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      In Nassau County D.A.'s Race, Kaminsky and Donnelly Clash on Bail Reform

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      A special election for Nassau County district attorney has centered on recent changes to New York’s bail laws.When the district attorney seat in Nassau County became vacant earlier this year, Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator and a former federal prosecutor, was widely seen as a shoo-in.But the special election next Tuesday has become increasingly competitive, largely because Mr. Kaminsky’s Republican opponent, Anne Donnelly, has effectively framed the contest as a suburban referendum on the state’s recent laws to loosen bail restrictions.Backed by an influx of money from the local Republican Party, Ms. Donnelly’s campaign has run a barrage of ads that incessantly attack Mr. Kaminsky for supporting the state’s bail reform laws. They falsely depict Mr. Kaminsky as the mastermind behind the 2019 legislation; highlight mug shots of violent criminals her campaign says were released as a result of the law; and urge voters to “keep Nassau safe” by voting against “‘Turn ‘Em Loose’ Todd.”The race has become a key test of just how far Democrats can pursue left-leaning criminal justice policies before those policies return to haunt moderate members, like Mr. Kaminsky, in competitive districts with ever-crucial swing voters — even in Nassau County, which has trended Democratic in recent elections.Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said Ms. Donnelly was a “substandard” candidate who had distorted the damage done by changes in bail laws and who mischaracterized Mr. Kaminsky’s record on the issue. But he acknowledged that the race had become competitive because of the passage of bail reform.“My question to the far left is: What do you win when you force things too far and you end up losing good progressives who are more moderate?” said Mr. Jacobs, who is also the leader of the Democratic Party in Nassau County.Anne Donnelly, the Republican candidate, said that “bail reform makes people less safe.”Johnny Milano for The New York TimesBail reform is also playing a notable role in neighboring Suffolk County, where Timothy Sini, the Democratic district attorney, and Ray Tierney, the Republican challenger, have both criticized the changes to state law, saying they endanger public safety.“We fought hard against this law,” Mr. Sini, a former police commissioner credited with taking on the MS-13 gang, said during a recent town hall. But nowhere has the issue seemed more divisive in New York than in Nassau County, where the district attorney contest has become one of the state’s most bitterly fought races.Mr. Kaminsky and Ms. Donnelly have dueled over crucial newspaper endorsements, spent millions in advertising and traded accusations of lying and fearmongering about violent crime in Nassau County — made up of mostly affluent white suburbs that have long been heralded as the safest in the country.“There’s been an extensive effort by Republicans in this race to give people the perception that crime is on the rise here, and that city crime, which is out of control, is coming here,” Mr. Kaminsky said in an interview. “That has been their underlying and explicit message from Day 1.”Ms. Donnelly, who has worked in Nassau’s district attorney office for more than 30 years, said in an interview that Nassau was “a very safe county,” but that “bail reform makes people less safe and has put a revolving door on the front of the courthouse where criminals are not held accountable.”“I made bail reform an issue against my opponent because he owns bail reform,” she said. “He voted for it. He made sure it got passed. It’s not moderate.”In 2019, after regaining full control of the State Legislature for the first time in years, Democrats passed a law that sharply curtailed judges’ ability to set cash bail for most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felonies. It was an effort meant to stop the poor from being jailed before trial simply because they couldn’t afford to post bail, while those charged with the same crime who had more resources were released.The law created significant backlash after law enforcement officials raised the specter of dangerous criminals on the loose. It then became a political flash point in Albany, pitting moderate Democrats against the progressive wing of the party in 2020, an election year. Democrats ultimately agreed to roll back certain parts of the law that year after acknowledging some limitations.At the same time, Republicans spent millions of dollars attacking Democrats for supporting the original law, as well as the defund the police movement, running ads that were meant to stoke fears over the supposed harm to public safety from the law.Their tactic worked, to an extent. Democrats lost two House seats in 2020, as well as two State Senate seats just outside of New York City, including on Long Island. But Democrats in the State Capitol ultimately expanded their majority in the State Senate, buoyed by record turnout from the 2020 presidential election and an aggressive mail-in vote campaign.Now, the district attorney race has catapulted the bail law, and Mr. Kaminsky’s involvement in it, to the forefront for a second year in a row.“This race has become a talisman for how deeply this bail reform issue cuts with voters,” said Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant. “You can bet that if Kaminsky were to lose this race, having gone into it as such a clear favorite, that the Republicans and some of their allies will double down and run against incumbent Democrats on this issue.”Mr. Kaminsky said Ms. Donnelly was being “dishonest” in saying that he wrote the bail law in 2019. While he voted for the state budget that included the bail law, he was not a co-sponsor of the law and was one of the Democrats who lobbied for a more restrained version of the law, in 2019, as well as when it was rolled back in 2020.“The Republicans have basically said, ‘What’s the penalty for lying?’” Mr. Kaminsky said. “I think being honest is a central character trait of being the district attorney, which has to have the most integrity of any position in government.”Mr. Kaminsky entered the race with an edge.Once a reliable G.O.P. stronghold, Nassau County has turned more Democratic over the past few decades as a result of demographic changes, mirroring a national political shift of traditionally conservative suburban voters slowly moving to the left. The county has more registered Democrats than Republicans — it voted twice for Barack Obama, as well as for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 — but it still has a sizable contingent of independent voters. The previous district attorney, Madeline Singas, who resigned this year to become an associate judge on the State Court of Appeals, is a Democrat.Mr. Kaminsky jump-started his campaign with nearly $1.5 million he raised as a State Senate candidate. Since then, he has raised an additional $1.5 million, including $20,000 from Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor.Ms. Donnelly, in her first run for public office, has received just over $250,000 in campaign contributions, including nearly $50,000 from Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir who spent millions of dollars last year in support of candidates running against Democrats who supported bail reform. Her campaign has also received substantial financial support from the county’s Republican Party, which has transferred more than $720,000 to her campaign account.The Daily News editorial board endorsed Mr. Kaminsky, but he suffered a blow after the editorial board of Newsday, the largest daily newspaper headquartered on Long Island, announced on Saturday it was endorsing Ms. Donnelly. The endorsement portrayed Mr. Kaminsky as an ambitious politician who was late to push back against bail reform, “perhaps to stay in the graces of New York City progressives who hold the key to success for statewide office.”National politics could also play a role in the race if President Biden’s sagging approval ratings energize more Republicans to vote next week or dampen enthusiasm among Democrats, especially in an off-year election.Indeed, some political observers are eyeing the Nassau race — as well as the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia — as an early test of Democrats’ ability to protect their slim majority in Congress in next year’s midterm elections, when many of the most competitive races will play out in swing suburban districts.“As important as this race might be for people in Nassau, it’s about a heck of a lot more than who the next chief law enforcement officer in the county will be,” said Lawrence Levy, the executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, on Long Island.“It’s about how specific issues like bail reform and other law-and-order issues will play to the impact of the party’s national brand,” he said. “Long Island, even if it doesn’t count in national elections because it’s in a blue state, is a typical suburban swing region, so what happens here can be a bellwether for what might happen next year.”Katie Glueck contributed reporting. 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      Thomas Kenniff, Manhattan D.A. Candidate, Sees a City on the Brink

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      Thomas Kenniff, who is facing Alvin Bragg in the Nov. 2 election, has focused his campaign on a recent increase in some types of crime.Thomas Kenniff believes that New York City is teetering on a precipice.Mr. Kenniff, the Republican candidate for Manhattan district attorney, is not referring to Covid-19 or climate-related disasters, like the flooding that killed 13 people in the city last month.No, it is crime that worries Mr. Kenniff — crime, and progressive policies that he believes have contributed to its rise, particularly the bail reform law that went into effect in January 2020, which stopped criminal courts from setting cash bail on most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.Though legal experts who have studied the matter say there is no clear connection between that law and the rise in some categories of violent crime, including murders and shootings, Mr. Kenniff, 46, is convinced that a link exists.“As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years,” he said in a recent debate with his Democratic opponent, Alvin Bragg. The election, on Nov. 2, will determine the leader of an office that handles tens of thousands of cases a year and conducts many high-profile investigations, including an ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, has an overwhelming advantage. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Manhattan by nearly eight to one, and residents of the borough — which Mr. Kenniff left for Long Island about four years ago — have not elected a Republican as their district attorney since 1937.Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney, supported the bail reform law that Mr. Kenniff has criticized.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kenniff, a major in the Army National Guard and veteran of the Iraq War, says he expects to compete with Mr. Bragg given the number of Manhattanites he hears from who are concerned about crime.“I do think there is something fermenting in response to what is happening on the street level that Alvin Bragg has not condemned in any meaningful way,” Mr. Kenniff said.Asked to respond, a spokesman for Mr. Bragg, Richard Fife, said that Mr. Kenniff had spent the campaign “making ridiculous attacks playing on people’s fears.”“Alvin Bragg understands from personal experience the safety concerns families face and the inequities embedded into our system,” Mr. Fife said.Mr. Kenniff has consistently asserted — as have other law enforcement figures, most prominently Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department — that the bail overhaul is partly behind the spike in certain categories of gun crime, which began in the summer of 2020.Experts disagree, and point toward similar spikes in murders and shootings in cities around the country, regardless of their bail laws.“There is no evidence linking the bail reforms to the uptick in shootings and homicides,” said Michael Rempel, the director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the mayor’s office, the state courts and other institutional players in the criminal justice system.Mr. Kenniff, who now works primarily as a defense lawyer, said that he sees a correlation and rejects arguments like Mr. Rempel’s.“I reject it based on what I’ve seen in my own practice and the people I’ve represented,” he said. “I reject it based on what I see on the streets.”From Long Island to IraqMr. Kenniff was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and grew up in Massapequa, in a waterfront house on the South Shore of Long Island. He attended the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. And he began to consider the possibility of being a lawyer, in part because of the unlikely influence of the actor Tom Cruise.“Whatever part he was playing, you wanted to do that,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I saw ‘Days of Thunder,’ I wanted to be a racecar driver. I saw ‘Cocktail,’ I wanted to become a bartender.”The movie that really influenced Mr. Kenniff was “A Few Good Men,” in which Mr. Cruise plays a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, military lawyers who prosecute and defend members of the armed services.After graduating from Hofstra’s law school, and spending several years at a law firm and the Westchester district attorney’s office, Mr. Kenniff began the commissioning process. In early 2005, he was deployed to a military base right outside of Tikrit, Iraq.While abroad, he defended soldiers who were charged with violations of military law and provided counsel to soldiers and civilians. He also sweated out a number of rocket attacks, said his roommate, Major Robert Kincaid, who added that Mr. Kenniff soon got used to the strikes.“We heard the alarms go off and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the shelter,’” Mr. Kincaid recalled. “And he looks at me and goes, ‘Are you going to do that? I think it’s safer in here.’”Mr. Kenniff returned to the United States toward the end of 2005 and after about six more months as a prosecutor in Westchester, he left the office to start a law firm with another veteran, Steven M. Raiser, where over the past 15 years he has done defense work for a wide range of clients.Mr. Kenniff spent long stretches of the pandemic housed at a hotel in Manhattan, like other service members, and on active duty at the Javits Center, which was transformed into a field hospital. During that time, Mr. Kenniff began following the nascent Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney and grew alarmed at what he was hearing.A Return to ‘Broken Windows’Eight candidates ran as Democrats to become Manhattan district attorney, including three without any prosecutorial experience.But as murders and shootings continued to rise in the early months of 2021, voters leaned toward more experienced contenders like Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Bragg won a close primary, leaving him poised to become the first Black Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Kenniff said he is concerned that Mr. Bragg — who supported the bail law and has pledged to dedicate new units in the office to hold the police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions — will implement lenient policies that will encourage crime.Asked about his own priorities, Mr. Kenniff said that he wanted to focus on reducing gun crime, which he believes means also cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.He said he believes in the merits of “broken windows” policing, the idea that actively policing and prosecuting petty crimes will have a healthy effect on the overall crime rate. The theory has been called into question by a number of criminologists and others, who say it naturally leads to discriminatory overpolicing.“I’m not trying to upend the whole concept of a prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I don’t need 20-page manifestoes about how I’m going to do this, this and that.”Mr. Kenniff has reserved much of his energy for criticizing the bail law, which was passed in an effort to ensure that poor people were not disproportionately penalized because they could not afford bail. The law effectively eliminated money bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but allowed for bail to be set on virtually all violent felonies.It was met with immediate resistance from opponents, who argued that it would lead to the release of dangerous criminals. In April 2020, the law was amended to allow judges more discretion to jail defendants. (It remains illegal in New York for judges to consider a defendant’s threat to public safety in setting bail, as it has been for the last 50 years.)The law remains a target of conservatives, including Mr. Kenniff, who says that along with the disbandment of the police’s anti-crime units and local politicians’ lack of support for the police, the law was key to rises in gun crime. He argues that the pretrial release of those charged with crimes like gun possession and misdemeanor assault has endangered communities.As of yet, there is no evidence of that. The mayor’s office of criminal justice has found that the bail law had no discernible effect on the rate of rearrest. And studies conducted in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which made similar changes, found that their rates of recidivism had not gone up.None of that carries weight with Mr. Kenniff.“The notion that these policies haven’t contributed to what is going on on the street is just utterly counterintuitive,” he said. “So would I be skeptical, am I skeptical, of studies and statistics that say otherwise? Sure.” More

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      Conservative Group, Seizing on Crime as an Issue, Seeks Recall of Prosecutors

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      A group backed by undisclosed donors is targeting three Democratic prosecutors in Northern Virginia for recall campaigns in a test of what could be a national strategy in 2022.WASHINGTON — A Republican-linked group said on Monday that it was beginning a recall campaign backed by undisclosed donors to brand Democrats and their allies as soft on crime by targeting progressive prosecutors.The initial focus is three prosecutors who were elected in the affluent Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington in 2019 amid a national wave of pledges by Democrats to make law enforcement fairer and more humane.The group, Virginians for Safe Communities, said the targets of the recall effort were Buta Biberaj of Loudoun County, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti of Arlington County and Steve Descano of Fairfax County, all of whom hold the position of commonwealth’s attorney.The campaign faces uncertain prospects, starting with clearing signature-gathering requirements and legal hurdles.But the organizers described it as part of a broader national push to harness voters’ concerns about rising crime rates in cities and a backlash to anti-police sentiment.“All things in politics have their time, and now is the moment that people who are for law enforcement have woken up,” said Sean D. Kennedy, a Republican operative who is the president of Virginians for Safe Communities. He called the recall efforts in Northern Virginia a “test case to launch nationwide.”He said the group had raised more than $250,000, and had received pledges of nearly another $500,000. He would not reveal the identities of donors to the group, which is registered under a section of the tax code that allows nonprofit groups to shield their donors from public disclosure.Mr. Kennedy, who has worked for Republican campaigns and committees, is an official at the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, but he said the new group was independent from that one. Others involved in the new group include the former F.B.I. official Steven L. Pomerantz and Ian D. Prior, who was an appointee at the Justice Department during the Trump administration and before that worked for well-funded Republican political committees.Mr. Kennedy cast Virginians for Safe Communities as something of an antidote to a political committee funded by the billionaire investor George Soros, a leading donor to Democratic causes. His group, Justice and Public Safety PAC, has spent millions of dollars in recent years backing candidates in local district attorney elections who supported decriminalizing marijuana, loosening bail rules and other changes favored by progressives.The spending upended many of the races, which had previously attracted relatively little funding and attention from major national interests.Mr. Soros’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment.His PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each supporting the campaigns of Ms. Dehghani-Tafti, Mr. Descano and Ms. Biberaj in 2019, when they swept into office promising a new approach to criminal justice.Their victories came at a time when politicians from both parties were re-examining tough-on-crime policies that enacted harsh sentences for drug crimes and laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities. In late 2018, President Donald J. Trump signed into law the most consequential reduction of sentencing laws in a generation. The next month, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then preparing to run against Mr. Trump, apologized for portions of the anti-crime legislation he championed as a senator in the 1990s.The skepticism of law enforcement and the criminal justice system was further catalyzed by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, after which calls to “defund” law enforcement echoed from racial justice marches to the halls of Congress. Many Democrats, including President Biden, have rejected the “defund the police” movement.But, a year and a half after Mr. Floyd’s death, American cities are facing a surge in gun violence and homicides that began during the throes of the pandemic and has continued into this year.Republicans have sought to pin the blame on Democrats and their allies, and have tried to reclaim the law-and-order mantle that politicians of both parties had embraced in the 1980s and 1990s, but later downplayed amid concern about police misconduct and disparities in the criminal justice system.Conservatives “have basically sat on the sidelines of this issue,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It has been dominated by one side, and our side had basically unilaterally disarmed.”He accused the three Northern Virginia prosecutors of enacting “dangerous policies” that are “undermining the public’s faith in our justice system.” He cited an increase in the homicide rate between the end of last month and the same time last year in Fairfax County.Ms. Dehghani-Tafti, the head prosecutor for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church, said in an email that she was “doing exactly what I promised my community I would do — what I was elected to do — and doing it well: making the system more fair, more responsive and more rehabilitative, while keeping us safe.”Some of the more progressive planks in her campaign platform and those of Ms. Biberaj and Mr. Descano — ending prosecutions for marijuana possession and not seeking the death penalty — were at least partially codified statewide this year. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia signed legislation abolishing the death penalty and legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.Ms. Dehghani-Tafti accused Mr. Kennedy’s group of using undisclosed “dark money” and “relying on misinformation” to “overturn a valid election through a nondemocratic recall.”Recalls are rare in Virginia, requiring the collection of signatures from a group of voters equal to 10 percent of the number who voted in the last election for the office in question, followed by a court trial in which it must be proved that the official acted in a way that constitutes incompetence, negligence or abuse of office. In the case of the prosecutors, the signature requirement would range from about 5,500 in Arlington to 29,000 in Fairfax.Mr. Kennedy said his group intended to pay people to gather signatures starting as soon as this week, with the goal of reaching the thresholds by Labor Day.Recent efforts to defeat or recall progressive prosecutors have so far not been successful in other jurisdictions, including Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and a pending grass-roots effort to recall the three Virginia prosecutors has not gained much apparent traction. More

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      Eric Adams’s Win Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Black Leaders in New York

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      Black candidates are poised to occupy some of New York’s top elected offices, including those of mayor, public advocate and two of the city’s five district attorneys.A cascade of victories for Black candidates in the New York City Democratic primaries — highlighted by Eric Adams’s win in the mayoral race — is redefining the flow of political power in the nation’s largest city.For just the second time in its history, New York City is on track to have a Black mayor. For the first time ever, the Manhattan district attorney is set to be a Black man, after Alvin Bragg won the Democratic nomination. The city’s public advocate, who is Black, cruised to victory in last month’s primary. As many as three of the five city borough presidents may be people of color, and the City Council is poised to be notably diverse.“This is a mission-driven movement,” Mr. Adams said in Harlem last weekend, at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters. “If you don’t sit back and rejoice in this moment, shame on you. Shame on you. One of your own is going to move to become the mayor of the most important city in the most important country on the globe.”If Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg win their general elections as expected, they will become among the most influential elected Black officials in the state, joining the state attorney general, Letitia James; the State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins; and Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie.Black Democrats also claimed two new congressional wins last year in New York City: Representatives Ritchie Torres, who identifies as Afro-Latino, in the South Bronx; and Jamaal Bowman, who defeated the longtime congressman Eliot Engel, in a district covering parts of the Bronx and Westchester County.Their success was repeated by Black candidates across the highest levels of city government this year, who were often propelled in part by strong support among Black voters.“Twitter has its place in modern-day campaigning — however, if you’re more comfortable online than in a Black church on Sunday morning, that says something about your likelihood of success,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s highest-ranking House Democrat, who may become the first Black speaker of the House.“Black New Yorkers are under siege by rising crime and intense housing displacement,” Mr. Jeffries said. “Our community is closest to the pain, and therefore Black candidates are uniquely positioned to speak powerfully to the needs of working-class New Yorkers.”Mr. Adams focused his mayoral campaign on combating inequality and promoting public safety.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesMr. Adams won on the strength of more moderate, working-class Black and Latino voters, as well as some centrist white voters outside of Manhattan, with assists from labor unions, his own strong fund-raising and super PAC spending. He ran on a message focused on combating inequality and promoting public safety, and he supported a more expansive role for the police than some of his rivals did.Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president who is narrowly leading in his re-election battle, called Mr. Adams’s primary victory and those of other Black candidates a “watershed moment” — one that will help determine whether issues of improving infrastructure, public safety and schools can be achieved equitably in a city shaped by deep racial and socioeconomic disparities.“We had a Black president before we had our second Black mayor, so it’s our time,” Mr. Richards said, recalling the excitement he felt as an elementary school student when David N. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, was elected more than three decades ago.Other diverse American cities, from Detroit to Kansas City, Mo., have elected more Black mayors than New York City has, while cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta are led by Black women. Los Angeles, like New York, has had just one Black mayor.But the results in New York this summer, especially at the top of the ticket, underscored the central role Black voters play both in city politics and in the national Democratic Party, less than a year after Black Americans played decisive roles in electing President Biden and flipping the Senate to the Democrats. Some have likened Mr. Adams’s coalition, at least in part, to the one that propelled Mr. Biden to the presidency, a comparison both Mr. Adams and the White House chief of staff have embraced.Black voters were also vital to the Democratic efforts to reclaim the Senate, a goal that came down to two victories in Georgia. And in New York, Black voters played a significant role in electing Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2013 (though his coalition also included far more white progressives than Mr. Adams’s did).There was little exit polling available on the New York City mayor’s race, but surveys from other years showed that Black voters were not the majority of the electorate. Still, Black voters are among the most reliable voters in the Democratic Party, and the sparse polling data that was available during the primary showed that Mr. Adams was the overwhelming favorite of those voters — meaning that they packed a more unified electoral punch than other constituencies whose preferences were spread more evenly among several contenders.“The Democratic Party can’t win anything of significance without Black voters,” said Leah Daughtry, a longtime party strategist. “You have, with every passing cycle, an increasing awareness and acceptance that we make a difference.”She suggested that Mr. Adams’s victory — which disappointed the most left-wing forces in the city — may prompt a reassessment of what it means to be “progressive” in New York.“Is it that Black and brown people are not as progressive as some people want to say they are, or does the definition of ‘progressive’ need to be looked at?” said Ms. Daughtry, whose father, the Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry, was an early mentor of Mr. Adams’s.Mr. Adams’s relatively moderate message on policing was plainly a significant factor with a substantial number of voters. But his win was driven by dynamics that go well beyond ideology, including a sense among some New Yorkers that Mr. Adams not only felt their pain, but had lived it.The slate of other Black candidates who won their primaries represents considerable generational and political diversity. Jumaane D. Williams, the city’s public advocate and one of New York’s most prominent younger left-wing leaders, stressed that those results show that voters of color “aren’t a monolith.”“Voters of all hues want to be respected for their lived experiences and their traumas,” said Mr. Williams, who easily won his primary last month, and may be considering a run for higher office. “They want to feel safe and have all of the access to as good a life as they can and they want to see this city reopened with justice and equity.”Mr. Torres, who backed Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign, supported Mr. Adams as his second pick under the city’s ranked-choice voting system. He said the success of ideologically diverse Black contenders was a function of candidate quality, highlighting the deep and growing bench of candidates of color across the city.“That’s the only variable that explains the widely varied ideological results of the 2021 election cycle,” the congressman said. “It speaks to the caliber of the next generation of Black public figures.”Another through line for several of the successful contenders was their ability to connect their personal stories to some of the most searing challenges facing Black New Yorkers. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg speak in strikingly personal terms about the need to combat both police brutality and gun violence that has disproportionately affected neighborhoods with many Black and Latino residents.Mr. Adams has said he was beaten by police as a teenager. He later joined the police force, pushing to combat misconduct from within the system. Mr. Bragg has described a police officer putting a gun to his head when he was a teenager — and he cast himself as the candidate best positioned to tackle criminal justice reform from the powerful prosecutor’s office.“It’s not just having a first Black district attorney in Manhattan, but the experiences that for me have gone along with that,” Mr. Bragg said in an interview, ticking through his own encounters with the law enforcement system. Despite the historic results, racial tensions seeped into some of the contests. Mr. Adams’s allies claimed without evidence that an alliance between Mr. Yang and Kathryn Garcia, who finished second to Mr. Adams by one point, could amount to suppression of Black and Latino voters. And as ballots were being counted for the Queens borough presidency, Mr. Richards wrote on Twitter that his chief rival, Elizabeth Crowley, was “racist.”“Throughout this campaign I faced the dog whistles and microaggressions and I couldn’t talk about it because people would say I was trying to use race to my advantage in the race,” Mr. Richards later said.In a statement posted on Twitter, Ms. Crowley decried “slanderous and untruthful remarks made by one of my opponents” and said she was “proud of the campaign of inclusion and optimism that we ran.”Whatever the result in that race, Mr. Richards and others said that while they were buoyed by Mr. Adams’s victory, his path — he was the first choice of every borough but Manhattan — illustrated stark divides in the city.After a count of absentee ballots, Mr. Adams prevailed over Kathryn Garcia by one percentage point.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times“If you look at the demographic maps from this election it paints a very scary story,” Mr. Richards said, adding, “As diverse as we are, we are still a divided city.”For many Black leaders, Mr. Adams’s election is both a vindication and cause to wonder what might have been.Keith L.T. Wright, the chair of New York County Democrats, worked for Mr. Dinkins when he was the Manhattan borough president. For decades, Mr. Wright has harbored “extreme resentment” that Mr. Dinkins did not win a second term.“Can you imagine if David had two terms? The gentrification problem would not be as serious,” Mr. Wright said. “If he had gotten his hands on the Board of Education we would not have the educational inequality problem we have right now.”Maya Wiley — who would have been the city’s first Black female mayor, but came in third — has said that the diversity of the mayoral field, as well as Mr. Adams’s win, would have implications for shaping perceptions of a suitable leader.“It shows that we have a pipeline of people of color, particularly Black people, who can run and contest effectively in our important executive offices,” she said. “I don’t think this is a one-time phenomenon. This is really about our democratic process opening up.” More

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      Alvin Bragg Likely to Take Over Trump Investigation

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      With his main rival, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceding, Alvin Bragg is poised to lead the investigation into Donald J. Trump’s family business.Alvin Bragg, a career prosecutor with experience taking on white-collar crime and corruption, is poised to become Manhattan’s next district attorney, a job that will include overseeing the most prominent and contentious criminal case in the United States: the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump’s family business.Given the overwhelming edge Democrats hold in Manhattan, Mr. Bragg is heavily favored to win the general election in November after his foremost opponent in the Democratic primary, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceded on Friday.If he wins, Mr. Bragg would immediately take over a high-stakes inquiry that on Thursday yielded a 15-count indictment against the Trump Organization, the Trump family business, and one of its key executives, Allen Weisselberg.The indictment charged Mr. Weisselberg in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on close to $1.8 million in benefits and bonuses and the company with profiting from his alleged actions. The charges were the first of what could be a number of others in the long-running inquiry, which will continue to focus on Mr. Trump’s company, as well as on the former president himself.Mr. Weisselberg has so far rebuffed pressure to cooperate with investigators. Should he continue to do so, Mr. Bragg would oversee any trial in the case. And if the investigation involving Mr. Trump’s business continues after the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., leave office in January, Mr. Bragg will take charge of the inquiry.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Bragg acknowledged the highly consequential nature of the investigation into Mr. Trump, but he said he was equally focused on other important tasks.“We’re also talking about the gun-trafficking issues, the scope of the entire system and the collateral consequences,” he said. “It’s all a profound responsibility.”Mr. Bragg, 47, would be the first Black person to lead an office that still prosecutes more Black people than members of any other racial group. During the campaign, he sought to balance concerns about public safety with a vision for a more equitable criminal justice system.A former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general, he led seven other candidates for the Democratic nomination when polls closed last week with the race too close to call.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who trailed Mr. Bragg by about three percentage points, had pinned her hopes on tens of thousands of absentee ballots. But as those ballots began to be tallied this week, they showed she was not picking up enough votes in key districts to cut into Mr. Bragg’s overall lead. On Friday, she ceded the race and congratulated him.“I spoke with Alvin Bragg earlier today and congratulated him on his historic election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney,” she said in a statement. “We had important disagreements throughout the campaign, but I am confident in Alvin’s commitment to justice, and I stand ready to support him.”Tali Farhadian Weinstein campaigned on the Upper East Side on Primary Day. She conceded the race on Friday. Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMany of Mr. Bragg’s priorities and proposed policies align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorney’s offices around the United States in recent years. But he defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experience growing up in Harlem.Mr. Bragg’s supporters have said that his racial identity, as well as policies that account for the harm that prosecution can do to communities of color, was one of the key reasons that they favored him.Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor and a supporter of Mr. Bragg’s, said the combination was important to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety,” Professor Murphy said. But, she added, the district attorney should also “understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community as well.”Mr. Bragg said repeatedly during the campaign that he had sued Mr. Trump or his administration more than 100 times during his tenure at the attorney general’s office. He also said he expected to be attacked by Mr. Trump, who said this week that the investigation was a form of “political persecution” being led by “New York radical-left prosecutors.”Mr. Vance, who did not seek re-election, is coordinating his efforts with Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump and the case against Mr. Weisselberg and Mr. Trump’s business.“He can handle this,” Mr. Bharara said.For much of the primary, Mr. Bragg was thought to be trailing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, another former federal prosecutor who also served as counsel to the former U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, and the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez. She dominated the fund-raising battle and gave her own campaign $8.2 million, more than three times as much money as anyone else raised overall, and led in most polls.But a late resistance to her candidacy grew, in part because of the money she spent on the race. On Primary Day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters from supporting Ms. Farhadian Weinstein during a radio interview, and cited Mr. Bragg and another contender, Tahanie Aboushi, as better choices.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a brief interview on Friday that she would continue to be an advocate for issues she focused on during the campaign, particularly violence against women, which she said was startlingly common and underreported.Mr. Bragg will face Thomas Kenniff, the Republican candidate, in November. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y., a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order. In recent weeks, he had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, but then switched to criticizing Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg’s campaign was helped by endorsements from several key figures and groups, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York; Zephyr Teachout, an activist and former candidate for governor; The New York Times Editorial Board (which is separate from the newsroom); and the political action committees of Planned Parenthood and Color of Change. Color of Change’s committee pledged $1 million to Mr. Bragg and spent close to $500,0000.Mr. Bragg made inroads with some unlikely allies, often through a willingness to hear and incorporate others’ positions. He impressed Five Boro Defenders, a public defenders group, enough that the group invited him to a “decarceral debate” in February where candidates were asked to explain how their policies would help reduce the number of people incarcerated in prisons and jails.“He was always the traditional prosecutor that probably fit most squarely into that progressive prosecutor peg and not necessarily into a decarceral peg,” said Amanda Jack, a member of the group. “But the consensus among us was that he was just really willing to listen and learn in the interview.”Ms. Teachout said that Mr. Bragg’s willingness to learn was exemplified in a memo that he prepared to walk potential supporters through his plans for the office. and that led her to endorse him. She called it “a really significant document.”The memo put Mr. Bragg’s priorities front and center. In it, he pledged to form new units to hold police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions; to provide more resources to bureaus that investigate white-collar crime; and to stop tying success within the office to conviction rates.“The need for reform in our office’s policies and practices is urgent,” the document concluded. “It is critical that the changes described in this memorandum take effect immediately.”Mr. Bragg, a lifelong Harlem resident, said he had been moved to pursue a career in law by his experiences growing up, including several encounters in which guns were held to his head by civilians and police officers.He attended Harvard and Harvard Law School, was a clerk for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., worked as a civil rights lawyer and later became a prosecutor, first in the New York attorney general’s office and later in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.When he returned to the attorney general’s office in 2013, he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians and eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.His classmates noted his potential when he was an undergraduate. A lengthy 1995 profile in The Harvard Crimson reported on his having said that he was unlikely to seek elected office. The paper was unconvinced.“Whatever he does eventually,” the article said, “today there is a definite sense of the anointed about him.” More

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

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

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      Bragg Holds Lead in Manhattan District Attorney Primary

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      Alvin Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, maintained a four-point lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein. If elected, he would the first Black person to hold the office.Alvin Bragg was leading in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney as returns came in Tuesday night, maintaining a steady margin of about four percentage points over Tali Farhadian Weinstein in a race likely to determine who heads the most prominent local prosecutor’s office in the country.The winner of the primary will be heavily favored to win the general election in November and would lead an office that prosecutes tens of thousands of cases a year and is running a high-profile inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had long been seen as front-runners in the race, and they proved it on Primary Day, beating six other candidates by double-digit margins with nearly all of the in-person returns in on Tuesday night.A sizable number of absentee ballots — as many as 59,000, according to The Associated Press — had not yet been counted. As of midnight, Mr. Bragg’s lead stood at about 7,000 votes in the only major race on the ballot that did not make use of ranked-choice voting.The returns Tuesday showed Mr. Bragg performing particularly well on the Upper West Side and in his home neighborhood of Harlem, and he performed solidly throughout the borough with strong showings in every district. While many of his proposed policies and priorities align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorneys’ offices around the country in recent years, Mr. Bragg defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experiences growing up. If elected, he would be the first Black person to hold the office.“We are going to demand and deliver on both safety and fairness,” Mr. Bragg said in a speech at his election party in Harlem in which he acknowledged that there were votes still to be counted but declared victory and spoke as if he had already won. He pledged to help end racial disparities in the justice system​ and to run an office informed by his and his supporters’ life experiences.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a statement that the race was far from over.“We all knew going into today that this race was not going to be decided tonight, and it has not been,” the statement said. “We have to be patient.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who would be the first woman to hold the office, ran a more moderate campaign than most of the field, declining to join some other candidates in saying that she would not prosecute certain categories of crime under any circumstances. She raced ahead of the other contenders in fund-raising, bringing in at least $12.8 million, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign — causing her competitors and some observers to accuse her of trying to buy the race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters on Tuesday from backing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.“Please do not support multimillionaires and billionaires who are just trying to buy elections and not supporting policies that will help us,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s focus on public safety separated her from most of the other candidates, whose strategies to make the criminal legal system less punitive may have made it difficult for voters to differentiate among them.The one exception was Liz Crotty, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who won the endorsement of several police unions and talked about the importance of public safety throughout the race.Three candidates without prosecutorial experience — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — ran to the left of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and Mr. Bragg, arguing that the office required fundamental change that no candidate with prosecutorial experience could deliver. That position ran counter to the messaging of Mr. Bragg, as well as a fellow former prosecutor, Lucy Lang, who also ran on the idea that she had the knowledge and experience to improve the office’s treatment of everyone it comes into contact with, including defendants.Ms. Aboushi, who was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, outperformed the other five candidates throughout the night, trailing only Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.If Mr. Bragg ultimately wins the nomination, he will be overwhelmingly favored in the general election against the Republican nominee, Thomas Kenniff, who ran uncontested. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said that the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order, and in recent weeks, had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein by name, calling her “soft on crime” and saying on Twitter that her platform “promises to be the last nail in NYC’s coffin.”Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein both have substantive legal pedigrees. Mr. Bragg graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge in New York and worked as a defense and civil rights lawyer. He first worked as a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and then returned to the attorney general’s office, where starting in 2013, he led a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.Erin E. Murphy, a law professor at New York University who supports Mr. Bragg, said that the combination of the candidate’s policies and his racial identity was key to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety that exist in our communities but also that they understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein graduated from Yale Law School, clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court, served as counsel to the former United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and after a stint as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn was on the leadership team in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.The district attorney’s office has had only two leaders in close to 50 years, and the current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has held his seat for more than a decade. He was considered one of the most progressive prosecutors in the United States when he was first elected in 2009. But since he took office, a wave of prosecutors have won elections by pledging to make their offices less punitive and less racist, a trend that has changed the way that such races are run.In the opening months of this year, it looked as if the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney would follow suit, with Ms. Aboushi, Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart tipping the balance of the race toward the left. But as Ms. Farhadian Weinstein emerged as a financial powerhouse and gun violence rose in certain areas of the city, the focus of the race changed, and she and Mr. Bragg began to be seen as front-runners. More

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      Primary Day in N.Y.C.: Where the Races Stand

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Wednesday. Weather: Sunny and dry, with a high in the mid-70s. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 4 (Independence Day). Desiree Rios for The New York TimesEven as gloomy weather descended on New York, hundreds of thousands of voters cast their ballots on Primary Day.The election offered the first major test of a new voting system and capped off months of campaigning in several city races. But winners will not immediately be called in many major contests, including the Democratic primary for mayor and the city comptroller race, with no single candidate getting more than 50 percent of the vote and ranked-choice selections yet to be processed.Here’s a look at where the races stand (and you can follow all the results here):Eric Adams is ahead. But results are far from final.In initial tallies after Tuesday’s voting, Mr. Adams was in front among the Democratic candidates for mayor with nearly 32 percent of first-choice votes. He was trailed by Maya Wiley, with about 22 percent, and Kathryn Garcia, with more than 19 percent.The three remained firmly optimistic on Tuesday night. But Andrew Yang, who was in fourth place at less than 12 percent, conceded. “We still believe we can help, but not as mayor and first lady,” he said with his wife, Evelyn, at his side.As ranked-choice votes are tabulated, those standings could change, and absentee ballots also must be counted. It may be weeks before an official winner is named.The eventual victor will face off in the Nov. 2 general election against Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who handily won the Republican primary over Fernando Mateo.[Read about the major takeaways from Primary Day, and check out neighborhood-level results.]Alvin Bragg leads the Democratic race for Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor and deputy attorney general, was ahead in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney, leading Tali Farhadian Weinstein by about three and a half percentage points. His platform was focused on police accountability and racial justice.If his lead holds, Mr. Bragg would become the first Black person to lead the office. If Ms. Farhadian Weinstein pulled ahead, she would become the first woman.The Manhattan district attorney’s race, which did not use the ranked-choice system, included eight candidates total.[Looking for more information on the race? Here’s our full story.]Other races were headed to ranked-choice tabulation.In the contest for comptroller, a position that will play a significant role in the city’s economic recovery, Brad Lander, who was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was ahead in first-choice votes. He was leading Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, by about nine percentage points.The winners of many City Council races were also still undeclared. Several incumbents coasted to easy victories, but in most districts the current officeholder was not running, guaranteeing at least 32 different faces.From The TimesUnanimous Vote Is Final Step Toward Removing Roosevelt StatueConnecticut Legalizes Recreational Marijuana, With Sales Set for May 2022With Mass Vaccination Sites Winding Down, It’s All About the ‘Ground Game’Morgan Stanley says no vaccine, no entry.Sylvia Deutsch, a Force in New York City Land Use, Dies at 96Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingSeveral mayoral candidates showed support for renaming streets named for slaveholders. What would the effort take to accomplish? [Curbed]Lagging vaccination rates among workers at group homes for disabled New Yorkers are sparking concerns. [Gothamist]At the Newkirk Plaza subway station in Brooklyn, residents say, officials have not addressed a growing rat infestation problem. [The City]And finally: Who got Special Tony Awards?The Times’s Julia Jacobs writes:The Tony Awards, long delayed by the pandemic, announced on Tuesday the first recipients, including the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization started five years ago by a group of actors and others as a tool to work toward dismantling racism through theater and storytelling.The other recipients were “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” an intricately choreographed concert by the former Talking Heads singer, and “Freestyle Love Supreme,” a mostly improvised hip-hop musical that was created, in part, by Lin-Manuel Miranda.These honors, called Special Tony Awards, were presented to three recipients that the Tony administration committee thought deserving of recognition even though they did not fall into any of the competition categories, according to a news release.The recipients were announced more than one year after the ceremony had originally been scheduled to take place. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony was put on hold.The awards show — a starry broadcast that will celebrate Broadway’s comeback — is now scheduled to air on CBS in September, when Broadway shows are scheduled to return to theaters in almost full force. Most of the awards, however, will be given out just beforehand, during a ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.It’s Wednesday — show your appreciation.Metropolitan Diary: Familiar sightDear Diary:I was on an uptown No. 1 train. Across the aisle was a young man who looked to be in his early 20s. He had long, thick, curly red hair. There was a guitar case on the floor next to him.We looked at each other and smiled. I got off at the next stop.Around two months later, I got on another uptown 1. I sat down, looked up and saw the young red-haired man with his guitar case across the aisle and two seats away.We looked at each other. His eyes widened in surprise and his face broke into a grin.I’m sure I looked surprised, too, and I grinned, too.In two stops, he got off the train. We were both smiling.— Deametrice EysterNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More