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      Glass Ceiling Persists for Women in Mayor’s Race

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      Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley placed second and third in the Democratic mayoral primary. Many New Yorkers hoped the glass ceiling would finally be broken.It was a constant refrain for the two leading female candidates running for mayor of New York City: The city has had 109 mayors, and all of them were men. It was finally time for a woman.The two candidates, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, had experience in government. They had major endorsements from unions, elected officials and newspaper editorial boards. They raised millions of dollars and gained momentum in the final weeks of the campaign.But Ms. Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, still fell short, placing second and third in the Democratic primary behind Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.New York is one of a handful of major cities where voters have yet to elect a woman as mayor, along with Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. Boston recently got its first female mayor, and women currently run more than 30 of the nation’s 100 largest cities.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia won more than 380,000 first-choice votes between them, or nearly 41 percent of the votes. Ms. Garcia finished just one percentage point behind Mr. Adams under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.But their loss felt like a missed opportunity for those who believed that New York would at long last elect a woman.“I’m disappointed and sad,” said Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker who ran for mayor in 2013. “I give a lot of credit to Eric Adams, but I want a woman to be mayor of New York. It is truly, truly disheartening.”Maya Wiley garnered the second highest number of first-place votes, but finished in third place under the ranked-choice voting system.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe Democratic primary field was the most diverse ever: Four women were on the ballot including Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Joycelyn Taylor, a businesswoman. A fifth, Loree Sutton, a retired Army brigadier general, dropped out of the race in March. Of 13 candidates on the ballot, only three were white men; if he is elected in November, Mr. Adams will be the city’s second Black mayor.This was the first time New York City used ranked-choice voting in a citywide election, allowing voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference. In other cities, candidates have often formed alliances to boost their chances.While Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley each ran strong campaigns that embraced the notion that it was time for a woman to lead the nation’s largest city, they did so independently.The two campaigns had discussions about Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley campaigning together and Ms. Garcia wanted to do it, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions.But Ms. Wiley appeared to have reservations on a policy level; Ms. Garcia was more conservative on policing, for instance, and was one of three candidates favored by the union that represents police officers. Ms. Wiley wanted to cut the police budget by $1 billion a year.Observers also suggested Ms. Garcia may have had more to gain from an alliance than Ms. Wiley. Some of Ms. Garcia’s moderate voters, for instance, might not have voted for Ms. Wiley even if the candidates campaigned together.Ms. Garcia instead struck a late alliance with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, and that helped win over some of his supporters.Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she did not have any regrets over her decision not to campaign with other candidates.“We stood as a campaign on principle, and we stood with everyone who met our principles,” she said.Nearly 130,000 of Ms. Wiley’s votes — roughly half of her total support — were reallocated to Ms. Garcia under ranked-choice voting once Ms. Wiley was eliminated; Mr. Adams received nearly 20 percent of Ms. Wiley’s votes. The rest of the ballots were “exhausted” or eliminated in the final round because the voters did not rank either finalist. In the end, Ms. Garcia lost to Mr. Adams by less than 8,500 votes. Ester Fuchs, a political science professor at Columbia University, said it would have been a smart strategy for Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley to endorse each other, despite their differences, to give each a better chance at beating Mr. Adams.“Why did Adams start panicking when Yang and Garcia campaigned for one day together?” she said. “Garcia did get quite a few of Yang’s voters. That’s how ranked-choice voting can work.”The new voting system also could have hurt Ms. Wiley’s chances in a less obvious way: Under the old system, Ms. Wiley — who finished with the second-most number of first-place votes — would have moved on to face Mr. Adams in a head-to-head runoff election.Women are expected to make gains in the City Council, which could have a majority of female members for the first time next year. But the major citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and public advocate — will be occupied by men, and potentially four of the five borough presidents will be men as well.Still, Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she and Ms. Garcia had made significant strides for women in the city.“We did shatter the glass ceiling,” she said. “The glass ceiling that said that women could not be top-tier candidates. The glass ceiling that said women would be discounted. The glass ceiling that said we can’t be seen as leaders, and I think we demonstrated that is not true.”Ms. Garcia also referred to the glass ceiling in her concession speech, delivered in front of a women’s suffrage monument in Central Park featuring Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Ms. Wiley had held a major event earlier in the campaign in front of the statue, appearing alongside Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon.“This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor,” Ms. Garcia said. “We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken.”While some voters were excited simply to vote for a woman, many others were focused on ideology or experience, and were drawn to Ms. Garcia’s experience as a manager or Ms. Wiley’s progressive values. Michele Bogart, an art history professor in her 60s who lives in Brooklyn, ranked Ms. Garcia first and left Ms. Wiley off her ballot.“She increasingly struck me as a solid, can-do sort of official,” she said of Ms. Garcia.Catt Small, 31, a designer in Brooklyn, voted for Ms. Wiley first and also ranked Ms. Morales and Ms. Taylor on her ballot. After Mr. Adams won, Ms. Small was rethinking whether she should have ranked Ms. Garcia fifth to try and block him.“I ranked so many women and so many women of color on my ballot,” she said. “I was really hopeful that this was going to be the time.”Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley both faced an array of challenges during the campaign. They had some institutional support, but less than Mr. Adams did. They were also not viewed as seriously early on as Mr. Yang, even though he had less experience than they did, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which analyzes women’s political participation.Some voters also have reservations about electing women to executive jobs like mayor or president, Ms. Walsh said, and those may have come into play. These voters tend to be more comfortable seeing women in legislative roles.“When they’re trying for that top job where the buck stops, there are still gender stereotypes about who can lead,” she said.Voters might also have believed that a male candidate would be tougher on crime. The city has never had a female police commissioner, for instance, though Mr. Adams says he wants to change that. During the campaign, Mr. Adams focused intensely on public safety — the top issue for many voters — and highlighted his experience as a former police captain. And although Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia both surged toward the end of the campaign, the momentum came too late to lift them to victory.Ms. Wiley, for example, won early support from the powerful 1199 SEIU union, but progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse her until June. Ms. Garcia did not register high in the polls until she secured endorsements from The New York Times and the New York Daily News in May.Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley faced less overt sexism during the campaign than Ms. Quinn, who lost to Mr. de Blasio in 2013 and was criticized for being unlikable, dowdy and not feminine enough. Ruth W. Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president, faced similar attacks over her appearance when she was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997.One notable difference was that more female reporters were covering the race than in the past and they covered gender with more nuance, Ms. Fuchs said.“Gender did not hurt them for the first time in my lifetime,” Ms. Fuchs said of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley. “The media did not weaponize gender in this race.”The candidates did call out examples of what they viewed as sexism on the campaign trail. Ms. Garcia grew frustrated when Mr. Yang repeatedly said that he wanted to hire her for his administration; she insisted that she wanted to be the mayor, not work for one. Ms. Wiley argued that she was receiving unfair criticism over her ties to Mr. de Blasio instead of being judged on her own record.Ms. Quinn said she thought both women were held to a higher standard than their male rivals. “They had to be more substantive and more competent than the men to even be considered on par,” she said.And ultimately, she suggested, some New Yorkers may simply not have been comfortable voting for a woman.“I don’t know if voters are even aware of it,” Ms. Quinn said. “I think it is for many voters ingrained in their being from having lived in such a sexist society for their entire lives.”But Ms. Sutton, who endorsed Ms. Garcia after she dropped out of the race, said that while she was sad about the outcome, she was confident that a woman would be elected mayor soon.“She was one percentage point away — it’s heartbreaking yet it’s also exhilarating,” she said. “It should make New York power brokers pay attention.”Michael Gold contributed reporting. More

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      In Michigan, Pro-Impeachment Republicans Face Voters’ Wrath

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      Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump, seeks “decency and humility” in Western Michigan, but has found anger, fear and misinformation.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Representative Peter Meijer cites Gerald R. Ford as his inspiration these days, not because the former president held his House seat for 24 years or because his name is all over this city — from its airport to its freeway to its arena — but because in Mr. Ford, the freshman congressman sees virtues lost to his political party.Ford took control after a president resigned rather than be impeached for abusing his power in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of an election.“It was a period of turmoil,” said Mr. Meijer, who was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ford’s greatest asset, he added, was “offering — this word is becoming too loaded of late — a sense of morals, moral leadership, a sense of value and centering decency and humility.”“Sometimes when you’re surrounded by cacophony, it helps to have someone sitting there who isn’t adding another screaming voice onto the pile,” Mr. Meijer added.Six months after the Capitol attack and 53 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, on John Parish’s farm in the hamlet of Vermontville, Mr. Meijer’s problems sat on folding chairs on the Fourth of July. They ate hot dogs, listened to bellicose speakers and espoused their own beliefs that reflected how, even at age 33, Mr. Meijer may represent the Republican Party’s past more than its future.The stars of the “Festival of Truth” on Sunday were adding their screaming voices onto the pile, and the 100 or so West Michiganders in the audience were enthusiastically soaking it up. Many of them inhabited an alternative reality in which Mr. Trump was re-elected, their votes were stolen, the deadly Jan. 6 mob was peaceful, coronavirus vaccines were dangerous and conservatives were oppressed.“God is forgiving, and — I don’t know — we’re forgiving people,” Geri Nichols, 79, of nearby Hastings, said as she spoke of her disappointment in Mr. Meijer. “But he did wrong. He didn’t support our president like he should have.”Under an unseasonably warm sun, her boyfriend, Gary Munson, 80, shook his head, agreeing: “He doesn’t appear to be what he says he is.”Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman member of Congress, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFor all its political eccentricities, Michigan is not unique. Dozens of congressional candidates planning challenges next year are promoting the false claims of election fraud pressed by Mr. Trump. But Western Michigan does have one distinction: It is home to 20 percent of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — that is, two of 10.The other one, Representative Fred Upton, 68, took office in an adjacent district west and south of here the year before Mr. Meijer was born, 1987. But the two find themselves in similar political straits. Both will face multiple primary challengers next year who accuse them of disloyalty — or worse, treason — for holding Mr. Trump responsible for the riot that raged as they met to formalize the election results for the victor, President Biden.Both men followed their impeachment votes with votes to create a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot, two of 35 House Republicans to do so. Both face a backlash from Republican voters who are enraged by what they allege are an effort by the F.B.I. to hunt down peaceful protesters, a news media silencing conservative voices, a governor who has taken away their livelihoods with overzealous pandemic restrictions and a Democratic secretary of state who has stolen their votes.Many of their grievances have less to do with Mr. Trump himself than the false claims that he promoted, which have taken root with voters who now look past him.“People think people who support Trump are like ‘Trump is our God,’” said Audra Johnson, one of Mr. Meijer’s Republican challengers, explaining why she refuses to get inoculated against the coronavirus with a vaccine the Trump administration helped create. “No, he’s not.”Audra Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, is one of many challengers to Mr. Meijer in the Republican primary next year.Emily Elconin for The New York Times“People are terrified,” Ms. Johnson added over grilled cheese and tomato soup at Crow’s Nest Restaurant in Kalamazoo. She added, “We’re heading toward a civil war, if we’re not already in a cold civil war.”In June, a Republican-led State Senate inquiry into Michigan’s 2020 vote count affirmed Mr. Biden’s Michigan victory by more than 154,000 votes, nearly 3 percentage points, and found “no evidence” of “either significant acts of fraud” or “an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity.”“The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain,” it concluded.The Meijer name graces grocery stores that are a regional staple — founded in 1934 by the congressman’s great-grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, a Dutch immigrant — and a popular botanical garden and sculpture park, established by his grandfather, Frederik, that is one of Grand Rapids’ biggest attractions. His father, Hank, and his uncle, Doug, took over the Meijer chain in 1990 as Forbes-listed billionaires.Peter Meijer’s pedigree is matched by his résumé: a year at West Point, a degree from Columbia University, eight years in the Army Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq as an intelligence adviser, and an M.B.A. from New York University.But these days in some circles, “Meijer” is less synonymous with groceries, gardens and prestige than with the impeachment of Mr. Trump.“Last time, the problem was we were running against Peter Meijer,” said Tom Norton, who lost to Mr. Meijer in the 2020 primary and is challenging him again in 2022. “The advantage this time is we’re running against Peter Meijer. It’s a complete flip.”In his Capitol Hill office, Mr. Meijer said that in one-on-one discussions with some of his constituents, he could make headway explaining his votes and how dangerous the lies of a stolen presidential election had become for the future of American democracy.“The challenge is if you believe that Nov. 3 was a landslide victory for Donald Trump that was stolen, and Jan. 6 was the day to stop that steal,” he said. “I can’t come to an understanding with somebody when we’re dealing with completely separate sets of facts and realities.”At a recent event, he said, a woman informed Mr. Meijer that he would shortly be arrested for treason and hauled before a military tribunal, presumably to be shot.“People are willing to kill and die over these alternative realities,” he said.Representative Fred Upton, another Republican impeachment voter, has been in office since 1987.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesYet at least one of his primary challengers is amplifying that alternative reality. Ms. Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, splashed onto the scene in 2019 as the “MAGA bride,” when she appeared at her wedding reception over the July 4 weekend in a Make America Great Again dress.She helped organize armed protests of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions at the State Capitol in Lansing and traveled with a convoy of buses to Washington for Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 protest against election certification.While she said she did not enter the Capitol that day, she said she knew people who knew people who did — peacefully, she insists.“Honestly, they’re terrified that the F.B.I. is going to come knock on their door,” Ms. Johnson said.Mr. Norton, who jousted with Mr. Meijer at the Northview Fourth of July parade in a middle-class Grand Rapids neighborhood, said afterward that he was sure there was election fraud in 2020 and was pushing for an Arizona-style “forensic audit” that would go even deeper than the audit already conducted.One of Mr. Upton’s challengers, state Representative Steve Carra, has introduced legislation to force such an audit in Michigan, even though he conceded that he had only skimmed the June report, which not only concluded that there was no fraud but called for those making such false claims to be referred for prosecution.“To say that there’s no evidence of widespread fraud I think is wrong,” said Mr. Carra, who was elected to his first term in November, at age 32.He sees a golden opportunity to finally unseat Mr. Upton, who has been in Congress since before Mr. Carra was born. Redistricting could bring a new cache of voters from neighboring Battle Creek who have not spent decades pulling the lever for the incumbent. Mr. Upton’s challengers are bringing his moderate voting record to primary voters’ attention.But above all, there is Mr. Upton’s impeachment vote.“When Fred Upton voted to impeach President Trump, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Mr. Carra said, sitting on a park bench in Three Rivers, Mich.Jon Rocha, another of Mr. Upton’s challengers, spoke in measured tones to a reporter about his rival’s vote to impeach. Mr. Upton had been acting out of emotion, said the former Marine, who is Mexican American and a political newcomer, and had failed to consider Mr. Trump’s due process or take the time to investigate.But onstage in front of the crowd at the Festival of Truth, Mr. Rocha’s tone darkened.“This country is under attack,” he thundered. “Our children are being indoctrinated to hate the color of their skin, to hate this country and to believe this country is systemically racist and meant to oppress anybody with a different skin pigment. I can attest to you, as an American Mexican, that is not the case.”Jon Rocha, who spoke at the festival in Vermontville, is challenging Mr. Upton in the Republican primary.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesOppression is a theme: Ms. Johnson said she understood — though, she hastened to add, did not condone — violence by beleaguered conservatives. Mr. Norton suggested that transgender women were driven by mental illness to lop off body parts, and yet it was only those who objected who were ridiculed. Larry Eberly, the organizer of the Festival of Truth, warned the crowd that “we’re being manipulated” into accepting coronavirus vaccines, bellowing to cheers, “I will die first before they shove that needle into my arm.”In the end, none of this may matter to the composition of Congress. The anti-incumbent vote may be badly split, allowing Representatives Meijer and Upton to survive their primaries and sail to re-election.Mr. Meijer’s district had been held for a decade by Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning iconoclast who was fiercely critical of Mr. Trump and was the first House Republican to call for his impeachment. Amid the backlash, Mr. Amash left the Republican Party in 2019 to try to run as a libertarian. Then, when Mr. Amash found no quarter, he retired.But Mr. Meijer will have his name, the support of the Republican apparatus and a formidable money advantage.The question vexing him is not so much his own future, but his party’s. That is where he looks wistfully to Ford.“Was he necessarily the leader on moving the Republican Party in a direction? I can’t speak to what his internal conversations were,” Mr. Meijer said. “But in terms of giving confidence to the country that Republican leadership could be ethical and honest and sincere, I think he hit it out of the park.” More

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      Eric Adams, Once a Political Outsider, Conquers the Inside Game

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      Mr. Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City by portraying himself as a working-class politician who understood the concerns of average New Yorkers.The morning after winning the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, Eric L. Adams on Wednesday asserted that he had won a mandate to address the urgent struggles of America’s urban working class.As he appeared at a parade celebrating essential workers and toured morning television news shows, Mr. Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, sought to cement his image as a man who understands what it is to fear both gun violence and police misconduct. It was one thing to theorize about solving problems of injustice and inequality, he suggested. It was another to experience them as a working-class person of color in New York.“Finally one of your own is going to understand,” Mr. Adams said to a throng of health care workers at a parade.If Mr. Adams sounded, in that moment, like a political outsider, it is because for many years, he was more iconoclast than institutionalist.Mr. Adams was the rebel police officer who agitated against police misconduct from within the force, eventually rising to captain. He was the borough president who attracted more attention for quirky stunts — displaying drowned rats at a news conference to draw attention to a vermin problem, for instance — than for his record on land use policy. And he was the Brooklyn mayoral candidate who lost out on first-place endorsements from prominent Brooklyn-area members of the New York congressional delegation.But in other ways, Mr. Adams emerged in the mayoral contest as something of an establishment figure, earning the support of leading labor unions, locking down key party officials including two fellow borough presidents, and building an old-school Democratic coalition that attracted working-class Black, Latino and some moderate white voters.He was among the most message-disciplined candidates in the race, repeatedly declaring that public safety was the “prerequisite” to prosperity, a pitch that became increasingly resonant amid a spike in violent crime. And he used his personal story of overcoming poverty and police violence to emerge as a credible messenger on urgent issues of safety, justice and inequality.“We don’t live in theory,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who has known Mr. Adams for decades, pointing to the rise in shootings in cities across the country. “This is not an ivory tower exercise and that’s what worked for Eric.”Despite all of that institutional support and his ultimate victory, Mr. Adams defeated his nearest rival, Kathryn Garcia, by just one percentage point, according to the latest tally of ballots on Tuesday. Ms. Garcia conceded to Mr. Adams on Wednesday, as did the third-place finisher, Maya Wiley, the most left-leaning candidate in the field among the top tier of contenders.He still faces a general election campaign against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, but is expected to win easily because of the city’s overwhelming Democratic tilt — allowing him to already talk of an early transition as he moves toward assembling a government, and to contemplate the significant policy and political challenges that await.Mr. Adams’s victory was, in some ways, a repudiation of the most left-wing forces in the city, even as deeply progressive candidates scored other victories elsewhere on the ballot.A year after the rise of a powerful defund-the-police movement in New York, Mr. Adams won on a message that put public safety at the center of his platform, and he explicitly called for more police in certain scenarios: He supported adding more police to patrol the subways, for example, and backs reconstituting a reformed plainclothes anti-crime squad, even as he has been a vocal critic, for decades, of police abuse.He ran as a business-friendly candidate who did not demonize real estate; on the contrary, Mr. Adams, who owns property himself, once declared, “I am real estate.” And he is supportive of charter schools in some circumstances.But he is not especially ideological and on some social safety net issues, he has taken a much more liberal approach. For instance, he supports an ambitious expansion of the earned-income tax credit.Mr. Adams faces skepticism from the left over his politics, but as he assumes the nomination, he also faces doubts from some Democrats across the ideological spectrum over questions of transparency and ethics.In 2010, when he was a state senator and the chairman of the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, a state inspector general report suggested that Mr. Adams had given the “appearance of impropriety” by getting close to a group seeking a casino contract at Aqueduct Racetrack.A review of his fund-raising practices by The New York Times earlier this year showed that he has pushed the boundaries of campaign-finance and ethics laws, though he has not been formally accused of wrongdoing. And the last month of the campaign saw controversies over transparency issues play out concerning his tax and real estate disclosures and even questions of residency, culminating in an extraordinary moment in which Mr. Adams offered journalists a tour of the apartment where he said he lived.Mr. Adams’s formative years in the public eye were spent in the Police Department, where he helped found an organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. His efforts inspired some and rankled other colleagues on the force who describe a career trajectory that was more complex than Mr. Adams sometimes suggests.But to this day, some voters remember Mr. Adams from those efforts, which helped him dispatch arguments from opponents that he was overly inclined to embrace policing as an answer to the city’s challenges.“My admiration for him really started when he was a policeman talking about police brutality, and a captain talking about police officers not fulfilling their oath,” said Charles B. Rangel, the former New York congressman, who endorsed Mr. Adams.As an outspoken police officer, Mr. Adams had his share of controversies, too, aligning himself at various times with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has repeatedly promoted anti-Semitism, and the ex-boxer Mike Tyson after his 1992 rape conviction. Mr. Adams lost a 1994 congressional run, and he was also a registered Republican for a period of time in the 1990s.In 2006, he was elected to the State Senate as a Democrat, part of a wave of Central Brooklyn politicians who came up from outside the party, and in 2013, won an election to be Brooklyn borough president. Mr. Adams, who became an evangelist for veganism after he says he reversed his diabetes by reforming his diet and exercise routines, became known for preparing vegan meals at Borough Hall, and he developed a reputation as a splashy New York character prone to making unexpected remarks and appearances. There was the gruesome rat-related news conference, for instance, or Mr. Adams’s announcement that he, as a former law enforcement officer, would begin bringing a gun to houses of worship after a massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue. “In order to get a message across in New York City, first you have to get people’s attention,” said Evan Thies, an Adams spokesman. “People might look at the spectacle of dead rats at a press conference and be turned off by that, but they’re paying attention, and they’re paying attention to a critical health issue to lower-income people. Why was it on the news? Because Eric forced people to look at something they didn’t want to look at.”There is no question that Mr. Adams has an idiosyncratic streak. But his decades in public life suggest that the likely next mayor of the nation’s largest city also has shrewd instincts and an ability to navigate a politically eclectic set of relationships.Mr. Sharpton noted that Mr. Adams was “literally a founding member” of the National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton’s organization.“At the same time, he was a policeman, able to be friendly with more conservative elements that were not supportive of me,” Mr. Sharpton continued. “He has a way of working with people who don’t work with each other.”In his current role, Mr. Adams has been an enthusiastic promoter of his borough, building deep relationships there with diverse constituencies including Black voters and Orthodox Jewish leaders.But Representative Nydia Velázquez, who backed two of Mr. Adams’s rivals under the city’s ranked-choice voting system, noted that he was not the first choice of the members of Congress who represent much of Brooklyn (though Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking House member in the New York delegation, backed Mr. Adams as his second choice).“He will have a honeymoon with voters, but then people want to know how his administration — what does it mean for them, the ascension of Eric Adams to City Hall?” said Ms. Velázquez, who said she hoped Mr. Adams could have a “more productive” relationship with the delegation moving forward. “That will be measured by the agenda he will be able to tackle.”Mr. Adams’s team is especially focused on ways to use newly available state and federal resources to combat gun violence, and his campaign plans to offer more details on dealing with violence tied to handguns in coming weeks.Mr. Adams said on “Good Day New York” that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo made it easier to fight crime with his recent emergency declaration concerning gun violence.“We have to look at the feeders of crime,” he said. “My team is going to sit down and look at the common denominators of those who are committing crimes. If you don’t start targeting what’s feeding crime then we are going to throw good money into a bad scenario.”Mr. Adams said he would go after gang violence in the city, but that he also wants to help crisis management teams and youth organizations trying to prevent violence.He is aware of the skepticism he faces from some on the left. Mr. Adams reached for conciliatory notes on Wednesday, urging New Yorkers to “get over the philosophical differences we have.”“Let’s decide that we must live in a safe city where we educate our children and make sure everyone has an opportunity to prosper in this great city,” he added.Plus, he said, the ride could be fun.“You all would be bored if those other candidates were mayor,” he said. “You guys are going to have so much fun over the next four years.”Almost as to offer proof, Mr. Adams ended his day by fulfilling a rather unorthodox campaign promise he had made to a group of young New Yorkers: He had his left ear pierced. More

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      Kathryn Garcia Concedes in N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

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      Ms. Garcia moved up to second place after the latest ranked-choice tally, but still fell one percentage point behind Eric Adams.Kathryn Garcia, a former New York City sanitation commissioner who staged a late charge in the city’s Democratic primary, conceded on Wednesday to Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, after a count of absentee ballots left her trailing him by just 8,400 votes.The location of her concession speech, at the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, was freighted with meaning.“For 400 years, no woman has held the top seat at City Hall,” said Ms. Garcia, who in Tuesday’s tally lost by one percentage point. “This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor. We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken, but we have not cracked that glass ceiling.”Ms. Garcia ran on her reputation for managerial competence, offering herself as a counterweight to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who developed a reputation as a sometimes hapless administrator. Her candidacy gained momentum after she was endorsed by The New York Times and The Daily News; a late alliance with a rival candidate, Andrew Yang, likely helped her draw second-place votes from his supporters.Her concession speech contrasted sharply with the sheer ebullience accompanying Mr. Adams’s Wednesday tour of the morning shows.A plainly thrilled Mr. Adams sought to cast himself as the new voice of working-class Democrats in America, a class of voters he suggested had been neglected by the party elite for far too long.Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly seven to one in New York City, and as the Democratic nominee, Mr. Adams will be an overwhelming favorite against the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, in the November general election.Mr. Adams spent almost no time on Wednesday morning addressing the November election. When asked about Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, Mr. Adams swiftly dismissed him as a single-issue candidate focused on subway crime in a city facing a multitude of complicated issues.Instead, he directed his attention to what his win over 12 other Democratic candidates for mayor might portend for his party.“It’s extremely exciting right now that just an everyday blue-collar worker, I like to say, is going to potentially become the mayor of the City of New York,” Mr. Adams said on CNN.Mr. Adams repeated his argument that Democrats like him are too often ignored by a political party that focuses too much on the ideological debates that drive the conversation on Twitter.“There’s a permanent group of people that are living in systemic poverty,” he said on CBS. “You and I, we go to the restaurant, we eat well, we take our Uber, but that’s not the reality for America and New York. And so when we turn this city around, we’re going to end those inequalities.” More

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      Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

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      In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me thatapproximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.Trump Support Rises With AnimusA study found that animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party. More

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      Eric Adams Wins Democratic Primary for NYC Mayor

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      Mr. Adams held off Kathryn Garcia after a count of 118,000 absentee ballots saw his substantial lead on primary night narrow to a single percentage point.Eric L. Adams, who rose from poverty to become an iconoclastic police captain and the borough president of Brooklyn, declared victory in the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City on Tuesday, putting him on track to become the second Black mayor in the history of the nation’s largest city.The contest, which was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday night, was seen as one of the city’s most critical elections in a generation, with the winner expected to help set New York on a recovery course from the economic devastation of Covid-19 and from the longstanding racial and socioeconomic inequalities that the pandemic deepened.But as the campaign entered its final months, a spike in shootings and homicides drove public safety and crime to the forefront of voters’ minds, and Mr. Adams — the only leading candidate with a law enforcement background — moved urgently to demonstrate authority on the issue.Mr. Adams held an 8,400-vote lead over Kathryn Garcia, a margin of one percentage point — small enough that it was not immediately clear whether she or any of his opponents would contest the result in court. All three leading candidates had filed to maintain the option to challenge the results. If no one does so, Mr. Adams’s victory could be certified as soon as next week.“While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: An historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City,” Mr. Adams, 60, said in a statement.Yet neither Ms. Garcia nor Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio who finished in third place, was ready to offer a concession on Tuesday, with each offering brief statements that vaguely alluded to their next steps.The results came after the city’s Board of Elections counted an additional 118,000 absentee ballots and then deployed a ranked-choice elimination system — the first time New York has used it in a mayoral election.Kathryn Garcia moved ahead to second place on the strength of ranked-choice balloting but could not surpass Mr. Adams.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThere are potentially several thousand votes still to be counted, which may include affidavit votes and defective absentee ballots that voters can fix within the next week. Although the Board of Elections could not provide a precise number of those votes on Tuesday, the Adams campaign said there were not enough for Ms. Garcia to overtake him.Lindsey Green, a spokeswoman for Ms. Garcia, said in a statement that campaign officials were “currently seeking additional clarity on the number of outstanding ballots and are committed to supporting the Democratic nominee.”Under the ranked-choice voting system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. Because Mr. Adams did not receive more than 50 percent of first-choice votes on the initial tally, the winner was decided by ranked-choice elimination.Thirteen Democratic candidates were whittled down one by one, with the candidate with the fewest first-place votes eliminated, and those votes were redistributed to the voters’ next-ranked choice. Ms. Wiley, who emerged late in the primary as a left-wing standard-bearer, was eliminated following the seventh round of tabulations.Ms. Garcia won far more of Ms. Wiley’s votes than Mr. Adams did, but not quite enough to close the gap.Still, it was a striking result for Ms. Garcia, a candidate who until recently was little known and who lacked the institutional support and the political operation that helped propel Mr. Adams, a veteran city politician.In heavily Democratic New York City, Mr. Adams will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee and the founder of the Guardian Angels.“Now we must focus on winning in November so that we can deliver on the promise of this great city for those who are struggling, who are underserved and who are committed to a safe, fair, affordable future for all New Yorkers,” Mr. Adams said in his statement.The final-round matchup between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia illustrated sharp divisions within the Democratic Party along the lines of race, class and education.Mr. Adams, who cast himself as a blue-collar candidate, led in every borough except Manhattan in the tally of first-choice votes and was the strong favorite among working-class Black and Latino voters. He also demonstrated strength with white voters who held more moderate views, especially, some data suggests, among those voters who did not have college degrees — a coalition that has been likened to the one that propelled President Biden to the Democratic nomination in 2020.Ms. Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who ran on a message of technocratic competence, was popular with white moderate voters across the five boroughs.But she was overwhelmingly the candidate of Manhattan, dominating in some of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. She appealed to highly educated and more affluent voters across the ideological spectrum there and in parts of brownstone Brooklyn, even as she struggled to connect with voters of color elsewhere in the kinds of numbers it would have taken to win.The results capped a remarkable stretch in the city’s political history: The race began in a pandemic and took several unexpected twists in the final weeks, as one candidate confronted accusations of sexual misconduct dating back decades; another faced a campaign implosion; and Mr. Adams, under fire over residency questions, offered reporters a tour of the Brooklyn apartment where he says he lives.Most recently, it was colored by a vote-tallying disaster at the Board of Elections, leaving simmering concerns among Democrats about whether the eventual outcome would leave voters divided and mistrustful of the city’s electoral process. In a statement Tuesday night, Ms. Wiley thanked her supporters and expressed grave concerns about the Board of Elections.“We will have more to say about the next steps shortly,” the statement said. “Today we simply must recommit ourselves to a reformed Board of Elections and build new confidence in how we administer voting in New York City. New York City’s voters deserve better, and the B.O.E. must be completely remade following what can only be described as a debacle.”Ms. Garcia came in third place among voters who cast ballots in person on Primary Day and during the early voting period, trailing both Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley. But on the strength of ranked-choice voting, she surged into second place, with significant support from voters who had ranked Ms. Wiley and Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, as their top choices.Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang spent time during the final days of the race campaigning together and appearing on joint campaign literature, a team-up that plainly benefited Ms. Garcia under the ranked-choice process after Mr. Yang, who began the race as a front-runner but plummeted to fourth place on Primary Day, dropped out.Maya Wiley, who had the second highest number of first-place votes, lost ground during the ranked-choice process.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMs. Wiley, a favorite of younger left-wing voters, had sought to build a broad multiracial coalition, and she earned the support of some of New York’s most prominent Democratic members of Congress. Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia both ran as relative moderates on policy issues, including policing, education and their postures toward the business and real estate communities.The apparent victory of Mr. Adams, who embraces a relatively expansive role for law enforcement in promoting public safety, amounts to a rebuke of the left wing of his party that promoted far-reaching efforts to scale back the power of the police. The race was a vital if imperfect test of Democratic attitudes around crime amid a national wave of gun violence in American cities.Mr. Adams pushed for urgent action to combat a rise in gun violence and troubling incidents of subway crimes as well as bias attacks, especially against Asian Americans and Jews. While crime rates are nowhere near those of more violent earlier eras, policing still became the most divisive subject in the mayoral race.But some older voters had first heard about Mr. Adams when he was a younger member of the police force, pushing to rein in police misconduct.That background helped him emerge as a candidate with perceived credibility on issues of both combating crime and curbing police violence. And some Democrats, aware that national Republicans are eager to caricature their party as insufficiently concerned about crime, have taken note of Mr. Adams’s messaging — even if his career and life story are, in practice, difficult for other candidates to automatically replicate.“What Eric Adams has said quite well is that we need to listen to communities that are concerned about public safety, even as we fight for critical reforms in policing and racial justice more broadly in our society,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat and the chairman of the Democratic House campaign arm, who endorsed Mr. Adams the day before the primary.While Mr. Adams was named the winner on Tuesday night, he faces significant challenges in unifying the city around his candidacy. He has faced scrutiny over transparency issues concerning his tax and real estate disclosures; his fund-raising practices and even questions of residency, issues that may intensify under the glare of the nominee’s spotlight, and certainly as mayor, should he win as expected in November.Michael Gold More

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      Democratic Turnout in N.Y.C.'s Feisty Mayoral Primary? 26%

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      With one of the most competitive mayor’s races in recent memory and a number of hotly contested down-ballot primaries, the turnout in last month’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City was the strongest in years.So far, the Board of Elections has counted the ballots of about 820,000 registered Democrats who voted in-person in the mayoral primary. As of Friday, an additional 125,794 Democratic absentee ballots had been returned, likely bringing the turnout to at least 945,000 voters.That means that roughly 26 percent of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats voted in the mayoral primary this year — which is higher than, say, the 22 percent that voted in 2013, the last time there was a wide-open mayoral race. Bill de Blasio ended up prevailing. However, the turnout was low by historical standards; a number of bitterly fought races in the 1970s and 1980s drew more voters.The Democrats’ choice will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, who won the Republican primary with even lower turnout. The elections board has tallied about 55,000 in-person votes from Republicans, and another 5,800 absentee ballots have been returned. That total of 60,800 ballots accounts for about 10 percent of the city’s registered Republicans. More

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      More Results Expected in the Mayor’s Race

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Humid and mostly sunny, with a high in the mid-90s, and watch out for a severe storm this evening. Dangerously hot weather is expected through tomorrow. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 19 (Eid al-Adha). Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIt has been two weeks since New York City residents last cast ballots in the Democratic mayoral primary. And while Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holds a lead in the results released so far, it is not yet clear who will win.Today, elections officials are poised to release a new tally of results that could shed more light on who will ultimately prevail: a tabulation that incorporates for the first time the votes of tens of thousands of New Yorkers who cast ballots by mail.How did we get here?Under the city’s new ranked-choice system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference.Two weeks ago, elections officials began releasing preliminary results that included the first-choice votes of people who cast their ballots in person during the early-voting period or on Primary Day. In those results, Mr. Adams led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.6 percentage points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12.5 points.But since Mr. Adams did not get more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes, the ranked-choice system kicks in: lowest-polling candidates are eliminated a round at a time, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidate those voters ranked next.A preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted last week, showing Ms. Garcia trailing Mr. Adams by only two percentage points.That tally, however, did not include the votes of any of roughly 125,000 outstanding absentee ballots.What happens today?Elections officials are expected to conduct another ranked-choice tabulation that includes most of those absentee ballots.For either Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley to beat Mr. Adams, they would need a strong showing in these results.Is it over after today?No. Voters are still allowed to correct errors with mail-in ballot envelopes that might prevent their ballots from being counted until this Friday. Final results are expected to arrive sometime next week.And the campaigns of Ms. Wiley, Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia have filed lawsuits preserving their right to challenge the election results.From The Times‘Maybe We Can Be Friends’: New Yorkers Re-emerge in a Changed CityA Gifted Writer Returns With a Supremely Harrowing NovelMoving Downtown, to the Center of the ActionMet Opera Strikes Deal With Stagehands Over Pandemic PayWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingAbout 65,000 shells and aerial effects were launched from five barges near Midtown and Long Island City in what organizers billed as the biggest July 4 show ever. [Gothamist]A 33-year-old man was fatally shot outside a public housing development in the Bronx, police said. [Daily News]City officials are considering a proposal to create 24-hour entertainment districts where people can party all night. [Associated Press]And finally: A library transformed The Times’s James S. Russell writes:Muddling along for four decades in a nondescript former department store, the Mid-Manhattan library, at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, served a growing swarm of local residents and commuters. But the branch steadily became dilapidated — an “embarrassment” to the New York Public Library system, as Anthony W. Marx, its president, put it.After three years of construction and $200 million, the library system was ready to reopen its largest circulating branch in spring 2020. Instead, the pandemic extended the closure. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, as it is now known (after a $55 million gift), finally threw open its doors to unlimited browsing in June.Its theatrically expressive heart is a dramatic atrium billowing upward from the second floor, displaying the vast circulating collection of up to 400,000 volumes. The branch is phasing in its extensive programming over the coming months. (The New York and Queens library systems will fully reopen today, and Brooklyn will follow a few days later.)Libraries have taken on the great task of helping people acquire knowledge, whatever the means of delivery, and have become more central to community life. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg made libraries Exhibit A in his 2018 book, “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.” He argued that “social infrastructure” — public places where people mingle and interact — can help reduce crime, isolation, and even strengthen communities.It’s Tuesday — how about a new book?Metropolitan Diary: Last car Dear Diary:I parked my car at an outdoor lot near Madison Square Garden while my friend and I went to the Rangers game. After the game, we walked to Virgil’s and spent some time catching up over a leisurely barbecue dinner.On the way back to the car, I got a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach when the parking lot came into view. From a distance, it appeared that my car was the only one left in the lot.My uneasy feeling was soon justified. When I left the car there earlier in the evening, I had somehow failed to notice the sign clearly stating that the lot closed at 11 p.m.As my friend and I stood helplessly at the locked gate pondering our stupidity and predicament, I saw a piece of paper taped to the fence and flapping in the wind. It was a handwritten note.“I’m in the Irish pub around the corner,” it said. “Meet me there.”— Vincent BucciIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Read more Metropolitan Diary here.New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More