Elections

Democrats are breathing easier. Republicans are crying censorship. For all of the country’s news consumers, a strange quiet has descended after a four-year bombardment of presidential verbiage.That soothing sound that Gary Cavalli hears emanating from Twitter these days? It is the sound of silence — specifically, the silence of former President Donald J. Trump.“My blood pressure has gone down 20 points,” said Mr. Cavalli, 71, whose obsessive hate-following of Mr. Trump ended for good when Twitter permanently barred the former president in January. “Not having to read his latest dishonest tweets has made my life so much happier.”It seems like just yesterday, or perhaps a lifetime ago, that Mr. Trump swaggered through the corridors of Twitter as if he owned the place, praising himself and denigrating his enemies in an endless stream of poorly punctuated, creatively spelled, factually challenged ALL-CAPS DIATRIBES that inflamed, delighted and terrified the nation to varying degrees. That all ended on Jan. 8, two days after a mob egged on by his incendiary remarks had stormed the United States Capitol in an ill-conceived effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.One hundred days have now elapsed since the start of the ban — a move that raised questions of free speech and censorship in the social media age, upset pro-Trump Republicans and further enraged a now-former president who still refuses to accept the fact that he lost the election.To many of the former president’s detractors, the absence of a daily barrage of anxiety-provoking presidential verbiage feels closer to a return to normalcy than anything else (so far) in 2021.“I legitimately slept better with him off Twitter,” said Mario Marval, 35, a program manager and Air Force veteran in the Cincinnati area. “It allowed me to reflect on how much of a vacuum of my attention he became.”For Matt Leece, 29, a music professor in Bloomsburg, Pa., the Twitter suspension was akin to a clearing of the air: “It’s like living in a city perpetually choked with smog, and suddenly one day you wake up and the sky is blue, the birds are singing, and you can finally take a full, nontoxic breath.”Yet for millions of Trump loyalists, his silence has meant the loss of their favorite champion and the greatest weapon in their fight against the left.“I miss having his strong, conservative, opinionated voice on Twitter,” said Kelly Clobes, 39, a business manager from southern Wisconsin. “Other people have been allowed to have free speech and speak their minds, and they haven’t been banned. Unless you’re going to do it across the board, you shouldn’t do it to him.”Even in a forum known for turning small differences into all-out hostility, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was unique. There was its sheer volume. From 2009, when he posted his first tweet (“Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”), to Jan. 8 of this year, when he posted his last (“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20”), Mr. Trump tweeted more than 56,000 times, according to an online archive of his posts. He tweeted so often on some mornings in office that it was hard to believe he was doing much else.Then there were the presidential tweets themselves.The one where he predicted that if he were to fight Joe Biden, Mr. Biden would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” The one where he called Meryl Streep “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood.” The one where he accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. The one where he boasted that his “Nuclear Button” was “much bigger & more powerful” than that of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. (“And my Button works!” he added.)Love it or hate it, it was impossible to ignore Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, which flowed from the platform directly into the nation’s psyche. His tweets were quoted, analyzed, dissected, praised and ridiculed across the news media and the internet, featuring often in people’s “I can’t believe he said that” conversations. For his opponents, there was a rubbernecking quality to the exercise, a kind of masochistic need to read the tweets in order to feel the outrage.Seth Norrholm, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and an expert on post-traumatic stress, said that Twitter had offered Mr. Trump a round-the-clock forum to express his contempt and anger, a direct channel from his id to the internet. Every time he used all-caps, Professor Norrholm said, it was as if “an abuser was shouting demeaning statements” at the American people.Although “out of sight, out of mind really works well for a lot of people in helping them to move forward,” he continued, Mr. Trump has refused to go away quietly. Indeed, he has set up a sort of presidential office in exile at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, emerging intermittently to issue statements on quasi-presidential letterhead and to heap derision on Republicans he deems insufficiently loyal.“It’s as if you’re in a new relationship with the current administration, but every now and then the ex-partner pops up to remind you that ‘I’m still here’ — that he hasn’t disappeared entirely and is living in the basement,” Professor Norrholm said. “What’s going to happen over the next couple of years is that you will hear rumbles from the basement. We don’t know whether he’ll emerge or not, or whether it’s just some guy in the basement making some noise.”But how significant is the noise? Many Republicans still seem to be hanging on Mr. Trump’s every word. But others say that without Twitter or indeed the presidency, his voice has been rendered nearly impotent, much the way Alpha, the terrifying Doberman pinscher in the movie “Up,” becomes ridiculous when his electronic voice malfunctions, forcing him to speak with the Mickey Mouse-like voice of someone who has inhaled too much helium.“He’s not conducting himself in a logical, disciplined fashion in order to carry out a plan,” the anti-Trump Republican lawyer George Conway said of the former president. “Instead, he’s trying to yell as loudly as he can, but the problem is that he’s in the basement, and so it’s just like a mouse squeaking.”Not everyone agrees, of course. Even some people who are no fans of Mr. Trump’s language say that the Twitter ban was plain censorship, depriving the country of an important political voice.Ronald Johnson, a 63-year-old retailer from Wisconsin who voted for Mr. Trump in November, said that Twitter had, foolishly, turned itself into the villain in the fight.“What it’s doing is making people be more sympathetic to the idea that here is somebody who is who is being abused by Big Tech,” Mr. Johnson said. Although he doesn’t miss the former president’s outrageous language, he said, it was a mistake to deprive his supporters of the chance to hear what he has to say.And many Trump fans miss him desperately, in part because their identity is so closely tied to his.Last month, a plaintive tweet by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, that bemoaned Mr. Trump’s absence from the platform was “liked” more than 66,000 times. It also inspired a return to the sort of brawl that Mr. Trump used to provoke on Twitter, as outraged anti-Trumpers waded in to inform Mr. Giuliani exactly what he could do with his opinion.It is exactly that sort of thing — the punch-counterpunch between the right and left, the quick escalation (or devolution) into name-calling and outrage so often touched off by Mr. Trump — that caused Mr. Cavalli, a former sportswriter and associate athletic director at Stanford University, to leave Twitter right before the election. He had been spending an hour or two a day on the platform, often working himself up into a frenzy of posting sarcastic responses to the president’s tweets.When he called Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, a “bimbo,” Twitter briefly suspended him.“I thought, maybe God’s sending me a message here, and this is something I shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “So I quit.” His wife was happy; he has tried to channel his pent-up outrage by writing letters to the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle.Joe Walsh, a former Trump-supporting Republican congressman who is now an anti-Trump talk-radio host, said that even some people who hate the former president are suffering from a kind of withdrawal, their lives emptier now that Mr. Trump is no longer around to serve as a villainous foil for their grievances.“I completely get that it’s cool and hip to say, ‘I’m going to ignore the former guy’ — there’s a lot of performance art around that — but a lot of people miss being able to go after him or talk about him every day,” he said. “We’re all so tribal and we want to pick our tribes, and Trump made that dividing line really easy. Where do you stand on Biden’s infrastructure plan? That’s a little more nuanced.” More

Three weeks into her tenure as Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey has done something her predecessor did not: order the police to release documents about a leader accused of sexual abuse.BOSTON — Three weeks after her swearing-in as acting mayor of Boston, Kim Janey was enjoying a sort of honeymoon, enacting feel-good policies like forgiving library fines and basking in the spotlight that came with her status as the city’s first Black and first female mayor.Though she had landed the position in part by happenstance — she was City Council president when her predecessor, Martin J. Walsh, was tapped to be secretary of labor — Ms. Janey has moved slowly and deliberately to build her political profile, taking her place on the growing list of Black women running major U.S. cities.That cautious approach ended last Saturday, when Ms. Janey found herself responding to a police scandal.A report in The Boston Globe reviewed the handling of sex abuse allegations involving Patrick M. Rose, 66, the former president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, the largest and most muscular of the city’s three major police unions.The police, The Globe reported, had allowed Mr. Rose to serve for more than two decades after a 12-year-old accused him of sexual assault. Though the victim ultimately recanted and the criminal case was closed, an internal affairs investigation by the police subsequently found he had most likely broken the law.Those allegations resurfaced last year, when another child came forward, alleging abuse between the ages of 7 and 12, followed by four more victims. Mr. Rose was ultimately charged with more than 30 counts of sexual abuse of children.Patrick M. Rose, former president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, served on the police force for two decades after a 12-year-old accused him of sexual assault.Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe, via Associated PressMr. Rose maintains his innocence, both in the 1995 charges and in the more recent ones, said his lawyer, William J. Keefe.Ms. Janey, one of six candidates running for election in November, was faced with a choice: Should she keep the internal police records private, as Mayor Walsh, her predecessor in City Hall, had, citing the victims’ desire for privacy?Or should she take the path urged by fellow progressives in the City Council, demanding that the police release the records to the public — and risk unsettling the victims and poisoning her relationship with the powerful police union? This week, Ms. Janey’s choice became clear.“As a mother and as a grandmother I was heartbroken and angry to learn nothing was done to keep Mr. Rose away from children, or to terminate him, for that matter,” she said. “Transparency cannot wait any longer.”Her decision points to a larger political calculus, said Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University.“She has probably made the calculation that she is better off without the police, which is amazing,” he said. “Because the support of the police is, to some extent, code for the support of white voters in Boston.”This election will provide a snapshot of a city undergoing rapid change, as professionals move into neighborhoods once dominated by middle-income Irish-American and Italian-American families.Though Boston’s white population had dipped to 44 percent by 2017, white voters historically turn out in far greater numbers in city elections, and police union endorsements, telegraphed early in the race, were signals to them.This year, however, “none of the top-tier candidates are shopping for police support,” said Erin O’Brien, a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston.A poll released on Wednesday by WBUR and MassINC, a polling group, found that 46 percent of voters were still undecided. But it identified two front-runners — City Councilor Michelle Wu, with 19 percent support, and Ms. Janey, with 18 percent — who are both outspoken proponents of policing reform.Describing the way politicians viewed the police in the past, Dr. O’Brien said, “It’s like the boogeyman, in some ways — ‘don’t cross the police, don’t cross the police’ — well, no one’s done it, they’re afraid of them.” Rachael Rollins beat a prosecutor with police backing when she was elected Suffolk County district attorney in 2018.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesBut recent elections suggest the clout of the police is waning, she said, pointing to the 2018 upset win of Rachael Rollins, a progressive, as district attorney in Boston, over a longtime prosecutor with police backing. Dr. O’Brien compared the union’s political clout to the Wizard of Oz, who appears formidable but only from a distance.“They have a lot of power until the curtain gets pulled,” she said. “The question is whether the curtain has already been pulled.”The internal affairs file on Mr. Rose, which will be made public early next week, should shed light on the decision to return him to street duty after a 12-year-old came forward with an allegation of sexual abuse.Although the victim’s complaint was dropped, ending the first criminal prosecution, a subsequent internal affairs investigation by the police, which uses the lower legal standard of preponderance of the evidence, found he had broken the law, according to The Globe.The findings should have been forwarded to the department’s legal adviser and the police commissioner at the time, Paul F. Evans, who would determine a punishment, said Daniel Linskey, a former superintendent in chief of the Boston Police, who is now a managing director at Kroll, a security consultancy firm.Mr. Linskey said he supported Mayor Janey’s decision to make the files public, which he said could help “restore trust and integrity in the system.”He added that, as far as he knows, police officers are not rallying to Mr. Rose’s defense.“I don’t think the police union is going to die on the hill for this one,” he said. “There is no rallying cry behind Pat on this because the information to date seems to indicate that there is some substance to the charges.”Mr. Keefe, Mr. Rose’s lawyer, said his client did not pressure any witness to withdraw the charges.“He denies anyone was pressured to do anything,” he said.A police spokesperson referred The New York Times to the mayor’s statement. An official at the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association did not respond to requests for comment.The Rose case is only one of the thorny police matters that Mayor Janey inherited, including the fact that the department has no permanent commissioner. Though Mr. Walsh appointed one, a veteran officer named Dennis White, he was placed on paid leave after The Globe reported that he had threatened to shoot his wife, also a Boston police officer, and was later ordered to stay away from his family.Many of the legal structures governing Boston’s police, like overtime rules and disciplinary practices, are outside the direct authority of the mayor, determined in collective bargaining between the city and the unions.Still, Mr. Walsh, before leaving office, had embarked on new steps to increase oversight of police, including creating a new Office of Police Accountability, which includes a civilian review board.Thomas Nolan, who served as a Boston police officer for 27 years and is now an associate professor at Emmanuel College, said Boston could follow the lead of cities like Oakland, Calif., or Chicago, which have increased civilian control over policing.“It may come to a point where we scratch our head and say, ‘Do you know there was a time when they let the police investigate themselves for wrongdoing?’” he said. “The accountability will come when they can’t basically absolve their own people of wrongdoing.” More

A member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and heavy metal guitarist has become the first defendant to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the insurrection at the US Capitol.Jon Ryan Schaffer, the frontman of the band Iced Earth, has agreed on Friday to cooperate with investigators in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, and the Justice Department will consider putting Schaffer in the federal witness security program, a US district judge said. This signals that federal prosecutors see him as a valuable cooperator as they continue to investigate militia groups and other extremists involved in the insurrection on 6 January as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win.Schaffer, a supporter of Donald Trump, was accused of storming the Capitol and spraying police officers with bear spray. He pleaded guilty in a deal with prosecutors in federal court in Washington to two counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous or deadly weapon.An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Schaffer.Schaffer, of Columbus, Indiana, was wearing a tactical vest and baseball hat that read Oath Keepers Lifetime Member on 6 January and acknowledged in his plea agreement that he is a “founding lifetime member” of the extremist group, prosecutors said.The 53-year-old was not charged in the case involving Oath Keepers members and associates, who are accused of conspiring with one another to block the certification of the vote. The case is the largest and most serious brought by prosecutors so far in the attack.Authorities say those defendants came to Washington ready for violence and intent on stopping the certification. Many came dressed for battle in tactical vests and helmets and some discussed stationing a “quick reaction force” outside the city in the event they needed weapons, prosecutors have said.In his deal with prosecutors, Schaffer admitted to being one of the first people to force their way into the Capitol after the mob broke open a set of doors guarded by Capitol police. Schaffer was sprayed in the face with a chemical irritant that overwhelmed officers deployed and left the Capitol while holding bear spray, authorities said.Schaffer has voiced various conspiracy theories, once telling a German news station that a shadowy criminal enterprise is trying to run the world under a communist agenda and that he and others are prepared to fight, with violence.In court documents, the FBI said Schaffer “has long held far-right extremist views” and that he had previously “referred to the federal government as a ‘criminal enterprise’”.He turned himself in to the FBI a few weeks after the riot, after his photograph was featured on an FBI poster seeking the public’s help in identifying rioters.More than 370 people are facing federal charges in the deadly insurrection. More

This year’s election is shaping up to be the city’s first in which super PACs play a major role.The New York City mayor’s race already has a national-politics tinge thanks to one guy: the businessman Andrew Yang, whose long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination sputtered out early last year, but who is now seen as a front-runner in the city’s mayoral election. (That’s despite his knack for eliciting groans on Twitter.)But it’s not just the personalities that are bridging the divide between local and national politics. It’s also the money.This mayoral election is shaping up to be the city’s first in which super PACs — the dark-money groups that sprang up after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — play a major role.But it’s also the first race in which a number of candidates are taking advantage of a city policy that allows campaigns to gain access to more generous public matching funds, based upon their level of grass-roots support.With the potentially decisive Democratic primary just over two months away, our Metro reporters Dana Rubinstein and Jeffery C. Mays have written an article looking at how the hunt for super PAC cash is complicating the race — and raising ethical questions about some campaigns, including a few that are also receiving public matching funds. Dana took a moment out of her Friday afternoon to catch me up on where things stand.Hi Dana. So, the Citizens United decision was handed down in 2010. Yet it seems as if this is the first time we’re hearing about super PACs being used in a big way in the New York mayor’s race. How does this development interact with the city’s newly beefed-up matching-funds policy, which is aimed at encouraging small donations? Is this a case of contradictory policies — or, as a source in your story put it, “like patching one part of your roof and the water finds another way in”?There was some independent-expenditure (or “I.E.”) activity in the 2013 mayoral primary, but it wasn’t candidate specific — with one possible exception. There was a super PAC called New York City Is Not for Sale that was candidate specific, in the sense that it was targeting one candidate, Christine Quinn, and it got its funding from Bill de Blasio supporters. But this is really the first time we’ve seen candidate-specific I.E.s. As they’ve proliferated on the national level, New York City candidates have been taking their cues from the national scene.If you talk to folks at the Brennan Center, who are big advocates for the matching-funds program, they’ll point to it and say that voters should take heart, because in many ways it is proving itself to be a success. The six mayoral candidates who qualified for matching funds this year were the most ever. The matching funds are being doled out in accordance with how many voters from New York City are contributing to campaigns, and that means someone like Dianne Morales, who has no previous electoral history and was not at all a big player in the New York political scene before this election, is able to make a real case for the mayoralty. She is able to mount a real campaign. She got like $2 million in matching funds in this round.But then you have this parallel universe of super PAC money. And in some cases you have candidates who are getting matching funds — which are our taxpayer dollars — and benefiting from super PACs. Of course, super PACs are supposed to be independent and not coordinate with campaigns, but regardless, for some voters it’s hard to see that and think it’s an ideal scenario.Basically, what we have is two parallel fund-raising systems: One is almost completely ungoverned, and the other is very strictly regulated and involves taxpayer money.Who is leading the race for super PAC money in New York? And what’s the overall state of the race these days, money matters aside?Shaun Donovan, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, is participating in the matching-funds program, and he has a super PAC. Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, has a super PAC too — although a much less lucrative one — and is also taking matching funds. Andrew Yang has one super PAC that was formed by a longtime friend of his named David Rose; it’s raised a nominal amount of money, but no one is under the illusion that it won’t start raising a lot soon. And there’s this other super PAC connected to Yang that’s supposedly in the works, and that Lis Smith, who was involved in Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, is involved with.Then there is Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive and one of the highest-ranking African-American bank executives ever. He has a super PAC that has raised $4 million from all kinds of recognizable names. They’re spending a lot, with the goal to just sort of increase his name recognition.As far as the state of the race, we have no idea. As you can attest, there’s been virtually no credible polling here. In terms of the available polls, there is some uniformity to what they suggest: Yang has a lead, yet half of voters are undecided. You have Eric Adams, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley, and then the rest of the pack.It is both too soon to say and also alarmingly close to the actual primary election day, June 22. We really don’t have a sense of where things stand. When you add to this ranked-choice voting, which is new this year, it’s really an open question.Earlier you mentioned Shaun Donovan, whose story figures prominently into the article you and Jeff just wrote. Fill us in on what’s going on there.In addition to being the former housing secretary for Obama, he was the budget director. So he’s a very well-regarded technocrat — who also is the son of a wealthy ad-tech executive. Someone formed a super PAC to support his candidacy for mayor; that super PAC has raised a little over $2 million, and exactly $2 million of that sum was donated by his dad.It’s completely within the realm of possibility that his dad was like, “You know what, I really love my son, I think he’d be a great mayor, I’m going to fund his super PAC,” without any coordination about how that money would be used. But it’s hard for some people to imagine a scenario where a father and son don’t talk about this kind of thing. Or maybe it isn’t! The point is that it’s almost unknowable, isn’t it?There’s a lot of winking and nodding involved in this stuff, and you don’t necessarily need direct coordination in order to have what is effectively coordination.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is 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

The candidate for mayor of New York responds to a column by Paul Krugman.To the Editor:In “Andrew Yang Hasn’t Done the Math” (column, April 16), Paul Krugman criticized a proposal I have not put forth as part of my run for mayor of New York.My plan is a targeted $1 billion cash relief initiative to distribute $2,000 a year to the 500,000 poorest New Yorkers.This will mitigate the disproportionate impact of automation on Black, Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers. A new report by the Center for an Urban Future found that nearly half of all job tasks held by Hispanic men can be automated.We know that targeted cash relief works. The Atlantic and Bloomberg recently reported on the success of a pilot in Stockton, Calif. Compared with the control group, several positive outcomes were found for the 125 people in lower-income neighborhoods who received $500 a month.Likewise, the federal stimulus checks also played a crucial role in lessening the economic disruption of the pandemic. Despite big job losses — most felt by women of color — the poverty rate actually fell after people received cash deposits.My 2020 presidential campaign elevated cash relief as an anti-poverty solution, and if I am elected, my targeted plan for the city will be a lifeline for many.The research is there.Andrew YangNew YorkThe writer is a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York. More

Three months after an insurrection at the US capitol, an estimated 50 million Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to a recent national survey. But it’s far from clear how many Americans might still be willing to take violent action in support of that belief.Early research on the continued risk of violence related to Trump’s “big lie” has produced a wide variety of findings. One political scientist at the University of Chicago estimated, based on a single national survey in March, that the current size of an ongoing “insurrectionist movement” in the US might be as large as 4% of American adults, or about 10 million people.Other experts on political violence cautioned that survey results about what Americans believe provide virtually no insight on how many of them will ever act on those beliefs. Researchers who have interviewed some of Trump’s most loyal supporters over the past months say that many of them appear to be cooling down – still believing the election was stolen, but not eager to do much about it. The handful of attempts by far-right extremist groups to mobilize nationwide protests after 6 January have mostly fizzled.“Lots of people talk the talk, but very few walk the walk,” Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start), told the Guardian. “Only a tiny fraction of the people who adhere to radical views will act on them.”More than 800 people from a crowd of more than 10,000 are estimated to have breached the Capitol building, the acting capitol police chief said in February. Nearly 400 of them are now facing charges.Extremism experts have called the 6 January attack an example of “mass radicalization,” with a majority of people charged in the incident having no affiliation with existing extremist groups, according to early analyses. More than half of the people charged in the insurrection appeared to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends, according to one analysis. Nearly half were business owners or had white collar jobs, and very few were unemployed, a sharp contrast with the profiles of some previous violent rightwing extremists.Today Trump’s relative silence and the gradual return to more normal life as more Americans have been vaccinated, have created very different conditions than in the days and weeks before 6 January.“The charismatic leader has been silenced for the most part. He might find his way back into the public spotlight, but as of right now, he’s been effectively muted,” Jensen said.“We were in a really unique situation with the pandemic, and the lockdowns, and people being isolated and fearful. You had a vulnerable population,” he added. Today, “people are getting back to their lives.”The ‘cooling out’In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, a large majority of Americans condemned the rioters and said they should be prosecuted.But research in the past months has also shown that many Republican voters are still loyal to Trump and receptive to lies from him and other Republican politicians about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed.A March survey from Reuters/IPSOS found that more than half of Republicans endorsed a false claim that the attack was “led by violent leftwing protesters trying to make Trump look bad”, and also said they believed that the people who gathered at the Capitol “were mostly peaceful, law-abiding Americans”.Six in 10 Republicans in that survey also said they believed “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.” That percentage of the sample would correspond with roughly 50 to 55 million Americans, Chris Jackson, the IPSOS senior vice-president for public affairs, told the Guardian.In mid-March, researchers at the University of Chicago attempted to home in on the percentage of Americans who still believed in Trump’s “big lie,” and who also may be willing to act violently as a result, using a nationally representative sample of a thousand American adults.Two-thirds of the respondents said they believed the election was legitimate, the researchers found. Another 27% said they believed the election had been stolen from Trump, but endorsed only non-violent protest. Only 4% said they believed the election was stolen, and also expressed a willingness to engage in violent protest.That 4% would translate to roughly 10 million American adults, said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats who specialized in global suicide terror attacks, and who pivoted last year to focus on political violence in the United States.Other experts have argued that what survey respondents mean when they say they support using violence to achieve their political goals is far from obvious, according to Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State University who has been polling Americans about political violence since 2017.The findings of that research are concerning: as of February, 20% of Republicans and 13% of Democrats now say violence is at least “a little” justified to advance their party’s goals.But only a small fraction of the respondents who had said violence by their side was at least “a little justified” in a previous survey endorsed armed, fatal violence, Kalmoe said, instead mentioning fistfights, property destruction and non-violent actions like insults. “‘Violence’ doesn’t mean mass death or even killing even among the people who think some violence is OK,” Kalmoe said.“There are many steps from attitudes to behavioral intentions to behaviors that stop people from acting violently, even when they hold violent views,” he added. Knowing how many people might complete all of those steps is a “nearly impossible question.”Christopher Parker, a political scientist who studies race and the evolution of American rightwing movements, said that a preliminary finding that 4% of American adults believed the election was stolen from Trump and endorsed violence was a plausible survey result, given that about 7% of American adults had said they participated in a Tea Party event.A March survey by the Pew research center found a similar proportion of Americans expressing the most skeptical view of a crackdown on the Capitol rioters, with 4% saying it was “not at all important” for them to be prosecuted.But it was also very possible that the attitudes of Trump supporters were shifting over time, Parker cautioned, and that the 4% figure from mid-March may already be shrinking.In focus groups with Trump loyalists in Wisconsin and Georgia that Parker worked on, Trump supporters appeared “angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.” Trump voters appeared to be much less threatened by Biden than they were by Obama, the focus groups indicated, and were interested in what Biden’s post-pandemic recovery plan might do for them personally.Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist who is currently conducting interviews in the region, found that in eastern Kentucky, even among dedicated Trump supporters, there’s been a “cooling out.”I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went awayHochschild, the author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, said that Trump’s most ardent supporters, the ones who believe the election was stolen from him, “are in a squeeze”, feeling threatened by the law enforcement crackdown on the Capitol rioters on one hand, and a sense of abandonment at Trump’s behavior on the other.On 6 January, some Trump supporters “had felt proud, patriotic, defending democracy, and in a day’s time that had turned around to dishonor, criminalization. They were put down. The law was looking for them,” she said.At the same time, “I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went away, disappeared into silence. They feel like: ‘Wait a minute: why isn’t he speaking up for us? Why isn’t he defending us?’”A minority of Trump supporters Hochschild is interviewing today are doubling down on their election fraud beliefs, she said, expressing paranoia about big government taking over, and feeling “monitored and unsafe”. But the majority has “divested emotion from the issue” of “election fraud”. Experts cautioned that even the tiniest fraction of people willing to use violence in support of their extreme beliefs is dangerous, particularly in the US, where political violence in recent years has often taken the form of high-casualty mass shootings in places like churches, synagogues and stores.Hochschild said she is more concerned about further political violence in the long term than the short term. “I do feel there are a lot of people whose position is extreme,” she said. “I just don’t see it mobilized at this point.”“The reality is, when you see 6 January, that was not a large share of Americans that did that,” said Jhacova Williams, a Rand Corporation economist who has studied the after-effects of lynchings in the American south.Still, she said, political violence can have devastating, lasting effects, on both people and on democracies, while being driven by relatively small numbers of people, as long as the majority does not intervene.While lynchings were held in public and attracted crowds, “If you look historically, it wasn’t as if you had masses in the south that were lynching people,” Williams said. “It was a subset of people who were doing that.” More

He saved democracy itself. More

A study by a liberal group found a reverse coattails effect in 2020: Down-ballot candidates may have helped elect President Biden, rather than the other way around.Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.But her run may have helped another candidate: Joseph R. Biden Jr.The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates. That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found. The analysis was carried out using available precinct-level data in eight states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and New York — and controlling for factors like education to create a comparison between contested and uncontested districts.The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.“The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.”The idea isn’t new, but it is the first time that a comprehensive study has been done on the possibility of such a reverse coattails effect, and it comes as the Democratic Party ramps up its strategizing for the midterm elections next year.In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts. The hope was that if there was at least one Democrat running in every county, it would help the party build a larger base for future elections. Mr. Dean was met with skepticism from national strategists who believed in a more conventional method of focusing limited campaign resources on swing districts. After his tenure, the strategy fell out of favor.What tends to derail any such 50-state, all-districts strategy are the limited resources that both parties have in any election, and the realpolitik considerations that inevitably lead them to pour disproportionate amounts of money into certain races seen as particularly important and winnable.“If you have candidates dedicated to ground game, then it could be helpful, but usually campaigns at the lower end of the spectrum don’t have that kind of money, and it’s certainly not done by parties as much anymore,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster. He said that one reason for this could be that controlling messaging down the ballot is hard to do when campaigns at the top of the ticket have different approaches to issues from those of local candidates.For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.Mr. Morales Rocketto expressed hope that the study would start a conversation among Democrats on how they invest in state and local races.During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic campaigns for the Senate, like Amy McGrath’s in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s in South Carolina, raised huge sums of money, in some cases topping $90 million for a single campaign. By comparison, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it raised $51 million for legislative races in 86 chambers across 44 states.“Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”And what those losses look like is already known, Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued.“When Republicans took control of 21 state legislative chambers in 2010, we lost control for a near decade to win the United States Congress,” she said. “We now have a challenge with keeping the United States Senate, and Republicans are eroding our voting rights in these state legislatures.”Since the presidential election, Republican-run legislatures across the country have been drafting bills to restrict voting access, prompting Democratic calls for additional local party infrastructure. The way to get that investment and attention from the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Morales Rocketto said, is to highlight how a bottom-up approach can help the party at the national level, too.Ms. Post echoed that sentiment. “So much of the building blocks of American democracy are truly built in the state,” she said.Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”Mr. Hobart said that both parties should want to have strong candidates running for office up and down the ballot, because parties never know what districts will become competitive. For Republicans in 2020, some of those surprise districts were along the southern border of Texas, which had previously been a relatively blue region.“It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”The new study will be just one consideration as the D.N.C. reviews its strategy for state legislative and other down-ballot races in the midterms. The committee is pledging to increase investment in such races, both to help win traditional battleground states and to grow more competitive in red-tinted states that are trending blue.Officials at the D.N.C., who declined to speak on the record about the study, pointed to Kansas, which has a Democratic governor but voted for former President Donald J. Trump by 15 percentage points, as an example of a state where they’d like to put the study’s findings into action.Democrats in the state are gearing up to try to re-elect Gov. Laura Kelly, and Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, said he hoped to test the theory. He said that having Democrats campaign in deep-red districts required a different type of field organizing.“There are some counties where if the state party can’t find a Democrat, we can’t have an organized county party, because the area is so red,” he said. “But if we can run even the lone Democrat we can find out there, and get a few of those votes to come out — you know the analogy: A rising tide lifts all Democratic ships.”Some Democratic strategists in Kansas noticed that phone-bank canvassers had more success with voters during the general election when they focused on congressional and local candidates, rather than headlining their calls with Mr. Biden. They’re hoping that building local connections in the state will help Ms. Kelly’s campaign.In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits. That was five percentage points better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016.Ms. Carter said she had tried to start grass-roots momentum in the district. “For me, running for office was never an ambition,” she said. “It was more so out of the necessity for where I live.”Ms. Carter’s district has grown exponentially during the last decade, bringing with it changing demographics and different approaches to politics. She knew through previous political organizing and her own campaigning that many people in her district, including friends and family, didn’t know when local elections were, why they were important or what liberal or conservative stances could look like at a local level.Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.“I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”Nick Corasaniti More