr. Salaam’s mother, Sharonne, told me. But many others did not. “You still have that boiling sensation as you try to move on with your life,” said Ms. Salaam, who was teaching at the Parsons School of Design when her son was arrested. Exoneration did not bring peace for everyone. “It was easier for Yusef to move on and see a path forward.”After the construction job, Mr. Salaam worked in tech at Weill Cornell, became a motivational speaker, wrote books, received a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama and helped to raise 10 children — seven of his own and three stepchildren.He would like to bring more public bathrooms to Harlem. He worries about the effects of global warming on people who make their living as outdoor vendors. He wants people to look inward and to look outward, to try to stay positive. Yet to this day he has not had an apology from any of the prosecutors in his case. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Upper Manhattan voters have embraced him overwhelmingly. A landslide can be the best revenge. More