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      The Mess in Los Angeles Points to Trouble for Democrats

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      Democrats in cities across America are having trouble holding their coalitions together.In Los Angeles, the battle is over power in the form of representation on the City Council; in San Francisco and New York, it’s over affordable housing and access to public schools; across the nation, it’s over tough versus tolerant criminal prosecution and lenient versus punitive approaches to homelessness.These tensions are, in turn, aggravated by white gentrification and have one thing in common: limited or declining resources, with shuttered businesses no longer paying taxes evident on downtown streets. An absence of growth prevents elected officials from expanding benefits for some without paring them for others.Political tensions between African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white communities in Los Angeles are now on full display as a result of the publication of a secretly taped conversation that exposed the crude, racist scheming of three Hispanic City Council officials and a Hispanic labor leader — who were, in the main, angling to enhance their power at the expense of Black competitors.These zero-sum conflicts epitomize the problem for liberals struggling to sustain a viable political alliance encompassing core minority constituencies.“In general, conflict among groups is more likely to emerge when resources are scarce,” Vasiliki Fouka, a political scientist at Stanford, and Marco Tabellini, a professor at Harvard Business School, said by email, in response to my inquiry about Democratic intraparty tensions. “This is especially true when groups perceive each other as different and have different priorities and preferences.”Fouka and Tabellini, authors of the 2021 paper “Changing In-Group Boundaries: The Effect of Immigration on Race Relations in the United States” noted in their email that “when the size of the pie is growing, everyone enjoys larger benefits and groups are less likely to view each other as competitors.”“Education,” they added,is a case where we have recently seen such zero-sum dynamics. One example is the controversy over the admissions system of Lowell High School in San Francisco — from selective criteria based on grades, which led to higher representation of Asian and white students, to a lottery system that increased admissions of Black and Latino students. That case ended with the recall of school board members, due to pressure exerted largely by Chinese American voters. The San Francisco case demonstrates that political power is key for settling disputes and allocating resources across other battlegrounds like education and housing.The City Council redistricting process in Los Angeles epitomizes “I win-you-lose” politics. Fifteen districts of equal population must be drawn every 10 years within the confines of a city with rapidly changing demographics. The gains of one group almost inevitably come at the expense of another.Nearly 60 years ago — in 1963 — Los Angeles became “almost a parable of rainbow politics,” Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, wrote last week in “L.A. Backstory: The History Behind the City Council’s Racist Tirades.”That year, Meyerson explains, three Black Democrats, including Tom Bradley, a former police lieutenant, won seats on the City Council. In 1973, Bradley was elected mayor, winning the first of five elections with a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that kept him in office for a record 20 years.In order to maintain this bloc, “a delicate dance ensued,” Meyerson continues:Since the 1960s, the three of the city’s 15 council districts located in and around heavily Black South Central had been informally designated as Black seats, and Latino political leaders agreed not to contest them, even as the Black share of the city’s population shrank from 15 percent in the 1970 census to 8 percent in the 2020 census, and even as the city’s share of Latinos rose to 48 percent in 2020.I asked Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, about the history of racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles as well as the current situation. He wrote back by email: “Between 1900 and 1949, there were no City Council members who were African American, Latino, Jewish or Asian American.” In 1949, Ed Roybal became the first Hispanic member of the council and held his seat until 1962 when he successfully ran for Congress, Sonenshein noted. But “then there was a long hiatus with no Latino members until 1985, all during the heyday of the Bradley Black-Jewish coalition.”Now, according to Sonenshein, “there are three African American and four Latino ‘seats’ on the council,” with the strong possibility of a fifth Hispanic seat depending on the outcome of a Nov. 8 runoff. Black Democrats have held three council seats every cycle since 1963 despite the sharp decline in the African American share of the city’s electorate, the result, Sonenshein wrote, of “a long-term Black-Latino détente and at times strong alliance.”I asked Sonenshein about the all-or-nothing element of redistricting in Los Angeles, and he replied that the unusually strong powers held by the City Council make the competition for seats particularly intense:The conflict is further enhanced by the unique nature of the L.A. council. It is certainly the most powerful council in any city with a mayor-council system. The relatively small size of the council and the visibility of the council as the most public-facing institution in the city government make each seat immensely valuable. L.A.’s growing stature as a key political force in California and even national Democratic politics causes state legislators to consider abandoning their seats when a council position opens up. (Can you imagine that happening in N.Y.C. or Chicago?)Conversely, Sonenshein argued, there are two factors mitigating conflict: “strong incentives in communities to build and maintain progressive cross-racial and cross-ethnic coalitions on the Tom Bradley model and crosscutting elite political alliances that link together members in different communities.”Sonenshein described the current situation in Los Angeles as themirror image of the 1990s. As the Latino population grew in the 1980s and 1990s in what was then known as South Central Los Angeles, there was considerable intergroup tension at the street level. Jobs, housing, services, all played a role. It took a while for those tensions to bubble up to the political level.David Sears, an emeritus professor of psychology and political science at U.C.L.A., emailed his response to my query about racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles:The zero-sum character of redistricting surely exacerbates intergroup conflict. In L.A., such conflicts are barely below the surface in general. Especially Black-brown. Latinos have moved into historically Black neighborhoods in large numbers in L.A. and now generally outnumber Blacks. City Council representation has not adjusted to reflect that change. Black-brown political coalitions do form but they can be evanescent, with the tensions generally sub rosa rather than displayed out in public.In peaceful times, Sears wrote, “the theory of ‘common in-group identity’ argues that coalitions can form around a common superordinate identity. One example would be the Democratic Party in the California legislature,” where there are “lots of pressures to bind the coalition together — e.g., maintaining a supermajority.”Sears cautioned, however, that “subordinate group identities can sometimes fracture that common identity when subordinate group identities are made salient, as in redistricting (or ticket composition) decisions. The current controversy is a textbook example of these dynamics.”Sears pointed out possible future developments. On one hand, he again mentioned “lots of pressures to bind the coalition together.” At the same time, however, he noted:Centrifugal pressures include upward mobility among Latinos, who are rapidly moving into being small-business entrepreneurs. The younger generation is getting a lot better educated: e.g., the numbers of Latinos admitted to U.C.L.A. are rising rapidly. And intermarriage with whites is very common in post-immigrant generations.“Expect more ethnic conflicts,” Sears concluded,despite the incentives for coalition building. The fragmentation of neighborhoods leads to fragmentation in the schools. Many lighter-skinned Latinos have an easier road of it than African Americans in terms of upward mobility. I believe that broken families are still much more common in the Black community, which has its costs.Redistricting is a redistribution of political power, and political power determines the allocation of crucial resources. Cecilia Menjívar, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., emailed me her analysis of the role of scarcity in the struggle for power:Ethnic conflict does not happen in a vacuum of other social forces, especially material resources such as income and especially inequality — absolutely and relative — in personal income but also resources such as housing and school funding, etc., which varies quite a bit by place, neighborhood, etc. This is important because it’s not just income and material resources but increased inequality — the uneven distribution of resources that shapes perceptions about a sense of scarcity that groups (and individuals) perceive.Income and access to resources and benefits are all key, Menjívar continued, “but inequality, the uneven distribution and access to resources and society’s benefits, is absolutely vital to consider here because it is perceptions of unequal access, unequal distribution of benefits, etc., that I see more than income distribution alone.”Along similar lines, Betina Wilkinson, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, emailed me to say that her survey and focus group data “reveal that for some Blacks and Latinxs, social, economic and political opportunities are zero-sum since they feel that their sociopolitical power and struggles are comparable to those of the other minoritized group, that there are limited resources and opportunities and thus that the other group poses a threat to them.”Limited economic opportunities granted to Black and Hispanic Americans, Wilkinson argued,along with many employers’ deep-seated racism against Blacks and favorability toward Latinxs prompts some Blacks to regard Latinxs as economic threats. What matters is perceptions. Perceptions of one’s sociopolitical standing and perception of the opportunities and resources that one and one’s group has to move up the socioeconomic ladder.Karen Kaufmann, a lecturer at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., argued in a 2007 paper, “Immigration and the Future of Black Power in U.S. Cities,” that biracial and multiethnic coalitions in Los Angeles and other cities have produced only modest gains for minorities in patronage and set-aside contracts, posing little threat to the white establishment:Scholars assume that Blacks and Latinos would obviously be individually and collectively better off if they governed in unity. This perspective assumes that minority mayors and legislators are particularly responsive to poor urban communities, especially in contrast to white-led administrations. This assumption, regardless of how reasonable it appears, is not a matter of fact. The preponderance of evidence to date suggests that minority representation does quite little to advance minority interests above and beyond policies and programs that already exist under White regimes.Since “minority-specific rewards in the realm of local government are largely inelastic,” Kaufmann argued, “Blacks and Latinos have powerful incentives to compete with one another for control of these resources.”To the extent “that the pool of minority benefits such as government jobs, appointments, contracts and redistributive monies will not be appreciably larger under a minority-led regime than it is under a White-led government,” Kaufman continued, “minority groups will be better off as the most powerful minority in a coalition with Anglos than as the second most powerful in a minority-led administration.”For Black and Hispanic Americans, according to Kaufmann, “the impetus for political inclusion is not so much about opening up new sources of minority opportunity as it is about controlling those already established. From this perspective, the absence of minority coalition building at both the elite and the mass level generally constitutes rational, group-interested behavior.”A series of Public Opinion surveys of Los Angeles residents conducted by Loyola Marymount University in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2022 suggested a recent deterioration in race relations in the city.The Loyola study found a sharp drop in optimism concerning race relations in 2022. For example, from 2017 to 2022, the percentage of Los Angeles residents saying race relations had improved fell from 40.6 to 19.3 percent. The percentage saying relations had worsened grew from 18.0 to 38.5 percent.Similarly, the percentage of resident saying riots were likely to happen in the near future grew from 40.8 in 2015 to 64.7 percent in 2022. From 2019 to 2022, the percentage of residents saying racial and ethnic groups were getting along well fell from 72.4 to 61.2 percent.Los Angeles and cities everywhere can look forward to constrained budgets restricting spending on everything from schools to housing to street repairs to policing. These limits drive relentless competition, foment resentment and ravage coalitions.in “Nury Martinez’s Racism Feeds Into Black Angelenos’ Worst Fear. It’s Us Versus Them,” Erika D. Smith, a Los Angeles Times columnist, describes the brutal realpolitik in the covertly recorded conversation I mentioned earlier, which included Nury Martinez, then the City Council president:It wasn’t just a forum for swapping the kind of racist remarks and “jokes” you might hear at a Trump rally. It was ostensibly convened to talk about the redistricting of City Council seats that was happening at the time. But it very quickly veered into strategies for manipulating district maps to deprive Black people of political power and provide it to Latinos instead.The controversy in Los Angeles raises a key question: Is the City Council debacle an exception or is it a warning sign that the bitter, if often submerged, battles involving intraparty competition — part of the package of tensions continually inflamed by Donald Trump — will further endanger Democratic prospects this year and in 2024?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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      The ‘Sleeping Giant’ That May Decide the Midterms

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      The choices made by Latino voters on Nov. 8 will be crucial to the outcome in a disproportionate share of Senate battleground states, like Arizona (31.5 percent of the population), Nevada (28.9), Florida (25.8), Colorado (21.7), Georgia (9.6) and North Carolina (9.5).According to most analysts, there is no question that a majority of Hispanic voters will continue to support Democratic candidates. The question going into the coming election is how large that margin will be.In terms of the battle for control of the House, three Hispanic-majority congressional districts in South Texas — the 15th, 28th and 34th — have become proving grounds for Republican candidates challenging decades of Democratic dominance. In a special election in the 34th district in June, the Republican candidate, Mayra Flores, prevailed.Two weeks ago, The Texas Tribune reported that:Since Labor Day, outside G.O.P. groups have blasted the Democratic nominees on multiple fronts, criticizing them all as weak on border issues and then zeroing in on candidate-specific vulnerabilities. Democratic groups are countering in two of the races, though for now, it is Republicans who appear to be in a more offensive posture.Last week, Axios reported that in the 15th Congressional district, which is 81.9 percent Hispanic, national Democratic groups had begun to abandon its nominee as a lost cause:Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, a progressive running in a majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley district against Republican Monica de la Cruz, isn’t getting any Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee support in her Trump +3 district. House Majority PAC is planning to cancel the scheduled ad reservations for her at the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the group’s plans.Across a wide range of studies and exit poll data analyses, there is general agreement that President Donald Trump significantly improved his 2016 margin among Hispanic voters in 2020, although there is less agreement on how large his gain was, on the demographics of his new supporters, or on whether the movement was related to Trump himself, Trump-era Covid payments or to a secular trend.In their July 2022 paper “Reversion to the Mean, or their Version of the Dream? An Analysis of Latino Voting in 2020,” Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil R. Velez and Emily A. West, political scientists at Emory, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh, write that there isan increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos. Moreover, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among newly-engaged U.S.-born Latino children of immigrants and Catholic Latinos. The results point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.That is, the more Hispanic voters subordinate traditional party and ethnic solidarity in favor of voting based on conservative or moderate policy preferences, the more likely that are to defect to the Republican Party.The authors caution, however, that nothing is fixed in stone:On the one hand, there is evidence that working-class Latino voters became more supportive of Trump in 2020, mirroring increases in educational polarization among the mass public. If similar processes are at play for Latinos — and if such polarization is not Trump-specific — then this could mean a durable change in partisan loyalties.On the other hand, they continue,Historical voting patterns among Latinos reveal natural ebbs and flows. Using exit poll data from 1984-2020, political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that the pro-Democratic margin among Latinos ranges from +9 in 2004 to +51 in 1996, with an average margin of +35 points. Instead of reflecting a durable shift, 2020 could be a “reversion to the mean,” with 2016 serving as a recent high-water mark for the Democrats.In an email responding to my inquiry about future trends, Fraga wrote:My sense is that most of the Latinos who shifted to the Republican Party in 2020 have not returned to the Democratic Party. Many of these new Republican converts were ideologically conservative pre-2020, so Republicans didn’t have to shift their policy message very much to win them over.“Portrait of a Persuadable Latino” — an April 2021 study by the nonprofit Equis Research of Hispanic defections from the Democratic Party — found similar overall trends to those reported in the Fraga-Velez-West paper, but revealed slightly different demographic patterns.The Equis survey found that the largest percentage tilt toward Trump was among women, at plus 8 percent, compared with men, at 3 percent; among non-college Latinos, plus 6, compared with just 1 percent among the college educated; among Protestants, plus seven compared with plus 5 among Catholics and plus 15 percent among conservative Hispanics — compared with no tilt among liberals and a plus 4 percent tilt among moderates.Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Labs, a nonprofit committed “to massively increase civic participation among Latinos in this country,” emailed a response to my query about Hispanic voter trends:While Latinos shifted toward Republicans between 2016 and 2020, an 8-point swing toward Trump, we do not see evidence of a further decrease in Democratic support since Biden’s win. In most states, things do not look worse for Dems with Latinos than they did in the last election, nor do they look better.But, Odio pointedly cautioned,The political environment has the potential to lead to further erosion of Democratic support among Latinos. A meaningful share of Latino voters remain on the fence, having not firmly chosen a side in the election. These late breakers could move toward either party, or toward the couch, before the midterms are over.Odio sent me a September 2022 Equis report, “Latino Voters in Limbo — A Midterm Update,” which found thatYoung Latinos (18-34), Latino men, and self-identified conservatives are overrepresented among the 2020 Biden voters who today disapprove of the president’s job performance. Among the most likely to be undecided today are ideological holdouts: conservative and moderate Latinos who have held back from Republicans, despite seeming to share some characteristics with their G.O.P.-supporting white counterparts. Notably Republicans have not increased support among these Latinos in the last year in almost any state — likely because a large majority of conservative or moderate Latinos who don’t yet vote Republican believe Democrats “care more about people like them.”Today, the report continues, “what keeps many Latinos on the fence is again concerns about the economy and fears that Democrats don’t consistently prioritize the economy, handle it as decisively as business-obsessed Republicans, or value hard work.”A separate Equis study, “2020 Post-Mortem: The American Dream Voter,” found that a negative attitude toward socialism was a factor among Hispanics nationwide, especially among those who stress the importance of working hard to get ahead:There isn’t one overriding concern about “socialism”— but a package of complaints usually rises to the top around government control over people’s lives, raising taxes, and money going to ‘undeserving’ recipients. If a through line exists, it is a worry over people becoming “lazy and dependent on government’ by those who highly value hard work.”The American Dream Voter study found that the declining salience of immigration in 2020 compared with either 2016 or 2018, combined with the debate in 2020 over Covid lockdowns versus reopening the economy, diminished ethnic solidarity in 2020, allowing conservative Hispanics to shift their allegiance to the Republican Party:The economy unlocked a door: the issue landscape shifted to more favorable ground for Trump, opening a way for some Latinos who found it unacceptable to vote for him in 2016. The socialism attack broke through: it created a space for defection,” according to the report’s authors. “Democrats retain some natural credibility with Latino voters but have lost ground on workers, work and the American Dream; they’re also open to attack for taking Hispanics for granted; Republicans have some openings but are still held back by their image as the uncaring party of big corporations.In 2016, the study continued,some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican — based on their demographics, partisanship and ideology — were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hard-line immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity. By the middle of 2020, neither views on immigration nor the role of Hispanic identity were showing a major effect on vote choice — they were no longer cleanly differentiating Trump voters from Democratic voters.In 2018, according to the study, “Trump lost even the conservatives on family separation. But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the (2020) election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”A 2021 Pew Research report found that Latinos view anti-Hispanic discrimination differently from anti-Black discrimination. Hispanic voters were asked whether “there was ‘too much,’ ‘about the right amount’ or ‘too little’ attention paid to race and racial issues” when it comes to Hispanics and then asked the same question about Black Americans.Just over half, 51 percent, of Latino respondents said, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination against Hispanics, 28 percent said, “about the right amount” and 19 percent said, “too much.” Conversely, 30 percent of Latino respondents said that in the case of Black Americans, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination, 23 percent said, “about the right amount” and 45 percent said, “too much.”The American Dream Voter survey Equis performed found that when Hispanics were asked “which concerns you more, Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies or Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies,” 42 percent of Latinos said socialism/leftist policies and 38 percent said fascist/anti-democratic politics.Equis did find substantial Democratic advantages when Hispanics were asked which party is “better for Hispanics” (53-31), which “is the party of fairness and equality” (51-31) and which party “cares about people like you” (49-32). But the Democratic advantage shrank to statistical insignificance on key bread-and- butter issues: which party “values hard work” 42-40 and “which is the party of the American dream” 41-39, and a dead 42-42 heat on “which party is better for the American worker?”Last month, Pew Research released a survey that showed continuing Democratic strength among Hispanics, “Most Latinos Say Democrats Care About Them and Work Hard for Their Vote, Far Fewer Say So of G.O.P.”Pew found that over the past four years, Democrats experienced a modest gain in partisan identification among Hispanics over Republicans, going from 62-34 (+28) in 2018 to 63-32 (+31) in 2022.From March 2022 to August 2022, the share of Latinos identifying abortion as a “very important issue” shot up from 42 to 57 percent in response to the Supreme Court’s decision’s decision in Dobbs in June. Hispanics favor abortion rights by a 57-40 margin, slightly smaller than the split among all voters, 62-36, according to Pew.At the same time, the percentage of Latino respondents listing violent crime among the most important issues rose from 61 to 70 percent; support for gun control rose from 59 to 66 percent; and concern over voter suppression rose from 51 to 59 percent.Registered Latino voters split 53-26 in favor of voting for a generic Democratic congressional candidate over a generic Republican, according to Pew, but there were striking religious differences: Catholics, who make up 47 percent of the Hispanic electorate, favored a generic Democratic House candidate 59-26; evangelical Protestants, 24 percent of Hispanics, backed Republicans 50-32; Latinos with little or no religious affiliation, 23 percent, backed Democrats 60-17.Matt A. Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at U.C.L.A, pointed to data in the Oct. 2 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials weekly Latino voter poll:Indeed if you look at issues like access to abortion, student debt, immigrant rights and gun violence, there are no signs at all that Latinos are becoming more conservative. When asked about government policy, 70 to 80 percent of Latino voters give support to the Democratic Party policy agenda. Indeed for the fourth week in a row, the NALEO tracking poll shows that abortion rights are the number two most important issue to Latino voters in 2022 and issues such as mass shootings and lowering the costs of health care are top 5 issues as well.Trump’s 2020 gains reflected “a clear pattern that concern over the Covid economic slowdown helped Trump make temporary gains with Latino voters,” Barreto argued. “Because so many were negatively impacted by the slumping economy in 2020, Trump was able to convince at least some Latinos that he would reopen the economy faster.”Despite those improvements, Barreto contended, “the reality is that Trump’s gains in 2020 were not part of any pattern of realignment or ideological shift among Latinos. As the national economy continues to recover and improve, Biden favorability continues to recover among Latinos.”In September 2020. Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at the University of California- Berkeley, wrote an essay for The Times with Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a liberal advocacy group. They wrote that when they asked white, Black and Hispanic votershow “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. The message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs “and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.In other words, Haney López and Gavito wrote, “Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.” Progressives, they continued,commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.I asked Haney López about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 election. He emailed me his reply:As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status. Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.Some Latinos, Haney López continued,are susceptible to Republican propaganda promoting social conflict and distrust. The greatest failure of the Democratic Party with respect to Latinos, and indeed the polity generally, is its failure to pursue policies and to stress stories that build social solidarity, especially across lines of race, class, and other wedge identities, including gender and sexual identity.Asked the same set of questions, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a former dean of the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, had a somewhat different take.By email, Suárez-Orozco wrote:I am unpersuaded by the claim that Hispanics are becoming more conservative. To be more precise, over time, they are becoming more American. The holy trinity of integration: language, marriage patterns, and connectivity to the labor market tell a powerful story. Over time, Hispanics mimic mainstream norms. They are learning English much faster than Italians did a century and a half ago, they are marrying outside their ethnicity at very significant rates, and their connectivity to the labor market is very muscular.To Suárez-Orozco, Latinos in the United States are primed to play an ever more significant role — in politics and everywhere else: “The dominant metaphor on Hispanics qua elections over the last half-century has been ‘the sleeping giant.’ When the sleeping giants wakes up: Alas, s/he is us.”The question is whether this sleeping giant will move to the right or to the left. The evidence points both ways — but this is not a contest the Democrats can afford lose.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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      Dozens of Candidates of Color Give House Republicans a Path to Diversity

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      House Republicans are fielding a slate of 67 Black, Latino, Asian or Native American candidates on the ballot in November, by the party’s count, raising an opportunity to change the composition of a House G.O.P. conference that now has only a dozen members of color.Depending on the outcome, those Republican candidates say, they could challenge the notion that theirs is the party of white voters.The lineup of Republican candidates is historic — 32 Latinos, 22 Black candidates, 11 Asian Americans and two Native Americans, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. (Of those candidates, four identify as more than one race.) Many of them are long shots in heavily Democratic districts, but with so few Republicans of color now in Congress, the party’s complexion will almost certainly look different next year.More remarkable, perhaps, is that the Republican candidates are nearing the finish line even as some of the party’s white lawmakers have ratcheted up racist language or lines of attack — a sign that some party leaders remain unconcerned about racial sensitivity.This weekend, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, rallied with former President Donald J. Trump in Nevada and told the crowd that Democrats were “pro-crime” and wanted reparations — widely understood as a reference to slavery — for “the people that do the crime.” At the same event, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, invoked the racist “great replacement theory” when she said, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.”Elsewhere, including in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democrats have accused Republicans of darkening the skin of Black candidates in campaign materials and of running ads brazenly trying to tether Black politicians to Black criminals.The 2022 candidates do not want such issues to derail their groundbreaking runs. After watching the comments from Ms. Greene and Mr. Tuberville, Anna Paulina Luna, a Latina favored to win a House seat in Florida, responded carefully but did not condemn them, instead saying, “Establishment Democrats are exploiting illegals as political currency.”“Many times, illegal immigrants are employed under the table. Many Americans are not offered fair wages because some choose to pay illegals under the table at lower cost,” she said, continuing, “During the naturalization process, individuals are required to learn about our history and culture. That is important as a nation.”Still, the numbers speak for themselves. The only two Black Republicans in the House, Representatives Burgess Owens of Utah and Byron Donalds of Florida, are likely to be joined by Wesley Hunt of Texas and John James of Michigan, Black G.O.P. candidates who are favored to win on Nov. 8. The numbers of this small group could rise further with victories by Jennifer-Ruth Green in Indiana, John Gibbs in Michigan and George Logan in Connecticut, all of whom have a chance.The ranks of the seven incumbent Latino Republicans in the House could nearly double if all six Latino candidates in tight races triumph. And Allan Fung, a Republican in a tossup contest in Rhode Island, could lift the number of Asian American Republicans by 50 percent if he wins and two Southern California incumbents, Representatives Young Kim and Michelle Steel, beat back Democratic challengers.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“It’s Hispanic people, Black people, Black women, Black men, Asian men, Asian women,” Mr. Hunt of Texas said in an interview. “It has been outstanding to see our party get to the point where, yeah, we’re conservatives, but guess what: We’re also not monolithic.”Michelle Steel, right, became one of the first Korean American women in Congress when she won a House race in California in 2020. She is seeking to defend her seat.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesRepublicans have a long way to go to match the Democrats in diversity. A strong G.O.P. showing in November could bring the number of Black Republicans in the House to seven. House Democrats have 56 Black members, including influential leaders.If Republicans end up with 13 Latino members in the House, they still will not measure up to the 34 Hispanic Democrats.And with the right political breaks, Democrats could end up bolstering their already diverse caucus. Fourteen out of the 36 Democrats aiming for competitive Republican seats are candidates of color.Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the House Democratic campaign arm, said that “Republicans are mistaken if they think finally engaging with communities of color in the year 2022 with flawed candidates” would distance their party from what he called an “unpopular, extreme agenda.”“While Republicans attempt to dilute the number of white supremacists within their ranks, their politics of dividing Americans and promoting hate remains,” he said.Republicans, however, see a virtuous circle in the gains they are making: As more candidates of color triumph, the thinking goes, more will enter future races, and more voters of color will see a home in the Republican Party. .css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“We’re narrative busters,” said Mr. Donalds, who helped the National Republican Congressional Committee with recruiting candidates. “We break up the dogma of Democratic politics, in terms of how to view Republicans.”Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the group’s chairman, said this year’s slate was no accident. Four years ago, when he took over the committee, he set about changing the way Republicans recruited candidates, seeking far more diversity. The group would de-emphasize the Washington-based consultants who had a financial stake in promoting their candidates and instead rely on members to seek out talent in their districts.John James speaking to supporters in 2020, when he lost a close race for Senate in Michigan. Republicans recruited him to run for the House in 2022.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York TimesTwo years ago was a dry run; House Republicans gained an unexpected 14 seats, and every seat they flipped from Democrats was captured by a woman or a candidate of color.Mr. Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters and Black men — which he made despite his stream of racist and xenophobic comments while in office — inspired a fresh push by Republicans.Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, who helped with Latino recruitment, said it was not a difficult pitch. More Hispanic candidates were galvanized to run by soaring inflation rates, a surge of migrants in heavily Latino border districts and a growing sense that Democrats were now the party of the educated elite, he said.“Democrats, one could argue, have done a good job with their rhetoric, but their policies have been disastrous, and they’ve been particularly disastrous for the working class,” Mr. Diaz-Balart said. “Was Trump’s rhetoric the words that would be ideal to get Latino voters? No, but the policies were.”Mr. Donalds insisted the former president was not a racist but said, “The question is really silly at this point.”“Republicans now are far more open and far more direct about talking to every voter, not just Republican voters, quote, unquote,” he said. “I think that that’s what’s given the impetus for people to decide to run.”That and a lot of pushing. Mr. Emmer spoke of meeting a trade expert who worked for Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona two years ago, then telling Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, to persuade Juan Ciscomani to run.Mr. Ciscomani recalled talking over the possibility with his wife and Mr. Ducey in 2018 and 2020 before backing away. In the spring of 2021, the one-two push from Mr. Emmer and Mr. McCarthy sealed the deal.“Democrats have taken the Hispanic vote for granted,” he said. “They pandered to the Hispanic community, saying what they wanted to hear and doing nothing about it.” He added: “But Republicans never made an effort. They never tried to get their votes.”Mr. Ciscomani is now favored to win back Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District from the Democrats.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican, is favored to win his House race in Arizona.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesIn 2020, Mr. James — a Black Republican whom Mr. Emmer called “a candidate that only comes along once in a while” — fell short in a surprisingly close race to unseat Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan. Afterward, the N.R.C.C. chairman cleared a path for Mr. James to run for the House.“I told him, ‘To learn to really refine your ability when it comes to campaigning and to understand the business of campaigning, there’s nothing wrong with starting in the House,’” Mr. Emmer said.Mr. Hunt had also tried to run for office and failed — in 2020, for a House seat in the Houston suburbs. In 2018, Mr. McCarthy had been in Houston for a fund-raiser when he met Mr. Hunt, a veteran West Point graduate with a conservative bent, and pressed him to run.Mr. Hunt recalled that after his 2020 loss, “Kevin McCarthy called me the next day, and he said: ‘Hang in there. Let’s see what happens after redistricting. We need you up here. Please don’t give up the fight.’”Mr. Hunt added, “It changed everything.”Ms. Luna had been a conservative activist and political commentator when she decided on her own to run for a Tampa-area House seat in 2020. She said she did not hear from Republicans in Washington until after she won the Republican primary. But when she came up short against Representative Charlie Crist, the hard sell descended.Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, called her days after her defeat, seeing her as a potential recruit for the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich followed, and then Mr. Donalds took her under his wing. “When people see that we are conservatives, we are Republicans, and there’s not this stereotype of what it means to be Republican, I think it empowers them to own their convictions, to own their ideologies,” she said on Friday.Democrats have made it clear that they will not shy away from criticizing Republican candidates for their positions just because of their backgrounds. They have highlighted college writings by Mr. Gibbs suggesting women should not have the right to vote. Representative Mayra Flores of Texas, who won a special election in June but faces a tough race in a more Democratic district, has promoted QAnon conspiracy theories.Representative Burgess Owens, left, and Representative Victoria Spartz after Ms. Spartz made an emotional speech about Ukraine in March. Mr. Owens is one of two Black Republicans in the House.Win McNamee/Getty ImagesRepublicans who want to diversify their ranks say they also hope to change the views of some G.O.P. voters. Mr. Hunt told of a young man who talked with him after a campaign event, then handed his phone over so he could talk to the man’s white grandfather.“He said: ‘Mr. Hunt, you’re the first Black person I ever voted for my entire life. I’m here to tell you that I was racist, and I grew up racist, and there have been times in my life that I have not treated Black people fairly,’” Mr. Hunt recounted. “‘I met you and I said, I have to get behind this guy, in spite of my prejudice.’” More

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      Christian Walker, Warrior for the Right, Now Battles His Father

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      Soon after Herschel Walker, the former football star, announced he would run for U.S. Senate in Georgia as a Republican, his son Christian appeared with him at an event at Mar-a-Lago, and grinned when his father greeted him with a kiss on the head. “Had the honor of introducing my dad,” he tweeted, “then got to hug a future senator. Perfect night.”The moment seemed a logical convergence of Christian Walker’s personal and public lives: the young man was already emerging as a conservative social media star who took delight in provoking the left, and defending Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.Yet, after that night, he fell largely silent about his father’s campaign. That changed in spectacular fashion Monday night after news broke that in 2009, Herschel Walker, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, paid for his then-girlfriend to have an abortion, according to a report from the Daily Beast.“You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” Christian Walker wrote of his father on Twitter.Feuding among family can be a source of embarrassment for any political campaign. But what unfolded in Georgia this week was extraordinary for the level of indignation so forcefully and publicly aimed at a candidate by his child at such a crucial campaign moment.Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, one of the most competitive races in the country,Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNow, Christian Walker, 23, is at the center of a drama that could upend one of the most competitive races in the country.The elder Mr. Walker called the abortion report a “flat-out lie,” while conservative news media and Republicans, eager to regain control of the narrowly split Senate, rallied to his side. The Walker campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.The spectacle has also put a fresh spotlight on how Christian Walker arrived at his political views, some, he now says, directly connected to his father and his own tumultuous family life.Christian Walker, though, has been his own right-wing warrior for several years. He built a large social media presence, and revels in his seeming contradictions. He is a young Black man who called the George Floyd protests “terrorist attacks.” He is attracted to men but does not identify as “gay,” while calling L.G.B.T.Q. activists a “rainbow cult” and mocking Pride Month. He delights in antagonizing the left through short video rants on social media, often while holding an iced coffee and wearing an impish grin.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.His following on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram has made him well-known among members of Gen Z — many of whom are now just hearing about his father’s heyday as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star at the University of Georgia.In several statements (some deleted) and videos posted on Twitter on Monday and Tuesday, the younger Mr. Walker tore into his father, displaying an angry, wounded vulnerability that points to a complicated relationship with his celebrity father.“My favorite issue to talk about is father absence. Surprise! Because it affected me,” he said in a video posted to Twitter this week.“He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them,” he said of his father in one of two videos he posted to Twitter. “He was out having sex with other women. Do you care about family values?”Christian Walker has leveled some of his criticism at conservative activists and pundits who he said are “questioning my authenticity” while trying to pressure him into publicly supporting his father’s candidacy.He said he decided to speak out after his father denied the abortion story.“I haven’t told one story about what I experienced with him,” he said in one video. “I’m just simply saying don’t lie.”Christian Walker in 2020. He has leveled some of his criticism at conservative activists and pundits who he said are “questioning my authenticity” while trying to pressure him into publicly supporting his father’s candidacy.RHTY/starmaxinc.com/ShutterstockDespite the personal nature of his latest posts about his father, they echoed similar themes from many of his political diatribes, videos that often include tirades against men, like Herschel Walker, who have fathered children out of wedlock, or men and women who have affairs.“You’re not a victim when you sleep with a married man,” Christian Walker titled a recent episode of his podcast, “Uncancellable.” He has criticized an Instagram model for her alleged affair with the singer Adam Levine, who he noted “had a pregnant wife with children at home.”At times, he has publicly embraced his father’s legacy, initially promoting his candidacy. At other times he’s asserted his independence, writing in 2015, when he was a teenager, “um people need to understand that I’m CHRISTIAN WALKER not Herschel walkers son.”Christian Walker did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Walker, who grew up in Dallas, is the only child of Herschel Walker and his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman. Ms. Grossman filed for divorce in 2001, two years after their son was born.Herschel Walker dedicated his 2008 memoir to his son, writing: “To my son, Christian Walker, I love you. Thank you for helping me to mature as a man and a father.”After his son’s Twitter posts this week, Herschel Walker tweeted, “I LOVE my son no matter what.”Heath Garrett, a strategist whose firm does work with a Herschel Walker-aligned PAC, said Wednesday that he thinks “it is possible that Georgia voters are capable of having sympathy for both Herschel and Christian in this saga.”Christian Walker’s comments this week prompted a backlash from some conservatives, but also an outpouring of support on social media. Many, including some self-described liberals, said they disagreed with his politics but were moved by his family struggle. Others shared stories of their own absentee parents or childhood trauma.In Dallas, Christian Walker became a star athlete making waves in the competitive cheer scene in Texas. He won a world championship as a member of Spirit of Texas, a premier cheer team, according to social media reports and press interviews.In past interviews, Herschel Walker has said that after getting over the surprise about his son’s sport of choice, he was supportive. “I was proud that he was doing it,” he told C.B.S. News in 2015.Christian Walker continued his cheer career when he enrolled at Southern Methodist University in 2017. But in 2020, when he moved to the West Coast and transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, his priorities seemed to change.Posts on Christian’s Instagram account dated before June 2020 mostly consist of cheerleading photos, scenic Los Angeles, and typical influencer shots of him posing in designer clothing brands such as Gucci and Givenchy.But his posts made after the murder of George Floyd have an explicitly political slant. He called the Black Lives Matter protest movement the “KKK in blackface.” Along the way he amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across social media platforms.In online classes at U.C.L.A., however, Mr. Walker did not display the same level of combativeness, fellow classmates said.Jessica Epps, who took several classes with him during her time at U.C.L.A., remembered being surprised about how understated he was. During one class that took place amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the professor asked students to discuss the movement, and Ms. Epps remembered Mr. Walker speaking up and being somewhat critical. Still, he was measured in his response, she said.“His demeanor definitely seemed a lot more calm and reserved in the classroom setting,” she said. He seldom spoke during lectures, and mostly “kept to himself,” she said.He was also shaped by the uniqueness of being a conservative on a liberal college campus, he told The Conservateur, a conservative site.“Public schools and colleges have turned into Leftists’ indoctrination centers,” he told the publication. “There’s no ‘tolerance’ for any perspective other than the one that the professor is pumping into you.”At U.C.L.A., Christian Walker became known for tirades filmed in his car at a Starbucks drive-through, and conflicts with students and administrators.In livestreams and direct messages on social media, he feuded with fellow students and other people who assailed his political beliefs and, specifically, his use of an offensive term for mentally disabled people.The incident that seemed to spark the most acrimony occurred earlier this year, when he tweeted screenshots of comments made by students in a Chinese language class he had taken the year before, which showed them expressing their anger at his being in the class with them.“How dare you @ucla. I’ve paid 100s of thousands for this degree. I show up to class to study like everyone else. And you allow your students to treat me like crap because of my political beliefs? Wow. Disgusting,” Christian tweeted.Some U.C.L.A. students were fascinated by his persona.“He’s very loud, very flamboyant, he’s very attention-grabbing if you’re scrolling and find one of his videos — he’s immediately yelling,” said Joseph Keane, a recent U.C.L.A. graduate who said he and his roommate would watch Christian Walker’s videos to amuse themselves. “We would laugh — it’s intentionally over the top.”Mr. Keane said Christian Walker was well-known on campus as a conservative firebrand, though he and his friends did not take him seriously.In June, Christian Walker graduated from U.C.L.A. with a bachelor’s degree, according to the school. Shortly after, he announced he was moving to a place where more people shared his political beliefs: Florida. More

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      Herschel Walker’s Son Is No Hero

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      This week, Herschel Walker’s 23-year-old son, Christian Walker, took a starring role in the elder Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign — to burn it to the ground.Christian published a blistering rant on social media, condemning Herschel for his lies after The Daily Beast published a report claiming that Herschel — who supports a complete ban on abortions with no exceptions — had not only urged a woman he was dating in 2009 to get an abortion, but paid for it.As a gentlemanly hypocrite, Herschel also sent her a “get well” card with a steaming cup of tea on the front — how apropos in retrospect — and signed with the message, “Pray you are feeling better,” according to The Daily Beast.Walker, of course, has denied this account. His lawyer told The Daily Beast the report is a “false story” and that he’s being targeted because he’s a Black conservative.No, sir. The verb you may be looking for is not “targeted,” it’s “exposed.”I have no way to independently verify The Daily Beast’s reporting, but Christian appears to believe it.In a message posted on social media after The Daily Beast’s story was published, Christian said:“The abortion card drops yesterday. It’s literally his handwriting in the card, they say they have receipts, whatever. He gets on Twitter, he lies about it. OK, I’m done. Done! Everything has been a lie.”Yes, it has all been a lie. Even before The Daily Beast’s report, Herschel Walker’s entire candidacy was a back-patting product of Donald Trump’s binary, friends-or-enemies approach to Blackness. Trump handpicked him to run because he was the anti-Colin Kaepernick: a Black football player who wouldn’t resist but acquiesce, one who wouldn’t campaign for Black lives but against them, one who wasn’t articulate and principled but unintelligible and fraudulent.Herschel spoke at the Republican National Convention during the summer of 2020, as Trump continued a more than three-year war against kneeling players “disrespecting” the flag and the national anthem. Herschel said in his R.N.C. speech:“Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn’t Donald Trump. Just because someone loves and respect the flag, our national anthem, and our country doesn’t mean they don’t care about social justice. I care about all of those things. So does Donald Trump. He shows how much he cares about social justice in the Black community through his actions, and his actions speaks louder than stickers or slogans on a jersey.”Herschel helped give cover for Trump’s racism in the heat of his re-election bid, so Trump rewarded him by supporting him for Senate.Of course, Trump issued a statement defending Herschel from the abortion claims, saying Herschel had “properly denied the charges” and that he had “no doubt” Herschel was “correct.”But Christian adds an interesting wrinkle in this narrative. He seems angry. And hurt.In his video, Christian spoke directly to the right:“And so, for the right to say I’m being suspicious for saying, ‘Hey, I’m done with the lies,’ when you all have been calling me saying, ‘Is this true about your dad? Ah, we’re not going to win Georgia.’ [unintelligible] That’s been you. You have no idea what I’ve been through in my life. You have no idea what me and my mom have survived. We could have ended this on Day 1.”Of course, Christian is a complicated character, and that’s being charitable. More accurately, he’s come across as a nasty piece of work.He is an election denier who opposes Black Lives Matter (he has called it a “terrorist organization” and “the K.K.K. in blackface”), as well as gay pride (even though, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “Walker has said he is not gay but is attracted to ‘big, strong, muscular men.’”). He is also anti-body positivity (He said on Instagram, “I’m tired of all these models who look like they’ve never seen a treadmill in their life”), anti-feminist (he said on Instagram, “Maybe men aren’t trash, and maybe you feminists should shave your armpit hair”), and he rages against Covid protocols (as he said when complaining about Covid restrictions, “I don’t care about your grandma, at all. I don’t.”).As someone who is Black and queer, allow me to borrow from that vernacular, and say in a tone dripping with disdain: “Child, please.”Christian says he could have stopped Herschel’s campaign from the beginning. But he didn’t. And neither was he passively disengaged. He was an active participant in the fraud. He knew when his father launched his campaign whatever Herschel had put him and his mom through, and he still actively supported him on social media and even sold campaign merchandise.Maybe, as he said on Tuesday, the lies just became too much for him as new revelations came to light. But to me his comments reveal some striking situational ethics on Christian’s part. He’s not opposed to lying, he’s just opposed to lying that personally affects him.He was perfectly OK with Trump’s lies. He even seemed to have bought into the lie of a stolen election and even the fake electors scheme, saying after the election:“The electors might have cast their vote today. They’re not counted until Jan. 6, when Congress meets. And for your information, seven states sent their GOP electors to vote for Trump today: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico. This preserves President Trump’s right to remedy the fraud with his own electors.”In fact, on the day of the 2020 elections, Christian posted a picture of him with Trump and wrote in the caption, “I’m so proud to know you and cherish my families relationship.” (I assume he meant to write about cherishing his family’s relationship with Trump.)In December, Christian spoke at a campaign event for his father held at Mar-a-Lago, and captioned his post about it, “Just a casual Wednesday with Uncle Don.”If Christian was truly offended by lies, he would have rejected Uncle Don long before he rejected his own father. And that’s not all. Christian revealed the root of his objection at the end of his social media rant: “Me, my mom, as we’re chased down by the media, terrorized, all these different things. People are questioning my authenticity. I’m done.”Herschel’s conduct, understandably, has touched Christian’s life for years, but Christian only spoke out with this kind of fervor after people started to question him — and doubt his authenticity.Listen, I’ll accept help from anyone willing to prevent the abomination of Herschel Walker being elected a senator from Georgia. And I’m not discounting any pain that Christian might feel.I am saying, though, that victims can also be villains. I am saying that one person’s trauma can spur another’s cruelties. I am saying that having a hard life doesn’t give you the right to make life harder for others. I am saying that the idiom remains true: Hurt people hurt people.Christian Walker is young. He has a lot of living to do. But he’s an adult. And if he’s old enough to act in ways that harm others, he is old enough to be called out for it.He has existed up to this point largely as an internet provocateur in a social media market that can reward self-aggrandizement with self-enrichment and social capital. He was all in. He threw flames like a pyromaniac.Now, he wants credit for calling out a sham campaign that he had participated in. But there are no laurels for him. He is a lot of things, but a hero isn’t one of them.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

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      The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and –0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”There are, Graham argues,long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021, that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”In addition, the authors write:Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.For the past two decades, white working-class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point whereEducation divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republican Group’s Ads Take On Fetterman Over Gun Incident Involving Black Jogger

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      The super PAC affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition is beginning a significant ad buy in Pennsylvania that aims to draw attention to a 2013 incident in which John Fetterman, now the Democratic nominee for Senate, moved to detain an unarmed Black jogger.The $1.5 million buy includes two ads on the subject aimed predominantly at the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh markets. They will run on broadcast television and are intended to reach Black voters, according to Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican group. The ad campaign will begin on Tuesday and run through Election Day, he said.The strikingly negative ads focus on a moment that Mr. Fetterman’s Democratic opponents pummeled him over in the primary. When Mr. Fetterman was the mayor of Braddock, Pa., he brandished a shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots and saw the man running, according to the police report.In the new set of ads, narrators — both of whom are Black — relay aspects of the incident and express outrage.“My message to Black voters: Do your homework about John Fetterman,” says one narrator. “He didn’t even apologize. And now he wants our vote? Not a chance.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Democrats’ House Chances: Democrats are not favored to win the House, but the notion of retaining the chamber is not as far-fetched as it once was, ​​writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Latino Voters: A recent Times/Siena poll found Democrats faring far worse than they have in the past with Hispanic voters. “The Daily” looks at what the poll reveals about this key voting bloc.Michigan Governor’s Race: Tudor Dixon, the G.O.P. nominee who has ground to make up in her contest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, is pursuing a hazardous strategy in the narrowly divided swing state: embracing former President Donald J. Trump.“Why did John Fetterman see a Black man and do that?” asks another narrator. “He knows why. And our community does too.”A spokesman for Mr. Fetterman did not immediately respond to a request for comment when told about the substance of the ads. .css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.A different pro-Oz group began airing spots on the same subject in Pennsylvania last month.Mr. Fetterman, who is now Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, has emphasized that he initially ran for mayor to stop violence. He has strongly disputed any notion that he acted out of bias in 2013, telling PhillyVoice in 2016 that “this had nothing to do with race. The runner could have been my mother for all I knew, thanks to what the jogger was wearing.”No charges related to the incident were brought against Mr. Fetterman, who has said he saw someone “dressed entirely in black and a face mask” running in the direction of an elementary school soon after the Sandy Hook shooting.“I believe I did the right thing,” Mr. Fetterman told WTAE-TV at the time. “But I may have broken the law during the course of it. I’m certainly not above the law.”Part of that sentence — “I may have broken the law” — is featured in the ads.The jogger, Christopher Miyares, who in 2018 was charged with multiple felonies in a separate incident, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in a letter from a state prison in 2021 both that Mr. Fetterman “lied about everything” and that he hoped Mr. Fetterman “gets to be a senator.”Still, during the primary campaign, Mr. Fetterman faced sharp criticism for how he handled and discussed the 2013 incident. While he won that race handily, some Democrats worried that Republicans would use the incident to weaken Black turnout in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the general election.Mr. Brooks disputed the idea of that being the goal of the ad campaign.“I would say it’s the exact opposite,” he said. “We’re trying to change opinions and to maximize the turnout in the African American community for Dr. Oz.”The ads, though, do not mention Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate. Polling for the Republican Jewish Coalition found that Mr. Fetterman had an overwhelming lead with Black voters, according to a survey conducted Aug. 29- Sept. 1.But the survey also found that “just 6 percent of Pennsylvania voters, including only 4 percent of Black voters, have seen, read, or heard ‘a lot’” about the 2013 incident, and that message testing showed that “key Democratic audiences react negatively to information regarding the incident at gunpoint.”“There is clearly an opportunity to litigate this issue, especially among the Black community and within urban areas,” the memo said. More

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      America Has a Ginni Thomas Problem

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      Clarence and Virginia (Ginni) Thomas don’t discuss their dueling efforts to destroy our democracy when they come home from a day of wreaking havoc.That’s what Ms. Thomas, a conservative activist and an adherent to the lie that Donald Trump won the last election, wants us to believe. That’s essentially what she told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when it interviewed her last week.I don’t believe that any more than I believe Trump can declassify documents with his mind.Why does this matter? Because Ms. Thomas pressed the White House and various state legislators to overturn the 2020 election, and her husband has refused to recuse himself from election-related cases. In fact, Justice Thomas was the Supreme Court’s lone dissent when it rejected Trump’s efforts to withhold documents from the Jan. 6 committee.In March, The National Law Journal spoke with several experts who agreed that Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the case. One called his refusal to do so “arguably unprecedented.”Ms. Thomas didn’t just encourage people to overturn the election; she was at the Stop the Steal rally from which the insurrection sprang on Jan. 6, although she told The Washington Free Beacon that she returned home before Trump took the stage.In other words, Ms. Thomas is a one-woman constitutional crisis.According to The New York Times, during her testimony before the committee, Ms. Thomas repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That is a lie. She knows it, and we know it.Because she is repeating this lie, I can’t believe anything she says without proof. Therefore, her claim that she never discussed her election subversion activities with her husband rings hollow.Did she also not share with him her seemingly deranged Facebook posts framing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting as “dangerous to the survival of our nation” or espousing the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wiretapped Trump?Is the Thomas household just silent, filled only with the hum of grievance and betrayal? Or do these spend their time talking in trivialities, reminiscing about their polar opposite upbringings — him born in the predominately Black, Gullah community of Pin Point, Ga., her born in predominantly white Omaha, Neb., which at the time was facing its own racial tensions?Maybe they share maleficent chuckles recalling how he rebuffed questions at his confirmation hearing in 1991 over the allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, calling it, absurdly, a “high-tech lynching,” or how Ms. Thomas in 2010 left a voice mail message for Hill, demanding that she apologize to her husband.According to The Times, the message was: “Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”What?! Ma’am, if you don’t stop playing on that lady’s phone!The ask was brazen. It was disrespectful. It was delusional. But that’s Ginni Thomas.Sure, maybe the woman with the audacity to call her husband’s accuser and ask that person to apologize to the man she says abused her is too bashful at home to raise her most recent antics with her husband. But it seems unlikely; for years, journalists have documented how close and forthright Justice and Ms. Thomas are with each other. As early as 1991, the year he was confirmed, one of his longtime friends, Evan Kemp, told The Washington Post that she was the one person he really listened to.In the same article, one of Ms. Thomas’s aunts is quoted as saying Justice Thomas “was so nice, we forgot he was Black.” She added, “And he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”Can you imagine? How must it feel to marry into a family where people think of your Blackness as a weight on the wrong side of the scales and you have to achieve at the highest level to balance it out? Of course, Justice Thomas may not object to that characterization. But he and his wife may still spend their quiet time unpacking it.Ms. Thomas is not a minor player and outside agitator. She is connected and influential. According to The Times, she led a group of hard-right activists in a White House meeting with Trump where “members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.”According to the paper, one of the people the group asked to have at the meeting was an assistant Ms. Thomas hired after the conservative group Turning Point USA fired the person for texting a colleague, “I hate Black people.”Since Ms. Thomas is married to a Black man, I can’t make any of that make sense. Maybe, like her aunt, she forgot Justice Thomas was Black.But the major issue remains: The wife of a Supreme Court justice has been actively engaged in trying to overturn an election, and the justice won’t recuse himself from any cases related to that issue. They are Mr. and Mrs. Mutiny.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More