Dealing with Andrew Cuomo, I wrote after interviewing him in early 2019, is like playing a manic chess game. He tries to guide every move, constantly recalculating and recalibrating. He uses his hands for emphasis and dominance—at one point he reached over, grabbed my ankle (I was sitting with my legs crossed), and held it tight. He stares people down; he berates; he talks and talks, counting on his ability to break whomever he’s talking to.
Air Force Two is a smaller plane than Air Force One. The exterior is the same light-blue and white, but unlike the commander in chief’s plane, the vice president’s aircraft is open plan—from the back, you can see all the way to the front, where a small office doubles as a bedroom. Kamala Harris spends most of her Air Force Two flights in that office, with the door closed. She doesn’t work the plane, the way Joe Biden or even Mike Pence did.
Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember.
Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember.
Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on March 11, 2020.BRADDOCK, Pa.—John Fetterman didn’t grow up with anyone who had a biker-bar bouncer’s chin beard or who wore work shirts and shorts in February. He didn’t grow up committed to LGBTQ rights and legalizing marijuana and a living wage. The Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic candidate for the U.S.
A tale of hubris and comeuppance is unfolding daily around New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. It’s a tale of a man who bullied colleagues for years and took time out of managing the pandemic to write a book about how well he was managing the pandemic, but is now facing accusations of harassment, incompetence, and fatal mistakes.
With one move, Democrats could reshape government and potentially lock in their majority in the Senate for years to come. Four of their own stand in the way.The party may have just a few months to make it happen—but leaders in the House and Senate are taking their time and arguing about the details.Advocates see statehood for Washington, D.C.
Jim Clyburn sat by himself on the dais at Joe Biden’s inauguration, thinking about his late wife, Emily, who wasn’t there with him.Without Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat, who endorsed the former vice president at a crucial moment last year, Biden might not have taken the oath of office yesterday. But without Emily’s influence, Clyburn told me, that endorsement might never have happened.
WILMINGTON, Del.—What, exactly, is Joe Biden supposed to do with this? What is he supposed to say?Today in Washington, D.C., a mob urged on by President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s decisions led to police tear-gassing protesters in front of the White House in June. His decisions led to the same outcome in the Capitol Rotunda today, and Vice President Mike Pence and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris were rushed away.
In Donald Trump’s America, anyone who crosses him will be famous for 15 minutes. A lifelong Republican and self-proclaimed “functionary” reached his breaking point this week. That’s Gabe Sterling, who holds the impressively bureaucratic title of Georgia’s voting-system implementation manager.
First, Joe Biden has to pick his Cabinet and his White House staff. But after that, there’s only one name on leading Democrats’ list for Democratic National Committee chair: Jaime Harrison, who lost a race for U.S. Senate in South Carolina last week.If he’s named as chair, Harrison will inherit an organization in significantly better shape than it was when Tom Perez took over in 2017.
Updated at 10:20 p.m. ET on November 7, 2020.WILMINGTON, Del.—For half a century, across three presidential runs he made and three more he thought about making, Joe Biden had never won a single primary delegate before his South Carolina romp in February catapulted him to the Democratic nomination. But his strategy never changed. Biden won the White House the same way he won his first race, for New Castle County council in 1970: by being himself.
Updated at 11:18 p.m. ET on November 6, 2020.WILMINGTON, Del.—The difference between Biden headquarters tonight and Waiting for Godot is that Waiting for Godot had more action.Everyone is waiting for the obvious to happen. We’re by the stage around the corner from the Wilmington Westin. Red, white, and blue Jeeps and trucks—props—are still parked here, remnants of the Tuesday-night victory celebration that never happened. A giant American flag is blowing in the wind.
In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by the narrowest margin of any state—10,704 votes. “There are 11,000 more votes in Detroit,” Garlin Gilchrist told himself that night. “There are 11,000 Black men who could vote to change that.”A few months later, Gilchrist, then just 35, entered the race for Detroit city clerk—the city’s chief elections officer. His pitch: He could help engage more voters, and help make it easier for them to vote.
The night after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Democrats gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court, repeating the rallying call “No confirmation until inauguration!” That had zero effect on Senate Republicans, who pledged their support for Donald Trump’s choice even before the president announced it would be Amy Coney Barrett.New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is among those struggling with what to do.
Updated on September 19, 2020, at 6:08 p.m. ET.Nearly every reporter in Washington has experienced it: A Republican member of Congress says “off the record,” shifts into a quieter voice, and expresses how much he or she doesn’t like President Donald Trump. Soon after, you watch this same elected official speak up in favor of the president—or, more often, avoid saying anything meaningful at all.
Howie Hawkins may be the Green Party’s presidential nominee, but he isn’t Jill Stein—or at least, he can’t be, because he’s not on the ballot in as many swing states as Stein was in 2016. Courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania decided this week to keep his party’s ticket off of the 2020 ballots. But Hawkins told me he’s not Kanye West either, even though Republican operatives have been helping both the Green Party and West’s “Birthday Party.
For 17 years, Victoria Burton and Mike Hankins spent September 11 the same way: just the two of them, at home, with no set schedule. Maybe they’d watch the reading of the names of the dead for a bit. Occasionally, flipping through the channels, they’d linger on a program that was replaying news coverage from the attacks. But mostly they’d just be with each other.The anniversary was always a weird day to process.
Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s 33-year-old lieutenant governor, is only a few years older than Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times by a police officer in Wisconsin last month.It’s hard, Barnes told me on the latest episode of The Ticket, to be months past the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the death of George Floyd and feel like nothing has improved.
Calls from the White House come in with the number blocked. People who are used to getting them know to pick up. And invitations to sit in the first lady’s box for the State of the Union address don’t come around very often. People who get them know to say yes.Kamala Harris received one of those invitations at the end of January 2012. She was in Washington, D.C.
If Joe Biden is elected in November, his presidency will likely be defined by history-shaping decisions made after long, deliberative, some might say operatic processes. Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate—the first woman of color to appear on a major-party ticket—was precisely that sort of careful, drawn-out decision.
A few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice held a press briefing in her office to talk about the threats she saw on the horizon as Barack Obama’s presidency drew to a close. “What keeps you up at night? one reporter asked toward the end of the meeting. Her answer: a pandemic that spirals out of control.
Donna Shalala has a new dog named Fauci. He’s a rescue dog, maybe part Yorkie, she figures. The name seemed right: He was found running into an Italian restaurant in Miami, where she lives, so the animal-shelter staff suggested that she give him an Italian name. And like everyone else, she’s been thinking a lot about Anthony Fauci for the past few months.
Eliot Engel first won his seat in Congress in 1988, in a primary that helped end the old corrupt Bronx machine. Today, according to the official call by the Associated Press, he lost his June primary to newcomer Jamaal Bowman, in a race that became a national symbol of the rise of a new wave of progressives.A lot is happening in Engel and Bowman’s sliver of the Bronx and Westchester—and a lot is changing.
When Doug Jones invokes the civil-rights movement of the early 1960s, he knows the stakes. Forty years before his upset win in a 2017 special election to represent Alabama in the Senate, Jones, a U.S. attorney, prosecuted Klansmen for the Birmingham church bombing—and insisted that the guilty verdict not be seen as the end of the movement’s story.Jones understands why Americans might be cynical about the current civil-rights protests.
He’s old. He worked with Barack Obama. He’s generally seen as a decent guy.If you know more than that about Joe Biden, you know more than many voters.
In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials.