The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

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AMERICUS, Ga. — One mother worked at
Habitat for Humanity. The other helped teen-
agers who had run afoul of the law. Their sons
played soccer together, and for a few years, the
two women also sat on the county school board.
They were friendly on the sidelines until 2014,
when different battle lines became clear.
That was when the Sumter County Board of
Education got a new voting map. Donna

Minich, who is white, had championed it. She
said it was time to shrink the board for the small
rural county, something state officials had
urged for years.
But Carolyn Whitehead, who is African-
American, saw the map as a potential threat.
The board, which was predominantly Black, re-
flected the demographics of the student body.
The new map eliminated some districts held by

A New Map Reduced


Black Representation


in a Georgia County,


Opening Fresh


Racial Fissures


PHOTOGRAPHS BY AUDRA MELTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Voting Rights Battle in a School Board ‘Coup’


By NICHOLAS CASEY Photos of current members
of the Sumter County school
board, above, which had a
Black majority until a new
voting map created seats
Blacks were unlikely to win.
Black students make up
nearly three-quarters of the
Continued on Page A14 student body of 4,500.

WASHINGTON — Joseph R.
Biden Jr.’s $2 trillion plan to fight
global warming is the most ambi-
tious climate policy proposed by a
leading presidential candidate, a
political lightning rod spotlighted
on Thursday night when the Dem-
ocratic nominee acknowledged
during a debate that it would
“transition” the country “from the

oil industry.”
But no one knows better than
Mr. Biden, the former vice presi-
dent, that it almost surely will not
be enacted, even if his party se-
cures the White House and the
Senate. Thirty-six years in the
Senate and the searing experi-
ence of watching the Obama ad-
ministration’s less ambitious cli-
mate plan die a decade ago have
taught him the art of the possible.
Still, a President Biden could

have real impact: solar panels and
wind turbines spread across the
country’s mountains and prairies,
electric charging stations nearly
as ubiquitous as gas stations and a
gradual decrease in the nation’s

planet-warming greenhouse pol-
lution.
“The oil industry pollutes sig-
nificantly,” Mr. Biden said at the fi-
nal presidential debate, adding,
“it has to be replaced by renew-
able energy over time.”
Mr. Biden’s advisers insist that
climate change is not just a politi-
cal slogan. And on Capitol Hill, his
team is already strategizing with
Democratic leaders on how they

Beyond Biden’s Climate Plan Lies Reality: A Piecemeal Approach


By CORAL DAVENPORT Packed Agenda Would


Make It Hard to Act


Continued on Page A

TIM GRUBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Charles Adams had to square his duties with the Police
Department and the Minneapolis North High School football team. Sports of The Times, Page D1.

An Officer, a Coach, and a Healer


WASHINGTON — “Covid,
Covid. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,”
President Trump groused at a
rally in North Carolina on Satur-
day, expressing dismay that the
deadly coronavirus pandemic had
come to dominate the final days of
his struggling re-election cam-
paign. He made up a scenario: “A
plane goes down, 500 people dead,
they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid,
Covid, Covid, Covid.’ ”
But just seven hours later, the
White House made its own Covid
headlines when officials acknowl-
edged that another coronavirus
outbreak had struck the White
House, infecting Vice President
Mike Pence’s chief of staff and
four other top aides — and raising
new questions about the Trump
administration’s cavalier ap-
proach to the worst health crisis in
a century.
“We’re not going to control the
pandemic,” Mark Meadows, the
White House chief of staff, said on
CNN’s “State of the Union” on
Sunday morning, essentially of-
fering a verbal shrug in response
to any effort to prevent an out-
break in the top echelon of the na-
tion’s leaders. “We are going to
control the fact that we get vac-
cines, therapeutics and other miti-
gations, because it is a contagious
virus — just like the flu.”
Mr. Trump made no reference to
the new cases during campaign
rallies in New Hampshire and
Maine on Sunday. But for voters,
the new wave of infections at the
White House just over a week be-
fore Election Day was a visceral
reminder of the president’s dis-
missive and erratic handling of
the virus, even in one of the most
secure spaces in the country. And
it comes just as the United States
suffers its third surge in infections
across the nation, with a record
number of daily new cases on Fri-
day and a death toll that has risen
to almost 225,000.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Demo-
cratic presidential nominee, said
Sunday that the statement by Mr.
Meadows was “an acknowledg-
ment of what President Trump’s
strategy has clearly been from the
beginning of this crisis: to wave
the white flag of defeat and hope
that by ignoring it, the virus would
simply go away. It hasn’t, and it
won’t.”
“It’s sadly no surprise then that
this virus continues to rage un-
checked across the country and
even in the White House itself,”
said the former vice president,
who has sought to make the ad-
ministration’s handling of the co-
ronavirus the centerpiece of his
campaign.
From the beginning, Mr. Trump
has downplayed the threat of the
virus, initially insisting that it
would just “go away” and failing to
ramp up testing that might have

TRUMP APPROACH


TO VIRUS FAULTED


IN NEW OUTBREAK


5 ON PENCE STAFF SICK


White House Continues


to Defy Caution Amid


Jump in U.S. Cases


This article is by Michael D.
Shear, Annie Karni, Maggie Ha-
bermanand Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Continued on Page A

WASHINGTON — Pope Fran-
cis on Sunday named Wilton
Gregory, the archbishop of Wash-
ington, a cardinal, elevating the
first African-American to the Ro-
man Catholic church’s highest
governing body, a groundbreak-
ing act in a year when demands
for racial justice have consumed
the country.
The rise of Archbishop Gregory,
who is also the first American
named to the College of Cardinals
since 2016, comes as debates over
how to address the legacy of slav-
ery and racism have extended to
the Catholic Church, which for
centuries excluded African-Amer-
icans from positions of power.
“By naming Archbishop Wilton
Gregory as a Cardinal, Pope Fran-
cis is sending a powerful message
of hope and inclusion to the
Church in the United States,”
Archbishop José H. Gomez, the
president of the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops,
said in a statement.
The move is the latest sign that,
seven years into his papacy, Pope
Francis continues to redirect the
church toward greater accept-
ance of those on the margins. He
has worked to diversify the Col-
lege of Cardinals and center the
poor and migrants and has
warned of the threat of climate
change. Last week Pope Francis
expressed support for same-sex


African-American


Named Cardinal,


Making History


By ELIZABETH DIAS
and JASON HOROWITZ

Continued on Page A

Joe Biden has outraised Presi-
dent Trump on the strength of
some of the wealthiest and most
educated ZIP codes in the United
States, running up the fund-rais-
ing score in cities and suburbs so
resoundingly that he collected
more money than Mr. Trump on
all but two days in the last two
months, according to a New York
Times analysis of $1.8 billion do-
nated by 7.6 million people since
April.
The data reveals, for the first
time, not only when Mr. Biden de-
cisively overtook Mr. Trump in the
money race — it happened the day
Senator Kamala Harris joined the
ticket — but also what corners of
the country, geographically and
demographically, powered his re-
markable surge.
The findings paint a portrait of
two candidates who are, in many
ways, financing their campaigns
from two different Americas.
It is not just that much of Mr. Bi-
den’s strongest support comes
overwhelmingly from the two
coasts, which it does. Or that Mr.
Trump’s financial base is in Texas,
which it is. It is that across the
country, down to the ZIP code lev-
el, some of the same cleavages
that are driving the 2020 election
— along class and education lines
— are also fundamentally reshap-
ing how the two parties pay for

Map of Donors


Reveals a Split


On Class Lines


This article is by Shane Gold-
macher, Ella Koezeand Rachel
Shorey.

Continued on Page A

The official who oversees voter
registration in New York City is
the 80-year-old mother of a for-
mer congressman. The director of
Election Day operations is a close
friend of Manhattan’s Republican
chairwoman. The head of ballot
management is the son of a for-
mer Brooklyn Democratic district
leader. And the administrative
manager is the wife of a City Coun-
cil member.
As the workings of American
democracy have become more
complex — with sophisticated
technology, early voting and the
threat of foreign interference —
New York has clung to a century-
old system of local election admin-
istration that is one of the last ves-
tiges of pure patronage in govern-
ment, a relic from the era of pow-
erful political clubhouses and
Tammany Hall.
Already this year, the New York
City Board of Elections failed to
mail out many absentee ballots
until the day before the primary,
disenfranchising voters, and sent
erroneous general election ballot
packages to many other resi-
dents, spreading confusion.
Now, the agency is facing per-
haps its biggest challenge yet: a
heated general election, during a
pandemic, under a president who
has fomented distrust in the legiti-
macy of the vote — including by
pointing to the problems in New
York as evidence of widespread
fraud, an unfounded claim.
It is also the first presidential
election in New York with early
voting, which began Saturday
with tens of thousands of resi-
dents flooding polling places.
“I expect the B.O.E. to pull this
off — there’s no other option. It’s
the most important election of our
lifetime,” said Scott Stringer, the
city comptroller. “But we should-


Shaky Record


For Overseers


Of City’s Votes


Elections Board Is Relic


of Patronage Politics


By BRIAN M. ROSENTHAL
and MICHAEL ROTHFELD

Continued on Page A

For generations, public schools assimi-
lated immigrants into French society.
The beheading of a teacher has raised
doubts over that process. PAGE A


INTERNATIONAL A10-


A Failure of French Integration


The coronavirus’s spread in Wisconsin
managed to subdue a city’s urge to cheer
on its beloved Packers together.PAGE A

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-

Quiet Game Day in Green Bay
An effort to bolster the United States’
generic drugs sector underscores the
challenges of a Trump administration
industrial policy. PAGE B

BUSINESS B1-

A New Agency in the Hot Seat
Teenagers competing in the Virtual
Cabaret Convention are singing from
the Great American Songbook. PAGE C

ARTS C1-

Old Songs, New Voices
A tradition of veteran Black players in
Major League Baseball guiding their
successors has lived on. PAGE D

SPORTSMONDAY D1-

Paying the Help Forward


Innovation doesn’t stop in a pandemic.
So while some have the home office,
engineers have the garage. PAGE B

Back to Their First Labs


European cities are working to convert
properties once aimed at tourists into
long-term rentals. PAGE A


Turning Away From Airbnb Mesut Özil angered China with a tweet,
then refused a pay cut. Now he’s in exile
from his Premier League club. PAGE D


Erasure of a Soccer Star


A near party-line vote on Sunday cut off
debate over Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s
Supreme Court nomination. PAGE A


NATIONAL A13-


On the Brink of Confirmation


Jerry Jeff Walker, 78, never had a Top 40
pop hit, but his best-known composition
became an enduring standard. PAGE B

OBITUARIES B7-

Creator of ‘Mr. Bojangles’


Struggling houses of worship have had
to close, but many reused religious
spaces are still sanctuaries. PAGE A

New Calling for Old Churches
There’s theater aplenty in New York.
Below, Grace Orr in “Electric Feeling
Maybe” in Brooklyn. PAGE C

Where the Curtains Still Rise


Charlie Warzel PAGE A


EDITORIAL, OP-ED A22-

Late Edition


VOL. CLXX.... No. 58,858 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020


Today,mostly cloudy skies, humid in
the morning, high 59. Tonight,re-
maining cloudy, low 53. Tomorrow,
mostly cloudy, very chilly, high 54.
Weather map appears on Page D8.

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