Race and Ethnicity

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away?

      by

      Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote.If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy?If the Democratic Party has been thrust into that role — whether it wants it or not — recent election results and adverse polling trends suggest that it stands a good chance of losing both branches of Congress in 2022 and that Trump or a Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024.The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democratic difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate?If, as much evidence shows, working class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial, and gender issues than by economics — many non-college whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?I asked a group of scholars and Democratic strategists versions of these questions.Three conclusions stood out.There was near unanimous agreement that the Republican Party under the leadership of Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but disagreement over the degree of the danger.There was across the board opposition to the creation of a third party on the grounds that it would split the center and the left.In addition, a striking difference emerged when it came to the choice of strategic responses to the threat, between those who emphasize the built-in structural advantages benefiting the Republican Party and those who contend that Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues in order to regain support among working class voters, white, Black and Hispanic.Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard, argued in an email thatThe radicalized G.O.P. is the main anti-democratic force. Trump plays a crucial threatening role, but I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters. If Trump disappears or steps back, other Trumpists will step up, many are already in power.Skocpol’s point:Only repeated decisive electoral defeats would open the door to intraparty transformations, but the Electoral College, Senate non-metro bias and House skew through population distribution and gerrymandering make it unlikely that, in our two-party system, Democrats can prevail decisively.Because the Democratic Party is structurally weakened by the rural tilt of the Senate and the Electoral College — and especially vulnerable to gerrymandered districts because its voters are disproportionately concentrated in metro areas — the party “may not have enough elected power to accomplish basic voter and election protection reforms. Very bad things may happen soon,” Skocpol wrote. Republicans are positioned, she continued, “to undo majority democracy for a long time.”At the same time, Skocpol is sharply critical of trends within the Democratic Party:The advocacy groups and big funders and foundations around the Democratic Party — in an era of declining unions and mass membership groups — are pushing moralistic identity-based causes or specific policies that do not have majority appeal, understanding, or support, and using often weird insider language (like “Latinx”) or dumb slogans (“Defund the police”) to do it.The leaders of these groups, Skocpol stressed,often claim to speak for Blacks, Hispanics, women etc. without actually speaking to or listening to the real-world concerns of the less privileged people in these categories. That is arrogant and politically stupid. It happens in part because of the over-concentration of college graduate Democrats in isolated sectors of major metro areas, in worlds apart from most other Americans.Along similar lines, William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and former White House aide during the Clinton administration, wrote, “For the first time in my life, I have come to believe that the stability of our constitutional institutions can no longer be taken for granted.”Galston argues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party threatens to limit, if not prevent, efforts to enlarge support: “Everything depends on how much the Democrats really want to win. Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”“In my view,” Galston continued,the issue is not so much ideology as it is class. Working-class people with less than a college degree have an outlook that differs from that of the educated professionals whose outlook has come to dominate the Democratic Party. To the dismay of Democratic strategists, class identity may turn out to be more powerful that ethnic identity, especially for Hispanics.Democratic leaders generally and the Biden administration specifically, Galston said, have “failed to discharge, or even to recognize” their most important mission, the prevention of “Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office. They cannot do this with a program that drives away independents, moderates, and suburban voters, whose support made Biden’s victory possible.”The party’s “principal weakness,” Galston observes “lies in the realm of culture, which is why race, crime and schools have emerged as such damaging flash points.” In this context, “the Biden administration has failed to articulate views on immigration, criminal justice, education and related issues that a majority of Americans can support.”Not all of those I contacted have such a dire outlook.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, for example, agrees that “American democracy faced an unprecedented threat in 2020 when a sitting president refused to acknowledge electoral defeat,” but, she continued, “this threat was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed.”This, Lee points out, is “a story of Republicans judges and elected officials upholding democracy at personal cost to their own popularity with Republican voters. Republican elected officials in a number of cases sacrificed their political ambitions in service to larger democratic ideals.”Lee cautioned that polls showing majorities of Republican voters questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be taken with a grain of salt:It is likely that a significant share of those who profess such beliefs are just simply telling pollsters that they still support Trump. I would not declare the death of democratic legitimacy on the basis of what people say in public opinion polls, particularly given that Republican elected officials all across the country participated in upholding the validity of the 2020 outcome.Lee does agree that “election subversion is by far the most serious threat to American democracy,” and she contends that those seeking to protect democracy should “should focus on the major threat: Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize American elections and Republicans’ efforts in some states to undermine nonpartisan election administration.”Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she “certainly see threats, but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”At the same time, she cautioned,the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.ALG Research, one of the firms that polled for the 2020 Biden campaign, conducted postelection focus groups in Northern Virginia and suburban Richmond in an attempt to explore the success of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who defeated Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race a month ago.A report on the study of 2020 Biden voters who backed Youngkin or seriously considered doing so by Brian Stryker, an ALG partner, and Oren Savir, a senior associate, made the case that the election was “not about ‘critical race theory,’ as some analysts have suggested.” Instead, they continued, many swing voters knew thatC.R.T. wasn’t taught in Virginia schools. But at the same time, they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula.ALG focus group participantsthought Democrats are only focused on equality and fairness and not on helping people. None of these Biden voters associated our party with helping working people, the middle class, or people like them. They thought we were more focused on breaking down social barriers facing marginalized groups. They were all for helping marginalized groups, but the fact that they couldn’t point to anything we are doing to help them was deeply concerning.In a parallel argument, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, wrote in an essay, “Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars,” thatDemocrats are not on strong ground when they have to defend views that appear wobbly on rising violent crime, surging immigration at the border and non-meritocratic, race-essentialist approaches to education. They would be on much stronger ground if they became identified with an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but nonideological education for their children.Looking at the dangers facing American democracy from a different vantage point, Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” rejected the argument that Democrats need to constrain the party’s liberal wing.“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.They have won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 presidential elections — that’s almost unthinkable. They have also won the popular vote in the Senate in every six-year cycle since 2000. You cannot look at a party in a democracy that has won the popular vote almost without fail for two decades and say, gee, that party really has to get it together and address its “liabilities.”Instead, he argued,the liabilities lie in undemocratic electoral institutions such as the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate (where underpopulated states have an obscene amount of power that should be unacceptable in any democracy), gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts in many states, and recent political demographic trends — the concentration of Democratic votes in cities — that favor Republicans.“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’ ”Jacob Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale, takes a similar position, writing by email:There are powerful economic and social forces at work here, and they’re particularly powerful in the United States, given that it has a deep history of racial inequality and division and it is on the leading edge of the transformation toward a knowledge economy in which educated citizens are concentrated in urban metros. The question, then, is how much Democrat elites’ strategic choices matter relative to these powerful forces. I lean toward thinking they’re less important than we typically assume.Instead, Hacker argued, the Republican Party has becomeparticularly dangerous because it rests on an increasing commitment to and reliance on what we called “countermajoritarianism” — the exploitation of the anti-urban and status quo biases of the American political system, which allow an intense minority party with a rural base and mostly negative policy agenda to gain and wield outsized power.The conservative strategy, which Hacker calls “minoritarianism,” means that “Republicans can avoid decisive defeats even in the most unfavorable circumstances. There is very little electoral incentive for the party to moderate.”The result? “Neither electoral forces nor organized interests are much of a guardrail against a G.O.P. increasingly veering off the nation’s once-established democratic path.”Julie Wronski, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, described the systemic constraints on the Democratic Party in an email:In the current two-party system, the Democratic Party isn’t just the crucial institutional advocate of democracy. It is the only political entity that can address the federal and state-level institutions that undermine full and equal democratic representation in the United States. Decisive victories should be enough to send a message that Americans do not support anti-democratic behavior.The problem for Democrats, Wronski continued, is thatdecisive victories are unlikely to occur at the national level because of the two-party system and partisan gerrymanders. Winning elections (while necessary) is not enough, especially if core constituencies of Democratic voters are explicitly targeted through state-level voting restrictions and gerrymanders.Those who would seek to restore respect for democratic norms in Trump’s Republican Party face another set of problems, according to Wronski. At the moment, she writes, a fundamental raison d’être of the Republican Party is to prevent the political consignment “to minority status” of “whites, and in particular white Christians, whose share of the population, electorate, and federal-level office holders is diminishing.” This commitment effectively precludes the adoption of a more inclusive strategy of “appealing to racial, ethnic, and religious minority voters,” because such an appeal would amount to the abandonment of the Republican Party’s implicit (and often quite explicit) promise to prevent “the threat of minority status that demographic change poses to white Christians.”Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, anticipates, at least in the short term, a worsening of the political environment:Trump has the support of nearly half of American voters and is very likely to run for president in 2024. Given electoral trends, there is a high likelihood that he will win. Moreover, even if he doesn’t win legitimately, there is little doubt that he will once again try to subvert the election outcome. At that point, his party is likely to control both houses of Congress and he may be successful in his efforts.Enos argued in an email that “the liabilities of the Democratic Party can be overstated” when there isa more fundamental problem in that the working-class base, across racial groups, of the Democratic Party has eroded and is further eroding. That Democrats may not have yet hit rock bottom with working-class voters is terrifying for the future of the party. As much as people want to point to cultural issues as the primary reason for this decline in support, the wheels on the decline were put in motion by macroeconomic trends and policies that made the economic and social standing of working-class people in the United States extremely tenuous.Those trends worked to the advantage of Democrats as recently as the election of Barack Obama, Enos continued, when many working-class voters “looking for change, even voted for a Black man with a foreign-sounding name in 2008.” But, Enos continued, “when the Republican Party stumbled into a populist message of anti-elitism, protectionism, cultural chauvinism, and anti-immigration, it was almost inevitable that it would accelerate the pull of working-class voters toward Republicans.”At the moment, Enos believes, the outlook is bleak:Given the current institutional setup in the United States and the calcified nature of partisanship, I am not sure that Republicans can ever experience large-scale electoral defeat of the type that would shake them from their current path. In 2020, they were led by the most unpopular president in modern history running during a disastrous time for U.S. society and they still didn’t lose by much. That, perhaps, is the real issue — even though they are massively unpopular, partially because of their anti-democratic moves — the nature of U.S. elections means that they will never truly be electorally punished enough to cause them to reform.All of this raises a key question. Has the Republican Party passed a tipping point to become, irrevocably, the voice of ultranationalist racist authoritarianism?It may be that in too many voters’ minds the Democratic Party has also crossed a line and that Democratic adoption of more centrist policies on cultural issues — in combination with a focus on economic and health care issues — just won’t be enough to counter the structural forces fortifying the Republican minority, its by-any-means-necessary politics and its commitment to white hegemony.The Biden administration is, in fact, pushing an agenda of economic investment and expanded health care, but the public is not yet responding. Part of this failure lies with the administration’s suboptimal messaging. More threatening to the party, however, is the possibility that a growing perception of the Democratic Party as wedded to progressive orthodoxies now blinds a large segment of the electorate to the positive elements — let’s call it a trillion-dollar bread-and-butter strategy — of what Biden and his party are trying to do.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

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The Words Democrats Use Are Not the Real Problem

      by

      After Donald Trump and the Republican Party made gains among Black and Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election, a chorus of voices emerged to blame the outcome on Democratic messaging.Democrats, went the argument, were too “woke,” too preoccupied with “identity politics,” too invested in slogans like “defund the police” and too eager to embrace the language of the activist left. Terms like “BIPOC” (an acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color) and especially “Latinx” alienated the working-class Black and Hispanic voters who shifted to Trump in key states like Florida and North Carolina.It makes sense that this is where the conversation turned. People who work with words — journalists, commentators and political professionals — are naturally interested in the impact of messaging and language on voters.At the same time, it is important to remember that language does not actually structure politics. Yes, a political message can persuade voters or, on the other end, help them rationalize their choices. And yes, a political message can be effective or ineffective. But we should not mistake this for a causal relationship.The forces that drive politics are material and ideological, and our focus — when trying to understand and explain shifts in the electorate — should be on the social and economic transformations that shape life for most Americans.With that in mind, let’s return to the debate over the Democratic Party’s declining fortunes with Hispanic voters. (In all of this, it is important to remember that even with the significant shift to Trump, who improved on his 2016 total in 2020 by 10 percentage points, according to Pew, Biden still won 59 percent of the Hispanic voters who cast ballots.)Does a term like “Latinx” alienate some portion of the Hispanic voting public? A recent survey says yes. According to a new national poll of Hispanic voters, only 2 percent chose the term to describe their ethnic background, and 40 percent said it offends them either “a lot” (20 percent), “somewhat” (11 percent) or “a little” (9 percent). To the extent that Democratic politicians and affiliated voices used the term — demonstrating their distance from the communities in question — that may have left a bad taste in the mouths of some Hispanic voters. But it does not follow from there that use of the term explains anything about electoral trends among Hispanics. For those, we have to look at the material and ideological shifts I mentioned earlier.It would be too much for a single column to give a full inventory of those changes. But I can point to a few. First, there is the economy. In areas like the Rio Grande Valley of Texas — where Republicans made major inroads with Mexican American voters in 2020 — rising wages for workers in the region’s oil and gas industry helped shift some voters to the right. Nationally, there’s evidence that some Hispanic voters credited Trump with wage growth and rewarded him with additional support. In general, upward mobility and a greater sense of integration into the mainstream of American society has made a significant number of Hispanic voters more open to Republican appeals.Playing a similar role is evangelical religion. As my news-side colleague Jennifer Medina noted in a piece last year, “Hispanic evangelicals are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the country.” Churches remain important sites for political socialization, and evangelicalism is, at this juncture, a conservative force in American culture and politics. It makes sense, then, that Hispanic evangelicals are also much more likely than their Catholic counterparts to vote Republican.According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, “Hispanic Protestants” were more likely than all other Hispanics to approve of Trump’s performance as president, his handling of the economy, his handling of “racial justice protests” and his handling of the pandemic. Hispanic Protestants were also much more likely to say that “Christians face a lot of discrimination.”There is also the longstanding effort by Republicans to mobilize Hispanic conservatives for the Republican Party. “For the past half century,” the historian Geraldo Cadava writes in “The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump,” “Hispanic Republicans and the Republican Party have been deliberate and methodical in their mutual, sometimes hesitant, embrace.” Beliefs about relations with Latin America, about “the United States as the protector of freedom in the world” and about “market-driven capitalism as the best path to upward mobility” have helped Republicans build a durable bulwark among Hispanic voters, one that the Trump campaign built on with focused and sustained outreach.Entangled in these social and economic transformations is a longstanding and potent American ideology that slots some people as “makers” and others as “takers,” to use Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff language to donors during his presidential campaign in 2012. Although traditionally associated with whiteness and masculinity, this “producerism” holds sway and currency across the electorate. That’s part of why candidates in both parties scramble to associate themselves with blue-collar workers and why some Democratic proponents of the social safety net insist that their policies provide a “hand up, not a handout.”I think that a part of Donald Trump’s appeal, especially for men, was the degree to which he embodied the producerist ideal. His image, at least, was of the commanding provider, who generated wealth and prosperity for himself and others. Put another way, the prevalence of producerist ideology in American society helped frame Trump — previously the star of “The Apprentice” — as a political figure, making him legible to millions of Americans. Hispanic voters were as much a part of that dynamic as any other group.The point here is not to write an exhaustive explanation of what happened among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. The point is that our constant battles over language are more distracting than not. The whys of American politics have much more to do with the ever-changing currents of race, religion and economic production than they do with political messaging. And no message, no matter how strong on the surface, will land if it isn’t attentive to those forces and the other forces that structure the lives of ordinary people.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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Glenn Youngkin Activated White Racial Anxiety and Won Over Voters

      by

      Glenn Youngkin’s defeat of Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race shocked some. But it resulted from multiple factors. Democrats still haven’t delivered on their promises or moved major legislation — their infrastructure, social spending and voting rights bills — through Congress. And McAuliffe ran a last-cycle campaign, an anti-Donald Trump campaign.Of course, there are structural, historical patterns that still hold true in states like Virginia, where voters tend to punish whichever party controls the White House. But what can’t be denied is the degree to which Youngkin successfully activated and unleashed white racial anxiety, positioning it in its most potent form: as the protection of the vulnerable, innocent and helpless. In this case, the white victims in supposed distress were children.Youngkin homed in on critical race theory, even though critical race theory, as Youngkin imagines it, isn’t being taught in his state’s schools. But that didn’t matter.There are people who want to believe the fabrication because it justifies their fears about displacement, powerlessness and vulnerability.In fact, the frenzy around critical race theory is just the latest in a long line of manufactured outrages meant to tap into this same fear, and the strategy has proved depressingly effective.There was the fear of “race-mixing” among children — including the notion that Black boys might begin dating white girls following the desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. (By the way, this was a variation on the ancient and dusty fear peddled during Reconstruction that not only were Black men incapable of governing, but their rapacious nature also put white women at risk of rape and devilment.)There was the fear of a collapse of the Southern way of life and society following the successes of the civil rights movement. That gave rise to the Republicans’ “Southern strategy.”Richard Nixon used the fear of a lost generation to launch his disastrous war on drugs, which was not really a war on drugs at all but yet another way to ignite white racial anxiety.Nixon aide John Ehrlichman would later tell Harper’s Magazine:“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”Ronald Reagan employed the myth of the welfare queen to anger white voters.As The New Republic put it, “the welfare queen stood in for the idea that Black people were too lazy to work, instead relying on public benefits to get by, paid for by the rest of us upstanding citizens.”This, even though, as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, “Compared with other women in the United States, Black women have always had the highest levels of labor market participation regardless of age, marital status, or presence of children at home.” In fact, working-class white people have benefited most from assistance from the government.George H.W. Bush ginned up fears of white women being raped by Black former prisoners with his 1988 Willie Horton ad, hammering home a tough-on-crime message.Even Democrats got in on the action during Bill Clinton’s presidency with their “crack baby” mythology, painting a dystopian portrait of an entire generation. Black children and young adults, they implied, were “superpredators,” unrepentant, incorrigible criminals who roamed the streets, willing “to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons,” as then-Senator Joe Biden said.Sarah Palin tried her best to other Barack Obama and make white people afraid of him, accusing the Illinois senator of “palling around with terrorists.” At the same time, birthers were questioning if Obama was born in the United States and wondering whether he was Christian or Muslim.Then came Donald Trump, the chief birther, who ratcheted up this fear appeal to obscene levels, positioning Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as people who hate America. He disparaged Black countries, demonized Black athletes and found some “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville.So it’s no wonder Youngkin’s critical race theory lie worked. The parasite of white racial anxiety needed a new host, a fresher one.You could argue that the Democrats made missteps in Virginia. Absolutely. But, to win, Democrats also needed to tamp down white people’s fears, which is like playing Whac-a-Mole.Some of the very same people who voted against Donald Trump because they were exhausted and embarrassed by him turned eagerly to Youngkin because he represented some of the same ideals, but behind a front of congeniality.Youngkin delivered fear with a smile.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Pounce on Schools as a Wedge Issue to Unite the Party

      by

      Rallying around what it calls “parental rights,” the party is pushing to build on its victories this week by stoking white resentment and tapping into broader anger at the education system.After an unexpectedly strong showing on Tuesday night, Republicans are heading into the 2022 midterm elections with what they believe will be a highly effective political strategy capitalizing on the frustrations of suburban parents still reeling from the devastating fallout of pandemic-era schooling.Seizing on education as a newly potent wedge issue, Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.Yet it is the free-floating sense of rage from parents, many of whom felt abandoned by the government during the worst months of the pandemic, that arose from the off-year elections as one of the most powerful drivers for Republican candidates.Across the country, Democrats lost significant ground in crucial suburban and exurban areas — the kinds of communities that are sought out for their well-funded public schools — that helped give the party control of Congress and the White House. In Virginia, where Republicans made schools central to their pitch, education rocketed to the top of voter concerns in the final weeks of the race, narrowly edging out the economy.The message worked on two frequencies. Pushing a mantra of greater parental control, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of some white voters, who were alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America. He attacked critical race theory, a graduate school framework that has become a loose shorthand for a contentious debate on how to address race. And he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to “Beloved,” the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.But at the same time, Mr. Youngkin and other Republicans tapped into broader dissatisfaction among moderate voters about teachers’ unions, unresponsive school boards, quarantine policies and the instruction parents saw firsthand during months of remote learning. In his stump speeches, Mr. Youngkin promised to never again close Virginia schools.While Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee, and his party allies eagerly condemned the ugliest attacks by their opponents, they seemed unprepared to counter the wider outpouring of anger over schools.Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor-elect, pushed a message on education that stoked the resentment of white voters while speaking to broader frustrations with schools.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesFor weeks before the Virginia election, Republicans pointed to the school strategy as a possible template for the entire party. Mr. Youngkin’s narrow but decisive victory on Tuesday confirmed for Republicans that they had an issue capable of uniting diverse groups of voters. The trend was most evident in Mr. Youngkin’s improvement over former President Donald J. Trump’s performance in the Washington suburbs, which include a mix of communities with large Asian, Hispanic and Black populations.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, listed education as a main plank of his party’s plan to reclaim power, with promises to introduce a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”“If the Virginia results showed us anything, it is that parents are demanding more control and accountability in the classroom,” he wrote in an election-night letter to his caucus.Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, one of the most active outside groups working to elect Republicans to the House and Senate, said the strategy was ripe for replicating in races across the country.“It’s always possible to overdo something,” he added, cautioning that Republicans would be unwise to pursue attacks that appear hostile to teachers themselves. “But very clearly there’s a high level of concern among parents over political and social experimentation in schools that transcends ideology.”While the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams — they largely avoided offering specific plans to tackle thornier issues like budget cuts and deepening educational inequalities.But the election results suggested that Republicans had spoken about education in ways that resonated with a broader cross-section of voters.In Virginia, the Youngkin campaign appealed to Asian parents worried about progressive efforts to make admissions processes in gifted programs less restrictive; Black parents upset over the opposition of teachers’ unions to charter schools; and suburban mothers of all races who were generally on edge about having to juggle so much at home over the last year and a half.“This isn’t partisan,” said Jeff Roe, the Youngkin campaign’s chief strategist. “It’s everyone.”Democrats largely declined to engage deeply with such charged concerns, instead focusing on plans to pump billions into education funding, expand pre-K programs and raise teacher pay.In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic candidates for governor adopted the approach of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who faced a recall challenge that exploited similar lines of attack but beat it back by leaning into vaccination and mask mandates in schools. Ahead of the midterms, many of the educational issues are sure to linger.Already, the effects of remote learning on parents have been severe: School closures drove millions of parents out of the work force, led to an increase in mental health problems among children and worsened existing educational inequalities. Many of those effects were borne most heavily by key parts of the Democratic base, including women and Black and Latino families.Strategists, activists and officials urged Democrats to prepare for the Republican attacks to be echoed by G.O.P. candidates up and down the ticket.Virginia was among the East Coast states that were slowest to reopen their schools. Some parents supported the cautious approach, but others became angry.Kenny Holston/Getty ImagesGeoff Garin, a top Democratic pollster, said the party’s candidates needed to expand their message beyond their long-running policy goals like reducing class sizes and expanding pre-K education.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Michelle Wu Is Neither White Nor Male. She Was Elected Mayor of Boston.

      by

      BOSTON — Time to retire the tired old tropes about Brahmin swells, Irish ward heelers and the petty parochialism that for too long has defined this city on the national stage. A Taiwanese American woman from Chicago is about to become the mayor of Boston, a town that, until Tuesday, had elected only white men to that office.Michelle Wu defeated Annissa Essaibi George, a City Council colleague whose father is from Tunisia and mother was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp.The election of Ms. Wu, a 36-year-old lawyer, represents a seismic shift to a political landscape in which “white” and “male” were prerequisites to be elected mayor since the position was established here in 1822. Ms. Wu will join at least 11 women (and possibly 13, depending on election results) as mayors of U.S. cities with a population of more than 400,000.Ms. Wu and Ms. Essaibi George, both Democrats, emerged in September as the top vote-getters in the nonpartisan preliminary election, which included not a single white man among the five candidates. By winning the runoff on Tuesday, Ms. Wu will succeed acting Mayor Kim Janey, who in March became the first Black Bostonian and first woman to occupy the position, after Marty Walsh stepped down to join the Biden administration as secretary of labor.It’s a long way from the Irish domination of the mayoralty that began in 1884 with the election of Hugh O’Brien, a native of County Cork. The office was held without interruption by men of Irish descent from 1930 to 1993, when Thomas Menino became the first Italian American to claim the job.That was almost 30 years ago, but like most caricatures of this city, the idea of Boston as more Irish than Guinness stout retains a stubborn hold on the national imagination. In fact, Boston has been a “majority minority” city since the turn of this century, when census figures first confirmed the percentage of non-Hispanic whites had dropped below 50 percent (to 49.5 percent). The latest census data shows the city becoming even more diverse, with the proportion of Asian, Hispanic and multiracial residents on the rise.That reality stands in stark contrast to images of Boston that are seared into memory — white women in house coats and hair curlers throwing rocks at school buses full of Black children, and a white teenage thug assaulting a Black lawyer with an American flag on City Hall Plaza during a demonstration against a federal court order to desegregate the public schools through busing. Those photographs are more than 40 years old, but their power to define the city as insular and racist remains undiminished.To be sure, the legacy of that era lives on in a school system abandoned by those opposed to integration, leaving behind a student population that today is only 14 percent white. Under Mayor Ray Flynn, control of the chronically underperforming schools shifted in 1991 from an elected school committee to a panel chosen by the mayor, a change many denounced as a move that disenfranchised minority parents. A nonbinding question on the city ballot Tuesday asked whether voters should again be allowed to elect its school committee, as voters do in every other city and town in Massachusetts (it looked poised to pass). Ms. Wu supports a hybrid model with a majority of the committee elected by voters and a number of experts appointed by the mayor.It is a measure of how much Boston has changed that Ms. Essaibi George, who grew up in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood and taught in the public schools, failed in her bid to brand the Chicago-born Ms. Wu as an outsider. Ms. Wu first came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC 10 poll last month found that 59 percent of likely voters said it did not matter to them whether a candidate was Boston born and reared.The election of an Asian American woman will not erase the high cost of housing, the rise in crime or the racial disparities in education, wealth and medical outcomes that persist here, as they do in most major American cities. But Ms. Wu comes to the job with bold plans to address gentrification and climate change and to reform the police, many inspired by her former Harvard Law School professor and mentor, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Some of those ideas she cannot adopt unilaterally. Her proposal to reintroduce rent control, outlawed statewide by a ballot initiative in 1994, would require the approval of the State Legislature and Gov. Charlie Baker, who would most likely oppose it.And, for all the hype about the historic nature of this race — two women of color vying for mayor in a city whose politics have been long dominated by white men — public interest in the campaign was anemic at best. Many Bostonians sat out the election, with turnout not expected to top 30 percent of the city’s 442,000 registered voters.Ms. Wu should not be misled. Those stay-at-home voters will be paying close attention when she takes the oath of office in two weeks. Politics in Boston might just have gotten more diverse, but it is still this city’s favorite spectator sport.Eileen McNamara teaches journalism at Brandeis University. She won a Pulitzer Prize as a columnist for The Boston Globe.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

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Eric Adams's Style: ‘Everything About You Must Say Power’

      by

      New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, pays a lot of attention to what he wears. You should, too.Six years ago, Eric Adams, then Brooklyn borough president, stood onstage at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and thundered his commencement advice at the soon-to-be graduates.He exhorted them to “reach for the stars.” “You are lions,” he told them. They should always say to themselves, “I am possible.”But, he warned them, while you’re doing all that, do not forget, “When you play where the big boys and the big girls play, everything you do people watch.”“People look at your presentation before they take you seriously,” he said. “Everything about you must say power.”On the first Tuesday in November, as he strode to a podium in Brooklyn to declare victory in New York City’s mayoral contest, becoming the second Black mayor in the city’s history and chief of the power playground, Mr. Adams modeled exactly what that meant — as he has been doing since he began his climb toward Gracie Mansion. His white shirt was so pristine it practically glowed; his collar open; his cuff links closed.Mr. Adams in his signature look: Ray-Ban aviators, open collar, neatly buttoned jacket and pocket square.Andrew Seng for The New York Times“Whether he’s talking or not, he’s always saying something with his dress,” said George Arzt, a Democratic political consultant who was also Ed Koch’s press secretary. “And it’s: ‘I’m here. I’m in charge. I mean business.’”It’s unusual for city politicians to engage with questions of image-making. Most often, they actively avoid personal discussions of dress, believing it makes them seems frivolous or elitist. If they do connect with the fashion world, it is usually as an economic driver of the city or as the garment district: Michael Bloomberg handing Ralph Lauren a key to the city for investing millions in new stores; Bill de Blasio welcoming the industry to Gracie Mansion before fashion week. It’s usually just about business.Not for Mr. Adams.As he proved when he wore a bright red blazer to a Hamptons fund-raiser in August, or posted a photograph of himself in a new tower with the city’s skyscrapers spread out at his feet, his aviators reflecting the girders and gleam of the building, he is more than willing to use his clothes to stand out.And as the 61-year-old assumes his role as the mind — and face — of the city, a chaotic amalgamation of identities, politics, problems and possibility, at a time when New York is still recovering from a Covid-19-induced economic and spiritual nadir and after the social justice protests of 2020, he will become one of the most visible men in the metropolitan area. He can suffer that, or he can use it to his own ends.Mr. Adams, and his new earring, with Jumaane Williams, the New York  City public advocate, at a rally near Brooklyn Borough Hall.James Estrin/The New York Times“He manages to appeal to a lot of different people with a lot of different expectations,” said Nancy Deihl, the chair of the art department at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “He’s really dressing for that.” It is a strategic deployment of dress that goes far beyond respectability politics into what might be called charisma politics.He is, Mr. Arzt said, a mayor “for the visual age.”There are still questions about Mr. Adams’s specific plans for New York and how he intends to accomplish them, but in this one area at least he has always been absolutely clear: What you wear matters. It has meaning and import. And throughout his career he has crafted his own presentation to bridge communities and interest groups, to assert his place in the room — and beyond.“It’s All in the Clothing”Just over a decade ago, when Mr. Adams was a state senator in Albany, he actually orchestrated a campaign featuring clothes.The goal wasn’t a run for office, but rather to get the male members of his constituency to stop wearing pants that appeared to be sliding down their underwear. Complete with posters and a video, it was called “Stop the Sag.”“You can raise your level of respect if you raise your pants,” Mr. Adams said in the video, wearing, The New York Times reported, “a gray suit, green tie and white pocket square” and framing the low-slung pants by contrast as participating in — and helping perpetuate — a continuum of offensive racial stereotypes that stretched from Aunt Jemima through minstrel performers.As to why any of this mattered, he told the paper, “The first indicator that your child is having problems is the dress code.”Ultimately, he said, “It’s all in the clothing.”A “Stop the Sag” billboard in Brooklyn in 2010.Robert Mecea/Associated PressSince then, clothing has played a key role in much of his public storytelling, where he uses it as a sort of universal shorthand, a shared language almost anyone can understand. Reciting his personal narrative, for example, he described taking a garbage bag of clothes to school in case his family was evicted while he was away (clothing as a symbol of homelessness). Commemorating his 22-year career as a policeman in his Twitter bio, he wrote, “I wore a bulletproof vest to keep my neighbors safe” (clothing as a symbol of the positive side of law enforcement). Dramatizing a life lesson, he told an apparently borrowed story about confronting a rude neighbor who ignored him until he donned a hoodie (clothing as symbol of racial prejudice and threat).And celebrating his electoral victory, he said, “Today we take off the intramural jersey, and we put on one jersey: Team New York” (clothing as symbol of unity).“He clearly knows a lot more about the subject than the average politico,” Alan Flusser, a tailor in New York and the author of “Clothes and the Man,” said of Mr. Adams. As to how he learned it, Mr. Adams said his role model growing up was his uncle, Paul Watts, a longshoreman who was always in “a hat, nicely pressed suit and shined shoes,” as well as his local pastors — though he has taken their lessons and made them entirely his own.According to Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a state assemblywoman and chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, “Eric’s style has evolved along with his career” — from police chief with an actual uniform to Brooklyn borough president with a quasi-uniform in the shape of the position’s official nylon jacket to today..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Now, Ms. Hermelyn said, “He’s projecting New York City as the capital of the world through his wardrobe. But he’s also saying he grew up on these streets.”Indeed, there are a number of stories embedded in Mr. Adams’s current shirts and suits and accessories of choice.The Stories Clothes TellMr. Adams got his ear pierced in July after winning the Democratic primary because, he said, he had met a young man during the campaign who expressed doubt over whether any politicians keep their promises. When Mr. Adams asked what he could do to prove him wrong, the young voter said he could agree to pierce his ear if he won — and then actually follow through.“Day 1, living up to my promises,” Mr. Adams said in a video of the experience. Now he wears a diamond, which serves as winking symbol of his commitment. But also an effective counterpoint to his perfectly tailored suits, one button often neatly done up to smooth the line, which both advertise his fitness (famously achieved in part by going vegan after a being diagnosed with diabetes) and put him squarely in the tradition of Wall Street power brokers.“He wears clothes in a modern way,” Mr. Flusser said — closefitting, in the vein of Daniel Craig as James Bond, often without a tie — “but with classic flourishes from the past: shirts with cutaway collars, pocket squares.” Details, Mr. Flusser said, “identified with the highfliers.”Mr. Adams in Sunset Park in Brooklyn in late October.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesIndeed, Mr. Adams is so detail-oriented in his dress that his decision to largely abandon the tie (except at debates, where he favored a four-in-hand knot with center dimple) was clearly deliberate, another visual clue that plugged him into the evolution of the modern male dress code. Also notable is the “energy stone bracelet” he wears on his right wrist, composed of stones from Asia and Africa that supporters gave him, and his propensity for a white shirt.“The white shirt is a really powerful image,” said Ms. Deihl of N.Y.U. “It conveys impeccability, crispness and currency.”Together, she said, it all lays claim to a visual genealogy that extends from Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. through to President Barack Obama, whose black aviator Ray-Bans Mr. Adams adopted.“After I saw President Obama wearing a similar pair, I decided I needed these to make myself look cool — Obama cool,” he told New York Magazine’s Strategist. (Other preferred brands include Florsheim Berkley penny loafers, Joseph Abboud chinos bought from Men’s Wearhouse and shirts from Century 21.)Given that clothes are the unspoken and unwritten way we signal to the world our membership in a group, be it caste or class or profession, this particular collection of styles and names offers a medley of associations that allow Mr. Adams to be a master of the universe, a next-gen executive, a representative of the wellness contingent and the street-smart local, all at the same time. It’s a button-pushing balancing act that reflects both his chameleon-like politics and ambitions. For himself and his new role.“Part of the challenge here is perceptual — that New York is on the decline, that it is not healthy, that it is not safe,” said Evan Thies, one of Mr. Adams’s senior advisers. He noted that Mr. Adams “connects dress with confidence” — in himself and now, by transference, his city.His job is changing that impression. If he can do that through not only policy but (at least to start) sheer force of image — the “broken windows” theory made personal, all wrinkles ironed out — he may not just have won the election, Mr. Thies said, but “half the game.” More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Michelle Wu Makes Her Play for Boston Mayor

      by

      BOSTON — Michelle Wu was weeks away from her first City Council election when she lost her voice.Her supporters watched apprehensively. Wasn’t it enough of a challenge that, in a city of backslapping, larger-than-life politicians, their candidate was a soft-spoken, Harvard-educated policy nerd? Or that, in a city of deep neighborhood loyalties, she was a newcomer? Now, at crunchtime, she could barely make herself heard above a rasp.But it became clear, when Election Day arrived, that they need not have worried. Ms. Wu, then 28, had put the pieces in place, learning Boston’s political ecosystem, engaging voters about policy, cobbling together a multiracial coalition. This was not about speeches. She would win in a different way.On Nov. 2, when Ms. Wu, 36, faces off against another city councilor, Annissa Essaibi George, in Boston’s mayoral election, she could break a barrier nationally.Though Asian Americans are the country’s fastest-growing electorate, Asian American candidates have not fared well in big-city races. Of the country’s 100 largest cities, six have Asian American mayors, all in California or Texas, according to the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.Ms. Wu campaigning at a community event in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston in September.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesMs. Wu, a protégée of Senator Elizabeth Warren, began her political career in this city as it was turning a corner, its electorate increasingly young, well-educated and left-leaning.She proposes to make Boston a laboratory for progressive policy; to reapportion city contracts to firms owned by Black Bostonians; to pare away at the power of the police union; to waive fees for some public transportation; and to restore a form of rent control, a prospect that alarms real estate interests.“In nearly a decade in city government, I have learned that the easiest thing to do in government is nothing,” she said. “And in trying to deliver change, there will be those who are invested in the status quo who will be disrupted, or uncomfortable, or even lose out.”Critics says Ms. Wu is promising change she cannot deliver, since several signature policies, like rent control, require action by state bodies outside the mayor’s control.“Michelle talks, day in and day out, about things that are not real,” said Ms. Essaibi George, who has run as a pragmatic centrist and is an ally of former Mayor Martin J. Walsh. “My style is to be accurate in the things I say out loud, and to make promises I can truly keep.”Polls since the preliminary election have shown Ms. Wu with a substantial lead over Ms. Essaibi George.Ms. Wu will face Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, left, in Boston’s mayoral election on Nov. 2.Josh Reynolds/Associated PressOthers warn that Ms. Wu lacks allies within Boston’s traditional power centers and will run into resistance, even on everyday matters.Ms. Wu says that she is ready for those battles, and that the course of her life has compelled her, gradually, in the direction of taking greater risks. For example, she was not supposed to go into politics to begin with.A family unravelsMs. Wu was born shortly after her parents immigrated from Taiwan, intent on setting the next generation up for success.Han Wu, a chemical engineer, had been offered a spot as a graduate student at Illinois Institute of Technology. But he and his wife, Yu-Min, barely spoke English, and so, from the age of 4 or 5, their oldest daughter, known in Mandarin as Wu Mi, served as their interpreter, helping them navigate bureaucracy and fill out forms.At her suburban Chicago high school, she was Michelle. She stacked up A.P. classes, joined the math team and color guard, and earned perfect scores on the SAT and ACT exams. As co-valedictorian, she wowed the audience at graduation with a piano solo from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”Her sister Sherelle said their parents encouraged them to range widely but expected mastery.“They always made us feel that we could do anything, but whatever we chose, we had to be the best,” Sherelle Wu, a lawyer, said. “You know, I could have been an artist, but I had to be Picasso. My brother played the cello, and he could be Yo-Yo Ma.”Ms. Wu, top right, with her mother, Yu-Min, her sister Sherelle, bottom left, and her brother Elliot.Politics, however, was off the table; their parents, raised by parents who fled famine and civil war in China, viewed it as a corrupt, high-risk vocation. They wanted Michelle to go into medicine, along a “pipeline of tests and degrees to a stable, happy life,” she said. When she left for Harvard — something her parents had hoped for her whole life — Ms. Wu was not sure whether she was a Republican or a Democrat.It was while she was at Harvard that her family came unraveled.Her father had lived apart from the family starting when she was in high school; her parents would eventually divorce. Her mother, isolated in their suburban neighborhood, began acting erratically, shouting at the television and dialing 911 to report strange threats.Ms. Wu, newly graduated, had started a fast-track job at the Boston Consulting Group when Sherelle Wu called and said, “We need you home, now.”Ms. Wu, right, at her graduation from Harvard University in 2007.Ms. Wu rushed home and was shocked by her mother’s condition. She has described finding Yu-Min standing in the rain with a suitcase, convinced a driver was coming to ferry her to a secret meeting. She examined her daughter’s face closely, seeking evidence that she was not an android.“You’re not my daughter anymore, and I’m not your mother,” Ms. Wu’s mother told her.Ms. Wu marks this period as the crossroads in her life, the point where she let go of the script that her parents had written for her.“Life feels very short when that kind of switch happens,” she said.Thrust into position as the head of the family, Ms. Wu, then 22, dove in. She became a primary parent to her youngest sister, who was 11, eventually filing for legal guardianship. She managed psychiatric treatment for her mother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and opened a small tea shop, thinking her mother might take it over..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Then, frustrated by the bureaucratic obstacles she had encountered, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, bringing her mother and sister back to Boston with her. This time, she intended to stay.A political baptismMs. Warren, who taught contract law, remembers Ms. Wu coming to her office hours in her first semester of law school.Ms. Wu had come to apologize for some academic shortcoming, though Ms. Warren had not noticed any. “She felt she hadn’t done her best and wanted me to know she had not intended any disrespect,” Ms. Warren recalled.As they sat together, Ms. Wu told the story about how she had come to care for her mother and sisters. Ms. Warren listened, marveling. “Michelle was doing something in law school that, in 25 years of teaching, I never knew another student to be doing,” she said.That marked the beginning of a close relationship between Ms. Wu and Ms. Warren, who would become Massachusetts’s progressive standard-bearer. Asked this summer why she endorsed Ms. Wu over other progressives, Ms. Warren responded simply, “Michelle is family.”Senator Elizabeth Warren campaigning for Ms. Wu in September.Philip Keith for The New York TimesIn law school, Ms. Wu began expanding her networks in government. During a legal fellowship in Boston City Hall, she designed a streamlined licensing process for restaurants and started a food truck program, attracting the interest of Thomas M. Menino, the mayor at the time.When Ms. Warren decided to run for Senate, Ms. Wu asked for a job on her campaign. John Connolly, a former city councilor who ran against Mr. Walsh in 2013, credits her with “a phenomenal, genius-level understanding of field politics,” similar to Mr. Menino in her “photographic memory of the nooks and crannies of Boston.”“She can tell you the six places Albanians socialize in Roslindale,” he said.She went on to win an at-large seat on Boston’s City Council in 2012, making her only the second woman of color to serve on the Council, after Ayanna Pressley.Almost immediately, she was in hot water with progressives. In the election for City Council president, Ms. Wu had pledged her support to William P. Linehan, a leader of the Council’s conservative faction and one of her early supporters.Shortly before the vote, Ms. Pressley jumped into the race, and it became an ideological showdown. A parade of progressive heavyweights tried to persuade Ms. Wu — at 28, the youngest councilor ever elected — to switch her vote. She recalls “thousands and thousands” of phone calls and emails that left her “in bed crying, devastated and shaken,” unsure she even wanted the position she had just won. Still, she did not budge.Ms. Wu working in her office as a city councilor in 2014.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThe vote cast a shadow over her victory: Many progressives saw her choice as an act of political self-interest, and conservatives, who repaid the favor by backing her for City Council president in 2015, were disappointed that she resumed voting with progressives, Mr. Linehan said in an interview.“She gets elected, and goes back to the people who were abusing her, because that was her political future,” he said. (He is supporting Ms. Essaibi George in this race.)Others in the city, though, recall watching the young politician with new interest, surprised by her toughness.“She is so nice, people sometimes mistake her niceness for softness,” Leverett Wing, one of her early supporters, said. “It showed she wouldn’t succumb to pressure. It showed she had the mettle to lead the institution.”‘She had a long game’Over four terms as city councilor, Ms. Wu has built a reputation for immersing herself in the nitty-gritty of government, reliably showing up at meetings on unglamorous matters.“The word that is coming to mind here is ‘methodical,’ and that’s almost dismissive — I don’t want to paint a picture of someone who says, ‘I’m going to be mayor and I’ll just tick all the boxes,’” said Chris Dempsey, an activist and former state transportation official. “It’s the consistency with which I have seen her show up and work on issues and build constituencies and start conversations.”She captivated young progressives with far-reaching proposals like a citywide Green New Deal and fare-free transit, campaigns she rolled out on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, alongside dispatches from her campaign headquarters and her two young sons.“All my classmates started to talk about Michelle Wu,” said Benjamin Swisher, 22, a senior at Emerson College, adding that her candidacy “shows that young people can do it, that we have the ideas to push this country forward and create that new America.”Ms. Wu can be sharp elbowed, and often brought her criticisms of Mayor Walsh straight to the press or social media, to his irritation. In 2020, after she criticized a city coronavirus fund, he remarked that it would be better “if the city councilor just took time out of her schedule just to give me a call and maybe go on a call to talk to us.”In September 2020, she was the first candidate to declare a run against Mr. Walsh, at a moment when polls showed he was heavily favored to win.Four months later, President Biden chose Mr. Walsh as labor secretary, and the stars lined up.An M.B.T.A. coin pendant Ms. Wu had made into a necklace.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times“This has been thought out and played out and planned out for years,” said Peter Kadzis, a commentator for GBH radio. “She had a long game to get into the office, a much longer game than anyone I’ve ever known who has become mayor.”Her success at mounting an electoral challenge does not mean she will be able to perform well as mayor, her critics warn. She could face pushback from powerful players in the city’s development sector, who may seek to block her agenda.“The nuts and bolts of how that government runs, and the city workers — she’s going to have her hands full trying to control them and manage them,” said Mr. Linehan, the former city councilor. “Are you going to bring in some people from Harvard to manage them? You’re going to get a reactionary response.”“She’s Ms. Outside,” he added.Ms. Wu allows that there are challenges ahead. But no leap seems more vertiginous than the one she took when she was 22, and decided not to follow the plan that her parents had so carefully plotted out.“In some ways, maybe the biggest risk of all,” she said, “was choosing to step away from that.” More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      8 Black Women Who Are Mayors in Some of the U.S.'s Biggest Cities

      by

      When Kim Janey failed in September to qualify for the mayoral runoff election in Boston, effectively ending her time as the city’s top leader, her political rivals rejoiced and her supporters were dismayed. But her loss affected one group in particular: the collective of seven other Black women who are mayors of large cities. It’s currently a record number.Black women mayors lead eight of the 100 cities with the largest populations in the United States, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. Their disparate communities stretch across both coasts, the Midwest and the South, from Boston, San Francisco and Chicago to New Orleans, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. Some of their cities have large Black populations but others do not. And the women have forged a quiet fellowship because of their relative scarcity and similar experiences of managing the myriad facets of a big city as mayors in a shifting political landscape.That these eight Black women have achieved this milestone is both remarkable and a long time in the making, say analysts of Black politics. The number of female mayors of any race in major U.S. cities has more than tripled in the last decade, from just nine in 2011 to 31 today, according to CAWP, which began tracking this data in 1997. But within that number, the rise of Black women has been particularly dramatic.“This is the age of Black women in politics,” said David Bositis, a scholar of Black politics and a voting rights expert witness in federal and state courts. “This has been culminating for a long time.”According to CAWP, the first Black female mayors of the 100 largest American cities — Lottie Shackelford of Little Rock, Ark., and Carrie Saxon Perry of Hartford, Conn. — were elected in 1987. Ms. Shackelford was in disbelief on her inauguration day, she recalled in a recent interview: “Is this really true? Is this happening?”Kim Janey, the mayor of Boston.Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesMuriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesBut for a long time, Ms. Shackelford and Ms. Perry were members of a lonely club. For decades, there were no more than two or three Black female mayors serving at the same time. That number only began to shift six years ago, rising to four in 2015, seven in 2018 and eight this year. And even as more Black women have won mayoral races across the country, the numbers of Latina and Asian American female mayors of major cities have continued to hover around one to three at a time.In interviews with the current Black female mayors — Ms. Janey in Boston; Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta; Muriel Bowser in Washington; London Breed in San Francisco; LaToya Cantrell in New Orleans; Tishaura Jones in St. Louis; Lori Lightfoot in Chicago; and Vi Lyles in Charlotte, N.C. — all eight women said they were heartened by their collective achievement, but had no illusions about the barriers still standing in the way of Black women in U.S. politics.“It doesn’t mean that racism magically disappears. It doesn’t mean that sexism magically disappears,” said Ms. Janey of Boston.Ms. Bowser in D.C. was the first of the eight to be sworn in, in 2015. Ms. Janey took her oath in March of this year and Ms. Jones assumed office in April. Six of the eight — Ms. Breed, Ms. Lyles, Ms. Jones, Ms. Lightfoot, Ms. Cantrell and Ms. Janey — are the first Black women to serve as mayors of their cities.LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesThis breakthrough moment may be a fleeting one. In Atlanta, a city where nearly half of the population is Black, Ms. Bottoms announced earlier this year that she would not be running for a second term. Two Black candidates — Kasim Reed, a man and the city’s former mayor, and Felicia Moore, a woman and the current city council president — are leading the race to replace her in the Nov. 2 election, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. In Boston, Ms. Janey, who was appointed acting mayor earlier this year, came in fourth in the preliminary election this fall, failing to secure a spot in the runoff; the frontrunner to replace her, Michelle Wu, is an Asian American woman and a current city councilor. Even without Ms. Janey, though, the number of Black women mayors may not diminish. India Walton, a Democrat, is currently running for mayor of Buffalo; if elected, she would be the first woman — and first Black woman — to lead New York’s second-largest city.Political experts attribute the rise in Black female mayors, and Black women in other elected positions, to a number of factors, including a changing electorate, grass roots activism and increased support from so-called gatekeepers, including political parties, major unions and other organizations that can help boost a candidate through fund-raising and endorsements.This trend has accelerated in the last five years, Debbie Walsh, the director of CAWP, said: “There has been increased activism in recruiting and supporting women of color who are running for office, certainly on the Democratic side. More and more of these gatekeepers are engaging and seeking out Black women candidates.”One political scientist also points to young Black women’s early exposure to civic engagement through sororities and other clubs, describing their political rise as “Black girl magic.”“One of the things that I’m finding in my research is that the overwhelming majority of Black female mayors belong to a sorority — and they learned about activism in college because these sororities emphasize community service,” said Sharon Wright Austin, a professor of political science at the University of Florida and editor of the forthcoming book “Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors.”Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Atlanta mayor.Anissa Baty for The New York TimesVi Lyles, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C.Liam Woods for The New York TimesEven as more cities have elected Black women as mayors, other executive government positions — for which mayorships of major cities have traditionally been steppingstones — have remained out of reach. No Black woman has ever been elected governor or president. Only two Black women have ever been elected to the Senate and, with the election of Kamala Harris as the nation’s first Black, female and Asian American vice president, there are currently no Black female Senators in office.Dr. Austin sees the increasing number of Black female candidates for these positions as encouraging nonetheless. “Before, it used to be that Black women didn’t run. They were the organizers and the campaign volunteers, but the men were the ones who were running for office,” she said. “But now you’re seeing Black women not only organizing campaigns and working in communities but having the confidence that they can run for office themselves.”Dr. Austin cited Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, as emblematic of the kinds of Black female candidates who are shifting the balance. Ms. Abrams rose to prominence after her loss thanks to her efforts to highlight voter suppression and mobilize Black voters in Georgia, and she has been credited with helping to flip the state for Democrats in the 2020 presidential election and 2021 Senate runoffs.“You could argue that these candidates were unsuccessful because they didn’t win the election but you can’t really say that their campaigns are failures,” Dr. Austin said. “Because each time a woman runs, it’s sending a signal to other women that they can run, too.”Some experts say that perhaps no other politician has a more direct and profound impact on people’s lives than a mayor, particularly in cities that operate under the strong-mayor model of governance used in most major American cities (including all but one of the cities — St. Louis — currently run by a Black woman). In this kind of system, mayors can hire and fire police chiefs, manage the city’s budget, enforce municipal policy, negotiate city contracts and in some cases even oversee cultural institutions and public transportation.London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“Mayors are arguably the most important politicians in any American citizen’s life,” said Ravi Perry, a professor of political science at Howard University. “Everything that we actively deal with as citizens mostly is litigated and legislated at the local level.”Once in office, however, Black female mayors recounted how they’ve often found themselves continuing to battle the same stereotypes that made it so difficult for them to secure their positions in the first place. Many of the current mayors talked about experiencing everyday bias, from coded language and leading questions about their qualifications to more outright discrimination.Ms. Bottoms of Atlanta said she is often asked who is advising her — implying, she feels, that she is incapable of making decisions on her own. “It was not enough that I stood on my own two feet,” she said. “It had to be someone else or something else that was responsible for me.”Women in these executive leadership positions, and particularly women of color, are often held to impossibly high standards, experts say, making it harder for them to accomplish their policy goals or win re-election. “It’s a scenario we call a glass cliff,” said Ms. Walsh, the CAWP director. “Expectations are set too high. And then, when they don’t meet them, it’s a steeper fall for those women.”Part of the challenge for many of these leaders may also be the increasingly diverse electorates that have sent them to office, Andrea Benjamin, a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Oklahoma, explained. “Historically we know that Black mayors were first elected in majority Black cities. It took that kind of majority voting to get them in office,” she said. “You have to have a much broader appeal now, which can put you in a precarious position.”Lori Lightfoot, the Chicago mayor.Akilah Townsend for The New York TimesTishaura Jones, the mayor of St. Louis.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesBrought together by their mutual experiences, the women say they find solace in their bonds with each other. In moments of strength, happiness and adversity, they lean on each other.“There’s definitely a sisterhood there,” said Ms. Jones of St. Louis, adding that seeing strong Black women leading major cities bolstered her resolve in her own campaign.The mayors have text threads. They do group video chats and share jokes. They watch each other on T.V. and read each others’ statements, seeking lessons in leadership applicable to their own cities. Ms. Jones and Ms. Bottoms were in the same historically Black sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. Ms. Lyles even sent Ms. Bowser a baby gift.The support system provides a private space for shared insights, both professional and personal. “I think that all of us recognize that we’re walking in the same shoes,” Ms. Lyles said.In essence, the women lift each other up. For Ms. Bottoms, this sometimes means sending a text just to say: “Hey girl, I’m thinking about you. Keep your head up.”Many of the mayors also said they felt a sense of responsibility that extended beyond the realm of local governance.They know that millions of Black women and girls are watching them, seeking inspiration. When Ms. Janey of Boston takes video meetings, adults will often bring their children onto the screen — and when she acknowledges them, the children light up, she said.Karen Weaver, the interim executive director of the African American Mayors Association and the former — and first female — mayor of Flint, Mich., summed up the inspiring effect these women can have for young people: “If you don’t see it, you don’t dream it.” More