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      With Peltola’s Defeat of Palin, Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Has a Moment

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      Mary Peltola, whose victory in a special election on Wednesday makes her the first Democrat in nearly half a century to represent Alaska in the House, won the contest for the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term with an upbeat campaign that appealed to Alaskan interests and the electorate’s independent streak.But Alaska’s new voting system also played a big role in Ms. Peltola’s three-percentage-point victory over former Gov. Sarah Palin, her Republican opponent.Ms. Peltola, who will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, won at least in part because voters had more choices. While more voters initially picked a Republican candidate, that didn’t matter. Given a second choice, many Republican voters opted for a Democrat — Ms. Peltola — over Ms. Palin.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday night, Ms. Palin criticized the new voting system as “weird.” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called the system a “scam to rig elections” against Republicans.But proponents of systems like Alaska’s say this is how it is supposed to work. When voters have more choices, they’re less likely to vote along strict party lines, reducing polarization and giving independent-minded or more centrist candidates a better shot.The changes to how Alaskans choose their representatives in state and federal elections were decided on in 2020, when allies of Lisa Murkowski — the state’s senior senator, who ran in 2010 as a write-in candidate after losing that year’s Republican Party primary — promoted and bankrolled a ballot initiative that passed by a narrow margin — precisely 3,781 votes, out of more than 344,000.The consequences for Alaskan politics, and for the country, could be seismic. New York, Maine and Utah also have some form of ranked-choice voting, as do dozens of American cities. But the Alaska approach — which combines ranked-choice voting across party lines with an instant runoff between several top candidates — goes further in disrupting political parties’ influence.Second choices matterIn the first stage of the complex new system, voters in a primary pick from a list of candidates from all parties and ideological stripes.The top four finishers then make the ballot for the general election, when voters rank up to four choices in order of preference: first, second, third and fourth — or none at all.Over multiple rounds of what is known as instant runoff or ranked-choice voting, election officials first eliminate candidates with no chance of winning and then reallocate the second, third and fourth choices of their voters to others.Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska doing interviews at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Anchorage in July.Ash Adams for The New York TimesNicholas Begich III, a Republican, failed to meet the threshold, meaning his votes were reallocated based on their second choices. But 15,000 voters who preferred Mr. Begich crossed party lines to select Ms. Peltola as their backup pick instead of Ms. Palin. A further 11,000 Begich voters opted for no second choice or another candidate. In total, that meant that nearly half of Mr. Begich’s voters, presumably Republicans, did not vote for Ms. Palin.Scott Kendall, a leading proponent of the Alaska system, said in an interview on Thursday: “The campaign that Nick Begich ran was a clinic in how to have your party lose a ranked-choice election.” More

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      Mary Peltola, a Democrat, Defeats Sarah Palin in Alaska’s Special House Election

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      In an upset with the potential to reverberate nationally, Mary Peltola has won a special House election in Alaska, according to The Associated Press, and will finish the remaining few months of the term of Representative Don Young, who died in March after serving nearly 50 years as his state’s lone congressman.Ms. Peltola, a Democratic former state lawmaker and Alaska Native, defeated two other candidates who survived the raucous special primary election in June: Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Nicholas Begich III, a Republican from the state’s most prominent Democratic political family. Voters participated in a new system, ranking the three in order of preference.Ms. Peltola’s victory adds to a series of recent wins for Democrats, most notably the special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District. Democrats have grown more confident about their chances of holding on to the Senate in November as Republicans squabble among themselves, although most acknowledge that retaining control of the House will be more difficult.David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who is now the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, said Ms. Palin’s defeat and the Republicans’ loss of Mr. Young’s seat “would be read as a huge victory for Democrats and defeat for MAGA Republicans.” He added: “Obviously, there are mitigating factors that should temper the impulse to generalize.”At 49, Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, albeit only temporarily — unless she wins a full term in November.She ran a relentlessly upbeat campaign that implicitly contrasted her reputation for kindness with the bombast and penchant for drama associated with Ms. Palin, even though the two women have been friends since serving together in the Statehouse as expectant mothers. They even exchanged text messages on the day of the general election for the temporary seat, with Ms. Palin advising Ms. Peltola to dress warmly for her final round of canvassing.“I think respect is just a fundamental part of getting things done and working through problems,” Ms. Peltola told reporters as the first votes rolled in on Aug. 16.Al Gross, an independent candidate who previously ran for Senate in 2020 against Dan Sullivan, a Republican, dropped out after the primary and endorsed Ms. Peltola, who also finished ahead of write-in candidates, including Tara Sweeney, a former Trump administration official.Ms. Peltola cobbled together a winning coalition in the special election by appealing to the same independent streak and devotion to Alaskan interests that Mr. Young was known for. Her father and the longtime congressman were close friends, and, as a young girl, she would tag along as he campaigned for Mr. Young. But she sharply diverges from Mr. Young and her top Republican opponents, including Ms. Palin, in her support for abortion rights, her concern about climate change and her calls for developing Alaska’s resources with greater sensitivity to the needs of local communities.Ms. Peltola has sought to highlight her Native roots in a state where more than 15 percent of the population identifies as Indigenous. As a Yup’ik woman, she said, she has sought to use the teachings of her community in her broader appeals for bipartisanship. “Dry fish and pilot bread — that is how I got other legislators in the room when I was rebuilding the bipartisan Bush caucus,” she said in an ad introducing herself to voters. (“Bush caucus” refers to a group of legislators from rural Alaska.)Ms. Peltola served in the Alaska House from 1999 to 2009 before becoming the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which works with tribes to manage salmon resources. She has also served as a councilwoman in Bethel, a small city in western Alaska, and as a judge on the Orutsararmuit Native Council Tribal Court.She made that experience central to her campaign message, a uniquely Alaskan appeal to voters in a state where many rural communities depend on reliable stocks of fish for their very subsistence. Ms. Peltola’s ads were critical of out-of-state trawlers — high-volume fishing ships, often from China or Russia, that sweep up prized salmon and halibut along with lower-value species such as pollock.The Supreme Court’s move in June to overturn Roe v. Wade was another major theme of Ms. Peltola’s campaign. More than 60 percent of Alaskans favor abortion rights, breaking with the position held by Republicans like Ms. Palin, who hailed the decision as a victory for states’ rights. Abortion remains legal in Alaska, though the law requires that a patient receive counseling intended to discourage the practice.Ms. Peltola will face voters again this fall as she tries to retain the seat in Congress beyond the remainder of Mr. Young’s term.Voters in November will rank their choices from the top four finishers of the regular primary on Aug. 16. Ms. Peltola finished ahead of Ms. Palin in that primary, followed by Mr. Begich.Ms. Palin’s defeat in the special election is likely to raise doubts about her viability in November.Former President Donald J. Trump visited Anchorage in July to hold a rally for Ms. Palin, whose campaign was being managed by one of his longtime political lieutenants, Michael Glassner. Mr. Trump hailed her as “legendary.”At that rally, Ms. Palin attacked Mr. Begich, her chief Republican opponent, as a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only. And she nodded in jest to the complaints of her critics, who have accused her of erratic behavior and of abandoning the state after her 2008 loss.“We have been mocked and ridiculed and falsely accused and told to sit down and shut up,” she said. “The stuff that you’ve heard about me — it’s a lie. I’m way worse than what you’ve heard.”Mr. Trump expended most of his energy at the rally attacking Senator Lisa Murkowski, who broke with him frequently on abortion and other issues and who voted for his impeachment after the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Both Ms. Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka, whom Mr. Trump endorsed, advanced in the state’s Senate primary race and will face off again in November.Mr. Trump is a divisive figure in Alaska, which has long had an independent streak. He remains highly popular among hard-core Republican voters but has alienated thousands of more moderate Republicans and independents.Although Mr. Trump won Alaska by 10 percentage points in 2020, besting Joseph R. Biden Jr., those results represented a decrease from his commanding 15-point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mr. Trump’s waning overall popularity has led some analysts to speculate that his endorsement of Ms. Palin could do as much to mobilize his political opponents against her this fall as it could to help her. And Ms. Palin’s starkly low approval ratings in her quest to win Mr. Young’s former seat permanently indicate that another candidate might squeak through in November. If the special election and Aug. 16 primary results are any indication, Ms. Peltola appears well positioned to do so.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Democrats in Georgia, Buoyed by Recent Wins, Seek to Keep Up Momentum

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      COLUMBUS, Ga. — As President Biden and Democrats in Congress have notched some wins in Washington lately, Democrats in Georgia have been happily accepting the credit.“Georgia Democrats, we did the work,” Stacey Abrams, the party’s nominee for governor, told delegates at the state party’s convention this weekend. “We provided the voices and the votes that delivered these resources, and now we deserve a better life, a brighter future.”Georgia Democrats’ claim as the clutch players of the 2020 cycle is earned — the state’s Electoral College votes went to a Democrat for the first time since 1992, and it elected two Democratic senators, giving the party control of the Senate. But it has no doubt ramped up the pressure for 2022, raising expectations that the far-from-solidly-blue state might not meet in 2022.Behind Democrats’ boasts at the convention, there is considerable anxiety among party activists. Democrats’ success hinges on a mix of sky-high turnout from the base along with a strong showing from moderate and independent voters in conservative-leaning counties. Now, with a racially diverse statewide ticket and more funding and manpower than the state party has ever seen, the party threw its support behind both its current slate of candidates and its strategy from the past cycle.Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, said the slate of statewide candidates was “the most extraordinary ticket Georgia has ever produced.”David Walter Banks for The New York TimesRiding a wave of recent legislative wins on climate and health care, along with a boost from President Biden’s student debt relief plan, politicians at Georgia’s Democratic State Convention this weekend played up the role of their voters in securing those victories in Washington.One of the two senators Georgians elected in 2020, Raphael Warnock, is vying this year for a full term against the former University of Georgia football icon Herschel Walker. On Saturday, in a packed convention hall 100 miles southwest of Atlanta, Mr. Warnock joined the state’s top Democratic candidates and elected officials to pitch the party faithful on making the 2022 midterms a repeat of the last election cycle.Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the first Black Democrat to represent Georgia in the Senate, focused his speech on the policies that Democrats passed with a razor-thin majority in the Senate and his effort to push Mr. Biden to take action on student loan debt. After those wins, he said, Democrats need time to accomplish even more.“I believe that we’ve started to shape the future that embraces all of our children. But that work is not yet done,” Mr. Warnock told the large crowd of delegates, elected officials and supporters that gathered on Saturday, imploring them to organize in their communities to turn out in the same large numbers that elected him and Jon Ossoff to the Senate in 2021. “I’m glad you’re in this room,” he said. “But the work happens outside of this room.”The convention kicked off a 10-week stretch of campaigning and voter mobilization efforts that will determine the party’s fate in the November midterm elections and prove whether the party’s wins during the 2020 presidential election and U.S. Senate runoffs were a one-off in the state or the beginning of a trend toward blue.Among those counting on big Democratic gains is Representative Sanford D. Bishop Jr., a 15-term incumbent whose district is a top target for Republicans under new lines that make it more competitive. His Republican challenger is Chris West, a lawyer and first-time candidate who has campaigned on a heavily conservative platform and painted Mr. Bishop as disconnected from voters in the heavily rural district, which stretches from the Florida-Georgia line through the center of the state.Mr. Bishop said he did not believe that voters in his district would think of him as “out of touch” nor would they deny that he’s been “up close and personal” with constituents. He pointed to his staff and called them his “eyes and ears” in the district. Asked if that would be enough to set him apart, he underlined his decades spent in both the Georgia state house and U.S. House of Representatives and criticized Mr. West as having “no legislative experience.”As Georgia’s Republican candidates pummel Democrats on the economy and tie them to Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings, Democrats used Saturday’s convention to highlight the contrast between their policies and those of Republicans, especially on abortion access and preservation of democracy. Ms. Abrams exalted her running mates, calling Georgia’s slate of statewide candidates “the most extraordinary ticket Georgia has ever produced.”She added: “It looks like Georgia and sounds like Georgia — it knows Georgia.” More

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      How Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Is Dividing Democrats

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      President Biden’s executive order Wednesday to cancel thousands of dollars in college debt for millions of Americans has divided Democratic candidates like few other policies of his administration, with some Democrats using the plan to distance themselves from a president who could prove to be a heavy burden in their states and districts.The responses were starkly divided along racial and generational lines, with Black candidates and younger voters more likely to approve and Democrats running as centrists more likely to be critical. But among Democratic candidates in tough campaigns, there was little consistency to be found.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes of Wisconsin, both Black and both hoping to be in the Senate next year, were supportive. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, a Democrat in a tight race for re-election and running as a moderate conciliator, was highly critical.Yet Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, another Democrat seeking re-election in a swing state as a bipartisan moderate, backed the plan.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Senate candidate hoping to appeal to working-class voters, praised the move as relief to struggling Pennsylvanians too often forgotten by policymakers. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, also running for the Senate as a voice of the working class, decried it as a gift to those already on a path to success at the expense of Ohioans shut out of higher education.“While there’s no doubt that a college education should be about opening opportunities, waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet,” Mr. Ryan said in a statement.The sharp divisions over the debt relief order were somewhat surprising considering how long the plans were under consideration and the lengthy journey the issue has taken from a rallying cry at Occupy Wall Street protests more than a decade ago to a Biden campaign promise in 2020.The provenance of the plan was no doubt from the left wing of the party — including Senators Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts — that campaigned on promises of far more generous debt forgiveness. The fact that Mr. Biden issued a moderate version a little more than two months before the November midterm elections might have been expected to unite the party, not divide it.But the move was coming from an unpopular president at a time when Republicans — and some Democratic economists — have been portraying any expensive social welfare proposal as jet fuel for skyrocketing inflation.“There’s still a real debate in the party on how interventionist the government should be,” said Waleed Shahid, a liberal strategist and spokesman for Justice Democrats, a progressive group that has strongly pushed for student debt relief. He added, “Some of these Democrats feel like they have to punch back at the president in purple states, and this is what they have chosen to punch back on.”Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, said the debt relief was not targeted enough at low-income Americans.John Locher/Associated PressBeneath the raw politics of the moment are substantive criticisms. Mr. Biden’s action would cancel $10,000 in debt for Americans earning less than $125,000 per year and cancel $20,000 for low-income students who received Pell grants.Ms. Cortez Masto and Mr. Ryan both said the debt relief was not targeted enough at low-income Americans or college students entering fields with low pay and desperate need, like rural health care or emergency medicine. More

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      Democrats Sense a Shift in the Political Winds, but It May Not Be Enough

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      Energized abortion-rights voters. Donald J. Trump back in the spotlight. Stronger-than-expected special elections, including a surprising win early Wednesday in New York.Democratic leaders, once beaten down by the prospect of a brutal midterm election in the fall, are daring to dream that they can maintain control of Congress this November.An unexpected victory by Pat Ryan, a Democrat, in a special House election to fill a vacancy in New York’s Hudson Valley offered Democrats solid evidence that their voters were willing to come out and that their message was resonating. It followed strong Democratic showings in other special elections, in Nebraska, Minnesota and upstate New York, since the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. Mr. Ryan placed abortion rights front and center while his Republican opponent, Marc Molinaro, sidestepped the issue to focus on the problems his party still believes will drive voters — inflation, crime, the economy. It didn’t work.“Kevin McCarthy made a big mistake by measuring the drapes too early and doubling down on Trumpism, and it’s proving to be fatal,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, referring to the House Republican leader.But the House map in 2022 favors Republicans, thanks to Republican-led redistricting and a slew of retirements of Democratic lawmakers. That means the shifting political winds are more likely to merely blunt any Republican wave in the House rather than save the Democratic majority.Primary races and special elections, which fill seats that are vacated before the end of a lawmaker’s term, are not necessarily reliable predictors of general election turnout, Republicans note.“Majorities are won in November, not August,” said Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ official campaign arm. “We look forward to prosecuting the case against Democrats’ failed one-party rule that’s left American families worse off.”That endeavor is becoming harder. Falling gas prices have robbed Republicans of the starkest visual evidence of inflation. Passage in recent weeks of legislation to control prescription drug prices, tackle climate change, extend health insurance subsidies, bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing and impose tighter gun controls on teenagers and the mentally ill have given Democrats achievements to run on while countering accusations of a do-nothing Congress.And the F.B.I.’s seizure of hundreds of highly classified documents from Mr. Trump’s Florida home has put the former president back into the spotlight as Democrats press their efforts to cast Republicans as extremists and make the November election a choice between the two parties, not a referendum on President Biden.Demonstrators against former President Donald J. Trump near Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., shortly after the FBI recovered boxes of government documents.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesFor the first time since the fall of 2021, polling averages indicate a narrow majority of voters who say they prefer Democratic over Republican control of Congress.Even some Republicans own up to nervousness.“It looks like troubling clouds on the horizon to me,” said Representative Billy Long, a Republican from Missouri. “The Republicans need to heed Satchel Paige’s advice of ‘Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.’”And yet, for all the trend lines tilting toward Democrats, there is still the unavoidable math of the midterms.Read More on Abortion Issues in AmericaFetal Personhood: A push to grant fetuses the same legal rights as people is gaining momentum, as anti-abortion activists move beyond bans and aim to get the procedure classified as murder.Struggling to Decode Laws: Doctors’ concerns about complying with new abortion bans left a pregnant Louisiana woman with a fatal diagnosis for her fetus, but no clear path for an abortion.Surrogacy Industry: Fearful of legal and medical consequences of new abortion laws, gestational surrogates and those working with them are rewriting contracts and changing the way they operate.A Rare Prosecution: A teenager used pills to terminate her pregnancy at home with the aid of her mother. Their Facebook messages are now key evidence in a rare prosecution over abortion.Republicans need a mere five seats to win a House majority — and their candidates are in strong positions to win the bulk of nine districts that Mr. Trump would have won easily two years ago if the new maps had been in place. Seven of those nine seats do not have a Democratic incumbent to defend them. Republicans might have their pick of another seven Democratic seats that Mr. Trump would have won in 2020, though by narrower margins. Four of those have no incumbent to defend them.The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates 10 Democratic seats as leaning toward or likely to be Republican, against three Republican seats that lean Democratic. That works out to a Republican majority.“The Republicans don’t need a wave to win back the House,” said Nathan L. Gonzalez, a nonpartisan House election analyst. “There will be some Democrats who win in Trump districts, but they will be the exceptions, not the rule.”Still, more than a dozen interviews with Democratic candidates illustrated the consistency of their optimism. They all saw Democratic and independent voters as newly energized by the abortion issue. They believed recent Democratic achievements had changed their image as an ineffectual majority to an effective one. And they detected real fear among voters of a resurgent, anti-democracy right wing, abetted by the Republican leadership. More

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      Matt Castelli’s Long-Shot Race to Defeat Elise Stefanik

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      GLENS FALLS, N.Y. — Matt Castelli has spent much of his career in the shadows.Over nearly 15 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, he hunted down terrorists in one way or another. Half-Sicilian, with a glistening black beard, he has the look of a global Everyman — someone who you might imagine, in the immortal words of Indiana Jones, “speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom” and can “blend in, disappear” in any society.Much of what Castelli did in government service he can’t talk about — so it’s hard to know exactly what his accomplishments are. Now, after stints with the National Security Council under the Obama and Trump administrations, Castelli is attempting a radical career shift.He’s running to unseat Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican in the House, who has made an abrupt transition of her own — a Harvard-educated darling of the G.O.P. establishment who is now a pro-Trump bomb-thrower.Castelli, 41, has not received much help from national Democrats, who have all but written off Stefanik’s upstate New York district as a lost cause. In 2020, she won re-election by nearly 18 percentage points, running nine points ahead of President Trump.But after trouncing his primary opponent, a more progressive Democrat, by more than 60 percentage points in Tuesday’s primary, Castelli argues that he has more of a chance to win the North Country, as the area is known, than party officials and pundits expect. (Stefanik ran uncontested.)“This is a moderate district,” Castelli said last week over beers at Fenimore’s Pub in Glens Falls. “And Stefanik is no longer a moderate.”Elise Stefanik and other Republicans defended Donald Trump after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago. Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesA major component of Castelli’s strategy is leaning into that word: moderate. His campaign collected more than 6,600 signatures to put him on the ballot for the Moderate Party, taking advantage of New York election laws that allow candidates to run on multiple tickets. That total was more signatures than he collected to make the Democratic Party ballot and nearly twice as many as the rules required.He figures there could be thousands of independents and disaffected Republicans who might not stomach voting for a Democrat but would choose a Chevy-pickup-driving, American-flag-waving national security specialist who is not shy about rejecting the left-wing inclinations of, say, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx.Motivated after Sept. 11 …Raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., by a Republican mother and Democratic father, Castelli played baseball in high school, then went to Siena College, a private Franciscan institution near Albany. He was inspired to get a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University after Sept. 11, then joined the C.I.A., where, he says, he “straddled” the agency’s operational and analytical wings as a targeting specialist and, later, a leader of various teams.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAug. 23 Primaries: The Democratic establishment in Florida and New York had a good night. Here are some key takeaways and a rundown of who won and who lost.The Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s increasingly hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a special election in New York’s Hudson Valley is the latest example.Bruising Fights in N.Y.: A string of ugly primaries played out across the state, as Democrats and Republicans fought over rival personalities and the ideological direction of their parties.Challenging DeSantis: Florida Democrats chose Representative Charlie Crist, a former Republican, to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis, setting up a contest between a centrist and a hard-right G.O.P. incumbent.After spending five months in Barack Obama’s National Security Council, he spent a year as a director for counterterrorism in Donald Trump’s tumultuous National Security Council, serving under Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then Gen. H.R. McMaster. Castelli then returned to the C.I.A. for about two years in a liaison role while attending business school at Northwestern University on the side, before leaving for the private sector.During his time in two administrations, Castelli also had a front-row seat to the rise of groups like the Islamic State, which gave him a direct appreciation for the blowback America faced in the Islamic world after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After seven C.I.A. officers were killed by a suicide bomber in 2009 at an American base in Khost, Afghanistan, Castelli took a more “operational role,” he said, declining to go into details.… and again after Jan. 6But it was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Castelli says, that motivated him to leave his job at a health care company to run for public office. Last year, he moved upstate for the first time and now lives in Glens Falls, an old lumber-mill and paper-factory town near Lake George, and announced his run against Stefanik in September. That has fueled the accusation from Stefanik’s local political machine that Castelli is a carpetbagger — a transplant from Washington, D.C., or, worse, Poughkeepsie.In Castelli’s telling, however, his decision to run against Stefanik was inspired by her defense of Trump and embrace of his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — even after the assault on the Capitol — offended his sense of patriotism.“It was an attack against our country,” he said. “For those of us who swore an oath to the Constitution, this was an effort to overturn all of that. And for me, it was galling.”Castelli estimates he has put at least 40,000 miles on his Chevy driving around the 21st District, which, at around a third of the state, is one of the country’s largest by geographic area. Plattsburgh is the district’s most populous city, but most of the area is rural — and Stefanik was known to run up 40-point margins over her previous Democratic opponents. More

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      What Two Primaries Reveal About the Decline of Working-Class Democrats

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      The results of the Democratic congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday give us a hint of just how far the working-class liberalism once associated with city politics has declined. The winners of two races in particular, Jerrold Nadler and Daniel Goldman, who will almost surely represent much of Manhattan (and a bit of Brooklyn) in the House, emerged as the victors of complicated congressional primaries in districts that were redrawn to reflect national shifts in population.They represent different kinds of New York City Democrats — Mr. Nadler, a longtime congressman, has deep roots in the old grass-roots liberalism of the Upper West Side, while Mr. Goldman is a political newcomer whose star has risen through his association with opposition to Donald Trump — but their shared success nonetheless highlights socioeconomic divisions in Manhattan that have a long history.The primaries reflected the tensions and divisions within contemporary liberalism itself and raise the question of how (or whether) Democrats can effectively represent such radically different constituencies.The changes in the city districts were a result of math — subtraction, to be specific. New York State lost a seat in the House because its population came up short by 89 people in a census conducted in 2020, at the height of Covid in New York. Indeed, if so many New Yorkers had not died in the early months of the pandemic, these contests — particularly the one that pitted Mr. Nadler against his House colleague Carolyn Maloney — would almost certainly not have taken place.Beyond the numbers, though, the primaries were part of a continuing story of class divisions in New York City. In the mid-1930s, the Columbia University sociologist Caroline Ware wrote a study of Greenwich Village that focused on the Irish and Italian immigrants who moved there in the late 19th century and whose Catholic churches still dot the neighborhood.Some at the time saw the Village as a success story of immigrant assimilation. But Professor Ware had a different interpretation. The people of the Village, she suggested, lived side by side but had little contact with one another. They were left to navigate a complicated city as “isolated individuals rather than as part of coherent social wholes.”The national Democratic Party faces a similar class divide between highly educated urbanites and the working-class voters for whom it often claims to speak. It’s no secret that the party has moved away from the fiercely pro-union New Deal politics of the mid-20th century. For much of the 20th century, New York State’s congressional delegation included more than 40 representatives (compared with 27 today), a voting bloc that generally collaborated in support of an expansive social welfare state and working-class interests. New York representatives included many of the country’s most left-leaning politicians (like the Upper West Side’s Bella Abzug).Mr. Nadler and Mr. Goldman come from different backgrounds, politically and economically. Mr. Nadler grew up in the city and got active in politics opposing the Vietnam War. Mr. Goldman is a Washington native who attended Sidwell Friends, Yale, Stanford; he served as assistant U.S. attorney with Preet Bharara in the Southern District of New York.For Mr. Nadler, despite his victory on Tuesday night, the political world he emerged from no longer exists as a vital force. This is in part because of transformations within Democratic politics.Mr. Nadler’s political career was forged at a pivotal moment in the aftermath of New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. He was first elected to the State Assembly in 1976. In the following years, Democratic city officials were forced to increase subway fares, close public hospitals, charge tuition at CUNY and cease to embrace a politically ambitious role for local government. Mr. Nadler was elected to Congress in the early 1990s, when Democratic leaders like Bill Clinton proclaimed the end of the era of big government and were most optimistic about free trade and deregulation despite its impact on cities like New York.He has supported many measures over his long career that would aid working-class people, but at the same time the Democrats have generally backed away from politics that would more forcefully address inequality and the economic divide.Meanwhile, the economic fortunes of Manhattan were also changing — as part of an effort to secure a steadier tax base in the aftermath of the collapse of manufacturing, the city under Ed Koch began to reorient its economy toward Wall Street and real estate development.As Wall Street became an engine of the city’s economy in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan’s demographics began moving in largely the opposite direction from the city as a whole. From 2010 to 2020, the white and Asian share of the borough’s population grew, while the Black and Latino share fell.Today, the institutions that had once helped to stitch together constituencies from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, like unions, are far weaker in the city and nationally than they once were. People confront the problems of living in New York through the lens of personal ambition — as “isolated individuals,” as Professor Ware put it — rather than through collective efforts to improve the city’s life.The narrow victory of Mr. Goldman illustrates even more sharply the political crisis of working-class New York. In addition to being an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune, Mr. Goldman is a type well known to denizens of Lower Manhattan, a successful lawyer who was able to self-fund his campaign. He is clearly a candidate whose political appeal was strongest for the new leaders of the Village and Lower Manhattan, the professional upper classes who work in law firms and investment banks, who fund their children’s schools’ parent-teacher associations and the park conservancies.This is a social world that has little meaningful overlap with the working-class population, often Asian and Latino, that still dwells here but lacks the confident political organization and alliances with the middle class that it once possessed.Mr. Goldman’s political fortunes rose with his role as lead counsel in the first impeachment suit against Mr. Trump; his path to the House was largely paved by this rather than any deep engagement with the kinds of material issues that affect the lives of working- or even middle-class New Yorkers.Mr. Goldman’s race was very close — he won by roughly 1,300 votes. The runner-up, Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman, ran a campaign whose rhetoric focused on class appeals, but unions and progressive groups proved unable to act in a coordinated way to support any single candidate in a crowded field.Despite their different backgrounds, both Mr. Goldman and Mr. Nadler embody a Manhattan that has shifted in ways that affect not only its own politics but those of the country at large. Their careers point to the divides that Professor Ware pointed out decades ago.In her account, the Village — and New York, and America as a whole — faced the problem of how to respond to the collective problems of a modern industrial society through the lens of a political culture that had been shaped by ruthless individual acquisition. The particular problems have changed, and yet Lower Manhattan remains home to a population that, as dense as it is, is intensely divided by class and ethnicity, that is characterized (as Professor Ware put it) by “an almost complete lack of community integration.”The bitter politics of the August primaries, which reveal yet again the declining power of New York’s liberalism, are the result.Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics” and “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.”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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      in Elections

      In N.Y. Primaries, a Fight for the Democratic Party’s Future

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      The party’s more moderate establishment declared victory, but a closer look reveals the battle for the soul of the party will grind on.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a moderate Democrat from New York City’s northern suburbs, saw a clear-cut lesson in his lopsided primary victory Tuesday night over one of his home state’s brightest left-wing stars.“Tonight, mainstream won,” Mr. Maloney, who also leads House Democrat campaign committee, declared afterward. “Common sense won.”The 30-point margin appeared to be a sharp rebuke to the party’s left flank, which had tried to make the race a referendum on Mr. Maloney’s brand of leadership in Washington. A second, narrower win by another moderate Democrat, Daniel Goldman, in one of the city’s most liberal House districts prompted more hand-wringing among some progressives.But as New York’s tumultuous primary season came to a close on Tuesday, a survey of contests across the state shows a more nuanced picture. Four summers after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory ignited Democrats’ left flank and positioned New York at the center of a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, the battle has entered a new phase. But it is far from abating.Mostly gone this year were shocking upsets by little-known left-leaning insurgents like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and a gaggle of challengers in Albany. They dislodged an entrenched block of conservative Democrats controlling the State Senate in 2018. Representative Jamaal Bowman defeated a powerful committee chairman in 2020. Those contests made the political left appear ascendant.Kristen Gonzalez, a State Senate candidate supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, won her primary race in a district in Brooklyn and Queens.Janice Chung for The New York TimesTwo years later, though, the tension within the party appears likely to grind on, as progressives struggle to marshal voters into movements as they did during the Trump presidency. At the same time, the party’s establishment wing has regained its footing after President Biden and Mayor Eric Adams, avowed moderates, won the White House and City Hall.“We are past that political and electoral moment,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the director of New York’s liberal Working Families Party, said of the rapid gains of past election cycles. “The headwinds are a real amount of voter fatigue, economic malaise and just the pressures of everyday life.”Ms. Nnaemeka and her allies still found reason to celebrate on Tuesday though, particularly over state-level contests. Kristen Gonzalez, a tech worker supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, won a marquee Brooklyn-Queens State Senate race over Elizabeth Crowley, despite Mayor Adams and outside special interests openly campaigning against her.“Today, we really proved that socialism wins,” Ms. Gonzalez told jubilant supporters after her win.As moderates backed by well-financed outside groups and well-known leaders like Mr. Adams sought to oust them, progressives also successfully defended key seats won in recent election cycles.Among them were Jabari Brisport, a member of the Democratic Socialists, and Gustavo Rivera, another progressive state senator targeted by Mr. Adams. Mr. Bowman, whose district had been substantially redrawn in this year’s redistricting process, also survived.“We had some really good wins,” Ms. Nnaemeka added. “Despite the headwinds, despite the dark money, despite the redistricting chaos, we sent some of the hardest working champions of the left back to the State Senate to complete the work the federal government isn’t doing right now.”But in many of the most recognizable races, there were clear signs that those wins had limits.Mr. Maloney provided moderates with their most resonant victory, defeating Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive state senator who was part of the 2018 insurgency, by a two-to-one margin. This time, she had the vocal backing of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. She fiercely critiqued Mr. Maloney as “a selfish corporate Democrat with no integrity.”Alessandra Biaggi mounted an aggressive challenge to Mr. Maloney from the left.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut she was drowned out by a flood of outside spending that came to Mr. Maloney’s aid, with attacks centered on her harsh past criticisms of the police. She struggled to quickly introduce herself to voters in a district she had never run in before. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Bill Clinton also openly lent their support to the congressman.In the race for an open Democratic seat in New York City, Mr. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, beat out three progressive stars in some of the city’s most liberal enclaves. All had once enjoyed the backing of the Working Families Party. And former Representative Max Rose, an avowed centrist attempting to make a comeback on Staten Island, handily turned back a primary challenger championed by activists.The outcomes — along with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s yawning primary victory in June over a left-aligned challenger, Jumaane Williams — left leaders of the party’s more moderate wing crowing over what they see as a more pragmatic mood among the electorate in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. More