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    The Digestible Politics of the Message Tee

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    Some elected officials and those in power are making use of a classic bit of fashion to deliver big ideas.With his approval rating dipping, New Yorkers seem to have lost trust in their mayor Eric Adams. But Mr. Adams is up front about where he’s putting his own trust right now: with God.On Tuesday, Mr. Adams, who announced that he would be running for re-election not as a Democrat but an independent, appeared at a press briefing wearing a T-shirt with the words “In God We Trust,” printed above an American flag.“This outfit is not campaigning, this outfit is my life,” Mr. Adams told reporters when asked about the white shirt, which looked to be about as premium as something purchased at a boardwalk souvenir stall.“I went through hell for 15 months and all I had was God,” said Mr. Adams, alluding to the federal corruption charges that were dropped against him this month.Mr. Adams is not the only political figure bringing the graphic T-shirt into formal political spaces.During President Trump’s prime-time address in early March a cluster of Democrats wore slogan T-shirts, providing a cotton-based clap-back to the president’s talking points. A few brandished the recognizable text: “Resist.” Florida representative Maxwell Frost, the first Gen-Z member of Congress wore a tee with the slogan “No Kings Live Here.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ro Khanna Wants to Take On JD Vance

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      Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, sees the vice president — a likely heir to President Trump’s political movement — as a unique threat to the constitutional order.Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, has been busy in the early months of 2025 trying out ways to make himself a counterweight to the Trump administration.In a social-media skirmish in February over the administration’s hiring and firing of an official who had written racist posts, Mr. Khanna drew the ire of Vice President JD Vance, who told him, “You disgust me.” More recently, Mr. Khanna has been staging town halls in Republican districts across California with a parade of progressive co-sponsors.Now, he is planning to shine an even brighter spotlight on Mr. Vance — and on himself — with speeches aimed directly at the vice president in April in Ohio, Mr. Vance’s home state, and at their shared alma mater, Yale Law School.In an interview, Mr. Khanna, 48, said he intended to cast Mr. Vance as a unique threat to America’s constitutional order, and argued that there was no time to waste in building the case against Mr. Vance, a likely heir to President Trump’s right-wing political movement.His speaking tour of several cities in Ohio, and on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., is also an effort to nudge himself into the national conversation about the Democratic Party’s future.For Mr. Khanna, who has represented much of Silicon Valley since unseating a Democratic incumbent in 2016, that has been a long-term project. He makes a cascade of cable news appearances and travels widely; his repeated trips to New Hampshire before the 2024 election included appearances as a surrogate for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and an unusual debate with Vivek Ramaswamy. At last year’s Democratic convention, he arranged to meet with delegates from 15 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      AOC Puts Her Own Spin on Bernie Sanders’s Pitch at Las Vegas Rally

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      The two progressive leaders, one young and one old, are touring Western cities with a similar message but a key difference in how they sell it.Even as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has fired up the American left over the past decade, his speeches have the flavor of a sociology lesson. He rarely makes himself the main character.Which is why it is striking how differently the young leader often seen as his successor, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, approaches politics.As she kicked off a Western tour with Mr. Sanders on Thursday in North Las Vegas, Nev., she introduced herself by name — which he never does — and used her experience waitressing to explain her politics to a crowd of several thousand people.“I don’t believe in health care, labor and human dignity because I’m a Marxist — I believe it because I was a waitress,” she said. “Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on and because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. And I know that we don’t have to live like this.”Mr. Sanders, by contrast, delivered a version of the same speech he has given since before Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was born, railing against corporate greed. “Eat the rich,” someone yelled.Unlike Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Sanders rarely injects his personal story, including his middle-class roots, into his speeches.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bernie Sanders Has an Idea for the Left: Don’t Run as Democrats

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      The Vermont senator, who has long had a tense relationship with the Democratic Party, suggested in an interview that more progressives should join him in running as independents.Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a message for his fellow progressives: Why don’t you shed the Democratic label and run as an independent, the way he does?Mr. Sanders’s admonition came in an interview with The New York Times on the eve of a three-day, five-city swing through Western states alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. He predicted that they would draw tens of thousands of people to rally against President Trump, Elon Musk and the influence of billionaires on the American government.“One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Sanders said in the interview on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of great leadership all over this country at the grass-roots level. We’ve got to bring that forward. And if we do that, we can defeat Trumpism and we can transform the political situation in America.”The suggestion that would-be leaders of the left should abandon the Democratic Party picks at a political scab that has never fully healed. Mr. Sanders, 83, a longtime independent, has had a tense yet codependent relationship with the party for decades.While he has never accepted the Democratic label for himself, he is a member of the Senate Democratic caucus and has run under the party brand when it was politically expedient, including his two bids for its presidential nomination. In 2017, he waged a hard-fought but ultimately futile effort to install an ally to lead the Democratic National Committee.In 2011, Mr. Sanders said during a radio interview that “it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition” for his 2012 re-election. The Vermont senator said at the time that he could not do it himself because he was not a Democrat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Are the Next Leaders of the Democratic Party?

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      Democrats will soon have a leadership vacuum, and there will be no shortage of highly ambitious governors, senators and transportation secretaries looking to fill it.American presidential elections tend to be a zero-sum game for the parties and their voters. Win, and everything is great. Lose, and your party is rudderless, leaderless and powerless.So it goes for the Democrats after Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat to former President Donald J. Trump. Questions about who will lead the party, and in what direction, will be hotly debated as officials explore what went wrong and forge plans to oppose the next Trump administration.Jockeying has already begun, and not all ambition may be rewarded. Appearing too eager to seize the opportunity presented by Ms. Harris’s defeat could backfire if Democrats are not ready to move forward. But if the period after the 2016 election is any guide, scores of Democratic figures and groups will try to fill the leadership void created as President Biden leaves office.Four years is a very long time in politics. In that time, Barack Obama went from a state senator to a presidential nominee. In even less time than that, Mr. Trump transformed from being a reality show figure pushing a racist lie about Mr. Obama to president himself. It is not out of the question that the Democrats’ next leader is not someone on the nation’s radar today.With those caveats, here’s a look at six groups of people who could determine which direction Democrats take as the second Trump administration unfolds.Kamala Harris and Tim WalzMs. Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota campaigning in August in Philadelphia. In his own concession speech last week, Mr. Walz signaled that he was eager to remain relevant in the party.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tim Walz and AOC Play Madden and Crazy Taxi and Talk Politics

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      Wearing a camouflage Vikings hat, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota joined Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, on Sunday to play Madden NFL 25 and talk about the election.“Are we going to play some ball? Are we ready to do it?” Mr. Walz said to the audience watching via the streaming platform Twitch, cautioning that he was prepared to lose. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, played as the Buffalo Bills, while Mr. Walz, a former high school football coach, went with the Vikings.He and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez talked about the politics of Congress, where Mr. Walz served before he became governor and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee. They compared the House to “public school,” with the Senate being more like “private school.” The House, they agreed, is where policy for the nation is shaped, and Mr. Walz said he would have been proud to have voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a signature achievement of President Biden’s administration.As the talk turned to the Senate and its procedures, Mr. Walz said knowingly to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez: “I don’t know where you stand, but I’m going to guess you and I are probably the same on the filibuster.”“Oh yeah, we have got to get rid of that thing,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez responded.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was an early proponent of removing the filibuster several years ago. Vice President Kamala Harris said in September that she would support ending the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade. After the stream ended, a Walz campaign official said that Mr. Walz “shares the vice president’s position.”In their Bills-Vikings Madden matchup on Sunday, which Mr. Walz and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez played for just a scoreless first half, they discussed housing policy and she asked him about voters who might be frustrated by the huge sums of money in politics or by the Biden administration’s positions about the war in Gaza. Twitch showed that about 12,500 people were watching on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s channel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Has Called for Mayor Eric Adams to Resign?

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      Even before news of Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment was made public on Wednesday, prominent elected officials had already called for his resignation, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. But after the news of the mayor’s indictment, the calls for his resignation promptly surged. Mr. Adams is not required to resign.Scott Stringer, the former New York City comptroller who is among the Democrats running against Mr. Adams in next year’s Democratic primary, said on Wednesday night that the mayor needed to “resign for the good of the city,” repeating a line used by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.“There is simply zero chance that the wheels of government will move forward from this full steam ahead,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement. “Instead, we are left with a broken down train wreck of a municipal government.”Brad Lander, the current New York City comptroller, who is also running for mayor, echoed the sentiment.“Mayor Adams, like all New Yorkers, deserves due process, the presumption of innocence, and his day in court,” he wrote on X. “However, it is clear that defending himself against serious federal charges will require a significant amount of the time and attention needed to govern this great city. The most appropriate path forward is for him to step down so that New York City can get the full focus its leadership demands.”Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who is also running for mayor against Mr. Adams, joined the chorus. “We need a leader who is fully focused, without distraction, on the enormous challenges we face — from housing affordability to public safety,” Mr. Myrie wrote on X. “A mayor under the weight of a serious indictment can no longer do that — and today I am calling on him to resign.”Councilman Shekar Krishnan, who represents a district in Queens, said Mr. Adams “will absolutely be unable to lead from inside a courtroom. He must resign.”State Senator John Liu, another Queens Democrat, said New Yorkers “need a mayor who is able to devote full time and full energy to putting the city on the right track, including recruitment and retention of top leadership for the city.” He added: “Mayor Adams is simply unable to do that for the foreseeable future and therefore, for the good of all New Yorkers, must resign immediately.”Other elected officials who have called for Mr. Adams to step down include State Senators Gustavo Rivera, Julia Salazar and Jabari Brisport; City Councilmembers Tiffany Cabán and Alexa Avilés; and Assemblymembers Emily Gallagher and Phara Souffrant Forrest. More

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      In Chicago, Biden and Harris Enact a Cast Change Onstage

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      The first night of the convention introduced the party’s new protagonist, and gave the old one a curtain call.Notice anything different?The organizers of the Democratic National Convention hope you did. Less than a month ago, the party upended the election when President Biden withdrew from the campaign, and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. Suddenly, the previously scheduled rerun of the 2020 election, tuned out by many weary voters, was new programming, with a new cast.The first night of the convention wasted little time unveiling its new star — even as it also had to finish off the last one’s story arc.Early in the evening, Ms. Harris made a surprise appearance onstage in Chicago to her campaign anthem, Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” The crowd of delegates exploded with cheers.This was an energy that the party had been missing for a while, and the prime-time production was designed to flaunt it. Ms. Harris’s kickoff remarks were brief —“We are moving forward!” — but there was a showmanship to the moment that suggested that the candidate plans to take the fight to Donald Trump where he lives, in the TV lights.If Ms. Harris’s unexpected cameo had a measure of Mr. Trump’s theatricality, however, it had a different energy: expansive and effusive rather than brassy and bold. Beaming and waving to the crowd in a camel-colored suit, she reflected the room’s energy back to it rather than basking in it and soaking it up.This was a big change from the convention Democrats anticipated having just weeks ago, under the tentative, 81-year-old Mr. Biden. The slogans onstage — “For the People, For the Future” — emphasized the message of newness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      AOC, Once an Outsider, Takes Center Stage at DNC

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      Four years ago, Democrats allotted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York a scant 90 seconds to speak at their convention. She used it to symbolically nominate Senator Bernie Sanders for president and never mentioned Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s name.So when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez took the convention stage on Monday night in Chicago shortly before Hillary Clinton, her prime-time speaking slot offered a vivid display of how far the Democratic Party and the leader of its progressive wing have moved to embrace each other since 2020.Greeted with chants of “A-O-C,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who made her name by taking on the Democratic establishment, delivered an affectionate tribute to Mr. Biden, laced into Donald J. Trump and forcefully endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as a champion of working Americans.“We know Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing palms of his Wall Street friends,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I, for one, am tired of hearing about how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life.”She added: “The truth is, Don, you cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business.”The thunderous applause that followed would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. At their last convention, Democrats seemed more comfortable spotlighting Republicans supporting Mr. Biden than a young leftist like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose policies and rhetoric they feared would alienate moderate swing voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More