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      Curtis Sliwa Wins Republican Primary for New York Mayor

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      Curtis Sliwa won the Republican primary in the New York mayor’s race on Tuesday, setting up a long-shot challenge in November to the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.With a significant portion of votes counted, Mr. Sliwa was beating Fernando Mateo by over 40 percentage points, according to The Associated Press.His victory capped a bitter campaign pitting onetime friends and first-time candidates against each other to become the standard-bearer of a party whose political power in New York has waned significantly since it vaulted consecutive mayors, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, to City Hall for a total of five terms.With public attention on crime and safety increasing amid the city’s efforts to move past the coronavirus pandemic, both Republican candidates this year sought to claim the law-and-order mantle. But Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of self-appointed crime fighters, may have been especially well positioned to capitalize on the circumstances.Juan Pagan, who was in the crowd at Mr. Sliwa’s primary night party at the Empire Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, said the candidate’s background had given him a clear edge in the race.“He’s a hard-core New Yorker,” said Mr. Pagan, a 65-year-old retiree from the Lower East Side, speaking in room festooned with red and white balloons scraping the ceiling beneath a sparkling chandelier. “It’s in his veins, it’s in his blood.”Ayton Eller, wearing a “Refund the Police” T-shirt and a “Trump 2020” yarmulke, echoed that sentiment.“He knows New York inside and out, he’s been to all the diverse neighborhoods, Harlem, the Bronx,” said Mr. Eller, 41, an accountant who lives in Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood.Mr. Giuliani, who endorsed Mr. Sliwa, was also in attendance. He said that Democrats discounted the Republican at their peril.“People underestimate Curtis,” Mr. Giuliani said.A radio host and longtime fixture in the New York media landscape who joined the Republican Party only last year, Mr. Sliwa first gained prominence in the 1980s for his creation of the crime-fighting group, whose members roamed the subway and streets in red berets, offering a sense of safety to some New Yorkers who felt especially jittery at a time when crime was far more rampant in the city than it is now.The group earned its share of headlines, but Mr. Sliwa, a former McDonald’s night manager, later acknowledged that some of them were based on events that had been faked for the publicity.Fernando MateoAndrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Mateo, a restaurateur with ties to New York’s taxi industry, was born in the Dominican Republic and is a longtime Republican fund-raiser. He gained his own measure of notoriety when it emerged that he had acted as a middleman in fund-raising efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio that attracted scrutiny from investigators.Republican leaders were divided over which candidate was the best option to vie for leadership of a city where Democrats hold an edge of more than six to one in registered voters. The Manhattan, Queens and Bronx Republican Parties endorsed Mr. Mateo; Mr. Sliwa had the backing of the Staten Island and Brooklyn parties.The Republican nominating contest on Tuesday came as the party has grown increasingly irrelevant in the nation’s large cities, aligning itself firmly with rural, conservative voters since Donald J. Trump’s ascent.Nate Schweber contributed reporting. More

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      Primary Day in New York: Rain, Short Lines and a New Kind of Ballot

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      New York City voters used ranked-choice voting for the first time in a mayoral race on Tuesday, and many of them took it in stride.Laura Benedek, 75, has not missed an election since she cast her first vote — for Lyndon B. Johnson as president. Seated in her wheelchair on Tuesday, outside her polling place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she flaunted her “I Voted” sticker. More

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      After voting, Eric Adams leans into his appeal to working-class New Yorkers.

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      By turns triumphant, teary-eyed and playful, Eric Adams — the Brooklyn borough president and retired police captain who has led the recent polls in New York’s topsy-turvy mayoral race — cast his ballot early Monday morning in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.“I am a New York story,” he told supporters who cheered “Eric! Eric!” after he voted, standing not far from the Brownsville neighborhood where he spent a childhood punctuated with economic and educational struggles, emphasizing a theme that has struck a chord with many working-class New Yorkers. “This is a moment where the little guy has won.”The outcome of the race — a Democratic primary that will almost certainly determine New York’s next leader at a critical moment — remains very much in flux, with several other candidates within striking distance of the lead. But Mr. Adams said he had been feeling certain of victory for some time, buoyed by thoughts of his mother, who died about two months ago.“I slept like a baby,” he said. “I heard my mother’s voice saying, ‘Baby — you got this.’”“I slept like a baby,” @ericadamsfornyc says after voting. “It must have been after the first debate… I heard my mother’s voice saying, ‘Baby—you got this.” pic.twitter.com/TlBpvEXaMB— Anne Barnard (@ABarnardNYT) June 22, 2021
      Mr. Adams’s Primary Day tour began just blocks from the townhouse that he owns and claims as his primary residence, even though reporters have raised questions about how much time he actually spends there.He has called the issue an attempt by rivals to distract from his Everyman appeal.Later, outside Ebbets Field Middle School in nearby Crown Heights, Mr. Adams was approached by campaign volunteers, poll workers and passers-by for selfies. One asked for his business card “so that I can contact you.” An aide gave him his card instead.Mr. Adams went out of his way to greet a uniformed parks worker who was cleaning a public bathroom. “How are you?” he called through the chicken-wire fence. “Keeping it clean?”“Trying!” she said.“That’s what happened on this trail that a lot of people don’t understand,” Mr. Adams said in an interview, frequently pausing to put voters’ queries first. “The more people who got to know me and my story the more they said, you know what, I see myself in Eric’s journey.”Mr. Adams has drawn significant support from Black voters, but also working-class New Yorkers broadly, reflecting an upsurge in economic anxiety and concerns over crime as the city tries to recover from the pandemic.“We sit around the table on Thanksgiving and people share their stories,” he said. “Everyone knows someone who’s been a victim of crime. Everyone knows someone who had learning disabilities, who didn’t get the resources, or on the verge of homelessness. The number of times I had to navigate, ‘Am I going to get this check in time to pay this rent?’” More

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      Policing and the New York Mayoral Race

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      Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the New York City mayoral race began, two issues dominated: the pandemic and the police. The city saw enormous protests last summer that prompted calls to rethink or defund the police department. In the last few months, however, the progressive consensus has unraveled. While overall crime was down at the end of 2020, acts of violence were on the incline: Murders were up 45 percent in New York, and shootings had increased by 97 percent. A central question of the contest has become: Is New York safer with more or fewer police officers?Today, we see this tension play out in a single household: Yumi Mannarelli and her mother, Misako Shimada.Ms. Mannarelli took part in the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and is an ardent supporter of defunding the police. Ms. Shimada, who was born in Japan, is unconvinced. The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes has meant she feels safer with a police presence. On today’s episodeMisako Shimada and Yumi Mannarelli, a mother and daughter who live in New York City. Early voting Sunday morning at Saratoga Village in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is the first year that New York City voters have been able to vote early in a mayoral election.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBackground reading The New York City mayoral race has been fluid, but the centrality of crime and policing has remained constant. There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo and Rob Szypko.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Theo Balcomb, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman and Wendy Dorr. More

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      Primary Day Is Finally Here

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Watch out for showers and thunderstorms most of the day. The temperature will fall from the mid-70s in the morning to the mid-60s by evening. More

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      New Yorkers Vote for Mayor in Race Tinged With Acrimony and Uncertainty

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      Voters on Tuesday will participate in the city’s first mayoral election using ranked-choice voting, a system that may delay the declaration of a winner until mid-July.When the New York City mayoral primary campaign began, the city was steeped in grave uncertainty about its future. Candidates laid out radically different visions for how they would guide a still-shuttered metropolis out of overlapping crises around public health, the economy and racial injustice. More

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      Here’s How New Yorkers Feel About Ranked-Choice Voting

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      New Yorkers are using a new voting system citywide for the first time, but in interviews, many seemed characteristically unfazed: “It’s real easy if people just learn how to read.”A New York City mayoral race that began over Zoom during the height of the pandemic came down to street campaigning in its final hours on Monday, with as many as half a million voters preparing to cast ballots when polls open on Tuesday. More