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      The Left-Right Divide Might Help Democrats Avoid a Total Wipeout

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      With the midterm election less than two weeks away, polling has turned bleak for the Democrats, not only increasing the likelihood that the party will lose control of the House, but also dimming the prospects that it will hold the Senate.The key question is whether Republicans will wipe out Democratic incumbents in a wave election.In a 2021 article, “The presidential and congressional elections of 2020: A national referendum on the Trump presidency,” Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, described how the Trump administration and its 2020 campaign set the stage for the 2022 midterms:Reacting to the [Black Lives Matter] protests, Trump doubled down on race‐baiting rhetoric, posing as defender of the confederate flag and the statues of rebel generals erected as markers of white dominance in the post‐Reconstruction South, retweeting a video of a supporter shouting “white power” at demonstrators in Florida, and vowing to protect suburbanites from low-income housing that could attract minorities to their neighborhoods.The headline and display copy on my news-side colleague Jonathan Weisman’s Oct. 25 story about the campaign sums up the party’s current strategy:With Ads, Imagery and Words, Republicans Inject Race Into Campaigns: Running ads portraying Black candidates as soft on crime — or as “different” or “dangerous” — Republicans have shed quiet defenses of such tactics for unabashed defiance.Republican strategies that emphasize racially freighted issues are certainly not the only factor moving the electorate. Republican skill in weaponizing inflation is crucial, as is inflation itself. Polarization and the nationalization of elections also matter, particularly in states and districts with otherwise weak Republican candidates.Jacobson is one of a number of political analysts who argue that the calcification of the electorate into two mutually adversarial blocs limits the potential for significant gains for either party. In a recent essay, “The 2022 U.S. Midterm Election: A Conventional Referendum or Something Different?” Jacobson writes:Statistical models using as predictors the president’s most recent job approval ratings and real income growth during the election year, along with the president’s party’s current strength in Congress, can account for midterm seat swings with considerable accuracy. For example, applying such a model to 2018, when President Donald Trump’s approval stood at 40 percent and real income growth at 2.1 percent, Republicans should have ended up with 41 fewer House seats than they held after the 2016 election — improbably, the precise outcome.Applying those same models to the current contests, Jacobson continued,the Democrats stand to lose about 45 House seats, giving the Republicans a 258-177 majority, their largest since the 1920s. For multiple reasons (e.g., inflation, the broken immigration system, the humiliating exit from Afghanistan) Biden’s approval ratings have been in the low 40s for the entire year. High inflation has led to negative real income growth.No wonder then, Jacobson writes, that “the consensus expectation at the beginning of the year was an electoral tsunami that would put Republicans in solid control of both chambers.” Now, however, “this consensus no longer prevails.”Why?Partisans of both parties report extremely high levels of party loyalty in recent surveys, with more than 96 percent opting for their own party’s candidate. Most self-identified independents also lean toward one of the parties, and those who do are just as loyal as self-identified partisans. Party line voting has been increasing for several decades, reaching the 96 percent mark in 2020. This upward trend reflects a rise in negative partisanship — growing dislike for the other party — rather than increasing regard for the voter’s own side. Partisan antipathies keep the vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents from voting for Republican candidates regardless of their opinions of Biden and the economy.Jacobson noted in an email that over the past weekthe numbers have moved against the Democrats, and they should definitely be worried. The latest inflation figures were very bad news for them. But I still doubt that their House losses will approach the 45 predicted by the models and I think they still have some hope of retaining the Senate — or at least, their tie.Jacobson points out that in the current lead-up to the midterms, there is an exceptionally “wide gap between presidential approval and voting intentions, with the Democrats’ support on average 9.2 percentage points higher than Biden’s approval ratings.” He also notes that in previous wave elections, the spread between presidential approval and vote intention was much closer, 5 points in 1994, 4.9 in 2006, 0.3 in 2010 and 4.1 in 2018.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued in an email that polarization has in very recent years changed the way voters evaluate presidents and, in turn, how they cast their ballots in midterm contests. “There is a higher floor and lower ceiling in presidential approval,” she said:If anything, approval is fairly resistant to external shocks in ways that look very different from either George W. Bush or Obama. An approval rating below 50 percent seems to be the new norm. But if we think about this from a partisan lens, an overwhelming percent of Democrats will always support the Democratic president, while an overwhelming percent of Republicans will oppose him.Put another way, Wronski said, “it wouldn’t matter what Biden does or doesn’t do to curb inflation, Democrats will largely support, and Republicans will largely oppose.”In this context, “partisanship serves as lens through which economic conditions are evaluated. The stronger partisanship exists as a social identity, the more likely it will be used as the motivation to view and accept information about economic conditions, like inflation.”Negative partisanship, Wronski wrote, “has emerged in recent elections as a driver of voting turnout and vote choice,” with the resultthat partisan antipathies keep Democrats from voting for Republican candidates. No matter how bad economic conditions may be under Biden, the alternative is seen as much worse. The threat to abortion rights and democracy should Republicans take control of Congress may be a more powerful driver of voting behavior.While polls show growing public fear that adherence to the principles of democracy have declined, Wronski pointed out thatthose concerns do not trump more immediate needs like being able to afford food, housing, and gas. To be fair, people cannot fight for lofty ideals like democracy when their basic needs are not being met. People need to be secure in their food and housing situation before they can advocate for bigger ideas.There is another factor limiting the number of House seats that the Republican Party is likely to gain: gerrymandering.Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, makes the case that in state legislatures both parties “hoped to avoid creating districts that were uncertain for their party and/or winnable for the other party. One upshot of this is that in a neutral or close-to-neutral environment, there aren’t many winnable seats for either party.”Trende elaborates: “In the swingiest of swing seats where Biden won between 51 percent and 53 percent, there are just 19 seats. Of those seats, 10 are held by Democrats, seven are held by Republicans, and one is a newly created district.” In a neutral year when neither party has an advantage in the congressional vote, Trende writes, if “Republicans won all the districts where Joe Biden received 52 percent of the vote or less and lost all of the districts where he did better, they would win 224 seats.Gerrymandering has created what Trende calls “levees” — bulwarks — that limit gains and losses for both parties. The danger for Democrats is the possibility that these levees may be breached, which then turns 2022 into a Republican wave election, as was the case in 1994 and 2010: “In a universe where Republicans win the popular vote by four points, sweeping all of the districts that Biden won with 54 percent of the vote or less, the levee would break and the Republican majority would jump from 232 seats to 245 seats.”When Trende published his analysis on Sept. 29, the generic congressional vote was almost tied, 45.9 Republican to 44.9 Democratic, close to a “neutral” election. Since then, however, Republicans have pulled ahead to a 47.8 to 44.8 advantage on Oct. 22, according to RealClearPolitics. FiveThirtyEight’s measure of the generic vote shows a much closer contest as of Oct. 25, with Republicans ahead 45.2 to 44.7 percent.In 2010, the Republican Party’s generic advantage in late October was 9.4 points, a clear signal that a wave election was building.Educational polarization — with college-educated voters shifting decisively to the Democratic Party and non-college voters, mostly white, shifting to the Republican Party — in recent elections has worked to the advantage of the right because there are substantially more non-college voters than those with degrees.This year, the education divide may work to some extent to the benefit of Democrats.James L. Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, pointed out in an email that not only do “polarization and party loyalty make the election outcomes less likely to depend on immediate economic circumstances,” but also “educational polarization, combined with the fact that better-educated voters tend to turn out at higher rates in midterm elections than do less-educated voters, may help the Democrats despite voter concerns about Biden or the economy.”Even with inflation as one of the Democratic Party’s major liabilities, the intensification of polarization appears to be muting its adverse impact.In their 2019 paper, “Motivated Reasoning, Public Opinion, and Presidential Approval,” Kathleen Donovan, Paul M. Kellstedt, Ellen M. Key and Matthew J. Lebo, of St. John Fisher University, Texas A&M University, Appalachian State University and Western University, wrote that “Polarization has increased partisan motivated reasoning when it comes to evaluations of the president,” as the choices made by voters are “increasingly detached from economic assessments.”As partisanship intensifies, voters are less likely to punish incumbents of the same party for failures to improve standards of living or to live up to other campaign promises.Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communication and a co-director of the polarization lab at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email that “people (particularly partisans) are far less likely to, for instance, rely on retrospective voting — that is, they won’t throw the bums out for poor economic conditions or problematic policies.”In the early 1970s, Lelkes wrote, “partisanship explained less than 30 percent of the variance in vote choice. Today, partisanship explains more than 70 percent of the variance in vote choice.”This trend grows out of both identity-based partisanship and closely related patterns of media and information usage.As Lelkes put it:There are various explanations for this. There is an identity/motivated reasoning perspective, where people think better us than them and would prefer a lampshade to an out partisan. Another possibility is that people get skewed information. If I watch lots of Fox News or pay even marginal attention to Republican candidates, I’ll hear lots about the economy. If I watch MSNBC and pay attention to Democratic candidates, I’ll hear a lot about abortion, but less about the economy.Not everyone agrees that polarization will limit Democratic losses this year.John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote by email that “it is absolutely true that party loyalty in congressional elections has increased. But this does not stop large seat swings from occurring.”There is, Sides continued, “some evidence that midterm seat swings can be driven by people actually switching their votes from the previous presidential election,” suggesting that “clearly not every voter is a die-hard partisan.”Sides remained cautious, however, about his expectations for the results on Nov. 8: “The recent poll trends are pushing toward larger G.O.P. gains but I am not sure those trends suggest the 40+ House seat gains that the national environment would forecast.” A narrow win, he wrote, would mean that Republican leaders in the House will face “a very delicate task. On the one hand, they have to appease Freedom Caucus types. But they also have to protect potentially vulnerable G.O.P. members in swing districts. I do not know how you manage that task, and so I do not envy Kevin McCarthy.”Dritan Nesho, a co-director of the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, was distinctly pessimistic concerning Democratic prospects:An empirical analysis of the 2022 midterm polls in the final stretch suggests that this election will tip both the House and the Senate toward Republicans, and it’s no exception to historical trends suggesting the incumbent party tends to lose an average of 28 seats in the House and 3 or so seats in the Senate. Key numbers around lack of confidence in the economy, the pervasive impact of inflation, and a worsening personal financial situation among a majority of voters today, actually suggest a stronger loss than the average.The two best predictive variables for election outcomes, Nesho writes,are presidential approval and the direction of personal finances. Both are severely underwater for Democrats. In our October Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, Biden has plateaued at 42 percent job approval and 54 percent of voters report their personal financial situation as getting worse. 55 percent blame the Biden administration for inflation rather than other factors (including 42 percent of Democratic respondents), and 73 percent expect prices to further increase rather than come down. 84 percent of voters think the U.S. is in a recession now or will be in one by next year.If that were not enough, Nesho continued,at the same time Democrats are seen as disconnected from the key issues of concern for the median voter. Republicans are connecting better with general voters on inflation and the economy, crime, and immigration; Democrats are seen as preoccupied with Jan. 6, women’s rights/abortion, and the environment, which are further down the list of concerns.Republicans, in turn, have pulled out all the stops in activating racially divisive wedge issues, relentlessly pressing immigration, crime and the specter of generalized disorder.In Missouri, for example, Brian Seitz, a state representative, is determined to “shut down” critical race theory, declaring, “There is a huge red wave coming.” Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, ran a Facebook ad that read: “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate, contends that Democrats are recruiting immigrants and “have decided that they can’t win re-election in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Blake Masters, the Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, warns that Democrats want to increase immigration “to change the demographics of our country.”Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, observed in an email: “By all rights this should be a debacle for the incumbent party based on the fundamentals — the relative bad news about the economy — inflation — crime, the southern border, and the lingering Afghanistan fiasco.”But, Shapiro added:There are mitigating factors: a very important one is that the Republicans picked up many seats in the House in 2020 so those seats are not at risk now for the Democrats, thanks to around 11 million more Republican voters in 2020 than in 2016. The other factor is the Dobbs abortion decision that led to a surge in Democratic voter registration, very likely significantly women and younger voters. This at best has just helped the Democrats to catch up to Republicans.The crucial question in these circumstances, in Shapiro’s view, “will be relative partisan turnout — will this be more like 2010 or 2018? I sense the enthusiasm and anger here is at least a bit greater among Republicans than Democrats for House voting.”Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, emailed me to say that he agrees “with those who think the Democrats will lose the House,” but with Republicans seeing “a below historical average seat gain, i.e. under the 40-45 seats that some models are predicting.”Cain argued that a Democratic setback will not be as consequential as many on both the left and right argue: “It’s not like either party needs to worry about being locked out of power for very long. The electoral winds will shift, and the window to power and policy will open again soon enough.” Polarization, Cain noted, “has made it clear to both parties that you have to grab the policy prizes while you have trifecta control” — as both Trump and Biden have done during their first two years in office.One difference between the current election and the wave election of 1994 is that this time around Republicans have no attention-getting, mobilizing agenda comparable to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. They have contented themselves with hammering away on the economy, race and immigration.Republicans are fixated on an ethnically and racially freighted agenda of gridlock and revenge. They propose to reduce immigration and to roll back as much as they can of the civil rights revolution, the women’s rights revolution and the gay rights revolution. They threaten to hound Biden appointees, not to mention the president’s son Hunter, with endless hearings and inquiries. The party has also signaled its refusal to raise the debt ceiling and promised to shut down the government in order to force major concessions on spending.While this agenda may win Republicans the House and perhaps the Senate this year, it contains too many contradictions to achieve a durable Republican realignment.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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      Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

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      I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research, often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.“What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stephens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”It was also clear, to some within abolition-democracy, that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “reestablish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against the abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: that democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.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 John Fetterman-Mehmet Oz Debate: The Midterms in Miniature

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      Let’s imagine that someone wanted to design a debate scenario that captured the high-stakes, uncertain, migraine-inducing essence of this freaky election cycle. (Don’t ask me why. Politics makes people do weird stuff some times.) The final result could easily wind up looking an awful lot like the Senate showdown in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz.Here we are, two weeks out from Election Day, with Pennsylvania among a smattering of states set to determine which party controls the Senate. For various reasons, Pennsylvanians have had limited opportunities to take an extended measure of the candidates. With the race now tighter than a bad face lift, this debate may be the candidates’ last big chance for a breakout performance — or a catastrophic belly flop. Rarely have so many expectations been heaped onto one measly debate.Consider the stark contrast between the candidates’ core brands. On the Republican side, there’s Dr. Oz: a rich, natty, carpetbagging TV celebrity with a smooth-as-goose-poop manner and Mephistophelean eyebrows. Mr. Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, is 6-foot-8 and beefy, with tats, a goatee and the sartorial flair of a high school gym teacher — an anti-establishment, regular-Joe type better known for his trash-tweeting than for his oratorical prowess.Hovering over this hourlong prime-time matchup are questions about Mr. Fetterman’s health. He suffered a stroke in May that has left him with auditory processing issues, and he will rely on a closed captioning system in the debate. Voters can be unforgiving — and the opposition ruthless — about verbal stumbling. (Just ask President Biden.) And the closed captioning technology Mr. Fetterman uses can lead to lags between questions being asked and answered.Already there has been chatter about his performance on the stump. This month, an NBC reporter said that, in a pre-interview sit-down, Mr. Fetterman seemed to be having trouble understanding her. Republicans have accused him of lying about the severity of his condition and suggested he is not up to the job. A major blunder on the debate stage, or even the general sense that Mr. Fetterman is struggling, could prove devastating.On the other hand … Dr. Oz and his team have mocked Mr. Fetterman’s medical travails — which seems like a particularly jerky move for a medical professional. This may tickle the Republican base but risks alienating less partisan voters. In appealing to a general-election audience, Dr. Oz will need a better bedside manner to avoid coming across as a callous, supercilious jackass.And here’s where the dynamic gets really tense: After much back-and-forth between the campaigns, Mr. Fetterman agreed to only a single debate, pushed to this late date on the campaign calendar. There are no second chances on the agenda, and precious little time to recover if something goes sideways for either candidate.While the particulars of the Pennsylvania race are unusual, the minimalist approach to debating is ascendant. For the past decade, the number of debates in competitive races has been on a downward slide, and they appear headed the way of floppy disks and fax machines. This election season, barring unforeseen developments, the major Senate contenders in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida, as in Pennsylvania, will face off only once — which is once more than those in Nevada, where debates seem to be off the table altogether. Likewise, the Republican and Democratic candidates in Missouri have yet to agree on conditions for appearing together.This trend is not limited to the Senate. Several candidates for governor have so far opted to shun debates. And starting with the 2024 presidential election, the Republican National Committee has voted to keep its candidates out of events hosted by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates unless it overhauls its rules for how the debates are conducted, including when they are held and who can be a moderator. Even if the committee eventually backtracks (which seems likely), its threat emphasizes just how far debates have fallen.This is a not-so-great development for a democracy already under strain.Once upon a time, candidates felt obligated to participate in debates. But as campaigning increasingly take place inside partisan bubbles, and the ways to directly communicate with voters proliferate, the contenders have become less inclined to brave this arena. Why endure intense, prolonged, unscripted scrutiny when it is so much less stressful to post on social media? Increasingly, campaigns are deciding these showdowns simply aren’t worth the work or the risk involved.But this misses the point. Debates aren’t supposed to be conducted for the electoral advantage of the candidates. They are meant to benefit the voting public. Debates require political opponents to engage face-to-face. They give voters an opportunity to watch the candidates define and defend their priorities and visions beyond the length of a tweet or an Instagram post. They are one of the few remaining political forums that focus on ideas. They contribute to an informed citizenry. Failure to achieve these aims suggests that the practice should be reformed, not abandoned.Admittedly, this seems like wishful thinking as members of both parties grow more comfortable with ducking debates. Republicans in particular are conditioning their supporters to believe that such matchups, and the journalists who typically run them, are biased against them.Those who view debates as some combination of boring, artificial and pointless will probably cheer their decline. (I feel your pain. I really do.) But the loss of this ritual is another troubling sign of our political times, and of a democracy at risk of sliding farther into crisis as its underpinnings are being steadily eroded.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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      Fears Over Fate of Democracy Leave Many Voters Frustrated and Resigned

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      As democracy frays around them, Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.LA CROSSE, Wis. — Allyse Barba, a 34-year-old in the insurance industry, watched excitedly upstairs at Thrunie’s Classic Cocktails as Mandela Barnes, the youthful Democrat running for the Senate, tore through his stump speech just 19 days before the election.Then Ms. Barba reflected on the politics of her state: the divide between the blue dot of downtown La Crosse and the surrounding red reaches of western Wisconsin, where she said she could not have a civil conversation; the Republican favored to win the seat in her congressional district, who was at the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021; and a Legislature so gerrymandered that her Democratic Party does not stand a chance.“It is disheartening to live in a state where nothing happens,” she said glumly. “Voting isn’t making a difference right now.”Seventy-one percent of all voters believe that democracy is at risk, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, but only 7 percent identified that as the most important problem facing the country. Americans face more immediate concerns: the worst inflation in 40 years, the loss of federal abortion rights after 50 years and a perception that crime is surging, if not in their communities then in cities nearby.But another factor is dampening people’s motivation to save America’s representative system of government: Some have already lost faith in its ability to represent them.Wisconsin would seem like a state where concerns over democracy feel pressing — especially in this western swath of the state. The House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack uncovered text messages indicating that Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican seeking re-election, wanted to hand-deliver a slate of fake Wisconsin electors to Vice President Mike Pence that day to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state.Derrick Van Orden, the fiercely pro-Trump Republican running to succeed Representative Ron Kind, a moderate Democrat who has represented much of western and central Wisconsin since 1997, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6.And Wisconsin, perhaps more than any other state, is suffering through the erosion of democratic ideals already. Though virtually every elected statewide officer here is a Democrat, extreme gerrymandering of state legislative maps has given Republicans near supermajorities in the State Senate and House. At best, Democrats enter the state elections in November hoping to perpetuate the stalemate by re-electing their governor, Tony Evers, said Michael Hallquist, a Democratic alderman in Brookfield, outside Milwaukee.But that democratic erosion may have sent many of Wisconsin’s citizens on a downward spiral of feeling powerless, apathetic and disconnected as one-party control becomes entrenched.Tammy Wood, right, at Thrunie’s in La Crosse.Liam James Doyle for The New York Times“It is daunting to convince fellow Democrats their votes matter,” said Tammy Wood, a party organizer who tried to fire up the crowd at Thrunie’s with a rousing “Welcome, Democrats, defenders of democracy!”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.Losing Ground: With inflation concerns front and center, the state of democracy in the United States is not shaping up to be the driver of votes that many on the left hoped it would be.In Minnesota: The race for attorney general in the light-blue state offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.“That is the purpose of the gerrymander — to make us fall into that feeling of defeat,” she added. “But we can’t let that happen.”Of course, just what is threatening democracy depends on who you talk to. Many Republicans are just as frustrated, convinced that the threat stems from liberal teachers, professors or media personalities who they fear are indoctrinating their children; undocumented immigrants given a path to citizenship; or Democrats widening access to voting so much that they are inviting fraud.Michelle Ekstrom, 48, a moderate in Waukesha, typified Republicans who fear the electoral system has already been compromised.“I feel that it’s definitely crooked,” she said. “I always think to myself, What is the purpose if I go vote? Someone crooked somewhere along the way is just going to put more votes in somewhere else than the real people’s votes. I think it’s definitely tilted heavily on the Democratic side.”Mindy Pedersen, who runs a protective packaging business in Eleva, south of Eau Claire, believes democracy is being threatened by a dwindling self-reliance among Americans, saying they seem instead to be gravitating to their own kind — women, Black people, L.G.B.T.Q. people — to press their grievances. She described a meeting of a network of female business owners where she was asked to describe how the group had helped her company thrive. She replied that her gender had nothing to do with her success; she has been ostracized ever since, she said.“Do we want equality or do we want to crush our opposition, which is men?” Ms. Pedersen asked. “If I put out a sign that said, ‘White heterosexual women matter, and by the way, I love Jesus,’ oh, could you imagine the reaction?”Indeed, ask voters exactly what is threatening democracy and the answers are as varied as the individuals who formulate them.Peter Flucke, a retired police officer, sees a breakdown of the rule of law as representing the unraveling of democratic control.Liam James Doyle for The New York TimesPeter Flucke, 61, a retired police officer from Ashwaubenon, outside Green Bay, sees a failure of governments to protect their citizens and a breakdown of the rule of law as representing the unraveling of democratic control. Where does Mr. Flucke, now a bicycle and pedestrian safety consultant, see that happening? Not in the grainy images of lawlessness seen in countless attack ads against Democrats, but in rising death tolls in Wisconsin’s crosswalks and bike lanes.Mr. Flucke, an independent, said he would probably vote for Mr. Barnes and Mr. Evers, though not because of all this democracy talk. In the end, he said, he is most worried about his two daughters losing their right to choose an abortion.Caleb Hummel, 25, an engineer in Waukesha, also sees a threat to democracy, though it is by no means top of mind: socialism. His opposition to abortion is driving his vote for Republicans, but “there’s something to” this democracy-in-peril talk, he said. “The far left is demonstrating somewhat socialist policies.”Some voters are following with alarm the threats to democracy that spun out of Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Katheryn Dose, 74, a retired nurse in La Crosse, cited at length reports of Senator Johnson’s offer to deliver the slate of fake electors for Mr. Trump. She said it was “frightening” that her congressman next year could be Mr. Van Orden. And she looked beyond her own state to candidates like Kari Lake, a Republican running for governor in Arizona, who claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.“For me, I really worry about people like that being elected and running this country,” Ms. Dose said. “Election deniers with the power to deny the next election? That is a huge concern.”But voters like Ms. Dose appear vastly outnumbered by those who express concern for the fate of democracy, yet say they are willing to vote for candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election.David and Mindy Pedersen at home in Eleva, Wis. Ms. Pedersen believes democracy is being threatened by a dwindling self-reliance among Americans. Mr. Pedersen scoffed at the notion Jan. 6 presented a real threat to American democracy.Liam James Doyle for The New York TimesMs. Pedersen’s husband, David, a conservative who runs the packaging company with her, scoffed at all the fuss over Jan. 6.“In reality, do you think those people were really going to overthrow the government? Really?” he asked, taking offense at even being asked whether Jan. 6 was a threat to democracy. “Was Trump ever really going to not leave office? You know he would.”Mr. Barnes, Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, clearly senses that the issue is not his ticket to the Senate. As he spoke to supporters, he did make the case that Mr. Johnson was a threat — “He personally attacked our democracy” — but only after criticizing Mr. Johnson’s support for a tax break for the wealthy, his efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act, his opposition to Medicare negotiating prescription drug prices, his embrace of Wisconsin’s newly relevant 1849 abortion ban and much more.If Mr. Barnes had to choose the top two issues driving voters to the polls, he said later, he would pick inflation and abortion.Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some of the apathy toward democracy’s fate stemmed from the structure of the American political system. Other countries have multiparty democracies where citizens have political options more narrowly tied to their interests — like “green” parties for environmentalists, religious parties or socialists. Ruling coalitions of multiple parties offer more citizens a stake in the government and something to root for.“Our two-party system is all or nothing,” Mr. Burden said. “Either your party wins the White House or loses it, wins Congress or loses it. It makes feelings more intense, positively or negatively.”People gathering outside Democratic Party offices in Eau Claire, Wis., after a canvassing event.Liam James Doyle for The New York TimesAnd in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, where gerrymandering has ensured that the electorate’s partisan composition need bear little resemblance to that of its Legislature or congressional delegation, those feelings are entrenched. Only 2 percent of bills sponsored by Democrats in the Wisconsin State Legislature last session got a hearing, much less a vote.“In many ways, it does feel like there is not a lot of hope,” Mr. Hallquist, the alderman, said.Brad Pfaff, the candidate trying to keep western Wisconsin in the Democratic column, knows he has “more work to do” to convince voters that his opponent, Mr. Van Orden, a telegenic, retired Navy SEAL, disqualified himself from serving in Congress on Jan. 6.Mr. Van Orden’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Mr. Van Orden wrote in an op-ed in The La Crosse Tribune that he had traveled to Washington “to stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”“When it became clear that a protest had become a mob, I left the area, as to remain there could be construed as tacitly approving this unlawful conduct,” Mr. Van Orden said.His base is not asking for an apology. “Why wasn’t the same shadow cast on the people burning down buildings and attacking the police the summer before?” Ms. Pedersen asked. “Why were those thugs not painted the same way as the Trump thugs?”Democrats are not giving Mr. Van Orden a pass.“The idea that Wisconsin would allow someone who was part of the Jan. 6 insurrection to go to Congress, the idea that we could even contemplate that, is deeply troubling,” Tammy Baldwin, the state’s Democratic senator, told party volunteers in Eau Claire before sending them off to canvass.But Mr. Pfaff sees it as a distinct possibility, if not a probability.Nationally, the Times/Siena poll found, 71 percent of Republicans said they would be comfortable voting for a candidate who thought the 2020 election had been stolen, as did 37 percent of independent voters and a notable 12 percent of Democrats.Mr. Pfaff, whose family has farmed in La Crosse County for seven generations and who served in the state and federal departments of agriculture, said he did not so much argue that Mr. Van Orden’s presence at the Capitol disqualified him. Instead, Mr. Pfaff said, it was “a window into his soul,” revealing “who he is as an individual” — too partisan for a district that, in the last 42 years, has been represented by a moderate and openly gay Republican, Steve Gunderson, and then by a centrist Democrat, Mr. Kind.But the district has changed. The consolidation of family farms into corporate operations has dislocated families from land they had worked for generations, turning them into employees of big agribusiness. Local manufacturing has been buffeted by globalization.“That has had a real impact on the people of this district,” Mr. Pfaff said. “They do feel that we’ve been left behind.”In the long rural stretches, hills and coulees between the hipster hangouts and union halls of La Crosse and Eau Claire, Van Orden and Johnson campaign signs jostle with faded Trump-Pence placards. Mr. Pfaff, who noted that Democratic super PACs were not coming to his aid, said it would be pointless in any case for outsiders to ask local voters to reject Mr. Van Orden as a threat to the political order.“We’re patriotic Americans, we know the difference between right and wrong, and what happened in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 was wrong,” he said. “But the thing is, if somebody from the outside, you know, somebody from the East Coast or West Coast, starts talking about something like that, that’s not how people want it. They’re not going to hear that.”Dan Simmons More

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      How Political Primaries Drive Britain’s Dysfunction

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      In the United States, too, the rise of inside-party primaries has empowered candidates at the extremes, and the result is likely to be a greater disconnect with the public.The rise and fall of Liz Truss, Britain’s six-week prime minister, embodies a seismic and long-mounting change in British politics, though its cause and consequences may not always be obvious.Ms. Truss was only the fourth British leader to win the job through a particularly American practice newly common in her country: a party primary.As in most parliamentary democracies, British parties, for most of their history, chose their leaders, and therefore the prime minister, through a poll of party officials.But in recent elections, Britain has shifted that power to party bases, which now select party leaders in elections somewhat like those held in the United States for party nominations.This was intended to empower voters over back-room party bosses, elevating politicians who would be more representative and therefore more electable. But the consequences have been very different.As in the United States, British primary voters tend to be more ideologically fervent and less inclined to moderation than are party bosses or even the median party supporter, surveys find.This has, in both countries, tended to elevate candidates who are more extreme, with research suggesting that the effect has been to make politics more polarized and dysfunctional. Ms. Truss, and the policies that seemingly ended her brief tenure, have become prime examples.Britain’s Conservative Party selects leaders first by winnowing down candidates in the traditional way: voting among party lawmakers. In four out of five such rounds, Ms. Truss was only the third-most selected candidate. In the fifth round, she came in second to Rishi Sunak, who is seen as more moderate.But, since 2001, the party has put its final two leadership candidates to a vote among dues-paying members. Ms. Truss’s libertarian ideas were seen as risky and extreme among party officials. But they were embraced by primary voters, who chose her over Mr. Sunak.More on the Situation in BritainA Rapid Downfall: Liz Truss is about to become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. How did she get there?Lifelong Allowance: The departing prime minister is eligible for a taxpayer-funded annual payout for the rest of her life. Some say she shouldn’t be allowed to receive it.Staging a Comeback?: When Boris Johnson left his role as prime minister in September, he hinted he might return. He is now being mentioned as a successor to Ms. Truss.Those voters — about 172,000 of them — bear little resemblance to the average Briton. Roughly two in three are male. Two in five are 65 or older, double the proportion in the general population. Three in four voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, compared with only 52 percent of Britons, and 58 percent of all Conservative supporters.Ms. Truss’s economic ideas may have wooed those primary voters, but her policies, and the economic shudder that followed them, alienated much of the rest of the country. Even many Conservative supporters, most of whom do not qualify to vote in primaries, told pollsters that they intended to vote for other parties.In this case, the political shift brought about by primary voters’ pull toward an extreme was stark and, with Ms. Truss having resigned under party pressure, ultimately brief.But it is of a piece with what a growing body of political science research suggests are deeper and longer-term changes brought about by the rise of party primaries in a few democracies.A Quietly Seismic ShiftDavid Cameron, a former British prime minister, deepened his party’s commitment to primaries.Pool photo by ReutersBritain’s first leadership primary open to party members was held by Labour in 1994, part of an effort by that party to emphasize a connection to everyday citizens.The Conservatives followed in 2001, responding to deep election losses, said Agnès Alexandre-Collier, who studies British party politics at the University of Burgundy in France. Conservatives also began holding primaries for some individual seats in Parliament.This was intended to elevate Conservative politicians, Dr. Alexandre-Collier said, who would be “more modern, closer to the people, more in touch with the population, because the Conservatives were seen to be disconnected, out-of-touch elites.”Primaries were a relatively untested concept in Europe. The United States had only begun inviting voters into the process of selecting party nominees in the 1970s and ’80s.American party officials had long used control over nominations to block candidates who did not embrace party orthodoxy — and, often, to bar racial and religious minorities. Many Americans objected to this as undemocratic and divisive, pressuring parties to open up.In Britain, it was David Cameron, then the Conservative leader, who in 2009 deepened his party’s commitment to primaries, surrendering party control over nominations in dozens of races.“This will have a transformative effect on our politics, taking power from the party elites and the old boy networks,” he said at the time. A year later, he became prime minister.But in both the United States and Britain, primaries brought other changes, too.Party officials tend to overwhelmingly prefer moderate candidates over ideological ones, research has found. This holds true even in uncontested districts, suggesting that the preference runs deeper than electability considerations.To activists looking to push their parties further left or right, this can look like a conspiracy to block change. To parties, it is often intended to enforce internal unity and cohesion, as well as what is known in European politics as the “cordon sanitaire,” or an informal ban on extremists and demagogues.As primaries have shifted power from parties to the rank-and-file, these barriers have fallen away.This has also granted individual lawmakers greater independence, allowing them to more freely buck party positions — but binding them to primary voters’ desires instead.How Primaries Change PoliticsJeremy Corbyn won a Labour Party leadership vote in 2015 thanks to primary voters.Jessica Taylor/Agence France-Presse, via U.K. Parliament/AFP via Getty ImagesMr. Cameron quickly saw his party fill with rebellious lawmakers who had won primaries by championing a position that party insiders had opposed: leaving the European Union.At the same time, Mr. Cameron faced the prospect that, in any future leadership contest, his fate would be up to primary voters who also favored this policy. In 2016, partly as an effort to stave off these threats, Mr. Cameron held the referendum that ultimately resulted in Britain’s departure from the union.This is why some political scientists now argue that a straight line can be drawn from the Conservatives’ use of primaries, and the power it handed to a small and ideologically committed faction of voters, to Brexit.Britain’s Labour Party has also changed.Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing lawmaker long at odds with his party’s leadership, won a leadership vote in 2015 thanks to heavy support from primary voters.But Mr. Corbyn took a soft line on Brexit, which saw his party’s support drop in polls and angered party officials who wanted Labour to champion a policy of remaining in Europe.Still, even as Labour officials tried to eject Mr. Corbyn, primary voters kept him in power. During his five-year leadership, Labour failed to win a majority although Conservatives struggled through leadership crises and economic turmoil.“Internal democracy can undermine a party’s ability to select candidates who can win general elections,” Georgia Kernell, a U.C.L.A. political scientist, wrote in a Washington Post essay, referring to Mr. Corbyn.“Party activists rarely represent the population,” she added. “Nor do they often represent the party’s own voters.”Weaker PartiesWhen Donald J. Trump was running his primary campaign, Republican officials tried to stop his rise.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesIn perhaps the most famous case of primary voters overruling party officials, Republican leaders repeatedly attempted to halt Donald J. Trump’s rise in their party’s 2016 primary.Those who have not subsequently fallen in line, like Representative Liz Cheney, who called Mr. Trump a threat to democracy, have often seen their careers ended by primary challenges.“It’s counterintuitive, but democratizing parties will ultimately harm democracy,” Jennifer N. Victor, a George Mason University political scientist, wrote in 2018, just as Democrats announced changes to curtail party bosses’ influence over primary nominations.“Democracy requires institutional forces of coordination to enforce collective action,” Dr. Victor said. “It comes in many forms. All of them can be called leadership.”“Without them,” she added, “we’re all just in ‘Lord of the Flies.’”Still, in countries where voters now expect to select their party’s leaders, reverting that authority back to party insiders, even if their choices were sometimes more representative of the electorate, would surely feel to citizens like an unacceptable loss of democratic rights.Voter-led primaries remain unusual in the world.One exception was, briefly, France, whose two traditionally dominant parties held primaries for nominations to the 2017 presidential contest.Voters in France’s right-wing party, which had been expected to win, chose a scandal-plagued candidate who was friendly with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and who lost. The winner of the left-wing party’s primary went on to take only 6 percent of the national vote.“This experiment was seen as an absolute failure,” Dr. Alexandre-Collier said. “It gave priority to the most populist leaders,” she added, as primaries have tended to do across countries.Both parties quietly ended the practice, returning candidate selection in France to party officials. More

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      The Week in Political News

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      Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesVoter turnout in Georgia is far outperforming that of previous midterm elections, rivaling presidential-year figures. On the first day of early voting, more than 130,000 people cast ballots — a more than 85 percent increase from the same day in 2018, according to the secretary of state’s office. More