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      Biden Looks for New Ways to Energize Black Voters

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      With much of his racial equity agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, President Biden is trying to close an enthusiasm gap among the voters who helped deliver him to the White House.During a recent town hall with the Congressional Black Caucus, Vice President Kamala Harris offered a gut check to the 200 people who had gathered to take stock of the state of civil rights in America.“We are looking at a full-on attack on our hard-fought, hard-won freedoms,” Ms. Harris told the crowd, which erupted in applause as she spoke. “So much is at stake,” she said of the 2024 presidential election, “including our very democracy.”In 2020, President Biden promised Black voters he would deliver a sweeping “racial equity” agenda that included a landmark federal voting rights bill, student loan relief, criminal justice reform and more. Three years later, with much of that agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, the White House is looking for new ways to re-energize a crucial constituency that helped propel Mr. Biden to the presidency.That means describing the stakes of the election in stark terms, as Ms. Harris did over the summer in Boston, arguing that the Republican Party is trying to reverse generations of racial progress in America. But Mr. Biden is also asking voters to judge him on a series of achievements that benefit Black Americans — but that are hardly the marquee promises from the early days of his administration.In recent weeks, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to highlight its economic accomplishments, which include the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and the fastest creation rate of Black-owned small businesses in over 25 years. It has pointed to social policy efforts, such as increased enrollment in Obamacare and closing the digital divide, as examples of real impacts on the Black community.Vice President Kamala Harris has defended the administration’s racial equity policies.David Degner for The New York TimesIn an opinion essay published on Sunday in The Washington Post, marking the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, Mr. Biden said his stewardship of the economy — a top concern among Black voters — was helping to fulfill the nation’s promise of equality.The president wrote that his administration was “advancing equity in everything we do making unprecedented investments in all of America, including for Black Americans.”Administration officials acknowledge that some of those advances may not immediately resonate with a population that sees its constitutional rights under assault. While polls show continued strong support for Mr. Biden among Black voters, there are growing concerns about an enthusiasm gap among the most loyal constituencies in the Democratic Party.Neera Tanden, Mr. Biden’s domestic policy adviser, said the president was focused on dismantling inequities that had been embedded for decades.“I think we’ll have a transformative change,” Ms. Tanden said, pointing to executive orders Mr. Biden signed in his first days in office, which directed federal agencies to consider racial equity when it comes to the distribution of money and benefits.But, she added, “it won’t be something millions of people feel in a minute.”For Black Americans like Maeia Corbett, the promises of future benefits ring hollow.“Looking at these promises that this administration has made, it’s like a whirlwind,” said Ms. Corbett, 27. “What can I grasp onto when all of these things are being taken from me?”Ms. Corbett, who graduated from college just months before the coronavirus pandemic brought student loan payments to a pause, had been banking on Mr. Biden’s promise to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.When the Supreme Court ruled in June that Mr. Biden’s plan was unconstitutional, Ms. Corbett, like many Black Americans, felt a familiar sting of disappointment. The fact that the decision came just 24 hours after the court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, a longstanding mechanism for economic and social mobility for Black people, was almost disorienting.“It’s like you get to the steps of equity and the steps are torn down,” she said.Ms. Corbett’s sentiments are a warning sign for the president, who has tied the success of his presidency to racial progress. Mr. Biden has said he would use the power of his office to address inequity in housing, criminal justice, voting rights, health care, education and economic mobility.“I’m not promising we can end it tomorrow,” Mr. Biden said in January 2021. “But I promise you: We’re going to continue to make progress to eliminate systemic racism, and every branch of the White House and the federal government is going to be part of that effort.”Melanie L. Campbell, the president of the nonpartisan National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, said Black women — widely credited with securing Mr. Biden’s win — could see tangible progress in historic appointments of Black women to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. But the courts, conservative activists and a bitterly divided Congress have curtailed a lot of Mr. Biden’s agenda. Lawsuits have held up the administration’s efforts to forgive the debts of Black and other minority farmers after years of discrimination. Congress has blocked two signature pieces of legislation Mr. Biden championed, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And conservative groups have vowed to pursue legislation challenging Mr. Biden’s plans to prioritize race-conscious policies throughout the federal government.Now, with aides describing him as frustrated over the setbacks, Mr. Biden is taking pains to cast the election as a choice between his agenda and the extremism of “MAGA Republicans,” or those loyal to former President Donald J. Trump.“My dad used to say: ‘Joey, don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative,’” Mr. Biden says in a common refrain.Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Biden campaign, said the campaign would emphasize that Mr. Biden should not be blamed for the Supreme Court decisions. “It’s the court that just rolled back equity, and we’re going to point to it,” he said.The Biden administration has pointed to social policy efforts as examples of real impacts on the Black community.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesA recent Axios survey of more than 780 college students and recent graduates found that 47 percent of voters blamed the Supreme Court for student loans not being forgiven, 38 percent blamed Republicans and 10 percent blamed Mr. Biden.Still, polls show that Black voters under 30 have far less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden than their elders do.Mary-Pat Hector, the chief executive of Rise, a student advocacy organization that has pushed for student debt relief and college affordability, said the disillusionment among young voters was real. On issues like student loan debt and climate, Ms. Hector said, all the voters see are “things we were told were going to happen that just haven’t happened.”“When it comes to Gen Z,” she said, “they don’t forget, and it’s hard for them to forgive.”In the meantime, the White House says it has not given up on its most ambitious goals.This month, the Education and Justice Departments released guidance for how colleges should navigate the affirmative action decision, urging them to continue to strive for diversity. And the Education Department is preparing to start new loan programs, while delivering billions in loan relief by fixing existing programs that have long disenfranchised Black borrowers. And dozens of federal agencies are working through “equity action plans” tackling everything from disparities in home appraisals to maternal mortality.Stephen K. Benjamin, Mr. Biden’s director of public engagement, said he believed the administration’s economic record would resonate, even as he acknowledged that the White House needed help from Congress to make good on its broader agenda.“I do believe when the rubber hits the road,” he said, “people will pay more attention to these dramatic investments in their quality of life.”Lennore Vinnie, 53, said she felt the administration was looking out for people like her.Having benefited from affirmative action when she entered the white, male-dominated information technology field in the 1990s, Ms. Vinnie, a single mother of two, incurred $280,000 in student loan debt after years of pursuing a doctoral degree to advance to a senior leadership position. Some of the debt was acquired at predatory for-profit colleges.Lennore Vinnie is applying for loan relief through forgiveness programs that were not affected by the Supreme Court ruling.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“I know for me, as an African American woman, you can never have too many degrees or too many credentials,” she said, “because that way I take away all your reasons for not putting me in the position.”Ms. Vinnie, who ultimately obtained her doctorate and her promotion, is applying for relief through loan forgiveness programs that were not affected by the Supreme Court ruling.Ms. Harris’s appearance before the Congressional Black Caucus in Boston encapsulated the administration’s strategy moving forward: highlighting its progress while rallying a community to remember — and repeat — history.In Boston, the crowd was rapt, shouting “preach!” as she called out “extremist so-called leaders” who sought to distract from the nation’s legacy of slavery and systemic racism.Ms. Harris then reminded the room that Black voters drove Mr. Biden to win the presidency in 2020, and made her the first Black vice president. “The future of America,” she said, “has always relied on the folks who are in this room.” More

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      ‘No Place for Hate in America,’ Haley Says, Recalling 2015 Church Massacre

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      Nikki Haley, fresh off a strong debate performance last week, was back on the trail and took a moment to condemn the weekend shooting in Jacksonville, Fla.Breaking from her usual stump speech at a South Carolina town hall event on Monday, Nikki Haley paused to condemn a deadly weekend rampage in Jacksonville, Fla., that the authorities were investigating as a hate crime.“I am not going to lie to you, it takes me back to a dark place,” Ms. Haley told an audience of roughly 1,000 people gathered in a corporate campus auditorium in Indian Land. “There is no place for hate in America.”Ms. Haley was governor in 2015 when a white supremacist opened fire in an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine Black parishioners at a Bible study. Ms. Haley eventually called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol. She later described struggling with the beginning effects of post-traumatic stress disorder in response to the shooting, but she said that the victims’ families showed her what strength and grace looked like.Ms. Haley also toed the Republican Party line on guns and racism, suggesting that such violence and mass shootings could be prevented if Americans improved mental health services, abided by gun laws and rejected division and hate in their everyday lives.She renewed her calls for the need to reverse what she often describes as a “national self-loathing,” or the idea that “America is bad or that America is rotten or that it is racist.”“Don’t fall into the narrative that this is a racist country,” she told the mostly white and graying crowd, citing her own election in 2010 as the first woman and person of color to lead the state as progress. “It was only 60 years ago today that Martin Luther King gave that speech. Look at how far we have come.”The way Ms. Haley, a former United Nations ambassador, and other Republican presidential candidates tend to downplay structural racism and prejudice — and to focus on the nation’s racial progress — puts them at odds with most Black voters.On Monday, Ms. Haley’s home state rival in the presidential race, Senator Tim Scott, called the Florida rampage “heinous.” He said that the killings had prompted patrons at his church service to discuss “the absolute devastation” in 2015 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.Asked whether the Republican Party had done enough to denounce white supremacist violence, Mr. Scott argued that it was the duty of every American, regardless of party affiliation, to do their part. “The question is, Have humans done enough to talk about racism and discrimination that leads to violence and to death,” he said.Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy during the debate last week.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOn Monday, Ms. Haley was back in her home state for a victory lap after a strong performance in the first Republican primary debate. In recent days, her polling numbers have climbed, and top donors have seen her as a standout. So many people packed into her town hall at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land that attendees filled a balcony and an overflow room.As they return to the campaign trail, Ms. Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and political newcomer, have continued the clashes they started on the debate stage, where they tussled over policy on China, Israel and the war in Ukraine. Mr. Ramaswamy has unveiled his foreign policy platform, and on his website, he accuses Ms. Haley of lying about his stances on Israel, and calls her by her first and maiden last name, Nimarata Randhawa. For her part, Ms. Haley did not mention Mr. Ramaswamy by name, but she elicited loud laughter from the audience on Monday when she asked voters if they had watched the debate.“Bless his heart,” she said. “I know I wear a skirt. But y’all see me at work. If you say something that is totally off the wall, I am going to call you out on it.”Leaving the town hall, Ross Payne, 62, a former managing director for Wells Fargo, said that he supported Ms. Haley, whom he called the “Iron Lady,” a reference to Margaret Thatcher and a hero of Ms. Haley. But he said he had been somewhat disappointed with her answer to his question on whether she would be willing to pull from both sides of the political aisle to regulate guns and automatic weapons.Ms. Haley said that though she worried about her own children, people should have the ability to protect themselves, and that she would improve access to mental health services and ensure that people arrested for gun violations stay behind bars.“Like with abortion, can’t we all agree that if you want an AR semiautomatic weapon, you’ve got to go through two or three weeks of training and extensive vetting before you can get your hands on a weapon like that?” Mr. Payne said, echoing Ms. Haley’s calls at the debate for consensus on abortion. “A weapon that can kill, you know, 10 people in 10 seconds.”Maya King More

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      With the Latest Trump Indictment, Mind These Lessons From the South

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      With her sweeping indictment of former President Donald Trump and over a dozen co-conspirators, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis is now set to prosecute her case in a court of law. Just as important, it is essential that she and others continue to explain to the American public why the decision serves a critical purpose beyond the courts and for the health of our constitutional order.The indictment should be situated in the broader arc of American political development, particularly in the South. That history justifies using the criminal justice system to protect the democratic process in Georgia — a critical swing state — for elections now and in the future.We have the benefit of hindsight to heed the great lesson of the Reconstruction era and the period of redemption that followed: When authoritarians attack democracy and lawbreakers are allowed to walk away from those attacks with impunity, they will try again, believing there are no repercussions.We should not make those mistakes again.The period after the American Civil War entrenched many of America’s political ills. Ex-confederates were welcomed back into the body politic without meaningful penance. There were vanishingly few arrests, trials and lengthy punishments. Suffering minimal political disabilities, they could muster enough power to “redeem” Southern governments from biracial coalitions that had considerable sway to remake the South.Examples of democratic decay were regrettably abundant. An early sign occurred in Louisiana. With a multiracial electorate, Reconstruction Louisiana held great promise. During contentious state elections in 1872, Louisiana Democrats intimidated Black voters from casting ballots and corruptly claimed victory. The disputed election spurred political violence to assert white supremacy, including the Colfax Massacre in 1873, where as many as 150 Black citizens were killed in Grant Parish when a white mob sought to take control of the local government.Federal prosecutors brought charges against a number of the perpetrators. But in 1876, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Cruikshank that the federal government could not prosecute private violence under the 14th Amendment because it could only protect citizens against constitutional rights violations by state actors. By its decision, the court gave license to mobs to disrupt the peaceful transition of power with grave consequences.South Carolina could have been a Reconstruction success story. Its state constitution and government reflected the values and priorities of its Black majority. The planter elite attacked the Reconstruction government as a socialist rabble and baselessly mocked elected officials as incompetent. In the lead-up to elections in 1876, political violence brewed across the state, and Democrats secured a narrow victory. But democratic decay was precipitous. Over time, South Carolina imposed new limits on voting, moving precincts into white neighborhoods and creating a confusing system. Legislators passed the Eight Box Law, which required voters to submit a separate ballot for each elected office in a different box and invalidated any votes submitted in the wrong box. This created a barrier to voting for people who could not read.The lack of repercussions for political violence and voter suppression did little to curb the impulse to crush biracial democracy by mob rule. The backsliding spread like cancer to Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina.In Georgia, just before the state was initially readmitted to the Union, Georgians elected a Republican to the governorship and a Republican majority to the state senate. Yet the promise of a strong Republican showing was a mirage. Conservative Republicans and Democrats joined forces to expel more than two dozen Black legislators from the Georgia General Assembly in September 1868. From there, tensions only grew. Political violence erupted throughout the state as elections drew closer that fall, most tragically in Camilla, where white supremacists killed about a dozen Black Georgians at a Republican political rally.The democratic failures of that era shared three common attributes. The political process was neither free nor fair, as citizens were prevented from voting and lawful votes were discounted. The Southern Redeemers refused to recognize their opponents as legitimate electoral players. And conservatives abandoned the rule of law, engaging in intimidation and political violence to extinguish the power of multiracial political coalitions.At bottom, the theory behind the Fulton County indictment accuses Mr. Trump and his allies of some of these same offenses.The phone call between Mr. Trump and the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” Mr. Trump demanded) is crucial evidence backing for a charge relating to soliciting a public officer to violate his oath of office. Mr. Trump’s coercive tactics persisted even though he should have known that Joe Biden fairly won the state’s Electoral College votes. But facts never seemed to matter. Mr. Trump’s false allegation of a rigged contest — a claim he and others made well before voting began — was grounded in a belief that opposition to his re-election was never legitimate.Mr. Trump and his allies could not accept that an emerging multiracial coalition of voters across the state rejected him. Election deniers focused on Atlanta, a city whose Black residents total about half the population, as the place where Georgia’s election was purportedly stolen. The dangerous mix of racial grievance and authoritarian impulses left Trump loyalists feeling justified to concoct the fake electors scheme and imploring the General Assembly to go into a special session to arbitrarily undo the will of Georgians.Political violence and intimidation are some of the most obvious symptoms of democratic decay. The charges in Fulton County are an attempt to use the criminal justice system to repudiate political violence.The sprawling case is stronger because the conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results was replete with acts of intimidation by numerous people. Mr. Trump and Rudy Giuliani engaged in a full-scale harassment campaign against Fulton County election workers when they baselessly alleged that two individuals added fake votes to Mr. Biden’s tally. Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Raffensperger and a state employee with “a criminal offense” if they declined to join his corruption, warning them they were taking “a big risk.” A healthy democracy cannot tolerate this behavior.Democracy is not guaranteed, and democratic backsliding is never inevitable. The country avoided the worst, but the past few years have still been profoundly destabilizing for the constitutional order in ways akin to some of the nation’s darker moments.Indeed, the case by Ms. Willis can be seen as an effort to avoid darker moments in the future, especially for a critical swing state like Georgia. We should remember the words in 1871 of Georgia’s first Black congressman, Jefferson Franklin Long, who spoke out when Congress debated relaxing the requirements for restoring certain rights to ex-Confederates without meaningful contrition: “If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men … I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”His prediction proved all too accurate. It now may be up to the people of Fulton County to stop election denialism’s widening gyre.Anthony Michael Kreis is an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, where he teaches and studies constitutional law and the history of American politics.Source photographs by Bettmann, Buyenlarge, and Corbis Historical, via Getty.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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      Kamala Harris Takes on Forceful New Role in Biden’s 2024 Campaign

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      The vice president is trying to reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.In recent weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has dashed off to Florida on short notice. She sparred with the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, over how to teach slavery in schools. And she flew into Iowa to defend abortion rights while 13 Republican presidential candidates were having dinner a few miles away.Although her words were directed at Republicans, her message was also aimed at all her doubters.Once a rising star as a senator in California, Ms. Harris has for years been saddled by criticism of her performance as vice president. She has struggled with difficult assignments on issues such as the roots of illegal migration and the narrow path to enduring voting rights protections. Concerns about her future spread as Democrats pondered whether she would be a political liability for the ticket.Ms. Harris’s recent moves are her latest attempt to silence those concerns and reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.“It’s good to have her out there,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee, who added that the vice president’s decision to take on the Republican Party — assertively and in real time — was central to the campaign’s 2024 strategy.It also keeps President Biden above the fray.“He is still uniting the West against Russian aggression, and he’s tackling the economy and inflation,” Mr. Richmond said. “She can go highlight the accomplishments, and she can take on people like DeSantis.”In interviews, aides and advisers acknowledge that Ms. Harris has been affected by the years of criticism. She has often approached events defensively, focusing on not making mistakes, rather than looking for opportunities to attack.But now, galvanized by what she has described as rising extremism in the Republican Party, Ms. Harris is expanding her profile.Ms. Harris forged a reputation as a pragmatist during her early years as a prosecutor, district attorney and state attorney general, which has shaped her approach to the vice presidency.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe tussle with Mr. DeSantis, who is struggling to break through as he campaigns to be the Republican presidential nominee, provides a glimpse into Ms. Harris’s role as something of a one-woman rapid-response operation.When Florida last month approved an overhaul to its standards for teaching Black history, which now say middle schoolers should be taught that enslaved people developed skills that could be of personal benefit, Ms. Harris directed her staff to get her down immediately to Jacksonville, a White House official said.She was on the ground within 24 hours, speaking to a packed audience in a historically Black neighborhood, about “extremist so-called leaders” who want to sanitize history.“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris said, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd.Her appearance caught the eye of Mr. DeSantis.“You clearly have no trouble ducking down to Florida on short notice,” he said in an open letter last week, accusing her of trying to score political points and inviting her to discuss the new standards.Ms. Harris, who returned to Florida for her second trip in less than two weeks, had a swift reply.“Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said before pausing as the crowd at an African Methodist Episcopal Church event in Orlando erupted in applause. “And I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”The vice president’s press secretary, Kirsten Allen, said Ms. Harris would “continue to call out extremist leaders as they attempt to pull our country backward with book bans, revisionist history and barriers that make it harder for Americans to participate in our democracy.”Despite her more public role, Ms. Harris’s approval ratings have remained stubbornly low. About 52 percent of Americans have a negative view of her, while 40 percent have a positive view, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. Mr. Biden has also had trouble with persistently low approval ratings.But Ms. Harris connects to sections of the electorate that are not always a natural fit for Mr. Biden, including women, minority groups and younger voters. At 58, Ms. Harris is decades younger than the 80-year-old president, who would be 86 at the end of a second term.As Ms. Harris fans out across the country, some of her longtime allies said she was showing the kind of swagger they remembered from much earlier in her career, dating back to her days as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California.“Seeing her in this role, understanding she has a president who she reports to, it’s kind of funny to me,” said Lateefah Simon, who was hired by Ms. Harris in 2005 to lead a new program aimed at keeping first-time drug offenders out of jail.She recalled a confident Ms. Harris walking through the office when she won re-election for district attorney in 2007, reminding each staffer that she would be the boss for another four years. Ms. Simon believes Ms. Harris is making an impact as vice president but wonders how she is adjusting to being second in command.“I’m like, ‘Kamala with a boss?’” she said.Ms. Harris often draws on her legal background on the campaign trail as a way to emphasize her expertise — a strategy that serves as a counterweight to Republican claims that she is incompetent.At a recent speech on gun reform, she said she had studied autopsy photographs and had “seen with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body.”And in July, when she made a trip to Iowa for a discussion on reproductive rights, she said that she had investigated sex crimes, so she understood that denying a woman an abortion was an “immoral” approach to survivors of rape or incest.The timing of the trip to Iowa was no accident: As she spoke at Drake University, saying opponents of abortion in state legislatures around the country “don’t even know how women’s bodies work,” former President Donald J. Trump and a dozen of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination were in Des Moines for a G.O.P. dinner.Her appearance came just two weeks after the state’s Republican governor signed a strict new abortion ban into law, making it illegal to have the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy. (A judge has put the ban on hold.)Ms. Harris has made abortion rights a key part of her campaign message since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. v. Wade.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesMs. Harris’s decision to go on the offensive is a notable shift.For all of her boundary-breaking as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American to serve as vice president, she has long been known for pragmatism and, to her critics, for a defense of the status quo.She has described herself in the past as a “pragmatic prosecutor” who owns a gun for personal safety and also believes in criminal justice reform. As vice president, she has had to appeal to broad constituencies; being seen as a moderate is a benefit at a time when conservative critics have tried to portray her as radical and out of step with the nation.But now, with the campaign in full swing, the White House is giving Ms. Harris room to make more assertive moves against Republican opponents.Ms. Harris is attempting to help Mr. Biden win a second term in office, a refocus after taking on assignments such as voting rights without a clear path for success. Kenny Holston for The New York TimesShe also has been freed up to travel more, something that has been in the works since the midterm elections when Democrats held off a widely expected red wave.Because the Senate was split evenly for the first two years of the Biden administration, Ms. Harris could never be more than 24 hours away from the Capitol when the Senate was in session in case her tiebreaking vote was needed.With Democrats now holding a 51-to-49 edge, at least in cases when Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, votes with them, Ms. Harris has more flexibility to move. Some are hoping she continues to seize on the opportunity.Stefanie Brown James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organization that helps elect Black officials, has urged Ms. Harris’s staff to have her out in front on affirmative action and abortion issues, in particular. She said for the past two and a half years, Ms. Harris was “a little too much in the background and not seen enough or heard enough.”“She definitely is having a moment,” Ms. James said. But she added a note of caution, saying she hoped it would be “a sustainable moment.” More

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      Does It Matter What Trump Really Believes?

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      More from our inbox:Anti-Trump Republicans as Swing VotersRacial Disparities in the Swimming PoolMultitask? Maybe.A Dog’s Behavior Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump, in Shadow of Capitol, Issues a Not Guilty Plea” (front page, Aug. 4):So, Donald Trump pleads not guilty to fraud and obstruction charges that resulted in violence, death and utter chaos on Jan. 6.He truly doesn’t know what guilt means. Nor responsibility. Nor having an honest reckoning with himself over the conduct he chose leading up to and on that infamous day. He knows only lies, blaming others and outrage.These are not traits that serve a president of a local board, never mind a chief executive of a large and complex nation battling sophisticated economic, diplomatic and social problems crying out to be addressed.I hope we never again have enough citizens who fall for a presidential candidate with these major character deficiencies.Amy KnitzerMontclair, N.J.To the Editor:Re “The Trial America Needs,” by David French (column, nytimes.com, Aug. 1):For the life of me I just cannot understand why prosecutors must prove that Donald Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won the election.How can refusing to see the truth be a valid defense for his actions? In law school I learned about the “reasonable person” standard for determining liability in a number of circumstances. If a reasonable president would have known that he lost an election in view of the overwhelming evidence, shouldn’t this former president be imputed with this knowledge whether he believed it or not?Refusing to acknowledge facts is not reasonable. He can’t be allowed to use obtuseness to avoid the consequences for his actions.Rhonda StarerHarrington Park, N.J.To the Editor:Re “A President Accused of Betraying His Country” (editorial, Aug. 3):In his final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump was asked whether he would accept the result of the election if he lost. He refused to say. “I will look at it at the time,” he responded. “I will keep you in suspense.”That the moderator, Chris Wallace, thought it necessary to pose the question should have been shocking. Mr. Trump’s unabashed contempt for democracy should have been disqualifying in the minds of enough voters to ensure he’d not be elected.Looking back now, nobody can claim that Mr. Trump didn’t put us on notice for what we’re facing now. It is an example of how we ignore certain kinds of red flags at our own great peril.David SabrittSeattleTo the Editor:Re “First Amendment Is Likely Linchpin of Trump Defense” (front page, Aug. 3):It may make sense as a legal strategy, but as a political argument for re-election, “I have a constitutional right to lie all I want” doesn’t sound like a winner, at least to this voter.Anna Cypra OliverGreat Barrington, Mass.Anti-Trump Republicans as Swing VotersRepublican voters are apparently not concerned about Donald J. Trump’s increasing legal peril.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Far Ahead in the G.O.P. Race Despite Charges” (front page, July 31):I draw an important inference from the data in the poll described in the article: Donald Trump will lose the general election if he is the Republican nominee.The nearly one in four G.O.P. voters who are truly anti-Trump will do what they did in 2020 and vote for the presumed Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Those swing voters proved to be a deciding factor last time, and their numbers increase with each new indictment of the former president.It doesn’t matter how unwavering Trump supporters are. If they want to elect a Republican president, they need to choose someone other than Mr. Trump. Nearly all the other G.O.P. candidates tiptoe around the mention of Mr. Trump to avoid alienating his base, but sycophancy won’t sway his followers.A more effective (and pragmatic) approach would be to repeatedly argue that swing voters, a.k.a. moderate Republicans, will hand this election to the Democrats if Mr. Trump is the nominee.Jana HappelNew YorkRacial Disparities in the Swimming Pool Allison Beondé for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Why We Need More Public Pools,” by Mara Gay (Opinion, July 30):Kudos to Ms. Gay for highlighting an important public health disparity and drowning crisis. The disproportionately high rates of drowning among Black and brown people should be unacceptable and widely recognized as a safety and public health priority.The racist policies discussed by Ms. Gay that limit resources for access to swimming opportunities contribute to the wide disparities in swimming ability and water safety.More inclusive access to competitive swimming is also important to provide swimming role models. The reversal in 2022 of the ban on the Soul Cap for Black hair by the International Swimming Federation (FINA) shows that policy change can occur through public campaigns.A much greater national public health campaign can help ensure that not only are water safety and swimming training made widely available but also that the physical and mental health benefits of swimming are widely understood and enjoyed by all, especially as the climate heats and relief is needed.Adrienne WaldHigh Falls, N.Y.The writer is an associate professor of nursing at Mercy College, specializing in public health and health promotion, and an avid swimmer.Multitask? Maybe. Janet MacTo the Editor:“Today’s Superpower Is Doing One Thing at a Time,” by Oliver Burkeman (Opinion guest essay, July 30), hit a chord in me. Mostly, because I desperately want to stop multitasking, but I simply cannot: I am a mother.Mr. Burkeman’s article is written from such a place of privilege — white, male and well off — that it began to sicken me that he was imploring the rest of us to stop multitasking. In fact, I reread the article, searching for any quotes he might have from a woman, but indeed, all his sources were men.In other words, not multitasking is a privilege that very few of us can afford.Melissa MorgenlanderBrooklynTo the Editor:I began reading Oliver Burkeman’s essay using the newspaper as a kind of readable place mat on which I enjoyed my Sunday lunch. I made it just past the second paragraph when I closed and removed the paper, carrying on with lunch atop the bare table.I felt empowered but haven’t managed to get to the rest of the piece since then.Pablo MonsivaisSpokane, Wash.A Dog’s Behavior Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Stressed-Out Life of a Biter in Chief,” by Alexandra Horowitz (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 3):Thank you for publishing this piece about dog behavior, specifically biting.I am one of the many who don’t like dogs. In fact, I fear them. The reason? Every dog that has ever jumped on me, growled at me or attempted to bite me did so immediately after its human companion told me that the dog is friendly and safe to be around, followed by dismay and surprise that their dog would do such a thing.It is helpful to know more about the myriad reasons that dogs bite, even if it doesn’t assuage my fear of them.Lisa M. FeldsteinNew York More

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      It’s No Surprise That Donald Trump Is Being Charged Under a Reconstruction-Era Law

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      Of the four charges included in the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump, one — violating Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code — seemed to surprise many. It shouldn’t have.That statute dates back to Reconstruction, as Congress responded to the Confederacy’s white-power insurrection against the United States. Reconstruction sought not only to restore the Union after the Civil War, but also to build guardrails against such an authoritarian faction ever again being able to subvert the Republic.It’s therefore appropriate that Section 241 and other Reconstruction-era laws are precisely those that the American legal system is turning to in response to a former president who stoked the flames of an insurrection in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to undermine the democratic process. One of the rioters, later sentenced to three years in prison, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol, an indelible image captured in photographs and widely circulated.Congress enacted Section 241 as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1870 (also known as the Enforcement Act for its role in enforcing the terms of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, crucial to providing Black people with the rights and protections of citizenship). The law addressed the rise of white supremacist groups after the Civil War, especially the Ku Klux Klan, which organized citizens and public officials to intimidate freed Black people to suppress their participation in the political process. It empowered federal agents to stop these conspirators from depriving any Americans, in particular Black Americans, of the right to have a say in their government.The Justice Department has charged Mr. Trump with doing exactly that: the government asserts in its detailed 45-page indictment that through his attempts “to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Trump conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” voters in exercising their “right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”Bringing civil rights charges against the former president is not overreach by the Justice Department, as some have suggested. By enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the department is doing the very thing the law was designed to do by prosecuting a political leader who, while in office and after, sought to cancel the votes of millions to hold power.In 1871, with Klan violence continuing, Congress passed two more bills to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Ku Klux Klan acts. Among other things, these laws empowered citizens to sue anyone who conspired to intimidate or retaliate against them for exercising their political rights.Armed with these laws, the Justice Department oversaw the arrest and conviction of hundreds of Klansmen, and by 1873 the group had been effectively (though temporarily) crushed. While Section 241 has regularly been used ever since to police civil rights violations, with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Klan Act litigation brought by private parties declined precipitously, according to our research, until in recent years.In July 2017, our organization, Protect Democracy, filed a Klan Act lawsuit against the 2016 Trump campaign over what we asserted was its role in Russian efforts to compromise the political rights of Americans. While that suit did not succeed, it was the beginning of a spate of private Klan Act litigation unseen in more than 100 years.Several lawsuits have been filed by our group and others. Among the results: A restraining order was issued against armed groups that surrounded ballot drop boxes in ways that intimidated voters; the Proud Boys were ordered to pay more than $1 million in damages for desecrating the property of a Black church; and a jury ordered 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $26 million in damages to nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017. Still pending are lawsuits seeking damages against those responsible for Jan. 6, against those who organized a car caravan that threatened to drive a campaign bus off the highway and against Mr. Trump and others for seeking to deprive Black voters from having their votes counted in the 2020 election.Other Reconstruction-era laws are also in the center of debates today. Congress recently reformed the Electoral Count Act, passed in response to the contested presidential election of 1876, after Mr. Trump and his allies sought to use the law’s ambiguities to overturn the 2020 election. The former president has also pledged, if re-elected, to abolish the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. That guarantee was ratified in 1868 to reverse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision holding that African Americans were not citizens.Yet another 14th Amendment provision, Section 3’s prohibition on those who have engaged in insurrection against the United States from holding power again, was recently applied for the first time since Reconstruction to bar from office a New Mexico county commissioner who breached the barricades outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. And recently, our organization filed a voting rights lawsuit under the 1870 law that readmitted Virginia to the Union. The Virginia Readmission Act limited the circumstances in which the state could disenfranchise its citizens, and our lawsuit argues that the state’s lifetime ban on voting by anyone convicted of any felony violates that law.These battles are the newest iterations of the Reconstruction-era clashes. Just as the integration of freed Black people into our democracy in the 1870s was met with fierce resistance, so too did the election of the nation’s first Black president give rise to a revival of open bigotry. And just as the enactment of laws in the 1870s to enforce equal citizenship were met with intransigence, so too today should we expect to see their enforcement resisted.The outcome of these legal clashes will determine the future of the country’s experiment in self-government. Either these laws will finally be fully realized and usher in a true multiracial democracy or the 150-year resistance to Reconstruction will prevail and white Americans reluctant to share power will reinforce their dominance over a diversifying nation. Authoritarianism rather than democracy would then be the order of the day.Ian Bassin is a co-founder and the executive director of the group Protect Democracy and a former associate White House counsel. Kristy Parker is counsel at Protect Democracy and the former deputy chief of the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.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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      DeSantis Faces Swell of Criticism Over Florida’s New Standards for Black History

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      In one benchmark, middle schoolers would learn that enslaved Americans developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.Mr. DeSantis has made fighting a “woke” agenda in education a signature part of his national brand. He overhauled New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college, and rejected the College Board’s A.P. course on African American studies. And his administration updated the state’s math and social studies textbooks, scrubbing them for “prohibited topics” like social-emotional learning, which helps students develop positive mind-sets, and critical race theory, which looks at the systemic role of racism in society.With Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Biden now both official candidates in the 2024 campaign, each side quickly accused the other of pushing propaganda onto children.Florida’s rewrite of its African American history standards comes in response to a 2022 law signed by Mr. DeSantis, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.The new standards seem to emphasize the positive contributions of Black Americans throughout history, from Booker T. Washington to Zora Neale Hurston.Fifth graders are expected to learn about the “resiliency” of African Americans, including how the formerly enslaved helped others escape as part of the Underground Railroad, and about the contributions of African Americans during westward expansion.The teaching of positive history is important, said Albert S. Broussard, a professor of African American studies at Texas A&M University who has helped write history textbooks for McGraw Hill. “Black history is not just one long story of tragedy and sadness and brutality,” he said.But he saw some of Florida’s adjustments as going too far, de-emphasizing the violence and inhumanity endured by Black Americans and resulting in only a “partial history.”“It’s the kind of sanitizing students are going to pick up,” he said. “Students are going to ask questions and they are going to demand answers.”The Florida Department of Education said the new standards were the result of a “rigorous process,” describing them as “in-depth and comprehensive.”“They incorporate all components of African American History: the good, the bad and the ugly,” said Alex Lanfranconi, the department’s director of communications.One contested standard states that high school students should learn about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during race massacres of the early 20th century, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre. In that massacre, white rioters destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., and as many as 300 people were killed.By saying that violence was perpetrated not just against but “by African Americans,” the standards seem to grasp at teaching “both sides” of history, said LaGarrett King, the director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo.But historically, he said, “it’s just not accurate.”By and large, historians say, race massacres during the early 1900s were led by white groups, often to stop Black residents from voting.That was the case in the Ocoee Massacre of 1920, in which a white crowd, incensed by a Black man’s attempt to vote, burned Black homes and churches to the ground and killed an unknown number of Black residents in a small Florida town.Geraldine Thompson, a Democratic state senator who pushed to require Florida schools to teach the massacre, said she was not consulted in the formation of the new standards, though she holds a nonvoting role on the Commissioner of Education’s African American History Task Force.She said she would have objected to the standards as “slanted” and “incomplete.” She questioned, for instance, why more emphasis was not placed on the history of African people before colonization and enslavement.“Our history doesn’t begin with slavery,” she said in an interview. “It begins with some of the greatest civilizations in the world.”The Florida standards were created by a 13-member “work group,” with input from the African American history task force, according to the Florida Department of Education.Two members of the work group, William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, released a statement responding to critiques of one of the most dissected standards, depicting enslaved African Americans as personally benefiting from their skills.“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited,” they said, citing blacksmithing, shoemaking and fishing as examples.“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history,” they said. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”Florida is one of about a dozen states that require the teaching of African American history.Other states with such mandates include South Carolina, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey.The state mandates date back decades — Florida’s was passed in 1994 — and often came in response to demands from Black residents and educators, said Dr. King, at the University at Buffalo.“There is a legacy of Black people fighting for their history,” he said.But for as long as Black history has been taught, he said, there has been debate about which aspects to emphasize. At times, certain historical figures and story lines have emerged as more palatable to a white audience, Dr. King said.“There is Black history,” he said. “But the question has always been, well, what Black history are we going to teach?”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off

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      In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.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