Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      On the Ballot This Year: The Ballot Itself

      by

      Republicans are trying to limit the use of citizen-initiated legislation in some states after years of progressive victories.Ballot measures, a tool many states adopted during the Progressive Era to allow voters to pass their own laws, don’t always get much news coverage — but they can often surprise us.This year, there are hotly contested ballot measures on abortion, marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion, among other topics.But at the same time, there are efforts in many states to make it harder to pass ballot measures.Depending on whom you ask, these proposals are either a frontal attack on democracy or a necessary move to counteract attempts by national liberal groups to hijack state politics.Either way, state legislatures have made hundreds of attempts to limit or restrict the use of ballot measures over the last five years, according to forthcoming research by Emma Olson Sharkey, a lawyer with the Elias Law Group.In some cases, legislatures have tinkered with the rules for how many signatures are required, or the necessary qualifications for those doing the canvassing.But this year, legislatures in several states have put proposals to make passing ballot measures more difficult on the ballot itself.Take Arkansas, where there is a ballot measure this year to restrict ballot measures, called Issue 2. If a simple majority votes yes, in the future it will take 60 percent of voters to adopt constitutional amendments or laws initiated by citizens.The measure was sponsored by two Republican lawmakers, State Representative David Ray and State Senator Bart Hester. Ray, in a television discussion of the proposal, described the higher threshold as necessary “to ensure that there’s a genuine consensus among voters.” The Arkansas Constitution, he said, should not be amended in “willy-nilly fashion” by “big-money, out-of-state interests.”There is some sleight of hand there, opponents say. Issue 2 would effectively grant a veto on ballot measures to 40 percent of the public, while the Republican-led General Assembly could still pass laws by a bare majority.Most states require a simple “50 percent plus one” majority to pass a ballot measure. Only three states have supermajority requirements similar to what’s on the table in Arkansas — Florida, Washington and Oregon, in some circumstances.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.In Arizona, there are three proposed restrictions to ballot measures on this year’s ballot: Proposition 128, which would allow the Legislature to amend or repeal ballot measures even after they are approved if a judge rules that provisions within them are unconstitutional; Proposition 129, which would limit citizen-initiated ballot measures to a single topic; and Proposition 132, which would require any ballot initiative that would raise taxes to pass by 60 percent.As in Arkansas, the supporters of these ballot measures say they are necessary to rein in abuses of the process. Critics say they are intended to lock in the power of a Legislature that was gerrymandered to favor Republicans despite an independent redistricting commission’s best efforts to make the maps fairer.Liberal groups have found ballot measures to be a powerful, if expensive, tool to promote their policies — even in red states. They say their successes in raising the minimum wage and expanding health care coverage via what they call “direct democracy” have caused Republicans to push back by changing the rules. In Maine, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah, voters have expanded access to Medicaid via ballot measure, going over the heads of the states’ legislatures.In South Dakota, voters this year decisively defeated Republicans’ push to pass a constitutional amendment requiring most voter-initiated referendums to pass with 60 percent of the vote, rather than by a simple majority. More than two-thirds of voters rejected the measure.Most, but not all, of the legislatures trying to limit the use of ballot measures are Republican-held. Democratic-run Colorado raised the requirement for passing constitutional amendments to 55 percent in 2016, for instance.Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a progressive group that focuses on winning ballot measures, hailed the results of the recent referendum in Kansas, where voters rejected a proposal to add a ban on abortion to the state’s Constitution.“Many of us had a delightful wake-up call on the power of ballot measures in early August with the vote in Kansas,” Hall said. “But it has also sparked a backlash,” she added, and “a lot of opposition spending.”In Arkansas, reaching a 60 percent threshold might be difficult on highly polarized issues, but it would probably not be insurmountable.From 2000 to 2020, Arkansas voters approved 32 ballot measures out of 44 total. Only 18 of the 32 would have passed under the proposed 60 percent threshold.While progressives in Arkansas have notched some victories, there is no clear pattern.In 2020, voters barred state legislators from serving for more than 12 consecutive years in office. State judges removed two other proposals from the ballot on technicalities: a proposal to create an independent redistricting commission, and the introduction of a ranked-choice voting system similar to Alaska’s. In 2018, Arkansas voters passed a measure to require photo identification to vote; they also increased the state’s minimum wage to $11 per hour. And in a 2016 ballot measure, they legalized medical marijuana.The California modelFor the skeptical, California offers a cautionary tale. Critics of the state’s penchant for direct democracy say it has led to higher taxes and a not-in-my-backyard mind-set, exacerbating a housing crisis and driving away businesses.This year, one of the most expensive races in the country is not for any political office, but a battle over two ballot measures in California regarding gambling on sports.Proposition 26 would allow tribal casinos and the state’s racetracks to host sports betting. Proposition 27 would allow Native American tribes and licensed gambling companies to host sports betting outside tribal lands.An estimated $440 million has been spent on lobbying campaigns and ads so far on the two propositions, with little transparency on who is funding what — exactly the kind of spectacle many states are trying to avoid.“These are hard calls,” Hall said, defending her group’s use of ballot measures as necessary to circumvent gerrymandered and sclerotic legislatures. “These are expensive. And California’s an example of where maybe it’s gone too far.”What to read on democracyRepublicans are keeping tabs on the political affiliations of poll workers in swing states, and claiming unfairness when there are more Democrats than Republicans, The Washington Post reports.Former President Donald Trump called this week for a return to paper ballots.The Center for Public Integrity examined which states make it the most difficult for people to vote, and which ones make it easier.An Iowa man has been arrested on suspicion of making threats toward an elections supervisor in Maricopa County, Ariz.Representative Liz Cheney urged Arizonans to vote against Kari Lake for governor and Mark Finchem for secretary of state, warning that they are threats to democracy.In Green Bay, Wis., conspiracy theories about the 2020 election abound, changing the tenor of municipal races and yielding a robust pool of partisan poll observers.viewfinderSupporters of Mandela Barnes watching him speak at an event on Monday at a brewery in Racine, Wis.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAn abortion rights pitchOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Haiyun Jiang told us about capturing the image above:The lighting was tricky, I realized when I walked into a little brewery where Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, was holding a “Ron Against Roe” event targeting his opponent, Senator Ron Johnson, over his opposition to abortion rights.It was the middle of the day, and the sunlight was harsh. I tried to avoid making images that had too much discrepancy in light.As Barnes spoke, I noticed that women made up the majority of the audience. I directed my lens toward them, finding a table for which the lighting worked and waiting for the right moment to convey the audience’s mood.For me, this image shows the significance of abortion rights as an issue in this year’s midterm elections.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

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Five Takeaways From the Arizona Senate Debate

      by

      PHOENIX — It was a battle over whether Arizona is still the conservative-leaning state of Barry Goldwater and John McCain.Senator Mark Kelly faced his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, on Thursday in the first and only debate of the race that will help decide whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate, which they hold by the barest of margins. Mr. Kelly repeatedly emphasized his independent image, referring frequently to his disagreements with members of his own party, including President Biden.The two men, who have spent months attacking each other on issues including abortion, border security, inflation and election integrity, were also joined by Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, who has not reached double digits in polls.The debate did little to cover new ground on the most contentious issues, but the moderator asked pointed, direct questions in a bid to force the candidates to clarify their sometimes murky positions. Mr. Masters tried to straddle the line between his previous hard-line stances and his more recently adopted softer tone — but continued to largely play to his base, even if it required some winks and a nod or two.Abortion becomes a flash point.Abortion has vaulted to the front of many voters’ minds in Arizona, not just after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this June, but because a state judge revived a total ban on abortions from 1864 that had sat dormant for decades. Abortions in the state, already on shaky ground, halted abruptly.So on Thursday, each candidate tried to paint the other as an abortion extremist. Mr. Kelly pointed to statements where Mr. Masters had called abortion “demonic,” and said Mr. Masters wanted to punish doctors and ban abortions in cases of rape.Mr. Masters said he was proud to call himself one of the most pro-life candidates running for Senate, and quickly leveled a misleading accusation that Mr. Kelly supported late-term abortions up until the moment of birth. In reality, abortions late in pregnancy are rare and often occur because of a devastating health problem in an otherwise wanted pregnancy.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.It’s always 2020 in Arizona.Faced with a direct question about whether Mr. Masters believed the 2020 vote was stolen, he seemed to blink. He talked of collusion between tech companies, the news media and F.B.I. to suppress negative news about President Biden’s son Hunter.“But not vote-counting, not election results?” asked the moderator, Ted Simons, a host on the Arizona PBS station.“Yeah, I haven’t seen evidence of that,” Mr. Masters replied.During the Republican primary, Mr. Masters won an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump and earned legions of conservative followers by fanning the falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen and Mr. Trump was its rightful winner.But some of that language has been scrubbed from his campaign website since Mr. Masters entered the general election, where such conspiracy theories don’t play as well with independent voters, who either trust Arizona’s popular mail-in voting systems or simply want to move on.Mr. Kelly said Mr. Masters’s peddling of “conspiracy theories” was undermining American democracy.“I’m worried about what’s going to happen here in this election and 2024,” he said. “We could wind up in a situation where the wheels come off of our democracy.”Both see a crisis at the southern border.Political veterans in Arizona believe that inflation and the southern border are Republicans’ two strongest issues, and Mr. Masters hammered both early and often. He painted a Dante-esque picture of the border — beset with cartels, overflowing with fentanyl and wide-open for millions of “illegals” to sweep through.“Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, they laid out the welcome mat,” Mr. Masters said. “They surrendered our southern border. They’ve given it up to the Mexican drug cartels.”Crossings at the southern border have surged to their highest levels in decades as migrants flee gangs and political and economic turmoil in Venezuela, Central America and elsewhere. Many of those migrants are turning themselves directly over to American authorities to plead their cases in immigration courts.Mr. Kelly called the border “a mess” of chaos and crisis, but said he had worked to get money for more Border Patrol agents and technology to screen for drugs at ports of entry.Don’t California my Arizona.Like other Republicans in the Southwest, Mr. Masters frequently uses California as a kind of foil, making the state a stand-in for liberalism gone wild. And one reliable way to rile residents in other parts of the West? Bring up the notion that the nation’s most populous state — which is in a near constant drought — is taking too much water from the Colorado River.“I’m tired of Senator Kelly acting like the third senator from California,” Mr. Masters said onstage Thursday, echoing a refrain he has made throughout the campaign. “We need someone in there with sharp elbows who’s going to fight for our water.”“Why is California even putting its straw into the Colorado River?” he added, arguing that the state should instead rely on desalination and the Pacific Ocean.Left unsaid was the more basic implied attack: Mr. Masters is the protector of the state; Mr. Kelly is merely a liberal in disguise.A third-party candidate for a third of voters?The vast majority of voters would have trouble naming Mr. Victor — he has struggled to raise money or capture media attention. But he held his ground Thursday night, insisting that the moderator allow him to answer all the same questions as Mr. Kelly and Mr. Masters.For the most part, Mr. Victor took a predictable Libertarian pox-on-both-their-houses approach, and portrayed himself as the outsider who would not be beholden to either President Biden or Mr. Trump. And there could be a receptive audience for that message: Roughly a third of Arizona’s voters are not registered as Republicans or Democrats, and many view themselves as moderates or describe themselves as leaning libertarian.Mr. Victor could easily attract enough voters to act as a kind of spoiler for Mr. Masters, denying him just enough votes to push Mr. Kelly over the edge. Indeed, at several points during the debate, Mr. Victor attacked Mr. Masters for waffling on his stances and leaped to the defense of Mr. Kelly. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows

      by

      In August, President Biden met with several historians at the White House to discuss the threats facing American democracy.Most of the conversation, according to a report in The Washington Post, was about “the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.” Those present were people who had “been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.”Now, I was obviously not at this meeting. But I have been thinking about what I would say to Biden about the threats to American democracy. The most acute threat, it’s true, comes from election deniers and the authoritarian mass movement led by the previous president, Donald Trump. But the long-term threat is less an imposition from bad actors and more a constitutive part of our political system. It is, in fact, the Constitution. Specifically, it is a set of fundamental problems with the structure of our government that flow directly from the Constitution as it currently exists.We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.Americans, in short, had forced the Constitution to accommodate their democratic impulses, as would be the case again and again, up to the present. The question, today, is whether there’s any room left to build a truly democratic political system within the present limits of our constitutional order.In his new book “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy says the answer is, essentially, no. “Our mainstream political language still lacks ways of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains,” Purdy writes.This is true in two ways. The first (and obvious) one is that the Constitution has enabled the democratic backsliding of the past six years. Founding-era warnings against demagogues — used often to justify our indirect system of choosing a president — run headfirst into the fact that Donald Trump was selected constitutionally, not elected democratically. (Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist No. 68, “The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” This, it turns out, was wrong.)And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”“If enough people believe it is their responsibility to resist and disable any government they did not help to elect, self-rule can become impossible,” Purdy writes. “Donald Trump’s presidency,” he continues, “arose from all of these dysfunctions.”Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”There is much more to say about the ways that our political system has inhibited democratic life and even enabled forms of tyranny. For now, it suffices to say that a constitution that subverts majority rule, fuels authoritarian movements and renders popular sovereignty inert is not a constitution that can be said to protect, secure or even enable American democracy.In a speech in Philadelphia last month, Biden did speak publicly on the threats to American democracy. He focused, as almost any president would, on the Constitution. “This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.”The problem, and what this country must confront if it ever hopes to turn its deepest democratic aspirations into reality, is that we don’t actually honor the will of the people. We deny it. And it’s this denial that sits at the root of our troubles.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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Have a Whole Lot Riding on Nevada

      by

      LAS VEGAS — Nevada has long been a bellwether in national elections. The caricature of a casino on every block and a slot machine in every grocery store has given way to the reality of a diverse state with growing minority populations and a widening urban-rural divide that is a microcosm of America.The truth is — and never could it be more resonant than this year — for Democrats, as goes Nevada, so goes the nation. Nevada has a closely fought contest for governor, with the Democratic incumbent, Steve Sisolak, facing Joe Lombardo, sheriff of the most populous county. And its congressional races could help determine partisan control of both chambers: In three of its four House races and in the contest for U.S. Senate, Democratic incumbents are in tight battles.For Democrats, Nevada holds promise and peril. It is truly a purple state, and Democrats are hoping to hold together a tenuous multiracial coalition and keep at bay a Republican Party determined to flip the state red.The pressure is particularly acute for Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Across the country, from Georgia to Pennsylvania to Arizona, Senate races are neck and neck, and Nevada is no different; a very slight Democratic advantage has given way to pretty much a dead heat. If this seat gives Senate control to the Republicans, it could change the direction of the country on major public policy issues, including abortion, and most obviously, on confirming judges.Ms. Cortez Masto faces Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general who is embraced by both Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell and is the son and grandson of Republican senators. The challenges for Ms. Cortez Masto reflect struggles for Democrats across the country — worries over inflation and the economy, a distinct urban-rural split among the electorate, an opponent who has endorsed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election and, especially for the first Latina elected to the Senate, a need for robust support from Hispanic voters.She has emphasized the achievements of Democrats in Congress — especially the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, and their impact on manufacturing and other jobs. And she has also focused on abortion as part of her outreach to Latino voters, since a majority of Hispanics in the state support abortion rights.Ms. Cortez Masto might as well be running in three states in one: Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, represented about 70 percent of the vote in the 2020 presidential elect (Joe Biden won it by just under nine points); Washoe County, which includes Reno, has just under 20 percent (Mr. Biden won here by 4.5 points); and 15 rural counties, many of which Mr. Trump won with over 70 percent of the vote.She will benefit from an electoral machine built by Harry Reid, the longtime senator who died last year, that Democrats in the rest of the country have looked at with envy. For years, that machine has reliably registered voters and then turned them out. The question this year is if it will be enough to overcome significant economic and electoral headwinds.Adam Jentleson, who worked closely with Mr. Reid, wrote last year that the Nevada Democratic machine “focused on the tough work of building coalitions between organized labor and progressive groups and invested in the nuts and bolts of politics, like voter registration.”In 2016, Mr. Reid’s operation helped Ms. Cortez Masto win by 2.5 points. It is a model for Democratic state operations: It has helped produce Democratic victories in cycles since 2008 (with 2014 an outlier red wave year) for presidential as well as most midterm elections, when the national party often struggles to get its full coalition to the polls.The turnout next month will be a critical test of how that machine operates in the first elections since its founder’s death. Mr. Reid was a unique figure. His ability to raise money for candidates kept the machine humming.Since Mr. Reid’s death, the Nevada model — the Reid machine in coordination with the Democratic Party — has shown some cracks. The Reid machine, now in the hands of Ms. Cortez Masto and Governor Sisolak, and the party have clashed over money and policy direction on everything from support for Israel to primary endorsements. Young activists, keen on pulling the party to the left, have taken up positions in the party itself, alienating Reid operatives.What this likely means for Ms. Cortez Masto and other Democrats in Nevada is that they cannot expect to have the kind of overwhelming fund-raising advantage that they have been used to.That is not the only concern for Democrats. Despite her heritage, Ms. Cortez Masto is fighting to maintain a grip on a majority of Latino voters, who will account for 15 percent to 20 percent of the general electorate.Ms. Cortez Masto had never worn her ethnicity on her sleeve, but she has been emphasizing it in this race. Her campaign has significantly ramped up its Latino voter contact efforts, hiring a Spanish-speaking press secretary, holding events in the community and announcing during Hispanic Heritage Month that 200 Latino leaders had endorsed her.Ms. Cortez Masto’s personal story, as a pioneering Latina legislator, is a ubiquitous element of her pitch. In her ads, she has emphasized her family, including a grandfather from Mexico — Mexican immigrants make up a majority of the Latino population in the state.She will also depend on another turnout machine: the Culinary Workers Union, which is at least half Hispanic and represents tens of thousands of casino employees. The union is expected to knock on over one million doors for this election, about twice as many as it did in 2020.Since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, Ms. Cortez Masto has been relentlessly using abortion to attack Mr. Laxalt, who supports an abortion ban after 13 weeks of pregnancy. Still, like many Democrats in purple states, she remains vulnerable. In a recent poll, Ms. Cortez Masto led Mr. Laxalt by 19 points among Hispanics, but nearly a third of that demographic was undecided. When she won in 2016, she was estimated to have won over 60 percent of Hispanics, which is well above where she is polling right now.Nevada observers on both sides of the aisle say she is running the best campaign in the state. Her ads are sharp, her social media presence ubiquitous and her campaign disciplined. Ms. Cortez Masto, who has long prided herself on being a workhorse, has shown an indomitability that would have impressed Mr. Reid. She also has adopted her mentor’s fund-raising prowess, having much more cash on hand than Mr. Laxalt.Most years, she would be considered a favorite. But this year, nearly all of the numbers in Nevada tilt toward the Republicans. President Biden’s approval ratings here are just over 40 percent. Unemployment is still high relative to the rest of the country, and inflation continues to take a bite out of paychecks. And a Democratic registration advantage has eroded as nonpartisan registration has expanded.Republicans now see the Nevada Senate race as one of their best shots at gaining control of the Senate, with Ms. Cortez Masto vulnerable. If she prevails, her campaign could provide a blueprint for Democrats elsewhere, especially in the Mountain West and Southwest, on the way to 2024.Nevada, once again, could be the neon beacon for the country.Jon Ralston is the chief executive of The Nevada Independent.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

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Worry for Mandela Barnes as GOP Attack Ads Take a Toll

      by

      MADISON, Wis. — Politicians who visit diners know the deal: In exchange for photos establishing their working-class bona fides, they must cheerfully accept heaping portions of unsolicited advice.But on Tuesday at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner here in Madison, one of the first people to approach Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, took the tradition to a new level, presenting him with a typed-up list of concerns about his campaign.The supporter, Jane Kashnig, a retired businesswoman who has spent recent weeks going door to door to speak with voters, told Mr. Barnes his backers were jittery about his inability to repel an unending volley of attack ads from Senator Ron Johnson and his Republican allies.Show more fire, Ms. Kashnig urged the Democrat and his campaign. “The people on the doors want him to fight,” she said.Democrats in Wisconsin are wringing their hands about how Mr. Barnes’s political fortunes have sagged under the weight of the Republican advertising blitz. Grumbling about his campaign tactics and the help he is receiving from national Democrats, they worry that he could be one of several of the party’s Senate candidates whose struggles to parry a withering G.O.P. onslaught could sink their candidacies and cost Democrats control of the chamber.At Monty’s Blue Plate Diner in Madison, Wis., one voter presented Mr. Barnes with a list of concerns about his campaign.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes held a “Ron Against Roe” event at the diner, referring to Senator Ron Johnson’s opposition to abortion rights.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBeyond Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidates and their allies in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia have alarmed Democrats with their gains in the polls after an enormous investment in television advertising. In those three states, Republicans and their allies outspent Democrats in September, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.The Republican wave of ads has helped counteract the Democratic momentum that followed the Supreme Court’s decision in June to end the constitutional right to an abortion. Republicans have shifted the debate to more friendly terrain, focusing in Wisconsin and other places on crime.“There were weeks where we would get outspent two-to-one on TV,” Mr. Barnes said in an interview. “There has been an unprecedented amount of negative spin against me.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.It has been an abrupt turnaround for Mr. Barnes since late summer, when he won the Democratic primary by acclimation and opened up a lead in polls over Mr. Johnson, who has long had the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent senator on the ballot this year. But the hail of attack ads from Mr. Johnson and allied super PACs has tanked Mr. Barnes’s standing, particularly among the state’s finicky independent voters.Republicans have seized in particular on Mr. Barnes’s past progressive stances, including his suggestion in a 2020 television interview that funding be diverted from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services — a key element of the movement to defund the police. Since then, Mr. Barnes has disavowed defunding the police and has called for an increase in funding.Mr. Barnes entered the Democratic primary race as a favorite of the party’s progressive wing.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesRace has also been at the center of the televised assault on Mr. Barnes, who is Black. Mail advertising from Republicans has darkened Mr. Barnes’s skin, while some TV ads from a Republican super PAC have superimposed his name next to images of crime scenes.Those overtones come as no surprise to Wisconsin Democrats. He is only the third Black statewide official in Wisconsin’s history; the first two both lost re-election in campaigns widely regarded as racist. And Democratic strategists and voters are well aware that fighting back aggressively has its dangers.“It’s real easy to go from ‘fired up for change’ to ‘the angry Black guy from Milwaukee’ in the public perception,” said Alexia Sabor, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Dane County, which includes Madison.For all of the Republican optimism, Mr. Barnes still has a path to victory. Wisconsin elections over the last two decades have been very close, with Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. each winning the deeply polarized state by fewer than 25,000 votes in their successful presidential campaigns. And Wisconsin Democrats have a record of winning tight races: Including nonpartisan State Supreme Court elections, the party has won nine of the 10 statewide elections since 2018. Mr. Johnson is also less popular in the state now than he was when he won narrow victories in 2010 and 2016.“I have not met somebody who’s like, ‘Oh, gee, how should I vote in the Senate race?’” said Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, a longtime friend and political supporter of Mr. Barnes. “I mean, mostly people know.”Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin and other prominent Democrats in the state held a rally for abortion rights at the State Capitol on Tuesday. Mr. Barnes was not present.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes entered the primary as a favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. When he first ran for office, in 2012, he wrote on Twitter that progressive candidates who moved to the political center were “compromising all integrity.” In 2019, he delivered the Working Families Party’s response to Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address.Mr. Barnes, 35, a former state legislator who was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, consistently led in the primary polls. Two weeks before the primary, his leading rivals dropped out and endorsed him one by one, saying they hoped to give him a runway to raise money and begin attacking Mr. Johnson..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“I gave him a two-week head start,” said Tom Nelson, the Outagamie County executive, who was the first Democratic Senate candidate to end his campaign and back Mr. Barnes.But now, Mr. Nelson said, “The campaign needs to fire its media consultant.” He added, “They’re losing.”The Republican ads have been remarkably effective. Shortly after the Aug. 9 primary, Mr. Barnes led Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points overall and by 15 points among independent voters, according to a poll conducted by Marquette University Law School. But 41 percent of voters still didn’t have an opinion about Mr. Barnes. A month later, Mr. Johnson led by a point overall and by two points among Wisconsin’s independents.Mr. Johnson declined an interview request. In an interview with a conservative talk radio host in Milwaukee last month, Mr. Johnson accused Democrats of “playing the race card,” adding, “That’s what leftists do.”Mr. Johnson has the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent senator on the ballot this year. But he has pulled out narrow victories twice before, in 2010 and 2016.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesA Barnes event in Racine, Wis. On Monday, his campaign begin airing an ad criticizing Mr. Johnson’s anti-abortion stance.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes, who announced on Wednesday that he had raised $20 million during the three-month fund-raising period that ended Sept. 30, has responded to Mr. Johnson with gentle advertisements in which he speaks to the camera and calmly asserts that the senator is lying about his record. In one, he is at a kitchen table making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Only on Monday did the Barnes campaign begin airing an ad criticizing Mr. Johnson’s opposition to abortion rights.Some Democrats also worry that Mr. Barnes is not sufficiently motivating Black voters, a key constituency largely concentrated in Milwaukee. Most of the city’s leading Black elected officials endorsed other candidates during the Senate primary.“The progressives have been Mandela’s base from the day that he was elected — it really has never been the Black community,” said Lena Taylor, a Black Democratic state senator from Milwaukee whom Mr. Barnes unsuccessfully challenged in a 2016 primary for her seat. “Because of that, he does have to do a little bit more with what other people would have seen as his natural base.”Even Mr. Barnes’s longtime supporters are frustrated that his campaign has allowed Republicans to frame the contest as being about crime rather than Mr. Johnson’s past support for overturning the 2020 election and the misinformation he continues to spread about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Barnes once spoke of diverting money from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services, but now emphasizes his support for giving more money to law enforcement.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“To call what happened on Jan. 6 an armed insurrection, I just think is not accurate,” Mr. Johnson said on Tuesday during remarks to the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.Senior Democrats in Wisconsin and Washington concluded long ago that condemning Mr. Johnson over Jan. 6 in television ads is not a winning argument with swing voters.“To make Mandela and Black folks endure the relentless racist attacks, then not hit back on treason, corruption and lies, is unfortunate,” said Francesca Hong, a state representative from Madison who was an early supporter of Mr. Barnes.In the interview with Mr. Barnes, held after a campaign stop at a brewery in Racine, he both reiterated his support for increasing funding for law enforcement and said he had not changed any progressive positions he took earlier in his political career.“Things haven’t changed, right? But it’s what we talk about,” he said. “My positions are the same and where I stand on those issues is the exact same.”He also said he did not believe he faced extra hurdles running to represent Wisconsin as a Black Democrat from Milwaukee — the state’s largest city but one that has long punched below its weight in statewide elections. Since 1913, when the ratification of the 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of senators, Wisconsin has elected only one from Milwaukee, Herb Kohl, who served four terms.“There’s a Black dude from Chicago whose middle name was Hussein,” Mr. Barnes said, referring to former President Barack Obama. “He won Wisconsin twice.”Mr. Barnes joined United Auto Workers members on a picket line on Monday in Mount Pleasant, Wis.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPerhaps the clearest sign of Mr. Barnes’s political challenges is the lack of eagerness by some of his fellow Democrats to campaign with him.Three hours before Mr. Barnes’s stop at the Madison diner, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat locked in a tight re-election race of his own, held a rally on the steps of the State Capitol calling on voters to punish Republicans for refusing to consider changes to the state’s 1849 law banning abortion. Those present included the state’s attorney general, treasurer, Democratic state legislators and the state Democratic Party’s chairman.Mr. Barnes wasn’t there, and the parade of speakers barely mentioned him.“It wasn’t that he wasn’t invited or was invited,” Mr. Evers said afterward. “He just scheduled something different at the same time to talk about the same thing.”Mr. Johnson, for his part, appears to be in a jubilant mood. On Wednesday, he thanked the Tavern League of Wisconsin, the state’s trade association for bars, for endorsing him by posting a video in which the 67-year-old senator chugs a Miller Lite in four seconds. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      ‘The Run-Up’: Can Democrats Catch up to Years of Republican Unity?

      by

      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOn today’s episode: How the Republican grass roots got years ahead of a changing country, and whether the Democrats can catch up.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesGuestsJ. David Goodman, The Times’s Houston bureau chief, covering Texas.Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.Background ReadingPatriot Mobile, a Christian cellphone company, is spending money to promote conservative views on race and gender in schools. Read J. David Goodman’s reporting on how the company has become a rising force in Texas politics.Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, Democrats in difficult re-election races are reorienting their campaigns around abortion rights.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Suddenly, a New Jersey Congressional Race Looks Like a Bellwether

      by

      SCOTCH PLAINS, N.J. — When New Jersey’s congressional map was redrawn last year, Representative Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat, was widely considered a political goner.President Biden’s popularity had plummeted, gas prices were soaring and Mr. Malinowski’s Seventh Congressional District — in which he barely eked out a re-election victory in 2020 — had been redrawn to include nearly 27,000 more registered Republicans. When Mr. Malinowski announced he would run for a third term, he did so in a terse statement, quoting an ominous Shakespearean battle cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”But 10 months later, as voters have absorbed the impact of the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that Democrats believe the national political momentum has shifted to a degree that even this race, written off by some as a strategic sacrifice, is narrowing.Any path by which Democrats are able to stave off a midterm rout or retain a slim House majority cuts straight through districts like Mr. Malinowski’s, where moderate, well-educated voters helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018 and are seen as crucial to holding it.“I do see it as a bit of a bellwether — an indicator of how things are going to go nationally,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who was a key architect of former Gov. Chris Christie’s victories in 2009 and 2013.Mr. Malinowski is running for a second time against Tom Kean Jr., the namesake of a beloved former New Jersey governor making his fourth run for Congress. Mr. Kean came within about 5,000 votes of winning in 2020 and remains a formidable opponent this year.Still, a national political action committee dedicated to preserving the Democratic majority in the House has suddenly begun buying up its first television time for Malinowski ads. And Democratic loyalists who have been knocking on doors for Mr. Malinowski say concern over abortion rights has grown palpable within the suburban swing district, which stretches from one side of northern New Jersey to the other.“I don’t know a woman who isn’t really angry and really scared,” Jennifer Robinson of Tewksbury, N.J., who supports Mr. Malinowski, said on Sunday night after a forum with both candidates sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey.“Republicans targeted this race thinking Tom Kean Jr. was going to ride a red wave,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Instead, with five weeks to go, this race remains neck and neck.”None of the major independent polling operations in New Jersey have released surveys about the race. A poll conducted in late July, paid for by a group that supports term limits, showed Mr. Kean leading by eight percentage points; 11 percent of the 400 people surveyed said they were undecided.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.On Sunday, an internal poll memo released by Mr. Malinowski’s campaign suggested that the race had narrowed, and that he and Mr. Kean were statistically tied, 48 percent to 48 percent.Mr. Kean’s campaign spokesman dismissed the poll and called its release a “desperate cry for help.”Mr. Malinowski and three other New Jersey Democrats rode a wave of anti-Trump fervor to Congress during the 2018 midterm cycle, temporarily leaving the state with just one Republican in its 12-person congressional delegation. But many of these newly blue swing districts remained highly competitive.Last year, the new congressional map, redrawn to reflect the 2020 census, eased some of the pressure on Democrats. As it added Republican-leaning towns to Mr. Malinowski’s district, it shored up the districts of several other vulnerable incumbents at a time when Democrats were bracing for a midterm shellacking.The districts of Democratic Representatives Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim and Mikie Sherrill all shed Republican-leaning towns — territory that in southern and central New Jersey the state’s two Republican congressmen, Christopher Smith and Jeff Van Drew, mainly absorbed, making their seats safer, too. Only Mr. Malinowski’s race, on paper, got harder.Yet until last month, the Democrats’ House Majority PAC had not made ad buys for Mr. Malinowski’s race, even as Republican special interest groups prepared to pump millions of dollars into Mr. Kean’s.But in late September the political action committee began booking television airtime, and it has now reserved between $100,000 and $185,000 in ads each week until Election Day, according to data maintained by Ad Impact, a company that tracks political advertising.Tom Kean Jr. speaking to voters in Scotch Plains, N.J., on Sunday. He came close to winning in 2020.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Malinowski’s district includes affluent commuter towns close to New York City, communities filled with horse-country estates (and a former president’s golf course) and rural, Republican bastions. Voters in the district backed Mr. Biden by less than four percentage points, even though he beat former President Donald J. Trump by nearly 16 percentage points in New Jersey, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by just over one million voters.Even if it has narrowed, the race remains a decidedly uphill battle for Mr. Malinowski.Inflation has been stubborn, and consumers are still feeling an economic pinch — an issue that a Monmouth University poll released on Monday found is likely to overshadow abortion access as a motivator heading into the midterms. Only 42 percent of voters across the country support Mr. Biden, according to last month’s New York Times/Siena College poll, a threshold that is just as bad or worse than any president whose party went on to lose control of Congress in midterm elections, going back to 1978.And Mr. Malinowski remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations he failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock trades, an error he has taken responsibility for and said resulted from carelessness.“It’s better for Democrats than six months ago,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But it’s still a better political environment for Republicans than it was two years ago — and certainly four years ago.”At the forum on Sunday, questions from an audience filled almost entirely with Malinowski supporters centered largely on Mr. Kean’s position on abortion.Mr. Malinowski supports access to abortion at any point in a pregnancy, and he said on Sunday that he would vote to enshrine a right to abortion into federal law.Mr. Kean, a former state senator and assemblyman, has said he supported a “woman’s right to choose.” But he opposes abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent extenuating circumstances, according to his campaign.“I think there are meaningful exceptions that should be rape, incest, life and the health of the mother,” he said Sunday. “Those are exceptions for a reasonable amount of time.”In the Senate, he voted against a bill affirming abortion as a right in New Jersey. He said he opposed the legislation, which was later signed into law, because it permitted abortion at any point in a pregnancy, including what he called late-term abortion. Abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy are rare, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.A Kean campaign website is less nuanced.“Tom is a fierce defender of the sanctity of life, fighting every step of the way to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws proposed in New Jersey, and will continue to do so in Congress,” it reads.“When I’m talking about the egregious piece of legislation, the ability to choose to terminate, for not valid reasons, when a baby can stay alive, be alive, outside of the womb, is wrong,” he said at the forum.Of the 616,000 registered voters in the district, about a third are not enrolled in either major party. It is these moderate voters who tend to sway elections in New Jersey.Motivating supporters to turn in mail ballots or to show up at polling places during an election year with no statewide races is crucial for any candidate, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.“Elections are about turnout,” Ms. Walsh said. “The people who turn out are the people who feel they have the most at stake.”Ms. Walsh, whose organization studies voting trends among women, said she believed the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly 50 years of abortion rights in the United States would be an “energizer.”“I think it all feels very real to people,” she said.Tracy Keegan, a founder of Summit Marches On, a left-leaning group in Mr. Malinowski’s district that formed after the 2017 Women’s March and includes mainly women with children, said she believed the growing energy among voters extended beyond concern over reproductive rights.“It’s not just about abortion,” she said. “It’s about a government’s willingness to remove freedoms.”A gun control rally in Summit, N.J., after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, drew hundreds of people, said Ms. Keegan. a 51-year-old mother of three.“It wasn’t just Democrats,” she said. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Online Fund-Raising Was Supposed to Save Politics. Instead, It’s Dragging Us to Hell.

      by

      In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our Yahoo browsers. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Amid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter.Mr. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. “McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days.Mr. McCain and Mr. Dean both lost — but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time.The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “the victory lab.”The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.A warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. Obama for the outburst.But after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign.This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer.The story was similar for Amy McGrath, who ran against Senator Mitch McConnell, and Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who got shaved clean by Bryan Steil. The lesson remains unlearned: This year Marcus Flowers has raised $10 million in his assuredly hopeless race against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — double the receipts of more competitive races. Added together, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates. At a minimum, that money could be used more efficiently by the Democratic Party. But that entire way of thinking might be a reflection of broken politics brain. Aren’t there myriad better uses for all that altruism than pumping out hokey attack ads?As the social media outrage fund-raising model began to come into form, the political parties began to professionalize their grass-roots outreach using email and then text messages. Gone was the decentralized model Mr. Dean had road-tested, whereby supporters organized among themselves, recruiting neighbors and message board friends toward a common cause. By the 2010s, that was displaced by centralized, beta-tested boiler rooms that used powerful digital tools to prey on people’s emotions. The result is very little message variation within the party coalitions. We’ve seen a few exceptions, most notably Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. But overall, it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.To get a sense of just how noxious and stupid the material is that reaches America’s inboxes, I like to peruse The Archive of Political Emails’ The Firehose from time to time. A colleague of mine engineered the site for archival purposes, signing up for various lists and funneling them to the same place. You won’t be surprised to find out that The Firehose is largely devoid of that community-minded hopey-changey stuff that we were promised in the aughts. Instead it’s peppered with conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time. (We all have our weaknesses.)Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?This part is a deep, bipartisan problem. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee might be the longest-running offender when it comes to sending apocalyptic, wheels-off messages demanding voters’ money. It has even been chastised from within its own ranks — to little effect.There is also the more direct grift. Last year I wrote about how the National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation form used a prechecked box scheme, which automatically doubled the dollar amount and made it recurring. A warning aggressively threatened donors if they unchecked the box. Similar tactics resulted in the Trump campaign’s having to return $122 million to supporters who had been duped and, in some cases, financially devastated. If the old fund-raising system was transactional, this new one is dominated by the eternal and emotionally toxic hunt for the small donor.As gross and unethical as those tactics are, the greatest threat resulting from all of this is how the very politicians who are refusing to abide by the results of democratic elections are often being funded: by the once vaunted online donor, even if this one just wants to watch the whole system burn.Senator Josh Hawley raised around $3 million in the first quarter of 2021, mostly after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol. He’s even merchandising this asininity. Most of the Republican leadership has fund-raised on Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-addled social media site. Rank-and-file voters who preferred candidates who promised to decertify the last election or who might certify the next one only if they get their preferred winner (or both) helped fund those candidates in Republican primaries this year.Many of these candidates have struggled to raise what is required for the general elections, in part because Mr. Trump is sucking up nine figures for his PACs, at least one of which spent copiously on legal fees this summer while spending little on supporting Republican candidates. But some wild-eyed insurrectionists might get swept into office during an election cycle in which Republicans perform well, and that is dangerous enough.Maybe, then, given the results of our two-decade experiment in people-powered politics, we might temper rhetoric that glorifies the mighty grass-roots dollar. And reflect on how we might reform our financing system to disincentivize the crazy-making. Empowering the little guy and draining the swamp sounds nice and all, but as it turns out, there is something to be said for a little gatekeeping.And if you don’t believe me, the O.G. disrupter basically admitted as much.Last week I called Mr. Dean to ask him to reflect on the devolution of the netroots model that seemed to offer so much hope for doe-eyed reformers two decades ago.“At the time, it was a way that a young generation could start pushing their way up by using technology,” he said, “and it was incredible.”“But now that technology has been abused,” he continued. “The right-wingers are using it in service of fascism.” He added, “And I just send all my fund-raising emails to junk.”Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”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