Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)
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Fears Over Fate of Democracy Leave Many Voters Frustrated and Resigned
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
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
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
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The Ins and Outs of America’s Shrug at the Threat to Democracy
With voters distracted by other issues and election denial flourishing, the country has what academics call a legitimacy problem.One way to read the striking results of the New York Times/Siena College poll released this week is that democracy is not shaping up to be the driver of votes that many on the left hoped it would be.The obvious reason is that inflation is a far more immediate issue on the minds of most voters, who are watching their savings evaporate or struggling to pay their bills. That’s Abraham Maslow 101: Physiological needs of food and shelter will always take priority over abstractions.But another way to interpret the survey is as yet more confirmation that American democracy is indeed in trouble.In a Twitter Spaces conversation today with Ruth Igielnik, a staff editor for news surveys who worked on this week’s poll, and Nick Corasaniti, a national correspondent on the politics team, we unpacked why, even though 71 percent of voters agreed that democracy was at risk, only 7 percent said that democracy’s fragile state was the most important problem facing the country. You can listen to our discussion here.Ruth noted that voters’ responses to the question “What one or two words do you think summarize the current threat to democracy?” were all over the map.Some said “election deniers” or “Donald Trump,” while others said “Joe Biden,” “inflation and taxes” or “the one percent, a.k.a. Wall Street and hedge funds.” Another person said “our division” — that is, political polarization itself.Nick, who recently returned from a reporting trip in Michigan, added some texture from tagging along during voter canvassing in Detroit and its suburbs, as well as in Saginaw, a city of about 50,000 people in the center of the state. Biden carried Saginaw County by just a few hundred votes in 2020.“We encountered a ton of voters, and not a single one of them brought up any issues of democracy,” Nick said.He added that the organizers, as they prepared the canvassers for what they should expect to encounter, told them: “You’re going to hear about issues like, why are our wages so low when we’re a predominantly union town? Why are prescription drug prices so persistently high? Why are there potholes in the road? Why can’t I get a garbage can?”Lonna Atkeson, who studies political psychology at Florida State University, said voters were just thinking rationally. When it comes to protecting democracy, she noted, each side sees the other as the problem.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.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.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.“So there’s not really much to go on there other than to vote for your own party,” Atkeson said, “whereas the economy is a clear signal. It’s on your doorstep. You feel it every day. Maybe there’s something that can be done about that.”A legitimacy problemMost serious experts on democracy — academics who study governments around the world, and why they fall apart — would say that election deniers are the real danger.And the new Times/Siena poll shows that millions of them are out there, despite zero evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Nick wrote in an article explaining the poll results, “Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.”There’s an academic term for that: a legitimacy problem.Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociologist and political scientist who did seminal work on what makes democracies successful, published an influential paper in 1959 called “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.”At the time, he was trying to understand two main questions: why Europe veered toward extremist ideologies like fascism and communism after World War I, and whether the nascent democracies forged by fire and blood in World War II were sustainable.Lipset defined democracy this way: “a political system which supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing the governing officials.”The United States still meets that pretty basic requirement. Despite Trump’s bellowing about a stolen election, and his efforts to whip up the mob that assaulted the Capitol, Biden duly assumed office in 2021 after a near-disastrous handover of power. The system held, albeit tenuously.But Lipset’s framework should alarm us today because, as the Times poll suggests, nearly half the country still doesn’t consider Biden the legitimate president.Many of Donald Trump’s supporters deny the legitimacy of the last presidential election.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesPretend the U.S. is a foreign country; how would we explain what is happening? Two years on, the fever that powered an attempt to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power has not broken, and it’s still being stoked every day by the loser of the previous election.As Lipset wrote, “If a political system is not characterized by a value system allowing the peaceful ‘play’ of power — the adherence by the ‘outs’ to decisions made by ‘ins’ and the recognition by ‘ins’ of the rights of the ‘outs’ — there can be no stable democracy.”Lipset also defined a stable democracy as the absence “of a major political movement opposed to the democratic ‘rules of the game’” — which required, he thought, that “no totalitarian movement, either Fascist or Communist, received 20 percent of the vote.”The one silver lining in the poll? Only 17 percent of the voters who saw democracy as threatened said there was a need to go “outside the law” to fix the problem. And of those voters, just 11 percent said the answer would be to “take up arms/violence/civil war.”Then again, maybe that’s no silver lining at all: By my math, that would still be over a million people. Buckle up.What to read on democracyA South Florida man became the first of 20 defendants ensnared in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s voter fraud dragnet to have charges dropped, ABC News reports.The midterm legal battles have already begun: The Democratic National Committee has filed a court motion to try to stop Republicans in Pennsylvania who want to disqualify mail-in ballots without handwritten dates on them.Tens of thousands of transgender people could be disenfranchised in the November elections because of strict voter ID laws and other rules in their states, according to Rolling Stone.Nonwhite voters were 30 percent more likely to have their vote-by-mail application or ballot rejected compared with white voters in Texas, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which analyzed data from the March primary.Election offices large and small across the country are contending with internal threats that could undermine the integrity of the midterms: election deniers holding positions of power in them, CNN reports.The head of a major federal union warned this week that demonization of the Internal Revenue Service by some Republicans could put the agency’s employees in danger.Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, is stepping up his courtship of right-wing fringe figures, including adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.viewfinderSupporters of Stacey Abrams at a campaign event in Athens, Ga.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesOn the trail in GeorgiaA couple of hundred people had gathered to wait for a glimpse of Stacey Abrams by the time her purple bus pulled up in College Square in Athens, Ga. Abrams’s supporters have often spoken to me about how inspiring it is for them to see her running for office when for so long Black women have organized politically behind the scenes.I crept to the center of the crowd for a photo of Abrams as she spoke. At one point, I turned around and captured this image of a group of racially diverse and multigenerational women. To me, it represented a key group of her supporters and their feelings about her candidacy and the future.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More
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There Is a Way to Make America Safe for Democracy
Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong.We might be comfortable with decision-making by majorities at our P.T.A. meetings or when deciding on the theme for the next vacation Bible school, but we’re uneasy with the prospect when it comes to our politics. And our political lexicon is stocked with phrases and aphorisms that highlight the danger of majoritarian systems and even rebuke the concept outright.There are the usual warnings about the “tyranny of the majority”; there is the quip, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, that democracy is “two wolves and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch”; and there is the oft-heard assertion — and I’ll admit a personal bête noire — that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens.Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, where it is exercised in a monarchy or in a republic, I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.”Americans take for granted the idea that our counter-majoritarian Constitution — deliberately written to constrain majorities and keep them from acting outright — has, in fact, preserved the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of majority rule, and that any greater majoritarianism would threaten that freedom.Well, what if that’s not true? Yes, majorities acting through our representative institutions have been overbearing and yes, the Supreme Court has occasionally protected the rights of vulnerable minorities, as well as those of the people at large. But there have been just as many, if not more, examples of the reverse: of majorities safeguarding the rights of vulnerable minorities and of our counter-majoritarian institutions freeing assorted bullies and bosses to violate them.I’ve written about some of these episodes before (and I’m hardly the only person to have drawn attention to them): how the court gutted both the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and the laws written to secure the lives of Black Americans, free and freed, from discrimination, violence and exploitation.If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.The advent of Jim Crow, similarly, had less to do in the beginning with a nefarious majority of voters rushing to the polls to subjugate their Black neighbors than with a long campaign of violence meant to neutralize Black voters and intimidate their white allies. The men who pioneered Jim Crow in Mississippi, for example, were by no means a majority, nor did they represent one in a state where a large part of the public was Black. As the historian C. Vann Woodward summarized it in “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” “In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud.”There was, however, a majority vote to protect the rights of voters in the South. But that vote — the vote to pass the 1890 Federal Elections Bill, which would have empowered the national government to supervise elections in the former Confederate states — failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead.It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society (on that last point, 64 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, support laws or policies that would “protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces”). If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination.If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it.Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation.If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.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
- in Elections
The Battle Between Pocketbooks and Principles
You are never in the voting booth alone.You bring with you your hopes and fears, your expectations and your disappointments. Your choice is made through a maze of considerations, but it hinges primarily on how the candidates — their principles and their party — line up with your worldview. Would they, if elected, represent and promote the kind of community and country you want to live in? Are they on your side, fighting for you and people like you?Often, the things that are top of mind as you consider those questions are urgent and imminent, rather than ambient and situational. Issues like the economy, for instance, will almost always take top billing, since they affect the most people most directly.Anger over abortion can also be potent, and in some races, it may determine the outcome, but it is a narrower issue. First, no person assigned male at birth will ever have to personally wrestle with a choice to receive an abortion or deal with health complications from a pregnancy that might necessitate an abortion. So, for half the electorate, the issue is a matter of principle rather than one of their own bodily autonomy.Furthermore, at the moment, abortion is still legal in most states. Yes, clinics have disappeared completely in 13 of the 50 states, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute, but for millions of American women living in blue states, abortion access hasn’t changed since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs.That is not to diminish the outrage people do and should feel about this right being taken away from them. It doesn’t diminish my personal outrage, nor does it assume that abortion rights are safe in the states that have yet to outlaw the practice.But I mention it as a way to understand something I’ve seen over and over in the electorate: Incandescent rage, however brightly it burns at the start, has a tendency to dim. People can’t maintain anger for extended periods. It tends to wear on the mind and the body, as everyday issues like gas and rent and inflation push to get back into primary consideration.I have seen repeatedly how people abandon their principles — whether they be voting rights, transgender issues, gun control, police reform, civil rights, climate change or the protection of our democracy itself — when their pocketbooks suffer. There is a core group of people who will feel singularly passionate about each of these problems, but the rest of the public adjusts itself to the outrage and the trauma, shuffling each issue back into the deck. They still care about these problems as issues in the world, but they don’t necessarily see them as urgent or imminent.In a New York Times/Siena College poll released this week, voters were asked “What do you think is the MOST important problem facing the country today?”A plurality, 26 percent, said the economy, and 18 percent said inflation or the cost of living. Just seven percent said the state of democracy, and four percent said abortion.After the Supreme Court struck down Roe, Democrats saw a measurable shift in their direction, as voters began to say that they were leaning toward the Democrats in the midterm elections. The anger among many voters was palpable; the offense was fresh. But now, that momentum has stalled, and some see a swing back toward Republicans as we get further out from the ruling and worrisome economic news retakes the headlines.I still believe that anger over abortion will be felt in the midterms. I believe that taking away such a fundamental right feels like a betrayal that must be avenged. I believe that many parents of daughters are incensed at the idea of those girls inheriting an America where they will have less say over their bodies than their mothers had.But I also know that energy attrition in the electorate is real. I know that historical trends are on the side of Republicans going into the midterms, and even a minor stalling of momentum and erosion of energy could make the already slim chance that Democrats would hold the House of Representatives an impossibly long shot.In the closing days of this campaign cycle, Republicans are driving home perennial issues: the economy and crime. Democrats are arguing big issues of policy: abortion and protecting democracy. In this battle of pocketbooks and principles, which will win out?For those with any sense of political vision and history, the policy side must take precedence. Economic issues are cyclical. They’ll always present themselves. But grand issues like bodily autonomy can define generations. And protecting democracy can define empires.What is the point of a cheaper tank of gas, if it must be had in a failed democracy that polices people’s most intimate choices about their own bodies?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
