Elections

ANCHORAGE — Sitting in a darkened exhibition room at the Anchorage Museum on a recent Tuesday morning, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska conceded that she might lose her campaign for a fourth full term in Congress, where she is one of a tiny and dwindling group of Republicans still willing to buck her party.“I may be the last man standing. I may not be re-elected,” she said in an interview after an event here, just days after breaking with the G.O.P. to support confirming Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee and the first Black woman to serve there. “It may be that Alaskans say, ‘Nope, we want to go with an absolute, down-the-line, always, always, 100-percent, never-question, rubber-stamp Republican.’“And if they say that that’s the way that Alaska has gone — kind of the same direction that so many other parts of the country have gone — I have to accept that,” Ms. Murkowski continued. “But I’m going to give them the option.”In a year when control of Congress is at stake and the Republican Party is dominated by the reactionary right, Ms. Murkowski is attempting something almost unheard-of: running for re-election as a proud G.O.P. moderate willing to defy party orthodoxy.For Ms. Murkowski, 64, it amounts to a high-stakes bet that voters in the famously independent state of Alaska will reward a Republican centrist at a time of extreme partisanship.She has good reasons to hope they will. Though it leans conservative, Alaska is a fiercely individualistic state where the majority of voters do not align with either major political party. And under a new set of election rules engineered by her allies, Ms. Murkowski does not have to worry about a head-to-head contest with a more conservative opponent. Instead, she will compete in an Aug. 16 primary open to candidates of any political stripe, followed by a general election in which voters will rank the top four to emerge from the primary to determine a winner.Despite her penchant for defecting from the party line, Ms. Murkowski also has powerful help from the Republican establishment; Senator Mitch McConnell’s leadership political action committee announced last week that it had reserved $7.4 million worth of advertising in Alaska to support her candidacy.So she has embarked on a re-election campaign that is also an effort to salvage a version of the Republican Party that hardly exists anymore in Congress, as seasoned pragmatists retire or are chased out by right-wing hard-liners competing to take their places.“The easy thing would have been to just say, 20 years is good and honorable in the United States Senate. It’s time to, as I always say, it’s time to get my season ski pass at Alyeska and really get my money’s worth,” Ms. Murkowski said, referring to the nearby ski resort. “But there is a different sense of obligation that I am feeling now as a lawmaker.”Still, Ms. Murkowski, the daughter of a former Alaska senator and governor, faces a tough race. Her vote last year to convict former President Donald J. Trump at his impeachment trial on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol prompted Alaska’s Republican Party to censure her and join Mr. Trump in embracing a right-wing primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka.Ms. Murkowski is the daughter of a former Alaska senator and governor.Ash Adams for The New York TimesA view of Anchorage, the biggest city in a famously independent state.Ash Adams for The New York TimesAnd while there is now no Democrat going up against Ms. Murkowski in the race, it is not clear whether she can attract enough support from liberal voters to offset the conservatives who have been alienated by her stance against Mr. Trump. Many liberals have been angered by Ms. Murkowski’s opposition to sweeping climate change policies, as well as her support in 2017 for the $1.5 trillion Republican tax law that also allowed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.So Ms. Murkowski has been reminding voters of her flair for pursuing bipartisan initiatives, such as the $1 trillion infrastructure law that is expected to send more than $1 billion to her state, and promoting her strong relationships with Democrats. At an Arctic policy event in the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, she appeared with Senator Joe Manchin III, the centrist West Virginia Democrat, who was wearing an “I’m on Team Lisa” button and proclaimed, “I’m endorsing her 1,000 percent.”All of it is fodder for her staunchest opponents. Ms. Tshibaka, a Trump-endorsed former commissioner in the Alaska Department of Administration, has worked to paint Ms. Murkowski as a liberal and to rally the state’s conservative base against her. She is trying to capitalize on longstanding antipathy for the senator on the right, which was incensed when she voted in 2017 to preserve the Affordable Care Act and by her opposition in 2018 to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation.“It’s time for a change. We feel forgotten,” Ms. Tshibaka told supporters at the opening of her Anchorage campaign office this month. “We feel unheard, and we don’t feel like these votes and decisions represent us.”Standing atop a desk, she urged them to “rank the red,” meaning to place her as their top choice without ranking any other candidate on the ballot.“We feel unheard, and we don’t feel like these votes and decisions represent us,” said Kelly Tshibaka, Ms. Murkowski’s leading challenger.Ash Adams for The New York TimesMs. Tshibaka, whose campaign did not respond to requests for an interview, told the crowd of supporters how Ms. Murkowski’s father, Frank, named his daughter to finish out his term as senator once he became governor in 2002, deriding what she called the “Murkowski monarchy.”Supporters grabbed slices of pizza and picked up bumper stickers, as well as decals that showed Ms. Murkowski embracing President Biden.“Nothing surprises me at this point. I don’t understand why she makes the decisions she makes,” said April Orth, 56, who called Ms. Murkowski’s vote to confirm Judge Jackson “an injustice to the people of the United States of America.”Ms. Tshibaka emphasized her conservative credentials and support from Mr. Trump, regaling the crowd with stories about her visit to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for a campaign event. (The February event cost her campaign $14,477.10 for facility rental and catering, according to her latest campaign filing.)Joaquita Martin, 55, a paralegal, called Mr. Trump’s support “an incredibly powerful endorsement” of Ms. Tshibaka, adding that “I identify as a conservative, and Murkowski can call herself Republican all day long, but if that’s the definition of Republican, I’m out. That’s not me.”Ms. Murkowski’s decision to seek another term did not come lightly. Ms. Murkowski famously lost her Republican primary election in 2010 to a Tea Party-backed candidate, then ran anyway as an independent and triumphed in a historic write-in campaign with a coalition of centrists and Alaska Natives.April Orth, 56, is a supporter of Ms. Tshibaka. “Nothing surprises me at this point,” she said of Ms. Murkowski. “I don’t understand why she makes the decisions she makes.”Ash Adams for The New York TimesDeventia Townsend, a registered Democrat, and his wife, Charlene. “She has so much courage,” Mr. Townsend said of the senator. “She votes from her heart.”Ash Adams for The New York TimesOf the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Mr. Trump last year, Ms. Murkowski is the only one facing voters this year. She has not shied away from that distinction; she speaks openly of her disdain for Mr. Trump and his influence on her party. She has also supported Deb Haaland, Mr. Biden’s interior secretary and the first Native American to serve in the post, and boasted of her lead role in negotiating the infrastructure law.It has made for some unpleasant moments, she and her family say.“On one hand, had she chosen not to run, I would have been completely supportive because it’s just been like, ‘Damn girl, this has been a long haul,’” said Anne Gore, Ms. Murkowski’s cousin. “But on the other hand, you’re like, ‘Oh, sweet mother of Jesus, God on a bicycle — thank God you’re running’ because, you know, we can’t lose any more moderates.”While Ms. Murkowski has never secured more than 50 percent of the vote in a general election, this year she could stand to benefit from the new election rules, which advantage candidates with the broadest appeal in a state where most voters are unaffiliated.“I don’t think it changes their behavior, but it rewards behavior that is in line with the sentiment of all Alaskans, rather than the partisan few,” said Scott Kendall, a former legal counsel to Ms. Murkowski who remains involved with a super PAC supporting her re-election and championed the new rules.Mr. Kendall said his push for the statewide changes was independent from the senator’s campaign, arguing that his goal was “treating every Alaska voter the same and giving them the same amount of power.”There is little question that it has made for a friendlier landscape for Ms. Murkowski and appeals to the middle. At least one candidate, the libertarian Sean Thorne, jumped into the race because of the potential to prevail in a broad primary.For now, Ms. Murkowski is focusing on the basic needs of her state.Earlier this month, she stood, beaming, before about 1,200 local, tribal and community leaders who had flown across the state for a symposium explaining how Alaska stood to gain from the infrastructure law, which she singled out as perhaps her proudest accomplishment.“This is going to be an Alaska that is better cared for than ever before and an Alaska with a higher quality of life, whether you’re here in Anchorage or whether you’re in a remote village,” she declared. She mingled through the buzzing crowd, introducing herself as Lisa and embracing longtime friends.Ms. Murkowski’s campaign is focusing on the basic needs of her state and trumpeting the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that was passed last year.Ash Adams for The New York TimesTribal leaders talked about how the law would give them a chance to connect communities with broadband and ensure they had clean drinking water. A Kwethluk city employee waited to give the senator a handout describing a port project, while another village official asked for help with a broken washateria, first built in 1975, that had left them without running water since Christmas. And then there were the constituents who wanted a brief word about Ms. Murkowski’s work in Washington.Deventia Townsend, 62, a retired Army veteran and registered Democrat, had come to the forum with his wife, Charlene, to see if they could get help with some home repairs. But when he saw Ms. Murkowski, he stopped her to express his gratitude for her vote for Judge Jackson.“She has so much courage,” Mr. Townsend said of the senator. “She votes from her heart.”Later, at a pizza party at a local bar to benefit her campaign, Ms. Murkowski talked to supporters about her friendship with Mr. Manchin and long-gone titans of the Senate in both parties, name-dropping former Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and quoting former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska as she recalled a bygone era when camaraderie and common purpose tempered partisanship on Capitol Hill.Perhaps her own candidacy could prove there was still hope for that kind of politics.“You’ve got to demonstrate that there are other possibilities, that there is a different reality — and maybe it won’t work,” Ms. Murkowski said in the interview. “Maybe I am just completely politically naïve, and this ship has sailed. But I won’t know unless we — unless I — stay out there and give Alaskans the opportunity to weigh in.”Kitty Bennett More

Primaries for Congress and the State Senate are likely to be delayed after New York’s highest court ruled that new districts were unconstitutional.Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a decision that many people who follow politics in New York did not expect: The state’s top court threw out the new map for congressional and State Senate districts. We’ll also look at opposition to the city’s plans for homeless shelters in Chinatown.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesNew York’s top court said Democrats had violated the State Constitution when they took it upon themselves to draw new congressional and State Senate districts, which were widely seen as likely to favor Democratic candidates. The judges ordered a court-appointed expert to prepare new maps.The ruling is expected to delay the June 28 primaries for congressional and State Senate districts until August, to allow time for new maps to be readied and for candidates to collect petitions to qualify for the ballot in the districts on those maps.But there could still be primaries in June for governor and the State Assembly because those districts were not at issue. The high court left it to a trial court judge and the state Board of Elections to figure out the details with “all due haste.”My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that Democratic leaders had counted on the Court of Appeals, with all seven judges appointed by Democratic governors, to overturn earlier decisions about the congressional and State Senate maps from a Republican judge in Steuben County and a bipartisan appeals court in Rochester. The high court instead issued a more damning verdict that is not subject to appeal.National Democrats had looked to New York to pick up as many as three new seats in the fall and offset redistricting gains by Republicans across the country. Now, with the ruling likely to eliminate the prospect of Democratic gains in New York, Republicans’ chances of retaking control of the House of Representatives appear to have increased.With Chief Judge Janet DiFiore writing the majority opinion, the court concluded that the Democrats — who control the Assembly and State Senate and adopted the maps at issue in February — had ignored a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2014 that banned partisan gerrymandering. The judges said the Democrats had designed districts “with impermissible partisan purpose.”Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said she was reviewing the decision. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Democrats in the State Senate, said they still “believe in the constitutionality” of their maps and will repeat that to the court-appointed expert assigned to draw ones.Republicans and several nonpartisan public interest groups applauded the ruling. “The will of the people prevailed over the Corrupt Albany Machine in a tremendous victory for democracy, fair elections & the Constitution!” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, an endangered Republican, wrote on Twitter. Her Staten Island-based district was among several that the Democrats’ congressional map would have made significantly bluer by adding liberal voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.WeatherEnjoy a sunny day in the high 50s with breezes that will continue into a mostly clear evening, when temps will drop to the 40s.alternate-side parkingIn effect until Monday (Eid al-Fitr).The latest New York newsMayor Eric Adams has appointed several well-respected government professionals with no known red flags. But he has also surrounded himself with friends and allies with histories that led to protests and even arrests.A former Police Department officer accused of assaulting a Washington police officer during the Capitol riot is on trial.A newly released, partially redacted 2017 letter confirmed the Yankees’ illicit use of electronic devices to decipher and share opposing teams’ signs.Chinatown fights the city’s shelter planAndrew Seng for The New York TimesThe Chinatown neighborhood in Manhattan is about to get two new homeless shelters, one of which is proposing to allow drug use. Residents are fighting the city’s plans. I asked my colleague Andy Newman, who covers homelessness and related issues, to explain.The fight over the new shelters has elevated the usual not-in-my-backyard objections. What’s fueling residents’ heightened urgency?Hardly any neighborhood in the city welcomes homeless shelters. But anti-Asian hate crimes increased by over 300 percent from 2020 to 2021, and a lot of those attacks were linked to homeless people — and a lot of people in Chinatown feel that their very right to live is under attack. One man whose children go to school in Chinatown said at a community board hearing: “We do so much for this country and the city, and our human rights, my son and daughter’s human rights, are being taken away.”You mentioned the community board, which has just voted to oppose one of the new shelters. Will that vote make a difference, or will it just add to the pressure on Mayor Eric Adams?The community board’s vote is not binding — the city does not need the community board’s support to open that shelter, on Grand Street. But the community board resolution against it, which was introduced in response to complaints from the community, is a measure of the degree of opposition. The optics are tricky for Adams. He has thrown his weight behind opening more shelters as part of his plan to convince people who live in the streets and subways to come indoors. He has also been a strong supporter of the “harm reduction” approach to the opioid crisis that this planned shelter embraces.But he is also under pressure to stop hate crimes against Asian New Yorkers, and many residents of Chinatown believe that this shelter would lead to more such crimes — even though the shelter’s supporters, and city homeless services officials, argue that the shelter will actually make the neighborhood safer by taking in people who are already homeless in the neighborhood and connecting them to mental health and substance abuse services.Jacky Wong, founder of Concerned Citizens of East Broadway, which opposes another Chinatown shelter, questions the city’s approach of opening shelters in areas with a lot of street homelessness. “People may come here just to buy drugs, and so they would be considered ‘from’ this neighborhood,” he told me. “Why not give them housing in a neighborhood where they have more positive connections?”How has Chinatown coped with what residents say was a surge in random violence and thefts that accompanied the pandemic?Every Chinese-speaking person we interviewed has either witnessed or been a victim of some kind of episode of violence, crime or disorder that they attributed to a homeless person. Senior citizens are taking self-defense courses. Doctors said they send their staff home early so that they don’t have to deal with the streets and subways after dark.The city says the new shelters are partly a response to the killing of a homeless Asian man in 2019. But plans to name one of the shelters for him have drawn opposition. Why?Many people in Chinatown feel that the city is exploiting the 2019 murder of Chuen Kwok, an 83-year-old man from Hong Kong who slept in the street in Chinatown, as a justification for forcing a shelter on a community that doesn’t want it. These planned shelters are intended for people who are street-homeless, and there is a widely held belief in Chinatown that street homelessness is primarily a problem of the non-Chinese population, notwithstanding Kwok.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

The Court of Appeals said Democrats violated the State Constitution and ignored the will of the voters. The judges ordered a court-appointed expert to draw replacements.New York’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that Democratic leaders had violated the State Constitution when they took it upon themselves to draw new congressional and State Senate districts, and ordered that a court-appointed special master draft replacement lines for this year’s critical midterm elections.In a sweeping 32-page ruling, a divided New York State Court of Appeals chided Democrats for ignoring a constitutional amendment adopted by voters in 2014 to curb political influence in the redistricting process. The amendment also created a new outside commission to guide the process.The judges additionally found that the congressional districts designed by Democrats violated an explicit state ban on partisan gerrymandering, undercutting the party’s national campaign to brand itself as the champion of voting rights.Writing for the four-judge majority, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said that Democratic lawmakers created congressional and State Senate maps in a way that was “procedurally unconstitutional,” and that the congressional map in particular was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”The ruling, which is not subject to appeal, was expected to delay the June 28 party primaries for the congressional and State Senate districts until August, to allow time for new maps to be drawn and for candidates to collect petitions to qualify for the ballot.The verdict delivered a stinging defeat to Democrats in Albany and in Washington and cast this year’s election cycle into deep uncertainty.Party leaders had been hopeful that the Court of Appeals, with all seven judges appointed by Democratic governors, would overturn earlier decisions by a Republican judge in Steuben County and a bipartisan appeals court in Rochester.Instead, the high court issued an even more damning verdict that denied the Democrat-dominated State Legislature a chance to redraw the maps itself. That task, the judges said, should be handled by a politically neutral special master, who would be overseen by a trial court.National Democrats had been counting on the New York congressional maps adopted in February to deliver as many as three new seats this fall and offset redistricting gains by Republicans across the country. Now, with Democratic gains likely to be erased or minimized in New York, Republicans are on track to make modest gains nationally, easing their path to retaking control of the House of Representatives this fall.Democrats were likewise expecting the State Senate maps they adopted in February to help safeguard the party’s supermajority in Albany.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Wednesday’s decision was a milestone in New York jurisprudence, the first time since the 1960s that the Court of Appeals has struck down district lines approved by lawmakers in their once-in-a-decade redistricting process.But the ruling is part of a growing trend across the nation in which state courts have taken up more active stances against partisan gerrymandering as federal courts have been removed from these battles by the Supreme Court.This year alone, state courts in Ohio, North Carolina, Kansas and Maryland have scrapped plans put in place by lawmakers because they ran afoul of state constitutional language outlawing partisan mapmaking, like that adopted by New York voters in 2014. The courts are widely expected to scrutinize new lines in Florida that overwhelmingly favor Republicans, as well.“States can be the laboratories of redistricting reforms,” said Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “And this just goes to show that if a state court is willing to look carefully to its constitution and laws, it will find principals that can restrict the most extreme partisan acts.”Unlike New York, though, some of those courts have indicated they will allow 2022 elections to take place on tainted maps, potentially putting Democrats at a greater disadvantage nationally.The judges in New York were silent on whether to reschedule primary elections for other contested seats — including for governor, lieutenant governor and the State Assembly — leaving it to a trial court judge, Patrick F. McAllister, and the State Board of Elections to work out the details with “all due haste.” The board said Wednesday evening that it did “not foresee” moving those contests.But the judges appeared to bless the idea of separating them, pointing out that New York has a history of holding bifurcated primaries. They were more explicit in rejecting Democrats’ plea to allow this year’s elections to proceed on tainted lines and fix them later.“We reject this invitation to subject the people of this state to an election conducted pursuant to an unconstitutional reapportionment,” Judge DiFiore wrote in the majority opinion.Justice McAllister has already appointed Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, as special master to draw the congressional and State Senate lines by late May.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said Wednesday afternoon that she was reviewing the decision. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they still “believe in the constitutionality” of their maps and plan to argue their case to the special master.Republicans and several nonpartisan public interest groups lauded the decision.“The will of the people prevailed over the Corrupt Albany Machine in a tremendous victory for democracy, fair elections & the Constitution!” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a New York City Republican, wrote on Twitter.Ms. Malliotakis’s Staten Island-based district was among several that the Democrats’ congressional map would have made more challenging for Republicans, in her case by adding liberal voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn. The map also created new Democratic pickup opportunities on the eastern end of Long Island and in Central New York, and shored up Democrat-held swing seats in the Hudson Valley, by cramming conservative voters into just a handful of districts.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

Many of the party’s voters are hungry for their candidates to go on offense against Republican cultural attacks, even if it puts them on less comfortable political terrain.If Democrats could bottle Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who gave a widely viewed speech condemning Republicans’ push to limit discussions about gender and sexuality in schools, they would do it.McMorrow’s big moment, which we wrote about on Monday, made her an instant political celebrity on the left. Her Twitter following has rocketed past 220,000. Democrats raising money for state legislative races have already found her to be a fund-raising powerhouse.McMorrow’s five minutes of fury was so effective, Democrats said, in part because it was so rare.It tapped into a frustration many Democrats feel about their party leaders’ hesitation to engage in these cultural firestorms, said Wendy Davis, a former Texas lawmaker whose filibuster of an abortion bill in 2013 made her a national political figure.‘What we’re fighting for’“There comes a point when you simply need to stand up and fight back,” Davis said.“The strategy of not meeting the right wing where they are can only take you so far,” she added. “I think people have been really hungry to see Democrats pushing back and pushing back strongly, like Mallory did.”Other Democrats are urging candidates to defend their beliefs more aggressively, rather than ignoring or deflecting Republicans’ cultural attacks by changing the subject to pocketbook issues.“Democrats are afraid to talk about why we’re fighting about what we’re fighting for,” said Tré Easton, a progressive strategist. “It was exactly the kind of values-focused rebuttal that I want every Democrat to sound like.”Finding the messageAnother lesson of McMorrow’s speech, said Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, is that voters are searching for authenticity and passion rather than lock-step ideological agreement.“Voters want candidates who talk like actual people instead of slick, poll-tested performers,” Katz said. “They like candidates who are unfiltered, not calculated and scripted. And even if they don’t always agree with you, if a candidate is direct and honest, voters tend to respect that.”Fetterman, who is leading polls ahead of the May 17 primary, is a progressive aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. His main opponent is Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist from a suburban district outside Pittsburgh. Fetterman has worked to reassure Democratic Party leaders in and outside the state that he is not too far left to win a seat that is crucial to their hopes of retaining their Senate majority.But the fault lines within the party are about how to communicate with the public just as much as they are about traditional arguments between progressives and moderates.Party strategists in Washington, led by centrist lawmakers facing tough re-election bids, have settled on a heavily poll-tested midterm message that emphasizes the major legislation Democrats have passed in Congress: the $1.9 trillion economic relief package known as the American Rescue Plan and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law.It’s an approach that leaves some Democrats wanting a little more Mallory McMorrow.“I agree that we should be making sure every single day to tell the American people what we’re doing to benefit them and their families,” Davis said, measuring her words carefully. “But we also need to fight fire with fire.”What to readNew York’s highest court ruled that Democratic leaders had violated the State Constitution when drawing new congressional and State Senate districts, ordering a court-appointed expert to draw replacements for this year’s critical midterm elections.Democratic lawmakers released a report alleging that in 2020, top Trump administration officials had awarded a $700 million pandemic relief loan to a struggling trucking company over the objections of Defense Department officials.The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is returning in person on Saturday after a two-year pandemic absence. It has some in Washington calculating the risks involved. President Biden will be there. Anthony Fauci is skipping it.pulseSeventy-three percent of college-educated women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, while 59 percent have a very unfavorable view of him.Sergio Flores/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s the gender gap, stupidIt might be the most important rift in American politics: the gender gap between the two major parties. And it’s growing larger.New public opinion research by the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington, explores just how far apart Democrats and Republicans now are on a bevy of issues, including their contrasting approaches to sex and sexuality and their spiritual practices.Driving the split, in large part, is the steady migration of college-educated women to the Democratic Party. In 1998, the study’s authors note, only 12 percent of Democrats were women with a college degree. That figure is now 28 percent — making them a dominant bloc in the party. For comparison, men without college degrees now make up 22 percent of the Republican Party, up from 17 percent in 1998.That gender gap is a quiet driver of political polarization, said Daniel Cox, the director and founder of A.E.I.’s Survey Center on American Life.He was struck by the stark differences of opinion between women with college degrees and men without them on two issues in particular: climate change and abortion.Sixty-five percent of college-educated women favor protecting the environment over faster economic growth, A.E.I. found, versus only 45 percent of men without college degrees. Seventy-two percent of college-educated women say abortion ought to be legal in most cases, while just 43 percent of men without a college education agree.The gender gap was growing well before Donald Trump, Cox said. But his election “supercharged” the political activism of millennial women in particular, he said.It was primarily college-educated women who rallied on the National Mall in 2017 to express their opposition to Trump, a Republican president swept into office by — as he put it — “the poorly educated.”College-educated women rallied to Joe Biden during the 2020 election, repelled by Trump’s brash and aggressive political style.Those feelings have only intensified. Seventy-three percent of college-educated women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, A.E.I. found, while 59 percent have a very unfavorable view of him. By contrast, 48 percent of men without college degrees view Trump unfavorably.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

Proud Boys member pleads guilty for role in US Capitol attackPlea agreement filed in federal court calls for Louis Enrique Colon to admit to a single felony charge and cooperate with prosecutors A member of the far-right Proud Boys group on Wednesday pleaded guilty to obstructing police officers when he joined the 6 January 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters of then-president Donald Trump, in their attempt to overturn his election defeat.The plea agreement filed in federal court in Washington, DC, calls for Louis Enrique Colon of Missouri to admit to a single felony charge and cooperate with prosecutors.Colon admitted to crossing police barricades during the riot before climbing a wall to gain access to a higher level of the Capitol.While inside the Capitol building, Colon used his hands and a chair to obstruct police officers who were trying to lower retractable doors to stop rioters from streaming into the building.The attack followed a rally led by Trump near the White House, in which he urged thousands gathered to advance to the Capitol and “fight like hell” while both chambers of the US Congress were convening to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.Biden’s win was certified in the early hours of the following day after lawmakers, staff and journalists had fled for their lives during the deadly riot at the Capitol.Colon, 45, was charged in February 2021, along with four other members of the Kansas City metro chapter of the Proud Boys group. He is the first defendant in that case to plead guilty.A judge had imposed monitoring conditions on Colon while he awaited trial. Colon will be sentenced later this year, and he faces a statutory maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.He will probably receive a reduced sentence because of his admission of responsibility and cooperation.Colon was not charged in the same conspiracy case as Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman and one of the most high-profile of the 800 people facing criminal charges relating to the riot.Colon’s plea comes two weeks after a Proud Boys leader, Charles Donohoe, pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding, and assaulting and impeding police officers.Meanwhile, in a different criminal case, one of the dozens of police officers injured during the insurrection testified on Wednesday that he didn’t punch or pick a fight with a retired New York police officer charged with attacking the officer.Thomas Webster, whose trial on an assault charge started this week, claims he was acting in self-defense when he tackled Metropolitan police department officer Noah Rathbun outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021.Rathbun said he reached out with an open left hand and pushed Webster in the face after the New York man shoved a bike rack at him. Rathbun said he was trying to move Webster back from a security perimeter that officers were struggling to maintain behind rows of bike racks.“It’s unfortunate to be in the nation’s capital and be treated like that by another citizen,” Rathbun said during the second day of Webster’s trial.Videos shown by prosecutors depict Webster shoving a bike rack at Rathbun before swinging a flag pole at the officer in a downward chopping motion, striking a metal barricade in front of the officer.After Rathbun grabbed the broken pole and retreated, Webster charged at the officer and tackled him to the ground.Rathbun said he started choking and couldn’t breathe when Webster grabbed his gas mask and the chin strap pressed against the officer’s neck.Separately from the hundreds of criminal prosecutions, a special House of Representatives committee is investigating any links between Trump, his White House team, congressional Republicans and the insurrection.TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

A record number of abstentions, and a strictly binary choice for voters — many of whom said they were picking the lesser of two evils — are trouble signs even within a mature democracy.You should know at least two crucial facts about the French presidential election, whose final round was held last Sunday.The first is that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate known for her warm relationship with Vladimir Putin and her hostility toward the European Union and immigrants, lost the election — but with the best showing that her party has ever had, carrying 41.5 percent of the second-round vote.The second is that Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president from the center-right En Marche party, won the election — but with the lowest share of registered voters of any candidate since 1969, because of historically low turnout and high numbers of votes that were cast blank or spoiled in a show of protest.Of those two facts, the first has garnered the most attention. But the second may be more important.Vote, or hostage negotiation?In the first round of the presidential election, Macron came in first, but with nowhere close to a majority. He got barely more than a quarter of the total votes, with 27.85 percent. Le Pen came next with 23.15 percent, and the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, got 21.95 percent. The rest of the votes were divided between smaller parties.That’s actually pretty common: Today, in many mature democracies, it’s uncommon for any party or ideological faction to get more than about a third of the votes. In the German federal election last year, the center-left party came first, but with only 25.7 percent of the vote — strikingly similar to the numbers for Macron in the first round. In multiparty parliamentary systems, that results in coalition governments in which two or more parties work together — take Germany, again, where a three-party coalition now governs.Ms. Le Pen had a strong showing in both rounds of the 2022 French presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut in direct presidential systems, the winner takes all. And for many voters, that means that elections are less a matter of who they want to support than of who they most want to oppose.So when Le Pen made the second round runoff of the French election, the contest took on the tenor of a hostage negotiation. Macron argued that Le Pen was an existential threat to France, and called for all other candidates’ supporters to unite behind him in order to prevent her from winning the presidency. Mélenchon, the leftist candidate, made a similar plea to his supporters. “We know who we will never vote for,” he said on April 10. “We must not give a single vote for Madame Le Pen.”In the end, enough voters aligned behind Macron to keep the far right out of the presidency. And it seems that many heeded the calls to hold their noses and vote for Macron, despite their aversion to him, in order to protect the country from the far right: According to one poll, about 45 percent of those who voted for him did so only to oppose Le Pen.But the same poll found that the opposite was also true: About 45 percent of Le Pen voters were more interested in opposing Macron than in supporting the far right. Other data bears that out: The overseas French territories Martinique and Guadeloupe supported Mélenchon in the first round, but then gave a majority to Le Pen in the second.Others withdrew entirely. Abstentions and blank ballots hit record highs in this election — a notable development in France, where turnout has historically been around 80 percent.A warning from historyExperts who study France’s history of revolutions and democratic collapse see signs of danger in a system that pushes a wide spectrum of voters into a binary choice between what some see as the lesser of two evils.So how do you tell the difference between normal political anger that can work itself out through a series of elections without leading to serious instability, and something dangerous enough to require structural change to the system itself?A woman voting at a polling station in Saint Denis, in the suburbs of Paris. The election saw a high level of voter abstentions.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“That’s the question of French history, right?” Terrence Peterson, a political historian at Florida International University, told me. “Historians have been asking that question about France for a long time, given its history of repeated revolutions.”He saw particular cause for concern in the rising levels of abstentions. “When voters express that they feel disenfranchised, if a majority of them do, then that’s a clear sign” of serious trouble, he said.Some in France have begun to call for an overhaul of the Constitution to make the system more representative. Mélenchon has called for a new Constitution to be drafted via a people’s constituent assembly. In an editorial last week in the French newspaper Le Monde, Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, argued that the lack of proportional representation had brought the far right “to the gates of power” in France.Camille Robcis, a Columbia University historian who studies 20th-century French politics and institutions, said that she was not surprised to hear such calls. “You have a kind of disconnect between the representatives and the popular vote, the electorate,” she said. “The result is that these disenchanted, disenfranchised voters are moving to the extremes.”How am I doing?I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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“The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”In some regions, Sciubba continues,Population pressures are blowing the top off of a pot already boiling with poor governance, civil war and environmental destruction. At best, there’s only dim hope for a peaceful future. When the pot boils over, countries across the globe feel the effects in the form of refugees and terrorist extremism.The resulting turmoil is empowering the ethnonationalist right — propelling Viktor Orban’s re-election to a fourth term on April 3 in Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent showing in the April 24 French presidential election. In the United States, immigration has become a primary driver of the polarization between Republican and Democratic voters, crucial to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his continuing lead in the polls for the 2024 presidential nomination.As far back as 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford, described what he called a “third demographic transition” in “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries”:A third demographic transition is underway in Europe and the United States. The ancestry of some national populations is being radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration of persons from remote geographic origins or with distinctive ethnic and racial ancestry, in combination with persistent sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population.Low fertility and high immigration, according to Coleman, “are significant because they are changing the composition of national populations and thereby the culture, physical appearance, social experiences and self-perceived identity of the inhabitants.”The British demographer Paul Morland, in an interview this year with the BBC, addressed the race issue head on in describing politically volatile population trends:The huge expansion in white populations we previously took for granted is now retreating, and historically majority-white countries are becoming much more diverse. Mass migration into Europe and America has changed the face of those continents, and identities will surely continue to shift in these nations over time. Toward the middle of the current century, the percentage of the U.S. population that belongs to minority groups is expected to be more than 50 percent, and that will surely have an impact. If you look at the ethnic makeup of Trump voters and his slim electoral victory, it’s clear he would not have been elected if America was less white.At the same time, Morland noted,Africa is about to have a huge population explosion — by 2100, there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Africans as Europeans. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in the global balance. The world is set to become much more African, and it will be very interesting to see how that will affect things.In his 2019 book, “The Human Tide,” Morland wrote: “If the biggest global news story of the last 40 years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next 40 years will be Africa’s population growth.” It’s striking, Morland continues, “to realize that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk.”A graphic in Sciubba’s book illustrates the emergence of below-replacement fertility rates in Europe and North America — rates that have led to what my Times colleague Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety.”Immigration, of course, does not engender only political responses. The psychological reaction to immigration — to the influx of new and unfamiliar populations — varies widely across the electorate.In a 2012 paper, “Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes,” Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto and Jonathan Haidt argued thatindividuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity) and subvert American traditions and order (Authority).In an email to me, Ditto took this concept a step further:For some people immigration is conceived as akin to contamination, as allowing impure foreign elements into a sacred and pure “American” body politic — and those apprehensions about contamination drive their resistance to immigration — perhaps legal as much as illegal.But, Ditto cautioned, “this should not be taken to mean that these people view immigrants in a dehumanized way (as some kind of vermin) — that would be taking it too far. It is much more implicit than that — just a general valuation of purity and discomfort with contamination.”Along related lines, in 2014, Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and Corey Fincher, of the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow, published “Democracy and Other Governmental Systems.” They develop a germ-related stress theory that in many respects complements Ditto’s emphasis on the crucial role of purity. “The psychological dimension of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism,” Thornhill and Fincher contend, joins these features to pathogen-linked threat.Conversely, Thornhill and Fincher argue, “individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and women’s rights and freedom” are found more commonly in countries with relatively low health-related hazard.In an earlier paper, Fincher and Thornhill argued:In contemporary societies, collectivists and individualists differ significantly in their view of the social structure of the society in which they reside. Collectivists emphasize the boundary between in-group and out-group and are distrusting of and unwilling to contact out-group members; individualists make less distinction between in- and out-groups, and are more trusting of and show more willingness to contact out-groups.While it remains the subject of intense debate in academic circles, this line of argument has been gaining adherents.I asked Lene Aaroe, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, about growing opposition to immigration, and she wrote back, first citing “two of the classical explanations” that underscore “concerns over cultural integration and competition over economic resources, respectively, as major drivers of attitudes on immigration.”She noted that in addition to these classical explanations there is “a growing line of research that emphasizes that psychological motivations for disease avoidance shape opposition to immigration. I have contributed actively to this line of work.”Aaroe described the premise of her research:That over human evolutionary history pathogens and infections have constituted a central threat to our species. In addition to the physiological immune system which fights infections once they have entered the body, our species has therefore evolved psychological motivations to help us avoid coming into contact with infections in the first place. These psychological mechanisms are typically referred to as the so-called behavioral immune system.These psychological mechanisms, according to Aaroe, “operate automatically at the unconscious level. They work through emotions of disgust and fear of disease and motivate people to respond with avoidance and distance-taking in the face of potential infection risk.” Aaroe noted that the fear of disease is often a misperception not based on reality but on a psychological trait prompting prejudicial judgments.In modern diverse and multicultural societies, Aaroe continued, “facial birthmarks, physical disabilities, or something as innocent as differences in skin color and ethnicity are subconsciously misinterpreted as cues of potential infection risk with skepticism and distance-taking as outcomes.”People vary in the sensitivity of their behavioral immune systems, Aaroe wrote, so “some are more prone to experience disgust in situations that involve potential infection risk (e.g. drinking from another person’s water bottle). Our cross-national research conducted in the United States and Denmark” — “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration” and “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties” — “supports” the idea that “these individuals are also more likely to be skeptical toward immigration and to identify and vote for social conservative political parties that prioritize social conformity, order, and exclusionary policies toward out-groups and unfamiliar others.”Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of the line of reasoning developed by Ditto, Thornhill and Aaroe. Someone with an elevated fear of pathogens, who has more or less unconsciously translated that fear into opposition to immigration, may view liberals who want to open the nation’s doors as a threat to his or her health and, at the extreme, to his or her life.If this logic holds true, we have entered a new moral universe.Morteza Dehghani, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, emailed that he and his colleagues have found that “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups could be understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations.”In a 2021 paper, “Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice,” Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh and Dehghani concluded:Across five studies, ranging from geospatial analysis of 3,108 U.S. counties to social psychological experiments with over 2,200 participants, we found evidence that group-level moral concerns (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity) are predictive of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even after controlling for county-level confounders, such as political ideology.The moral legitimization of violence is the focus of Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, in their 2014 book, “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships.”They write that violence isconsidered to be the essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.Fiske and Rai argue that people “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.”Political conflict, scholars have found, can move into the zone of morally justified violence when elected officials and candidates focus their campaigns on grievance. As Ditto put it by email:When groups interact with each other, exchange things, this creates the potential for feelings of grievance to develop — they screwed us in some way. Once you feel that a group has wronged you or your group, then you are in moral territory.In a February 2021 paper, “Populism and the Social Psychology of Grievance,” Ditto and Cristian G. Rodriguez, a professor of psychology at the Universidad de los Andes, in Chile, write: “Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that ‘the people’ have been treated unfairly by ‘the elite.’” Evoking past grievance, they write, “has two clear collateral costs: it can be used to justify undemocratic means to gain political power, and its evocation risks initiating a self-escalating cycle of inter-factional political conflict.”As conflicts escalate, so do the perils of grievance politics:Feelings of grievance can lead people to feel licensed to abandon previous moral and procedural constraints. Although sometimes these constraints feel arguably bendable, abandoning other moral rules, such as adherence to democratic political tactics or prohibitions against violence, can be substantially more problematic. Research on highly contentious and moralized political environments has found them to foster an increased willingness to condone undemocratic means to achieve desired political ends, up to and including violence. In the U.S., partisan anger is associated with tolerance of cheating, lying and voter suppression as acceptable political tactics.I asked Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, how partisanship can become moralized, legitimating opposition and even violence. He replied:Politics plays a tremendous role in this. It is politicians who give action to latent attitudes and can organize collective action or even harness the power of the state. For example, Trump supporters might have had a latent tendency to be opposed to immigration but when Trump comes along and tells them that we need to “build a wall,” this made them think that immigration must really be a problem and, so, this latent tendency is activated. Then, when the state gets involved in building this wall and aggressively enforcing immigration, it brings power and action to these tendencies.Hostility to immigration, Enos wrote,seems to be tightly related to a person’s larger worldview, so that a person that tends to be right-wing will also tend to have hostility to immigration and a person who is left-wing will tend to be more open. Scholars don’t agree on how to characterize the differences between these worldviews, but notice that much of the language used to describe the differences has implications for acceptance of immigrants — for example, people on the right are described as seeing the world as ‘threatening’ or having a ‘closed’ worldview.Peter Howley, a professor of behavioral economics at Leeds University, shared Enos’s view of the crucial role of closed- and open-mindedness. “Openness is strongly correlated with immigration attitudes,” he wrote in an email, “and our own research demonstrates how openness strongly moderates the relationship between inflows of migrants into one’s local area and the self-reported well-being of existing residents.”This openness, Howley continued,captures the degree to which people are attracted by novel stimuli and entails a preference for variety and new experiences. For people comparatively low on openness, demographic change and all it entails from exposure to new cuisine, music and amenities may be a daunting prospect, but for people with high scores on openness, demographic change offers the potential for exciting new experiences.The political scientists Christopher D. Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico, both of the University of Minnesota, write in their book “Open Versus Closed”:As partisan conflict has been extended to cultural and lifestyle issues, engaged citizens have organized themselves into parties by personality, a process we refer to as “dispositional sorting.” In particular, those with “closed” personality traits have moved into the Republican column over the past few decades, and those with “open” traits have become Democrats. More generally, open citizens now take their economic policy cues from trusted elites on the cultural left, while closed citizens adopt the positions of those on the cultural right.The conflicts within this country reflect in miniature the global tensions of the 21st century. Sciubba puts the predicament in context in her introduction to a new collection of essays, “A Research Agenda for Political Demography.”At one extreme:In high- and middle-income countries, the most recent transition is to extremely low fertility and low mortality, leading to a shift in the composition of various age groups — far more elderly than youth and declining proportions of those in the middle ages. For the world’s most developed countries, national goals of economic growth of 2 percent or more are mismatched with shrinking populations — the idea of infinitely expanding economies is rubbing up against demographic reality. In some states with low fertility, immigration is eroding the advantages of longtime ethnic majorities and political tensions are high. Rising support for anti-immigrant far-right parties and populists, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, are demonstrations of the connection between demographics and politics.At the other extreme:In lower-income countries, fertility remains high, but declining mortality means that these populations are growing exponentially — a different transformation. Population density is increasing as the amount of available land stays constant and the number of people who inhabit it grows two- or threefold. Climate change is accelerating strains on the land itself, and economic forces like globalization are restructuring economies, often toward production for export, rather than for subsistence. Economic crises too often turn into civil conflict, which then pushes populations into new communities and across borders, and creates a new set of problems for both senders and receivers.By this reasoning, the prospect, globally, is for worsening conflict between rich and poor countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. In many respects, politics is about organizing fear. Democracies break down and republics dissolve when fear is used too often as a motivating tool, a partisan weapon. The issue now is whether the political system can begin to organize our fear of one another in a constructive fashion that resolves rather than exacerbates conflicts.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