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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

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      Democratic Elites Were Slow to See What Voters Already Knew

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      President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree on this much: It is the elites who are trying to take Biden down, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters. But when I started arguing in February that his age would mortally wound his candidacy, it didn’t feel that way to me. I saw the elites propping him up, ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters.Who’s right?Maybe we both are. In any system, elites are most visible when they are fractured and factions are acting against each other. In July 2023 — before the primaries, before last month’s debate — a Times/Siena poll found that Democratic primary voters, by 50 to 45 percent, preferred that the party nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.But the Democratic Party’s elites were in lock step around Biden. They refused to listen to what their voters were saying. The fact that he was barely campaigning or giving unscripted interviews was rationalized rather than criticized. No major Democrats decided to challenge him for the nomination. Representative Dean Phillips’s effort to draft alternative candidates was rebuffed and his subsequent primary challenge ignored. Some of this reflected confidence in the president. Some of it reflected the consequences of challenging him.The White House and the Democratic Party apparatus it controls are powerful. Congressional Democrats will not get their bills prioritized or their amendments attached if they are too critical of the party leadership. Nonprofit leaders will stop getting their calls returned. Loyal party donors will abandon you if you’re branded a heretic. “I would be crucified by them if I spoke out of line,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair told NBC News early this month. “I know when you get out of line, they all of a sudden have a shift of priorities, and your races, your state is no longer on the map.” That was far truer a year ago, when Biden’s position in the party was unchallenged.These actions, decisions and calculations by Democratic Party elites were neither unusual nor conspiratorial. This is simply how parties work. But it meant that Democratic voters were given neither a real choice of candidates nor a demonstration of Biden’s fitness for the campaign. What they were given instead was signal after signal that every power broker in the party was behind Biden and confident in his ability to win re-election. Who were they to argue? Biden won the primary contest in a landslide.In February, after Biden skipped the Super Bowl interview and flubbed the news conference intended to defend his memory, I published a series of columns and interviews arguing that he should step aside and Democrats should choose a new ticket at the convention. My argument was that his age had become an insuperable problem — visible in every poll and appearance, omnipresent when you spoke to ordinary voters — and the way his team was insulating him from unscripted interviews reflected a recognition of his diminishment. Biden was trailing Donald Trump even then. He was not showing himself capable of the kind of campaign needed to close the gap. And the risk of frailty or illness causing a catastrophe across the long months of the campaign seemed unbearably high.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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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Backs Biden: ‘He Is Not Leaving This Race’

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      Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the most prominent progressives in the Democratic caucus, said late Monday that she stood behind President Biden.“I have spoken to the president over the weekend,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told reporters outside the Capitol. “I have spoken with him extensively. He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed.”She highlighted his efforts on Monday to reiterate that message. “Joe Biden is our nominee,” she said. “He is not leaving this race, he is in this race, and I support him.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said that it was essential for Democrats to turn their focus back to former President Donald J. Trump and what he would do if elected again. She told Mr. Biden to “increasingly commit to the issues that are critically important to working people across this country” — like expanding Medicare and Social Security and making housing more affordable, she said.“What I think is critically important right now is that we focus on what it takes to win in November,” she said. “Because he is running against Donald Trump, who is a man with 34 felony convictions — that has committed 34 felony crimes. And not a single Republican has asked for Donald Trump to not be the nominee.”Members of Congress returned to Washington on Monday after a recess, and Democrats have been meeting and discussing their path forward.While a handful of House Democrats have called for Mr. Biden to step aside since his debate performance last month, he has received politically important support from others, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — and now at least one member of the so-called Squad, a group of progressives of which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a part. More

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      Ocasio-Cortez Backs N.Y. Bill Limiting Donations to Israeli Settlements

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      Under the bill, New York nonprofits that provide financial support to Israel’s military or settlements could be sued for at least $1 million and lose their tax-exempt status.A long-shot effort by left-leaning New York state lawmakers to curtail financial support for Israeli settlements has drawn a big-name backer — but she doesn’t have a vote in Albany.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who rarely wades into state politics, publicly backed a bill on Monday that could strip New York nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if their funds are used to support Israel’s military and settlement activity. Her involvement underscores the extent to which the war in Gaza and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians more broadly have animated the left flank of the Democratic Party as a pivotal election approaches.“It is more important now than ever to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for endorsing and, in fact, supporting some of this settler violence that prevents a lasting peace,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said at a news conference. “This bill will make sure that the ongoing atrocities that we see happening in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the ongoing enabling of armed militias to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank, do not benefit from New York State charitable tax exemptions.”Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport introduced the bill, called the “Not on Our Dime” act, months before the Oct. 7 attack, saying it was an effort to prevent tax-exempt donations from subsidizing violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It was widely criticized by Albany lawmakers and declared a “nonstarter.” Now its sponsors say they plan to revise the bill to prohibit “aiding and abetting” the resettling of the Gaza Strip or providing “unauthorized support” for Israeli military activity that violates international law.“There’s a newfound consciousness in our country with regards to the urgency of Palestinian human rights, and we have to propose and advocate for legislation that reflects public sentiment,” Mr. Mamdani said in a recent interview, referring to some of Israel’s violence toward people in Gaza and the West Bank as “war crimes.”The lawmakers announced the relaunch of the bill at an event at Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Bronx district office on Monday morning, surrounded by left-leaning elected officials from the City Council and State Legislature. Asked why she had chosen to endorse a state-level bill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said that it was “politically perilous” to do so and that she had wanted to support her colleagues.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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      The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don’t Know

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      Six days after winning election to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did what so many young progressives do while visiting the nation’s capital: She went to a rally. It was 2018, and Democratic dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump was a constant in Washington — but Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t protesting a Republican policy. She was at a sit-in at Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office organized by a group dedicated to pushing Democrats to the left on climate issues. Ms. Pelosi said she welcomed the protest, but behind closed doors, top Democrats soon became exasperated with their new colleague.First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.But Democrats frustrated by her theatrics may be missing a more compelling picture. In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesThe strategy she has come to embrace isn’t what anyone would’ve expected when she arrived in Washington. In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bridges the gap between the two. The dream for Democrats is that one day, she or someone like her could emerge from the backbench to bring new voters into the party, forging a coalition that can win election after election. It’s too early to tell whether she has what it takes to pull that off. But what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.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