Elections

Democratic turnout was high in the Tuesday primary for the State Supreme Court, ahead of a costly general election that will decide the future of abortion rights and gerrymandered maps in the state.MILWAUKEE — Eight months after the nation’s highest court made abortion illegal in Wisconsin, a liberal State Supreme Court candidate who made reproductive rights the centerpiece of her campaign won more votes than her two conservative opponents combined.The Wisconsin Supreme Court primary election on Tuesday was a triumph for the state’s liberals. In addition to capturing 54 percent of the vote in the four-way, officially nonpartisan primary, they will face a conservative opponent in the general election who was last seen losing a 2020 court election by double digits. It proved to be a best-case scenario for Wisconsin Democrats, who for years have framed the April 4 general election for the State Supreme Court as their last chance to stop Republicans from solidifying their grip on the state. Republicans took control of the state government in 2011 and drew themselves legislative maps to ensure perpetual power over the state’s Legislature, despite the 50-50 nature of Wisconsin politics.“If Republicans keep their hammerlock on the State Supreme Court majority, Wisconsin remains stuck in an undemocratic doom loop,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.Now, with an opportunity to retake a majority on the State Supreme Court that could undo Wisconsin’s 1849 ban on nearly all abortions and throw out the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps, Democrats have the general election matchup they wanted. Janet Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz), a liberal circuit court judge in Milwaukee County, will face off against Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who lost a 2020 election for his seat by nearly 11 percentage points — a colossal spread in such an evenly divided state. Abortion rights demonstrators gathered in Madison, Wis., in January 2022. Judge Protasiewicz has sought to put abortion, which is now illegal in most cases in Wisconsin, at the center of the campaign. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTuesday’s results suggested that the state’s Democratic voters are more energized than Republicans. While the number of ballots cast statewide represented 29 percent of the 2020 presidential electorate, the turnout in Dane County was 40 percent of the 2020 total, a striking figure for a judicial election. In Dane County, which includes the liberal state capital of Madison, Joseph R. Biden Jr. took three out of every four votes.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Black Mayors: The Black mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston have banded together as they confront violent crime, homelessness and other similar challenges.Wisconsin Supreme Court: Democratic turnout was high in the primary for the swing seat on the court, ahead of a general election that will decide the future of abortion rights and gerrymandered maps in the state.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Republicans will also face the financial might of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which on Wednesday transferred $2.5 million to the Protasiewicz campaign. Justice Kelly did not spend a dollar on television advertising during the primary, but he was aided by $2.8 million in spending from a super PAC funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Democrats also helped Justice Kelly by spending $2.2 million to attack his conservative opponent, Jennifer Dorow, a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. Justice Kelly has said he expects Mr. Uihlein’s PAC, Fair Courts America, to spend another $20 million on his behalf for the general election. That money will not go as far as the cash transferred directly to the Protasiewicz campaign because candidates can buy television advertising at far lower rates than PACs. Wisconsin’s conservatives, who have controlled the court since 2008, fear a rollback not just of their favorable maps but also of a host of Republican-friendly policies that were ushered in while Scott Walker was governor, including changes to the state’s labor and voting laws. “She’s going to impart her values upon Wisconsin regardless of what the law is — does that seem like democracy to you?” said Eric Toney, the district attorney for Fond du Lac County, who was the Republican nominee for attorney general last year. “This isn’t Republicans and Democrats. It’s democracy and the rule of law that is on the line.”There is also the question of how Wisconsin Republicans coalesce after their second bruising primary contest in six months. Throughout the campaign, Justice Kelly declined to say that he would back Judge Dorow in the general election, while her supporters flatly said that he would lose the general election.It was a bit of a replay of the governor’s race last year, when bitter intraparty feelings remained after Tim Michels, with former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, defeated former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch in the primary. Ms. Kleefisch then did little to encourage her supporters to back Mr. Michels, who later lost the general election to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.“With Michels and Kleefisch, there wasn’t that come-together-to-Jesus moment,” said Stephen L. Nass, a Republican state senator from Whitewater. “I think people realize now that was a mistake. It should have happened. And now we’ve got to do it.”Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was one vote away from overturning Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, deciding in a series of 4-to-3 decisions to reject Mr. Trump’s efforts to invalidate 200,000 votes from the state’s two largest Democratic counties.Judge Protasiewicz speaking at her primary night party on Tuesday in Milwaukee. She has openly declared her views in support of abortion rights and against Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislative maps.Caleb Alvarado for The New York Times“What our Supreme Court did with the 2020 presidential election kind of turned people’s stomachs,” Judge Protasiewicz said in an interview on Tuesday over coffee and paczki, a Polish pastry served on Fat Tuesday. “We were one vote away from overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.”Judge Protasiewicz has pioneered what may be a new style of judicial campaigning. She has openly proclaimed her views on abortion rights (she’s for them) and the state’s legislative maps (she’s against them). That has appeared to offend Justice Kelly, who devoted chunks of his Tuesday victory speech to condemning the idea that Judge Protasiewicz had predetermined opinions about subjects likely to come before the court.“If we do not resist this assault on our Constitution and our liberties, we will lose the rule of law and find ourselves saddled with the rule of Janet,” Justice Kelly told supporters in Waukesha County. But Judge Protasiewicz has considerable incentives to put her views on hot-button topics front and center for voters. (She calls them “my values” to remain within a law that prohibits judicial candidates from plainly stating how they would rule on specific cases.) Democrats learned in last year’s midterm contests just how potent and motivating abortion is for their voters. Judge Protasiewicz, in the interview, recounted how voters had come to her campaign stops wearing sweatshirts bearing the words “Fair maps now.” “The voters are demanding more,” said Rebecca Dallet, a liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, at the Protasiewicz victory party on Tuesday in Milwaukee. “People want to know more about their candidates. And I think there’s a way to communicate that without saying anything that shouldn’t be said about future cases.”Justice Kelly’s views are hardly opaque, either.Appointed to the court by Mr. Walker in 2016 before losing his re-election bid in 2020, Justice Kelly went on to work for the Republican National Committee as an “election integrity” consultant. He has the endorsement of the state’s three major anti-abortion groups.Justice Kelly speaking at a party on Tuesday night in Okauchee Lake, Wis. He said in an interview that only state legislators, not the State Supreme Court, could overturn Wisconsin’s abortion ban.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDuring an interview on Monday night in Sheboygan, Justice Kelly said only legislators could overturn the state’s 1849 abortion ban, enacted decades before women were allowed to vote. He said that complaints about the maps amounted to a “political problem” and that they were legally sound.Yet in the same interview, conducted in the back of a bar during a meeting of the Sheboygan County Republican Party, Justice Kelly declined to say whether he supported the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling in December 2020 that rejected Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the state’s presidential election results.“If I were to say it was decided correctly, then the hullabaloo would be, ‘Justice Kelly doesn’t care about election integrity,’” he said. “If I say it was decided incorrectly, the hullabaloo would be, ‘Justice Kelly favors overthrowing in presidential elections.’ And so I don’t think there’s any way to answer that question in a way that would not get overcome by extraneous noise.”Still, he said he had “no reason to believe” Wisconsin’s 2020 election was not decided properly.Since Justice Kelly lost in 2020, he and other Republicans have taken it as an article of faith that the wide margin of his defeat could be attributed to the Democratic presidential primary, which fell on the same day. Several Republicans asserted that Wisconsin’s Democratic Party leadership had colluded with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose presidential campaign was by then a lost cause, to remain in the race to lift the chances of the liberal candidate, Jill Karofsky.“It still pains me to admit that, as it turns out, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders combined can turn out more votes than little old me,” Justice Kelly said Monday.Faiz Shakir, who was the campaign manager for the Sanders campaign, said in an interview that Mr. Sanders had indeed decided to suspend his campaign and concede to Mr. Biden days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary, but encouraged his supporters to vote in the primary anyway to influence the court election.One thing that is clear is that the next six weeks in Wisconsin politics will be dominated by the Protasiewicz campaign’s effort to place abortion rights at the center of the race. The issue will feature heavily in her television advertising, while Republicans will try to change the subject to crime — or anything else. “Everybody is very emotional about abortion, so that’s the tail that’s going to wag the dog,” said Aaron R. Guenther, a conservative Christian minister from Sheboygan. “It’s not what all of life is about, but it’s what the election is going to be about.”Dan Simmons contributed reporting from Okauchee Lake, Wis. More

Democrats’ House super PAC plans to spend $45 million trying to flip as many as six seats Republicans won in 2022. It could set off a major spending contest.New York almost single-handedly cost Democrats their House majority in last fall’s midterm elections. Now, a leading Democratic group is preparing to pour record sums into the state, in hopes it can deliver the party back to power next year.House Majority PAC, the main super PAC aligned with congressional Democrats, will unveil a first-of-its-kind, $45 million fund this week dedicated to winning back four seats Republicans flipped in New York, and targeting two other competitive districts. Republicans currently control the chamber by only a five-seat margin.The planned Democratic infusion would dwarf outside spending in the state in recent election cycles, and reflects just how central traditionally blue New York has become to the national House battlefield for both parties. Of the 18 districts nationwide that President Biden won in 2020 that are now represented by Republicans, New York is home to six.“The path to the majority runs through New York,” Mike Smith, the group’s president, said in an interview outlining its plans. “It’s not just us seeing it. It is the Republican Party seeing it. It’s every donor around the country seeing it.”The announcement comes amid bitter Democratic infighting over how to regroup from last year’s whiplash elections. While the party outperformed expectations nationally, New York was a glaring outlier. On Election Day, Republicans here harnessed fears about rising crime and one-party Democratic rule to run a nearly clean sweep through competitive districts and secure their majority.Mr. Smith said his group was still raising the funds, but planned to move unusually early in the election cycle to try to reshape how voters view those six newly elected Republicans, who represent districts in Long Island, the Hudson Valley and Syracuse. Many of them succeeded in portraying themselves as common sense moderates in suburban territory, but they will enter a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers, as among the most endangered Republicans in the country.Among Democrats’ best cudgels may be one of those freshmen, Representative George Santos, the Republican who flipped a suburban Long Island seat only to watch his résumé unravel into a series of elaborate lies and potential frauds.Lawmakers called for the expulsion of Representative George Santos, who flipped a suburban Long Island seat, earlier this month.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“These freshman Republicans have no real track record to run on other than what’s happening in the national space,” Mr. Smith said. “And that’s George Santos, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the most extreme elements.”That effort is almost certain to set off a major spending war with Republicans, whose main super PAC has consistently out-raised and outspent House Majority PAC nationally. In New York, the Democratic group spent around $13 million last year, while Republicans’ Congressional Leadership Fund pumped in at least $21 million.Unlike traditional candidates or party committees, dark money groups can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.The Congressional Leadership Fund has yet to detail its strategy for 2024. But on Tuesday, several vulnerable House Republicans — Mr. Santos not among them — established a new joint fund-raising committee named “New York Majority Makers,” designed to help bundle smaller contributions to protect their seats.And in a sign of their significance to party leaders, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was scheduled to make an early fund-raising stop New York in March. The event will help at least one at-risk incumbent build an early fund-raising advantage while Democrats are still recruiting challengers.Cash is only one factor that could tip the balance of power. To be successful, Democrats will also have to revamp their own image in certain parts of New York where voters rejected them last fall.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the party’s new House leader, has called for a careful review of what went wrong. But for now, the party’s progressive and moderate wings have vastly different prescriptions on how to address concerns about public safety and rising living costs that are especially acute here. The party’s left flank has spent months agitating to remove the more moderate chairman of the state party, Jay Jacobs, who they believe has overseen a moribund organization.In the interview, Mr. Smith said that Democrats had let Republican candidates dominate the conversation around crime last year, which “definitely hurt us.”“There is no getting around the top of the ticket concerns,” he said, referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, who waited until the campaign’s final weeks to aggressively counter Republicans’ attacks on the issue and won by a narrower than expected margin. “That is a big part of how we got to where we are today.”Still, at least on paper, many of the districts could easily change hands in a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers.In the suburbs of Westchester and Rockland counties, Representative Michael Lawler defeated his Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point last fall by running as a moderate focused on issues like crime and inflation. Now, he has to win another term in a district that Mr. Biden won by 10 points in 2020 and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to two.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, another relative centrist, faces similarly daunting numbers on the South Shore of Long Island, where a wave of Republican enthusiasm — and depressed turnout by Black voters — helped him narrowly win a district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who narrowly won a House race on the South Shore of Long Island, may face a tougher race in 2024.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesRepresentatives Brandon Williams and Marc Molinaro will be defending Democratic-leaning districts around Syracuse and in the Hudson Valley. Representative Nick LaLota likely faces an easier race on the East End of Long Island, which narrowly voted for Mr. Biden but has been friendly ground to Republican congressional candidates for a decade now.And then there is Mr. Santos, who has not indicated clearly whether he will seek a second term in a district that Mr. Biden won by eight points. Nearly every other New York Republican freshman has called on him to resign, and local party leaders have vowed to back a primary challenger. More

Counting votes and cutting violenceShattered glass at Brazil’s Supreme Court after supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brasília in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesThe resilience of Brazilian democracy, in the face of efforts by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro to undermine the validity of the recent presidential election, is a story that has just about everything. Courtroom drama, baseless claims of voter fraud, brawls in the halls of power, and hopeful hints that democracy may not be as fragile as it has seemed in recent years.There has been, unsurprisingly, a lot of focus on the powerful individuals whose decisions ensured that the election result was respected, such as an aggressive Supreme Court justice and the leaders of its military. Their decisions were undoubtedly important. But focusing on a few people’s choices can obscure another important issue: the strength of Brazil’s democratic institutions — and how that affects ordinary Brazilians’ lives.I know that “institutions” can sound dry as a topic — a second ago we were talking about riots, now I’m conjuring visions of paperwork and buzzing fluorescent lighting — but stay with me here.Because I want to talk about a new paper about Brazilian political institutions by Camilo Nieto-Matiz, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and Natán Skigin, a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame. It reads a bit like political science as scripted by Martin Scorsese — light on the paperwork, heavy on the murders and gangland politics. And although it is not specifically about Bolsonaro or the recent election, it offers important context about the conditions that brought the country into, and potentially out of, a democratic crisis.A surprising way to reduce violent crimeBrazil’s electronic voting system has made headlines around the world with the false claims by Bolsonaro, as president, that it was rife with fraud.But Nieto-Matiz and Skigin began studying the system years earlier, when Brazil first began rolling it out to districts across the country. They noticed that it seemed to be having a surprising effect: When electronic voting was introduced into a particular area, violent crime there quickly fell.“That was really puzzling,” Nieto-Matiz told me when we spoke last week. They had expected to perhaps find a relationship between electronic voting and particular policies: perhaps a benefit to illiterate citizens, whose votes were more likely to be counted under the new electronic system than the old paper one. But the decrease in violence seemed to happen almost immediately, before any new policies had a chance to take effect. What could account for that?When they dug a little deeper, they found that the new voting system seemed to make it slightly less likely for political parties that gain votes by promising goods or resources in exchange for support — what political scientists call clientelistic parties — to win elections. Those parties may have been more likely to rely on ballot fraud to win, the researchers hypothesized, which became harder once electronic voting was introduced.By contrast, so-called programmatic parties, which tend to mobilize support by promising to enact certain policies — for example the leftist agenda of the Workers Party, the party of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — did slightly better under the new system. (Programmatic parties can have right-wing agendas, too. And no party is exclusively one model or another, but they tend to skew in one direction.)Nieto-Matiz and Skigin wondered whether there might be a link between violence and the type of party that prevailed in elections, so they set out to test that more rigorously — resulting in the current paper.They examined a set of local elections so tight that they were essentially coin flips, making the results as close to random as it would be possible to be in real-world politics. That way, they could be reasonably confident that differences were because of the type of party that won, rather than the underlying conditions in the district.The results were striking: When programmatic parties won, local homicide rates immediately fell. But when clientelistic parties won, violence in their districts actually got worse. And, once again, the researchers said, the effect showed up far too quickly for it to be the result of new laws or policies.One study isn’t enough to conclusively say why they found a correlation between programmatic parties and reduced violence, the researchers were careful to note when we spoke. But they had a hypothesis — and that’s where things start getting Scorsese-ish.They suggest that clientelistic parties are more likely to collaborate with local armed groups, which in Brazil include criminal gangs and paramilitary groups backed by landowners and oligarchs.Research has shown that clientelistic parties tend to have relatively loose internal controls on membership and candidates, which can make them useful vehicles for criminals looking to get into politics — something that other studies have found in India and Colombia. Additionally, gangs and paramilitaries can help get rid of political opposition, assist with election fraud, or deliver the votes of people from groups or areas under their control.By contrast, because programmatic parties need to maintain ideological discipline, they tend to have stronger institutional controls over who can be a party candidate or official. And they might also face more of a backlash if voters perceive them as corrupt or violent, because their appeal to voters is based on how well they enact their ideological agendas in office. That’s harder to do while mired in investigations or prosecutions for wrongdoing, which means they have less incentive to collaborate with violent groups.So the theory goes that, while individual politicians’ decisions might vary quite a bit, clientelistic parties had more of an incentive to enter into mutually beneficial relationships with gangs, paramilitaries or other violent actors. And that gave those armed groups more impunity and local power, which in turn increased violent crime.Which brings us back to the resilience of Brazilian democracy.Research has shown that over time, programmatic parties tend to crowd out clientelistic parties, because support for the latter tends to collapse as soon as they’re out of power and unable to distribute resources to supporters. Skigin and Nieto-Matiz’s work adds to that by showing how the process might also reduce the power of violent groups.“We should expect that those that those criminal actors or generally coercive actors, they should be either weakened, or, if they are able to survive, they are not going to be able to resort to as much violence,” Skigin said.Viewed through that lens, the broader story of Brazil’s democracy starts to look less like an episode of democratic crisis, and more like turbulence on a long, slow and still incomplete trajectory of democratization.And it suggests that the recent election, which saw the victory of a candidate for the Workers Party — the largest programmatic party in the country — may have implications for ordinary citizens’ lives that go far beyond his party’s policies or ideology.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

Alarms raised as McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson access to January 6 footageDemocrats condemn House speaker’s move and warn Capitol security could be endangered if Fox News host airs footageThousands of hours of surveillance footage from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol are being made available to the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, that Democrats condemned as a “grave” breach of security.‘A big freaking deal’: the grand jury that investigated Trump election pressureRead moreThe hard-right host said his team was spending the week at the Capitol, preparing to reveal their findings.Granting exclusive access to January 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move, seen by some critics as essentially outsourcing House oversight to a TV personality who has promoted conspiracy theories about the attack.“It’s a shocking development that brings in both political concerns but even more importantly, security concerns,” said Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who was a chief counsel during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.Many critics warned that Capitol security could be endangered if Carlson aired security footage that details how rioters accessed the building and routes lawmakers used to flee to safety. A sharply partisan retelling of the Capitol attack could accelerate a dangerous rewriting of the history of January 6, when Trump encouraged supporters to attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election.“It is not lost on anyone that the one person that the speaker decides to give hours and hours of sensitive secret surveillance footage is the person who peddled a bogus documentary trying to debunk responsibility for the January 6 riot from Donald Trump onto others,” Goldman said.“Kevin McCarthy has turned over the security of the Capitol to Tucker Carlson and that’s a scary thought.”McCarthy’s office declined to confirm the arrangement, first reported by Axios.Images and videos from the Capitol attack have been widely circulated by documentarians, news organizations and rioters themselves. But officials have held back much of the surveillance video that offers a detailed view of the grisly scene and brutal beatings of police.The House committee investigating the January 6 attack worked with US Capitol police to review and release segments of the footage as part of public hearings last year.The chief of Capitol police, Tom Manger, said only: “When congressional leadership or congressional oversight committees ask for things like this, we must give it to them.”House Democrats planned to convene on Wednesday for a private call to hear from Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who chaired the January 6 committee, and others. The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, called McCarthy’s decision an “egregious security breach”.“Unfortunately, the apparent disclosure of sensitive video material is yet another example of the grave threat to the security of the American people represented by the extreme Maga Republican majority,” the New Yorker told House colleagues.Zoe Lofgren of California, the former chair of the House administration committee and a member of the January 6 panel, said: “It’s really a road map to people who might want to attack the Capitol again. It would be of huge assistance to them.”Carlson, who produced a documentary suggesting the federal government used the Capitol attack as a pretext to persecute conservatives, confirmed that his team was reviewing the footage.“We believe we have secured the right to see whatever we want to see,” Carlson said on his show on Monday.It’s not clear what protocols Carlson and his team are using to view the material, but he said “access is unfettered”.The January 6 committee, which was disbanded once Republicans took the House, created a secure room for staff to examine more than 14,000 hours of footage. The process took months, according to a person familiar with the investigation.Any clip the committee wanted to use had to be approved by Capitol police. If police had an objection, the committee would engage in negotiations to redact any content that could potentially endanger the force or its protection of the Capitol.Capitol police reported an increase in threats to member safety over the last several years. The number of possible threats against members of Congress rose from about 4,000 in 2017 to more than 9,600 in 2021, then declined last year to 7,501.Republicans said McCarthy’s decision was part of his commitment to create a more transparent House and engage in oversight, as Republicans launch investigations touching many aspects of government.“I support Speaker McCarthy’s decision,” said Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the House administration committee chair.Hard-right figures cheered. “For all of you that doubted we would release the tapes. Here you go!” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, now close to McCarthy.Rodney Davis, a former Illinois Republican, said if the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the film-maker Alexandra Pelosi, was able to film on January 6 and release her footage, McCarthy should be able to grant Carlson access.Others said the two situations are not comparable, as countless hours of footage have been released from many sources.“I think we should remember that the January 6 attack happened in broad daylight,” said Sandeep Prasanna, a former investigative counsel on the January 6 committee.“My concern is that I don’t see how releasing thousands of hours of footage to one handpicked controversial media figure could ever produce the same factual and careful analysis that the committee produced over that year and a half.”TopicsUS Capitol attackFox NewsKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘A big freaking deal’: the grand jury that investigated Trump election pressureForeperson Emily Kohrs gives insight into process usually cloaked in secrecy, after portions of grand jury report released last weekAsked if the grand jury she led recommended indicting Donald Trump over his election subversion in Georgia, the foreperson of the jury said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”Ron DeSantis gives Donald Trump kid-glove treatment in new bookRead moreShe also said sitting on the jury was “a big freaking deal”.Emily Kohrs, 30, spoke to the New York Times and outlets including the Associated Press and NBC News on Tuesday. She was authorised to speak but not to discuss details of the grand jury report, most of which remains secret after a judge disclosed portions last week.Those portions showed jurors saw possible evidence of perjury by “one or more witnesses”. Trump did not testify. His personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who advanced Trump’s lie about voter fraud in his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, was among those who did.The grand jury was requested by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney. Speaking to the AP, Kohrs described how, last May, jurors were led into a garage beneath an Atlanta courthouse, where officers with guns waited. Ushered into vans with heavily tinted windows, jurors were driven to their cars under police escort.“That was the first indication that this was a big freaking deal,” Kohrs said.Kohrs found herself at the center of one of the most significant legal proceedings in US history. She would become foreperson of the panel investigating whether the then president and associates illegally meddled in Georgia election results.The case is one of Trump’s most glaring legal vulnerabilities as he mounts a third presidential run, in part because he was recorded asking officials to “find 11,780 votes” and overturn Biden’s win.Jurors heard from 75 witnesses, from prominent Trump allies to local election workers. A judge, Robert McBurney, advised jurors on what they could and could not share publicly. Kohrs provided insight into a process typically cloaked in secrecy.She told the Times Giuliani, who was mayor of New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks, when she was 11, was “almost like a myth figure in my head”, leaving her “intimidated” in his presence.She told NBC the list of recommended indictments was “not short”, involving more than a dozen people, and that Trump “might” be among them.She told the Times the report would not offer “some giant plot twist. You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately”.Her remarks met with criticism in some quarters.Elie Honig, a federal prosecutor turned CNN analyst, said: “This is a very serious prospect. Indicting any person, you’re talking about potentially taking away that person’s liberty. We’re talking about potentially [indicting] a former president for the first time … she does not seem to be taking that very seriously.”Trump’s lawyers might seek to dismiss any indictment based on grand jury impropriety, Honig said.Trump was the first Republican to lose Georgia since George HW Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. Attempts to overturn Trump’s defeat included the famous call to Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, in which he asked his fellow Republican to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” to get to win.Kohrs told the Times the jury “definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicised”.She told the AP Raffensperger was “a really geeky kind of funny”. She said the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who fought not to testify, joked with jurors while Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, seemed unhappy to be there.Looking to other parts of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat, she said the jury “definitely talked about the alternate electors a fair amount” and “talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia legislature”.What does the release of Georgia’s grand jury report mean for Trump?Read moreKohrs told the AP she was fascinated by an explainer by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive. She said the jury studied the “concept of vote fraud in Georgia”, finding “unanimously that there was no evidence of vote fraud in Fulton county in the 2020 election”, which they “wanted to make sure we put in” the final report, “because somehow that’s still a question”.Trump and his supporters still claim the 2020 election was stolen.Kohrs sketched witnesses. When jurors’ notes were taken for shredding, she managed to salvage two sketches, of Graham and Marc Short, who was chief of staff to former vice-president Mike Pence, because there were no notes on those pages.Kohrs said she enjoyed learning about the White House from Cassidy Hutchinson, who was much more forthcoming than the former chief of staff Mark Meadows.Several witnesses have immunity deals. Trump’s attorneys have said he was not asked to testify. Kohrs said the jury didn’t think he would offer meaningful testimony.“Trump was not a battle we picked to fight,” she said.Kohrs told the AP she didn’t vote in 2020 and at the time did not know the specifics of Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud or efforts to reverse his loss. She said she did not identify with any political party, and did not feel political pressure.“I fully stand by our report as our decision and our conclusion,” she said.
Associated Press contributed reporting
TopicsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsGeorgianewsReuse this content More

Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests. “Only in this country can the kid who came from the basement in Jackson Heights … ,” George Santos began, before he was momentarily overwhelmed. “To everybody watching, I want you to know that the American dream is worth fighting for. It’s worth defending, and that’s why I jumped into this race.”In another era — two or four years ago, perhaps — the Santos saga, with its absurd cascade of lies, would have been an amusing sideshow for many Democratic politicians, who would have been able to mock the chaos and move on, comfortably sure that Santos, who fabricated much of his personal and financial biography, would only further hobble a neutered Republican minority. But the new congressman, now under investigation by local and federal authorities, was instead a crucial cog in Kevin McCarthy’s House majority, having flipped the redrawn Third Congressional District in New York, an area that had been represented by Democrats for decades, by eight points.These days, New York is known as the deep-blue state where Democrats lost four seats on the way to losing the House of Representatives and effectively halting President Biden’s domestic agenda for the next two years. Kathy Hochul, who served as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before accusations of sexual harassment and assault forced him from office in 2021, won the narrowest race for governor in 28 years, beating Lee Zeldin, a Trump-supporting congressman from Long Island, by less than six points. While forecasts for a national red wave didn’t materialize — Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate were largely triumphant in tossup races across the country, and Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn remained the Senate majority leader — Democrats stumbled in territory on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley that Biden won handily just two years earlier.These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)National parties function as enormous umbrella organizations, determining the presidential primary calendar and the process for allocating delegates at the national conventions. The drudgery of running elections is left to the local and state parties, as well as individual campaigns and independent political action committees.Kathy Hochul won the narrowest race for New York governor in 28 years.Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Sipa USA, via Associated PressElsewhere in the country, state Democratic parties are much more robust than they are in New York. In Wisconsin, under the leadership of 42-year-old Ben Wikler, the party offered crucial organizing muscle in Gov. Tony Evers’s re-election win, staving off a Republican statewide sweep. The Nevada Democratic Party, despite infighting among moderates and progressives, aided Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election, investing strongly in rural voter engagement. And in California, the party chair position is publicly contested among multiple candidates, with delegates voting as Democrats traverse the state and make their case in the media.As for New York, observers across the ideological spectrum agree that the state is entering an unprecedented era, with warring political factions and a glaring power vacuum. Hochul recently became the first governor in New York history to have the State Legislature, controlled by Democrats, vote down her nominee to the state’s highest court. Progressives spearheaded opposition to the judge, Hector LaSalle, arguing that he was too conservative.In challenging Hochul from the right, Zeldin was savagely effective — “Vote like your life depends on it,” he exhorted, echoing Richard Nixon, in the final days of the campaign — in seizing on suburban anxieties around rising crime that Republicans in other states weren’t able to successfully exploit. While Manhattan and the combined might of upper-income white and middle-class Black voters thwarted Zeldin in the five boroughs, he made notable inroads with working-class Asian Americans, potentially heralding a political realignment for the city’s fastest growing demographic. Hochul’s campaign was assailed for its relative listlessness and failure to counter Republican attacks on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Nancy Pelosi chided the governor. (Hochul’s staff did not make her available for an interview.)Within the confines of New York, Democrats remain historically dominant, retaining veto-proof majorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats, as is the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. But this is a recent shift: Republicans controlled the State Senate almost continuously from the mid-1960s until 2019. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, led the state for 12 years, and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran New York City from 1994 through 2013.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Heading into 2022, Democrats were confident that after decades of Republican rule in the State Legislature, they could entirely control the state’s redistricting process, engineering favorable House maps for the fall. After a quasi-independent commission deadlocked — critics argued that it was designed to fail when Cuomo helped create it a decade ago — Democratic state legislators redrew lines that strongly favored their party. Republicans sued in court, claiming that the Democrats’ maps violated an anti-gerrymandering clause in the State Constitution. To the shock of many political insiders, the Republicans won their court battle, and an outside special master was appointed by an upstate Republican judge to quickly draw new lines. House primaries were shoved from June to August.With the special master prioritizing competitiveness, not incumbency advantage, Democrats found themselves thrown together in some of the same districts. Representative Jerry Nadler was pitted in a nasty primary against his longtime colleague Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan. (Nadler would prevail.) North of the city, Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pugilistic centrist, decided to run in a new district spanning Rockland and Westchester that included far more turf than had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a neighboring progressive.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones fumed at the time. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism” against Jones, who is Black. Maloney held his ground, and Jones was forced to move to a new district in New York City, where he would lose in an August primary. Maloney fended off a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who ran far to his left. Then, despite a titanic war chest, he fell to Mike Lawler, a Republican state legislator, by less than a point. Jones tweeted one word: “Yikes.”And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.Protesters outside City Hall in New York in January, including Jumaane Williams, argued that Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, was responsible for losing four congressional seats.Kena Betancur/VIEWpress, via Getty Images“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”Until Cuomo’s downfall, Jacobs was known as a close ally of the imperious governor. His first tenure as party chairman came under Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, but his second began in 2019, a year after Cuomo won a commanding re-election. That election cycle was notable because Cuomo overcame a primary challenge from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who targeted him from the ascendant left. Though Nixon lost, six insurgent progressives defeated members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway group of centrist Democrats who had spent the last half decade in an unusual — and incredibly infuriating to progressives — power-sharing arrangement with State Senate Republicans. The I.D.C. had existed with Cuomo’s blessing, joining with Republicans to foil liberal priorities in the State Legislature, like tuition assistance for undocumented immigrants, tougher tenant protections and criminal-justice reforms. For Cuomo, a triangulating centrist determined to avoid having to sign or veto progressive bills while harboring dreams of the national stage, the arrangement worked just fine. (In 2018, I took a break from writing to run for State Senate myself, losing in a Brooklyn Democratic primary.)Since the state party, historically, has been a creature of the governor or the most powerful Democrat in the state, Jacobs is safe as long as Hochul tolerates him. And Hochul, some Democrats say, owes Jacobs for the work he did behind closed doors to ensure that the new governor had a comfortable primary win after Cuomo resigned and immediately began to plot a comeback. Jacobs’s fear was that a divided field could pave the way for a Cuomo revival, and he worked to rapidly hustle up institutional and financial support for Hochul that helped to deter another challenger, Attorney General Letitia James, from running against her.In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.A year later, Jacobs explored ways of undercutting the established vehicle for left-wing organizing in the state, the Working Families Party, a hybrid of party activists and labor unions that had endorsed Jumaane Williams over Hochul in the primary. He cut a check to a more moderate Democrat trying to primary Jamaal Bowman, a Westchester County congressman and a member of the Squad, the prominent group of far-left members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. After Republicans swept Democrats out of power in the New York suburbs last fall, Jacobs quickly blamed the left. “New York did underperform, but so did California,” Jacobs told the politics publication City & State in November. “What do those two states have in common? Well, governmentally, we’re among the two most progressive states in the country.”Jacobs is under fire from the party’s more progressive wing, which is calling for his ouster, but so far has had Gov. Hochul’s support.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA 67-year-old political lifer, Jacobs has an unrelated day job overseeing a string of popular and lucrative summer camps in upstate New York, in Pennsylvania and on Long Island, where he lives. Democratic business is often run out of a TLC Family of Camps office in Glen Cove, a small town on Nassau County’s Gold Coast. Politicos and journalists who want to reach Jacobs know to email his Camp TLC address; Jacobs cc’d his chief of staff at that summer-camp address to help arrange a telephone interview that lasted an hour, despite Jacobs’s initial hesitancy about going on the record.“People believe that the state party runs all the campaigns, determines the messaging, does the opposition research for every candidate and, you know, when a candidate anywhere loses, it’s the fault of the state party, and all of that is just not an accurate view of the function of the state party and what we actually do,” Jacobs said.Jacobs described the party as a “housekeeping organization” and a “coordinating entity” that works among labor unions, campaigns and other interest groups. He cited the maintenance of a voter file that campaigns use to target the electorate as among its most important work, as well as establishing campaign offices at election time. Fund-raising, too, is a big part of the work, and it’s there where Jacobs has been especially useful. A multimillionaire and prolific donor, Jacobs has given more than $1 million to various Democratic candidates and causes over the last two decades. It can be argued that it’s this wealth, in part, that has allowed him to continuously lead the Nassau County party since 2001. Few staunch Democrats are both better wired and more willing to cut checks than Jacobs.“How I run my businesses and my charitable donations and the rest would indicate, as well as my personal beliefs, would indicate that I’m really, personally, quite progressive, more so than most people would think,” Jacobs said. Rather, he argued, his message is direct: “Slow down. You’re going too fast. What you’re doing is going to lose us votes in the suburbs and rural areas.”In an unusual move for a party leader, Jacobs last year backed the rivals of several incumbent Democrats. His motivation, he told me, was “the behavior of some of these folks that are speaking on behalf of what I’d refer to as the far left. They practice the politics of personal destruction. They won’t argue the merits of what I say, but they’ll condemn me — and others, by the way, not just me — in really vitriolic terms, personal and the rest. Some of the reasons why I personally gave to some of the primaries — it was just a handful of people — it’s because of what they said about me. Personally.”Last August, Jacobs donated $2,900 — the maximum allowable amount — to a county legislator trying to unseat Bowman. The congressman won by 38 points anyway.“I don’t know Jay Jacobs,” Bowman told me. “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I’ve never met him in my life. Even though I was a newcomer in 2020, I was still duly elected, and I’m a member of the party now. One would’ve thought that the leader of the party would have reached out to have a cup of coffee or have a conversation.”Should Jacobs resign? “The short answer is yes,” Bowman answered. “But the more, I think, comprehensive nuanced answer or question is, What the hell are we even doing? You know, the whole thing about the corporate agenda, which I think Jay Jacobs and maybe even Governor Hochul and maybe others are missing is, when you talk about younger voters, millennials or Gen Z, they are not aligned with corporate interests over labor and working-class people.”But Jacobs has plenty of defenders, including county leaders across the state, who believe he’s an upgrade over his somnolent or domineering predecessors and has a realistic view of what it takes to win beyond the liberal confines of New York City. “It’s hard for me to understand this rancor from certain individuals, by the way, who never seem to be satisfied,” says Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “Only in New York could Jay win every single statewide election and hold the supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate and be chastised.”Gregory Meeks, the Queens congressman and chairman of the county organization there, echoes Jacobs’s critique: The progressive and socialist left has cost Democrats in general elections by forcing them to defend positions he believes are alienating. “Extremes cannot be the dominant part of a party, because it isolates everyone else,” Meeks says. “What’s not good for all of us is talking about defunding the police.”Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff. Among some Hochul allies, there has been quiet frustration directed at one of her top advisers, Adam Sullivan, who speaks frequently with Jacobs on Hochul’s behalf. Sullivan holds great sway in Hochul’s world because he managed her successful campaign for Congress more than a decade ago. Despite his low profile and the fact that his consulting firm, ACS Campaign Consulting, is based in Colorado, where he lives, Sullivan was one of a select few aides Hochul thanked in her victory speech. Sullivan himself disputes that there’s any behind-the-scenes friction. “The governor is completely committed to building a strong, robust party,” Sullivan says. “Everyone in her orbit is on the same page.” What isn’t clear is whether that page, and the vision for the future of the state party, includes Jacobs.Even Jacobs’s detractors acknowledge that dumping him and hunting for a replacement is only the beginning of a political project that will take many years. (Floated successors include Adriano Espaillat, a congressman who has built a strong operation among Dominican Americans in Upper Manhattan; Grace Meng, a Queens congresswoman and Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman who is the first Asian American elected to the House from New York; and Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens state senator.)All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”Through the first half of the 20th century, Tammany Hall, with origins as an Irish Catholic society in the late 1700s, was the embodiment of the local Democratic Party, using patronage to secure power and dominating state and city politics alike. Nothing equivalent rose to take its place. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would compare the state party right now to the machine that existed 50, 60, 70 years ago,” says Paterson, the former governor who later served as state party chairman during Cuomo’s tenure.New York never had a Harry Reid figure, a singularly powerful Democrat who took an obsessive interest in party building. The two Cuomos, Mario and his son Andrew, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years, and each treated the party organization as little more than a tool for self-promotion. A liberal icon to the rest of America for his soaring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mario Cuomo was assailed at home for barely lifting a finger to aid Democrats desperately trying to retake the State Senate. In 1990, The Times reported that Cuomo was hoarding more than $5 million for his own campaign while spending none for the State Senate Democrats, who were outspent 4 to 1 by Republicans. In 1994, the state party spent almost $2 million to aid Cuomo’s failed re-election effort while offering less than $30,000 apiece for the candidates for attorney general and state comptroller. By the end of the year, the party was moribund and completely broke, running up a million-dollar debt.The only Democratic governor in modern times to care about the future of the state party and down-ballot candidates was Eliot Spitzer, who won a landslide victory in 2006 and would resign, a little more than a year later, in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer was a proud liberal who wanted to break the Republican hold on the State Senate. The party, too, was trying to modernize in anticipation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president. For a brief period, under the leadership of Denny Farrell, an influential state assemblyman from Manhattan, talented operatives were hired, and Spitzer’s aides tried to implement a strategy for boosting legislative candidates.“The party itself had really dissipated,” recalls Spitzer, now a real estate developer. His team helped recruit and fund an upstate Democratic candidate who won a pivotal special election for a State Senate seat in early 2008. “It was partly fund-raising, partly finding the right candidates, partly putting the right energy into it.”Andrew Cuomo at a news conference in 2021, a few months before he announced his resignation. The two Cuomos, Andrew and his father Mario, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years.Mary Altaffer/Getty ImagesThe rise of Andrew Cuomo, who had a near-dictatorial hold on political affairs for nearly the entirety of the 2010s, put an end to nascent party-building plans. Cuomo treated Democratic politics as an extension of Cuomo politics, hoovering up resources and kneecapping Democrats he viewed as a threat. He was content to let Republicans keep the State Senate and rarely campaigned for House candidates. Donald Trump’s election, coupled with Sanders’s 2016 bid, would radicalize a new generation of Democrats. Soon, a democratic socialist candidate was winning a State Senate seat, and Working Families Party-supported insurgents were driving out the conservative Democrats who had chosen to align themselves with the Republican Party.By 2018, Ocasio-Cortez had felled one of the most powerful party bosses in New York, a sign that the left could win its battles against the establishment. “We need Democrats who are not running from their own shadow,” says Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party.The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.“What we saw is a party that did not know what role they should play,” Nnaemeka says, “and therefore played no role.”Ross Barkan writes frequently on New York and national politics. He is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid’s impact on New York City. This is his first article for the magazine. More

A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the class upheaval in American partisanship, with the Republican Party dominant in working class House districts and the Democratic Party winning a decisive majority of upscale House seats.Studies from across the left-right spectrum reveal these and other patterns: a nation politically divided by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.Four scholars and political analysts have produced these studies: Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, in “The Congressional Class Reversal,” “Socioeconomic Polarization” and “Education Polarization”; Oscar Pocasangre and Lee Drutman, of New America, in “Understanding the Partisan Divide: How Demographics and Policy Views Shape Party Coalitions”; and Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, in “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left.”Podhorzer’s analyses produce provocative conclusions.“Throughout the first half of the 20th century,” he writes in his class reversal essay, “Democrats were solidly the party of the bottom of the income distribution and Republicans were solidly the party of the top half of the income distribution.” In 1958, Podhorzer points out, “more than half of the members of the Democratic caucus represented the two least affluent quintiles of districts. Today, that is nearly the case for members of the Republican caucus.”The result? “In terms of income,” Podhorzer writes. “the respective caucuses have become mirror images of each other and of who they were from Reconstruction into the 1960s.”The shift is especially glaring when looking at majority-white congressional districts:From 1994 through 2008, Democrats did about equally well with each income group. But, beginning with the 2010 election, Democrats began doing much better with the top two quintiles and much worse with the bottom two quintiles. In 2020, the gap between the top two and the bottom two quintiles was 50 points. Since 2016, Democrats have been doing worse than average with the middle quintile as well.The income shift coincided with a deepening of the urban-rural partisan schism.“As recently as 2008,” Podhorzer writes, “40 percent of the Democratic caucus represented either rural or sparse suburban districts, and about a fifth of the Republican caucus represented majority-minority, urban or dense suburban districts. Now, the caucuses are sorted nearly perfectly.”As if that were not enough, divergent economic trends are compounding the urban-rural split.In his socioeconomic polarization essay, Podhorzer shows how median household income in white majority districts has changed.From 1996 to 2008, in majority white districts, there was virtually no difference in household income between districts represented by Republicans and Democrats. Since then, the two have diverged sharply, with median household income rising to $80,725 in 2020 in majority white districts represented by Democrats, well above the $62,163 in districts represented by Republicans.Podhorzer ranks congressional districts on five measures:1) Districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile (the bottom 40 percent) of both income and education; 2) districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile of income but in the middle quintile or better for education; 3) districts that are not in the other four measures; 4) districts that are either in the fourth quintile on both dimensions or are in the fourth for one and the fifth for the other; and 5) districts that are in the fifth quintile for both dimensions.Using this classification system, how have majority white districts changed over the past three decades?“For the entire period from 1996 through 2008,” Podhorzer writes,none of the white socioeconomic groups was more than 10 points more or less than average, although we can see the highest socioeconomic group trending more Democratic through that period. But everything changed dramatically after 2008, as the two highest socioeconomic groups rapidly became more Democratic while the lowest socioeconomic group became much less Democratic.In 1996, Democrats represented 30 percent of the majority white districts in the most educated and most affluent category; by 2020, they represented 86 percent. At the other end, in 1996, Democrats represented 38 and 42 percent of the districts in the bottom two categories; by 2020, those percentages fell to 12 and 18 percent.In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction, while whites without college have moved toward the right.Podhorzer does not dispute the existence of this trend, but argues strenuously that limiting the analysis to education levels masks the true driving force: racial tolerance and racial resentment. “This factor, racial resentment,” Podhorzer writes in the education polarization essay, “does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”In support of his argument, Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among whites with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college whites and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college- educated whites.At the same time, the Democratic margin rose from plus 12 to 70 percent over those twenty years among non-college whites low in racial resentment; and from 50 to 82 percent among college-educated whites low in racial resentment.In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college whites who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated whites who are racially resentful have become more Republican, in contradiction to the education divide thesis.Podhorzer makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked,” interacting with and compounding divisions based on racial attitudes:Educational attainment was among the important characteristics associated with those increasingly prosperous places. Add to that mix, first, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery, and, second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances. We are suffering from a polarization which provides an even more comprehensive explanation than the urban-rural divide.Changing racial attitudes are also a crucial element in Abramowitz’s analysis, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left,” in which he argues that “Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn 1972, on a 1 to 7 scale used by American National Election Studies, Abramowitz writes,Supporters of the two parties were separated by an average of one unit. The mean score for Democratic voters was 3.7, just slightly to the left of center, while the mean score for Republican voters was 4.7, to the right. By 2020, the distance between supporters of the two parties had increased to an average of 2.6 units. The mean score for Democratic voters was 2.8 while the mean score for Republican voters was 5.5.The ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans reached its highest point in 2020, Abramowitz observes, “since the ANES started asking the ideological identification question.”While the movement to the right among Republican voters has been relatively constant over this period, the Democratic shift in an increasingly liberal direction has been more recent and more rapid.“The divide between supporters of the two parties has increased considerably since 2012 and most of this increase was due to a sharp leftward shift among Democratic voters,” Abramowitz writes. “Between 2012 and 2020, the mean score for Democratic voters went from 3.3 to 2.9 while the mean score for Republican voters went from 5.4 to 5.5.”By far the most important shift to the left among Democrats, according to Abramowitz, was on the question “Should federal spending on aid to Blacks be increased, decreased or kept about the same?” From 2012 to 2020, the percentage of Democrats saying “increased” more than doubled, from 31.3 to 72.2 percent. The surge was higher among white Democrats, at 47.5 points, (from 24.6 to 72.1 percent), than among nonwhite Democrats, at 31.2 points, from 41.1 to 72.3 percent.The growing ideological congruence among Democrats has significant consequences for the strength of the party on Election Day. Abramowitz notes that “For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.”The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers, he continues, “is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections” to the right “among white Democrats”have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections, including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96 percent of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate.In their paper, “Understanding the Partisan Divide,” Pocasangre and Drutman of New America focus on race and ethnicity from the vantage point of an analysis of voting patterns based on the level of diversity in a district or community.“Republican districts,” they write,are some of the least ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts have diverse policy views, particularly on economic issues. Democratic districts are some of the most ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts are mostly in agreement over their views of both social and economic issues.Pocasangre and Drutman’s study reinforces the widespread finding “That Republican districts are predominantly white and, for the most part, less affluent than the national average. In contrast, Democratic districts are less white than the average but tend to be more affluent than average.”Pocasangre and Drutman find that the household income differences between Democratic and Republican-held seats continues to widen. From 2020 to 2022, the income in Democratic districts rose from $95,000 to $100,000 while in Republican districts it grew from $77,000 to $80,000, so that the Democratic advantage rose from $18,000 to $20,000 in just two years.Republican districts, the two authors continue, are “conservative on both social and economic issues, with very few districts below the national average on either dimension.” Democratic districts, in contrast, areprogressive on both policy domains, but have quite a few districts that fall above the average on either the social or economic dimension. In particular, of the 229 Democratic districts in 2020, 14 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues and 19 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues.On average, competitive districts tilt Republican, according to the authors:Very few competitive districts in 2020 were found on the progressive quadrants of social and economic issues. Instead, of the 27 competitive districts in 2020, 70 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues and 59 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues.These battleground districtslean toward the progressive side when it comes to gun control, but they lean toward the conservative side on all the other social issues. Their views on structural discrimination — an index that captures responses to questions of whether Black people just need to try harder to get ahead and whether discrimination keeps them back — are the most conservative, followed by views toward abortion.In addition, a majority of competitive districts, 57 percent, are in Republican-leaning rural-suburban communities, along with another 13 percent in purely rural areas. Democratic districts, in contrast, are 17 percent in purely urban areas and 52 percent in urban-suburban communities, with 31 percent in rural-suburban or purely rural areas.I asked Pocasangre about this tilt, and he emailed back:For now, most swing districts go for Republicans. The challenge for Democrats right now is that most of these swing districts are in suburbs which demographically and ideologically look more like rural areas where Republicans have their strongholds. So, Democrats do face an uphill battle when trying to make inroads in these districts.But, Pocasangre continued, “majorities in Congress are so slim that control of the House could switch based on idiosyncratic factors, like exceptionally bad candidates on the other side, scandals, changes in turnout, etc. Democrats need to get lucky in the suburbs, but for Republicans, they are theirs to lose.”Pocasangre and Drutman classified districts as Democratic, Republican, or competitive, based on the ratings of the Cook Political Report in the 2020 and 2022 elections: “Competitive districts are those classified as toss ups for each cycle while the partisan districts are those rated as solid, likely, or lean Democratic or Republican.”The Cook Report analysis of 2024 House races lists 20 tossup seats, 11 held by Democrats, 9 by Republicans, one of which is held by the serial fabulist George Santos, whose threatened New York seat is classified as “lean Democratic.” Eight of the 11 Democratic toss-ups are in three states, four in North Carolina and two each in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Four of the nine Republican tossups are in New York, along with two in Arizona.The changing composition of both Democratic and Republican electorates and the demographics of the districts they represent is one of the reasons that governing has become so difficult. One result of the changing composition of the parties has been a shift in focus to social and cultural issues. These are issues that government is often not well equipped to address, but that propel political competition and escalate partisan hostility.Perhaps most important, however, is that there now is no economic cohesion holding either party together. Instead, both have conflicting wings. For the Republicans it’s a pro-business elite combined with a working class, largely white, often racially resentful base; for the Democrats, it’s a party dependent on the support of disproportionately low-income minorities, combined with a largely white, college-educated elite.One might question why all these cultural and social issues have come so much to the fore and what it might take for the dam to give.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal judge from Milwaukee County, will face one of two conservatives in a race that could tilt the balance of the court, with abortion rights, gerrymandered maps and more in the balance.MILWAUKEE — Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, won her race on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, and advanced to the general election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the most consequential American election on the 2023 calendar.On April 4, Judge Protasiewicz will face one of two conservatives for a 10-year term on the court: Daniel Kelly, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, or Jennifer Dorow, a Waukesha County judge known for presiding over the trial last fall of a man who killed six people by driving through a 2021 Christmas parade. Late Tuesday, The A.P. had not yet projected which candidate would advance along with Judge Protasiewicz.The winner of the officially nonpartisan race will tip the balance of the state’s seven-member Supreme Court, which has been controlled by conservatives since 2008. If Judge Protasiewicz prevails, the court will have a four-member liberal majority that would be likely to overturn the state’s 1849 law forbidding abortion in nearly all cases, redraw Wisconsin’s heavily gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps, and influence how the state’s 10 electoral votes are awarded after the 2024 presidential election.“Everything we care about is going to be determined by who wins this election,” Judge Protasiewicz told supporters in a victory speech on Tuesday night. Influential Democrats in Wisconsin coalesced long ago behind Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz), who has endorsements from a range of top party officials and de facto support from many others. The other liberal candidate in the race, Everett Mitchell, a judge in Dane County, which includes Madison, lagged far behind the other three major candidates in fund-raising.More on Abortion Issues in AmericaAbortion Bills: More than 300 abortion-related bills — a majority of which seek restrictions — have been proposed around the United States. Doctors are the most vulnerable to punishment.A Missed Opportunity: Abortion rights activists say President Biden’s State of the Union speech could have done more to address what they view as a national health crisis.State Constitutions: Divergent decisions by state supreme courts in South Carolina and Idaho displayed how volatile the fight over abortion rights will be, as advocates and opponents push and pull over state constitutions.A New Lawsuit: A company that makes an abortion pill filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of West Virginia’s ban on the medication. A wave of similar cases are expected to be filed in coming months.Republicans split between Justice Kelly, who lost a 2020 election for a full term after being appointed in 2016 by Gov. Scott Walker, and Judge Dorow, whom Mr. Walker appointed to the Waukesha court.The fight for conservative votes grew increasingly bitter in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary election. Justice Kelly said in interviews on conservative talk radio and at campaign stops that he would not commit to endorsing Judge Dorow if she advanced to the general election, while Judge Dorow’s supporters argued that Justice Kelly was unelectable based on his performance in 2020, when he lost by 10 percentage points.The race is all but certain to become the most expensive judicial election in American history, topping the $15 million spent on a 2004 race for the Illinois Supreme Court. Already, more than $8.7 million has been spent on television and digital advertising in the Supreme Court race, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.Officials in both parties expect tens of millions more to be spent by each side during the six-week general election.Justice Kelly has used his deep-pocketed supporters as a reason to vote for him in the primary. He told conservatives gathered at a Republican Party dinner this month in Sawyer County that they should back him because he had the support of the billionaire Uihlein family, which has pledged to spend millions of dollars on his behalf. Justice Kelly said the Uihleins would not back Judge Dorow in the general election.“If it’s not me in the general election, I don’t think that money just moves over to Jennifer,” Justice Kelly said. “It just won’t be spent. So if I’m not the candidate in the general election, Jennifer will jump in completely unarmed when the left is going to spend up to $25 million.”The state’s Democrats and Judge Protasiewicz’s campaign believe Judge Dorow would be a stronger general election opponent. A Better Wisconsin Together, a Democratic super PAC, spent more than $2 million on television ads before the primary attacking Judge Dorow. The Uihleins’ super PAC, Fair Courts America, spent $2.7 million backing Mr. Kelly and attacking Judge Protasiewicz. More