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      Why These 2 N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Are on a Collision Course

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }N.Y.C. Mayoral RaceWho’s Running?11 Candidates’ N.Y.C. MomentsAn Overview of the Race5 TakeawaysAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy These 2 N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Are on a Collision CourseEric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Ray McGuire, a former Citi executive, have become fast rivals in the New York City mayoral race.Ever since Ray McGuire, right, entered New York’s mayoral race, he has vied with Eric Adams, left, to capture Black political influencers and voters.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETJust a few days after Raymond J. McGuire officially joined the New York City mayor’s race in December, a courtesy call came in from one of his Democratic rivals, Eric Adams.Mr. Adams, who, like Mr. McGuire, is Black, offered some provocative words of wisdom.“Being in politics is just like being in a prison yard,” Mr. Adams said, according to several people familiar with the video call. “You need to put a wall around your family because you might get shanked.”Mr. Adams’s campaign described the sentiment as “friendly advice.” Several people in Mr. McGuire’s campaign saw it differently, characterizing it as a “veiled threat” from a front-runner trying to intimidate a new challenger.For two years, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had been regarded as one of the favorites in the 2021 mayor’s race.He was a former police officer who had nuanced views of how social justice demands could coexist with policing needs. He had broad support in Brooklyn, and had raised more than $8 million to fuel his campaign — more than anyone else in the field.In a field of progressive rivals, he had appeared to be the leading Black moderate, representing a key city constituency. But now his stature in the race is suddenly being challenged.Mr. McGuire, a former global head of corporate and investment banking at Citi, quickly began making inroads among political power brokers in the Black community. He hired Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the State Democratic Party, to be his campaign manager; other Black political operatives who have strong connections to Representative Gregory W. Meeks, chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, also signed on.The filmmaker Spike Lee, whose brand is the borough of Brooklyn, narrated Mr. McGuire’s campaign announcement. Mr. McGuire raised $5 million in just three months, and landed the endorsement of Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man whose death in 2014 after being placed in a police chokehold became a flash point for the Black Lives Matter movement.“Eric came into this race believing that he would run a race of inevitability, not just as the borough president of Brooklyn, but the senior Black candidate in the race,” Mr. Smikle said. “Now, that’s not the case.”Mr. McGuire, talking with Councilman Rafael Salamanca in the Bronx, has raised $5 million in three months.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMr. McGuire and Mr. Adams have quickly become rivals, and their interactions as well as several interviews with people familiar with their relationship reveal a complicated story born at the intersection of race and class.It’s a natural rivalry between two successful Black men from humble beginnings who took different paths — Mr. McGuire through the Ivy League and the upper echelons of Wall Street, Mr. Adams through night school and the upper ranks of the New York Police Department — to become candidates for mayor.For Mr. Adams, the comparison is slightly irksome, adding to a perception that he might lack the polish to lead the city. He does not have the white-shoe law firm experience of Mr. Jeffries, the power broker and No. 5 House Democrat who The Washington Post once suggested was “Brooklyn’s Barack Obama,” or Mr. McGuire’s experience managing multibillion-dollar transactions.“Coming where I come from, I think people didn’t think I’d put it together, but now I have more money to spend on a campaign than any Black person running for office in New York City’s history,” Mr. Adams said.Four Black and Afro-Latino candidates sit among the Democratic mayoral primary’s top echelon, the most in recent memory. All talk extensively about how being Black and brown in America has affected their lives and will affect how they govern.Initial polls suggest that Mr. Adams is running second to Andrew Yang, the former 2020 presidential candidate; Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who served as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legal counsel, is roughly in fourth place; Mr. McGuire trails behind, along with Dianne Morales, an Afro-Latina who led a nonprofit in the Bronx dedicated to eradicating poverty.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales are also further behind in fund-raising; neither has yet qualified for the city’s generous matching-funds program. But while the two are competing for the progressive vote, they have largely stayed out of each other’s way, even naming the other as their second choice for mayor.Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire, on the other hand, seem destined for a collision course.“I can’t remember a time where you had this many strong African-American candidates, because what normally occurs is one will emerge out of a group of several with everybody else standing down,” said Mr. Jeffries, who has not decided if he will endorse anyone in the race. “There’s no expectation that will happen in this particular instance.”Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, described the prison yard remarks during the video call as “nothing more than friendly advice about the intense world of city politics.”“To infer otherwise,” he continued, “is an example of the kind of bias that Eric has been fighting his entire life.”But Mr. Adams’s video call in December was not the only time he had directed criticism at Mr. McGuire. At a forum in January, Mr. Adams said that he “didn’t go to the Hamptons” when the pandemic struck New York City — an apparent jab at Mr. McGuire, who said he had spent a total of three weeks in the Hamptons with his family last summer.The remarks were similar to ones Mr. Adams made at a virtual meeting with the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Queens in December, when he said that he didn’t attend Harvard and didn’t need to introduce himself to voters.Mr. McGuire, who left his job at Citigroupto run for mayor, has also sought to draw a contrast with his rivals, often saying that he has not been “termed out” and isn’t “looking for a promotion” — a likely reference to Mr. Adams and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, who are both barred by city law from running for third consecutive terms.As moderate Democrats, Mr. Adams and McGuire share several policy positions. Both are in favor of revamping Police Department protocols, but have not called for defunding the police. Mr. Adams was originally in favor of a plan from Mr. de Blasio to scrap the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, but changed his position and now believes — as Mr. McGuire does — that the test should not be the only criteria for admission.One area where they differ is on taxing the wealthy. Mr. Adams wants to increase taxes on those who earn more than $5 million per year for two years, and use the money to help the city recover from the pandemic. Mr. McGuire, who has business community support, has said that wealthy New Yorkers such as himself should pay their fair share but also believes that the city has to grow itself out of its financial deficit.Mr. Adams has tried to accentuate his working-class background, telling voters that he washed dishes before becoming a police officer.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe Black electorate in New York City is diverse, made up of Caribbean-Americans and African-Americans; of native New Yorkers, immigrants and transplants from other states. In the 2013 mayoral race, Mr. de Blasio won partly because of his enormous popularity among Black voters: Ninety-six percent of Black New Yorkers voted for him, according to exit polls, a higher percentage than David N. Dinkins captured in 1989 when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor.In the 2013 Democratic primary, Mr. de Blasio garnered 18,000 more votes in predominantly African-American neighborhoods than a Black rival, the former city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., largely based on how they proposed handling the policing tactic of stop and frisk.Given the financial difficulty wrought by the pandemic, Mr. McGuire’s financial pedigree may help with voters in places like central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, said Anthony D. Andrews Jr., the leader of the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Southeast Queens. He said that residents there are concerned about the city’s unequal property tax system and whether government jobs will be eliminated.“Some people will say the complexity of the city requires someone with a certain kind of education to be able to manage a $100 billion enterprise,” said Marc H. Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans and current president of the National Urban League, who knows both men. “But there may be other people who say, ‘Is that guy in touch with me? Does he know my pain?’”Mr. McGuire, who was urged by business leaders to run for mayor, has tried to accentuate his rise from a modest upbringing in his stump speeches. He was so poor growing up, he has said, that he washed and reused aluminum foil, and pressed scraps of soap together until they formed a bar.Having never met his father, Mr. McGuire was raised by his mother and his grandparents in a house full of foster siblings on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Dayton, Ohio. He found his way to a prestigious private school, went on to earn three degrees at Harvard, and became one of the highest-ranking Black executives on Wall Street, a mentor to young people of color and a behind-the-scenes patron of Black causes.“A Black man who grew up the way I grew up, I know exactly what they are going through,” Mr. McGuire said. “I know about the struggle.”Mr. Adams has touched on similar hardships of his youth, recalling at mayoral forums that neighbors used to leave food and clothes outside his family’s home. He said he first took an interest in becoming an officer after he was beaten by the police as a teenager.Mr. Adams worked his way up the ranks of the Police Department and founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group to confront institutional racism in the profession. He attended night school to attain a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and has taken to saying that he will be a “blue-collar” mayor.“I’m not fancy,” Mr. Adams said at a recent Queens County Democratic Party forum. “I was a dishwasher. I worked in a mailroom.”“Acknowledging the problems Black people face,” Mr. Adams said, “is different from understanding the problems.”Mr. Adams was recently endorsed by four wrongfully convicted men, dozens of ministers and leaders from the city’s African community. Four Black City Council members, including I. Daneek Miller, co-chairman of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, have also endorsed Mr. Adams.Of Mr. Adams’s supporters on the Council, another caucus member, Laurie A. Cumbo, the majority leader, has been among the most forceful in her criticism of Mr. McGuire.At a mayoral forum, Ms. Cumbo, who represents a Brooklyn district, questioned whether Mr. McGuire had made a “visible commitment to the community” before deciding to run for mayor. She criticized his charitable work in the art world as too “highbrow,” and said that he should make sure that his campaign was “more in alignment with the people.”Not long after, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire appeared at a Martin Luther King’s Birthday celebration in Harlem. Hoping to keep the peace, Mr. Adams pulled Mr. McGuire aside and told him that Ms. Cumbo’s comments were not coordinated with his campaign.Ms. Cumbo was not interested in peacemaking.“Ray McGuire is running a ‘Hello, my name is Ray McGuire’ kind of campaign,” she said. “Eric is running a ‘Hey sis, I just saw your mom yesterday getting the vaccine’ kind of campaign.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Voter Suppression Is Grand Larceny

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyVoter Suppression Is Grand LarcenyWe are watching another theft of power.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 28, 2021, 7:20 p.m. ETCredit…Charles Krupa/Associated PressIn 1890, Mississippi became one of the first states in the country to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of writing white supremacy into the DNA of the state.At the time, a majority of the registered voters in the state were Black men.The lone Black delegate to the convention, Isaiah Montgomery, participated in openly suppressing the voting eligibility of most of those Black men, in the hope that this would reduce the terror, intimidation and hostility that white supremacists aimed at Black people.The committee on which he sat went even further. As he said at the convention:“As a further precaution to secure unquestioned white supremacy the committee have fixed an arbitrary appointment of the state, which fixes the legislative branch of the government at 130 members and the senatorial branch at 45 members.” The majority of the seats in both branches were “from white constituencies.”Speaking to the Black people he was disenfranchising, Montgomery said:“I wish to tell them that the sacrifice has been made to restore confidence, the great missing link between the two races, to restore honesty and purity to the ballot-box and to confer the great boon of political liberty upon the Commonwealth of Mississippi.”That sacrifice backfired horribly, as states across the South followed the Mississippi example, suppressing the Black vote, and Jim Crow reigned.That same sort of language is being used today to prevent people from voting, because when it comes to voter suppression, ignoble intentions are always draped in noble language. Those who seek to impede others from voting, in some cases to strip them of the right, often say that they are doing so to ensure the sanctity, integrity or purity of the vote.However, when the truth is laid bare, the defilement against which they rail is the voting power of the racial minority, the young — in their eyes, naïve and liberally indoctrinated — and the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.In early February, a Brennan Center for Justice report detailed:“Thus far this year, thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 bills to restrict voting access. These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) slash voter registration opportunities; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges. These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.”On Feb. 24, the center updated its account to reveal that “as of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.”But it is the coded language that harkens to the post-Reconstruction era racism that strikes me.In Georgia, which went for a Democrat for the first time since Bill Clinton in 1992 and just elected two Democratic senators — one Black and one Jewish — there have been a raft of proposed voter restrictions. As State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican and chair of the newly formed Special Committee on Election Integrity, put it recently, according to The Washington Post, “Our due diligence in this legislature [is] to constantly update our laws to try to protect the sanctity of the vote.”Kelly Loeffler, who lost her Senate bid in the state, has launched a voter organization because, as she said, “for too many in our state, the importance — and even the sanctity of their vote — is in question.” She continued, “That’s why we’re rolling up our sleeves to register conservative-leaning voters who have been overlooked, to regularly engage more communities, and to strengthen election integrity across our state.”Senator Rick Scott and other Republicans on Feb. 25 introduced the Save Democracy Act in what they said was an effort to “restore confidence in our elections.”Jessica Anderson of the conservative lobbying organization Heritage Action for America said of the legislation: “I applaud Senator Scott for putting forward common-sense, targeted reforms to help protect the integrity of our federal elections and the sanctity of the vote. The Save Democracy Act will protect against fraud and restore American’s confidence in our election systems while respecting the state’s sovereignty.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is pushing a slate of restrictive voter laws that would make it harder for Democrats to win in the state. On his website, the announcement read this way: “Today, Governor Ron DeSantis proposed new measures to safeguard the sanctity of Florida elections. The Governor’s announcement reaffirms his commitment to the integrity of every vote and the importance of transparency in Florida elections.”They can use all manner of euphemism to make it sound honorable, but it is not. This is an electoral fleecing in plain sight, one targeting people of color. We are watching another of history’s racist robberies. It’s grand larceny and, as usual, what is being stolen is power.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Supreme Court Test for What’s Left of the Voting Rights Act

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Supreme Court Test for What’s Left of the Voting Rights ActWhile state legislatures consider new voting restrictions to address claims of election fraud, the justices will hear arguments on what kind of legal scrutiny such laws should face.The Supreme Court has never considered how a particular provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021, 12:24 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — As Republican state lawmakers around the nation are working furiously to enact laws making it harder to vote, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear its most important election case in almost a decade, one that will determine what sort of judicial scrutiny those restrictions will face.The case centers on a crucial remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. Civil rights groups are nervous that the court, now with a six-justice conservative majority, will use the opportunity to render that provision, Section 2, toothless.The provision has taken on greater importance in election disputes since 2013, when the court effectively struck down the heart of the 1965 law, its Section 5, which required prior federal approval of changes to voting procedures in parts of the country with a history of racial and other discrimination.But Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s majority opinion in the 5-to-4 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, said Section 2 would remain in place to protect voting rights by allowing litigation after the fact.“Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide and is not at issue in this case,” he wrote.But it is more than a little opaque, and the Supreme Court has never considered how it applies to voting restrictions.The new case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, was filed by the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to challenge voting restrictions in Arizona. Lawyers for civil rights groups said they hoped the justices would not use the case to chip away at the protections offered by Section 2.“It would be just really out of step for what this country needs right now for the Supreme Court to weaken or limit Section 2,” said Myrna Pérez, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which submitted a brief supporting the challengers.Civil rights lawyers have a particular reason to be wary of Chief Justice Roberts. When he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he unsuccessfully worked to oppose the expansion of Section 2, which had initially covered only intentional discrimination, to address practices that had discriminatory results.The Arizona case concerns two kinds of voting restrictions. One requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.” The law makes exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials.“I can’t believe the court would strike down common-sense election integrity measures,” Mark Brnovich, the state’s attorney general, said in an interview. In his brief, he wrote that “a majority of states require in-precinct voting, and about 20 states limit ballot collection.”Whether the particular restrictions challenged in the case should survive is in some ways not the central issue. The Biden administration, for instance, told the justices in an unusual letter two weeks ago that the Arizona measures did not violate Section 2. But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s interpretation of Section 2, which would limit its availability to test the lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions.Section 2 bars any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”Dissenting in the Shelby County case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Section 2 was not nearly as valuable as Section 5.A polling site in Phoenix in 2016. The case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was filed by the Democratic National Committee that year to challenge voting restrictions in Arizona.Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times“Litigation occurs only after the fact, when the illegal voting scheme has already been put in place and individuals have been elected pursuant to it, thereby gaining the advantages of incumbency,” she wrote. “An illegal scheme might be in place for several election cycles before a Section 2 plaintiff can gather sufficient evidence to challenge it. And litigation places a heavy financial burden on minority voters.”While Section 5 was available, Section 2 was used mostly in redistricting cases, where the question was whether voting maps had unlawfully diluted minority voting power. Its role in testing restrictions on the denial of the right to vote itself has been subject to much less attention.But Paul M. Smith, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, which submitted a brief supporting the challengers, said lower courts had worked out a sensible framework to identify restrictions that violate Section 2.“It is not enough that a rule has a racially disparate impact,” he said. “That disparity must be related to, and explained by, the history of discrimination in the jurisdiction. Our hope is that the court will recognize the importance of maintaining this workable test, which plays an essential role in reining in laws that operate to burden voting by Blacks or Latinos.”The two sets of lawyers defending the measures in Arizona did not agree on what standard the Supreme Court should adopt to sustain the challenged restrictions. Mr. Brnovich, the state attorney general, said the disparate effect on minority voters must be substantial and caused by the challenged practice rather than some other factor. Lawyers for the Arizona Republican Party took a harder line, saying that race-neutral election regulations that impose ordinary burdens on voting are not subject at all to challenges under Section 2.Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that both Arizona restrictions violated Section 2 because they disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters.In 2016, Black, Latino and Native American voters were about twice as likely to cast ballots in the wrong precinct as were white voters, Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the majority in the 7-to-4 decision. Among the reasons for this, he said, were “frequent changes in polling locations; confusing placement of polling locations; and high rates of residential mobility.”Similarly, he wrote, the ban on ballot collectors had an outsize effect on minority voters, who use ballot collection services far more than white voters because they are more likely to be poor, older, homebound or disabled; to lack reliable transportation, child care and mail service; and to need help understanding voting rules.Judge Fletcher added that “there is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.”In dissent, four judges wrote that the state’s restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense and applied neutrally to all voters.Lawmakers were entitled to try to prevent potential fraud, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain wrote. “Given its interest in addressing its valid concerns of voter fraud,” he wrote, “Arizona was free to enact prophylactic measures even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature.”The appeals court stayed its ruling, and the restrictions were in place for the election in November.Mr. Brnovich will argue before the justices on Tuesday in the case that bears his name. He said the Ninth Circuit’s approach “would jeopardize almost every voting integrity law in almost every state.”Leigh Chapman, a lawyer with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which filed a brief supporting the challengers, said the Supreme Court faced a crossroad.“Especially in the absence of Section 5,” she said, “Section 2 plays an essential role in advancing the federal commitment to protecting minority voters and ensuring that they have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Democrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?Disappointed by down-ballot losses, Democratic interest groups are joining forces to conduct an autopsy of the election results. Republicans do not yet seem willing to reckon with the G.O.P.’s major defeats.Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaking outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., after winning the election on Nov. 7.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETDemocrats emerged from the 2020 election with full control of the federal government and a pile of lingering questions. In private, party leaders and strategists have been wrestling with a quandary: Why was President Biden’s convincing victory over Donald J. Trump not accompanied by broad Democratic gains down ballot?With that puzzle in mind, a cluster of Democratic advocacy groups has quietly launched a review of the party’s performance in the 2020 election with an eye toward shaping Democrats’ approach to next year’s midterm campaign, seven people familiar with the effort said.There is particular concern among the Democratic sponsors of the initiative about the party’s losses in House districts with large minority populations, including in Florida, Texas and California, people briefed on the initiative said. The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing.Democrats had anticipated they would be able to expand their majority in the House, pushing into historically red areas of the Sun Belt where Mr. Trump’s unpopularity had destabilized the G.O.P. coalition. Instead, Republicans took 14 Democratic-held House seats, including a dozen that Democrats had captured in an anti-Trump wave election just two years earlier.The results stunned strategists in both parties, raising questions about the reliability of campaign polling and seemingly underscoring Democratic vulnerabilities in rural areas and right-of-center suburbs. Democrats also lost several contested Senate races by unexpectedly wide margins, even as they narrowly took control of the chamber.Strategists involved in the Democratic self-review have begun interviewing elected officials and campaign consultants and reaching out to lawmakers and former candidates in major House and Senate races where the party either won or lost narrowly.Four major groups are backing the effort, spanning a range of Democratic-leaning interests: Third Way, a centrist think tank; End Citizens United, a clean-government group; the Latino Victory Fund; and Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black Democratic candidates.They are said to be working with at least three influential bodies within the House Democratic caucus: the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist lawmakers. The groups have retained a Democratic consulting firm, 270 Strategies, to conduct interviews and analyze electoral data.The newly elected Democratic Representatives Jason Crow, Antonio Delgado, Jared Golden and Abigail Spanberger participated in a forum hosted by End Citizens United in 2019.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockDemocrats are feeling considerable pressure to refine their political playbook ahead of the 2022 congressional elections, when the party will be defending minuscule House and Senate majorities without a presidential race to drive turnout on either side.Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said there was a recognition in the party that despite Mr. Biden’s victory the 2020 cycle had not been an unalloyed Democratic success story.“I think people know that there was good and bad coming out of ’20 and there is a desire to look under the hood,” Mr. Sena said.Among the party’s goals, Mr. Sena said, should be studying their gains in Georgia and looking for other areas where population growth and demographic change might furnish the party with strong electoral targets in 2022.“There were a series of factors that really made Georgia work this cycle,” he said. “How do you begin to find places like Georgia?”Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, confirmed in a statement that the four-way project was aimed at positioning Democrats for the midterm elections.“With narrow Democratic majorities in Congress and the Republican Party in the thrall of Trump-supporting seditionists, the stakes have never been higher,” he said. “Our organizations will provide Democrats with a detailed picture of what happened in 2020 — with a wide range of input from voices across the party — so they are fully prepared to take on the G.O.P. in 2022.”In addition to the outside review, some of the traditional party committees are said to be taking narrower steps to scrutinize the 2020 results. Concerned about a drop-off in support with Latino men, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas earlier this year, one person familiar with the study said. It is not clear precisely what conclusions emerged from the exercise.So far there is no equivalent process underway on the Republican side, party officials said, citing the general lack of appetite among G.O.P. leaders for grappling openly with Mr. Trump’s impact on the party and the wreckage he inflicted in key regions of the country.As a candidate for re-election, Mr. Trump slumped in the Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest — giving up his most important breakthroughs of 2016 — and lost to Mr. Biden in Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally red states where the G.O.P. has suffered an abrupt decline in recent years. The party lost all four Senate seats from those states during Mr. Trump’s presidency, three of them in the 2020 cycle.But Mr. Trump and his political retainers have so far responded with fury to critics of his stewardship of the party, and there is no apparent desire to tempt his wrath with a comprehensive analysis that would be likely to yield unflattering results. One unofficial review, conducted by Mr. Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, concluded that Mr. Trump had shed significant support because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with particularly damaging losses among white voters.In the past, Democratic attempts at self-scrutiny have tended to yield somewhat mushy conclusions aimed at avoiding controversy across the party’s multifarious coalition.Donald J. Trump spoke on election night at the White House.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Democratic Party briefly appeared headed for a public reckoning in November, as the party absorbed its setbacks in the House and its failure to unseat several Republican senators whom Democrats had seen as ripe for defeat.A group of centrist House members blamed left-wing rhetoric about democratic socialism and defunding the police for their losses in a number of conservative-leaning suburbs and rural districts. Days after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said the party should renounce the word “socialism,” drawing pushback from progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.That airing of differences did not last long: Democrats quickly closed ranks in response to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, and party unity hardened after the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But there are still significant internal disagreements about campaign strategy.It has been eight years since either political party conducted a wide-ranging self-assessment that recommended thorough changes in structure and strategy. After the 2012 election, when Republicans lost the presidential race and gave up seats in both chambers of Congress, the Republican National Committee empaneled a task force that called for major changes to the party organization.The so-called 2012 autopsy also recommended that the G.O.P. embrace the cause of immigration reform, warning that the party faced a bleak demographic future if it did not improve its position with communities of color. That recommendation was effectively discarded after House Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate, and then fully obliterated by Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy.Henry Barbour, a member of the R.N.C. who co-authored the committee’s post-2012 analysis, said it would be wise for both parties to consider their political positioning after the 2020 election. He said Democrats had succeeded in the election by running against Mr. Trump but that the party’s leftward shift had alienated otherwise winnable voters, including some Black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities that shifted incrementally toward Mr. Trump.“They’re running off a lot of middle-class Americans who work hard for a living out in the heartland, or in big cities or suburbs,” Mr. Barbour said. “Part of that is because Democrats have run too far to the left.”Mr. Barbour said Republicans, too, should take a cleareyed look at their 2020 performance. Mr. Trump, he said, had not done enough to expand his appeal beyond a large and loyal minority of voters.“The Republican Party has got to do better than that,” he said. “We’re not just a party of one president.”Henry Barbour, a member of the Republican National Committee, at the party’s 2020 convention in Charlotte, N.C.Credit…Carlos Barria/ReutersIn addition to the four-way review on the Democratic side, there are several narrower projects underway focused on addressing deficiencies in polling.Democratic and Republican officials alike found serious shortcomings in their survey research, especially polling in House races that failed to anticipate how close Republicans would come to retaking the majority. Both parties emerged from the campaign feeling that they had significantly misjudged the landscape of competitive House races, with Democrats losing seats unexpectedly and Republicans perhaps having missed a chance to capture the chamber as a result.The chief Republican and Democratic super PACs focused on House races — the Congressional Leadership Fund and House Majority PAC — are both in the process of studying their 2020 polling and debating changes for the 2022 campaign, people familiar with their efforts said.The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican group, is said to be undertaking a somewhat more extensive review of its spending and messaging, though it is not expected to issue any kind of larger diagnosis for the party. “We would be foolish not to take a serious look at what worked, what didn’t work and how you can evolve and advance,” said Dan Conston, the group’s president.Several of the largest Democratic polling companies are also conferring regularly with each other in an effort to address gaps in the 2020 research. Two people involved in the conversations said there was general agreement that the industry had to update its practices before 2022 to assure Democratic leaders that they would not be caught by surprise again.Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster involved in reviewing research from the last cycle, said that the party was only now digging more deeply into the results of the 2020 election because the last few months had been dominated by other crises.Several Democratic and Republican strategists cautioned that both parties faced a challenge in formulating a plan for 2022: It had been more than a decade, she said, since a midterm campaign had not been dominated by a larger-than-life presidential personality. Based on the experience of the 2020 campaign, it is not clear that Mr. Biden is destined to become such a polarizing figure.“It’s hard to know what an election’s like without an Obama or a Trump,” Ms. Greenberg said, “just normal, regular, ordinary people running.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State Blue

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      Credit…June ParkSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionStacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo: How to Turn Your Red State BlueIt may take 10 years. Do it anyway.Credit…June ParkSupported byContinue reading the main storyStacey Abrams and Ms. Abrams was the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018. Ms. Groh-Wargo was her campaign manager. They opened Fair Fight Action in late 2018.Feb. 11, 2021We met and became political partners a decade ago, uniting in a bid to stave off Democratic obsolescence and rebuild a party that would increase the clout of regular, struggling Georgians. Our mission was clear: organize people, help realize gains in their lives, win local races to build statewide competitiveness and hold power accountable.But the challenge was how to do that in a state where many allies had retreated into glum predictions of defeat, where our opponents reveled in shellacking Democrats at the polls and in the Statehouse.That’s not all we had to contend with. There was also a 2010 census undercount of people of color, a looming Republican gerrymander of legislative maps and a new Democratic president midway into his first term confronting a holdover crisis from the previous Republican administration. Though little in modern American history compares with the malice and ineptitude of the botched pandemic response or the attempted insurrection at the Capitol, the dynamic of a potentially inaccurate census and imminent partisan redistricting is the same story facing Democrats in 2021 as it was in 2011. State leaders and activists we know across the country who face total or partial Republican control are wondering which path they should take in their own states now — and deep into the next decade.Georgians deserved better, so we devised and began executing a 10-year plan to transform Georgia into a battleground state. As the world knows, President Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in November, and the January runoff elections for two Senate seats secured full congressional control for the Democratic Party. Yet the result wasn’t a miracle or truly a surprise, at least not to us. Years of planning, testing, innovating, sustained investment and organizing yielded the record-breaking results we knew they could and should. The lessons we learned can help other states looking to chart a more competitive future for Democrats and progressives, particularly those in the Sun Belt, where demographic change will precede electoral opportunity.We realize that many people are thinking about Stacey’s political future, but right now we intend to talk about the unglamorous, tedious, sometimes technical, often contentious work that creates a battleground state. When fully embraced, this work delivers wins — whether or not Donald Trump is on the ballot — as the growth Georgia Democrats have seen in cycle after cycle shows. Even in tough election years, we have witnessed the power of civic engagement on policy issues and increases in Democratic performance. This combination of improvements has also resulted in steady gains in local races and state legislative races, along with the continued narrowing of the statewide loss margin in election after election that finally flipped the state in 2020 and 2021.The task is hard, the progress can feel slow, and winning sometimes means losing better. In 2012, for example, we prevented the Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the Georgia House of Representatives, which would have allowed them to pass virtually any bill they wanted. We won four seats they had drawn for themselves, and in 2014 we maintained those gains — just holding our ground was a victory.The steps toward victory are straightforward: understand your weaknesses, organize with your allies, shore up your political infrastructure and focus on the long game. Georgia’s transformation is worth celebrating, and how it came to be is a long and complicated story, which required more than simply energizing a new coterie of voters. What Georgia Democrats and progressives accomplished here — and what is happening in Arizona and North Carolina — can be exported to the rest of the Sun Belt and the Midwest, but only if we understand how we got here.Understand why you’re losing.To know how to win, we first had to understand why a century of Democratic Party dominance in Georgia had been erased. For most of the 20th century, Georgia Democrats had existed in a strained alliance of rural conservatives, urban liberals and suburbanites, all unconvinced that voting Republican would serve their ends. After serving as the incubator of the Gingrich revolution in the early 1990s, Georgia turned sharply to the right. When Democrats lost U.S. Senate seats in 2002 and 2004, as well as the governorship in 2002, it showed that former conservative Democrats had fully turned Republican. The Democratic Party lost its grip on power. By 2010, Democrats were losing every statewide race, and in 2012 the State Senate fell to a Republican supermajority. Clearly, Democrats had to change tactics. More

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      New York Schools Are Segregated. Will the Next Mayor Change That?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York Schools Are Segregated. Will the Next Mayor Change That?By deferring decisions on desegregating schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio has pushed those choices onto his successor — and into the race to replace him.The admissions process for elite schools like Stuyvesant High School has become one of the most fraught political issues in New York City.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York TimesJan. 29, 2021Updated 8:12 a.m. ETDuring a recent forum on education, a moderator asked the crowded field of Democrats running to be New York City’s next mayor a question they may not have wanted to answer: How would they approach the fraught issue of admissions into the city’s selective schools, where Black and Latino students are starkly underrepresented? A few of the candidates’ eyes widened when they heard the prompt, and some avoided furnishing a direct answer, resorting instead to vague language.“There are a lot of things we need to do in this direction,” said Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate. Raymond J. McGuire, a Wall Street executive, noted that the issue had “historic significance.” Those halting responses illustrate just how incendiary school integration still is in this proudly liberal city. But with the Democratic primary just five months away, the candidates have little choice but to confront school segregation, which has divided New Yorkers for a half-century. An influential activist movement led by city students is accelerating pressure on the candidates to make clear how integration would fit into their plans to reshape New York’s public school system, the nation’s largest. And a national reckoning over racism has forced the candidates to square the city’s self-image as a progressive bastion with its unequal school system. During the last few weeks alone, the candidates have been asked about their positions on radio and television interviews, in multiple forums, and in a series of New York Times interviews. Together, their responses revealed sharp differences in how they are approaching some of the most contentious integration policies.New York City is home to one of the most segregated school systems in America, in part because of the city’s labyrinth admissions process for selective schools. Housing segregation and school zone lines have produced a divided school system that has been compounded by competitive admissions that separate students by race and class as early as kindergarten.Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced a sweeping set of changes to how hundreds of racially segregated selective schools admit their students — but left most of the details up to the next administration.Some of the mayoral hopefuls are in favor of addressing the extreme underrepresentation of Black and Latino students in selective schools by overhauling gifted and talented programs and changing admissions for competitive middle schools and elite high schools. Others are offering less sweeping approaches. And several candidates declined to say anything definitive about those proposals, or said they would mostly maintain the existing system.Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, with his son Max. Mr. Stringer had previously avoided integration debates, but has recently moved to the left along with his party.Credit…Kholood Eid for The New York TimesThe most progressive candidates, including Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, are hoping to differentiate themselves from the pack by declaring their intentions to push potentially disruptive change that could spur integration.There are subtle differences even within that lane: Maya Wiley, a former de Blasio administration official who has been a leading figure in the pro-integration movement, sometimes gave conspicuously broad answers to direct questions about the policies she would implement as mayor. Mr. Stringer, who had assiduously avoided integration debates even in his own neighborhood, has recently moved to the left along with his party. Shaun Donovan, the former secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, has released the most detailed education policy plan so far, saying he would eliminate most academic prerequisites for middle school admissions and add weighted lotteries to further integrate those schools.More centrist hopefuls like Mr. McGuire, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, all promised to expand selective programs and schools, rather than fundamentally change them. That position is shared by Mr. Yang, the former head of a test preparation company, who declined an interview. Some education experts believe that desegregation is one of the few remaining levers available for improving academic outcomes for the city’s vulnerable students, many of whom have had little choice but to enroll in low-performing schools.“The plainest way to think of integration is that it is a proven and effective school improvement strategy,” said Matt Gonzales, the director of the Integration and Innovation Initiative at New York University’s Metro Center. Decades of research supports that view — not because there is alchemy found in diverse classrooms, but because integration redistributes resources, funding and power across schools. Mr. Gonzales said the candidates’ positions on this issue are not merely a signal of their progressive bona fides, but an essential way of understanding their approach to education. Mr. de Blasio’s education agenda has largely not included desegregation measures, and he has left major decisions related to integration to the next mayor. Dianne Morales, who is running to be the first Afro-Latina mayor, has among the strongest pro-integration positions of any of the candidates.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesHe has largely ignored a recommendation, made by a school integration group he convened, that the city should replace gifted and talented programs with magnet schools and enrichment programs. The next administration will likely have to respond. Mr. de Blasio said this month that he would soon scrap the current gifted exam given to 4-year-olds against the advice of many experts, though the city’s educational panel may force him to end the test immediately. But most of the candidates had already committed to changing that test, and will now have to determine whether to alter the program itself. And last month, Mr. de Blasio paused the use of academic prerequisites for middle school admissions for at least a year because of the pandemic. That will leave it up to the next mayor to decide whether to make that policy permanent — or end it. Ms. Wiley, who helped craft that proposal as a leader of the mayor’s integration group, said she would end middle school screening, as did Ms. Morales. Some candidates tried to find a middle ground: Mr. Stringer and Mr. McGuire said they would consider this year a pilot program, and make a permanent decision next year. Ms. Garcia said she would look at changes on a district-by-district basis, and Mr. Yang expressed skepticism about eliminating middle school screening during a recent forum.Gifted education is a third-rail issue because the programs have long been seen as a way to keep white families in public schools, and have been embraced by some middle-class families of color as alternatives to low-performing neighborhood schools. But some experts have argued that gifted schools have created a two-tiered system that caters to families with the resources to navigate it. Roughly 75 percent of students in gifted classes are white or Asian-American. Mr. Stringer said that his own children, who are in gifted programs, had benefited from a flawed system because of their parents’ privilege. “I recognize as a parent, I’m going to do everything I can to do the best for my kid,” he said. “But as mayor, I have to do what’s best for every child.” Mr. Yang offered a starkly different message in a recent forum, arguing that some parents would flee the city without gifted classes. “Families are looking up and saying, ‘Is New York where my kids are going to flourish?’” Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia said they would create more gifted classes in low-income neighborhoods, the favored policy position of many supporters of gifted programs. Activists have said that expanding gifted would only contribute to an inherently unfair system. Mr. McGuire said he would not “dismantle the programs, but I’d take a close look to make sure it’s fair and achieving its purpose.” Some candidates seemed eager to please all sides on the contentious if narrow issue of the entry exam for eight elite high schools, which is partially controlled by the State Legislature. In 2018, Mr. de Blasio started a campaign to eliminate the test. His effort failed after many low-income Asian-American families, whose children are overrepresented in the schools, mounted a massive effort to oppose the city’s plan. “I support efforts to desegregate the schools,” Raymond McGuire said in an interview. “This is basic equity, and it needs to happen.”Credit…Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesMr. Adams’ record on the issue demonstrates why so many politicians have tried to avoid staking out a position on the test. The borough president had long opposed the exam, and compared the specialized schools to “a Jim Crow school system.” But just a few weeks after he appeared at a news conference to trumpet the mayor’s plan, Mr. Adams reversed course following an outcry from some parents, particularly Asian Americans. Ms. Wiley has been a consistent critic of the exam, which she called discriminatory, but did not say exactly how she would approach the issue as mayor. Ms. Morales, Mr. Stringer and Brooklyn City Councilman Carlos Menchaca said that they would eliminate the exam.Ms. Morales graduated from Stuyvesant High School in the 1980s, and has watched with despair as the number of Black and Latino students at the school has dwindled. She said that going through the admissions process with her own children felt like an “obstacle course of barriers, targeted toward the people who are best positioned to overcome them.”Ms. Garcia, Mr. McGuire, Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang have said they would keep the exam in place, but promised to build additional specialized schools. That strategy was already tried by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but has not led to greater diversity. The candidates have mostly not provided specifics for how their approach would differ.That came as no surprise to Christina Greer, a professor of political science at Fordham University, who expects the candidates to remain vague to avoid offending voters. “A lot of liberals like integration in theory, as long as it doesn’t touch their children at all,” she said. “For a lot of politicians, integration is a no-win.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      On King Holiday, New York’s Mayoral Hopefuls Vie for Attention

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn King Holiday, New York’s Mayoral Hopefuls Vie for AttentionWith the Rev. Al Sharpton playing host in Harlem, the crowded field of Democratic candidates tried to sell themselves and inspire a battered city.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, emphasized his long-held ties to New York City, as a former police officer and as an elected official.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesJan. 18, 2021, 7:22 p.m. ETIt was something of a familiar scene: One by one, the candidates running for mayor of New York City took a turn at the lectern at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s headquarters in Harlem to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday.Eric Adams talked about being a Black police officer and invoked another officer’s memory: the one who saved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life after a stabbing in 1958.Raymond J. McGuire talked about how his goal was to get the Black community more than just “crumbs” when it comes to economic empowerment.And Andrew Yang recalled how he campaigned in Georgia in the U.S. Senate races with Martin Luther King III, who is now Mr. Yang’s campaign co-chairman.For three decades, lawmakers and would-be public servants have turned out at Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network in Harlem on the third Monday in January to spend a few minutes speaking about Dr. King’s legacy and to court the Black vote, trying to draw church-like shouts of approval from one of the toughest assemblages north of 110th Street.But this year’s ceremony felt different. The country was days removed from a riot on Capitol Hill aimed at overturning the results of an election in which Black voters played a pivotal role in delivering a victory for the Democratic candidate.New York City — once the center of the coronavirus pandemic and still reeling unevenly from its effects — is five months away from holding its most consequential mayoral primary election in a generation.The gathering at the National Action Network in Harlem has become a must-attend event for many political hopefuls.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesWith much of the mayoral campaign being conducted virtually, the Sharpton event was the first public gathering of many of the candidates, and many acknowledged the precarious moment, pledging to enact sweeping policies such as police reform, universal basic income and equity bonds for every child in New York City that would uplift the lives of the city’s most vulnerable.“We are ending in 48 hours the most bigoted and racist presidential term in our lifetime,” Mr. Sharpton told the audience.The candidates, he said later, have a tough road ahead with the myriad problems facing the country and the difficulties awaiting whoever is elected to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio.“People feel vulnerable,” Mr. Sharpton said. “So we have to have a mayor that makes you feel comfortable that they understand that your basic existence is at stake.”In spite of the high stakes, the race for mayor is still a messy and amorphous affair. There are established politicians such as Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller. They have both collected massive war chests and a string of important endorsements.There are wild card candidates like Mr. Yang, the former presidential candidate who attracted a storm of attention, both good and bad, when he entered the race last week; Maya Wiley, the former MSNBC commentator who bolstered her campaign by meeting fund-raising goals; and Mr. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive and favored candidate of the business community who raised $5 million in just three months.Andrew Yang has snared Martin Luther King III to become his campaign manager.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMr. Yang, the first mayoral candidate to speak, said that universal basic income, the proposal he is most associated with, was based on the beliefs and teachings of Dr. King.“It was what he was fighting for, what he was assassinated for, a universal basic income,” Mr. Yang said to polite applause.Mr. Yang added that Dr. King was a revolutionary thinker whose memory “has been sanitized.”Maya Wiley, a former MSNBC analyst who was counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, became the third mayoral candidate to qualify for public matching funds.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMs. Wiley said the country “stands at a crossroads” and was “staring down the face of white supremacy.” Falling back on her initial introduction as a police reformer she said that “we the people will tell you the police department what the job is and what the rules of the road are.”Mr. Adams told the crowd that he had been fighting for the Black community in New York City for decades, even when he was a police officer seeking to reform the department from within. He also recalled how a Harlem police officer, Al Howard, once came to Dr. King’s aid after he was stabbed in 1958.“I am not new to this, I am true to this,” he said, drawing some of the loudest applause of the day.Mr. Sharpton spoke highly of Mr. McGuire, defending his background in business and saying that he had secretly financed the efforts of activists to fight for civil rights and against police brutality.“A lot of us resent the stigmatizing of Black success,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Don’t beat a guy up because he’s successful in a city where we tell every white kid to be successful. He shouldn’t be subjected to a double standard.”Mr. McGuire leaned into his support from the business community and Wall Street background, saying that he was here to fix the city’s crisis in a way that benefited those who have not always shared in its economic success.“We’ve been outside for so long that they give us crumbs and want us to feel full,” Mr. McGuire said. “I’m not interested in crumbs. I’m not interested in cake. I’m interested in the bakery.”The Rev. Al Sharpton disclosed that Raymond McGuire had given Mr. Sharpton’s group some financial assistance when it was struggling.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesThere were no clear winners among the candidates. Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive and perhaps the most progressive candidate in the race, said the current tensions the city and nation are seeing are part of the ongoing struggle to realize Dr. King’s vision of a “radical redistribution of political and economic power.”Zach Iscol, a former Marine, spoke of how his combat experience had shaped him; Shaun Donovan, a former federal housing secretary under President Obama, suggested providing $1,000 “equity bonds” to every child in New York City, a proposal last heard from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey during the presidential campaign.Loree Sutton, the former veteran affairs commissioner, slightly flubbed the melody and some lyrics when she led the crowd in a rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” but the crowd persevered, carrying her to the end of the song.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to the country’s legacy of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom.Mr. Benjamin is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”Jan. 17, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ETMartin Luther King Jr. at home in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1956.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThere’s an image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that’s seared into my mind. Eyes inviting and innocent, face relaxed, the casually dressed Dr. King reminds me of a cousin at a card party — he looks so young. When Dr. King elucidated his dream at the March on Washington in 1963, he was 34 — younger than most Americans now, given the national median age of 38.Despite his youth, or perhaps because of it, Dr. King understood the long view of history. He could not have foreseen a crowd brandishing guns and ransacking the Capitol, abetted by a failed president and right-wing digital media networks peddling debunked conspiracy theories. But he might have foreseen the Senate election victories of two youthful Southerners, Jon Ossoff, 33, and Raphael Warnock, 51, the latter a charismatic preacher and a successor to his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church.Dr. King was a mobilizer of voters as much as he was an orator. To put voting rights at the forefront of the country’s consciousness, Dr. King helped launch a voter-registration drive in Selma, Ala., in early 1965. In many marches, over many weeks, Dr. King accompanied hundreds of Selma’s Black residents to the county courthouse. During one voter registration trip, he and 250 demonstrators were hauled to jail by the segregationist sheriff. That very day, county officers arrested some 500 schoolchildren who were protesting discrimination.When a 26-year-old Black civil rights activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was fatally shot during a march in nearby Marion, Ala., Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a voting-rights march from Selma to the state Capitol in Montgomery. The hundreds of demonstrators, including Hosea Williams, 39, and John Lewis, 25, chairman of the S.N.C.C., were stopped as they left Selma, at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama state troopers and local vigilantes attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. Alongside others badly injured, Mr. Lewis (a future U.S. congressman) suffered a fractured skull during “Bloody Sunday.”The march resumed days later with federal protection. It stood on the shoulders of longstanding action: As far back as the 1930s, Ella Baker, in her 20s and 30s, worked as a community organizer in New York. By the mid-1940s, she was traveling across the South, recruiting new members to anti-racist groups and registering voters.Personally and through their work, Ms. Baker, Mr. Williams, Mr. Lewis and Dr. King faced down legally sanctioned oppression. They confronted horrors that we do not feel as regularly in our bones. They lived through them. How is it that they remained patriots?In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to these examples of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom to carry us through, to show how our civil rights ancestors got things done. This country can survey their organizing tactics to see step-by-step how Dr. King and his allies accomplished so much. Commemoration involves studying their careers as a strategy and amending their efforts to provide a road map to achieving political power.At this tender juncture in our country’s trajectory, countless young grass-roots leaders and local organizations are reshaping human equality and power. Setting a national example, the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter and Georgia STAND-UP were part of an effort that registered roughly 520,000 overlooked, new voters after 2016. The New Georgia Project alone knocked on at least two million doors, made over six million phone calls and sent four million texts to get out the vote during the general election and the runoff, according to the organization.To Americans who voted for the first time this cycle, or to anyone else born after 2002, Bloody Sunday can seem like ancient history — as distant and abstract as the Teapot Dome scandal. I’ve spoken to young people who don’t know what a sit-in or redlining is. But to others who cast a ballot for Mr. Warnock or Mr. Ossoff, a direct protégé of John Lewis, watching Confederates storm a federal building after a failed right-wing attempt to invalidate votes in heavily Black Democratic strongholds, Bloody Sunday does not look like distant history at all.Georgia’s electoral upsets and the resistance to Trumpism belong to a larger narrative and pantheon of liberation campaigns. These movements do not peddle in transactional politics; they forge transformative politics. They don’t dwell in the greasy realm of back-scratching and short-term calculation. They work deeply in vision, courage and action, persevering and believing in themselves when no one else does.“You see, I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement,” Ella Baker once reflected to an interviewer. “This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be.”As we commemorate Dr. King, we need to toss the “great man” concept of leadership, our knee-jerk longing to worship epic individuals and not citizen action. Contrary to the mythology of most King celebrations, Dr. King’s true contribution wasn’t as a single messiah of civil rights, but as a formidable organizer of people and causes. To peddle the great Moses version of Dr. King’s legacy is to betray the greatness of his extraordinary deeds, whose lessons and necessity are more urgent than ever.Rich Benjamin (@IAmRichBenjamin) is writing a book that will be a family memoir and portrait of America. He is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More