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      En Los Ángeles, la política es más compleja que el escándalo racista

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      El audio filtrado de líderes latinos que usan un lenguaje racista también expuso su ambición de acumular más poder. Sin embargo, en el distrito más latino de la ciudad, han apoyado a candidatos negros.LOS ÁNGELES — Aunque en algún momento llegó a ser un sinónimo de la cultura negra, el sur de Los Ángeles ha experimentado un cambio demográfico dramático.Ahora hay misas católicas en español en el teatro donde Duke Ellington solía presentarse. En los pasillos de la escuela secundaria Thomas Jefferson, cuyos famosos exalumnos negros incluyen a Alvin Ailey y Dexter Gordon, aproximadamente nueve de cada 10 estudiantes son hispanos. En la histórica Central Avenue, la música ranchera resuena en las tiendas de comestibles.Pero en el Noveno Distrito de la ciudad, que abarca el tramo de Los Ángeles que alguna vez se conoció como South Central, hay un elemento que no ha cambiado: los votantes han elegido candidatos negros para integrar el Concejo Municipal durante casi seis décadas, incluido su actual concejal, Curren Price.En una grabación filtrada que ha trastornado la escena política de Los Ángeles este mes, se escuchó a cuatro líderes latinos discutiendo sobre cómo rediseñar los distritos políticos para su beneficio, usando términos racistas y palabras despectivas que fueron ampliamente condenadas. El audio también expuso las frustraciones de que no haya más latinos en cargos electos, en un momento en que representan la mitad de la población de la ciudad.Décadas de acuerdos y decisiones políticas han dado como resultado la composición actual del Concejo Municipal, donde los líderes blancos y negros ocupan más escaños de lo que podrían sugerir los datos demográficos. La divulgación de la grabación también ha abierto un debate sobre cuánto importan las políticas de bloques raciales de generaciones anteriores.La participación electoral en el Noveno Distrito es baja y algunos residentes dijeron que prestan poca atención a la política de la ciudad, a pesar de sus preocupaciones cotidianas por los delitos y la falta de vivienda. Mientras llevaba a casa a su hijo de 8 años que había salido de la escuela en el sur de Los Ángeles, María Robles, de 30 años, se preguntaba qué harán los políticos locales para resolver los problemas.“No voto, simplemente no lo hago”, dijo. “No creo que ningún político esté representando a los latinos. No nos defienden”.Sin embargo, en los círculos políticos de la ciudad, la brecha entre la población latina y su nivel de influencia ha sido un viejo problema. En ninguna parte es más evidente que en el Noveno Distrito, donde el 80 por ciento de los residentes son latinos.“La gente se siente incómoda hablando de esto, pero los latinos en Los Ángeles están subrepresentados”, dijo Fernando Guerra, director del Centro para el Estudio de Los Ángeles en la Universidad Loyola Marymount. Guerra realiza encuestas y grupos de discusión con residentes de la ciudad, y dijo que “cuando hablamos con los latinos en esas comunidades, les gustaría tener representación latina”.En la década de 1980, aumentó la cantidad de inmigrantes latinos que se mudaron al sur de Los Ángeles, huyendo de las guerras civiles centroamericanas y la perturbación económica de México. Al mismo tiempo, los trabajos de manufactura estaban desapareciendo, la violencia de las pandillas y las drogas proliferaba, y la clase media negra se estaba mudando a otros lugares. Para 1990, según los datos del censo analizados por SocialExplorer.com, por primera vez más de la mitad de los residentes de la zona eran latinos.María Robles, de 30 años, y su hijo Alex Salgado, de 8, caminan por el Noveno Distrito de Los ÁngelesLauren Justice para The New York TimesA menudo, la representación política va a la zaga del cambio demográfico, y Los Ángeles no ha sido la excepción. En algunos casos, los líderes latinos llegaron a acuerdos de beneficio mutuo para preservar los límites del distrito que protegían a sus colegas negros. En otros, el movimiento laboral mayoritariamente latino de Los Ángeles ha respaldado a los líderes negros confiables y establecidos por encima de los contrincantes latinos que no habían ocupado cargos públicos. Los miembros del sindicato brindan el apoyo voluntario y económico necesario para atraer votantes a las elecciones locales en las que, de otro modo, la participación podría ser mediocre en una ciudad grande y transitoria.Ahora los residentes latinos constituyen el grupo étnico más grande en 10 de los 15 distritos municipales de la ciudad, según datos de las autoridades. Pero su participación en la población votante elegible es menor que su participación en la población general, una brecha que reduce su poder electoral.Incluso antes de que Nury Martinez, una demócrata latina, renunciara como presidenta del Concejo Municipal y dejara su escaño en el Concejo la semana pasada debido al alboroto por la grabación de audio, solo cuatro de los quince escaños del Concejo estaban ocupados por latinos.La conversación filtrada ha tenido el efecto de reducir el poder de los latinos, al menos temporalmente. El martes, Martinez fue remplazada como presidenta por Paul Krekorian, un armenio estadounidense. Los otros dos miembros que se escuchan en la grabación, Gil Cedillo y Kevin de León, han sido despojados de sus tareas de comité y no han asistido a las reuniones durante una semana.El Noveno Distrito era considerado un escaño latino en la década de 1950, cuando Edward R. Roybal se convirtió en el primer concejal latino de la ciudad desde fines del siglo XIX. Cuando Roybal fue al Congreso en 1962, se nombró a Gilbert W. Lindsay, un organizador comunitario negro con fuertes lazos laborales, para remplazarlo. Lindsay se convirtió en uno de los políticos más poderosos de la ciudad, rigió durante tres décadas y se autodenominó como “el Emperador del Gran Noveno”. Sus tres sucesores en el Concejo han sido negros.Curren Price ha representado al Noveno Distrito desde 2013.Tracy Nguyen para The New York TimesCuando Price, un demócrata a favor de los trabajadores y exlegislador estatal, se postuló por primera vez para el escaño del Noveno Distrito en 2013, el millón de dólares que recaudó en contribuciones directas a la campaña se complementó con unos 700.000 dólares que los grupos laborales gastaron de forma independiente para apoyarlo.Los líderes laborales han respaldado a Price, para consternación de los retadores que pensaron que había llegado el momento de la representación latina.“Le dije a la gente que me iba a postular y me miraron como si tuviera covid”, dijo Jorge Nuño, de 45 años, activista local y propietario de una pequeña empresa que creció en el Noveno Distrito y perdió ante Price en la elecciones de 2017. “Me dijeron: ‘No, hombre, no lo hagas, los sindicatos van a quedarse con Curren’”.Dulce Vasquez, de 36 años, administradora universitaria y demócrata progresista que lo desafió este año, recibió más de 500.000 dólares en apoyo total, pero fue solo alrededor de un tercio de lo que consiguió Price, y no pudo competir con los bancos telefónicos del sindicato y los activistas que lo respaldaban.Price también recibió el respaldo de sus cuatro colegas latinos en el Concejo en su campaña contra Vásquez. Ganó abrumadoramente su tercer mandato en junio.Sin embargo, al caminar por las comunidades, Nuño y Vasquez dijeron que encontraron una sed genuina de conexión cultural entre los votantes latinos. “La gente quiere ver un liderazgo que se parezca a ellos”, dijo Nuño. “Quieren a alguien que, por ejemplo, pueda ir a sus salas de estar y tomar pan con café”.Ambos predijeron que los líderes sindicales respaldarán a un candidato latino cuando Price, de 71 años, deje el cargo. El veterano político está entrando en su mandato final de cuatro años bajo las reglas de límites de mandato de la ciudad. En otra grabación filtrada, Ron Herrera, quien desde entonces renunció como titular de la Federación del Trabajo, se refirió a esa posibilidad. Cuando se le preguntó acerca de encontrar un candidato latino para suceder a Price, dijo: “Tenemos a alguien”.Price, un abogado educado en Stanford y oriundo de Los Ángeles que también trabajó en el Concejo Municipal de Inglewood, dijo que el cuarto de millón de personas que viven en el Noveno Distrito lo han mantenido en el cargo porque comprende sus problemas básicos.La semana pasada, afuera de su oficina en Central Avenue, un mercado de agricultores ofrecía fresas, tarros de miel, cartones de huevos y consejos sobre el compostaje. El concejal dijo que expandir el mercado fue idea suya para traer productos y brindarles a las personas un lugar para reunirse y encontrar información sobre cupones de alimentos y recursos comunitarios.Al otro lado de la calle, todos los días, hay un mercado informal donde los comerciantes latinos venden mazorcas de maíz, bolsas de duros, ropa y juguetes alrededor del estacionamiento de una tienda departamental de descuento. Mientras paseaba por esa zona, Price los miró y dijo que también eran bienvenidos.Señaló carteles que presentan detalles en inglés y español sobre puntos de referencia del apogeo del área como un centro próspero para la comunidad negra: el Teatro Lincoln en la calle 23, apodado el “Apolo de la Costa Oeste” en referencia al famoso lugar de entretenimiento negro en Harlem. La Asociación de Ahorros y Préstamos de Liberty, una empresa de propiedad negra que ofrecía hipotecas a los residentes locales cuando los prestamistas blancos no lo hacían.“No es solo para los negros”, dijo Price sobre los hitos históricos. “También es para que la gente morena entienda nuestra historia”.La joya de la corona fue el Hotel Dunbar, donde grandes artistas como Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne y Ellington se hospedaron cuando atraían multitudes de personas afroestadounidenses a sus presentaciones en Los Ángeles, pero no se les permitía quedarse en hoteles para blancos. Dunbar sirve ahora como vivienda asequible para personas mayores.Tiendas de campaña para las personas sin hogar junto a la Iglesia de Jesucristo Judá.Lauren Justice para The New York TimesSin embargo, José Andrade, un músico de mariachi, se quejó de que el ayuntamiento no había respondido a las solicitudes para instalar topes de velocidad en las calles residenciales para impedir las carreras callejeras. “Estos muchachos corren como si estuvieran en la autopista”, dijo, “y nadie está haciendo nada al respecto”.Nacido en El Salvador, Andrade dijo que emigró con su esposa, Iris, a Los Ángeles en 1983 y se establecieron en el Noveno Distrito porque no podían pagar los alquileres en otros lugares de la ciudad.“Había pandillas en cada esquina”, dijo sobre esos días, mientras paseaba por los pasillos de una tienda de comestibles en Central Avenue y hablaba sobre la música mexicana. “Vivías con miedo de que te asaltaran o te robaran”.Las familias negras pudientes empacaron sus pertenencias y se mudaron a San Bernardino o Antelope Valley, donde las casas eran más grandes y las calles más seguras. Llegaron más inmigrantes, atraídos por los precios más bajos de las viviendas en la localidad. La economía comenzó a mejorar, impulsada por el auge tecnológico de California. Y, por diversas razones, las tasas de criminalidad cayeron.Para el año 2000, Andrade había comprado una casa de tres dormitorios por 170.000 dólares que alguna vez estuvo ocupada por una familia negra. Plantó árboles de limón, aguacate y mango y construyó dos apartamentos en la parte de atrás, que alquila a inmigrantes. Tres de sus cuatro hijos adultos han dejado el vecindario para ir a la universidad y dedicarse a sus carreras profesionales.Andrade se convirtió en ciudadano estadounidense hace unos años y dijo que no votó por Price porque no confiaba en el concejal.Leobardo Juan Camilo, carnicero en Laguna Market, uno de muchos comercios latinos en la Avenida Central Avenue en el Noveno DistritoLauren Justice para The New York TimesPrice reconoció que satisfacer las necesidades de su distrito ha sido un trabajo inacabado. De alrededor de 100.000 votantes registrados en el distrito, solo unos 12.500 votaron en las primarias de febrero en las que fue elegido.“Muchas veces, la gente dice: ‘Oye, tengo que asistir a mi tercer trabajo, no tengo tiempo para ir a una reunión, o no tengo tiempo para presentar una queja porque, de todos modos, nada va a pasar’”, dijo Price.Elmer Roldán, un guatemalteco estadounidense, se instaló en el vecindario en 1989. Dijo que durante mucho tiempo los residentes del Noveno Distrito han deseado más parques y tiendas de comestibles, y que sentía que la zona de la ciudad cerca de la Universidad del Sur de California recibía muchos recursos y atención.Sin embargo, Roldán comentó que la raza de su concejal no tiene nada que ver con el estado del vecindario. Dijo que los residentes latinos deberían asociarse con las personas negras “que tienen más cosas en común con nosotros, tanto política como económicamente”.“Los latinos no creen que no están recibiendo ayuda porque Curren Price sea negro”, dijo Roldan, quien votó por Price. “Sienten que los políticos, sin importar quiénes sean, no responden a las necesidades del vecindario”.“No creo que tener un integrante latino del Concejo cambie estas condiciones”, agregó.Mientras Price volvía caminando a su oficina, los electores que le hicieron señas tenían mucho que decir. Una mujer que vendía pozole y mojarras fritas afuera de una tienda que ofrece clases de zumba le informó que una luz urbana se había apagado cerca y estaba preocupada por la seguridad. Otro estaba preocupado por un farol de otra cuadra y quería que se instalara un semáforo.Le hablaban en español. Una vocera, que caminaba con Price, le tradujo lo que decían los vecinos.Corina Knoll es la jefa de la corresponsalía en Los Ángeles. Fue reportera en la sección Metro y antes trabajó más de una década en The Los Angeles Times, donde colaboró con dos Premios Pulitzer y participó en la investigación sobre cómo una lista secreta de oficiales problemáticos de un alguacil de condado obstruyó la justicia. @corinaknollShawn Hubler es corresponsal en California con sede en Sacramento. Antes de unirse al Times en 2020, pasó casi dos décadas cubriendo el estado para Los Angeles Times como reportera itinerante, columnista y escritora de revista. Compartió tres premios Pulitzer con el equipo Metro del periódico. @ShawnHublerMiriam Jordan es corresponsal en la sección Nacional. Cubre el impacto de la migración en la sociedad, la cultura y la economía de Estados Unidos. Antes de unirse al Times, cubrió inmigración por más de una década en el Wall Street Journal y fue corresponsal en Brasil, Israel, Hong Kong e India. More

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      In Quebec, the Independence Movement Gives Way to a New Nationalism

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      In Monday’s election, residents of a town that was once a stronghold of the independence movement are expected to back the province’s popular premier, who has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.L’ASSOMPTION, Quebec — Residents in the small city of L’Assomption, Quebec, once overwhelmingly backed the province’s bid to break away from Canada in order to establish a French-speaking, independent nation.On Monday, though, they and much of the rest of the province are expected to strongly back the re-election of their popular premier, who has abandoned calls for independence — and instead has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.“It’s a conservative nationalism that recalls the themes of culture, history and memory,” said Jacques Beauchemin, a sociologist and a leading intellectual behind this shift. “It’s a return to the meaning of identity.”But to critics, this nationalism threatens the cohesion of the increasingly diverse province by taking aim at immigrants, English speakers and other minorities.In its four years in office, the government of the premier, Francois Legault, has banned the wearing of religious symbols like the Muslim veil in some public areas and has further restricted the use of English. In his campaign for the election, Mr. Legault has doubled down on the issue of immigration, describing it as a threat to Quebec society — a stance at odds with that of the federal government, which is planning to increase immigration sharply over the next few years.The position is also at odds with the stance of Montreal, the multicultural city where the premier’s popularity is comparatively weak.“With this electoral strategy, Mr. Legault is deepening the divide between Montreal and the rest of Quebec,’’ said Gérard Bouchard, a historian and sociologist who is a leading intellectual in the province. “The result of this strategy is to marginalize immigrants and ethnic minorities who are concentrated in Montreal.”A spokesman for Mr. Legault declined a request for an interview.Quebec’s premier, François Legault, is expected to easily win a second mandate.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault’s brand of nationalism departs sharply from the ideology behind the left-leaning secessionist movement, which sought autonomy for the French Québécois majority that felt historically oppressed by an English-speaking minority. That movement identified with progressive liberation movements throughout the world and was backed by young, urban voters in Quebec.A onetime businessman who co-founded a successful budget airline, Mr. Legault started his political career in the separatist, social democratic Parti Québécois, a group ideologically opposed to the federalist, pro-business Liberal Party. But a decade ago, Mr. Legault altered the political landscape when he founded a new party, Coalition Avenir Québec, which offered a third way. Rejecting secession from Canada, his party blends an identity-based nationalist agenda with pro-business policies.In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, his ideas have especially caught on.“He has spoken about the notion of being Québécois, about our pride and culture,’’ said Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption.Mr. Legault — who represents the electoral district that includes L’Assomption — also partly owes his popularity to his economic policies, to the paternal figure he assumed during the pandemic and to a divided opposition, said Lisa Maureen Birch, a political scientist at Laval University and an editor of a book on the premier’s first term.Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption, said that the recent arrival of immigrants was both a source of inspiration and fear.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesIn his campaign, Mr. Legault has had to backpedal several times after making comments that, his critics say, reveal the divisiveness of his nationalism. When Mr. Legault was questioned at a campaign stop about racism and the case of an Indigenous woman who died after filming herself being abused by hospital staff, he accused members of her Atikamekw First Nations community of not wanting to fix problems on the ground but of seeking to revive a pointless debate on systemic racism, which the premier denies exists in Quebec’s institutions.He later apologized to the woman’s family.Mr. Legault, who wants Quebec to gain more control from Ottawa over immigration policies, also apologized during the campaign after linking immigration to violence and extremism. And he apologized last week, after his immigration minister falsely said that “80 percent of immigrants go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.’’L’Assomption is a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin. A river of the same name snakes around the city center, winding its way across a suburban and rural region with towns and roads with names pointing to Quebec’s Roman Catholic heritage.In the 1995 referendum on independence from Canada, 64 percent of the voters in L’Assomption’s electoral district said yes. In 2018, 57 percent voted for Mr. Legault, with the candidate of the pro-independence Parti Québécois finishing third.Located about 30 miles northeast of downtown Montreal, L’Assomption has only recently experienced the demographic changes that have affected Montreal for decades, said Mr. Nadeau, the mayor. Immigrants who used to rent in Montreal have started buying houses in the area as they seek more space, he said, adding that L’Assomption’s first ethnic restaurants opened just in recent years.Ralph Lorquet, 39, arrived in Quebec from Haiti when he was 16 and grew up close to L’Assomption, in Repentigny. Six months ago, his family took over this space from a defunct Portuguese restaurant and opened Lou Lou’s Casse Croûte, serving homemade Haitian fare. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times“Here, 10 years ago, we didn’t have a Haitian cafe or a Portuguese restaurant,” Mr. Nadeau said, adding that the immigrants’ arrival was both a source of inspiration and fear.On L’Assomption’s main commercial strip — which is called the Boulevard of the Guardian Angel and is lined with shops that give it a village-like feel — Normand Parisien, 68, a retired city employee, said he believed that L’Assomption was representative of a traditional Quebec and its psyche.“We feel threatened by multiethnicity because we’re a pretty homogeneous society,” said Mr. Parisien, who went to Montreal once a week to attend plays and modern dance performances before the pandemic. “It doesn’t frighten me that much personally. But all of this goes with language and religion; it’s all related. It’s who we are.’’The Legault government’s passing of the law banning the wearing of religious symbols was a response to this fear, especially of Muslim immigrants, Mr. Parisien said.“They don’t resemble us,” he said. “It’s a fear of the stranger.”In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, the premier’s ideas have especially caught on. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesOthers, like Nicole Robillard, 60, a retired hospital worker, said Mr. Legault was protecting French Québécois against immigrants who are trying to impose their values.“Why do people come here and try to change our culture? Why do they want to take away our crucifixes?” Ms. Robillard said, referring to the removal of the cross from the provincial legislature in 2019.Mr. Legault initially argued to keep the crucifix, saying it was not a religious symbol, but changed his position after the passage of the law on religious symbols.Critics say the law targets Muslims and fuels the debate over the place of veiled Muslim women in Quebec society. It embodies the transformation of Quebec nationalism, which saw itself as linked to other global liberation movements, into a reactionary force, said Jean-Pierre Couture, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa.“It has triggered — in the public debate, on the streets and in the metro — abuses against people who wear religious symbols, and that’s been transformed into votes at the ballot box,” Mr. Couture said. He added that the enemy of Quebec nationalism — American imperialism or an English-speaking Canada in the past — was now the veiled Muslim woman.Mr. Bouchard, the historian, traces the shift in Quebec nationalism to the separatists’ razor-thin loss in the 1995 referendum. The premier at the time, Jacques Parizeau — who also represented the electoral district of L’Assomption — blamed “money and ethnic votes” for the loss.Quebec’s changing nationalism is reflected in L’Assomption, a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault has described increasing immigration as “suicidal” for Quebec’s French identity — rejecting appeals by business leaders worried about the effects of a labor shortage and the province’s low birthrate.At Assomption-de-la-Sainte-Vierge Church — a Roman Catholic Church attended by aging French Québécois and younger immigrants from South America and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the Rev. Greg Ciszek worried about the effects of this anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec. It was a change from the Quebec he had come to as a 9-year-old immigrant from Poland, said Father Ciszek, now 41.“Now immigrants arrive and experience a rejection in part, a devaluation of their dignity,” Father Ciszek said.“If Quebec society wanted to perpetuate its French Canadian identity,” he said, “all it needed to do was have more children.”The Rev. Greg Ciszek said he was worried about the effects of anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times More

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      The Racial Divide Herschel Walker Couldn’t Outrun

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      WRIGHTSVILLE, Ga. — The race for a critical Senate seat was in full motion by midsummer, but there were just a few Herschel Walker campaign signs sprinkled around his hometown.They were planted in front of big homes with big yards, in a downtown storefront window, near the sidewalk by the Dairy Queen. There were two on the corner by the Johnson County Courthouse, near a Confederate memorial.The support appeared randomly scattered. But people in Wrightsville saw a dot-to-dot drawing of a racial divide that has shaped Wrightsville for generations — and is now shaping a critical political race with national implications.“All those campaign materials were in the white community,” said Curtis Dixon, who is Black and who taught and coached Mr. Walker, a Republican, in the late 1970s when he was a high school football prodigy. “The only other house that has a Herschel Walker poster is his family.”It may not be an exaggeration. In a predominantly Black neighborhood of small homes about a block from where Mr. Walker went to high school, nine people, including a man who said he was Mr. Walker’s cousin, gathered on a steamy Saturday in July to eat and talk in the shade.No one planned to vote for Mr. Walker. Most scoffed at the thought.Around the corner, a retired teacher named Alice Pierce said nice things about Mr. Walker’s mother and family, as most people do.“But I’m not going to vote for him, I’ll be honest with you,” she said.Fearful of repercussions in a small town, and out of respect for members of the Walker family who still live in the area, many Black residents in Wrightsville spoke only under the condition of anonymity.One woman, taking a break from mowing her lawn, said Mr. Walker would be in over his head as mayor of Wrightsville. “He’s famous to some people, because of football,” she said. “But he’s just Herschel Walker to me.”Mr. Walker, who is one of the most famous African Americans in Georgia’s history, a folk hero for legions of football fans, is unpopular with Black voters. And nowhere is the rift more stark than in the rural farm town where he was raised about 140 miles southeast of Atlanta.Mr. Walker’s hometown, Wrightsville, sprinkled with his campaign signs. Few are in the yards of Black residents, a microcosm that shows the racial divide among Mr. Walker’s supporters.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPolls show that Mr. Walker, despite his fame as a football player, may receive less than 10 percent of the Black vote in the Senate race against incumbent Raphael Warnock. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSince June, polls have routinely shown Mr. Walker attracting less than 10 percent of Black voters in the race against incumbent Raphael Warnock, the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Although Mr. Walker often boasts he is going to win “the Black vote,” surveys have found him poised to win no more Black voters than other Republicans on the ballot.There are easy explanations: Mr. Warnock, who is also Black, is a Democrat who preaches at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, and Mr. Walker is running as a Republican tied to Donald J. Trump.But there are complex reasons, too, especially in Wrightsville.“Herschel’s not getting the Black vote because Herschel forgot where he came from,” Mr. Dixon said. “He’s not part of the Black community.”Such feelings toward Mr. Walker have been present for decades. They are flowering ahead of November’s elections.But they took root during one seismic spring stretch in 1980. On Easter Sunday that April, Mr. Walker, the top football recruit in the country, committed to play at the University of Georgia in Athens. The signing made national news.Two nights later, after months of simmering tensions, there was a racial confrontation at the courthouse, a lit fuse that exploded into weeks of violence.The events, two of the biggest in town history, did not seem connected at the time. More than four decades later, their intersection may help decide the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.A confederate memorial near Wrightsville, the Johnson County seat.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times‘You can’t get into shape marching’Several two-lane roads lead to Wrightsville, a crossroads more than a destination, set amid rolling hills of farms and forests. It is the seat of a rural county with fewer than 10,000 residents, about one-third of them Black.A few miles from town, one road is labeled the “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.” Another passes by a substantial Confederate memorial. Down a nearby dirt road is the church that Mr. Walker attended as a boy.Another road to Wrightsville passes the spot, five miles from town, where Mr. Walker and six siblings were raised by Willis and Christine Walker in a white clapboard house.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Sensing a Shift: As November approaches, there are a few signs that the political winds may have begun to blow in a different direction — one that might help Republicans over the final stretch.Focusing on Crime: Across the country, Republicans are attacking Democrats as soft on crime to rally midterm voters. Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed example of this strategy.Arizona Senate Race: Blake Masters, a Republican, appears to be struggling to win over independent voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.The family home has been replaced by a stately, ranch-style brick one, where Mr. Walker’s widowed mother lives. Behind it is a second home, a place for Mr. Walker to stay when he visits. About eight storage buildings nearby hold his collection of classic cars.Mr. Walker’s childhood home is gone, replaced by a brick house where his widowed mother lives. A second home behind it is where Mr. Walker stays when he visits.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Walker, now 60, has mostly lived in Texas since the mid-1980s. He often comes to Wrightsville for the Fourth of July, and his cars comprise most of the parade. This year featured a new entry — a Chevy truck wrapped in an advertisement for “Team Herschel,” with Mr. Walker’s photo on the hood.The parade, just a few minutes long, takes place in front of the Johnson County Courthouse, perched on a central square surrounded mostly by empty storefronts. Banners on lampposts call Wrightsville “the friendliest town in Georgia.”But back in 1980, it was “a mean little town,” the Atlanta Journal reporter Ron Taylor wrote at the time, that “hangs at the damaged roots of all that did not grow after the sixties.”It was outside the courthouse in 1979 that the Rev. E.J. Wilson, a Black pastor and civil rights activist new to town, began organizing protests calling out the indignities of being Black in Wrightsville.Schools had been integrated, but plenty else felt separate and unequal. City jobs and services mostly went to white people. The police force was white. There was an all-white country club but no public parks or pools. Black neighborhoods had dirt roads and leaky sewers. There was still an all-white cemetery, Mr. Wilson pointed out.And plenty of residents could recall 1948, when the Ku Klux Klan marched on the courthouse and not one of the 400 registered Black voters voted in a primary election the next day.Mr. Wilson and John Martin, a local leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, saw Wrightsville as a rural echo of Birmingham a generation before, with Sheriff Roland Attaway in the hardened role of Bull Connor.Mr. Walker was the town’s most famous resident, a potentially powerful ally.“There were a few times after the Friday night football games when some of the protest leaders grabbed Walker, still in uniform and pads, and demanded he join them,” The New York Times Magazine wrote in 1981. “Sheriff Attaway offered to let Herschel carry a pistol. Most of the Black athletes quit the track team the same spring Herschel led it to its title.”Protests grew through the spring of 1980. So did opposition. National civil rights leaders arrived. The Klan and J.B. Stoner, the white supremacist politician later convicted of a church bombing, rolled in. There were standoffs and skirmishes.Some civil rights leaders saw Wrightsville as a rural echo of Birmingham a generation before. Peaceful demonstrations like this one in 1980 occasionally turned violent.Kenneth Walker/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APThe 1980 Johnson County High School yearbook honored the football team, led by Mr. Walker, the nation’s top recruit. While Mr. Walker wore No. 34 in college and the pros, he was No. 43 in high school. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTwo nights after Easter, the courthouse square filled with about 75 Black protesters and twice as many white ones. The Black protesters were attacked by the white crowd, and sheriff’s deputies joined in, Black leaders told reporters. No one was arrested.Violence continued sporadically for weeks. Schools and factories closed for fear of outbursts. A little girl, a woman and a policeman were hurt by gunfire. A cafe burned.In May, Sheriff Attaway and his deputies, guns drawn and bracing for a riot, rolled down South Valley Street into a Black neighborhood where Mr. Wilson’s red brick church still stands. They went door to door, arresting and jailing about 40 people, some for days, most without charges.Mr. Walker never got involved.“I’d like to think I had something to do with it,” said Gary Jordan, a white man who coached Mr. Walker in track and football, starting when Mr. Walker was in fifth grade. “I said, ‘You can’t get into shape marching. You’ve got to run. And practice is at 3.’”Mr. Walker had several other white mentors in town, including an owner of a service station where Mr. Walker worked and a farmer who had employed his parents. Another was a math teacher, Jeanette Caneega.“As a student in school, his role in society was not to solve the racial problems of the world,” she said this summer.“I don’t want to be divisive,” Gary Phillips, Mr. Walker’s high-school football coach, who is white, said, “but as an 18-year-old Black kid in Wrightsville with a lot of pressure on him, can you see how or why he might have decided that this is not the best thing for me, to start getting into this?”Mr. Walker soon left Wrightsville and rarely spoke about the episode. He declined to be interviewed for this article. In college, when he was asked by a reporter about the friction back home, Mr. Walker said that he was “too young” and “didn’t want to get involved in something I didn’t know much about.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a memoir published decades later, Mr. Walker only briefly noted the conflict. But he described a school confrontation between a Black student and the white principal the year before.“I could never really be fully accepted by white students and the African American students either resented me or distrusted me for what they perceived as my failure to stand united with them — regardless of whether they were right or wrong,” he wrote. “That separation would continue throughout my life with only the reasons for it differing from situation to situation.”He added: “I never really liked the idea that I was to represent my people.”Student football players warmed up on Herschel Walker Field.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAn Outsider at HomeToday, the school that Mr. Walker attended is shuttered behind a chain-link fence. A new school was built next to what is now called Herschel Walker Field. The complex sits on Herschel Walker Drive.Teachers, coaches and classmates in Wrightsville remember Mr. Walker’s demeanor. Polite. Humble. Kind. Respectful.People who plan to vote for him in November tend to mention those things, too. They credit Mr. Walker’s parents. Willis worked at a kaolin mine. Christine worked at a textile mill. They stayed mostly to themselves and taught their children to try to get along with everyone. “The good Christian woman that she is,” Mr. Walker wrote of his mother, “she also taught us that color was invisible.”Mr. Walker, in a family of strong athletes, was barely noticed until his junior year of high school. He was, by his telling, a chubby stutterer with so few friends that he paid children to talk to him. He was haunted by nightmares of wolves and was “petrified” of the dark and the Klan, he wrote in his memoir.He painted himself as an outsider, even in his hometown.“No one wanted to associate with me because I was an outcast, a stuttering-stumpy-fat-poor-other-side-of-the-railroad-tracks-living-stupid-country boy,” Mr. Walker wrote.In his early teens, Mr. Walker disappeared into books and devoted himself to fitness. He became a model student, a member of an honor society called the Beta Club. Ms. Caneega, the teacher who led the club, joked that she would have taught for free if she “had a class full of kids like him.”With no weight room in town, Mr. Walker did pull-ups from trees and ran barefoot along the railroad tracks. Mr. Jordan, the coach, wrapped a belt around Mr. Walker, fastened chains to him and had him pull truck tires across the Georgia red dirt.Mr. Walker won state titles in track in both sprints and the shot put and led Johnson County to a football state championship his senior year.The nation’s top college coaches crowded into Wrightsville. Some arrived by helicopter, landing on a field next to school. Mr. Walker delayed a decision for months through the tumultuous spring of 1980.“Part of that might be that he was so nice, he didn’t want to tell other people goodbye and no thanks after he got to know them a bit,” Vince Dooley, Georgia’s coach from 1964 to 1988, said.Mr. Walker flipped a coin. It landed on Georgia on Easter night.A coin? Many details of Mr. Walker’s biography bend toward fable. Until recently, it didn’t really matter. Mr. Walker was just a sports legend, spinning legends.Mr. Walker attracted national attention as a high-school football and track athlete. Residents remember coaches arriving by helicopter to woo him and watch him compete.J.C. Lee/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APMr. Walker, as a freshman, led Georgia to the 1980 national championship and a Sugar Bowl victory over Notre Dame. He later won the Heisman Trophy, cementing his status in state history and folklore.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesBut as scrutiny befitting a Senate candidate has grown, Mr. Walker has been found to be a purveyor of fiction and misdirection about basic résumé facts, such as graduating from Georgia (he did not) in the top 1 percent of his class (no); about the size, scope and success of his companies (all exaggerated); about working in law enforcement, including the F.B.I. (he has not); and about his number of children.His candidacy has resurfaced his 2008 memoir, “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder,” in which Mr. Walker described a dozen “alters,” or alternate personalities. It rekindled stories of Mr. Walker’s struggle with mental health, reminding voters of his admissions of violent tendencies (briefly chasing down a man he said he wanted to kill), suicidal thoughts (Mr. Walker, who nearly killed himself in an idling car in his garage, said he occasionally played Russian roulette with a revolver) and infidelity.His post-football life, especially, has been a stream of erratic behavior, some of it described in the book. Mr. Walker’s entrance into politics has prompted stories with new details surrounding allegations that he abused and made death threats against his former wife of nearly 20 years and his late girlfriend.He has denied the allegations and often deflects questions about his past by saying that he is “fighting to end the stigma of mental illness.”Such matters have not derailed Mr. Walker’s campaign. Stamped deeper into Georgia’s collective psyche is Mr. Walker’s first college touchdown in 1980. (“Oh you Herschel Walker! My god almighty, he ran right through two men!” the radio announcer Larry Munson shouted then.)When Mr. Walker arrived on Georgia’s campus, it had been less than a decade since the football team was integrated — one of the last in the country to do so. He became a near-instant hero among the school’s mostly white fan base when he led the Bulldogs to a national championship, playing in the Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame with a separated shoulder.“Up in a private box in the Superdome,” Dave Anderson of The Times wrote from the game, “the second most important citizen in Georgia peered down yesterday at the most important. President Carter was watching Herschel Walker run with a football.”Mr. Walker left Georgia after winning the Heisman Trophy his junior year, signing with the new United States Football League. State legislators wore armbands with Georgia’s colors, red and black, to mourn Mr. Walker’s departure.It was before his second season with the New Jersey Generals that the team was purchased by Mr. Trump, then a 37-year-old New York real-estate developer.“In a lot of ways, Mr. Trump became a mentor to me,” Mr. Walker wrote in 2008, “and I modeled myself and my business practices after him.”Mr. Walker was nudged into running for Senate by Donald Trump. The two met when Mr. Walker played for Mr. Trump’s United States Football League team in the 1980s.Audra Melton for The New York Times‘Run Herschel, Run’On a sweltering summer weekday at Jaemor Farms, a large produce stand off a rural highway, shoppers fondled ripe peaches and sampled ice cream.Mr. Walker sauntered in, still fit in a T-shirt and casual pants, trailed by a loose huddle of handlers. Heads turned. Mouths opened. An elderly woman rushed to her car to tell her husband.“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Drew Echols, whose family owns Jaemor Farms, a traditional campaign stop for would-be politicians. He shook his head and laughed. “It’s because they all know him. He’s Herschel Walker.”It was Mr. Trump who nudged Mr. Walker back to the bright lights of Georgia. Mr. Walker played 15 seasons of professional football, 12 in the N.F.L. He was wildly famous but never recaptured the success of his college career.“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” Mr. Trump said in a statement released in March 2021, adding: “Run Herschel, run!”And Mr. Walker did. He appeared at Trump rallies, where he stood out for his relative lack of vitriol. Bombast is not in Mr. Walker’s nature, though he does share Trump’s penchant for unscripted, sometimes incoherent, remarks.In July, for example, discussing China and climate change, Mr. Walker said that Georgia’s “good air decides to float over” to China, displacing China’s “bad air,” which returns to Georgia. “We got to clean that back up,” he said. And in May, after the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, he delivered a soliloquy that began, “Cain killed Abel, and that’s a problem that we have.”His public performances raise questions about why Mr. Walker chose — and was chosen — to run.Mr. Walker is widely viewed as “not being ready for prime time,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta who teaches African American politics. “Which for Black voters, who may be skeptical of the Republican strategy of nominating him in the first place, just smacks of what they view as tokenism.”Mr. Walker, with supporters in Oscilla, Ga. He tends to draw a crowd on the campaign trail.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Walker with Black clergy members at an event in Austell, Ga.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMuch of the recent campaign intrigue has been over whether Mr. Walker would debate Mr. Warnock, who makes a living preaching from a pulpit. (The two will face off in a debate later this month.) Mr. Walker is more comfortable with small talk. A lifetime of autograph seekers has made him comfortable with quick interactions and people smiling back at him.At Jaemor Farms, Mr. Walker met in a back room with about a dozen local farmers, all white. He was flanked by two polished white former state politicians, Terry Rogers and Butch Miller, who, like human crutches, kept the discussion moving forward whenever Mr. Walker wobbled into unfamiliar terrain.Mr. Walker half-joked that Democrats wanted to force farmers to use electric combines. He reminded the group that he was from rural Wrightsville. He said his grandfather raised cotton and peas.“I used to help pick,” Mr. Walker said. “I thought it was an upgrade to start baling hay.”The farmers laughed, knowingly. Then Mr. Walker detoured into remarks about China, TikTok and Archie Bunker.Georgia’s population is one-third Black, but Mr. Walker’s campaign staff is almost entirely white, as are the crowds that gather to watch him. “The thing you can’t measure about his support is how many people he’s going to pull in that never voted before, haven’t been involved, but know him from his Georgia football days,” Martha Zoller, a conservative talk-show host and political pundit in Georgia, said.Mr. Rogers, a former Republican state legislator and now a political consultant, noted that the Bulldogs are coming off their first national championship season since 1980.“This election’s being held during football season,” he said. “I think that goes a long way — especially if Georgia keeps winning.”The allusions to Georgia football are telling. Sanford Stadium in Athens, like many major sports venues in this country, remains a place where a mostly white fan base cheers mostly Black athletes. Mr. Walker, his No. 34 jersey long retired, is a link to feel-good nostalgia for a university where Black enrollment is about 8 percent. As a politician, Mr. Walker tries to keep his messages about race in America positive. He says he is pro-police without addressing violence against Black men. He spreads unfounded claims about voter fraud but does not address voter suppression. He says Democrats use race to divide “a great country full of generous people.”At a campaign stop in Wrightsville in August, he told a room full of women, nearly all of them white: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re racist.”In Wrightsville’s downtown, a shop promoted Mr. Walker’s candidacy. “We need to do more to promote Herschel here in his hometown,” said the shop’s owner, who is white.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhat’s Left BehindChange moves slowly in Wrightsville. As Mr. Walker said of his hometown last year, “If you got one year to live, you move there. Because that year’s forever. Same old, same old.”Since Mr. Walker left four decades ago, several textile factories in the area have closed, including the one where Mr. Walker’s mother worked. So have a window factory and a meatpacking plant. Downtown storefronts have emptied.The median household income in Johnson County is around $42,000 per year. About one-quarter of residents live in poverty. The race divide has softened, but slowly. As recently as 2003, Wrightsville drew attention for being one of several small Southern towns that still held segregated proms.Across from the courthouse is a floral and collectibles shop called Kreative Kreations. This summer, its display windows were decorated with campaign signs for Mr. Walker. “Run Herschel Run,” read a larger banner over the storefront.The store owner, Kevin Price, who is white and nearly a decade younger than Mr. Walker, grew up in Wrightsville and recalled his family “packing up every Saturday morning and heading for Athens” to watch the Bulldogs play.“We need to do more to promote Herschel here in his hometown,” Mr. Price said.On a shaded bench across the street, a woman named Lisa Graddy wondered just where Mr. Walker had run.“He forgot about his hometown,” Ms. Graddy said.Exactly what she and other Black residents expect from Mr. Walker is murky. It is a combination of investment, representation, empathy and engagement.Mr. Walker still has family in Wrightsville but little support from other Black residents. Tommy Jenkins, a former high school teammate, is among the few of them who plan to vote for Mr. Walker.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhy has he not used his fame, fortune and now his political standing to raise the voices of those he left behind, they ask. It is a question raised in 1980, echoing in 2022.One ex-teammate, Tommy Jenkins, said the answer to the question was once very simple. Mr. Jenkins was among the Black track athletes who boycotted the team and participated in the protests.“A lot of people criticized him for not standing up, but I understood why Herschel didn’t do it,” said Mr. Jenkins, a Black Wrightsville resident who intends to vote for Mr. Walker. “It would’ve ruined his career.”Christian Boone contributed reporting from Georgia. Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      Lost Hope of Lasting Democratic Majority

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      Revisiting an influential book and the notion that demographics are destiny.Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, when a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority” seemed prophetic.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday we wish a belated and maybe not-so-Happy 20th Birthday to “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the book that famously argued Democrats would gain an enduring advantage in a multiracial, postindustrial America.There are countless explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and the growing dysfunction of American political life. This book does not necessarily rank at the top of that list. But when historians look back on this era, the book’s effect on American politics might be worth a mention.The thesis that Democrats were on the cusp of a lasting advantage in national politics helped shape the hopes, fears and, ultimately, the conduct of the two major parties — especially once the Obama presidency appeared to confirm the book’s prophecy.It transformed modest Democratic wins into harbingers of perpetual liberal rule. It fueled conservative anxiety about America’s growing racial diversity, even as it encouraged the Republican establishment to reach out to Hispanic voters and pursue immigration reform. The increasingly popular notion that “demographics are destiny” made it easier for the progressive base to argue against moderation and in favor of mobilizing a new coalition of young and nonwhite voters. All of this helped set the stage for the rise of Mr. Trump.This is a lot to attribute to a single book, especially since the book does not really resemble the Obama-era caricature advanced by its supporters. The book does not put forward what became a commonly held view that racial demographic shifts would allow Democrats to win through mobilization, a more leftist politics or without the support of white working-class voters.Instead, the book argued — not persuasively, as we’ll see — that Democrats could build a majority with a (still ill-defined) “centrist” politics of the Clinton-Gore variety, so long as they got “close to an even split” of white working-class voters.“We were clearly overly optimistic about that prospect, to say the least,” said John Judis, one of the authors of the book, of the prospect of such high levels of Democratic support.One easy way to see the divergence between reality and the expectations promoted by the book is to look at its projections for the Electoral College, compared with how the nation actually voted over the next 20 years: More

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      Blake Masters, GOP Senate Candidate, Links Fed Diversity to Economic Woes

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      Blake Masters, the Republican nominee challenging Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, suggested in a sarcastic Twitter post late Sunday that the nation’s economic struggles were connected to increased gender and racial diversity in Federal Reserve leadership.He then dug in on Monday with a video in which he denounced “the Democrats’ diversity obsession” and described Vice President Kamala Harris as a beneficiary of an “affirmative action regime.”“Finally a compelling explanation for why our economy is doing so well,” Mr. Masters wrote on Sunday in response to an Associated Press report that found there were, according to the news agency, “more female, Black and gay officials contributing to the central bank’s interest-rate decisions than at any time in its 109-year history.”The post drew swift backlash, which Mr. Masters alluded to in a follow-up video Monday evening. “Well, this tweet made people mad,” he said, before adding that he didn’t care “if every single employee at the Fed is a Black lesbian as long as they’re hired for their competence” and that he had “never spoken to anyone who can say with a straight face that Kamala was somehow the most qualified candidate for that job.”Ms. Harris is the first woman and the first Black person to serve as vice president and had extensive political experience — including as a United States senator and the attorney general of California — before Joseph R. Biden Jr. chose her as his running mate. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsEvidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is the latest example.Sensing a Shift: Democrats, once beaten down by the prospect of a brutal midterm election, are daring to dream that they can maintain control of Congress, but a daunting map may still cost them the House.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are signaling concern that the midterm sweep they anticipated is complicated by attention on former President Donald J. Trump’s legal exposure.Campaign Ads: In what critics say is a dangerous gamble, Democrats are elevating far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries, believing they’ll be easier to defeat in November. We analyzed the ads they’re using to do it.Some fellow conservatives echoed the sentiment of Mr. Masters’s initial tweet and criticized the focus on diversity at the Fed at a time of high inflation. A number of Republican candidates and elected officials have also disparaged efforts to promote diversity and combat bigotry more broadly, and Republican primary voters have rewarded some nominees who espouse racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic views.Mr. Masters, a venture capitalist endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, has been particularly outspoken. Among other things, he has promoted what experts in extremism describe as a sanitized version of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — claiming that Democrats are trying to bring more immigrants into the country in order to dilute the political power of native-born citizens — and characterized the United States’ gun violence problem as “people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other — very often, you know, Black people, frankly.”Mr. Masters’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment Monday. His campaign manager said last month, in response to criticism of the candidate’s immigration views, that voters were “tired of being sorted into color boxes and prefer substance to identity pandering” — echoing how many on the right seek to paint efforts that combat racism, sexism and other forms of bias as “identity politics” and “wokeness.”Republican voters seemed unmoved by a string of revelations about Mr. Masters’s views ahead of his Aug. 2 primary, including youthful writings that his opponent, Jim Lamon, had criticized as antisemitic. Mr. Masters handily defeated Mr. Lamon.But whether Mr. Masters can appeal to voters beyond his right-wing base in November seems to be weighing on party leaders: Senate Republicans’ political action committee canceled $8 million of television, radio and digital advertising in Arizona last week, signaling increasing pessimism about Mr. Masters’s ability to win a race that Republicans once saw as a relatively easy pickup en route to retaking a Senate majority.Mr. Masters has stripped hard-line abortion policies from his website — an implicit recognition of the backlash Republicans are facing over the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and released an ad in which he sought to cast his abortion platform as “common sense.”The website changes, reported by NBC News on Thursday, removed language in which Mr. Masters described himself as “100 percent pro-life” and called for a constitutional amendment that would give fetuses the same legal rights as an infant or adult.The anti-abortion movement is pursuing such measures, known as fetal personhood laws, as a way to criminalize abortion as murder and to eliminate the exceptions included in many current abortion bans. But a growing volume of data shows the political perils of that policy. Republican candidates have underperformed in special elections held since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, and voters in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislators to ban or severely restrict abortion.More Republicans have shifted away from hard-line abortion positions in recent weeks. Mr. Masters’s ad, which focused on rare third-trimester abortions and said Mr. Kelly supported an “extreme” policy, was in line with a longtime anti-abortion strategy of centering public messaging on abortions later in pregnancy — even though more than 90 percent of abortions take place at or before 13 weeks’ gestation, and the state laws that have taken effect since June generally ban the procedure early in pregnancy, or at any point. More

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      How We Think About Politics Changes What We Think About Politics

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      When so many voters — a majority, in fact — say that they prefer consensus to conflict, why does polarization continue to intensify?In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhay and Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics:Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true.The concept of belief polarization has been defined in a number of ways.In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarization in a complex world,” Alan Jern, Kai-min Kevin Chang and Charles Kemp — of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Melbourne — write: “Belief polarization occurs when two people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data.”There is, they continue, “ample evidence that people sustain different beliefs even when faced with the same information, and they interpret that information differently.” They also note that “stark differences in beliefs can arise and endure due to human limitations in interpreting complex information.”Kristoffer Nimark, an economist at Cornell, and Savitar Sundaresan, of Imperial College London, describe belief polarization this way: “The beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space.”Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, professors of philosophy at Vanderbilt, argue in their 2019 paper, “How Does Belief Polarization Work”:Part of what makes belief polarization so disconcerting is its ubiquity. It has been extensively studied for more than 50 years and found to be operative within groups of all kinds, formal and informal. Furthermore, belief polarization does not discriminate between different kinds of belief. Like-minded groups polarize regardless of whether they are discussing banal matters of fact, matters of personal taste, or questions about value. What’s more, the phenomenon operates regardless of the explicit point of the group’s discussion. Like-minded groups polarize when they are trying to decide an action that the group will take; and they polarize also when there is no specific decision to be reached. Finally, the phenomenon is prevalent regardless of group members’ nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of education.Talisse, writing separately, observes:The social environment itself can trigger extremity shifts. These prompts need not be verbal, explicit, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members that some belief is prevalent among them — hats, pins, campaign signs, logos, and gestures are all potential initiators of belief polarization. Further, as corroboration is really a matter of numbers, those with the power to present the appearance of widespread acceptance among a particular social group of some idea thereby have the power to induce extremity shifts among those who identify with that group.Perhaps the most salient recent illustration of belief polarization is the diametrically opposed views of Trump loyalists and of their Democratic adversaries over the legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump supporters are convinced it was stolen; Democrats and independents are certain that Joe Biden is the legitimate president.Similarly, politicians on the right — and Fox News — are treating the F.B.I. raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a corrupt politicization of federal investigative authority, while liberals — and CNN — counter that the raid demonstrates that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.Suhay and her colleagues expand the scope of belief polarization to look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats over the causes of inequality:We illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequality. Republican politicians and citizens are optimistic about the American dream and pessimistic about poor people’s behavior; Democratic politicians and citizens are pessimistic about the dream and optimistic about poor people’s ability to succeed if given the chance.These patterns, Suhay and her collaborators continue,hold for beliefs about economic inequality along both class and race lines. Variation in societal versus individual blame is consistently associated with views on social welfare, taxation, and affirmative action. We conclude that Americans’ beliefs about the fairness of the economy represent a crucial component of a redistributive versus anti-redistributive ideology that is increasingly associated with the two political parties.Suhay writes:The Democratic Party has long justified its left-leaning economic policies with two central claims: significant economic inequality exists between individuals and social groups, and these great inequalities are unfair because society, not individuals, are to blame for them. The latter proposition is especially important. It is difficult to deny that many harsh inequalities exist in the United States. Exorbitant wealth as well as homelessness are plain to see. However, such inequalities might be tolerated if they are viewed as the outcome of a meritocratic system. Democrats argue instead that “the American dream” — success via hard work — is not a reality for many. Thus, low-income people deserve government assistance.Conversely, Suhay continues, Republicans emphasizeaggregate economic growth and downplay the extent of inequality. Second, Republicans argue that existing inequalities are fair — successful people have achieved success via hard work or ingenuity, and those facing difficult economic circumstances are to blame for them. Third, in response to Democrats’ instinct to use government to combat inequality, Republicans argue government efforts to intervene in business affairs, redistribute wealth, and assist those in need often do more harm than good, depressing the economic output of both firms and individuals. These narratives justify Republicans’ conservative economic agenda by insisting that the status quo is fine: inequality is minimal; inequalities that do exist are “just deserts”; and, even if one wished to help, government intervention in fact undermines individual and aggregate prosperity.Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.In an email, Suhay noted thatmany social scientists today are focused on misinformed and extreme beliefs in the Republican Party, including Republicans’ greater likelihood of rejecting climate science and Covid-19 vaccination and their embrace of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.But, Suhay wrote, many of those same scholars “are missing growing extremity on the political left. It may be more benign or even beneficial in some cases, but it is still a phenomenon worth study.” In addition to “a surge of claims on the left that the economy is extremely unequal and that this is because our country does not provide equal opportunity to all of its inhabitants,” there has been a parallel surge among liberals on the issue of “racial justice — in both the economic and criminal justice arena.”A third development on the left, Suhay added, and onewhere we have seen the most rapid change, is around gender identity. Democrats increasingly say society ought to protect the rights of transgender people and the expression of transgender identity because gender fluidity is a natural part of the human condition and trying to curb its expression causes people harm. The popularity of each of these views has surged on the left recently.There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines.Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.Their conclusions run counter to assumptions that elites are less polarized than the general public because “they tend to be more knowledgeable, which is associated with greater belief accuracy” and because they “possess domain expertise in politics and public policy that could reduce the influence of cognitive biases.”In fact, Lee and colleagues counter, “belief polarization can be unchanged or widen when belief accuracy increases.”I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email:The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.One theme that emerges repeatedly in looking at belief polarization is the role race plays as a central factor:Peter K. Enns and Ashley Jardina, political scientists at Cornell and Duke, make the case in their October 2021 paper, “Complicating the role of White racial attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” thatMost of the research on the relationship between white racial attitudes and Trump support is part of a tradition that assumes that racial attitudes are fairly stable predispositions that form early in life and then later become important for political reasoning. Implied in this line of research is that politicians or political campaigns do not change levels of prejudice, but they can prime these attitudes, or make them more or less salient and therefore more or less politically relevant.Enns and Jardina write that in contrast to this view, over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign “many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton.”To test their argument, the authors used “a unique panel data set from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign.” From that study, they found:The strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump’s as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites’ immigration opinions.They found, for example, that from January 2016 to August 2016, the percentage of Trump supporters voicing strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by roughly 15 percentage points.In an email, Enns contended thatregardless of the precise underlying mechanisms (and multiple mechanisms could be at work), the evidence suggests that Trump’s rhetoric had a meaningful effect on the views his supporters expressed about these issues. We are definitely arguing that the attitudes individuals express can be changed by what candidates they support say and do. Although we cannot observe actual beliefs, to the extent that expressing previously unexpressed beliefs has a reinforcing effect, that would also provide evidence of a deepening or potential changing of racial attitudes.The strong association between Trump support and whites’ views on racial issues, Enns and Jardina argue in their paper,was not merely a result of Trump attracting racist whites by way of his own racist rhetoric or a reflection of partisan racial sorting that had already occurred; it was also a result of white Trump supporters changing their views to be more in line with Trump’s over the course of his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump not only attracted whites with more conservative views on race; he also made his white supporters more likely to espouse increasingly extreme views on issues related to immigration and on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police killings of African Americans.Andrew M. Engelhardt, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, developed a similar line of analysis in his January 2020 paper, “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.”In an email, Engelhardt wrote:Part of the reason White Democrats and White Republicans hold increasingly different views about Black Americans is due to their partisanship. It’s not just that Democrats with negative views became Republicans, or Republicans with more positive views became Democrats. Rather, people are changing their attitudes, and part of this, I argue, is due to how politicians talk about Black Americans. Republicans, for instance, could have internalized Trump’s negative rhetoric, and increasingly held more negative views. Democrats, similarly, hear Trump say these negative things and they move opposite, holding more positive views.In his paper, Engelhardt wrote that undergirding past studies of the role of race in politics and policymakingis an assumption that racial animus feeds political conflict. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that political conflict can shape racial attitudes — people’s views and beliefs about groups understood to be racial. Political scientists have failed to examine this possibility, perhaps because racial attitudes are seen as persistent and influential predispositions that form during childhood, long before most Americans become political animals. According to this line of reasoning, individuals use these early formed attitudes to make sense of politics; racial attitudes lead to partisanship.The ever-growing divide between left and right extends well beyond racial issues and attitudes. In his email, Engelhardt wrote that his results are “suggestive of partisanship motivating changes in other orientations which we might presumably see as more stable and core to individuals.” He cited research showing that “partisanship influences religiosity and religious affiliation” and other studies linking “political concerns to changes in racial self-identification.” Engelhardt added that he has “some unpublished results where I find partisanship leads Democrats to hold more positive views of gay men and lesbians, transgender individuals, and feminists, over time, with Republicans holding more negative views of these groups in the same period (data range 2016-2020).”In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”Zhirkov and Valentino continue:Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic candidates in presidential elections started to attract large shares of nonwhite voters whereas Republicans increasingly relied on votes of racially conservative whites. Over the same period, voters’ positions on seemingly nonracial political issues have gradually become more intertwined with racial resentment.Overall, the two scholars write,the growing racial gap between the Democratic and Republican support bases leads to formation of racialized stereotypes about the two parties. Specifically, a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.This “imagined racial coalition of each party,” in the view of Zhirkov and Valentino,carries profound implications for the ongoing discussion in the discipline about affective polarization in American politics: whites feel colder toward the Democratic Party when they imagine its coalition to be more heavily made up on nonwhites and feel warmer toward the Republican Party when they perceive it to be dominated by their racial group. As a consequence, rather than a cause, they may then come to accept a more conservative issue package advocated by the modern Republican Party.Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here:As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.I asked the authors how they would characterize the importance of race in contemporary American politics. In a jointly written email, they replied that in research to be published in the future, “we show that race is at least as strong, and often stronger, than cleavages such as religion, ideology, and class.”The pessimistic outlook for the prospect of a return to less divisive politics revealed in many of the papers cited here, and the key role of racial conflict in driving polarization, suggest that the ability of the United States to come to terms with its increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population remains in question. This country has been a full-fledged democracy for less than 60 years — since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the changes wrought by three additional revolutions: in civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. These developments — or upheavals — and especially the reaction to them have tested the viability of our democracy and suggest, at the very least, an uphill climb ahead.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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      Hochul’s Lt. Governor Pick Says He Is Afro-Latino. Some Latinos Object.

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      The three major Democrats running to become New York’s second-in-command have Latino roots, but Antonio Delgado’s claim to the heritage is being challenged.In New York’s Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, one goal had unified two outsider candidates, Diana Reyna and Ana Maria Archila: vying to be the first Latino elected to statewide office.Achieving that objective has now gotten more complicated.This month, Gov. Kathy Hochul named Representative Antonio Delgado as her new lieutenant governor and running mate, replacing Brian Benjamin, who resigned in April after being indicted on federal bribery charges.In announcing the choice, Ms. Hochul heralded Mr. Delgado’s Afro-Latino ethnicity, and noted his membership in both the Black and Hispanic congressional caucuses.Prominent Latino Democrats, who lobbied Ms. Hochul on the decision and have long pushed for greater representation in state government, were quick to celebrate an appointment that, once it becomes official, will make Mr. Delgado the first Latino to hold statewide office in New York.But as the congratulatory statements began to circulate, so did questions about Mr. Delgado’s background, putting a spotlight on issues of ethnicity, self-identity and representation in advance of the June 28 primary.Asked about his Afro-Latino heritage at the news conference where he was introduced as Ms. Hochul’s choice for lieutenant governor, Mr. Delgado gave a winding answer. He said people had surmised that he was Afro-Latino because of his name, or perhaps because he briefly lived in Puerto Rico, where he played semipro basketball. He then seemed to suggest that his Latino heritage stemmed from his family’s ties to Cape Verde, a small island nation off the west coast of Africa that was once a Portuguese colony.The answer mystified some of his supporters, and created an opening for his opponents to scrutinize his claims of being Latino.Luis A. Miranda Jr., a founding partner of the MirRam Group, a political consulting firm, posted celebratory comments on Twitter about Mr. Delgado’s appointment when it was announced. But after hearing his remarks at the news conference, Mr. Miranda said he was “puzzled by his explanation on ethnicity.”Mr. Delgado, in an interview with The New York Times, described the complexity of how he views his ethnicity. He said his mother grew up at a time when she felt safe identifying only as Black or white, but eventually embraced the Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan ancestry of her father, whom she did not know.“She became someone who identifies as a proud Black woman with Latino roots,” Mr. Delgado said in the interview. “And as I’ve tried to orient myself and my sense of identity through her, that is the entry point.”Asked how he identified himself, Mr. Delgado said: “I am a Black American man with Cape Verdean roots and Latino roots. When it pertains to my Latino roots, that comes from my mom’s side, whose own story around her identity is multifaceted and complex.”When Ms. Hochul picked Mr. Benjamin for the job, her choice was influenced by a desire to have her running mate be a person of color from the New York City area as a way to help broaden her appeal beyond her base as a white politician from western New York.Mr. Delgado offered many of the same qualities, giving the governor a running mate with name recognition and the potential to appeal to downstate Black and Latino voters as she seeks a full term this year.Ms. Archila, who has been endorsed by Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the House, and Ms. Reyna said they understood why Ms. Hochul would want a Latino running mate. Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the state and make up 19 percent of the population. But the two women questioned Mr. Delgado’s rationale for describing himself as Latino and cast Ms. Hochul’s decision as a political ploy.“Gov. Hochul is being extremely opportunistic and simplistic,” said Ms. Archila, whose running mate is Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate. “I think he should say more than, I have an ancestor who once was born in Colombia.”In selecting Mr. Delgado, Gov. Kathy Hochul, right, chose a running mate of color who may appeal to downstate voters who are not part of her natural base.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesMs. Reyna, whose running mate is Representative Thomas R. Suozzi, said at a recent campaign event that a “last name does not make you Latino.” The first statewide Latino official should be “authentic,” have “lived experience” and a record of helping Latino communities, she told Encuentro New York, a Latino advocacy group.“She tells us that her lieutenant governor is a member of the Latino community,” Ms. Reyna said of the governor. “This is not about identity politics. This is about being truthful.”Ms. Hochul and her campaign have said little about the questions surrounding Mr. Delgado’s ethnicity. They referred to him as Afro-Latino in the third line of a news release announcing his appointment; an email sent out the next day about a fund-raiser did not mention his ethnicity.“He identifies as Afro-Latino,” Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for Ms. Hochul’s campaign, said.The focus on Mr. Delgado’s ethnicity adds a new wrinkle to the primary for lieutenant governor, which was upended after the resignation of Mr. Benjamin, the presumptive favorite. For weeks, it appeared that he would remain on the primary ballot despite the criminal charges, but state lawmakers ultimately passed a bill allowing him to remove himself.It was then that Ms. Hochul chose Mr. Delgado to succeed Mr. Benjamin.Camille Rivera, a Democratic political strategist who identifies as Afro-Latina, said Ms. Hochul had missed an opportunity to energize an important voting bloc that could help decide the general election. Among the issues Latino leaders say they want state government to address are affordable housing, child care and inequalities in health care.“You have no statewide Latino representation, right?” Ms. Rivera said. “Here was an opportunity to actually lift up Latinos in a real way.”There has been little scrutiny of Mr. Delgado’s Latino heritage. Several news articles over the years have identified him incorrectly as Puerto Rican. Some articles from 2018, when he defeated John J. Faso, the Republican incumbent, to claim the House seat representing the Hudson Valley and Catskills regions, referred to him as Black.Asked whether he had ever corrected the record about being Puerto Rican before the news conference where he was introduced as lieutenant governor, Mr. Delgado said in a statement that he was “raised as a blend of heritages,” including “Latino roots.”“That’s the background I grew up with and how I identify,” he said in the statement. “My mom’s maiden name is Gomez and she grew up identifying as having Latina roots.”Racism and colorism may also play a role in how Mr. Delgado’s description of being Afro-Latino is being received, said Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, who identifies as Afro-Latino.“I find it curious that those of us with Black skin often have our Latino identity questioned,” said Mr. Torres, who supports Mr. Delgado. “As an Afro-Latino, I have been told repeatedly that I do not look Latino, whatever that means, and therefore, I must be less authentically Latino than those with lighter skin.”Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, an associate professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, said she understood why some Latinos were upset about the appointment. Being Afro-Latino in the United States, she said, involves a complicated mix of race, language and culture.“Experience informs what you see, how you perceive things, how you bring in issues that might go unseen or unrecognized,” Professor Dinzey-Flores said. Choosing someone from an Afro-Latino background so that constituency is represented in government, she added, should be about “authentically” capturing that experience and not “checking a box.”Melissa Mark-Viverito, a former New York City Council speaker who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, concurred, saying that Mr. Delgado’s claim of Latino heritage “raises the question and the concern of people loosely taking on certain identities and not being completely honest.”“That concerns me because as someone who fully embraces the importance of representation, we have two qualified Latinas running and a chance to make history,” Ms. Mark-Viverito said, referring to Ms. Reyna and Ms. Archila. “Yet it feels like we are being duped. It’s all very messy.”Days after Ms. Hochul named him as Mr. Benjamin’s successor, Mr. Delgado gave a 15-minute speech at the Harlem headquarters of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Mr. Sharpton said he was surprised that Mr. Delgado did not address the confusion about his Afro-Latino identity.“I think it’s something he can’t ignore,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview after Mr. Delgado spoke that day.Instead, Mr. Delgado reminisced about growing up in a Black Baptist church and drew hearty amens and nods of approval from the mostly Black crowd. He talked about why he pursued a career as a rapper after graduating from Harvard Law School, an issue opponents tried to use against him when he first ran for Congress.“I know the power of the culture,” Mr. Delgado said. “I am the culture.” More