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      Sometimes the Earth Makes the Rest of the Universe Look Very Good

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      Gail Collins: Bret, we should talk a bit about the passing of Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana. Any first thoughts?Bret Stephens: A sad moment. She represented immigrant striving, something her former husband should have learned to appreciate — but didn’t. Did you know her?Gail: No, my interactions with The Donald, as Ivana called him, didn’t begin until around the time of their divorce, when I was covering city government and he was trying to squeeze some deals out of the Council.However, I was working then for New York tabloids and I have very vivid memories of the huge headlines on the front page — we called it “the wood” — when he was wrecking their marriage by cavorting with Marla Maples.Bret: Ah, yes: “‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,’” if I recall the New York Post headline correctly. If Edith Wharton were alive today she’d write a novel about the period called “The Age of Relative Innocence.”Gail: I know I don’t need to tell you this, but nobody was encouraging all that over-the-top coverage of his sexual adventures more than the man himself. Legend had it that when he finally got Ivana to step away, he asked his press people whether he could get back on the wood if he dumped Marla, too.Bret: Do you think John Bolton ever says to himself, “I’m the Marla Maples of Donald Trump’s national security advisers”? No wonder the coups Bolton suggests he planned didn’t come off.But speaking of getting back on the wood, does some Machiavellian part of you sorta hope Trump runs for president again?Gail: Well, the totally self-regarding part is certainly rooting for it. If anyone else gets the nomination it’s possible we’d have a modestly normal campaign, which would be good for the country but very bad for my career of making fun of politicians.Bret: If anyone other than Trump wins the G.O.P. nomination, that person will likely be the next president.Gail: That’s certainly an underlying Democratic concern but we have to rise above it. Otherwise it’s like those jerks who try to help their candidate by underwriting the campaigns of the most terrible, hate-mongering person on the other side just to improve their chances.Can’t think of a possible Republican nominee that’d actually be worse, but that’s really your department. Any way we’d look back with nostalgia on the Trump era?Bret: Just imagine how nostalgic we’ll be under President Josh Hawley. Even now, there are plenty of middle-of-the-road voters who are looking back on the Trump years and saying to themselves, “Sure, it was crazy-town in the White House, but inflation was low, the stock market kept rising, gas was affordable, and Russia wasn’t invading its neighbors.” If Joe Biden doesn’t turn his administration’s fortunes around, Democrats are going to be facing a tsunami of voter fury.My advice to the president is to triangulate, triangulate, triangulate. What’s yours?Gail: I dunno — kidnap Joe Manchin, lock him in a tower and make it clear he’ll be forced to watch reruns of “My Mother the Car,” until he comes around on Biden’s priorities?Bret: I think we need an alternative plan, Gail ….Gail: Manchin is really sitting on the Democratic agenda, particularly when it comes to global warming. I know he’s in a very tight political situation in West Virginia, but he’s going to go down in history as the guy who helped make the planet a much worse place for future generations.Bret: As the great Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” That sentence pretty much sums up everything Democrats got wrong in Congress over the last 18 months.Gail: As it stands, it looks like Biden’s best hope is to get passage of what some are now calling Build Back Manchin — which so far seems to be some modest reforms on drug pricing.Breaks my heart, but am I right in suspecting it makes you do a happy dance?Bret: Well, I’m glad Manchin stood his ground on spending, because inflation would be even worse today if he hadn’t. Now it’s time for Biden to tack right on policy issues like fracking, border security and crime; go hard on Republicans on guns and abortion; then come up with a plan to help Ukraine defeat the Russian army quickly, before Moscow can use energy to blackmail Western Europe in the dead of winter.Maybe Biden can start by having Bill Clinton stop by the White House to offer some pointers on regaining the trust of the moderate center. Or is there someone else he should be talking to?Gail: Well, um, he should talk with someone who disagrees with you about fracking.One critical problem for the economy is the shortage of workers, and that’s in part because many mothers can’t find any safe or affordable place to leave their kids while they’re working. If Biden wants to change the subject, he should get back to high-quality, affordable early childhood education.I know that’s not the direction you were hoping to travel, but couldn’t resist.Bret: If Biden proposed something modest but attainable in that vein he might score a legislative victory, just as he did with the bipartisan gun bill that Senators Chris Murphy and John Cornyn hashed out last month. We also need more immigrants to make up for the labor shortfalls. How about raising the annual refugee cap to 750,000 from the current 125,000 while doing more to curb illegal immigration? That would combine humanity and good economic sense with political savvy.Gail: Sounds good in theory but I’d want to know a lot more about how that curbing of illegal immigration was going to work. No question that we need an efficient border operation, a goal that has eluded every recent president. But nothing good is accomplished by spreading terror in immigrant communities around the country.Bret: Agree. And by opening the door much wider to legal migration, we also reduce incentives for illegal and sometimes fatal border crossings, which in turn eases the pressure on border security.Gail: Speaking of immigration … there’s an upcoming Republican Senate primary in Arizona where that seems to be a big issue. One of the leading Republican candidates, Blake Masters, once called for “unrestricted immigration” — back when he was a youthful libertarian.Bret: He should have stopped there.Gail: And also a guy who in his youth derided American entry into World War I.Bret: Or even there.Gail: And II.Bret: Oh dear.Gail: He’s certainly a walking reminder of how important it is to remind young people on a daily basis that anything you put on the web can come back to haunt you. But here in 2022 he’s the candidate who said the problem of gun violence was all about “Black people, frankly.” And I hardly need mention he’s been endorsed by Donald Trump.This is for the seat that currently belongs to a Democrat, Mark Kelly. So my two questions are: How would you want Arizona to go if it’s a Masters-Kelly contest, and any other nightmare party primaries you see on the horizon?Bret: I wish Arizona still produced intelligent and independent-minded Republicans in the mold of Barry Goldwater, Jon Kyl, John McCain and Jeff Flake. Now it’s just a freak show. I’ll root for Kelly, but it’s a shame that as a senator the formerly cool astronaut has been such a space cadet.Gail: I love the begrudging way you think.Bret: The other race I’m looking at is the one in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney is hoping enough Democrats and independents will vote in the Republican primary to help her defeat her primary rival. I hope she does. She represents my idea of what political courage looks like.Gail: Agreed, yet also very interested to see how her more liberal Democratic constituents work out this problem: Do you reward an elected official for showing extreme courage while voting against practically everything you’d want Congress to do?Bret: Before we go, Gail, I neglected to mention the one government agency whose budget I would immediately double: NASA. I spent some of last week geeking out over the images that the Webb telescope has been beaming back to earth from its cosmic perch. It’s a good reminder that this country is still capable of doing good and mighty things.Gail: Such a jaw-dropping reminder that as self-obsessed as we tend to get, we’re hardly the center of the universe.Bret: Very true. And you’ve reminded me of a few lines of verse from my all-time favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the only writer who has ever tempted me to truly believe in God:Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Maryland Primary Races for Governor Pit Old Guard vs. Upstarts

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      Will a deep-blue state elect another Republican governor to succeed Larry Hogan? Tuesday’s competitive primaries will signal where the race is headed.SILVER SPRING, Md. — Tuesday’s primary elections for Maryland governor come at a moment when Democrats are jittery, unsure of the future and perhaps willing to bet on a flashy, unproven commodity.That could be a real problem for Tom Perez.As he did in early 2017, when he won a contest among party insiders at the dawn of the Trump era to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Perez is pitching himself as the safe establishment choice.But polling in the Democratic race for governor shows a dead heat between Mr. Perez and Wes Moore, a best-selling author, television show host and nonprofit executive who has been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. Peter Franchot, the state comptroller and a fixture of Maryland politics since the 1980s, is close behind.The race, like Maryland’s Republican primary for governor, will test voters’ appetites for competence and experience at a time when the bases of both parties are angry at their political establishments.Republicans will choose between Kelly Schulz, a former cabinet secretary for the departing Gov. Larry Hogan, who is term-limited, and Dan Cox, a first-term state delegate who has been endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and who wrote on Twitter during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that Vice President Mike Pence was a traitor.Mr. Cox is also one in a string of Republicans who have received help this year from Democrats pursuing the hazardous strategy of trying to elevate far-right G.O.P. primary candidates in the hope that they are too extreme to win a general election. The Democratic Governors Association has spent $1.16 million on advertising trying to lift his candidacy — more than all the Republicans combined have spent on TV and radio ads, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.While the Republican primary is a battle between Mr. Hogan’s center-right political operation and Mr. Trump’s far-right supporters, the Democratic primary has developed as a stylistic contest with few ideological differences: Mr. Perez’s awkward-dad competence, Mr. Moore’s charismatic dynamism and Mr. Franchot’s decades of experience in state politics.Wes Moore, a best-selling author, television show host and nonprofit executive, has faced questions about elements of his personal story.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesDemocrats are eager to win back the governorship of a deep-blue state that has been led by a Republican, Mr. Hogan, since 2015. At the same time, Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Maryland’s General Assembly that are likely to withstand even a strong Republican showing in November thanks to the state’s gerrymandered districts.Neither party’s primary has garnered the nine-figure sums spent on television and radio advertising in other states’ races. Mr. Perez and a super PAC supporting him have combined to spend $3.5 million — more than any other candidate in the governor’s race.Mr. Perez has highlighted his years working in the Justice Department and as labor secretary under former President Barack Obama. In his TV ads — one of which uses Mr. Obama’s voice promoting Mr. Perez — he describes himself as the candidate from the “get stuff done” wing of the party, though he uses a more pungent noun than “stuff.”In an interview on Thursday at an early-voting site in Silver Spring, an inside-the-Beltway suburb, Mr. Perez said Democrats would be taking a big risk in the general election if they nominated Mr. Moore.“I’ve been Senate-confirmed twice,” Mr. Perez said. “I’ve run for office twice. I’ve been vetted for vice president in 2016. I won’t spend the general-election campaign explaining something that I did in the past or that I didn’t do in the past.”Mr. Perez was referring to the fact that elements of Mr. Moore’s inspiring personal story have been challenged.A Rhodes scholar and a veteran of the Afghanistan war, Mr. Moore has placed his biography at the center of his campaign. He wrote a best-selling book that was promoted by Ms. Winfrey, who later gave him a show on her cable channel.Mr. Moore has repeatedly described himself as a Baltimore native, but he was born in the Washington suburbs and raised in the Bronx; he did not live in Baltimore until he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University.And he has sometimes not corrected interviewers who made flattering mistakes about his résumé, including one who said he had been inducted into a Maryland hall of fame for football (an institution that does not exist) and at least two others who described him as a Bronze Star recipient (he is not).Brian Jones, an aide to Mr. Moore, said the candidate had never given any false impressions about his record. He declined requests to make Mr. Moore available for an interview.“Wes Moore has absolutely nothing to exaggerate, he has absolutely nothing to regret, and anyone suggesting otherwise should be ashamed of themselves,” Mr. Jones said.Mr. Moore at the Robin Hood Foundation’s 2018 benefit in New York. He earned nearly $1 million a year at the organization.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesMr. Moore’s most recent job was chief executive of the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty organization in New York where he was paid nearly $1 million a year.There, in 2018, questions were raised about the amount of overtime Mr. Moore’s executive assistant was accumulating. The assistant, Maria Flynn, wrote a memo, reviewed by The New York Times, stating that Mr. Moore had “required” her to perform a litany of personal tasks for him, including booking Amtrak tickets for Mr. Moore’s nanny and scheduling, negotiating and drafting contracts for his many paid speaking engagements.Ms. Flynn was fired a week after submitting her memo.Robin Hood investigated Ms. Flynn’s allegations. According to an internal report reviewed by The Times, Mr. Moore told Robin Hood that he had asked Ms. Flynn not to submit for overtime pay for personal work she did for him outside the hours she worked for the organization and had instead “personally compensated” her with an unspecified quarterly bonus.The investigation ultimately concluded that Ms. Flynn’s termination was justified because she had filed excessive overtime hours with Robin Hood and had improperly “migrated files to her personal email account.”A separation contract she signed stipulated that Robin Hood would pay her $23,925 — three months’ pay and benefits — if she agreed not to sue the group or speak ill of her experience working there for Mr. Moore.Ms. Flynn said she could not discuss her tenure working for Mr. Moore because she signed a nondisclosure agreement upon her dismissal.“I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer,” she said. “I wasn’t able to fight.”A Robin Hood spokesman, Kevin F. Thompson, declined to discuss Ms. Flynn’s specific claims or the internal documents.“We take all employee misconduct allegations seriously, and we never had cause to take any disciplinary actions against Wes Moore,” he said.Mr. Jones, the aide to Mr. Moore, said the claims in Ms. Flynn’s memo were false and said they had surfaced through “flimsy opposition research” by Mr. Moore’s political opponents.The third major candidate in the Democratic primary, Mr. Franchot, said in an interview on Friday that his long career in Maryland politics would be valuable in addressing voters’ concerns about inflation and high gas prices.“People are looking for a steady hand at the helm, somebody that has had experience, obviously knowledgeable about the state’s economy,” said Mr. Franchot, who was first elected comptroller in 2006 and served in the General Assembly for two decades before that. “I’m the person that’s been on the stage for the last 16 years.”Republican voters face a different type of decision — whether fealty to Mr. Trump and lies about the 2020 election carry more political weight than Mr. Hogan, a two-term governor who cast himself as a check against excesses of Democratic supermajorities.Ms. Schulz, a former state delegate who spent nearly seven years in Mr. Hogan’s cabinet, has adopted the governor’s mantra and is betting on their political alliance. She would most likely be a formidable candidate in the general election. Mr. Hogan remains one of the nation’s most popular governors, and while the state has more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans, it has elected only one Democrat, Martin O’Malley, as governor since the turn of the millennium.Kelly Schulz held a baby in front of cutouts of Democratic politicians at an event this month in Annapolis. She has pitched herself as a moderate Republican successor to Gov. Larry Hogan.Matt Roth for The New York Times“She understands the nuance of what you have to do to win as a Republican in Maryland,” said Mileah Kromer, a pollster at Goucher College in Towson, Md.Ms. Schulz predicted that Mr. Cox would lose the general election by 30 percentage points to any of the Democrats running.“I don’t think there’s a single person out there in the state of Maryland that actually believes that Dan Cox can beat a Democrat in November,” she said in an interview, calling Mr. Cox an “out-of-control conspiracy-theorist-type person.”Mr. Cox’s campaign manager, his daughter Patience Faith Cox, did not respond to requests for comment.The Democratic Governors Association agrees with Ms. Schulz’s assessment. It has essentially fueled Mr. Cox’s entire ad campaign. Mr. Cox has spent just $21,000 on television and radio ads, yet polls show him tied with or leading Ms. Schulz.Mr. Cox has been a prolific amplifier of pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In December 2020, he wrote on Facebook that Mr. Trump should use the federal government to “seize federal vote machines in states where fraud is exceedingly rampant.”He chartered three buses from his home base in Frederick County to the Jan. 6, 2021, rally to protest the election results. That day, after the mob had breached the Capitol amid chants of “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Cox tweeted, “Pence is a traitor.”Dan Cox, a Republican state delegate in Maryland, has been a prolific amplifier of pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Brian Witte/Associated PressAhead of Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Cox has threatened lawsuits seeking to invalidate mail-in ballots and warned without evidence that “there have been mules in Maryland” illegally stuffing ballot drop boxes, a reference to a Trump-promoted film that makes false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.The counting of absentee ballots is expected to last for days after Tuesday’s vote. Maryland law forbids the processing and counting of ballots returned in drop boxes or by mail until Thursday, and aides for several candidates have warned that the winners in each primary may not be known until late in the week.Delegate Ric Metzgar, a Republican who is backing Mr. Cox, said that Mr. Hogan had alienated the party’s base by breaking with Mr. Trump and that Ms. Schulz had failed to present herself as anything beyond an extension of Mr. Hogan’s administration.“There’s not many Republicans supporting him at this moment, he’s distanced himself so far away from Trump,” Mr. Metzgar said. “You can’t ride coattails if there’s no coattails to hang on to.” More

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      Mail Ballots Are at Issue as States Consider New Rules and Legal Action

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      As the nation prepares for yet another pandemic election, the rules for voting by mail remain a flash point in many states, a conflict that is being waged in courtrooms and state houses over Republican-backed restrictions.Here’s what happened this week:In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections rejected a signature-matching requirement for absentee ballots that was proposed by the state Republican Party. The measure, denied by a party-line vote on Thursday, would have let counties compare signatures on applications and return envelopes for absentee ballots with those on voter registration cards.The board’s three Democrats said that the verification method would conflict with state law and would contribute to voters being treated differently, which they cautioned would be unconstitutional. The panel’s two G.O.P. members contended that checking signatures “simply builds trust in the system.”North Carolina is not the only battleground state where Republicans and Democrats are clashing over mail-in ballots.Pennsylvania’s top election official, Leigh M. Chapman, a Democrat who is the acting secretary of the commonwealth, sued three counties on Tuesday over their refusal to include undated mail-in ballots in their official tallies from the May 7 primaries.A state court had directed counties in June to report two sets of tallies to Ms. Chapman’s office, one that included ballots without dates handwritten on their return envelopes as required by law and one that did not.The three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster, which are controlled by Republicans — have prevented the state from completing its final certification of the primary results, state elections officials said.The lack of dates on ballot envelopes was a point of contention in the Republican Senate primary that was narrowly won by Dr. Mehmet Oz over David McCormick. Disputes over such ballots have resulted in legal action in state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.The conflict over mail-in voting is not limited to purple or red states.In deep-blue Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court on Monday denied a lawsuit filed by the state Republican Party that had sought to block no-excuse mail-in voting from becoming permanent.The party had argued that voting by mail, made popular during the pandemic and codified as part of a law signed last month by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is unconstitutional.The court’s order in Massachusetts was not the only setback this week for Republicans.In Texas, a lawsuit challenging voting restrictions that were enacted in 2021 was for the most part allowed on Tuesday to move forward by a federal court judge in San Antonio.The secretary of state and state attorney general, offices held by Republicans, had sought to dismiss the legal action by several voting rights groups.The restrictions forbade balloting methods introduced in 2020 to make voting easier during the pandemic, including drive-through polling places and 24-hour voting. They also barred election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee-ballot applications and from promoting the use of vote by mail.Voters must now provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on applications for mail-in ballots and on return envelopes. More

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      In Nadler-Maloney Matchup, Does Suraj Patel Stand a Chance?

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      Suraj Patel has few illusions about what he’s up against as he takes on two titans of New York politics, Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, in this summer’s blockbuster Democratic primary. But he does take hope from a theory about coffee shops.“There’s a Starbucks there and a Starbucks there, and then there’s some brand-new hipster coffee shop here,” the candidate said one recent weekday morning, whirling around 180 degrees in Velcro Stan Smith sneakers. “If all the people going to Starbucks split themselves half and half, then the third spot gets about 40 percent of the foot traffic.”“That,” he wagered a little optimistically, “is what we’re doing.”No doubt the Aug. 23 contest has been dominated by the bitter head-to-head confrontation between Ms. Maloney and Mr. Nadler, two septuagenarian fixtures of Manhattan’s political power structure who have been drawn into a single seat after serving three decades side by side in Washington.But in a summer when Democrats of all ages are reeling from stark losses on guns, abortion rights and the environment, Mr. Patel, 38, believes that discontent over the party’s aging leadership might just run deep enough for him to pull off a monumental upset.A frenetic Indian American lawyer who was just 9 when his opponents took office, Mr. Patel has adopted a less-than-meek approach. Campaigning recently in the heart of Mr. Nadler’s West Side stronghold, he sought to tie himself to Barack Obama and, when chatting up a retired apartment worker and union member, paraphrased the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic: “Fear is the mother of all sin.”“We’ve lost every major battle to Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the last decade, and the people who have been in office have no new answers,” Mr. Patel told him. “What we’re offering is a completely new set of arguments on inflation, on public safety, on economic growth and climate change.”The pitch landed. “I’m similar: proactive, go-getter, and you make sense,” replied the union man, Mario Sanders, keeping cool in an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. He walked off down 72nd Street with glossy Patel leaflets in one hand and his dog, Juicy, cradled in the other.Flipping enough votes to actually win, though, will be vastly more difficult, as Mr. Patel learned in two previous attempts to defeat Ms. Maloney, 76.He came closest in 2020, when he lost by less than four percentage points, winning diverse areas in Brooklyn and Queens that have since been removed from the district.Because the courts shuffled the district lines this spring, he only has weeks to try to reintroduce himself to New Yorkers who, in some cases, have enthusiastically supported his opponents since the 1970s, and to push younger voters to show up.Key Results in New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsOn June 28, New York held several primaries for statewide office, including for governor and lieutenant governor. Some State Assembly districts also had primaries.Kathy Hochul: With her win in the Democratic, the governor of New York took a crucial step toward winning a full term, fending off a pair of spirited challengers.Antonio Delgado: Ms. Hochul’s second in command and running mate also scored a convincing victory over his nearest Democratic challenger, Ana María Archila.Lee Zeldin: The congressman from Long Island won the Republican primary for governor, advancing to what it’s expected to be a grueling general election.N.Y. State Assembly: Long-tenured incumbents were largely successful in fending off a slate of left-leaning insurgents in the Democratic primary.With the party establishment shunning him, his most notable endorser is Andrew Yang, the former presidential and mayoral candidate who subsequently left the Democratic Party.Nor is Mr. Patel drawing the sort of sharp ideological contrasts that have propelled challengers to victory in recent cycles. He shares his opponents’ support for left-leaning policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, though many on the left view him skeptically. “I respect the hell out of it,” he said of Mr. Nadler’s voting record.“That’s a hard needle to thread,” said Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University. “Essentially, he’s saying, I will do the same thing they are doing, just minus 40 years’ experience.”Ms. Greer added that Mr. Patel had a heavy lift “to convince people he’s not just another young Obama upstart who thinks they are entitled to cut ahead of the queue.”Ms. Maloney and Mr. Nadler, flanking Gov. Kathy Hochul, were pushed into the same district after a court-ordered redistricting process.Anna Watts for The New York TimesMr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney appear torn between trying to ignore and to eviscerate Mr. Patel. They have dismissed his approach as ageist and warned that the city would suffer if it replaces two senior members with someone they charge has spent more time running for Congress than accomplishing anything of substance. “Most people do not go with that sort of ageism, most people look at people’s records,” Mr. Nadler, 75, said in May, not long after allies of both incumbents quietly tried to steer Mr. Patel to run in a neighboring district.Ms. Maloney recently told The West Side Rag that there was too much at stake for “on-the-job training” and accused Mr. Patel of “bigotry and lack of experience in dealing with critical issues I have dealt with my entire career.”In an interview over coffee (iced with Splenda, no milk) at an upscale cafe (Daily Provisions, neither Starbucks nor hipster), Mr. Patel insisted he was not worried about the institutional support lining up against him, nor his opponents’ critiques.He accused Ms. Maloney of using her perch in Congress to give oxygen to anti-vaccine activists (she says she supports vaccination) and knocked Mr. Nadler for taking corporate campaign funds.“Man, if you think people vote anymore on endorsements and other political leaders telling you who to vote for, then you’re missing the point,” he said.He showed up to greet voters in Chelsea on a Citi Bike, whipped out his iPhone to show off the average of seven miles a day he traverses on foot, and discussed his plans to start bar crawl canvassing, complete with coasters with his face on it. (He drew blowback for using the dating app Tinder to contact potential supporters in 2018.)His policy proposals skew technocratic, built around what Mr. Patel calls “the Abundant Society,” a plan for federal investments in education, child care, manufacturing and research.Mr. Patel came within four percentage points of upsetting Ms. Maloney in the 2020 primary.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe son of Indian immigrants, he lived above the family bodega in Bloomfield, N.J., where 13 people crammed in a one-bedroom apartment. The family moved to Indiana when he was 6 and bought its first motel.Mr. Patel tends to say less about how the business grew into a multimillion-dollar development and hotel management operation that made the family rich, spawned labor complaints and helped him finance a pricey East Village apartment and, until recently, a house in the Hamptons.In a city where politicians often rise through local office or activism, Mr. Patel dabbled in different lines of work: He helped the family business, including during the coronavirus pandemic; staffed Mr. Obama’s campaigns and White House travel; and taught business classes at N.Y.U.Mr. Patel would be the first Indian American from New York in Congress, and his campaign has drawn support from South Asians across the country. Indian American Impact, a national group, said it would run a WhatsApp messaging program to try to drive up turnout among the district’s small slice of South Asians. (Another Indian American, Ashmi Sheth, is also running.)“Democrats can’t just repackage the status quo and sell it back to voters as different when, in reality, people are looking for a clean break,” said Neil Makhija, the group’s leader.Across the district, though, responses to Mr. Patel’s overtures were more mixed.“Soon, when Nadler retires, then I’ll vote for you,” Roz Paaswell, 83, told him as he approached with a flier on the Upper West Side. “You’ve going to have a place in the city and in politics, but not in this seat.”Later, Ms. Paaswell heaped praise on Mr. Nadler and said she had never missed a vote. “He has seniority. He has clout. I love him,” she said.Vanessa Chen, 35, was equally blunt as she walked laps during her lunch break a few days later around Stuyvesant Town, one of the largest voting blocs in the district, just a stone’s throw from Mr. Patel’s apartment.“We just need new blood,” said Ms. Chen, a software engineer. “The Boomers are going. They don’t know how the new world works.”But does she plan to vote in August?“Probably,” she laughed, adding that she had not been aware of the primary date until a reporter informed her.Susan C. Beachy More