More stories

  • in

    David Hogg, Parkland Survivor and D.N.C. Vice Chair, Hopes to Unseat Democratic Incumbents

    David Hogg, a young liberal activist and now a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is leading an effort to unseat the party’s older lawmakers in primaries.Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.Mr. Hogg, 25, who emerged on the political scene as an outspoken survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said his party must squelch a pervasive “culture of seniority politics” that has allowed older and less effective lawmakers to continue to hold office at a moment of crisis.And so he is planning through a separate organization where he serves as president, Leaders We Deserve, to intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts as part of a $20 million effort to elect younger leaders and to encourage a more combative posture against President Trump.In an interview, Mr. Hogg said he understood that he would face blowback for his decision to serve simultaneously as a top official in the party — which is typically focused on electing Democrats over Republicans — and as a leader of an effort to oust current Democratic lawmakers.“This is going to anger a lot of people,” Mr. Hogg said of his efforts, which he began to brief allies, some lawmakers and party officials on in recent days. He predicted “a smear campaign against me” that would aim to “destroy my reputation and try to force me to stop doing this.”“People say they want change in the Democratic Party, but really they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power,” he said. “That’s not actually wanting change. That’s selfishness.”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

  • in

    Working Families Party Endorses 4 Candidates in Strategy to Beat Cuomo

    The progressive group backed Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Adrienne Adams and Zellnor Myrie for mayor as part of a broader effort to defeat the former governor, who is leading in the polls.As New York City voters tilt slightly toward the center, the left-leaning Working Families Party hopes that a slate of four mayoral candidates will be better than the one moderate rival currently leading the polls, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.The party on Saturday voted to endorse a slate of four candidates for mayor: Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens; Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn.Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper, co-directors of the New York Working Families Party, said in a statement that the city deserved a mayor who could “leave behind the scandal and corruption of the past and lead with integrity.”The four candidates “each have a record of fighting for working families, a vision to make New York City safe and affordable for all and the courage to stand up to Trump,” they added.The slate is the first of a two-part endorsement process that the party has embraced for the June 24 primary. In May, the group plans to throw its support behind a single candidate that its leaders believe is best positioned to defeat Mr. Cuomo.In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the three candidates backed by the Working Families Party failed to make the final round under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. This year, the group has adjusted its endorsement process in an effort to better leverage its influence.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

  • in

    Ro Khanna Wants to Take On JD Vance

    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

  • in

    What Thom Tillis’s Surrender to Trump Says About the Trump G.O.P.

    Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage. He delivered a doozy last month, challenging President Trump’s revisionist history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Vladimir Putin “a liar, a murderer” and “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”But Tulsi Gabbard is apparently no threat at all. Although she has been something of a Putin apologist, Tillis fell in line with 51 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and voted to confirm her as director of national intelligence. Afterward, on Facebook, he proclaimed his pride in supporting her.He made impassioned remarks in the Senate about his disagreement with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.But the following month, he voted to confirm Kash Patel, who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence, as director of the F.B.I.Courage, capitulation — Tillis pinballs dizzyingly between the two. As he gears up for a 2026 campaign for a third term in the Senate, he seems to be at war with himself. And perhaps more poignantly than any other Republican on Capitol Hill, Tillis, 64, illustrates how hard it is to be principled, independent or any of those other bygone adjectives in Trump’s Republican Party.That’s a compliment. For most Republicans in Congress, there’s no battle between conscience and supplication. They dropped to their knees years ago. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do. They praise Trump with their every word, including the conjunctions.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

  • in

    For Black Women, Adrienne Adams Is More Than Just Another Candidate

    The New York City Council speaker, who officially launched her mayoral campaign on Saturday, would be the first woman to lead City Hall.As Adrienne Adams officially kicked off her mayoral campaign on Saturday, she urged potential voters at a rally in Jamaica, Queens, to view her as an alternative to the city’s two most recognizable candidates, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.But many of her supporters see her candidacy as something else: an opportunity for Democrats to elect a qualified Black woman to lead the country’s largest city, less than a year after the bruising loss of Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to lead a major party presidential ticket.Wearing a pink pantsuit, Ms. Adams entered to cheers at the Rochdale Village Shopping Center in southeast Queens and danced with supporters as “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross played.“No drama, no scandal, no nonsense, just competence and integrity,” Ms. Adams said at the rally, summing up her candidacy.Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker and a Queens native, faces a tough path to the mayor’s office amid a crowded primary field and her own considerable fund-raising lag. But to the city’s most steadfast Democratic voting bloc, Black women, Ms. Adams’s candidacy represents more than a litany of messaging and policy promises.Ms. Adams presenting the city budget alongside Mayor Eric Adams, left, in 2022.Benjamin Norman 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

  • in

    Mayor Adams’s Rivals Reveal Fund-Raising Totals. Mr. Adams? Who Knows.

    With Mayor Eric Adams’s future in flux as he faces federal bribery charges, his challengers prepare for the possibility of an election before the June primary.With Mayor Eric Adams facing a five-count federal indictment and at least four Democratic primary challengers next year, the quarterly fund-raising reporting deadline on Friday carried heightened intrigue.Would Mr. Adams see a significant drop-off in donations? And of the candidates seeking to replace him, who would make the most of the mayor’s problems?The answers were only partially revealed on Friday, with Mr. Adams’s fund-raising disclosures not reported by the New York City Campaign Finance Board by day’s end.It was not clear if the mayor’s campaign filed disclosures at or past the deadline, or not at all. Vito Pitta, a compliance lawyer for the Adams campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.As for Mr. Adams’s Democratic rivals, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, claimed bragging rights by bringing his fund-raising total to just under a million dollars for his mayoral campaign so far. It was enough to potentially qualify him to receive $3.5 million in taxpayer money under the city’s matching funds program, which awards candidates $8 for every dollar up to the first $250 donated by a city resident.Mr. Lander said he was in a “strong position” to qualify for the maximum amount allowed in matching funds, enabling him to hit the $7.93 million spending cap for a primary or special election, should Mr. Adams resign or be forced out. Mr. Lander also raised the most money in the three-month reporting period that ended Oct. 7, collecting just over $315,000.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

  • in

    These Are the People Running for NYC Mayor Against Adams

    Now that Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted, his path to re-election in New York is likely to become much more difficult.Mr. Adams is running for a second term in a competitive Democratic primary next June. Already, four prominent Democrats have entered the race, arguing that Mr. Adams is a poor manager and has not addressed the city’s affordability crisis. And even more challengers may enter the race.So far, the field includes Brad Lander, the city’s left-leaning comptroller who recently pledged to end street homelessness for severely mentally ill people, and Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who has focused on affordable housing and whose 2021 mayoral campaign was derailed by allegations of sexual misconduct.There is also Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who is proposing free “universal after-school” programs, and Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who has focused on affordability and is friendly with unions.Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens who is weighing entering the race, wants to stop rent increases that have taken place under Mr. Adams. And former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 after facing a series of sexual harassment allegations, is also considering running, and has focused this year on combating antisemitism.If Mr. Adams resigns, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, would become acting mayor and might run for the job on a permanent basis. Mr. Williams is a left-leaning former City Council member from Brooklyn who has been a fierce critic of Mr. Adams, assailing the mayor’s aggressive policing strategy.Mr. Adams’s approval rating was already dismal before his indictment. In a Quinnipiac poll taken last December, only 28 percent of New Yorkers approved of the job he was doing — the lowest rating for any New York City mayor in a Quinnipiac survey since it began polling the city in 1996.Mr. Adams, a former police officer who ran for mayor on a public safety message, won by a slim margin in the 2021 Democratic primary. He beat his closest challenger, Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, by roughly 7,200 votes. More

  • in

    Massachusetts 2nd Congressional District Primary Election Results 2024

    Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Camille Baker, Neil Berg, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Nico Chilla, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Junghye Kim, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart, Jonah Smith, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Additional reporting by Mathew Brownstein; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White.
    Editing by Wilson Andrews, Lindsey Rogers Cook, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press. More