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      Adams’s Re-election Bid Fueled by Real Estate Titans and Out-of-Towners

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      The mayor has raised $1.3 million for re-election since January, relying on many wealthy donors from New York City and beyond.Despite falling poll numbers and critical news coverage, Mayor Eric Adams clearly has the continued monetary support of two influential spheres of influence: real estate leaders and the donor class from New York City and beyond.Mr. Adams has raised $1.3 million since January for his 2025 re-election effort in the latest reporting period, drawing maximum $2,100 donations from real estate magnates like Marc Holliday, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, and its founder, Steve Green; and Alexander and Helena Durst, members of The Durst Organization real estate dynasty, according to new filings with the city’s Campaign Finance Board. About $550,000 came from donors outside New York City who live in the suburbs, Florida and other states — a continuation of a pattern displayed early in his tenure, when he held fund-raisers in Beverly Hills and Chicago in his first months in office.As mayor, Mr. Adams has often taken positions that benefit the real estate industry, including being supportive of rent increases and criticizing state lawmakers for failing to replace a tax-incentive program for developers known as 421a.He has frequently met with real estate leaders and has used One Vanderbilt, one of the city’s newest skyscrapers, developed by SL Green, as a backdrop for photo ops and news conferences. As a small-time landlord, Mr. Adams once declared, “I am real estate.” And major landlords have consistently been among his most faithful donors.Mr. Adams frequently asserts that his political base of working-class New Yorkers and churchgoers understands and supports his mission. But the continued support from real estate interests only furthers the notion that Mr. Adams may be too aligned with major developers.Vito Pitta, a lawyer for the Adams campaign, insisted that the mayor’s success in addressing crime and job losses was driving donations.“Our campaign is well on its way to raising the maximum amount it can spend under the city’s campaign finance system — just 18 months into the mayor’s tenure — because New Yorkers see that Mayor Adams is lowering crime, increasing employment, and moving our city in the right direction,” Mr. Pitta said in a statement.Marc Holliday, left center, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, donated the maximum allowed to Mr. Adams, who watches from the side.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesThe spending cap for the 2025 primary is $7.9 million. Under the city’s generous public financing system, his campaign is expected to have about $4.6 million on hand, after matching funds are included.Mr. Adams has faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks. His approval rating fell to 46 percent in a Siena College poll last month. A longtime associate of his was charged in a straw donor scheme to raise money for his mayoral campaign; the mayor was not implicated. The New York Times reported that a photo of a police officer killed in the line of duty, which the mayor said he had long carried in his wallet, was created by employees in the mayor’s office last year, and was made to look old.The mayor also drew attention for his response last month to an 84-year-old tenant-rights activist whose family had escaped the Holocaust. The mayor publicly likened her to a plantation owner after he believed the activist had been disrespectful to him.Still, Mr. Adams, a Democrat who ran for office on a public safety message, could be difficult to beat in 2025.He is likely eager to show off a large war chest to fend off a serious competitor. He won a competitive Democratic primary in 2021 by only 7,197 votes.“The bigger the fund-raising number, the less likely that someone else gets into the race,” said Chris Coffey, a former campaign manager for Andrew Yang, one of the mayor’s primary opponents in 2021.Mr. Coffey said that the mayor’s low approval rating was not too worrisome, noting that Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, had an approval rating as low as 24 percent in his second year in office and still won two more terms.“If the city has made progress on public safety, it’s really hard to see the mayor have any re-election challenges,” Mr. Coffey said.The real estate industry once again also provided the largest donor base for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo Democrat who narrowly won a full four-year term in November. Of the $4.5 million her campaign raised in the first six months of the year, more than $950,000 came from developers and real estate investors, and more from other industries with business before the state, according to an analysis of her public filings by The Times.At least 45 donors connected to the real estate industry chipped in $18,000, the new legal maximum for statewide candidates, including Mr. Holliday, Scott Rechler and Jeff Blau. Mr. Rechler and Mr. Blau are both Democratic megadonors whose firms are competing with Mr. Holliday’s for a license to operate a casino in the New York City area.Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign raised $4.5 million since January, with roughly a fifth coming from developers and real estate investors.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesWith New York facing an affordable housing crunch, Ms. Hochul has spent much of the year fighting for new government programs to spur development. On Tuesday, she announced she would bypass opponents in the legislature and take executive actions that had been a priority of the real estate industry.Other major donors included members of the Sands family, which controls the Rochester-based beverage giant Constellation Brands; well-known Albany lobbyists Emily Giske, Giorgio DeRosa and the firm Cozen O’Connor; and tech executives like Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber. Ms. Hochul also brought in more than $250,000 at a fund-raiser this month from board members and doctors connected to Somos Community Care, a Bronx-based nonprofit that has tapped into lucrative government health programs.Ms. Hochul managed to raise the sum — plus another $1.5 million for the state Democratic Party — despite new, stricter contributions limits that cap individual gifts at $18,000, down from nearly $70,000 last election cycle. For much of the period, Ms. Hochul was also dealing with tumult within her political operation after reporting by The Times prompted the ouster of her top political aide.For his part, Mr. Adams was a prolific fund-raiser in 2021 and received significant support from a super PAC, which received donations from Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Mets and is vying for a casino license in the city. Earlier this year, SL Green retained Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff, to aid its bid to build a Caesars Palace casino in Times Square.A Broadway fund-raiser for the mayor last month at a showing of the musical “New York, New York” proved especially lucrative. The campaign raised about $600,000 at the event, which was organized by Mr. Carone, according to Evan Thies, a spokesman for the campaign.Helena Durst, principal of the Durst Organization, donated the maximum of $2,100 to Mr. Adams’s campaign.Santiago Mejia/The New York TimesFred Elghanayan, a founder of TF Cornerstone, a real estate company, and Todd Cooper, a founder of RIPCO Real Estate, both donated to the Adams campaign. A dozen people who work at Morgan & Morgan, a national personal injury law firm, donated a total of $25,000 to the mayor’s campaign. Four employees of Meridian Properties, another real estate firm, donated $8,400. Six people who work at another real estate firm, Top Rock Holdings, each gave the maximum of $2,100 to the mayor’s campaign.Many donations came from outside the state, including from Alex Havenick, a gambling and cannabis entrepreneur in Miami, and David Kovacs, a virtual reality video game developer in Miami. Brock Pierce, a cryptocurrency investor who once flew Mr. Adams to Puerto Rico on his private jet, donated $2,100. He listed his address as a ZIP code in Puerto Rico.There were plenty of smaller donations as well. A senior pastor at a church in Queens donated $250 to the mayor’s campaign, as did the director of a New York City children’s theater. More

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      Will New Yorkers Ever Have Another Mayor They Like?

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      Eric Adams — like most of his recent predecessors — hovers around a 50 percent approval rating. It’s hard to govern when only half the city is on your side.In the early 1990s, the historian Melvin Holli set out to solve a problem with a book called “America’s Big City Mayors.” Although governing a place like New York or Philadelphia was one of the most important political jobs in the country, we had no scholarly ranking of mayors, no orderly system of evaluating them as we did for presidents, thanks to the work of midcentury academics. Relying on surveys of biographers, social scientists and experts in urban policy and on an elaborate methodology, Mr. Holli concluded that Fiorello La Guardia was the best mayor in the history of the United States. No other New York mayor appeared on the “best” list; three were included among the worst.New York City is a notoriously difficult place to manage, and measuring success in real time is also complicated. On the face of it, the question of whether the current mayor is popular or not would appear to be a simple one determined by statistics, anecdote and so on, but it is knottier than that. In polling at the end of June, fewer than half of New Yorkers — 46 percent — indicated that they had a favorable opinion of Eric Adams, a decline of four points from his numbers in December.By contrast, Bill de Blasio, whose mayoralty was dominated by conversations about his irresponsible gym habits and deficits of personality, was doing a lot better at the same point in his tenure. Even as the bourgeois creative class and the business elites were coming to reject him as if he were rancid fast food, 18 months in, he was holding at a 58 percent favorability rating, with 81 percent of Black voters expressing a positive view of him.Mr. Adams’s problems occupy a wide space well outside the parameters of charisma. He has been criticized for a lack of vision or signature initiatives analogous to universal pre-K; a cronyist’s approach to staffing; a habit of petty and bizarre distortions of the truth. Some of this was predictable. During the campaign, his evasiveness led to headlines like, “Where Does Eric Adams Really Live?” because it was not obvious, a confusion that he blamed on shoddy paperwork at the hands of a homeless accountant.Last week, we learned that a picture of an old friend, a cop who died in the line of duty 36 years ago, had not in fact been held closely by the mayor in his wallet for decades as he had previously suggested. Rather, it was printed in his office last year by underlings, in response to the death of two police officers in Harlem.These shortcomings justify apprehension and may lead voters to turn toward someone new in 2025. And yet it is also true that New Yorkers hoping for a galvanizing figure, a mayor for all people, might need to adjust their expectations and make do with a mayor for half the people.Our current political landscape makes it too hard for a broad-consensus affection to emerge for anyone — it’s almost impossible to imagine how widely embraced La Guardia was, or even Ed Koch in his first term. Over the past 10 years, most mayoral approval ratings have hovered just above or below 50 percent. Although Michael Bloomberg had an approval rate of 31 percent early in his tenure, he briefly reached 75 percent during his deft handling of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, before slipping down in the years ahead.The 50 percent benchmark is so hard to surpass now, said George Arzt, a longtime political consultant in the city, because the electorate is so fragmented. La Guardia could govern well in part because as a liberal Republican who supported the New Deal he could connect to voters across constituencies. And there were simply fewer constituencies to think about.Lacking the sharp ideological divisions that burden the party today, Northeastern Democrats were unified by a strong labor movement. La Guardia had to forge an alliance with Jews and Protestants, with immigrants from Northern Europe and Southern Europe, but he was not operating in a city of 600 spoken languages. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Dominican immigrants to the city alone multiplied more than tenfold, reaching 1.1 million.Supporters of Eric Adams — and most people presumably — appreciate that violent crime and hate crimes are trending downward. Shootings have fallen 25 percent year to date. “I don’t think people are looking for vision; I think they’re looking not to get killed,” Alan Fishman, a banker, philanthropist and Adams backer, told me. “What you hear about cronyism and dysfunction, that doesn’t affect people day to day. It’s inside baseball.”What does touch people is the sincerity of the commitment. Whatever you thought of his policies, it was hard to doubt Michael Bloomberg’s devotion to New York. Mr. Adams and Mr. de Blasio have been cast as temperamental opposites, but they share a prominent trait, a deep investment in their own marketing. (This was evident most recently in Mr. de Blasio’s case, with the long, moody interview he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, gave The Times announcing their separation, when the alternative in situations like this is typically an aloof three-line news release.)Mr. de Blasio chased a national profile more or less from the moment he was elected mayor, and he was absent from the city for stretches when he ran for president, remaining in the race even though it had become clear his bid would go nowhere. Eager to engage the high-style factions of New York his predecessor ignored, Mr. Adams has been selling us on his “swagger” since his first week in office. History shows us that it is a very rare for the mayor of New York to move on to higher office. The goal ought to be legacy rather than fame. More

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      Six Charged With Organizing Illegal Donations to Adams’s 2021 Campaign

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      One defendant knew Mayor Eric Adams when they were police officers. Prosecutors did not accuse the mayor of knowing about what they called a scheme to acquire thousands of dollars in extra public matching funds.A retired inspector who worked and socialized with Mayor Eric Adams when they were both members of the New York Police Department was charged on Friday with conspiring with four construction executives and a bookkeeper to funnel illegal donations to Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign.The 27-count indictment accuses the defendants, some of whom had sophisticated knowledge of campaign finance law, of trying to conceal the source of thousands of dollars in donations by making them in the names of colleagues and relatives. The indictment, announced by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, says the group sought influence and perhaps city contracts, but it does not accuse Mr. Adams or his campaign of misconduct and does not suggest he was aware of the scheme.Mr. Bragg said in a statement that the defendants had concocted “a deliberate scheme to game the system in a blatant attempt to gain power.”In addition to the retired police inspector, Dwayne Montgomery, those charged were Shamsuddin Riza, Millicent Redick, Ronald Peek and the brothers Yahya and Shahid Mushtaq.The indictment describes the Mushtaqs as principals in EcoSafety Consultants, a construction firm that is also charged in the indictment. Mr. Riza, the operator of a second construction firm that was separately charged, has also worked with EcoSafety, the district attorney’s office said. Ms. Redick worked for him as a bookkeeper. Mr. Peek works at another construction safety firm.EcoSafety has been a city subcontractor since April 2021, according to records maintained by the city comptroller’s Office. The city has paid the firm $470,000 in that time.Scott Grauman, a lawyer for Shahid Mushtaq and EcoSafety, noted that his clients had pleaded not guilty pleas at an arraignment on Friday. “We will be vigorously defending against the allegations,” he added. Yahya Mushtaq had not been arraigned, but Mr. Grauman, who represents him as well, said he would also plead not guilty and vigorously fight the charges.Alexei Grosshtern, a lawyer for Ms. Redick, the bookkeeper, said his client knew only one of the other defendants, Mr. Riza. Ms. Redick, Mr. Grosshtern added, was unaware of any scheme and was surprised to be arrested. A lawyer for Mr. Riza could not immediately be reached for comment.Mr. Montgomery is related by marriage to Mr. Riza and is a former colleague of Mr. Adams’s. “Montgomery was a colleague of the mayor in the Police Department whom he knew socially and worked on criminal justice issues with,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for the mayor’s 2021 campaign. “Dozens of former police officers and criminal justice advocates hosted events for the mayor over the course of the campaign.”Mr. Montgomery’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, said his client had no business with the city and had not asked Mr. Adams, a friend of 35 years, to take any action on his behalf. “Dwayne Montgomery is a New York City hero, not a manufactured hero,” Mr. Ricco said, pointing to his client’s three decades of service with the Police Department and his commitment to the Harlem neighborhood where he grew up and where he was respected by the community. After Mr. Montgomery retired from the department in 2009, he was the chief executive of a security company, Overwatch Services, for five years. A City Hall spokesman said Philip Banks III, Mr. Adams’s deputy mayor for public safety, bought the firm from Mr. Montgomery around 2015. Winnie Greco, an adviser to the mayor, served with Mr. Banks on the Overwatch Services management team, according to an archived copy of the company’s website. Ms. Greco declined to comment.Mr. Montgomery’s biography on the archived web page of a separate security company, Public Safety Reimagined, which he co-founded last year, says he is also the director of integrity for Local 237 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents some city workers. New York City’s complex campaign finance law sits at the heart of the conduct detailed in the court papers. To diminish the influence of big donors and to help less-connected candidates get a leg up, New York City matches the first $250 of a resident’s donation eight to one. The defendants are accused of trying to mask large donations by funneling them through so-called straw donors. That enabled the campaign to garner more city funds, and potentially amplified the defendants’ influence with the incoming mayor.It was unclear how much public money was spent as a result of the scheme.On Friday, Mr. Thies thanked prosecutors for “their hard work on behalf of taxpayers.”“The campaign always held itself to the highest standards and we would never tolerate these actions,” Mr. Thies said. “The campaign will of course work with the D.A.’s office, the Campaign Finance Board and any relevant authorities.”The defendants held two fund-raisers for Mr. Adams, one in August 2020 and the other a year later. The second took place after Mr. Adams had won the Democratic primary, effectively ensuring his election as mayor.For each fund-raiser, according to prosecutors, the defendants recruited straw donors and then reimbursed them.“I’ll put the money up for you,” Mr. Riza texted one relative, according to the indictment.The defendants seemed aware that they were engaging in risky behavior.“You gotta be careful cause you gotta make sure you do it through workers they trust, that’s not gonna talk, because remember a guy went to jail for that,” Mr. Peek told Mr. Riza at one point, according to the indictment.The defendants appeared hopeful that their donations would help them win contracts on a development project. In July 2021, Mr. Riza forwarded an email advertising the project to Mr. Montgomery.“FYI! This is the one I want, Safety, Drywall, and Security one project but we all can eat!” Mr. Riza wrote, the indictment says.It was unclear whether Mr. Adams appeared at the fund-raisers. But Mr. Montgomery told Mr. Riza that the mayor would be more likely to do so if they could promise a certain amount of money would be raised, a practice that is not uncommon among politicians.Mr. Adams “doesn’t want to do anything if he doesn’t get 25 Gs,” Mr. Montgomery said, according to the indictment.Mr. Adams’s campaign said Mr. Montgomery appeared to be referring to the standard amount expected of hosts for a general election fund-raiser.In a July 2021 phone call, Mr. Riza told Mr. Peek: “I know what the campaign finance laws is. Make sure it’s $1,000 in your name and $1,000 in another person’s name because the matching funds is eight-to-one, so $2,000 is $16,000.” More

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      New York Primary Election 2023: Live Results

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      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. Reporting contributed by Dana Rubinstein. More

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      Meet the New Mayor: How a Refugee Won Over a Conservative German Town

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      The election of Ryyan Alshebl, a young man who fled Syria, offers surprising lessons for a Germany wrestling with its multicultural identity after an influx of refugees in 2015.The beer was flowing, the bratwurst were sizzling and the brass band at the village May Day festival led the crowd in ever tipsier renditions of the local drinking song.Clinking glasses all around was Ryyan Alshebl, a lanky, bearded 29-year-old from Syria.Eight years ago, Mr. Alshebl was part of the historic influx of refugees who crossed the Mediterranean Sea by dinghy and trekked the continent on foot, seeking asylum in Germany and other countries.Now he is the new mayor of Ostelsheim, a village of 2,700 people and tidily kept streets nestled in the rolling hills near the Black Forest in southwestern Germany.Ostelsheim appears to be the first German town to elect a mayor from the nearly one million Syrian refugees who reached the country in 2015, a wave that provoked a right-wing backlash and upended the political landscape. And the story of how this small, tight-knit village chose a refugee as mayor holds clues for a nation wrestling with an ever more multicultural identity.“If you look at our state elections, Ostelsheim is the kind of place that votes so conservatively. I thought it was going to be very, very tough for him,” said Yvonne Boeckh, a tax accountant, shouting over a rowdy polka number at the festival. “It’s just remarkable.”When Mr. Alshebl reached Germany with a college degree in banking, politics was hardly on his mind. Alone without his parents, who stayed behind in Syria, he threw himself into his new world and its traditions.Yet like many of the 2015 refugees, now gaining citizenship and building new lives, he never wanted to hide where he came from or apologize for it. And he rejected Germany’s old notions of integration.“Integration​ ​was a term that meant: We have a group of people that we need to find a way to teach some of the language and get them working,” he said. “And what kind of jobs? To work for the baker, the butcher, the shoemaker. But not to become mayor.”An aerial view of Ostelsheim, which dates to the fourth century and is nestled in rolling hills near the Black Forest.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesThe 2015 refugees were welcomed at first with an exuberant “Wilkommenskultur” — and former chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous line, “we can do it.” But wariness among parts of the population was leveraged by the far right, who became a force in German politics. That trend has regained momentum — even pushing mainstream politicians into harsher positions — as the numbers of people seeking asylum are again rising.A leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats recently argued for removing Germany’s constitutional commitments to offer asylum. Today, over half of Germans polled believe the disadvantages of immigration outweigh advantages.Yet a majority of 2015 refugees have successfully found jobs and learned the language. And some have not simply integrated, but become leaders. For these newcomers, however, electoral success has been more elusive — even in large, multicultural cities like Berlin.Another Syrian refugee ran in the capital as a Green Party candidate for the federal parliament in the autumn of 2021. He faced death threats, was attacked at a subway stop and ultimately withdrew his candidacy.Mr. Alshebl, meeting with Franziska Binczik, the head of the kindergarten, in Althengstett, Germany, a village near Ostelsheim, in May.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesMr. Alshebl’s journey from Syria began in Sweida Province, where his middle-class family was passionate about politics, but kept their conversations secret. When President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian government drafted him into the army, he fled the country.Joining him was a friend, Ghaith Akel, a jovial tech engineer. The two 21-year-olds escaped to Turkey and spent eight nerve-racking hours on a rubber boat in the Mediterranean. They journeyed by train, bus and on foot across Europe to reach Germany.German officials sent the pair to the town of Althengstett, next door to Ostelsheim, in the rural Swabia region, where many people work in agriculture or the region’s famous auto industry. At first, they found the locals — mostly white Germans, with heavy regional dialects — daunting.“They put up boundaries,” Mr. Akel recalled. “You have to get past each and every one of those barriers to reach them. Anything new or strange, they find worrisome — ‘he’s not blonde, he doesn’t speak Swabian dialect.’”Eventually, they discovered the key to gaining acceptance by the community. They joined the local clubs.Mr. Alshebl volunteered at the recreation center. When a leadership position organizing games opened up, he ran. “People could have said, ‘No, we can’t have this Syrian guy who doesn’t know anything about this place,’” he said. “But they gave me a chance.”Ostelsheim’s town hall. Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesThat experience rekindled his interest in politics. He vowed to perfect his German, enrolled in a vocational program for government administration and applied for an internship at the Althengstett town council. Eventually, the Althengstett mayor, Clemens Götz, hired him.Mr. Alshebl also learned to appreciate the local food.Ulrich Gellar, an Ostelsheim retiree, beamed at Mr. Alshebl’s enjoyment of spaetzle, a cheesy noodle dish, and maultaschen, the local dumplings. “And he drinks beer with us,” he said. “Little things like that have a big impact.”When Mr. Alshebl heard about Ostelsheim’s mayoral race last winter, Mr. Götz encouraged him to run.The main rival was a wealthy Ostelsheimer, with three children and a large family home.His friend, Mr. Akel, was nervous for him. “It’s a small village,’” he said, adding, “Their views on refugees are not always the nicest.”But Mr. Akel helped his friend campaign, with a simple strategy: Talk to everyone.Mr. Alshebl not only went door to door, he put up advertisements offering house calls on request.The May Day festivities were held at the local soccer club.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesSipping beers at the May Day celebration, locals recalled how intently he listened. Mothers unburdened complaints about day care shortages. Seniors were impressed by his familiarity with their retirement home grievances. For the first time since anyone could remember, a mayoral campaign energized the village.Not everyone was friendly. On local news websites, some readers posted comments asking how anyone could vote for a refugee. One family confronted Mr. Alshebl with news reports of refugees committing vandalism elsewhere in Germany. Others spread rumors he would impose Islamic sharia law.Friends in Ostelsheim urged Mr. Alshebl to advertise he was not Muslim; he is from Syria’s minority Druze sect. But he refused: “I didn’t want to stigmatize Muslims.” On election night, he won decisively — with his biggest support from Ostelsheim’s oldest, most conservative residents.Rainer Sixt, head of the band playing the May Day festival, insisted the surprise victory made sense. “The values in some places abroad, like tradition and home, are more like here in the countryside than in our own big cities,” he said.After the celebration, Mr. Alshebl visited his mentor, Mr. Götz. and his wife, Isabel. It was funny, they agreed, how long it has taken Germany to embrace an identity as a country of immigrants; since the 1950s, it has taken in Turkish guest workers, Balkan civil war refugees and Eastern Bloc exiles.A children’s soccer game at the local club, in May. Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times“This was long the reality in Germany,” Ms. Götz said. “Only now, the public finally became aware that Germany is not the same thing it was before.”Sipping his coffee, Mr. Alshebl grinned mischievously: “Or, at least, not since the election in Ostelsheim.”Mr. Alshebl, who officially starts his new job next month, now straddles two worlds — a comfortable one in Germany, and his family’s life in Syria, where they struggle to survive in a country ravaged by 12 years of war.“Everything OK?” he asked his mother recently, quickly picking up her call in his office.“We’re all fine — just waiting for the electricity, like always,” she said. Their diverging paths are palpable. Mr. Alshebl throws German words into the conversation, often oblivious to his family’s confusion.He compares his life to that of Syrian friends who have resettled in cosmopolitan German cities. There, they can create a small community, set up shops to buy familiar foods and speak Arabic together.But driving past Ostelsheim’s charming stone buildings, Mr. Alshebl mused that he was elected mayor not in spite of his l community — but because of it.“Maybe the only place you can become a mayor as a refugee is actually in a conservative country town,” he said. “Because to live here, you have to be a part of them.”“Maybe the only place you can become a mayor as a refugee is actually in a conservative country town,” Mr. Alshebl said. “Because to live here, you have to be a part of them.”Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times More

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      After Historic Primary in Philadelphia, a New Mayor Will Face Old Problems

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      Cherelle Parker’s win in the Democratic primary is a sign of how the city has changed. But Philadelphia’s challenges remain deep and daunting.PHILADELPHIA — The afternoon before Election Day, Jennifer Robinson, 41, was trying to manage her two small children in the quiet corner of a public library in a pocket of her city that had endured generations of abandonment. She was despondent about the state of Philadelphia, most of all about the crime, but she talked about the mayoral primary as if it had little bearing on any of it.“Nobody has any answers,” Ms. Robinson said, shifting her restless 11-month-old from arm to arm. “It’s a feeling of hopelessness.”This is the city that Cherelle Parker will be leading as mayor if she wins the general election in November, and these are the sentiments she will be trying to turn around. On Tuesday, Ms. Parker, a former state legislator and City Council member, secured a surprisingly decisive victory in a Democratic primary that had been seen as a tight five-way race up until Election Day.The huge number of undecideds in the last polls appear to have broken heavily for Ms. Parker, 50, the only Black candidate of the five main contenders hoping to lead a city where Black people make up more than 40 percent of the population and where the Black neighborhoods have been especially hard hit by gun violence and Covid.If she wins the general election, which she is favored to do given that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Philadelphia more than seven to one, Ms. Parker will be the first woman in a line of 100 mayors.That list of men goes back centuries, before the city had established itself as the cradle of American independence, and long before President Biden came to Independence Hall last September to warn the nation about threats to democracy.For Philadelphia, Ms. Parker’s primary victory is a sign of how the city has changed in just the last half-century. For most of the 1970s, the mayor was Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner who embraced brutal police tactics, particularly toward Black Philadelphians. But the city’s challenges remain deep and daunting.At least a half dozen Philadelphia public schools have been shut down because of asbestos contamination, a predictable debacle in a city where the average age of public school buildings is over 70 years. Housing costs are out of the reach for many residents. There is a city staffing shortage, with thousands of municipal positions unfilled. Hundreds of Philadelphians have died in recent years from opioid overdoses.Jennifer Robinson has become increasingly frustrated with local politicians over the last few years and doubts that any candidates for mayor can make a difference.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesLooming over all of this are the killings. Rates of gun violence have risen in cities large and small across the country, but they have been particularly severe in Philadelphia, a city of 1.6 million, nearly a quarter of whom live in poverty. More than 500 people were killed in each of the past two years, the highest annual tolls for the city on record, and many hundreds more have been injured by gunfire. The number of shootings and homicides has declined this year, but the city is awash in guns; Republican legislators have tried to remove the district attorney over the enforcement of gun laws, while city officials have sued Republican legislators for limiting their ability to enact stricter ones.Philadelphians are virtually unanimous in their alarm about the violence but have been less unified about the solutions. Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney who has insisted that the city cannot simply arrest its way out of the crisis, was re-elected by an overwhelming margin in 2021, with some of his strongest showings in the neighborhoods most scarred by violence.On Tuesday, many of those same neighborhoods voted for Ms. Parker, who pledged to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk.“People are not feeling safe, they’re feeling that a sense of lawlessness is being allowed to prevail,” she said in an interview shortly before she launched her mayoral campaign. “We can’t ignore that.”These proposals have faced strong pushback and skepticism about the ability to hire hundreds of officers at a time when police departments nationwide have struggled with recruiting.Her Republican opponent in the November general election is David Oh, also a former City Council member.Ms. Parker hugged supporters at a polling site during the primary election on Tuesday.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary, Ms. Parker’s pitch to voters was that she understood firsthand what their lives were like, as a Philadelphia native, as a Black woman who was the daughter of a teenage mother and as the mother of a Black son.This appeal has created lofty hopes among Black voters, said Carl Day, a pastor who leads the Culture Changing Christians Worship Center in one of the poorest and most violent areas of the city. “The expectation is definitely there from the Black community that she knows what we’re going through and so she will definitely bring about change,” he said.Still, he said, these hopes appeared to be mostly held by older Black voters, who were also more likely to embrace Parker’s agenda, including her push for more policing.Younger Black Philadelphians, Pastor Day said, were more skeptical of Ms. Parker and even worried about some of her policing plans. Already, Pastor Day said, he had seen younger people online wondering what this means, and saying that nothing was going to change. There is a seeming contradiction here: that a city deeply unhappy with the way things are going just voted for a candidate who was endorsed by dozens of sitting lawmakers, City Council members and ward leaders — even the current mayor, Jim Kenney, a term-limited Democrat who has become highly unpopular, said he voted for her.Isaiah Thomas, who won an at-large City Council seat on Tuesday, said that even with that support, it was not fair to call her the establishment candidate — most of her opponents had their own networks of connections. But he said the breadth of her support, including trade unions and lawmakers, showed that she knew how to build, and maintain, coalitions.“She’s a worker,” said Mr. Thomas, who joined the Council in 2020 and worked alongside Ms. Parker managing its response to the crises of the last three years. “She understands government, she understands the budget.”Carl Day, a pastor, said older Black voters were more likely than younger Black voters to embrace Parker’s agenda, including her push for more policing.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn state government, any Democratic mayor would find a more willing partner than his or her immediate predecessors. Last November, Democrats won control of the Pennsylvania House for the first time in a dozen years, a majority that was reconfirmed after a special election on Tuesday night. The current House Speaker, Joanna McClinton, represents part of Philadelphia, as does the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The new governor, Josh Shapiro, and the majority of the Democratic caucus in the State Senate are from the region.“There’s reason to be more optimistic about Harrisburg’s relationship with Philadelphia than there has been in many years,” said State Senator Nikil Saval, a Democrat, who endorsed one of Ms. Parker’s opponents in the race but praised some of her accomplishments on the City Council, such as a program she helped create that offered low-interest loans to homeowners.Still, in interviews in Philadelphia this week, voters and local politicians alike said that the most urgent task of the new mayor would be to give the city a jolt of optimism. For many in the city’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, that might start with the attention of someone who has seen up close their daily struggles. But, people insisted, hope would stick only if there were tangible results.“I haven’t seen anyone help; it’s just getting worse,” said Ms. Robinson, the mother in the library. “For me to vote for someone, I’d have to see difference.” More

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      Democrat Donna Deegan Wins Jacksonville’s Mayor Race in Florida Upset

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      Donna Deegan is only the second Democrat to be elected mayor of Florida’s biggest city in the past three decades.MIAMI — Donna Deegan, a Democrat, was elected mayor of Jacksonville on Tuesday, shaking up the politics of Florida’s largest city, where Republican mayors have been in power for all but four of the last 30 years.Ms. Deegan, a former television news anchor, defeated Daniel Davis, a Republican endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had been seen as the likely favorite in the traditionally Republican stronghold. In recent years, Jacksonville had been the most populous city in the country with a Republican mayor, Lenny Curry, who is term-limited; that distinction now goes to Fort Worth, Texas.Ms. Deegan’s victory is a rare bright spot for Florida Democrats, whose losses have mounted in recent elections to the point that the party has little sway in the State Capitol and a thin candidate bench.But while Florida has become decidedly more Republican — and while many have viewed Mr. DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, as all-powerful in state politics — Jacksonville has emerged as a swingy corner of the state. A majority of voters in Duval County, which shares a consolidated government with the city of Jacksonville, voted for the Democratic nominee for governor in 2018, for the Republican mayor in 2019, for President Biden in 2020, for Mr. DeSantis last year, and now for Ms. Deegan, who will be the city’s first female mayor.“We made history tonight,” Ms. Deegan told cheering supporters Tuesday night after Mr. Davis conceded.Mr. Davis, the chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, out-raised Ms. Deegan by a margin of four to one and seemed like the sort of business-friendly Republican that has long dominated elections in Jacksonville.Corey Perrine/The Florida Times-Union, via Associated PressMs. Deegan campaigned as a change candidate, leaning into the relationships she had made in the community as she overcame breast cancer three times while working on television and as she later created the Donna Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps people diagnosed with breast cancer.“I made a decision when we got into this race that, no matter what happened, no matter what the landscape was like, we were going to lead with love over fear,” Ms. Deegan said Tuesday night. “We would not go with division. We would go with unity.”Mr. Davis, the chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, out-raised Ms. Deegan by a margin of four to one and seemed like the sort of business-friendly Republican that has long dominated elections in Jacksonville, a Navy and shipping town. Mr. Curry, the outgoing mayor, was previously the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.Mr. Davis was known as more of a moderate when he was a state lawmaker, and as the leader of JAX Chamber he supported positions such as protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But as a mayoral candidate, he campaigned from the political right, promising to promote causes espoused by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which is closely aligned with Mr. DeSantis. He also pledged to be tough on crime in a city that has struggled with stubbornly high crime rates for years, including under Republican leadership.In advertisements, Mr. Davis and other Republicans cast Ms. Deegan as “radical” for backing demonstrators after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — though Mr. Curry and other local Republicans also supported the protests at the time.On Tuesday night, Mr. Davis said he would be willing to help Ms. Deegan for the good of the city. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Mayor-elect Deegan is successful in making Jacksonville the best Jacksonville it can be,” he said. The city has a strong-mayor form of government, giving the mayor broad administrative powers.Mr. DeSantis, who won Duval County by an 11 percentage-point margin in November, did not endorse Mr. Davis until late March — after Mr. Davis had already been forced into Tuesday’s runoff against Ms. Deegan.Beyond his lukewarm endorsement, which took place via Twitter on a Friday afternoon, Mr. DeSantis offered Mr. Davis little support. The governor did not visit Jacksonville to campaign, unlike one of Florida’s other top Republicans, Senator Rick Scott, who spent last weekend knocking on voters’ doors.In 2020, Ms. Deegan lost a congressional race by 22 percentage points. On Wednesday morning, unofficial results showed she had won about 52 percent of the vote, compared with Mr. Davis’s 48 percent, a difference of about 9,000 votes. Turnout was about 33 percent.Though 39 percent of Duval County voters are registered Democrats, compared with 35 percent registered Republicans and 24 percent registered without party affiliation, Republican voters outnumbered Democratic ones by about 3.5 percentage points on Tuesday — meaning that Ms. Deegan won independents and crossover Republican votes.Five other Jacksonville Democrats were elected on Tuesday, one as property appraiser and four to the City Council.Ashley Walker, a political consultant for Ms. Deegan, said that campaigning on local issues and with a candidate who connected well with voters were key to flipping Jacksonville from red to blue.“Democrats in Florida have to eat the elephant piece by piece,” she said. “We have to go win in these local areas that are purple and get down to the base of some local campaigns to have any chance of coming back statewide.”Nicholas Nehamas More