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      After Trump Pushed Independent Voters to Biden, He Will Need Them Again in ’24

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      In Arizona, where independents are a crucial voting bloc, there might not be the same sense of urgency for a Biden-Trump rematch. And some voters might look elsewhere.Although Donald J. Trump has been out of office more than two years, receding as an all-consuming figure to many Americans, to Margot Copeland, a political independent, he looms as overwhelmingly as ever. She would just as urgently oppose Mr. Trump in a 2024 rematch with President Biden as she did the last time.“I’ll get to the polls and get everybody out to the polls too,” said Ms. Copeland, a 67-year-old retiree who said she was aghast at the possible return to office of the 45th president. “It’s very important that Trump does not get back in.”At the same time, Andrew Dickey, also a political independent who supported Mr. Biden in 2020, said he was disappointed with the current president’s record, particularly his failure to wipe out student debt. (The Supreme Court is considering Mr. Biden’s debt forgiveness program, but appeared skeptical during a hearing.) Mr. Dickey, a chef, owes $20,000 for his culinary training.“I think I would possibly vote third party,” Mr. Dickey, 35, said of a Trump-Biden rematch. “There’s been a lot of things said on Biden’s end that haven’t been met. It was the normal smoke screen of the Democrats promising all this stuff, and then nothing.”In Maricopa County in Arizona, the most crucial county in one of the most important states on the 2024 electoral map, voters like Ms. Copeland and Mr. Dickey illustrate the electoral upside — and potential pitfalls — for Mr. Biden as he begins his bid for a second term, which he announced last week.The prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024 is Democrats’ greatest get-out-the-vote advantage. But the yearning by some past Biden voters for an alternative, including a third-party candidate, poses a threat to the president.Democrats have found electoral success in Arizona in recent years — but the state is still closely divided and will be key to the 2024 race.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s extremely narrow win in Arizona in 2020 was driven by independent voters, a bloc he flipped and carried by 11 percentage points, after Mr. Trump won independents in 2016 by three points, according to exit polls.In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for 60 percent of Arizona’s votes, independents outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans.In interviews last week with independents who voted for Mr. Biden, most praised his accomplishments and supported his re-election, some enthusiastically.But there was a share of 2020 Biden voters who were disappointed and looking elsewhere.“I think we have bigger problems than just Trump being re-elected,” said Richard Mocny, a retiree who switched his registration from Republican to independent after the rise of Mr. Trump, and who voted in 2020 for Mr. Biden. “Polarization in this country is just fierce,” he said. “I believe in looking at some of the new third parties popping up.”Recently, the group No Labels, which has not disclosed its financial backers, qualified to be on the Arizona ballot, and has raised concerns among some Democrats that it could field a spoiler candidate who would pull votes from Mr. Biden.Arizona’s independent voters, a sampling of whom were interviewed after having participated in an earlier New York Times/Siena College poll, are sure to be just as essential to Mr. Biden next year as they were in 2020. His 10,500-vote margin in Arizona, less than one percentage point, was his narrowest of any state. The Electoral College map of states likely to be the most contested in 2024 has narrowed to a smaller handful than usual: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.After supporting Mr. Biden in 2020, Richard Mocny is open to a third-party candidate. “Polarization in this country is just fierce,” he said.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesIndependent Biden voters in Arizona said that the economy was certainly a concern, including $5 local gasoline prices and in some cases their own stressed finances. But most Biden voters did not blame the president for persistently high inflation, which they said was largely beyond White House control.Many passionately agreed with Mr. Biden, as he said in his kickoff re-election video, that the Republican Party has been taken over by the far-right, or as Mr. Biden labeled them “MAGA extremists.”“The entire Republican Party went so far to the right,” said Sheri Schreckengost, 61, a legal assistant and political middle-of-the-roader, who in the past sometimes voted for Republicans. “Donald Trump changed all that for me,” she said. “The way things are now, there’s no way I’d vote for a Republican.”Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona was only the second by a Democrat for president since 1948. Maricopa County was the key to his victory. Mr. Biden flipped 60 precincts that had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. Most of the swing precincts are in suburbs north and southeast of Phoenix, in an arc roughly described by a beltway route known as Loop 101.Former President Trump lost 60 precincts in Maricopa County that he had won in 2016. The county is one of the most important in the country to the 2024 campaign.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMany suburban residents are newcomers to Arizona and they have transformed the former base of Barry Goldwater and John McCain, both Republican presidential nominees, into a purple state. There are the same concerns about Mr. Biden’s age as there are elsewhere in the country.In Mesa, a suburb with several precincts that Mr. Biden flipped, Maren Hunt, 48, an independent voter who works as a librarian, said of the president, as she entered a Trader Joe’s one evening, “I think he’s done a lot of good, but, you know, how much more does he have left in him?”Mr. Biden, the oldest person ever to occupy the Oval Office, would be 82 on Inauguration Day of a second term. Still, if it came down to a contest between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who is just four years younger than the president, Ms. Hunt did not hesitate about how she’d vote. “I’ll make sure to mail in my ballot early, very early,” she said.Similarly, Dlorah Conover, who would prefer a Democratic candidate in the mold of Bernie Sanders — the Vermont progressive, who declined to run again for president in 2024 after two unsuccessful campaigns — said that in a Trump-Biden showdown, it would be no contest.Dlorah Conover said that if the 2024 race came down to Biden-Trump, she would have a clear choice.Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times“This is a despicable human being,” Ms. Conover, 38, who plans to enter community college this month, said of Mr. Trump. “Biden would win hands down with me.”Mr. Trump has plenty of support in Arizona. A poll of registered voters in the state in April by Public Opinion Strategies found Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump by only 1 point in a hypothetical matchup.Despite the former president’s two impeachments, a civil suit accusing him of rape and defamation, and an indictment related to claims he paid hush money to a porn star, Mr. Trump’s core supporters are dug in.Lately, he has had increased support among Republicans against his chief rival for the nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. In a Trump-Biden rematch, Americans’ entrenched partisanship means that Mr. Trump could gain as much as Mr. Biden from an impulse to rally behind the nominee.Barry Forbes, 75, an independent who leans Republican, would prefer Mr. DeSantis as the nominee, but he said he would back Mr. Trump, in part because of Mr. Biden’s costly aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russian invaders — “a war we had no business getting involved in,” he said outside the Trader Joe’s.Much of Mr. Biden’s 2020 pitch to voters was that he would shrink the deep divisions among Americans, which Mr. Trump had expressly exploited for political gain. Voters seem poised to judge him on the progress he has made.“I think he’s done wonders on bringing our country back together after the number Trump did tearing us apart,” said Jenifer Schuerman, 39, an independent voter and a fifth-generation Arizonan.Jenifer Schuerman pointed to Mr. Biden’s record and his efforts to unify the country.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesAnother independent who voted for Mr. Biden, Joel Uliassi, a 22-year-old student at Arizona State University, was less impressed. “Biden ran on the idea he’d heal the divide,” he said. “He was going to bring us back together. From what I’ve seen we’ve gotten more divided and separated.”Mr. Uliassi, a music student who plays the trumpet, said he became discouraged about Mr. Biden during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which was when approval ratings of the president first dipped below the share of voters who disapproved, a trend that endures.“I had hoped this election would not be a repeat of the last election, but it looks like it’s ramping up to be that,” Mr. Uliassi said. “If it was another Trump-Biden rematch, I would consider both candidates more this time.” More

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      ‘Get cancer’: how election lies morphed into a plague of hate in Arizona

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      On a typical day during the 2022 elections in Arizona, threatening emails and social media posts flowed into Maricopa county’s inboxes.Emailers, social media posters and callers were mad about everything from printer problems on election day to vote counting to court rulings, documents obtained by the Guardian show.“Election stealing piece of shit – get cancer,” one person wrote to a county elections official.“You cheating sons of bitches every last one of you should swing for treason,” a Twitter account wrote to the county.“You deserve to be executed in front of America by Firing Squad,” another wrote to the county supervisors.Nearly all of the perpetrators of these threats believed that the election was stolen from the candidate they wanted to win. In 2022, the threats regularly mentioned the election being stolen from the Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who, despite her loss, has not conceded the race and is still fighting it in court.These kinds of harassing and threatening messages have become the new normal for elections officials, especially those in swing states such as Arizona. Since Maricopa county became a frequent target in 2020 after Trump lost both it and the state, the county has worked to catalogue and respond to threats to protect its employees and try to hold the people making these threats accountable, creating one of the most robust threat monitoring and response systems in the nation. County officials hope the system will help them in 2024, when they anticipate a rise in threats.After 2020, it seemed, more people felt empowered to threaten elections officials, egged on by politicians who continued to spread election lies, said Paul Penzone, the sheriff of Maricopa county.The number of threats against Maricopa county elections officials increased in 2022 compared with 2020, though the county improved and perfected the way it catalogued threats, making a direct comparison difficult. In 2022, the county processed 386 threats – more than one a day. Penzone said that 2024 could be even worse.“My concern is, with that empowerment now as we come into another presidential election, the populace who feel like that behavior is acceptable and appropriate, now they’re enabled, now they’re empowered and they feel like it is not only appropriate to do, but that it’s their responsibility to act that way,” Penzone said.The detailed process and level of monitoring and response from Maricopa county is far more than in most other election jurisdictions. The county is one of the country’s largest, and it’s situated in the middle of near-constant election denialism in a state where the fervor over purported voting irregularities has not died down.“You’re talking about 9,000 jurisdictions across the country, 3,000 counties, and the vast majority just do not have the resources and the tools and the skill level to do the kinds of things that you see in Maricopa,” said Neal Kelley, the chairman of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections and a former elections official in Orange county, California.How the county respondsThe threatening messages fall along common themes: they mention treason, saying the penalty for it is death, sometimes adding in the word or imagery of hanging. They say that “we the people” are watching officials’ moves. They bring up jail or prison, bloodshed, violence, war or the second amendment. Some are blatantly homophobic, antisemitic, sexist.Some willingly sign their names to their screeds, sometimes leaving their phone number or address, a sign that they don’t believe there could be repercussions. Depending on the content of a message and directness of a threat, though, the county contacts law enforcement for further investigation and potential prosecution.Over the past few years, in response to rising threats, Maricopa county has beefed up the way it monitors and responds to these kinds of messages.When a direct or indirect threat comes in, anyone in the county can send an email to an internal email address to document the threat, which then creates a ticket that can be responded to, similar to how an employee would file a ticket if they needed computer help. From there, analysts look over the threat and decide whether it should be forwarded to law enforcement agencies in Arizona and at the federal level.Whether law enforcement decides to investigate or, eventually, prosecute is out of county election officials’ hands.Some threats come directly to the county, via social media messages, emails or phone calls. But the county also proactively monitors certain corners of the internet where people toss around threats and plan responses, funneling those into the monitoring system as well.The threats most frequently target the public officials who run elections, like the county supervisors and recorder, and top elected officials in the state, like the governor, attorney general and secretary of state.But they also occasionally target lower-level employees whose roles rarely become fodder for the public’s ire. Those employees sometimes end up in videos that ping around the internet or land in certain publications that are known to kick up more threats, such as the far-right Gateway Pundit. When that happens, those employees face ongoing harassment and threats, too.If an employee becomes a target, the county works with them to improve their security and privacy online while providing any assistance they may need to cope with a barrage of hateful comments. In some cases, the county will add physical security for them as well, Penzone said.Since the 2020 election saw the central count facility become a target of protesters, the county has added a permanent fence and limited access to the area. During the 2022 election, the Maricopa county sheriff’s office had an increased presence at the site, adding a temporary fence around a broader part of the facility and putting more officers there to deter any mayhem. At one point, deputies rode by the area on horseback, probably as a show of force.For people who answer the phones, the county trains them on how to handle difficult callers by attempting to defuse and de-escalate the situation. The training follows a “Triple A” strategy of apologizing, acknowledging and assuring callers. If a caller continues to harass, the employee should provide a warning about their inappropriate behavior and let them know they will hang up if it continues.“You are not expected to be subjected to continued verbal abuse from callers,” says a training document obtained by the Guardian.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf a person calls and makes threats, the county advises the employee to remain calm and try to gather as much information as possible, like the caller’s name and target of their threat. Immediately after the call, the employee is directed to report the incident to a supervisor so it can be documented and responded to.When harassment becomes a threatThose who assess the harassing and threatening messages and phone calls walk a fine line when considering what could be an actionable threat. They weigh people’s free speech rights against safety.“Oftentimes, people say some really offensive things that cause you to feel uneasy or feel that your life may be threatened, but by letter of the law, maybe their words aren’t a direct threat,” Penzone, the county sheriff, said. “And that’s the frustrating part.”A few threats in Arizona have led to federal charges since 2020, like an Ohio man who was charged for sending threats to the secretary of state’s office, an Iowa man who threatened to kill a county supervisor and a Missouri man who threatened the county recorder.The Iowa man recently pleaded guilty. Clint Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors who was threatened, told the Washington Post he was glad a prosecution was “finally happening” when the charges were announced.“The wheels of justice turn awfully slow, including when there’s quite possibly actionable threats to not just me, but to my family, to our co-workers, my colleagues, the recorder, and election staff, people that are just trying to do a job,” he said. “This has been going on a long time, and I know that there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of election officials that have received calls like this.”Elections officials around the country have expressed frustration with a lack of prosecutions for these kinds of threats. In Maricopa county, Reuters reported, the county’s information security officer wrote to the FBI asking for more help last year.“Our staff is being intimidated and threatened,” the IT officer wrote. “We’re going to continue to find it more and more difficult to get the job done when no one wants to work for elections.”Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said he is working with a Republican lawmaker to advance a bill that would make the addresses of both elections officials and elected officials private as a way to prevent harassment and threats.When Kelley was in charge of elections in Orange county, California, he received veiled threats on occasion, which left him unnerved and searching for ways to make sure the threats didn’t escalate.“A lot of election officials who’ve experienced something have been frustrated because they report it, but then there’s no action taken,” he said.Federal prosecutions have increased for election-related threats, and the justice department launched a taskforce aimed at the issue in 2021, but there’s no data at the state level to show how local law enforcement has responded, Kelley said. And despite the increased prosecutions federally, “We’re not seeing the kinds of numbers that would probably equate to what actually is happening out there with threats,” he said.Aside from prosecutions, elections officials can work to dispel disinformation and transparently explain to voters the various checks and balances that make election fraud rare, Kelley said. They should use their official channels to spread these messages and work toward creating systems to monitor threats, though that requires better funding.And when politicians lose an election, they should concede and move on quickly, signaling to their followers to do the same, Kelley said. Several Arizona hopefuls still have not conceded their races, five months after the November 2022 election.For Penzone’s part, he’s balancing making elections workers safe with not overpolicing polling sites, which could deter voters as well.Since 2020, election protection has grown to be a bigger and more constant part of his office’s duties.“In a perfect world, I would tell you that if I had enough staff, I would create a division specifically for election-related crime and security,” Penzone said. More

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      An end to political deadlock? Arizona’s experiment with third parties

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      In a swing state that’s likely to decide the next presidential election, two new third parties want to get on the ballot and other groups want to remake the way votes are cast and counted.Arizona, which voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 as the state has grown more purple, could see big shifts to its political establishment in the next year, all premised on the idea that the dominance of the two main political parties creates dysfunction and prevents progress on issues that matter to voters. That has Democrats and Republicans here worried.One new party, No Labels, gathered enough signatures to put candidates on the ballot in 2024. Another new party, Forward, is starting to gather signatures to get ballot status.Separately, a coalition of voting groups has surveyed voters to understand their thoughts on ranked-choice voting and open primaries in an effort to run a 2024 ballot measure that would greenlight the concepts in Arizona.While similar efforts are afoot in other states and nationwide, Arizona provides a fertile place to experiment with attempts to reimagine elections.About one-third of Arizona voters aren’t registered with a political party. Both major parties try to court these independent voters to build winning coalitions. In recent years, Democrats have been more successful at amassing independent support, though Republicans dominated for decades before that.The state also has one of the country’s most prominent independents – Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat who left the party earlier this year and hasn’t said whether or how she’ll run to keep her seat in 2024.Because of its new status as a swing state, donors are now much more interested in spending money in Arizona. This influx of cash means more groups can afford to gather signatures and promote ballot measures, both of which can cost millions in Arizona.And with a state Republican party that’s affixed to the far right, there’s an opening for centrist and center-right candidates who could seek support from moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents.The level of extremism and dysfunction shows why a two-party system with closed primaries doesn’t work, said longtime consultant Chuck Coughlin, who is working with Save Democracy Arizona, a group advancing ranked-choice voting in Arizona.“You did experience the same election I just did, did you not? You did experience this overwhelming feeling of joy with candidates you had to choose from?” he joked about the vitriolic 2022 campaigns. “The obvious answer is because the system is so badly broken right now.”The rise of third partiesPaul Bentz, a Republican consultant and pollster in Arizona, said the dissatisfaction with the two main parties has created a lane for third parties. One big hurdle, though, is that independents often pride themselves on their lack of party affiliation.“What independents do care about is the candidates, and they want to choose based on the issues,” Bentz said. “So if this gives a platform for an alternative individual to present different issues and let independents choose them, that would be something that’s very attractive to them. But there is no independent party because independents specifically don’t want to be part of a party.”No Labels, a centrist party founded in 2010, so far has ballot status in Alaska, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, though the group wants to be on the ballot in 22 states by the end of the year, spokesperson Maryanne Martini said.It’s not clear if the party will run any candidates in Arizona next year. Martini said the group isn’t actively recruiting candidates at this point.Soon after No Labels gained ballot status, the Arizona Democratic party sued to try to get it removed. Democrats overall have been more vocally concerned than Republicans about these incoming centrist parties, fearing they will peel off votes from the left and spoil races for Democrats.In its lawsuit, the Arizona Democratic party alleges No Labels isn’t following requirements for political parties and didn’t follow laws for signature-gathering, so it shouldn’t be recognized as a party in the state.“Arizonans deserve better and voters deserve to know who is behind this shadowy organization and what potentially nefarious agenda they are pushing,” the Arizona Democratic party spokesperson Morgan Dick said when the lawsuit was announced.Martini called the lawsuit “undemocratic and outrageous”.“If either party in Arizona is worried about a No Labels candidate taking votes away from them, we think they should focus more on appealing to the growing commonsense majority they often ignore and less on filing baseless lawsuits to try to kick competitors off the ballot,” she said.The Forward party, a moderate party co-chaired by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, has legal status in six states and is working toward it in nearly two dozen others this year. In addition to gathering signatures, the party is hosting community events in Arizona to build support, said Chris Hendrickson, the state lead for the party.At a kick-off event in March, four Democratic members of the Arizona house of representatives declared themselves “Forward Democrats”. They aren’t leaving their party, but they support Forward’s mission. Last year, Forward endorsed Democratic US senator Mark Kelly and independent congressional candidate Clint Smith.“I don’t think the objective is to push out any one party or another,” Hendrickson said. “We really need to have four or five legitimate parties who all bring something to the table.”A lot of the consternation over centrist parties relates to the 2024 presidential election. Democrats worry a third-party candidate could cost them the presidency and throw the election to Republicans, possibly to Trump.No Labels said it “is not running and will not run a presidential campaign”. The Forward party also said it won’t run a presidential candidate in 2024 and is primarily interested in state and local elections.Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said the third parties would serve more to hurt Democrats than dismantle a two-party system, though he understands voters’ interest in ending two-party dominance.“The problem is adding minor parties doesn’t put an end to a two-party system,” Cani said. “It just creates new minor parties that will end up with the same chance of winning elections as the Libertarian and Green parties.”A push for ranked-choice votingOther groups want to see the way Arizonans vote change to allow more moderate candidates to win elections and force the parties to run more broadly appealing campaigns.Ranked-choice voting comes in different forms, but typically asks voters to rank candidates in order of their preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t get enough votes, their second and subsequent choices are counted until someone gets more than 50% of votes. The system sometimes necessitates an open primary election, where voters don’t need to select which party’s primary to participate in.Coughlin, the consultant who’s working on a potential ballot measure, said the group is still surveying voters to understand whether a measure could be successful. So far, the groups are looking at a final-five version of voting, where all candidates appear on one primary ballot and the top five move to a general.“Our goal is to make sure that nobody can win in a primary and that all of the decisions are made in November and that we create the greatest amount of competition possible,” he said.Ranked-choice voting confuses some voters, but the idea of open primaries tends to get more support. Partisan, closed primaries are now paid for by taxpayers in Arizona, and focus groups have strongly favored defunding them, Coughlin said.To gather enough signatures and then run a campaign to support a ranked-choice ballot measure would cost around $20m. Coughlin said the group would need to start collecting signatures by August.Though Save Democracy Arizona may not shoot for a ballot measure next year, the idea of ranked-choice voting has Republican lawmakers pushing proposed laws to stop the effort.Republicans in the legislature sent a question to the ballot for next year that would prohibit anything but the kind of primary elections Arizona has now. That means there could be measures to approve ranked-choice voting and to prohibit it on the same ballot.They also approved a bill that prohibits ranked-choice voting at any level in Arizona, though that proposal was vetoed. The Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, said the bill was unnecessary as the practice isn’t used in Arizona, and that ranked-choice voting “is used successfully elsewhere in the country”. More

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      The ‘Diploma Divide’ Is the New Fault Line in American Politics

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      The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will ebb and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear.Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least one major political realignment: educational attainment is the new fault line in American politics.Educational attainment has not replaced race in that respect, but it is increasingly the best predictor of how Americans will vote, and for whom. It has shaped the political landscape and where the 2024 presidential election almost certainly will be decided. To understand American politics, candidates and voters alike will need to understand this new fundamental.Americans have always viewed education as a key to opportunity, but few predicted the critical role it has come to play in our politics. What makes the “diploma divide,” as it is often called, so fundamental to our politics is how it has been sorting Americans into the Democratic and Republican Parties by educational attainment. College-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees — especially white Americans, but increasingly others as well — are now more likely to support Republicans.It’s both economics and cultureThe impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.The road to political realignmentThe diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.In 2024, Democrats are likely to enter the general election with 222 electoral votes, compared with 219 for Republicans. That leaves only eight states, with 97 electoral votes — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — up for grabs. And for these states, education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.The 2024 mapA presidential candidate will need a three-track strategy to carry these states in 2024. The first goal is to further exploit the trend of education levels driving how people vote. Democrats have been making significant inroads with disaffected Republicans, given much of the party base’s continued embrace of Mr. Trump and his backward-looking grievances, as well as a shift to the hard right on social issues — foremost on abortion. This is particularly true with college-educated Republican women.In this era of straight-party voting, it is notable that Democrats racked up double-digit percentages from Republicans in the 2022 Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania governors’ races. They also made significant inroads with these voters in the Senate races in Arizona (13 percent), Pennsylvania (8 percent), Nevada (7 percent) and Georgia (6 percent).This represents a large and growing pool of voters. In a recent NBC poll, over 30 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they were not supporters of MAGA.At the same time, Republicans have continued to increase their support with non-college-educated voters of color. Between 2012 and 2020, support for Democrats from nonwhite-working-class voters dropped 18 points. The 2022 Associated Press VoteCast exit polls indicated that support for Democrats dropped an additional 14 points compared with the 2020 results.However, since these battleground states largely fall in the middle of education levels in our country, they haven’t followed the same trends as the other 42 states. So there are limits to relying on the education profile of voters to carry these states.This is where the second group of voters comes in: political independents, who were carried by the winning party in the last four election cycles. Following Mr. Trump’s narrow victory with independent voters in 2016, Mr. Biden carried them by nine points in 2020. In 2018, when Democrats took back the House, they carried them by 15 points, and their narrow two-point margin in 2022 enabled them to hold the Senate.The importance of the independent voting bloc continues to rise. This is particularly significant since the margin of victory in these battleground states has been very narrow in recent elections. The 2022 exit polls showed that over 30 percent of voters were independents, the highest percentage since 1980. In Arizona, 40 percent of voters in 2022 considered themselves political independents.These independent voters tend to live disproportionately in suburbs, which are now the most diverse socioeconomic areas in our country. These suburban voters are the third component of a winning strategy. With cities increasingly controlled by Democrats — because of the high level of educated voters there — and Republicans maintaining their dominance in rural areas with large numbers of non-college voters, the suburbs are the last battleground in American politics.Voting in the suburbs has been decisive in determining the outcome of the last two presidential elections: Voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Phoenix determined the winner in the last two presidential elections and are likely to play the same pivotal role in 2024.These voters moved to the suburbs for a higher quality of life: affordable housing, safe streets and good schools. These are the issues that animate these voters, who have a negative view of both parties. They do not embrace a MAGA-driven Republican Party, but they also do not trust Mr. Biden and Democrats, and consider them to be culturally extreme big spenders who aren’t focused enough on issues like immigration and crime.So in addition to education levels, these other factors will have a big impact on the election. The party that can capture the pivotal group of voters in the suburbs of battleground states is likely to prevail. Democrats’ success in the suburbs in recent elections suggests an advantage, but it is not necessarily enduring. Based on post-midterm exit polls from these areas, voters have often voted against a party or candidate — especially Mr. Trump — rather than for one.But in part because of the emergence of the diploma divide, there is an opening for both political parties in 2024 if they are willing to gear their agenda and policies beyond their political base. The party that does that is likely to win the White House.Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and is a senior adviser to the Brunswick Group.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republican Mark Lamb Files to Run for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate Seat

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      Mark Lamb, a sheriff and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump, will run for the seat held by Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent.Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump known for his policing of elections and his defiance of a pandemic lockdown, announced Tuesday that he would run for Senate in Arizona next year, a contest that could determine control of the closely divided chamber.Mr. Lamb, 50, became the first high-profile Republican to compete for the seat, one currently held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent. Ms. Sinema has not said whether she will run, but if she does, there is already one Democratic challenger: Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix.In his announcement video, Mr. Lamb said he would “stand up to the woke left” and “secure our border and support our law enforcement.” He also called out his support for gun rights and his anti-abortion stance in the ad.Mr. Lamb, as the top law enforcement officer in Arizona’s third-most populous county, Pinal, made headlines when he refused to enforce the state’s stay-at-home order in 2020 and then when he expressed sympathy for the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has also sown doubt over the results of the 2020 election and drawn scrutiny for his embrace of private militias and hard-line positions on immigration.The field appears likely to grow, as Republicans see an opening to retake the seat in the potential matchup between Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema, which could split the Democratic and independent voters who have powered victories for the left in the state.Kari Lake, a Republican who refused to accept her defeat in the governor’s race last year, has also signaled that she could jump into the race.Ms. Sinema has infuriated Democrats with her departure and opposition to key planks of their agenda in the Senate. Her split with the party came shortly after it gained an outright majority in the Senate during the midterm elections last fall.Arizona was one of the key battlegrounds in those elections, and in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory there over Mr. Trump helped him to secure the presidency. More

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      Kyrsten Sinema is readying for a re-election campaign as an independent

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      The Arizona US senator Kyrsten Sinema is preparing for an independent re-election campaign in a move that will not only test whether the former Democrat can build a centrist base apart from her former party – but may also risk splitting votes among Democratic supporters.Earlier this week, Sinema gathered her team in Phoenix and discussed re-election strategies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing anonymous sources. Part of the meetings involved Sinema and her team reviewing slideshows that laid out a timeline of her potential run, as well as timing details, according to the Journal which reviewed the slides.The slideshows covered Sinema’s current communications strategy and highlighted her track record as an independent senator.“Kyrsten is an independent voice for Arizona. As Arizona’s senior senator, she’s committed to ignoring partisan politics, shutting out the noise and delivering real results helping everyday Arizonans build better lives for themselves and their families,” one of the slides said, according to the Journal.Another slide indicated obtaining a poll and opposition research by 30 September and finalizing campaign staff by the end of the year, the Journal reported.Sinema defected from the Democratic party and declared herself an independent last December, days after Democrats and independents secured a 51-49 majority in the Senate.“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” Sinema announced in an op-ed in Arizona Central at the time.The switch came after Sinema, over the last two years, often withheld her support for the Joe Biden White House’s various legislative initiatives, including voting rights protections. That drew the ire of many of her colleagues and supporters of the Democratic president.With Sinema preparing for a re-election campaign, Arizona seems to be in store for a competitive three-way race that also involves Democratic US House representative Ruben Gallego, 43, and unsuccessful 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, 53.According to an individual familiar with Sinema’s campaign, she has brought in $2m this year through March and has approximately $10m “cash on hand”, the Journal reported.Experts speculate that Sinema’s independent re-election campaign could split Democratic votes and set the Republicans up to turn the seat in their favor.Last Thursday, Arizona Democrats announced that they would sue to prevent the moderate organization No Labels from being recognized as a political party for the 2024 elections. The move signals Democrats’ concerns that a third-party candidate may split votes and in turn risk Biden’s re-election as well as bring about a potential Republican majority in the Senate. More

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      Arizona Supreme Court Turns Down Kari Lake’s Appeal in Her Election Lawsuit

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      The justices refused to hear Ms. Lake’s claims disputing her loss in the governor’s race, but sent one part of her lawsuit back to a trial court for review.Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted.In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit.“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.”But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.The decision dealt another setback to Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor whose strident election denialism helped her to gain the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, contending on Twitter that remanding the signature verification aspect of her case back to the trial court was vindication.“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” Ms. Lake wrote. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”Ms. Lake had argued that “a material number” of ballots with unmatched signatures were accepted in Maricopa County. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling on the matter, effectively saying that she would have to show the numbers that prove the election outcome “would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”She fell to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was Arizona’s secretary of state, by just over 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million ballots cast in the battleground state — less than one percentage point.Representatives for Ms. Hobbs, a defendant in Ms. Lake’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ms. Lake has repeatedly pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Maricopa County, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who helps oversee elections, said in a statement, “Since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”He added, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”Ms. Lake’s chief strategist, Colton Duncan, vowed that Ms. Lake’s lawyers would expose more fraud and corruption.“Buckle up, it’s about to get fun,” he said. More

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      Why Fox’s Call on Arizona, Which Was Right, Was Still Wrong

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      It was more a risky guess than a sound decision, and easily could have led to a missed call.The Fox News election-night call that Joe Biden would win Arizona in 2020 proved correct but wasn’t based on sound principles.Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, my guess is you’d be interested in my colleague Peter Baker’s article about the drama at Fox News in the aftermath of its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.Here’s the short version: Fox News executives, news anchors and pundits were enraged over the call, with messages and a recording showing they thought it hurt ratings and threatened to “impact the brand” by alienating Donald J. Trump’s supporters.Most people would agree that political and branding concerns shouldn’t dictate an election call by a news organization. But the article has nonetheless rekindled an old debate about whether Fox News was really “right” to call Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night in 2020.This debate can be a little confusing, since Fox was right in the most important sense: It said Mr. Biden would win Arizona, and he ultimately did.But a race call is not an ordinary prediction. It’s not like calling heads or tails in a coin toss. A race call means that a candidate has something like a 99.9 percent chance of winning. As a result, a call can be wrong, even if the expected outcome ends up happening. If you assert that there’s a 99.9 percent chance that a coin flip will come up heads, you’re wrong — regardless of what happens next.Of course, everyone knows heads or tails is a 50-50 proposition. It’s much harder to know whether Mr. Biden had a 50.1 percent or 99.9 percent chance of winning Arizona based on the data available at 11:20 p.m. Eastern on election night, when Fox called the state for Mr. Biden. Most other news organizations didn’t think so; only The Associated Press, a few hours later, joined Fox in making the call so quickly. And in the end, Mr. Biden won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point — a margin evoking a coin flip.Was the Fox call the result of the most sophisticated and accurate modeling, or more like being “right” when calling heads in a coin flip? It appears to be the latter — a lucky and dangerous guess — based on a review of televised statements by the Fox News decision team and publicly available data about the network’s modeling.The Fox team believed Mr. Biden would win Arizona by a comfortable margin at the time the call was made, based on erroneous assumptions and flawed polling. While it worked out for Fox in the end, similarly risky decisions could have easily led to a missed call, with potentially dire consequences for trust in American elections.I should disclose that I’m not an entirely disinterested party. Here at The Times, we rejected the A.P. call on Arizona (The Times usually accepts A.P. calls, but we independently evaluate A.P. projections in very important races) because we couldn’t rule out a Trump victory based on the available data. I believe we were right about that decision. But much as the Fox team has an incentive to argue its case, readers may believe that I have an incentive to argue against the Arizona call. I should also disclose that I know and like the Fox News decision desk director Arnon Mishkin.In a recording of a Fox Zoom meeting two weeks after the election obtained by The Times, Mr. Mishkin acknowledged that the Arizona call appeared “premature” but that “it did land correctly.”A Fox spokesperson on Sunday said that “Fox News continues to stand by its decision desk’s accurate call of Arizona.”Still, there is a compelling body of publicly available evidence suggesting that Fox, when it called the state, fundamentally misunderstood the remaining votes. It did not imagine that Mr. Trump could come so close to winning.Why Fox made the callAt the time Fox called Arizona, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 8.5 percentage points, with an estimated 73 percent of the expected vote counted. The tabulated votes were mainly mail ballots received well ahead of the election. To win, Mr. Trump needed to take about 61 percent of the remaining votes.In addition to the tabulated vote, the Fox decision desk also had the Fox News Voter Analysis, otherwise known as the A.P. VoteCast data — a pre-election survey fielded by The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago. The AP/NORC data showed Mr. Biden ahead by six percentage points in Arizona.A person with knowledge of how the call was made, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Fox team believed that the early returns confirmed the Fox News Voter Analysis. Indeed, Mr. Biden’s early lead seemed to match the survey’s findings among early voters, who broke for Mr. Biden by 10 points in the survey, 54 percent to 44 percent. The implication was that Mr. Biden was on track for a clear victory.When asked on election night on Fox to explain the Arizona call, Mr. Mishkin rejected the notion that Mr. Trump would do well in the outstanding ballots. Instead, he said he expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote:“We’ve heard from the White House that they need to get just 61 percent of the expected vote and they’ll be getting that.” He added: “But the reality is that’s just not true. They’re likely to only get 44 percent of the outstanding vote.” These figures were repeated by Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster on the Fox decision desk, and Mr. Mishkin in subsequent appearances. At the various times these statements were made, Mr. Biden would have been on track to win the state by between four and nine percentage points if the outstanding vote had gone so heavily in his favor.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said he “misspoke on election night” when he said Fox expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote. If Mr. Mishkin did misspeak, there was still no indication that the Fox team expected Mr. Trump to win the remaining votes by a meaningful margin — let alone an overwhelming margin.On air on election night, Mr. Mishkin offered two main reasons to expect Mr. Biden to fare well in the remaining vote:“Yes, there are some outstanding votes in Arizona. Most of them are coming from Maricopa, where Biden is currently in a very strong position. And many of them are mail-in votes, where we know from our Fox News Voter Analysis that Biden has an advantage.”On their face, these arguments weren’t outlandish. Mr. Biden won Maricopa County, which is the home of Phoenix and a majority of Arizona voters. He won the mail vote in Arizona as well.In the end, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the remaining vote, all but erasing Mr. Biden’s advantage.What Fox missedHow could a group of mostly mail-in and mostly Maricopa ballots break for Mr. Trump by such a wide margin? The reason was foreseeable before election night.While “mail” votes sound monolithic, there can be important differences between mail ballots counted before and after the election. That’s because Arizona counts mail ballots in roughly the order in which they are received, and different kinds of voters return their ballots at different times.Ahead of the election, it was clear that Democrats were turning in their ballots earlier than Republicans. As a result, the mail ballots counted on election night — those received at least a few days before the election — were likely to break for Mr. Biden by a wide margin.The flip side: The voters who received mail ballots but had not yet returned them were very Republican. If they ultimately returned their ballots, these so-called “late” mail ballots counted after the election would break heavily for Mr. Trump.It wasn’t inevitable, of course, that Mr. Trump would win these ballots by as wide a margin as he ultimately did. It was possible that many of these Republicans would simply vote on Election Day. In the midterms last November, for instance, Republicans failed to decisively win the “late” mail vote under fairly similar circumstances.But in 2020, whether the late ballots would be overwhelmingly Republican was nonetheless “the big question,” as I wrote before the election. As a result, we never contemplated the possibility of a call in Arizona on election night; it was an easy decision for us to reject the A.P. call without knowing exactly how the “late” mail ballots would break.When asked on television the day after the election if the so-called late mail voters could back Mr. Trump with more than 60 percent support, Mr. Mishkin dismissed the possibility, saying it could happen “if a frog had wings.”Mr. Mishkin said he did not “ascribe any significance” to whether mail voters turned in their ballots on Election Day. Instead, he expected the “late” ballots would “confirm” their call. He was confident the late data “would look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” which to that point had shown Mr. Biden with a clear lead.Similarly, Mr. Shaw said in a radio interview the day after the election that “we don’t have any evidence” that “late” early voters would break for Mr. Trump.In fairness to Fox News and The A.P., it was hard to anticipate the difference between early and late mail ballots ahead of the election. It required marrying a detailed understanding of absentee ballot returns with an equally deep understanding of the mechanics of how Arizona counts mail ballots.The Fox News Voter Analysis was a factor here again as well. The survey offered no indication that mail voters surveyed near the election were likelier to back Mr. Trump, according to the person with knowledge of the call. And previously, late-arriving mail ballots in Arizona had benefited Democrats.But the ballot return data showed that this time could be very different. In the end, it was.Models and polls that missed the markAnalytical and research failures are inevitable. No one can perfectly anticipate what will happen on election night, especially in the midst of a pandemic. What matters is whether these failures yield a bad projection, and here the quality of statistical modeling — and especially whether the model properly quantifies uncertainty — becomes an important factor.Fox’s statistical modeling was highly confident about its Arizona call. On election night, Mr. Mishkin said, “We’re four standard deviations from being wrong” in Arizona. This implied that the Fox model gave Mr. Trump a 1-in-10,000 chance of victory.It’s hard to evaluate why the model was so confident. What’s clear is that it provided a basis for Fox to call the race, even as there were mounting nonstatistical reasons to begin to doubt the estimates.By the time of the Arizona call, it was already clear that the AP/NORC survey data — along with virtually all pre-election polling — had overestimated Mr. Biden. In North Carolina, for example, Mr. Trump had already taken the lead after AP/NORC data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by five points. The same data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by seven points in Florida, where Mr. Trump was by then the projected winner.As a result, there was already reason to be cautious about estimates showing great strength for Mr. Biden. But rather than become a source of uncertainty, Mr. Biden’s positive numbers in the AP/NORC data appeared to become a source of confidence — as Mr. Biden’s strength in the early vote appeared to confirm expectations.One indication that Fox’s modeling was prone to overestimate Mr. Biden was its publicly available probability dials, which displayed the likelihood that Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump would win the key battleground states.At various points, these estimates gave Mr. Biden at least an 87 percent chance of winning Ohio and at least a 76 percent chance of winning Iowa; Mr. Trump ultimately won both by nearly 10 points.Maybe most tellingly, Fox gave Mr. Biden a 95 percent chance to win North Carolina — even at a point when it was quite obvious that Mr. Trump would win the state once the Election Day vote had been counted.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said, “The program that translated the decision desk’s numbers into the probability dials was not working properly at times.” Fox stopped using the probability dials on air, though they remained available online.But even if the dials were erroneously overconfident or otherwise not exactly to Fox’s liking, they nonetheless erred in almost exactly the same way as the Arizona call. In all four states, including Arizona, the AP/NORC data greatly overestimated Mr. Biden; the early vote count leaned heavily toward Mr. Biden; and the Fox estimates confidently swung toward Mr. Biden.Whether it was inaccurate AP/NORC data, misunderstanding the “late” mail vote, technical issues or overconfident modeling, there’s not much reason to believe that there was a factual basis for a projection in Arizona. It came very close to being wrong. If it had been, it could have been disastrous.The public’s confidence in elections would have taken another big hit if Mr. Trump had ultimately taken the lead after a call in Mr. Biden’s favor. It would have fueled the Trump campaign’s argument that he could and would eventually overturn the overall result. After all, he would have already done so in Arizona. More