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      Sarah Palin Knows How to Get Attention. Can She Actually Win?

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      Endorsed by Donald Trump for Alaska’s lone House seat, the former vice-presidential candidate hopes she can mount a political comeback. But she’s not the phenomenon she once was.The last time Sarah Palin and Donald Trump shared a stage together, the former Alaska governor gave a meandering endorsement speech that displayed her inventiveness with the English language — and her instinctive connection to the Republican base.She spoke of “right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions and our Constitution” and railed against “squirmishes” abroad. It was 20 minutes of vintage Palinisms: “He’s going rogue left and right” — “No more pussy footin’ around!” — “Doggone right we’re angry!” — “us Joe six-packs.” BuzzFeed published the transcript in full, calling it “bizarre.”Beneath the malapropisms and the circumlocutions, though, Palin turned out to have a shrewder feel for Republican voters than those in the press who scorned her, and who underestimated him.Palin’s endorsement of Trump in January 2016 gave him credibility on the populist right at a crucial moment, though it didn’t put him over the top in Iowa, where Senator Ted Cruz of Texas won the caucuses that year. The move even briefly fueled speculation that the two might form a ticket — him the brash, unpredictable New York billionaire; her the snowmobile-drivin’, moose-huntin’ Mama Grizzly from Wasilla. Tabloid dynamite!Trump has now returned the favor, offering Palin his “Complete and Total Endorsement” in her race to succeed Representative Don Young, Alaska’s lone House member, who died on March 18.But six years after they shared that stage in Iowa, both Trump and Palin are somewhat diminished figures. He, of course, is a twice-impeached former president. And though he remains the Republican Party’s most powerful person, his endorsements don’t carry the punch they once did.Palin, meanwhile, has been left to lament, during her libel trial against The New York Times, how she lost her TV gigs and her national political platform. In October, the last time anyone tried to gauge her popularity in Alaska, Palin’s approval rating was just 31 percent, according to the Alaska pollster Ivan Moore.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.So the question must be asked: Can Donald Trump help Sarah Palin win?“I think she’s the favorite right now,” said Kristopher Knauss, a political consultant in Alaska. But that does not mean Palin is a lock.What’s going for herPalin enters the race with some significant advantages.She’ll have near-universal name recognition. She should be able to raise significant sums of money from small donors — a must, given how soon the June 11 primary will be held. She was a popular governor, though by the end of her tenure, her approval rating had slunk from the low 90s to the mid-50s. And the national interest in the race will lead to free media coverage that her opponents can’t match.Palin and Trump share much in common. She ran for governor in 2006 as an outsider taking on a corrupt political establishment. In 2008, as the vice-presidential running mate for Senator John McCain of Arizona, she pioneered the raucous style of political rallies that Trump would turn into the defining feature of his 2016 run. Many of his campaign themes were first hers: battling the media, railing at cultural elites, trashing Washington insiders.Like Trump, Palin parlayed her celebrity into a reality TV show — “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” which was produced by Mark Burnett, the mastermind of “The Apprentice.” The show got decent ratings, but was canceled after just one season.The two saw each other as kindred spirits, their allies say. In 2011, when Palin was flirting with a presidential run, she visited New York and sat down with Trump and his wife for pizza at Famous Famiglia. (They shared “a pepperoni pizza, a sausage pizza and a meatball pizza,” according to an account at the time by our colleague Trip Gabriel.)Today, Palin is being represented by Michael Glassner, who was the chief operating officer of Trump’s 2020 campaign. The two go way back: Glassner worked with Palin on the McCain campaign, then was the chief of staff of Palin’s political action committee before Trump hired him as his national political director.But that was all long ago, and Palin is no longer a novelty — she’s a 58-year-old former governor who hasn’t held office in more than a decade, and whose star has faded considerably.Trump has backed Palin in her race to succeed Representative Don Young, Alaska’s lone House member, who died on March 18.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWhat’s going against herPalin’s strong name recognition is unlikely to be decisive, said Mike Murphy, a former McCain adviser. Noting her high negative ratings, he said “Palin fatigue” could doom her chances among voters who revered Young and take his replacement seriously.“Crazy times deserve crazy politicians, so it’s not impossible that she wins,” Murphy said. “Though I would bet against it.”Palin will be competing in a huge field — 51 candidates, including Santa Claus.That’s partly by design. The voting system Alaska adopted in 2020 was meant to encourage a wide range of candidates to compete. Rather than begin with separate primary elections held by the major political parties, the race will start with one primary that is open to everyone who qualifies. The top four candidates then advance to a general election in which voters rank their favorites.The system was intended to discourage negative campaigning. Because voters’ second choices are factored into the results, candidates must be careful not to alienate voters who support their rivals. In the New York mayor’s race, this led some candidates to form alliances and campaign together. Does Palin have the discipline to play nice?“Ultimately, someone’s got to get to 50 percent,” said Moore, the pollster. “That’s tough to do when 56 percent don’t like you.”Moore said that in the fall, when he modeled Palin’s inclusion in a hypothetical four-way Senate general election between Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Republican incumbent; Kelly Tshibaka, the hard-right Republican challenger; and Elvi Gray-Jackson, a Democratic state lawmaker, Palin was eliminated in the first round.Alaska’s fierce independent streak could also hurt Palin’s chances. More than 60 percent of its voters are not registered members of either major political party, and Trump is not especially popular. According to Moore, 43 percent of Alaskans have a “very negative” opinion of the former president.“Alaskans don’t like people from ‘outside’ telling them how to vote,” said Dermot Cole, an author and political blogger in Alaska. For that reason, he said, Trump’s endorsement is unlikely to carry much weight.Why Palin would want to return to politics is a bit of a mystery. She never enjoyed being governor, according to emails published by a disgruntled former aide, and she always seemed to resent the bruising coverage she received from the national news media. Alaska political observers could not recall her participating in any local causes over the 13 years since she announced that she would not be finishing her term, either.That abrupt departure, in favor of cultivating her national celebrity status, could undermine whatever advantages her famous name and Trump’s endorsement have given her, several of the observers said.“When she quit, she lost a great deal of whatever support she had left,” Cole said.But Palin has always made her own choices. Announcing her resignation in July 2009, she explained that she had no intention to do the expected.“We’re fishermen,” she said. “We know that only dead fish go with the flow.”What to read tonightPresident Biden called Russian attacks on civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, a “war crime.” And an analysis of satellite images by The Times refuted claims by Russia that the killings in Bucha had occurred after its soldiers had left the town. Read the latest on the war in Ukraine.Democrats’ calls for the Justice Department to take more aggressive action in the Jan. 6 investigation are putting pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has maintained a deliberative approach.A major report from a United Nations panel found that while nations have made some progress in moving away from fossil fuels, they need to move much faster to retain any hope of preventing a perilous future for the planet.As Republican activists aggressively pursue conservative social policies in state legislatures across the country, liberal states are taking defensive actions, our colleagues Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan report. This flurry of action is intensifying the differences between life in liberal- and conservative-led parts of the country — and it’s a sign of the consequences when state governments are controlled increasingly by single parties.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How a Murdoch Hopes to Save American Democracy

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      Kathryn Murdoch is trying to change how elections are run. It’s a work in progress.Over the last decade, as America’s two dominant political parties pulled farther apart, a group of centrist-minded donors was growing increasingly frustrated.A gridlocked Congress made bipartisan policy wins close to impossible. Campaign-finance reform? The Supreme Court effectively put a stake in it in 2010. Climate legislation? Time and again, it hit a phalanx of Republican opposition.“Basically, everything that we were looking at would run up against a nonfunctioning government,” said Kathryn Murdoch, who has become a leader of a network of donors seeking to change the way Americans choose their elected officials.Fix the election system, the thinking goes, and the government will begin to run more smoothly. But when Murdoch’s family foundation, Quadrivium, examined the democracy reform movement, they found it too anemic and fractured to be effective.“Everything was very subscale, it seemed very clear to me — smart people, good ideas, a lot of data backing all of it up, but subscale for the problem, and not a lot of collaboration or, frankly, enough funds,” Murdoch said in an interview.The daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul, Kathryn Murdoch has often found herself at odds with the conservative politics of her family’s TV, print and radio empire. Murdoch, a registered independent who is American, spent years funding efforts to slow climate change, only to encounter political obstacles at nearly every turn. Her new focus is building a movement to reshape American democracy itself, and she has set a goal of mobilizing $100 million to do so over the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.This focus has meant pitching her fellow philanthropists on why they should donate to democracy groups rather than to their own causes.“There’s not necessarily a special-interest group that is helping to ensure the integrity of the system,” said Marc Merrill, a software entrepreneur and donor who works with Murdoch on political overhaul projects. “Well, that’s an opportunity.”Murdoch’s problem with primariesMurdoch quickly determined that the chief villain was the partisan primary.It was aiding extremist candidates like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia. It was forcing moderate Republican senators like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to cater to the right wing rather than to the center of the electorate. And it was souring voters on politics. Murdoch has the statistics at her fingertips: In 2020, just 10 percent of Americans effectively elected 83 percent of the House. Only 17 percent of general elections for House seats were competitive.“What I hear all the time is that there are people who want to work on legislation, but they can’t before their primary, because they are terrified — and particularly if there’s an extreme Trumpy candidate or something like that,” Murdoch said. “They’re terrified of being seen as bipartisan. And that’s absolutely the wrong thing for the American people.”Murdoch says she now sees a “clear path” to fixing what ails American democracy, even if it takes years. A big part of the solution, in her view, is getting rid of partisan primaries altogether.On that much, advocates agree — though they may differ on the remedy required.In addition to Murdoch, several other donors have bankrolled the idea of eliminating partisan primaries. John and Laura Arnold, a billionaire couple from Texas, are big financial backers. So is Mike Novogratz, a Wall Street financier. Katherine Gehl, the former chief executive of a food company and co-author of “The Politics Industry,” a political reform manifesto, is an influential proponent.“How can we take that weapon away from people using it for those self-interested, narrow purposes?” Laura Arnold asked in a podcast discussion on partisan primaries with Gehl, who is pushing her own alternative called “final-five voting.”The biggest factor energizing those in the movement to reform American democracy is former President Donald Trump, whose attacks on the integrity of the election system alarmed many donors.Travis Dove for The New York TimesThe Trump factorThe biggest factor energizing advocates is Donald Trump, whose attacks on the integrity of the American election system and endorsements of fringe candidates have alarmed many donors.“After Trump got elected, things started to shift toward structural issues of democracy,” said Lee Drutman, who studies election reform as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “And the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was a galvanizing moment.”A separate group, launched by Novogratz, has been enlisting philanthropists to each pledge 1 percent of their net worth toward “protecting democracy” and said it had already raised $87 million toward a goal of $250 million in pledges by 2024.Most proposed changes include some variation on ranked-choice voting, a system that allows voters to select their preferred candidates in order. New York City used the system in its Democratic primary for mayor last year, to great media fanfare — a breakout moment for what previously had been an obscure cause promoted by a small and scattered group of activists.Before then, ranked-choice proponents had notched a few quieter wins. In Maine, voters pushed through a ballot initiative in 2016 to become the first state to allow the system in elections for federal office. Alaska followed in 2020 with a similar ballot initiative, and 51 cities across the country have adopted ranked choice in some form or another.Proponents of ranked-choice voting argue it will make campaigns more civil, save money, lessen the polarization that is poisoning American politics and give voters more choices. And while the data is still out on many of those claims, surveys do show that voters tend to like it.One detractor has been Sherrie Swensen, the clerk of Salt Lake County, Utah, a state that has embraced ranked-choice voting in municipal elections. Swensen, whose position includes overseeing elections, said the system was “very complex to implement,” as it took weeks to figure out how to design new ballots.The democracy lobbyMurdoch is plowing resources and much of her energy into Unite America, a collection of groups that backs organizations, campaigns and candidates that support her reform goals. Unite America is meant to be a “cross-partisan” meeting ground for donors and activists, she said. “It’s a group of people,” Murdoch added with a chuckle, “with a wide variety of reasonable opinions.”Its executive director is Nick Troiano, a 32-year-old activist who ran for office as an independent in Pennsylvania at 24. Troiano has recruited a staff of hard-nosed political operatives from both parties, hoping to develop a cadre of seasoned campaigners who can steer investments and advise ballot initiatives in new states.“One thing that we’ve learned is we have to professionalize running these campaigns, and some of the best political talent that’s out there is sometimes locked up in the parties,” Troiano said.Murdoch and Merrill have also invested in Citizen Data, a nonpartisan outfit that provides voter information and analytical tools to groups that don’t have access to the two parties’ vast data resources.In the short term, Troiano expects what he calls “the primary problem” to get worse before it gets better. He noted that only a few dozen House seats are expected to be competitive this year, according to the Cook Political Report, even though redistricting has shaped up to be more balanced than many expected.“The important thing is to take on the winner-take-all mind-set in American politics,” said Rob Ritchie, the head of FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform group. Ritchie predicts that between five and 10 states will be using some version of ranked-choice voting for presidential primaries by 2024, along with dozens more cities.Unite America’s official goals are somewhat more modest: help at least four new states start nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice in federal elections by 2024, using the Alaska model. Along with Alaska, several other states have already been largely “liberated” from partisan primaries, in Troiano’s estimation: California, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington.Over the long term, Murdoch says, she is starting to feel more optimistic about American politics.“When you’re outside of it, it’s very easy to be completely depressed and cynical and say, ‘It can never get fixed. There’s too much money involved. It’s all going to hell in a handbasket,’” Murdoch said. “But from the inside, if you join in and actually start doing it, you realize that we can get it done.”What to read The war in Ukraine has ushered in a new era of foreign policy, aligning the United States more closely with Europe and re-energizing its leadership role, Michael Crowley and Edward Wong report. Here is our live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden are suggesting different midterm slogans, with some vulnerable House Democrats revolting against the name “build back better,” Jonathan Martin reports.American Bridge, the Democratic super PAC, accused Trump of violating campaign-finance law by spending political funds on a 2024 presidential bid without formally declaring himself a candidate, Shane Goldmacher reports.how they runGlenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia race for governor last year has been attributed to parents who were upset about the state’s coronavirus response. New data has suggested otherwise. Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesVirginia’s ‘silver surge’Did angry school parents really sway the Virginia governor’s race?A new analysis by the Democratic-aligned firm TargetSmart suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong.Drawing on newly available voting records, the firm found that turnout among voters aged 75 or older went up by 59 percent in 2021 compared with the 2017 election for governor.As for those angry parents, when TargetSmart looked at counties where schools closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, it found no comparable surge for Republicans.“In fact,” TargetSmart’s Tom Bonier writes, “the biggest swings towards Republicans occurred in southwestern Virginia, where schools were open for in-person instruction for most of the year.”None of this means Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s focus on “parents’ rights” and critical race theory in schools did not affect his defeat of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate. But it does suggest that we should be skeptical of first impressions.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      After New York Tests a New Way of Voting, Other Cities May Do the Same

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      Elected leaders and voters in New York remain split over the ranked-choice system, but officials in Washington and elsewhere like the results. The most high-profile experiment in ranked-choice voting in U.S. history just took place in New York City. The reviews are mixed.Hundreds of thousands of voters ranked up to five candidates on their ballots in the Democratic primary for mayor, and many were glad to have that option. Others found the system confusing or wished they had been more strategic in making their choices.Some elected officials want to scrap the system because they believe it may disenfranchise Black voters, among others. But for now, it appears, ranked-choice voting is here to stay. Eric Adams, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary, saw his lead over the second-place candidate shrink from 75,000 votes to only 7,197 after ranked-choices were counted, and he attacked two of his rivals for campaigning together in the race’s final days to try to beat him. One of Mr. Adams’s allies, Councilman I. Daneek Miller of Queens, is promoting a bill that would let New Yorkers decide whether they want to keep ranked-choice voting, although there does not appear to be enough support among his colleagues for it to be approved.“You see these large leads dwindle because of voter rankings,” Mr. Miller said. “Is this an exercise in mediocrity? Do we want fourth- and fifth-place votes deciding leadership?”This year’s primary was the first time New York had used ranked-choice voting in a citywide race. The system is used in other countries and in cities like San Francisco, but it had never been attempted in a larger American city. Other places, including Washington D.C., the Seattle area and Lansing, Mich., could move to adopt the system. Christina Henderson, a member of Washington’s city council and a supporter of a bill that would bring ranked-choice there, said the New York election showed the system’s benefits, including the diversity of winning candidates like Mr. Adams, who is likely to become the city’s second Black mayor.“Races are more dynamic and collegial with genuine policy debates supplanting negative campaign tactics,” Ms. Henderson said.The new system changed how some candidates campaigned for mayor, encouraging them to appeal to their rivals’ supporters to earn a spot on their ballots. By striking a late alliance with Andrew Yang, for example, Kathryn Garcia won over many of his voters.But a major snafu by the city’s perennially dysfunctional Board of Elections — accidentally releasing an inaccurate vote count — could undermine confidence in the system. And although Mr. Adams won the primary, his allies have raised concerns that ranked-choice voting could hurt Black voters who might choose only one candidate. Some Black leaders sued last year to try to stop the system from being introduced.Mr. Adams himself has criticized how ranked-choice voting was rolled out, but he does not want to eliminate it. He said it was an obstacle for some voters and called for more education about it. “Your New York Times readers, your Wall Street Journal readers and all of those that had the ability to analyze all this information, it’s fine for them,” Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on WNYC this week. “But that’s not the reality when English is a second language, that’s not the reality for 85- and 90-year-old voters who are trying to navigate the process. Every new barrier you put in place, you’re going to lose voters in the process.”The system’s supporters have defended it vigorously, arguing that voters did understand how to use it. Maya Wiley, who finished third in the Democratic mayoral primary, wrote a piece for The Washington Post in support of the system despite losing. Ranked-choice advocates say the system helped improve the fortunes of female and minority candidates. The City Council appears poised to have its first-ever female majority, and women finished second and third in the mayoral primary. “We won’t let anyone take away the people’s voice and go back to the old system where costly, low-turn out runoff elections actually disenfranchised people,” said Debbie Louis, the lead organizer for Rank the Vote NYC, a group that supports the voting system. Some voters did not like the new approach. Rebecca Yhisreal, 61, who lives in West Harlem, said she voted for Mr. Adams first and ranked three other candidates on her ballot. But she said she preferred the old system, under which New Yorkers voted for one candidate and if no one got more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff. “It was kind of confusing,” she said. “I would rather it go back to how it was.”William Brown, a retiree who lives in Harlem, said the crowded mayoral ballot, which had 13 Democrats, had made it difficult for him to make sense of each candidate’s positions and to determine how to rank those he liked best. He said he had ranked Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, first, and had forgotten how many other candidates he ranked.“It’s unfair,” he said. “You have to take the time to understand it, but there’s too many candidates. It’s detrimental.”Mr. Miller, who is in his final year in the City Council and testified at a State Assembly hearing this week with other critics of ranked-choice voting, said residents in his Southeast Queens district had complained to him about the new system. It encouraged voters to focus on the horse race between candidates rather than on issues, he said.Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes on an initial tally, the process moves to an elimination-round method. The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidates those voters ranked next. The process continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.Some voters expressed regret that they had not been more shrewd by picking between Mr. Adams or Ms. Garcia so that their ballot helped decide the winner. More than 140,000 ballots were “exhausted,” meaning they did not name either finalist and were therefore thrown out. Those ballots represented nearly 15 percent of the 940,000 votes cast, a higher rate than in some other ranked-choice elections. In London Breed’s 2018 mayoral victory in San Francisco, about 8.5 percent of ballots were exhausted. Advocates for ranked-choice voting say the share of exhausted ballots should decrease as New Yorkers become more familiar with the system.Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, said he wanted to see more detailed voter data before deciding whether the system was a success. He said he would be concerned if the data showed wealthy voters ranking five candidates and poorer ones not doing so.“What I don’t want to see is a system that enfranchises some people and not others and we need the research to really tell what happened here,” Mr. de Blasio said.The city’s Board of Elections is planning to release detailed ballot information in the coming weeks that will reveal which neighborhoods took full advantage of ranked-choice voting. The information, known as the cast-vote record, will not be made public until recounts are completed in two unresolved City Council races. Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, does not appear to favor doing away with ranked-choice voting. Asked about his position on Mr. Miller’s bill, Mr. Johnson’s spokeswoman said in a statement that New Yorkers had voted to create the system in 2019.“Nearly three-quarters of voters approved the new system,” the spokeswoman, Jennifer Fermino, said. “The mission now should be to help provide more education on this important change to our elections.”Many voters liked ranked-choice voting. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Andrew Wilkes, 35, a pastor and policy director for Generation Citizen, a nonprofit civic-education group, said he felt the system gave voters more choices and made it easier for candidates of color to enter the race. He ranked Ms. Wiley first among the five candidates he listed for mayor.“I found it pretty intuitive,” Mr. Wilkes said. More

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      Glass Ceiling Persists for Women in Mayor’s Race

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

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      The Winner of the Democratic Primary for Mayor

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Wednesday. Weather: A heat advisory is in effect until tonight. Mostly sunny, with a high in the mid-90s. Scattered storms this evening. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 19 (Eid al-Adha). James Estrin/The New York TimesIt’s been two weeks of partial updates and countless caveats. But finally, we have a result.Eric Adams has won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, according to a call of the contest by The Associated Press on Tuesday. The former police captain edged out his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia, by a single percentage point after elections officials tallied absentee ballots and ran through the ranked-choice elimination rounds.He will be the overwhelming favorite in the November general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, given New York’s political makeup. He would become the second Black mayor in the city’s history.[Read more about the results and Mr. Adams’s base of support.]Here’s what to know:The resultsAfter Primary Day, as in-person, first-choice votes were tallied, Mr. Adams led the crowded field, with a roughly 10-point margin over the second-place candidate. But as ranked-choice selections were tabulated, Ms. Garcia and Maya Wiley moved into a tight three-way heat.But after more than 100,000 absentee ballots were tallied, Ms. Garcia could not fully close the gap: She trailed by about 8,400 votes in an unofficial final-round matchup. Ms. Wiley finished in third place. The two were vying to become the city’s first female mayor.Of the nearly 938,000 ballots counted overall, about 15 percent ranked neither Mr. Adams or Ms. Garcia. If a greater portion of them had ranked either candidate, the outcome of the race might have changed.The reactionNeither Ms. Garcia nor Ms. Wiley has conceded, and their campaign statements noted that the results had not yet been made official. It was not immediately clear whether either would bring legal challenges against the results, given the small margin. (All three leading candidates had filed to maintain the option to do so.)If they do not, the results could be certified next week.The remaining ballotsThe tabulations on Tuesday included most but not all of the absentee ballots.There are potentially several thousand votes still to be counted, which may include affidavit votes, as well as defective absentee ballots that voters can fix within the next week. The Adams campaign told my colleague Dana Rubinstein that there are maybe 3,000 votes left to count, which would make it mathematically impossible for Ms. Garcia to win.From The TimesCuomo Declares a Gun Violence Emergency in New York StateAs Delta Risk Looms, New York City Scales Back Covid MonitoringMan Charged With Hate Crimes After Racist Tirade Is Caught on VideoNew York’s Fiscal Watchdog Sues to End Mayor’s Pandemic Spending PowersHot Vax Summer? Falstaff and Shakespeare in the Park Are Ready.Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingThe city’s three public library systems will return to nearly full service this month, reopening at their prepandemic schedules. [Gothamist]More than 10,000 subway trips were canceled last month because of a shortage of train crew members, the most in a month since the earliest stages of the pandemic. [The City]A second Shake Shack employee has sued the Police Department over an incident last June in which officials made unfounded claims that fast-food workers intentionally poisoned officers [Daily News]And finally: Once again, life is a cabaretElysa Gardner writes:“Thank you all for risking your lives by coming out tonight,” Joe Iconis quipped, welcoming a socially distanced crowd to the June reopening of the cabaret venue Feinstein’s/54 Below in Manhattan.Iconis, a composer, lyricist and performer beloved among young musical theater fans, was joking, but before diving into an alternately goofy and poignant set with the actor and singer George Salazar, he added, earnestly, “It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real human beings, not computer screens.”Moist-eyed reunions between artists and fans have been taking place across the city as Covid-19 restrictions have gradually relaxed. Storied establishments like the jazz clubs Birdland and Blue Note, newer spots such as the Green Room 42 and City Winery at Hudson River Park (which both reopened in April) and the East Village alt-cabaret oases Pangea and Club Cumming are once again offering food, drink and in-the-flesh entertainment. And cabaret veterans — along with other jazz and pop acts, and drag performers — are returning to the work that is their bread and butter.“To see people physiologically responding to music again — toes tapping, heads bopping — that’s almost better than applause,” said the pianist and singer Michael Garin, one of many who used social media to stay connected with fans during the pandemic, and among the first to resume performances for live audiences.But, Garin noted, “It’s not like we’re flipping a switch and bringing everything back to normal.” Particularly in the spring, not everyone was ready to pick up where they left off.Still, it is the love of performing itself, and the perspective gained after a year of lost shows, that is driving many artists’ emotional responses to returning to the stage. Michael Feinstein, the multitasking American songbook champion and namesake for clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as New York, believes “that anyone who is a performer is coming out of this in a very different place, with a deeper sense of connection and joy and gratitude.”“I cannot imagine any artist now taking any moment of what we do for granted,” he added.It’s Wednesday — go see a show.Metropolitan Diary: No. 7 buzz Dear Diary:I was standing on a No. 7 train heading into Manhattan when a wasp started buzzing around my head and then landed in my hair.An older woman standing nearby noticed what was happening and the panicked expression on my face that said, “What do I do now?”Without a word, she calmly rolled up her newspaper and gently hit me on the head.The wasp, probably somewhat dazed, flew away.— Joan McGrathIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Read more Metropolitan Diary here.New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More

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      Eric Adams Wins Democratic Primary for NYC Mayor

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

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      Why New York’s Election Debacle Is Likely to Fuel Conspiracy Theories

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      Republicans have seized on the botched release of results from the mayor’s race — but the overall effect on public trust goes deeper.It has been one week since the New York City Board of Elections botched the release of preliminary ranked-choice tabulations from the city’s mayoral race, counting 135,000 dummy ballots that employees had used to test a computer system and then failed to delete.It was a stunning display of carelessness even from an agency long known for its dysfunction, and the reverberations will continue long after Tuesday evening, when Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary race by The Associated Press. (You can follow the latest news here.) That’s because, while the mistake was discovered within hours and corrected by the next day, it provided purveyors of right-wing disinformation with ammunition as powerful as anything they could have invented.Some supporters of former President Donald J. Trump quickly suggested that the results of the 2020 election might also have been miscounted. (Exhaustive investigations have made it very clear that they weren’t.) Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, called ranked-choice voting “a corrupt scam” — even though problems at the Board of Elections far predate it — and tweeted: “How can anyone trust that a voter’s fourth-place choice was accurately tabulated on the eighth round of ranking? Look at the debacle in New York City right now.” Mr. Trump himself suggested falsely that the true results would never be known.“We had an election where we did much better than we did the first time, and amazingly, we lost,” Mr. Trump said at an event in Texas on Wednesday. “Check out the New York election today, by the way. They just realized it’s a disaster. They’re unable to count the votes. Did you see it? It just came out. They’re missing 135,000 votes. They put 135,000 make-believe votes in. Our elections are a disaster.”The disinformation fueled by New York’s mistake may not end up being compelling to Americans who haven’t already bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. But it is very likely, especially among New Yorkers, to undermine overall trust in public institutions — and that sort of distrust creates fertile ground for disinformation to grow.“The average New York City Democrat probably doesn’t look to Donald Trump or Tom Cotton as a validator, but it does fit into that general narrative that’s been pushed into the ether for months,” said Melissa Ryan, the chief executive of CARD Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations combat disinformation and online extremism. “Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and whenever something like this happens, folks who aren’t necessarily right-wing hard-liners or believers in conspiracies generally — it’s going to erode their trust with another institution.”That’s significant, Ms. Ryan said, given that “people are susceptible to disinformation in part because they don’t trust institutions already, so they’re more inclined to believe the worst possible version.”There is some irony to the possibility that the Board of Elections’ error will undermine trust in election results, because it in fact revealed how quickly an actual miscount becomes apparent.The error should never have happened, but once it did, it “was detected less than hours after it was displayed,” said David J. Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “And yet we are now eight months past the November election, and the losing presidential candidate still can’t present any evidence of any systematic fraud anywhere in the country. They’ve had eight months, and the New York City problem was detected in probably eight minutes.”More to the point, because there is a paper trail, “we will get the right winner, just like we got the right winner in 2020,” Mr. Becker said. “If we can look at the facts of what happened and say, ‘Here’s where the structure failed, here’s where personnel failed, here’s where the process failed,’ and try to reform that, that would be a very, very positive outcome. But even with those mistakes, we’re going to get the correct answer.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      More Results Expected in the Mayor’s Race

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