34 2GM Tuesday March 15 2022 | the times
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it always seems that their definition of
electability is white candidates,”
Robinson said.
The row was started by an email from
Barbara Goldberg Goldman, a signifi-
cant donor and deputy state party trea-
surer in Maryland, leaked by the Axios
news website. She told fellow party
members: “Consider this: three Afri-
can-American males have run state-
wide for governor and have lost. Mary-
land is not a Blue state. It’s a purple one
[one Democratic and one Republican
senator]. This is a fact we must not
ignore. We need a winning team.”
Goldman’s email was in support of
Tom Perez, a white former chairman of
the Democratic National Committee
and an establishment figure in the ten-
candidate primary field. A spokesman
for Perez’s campaign said: “These hurt-Rough sleepers in New York and Wash-
ington have been urged to seek shelter
immediately as police hunt a “cold-
blooded” killer suspected of shooting
five homeless men.
Video of the latest shooting in New
York showed a black-clad suspect in a
balaclava stopping beside a man in a
yellow sleeping bag under some scaf-
folding. He kicked the sleeping man
with his left foot then shot him dead at
close range.
“The video is chilling,” Eric Adams,
New York’s mayor, told reporters. “The
case is a clear and horrific intentional
act.”
The victim, who was shot in the head
and neck, was found 11 hours later. He
was the second person to die in attacks
A race row has broken out in the
Democratic Party after leaked emails
revealed high-level doubts about the
ability of African-Americans to win
statewide elections.
A leading white donor cast doubt on
whether one of three black candidates
could win the election for governor of
Maryland in November, a goal regard-
ed as achievable with the retirement of
the moderate Republican incumbent in
a state that backed Joe Biden over
Donald Trump by a margin of 33 points.
It has prompted debate among black
candidates in other states over “elect-
ability” and the willingness of the party
to back up its claims to reflect the coun-
try’s diversity with the hard cash usual-
ly needed to fight a successful election
campaign.
More than a decade after Barack
Obama became the country’s first black
president there are only three black
senators and not a single black gover-
nor of the 50 states. Only four African-
Americans in the country’s history
have held that powerful position.
Campaigners accuse the Democratic
Party establishment of holding back
candidates and have challenged them
to get behind ambitious African-Amer-
icans wholeheartedly, amid allegations
that they tend to focus the big-money
support on white candidates.
Underlying the race tensions is the
party’s reliance on black voters to win
national and statewide elections while
failing to deliver on topics that they
care most about, such as criminal
justice reform.
“This donor’s words are not
anything different from the Demo-
cratic Party itself and how it invests
in candidates,” W Mondale
Robinson, founder of the
Black Male Voter
Project, told The Times.
“The Democratic
Party is quick to get behind white can-
didates, even if they are milquetoast
[feeble] candidates that have no chance
of winning. We see that over and over.
Losing an election has a lot to do with
how they invest, where they invest and
how the money is being spent.”
He pointed to the defeat of
Charles Booker, a black candi-
date for the 2020 Senate race in
Kentucky who raised $2 million,
but was narrowly defeated by
Amy McGrath, a white woman
seen as the party estab-
lishment choice,
backed by more than
$40 million.
“The Democratic
Party doesn’t say
white or black, they
say ‘electable’, andGunman attacks five men while they sleep rough
on homeless people over nine days. The
first was found stabbed and shot to
death inside a tent that had been set on
fire in Washington on March 9. Three
others have survived.
The police said similarities in the five
attacks, along with ballistics analysis,
suggested that they were linked.
Adams said a victim shot in Lower
Manhattan hours before the latest
attack survived only because he woke
up. Hank Sautner, a deputy chief with
the New York Police Department, said
the 48-year-old Hispanic man had
jumped up and screamed: “What are
you doing?”
In one account, he was said to have
scared the gunman away by leaping to
his feet, and pretending to put a phone
to his ear to call the police. As the sus-
pect fled, the victim ran to an emer-gency phone box on a nearby street to
raise the alarm.
Adams and Muriel Bowser, the
mayor of Washington, said in a state-
ment that they were “calling on unshel-
tered residents to seek shelter”.
Bullet casings found in the two
shootings in the SoHo area of New York
were of the same calibre as those found
after the three shootings in Washing-
ton DC, according to the New York Post.
Police said the attacker first struck in
Washington on March 3, at 4am. Offi-
cers, drawn by the sound of shots, found
a homeless man with gunshot wounds.
He was treated in hospital. Five days
later, at 1.21am, another man was shot
several times while sleeping on a street
in the same northeastern district of the
capital. He also survived.
The next morning, at 2.54am onMarch 9, an officer found a tent that
had been set alight in the street. A man
was found inside. He had died from
multiple stabbing and gunshot wounds.
Three days after that, last Saturday, a
homeless man was woken at 4am on a
street on the west side of Lower Man-
hattan. He had been shot in the arm.
Two hours later, on a block about half a
mile to the east, the man in the sleeping
bag, an African-American, was shot
dead.
Deputy Chief Sautner said the gun-
man appeared not to have spoken to
any of his victims. They appeared to
have been chosen at random; the only
thing they had in common was that
they were all homeless. Adams said:
“There (but for) the grace of God go I.
These are our brothers and sisters who
had fallen on hard times.”Will Pavia New York
Democrats row over black
candidates’ ability to win
ful and ill-conceived comments do not
reflect the values of our campaign, as
evidenced by Tom’s entire career to
advance civil rights and expand
opportunity.”
One of the black Americans in the
running, John King, who was education
secretary under Obama, told Axios: “In
Maryland we have a very diverse state
and a diverse electorate, so we are well-
positioned to have our first African-
American governor.”
Maryland is 55.5 per cent white and
30 per cent black, demographics not
dissimilar from Georgia, which elected
its first black senator last year.
Rushern Baker, another black candi-
date in the Maryland primary, said:
“Although those candidates didn’t win,
it’s not impossible. They just weren’t the
right candidates at the right time.”
A spokesman for the campaign of
Wes Moore, the third African-Ameri-
can candidate, said: “The idea that
there would be scepticism about a can-
didate’s electability because they are
black should have no place in the Dem-
ocratic Party in Maryland or anywhere
else in America in 2022.”
Goldman told Axios: “I regret mak-
ing the statement. It neither accurately
expresses nor depicts my views, and
does not represent my lifelong commit-
ment to supporting Democratic causes
and candidates.”
She resigned as deputy party treasur-
er last night. Yvette Lewis, the state
party chairwoman, said: “We do not
condone or support the comments in
her email and the party embraces
diversity.”
Chris Jones, a black governor candi-
date in Arkansas, said that donors
needed to be ready to fund new types of
candidates who may not fit preconcep-
tions. Arkansas has never had a black
statewide representative but Jones said
there were hundreds of thousands of
voters who felt overlooked who could
be reached. Scepticism from the party
establishment was “understandable”,
he said, as he challenged donors to take
more risks. “There’s a model of how we
win that is really not serving as well as
it could right now,” he said.United States
David Charter Washington Biden is
losing vital
supporters
Analysis
appointment of the
first black female
vice-president and the
nomination of the
first black female
judge for the Supreme
Court appear to have
done little to reverse
his decline in support.
Biden knows he
owes everything to
black voters. They
saved his presidential
campaign in the South
Carolina primary
after an appeal from
the influential black
congressman James
Clyburn, leading
Biden to swear on his
name that he would
not forget.
Black campaigners
say he and his party in
Congress have done
just that with the
failure to pass reforms
in policing, criminal
justice and voting
rights. Biden’s vow to
end the federalcriminalisation of
cannabis, wipe
convictions and free
those jailed for
possession have come
to nothing.
This inability to
deliver does not bode
well for the midterm
elections in
November. Some
commentators
blamed stay-at-home
black voters for the
Democrats’ failure to
hold the Virginia
governor’s mansion in
last year’s main
electoral test. Senior
African-Americans in
the state said the drop
in black support for
the party since the
2020 presidential race
was no more
significant than the
decline among other
groups or the decision
of suburban Biden
voters to switch
parties.P
resident
Biden won
the backing
of 92 per cent
of the black
vote in 2020 but
recent polling shows a
sharp drop in support
from this crucial
constituency for the
Democrats (David
Charter writes).
NBC News found in
January that black
support for Biden was
64 per cent, down
from 83 per cent last
April. A CNN poll last
month put black
approval of Biden at
69 per cent. TheMacron’s
wartime
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husband to
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says Le Pen
Marine Le Pen has sought to emphasise
her independence by insisting she
would take neither man nor dog with
her to the Élysée Palace if she won the
presidency next month.
The National Rally candidate told El-
le magazine that she had no intention of
continuing the custom that French
heads of state be accompanied by aFrance
Adam Sage ParisJohn King is one
of the candidates
in Maryland