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      The ‘New Redlining’ Is Deciding Who Lives in Your Neighborhood

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      If you care about social justice, you have to care about zoning.Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion race-to-the-top competitive grants program to spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.”Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.Economically discriminatory zoning policies — which say that you are not welcome in a community unless you can afford a single-family home, sometimes on a large plot of land — are not part of a distant, disgraceful past. In most American cities, zoning laws prohibit the construction of relatively affordable homes — duplexes, triplexes, quads and larger multifamily units — on three-quarters of residential land.In the 2020 race, Mr. Biden said he was running to “restore the soul of our nation,” which had been damaged by President Donald Trump’s embrace of racism. Removing exclusionary barriers that keep millions of Black and Hispanic people out of safe neighborhoods with strong schools is central to the goal of advancing racial justice. Over the past several decades, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, Black people have been integrated into the nation’s political life and the military, “but the civil-rights movement failed to integrate Black Americans into the private domain of American life.”Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.While exclusionary zoning laws are especially harmful to Black people, the discrimination is more broadly rooted in class snobbery — a second problem Mr. Biden highlighted in his campaign. As a proud product of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden said he would value the dignity of working people and not look down on anyone. The elitism Mr. Biden promised to reject helps explain why in virtually all-white communities like La Crosse, Wis., efforts to remedy economic segregation have received strong pushback from upper-income whites, and why middle-class Black communities have sometimes shown fierce resistance to low-income housing.If race were the only factor driving exclusionary zoning, one would expect to see such policies most extensively promoted in communities where racial intolerance is highest, but in fact the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities, where racial views are more progressive. As Harvard’s Michael Sandel has noted, social psychologists have found that highly-educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” Class discrimination helps explain why, despite a 25 percent decline in Black-white residential segregation since 1970, income segregation has more than doubled.By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from each other than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”It happened in 1968, when Mr. Biden’s hero Robert Kennedy brought together working-class Black, Latino and white constituencies in a presidential campaign that championed a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. It happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together to support (and then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin, despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades. And a similar coalition appears to be coming together in California, over the issue of exclusionary zoning. State Senator Scott Wiener, who has been trying to legalize multifamily living spaces, told me that Republican and Democratic legislators representing working-class communities have supported reform, while the opponents have one thing in common: They represent wealthier constituents who “wanted to keep certain people out of their community.” More

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      How Democracy Faces a Rising Threat Splitting Republicans and Democrats

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      The country is increasingly split into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and politics — they see the other as alien, immoral, a threat. Such political sectarianism is now on the march.American democracy faces many challenges: New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is on the rise in America.That contention helps make sense of a lot of what’s been going on in American politics in recent years, including Donald J. Trump’s successful presidential bid, President Biden’s tortured effort to reconcile his inaugural call for “unity” with his partisan legislative agenda, and the plan by far-right House members to create a congressional group that would push some views associated with white supremacy. Most of all, it re-centers the threat to American democracy on the dangers of a hostile and divided citizenry.In recent years, many analysts and commentators have told a now-familiar story of how democracies die at the hands of authoritarianism: A demagogic populist exploits dissatisfaction with the prevailing liberal order, wins power through legitimate means, and usurps constitutional power to cement his or her own rule. It’s the story of Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela and even Hitler’s Germany.Sectarianism, in turn, instantly evokes an additional set of very different cautionary tales: Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia, regions where religious sectarianism led to dysfunctional government, violence, insurgency, civil war and even disunion or partition.These aren’t always stories of authoritarian takeover, though sectarianism can yield that outcome as well. As often, it’s the story of a minority that can’t accept being ruled by its enemy.One-third of Americans believe violence could be justified to achieve political objectives. Rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a sign that the risks of sustained political violence can’t be discounted.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn many ways, that’s the story playing out in America today.Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral. It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drive sectarian conflict.Any casual observer of American politics would agree that there’s plenty of hostility between Democrats and Republicans. Many don’t just disagree, they dislike each other. They hold discriminatory attitudes in job hiring as they do on the Implicit Association Test. They tell pollsters they wouldn’t want their child to marry an opposing partisan. In a paper published in Science in October by 16 prominent political scientists, the authors argue that by some measures the hatred between the two parties “exceeds longstanding antipathies around race and religion.”More than half of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats tend to think of the other party as “enemies,” rather than “political opponents,” according to a CBS News poll conducted in January. A majority of Americans said that other Americans were the greatest threat to America.On one level, partisan animosity just reflects the persistent differences between the two parties over policy issues. Over the past two decades, they have fought bruising battles over the Iraq war, gun rights, health care, taxes and more. Perhaps hard feelings wouldn’t necessarily be sectarian in nature.But the two parties have not only become more ideologically polarized — they have simultaneously sorted along racial, religious, educational, generational and geographic lines. Partisanship has become a “mega-identity,” in the words of the political scientist Lilliana Mason, representing both a division over policy and a broader clash between white, Christian conservatives and a liberal, multiracial, secular elite.And as mass sectarianism has grown in America, some of the loudest partisan voices in Congress or on Fox News, Twitter, MSNBC and other platforms have determined that it’s in their interest to lean into cultural warfare and inflammatory rhetoric to energize their side against the other. As political sectarianism has grown in America, some of the loudest partisan voices in Congress or on Fox News, Twitter, MSNBC and other platforms have determined that it’s in their interest to lean into cultural warfare.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe conservative outrage over the purported canceling of Dr. Seuss is a telling marker of how intergroup conflict has supplanted old-fashioned policy debate. Culture war politics used to be synonymous with a fight over “social issues,” like abortion or gun policy, where government played a central role. The Dr. Seuss controversy had no policy implications. What was at stake was the security of one sect, which saw itself as under attack by the other. It’s the kind of issue that would arouse passions in an era of sectarianism.A Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted in March found that Republicans had heard more about the Dr. Seuss issue than they had heard about the $1.9 trillion stimulus package. A decade earlier, a far smaller stimulus package helped launch the Tea Party movement.The Dr. Seuss episode is hardly the only example of Republicans de-emphasizing policy goals in favor of stoking sectarianism. Last month, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, penned an op-ed in support of unionization at Amazon as retribution for the Seattle company’s cultural liberalism. At its 2020 national convention, the Republican Party didn’t even update its policy platform.And perhaps most significant, Republicans made the choice in 2016 to abandon laissez-faire economics and neoconservative foreign policy and embrace sectarianism all at once and in one package: Donald J. Trump. The G.O.P. primaries that year were a referendum on whether it was easier to appeal to conservatives with conservative policy or by stoking sectarian animosity. Sectarianism won.Sectarianism has been so powerful among Republicans in part because they believe they’re at risk of being consigned to minority status. The party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and conservatives fear that demographic changes promise to further erode their support. And while defeat is part of the game in democracy, it is a lot harder to accept in a sectarian society.It is not easy to accept being ruled by a hostile, alien rival. It can make “political losses feel like existential threats,” as the authors of the study published in Science put it.As a result, the minority often poses a challenge to democracy in a sectarian society. It’s the minority who bears the costs, whether material or psychological, of accepting majority rule in a democracy. In the extreme, rule by a hostile, alien group might not feel much different than being subjugated by another nation.Trump supporters in Walterboro, S.C., held signs that read “the silent majority” at a rally in 2016.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesDemocracies in sectarian societies often create institutional arrangements to protect the minority, like minority or group rights, power-sharing agreements, devolution or home rule. Otherwise, the most alienated segments of the minority might resort to violence and insurgency in hopes of achieving independence.Republicans are not consigned to permanent minority status like the typical sectarian minority, of course. The Irish had no chance to become the majority in the United Kingdom. Neither did the Muslims of the British Raj or the Sunnis in Iraq today. Democrats just went from the minority to the majority in all three branches of elected government in four years; Republicans could do the same.But changes in the racial and cultural makeup of the country leave conservatives feeling far more vulnerable than Republican electoral competitiveness alone would suggest. Demographic projections suggest that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority sometime in the middle of the century. People with a four-year college degree could become a majority of voters even sooner. Religiosity is declining.The sense that the country is changing heightens Republican concerns. In recent days, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson embraced the conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party was “trying to replace the current electorate” with new voters from “the third world.” Far-right extremists in the House are looking to create an “America First Caucus” that calls for “common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and an infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”It is not easy to pin down where political sectarianism in America fits on a scale from zero to “The Troubles.” But nearly every protection that sectarian minorities pursue is either supported or under consideration by some element of the American right.That includes the more ominous steps. In December, Rush Limbaugh said he thought conservatives were “trending toward secession,” as there cannot be a “peaceful coexistence” between liberals and conservatives. One-third of Republicans say they would support secession in a recent poll, along with one-fifth of Democrats.One-third of Americans believe that violence could be justified to achieve political objectives. In a survey conducted in January, a majority of Republican voters agreed with the statement that the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 suggests that the risks of sustained political violence or even insurgency can’t be discounted.Whatever risk of imminent and widespread violence might have existed in January appears to have passed for now.Mr. Biden speaks the day after Election Day in the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesInstead, Joe Biden was sworn in as president — a person who did not attempt to arouse the passions of one sect against the other during his campaign. His nomination and election demonstrates that sectarianism, while on the rise, may still have limits in America: The median voter prefers bipartisanship and a de-escalation of political conflict, creating an incentive to run nonsectarian campaigns.Yet whether Mr. Biden’s presidency will de-escalate sectarian tensions is an open question.Mr. Biden is pursuing an ambitious policy agenda, which may eventually refocus partisan debate on the issues or just further alienate one side on matters like immigration or the filibuster. Still, the authors of the Science paper write that “emphasis on political ideas rather than political adversaries” would quite likely be “a major step in the right direction.”And Mr. Biden himself does not seem to elicit much outrage from the conservative news media or rank-and-file — perhaps because of his welcoming message or his identity as a 78-year-old white man from Scranton, Pa.But sectarianism is not just about the conduct of the leader of a party — it’s about the conflict between two groups. Nearly anyone’s conduct can worsen hostility between the two sides, even if it is not endorsed by the leadership of a national political party. Mr. Carlson and the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene are only the latest examples.It leaves America at an uncertain juncture. Mr. Biden may dampen sectarian tensions compared with Mr. Trump, but it is not clear whether festering grievances and resentments will fade into the background with so many others acting to stoke division.Sectarianism, after all, can last for decades or even centuries after the initial cause for hostility has passed. More

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      If You Care About Social Justice, You Have to Care About Zoning

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      The Biden administration is off to a good start on housing, but there is much more it could be doing.Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion race-to-the-top competitive grants program to spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.” Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.Economically discriminatory zoning policies — which say that you are not welcome in a community unless you can afford a single-family home, sometimes on a large plot of land — are not part of a distant, disgraceful past. In most American cities, zoning laws prohibit the construction of relatively affordable homes — duplexes, triplexes, quads and larger multifamily units — on three-quarters of residential land.In the 2020 race, Mr. Biden said he was running to “restore the soul of our nation,” which had been damaged by President Donald Trump’s embrace of racism. Removing exclusionary barriers that keep millions of Black and Hispanic people out of safe neighborhoods with strong schools is central to the goal of advancing racial justice. Over the past several decades, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted, Black people have been integrated into the nation’s political life and the military, “but the civil-rights movement failed to integrate Black Americans into the private domain of American life.”Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.While exclusionary zoning laws are especially harmful to Black people, the discrimination is more broadly rooted in class snobbery — a second problem Mr. Biden highlighted in his campaign. As a proud product of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden said he would value the dignity of working people and not look down on anyone. The elitism Mr. Biden promised to reject helps explain why in virtually all-white communities like La Crosse, Wis., efforts to remedy economic segregation have received strong pushback from upper-income whites, and why middle-class Black communities have sometimes shown fierce resistance to low-income housing.If race were the only factor driving exclusionary zoning, one would expect to see such policies most extensively promoted in communities where racial intolerance is highest, but in fact the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities, where racial views are more progressive. As Harvard’s Michael Sandel has noted, social psychologists have found that highly-educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” Class discrimination helps explain why, despite a 25 percent decline in Black-white residential segregation since 1970, income segregation has more than doubled.By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”It happened in 1968, when Mr. Biden’s hero, Robert Kennedy, brought together working-class Black, Latino, and white constituencies in a presidential campaign that championed a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. It happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together to support (and then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin, despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades. And a similar coalition appears to be coming together in California, over the issue of exclusionary zoning. State Senator Scott Wiener, who has been trying to legalize multifamily living spaces, told me that Republican and Democratic legislators representing working-class communities have supported reform, while the opponents have one thing in common: They represent wealthier constituents who “wanted to keep certain people out of their community.”Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing affordability crisis and climate change. Economists from across the political spectrum agree that zoning laws that ban anything but single-family homes artificially drive up prices by limiting the supply of housing that can be built in a region. At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has left many Americans jobless and people are struggling to make rent or pay their mortgages, it is incomprehensible that ubiquitous government zoning policies would be permitted to make the housing affordability crisis worse by driving prices unnaturally higher. More

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      Donations Surge for Republicans Who Challenged Election Results

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      The lawmakers, who encouraged their followers to protest in Washington on Jan. 6, have capitalized on the riot to draw huge campaign donations.WASHINGTON — Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath, according to new campaign data.Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the challenges to President Biden’s victory in their chamber, each brought in more than $3 million in campaign donations in the three months that followed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia who called the rampage a “1776 moment” and was later stripped of committee assignments for espousing bigoted conspiracy theories and endorsing political violence, raised $3.2 million — more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.A New York Times analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission disclosures illustrates how the leaders of the effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s electoral victory have capitalized on the outrage of their supporters to collect huge sums of campaign cash. Far from being punished for encouraging the protest that turned lethal, they have thrived in a system that often rewards the loudest and most extreme voices, using the fury around the riot to build their political brands. The analysis examined the individual campaign accounts of lawmakers, not joint fund-raising committees or leadership political action committees.“The outrage machine is powerful at inducing political contributions,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida.Shortly after the storming of the Capitol, some prominent corporations and political action committees vowed to cut off support for the Republicans who had fanned the flames of anger and conspiracy that resulted in violence. But any financial blowback from corporate America appears to have been dwarfed by a flood of cash from other quarters.Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a freshman who urged his supporters to “lightly threaten” Republican lawmakers to goad them into challenging the election results, pulled in more than $1 million. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado — who like Ms. Greene compared Jan. 6 to the American Revolution — took in nearly $750,000.The sums reflect an emerging incentive structure in Washington, where the biggest provocateurs can parlay their notoriety into small-donor successes that can help them amass an even higher profile. It also illustrates the appetites of a Republican base of voters who have bought into Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud and are eager to reward those who worked to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election.Most of the dozens of corporations that pledged to cut off any Republican who supported overturning the election kept that promise, withholding political action committee donations during the most recent quarter. But for the loudest voices on Capitol Hill, that did not matter, as an energized base of pro-Trump donors rallied to their side and more than made up the shortfall.“We’re really seeing the emergence of small donors in the Republican Party,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “In the past, Democrats have been the ones who have benefited most from small-dollar donations. We’re seeing the Republicans rapidly catching up.”Lawmakers have long benefited richly from divisive news coverage, especially around prominent events that play to the emotions of an enraged or fearful voter base. But the new filings illustrate a growing chasm between those who raise money through a bombastic profile — often bolstered by significant fund-raising expenditures — and those who have focused their attentions on serious policy work.As provocative freshmen like Ms. Greene, Ms. Boebert and Mr. Cawthorn took in high-dollar figures, other more conventional members of their class in competitive districts — even those praised for their fund-raising prowess — were substantially behind.For instance, Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Young Kim of California, both of whom opposed the electoral challenges and have worked on bipartisan bills, each took in less than $600,000.Ms. Greene, Ms. Boebert and Mr. Cawthorn raised more money than the top Republicans on the most powerful committees in Congress, such as appropriations, budget, education and labor, foreign affairs and homeland security.In many cases, Republican lawmakers who fanned the flames of the Jan. 6 violence have since benefited by casting themselves as victims of a political backlash engineered by the Washington establishment, and appealed to their supporters.“Pennsylvania wasn’t following their own state’s election law, but the establishment didn’t want to hear it. But that’s not who I work for,” Mr. Hawley wrote in January in a fund-raising message. “I objected because I wanted to make sure your voice was heard. Now, Biden and his woke mob are coming after me. I need your help.”Ms. Greene fund-raised off a successful effort to exile her from committees, led by furious Democrats incensed at her past talk in support of executing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and encouraging her followers to “Stop the Steal” on Jan. 6. Setting goals of raising $150,000 each day in the days before and after the unusual vote, she surpassed them every time.“The D.C. swamp and the fake news media are attacking me because I am not one of them,” one such solicitation read. “I am one of you. And they hate me for it.”But the polarizing nature of Mr. Trump also helped some Republicans who took him to task for his behavior surrounding the events of Jan. 6.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, took in $1.5 million, and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has started an organization to lead the Republican Party away from fealty to Mr. Trump, raised more than $1.1 million.“It’s obvious that there’s a strong market for Trumpism in the Republican base,” Mr. Curbelo said. “There is also a strong market for truth-telling and supporting the Constitution.”Mr. Conant questioned how much of the fund-raising surge for some candidates was directly tied to the Capitol assault, which he said the conservative news media had generally “moved on” from covering.Instead, he said that Republican voters were “very nervous” about the direction of the country under Democratic control and were eager to support Republicans they viewed as fighting a liberal agenda.“It pays to be high-profile,” Mr. Conant said. “It’s more evidence that there’s not a lot of grass-roots support for milquetoast middle of the road. It doesn’t mean you have to be pro-Trump. It just means you need to take strong positions, and then connect with those supporters.”But if the Republican civil war has paid campaign dividends for fighters on both sides, individual Democrats involved in prosecuting Mr. Trump for the riot in his impeachment trial have not reaped a similar windfall.With her $3.2 million raised this quarter, Ms. Greene brought in more money than the combined total raised by all nine impeachment managers — even though they won widespread applause in liberal circles for their case against the former president. Three of the managers have raised less than $100,000 each over the past three months, according to the data.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene brought in more than the combined total raised by nine impeachment managers, three of whom raised less than $100,000 over the past three months.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAs money pours into campaigns, the Jan. 6 assault has also resulted in much spending around security precautions.The Federal Election Commission expanded guidance allowing lawmakers to use campaign contributions to install residential security systems at their homes, and top Capitol Hill security told lawmakers to consider upgrading their home security systems to include panic buttons and key fobs.Campaign filings show nearly a dozen lawmakers have made payments of $20,000 or more to security companies in the past three months, including Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who voted to convict Mr. Trump; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who gave a harrowing account of the riot; and Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California and one of the impeachment managers against Mr. Trump.Mr. Cruz and Mr. Hawley were also among the biggest spenders on security.Lauren Hirsch More

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      How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden

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

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      Shades of 2016: Republicans Stay Silent on Trump, Hoping He Fades Away

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      Just like when Donald J. Trump was a candidate in 2016, rival Republicans are trying to avoid becoming the target of his attacks or directly confronting him, while hoping someone else will.It was a familiar scene on Sunday when Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, tried to avoid giving a direct answer about the caustic behavior of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump had called Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, “dumb” and used a coarse phrase to underscore it while speaking to hundreds of Republican National Committee donors on Saturday night. When Mr. Thune was asked by Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” to comment, he chuckled and tried to sidestep the question.“I think a lot of that rhetoric is — you know, it’s part of the style and tone that comes with the former president,” Mr. Thune said, before moving on to say Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell shared the goal of reclaiming congressional majorities in 2022.Mr. Thune was not the only Republican straining to stay on the right side of the former president. The day before Mr. Trump delivered his broadsides against Mr. McConnell, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, presented Mr. Trump with a newly created award for his leadership.And Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump who enraged him when she criticized his actions in connection to the Jan. 6 riot, and indicated the party needs to move on, has also been trying a delicate dance to work back into a more neutral territory.This week, she told The Associated Press that she would not run if Mr. Trump did, a display of deference that underscored the complications the former president represents to Republicans.Like many Republicans, Mr. Thune, Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley were navigating the impulses of a former president who talks privately about running again in 2024, and who is trying to bend the rest of the party to his will, even after the deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He retains a firm hold on a devoted group of Republican voters, and party leaders have discussed the need to continue appealing to the new voters Mr. Trump attracted over the past five years.To some extent, their posture recalls the waning days of Mr. Trump’s first primary candidacy, in 2015 and 2016. While Mr. McConnell and a few other Republicans have been directly critical of Mr. Trump’s conduct following the Capitol riot, most are trying to avoid alienating the former president, knowing he will set his sights on them for withering attacks, and hoping that someone or something else intervenes to hobble him.Even as Mr. Trump makes clear he will not leave the public stage, many Republicans have privately said they hope he will fade away, after a tenure in which the party lost both houses of Congress and the White House.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, was critical of Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot in January.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“It is Groundhog Day,” said Tim Miller, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, the only candidate to repeatedly challenge Mr. Trump during the early stages of the Republican presidential primaries in 2016.“I always thought that was like a rational choice in 2015,” Mr. Miller said, referring to the instinct to lay back and let someone else take on Mr. Trump. “But after we all saw how the strategy fails of just hoping and wishing for him to go away, nobody learned from it.”Throughout that campaign, one candidate after another in the crowded field tried to position themselves to be the last man standing on the assumption that Mr. Trump would self-destruct before making it to the finish line.It was wishful thinking. Mr. Trump attacked not only Mr. Bush but several other candidates in deeply personal terms, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Only Mr. Bush sustained a response, though he eventually left the race after failing to gain traction; Mr. Cruz, in particular, told donors during a private meeting in late 2015 that he was going to give Mr. Trump a “big bear hug” in order to hold onto his voters.They all tried to avoid being the target of his insults, while hoping that external events and news media coverage would ultimately lead to his downfall. Instead, Mr. Trump solidified his position as primary voting began.“He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly, much more than any other politician, yet somehow people crave his approval,” said Mike DuHaime, who advised former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in that primary race. Mr. DuHaime recalled Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush’s wife in one debate, only for Mr. Bush to reciprocate when Mr. Trump offered a hand-slap later in that same debate.“Trump did self-destruct eventually, after four years in office,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But he can still make or break others, and that makes him powerful and relevant.”Even John Boehner, the former speaker of the House whose criticisms of Mr. Trump in his memoir, “On the House,” have garnered national headlines, told Time magazine this week that he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — well after the former president had spent months falsely suggesting the election would be corrupt.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she will not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump does.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressIn his speech before R.N.C. donors on Saturday night, Mr. Trump, in addition to attacking Mr. McConnell, also criticized a host of perceived enemies from both parties; among them was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was in danger on Jan. 6 because he was in the Capitol to certify the electoral votes. Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Pence, who recently signed a book deal, should have had “the courage” to send the electoral vote tallies back to the states, despite the fact that the vice president had made clear that he did not think he had the authority to do so.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, disagreed with the comparison to 2015, saying that Mr. Trump had more dominance over the base of the Republican Party now than he did then, according to public polling, and a greater number of senior Republican officials speaking out against him five years ago.“In 2021, there are no candidates trying to take out President Trump, just some occasional sniping from menthol-infused nitwits like John Boehner,” he said.Still, Mr. Trump does not have the complete control over the party that he did during four years in office. His critics include leading Republicans like Mr. McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House. Asked on Fox News on Tuesday if she would vote for Mr. Trump if he ran in 2024 Ms. Cheney replied “I would not.’Ms. Cheney, whom Mr. Trump has threatened as a target of his anger, also said her fellow Republicans shouldn’t “embrace insurrection.”And not all Republicans think that ignoring Mr. Trump is a mistake. One senior party member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to engage in a lengthy back and forth with Mr. Trump, said that with the former president out of office and off Twitter, his reach is limited.The Republican said there had been anecdotal evidence from members of Congress during the recess that Mr. Trump was less omnipresent for voters in their districts than he had previously been.While Mr. Trump was ascendant in 2015 and 2016, said an adviser to another Republican who may run in 2024, that wasn’t the case now. And if party leaders fight with him publicly or try to take him on, it could only strengthen him, the Republican argued, giving him more prominence.What’s more, the first senior Republican argued, Republican lawmakers have found common cause not just in battling President Biden’s policies but in the backlash to the Georgia voting rights law. Those fights have continued without Mr. Trump, and will accelerate, the Republican said, without being driven by the cult of personality around the former president.Other Republicans are privately hopeful that the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business by the New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., will result in charges that hobble him from running again or even being a major figure within the party. People who have spoken with Mr. Trump say that he is agitated about the investigation.While all of that may represent just a slow turn away from Mr. Trump, those Republicans believe the turn has begun.David Kochel, a Republican strategist and supporter of Mr. Bush during the 2016 campaign, sounded less optimistic.He noted that even the horror of Jan. 6 did not break the hold Mr. Trump has on other elected officials, and that several anchors on Fox News — the largest conservative news outlet — had consistently downplayed the attack on air, numbing viewers to what took place as time passes.In an interview on Fox News with the host Laura Ingraham late last month, when asked about the security around the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “It was zero threat right from the start. It was zero threat.”He added: “Some of them went in and there they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in and then they walked in and they walked out.”Mr. Kochel said Jan. 6 was “being stuffed down the memory hole” with the help of Fox News, noting that the strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump and hoping he fades away has had a less-than-perfect history of being effective.“We’ve seen this movie before — a bunch of G.O.P. leaders all looking at each other, waiting to see who’s going to try and down Trump,” he said. More