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      A.O.C. on Why Democrats’ ‘Talking Points Are Not Enough’

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      The House progressive spoke about “demoralizing” congressional negotiations, how she was told to stay away from Virginia’s elections, and what it means to excite the Democratic base.Last year, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic presidential nomination, a group of progressive lawmakers rallied around him to project party unity at a critical time.More than a year later, as the president seeks to pass a robust spending package of social policies that represent the bulk of his domestic agenda, many of the same leaders are looking for a return on their political investment.In an interview with The New York Times, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the country’s most prominent progressives, questioned whether Democratic leaders and the White House understood the scope of the demands coming from the party’s base. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Why do you feel this social policy bill has to pass as soon as possible, at the biggest scale possible?I think the stakes are really, really high.The entire reason that the Progressive Caucus gave their votes [for the infrastructure bill] was based on direct promises from the president, as well as direct promises from more conservative Democratic holdouts. And from House leadership as well. So if those promises don’t follow through, it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to get votes on anything moving forward, because the trust that was already so delicate will have been broken.Do you think these extended negotiations and the stuff that was cut will have an electoral effect? Obviously the Senate will have its say, but if the spending bill largely looks like what the House passed this week, will Democrats say it fulfills the promise of Election Day?I think that if we pass the Build Back Better Act as the House passed it, that we have a shot to go back to our communities and say we delivered. But that’s not to say that this process has not been demoralizing for a lot of folks, because there were enormous promises made. Not just at the beginning, and not just during the election, but that continued to be made.And this is where I have sounded the alarm, because what really dampens turnout is when Democrats make promises that they don’t keep.With the bipartisan infrastructure plan, there’s all of these headlines going around. And I understand the political importance of making a victory lap. But I think that the worst and most vulnerable position we could be in is to over-promise and under-deliver.So let’s not go around and say, “We’re going to replace every lead pipe in this country,” because according to the bipartisan infrastructure plan, that is not going to happen. That has not been funded. And if the Build Back Better Act gets cut even further, then that’s definitely not going to happen. You and other progressives backed Biden during the general election. Do you feel that this White House has continued to be open to the left? And that created trust, because trust requires vulnerability from all parties.There was some good faith with the American Rescue Plan [Democrats’ $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, signed in March]. But after that, which was quite early, it’s been a bit of a slog.I actually don’t direct this critique directly at the White House. I think, in general, the party doesn’t quite fully grasp what is happening in deep-blue communities.What is it that you say they’re missing?The talking points are not enough.Yes, is child care great? Absolutely. Universal pre-K, this is something I’m deeply, deeply supportive of. But we also have too much of a top-down strategy when it comes to our base. We’re always giving them the medicine and telling them what they need to accept, as opposed to really monitoring where the energy is, and being responsive to it. And allowing that to shape our strategy.And even with the infrastructure plan, this kind of investment is deeply needed in underserved communities like the Bronx. However, if we as a party are asking every single person in this party to take a victory lap, and do a news conference in front of a bridge or pothole, and we aren’t funding and actually fixing that pothole, I’m very concerned about how people are going to interpret that a year from now.But doesn’t the White House agree — didn’t it propose a more robust package? The obvious response here is that the administration faces the reality of a 50-50 Senate.There is an enormous amount of executive action that they’re sitting on that I think is underutilized. On student loans. We’ve got executive action on the table with respect to climate. There are certainly things that we can do with immigration.So why are we taking this as a legislative compromise, when the opportunity is so much greater, or when Biden could do this stuff with a stroke of a pen, and is just reminding us that he’s choosing not to?We always try to tell people why they need to settle for less, instead of being able to harness the energy of our grass roots and take political risks in service of them, the same way that we take political risks in service of swing voters. We can do both. The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More

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      Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock.

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      The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024.Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, put it this way in an essay published on the network’s website:As things stand, if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.These and other trends have provoked a deepening pessimism about Democratic prospects in 2022 and anxiety about the 2024 presidential election.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, holds similar views, but suggests that the flood tide of political trouble may be beyond Democratic control:Biden and the Democrats have had almost all bad news: the pandemic is still going; the economy has not picked up in terms of perceptions of the expected increases in employment and economic growth not on fire; perceptions of what happened in Afghanistan; what has happened on the southern border; high crime rates, all amplified in news reports. It is all perception, and the latest is the increase in inflation and gas prices that people see/feel. The critical race theory controversy and perceptions of Democrats being too woke and extreme. The bad news is overwhelming.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, provided me with data from the October WSJ/NBC poll asking voters which party can better manage a wide range of issues. On three key issues — controlling inflation (45R-21D), dealing with crime (43R-21D) and dealing with the economy (45R-27D) — the Republican advantage was the highest in surveys dating back to the 1990s.“Washington Democrats are spending months fighting over legislation,” McInturff wrote by email,but, during this time, voters tell us prices are soaring, the cost of living is tied for the top issue in the country, and there is a sharp increase in economic pessimism. It is these economic factors that are driving negative impressions about the direction of the country to unusually high levels, and this is hurting Democrats everywhere. No administration is going to thrive in that economic environment.In his analysis of the Nov. 6-10 Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Langer made the case thatWhile a year is a lifetime in politics, the Democratic Party’s difficulties are deep; they include soaring economic discontent, a president who’s fallen 12 percentage points underwater in job approval and a broad sense that the party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans — 62 percent say so.The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).On Nov. 3, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball updated the ratings for three incumbent Democratic senators — Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — from “lean Democratic” to “tossup.”An examination of Gallup survey results on the question “As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” reflects the damage suffered by the Democrats. From January through August, Democrats held a substantial 7.9 point advantage (48.2 percent to 41.3 percent). In September, however, Gallup reported a 2-point (47-45) Republican edge that grew to a 5-point (47-42) edge by October.In terms of election outcomes, Republican are once again capitalizing on their domination of the congressional redistricting process to disenfranchise Democratic voters despite strong public support for reforms designed to eliminate or constrain partisan gerrymandering. On Monday, The Times reported that the Republican Party “has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.” The current partisan split in the House is 221 Democratic seats and 213 Republican seats, with one vacancy.There is perhaps one potential political opportunity for Democrats — should the Supreme Court overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, mobilizing supporters of reproductive rights across the country.In the meantime, uneasiness prevails. Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, noted in an email thatBiden had two drops in approval ratings, one from June to August of about 6 points, and another from September to October of another 6 points. The first was a response to Afghanistan. The second was a response to Covid and weak employment growth over the summer.Passing the infrastructure bill should help “with the sense that the administration wasn’t doing enough for the economy,” Ansolabehere continued, but “the hit from Afghanistan is going to be harder to reverse, as it was a judgment about the administration’s handling of foreign affairs.”Micah English, a graduate student in political science at Yale who studies race, class and gender dynamics, argued in an email that Democratic leaders have, at least until now, mismanaged the task of effectively communicating their agenda and goals.“The Democratic Party has a messaging problem that they don’t seem to have any plans to rectify,” she wrote:The Republicans message right now is essentially “Democrats and Biden are only concerned about teaching your children critical race theory instead of focusing on the economy!” The Democrats have no unified countermessage, and until they do, they are likely to continue to suffer major losses in the midterms and beyond.This failure, English continued, has resulted in an inability to capitalize on what should have been good news:The Democrats have proposed legislation that contains incredibly popular policies, but if they continue to fail to communicate the benefits of this legislation to the wider public, it won’t do them any good in the midterms. Additionally, as the 2020 election demonstrated, the Democrats cannot continue to rely on the prospect of changing demographics to deliver them electoral victories.One theme that appeared repeatedly in the comments I received in response to my questions is that even as Biden has succeeded in winning passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, he has struggled to maintain an aura of mastery.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, argued in an email thatwhat a lot of swing voters expected from Biden was competent leadership during a time of crisis. And many perhaps expected that a return to normal leadership would immediately solve the unprecedented problems facing the country. Of course, that was never a realistic expectation.The crucial factors underlying Biden’s declining favorability rating, Schaffner continued, are “several things calling into question Biden’s effectiveness — the Afghanistan withdrawal, the continued impact of Covid, the struggling economy and the difficult time Democrats have had in passing their major legislative initiatives.”I asked a range of political scientists for their projections on how the 2022 elections for control of the House are likely to turn out. Their views were preponderantly negative for Democratic prospects.Matt Grossmann of Michigan State wrote: “Based on simple midterm loss averages, the Democrats are expected to lose 4 points of vote share and be down to ~45 percent of seats on ~48 percent of votes in 2022.” Those numbers translate into roughly a 24-seat loss, reducing Democrats to 197 seats. “There is not much under Democrats’ control that is likely to make a big difference in the extent of their losses,” Grossmann added. “They can try to avoid retirements and primary challenges in swing districts and avoid salient unpopular policies.”Robert M. Stein of Rice University is even less optimistic:In South Texas, Florida and parts of Arizona immigration policy is hurting Democrats with traditional-base voters. This is especially true with Hispanics in Texas border counties, where Trump did well in 2020 and Abbott (incumbent Republican governor) is making significant gains by appealing to the concerns of Hispanics over jobs and immigration.Stein adds:My guess is that Republicans are poised to take the House back in 2022 with gains above the average for midterm elections. Since 1946, the average seat gain for the party not in the White House is 27 seats. The best the Democrats can do is hold at the average, but given the Republican’s advantage with redistricting, my guess is that the Republicans gain 40+ seats.Martin Wattenberg of the University of California-Irvine wrote that “it would take a major event like 9/11 to keep the Democrats from losing the House.” He was more cautious about control of the Senate, which “really depends on the quality of the candidates. Republicans have had the misfortune of nominating candidates like Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell who have lost eminently winnable races due to their own foibles. It remains to be seen if they will nominate such candidates in 2022.”Wattenberg cited data from the General Social Survey showing a sharp rise in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as liberal or slightly liberal, up from 47 percent in 2016 to 62 percent this year: “The left-wing movement of the Democrats is probably going to hurt with the 2022 electorate that will likely be skewed toward older, more conservative voters.”At the same time, Bruce Cain of Stanford suggested that a Democratic defeat in 2022 could be a potentially favorable development for the party’s long term prospects:It is quite possible that losing in the 2022 midterm is the best path to winning the presidency in 2024. It will put the Republicans in a “put up or shut up” spot vis a vis problems facing the country, and Biden meanwhile can work the middle without looking over his left shoulder.Cain took this logic a step further to argue thatIn retrospect the worst thing that happened to Biden was the Democrats winning the two seats in Georgia. It raised expectations among some in his party that they could go left legislatively while the political sun was shining when in reality the political math was not there for that kind of policy ambition.Cain added:The best hope for the Democrats is that Trump will undermine some Republicans during his vengeance tour and that the weakness of the people who want to run under his banner will create some unexpected wins for the Democrats.Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at N.Y.U., added this observation:Pundits, who have to earn a living, always want to impute causality to election losses. However, the midterm cycle is just normal. Voters tend to balance the president. Over time, they also create divided government at the state level.A surprising number of those I contacted made the case that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan did more lasting damage to Biden than might have been expected.“The extended wall-to-wall media coverage of the hurried exit from Afghanistan probably served as a catalyst for some folks to ‘update’ their views on Biden’s performance and take into consideration both the foreign and domestic concerns,” Ted Brader, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email:I’m skeptical that those events themselves drove the lower assessments; Americans weigh domestic events much heavier than foreign affairs. But the heightened attention and criticism can serve as an attention-getting call to re-evaluate the president: “Wait, how well is he doing his job?” As political science research has convincingly demonstrated, bipartisan criticism, as we saw with the Afghan withdrawal, in particular, opens the door to weaker support among independents and members of the president’s own party.Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, wrote me that “things touching on competence (Afghanistan, border, congressional inaction) are probably the most important” in driving down Biden’s ratings, but “for the future, it is inflation and the general economy that will matter most, I think.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended in an email that the problems facing Biden and his Democratic colleagues run deeper than any single issue:Biden was elected as a moderate to put back some sanity into government through a steady hand and incremental reforms. Instead, a wing of the Democratic Party took the 2020 election in which the Democratic Party lost a surprising number of House seats as a voter mandate to implement a pretty fundamental program of social reform and sociocultural change. While I personally might like a lot of these policy initiatives myself, I also realize that this programmatic ambition is consistent with the wishes of only a minority of core Democratic voters, and certainly not that of the centrist voters who prevented Trump from being re-elected.The history of midterm elections suggests that substantial House losses for the party of the incumbent president are inevitable, barring such unusual circumstances as public hostility to the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks raising Republican support in 2002 — the only two times since that the incumbent party gained seats since World War II.In 2010, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, political scientists at Dartmouth, Columbia and the University of Texas at Austin, published “Balancing, Generic Polls and Midterm Congressional Elections,” in which they argued that “between February and Election Day, the presidential party’s vote strength almost always declines.” But, they continued,the degree of decline is unrelated to the public’s evaluation of the president. Clearly, during the midterm election year, the electorate shifts away from the presidential party in its vote choice for reasons that have nothing to do with the electorate’s attitudes toward the president. By default, this is balancing: The electorate votes against the presidential party to give more power to the other party.In a 1988 paper, “The Puzzle of Midterm Loss,” Erikson examined every midterm contest since 1902 and explicitly rejected the theory that such contests are a “negative referendum on presidential performance.” Instead, Erikson wrote,A “presidential penalty” explanation fits the data nicely. By this explanation, the midterm electorate penalized the president’s party for being the party in power: Holding constant the presidential year House vote, the president’s party does much worse at midterm than it would if it did not control the presidency.While substantial midterm losses for the incumbent president’s party are inevitable under most circumstances, that does not mean external developments have no influence on the scope of the outcome.Kitschelt, quoting James Carville, noted in his email: “It’s the economy, stupid. And that means inflation, the supply chain troubles and the inability of the Democrats to extend the social safety net in an incremental fashion.”The inflation rate, Dritan Nesho, the director of civic technology and engagement at Microsoft and a co-director of the Harvard-Harris Poll, wrote in an email,is now outpacing wage growth. As a consequence close to 4 in 10 voters are saying that their personal financial situation is getting worse. This figure is up from the low 20s in May and importantly, majorities of voters are not confident in either the Biden administration keeping inflation at bay (56 percent not confident/44 percent confident) and also of the Federal Reserve (53 percent not confident/47 percent confident).In addition, Nesho said,over two-third of voters (68 percent) believe illegal monthly border crossings have increased since Biden took office, 65 percent blame Biden’s executive orders for encouraging illegal immigration, and 68 percent want stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border.In January 2021, the month Biden took office, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index stood at 79. By Nov. 1, the index had fallen to 66.8, the lowest it has been since November 2011. Richard Curtin, director of the consumer sentiment survey, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report: “Consumer sentiment fell in early November to its lowest level in a decade due to an escalating inflation rate and the growing belief among consumers that no effective policies have yet been developed to reduce the damage from surging inflation.”Similarly, when Biden took office in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the inflation rate was 1.4 percent; as of October this year, the rate had risen to 6.2 percent.Perhaps nothing better encapsulates the problems Democrats face than the price of gas at the pump, which has risen, in the nearly 10 months Biden has been in the White House, to as high as $4.21 a gallon in California, $3.94 in Nevada and upward of $3.60 across the Mountain West.And no one foreshadows the dangers ahead more succinctly than Larry Summers. In his Nov. 15 Washington Post column, Summers, a former secretary of the Treasury, warned: “Excessive inflation and a sense that it was not being controlled helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and risks bringing Donald Trump back to power.”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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      Project Veritas Tells Judge It Was Assured Biden Diary Was Legally Obtained

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      But a search warrant in the case suggests the Justice Department believes the diary kept by the president’s daughter Ashley Biden was stolen.Project Veritas, the conservative group under scrutiny in a Justice Department investigation of how a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden was published days before the 2020 election, has told a federal judge that it received a diary from two people who said they had legally obtained it after she had abandoned it.“Project Veritas had no involvement with how those two individuals acquired the diary,” lawyers for the group said in a letter dated Wednesday to a federal judge in New York. The group’s lawyers were asking U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres for a so-called special master to determine what materials seized by federal investigators could be used as evidence in their investigation.Using initials for the individuals who the lawyers said approached the group with the diary, the lawyers said the group’s “knowledge about how R.K. and A.H. came to possess the diary came from R.K. and A.H. themselves.”In contrast with Project Veritas’s description in the letter of how the diary was obtained, a warrant used by federal authorities to search the home of the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, last Saturday indicated that federal authorities believed the property was stolen.The proceedings in the case have been sealed, but a producer for Fox News provided The New York Times with a copy of the letter written by the Project Veritas lawyers and its attachments, including a copy of the search warrant. The producer was seeking comment from The Times about allegations in the letter that the Justice Department had leaked news of the searches to the Times.Judge Torres ruled on Thursday that the government should refrain from examining the materials it obtained in the search, including from Mr. O’Keefe’s cellphones, until she decides whether to appoint a special master, according to a ruling from the judge posted on Twitter by a Project Veritas lawyer. The judge set a schedule for the government and Project Veritas to provide her with more information in the coming days, and indicated that she is unlikely to rule for at least a week.The F.B.I. executed search warrants last week at the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two former employees for the group.Project Veritas never ended up publishing Ms. Biden’s diary. It was made public less than two weeks before the 2020 election by a right-wing website that posted several photographs of diary pages it claimed were written by Ms. Biden. The website said it had obtained the diary from a “whistle-blower” who worked for a media organization that had decided not to publish a story on the topic. The search warrant provided some sense of the specific questions the government is seeking to answer in its investigation related to Project Veritas, which has previously said it purchased the diary.According to the search warrant — which described Ms. Biden’s property as “stolen” — the government said it was looking for any evidence Mr. O’Keefe had about how Ms. Biden’s property was obtained and whether Ms. Biden was surveilled before the property was taken.The government also said it was seeking any communications that the group prepared to send to Ms. Biden, Mr. Biden and others about her property.The government said in the search warrant that among the crimes it was investigating were conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines, conspiracy to possess stolen goods and transporting stolen property across state lines.Project Veritas has sought to portray itself as a news media organization that made a journalistic decision not to publish the diary, suggesting it is being targeted by the Biden Justice Department and that federal investigators disclosed the existence of the searches to a reporter for The Times.“This leaked information likely was intended to preemptively deflect criticism that the D.O.J. was being used to target a news organization viewed by some as critical of the Biden administration over the matter of President Biden’s daughter’s diary,” the Project Veritas lawyers said in their letter.They added: “Members of the news media like Mr. O’Keefe and Project Veritas depend on an atmosphere of confidence and trust. If the government may, pursuant to a search warrant, fully examine a reporter’s electronic devices — which include information and communications with government critics, watchdogs and whistle-blowers — then the truth-seeking function of the press will wither.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Murkowski Announces Re-election Bid, Setting Up Clash With Trump

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      Of the seven Republicans who found former President Donald J. Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, the Alaska senator is the only one facing re-election this year.WASHINGTON — Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, announced on Friday that she would seek re-election, formally entering what is expected to be the most expensive and challenging race of her political career after voting to impeach former President Donald J. Trump.Of the seven Republicans who found Mr. Trump guilty of incitement of an insurrection after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Ms. Murkowski is the only one facing re-election in the 2022 midterms. A moderate who has never won a majority of the general election vote in her Republican-leaning state, she is seen as the G.O.P.’s most vulnerable Senate incumbent at a time when there is little tolerance among the party’s core supporters for criticism of the former president or cooperation with President Biden.The race sets up a proxy battle between Mr. Trump, who has endorsed a Republican challenger, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other Republican leaders, who are backing Ms. Murkowski in her bid for a fourth full term.In a campaign video announcing her re-election bid, Ms. Murkowski made no mention of Mr. Trump, instead highlighting her work on behalf of the state and offering a pointed warning that “lower-48 outsiders are going to try to grab Alaska’s Senate seat for their partisan agendas.”“I’m running for re-election to continue the important work of growing our economy, strengthening our Alaska-based military and protecting our people and the natural beauty of our state,” Ms. Murkowski, a third-generation Alaskan, said. “I will work with anyone from either party to advance Alaska’s priorities.”Ms. Murkowski, first appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father after he became governor and resigned from the seat, is the second-most-senior Republican woman, after Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who won her own costly re-election bid last year. Ms. Murkowski has established herself as a crucial swing vote with strong relationships in both political parties, most recently helping negotiate the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden is expected to sign into law next week.It is unclear, however, whether Ms. Murkowski’s record of directing aid and support to her state will be enough to overcome the grip of the former president on her party. Alaska’s Republican Party censured her in March for voting to convict Mr. Trump. The former president endorsed a primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, the former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, who has promoted false theories of voter fraud in the 2020 election and hired a number of former Trump campaign staffers.“Lisa Murkowski is bad for Alaska,” Mr. Trump said in a June statement, after Ms. Murkowski voted to confirm Deb Haaland as Interior secretary. “Murkowski has got to go!”The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, has backed Ms. Murkowski, who also has support of her party leadership. Ms. Murkowski has a long record of bucking her party, having helped to shut down the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, opposed the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and voted for a number of Mr. Biden’s nominees during the first year of his administration.“We support all of our incumbents, and fortunately for us, we’ve got great candidates running in our primaries,” said Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the organization, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. But in the same interview, he acknowledged “you’d be foolish not to want and accept Donald Trump’s endorsement.”In 2010, Ms. Murkowski lost a primary race to Joe Miller, a Tea Party candidate, but mounted a successful write-in campaign, becoming the first write-in candidate in more than 50 years to win an election. In January, she told reporters that she would not switch parties, even as she questioned whether she belonged in a Republican Party that was influenced so heavily by Mr. Trump.“As kind of disjointed as things may be on the Republican side, there is no way you could talk to me into going over to the other side,” Ms. Murkowski said at the time. “That’s not who I am; that’s not who I will ever be.”Under a new election system approved a year ago, Ms. Murkowski will first compete in an open primary where the top four candidates will then advance to a ranked-choice general election. More

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      Why Democrats May Have a Long Wait if They Lose Their Grip on Washington

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      Voters’ reflexive instinct to check the party in power makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Usually, it’s the party out of power that frets about whether it will ever win again. This time, it’s the party in control of government that’s staring into the political wilderness.Democrats now have a Washington trifecta — command of the White House and both chambers of Congress. If the results of last week’s elections in Virginia and elsewhere are any indication, they may not retain it after next November’s midterm elections. And a decade or longer may pass before they win a trifecta again.The unusual structure of American government, combined with the electorate’s reflexive instinct to check the party in power, makes it hard for any party to retain a hold on both the White House and Congress for long.Since World War II, political parties have waited an average of 14 years to regain full control of government after losing it. Only one president — Harry Truman — has lost Congress and retaken it later. In every other case, the president’s party regained a trifecta only after losing the White House.It would be foolish to predict the next decade of election results. Still, today’s Democrats will have a hard time defying this long history. Not only do the Democrats have especially slim majorities, but they face a series of structural disadvantages in the House and the Senate that make it difficult to translate popular vote majorities into governing majorities.The specter of divided government is a bitter one for Democrats.The party has won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections but has nonetheless struggled to amass enough power to enact its agenda. That has added to the high stakes in the ongoing negotiations over the large Democratic spending package, which increasingly looks like a last chance for progressives to push an ambitious agenda.And it has helped spur the kind of acrimonious internal Democratic debate over the party’s message and strategy that would usually follow an electoral defeat, with moderates and progressives clashing over whether the party’s highly educated activist base needs to take a back seat for the party to cling to its majority. The strong Republican showing in Virginia and New Jersey last week has prompted yet another round of recriminations.But with such a long history of the president’s party struggling to hold on to power, one wonders whether any policy, tactic or message might help Democrats escape divided government.Some Democrats worry that they could be reduced to just 43 Senate seats by the end of the 2024 election.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe political winds seem to blow against the president’s party almost as soon as a new party seizes the White House. For decades, political scientists have observed a so-called thermostatic backlash in public opinion, in which voters instinctively move to turn down the temperature when government runs too hot in either party’s favor. The pattern dates back as long as survey research and helps explain why the election of Barack Obama led to the Tea Party, or how Donald Trump’s election led to record support for immigration.The president’s party faces additional burdens at the ballot box. A sliver of voters prefers gridlock and divided government and votes for a check and balance against the president. And the party out of power tends to enjoy a turnout advantage, whether because the president’s opponents are resolved to stop his agenda or because of complacency by the president’s supporters..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}While Democrats can still hope to avoid losing control of Congress in 2022, Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings make it seem increasingly unlikely that they will. Historically, only presidents with strong approval ratings have managed to avoid the midterm curse. And with Democrats holding only the most tenuous majorities in the House and the Senate, any losses at all would be enough to break the trifecta.If the Democrats are going to get a trifecta again, 2024 would seem to be their best chance. The president’s party usually bounces back when the president seeks re-election, perhaps because presidential elections offer a clear choice between two sides, not merely a referendum on the party in power. And in the House, a Democratic rebound in 2024 is very easy to imagine, even if far from assured.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

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      How Likely Is a Democratic Comeback Next Year?

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      The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it.There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020.This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag).Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating.When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and the author of “The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in U.S. House Elections.”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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      Swift Ruling in Jan. 6 Case Tests Trump's Tactic of Delay

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      The former president has leveraged the slow judicial process in the past to thwart congressional oversight, but the Jan. 6 case may be different.WASHINGTON — On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy powers, and Obama-appointed Federal District Court judges — to liberal cheers — ruled against him. Each ruling even made the same catchy declaration: “presidents are not kings.”But there was a big difference: The White House counsel case two years ago had chewed up three and a half months by the time Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 120-page opinion to end its first stage. Just 23 days elapsed between Mr. Trump’s filing of the Jan. 6 papers lawsuit and Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling against him.The case, which raises novel issues about the scope of executive privilege when asserted by a former president, is not over: Mr. Trump is asking an appeals court to overturn Judge Chutkan’s ruling and, in the interim, to block the National Archives from giving Congress the first set of files on Friday. The litigation appears destined to reach the Supreme Court, which Mr. Trump reshaped with three appointments.But if the rapid pace set by Judge Chutkan continues, it would mark a significant change from how lawsuits over congressional subpoenas went during the Trump era.The slow pace of such litigation worked to the clear advantage of Mr. Trump, who vowed to defy “all” congressional oversight subpoenas after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm. He frequently lost in court, but only after delays that ran out the clock on any chance that such efforts would uncover information before the 2020 election.So alongside the substantive issues about executive privilege, one key question now is whether Mr. Trump can again tie the matter up in the courts long enough that even a Supreme Court ruling against him would come too late for the special committee in the House that is seeking the Trump White House documents for its investigation into the Jan. 6 riot.Specifically, the Jan. 6 committee has demanded detailed records about Mr. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then sacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.The chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, has said he wants to wrap up by “early spring.” In that case, the committee would need access to the files it has subpoenaed by late winter for that information to be part of any report.Legally, the committee could continue working through the rest of 2022. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm election, the inquiry would very likely end.What happens next in the Jan. 6 White House files case may turn on the inclinations of whichever three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are randomly assigned to the panel that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal.Of the court’s 11 full-time judges, seven are Democratic appointees — including Judge Jackson, whom Mr. Biden elevated earlier this year — and four are Republican appointees, including three named by Mr. Trump. The circuit also has five “senior status” judges who are semiretired but sometimes get assigned to panels; four of those five are Republican appointees.If the D.C. Circuit declines, as Judge Chutkan did, to issue a preliminary injunction, Mr. Trump will presumably immediately appeal to the Supreme Court via its so-called shadow docket, by which the justices can swiftly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.If a stay is granted at either level, the question would shift to whether the D.C. Circuit panel echoes Judge Chutkan’s decision to move quickly in light of the circumstances, or throttles back to the slower pace it tended to follow on such cases when Mr. Trump was president.Notably, in another Trump-era case, involving access to financial papers held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, the Federal District Court judge assigned to that matter, Amit Mehta, was sensitive to the timing implications and took less than a month after the case was filed in April 2019 to hand down his opinion that Congress could get the records.But a D.C. Circuit panel took about five more months before reaching that same result — a nominal win for Congress — in October 2019. Mr. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 2020 to send the case back down to Judge Mehta to start the litigation over again using different standards.Separately, House Democrats have introduced legislation in response to the Trump presidency that would, among many other things, speed up lawsuits to enforce congressional subpoenas for executive branch information. Two people familiar with the matter said House Democratic leaders have indicated they plan to hold a floor vote on that bill before the end of 2021, though no date has been set; its prospects in the Senate are unclear.A related important difference in secrecy disputes between the Trump era and the Jan. 6 White House papers case is that when Mr. Trump was president, his administration controlled the executive branch files Congress wanted to see.Today, President Biden has refused to join Mr. Trump in invoking executive privilege, instead instructing the National Archives to give Congress the files unless a court orders otherwise. As a result, when it comes to government files, the default has flipped from secrecy to disclosure.During the phase of the lawsuit before Judge Chutkan, she signaled that she was averse to judicial delay. During arguments last week, she rejected a suggestion by a lawyer for Mr. Trump that she examine each document before deciding whether executive privilege applied.Representative Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, has said he wants the investigation to wrap up by “early spring.”Al Drago for The New York Times“I don’t see any language in the statute or any case that convinces me that where a previous president disagrees with the incumbent’s assertion of privilege, that the court is required to get involved and do a document-by-document review,” she said, adding:“Wouldn’t that always mean that the process of turning over these records, where the incumbent has no objection, would slow to a snail’s pace? And wouldn’t that be an intrusion by this branch into the executive and legislative branch functions?”Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      Ruth Ann Minner, Down-to-Earth Governor of Delaware, Dies at 86

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      The first woman in that position, she rose from being a receptionist in the governor’s office to claiming the top job herself.Ruth Ann Minner, who was raised by a sharecropper and dropped out of high school but went on to become the first and only woman to serve as governor of Delaware, died on Thursday at the Delaware Hospice Center in Milford. She was 86. The cause was complications of a fall, said Lisa Peel, one of her granddaughters.One of the last public events she attended was President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory celebration in Wilmington in November 2020. He called out her name from the stage before he began his speech, and he had been in touch with the family in recent days.Ms. Minner, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who was conservative on fiscal matters and progressive on social issues, served as governor from 2001 to 2009. A strong promoter of health care and a clean environment, she made headlines in 2002 for successfully pushing through one of the nation’s first smoking bans in public places, despite fierce opposition from many in Delaware’s powerful business community.She also successfully pushed for several education initiatives, including the first scholarship program in the nation to offer free college access to students who kept up their grades and stayed out of trouble. She implemented full-day kindergarten as well.Her other signal achievement was preserving and protecting the state’s open spaces, particularly its farmland and forests.Known for her no-nonsense approach and lack of pretense, Ms. Minner, who grew up during the Depression in a rural coastal area on the Delaware Bay, brought a down-to-earth style to the state capitol in Dover, where a political columnist called her the “Aunt Bee” of state government, a reference to the family matriarch on “The Andy Griffith Show.”“She was a leader who had a real common touch,” Gov. John Carney, who served as her lieutenant governor, said in a statement. Having grown up poor, he added, “she brought that perspective to her job every day, and she never lost her attachment to those roots.”Breaking the gender barrier when she was elected governor was not important to her, Ms. Minner told The Associated Press in 2000.“I’ve found out since the election, though, that it does matter to a lot of women,” she added. “It matters to a lot of young girls.”Ms. Minner in 2004 with John Carney, her lieutenant governor, after narrowly winning a second term.Pat Crowe II/Associated PressRuth Ann Coverdale was born on Jan. 17, 1935, in Milford, Del., the youngest of five children, and was raised in nearby Slaughter Neck. Her father, Samuel Coverdale, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Mary Ann (Lewis) Coverdale, was a homemaker.She left high school at 16 to work on the family farm. At 17 she married Frank R. Ingram, her junior high school sweetheart. The couple had three sons.Mr. Ingram died of a heart attack at 34 in 1967. In 1969 she married Roger Minner, with whom she operated a car-towing business. He died of cancer in 1991.She is survived by two sons, Frank Ingram Jr. and Wayne Ingram; seven grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her son Gary L. Ingram died in 2016.Having dropped out of high school, Ms. Minner was determined to make something of herself — and to show her sons that dropping out was not OK.She started by earning her high school equivalency diploma while working as a statistician with the Maryland Crop Reporting Service. She briefly attended Delaware Technical and Community College before landing a job as a clerk in the Delaware House of Representatives, where, she told The New York Times in 2001, she was able to study the ins and outs of statehouse politicking.She transferred to an office job with Sherman W. Tribbitt, a state representative. When he was elected governor in 1972, he brought her along as his receptionist. And then she ran for office herself.“I never had any intention of getting deeply involved in politics,” Ms. Minner told The Times. “But it finally got down to proving some things to myself.”She was elected to the State House in 1974. After eight years there and nearly a decade in the State Senate, she ran for lieutenant governor in 1992, with Thomas R. Carper at the top of the ticket. They won. In 2000, after two terms as governor, Mr. Carper was elected to the U.S. Senate and Ms. Minner was elected governor, winning 60 percent of the vote.By then, “she had become comfortable with being the only woman in the room,” Dr. Peel, her granddaughter, said in an interview. And Ms. Minner was one to stick to her guns, she said, to the point of being stubborn. When she made up her mind, there was no arguing with her.She faced a tough re-election fight four years later; after difficult battles with the legislature and scandals involving the state police and prison system, she squeaked into her second term with 51 percent of the vote.As Ms. Minner prepared to leave the governor’s office in 2009, Mr. Biden, who had just been elected vice president, participated in a tribute to her, at which he recalled her bruising fight to enact the ban on smoking in public places.“When we were watching your poll numbers falling precipitously, you did not budge,” he told her. “You were willing to risk your political life to get it done.”He added: “In this business of politics, the most important question is, what are you willing to lose over? If you can’t answer that question, then it’s all about ego and power and not about principle.” More