Alvin L. Bragg, Manhattan’s incumbent district attorney, won the race for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported.
He moves on to a general election that his two challengers have cast as a referendum on his record.
Mr. Bragg, 51, has held the job since 2022, when he became the first Black person to hold the office and the fourth district attorney in 80 years. He also became the first prosecutor to win the conviction of a president when Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies last year.
In this year’s primary, he faced a sole Democrat, Patrick Timmins, a civil litigator who served in the Bronx district attorney’s office in the late 1990s. Mr. Timmins said he campaigned in order to give Manhattanites who feared crime a chance for change.
In the general election, Mr. Bragg will face the Republican Maud Maron, a conservative activist and self-described former liberal who once was a Legal Aid Society lawyer. An independent, Diana Florence, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who opposed Mr. Bragg in 2021, is also running.
When Mr. Bragg ran for the office in 2021, he had a relatively low profile — he was a former federal prosecutor and had worked at the state attorney general’s office, where he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He used his personal story of growing up in Harlem when residents faced both high rates of crime and harassment from the police to win over voters. He pledged to balance public safety with fairness for all defendants.
He quickly became one of the nation’s most recognizable prosecutors.
In his first year, he created a division called Pathways that identifies defendants who would benefit from mental health or substance abuse programs more than incarceration. He also established another division to focus on sexual violence and child abuse.
Most prominently, he won the case against Mr. Trump, whom he successfully prosecuted on 34 counts of falsifying records to conceal a sex scandal that threatened to derail Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The president has since directed volumes of fury at Mr. Bragg, while he has fought to overturn his conviction.
Mr. Bragg was among a wave of progressive prosecutors who promised to reshape criminal justice with a focus on alternatives to prosecution. However, as crime rose during the pandemic, many were criticized as too lenient, and conservatives moved to unseat them.
Mr. Bragg’s challengers have employed similar messages, but they may have an uphill battle with the heavily Democratic voters in Manhattan. While Mr. Trump has made inroads with voters in the city, Mr. Bragg beat his Republican challenger with 83 percent of the vote in 2021.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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