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Also, Vladimir Putin evokes Stalingrad and a contested film is a box-office hit in India.The U.S. is building its military presence in Asia amid a broader effort to counter China.Pool photo by Rolex Dela PenaU.S. increases its military role in the PhilippinesThe two countries announced an agreement that would allow the U.S. to gain access to four more sites in the Philippines. The plans for a larger U.S. military presence in the country come amid fears about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.The deal signifies the first time in 30 years that the U.S. will have such a large military presence in the Philippines. Among the U.S.’s five treaty allies in Asia, the Philippines and Japan are closest geographically to Taiwan, with the Philippines’ northernmost island of Itbayat just 93 miles away.The Philippines’ defense secretary declined to name the locations of the four additional sites, but U.S. officials have long eyed access to land in the Philippines’ northern territory, such as the island of Luzon, as a way to counter China in the event that it attacks Taiwan.A shift in Manila: Since he took office last June, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has sought to revive his country’s relationship with the U.S. after it deteriorated under Rodrigo Duterte. Officials have started building contingency plans for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Here is a brief history of the U.S. military alliance with the Philippines.China reacts: A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry accused the U.S. of threatening regional peace and stability with its announcement. She said countries in the region should “avoid being coerced and used by the United States.”A battle for influence: China and the U.S. are wooing Indonesia. Its strategic location, with about 17,000 islands straddling thousands of miles of vital sea lane, is a defensive necessity as both sides gear up for a possible conflict over Taiwan.Stalingrad, a turning point in World War II, has become a Russian symbol of wartime heroism.Dmitry Lobakin/SputnikPutin evokes StalingradIn a speech delivered in Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad, President Vladimir Putin compared Germany’s decision to provide Ukraine with tanks to the Soviet Union’s fight against the Nazis in World War II. He said it was “unbelievable” that Russia was “again being threatened” by German tanks.“We aren’t sending our tanks to their borders,” Putin said. “But we have the means to respond, and it won’t end with the use of armor.”The State of the WarA New Assault: Ukrainian officials have been bracing for weeks for a new Russian offensive. Now, they are warning that the campaign is underway, with the Kremlin seeking to reshape the battlefield and seize the momentum.In the East: Russian forces are ratcheting up pressure on the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, pouring in waves of fighters to break Ukraine’s resistance in a bloody campaign aimed at securing Moscow’s first significant battlefield victory in months.Mercenary Troops: Tens of thousands of Russian convicts have joined the Wagner Group to fight alongside the Kremlin’s decimated forces. Here is how they have fared.Military Aid: After weeks of tense negotiations, Germany and the United States announced they would send battle tanks to Ukraine. But the tanks alone won’t help turn the tide, and Kyiv has started to press Western officials on advanced weapons like long-range missiles and fighter jets.During the defiant speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Soviet triumph in the battle over the Nazis in Stalingrad, Putin vowed that Russia would be victorious in Ukraine. His remarks came as Ukrainian officials warned that Moscow was opening a new offensive aimed at capturing more of eastern Ukraine.On the battlefield: Hours before Putin spoke, Russian missiles hit the city of Kramatorsk, a critical base for Ukrainian military operations.Today: Top E.U. officials are in Kyiv for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. They will discuss Ukraine’s reconstruction and its candidacy for membership in the bloc.“Pathaan” stars a secular Muslim actor who plays a patriotic Indian spy, who is Muslim.Sanjay Kanojia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA hit movie overcomes politics in IndiaThe spy thriller “Pathaan” has broken a string of box office records despite efforts by right-wing Hindu nationalists to block the film.The fans who flocked to see the Bollywood-infused movie were probably not there to defy hard-right activists, analysts said. Instead, they most likely wanted to see Shah Rukh Khan, the star of the film, who at 57 toned his abs to play an action hero.Khan spent four years off screen after the Hindu nationalist government leveled drug charges against his son, which turned out to be unfounded and which many saw as an attempt to vilify him. “I think it was this thirst to watch Shah Rukh Khan on the screen again,” said Pramit Chatterjee, a film critic and writer. Here’s our review.Context: The movie’s largest political message, if it has one, is that the hero who saves India is a Muslim in a country where 200 million religious minorities are increasingly painted by right-wing Hindu groups as outsiders and threats to the nation.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificAustralia’s decision to redesign its 5-dollar note has rekindled the country’s debate about republicanism.Mick Tsikas/EPA, via ShutterstockKing Charles III will not succeed his mother on Australia’s 5-dollar bill, which will instead be redesigned to honor Indigenous people.A U.S. senator called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. Around the WorldAstiyazh Haghighi’s uncovered hair trails behind her as she dances with Amir Mohammad Ahmadi in the video.Iranian authorities sentenced a young couple to five years in prison after they posted a video of themselves dancing in the streets at the height of the protests.Two E.U. lawmakers were stripped of their immunity in connection with claims of influence-peddling involving Qatar and Morocco.A paid version of ChatGPT is coming.The Week in CultureThe Grammy Awards are on Sunday. Here’s a list of nominees.Gawker is closing — again.Yuja Wang played all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra at Carnegie Hall. That’s sort of the classical music version of climbing Mount Everest.A nonbinary Broadway performer chose to opt out of the Tony Awards rather than compete in a gendered category.As heating and electricity prices soar in Europe, museums are rethinking their conservation climate-control systems.A Morning ReadJacinda Ardern almost exclusively wore pieces by designers from New Zealand.Hannah Peters/Getty ImagesAs New Zealand’s leader, Jacinda Ardern might have been known for many things on the international stage, but her wardrobe was rarely among them.Yet she always understood that fashion was a political tool — one she wielded so easily and subtly in the service of her agenda that most people didn’t realize it was happening, our chief fashion critic writes.SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAA journalist’s death sends a chillThe journalist Martinez Zogo was found dead this month in Cameroon, his body showing signs of torture. The killing has sent shock waves through West Africa.Zogo was editor in chief of the privately owned radio broadcaster Amplitude FM, and he hosted a hugely popular daily show, Embouteillage (the French word for traffic jam), which regularly exposed corruption. In the weeks before his death, Zogo spoke openly of the death threats he’d received as a result of his investigation into embezzlement at Cameroon’s public institutions.Reporters Without Borders describes Cameroon as having one of the continent’s richest, but also most dangerous, media landscapes. In 2019, the journalist Samuel Ajiekah Abuwe, known as Wazizi, died in police custody. Zogo’s death is emblematic of shrinking press freedom across the region. In Senegal, a prominent investigative reporter, Pape Alé Niang, was released on bail this month after he staged a hunger strike to protest a weekslong detention.As The Times’s West Africa correspondent, Elian Peltier, warns, “Intimidation, detention, deaths, as alarming and important as they are, also hide more structural issues for the press in many West and Central African countries.” Chief among those is a lack of funding and political will to protect reporters. — Lynsey Chutel, Briefings writer based in Johannesburg.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookArmando Rafael for The New York TimesThese meatballs can be paired with Italian, Mexican or Middle Eastern flavors; their versatility is limitless.What to WatchThe French drama “Full Time” is a portrait of modern labor, centered on a single mother who hits her breaking point.What to Listen toTake a spin through contemporary jazz.Where to GoNew businesses that opened during the pandemic have added flair and fun to Bangkok, an already flamboyant city.MindfulnessStuck in a mental loop of worries that seem to have no end? Here’s what you can do.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Do agricultural work (Four letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. Have a lovely weekend! — AmeliaP.S. Jason Bailey, who writes about film and TV, watched 651 movies last year. He wrote about picking the best ones.“The Daily” is about Democratic primaries in the U.S.We welcome your thoughts and suggestions about this newsletter. You can reach us at [email protected]. More

More from our inbox:‘The Carnage Must Be Stopped’Trump, Still FormidableThe Danger of Anti-Boycott BillsLiving Without Plastic Marta Lavandier/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Under Pressure, Board Revises A.P. African American Course” (front page, Feb. 2):It is, of course, sadly ironic that your article about the stripped-down African American course curriculum ran online on the first day of Black History Month.Either Gov. Ron DeSantis genuinely believes that critical thinking, a foundational understanding of how the United States came to be, and the reading of books that deepen kids’ sympathy for other kids will actually mess kids up, or he’s just pandering to the masses.Whether the governor likes it or not, our country’s history, like that of all empires, isn’t wholly pretty. Is it upsetting to learn that the land you live on was taken brutally from its original occupants and that the house you live in was bought with a loan that was denied to another person because of the color of his skin? I would hope so.But the purpose of teaching kids their country’s history isn’t to make them feel bad about themselves personally. If a kid, any kid, comes away from a classroom feeling lousy about themselves, that’s just poor teaching. They should, though, understand that not everyone has had those advantages, be grateful for their good fortune and work to make sure everyone else’s path is equally opportune.Teachers have a tough enough time helping children become empathetic and engaged citizens with the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in the global community without becoming shuttlecocks in a soulless game of political and cultural badminton.Kevin BarrBethesda, Md.The writer was an English teacher and administrator for over 40 years at Georgetown Day School in Washington.To the Editor:I’m a current high school junior who has taken a number of Advanced Placement courses. The College Board is absolutely spineless for bending to demands from the likes of Gov. Ron DeSantis. As much as he — or anyone else for that matter — might not like the Black Lives Matter movement, there is no way to neglect it in a course that studies the contemporary history and culture of African American people.And, of course, being presented with information doesn’t mean that it will be “indoctrination.”The blatant erasure of Black, queer and feminist scholars from the course is egregious. Nobody deserves to have their experience or perspective left out.At the center of this debate is the student’s right to learn, and I believe that the student’s right to learn trumps all. History isn’t meant to be watered down.Charles YaleOmahaTo the Editor:Gov. Ron DeSantis revealed one of the reasons for his rejection of the A.P. Black history course. “This course on Black history,” he said during a press conference. “What’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory?”Who would say that? How about the lesbian poet Audre Lorde? The author James Baldwin? The trans activist Marsha P. Johnson? Barbara Jordan, Bayard Rustin, Alvin Ailey and countless others?These layers of disenfranchisement have a detrimental effect on health equity, justice and more.Donna L. TapelliniLambertville, N.J.‘The Carnage Must Be Stopped’ Pool photo by Andrew NellesTo the Editor:As a Black man and a retired police officer, I have been crying quite a bit lately. Crying from a deep sense of outrage, grief, shame and fear.Outrage, because yet another unarmed Black man has been brutally killed by police officers. In communities of color throughout the United States, police use of deadly force and acts of misconduct and abuse have seemingly grown to epidemic proportions. People of color may now feel victimized by the very people who are supposed to protect them, worrying that they will become one of the ever-growing statistics.Grief, because of the pain that I know Tyre Nichols’s family and friends must now be going through.Shame, because the officers who killed Tyre looked exactly like me. They swore the same oaths that I did to protect and serve the community. They debased and dishonored the badge that they carried.But most of all, fear, because I worry that my grandsons, great-grandsons and sons-in-law may one day become victims of this insanity. I can only pray that they will remember the things I have taught them about how to survive a police encounter, and that they are able to live to fight another day.I know in my heart that Tyre Nichols will not be the last death of a Black man at the hands of police this year.There must be change. There must be accountability. The carnage must be stopped.Charles P. WilsonBeltsville, Md.The writer is webmaster and immediate past chairman of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers.Trump, Still Formidable Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Trump in ’24? G.O.P. Leaders Aren’t So Sure” (front page, Jan. 27):Lately there have been many reports of Donald Trump’s imminent political demise, but despite the predictions he remains a dangerous opponent and a formidable campaigner.His power has always come not from politicians but from ordinary people who see him as a bigger, more successful version of themselves. However inarticulate he sounds to the rest of us, the message his base hears is always clear.Many of his handpicked candidates lost in 2022 because of their own failings; his appeal to the MAGA base appears undimmed.He is a fighter, with the constitution and mentality of an alligator, striking back ferociously when attacked. He has no regard for the truth, but he has realized that millions of voters don’t either.Certainly none of the sorry bunch of Republicans mentioned in your article have anything like his power on the campaign trail.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass.The Danger of Anti-Boycott Bills Robert NeubeckerTo the Editor:Re “Politicians Push Back on Having E.S.G. Funds,” by Ron Lieber (“Your Money,” Jan. 30):The fight between red states and the asset manager BlackRock is a symptom of a much larger danger facing American democracy today: the attempt by state legislators to take away the right to boycott as a tool for social and political change.The first anti-boycott bill introduced in 2015 to punish Americans boycotting Israel has since been passed in 28 other states. Starting in 2021, Republicans used it as a template to punish companies engaged in environmental, social and governance investing in several states, leading to the current face-off with BlackRock in Texas.Bills introduced earlier this year in South Carolina, Iowa and Missouri follow the same template as the original anti-boycott law punishing boycotts of Israel, but expand the target to punish state contractors that may be engaged in boycotts of companies that do not offer reproductive health care or gender-affirming care and companies that do not meet workplace diversity criteria.From civil rights leaders to farm workers and anti-apartheid activists, Americans have relied on boycotts throughout the country’s history. We are currently at a crossroads where such a crucial tool may no longer be available for future generations.Julia BachaNew YorkThe writer is a filmmaker and director of “Boycott.”Living Without PlasticMust avoid: All of these items, which are part of the reporter’s everyday life, contain plastic.Photographs by Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Plastic Surgery: No Phone, No Credit Cards, No Bed” (Sunday Styles, Jan. 15):I enjoyed reading your report about living without plastic for 24 hours after taking out my home-delivered Times from its plastic wrapper.David ElsilaGrosse Pointe Park, Mich. More

The former president faces several potential Republican challengers in his bid for the White House.  Donald J. Trump refused to say he would support the next Republican presidential nominee if it was not him, exposing a potential quagmire along the party’s path toward reclaiming the White House in 2024 and showcasing, once again, the former president’s transactional spin on political loyalty.In a radio interview on Thursday, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump if he would support “whoever” wins the party’s nomination next year. Mr. Trump announced his third presidential campaign in November and faces a number of potential Republican challengers.“It would depend,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”The hesitation from Mr. Trump differed from many of the Republican Party’s top officials and most prominent activists. Several of Mr. Trump’s critics inside the party, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have repeatedly said they planned to back the G.O.P. nominee, even if that person is not their top choice.William P. Barr, who served as attorney general during the Trump administration, called Mr. Trump’s tactics “extortion” in an interview last August with Bari Weiss, a political writer and commentator. “What other great leader has done this? Telling the party, ‘If it’s not me, I’m going to ruin your election chances by telling my base to sit home. And I’ll sabotage whoever you nominate other than me.’ It shows what he’s all about,” Mr. Barr said. “He’s all about himself.”Minutes before Mr. Trump’s interview on Thursday, Larry Hogan, a Republican who is the former Maryland governor and a consistent Trump antagonist, said on the same radio program that he would back the Republican nominee.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.G.O.P. Field: Nikki Haley is expected to join the contest for the Republican Party’s nomination soon, but other contenders are taking a wait-and-see approach before challenging former President Donald J. Trump.Trump’s Slow Start: In the first weeks of his third presidential campaign, Mr. Trump notched a less-than-stellar fund-raising haul, yet another signal that his hold on some conservatives may be loosening.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: A plan spearheaded by President Biden could lead to a major overhaul of the party’s primary process by making South Carolina — instead of Iowa — the first nominating state.A Looming Issue: As Mr. Biden sharpens his economic message ahead of a likely re-election bid, the case over his handling of classified documents has thrust him into an uncomfortable position.“I imagine that will be the case,” Mr. Hogan said when asked if he would “support whoever the nominee of the Republican Party is in 2024.”Mr. Hewitt pressed the former governor on whether he would even back Mr. Trump’s nomination.“I just don’t think he’s going to be the nominee, but I’ll support the nominee,” Mr. Hogan said.The frequent explanation for partisan loyalty like Mr. Hogan’s is that winning a national election in a country increasingly divided between Republicans and Democrats is nearly impossible without a completely unified party. In 2020, for example, about 9 percent of Republicans voted for someone other than Mr. Trump, compared with just 3 percent of Democrats who voted for someone other than their nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to AP VoteCast, a study of the 2020 electorate conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.This week, a poll from The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump website, found that most Republicans wanted someone other than Mr. Trump to be the party’s next presidential nominee. But that same poll showed that 28 percent of Republican voters would be willing to back Mr. Trump in an independent bid.An independent campaign from Mr. Trump would splinter the Republican base and all but ensure another four years for Democrats in the White House. Mr. Trump, who has been registered in the past as a Democrat and a Republican, considered running for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination in 2000.Mr. Trump has long viewed politics through a personal lens, equating disagreements with his policies and tactics to a lack of allegiance to conservatism as a whole. One of the former president’s favored put-downs of opponents inside his party is to dismiss them as “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only.Even loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal brand of Republicanism has often not been enough to avoid being crushed by the former president’s dominating style of politics.In primaries last year, Mr. Trump refused to back campaigns for numerous longtime supporters and former officials in his administration — including Lou Barletta’s campaign for governor of Pennsylvania — over candidates who appeared more likely to win.Mr. Barletta, a former congressman, was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress in 2016, but the former president instead endorsed State Senator Doug Mastriano. Mr. Mastriano was leading in the primary polls but lost in the general election to the Democrat, Josh Shapiro, by double digits.In the 2016 race, Mr. Trump was also initially unwilling to say whether he would back the eventual Republican nominee, a source of deep alarm to party leaders and officials. During a Republican debate in August 2015, Mr. Trump was the only one of 10 candidates onstage who refused to pledge support to the eventual nominee — and the only one not to rule out a third-party bid.At the time, Mr. Trump said his decision would depend on how the Republican Party treated him.A month later, he declared he was being treated fairly by the party, and signed a pledge to support the eventual nominee during a private meeting at his Trump Tower office with Reince Priebus, who, at the time, was chairman of the Republican National Committee.Mr. Trump then hosted a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower. Mr. Priebus did not attend, despite Mr. Trump’s insistence.Maggie Haberman More

Male politicians who are parents of young children wearing their fatherhood on their sleeves and their babies on their chests.Several members of Congress, mostly men, held a news conference outside the Capitol last week — a typical sight in Washington. But these men were not just any men: They were dads — men who serve in the U.S. House of Representatives while also raising children. (If “father” is a catchall, “dad” seems to connote a father of young children, too busy even to expend an extra syllable.) The dads were announcing the Congressional Dads Caucus, a group of 20 Democrats aiming to push policies like paid family and medical leave and an expanded child tax credit. Spearheaded by Representative Jimmy Gomez, Democrat of California, who gained attention last month when he voted against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House with his son Hodge, then 4 months, strapped to his chest, the caucus also hopes to speak for a demographic that, in the halls of power, is well represented yet historically has not cast itself as an identity bloc.But times are changing. Fathers in heterosexual partnerships in the United States increasingly wish to split child rearing equitably. (Or, at least, to talk about splitting it: The data shows women still do significantly more. And there is evidence that fathers do more than they used to, but less than they say they do.) Some men, being men, have even managed to turn the dirty work of parenting into an implicit competition: Witness the peacocking dad — catch him in his natural habitat, his own Instagram grid — with a kid on his shoulders and a Boogie Wipes packet in his rear pocket, claiming the duty of caretaking but also its glory.This trend, perhaps most visible in the upscale and progressive milieu that dominates blue states, has flowed into politics. Democrats have pushed to make family leave available to all genders. Pete Buttigieg, a rising star, took several weeks’ parental leave in 2021 from his job as U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Politicians wear their fatherhood on their sleeves and their babies on their chests.“Family leave and affordable child care until very recently were considered women’s issues — ‘the moms are mad about this,’” said Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a parenting columnist for The Cut who wrote her doctoral dissertation on mom influencers. “It’s becoming a family issue, a dad issue. It feels significant.”But a curious lag has opened between societal hopes for dads and baseline expectations. Dads who assume their proper share of parenting and homemaking, according to this emerging worldview, should not accrue psychic bonus points anymore. However, they still do. In 2023, a father feeding his child in the park or touring a prospective school is admired and complimented to a degree a mother is not.“When the dads do or say something, they get the kind of attention I wish we would,” said Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, the only woman who is a member of the Dads Caucus — and a mother of two boys, 17 and 11.Spearheaded by Mr. Gomez, the Congressional Dads Caucus is a group of 20 Democrats aiming to push policies like paid family and medical leave and an expanded child tax credit.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesMs. Tlaib credited Mr. Gomez for pointing out this double standard at last week’s news conference. “He acknowledged that people were like, ‘Wow, this is so great,’” Ms. Tlaib said. “And it’s like, ‘What are you talking about? A lot of us moms have done this.’”For dads, the present state of affairs can be pretty sweet. Who doesn’t want to do 40 percent of the work for 80 percent of the credit? (Especially when it’s good politics.) But being a good ally may mean flaunting fatherhood and exploiting the ease with which fathers can draw attention to parents’ issues while not making it all about them, as men have occasionally been known to do.Because the attention is part of the point. “We know dads exist, but they can bring a spotlight to this issue,” said Gayle Kaufman, a professor of sociology at Davidson College and the author of “Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century.” “Just being realistic, when men think it’s important, it’s likely to get more attention.”One caucus member, Andy Kim of New Jersey, said that part of the caucus’s project was to shift the automatic association of family concerns away from being “mom” problems. He recalled someone asking his wife if she wished to be a stay-at-home mother, when it was in fact he who used comp time and then left his job at the State Department in order to care for their first of two sons, who are now 7 and 5. “She said, ‘You should talk to my husband,’” he said. The Dads Caucus’s inciting incident illustrated how novel it felt to see a dad dadding hard in Washington. Like many Congressional mothers and fathers, Mr. Gomez brought his family to Washington for his swearing-in ceremony, which typically would have followed a pro forma vote for the House Speaker. But this year, the body required an extraordinary 15 ballots over five days to select Mr. McCarthy. Families stayed in town; babies fussed.During an early voting round, Mr. Gomez and his wife, Mary Hodge (for whom Hodge Gomez is named — Ms. Hodge rejected a hyphenated last name, Mr. Gomez said), decided in the Democratic cloakroom to strap Hodge into a chest carrier to calm him. Which is how the 48-year-old congressman came to stride the House floor and cast his vote, as he put it then, “on behalf of my son, Hodge, and all the working families,” while Hodge politely squirmed and received a coochie-coo tickle from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ms. Hodge, who is the deputy mayor of city services in Los Angeles, returned to the West Coast before the voting marathon was complete. Hodge stayed with Mr. Gomez, who tweeted myriad baby shots. Mr. Gomez said in an interview that a mother in the identical situation likely would not have received such glowing coverage, like a “CBS Weekend News” feature with the caption “Congressman Pulls Double Duty.”“The praise I was getting for doing what any mother would do was out of proportion,” he said, adding, “if a woman did that, people would question her commitment to her job.”Mr. Gomez said the caucus had been formed with only Democrats in order to get it off the ground, given the disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over many economic family policies (to say nothing of related ones like abortion).Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who studies family economics, said some Republicans — he cited Senators Mitt Romney and J.D. Vance, among others — might co-sign some Democratic economic proposals for families. “There’s a growing recognition that not all the pressures facing families are cultural in nature,” Mr. Brown said. “It’s not all Hollywood elites making family life harder, it’s the pressures of the modern economy. If you’re concerned about people getting married later or not having kids, you need to orient policy in a more pro-family direction.”The caucus has already called for expanding child care access and universal family medical leave. But its most immediate achievement may be its members’ open reckoning with how prevailing conversations about care-taking shortchange everyone. Mothers are often ignored for what they do and made to feel guilt‌y for what they don’t. Fathers are frustrated by the limited public imagination for what they can do and evince a palpable, wistful anxiety of influence when speaking about motherhood. (“We talk about our kids like any moms do,” said Dan Goldman, a Caucus member and father of five who was elected to Congress from the Brooklyn district that includes the dad stronghold Park Slope.)Last year, before founding the Dads Caucus, Mr. Gomez went so far as to join the Congressional Mamas Caucus. “I had always advocated for all these issues,” he said.Because yes, of course, the Mamas Caucus — founded by Ms. Tlaib to push for many of the same policies the Dads Caucus backs — predates the Dads Caucus by several months.No matter: Ms. Tlaib was equanimous.“If it took Jimmy Gomez starting a Dads Caucus to get The New York Times to call me to talk about the Mamas Caucus,” she said, “then I’m all in.” 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.Late on the first Sunday of 2021, news broke of President Donald J. Trump’s call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to help contest the 2020 election. The next morning — Monday, Jan. 4 — was Fani Willis’s first day in the office as the district attorney for Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, as well as suburbs like Sandy Springs, East Point and Alpharetta. “Not the second day,” she told me when I met with her in November. “My very first day in this office — in that conference room, it’s all over the TV.” She found herself hoping that the secretary of state might have been “in another county when it happened,” she said, laughing darkly. He was not. And so, Willis said, “I’m stuck with it.”Outside Atlanta, Willis is now best known for this singular potential criminal target. Trump’s efforts to interfere in the outcome of the election in Georgia, in both phone calls to local officials and, potentially, as part of a scheme to organize alternate electors, have been under investigation by Willis’s office since February 2021. The Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone have testified before a special grand jury; so have former Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Raffensperger himself. In January, the special grand jury completed its investigatory work, submitting a report to Willis’s office and to a Superior Court judge, based on which Willis may or may not send evidence to a regular grand jury to seek criminal charges against Trump or his allies. If she does, there is every indication that she might bring one of her favorite prosecutorial tools to bear: racketeering charges, as laid out in the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, more famously used to prosecute the Mafia and criminal street gangs.Trump has attacked Willis on his Truth Social platform as a “young, ambitious, Radical Left Democrat ‘Prosecutor’ from Georgia, who is presiding over one of the most Crime Ridden and Corrupt places in the USA.” For a national audience not paying close attention to Atlanta politics, this claim might not sound fantastical. Willis, 51, is a Democrat and the first Black woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney — the first woman, period — and her victory in 2020 came amid a wave of reform-minded progressive prosecutors’ winning seats: George Gascón in Los Angeles, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.Willis (center) with her team in 2022 during proceedings to seat a special-purpose grand jury in Fulton County to look into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.Ben Gray/Associated PressBut it was evident from the outset that Willis would represent something quite different. In July 2021, six months into her tenure, she appeared before the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, which holds bimonthly public meetings in an assembly hall in downtown Atlanta, to request additional personnel. By the time she spoke, the session had already stretched over eight hours, including several public comments questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. She was joined by Fulton County’s Sheriff Patrick Labat, who wore a tactical vest that made him look as if he’d arrived straight from a hostage situation. Willis had dressed more business casual — a black V-neck blouse with bell sleeves, her hair braided and pulled back — but it immediately became clear who would be taking charge.“We have a public-safety crisis going on,” Willis began, coolly scanning her audience. Crime was rising, she said. Because of court backlogs and mismanagement by her predecessor, she argued, more dangerous individuals would end up on the streets unless she could hire more staff. Crime, she warned the commissioners, would be the primary issue in upcoming local elections. “None of your constituents is safe,” she thundered, sounding like a prosecutor facing another jury. “Not yours, Mr. Pitts — Chairman Pitts. Not yours, Commissioner Hall. Not yours, Commissioner Ellis.”Her slides piled up dire statistics: rapes up 86 percent from the previous summer, murders up 25 percent, more than 1,400 unindicted suspects who could soon be bonded out of jail. “So maybe you’re thinking, Well, this ain’t really my issue, not in my district,” she said. “But no! The murders are occurring eve-ry-where.” Photographs of victims flashed on the screen. A woman killed in April in District 1. “This young lady, she was in her 70s. My mama would say that’s young. Her tenant bludgeoned her to death.” A man killed in District 3. “He’s a high exec at U.P.S. After a hard workweek, he went to have a drink. I think that’s his right. He walked up and became a victim to gang violence. He’s dead. I’m the one who talks to his mama. Next slide.” A little girl in District 3. “Her and her mama and auntie shopping at Christmas. Anyone here don’t go to the mall around Christmas? How about dead?” A Tony Award-nominated actor in District 4. “Gets in a verbal dispute, is followed home and shot in the back multiple times. Your district.”And so it went, a virtuoso performance that had Sheriff Labat praising her, before his own remarks, as “the baddest D.A. in the country” and the commissioners offering full-throated, even profane support for her efforts. “[Expletive] the lowest millage rate!” shouted Marvin Arrington Jr., District 5’s commissioner, referring to the local tax burden. “We got to get these people locked up!” That September, the commission voted to appropriate an additional $5 million for Willis’s office.Willis has described a number of her initiatives as D.A. as progressive, including a pretrial diversion program in which individuals accused of certain crimes can avoid being indicted by agreeing to restitution and community service. But her overriding focus has been public safety, and on that front she has been an unapologetic doomsayer, employing rhetoric on violence and gang activity that can leave her sounding, at times, as if she shares Trump’s dim assessment of local crime levels. Gangs, Willis claimed at a news conference last May, “are committing, conservatively, 75 to 80 percent of all the violent crime that we are seeing within our community. And so they have to be rooted out of our community.”To that end, she quickly moved to expand her office’s gang unit. She has also pushed the Atlanta Police Department to seek more gang warrants and personally lobbied for the Safe and Secure Georgia Act, an attempt to make the state’s already-tough gang laws even tougher, imposing mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders and increasing the power of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Willis suggested the name for the bill, which died in the statehouse; when a reporter from the Atlanta NBC affiliate pointed out during an interview that all 25 of its initial sponsors were Republicans, Willis responded that she was “happy to work with anyone who wants to help me in this fight against gang violence and crime.”The election special grand jury inquiry is far from the only case helmed by Willis to make national news — or to open her up to criticism. In 2014, she was lead prosecutor on an infamous RICO case involving 35 teachers, principals and other educators in the Atlanta public-school system, who were accused of changing students’ answers on standardized tests for financial gain, a prosecution many observers found excessive. And since she took office, her crackdown on gangs has brought her in direct conflict with one of Atlanta’s biggest cultural exports, hip-hop music, in another series of cases that have drawn fire for potential overreach. There was a sweeping 105-count RICO indictment against 12 supposed members of various sets of the Bloods, including the Billboard-charting rapper YFN Lucci; later came gang charges and an indictment under RICO against the acclaimed artist Young Thug and 27 supposed associates (including another wildly popular rapper, Gunna), with members of the group accused of involvement in murder, armed robbery, drug dealing and witness intimidation. At a news conference in August, Willis announced the indictment of 26 supposed members of the Drug Rich gang, who were accused of attempted murder, armed robbery and a series of home invasions and burglaries targeting celebrities including Mariah Carey and the N.F.L. wide receiver Calvin Ridley. “We have a message,” she told the assembled reporters: “Get out of this county or expect to start seeing sentences that go life-plus, because I am not going to negotiate with gang members.”‘We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them.’When I visited her office late last year, Willis sat behind a large desk and indicated that I should take a seat on a couch about 10 feet away. Jeff DiSantis, her media-relations chief, sat in a corner, wearing cowboy boots and rarely glancing up from his laptop. Gov. Brian Kemp had just testified before the special grand jury that morning; if not for the rain, he might have walked over from his office in the Capitol building, only blocks away. Everyone I spoke with in Willis’s office referred to her as Madam D.A., and she faced me with her arms crossed and an apprising formality, the sort of person more used to asking the questions than answering them.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

Nikki Haley is expected to join the 2024 race this month, but other G.O.P. contenders are taking a wait-and-see approach. Some anti-Trump Republicans worry that too much dithering could be costly.Increased uncertainty is rippling through the Republican Party over how to beat Donald J. Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination, as an array of the party’s top figures move slowly toward challenging the politically wounded yet resilient former president.Contenders have so far been unwilling to officially jump into the race, wary of becoming a sacrificial lamb on Mr. Trump’s altar of devastating nicknames and eternal fury. Some are waiting to see if prosecutors in Georgia or New York will do the heavy lifting for them and charge Mr. Trump with crimes related to his election meddling after the 2020 contest or hush-money payments to a porn star during the 2016 campaign. And the sitting governors weighing a 2024 campaign, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, are vying to score legislative victories they can use to introduce themselves to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.The first entrant against Mr. Trump might be former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who served as United Nations ambassador under the former president and is set to announce her candidacy on Feb. 15, according to a person familiar with the plans. And this week, former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland said for the first time that he was “actively and seriously considering” running.But other potential challengers have more quietly wavered over when, where and how to unleash attacks on Mr. Trump’s candidacy, and to begin their own, after a midterm election in which his endorsements failed to usher in the red wave Republicans had expected. Republicans who hope to stop him worry that dithering by possible candidates could only strengthen Mr. Trump’s position — and could even lead to a field that is far smaller and weaker than many in the political world have anticipated.“There’s a non-Trump lane right now that’s as wide as the Trump lane, and there’s no one in that lane,” Mr. Hogan said in an interview.The lack of activity has included major Republican donors, a number of whom have moved away from Mr. Trump but, with few exceptions, are keeping their options open.But a flood of candidates into the race could also help Mr. Trump. Some Republicans fear a repeat of the primary campaign in 2016, when a cluttered field allowed Mr. Trump to win with roughly 25 percent of support in several contests, a possibility that his advisers are hoping for if he faces a particularly strong challenge from any one person.The case would-be challengers and their aides make behind the scenes is not that Mr. Trump’s policies were wrong, but that he would lose a rematch with President Biden, who won in 2020 in large part by presenting himself as an antidote to Mr. Trump.Republicans last week re-elected Ronna McDaniel, left, as the chair of the Republican National Committee. Many rank-and-file members do not support a third Trump campaign.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAmong those who have expressed concern is Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican House speaker, who has called Mr. Trump a “proven loser.” In private conversations, Mr. Ryan has told people that donors and other Republicans need to find ways to ensure that there are not too many candidates splitting the vote against Mr. Trump. But what exact approach they might take is unclear, as is which would-be challengers would be receptive to it.Mr. Trump has shown signs of both weakness and durability. His fund-raising haul in the first weeks of his campaign was comparatively thin, and members of the Republican National Committee, long a bastion of pro-Trump sentiment, are not eager to back a third Trump campaign. A survey this week by The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump website, and the Republican pollster Whit Ayres found that most likely G.O.P. voters wanted someone other than Mr. Trump to be the party’s 2024 presidential nominee.Gov. Ron DeSantis and His AdministrationReshaping Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has turned the swing state into a right-wing laboratory by leaning into cultural battles.Education: Mr. DeSantis, an increasingly vocal culture warrior, is taking an aggressive swing at the education establishment, announcing a proposed overhaul of the state’s higher education system.2024 Speculation: Mr. DeSantis opened his second term as Florida’s governor with a speech that subtly signaled his long-rumored ambitions for the White House.Prosecutor Ousting: A federal judge ruled that the governor violated state law when he removed Tampa’s top prosecutor, but that the court lacked the authority to reinstate him.Yet other recent polls suggest that he remains the Republican front-runner. And the Bulwark survey also found that a staggering 28 percent of G.O.P. voters would be willing to back Mr. Trump in an independent bid, a figure that would all but ensure another four years for Democrats in the White House.“I think there are a lot of things that are still uncertain” about the 2024 primary race, said former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.The clearest example of the mixed Republican situation is Ms. Haley, who has long been seen as a potential presidential candidate. She had made contradictory statements about whether she would challenge Mr. Trump, saying in 2021 that she would not do so. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump posted on his social media site a video of Ms. Haley making that remark, with the taunt that she had to “follow her heart, not her honor.”Ms. Haley’s expected entrance to the race this month would give Mr. Trump a challenger in the form of a popular former governor from what has historically been the first Southern state to vote in the primary cycle — and a state Mr. Trump won decisively in the 2016 primary.“I think she could be generational change, and I see that’s the lane Nikki’s got a shot at,” said Katon Dawson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party who is supporting Ms. Haley.So far, Ms. Haley appears to be treading gingerly around Mr. Trump. He revealed to reporters over the weekend that she had reached out to him to let him know that she might run — and instead of sounding angry, he sounded almost delighted at the prospect of having a direct target, and a more crowded field.Former Vice President Mike Pence is not expected to announce a campaign decision until later in the year.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesOthers considering a campaign include former Vice President Mike Pence, who has expressed disapproval of Mr. Trump’s efforts to use him to overturn the 2020 election while avoiding most criticism of his onetime ally. Mr. Pence has been building a campaign apparatus, including poaching a staff member from Ms. Haley, but he is not expected to make a final decision on running until later this year.Another potential Trump rival, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has avoided going directly after his former boss. He has set his sights lower, using his recent book to attack Ms. Haley and John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser under Mr. Trump who is also considering a candidacy.The person Mr. Trump is most acutely concerned about is Mr. DeSantis, whose advisers in Tallahassee are planning for the state’s coming legislative session with an eye on a potential presidential bid.The Florida governor, who has a book set to be published this month, has been promoting policies that could translate into applause lines for the Republican primary base, including a proposed “anti-woke” overhaul of the state’s education system and a potential new law letting residents carry firearms without a permit. One change that Mr. DeSantis would almost certainly need from a friendly Republican supermajority in the Legislature: loosening a state law that requires state elected officials in Florida to resign before running for federal office.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expected to challenge Mr. Trump, and he is said to be the candidate who most concerns the former president.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesYet while Mr. DeSantis has attracted interest in early primary states, he has a small, insular team, which has concerned some donors and activists. And his lack of a presence in those states has led to questions among activists in places like Iowa and South Carolina about whether he risks squandering a chance to consolidate support if he waits past spring.Mr. Ayres, the Republican pollster, said that “there’s no question there’s an opening” to run against Mr. Trump.“In a multicandidate field, he has a lock somewhere around 28 to 30 percent, and that is a very significant portion of the party,” Mr. Ayres said. “And they are very, very committed to him. But if he doesn’t get more than that, in a narrowing field or a small field, he’s going to have a hard time winning the nomination.”Senator Tim Scott, one of the party’s most prominent Black politicians, is another South Carolinian considering a campaign. He has proved to be one of the most prodigious Republican fund-raisers, collecting $51 million for his re-election campaign last year.Mr. Scott also laid the groundwork for a national campaign by spending $21 million helping elect Republicans in the 2022 midterms. He endorsed 77 candidates last year and participated in 67 campaign events in 21 states, an adviser said.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will give speeches soon in Iowa, a traditional early-contest state.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThis month, Mr. Scott will travel to Iowa, where he will speak at a fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Polk County, and he is beginning a “Faith in America” listening tour, including speeches in his home state and Iowa.Some prospective candidates have taken on Mr. Trump more directly. Former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lost her primary for re-election after helping lead the House committee investigating the former president’s role in the Capitol riot, is said to be considering a campaign, as well as possibly writing a book. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has been one of the most vocal Republicans in calling for the party to find a new leader.And Mr. Hogan has spent the two weeks since he left office speaking with political advisers and donors about running for president. In an interview on Wednesday, he cast the field as one Trump-aligned figure after another aiming to lead a party he said must move beyond the former president in order to win the general election.“Maybe a crowded field is good, with Trump and DeSantis fighting with each other and with six or eight other Trump people,” Mr. Hogan said. “It might create more of an opportunity for somebody like me.”Mr. Hogan is not the only Republican without clear Trump ties, however.Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has done little to burnish his national profile or prepare for a presidential bid since the midterm elections, when he was a rare Republican welcomed as a surrogate by both moderates and the party’s far right. Back then, he told some Republican allies that he saw an opening if the presidential field was not especially crowded.Virginia’s legislative session, which runs through the end of February, gives Mr. Youngkin — as it does Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — a reason to put off moving forward with presidential planning. More

Over the past four decades, the percentage of white Democrats who identify themselves as liberal has more than doubled, growing at a much faster pace than Black or Hispanic Democrats.In 1984, according to American National Election Studies data, 29.8 percent of white Democrats identified as liberal; by 2020, that percentage grew to 68.5 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of liberals among Black Democrats grew from 19.1 percent to 27.8 percent, and among Hispanic Democrats from 18 percent to 41 percent.This shift raises once again a question that people have been asking since the advent of Reagan Democrats in the 1980s: What does it mean for a party that was once the home of the white working class to become a coalition of relatively comfortable white liberals and less well off minority constituencies?I posed this and other questions to a range of scholars and political strategists, including William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, who recently cited similar (though not identical) trends in Gallup data. In an essay last month, “The Polarization Paradox: Elected Officials and Voters Have Shifted in Opposite Directions,” Galston wrote:In 1994, White, Black and Hispanic Democrats were equally likely to think of themselves as liberal. But during the next three decades, the share of White Democrats who identify as liberal rose by 37 points, from 26 percent to 63 percent, while Black and Hispanic Democrats rose by less than half as much, to 39 percent and 41 percent, respectively.Galston argued in an email that Black Democrats have assumed an unanticipated role in the party:African Americans are now a moderating force within the party. It was no accident that they rallied around the most moderate candidate with a serious chance of winning the nomination in 2020, or that the leader of the pro-Biden forces took the lead in rejecting the “defund the police” slogan.The coalition of upper-middle-class liberals and minority voters, Galston wrote, “has been sustainable because the former believe in the active use of government to fight disadvantage of various kinds and are willing, within limits, to vote against their economic self-interest.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, wrote back by email:Underlying the liberal shift among white Democrats is their tendency to hold more liberal racial attitudes. In the Voter Study Group’s Racing Apart report, the percentage of white Democrats that hold the most liberal positions on the standard racial resentment measure has increased over the last decade to such a large extent that their racial resentment views match those of Black Democrats.The Democratic Party, Wronski continued, has becomea coalition of racial minorities (especially Blacks), and whites who are sympathetic to the inequities and challenges faced by minority groups in America. Racial identities and attitudes are the common thread that link wealthier, more educated whites with poorer minority constituencies.The Democrats’ biracial working-class coalition during the mid-20th century, in Wronski’s view, “was successful because racial issues were off the table.” Once those issues moved front and center, the coalition split: “Simply put, the parties are divided in terms of which portion of the working class they support — the white working class or the poorer minority communities.” The level of educational attainment is the line of demarcation between the two groups of white voters.By 2020, the white working class — defined by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis as “whites without four-year college degrees” — voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden 67-32, according to network exit polls. In the 2022 election, white working-class voters backed Republican House candidates by almost the identical margin, 66-32.The shift of non-college white working class support to the Republican candidates, Wronski wrote,was driven by racial group animus. Trump was particularly able to attract members of the white working class on the basis of racial (and other) group sentiments — with those disliking minority groups being uniquely attracted to Trump, in a continuation of the division of the working class along racial lines.There are those who argue, however, that the contemporary Democratic coalition is more fragile than Wronski suggests. Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, emailed to say, “If you’re a Democrat, you might worry that the coalition is not stable.”Over the long haul, Enos wrote:College-educated whites, especially those with higher incomes, are not clear coalitional partners for anyone — they don’t favor economic policies, such as increasing housing supply or even higher taxes on the rich, that are beneficial to the working class, of any race. And many college-educated whites are motivated by social issues that are also not largely supported by the working class, of any race. It’s not clear that, with their current ideological positions, socially liberal and economically centrist or rightist college-educated whites are natural coalition partners with anybody but themselves.Enos went so far as to challenge the depth of elite support for a liberal agenda:My sense is that much of the college-educated liberal political rhetoric is focused on social signaling to satisfy their own psychological needs and improve their social standing with other college educated liberals, rather than policies that would actually reduce racial gaps in economic well-being, civil rights protections, and other quality of life issues.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, is an explicit critic of the left wing of the party. “It is plain to me that the Democrats’ greatest challenge is the progressive left,” Begala wrote in an email:Pew Research shows they are the most liberal, most educated, and most white subgroup in the Democratic coalition. They constitute 12 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democrat — which means 88 percent of us are not on their ideological team.In contrast, Begala continued:Black voters are both the most loyal Democrats and the most sensible, practical, strategic, and moderate voters. This is why it was important, politically and even morally, for President Biden to move the African-American-rich South Carolina primary ahead of overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire.In the November 2021 study of the composition of the Democratic Party that Begala referred to, Pew Research reported:The Progressive Left makes up a relatively small share of the party, 12 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. However, this group is the most politically engaged segment of the coalition, extremely liberal in every policy domain and, notably, 68 percent White non-Hispanic. In contrast, the three other Democratic-oriented groups are no more than about half White non-Hispanic.This disproportionally white wing of the party, as I have previously discussed, provided crucial support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley when they ran for Congress in 2018, putting them over the top in their first primary victories over powerful Democratic incumbents.A variety of forces is straining the center-left coalition.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiries:Many White liberals live in enclaves of affluence, sheltered from the economic and personal insecurity of the low-income communities. They are more strongly motivated by identity issues around gender and race, but are less concerned with poverty or economic insecurity issues than liberals in the sixties.As a result, in Cain’s view:Parts of the Democratic coalition are talking past each other and sometimes clashing. In the case of climate change, white liberals want to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles that most low-income nonwhites cannot afford. During Covid, affluent white liberals could work at home and have food delivered to them by nonwhite workers who left the food packages at their doorstep or who had to go to work and suffer higher rates of illness.When all said and done, “White liberals are still a better deal for nonwhites than the Republican Party,” Cain contended, “but it is revealing that the African Americans in South Carolina preferred Biden to Sanders or Warren.”The liberalism of white Democrats cuts across a wide range of issues. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited data collected by the Cooperative Election Study:In 2020 white Democrats scored similarly low on racial resentment as Black Democrats. And white Democrats actually have significantly lower levels of sexism than Black or Hispanic Democrats. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party was indeed fairly divided on issues of race in particular, but that no longer seems to be the case.Now, Schaffner continued, “white Democrats appear to be the most liberal group in the party on a range of issues, including immigration, climate, crime/policing, abortion, health care, gun control and economic/social welfare.”I asked James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, how the meaning of “liberal” changed over the past 40 years. He replied:The term has become infused with racial content. That may be the key to the conversion of educated suburban voters into liberals and Democrats. Trump’s open racism must surely have added greatly to the new meaning of liberalism. Perhaps the L-word has become a way to say, “I am not a bigot.”Along similar lines, Viviana Rivera-Burgos, a political scientist at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pointed out how much the liberal agenda has transformed in a relatively short time:Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration have become important ideological cleavages in the past 40 years or so. Being a liberal today means you’re most likely pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-restrictive or punitive immigration laws. These issue positions couldn’t be inferred based on someone’s ideology alone 40 years ago.Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, argued in an email that there is a danger of overemphasizing the liberal tilt of the Democratic electorate:Although the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has grown over the past three decades, it still remains true that only about half of self-described party members identify that way — in contrast to Republican voters, about 80 percent of whom call themselves conservative. So Democrats have long had and continue to have a more ideologically diverse coalition to assemble, with nearly half of the party calling themselves moderate or conservative.Erickson did not hesitate, however, to describe the party’s educated left wing asoverrepresented in the media, on Twitter, and in positions of power. That group is loud and more culturally liberal, though they often purport to speak or act on behalf of communities of color. Meanwhile, the African American and Latino voters who deliver victories to Democratic candidates in nearly every race have remained much more ideologically mixed.“If we continue to let white liberals on Twitter define what it means to be a Democrat,” Erickson warned her fellow Democrats, “we are going to continue to alienate the voters of color who are essential majority makers in our coalition. While the Twitterati wants to ‘Defund the Police,’ communities of color want their neighborhoods to be safe — both from police violence AND violent crime.”To build her case, Erickson cited that role of minority voters in the last New York City mayoral election: “They elected Eric Adams and rejected the far-left candidates whose voting blocs were made up primarily of white liberals,” noting that “Adams outpaced Maya Wiley by 23 points with Black voters and 10 points with Hispanic voters.”In local elections in 2021, Erickson continued, Black voters “rejected a measure in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, to defund the police: According to ward-level data, the predominantly Black Wards 4 and 5 rejected the Minneapolis ballot measure by wide margins (over 60 percent voted no), while predominantly white wards drove the measure’s support.Erickson suggested that the culturally liberal tilt of the party’s left wing was a factor in declining minority support:Case in point: Democrats dropped nine percentage points with non-college voters of color between 2012 and 2020, falling from 84 percent support in 2012 to 75 percent in 2020, according to Catalist. This was most pronounced with non-college men of color who went from 81 percent Democratic in 2012 to 69 percent in 2020.These losses reflect “a divergence in priorities and values,” Erickson wrote, citing poll data showing thatwhile Democratic primary voters say hard work is no guarantee of success, Black voters disagree — saying most people can get ahead in America if they work hard, and that by a two-to-one margin, Black Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to have good morals. Democratic primary voters of all races disagree with that statement by similar margins.While the party is divided on values and priorities, Erickson pointed out that Democrats in Congress have reached general agreement on many issues that were highly divisive in the past:There is only one pro-life Democrat left in Congress, and today’s moderate Democrats are loudly supportive of reproductive rights. There are no more NRA-endorsed Democrats on the Hill, and if gun safety legislation were brought up tomorrow, every single Democrat in federal office would support it. Similarly, every Democrat not only supported the Respect for Marriage Act but would’ve likely gone further to explicitly codify marriage equality into law at the federal level.The major intraparty conflicts that remain, Erickson wrote,are concentrated around two big questions. One is a process question: Do you believe progress is achieved by incremental steps or revolutionary change? The other is a values question: do you believe that, with some basic policy reforms, our economic system can deliver a good life to those who work hard in this country, or rather that it needs to be torn down and fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up?The transition from a partisan division among white voters based on economic class to one based on level of educational attainment has had substantial consequences for the legislative priorities of the Democratic Party.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out in an email that “the class base of the parties has atrophied” with the result that “the party system in the U.S. simply does not represent that ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’ Both parties represent a mix of haves and have-nots in economic terms.”Because the Democratic Party must hold down “a coalition of upper-income whites and minority constituencies across all income groups,” Lee wrote, party leadersare likely to prioritize issues that do not pit the well-off against the poor very directly, such as the rights agenda (e.g., voting rights, abortion, gays and lesbians) and climate/environment. Democrats in government are unlikely to genuinely prioritize the economic interests of low-income and working-class voters, because those voters simply do not represent a majority of their party’s coalition.As an example, Lee wrote, “Current Democrats are much more concerned about forgiving student loans than about the majority of voters who will not or did not go to college.”What, then, is likely to happen in the Democratic ranks?The reality, as summed up by Ryan Enos, is that for all their problems,The Democrats are clearly the majority party and may be a experiencing an unparalleled period of dominance: since 1992, a period of 30 years, Republicans have only won a majority of popular presidential votes once — in 2004 and that was during the extraordinary time of two overseas wars.For the moment, the Democratic coalition — with all its built-in conflicts between a relatively affluent, well-educated, largely white wing, on the one hand, and an economically precarious, heavily minority, but to some degree ascendant electorate on the other — remains a functional political institution.“In this sense,” Enos told me, “it’s important not to overstate the damage that some perceive liberalism as having done to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes.”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

After announcing presidential runs, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush all raised more per day in their out-of-the-gates fund-raising periods.Donald J. Trump’s knack for generating millions of dollars simply by emailing or texting supporters has helped him maintain a firm grip on the Republican Party since the 2016 presidential race.But in the first weeks of his third presidential campaign, he notched a less-than-stellar fund-raising haul, yet another signal that his hold on some conservatives may be loosening.Mr. Trump’s campaign said Tuesday that he had raised $9.5 million from Nov. 15, when he announced he was running again for the White House, through the end of 2022.That amounted to an average of $201,600 a day, a fraction of the sums that established front-runners from past elections — in both parties — have collected in their opening weeks, according to federal campaign finance reports.In 2015, when former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida opened his campaign as the front-runner for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, he averaged $762,000 a day in his first weeks as a candidate. That same year, when Hillary Clinton announced her presidential bid, she averaged $594,400 a day in her first campaign finance reporting period.Steve Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said that Mr. Trump remained the party’s best fund-raiser, and he pointed to the $80 million collected last year by the former president’s Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. That total for the calendar year includes the $9.5 million that was raised for Mr. Trump’s campaign through the joint fund-raising committee.“The campaign built out a second-to-none operation both on the national level and in early states since announcing,” Mr. Cheung said. “The president will wage an aggressive and fully funded campaign to take our country back from Joe Biden and Democrats who seek to destroy our country.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.First Acts: From the symbolic to the substantive, here is a look at what nine new governors elected last year have done in their first weeks in office. A Heated Challenge: Ronna McDaniel won a fourth two-year term to lead the Republican National Committee, but the contentious race for the position exposed a party struggling to find its way amid deep discontent.Presidential Race: Interviews with more than a third of the R.N.C.’s members point to a desire for an alternative nominee to former President Donald J. Trump to emerge from a competitive primary.Rural-Urban Rivalries: The relationships between big cities and rural-dominated state legislatures have often been hostile. But a dispute in Nashville suggests the nation’s partisan divide is making things worse.The super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign, MAGA Inc., reported having $54.1 million on hand at the end of the year. The super PAC will hold its first fund-raiser of the year at the end of February at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s South Florida resort, which Mr. Trump is also expected to attend, according to two people familiar with the planning.Mr. Trump’s poor fund-raising could be tied to the curious timing of his announcement. Starting a presidential campaign just after the 2022 midterms and just ahead of the holiday season might have limited his ability to keep the attention of online donors, who have for years fueled his political operation.Russ Schriefer, a strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign — which raised an average of $633,900 a day during its first reporting period of the 2012 race — noted that previous presidential front-runners had spent months, if not years, carefully considering the timing of their announcements and ensuring that their launches would be paired with strong initial fund-raising reports. Mr. Trump’s start, by contrast, appeared more ad hoc, he said.“The rules that applied to Mitt or Hillary or Jeb just don’t seem to apply to Trump,” Mr. Schriefer said.But inopportune timing would be a peculiar explanation for an experienced candidate seeking to return to the world’s most powerful political office. The quirks of the calendar may be only part of the explanation.Mr. Trump’s standing among Republicans dipped in public opinion polls in November and December, which coincided with the opening of his campaign. He was also roundly criticized after hosting a private dinner — a week after his campaign announcement — with Kanye West, who has been denounced for making antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and prominent young white supremacist..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Trump had also failed to deliver the “red wave” that he and others had promised voters in the midterm elections. Voters rejected many of the handpicked candidates he had encouraged to promote false claims that he had won the 2020 presidential race.Mr. Trump’s political future may be complicated by several investigations into his conduct, involving events before he was a candidate in 2016 and his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power after he lost in November 2020.“It looks like the Trump money machine has gone from a Ferrari engine to a lawn mower engine,” said Mike Murphy, one of the architects of Mr. Bush’s 2016 campaign bid. “He’s still got a knuckle of support, but in every metric of support, he’s slowly and steadily declining.”The former president’s fund-raising effort could rev back up if he returned to Facebook, which his political operation has long used to solicit donations. Mr. Trump’s account, which had 34 million followers, was suspended after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, but Meta, the platform owner, said last week that it would reinstate the former president’s access.Mr. Trump raised money almost exclusively through the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. While just $3.8 million of that cash was transferred to Mr. Trump’s presidential account, Mr. Cheung, the campaign spokesman, said all of the money would support the former president’s White House bid.Mr. Trump’s campaign and joint fund-raising committee had about $6.8 million on hand to start the year, according to the federal campaign finance reports.Adav Noti, the legal director of the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, said Mr. Trump’s campaign had spearheaded a new use of joint fund-raising committees, which have previously been simply used as umbrella groups to disburse money immediately to campaigns.“The Trump campaign pioneered this use of J.F.C. as the primary spending committee for the campaigns,” Mr. Noti said.The Trump joint fund-raising committee has also transferred money to a separate committee known as Save America, which has been used to support Mr. Trump’s political activities. That committee had $18.3 million on hand at the end of the year.Mr. Trump’s campaign account paid seven companies and consultants for political help, including Jamestown Associates, his longtime ad-making firm. Compass Legal has been engaged as the campaign’s legal firm.The campaign’s payroll included 21 people, including Lynne Patton, a former Trump administration official, and Walt Nauta, the former White House Navy valet.Mr. Nauta, who also went to work for Mr. Trump after leaving the White House, is among the Trump aides of interest to the Justice Department in connection with the investigation into the storage of more than 300 classified documents, and hundreds of other presidential records, at Mar-a-Lago.The Trump campaign paid $30,000 to the firm owned by Boris Epshteyn, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump who has positioned himself as in-house counsel on some matters, and reported an additional $20,000 owed to Mr. Epshteyn’s company.And there were, as there have been with every filing since he became a candidate in 2015, payments to Mr. Trump’s clubs. That means Mr. Trump’s campaign effectively paid Mr. Trump’s clubs for meals, rent and other expenses.There was a $1,122 fee to his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., as well as $68,700 to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort and residence, for catering and rent, both apparently for Mr. Trump’s Nov. 15 kickoff. There were also two separate meal reimbursement charges of $48.44 to the club.The Save America Joint Fundraising Committee appeared to have handled the spending related to Mr. Trump’s fund-raising, including roughly $260,000 on fees to WinRed, a company that processes online donations for Republicans, and more than $1 million to the email company Open Sesame.Beth Hansen, a Republican strategist and former manager of John Kasich’s campaigns for governor of Ohio as well as president, described Mr. Trump’s fund-raising totals in an interview as “anemic” for a former president.She said the sluggish pace appeared to reflect that Mr. Trump had become less appealing to voters.“The brand that he has was so attractive to people who were sick and tired of the status quo and sick and tired of being told they’re wrong,” Ms. Hansen said. “I just don’t think we’re there anymore as a country. And he can’t move away from it — his brand is too strong.”Neil Vigdor More