Elections

The American voters chose to give the Democrats the White House, but denied them a mandate. Even if Democrats somehow squeak out wins in both Georgia Senate races, the Senate will then pivot on Joe Manchin of West Virginia.Not only does this take much of the liberal wish list off the table, it also makes deep structural reform of federal institutions impossible. There will be no new voting rights act in honor of the late Representative John Lewis, no statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and no Supreme Court packing. For that matter, the filibuster will not be eliminated, which would have been the essential predicate for all of those other changes as well as expansive climate or health care legislation. Anything that Democrats want to do that requires a party-line vote is forlorn.In response to this disappointment, a number of left-of-center commentators have concluded that “democracy lost” in 2020. Our constitutional order, they argue, is rotten and an obstacle to majority rule. The Electoral College and the overrepresentation of small, mostly conservative states in the Senate is an outrage. As Ezra Klein has argued, our constitution “forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.” As a consequence, liberals can’t have nice things.The argument is logical, but it is also a strategic dead end. The United States is and in almost any plausible scenario will continue to be a federal republic. We are constituted as a nation of states, not as a single unitary community, a fact that is hard-wired into our constitutional structure. Liberals may not like this, just as a man standing outside in a rainstorm does not like the fact he is getting soaked. But instead of cursing the rain, it makes a lot more sense for him to find an umbrella.Liberals need to adjust their political strategy and ideological ambitions to the country and political system we actually have, and make the most of it, rather than cursing that which they cannot change.There are certainly some profound democratic deficits built into our federal constitution. Even federal systems like Germany, Australia and Canada do not have the same degree of representative inequality that the Electoral College and Senate generate between a citizen living in California versus one living in Wyoming.There is also next to nothing we can do about it. The same system that generates this pattern of representative inequality also means that — short of violent revolution — the beneficiaries of our federal system will not allow for it to be changed, except at the margins. If Democrats at some point get a chance to get full representation for Washington, D.C., they should take it. But beyond that, there are few if any pathways to changing either the Electoral College or the structure of the Senate. So any near-term strategy for Democrats must accept these structures as fixed.The initial step in accepting our federal system is for Democrats to commit to organizing everywhere — even places where we are not currently competitive. Led by Stacey Abrams, Democrats have organized and hustled in Georgia over the last couple of years, and the results are hard to argue with. Joe Biden should beg Ms. Abrams (or another proven organizer like Ben Wikler, the head of the party in Wisconsin) to take over the Democratic National Committee, dust off Howard Dean’s planning memos for a “50 state strategy” from the mid-2000s and commit to building the formal apparatus of the Democratic Party everywhere.This party-building needs to happen across the country, even where the odds seem slim, in order to help Democrats prospect for attractive issues in red states (and red places in purple states), to identify attractive candidates and groom them for higher office and to build networks of citizens who can work together to rebuild the party at the local level.A necessary corollary of a 50 state strategy is accepting that creating a serious governing majority means putting together a policy agenda that recognizes where voters are, not where they would be if we had a fairer system of representation. That starts with an economics that addresses the radically uneven patterns of economic growth in the country, even if doing so means attending disproportionately to the interests of voters outside of the Democrats’ urban base. That is not a matter of justice, necessarily, but brute electoral arithmetic.That does not mean being moderate, in the sense of incremental and toothless. From the financialization of our economy to our constrictive intellectual property laws to our unjust tax competition between states for firms, the economic deck really is stacked for the concentration of economic power on the coasts. Democrats in the places where the party is less competitive should be far more populist on these and other related issues, even if it puts them in tension with the party’s megadonors.We also need to recognize that the cultural values and rituals of Democrats in cosmopolitan cities and liberal institutional bastions like universities do not seem to travel well. Slogans like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” may be mobilizing in places where three-quarters of voters pull the lever for Democrats. But it is madness to imagine that they could be the platform of a competitive party nationwide.That doesn’t mean that we should expect members of the Squad not to speak out for fear of freaking out the small town voters that Democrats like Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia represent. But it does mean recognizing that, unlike the more homogeneous Republicans, the Democrats have no choice but to be a confederation of subcultures. We need to develop internal norms of pluralism and coexistence appropriate to a loose band of affiliated politicians and groups, rather than those of a party that is the arm of a cohesive social movement.The Democratic Party has a future within the constitution the country has. The question for the next decade is, will we withdraw into pointless dreams of sweeping constitutional change or make our peace with our country and its constitution, seeking allies in unlikely places and squeezing out what progress we can get by organizing everywhere, even when the odds of success seem slim.Steven Teles, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, is an author, with Robert Saldin, of the book “Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites.”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

Donald Trump’s refusal to admit defeat in the 2020 presidential election won’t stop President-elect Joe Biden from taking office in January. But it is having a lasting and divisive impact on the American electorate and that might be exactly what Republicans have in mind as they gear up for a Democratic White House.Biden has easily surpassed the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the the presidency and he has won millions more raw votes than Trump. But Trump has refused to concede and while he has publicly – and baselessly – argued that the election results show widespread voter fraud favoring Democrats, the president has also reportedly queried advisers about additional ways to stall or stop his departure from office.Those options are increasingly unlikely yet Trump’s campaign team has also continued to file lawsuits and recounts in key states challenging how the vote-counting process happened. Similarly those lawsuits have been unsuccessful.But other political strategists and veterans of transitions see another incentive: keeping Republican voters energized for upcoming Senate elections in Georgia, which could decide which party controls the Senate in 2021.That thinking goes that if voters are still paying attention to politics through November and December instead of taking a break because major elections have been decided, they are more likely to donate and come out to vote in Georgia (if they live there).That is vital in that keeping control of the Senate will give Republicans a powerful weapon to hobble Biden, frustrating his policy agenda and even limiting who he can pick for his cabinet posts.The strategy – and the attendant creation of a powerful myth of a stolen election – could also serve to keep many Republican voters motivated in midterm elections in 2022 and eventually the next presidential election in 2024. It could help Republican aims of reducing the Democrats to a single term in the White House in which they will be unable to achieve major policies, especially if Republicans continue to win more House seats.This refusal to accept Biden’s victory to varying degrees has sparked a high level of concern among veterans of past presidential transitions.“I think that there’s some truth to that and there’s some truth to defending for the sake of defending it in order to, again, rally this portion of the base that are the diehards, which I think is a minority but it’s an important minority to the party,” said Beth Noveck, who served on the transition team for Barack Obama.“So what all of this means about the future of the Republican party and the direction it will take and the role Trump will play and the cult of personality, it’s a very calculated political move to keep the base energized and demonstrate the kind of ‘pitched battle’ mentality of the other guy is the enemy is to maintain that sort of, frankly, rather fascist position.”But some Republicans worry that the larger Republican universe focusing on arguing that the election is flawed could actually backfire in Georgia. They fear it could even depress Republican turnout in Georgia as voters might wonder ‘If that election wasn’t legitimate, why should the Georgia elections be different?’ and ultimately not come out to match a highly enthusiastic Democratic voter base.At the same time, other Republicans see Trump’s loss and the opportunity to reinforce Republican numbers in Congress as a motivator for voters.“The last four years the singular message for Democrats has largely been around President Trump and when he’s gone how much of a motivator is that for him? And while Georgia may have delivered an electoral victory to Biden it’s by such a narrow margin I don’t think that anyone can buy into the idea that these voters are also wanting to give Biden a blank checkbook by giving him both the House and the Senate,” said Republican strategist Tim Cameron.Cameron added that for Democrats, “the last four years their rallying cry has been Trump and Russia stole this election from them and subsequently we’ve seen record-level turnouts in 2018 and 2020 and I don’t know why why we expect this to be any different for Republicans now that Biden’s president. If anything it may lead to record levels of Republican turnout in 2022. It’s too soon to say that but I just wouldn’t discount this.”There are signs that Trump’s quixotic arguments against the election results are dividing the country, creating a mass of people who see the election of Biden as illegitimate even as millions of Democrats celebrate his win.A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 70% of Republicans don’t feel the election was free and fair. Only a few Republican lawmakers have openly acknowledged Biden as the legitimate victor out of the presidential election, most have either said that the outcome of the election is still unclear or that Trump is within his rights to wait until every last vote is counted, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the highest-ranking Republican in the chamber.Here’s how this must work in our great country: Every legal vote should be counted. Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes.That’s how Americans’ votes decide the result.— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) November 6, 2020
The Republican National Committee, the main political arm for the president, has been encouraging these arguments as well. RNC talking points obtained by the Guardian urge supporters to argue that “The fight is not over. President Trump will continue to fight for us, and we will continue to fight for him” and “allowing these recounts and lawsuits to run their course will ensure that all Americans can be confident of the results of the election”. More

In 2004, I went to Ohio to cover John Kerry’s campaign to unseat George W. Bush. For liberals, the race felt existential. The Bush administration had lied America into war in Iraq, where an entirely predictable insurgency was raging. His military and C.I.A. were torturing people; the Abu Ghraib scandal had broken open in April.A worshipful cult of personality surrounded the president, whose administration was nakedly disdainful of truth. Yet four years earlier Bush had lost the popular vote, in a race where progressives were divided and a decisive number voted third party. Surely, it seemed, with the right mobilization Democrats should be able to defeat him this time.Liberal groups launched what Matt Bai described in The New York Times Magazine as “the largest get-out-the-vote effort ever undertaken to win a single presidential campaign.” It wasn’t enough. Democrats did increase their turnout, but Republicans increased theirs even more.Reporting from Ohio megachurches and right-wing rallies, I could see that many conservatives were motivated by the specter of gay marriage, which had been recognized in Massachusetts a few months earlier. In the election, 11 states including Ohio — including Oregon — passed ballot initiatives against same-sex marriage. Postelection surveys showed that “moral values” beat out issues like Iraq and the economy as voters’ chief concern.As I look back from 2020, two things seem obvious to me. L.G.B.T.Q. activists had justice on their side, even if the campaign for marriage equality caused a terrifying backlash before it triumphed. At the same time, it’s understandable why Democratic politicians like Barack Obama publicly opposed same-sex marriage in 2008, since to do otherwise risked producing permanent right-wing rule. Good policy and good politics are not the same thing.The 2004 election illuminates some of the dilemmas faced by today’s Democrats, who are currently locked in an internecine battle between progressives and moderates. It’s a frustrating and destructive fight because both sides are partly right.It’s the job of the activist left to push political limits, staking out positions that sound radical today but could, with enough work, seem like common sense in the future. But in the short term, an assertive left that garners national attention can threaten the political survival of Democrats who answer to a more conservative electorate.In a postelection interview with The Times’s Astead Herndon, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed frustration with those who are blaming leftists for Democrats’ down-ballot losses. “Progressive policies do not hurt candidates,” she insisted, noting swing-district Democrats who had co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation and the Green New Deal and had kept their seats.But most candidates who endorsed those initiatives were in safer districts than those who didn’t. When moderate Democrats like Conor Lamb and Abigail Spanberger say that left-wing slogans are poisonous in their communities, people who don’t live in those communities should take them seriously.Left-wing populists often believe that there’s a silent majority who agree with them, if only they can be organized to go to the polls. If that were true, though, an election with record high turnout should have been much better for progressives. Instead, 2020 was a reminder of something most older liberals long ago had to come to terms with: The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative than we are.Yet that doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party doesn’t need the left. Leaders like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were loyal soldiers in this election. After the primaries, they put aside their disappointment to rally voters whom Joe Biden might not have reached. One analysis showed that voting by young people was up 8 percent in 2020, and after the coronavirus, the issues young Biden voters cared about most were racism and climate change. The Democratic Party can’t afford to alienate the people inspired by Sanders and the Squad.The Democrats’ loss in 2004 was devastating, but recovering from it didn’t mean moving right. At the time, even civil unions for gay couples were controversial — the Ohio ballot initiative was one of several that banned them along with same-sex marriage. Agitation for marriage equality turned support for such unions into the moderate liberal position, then into the centrist position. Then marriage equality became the law of the land.Similarly, the Green New Deal made a climate plan like Biden’s, the most ambitious ever proposed by a major party presidential nominee, look moderate. Calls to defund the police are unpopular, but the slogan has already made other reforms — like changing the law to make it easier to hold police officers liable for misconduct — seem centrist and practical.Moderates need radicals to expand their scope for action. Radicals need moderates to wield power in a giant heterogenous country with sclerotic institutions and deep wells of reaction. Neither camp could have defeated Donald Trump on its own. It’s frustrating now, as it was heartbreaking in 2004, that revanchist Republicans retain such a hold on America. But that’s all the more reason for Democrats to stop their counterproductive sniping and work together to beat them.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

WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday sharpened his criticism of President Trump’s refusal to cooperate in an orderly transition, warning that “more people may die” from the coronavirus if the president does not agree to coordinate planning for the mass distribution of a vaccine when it becomes available.It was a marked shift in tone for the president-elect, intended to pressure Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden and his team had played down the difficulty of setting up a new government without the departing administration’s help. The new criticism came as the White House national security adviser all but conceded that Mr. Biden would be inaugurated and acknowledged the importance of a smooth federal handoff.“The vaccine is important. But it’s of no use until you’re vaccinated,” Mr. Biden said, pledging to work with Republicans to defeat the virus and spur an economic revival when he takes office. But he said the logistics of distributing vaccines to hundreds of millions of Americans were a vast challenge. “It’s a huge, huge, huge undertaking,” he said.“If we have to wait until Jan. 20 to start that planning, it puts us behind,” Mr. Biden said. “More people may die if we don’t coordinate.”Over the weekend, the president again refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory and on Monday morning tweeted, “I won the Election!” Without a concession from Mr. Trump, the official transition remains frozen — and could stay that way for months.Mr. Biden made his comments at a news conference after he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had discussed reviving the economy at a virtual meeting with business and labor leaders, including Mary Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, and Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, as well as the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, Richard Trumka, and the United Auto Workers president, Rory Gamble.“We all agreed that we want to get the economy back on track and get our workers back in the job by getting the virus under control,” Mr. Biden said. “We are going into a very dark winter. Things are going to get much tougher before they get easier. And that requires sparing no effort to fight Covid.”Mr. Biden reaffirmed his support for a $3.4 trillion stimulus bill that House Democrats passed this year that Senate Republicans have rejected, though he offered no hint of a compromise that could break Congress’s monthslong deadlock.But to do that, he said, will require new cooperation from Republicans, even those who have so far refused to publicly acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory. Asked what he would say to members of the president’s party who have backed Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede, Mr. Biden said he would offer them an open hand.“My message is: ‘I will work with you. I understand a lot of your reluctance because of the way the president operates,’” Mr. Biden said, adding that such conversations may not take place until Mr. Trump and his advisers have left office. “That’s a shame, but maybe that’s the only way to get it done.”Mr. Biden praised the Republican governors of North Dakota, Ohio and Utah, who have each taken steps to lock down their states in response to the virus — and drawn attacks from Mr. Trump in the process. Monday morning, the president hinted in a tweet that he might support a primary challenge to one of them — Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio.“Who will be running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio? Will be hotly contested!” Mr. Trump wrote.Mr. Biden said during his remarks that he had “enormous respect” for the Republican governors, including Mr. DeWine, who have bucked a president of their own party to insist that people wear masks.“It’s about being patriotic. It’s about saving lives for real. This is not hyperbole,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “There is nothing macho about not wearing a mask.”By contrast, Mr. Biden was sharply critical of administration officials including Dr. Scott Atlas, the radiologist who has emerged as the president’s most trusted adviser on combating the virus. Dr. Atlas has mocked the idea of wearing masks and recently urged people to “rise up” in protest of tough new restrictions in Michigan and elsewhere that were put in place to slow the spread of the virus.The president-elect said Dr. Atlas’s call for people to resist the restrictions went against the recommendations of health professionals across the country. “What are they doing?” Mr. Biden said. “It’s totally irresponsible.”Mr. Biden also said that he would “set an example” for Americans who may be wary of getting vaccinated, saying that if promising vaccines continue to prove safe and effective, “I would take the vaccine.”The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 16, 2020, 9:01 p.m. ETBiden will announce key members of his administration on Tuesday.Biden was asked about canceling student loan debt. Progressives saw an opening.A Biden adviser, Dr. Céline Gounder, talks about the incoming president’s plans to attack CovidMr. Biden blamed Mr. Trump for anxiety among some Americans about the safety of the vaccine. Polling has shown concern that Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic claims about the pace at which vaccines have progressed under his administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative could reflect unsafe politicization of the scientific process.“Look, the only reason people question the vaccine now is because of Donald Trump,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the reason why people are questioning the vaccine, because of all the things he says and doesn’t say — is it truthful or not truthful, the exaggerations.”Mr. Biden urged Americans to limit any Thanksgiving gatherings to groups of no more than 10 people, socially distanced and wearing masks, and after quarantining. He said his own family plans were uncertain.But on the larger question of Mr. Trump’s claims to victory, Mr. Biden was almost dismissive.“I find this more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started,” Mr. Biden said. Of Mr. Trump’s weekend tweeting, he added: “I interpret that as Trumpism. No change in his modus operandi.”A spokesman for Mr. Trump called Mr. Biden’s comments about endangered lives from a delayed transition “irresponsible and not based on fact,” insisting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made its plan for distributing the virus publicly available.The spokesman, Judd Deere, said the administration was prepared “to ship vaccine doses to every ZIP code in America” within 24 hours of approval by the Food and Drug Administration.Mr. Biden’s comments came as governors across the country have begun issuing tough new restrictions on businesses, schools, bars and sports venues in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, prompting an increasingly aggressive backlash from Republicans, including some of Mr. Trump’s advisers.In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s decision to shut down casinos, movie theaters and indoor dining — and to halt in-person learning at high schools and colleges — for three weeks prompted Republican lawmakers to call for her impeachment. She said the remarks by Dr. Atlas were “irresponsible” and left her breathless.Hours before Mr. Biden’s remarks, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, went further than any other senior Trump official in a public forum when he said that Mr. Biden appeared to have won the election and pledged a smooth transition from his staff.“Look, if the Biden-Harris ticket is determined to be the winner — and obviously things look that way now — we’ll have a very professional transition from the National Security Council,” Mr. O’Brien said.Perhaps wary of the ire of a president who refuses to concede the obvious, however, even Mr. O’Brien spoke conditionally, falsely suggesting that the election’s outcome remains uncertain.“If there is a new administration, they deserve some time to come in and implement their policies,” Mr. O’Brien said during a talk recorded last week and streamed on Monday as part of a conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.“And if we are in a situation where we are not going into a Trump second term, which I think people where I’m sitting in the White House would like to see, if it’s another outcome, it will be a professional transition — there’s no question about it,” he added.Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting. More

Scarred or energized by President Trump’s four years, Americans voted in record numbers for the 2020 election, despite a pandemic.

Once again, Mr. Trump found a trove of new followers in a fast-declining monolith of white blue-collar voters that went largely undetected by the public opinion polls. He confounded expectations further by adding a substantial number of votes in areas with a lot of Hispanic residents as well.

But while Mr. Trump’s divisive message and norm-defying presidency galvanized an unexpectedly large following in 2020, it alienated a bigger one. Mr. Biden rode the enthusiasm of a slightly tarnished Democratic coalition, along with a wave of desertions from the Republican white middle class, to win.

Trump
63.0
million
Trump
72.9
million
Trump
+9.9
million

Clinton
65.8
million
Biden
78.3
million
Biden
+12.4
million

An analysis of voting patterns across more than 2,500 counties where counting was at least 95 percent complete shows some of the major ways that this flood of voters upended traditional political alignments, setting a new stage for the post-Trump era.

Trump’s feat

After winning in 2016 in what many viewed as a fluke, Mr. Trump mounted a registration and turnout drive in the counties of his white, blue-collar base that appears to have succeeded.

“The Trump campaign worked on this for years, and pretty much kept it under wraps,” said Larry J. Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. “They told us they were doing it, but we really didn’t know the extent of it.”

Trump votes swelled in the Appalachians and the Piedmont South, in many of the same counties that dissented from the country’s embrace of the first Black American president — Barack Obama — in 2008. He found even more votes in the rural centers of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the farmlands of the Midwest.

And in a feat likely to touch off years of Democratic hand-wringing, Mr. Trump won a healthy share of additional Hispanic voters and may have benefited a little from reduced enthusiasm for Mr. Biden in some Democratic counties with large Black populations.

Change in number of votes cast, by county type

Large counties with people of color in the majority
32 counties

+22%

+30%
Majority Hispanic
47 counties

+19%

+37%
Predominantly Black
39 counties

+6%

+8%

It’s true that substantial majorities still voted Democratic in areas with concentrations of people of color. But in a polarized and evenly divided electorate, any shift can be significant.

Turnout in Philadelphia precincts where the population is predominantly Black was down 6 percent. In mostly rural areas across the South that are predominantly Black, turnout was up only slightly, and there was a modest shift to Mr. Trump. The exception was heavily contested Georgia, where turnout in areas with a large share of Black voters was way up, and shifted to Mr. Biden.

The trend in majority Hispanic counties was more pronounced, widespread and perhaps surprising in light of the president’s hard-line immigration policies and divisive messaging. This shift was especially stark in southern Florida, where many Cuban-Americans live. It was also apparent in counties in southern Texas that are predominantly Mexican-American, and in the flood of new voters in Phoenix, where Mr. Biden’s success in adding to 2016 Clinton totals was noticeably lower in Hispanic areas.

“The president made significant inroads with critical nonwhite swaths of the electorate while also growing his share of rural white voters,” said Ken Spain, a Republican strategist. “In any other election year, this would be an incredible feat that would all but guarantee victory.”

How did Biden win, then?

There was a countervailing force. Mr. Biden’s biggest cache of additional voters came from big counties — urban and suburban — that are mostly white, where his support increased substantially from Hillary Clinton’s vote in 2016.

This includes counties like DuPage in Illinois, Macomb outside Detroit and Montgomery outside Philadelphia.

But it also includes big cities in the South and West, like Charlotte, N.C.; Fort Worth; Phoenix and Seattle. In Republican Fort Worth, Mr. Biden got 121,000 more votes than Mrs. Clinton had; Mr. Trump got 62,000 more than in 2016. In Seattle, Mr. Biden’s increase of 186,000 votes dwarfed Mr. Trump’s additional 51,000.

Change in the number of votes cast, by county type

Large counties with a white majority
28 counties

+26%

+17%
Majority white, college educated and Republican
22 counties

+21%

+7%

In fact, Mr. Biden’s best hunting grounds for new voters were posh Republican counties. In areas with very high concentrations of white, high-income voters who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden garnered substantially more additional votes than his opponent.

Statistically, whether or not American voters had college degrees was by far the most significant predictor of where the 2020 tide of additional turnout was highest, and who won it. This metric is a stand-in for socioeconomic status — closely following patterns of higher income. Thus it could also be an indicator of cultural security, comfort and enfranchisement.

There was a stark schism in the white vote apparent along this fault line: Populist areas, highlighted by concentrations of white voters without a college degree, moved toward Mr. Trump. White areas with better-educated populations, whether cities, suburbs or college towns, moved decisively away.

Change in the number of votes cast, by county type

Predominantly white, college educated
31 counties

+26%

+11%
Predominantly white, no college
215 counties

+11%

+15%

The result was a substantial popular vote margin for Mr. Biden, and just enough votes in battlegrounds to win the Electoral College.

Change in the number of votes cast in battleground states

Arizona
15 counties

+44%

+33%
Florida
61 counties

+17%

+24%
Georgia
159 counties

+32%

+18%
Michigan
83 counties

+23%

+16%
North Carolina
100 counties

+23%

+17%
Pennsylvania
67 counties

+17%

+13%
Texas
136 counties

+39%

+26%
Wisconsin
72 counties

+18%

+15%

“Trump’s appeal to college-educated whites, especially women, was never very strong,” said Mr. Sabato, the University of Virginia professor. “Trump’s character and antics in office sent his backing among this large group plummeting. Blue-collar whites loved it, but their numbers could not substitute for losses elsewhere.” More

This year, several high-profile writers have left left-leaning publications after running afoul of what they describe as a pervasive culture of censoriousness, groupthink and intellectual-risk aversion. This month, Donald Trump once again stunned much of the liberal establishment by dramatically beating polling expectations to come within about 80,000 votes of another Electoral College victory.It’s worth asking whether there’s a connection between the two — that is, between the left’s increasingly constricted view of the world and the increasing frequency with which leftists are surprised by the world as it is.What, today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent. Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.The list goes on. But the central difference is this: The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.It’s from that factory that writers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have fled, and from which many other independent-minded thinkers will, sooner or later, follow. For them, the loss isn’t devastating: They have large followings and can use new digital platforms like Substack to make a generous living.For the new left — and the publications that champion it — the loss is much greater. It makes them predictable, smug and dull. It alienates readers. A current article on the New York magazine website is titled, “I Think About Björk’s Creativity Animal a Lot.” For gems such as this they got rid of Sullivan?But worse than making it dull, the purge (or self-purge) of contrarians has made the new left blind.According to the incessant pronouncements of much of the news media (including a few of my own), Donald Trump is the most anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-woman president in modern memory. Yet the CNN exit poll found that Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He also improved his vote share over 2016 with both Latino and Black voters, while losing most of the advantage he previously had with college-educated white males — precisely the demographic his policies had supposedly done most to favor.If the catechism of today’s left determined reality, none of this would have happened. Racial, ethnic or sexual identity would have trumped every other voting consideration. But as the Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar recently told Axios: “Trump did a much better job at understanding Hispanics. Sometimes, Democrats see Hispanics as monolithic.” Latino voters in his South Texas district were particularly turned off by progressive rhetoric about defunding the police, opposition to fossil fuels and decriminalizing border crossings.What is true of Cuellar’s constituency is true of everyone: People are rarely reducible to a single animating political consideration. Nor should they be subject to a simple moral judgment. Motives are complicated: It is perfectly possible to see Trump for the reprehensible man he is and still find something to like in his policies, just as it is possible to admire Biden’s character and reject his politics.The apparent inability of many on the left to entertain the thought that decent human beings might have voted for Trump for sensible reasons — to take one example, the unemployment rate reached record lows before the pandemic hit — amounts to an epic failure to see their fellow Americans with understanding, much less with empathy. It repels the 73 million Trump voters who cannot see anything of themselves in media caricatures of them as fragile, bigoted, greedy and somewhat stupid white people.It also motivates them. The surest way to fuel the politics of resentment — the politics that gave us the Tea Party, Brexit and Trump, and will continue to furnish more of the same — is to give people something to resent. Jeering moral condescension from entitled elites is among the things most people tend to resent.Which brings me back to the flight of the contrarians. As the left (and the institutions that represent it) increasingly becomes an intellectual monoculture, it will do more than just drive away talent, as well as significant parts of its audience. It will become more self-certain, more obnoxious to those who don’t share its assumptions, more blinkered and more frequently wrong.To the enemies of the left, the self-harm that left-leaning institutions do with their increasingly frequent excommunications is, ultimately, good news. The mystery is why liberals would do it to themselves.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

ATLANTA — Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Monday accused fellow Republicans of trying to undermine the legitimacy of the state’s election in an effort to swing the results to President Trump, who narrowly lost the state to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and later demanded the hand recount.Election officials in Georgia also announced Monday evening that they had discovered 2,600 ballots in Floyd County that had not been previously reported to the state, a notable but overall minor hiccup in what they otherwise described as a smooth recounting of the nearly five million ballots cast by Georgia voters during the presidential election.The counting is expected to wrap up this week, and elections officials have reported few problems aside from the error in Floyd County, which is located in northwestern Georgia and voted heavily for Mr. Trump. Democrats said the recount had so far resulted in no substantive changes, at least none that would affect the lead currently enjoyed by Mr. Biden.“The Floyd County situation was unfortunate,” said Gabriel Sterling, an official with the office of Georgia’s secretary of state. However, he added, “The majority of the counties right now are finding zero deviations from the original number of ballots.”Mr. Raffensperger, in an interview with The Washington Post, said that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was among those Republicans seeking to challenge legally cast absentee ballots with the aim of helping Mr. Trump take the lead in a state in which he is losing by several thousand votes. According to Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Graham asked about possible ways that ballots could be disqualified, including whether the secretary of state could reject all absentee ballots in counties that had a high number of signature mismatches on those ballots.A spokesperson for Mr. Raffensperger declined to comment when reached Monday evening. Senator Graham, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday, denied that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he find a way to throw out legally cast ballots.“That’s ridiculous,” said Mr. Graham, who said that his conversation with Mr. Raffensperger covered questions about Georgia’s system of using signatures to verify the identity of voters who use absentee ballots. “I thought it was a good conversation,” Mr. Graham said. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”Mr. Raffensperger, a lifelong Republican, was stung last week when Georgia’s senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both ardent Trump supporters, called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation, accusing him of mismanagement and calling the election he oversaw “an embarrassment.”Mr. Raffensperger has said he would investigate any allegations of irregularities in the election, but insists that the process was sound and the results are valid.Mr. Raffensperger also hit back at Representative Doug Collins, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s efforts in Georgia and who accused the secretary of state of caving in to pressure from Democrats. Mr. Raffensperger called Mr. Collins a “liar” and a “charlatan.”The extraordinary, labor-intensive effort to recount every vote in every one of Georgia’s 159 counties began Friday morning, and counties have until late Wednesday, just before midnight, to complete the work. As of Monday evening, 4.3 million ballots had been recounted, according to the secretary of state’s office, out of just under five million cast.The secretary of state’s office declined Monday to release the results of the recounts from individual counties. But over the weekend Patrick Moore, a lawyer for the Biden campaign, said that Democrats had been keeping tabs on the county-by-county results and had found that while some discrepancies between the original counts and the recounts had emerged, they were minor and would not affect Mr. Biden’s front-runner status in the state.“As expected, the counties that have completed their audit thus far have shifted vote totals but almost imperceptibly, and thus far in favor of Joe Biden,” Mr. Moore said during a telephone news conference.With the newly discovered ballots in Floyd County, Mr. Biden’s lead will go from around 14,200 to around 13,300 votes, according to Mr. Sterling. The New York Times declared Mr. Biden the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes on Friday, joining a number of major news organizations.Mr. Sterling said that the Floyd County officials discovered the issue in the midst of doing the recount. Mr. Sterling called the error “gross incompetence” on the part of the Floyd County elections director, and said that Mr. Raffensperger had asked the director to step down.It was the Trump campaign that demanded a hand recount last week in a letter to Mr. Raffensperger. Shortly afterward, Mr. Raffensperger ordered the recount, which his office said is technically an audit.Even so, Mr. Trump this weekend disparaged the Georgia process on Twitter. “Their recount is a scam, means nothing,” he wrote. On Monday, the president wrote in a tweet that the recount was “meaningless” because “Georgia won’t let us look at the all important signature match.”This last tweet was a reference to a discredited argument Mr. Trump had made previously concerning a consent decree that helped establish rules for verifying signatures on absentee ballots. But it would be impossible to check signatures in the hand recount because absentee ballots arrive in an envelope with the voter’s signature on the outside of the envelope; those signatures are checked by county elections officials, after which the envelopes are permanently separated from the ballots to ensure voters’ privacy.The remaining paper ballots, which are being recounted around the state, are thus wholly divorced from the process of signature verification.Fulton County — Georgia’s most populous county, which covers much of Atlanta — reported that it had completed its recount Sunday; officials noted few problems as they processed roughly 528,000 votes by hand, an effort that involved hundreds of workers who gathered to plow through stacks of ballots in a cavernous hall at Atlanta’s downtown convention center.Some of Georgia’s other large counties also reported on Monday that the recount was going smoothly. DeKalb County, a populous suburban county on Atlanta’s eastern flank, finished its count of 370,000 ballots Sunday, a process that one county official described as “seamless.”Ross Cavitt, a spokesman for Cobb County, said that the bulk of his county’s ballots had been counted, but that there was still work to be done Monday. “Nothing that indicates there’s going to be a substantial change in the results,” he added.Counties that have already certified their vote totals will have to recertify them after the Wednesday deadline if there are discrepancies from the original tally.The state faces a Nov. 20 deadline for certifying the overall results. After that point, by Georgia law, the second-place finisher may request another recount if the difference in the vote totals is within half a percentage point. (Mr. Biden currently leads by 0.28 percent.)That recount would be performed by running the ballots through scanners, not by hand. More

Fifty-nine of the country’s top computer scientists and election security experts rebuked President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud and hacking on Monday, writing that such assertions are “unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”The rebuttal, in a letter to be published on various websites, did not mention Mr. Trump by name but amounted to another forceful corrective to the torrents of disinformation that he has posted on Twitter.“Anyone asserting that a U.S. election was ‘rigged’ is making an extraordinary claim, one that must be supported by persuasive and verifiable evidence,” the scientists wrote. In the absence of evidence, they added, it is “simply speculation.”“To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise,” they wrote.The letter followed a similarly strong rebuttal of the president’s claims last week by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes top officials from the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and secretaries of state and state election directors from around the country.In a joint statement on Thursday, that group declared that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems had been compromised. Some of those officials expect to be fired in the coming weeks for their refusal to echo the president’s claims.Over the last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted various conspiracy theories involving Dominion, a major supplier of voting machines and other election technology. Among them, Mr. Trump wrote that Dominion machines had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” a claim with no basis in fact.Of five counties that experienced different software problems on Election Day in Michigan and Georgia, only two used Dominion software, and in each case the problems were fixed and did not affect results.Over the weekend, Mr. Trump also shared a video clip taken last year at the annual DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, where hackers probe voting machines sold by Dominion and Elections Systems & Software, looking for ways to manipulate the vote. The effort was meant to draw awareness to election security, and there is no evidence that the machines have ever been manipulated in an election.“We have never claimed that technical vulnerabilities have actually been exploited to alter the outcome of any U.S. election,” the election security experts wrote in their statement Monday.For years, election integrity and digital security specialists have called for improved security on voting machines and other election technical infrastructure, to add greater transparency and postelection auditing procedures.They were largely rebuffed at the federal level. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, killed three election security measures last year, arguing that they were unnecessary and “partisan.”Last year, one day after Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, testified that Russia was trying to sabotage the 2020 election, Mr. McConnell made clear that he was not going to pass election security legislation.“Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor in July 2019.Now Mr. Trump and other Republicans have called for some of the same measures, like risk-limiting audits, that Mr. McConnell blocked. Those Republicans include Rand Paul, Mr. McConnell’s fellow senator for Kentucky.“I wrote, and the House passed, the toughest election security reform bill to date, which then died in the Senate at Mitch McConnell’s hands,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in an email. “It takes a special kind of chutzpah to block every single bill to make our elections more secure and then question the legitimacy of this election.”That inaction, coupled with the unfounded claims against the election technology companies, has exasperated researchers.“It has been extremely frustrating that the existence of serious vulnerabilities is now being confused with the actual exploitation to tamper with elections, which is something that we’ve never seen any evidence for,” said Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who signed the letter.The group has persuaded some states to strengthen security. It helped get Colorado to put in place rigorous audits that examine samples of ballots for evidence of incorrect tallying, for example, but has been unsuccessful in pushing those measures at the federal level.Other signers of the letter include Ronald Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a pioneer in cryptography; Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University; Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the senior vice president at the nonprofit Internet Society; J. Alex Halderman, an election security expert; and Harri Hursti, an election security expert who was in Georgia during the election. More