Voting and Voters
Subterms
More stories
- in Elections
Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc
The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”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
- in Elections
Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up
In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me thatapproximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.Trump Support Rises With AnimusA study found that animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party. More
- in Elections
Eric Adams Wins Democratic Primary for NYC Mayor
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
- in Elections
How G.O.P. Laws in Montana Could Complicate Voting for Native Americans
STARR SCHOOL, Mont. — One week before the 2020 election, Laura Roundine had emergency open-heart surgery. She returned to her home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation with blunt instructions: Don’t go anywhere while you recover, because if you get Covid-19, you’ll probably die.That meant Ms. Roundine, 59, couldn’t vote in person as planned. Neither could her husband, lest he risk bringing the virus home. It wasn’t safe to go to the post office to vote by mail, and there is no home delivery here in Starr School — or on much of the reservation in northwestern Montana.The couple’s saving grace was Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community organizer for the Native American advocacy group Western Native Voice, who ensured that their votes would count by shuttling applications and ballots back and forth between their home and a satellite election office in Browning, one of two on the roughly 2,300-square-mile reservation.But under H.B. 530, a law passed this spring by the Republican-controlled State Legislature, that would not have been allowed. Western Native Voice pays its organizers, and paid ballot collection is now banned.“It’s taking their rights from them, and they still have the right to vote,” Ms. Roundine said of fellow Blackfeet voters who can’t leave their homes. “I wouldn’t have wanted that to be taken from me.”The ballot collection law is part of a nationwide push by Republican state legislators to rewrite election rules, and is similar to an Arizona law that the Supreme Court upheld on Thursday. In Montana — where Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, was elected in November to replace Steve Bullock, a Democrat who had held veto power for eight years — the effects of that and a separate law eliminating same-day voter registration are likely to fall heavily on Native Americans, who make up about 7 percent of the state’s population.Laura Roundine at home in Starr School, Mont., on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. She and her husband were two of the last beneficiaries of Western Native Voice’s get-out-the-vote program last year.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesIt has been less than a century since Native Americans in the United States gained the right to vote by law, and they never attained the ability to do so easily in practice. New restrictions — ballot collection bans, earlier registration deadlines, stricter voter ID laws and more — are likely to make it harder, and the starkest consequences may be seen in places like Montana: sprawling, sparsely populated Western and Great Plains states where Native Americans have a history of playing decisive roles in close elections.In 2018, Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, won seven of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized tribe and received 50.3 percent of the vote statewide, a result without which his party would not currently control the Senate. (One of the eight tribes wasn’t federally recognized at the time but is now.) In 2016, Mr. Bullock carried the same counties and won with 50.2 percent. Both times, Glacier County, which contains the bulk of the Blackfeet reservation, was the most Democratic in the state.In recent years, Republicans in several states have passed laws imposing requirements that Native Americans are disproportionately unlikely to meet or targeting voting methods they are disproportionately likely to use, such as ballot collection, which is common in communities where transportation and other infrastructure are limited. They say ballot collection can enable election fraud or allow advocacy groups to influence votes, though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.On the floor of the Montana House in April, in response to criticism of H.B. 530’s effects on Native Americans who rely on paid ballot collection, the bill’s primary sponsor, State Representative Wendy McKamey, said, “There are going to be habits that are going to have to change because we need to keep our security at the utmost.” She argued that the bill would keep voting as “uninfluenced by monies as possible.”Ms. McKamey did not respond to requests for comment for this article.Geography, poverty and politics all create obstacles for Native Americans. The Blackfeet reservation is roughly the size of Delaware but had only two election offices and four ballot drop-off locations last year, one of which was listed as open for just 14 hours over two days. Many other reservations in Montana have no polling places, meaning residents must go to the county seat to vote, and many don’t have cars or can’t afford to take time off.Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community organizer for Western Native Voice, said she couldn’t begin to estimate how many miles she had driven to help people return their ballots.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesBrowning, Mont., in June. Glacier County has a satellite election office in Browning, the county’s only office on the 2,285-square-mile reservation.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesAdvocacy groups like Western Native Voice have become central to get-out-the-vote efforts, to the point that the Blackfeet government’s website directs voters who need help not to a tribal office but to W.N.V.Ms. LaPlant, who was one of about a dozen Western Native Voice organizers on the Blackfeet reservation last year, said she couldn’t begin to estimate how far they had collectively driven. One organizer alone logged 700 miles.One of the voters the team helped was Heidi Bull Calf, whose 19-year-old son has a congenital heart defect. Knowing the danger he would be in if he got Covid-19, she and her family barely left their home in Browning for a year.Asked whether there was any way she could have returned her ballot on her own without putting her son’s health at risk, Ms. Bull Calf, the director of after-school programs at an elementary school, said no.Members of Western Native Voice at a three-day community organizing training in Bozeman, Mont., in early June. Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesThe ballot collection law says that “for the purposes of enhancing election security, a person may not provide or offer to provide, and a person may not accept, a pecuniary benefit in exchange for distributing, ordering, requesting, collecting or delivering ballots.” Government entities, election administrators, mail carriers and a few others are exempt, but advocacy groups aren’t. Violators will be fined $100 per ballot.In May, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Native American Rights Fund sued the Montana secretary of state, Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, over the new laws. The lawsuit alleges that the ballot collection limits and the elimination of same-day voter registration violate the Montana Constitution and are “part of a broader scheme” to disenfranchise Native voters. It was filed in a state district court that struck down a farther-reaching ballot collection ban as discriminatory last year.A spokesman for Ms. Jacobsen did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Ms. Jacobsen said, “The voters of Montana spoke when they elected a secretary of state that promised improved election integrity with voter ID and voter registration deadlines, and we will work hard to defend those measures.”The state-level legal process may be Native Americans’ only realistic recourse now, because on Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a ballot collection law in Arizona, signaling that federal challenges to voting restrictions based on disparate impact on voters of color were unlikely to succeed.Voting difficulties are acute not just for the Blackfeet but also for Montana’s seven other federally recognized tribes: the Crow and Northern Cheyenne, based on reservations of the same names; the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation; the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre of the Fort Belknap Reservation; the Assiniboine and Sioux of the Fort Peck Reservation; the Chippewa Cree of Rocky Boy’s Reservation; and the Little Shell Chippewa in Great Falls.On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, many residents have no internet. Often, the only way to register to vote is in person at election offices in Hardin and Forsyth, 60 miles or more one way from parts of the reservations..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}This made same-day voter registration a popular option for people who could make the trip only once. But under a new law, H.B. 176, the registration deadline is noon on the day before the election.Heidi Bull Calf, of Browning, said she would not have been able to vote safely without the help of Western Native Voice.Tailyr Irvine for The New York TimesKeaton Sunchild, the political director at Western Native Voice, said that last year, hundreds of Native Americans had registered to vote after that time.Lauri Kindness, a Western Native Voice organizer on the Crow Reservation, where she was born and lives, said: “There are many barriers and hardships in our communities with basic things like transportation. From my community, the majority of our voters were able to gain access to the ballot through same-day voter registration.”State Representative Sharon Greef, the Republican who sponsored H.B. 176, said its purpose was to shorten lines and reduce the burden on county clerks and recorders by enabling them to spend Election Day focusing only on ballots, without also processing registrations. She said that if people voted early, they could still register and cast their ballot in one trip.“I tried to think of any way this could affect all voters, not only the Native Americans, and if I had felt this in any way would have disenfranchised any voter, discouraged any voter from getting to the polls, I couldn’t in good conscience have carried the bill,” Ms. Greef said. “Voting is a right that we all have, but it’s a right that we can’t take lightly, and we have to plan ahead for it.”At a community organizing training in Bozeman in early June, Western Native Voice leaders framed voting rights within the broader context of self-determination and political representation for Native Americans.With the State Legislature adjourned for the year and the lawsuit in the hands of lawyers, organizers are turning their focus to redistricting.Montana will get a second House seat as a result of the 2020 census, and Native Americans want to maximize their influence in electing members of Congress. But arguably more important are the maps that will be drawn for the State Legislature, which could give Native Americans greater power to elect the representatives who make Montana’s voting laws.Redistricting will be handled by a commission consisting of two Republicans, two Democrats and a nonpartisan presiding officer chosen by the Montana Supreme Court: Maylinn Smith, a former tribal judge and tribal law professor who is herself Native American.Ta’jin Perez, deputy director of Western Native Voice, urged the group’s organizers to map out communities with common interests in and around their reservations, down to the street level. W.N.V. would send that data to the Native American Rights Fund, which would use it to inform redistricting suggestions.“You can either define it yourself,” Mr. Perez warned, “or the folks in Helena will do it for you.”The Northern Cheyenne Reservation in June. On the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, many residents have no internet and must register to vote in person. Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times More
- in Elections
Absentee Ballots May Determine if Eric Adams Wins Mayor's Race
The tallying of more than 125,000 absentee ballots will determine whether Eric Adams retains his lead in the Democratic primary.In a bland, sprawling warehouse in Manhattan, election workers carefully inspected piles of absentee ballots on Friday, an exercise that might be described as tedious if it were not so important.The ballots will most likely decide the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a race that is currently led by Eric Adams, who is seeking to become the city’s second Black mayor. His lead over his two closest rivals, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, was small enough that either could theoretically pass him once more than 125,000 absentee ballots are factored in.But Mr. Adams’s campaign suggested that its informal, unofficial tally of the absentee ballots counted so far indicated that he might have slightly widened his lead in first-place votes — placing an even heavier burden on Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley to close the gap through the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.Under that system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference. Because Mr. Adams did not collect more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the process moves to an elimination-round method: The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated a round at a time, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.In the first round, among people who cast their ballots in person during the early-voting period or on Primary Day, Mr. Adams led Ms. Wiley by 9.6 percentage points, and Ms. Garcia by 12.5 points. When a preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted on Wednesday, Ms. Garcia edged slightly ahead of Ms. Wiley, and trailed Mr. Adams by only two points.The city’s Board of Elections began counting absentee ballots on Monday and plans to release a new ranked-choice tally that includes most of them on Tuesday. A board spokeswoman declined on Friday to discuss the results of the counting until then.For either Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley to overtake Mr. Adams, they must outperform him in first-place absentee votes, or hope that enough absentee voters ranked him low on their ballots or left him off entirely.The city Board of Elections is expected to release the results of the absentee voting on Tuesday.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMs. Garcia, who beat Mr. Adams in Manhattan in the in-person vote tally, also showed strength in absentee ballots from the borough, according to a preliminary count of unofficial results obtained by The New York Times. She was the first choice on 9,043 ballots of 23,739 ballots counted as of Thursday night, or about 38 percent. She was the second or third choice on another 7,187 ballots.Mr. Adams was the first choice on 2,999 absentee ballots from Manhattan, or about 13 percent, and the second or third choice on another 5,304. Manhattan was the only borough he did not win in the in-person tally. The absentee ballots’ importance was underscored by how many campaign workers and volunteers have been observing the vetting and counting process this week.On Friday, Ms. Wiley had several volunteers at a site in Manhattan where absentee ballots were being counted. Mr. Adams’s campaign had many more — a sign that his campaign, with more money and institutional support, has often been more muscular and organized than those of his rivals.Mr. Adams had a team of volunteers seated at every table, diligently tallying his votes and Ms. Garcia’s with pens and notebooks. Occasionally, a volunteer challenged a ballot’s legitimacy over a signature or date.At one point, a small commotion could be heard.A volunteer for Mr. Adams was challenging a ballot backing Ms. Garcia because it had a stray pen mark. Election workers and campaign volunteers gathered around the table to scrutinize the ballot, and then set it aside for further examination.“Our team has been here all week making sure every single vote is counted,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, a City Council member from Upper Manhattan who is an ally of Mr. Adams’s. Mr. Rodriguez was leading the Adams campaign’s presence at the elections board site, leaving only briefly on Wednesday to vote on the city budget.Ms. Garcia’s campaign did not have volunteers at the Manhattan site, but her representatives said that members of the campaign’s legal team — including the prominent election lawyers Stanley Schlein and Sarah Steiner — were monitoring the proceedings.Ms. Wiley’s campaign sent an email to supporters on Thursday seeking volunteers to visit absentee sites on Friday.“All ballots have been cast, and while we cannot persuade any more New Yorkers to vote for Team Maya, we can make sure that every single vote counts, and is counted accurately!” the email said.The campaigns are allowed to monitor the absentee count and to challenge ballots that may be ineligible. Election workers wore face masks on Friday and held ballots up against a plastic partition so that campaign volunteers could read them. One ballot, for instance, had several first choices marked for mayor. An election worker told volunteers that it would be considered void when it went through a ballot-scanning machine.Ms. Wiley’s campaign filed a lawsuit on Thursday preserving its right to challenge the election results, following similar moves by the campaigns of Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia. Ms. Wiley argued that a full hand recount should be required if a decision about who gets eliminated under ranked-choice voting comes down to a “razor-thin” margin.Under the preliminary ranked-choice tally conducted Wednesday, Ms. Wiley fell just short of getting to the final round, trailing Ms. Garcia by fewer than 350 votes.“This is a wide-open race and as is standard procedure, my campaign filed a petition to preserve the right to challenge the results should we believe it is necessary,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement on Friday. “For now, we must allow the democratic process to continue and ensure every vote is counted transparently.”The Board of Elections is under close scrutiny after an embarrassing fiasco on Tuesday that forced it to retract preliminary ranked-choice vote totals it had released just hours before.The board had mistakenly included more than 130,000 sample ballots, used to test the ranked-choice software, in the preliminary count. The board ran the ranked-choice program again on Wednesday, with the result again showing Mr. Adams ahead of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley.Despite the vote-count debacle, Dawn Sandow, the board’s deputy executive director, sent a congratulatory email to staff members on Thursday. In the email, Ms. Sandow acknowledged that there had been “negative articles bashing this agency,” but she insisted that board employees had risen to the occasion.“The amount of changes thrown at us to implement in a short period of time during a worldwide pandemic was unsurmountable,” she wrote, “and WE DID IT ALL SUCCESSFULLY!”Dana Rubinstein and Katie Glueck contributed reporting. More
- in Elections
2020 Election Spurs Resignations and Retirements of Officials
The draining work of 2020 has spurred resignations and retirements. In a recent survey, one in three officials said they felt unsafe in the jobs.WASHINGTON — In November, Roxanna Moritz won her fourth term unopposed as the chief election officer in metro Davenport, Iowa, with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot.Five months later, she quit. “I emotionally couldn’t take the stress anymore,” she said in an interview.For Ms. Moritz, a Democrat, the initial trigger was a Republican-led investigation into her decision to give hazard pay to poll workers who had braved the coronavirus pandemic last fall. But what sealed her decision was a new law enacted by the Iowa legislature in February that made voting harder — and imposed fines and criminal penalties on election officials for errors like her failure to seek approval for $9,400 in extra pay.“I could be charged with a felony. I could lose my voting rights,” she said. “So I decided to leave.”Ms. Moritz is one casualty of a year in which election officials were repeatedly threatened, scapegoated and left exhausted — all while managing a historically bitter presidential vote during a pandemic.She has company. In 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections has left. One in four election officials in Kansas either quit or lost re-election in November. Twenty-one directors or deputies have left or will leave election posts in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, according to a tally by the reporting consortiums Spotlight PA and Votebeat.Some of those represent ordinary churn in a job where many appointees are nearing retirement, and others are subject to the vagaries of elections. In a survey of some 850 election officials by Reed College and the Democracy Fund in April, more than one in six said they planned to retire before the 2024 election.Others are leaving early, and more departures are in the wings. In Michigan, most of the 1,500 clerks who handle elections run for office, said Mary Clark, the president of the state Association of Municipal Clerks. “That said,” she added, “I am beginning to hear rumblings from a few appointed city clerks who are wondering if this ‘climate’ is worth the stress.”Election workers sorting ballots at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia last November.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAt a gathering of Florida election officials this month, “multiple people came up to me to say, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this,’” said David Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “There are the threats, the stress, the attacks on democracy on the officers, on the staff.“We may lose a generation of professionalism and expertise in election administration,” he said. “It’s hard to measure the impact.”In interviews, some election officials said they also worried that a flood of departures in the next two years could drain elections of nonpartisan expertise at a hinge moment for American democracy — or worse, encourage partisans to fill the vacuum. They cite moves by partisans alleging that the last election was stolen in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere to run for statewide offices that control election administration.That may be less likely at the local level, but the pain is no less acute. “We’re losing awesome election administrators who have tenure and know what they’re doing,” said Michelle Wilcox, the director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections in Wapakoneta, Ohio.The 2020 election was brutal for election officials by any measure. Beyond the added burden of a record turnout, many effectively found themselves conducting two votes — the one they had traditionally overseen at polling places, and a second mail-in vote that dwarfed that of past elections. The pandemic led to shortages of poll workers and money for masks and other protection equipment and vastly complicated voting preparations.Atop that, baseless claims of rigged voting and vote-counting by President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans elevated once-obscure auditors and clerks to public figures. And it made them targets for vilification by Trump supporters.A report issued last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University underscored the consequences: In a survey of election officials, one in three said they felt unsafe in the jobs. One in five said they were concerned about death threats.Better than three in four said the explosion of disinformation about elections had made their jobs harder. More than half said it had made them more dangerous.“The fact that one in three election workers doesn’t feel safe in their jobs is an extraordinary number and a real challenge to our democracy,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior democracy fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The center contributed to the report.Election challengers yelled as they watched workers count absentee ballots in Detroit last November. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIf lies and misstatements continue to fuel mistrust of elections and a hostility toward those who run them, “the entire infrastructure of how the nation governs itself becomes at risk,” he said.In Ohio, Ms. Wilcox said she and her office staff logged some 200 additional hours to conduct a November election that drew 25,940 voters — an almost 80 percent turnout.The 2020 vote, she said, was the first to include training in de-escalating standoffs with angry voters who refused to wear masks, and the first in which officials spent considerable time addressing baseless claims of fraud.“It was tough,” she said. “I was like, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’”In Butler County, Pa., Shari Brewer resigned as director of the Board of Elections in April 2020 — even before the state’s presidential primary.“I could see what was coming,” she said. “We had already budgeted for extra help and overtime, and this was the first primary in Pennsylvania where mail-in ballots were implemented” — a state law allowing no-excuse absentee balloting had passed the previous year.The workload increased, and no help arrived. So after 10 years — and still at the bottom of the county’s pay scale, she added — she threw in the towel.Indeed, the report issued last week said election officials singled out the crushing workload as a reason for leaving. Behind that, Mr. Rapoport said, is the failure of governments to address what he called an enormously underfunded election system that is a linchpin of democracy.The report called on the Justice Department to create an election threat task force to track down and prosecute those who terrorize election workers and for states to allot money to add security for officials. It recommended that federal and state governments, social media companies and internet search engines develop ways to better combat false election claims and take them offline more quickly.And it also asked states to take steps to shield election officials from political pressure and politically motivated lawsuits and investigations.Officials processing ballots in Madison, Wis., in November.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesParadoxically, Republican-controlled legislatures have moved in the opposite direction on some of those issues. Texas and Arizona have enacted laws explicitly banning private donations to support election work, embracing false claims from the right that private foundations in 2020 directed contributions to Democratic strongholds. Republicans in a dozen states have considered launching Arizona-style investigations of the 2020 vote despite warnings that they are feeding a movement of election-fraud believers.Ms. Clark, the head of the Michigan clerks’ association, said she believed that the pace of departures there would be influenced by the fate of Republican-backed legislation that would tighten voting rules and restrict election officials’ authority.And in Iowa, the Republican-controlled legislature voted this spring to shorten early-voting periods, clamp down on absentee ballot rules, sharply limit ballot drop boxes — and take aim at the county auditors who run elections. One clause eliminates much of their ability to take steps to make voting easier. Another makes it a felony to disregard election guidance from the secretary of state and levies fines of up to $10,000 for “technical infractions” of their duties.In Davenport, Ms. Moritz said, the pandemic and election-fraud drumbeat all but upended preparations for last year’s election. Tensions rose after she sparred with the Republican-run county board of supervisors over accepting donations to offset rising election costs.When poll workers were hired, she said, she checked with officials to make sure there was enough money in her $80-million-a-year budget to cover hazard pay. But the supervisors had set their pay at $12 an hour, and she failed to ask them for permission to increase it.Ms. Moritz says she made a mistake. “Nobody benefited from it but the poll workers,” she said. Two weeks after the election, when the county attorney called to tell her the pay was being investigated, she said, “I literally puked in my garbage can.”The supervisors have said their inquiry was not politically motivated, and the state auditor, a Democrat, is looking into the misstep. But in the storm of publicity that followed the supervisors’ inquiry, Ms. Moritz said, she began to receive threats. And any thought of staying on vanished after the legislature began to consider reining in auditors’ powers and penalizing them for errors like hers.“People are starting to second-guess if this is the profession they want to be in,” she said. “It was always a stressful job, and now it’s more so. And all these things coming down the pipe make it worse.”Susan C. Beachy More
- in Elections
In Chaotic Mayor’s Race, It’s All Down to the Absentee Ballots
The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, now a tight race among Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, will be decided by absentee ballots.Fresh off a vote-counting debacle that caught national attention, the chaotic New York City Democratic mayoral primary is moving into a new phase: the wait for absentee ballots.A preliminary, nonbinding tally of ranked-choice votes on Wednesday showed a highly competitive race, with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holding a lead of about two percentage points over Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner. Under the ranked-choice elimination-round process, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, finished just behind Ms. Garcia, trailing by fewer than 350 votes.But those results do not account for the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots submitted, and the race might look different once all eligible ballots have been accounted for.No one knows with any certainty how the absentee ballots will shape the outcome, though many political junkies and campaign officials are trying to game that out. Here is a look at what the data suggests, and a guide to what to watch for as New York moves closer to determining the Democratic nominee.When will we know who won?Final results are expected to arrive the week of July 12.Before that happens, the Board of Elections needs to finish counting the absentee ballots, a process that began on Monday. Those ballots that have been counted by July 6 will then be factored into a new ranked-choice tally that will be released on that date.The city’s new ranked-choice voting system allows voters to 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, the winner must be decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated in separate rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.The board must also consider absentee ballots that were initially deemed invalid, as well as affidavit ballots that were filed on Primary Day by voters who were told they were ineligible, but cast provisional ballots that would be counted if they were later deemed eligible.So is it officially a two-person race?No. While Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia were the last two candidates standing in the latest round of results released on Wednesday, those numbers were preliminary and could change as more absentee ballots are accounted for. Ms. Wiley remains in the mix.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Kathryn Garcia took slightly more of Andrew Yang’s redistributed votes than Eric Adams.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesDid the campaigns push absentee voting?Yes.Advisers for all three of the leading campaigns said that they engaged in so-called ballot-chasing efforts: direct follow-ups with voters who had requested absentee ballots, reminding those voters to return the ballots. The results in coming weeks will offer a sense of who ran the most sophisticated campaign on that front.As voters requested absentee ballots, the Adams campaign sent them personalized letters — regardless of whether they believed those voters were ranking Mr. Adams as their first choice — and added those voters to their broader communications strategy, following up by email and phone, as well as by mail.Mr. Adams may also benefit from his significant institutional support. He was backed by several major labor unions, an often-important dynamic in turnout efforts, and his consulting firm has particular experience with absentee ballots: It assisted the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, in her 2019 race against Tiffany Cabán — a contest decided by absentee votes.The Wiley campaign used phone-banking and texting to urge Democrats who requested absentee ballots to send them in, focusing on absentee voters who they believed might support Ms. Wiley.The Garcia campaign also sought names of voters who requested absentee ballots and followed up with them by mail and phone. Absentee voting was also a factor in shaping the timing of outreach strategies like digital engagement, a Garcia adviser said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a lead of about two percentage points over Ms. Garcia after a preliminary, nonbinding ranked-choice tally.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesCould Mr. Adams still lose?In the first round of votes, among people who voted in-person early and on Primary Day, Mr. Adams was in first place, leading Ms. Wiley by 9.6 percentage points, and Ms. Garcia by 12.5 points. But when the preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted, Ms. Garcia narrowly moved into second place and trailed Mr. Adams by only two points.It seems clear that the race is still an open three-way contest, but a final ranked-choice contest between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia, compared with Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley, might play out very differently.Sparse polls and interviews with party strategists and voters have suggested that Ms. Wiley’s voters — especially in places like Brownstone Brooklyn — often ranked Ms. Garcia on their ballots. But Ms. Garcia’s voters, especially the more moderate ones, were not always inclined to rank Ms. Wiley as high. That dynamic, if it holds, could make it more challenging for Ms. Wiley to pull ahead of Mr. Adams, even if she did surpass Ms. Garcia.Ms. Wiley, who emerged as the favorite of younger left-wing voters, may have also found it more difficult to connect with some who vote by mail, a group that has traditionally included older voters.Still, she had a burst of momentum in the final weeks of the race, and the absentee ballots from her strongholds could help boost her numbers. While Ms. Garcia was the favorite in vote-rich Manhattan, Ms. Wiley came in second in the first round of votes, and could see her numbers rise in some neighborhoods as absentee ballots come in.She emphasized that the contest was far from over.“It is a wide-open race,” she said on Thursday. “We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day, and it remains a deeply competitive race.”“We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day,” Maya Wiley said on Thursday. Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesManhattan had the most absentee ballots. Whom does that help?Many of those ballots are likely to benefit Ms. Garcia, who, in the first round of voting, was dominant in Manhattan.For example, many people voted by mail in the affluent, well-educated neighborhoods that border Central Park — and among in-person returns, Ms. Garcia pulled off strong showings in those areas. Ms. Garcia, with her emphasis on competence over any ideological message, may have also been an especially strong fit for some types of absentee voters.“Historically, absentee ballots have tended to come from older, more highly educated, more affluent voters,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist who has closely studied the city’s electorate. He pointed to Garcia-friendly neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. “Those are the kinds of voters who, particularly in Manhattan but also in the Brownstone belt, places like Riverdale, seem to have favored Garcia.”But on the first round of voting, Mr. Adams appeared to be the clear favorite in neighborhoods where many working-class Black and Latino voters live, and he also demonstrated some ability to connect with white voters with more moderate views.His allies argue that Ms. Garcia would have to pull in significant margins in Manhattan to cut into his expected lead in other parts of the city. The assembly districts where Mr. Adams had his strongest showings did cast fewer absentee ballots. But he led in more districts, and by higher margins, than Ms. Garcia overall.“It’s a fairly narrow path, and she would really have to overperform even in districts where she did well, in Queens and Brooklyn, and really run up the score in Manhattan,” said Neal Kwatra, who led a pro-Adams independent expenditure effort associated with a union representing hotel workers.Is there another key battleground?The second-largest number of absentee ballots were cast in Queens, where several candidates showed strength in the first round of voting.Mr. Adams, who won every borough but Manhattan in the first round, is likely to benefit from absentee ballots cast by Black homeowners in Southeast Queens, who tend to be more moderate. Ms. Wiley, who came in second place in Queens in the first round, was strong in Western Queens in particular, where many younger left-wing voters live; Ms. Garcia did well in places that are home to many white voters with more moderate views.Here is where ranked-choice voting may come into play.Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate who has since dropped out of the race, did especially well in Asian American neighborhoods in Queens and elsewhere in the city. He spent the last days of the race campaigning with Ms. Garcia — but some voters may have cast their absentee ballots before that apparent alliance was struck.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Ms. Garcia took slightly more of Mr. Yang’s redistributed votes than Mr. Adams. Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wiley’s voters when her votes were reallocated.If those circumstances play out again, does that help Ms. Garcia significantly in Queens as well as in Brooklyn, where many absentee ballots are outstanding and where Ms. Wiley came out ahead of Ms. Garcia on the tally of first-place votes?“Queens seems to favor Adams, Manhattan favors Garcia — we don’t know who that balance is going to ultimately benefit,” Mr. Gyory said, allowing for the possibility that Ms. Wiley could pull ahead, too. Until the absentee ballots are “processed, opened and fully counted, I don’t think anybody should presume how they’re going to vote,” he added.Charlie Smart, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting. More
