Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Democratic-Allied Group Pours $60 Million Into State Legislative Races

      by

      A Democratic-aligned group is investing nearly $60 million in state legislative races in five states, a significant sum in an often overlooked political arena where Democrats have struggled for decades.The group, the States Project, said it was focusing on flipping a single seat in the Arizona State Senate that could swing it to Democratic control, and on winning back both chambers of the Michigan and Pennsylvania legislatures. The group also aims to defend Democratic majorities in Maine and Nevada.The large infusion of cash from the States Project amounts to a recognition of the critical role that state legislatures play in American politics, orchestrating policy on abortion access, what can be taught in schools and other issues that animate voters. In every state except Minnesota, Virginia and Alaska, a single party controls both chambers.Next year, the Supreme Court could give the legislative bodies yet more power if it endorses a theory, often called independent state legislature doctrine, that would give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over elections. Left-leaning groups like the States Project argue that state legislative contests this year in several key battlegrounds could have an outsize impact on future elections.“The alarm bells are ringing in our state legislatures,” said Adam Pritzker, a founder of the States Project and a Democratic donor. “With the rise of the Tea Party and the balance of power dramatically shifting toward the right, the rest of us have been asleep at the wheel for too long at the state level. And now, this threat is truly off the charts.”Daniel Squadron, left, and Adam Pritzker founded the States Project, a Democratic-aligned group focused on state legislatures.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesThe $60 million investment represents all of the States Project’s spending for the 2022 election cycle. The group estimates that it has already contributed about half of the money to candidates and legislative caucuses.While Democrats have historically been outgunned by Republicans at the state legislative level, in part because of gerrymandered districts created after the Tea Party wave of 2010, they have ramped up their spending over the past few years and are coming closer to parity this year.On the television airwaves, Republican candidates and outside groups have spent roughly $39 million, while Democrats have spent roughly $35 million, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. In Pennsylvania and Arizona, Republicans have spent nearly $1 million more than Democrats on ads since July.Nonetheless, the Republican State Leadership Committee has sounded the alarm about falling behind Democrats financially in state legislative races.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.“The truth is, we have been outspent in every recent election cycle, and we know full well that we will be again this year,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican committee, said in a memo to donors on Wednesday.Though the group has not released its third-quarter fund-raising numbers, it announced a record second-quarter haul of more than $53 million in July. But the Republican committee also supports candidates for secretary of state and lieutenant governor, in addition to state legislative contenders.Frustration has sometimes boiled over from outside groups like the States Project that want more out of the Democratic National Committee.The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the arm of the Democratic National Committee that focuses on state legislative races, announced in July that it had raised $6.75 million, a record for the group, but still below what the States Project has been able to raise. A spokeswoman for the Democratic committee said that the group planned to spend roughly $50 million this cycle, but that it had not announced its third-quarter fund-raising.Mr. Pritzker, the States Project co-founder, said that “the national party in D.C. has always overlooked and underfunded legislatures,” adding: “If you need an example, the D.N.C. hasn’t given the D.L.C.C. a single dollar to this cycle. And that needs to change.”“This is definitely not a mission-accomplished message,” Mr. Pritzker said of his group’s new investment. “We’re pretty late to the game.”Brooke Goren, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said it had been “giving money directly to state parties and coordinated campaigns,” which “supports candidates up and down the ticket, including in every one of the D.L.C.C.’s targeted chambers.”Daniel Squadron, a former Democratic state senator from New York and another founder of the States Project, said that while some of the money would be spent on television and digital ads, the vast majority would be sent directly to candidates and Democratic legislative caucuses. They could then coordinate their spending based on their state’s campaign finance laws.“The top issue in state legislative races is a local issue in each district,” Mr. Squadron said. “So we started giving directly to the candidates and caucuses working in districts themselves. One thing that does is that gets them off the phones, out of the darkened rooms and into the districts to go meet their constituents.”Joanna E. McClinton, the Democratic leader in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, said the States Project had helped many of the party’s candidates in the state with training on messaging, and with an incentive program that unlocks more funding per candidate based on doors knocked.But the biggest accomplishment, Ms. McClinton said, was simply pulling even with Republicans who have controlled the state’s legislature for over a decade.“Because they have been in power for so long, they’re able to outpace us in so many ways, particularly around fund-raising,” she said.In Michigan, where Republicans control both chambers, the State Senate is considered a tossup for the first time in decades after an independent commission drew new legislative districts that reduced Republicans’ advantage. Since July, Democrats have spent more than $17 million on state legislative races in the state, far more than the roughly $3 million Republicans have spent, according to AdImpact.For the States Project, the central goal and biggest challenge is breaking through to voters on the issues of democracy and independent state legislature theory.“That state legislatures would be handed this power in presidential elections seems fantastical because it’s absurd,” Mr. Squadron said. “The fact that it may be what the Supreme Court says does strain credibility. It unfortunately happens to be true.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Pour Millions Into Key Secretary of State Races

      by

      Democrats are outspending Republicans in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada, where they see their opponents as threats to democracy.In a normal election year, races for secretary of state are sleepy affairs, and their campaigns struggle for media coverage amid the hurly-burly of more prominent Senate, governor and House contests.This year, however, is anything but normal.Democrats are pouring millions of dollars into races for secretary of state, buoyed by the nature of their Republican opponents and the stakes for American democracy.According to an analysis by my colleague Alyce McFadden, Democrats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have outraised their Republican opponents as of the most recent campaign finance reports. And overall, Democratic-aligned groups working on secretary of state races in those four states have outspent Republicans by nearly $18 million in this election cycle, according to the ad analytics firm AdImpact, with more spending on the way.The role of a secretary of state varies, but in those four states, as well as Arizona and Pennsylvania (where the governor appoints the secretary), they play a critical role in overseeing the mechanics of elections. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, for example, they often had to make judgment calls about how to ensure that voters had access to the polls when vaccines were not yet available, making elderly and immunocompromised Americans concerned about showing up in person.The ‘Stop the Steal’ slateMany of the Republicans running in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have earned national notoriety.Take Mark Finchem, a cowboy-hat-and-bolo-tie-wearing Arizona lawmaker running for secretary of state. He crushed his G.O.P. rivals in the primary by whipping up fears about a stolen election in 2020.In a recent interview with Time magazine, Finchem said it was a “fantasy” that President Biden won in 2020 — even though he was elected by more than seven million votes nationwide.“It strains credibility,” Finchem said. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?”Or Jim Marchant, the G.O.P. nominee in Nevada. Marchant has been a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement and has linked up with a slate of “America First” candidates in other states to raise money from national donors. As my colleague Alexandra Berzon has reported, those candidates, including Finchem, have been “injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud” into their campaigns.Others, such as Kristina Karamo in Michigan, have espoused fringe views on a variety of social issues. On her personal podcast, she called yoga a “satanic ritual” that was originally intended by its creators to “summon a demon.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.The Republican exceptionDemocrats are frustrated with the accolades that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican incumbent in Georgia, has received from political commentators. His refusal to overturn the 2020 presidential election results despite heavy pressure from Donald Trump, they say, was merely the minimum requirement of the job.“It’s good when Republicans are not openly treasonous,” Jena Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, said in an interview.But she accused Raffensperger of supporting what she characterized as the “worst voter-suppression package in the country” — the Republican-led law Georgia passed in 2021 overhauling voter access.The Democratic nominee in Georgia is Bee Nguyen, a state lawmaker and policy adviser at New American Leaders, a nonprofit that encourages immigrants and refugees to run for office. Nguyen, who took the seat Stacey Abrams vacated during her first run for governor in 2017, is Vietnamese American and the first Democratic woman of Asian descent to hold a state office in Georgia.Outside groups focused on bolstering Republicans who stood up to Trump in 2020 spent heavily on Raffensperger’s behalf in his primary against Representative Jody Hice, another Stop-the-Stealer. With the help of several million dollars in last-minute donations, along with the full backing of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular governor, Raffensperger defeated Hice by nearly 20 percentage points, avoiding a runoff.A New York Times analysis of that law, Senate Bill 202, found that the state’s Republican Legislature and governor “have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.”The law alone could change turnout in Georgia, which reached record levels during two Senate elections in January 2021. Democrats say Republicans changed the law to suppress votes from people of color; in a speech in Atlanta on Jan. 11, 2022, President Biden called it “Jim Crow 2.0.”Privately, Democrats worry, too, about complacency within their own ranks — particularly among centrists who may like the fact that Raffensperger bucked Trump’s will in 2020 but are less animated by the new voting law. Republicans have defended it as a common-sense effort to pull back what they characterized as emergency measures to accommodate voters during the pandemic. But they have struggled to explain why some measures, such as a restriction on handing out water to voters waiting in long lines, are necessary.Griswold, a lawyer who worked on voter access for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, also leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. She has used her national platform to reposition the organization as a bulwark of democracy against Trump and his Stop the Steal movement.Voters in Lost Mountain, Ga., during the primary in May. Democrats are furious about the state’s new voting rules.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA complicated picture for DemocratsDeciding how to calibrate their message to voters about the security and fairness of the upcoming midterms has been tricky for Democrats.That is especially true in Georgia, where newly registered voters of color powered Biden’s victory as well as those of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Democrats are wary of inadvertently signaling that the new voting rules could mean that those communities’ votes will be wasted this year.Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, stressed in an interview that despite Republicans’ attacks on the integrity of American elections, “our system works.”She noted that American elections are subject to “bipartisan checks and balances at every level,” with Democrats and Republicans alike enlisted to certify disputed votes and official results — while arguing that preserving these checks and balances is exactly what’s on the ballot this year.As for the new laws in states like Georgia, she said, “voters of color have faced these suppression tactics for generations” and expressed confidence that voters would overcome those barriers just as they did in 2020.But that system is under severe strain. Republican county officials in New Mexico, upstate New York and rural Pennsylvania have said they will refuse to certify votes from digital machines, and election officials across the country have faced death threats.Many Democrats were highly critical of the Biden administration’s strategy for pushing an overhaul of voting rights through Congress. It failed in January while facing unified Republican opposition and skepticism from centrist Democrats, led by Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration’s point person for voting rights, has faced repeated questions about what she has done to find workarounds in lieu of federal legislation, beyond making the occasional speech.Democrats pushed to appropriate federal funds to protect election workers in legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, but Republicans have resisted. On Wednesday, the House passed its version of an overhaul bill, but the Senate will need to pass its own, different version, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported.His article contained a quote from Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is the leading Republican author on the Senate side but has provoked concerns among Democratic colleagues, including Tim Kaine, with whom I spoke in March. They say that she is merely maneuvering to run out the clock at the bidding of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.“We can work together to try to bridge the considerable differences,” Collins told Hulse. “But it would have been better if we had been consulted prior to the House sponsors’ deciding to drop their bill.”What to readThere is scant evidence that the charitable giving of Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, matches the promises his company made. David A. Fahrenthold and Shane Goldmacher contacted the charities to ask.J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate in northern Ohio, has promoted himself as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan. But Neil Vigdor looked at the U.S. Air Force records, and there is no sign that the candidate was deployed there.Maggie Astor has been tracking the ratings that the National Rifle Association gives to political candidates since 2008. She has found that the Democratic break from the group is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress received an A.A rash of retirements has complicated Democrats’ efforts to hold the House, Catie Edmondson writes. Instead of battle-tested incumbents, first-time candidates are defending the districts.The American public’s views of Donald Trump have remained stable across different measures in recent months even as he faces multiple investigations, Ruth Igielnik writes.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

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      For First Time in at Least 25 Years, No Democrat Has Top Grade From N.R.A.

      by

      The Democratic break from the National Rifle Association is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress anywhere in the country received an A in the group’s candidate ratings, which were once a powerful influence in U.S. elections.A New York Times analysis of the N.R.A.’s letter grades for more than 900 general election candidates, the last of which were published this week, identified the milestone. It is the culmination of a yearslong trend of eroding support for the hard-line views of the organization, which retains strong allegiance from Republican candidates but has lost any semblance of bipartisan support.Of the more than 450 Democrats who will be on House or Senate ballots in November, only one, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, received even a B. Three received C’s, 23 received D’s and 370 — 81 percent of the total — received F’s. (The rest received a “?” rating, meaning they had no public record on gun policy or had made contradictory statements.)The numbers were even starker among the roughly 200 Democrats running for re-election, 98 percent of whom received F’s.There were more defections from the party line among Republicans, though they were still in the single digits: One, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, received an F, and seven, including four incumbents, received D’s. Notably, 24 percent of Republican candidates received a “?” rating, a mark the N.R.A. says “often indicates indifference, if not outright hostility,” to gun rights.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.That amount has increased sharply among Republicans; it was 11 percent a decade ago. By contrast, “?” grades among Democrats declined over the same period to 13 percent from 33 percent. Many Democrats used to avoid going on the record about guns out of fear of the N.R.A.’s well-funded backlash.All told, of 926 major-party candidates on House and Senate ballots this year, 36 percent received A’s and 40 percent received F’s, making 2022 the third election in a row in which the N.R.A. assigned more F’s than A’s.While Republicans have always supported the N.R.A. in larger numbers, it was not long ago that the group also had meaningful Democratic backing: In 2012, 70 Democrats running for the House or Senate received A’s. That is now unheard-of. The last Democratic incumbent with an A rating was Collin Peterson of Minnesota in 2020, when he lost re-election.Most incumbents received the same grade this year as the last time they ran, which is typical. Only 14 saw their grades change, seven in each direction.Almost all of those incumbents were Republican: the seven who were upgraded and six of the seven who were downgraded. (The one Democrat was Representative Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia, who went from a C to an F; as recently as 2018, he had received an A and an N.R.A. endorsement.) The downgraded Republicans — Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Marco Rubio of Florida and Todd Young of Indiana, and Representatives Steve Chabot of Ohio, Tony Gonzales of Texas and David Joyce of Ohio — all went from A’s to B’s.Mr. Rubio’s new grade reflected his decision to endorse limited gun restrictions after the Parkland, Fla., shooting in 2018. (Since senators receive ratings only when they run for re-election, this is the first year in which he has been graded since 2016.)The other Republicans who were downgraded voted for the bipartisan gun bill that passed in June. It was the first time in nearly three decades that Congress — long held in check by N.R.A. lobbying — passed any significant restriction on guns. More

    • 25 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      The Republic

      by

      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn kicking off the midterms, Joe Biden talked about American democracy as a shared value, enshrined in the country’s founding — a value that both Democrats and Republicans should join together in defending. But there is another possible view of this moment. One that is shared by two very different groups: the voters who propelled Biden to the presidency … and the conservative activists who are rejecting democracy altogether.Photo Illustration by The New York Times. Photo by Travis Dove for The New York TimesOn today’s episodeRepresentative James E. Clyburn of South CarolinaRobert Draper, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.”About ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is back. The host, Astead Herndon, will grapple with the big ideas animating the 2022 midterm election cycle — and explore how we got to this fraught moment in American politics.Elections are about more than who wins and who loses. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Are Starting to Feel Hopeful About the Midterms. Should They?

      by

      Illustration by The New York Times; images by Olivier Douliery, Anna Moneymaker and Andrii Shyp, via Getty ImagesThis article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.Just a couple of months ago, Democrats’ prospects heading into the November elections looked, if not quite doomed, then decidedly dour: Not only do Americans tend to swing against the president’s party in the midterms, but President Biden was also presiding over the worst spate of inflation in four decades and his approval ratings over the summer had plunged to the lowest of any elected president at that point in his term since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight.But the national political environment has changed: Since July, Biden’s approval rating has risen by five percentage points and Democrats have gained around a net three percentage points in the generic ballot, which asks whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, overtaking the Republican Party’s lead.What are some of the issues that voters care most about, and how might the parties’ recent rhetorical and legislative handling of them be driving the race? Here’s what people are saying.AbortionWhen the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, there was a great deal of speculation among poll watchers and pundits about whether the abrogation of the constitutional right to abortion would redound to the Democratic Party’s benefit, potentially boosting turnout and swinging independents who might otherwise vote for Republicans.Shortly before the decision was handed down, but weeks after a draft of it had been leaked, the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg didn’t find much evidence to support this theory: “I don’t know that I’ve seen a new influx of energy,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the co-editor of “Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance and Revolution in Trump’s America” and the former executive editor of Teen Vogue, told her. “It’s surprising. There were marches, but it wasn’t the level of activism that we saw a couple of years ago with Black Lives Matter or even the Women’s March.”In the months since, though, there have been signs that the curtailment of abortion rights has moved the needle: In an August poll, Gallup found that abortion had climbed on Americans’ list of “most important problems” facing the country, ranking behind only economic concerns and more general issues of government and leadership. What’s more, according to a Times analysis, Roe’s overturning was followed by a surge in voter registration among women in 10 states with available data, including Kansas, where strong turnout in an August primary helped defeat a referendum that would have effectively ended abortion rights in the state.Because most Americans favor at least some abortion rights, many Republicans have tried to avoid making abortion a central campaign issue, emphasizing instead that the matter has been returned to the states. But that rhetorical posture became much harder to maintain last week, when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, proposed a federal ban on the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy — “to cringes from many of his Republican colleagues,” The Times’s Carl Hulse reported.In the view of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, renationalizing the question of abortion regulation could be a risky political gamble for Republicans: “By Mr. Graham’s political logic, if voters in Colorado, Pennsylvania or Arizona think 15 weeks is too restrictive, they now have a reason to vote against those G.O.P. Senate candidates. Every Republican candidate will be asked to take a stance, and a Senate majority is made by swing states.”InflationPoll after poll after poll has found that inflation remains voters’ top concern heading into November. And while July’s Consumer Price Index report suggested that inflation had peaked, the August report suggested that it was not cooling as quickly as the White House and many economists had forecast. The price of rent and some food items actually increased between July and August, and workers lost buying power over the last year as prices increased faster than wages.These would be problems for any party in power during an election year, much less one whose leader has boasted of delivering wage gains. “Citizens of countries suffering from inflation have routinely sought to assign blame — to the government, to greedy companies or to politicians,” The Times’s Jonathan Weisman wrote last week of the Republican campaign strategy to blame Democrats for inflation. “Inflationary periods often yield labor strife, as workers and unions press for wage increases to keep up with rising prices, point fingers at ‘price-gouging’ companies and, more than anything, rage at those in power.”At the same time, some Republican officials have become concerned that inflation may no longer be the electoral clincher they had hoped for: Gasoline prices have fallen 26 percent from the record above $5 a gallon set in June, and consumer sentiment has improved as a result. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported this month that consumer inflation expectations were also falling, with households now expecting gas prices to be roughly unchanged a year from now.If inflation is indeed sinking in salience, some conservatives believe that Republicans will regret not elevating other issues like school curriculums, crime and immigration, Gabby Orr reported for CNN. “Our closing pitch must be compelling enough to make Republicans want to vote,” a Senate campaign aide told her. “‘It’s the economy, stupid’ no longer fits into that category.”Student debt reliefWhen Biden made the decision in August after months of lobbying to wipe out up to $20,000 of student loan debt for tens of millions of low- and middle-income Americans, it was in part because his chief of staff, among others, had argued that the relief could endear the administration to younger voters — an age group that, while more Democratic-leaning than any other, had broadly soured on the president.“It certainly energizes young people and people with student loan debt, which also includes many Republicans,” Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings, told NPR. “Overall, it’s a political win for Biden because he’s delivering on his promises, he has a chance to pick up on some moderate Republicans who have debt.”This read of Biden’s debt jubilee is shared even by some of his political enemies:But Philip Bump wrote for The Washington Post that, so far, there are no obvious signs that young people will reward Biden for the relief plan, which hasn’t yet taken effect. In approval rating polls since August, “when we look at Americans under 30 — the group with the most debt — there’s been little to no movement at all,” he noted.Nor, as Vox’s Christian Paz pointed out, does the relief plan seem to be making much of an impression with independent voters, who polls have suggested are divided on the issue. “Ultimately, the policy might have had the effect of stopping the bleeding of support that Biden and Democrats were experiencing among their base,” he wrote. But, he added, “What is apparent is that Biden’s action is not as popular with the kind of voter that tends to matter in midterm elections in swing states: older white Americans and independents.”The polling wild cardThe polling profession entered something of a legitimacy crisis after the 2016 presidential election that only deepened in 2020, as this newsletter has explored, and there’s good reason to be wary of the polling data we’ve seen so far in 2022: As Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, noted last week, Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, raising the possibility that the party’s supposedly favorable odds of retaining Senate control are an illusion.Polling mistakes matter not just because they can give pundits and readers a false impression of how an election might turn out; as Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Barack Obama, wrote in his newsletter last weekend, they can also change the outcome of the election itself, because campaigns, national party committees and super PACs rely on polling to make decisions about where to direct their efforts and funds.But Pfeiffer (and Cohn, too) sees evidence that the polls might actually be right this time around: Polls were more accurate in the 2018 midterms than they were in the 2020 presidential race, and recent special elections — including one that resulted in the pickup of a House seat in Alaska — have been encouraging for Democrats.Their predictive function (or dysfunction) aside, polls can also be useful for revealing trends in public opinion and voter behavior. In 2016, for example, pre-election polls accurately showed that Donald Trump was making huge gains among white voters without college degrees, and in 2020 they showed that he was also making gains among Hispanic voters. Even when polls miss on the horse race, Cohn noted this week, “these trends uncovered by polls continue to have import.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“Are the Polls Wrong Again?” [The New York Times]“Will Abortion Affect the Midterm Vote for Candidates? Lessons From the Ban Gay Marriage Ballot Initiatives” [The Brookings Institution]“Two Months That Turned the 2022 Midterms on Their Head” [The Cook Political Report]“America’s Dueling Realities on a Key Question: Is the Economy Good or Bad?” [The New York Times]“Four Types of Voters We’re Watching in the Midterms” [The New York Times]What’s at stake for you on Election Day?In the final weeks before the midterm elections, Times Opinion is asking for your help to better understand what motivates each generation to vote. We’ve created a list of some of the biggest problems facing voters right now. Choose the one that matters most to you and tell us why. We plan to publish a selection of responses shortly before Election Day. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Public Schools Will Be on the Ballot in November

      by

      I believe America needs high-quality education that’s available to all children as an engine of economic mobility and as a building block for preparing the next generation of engaged citizens. I also know that in general, public school parents — like me — are satisfied with their children’s education, even if they aren’t exceedingly confident in the system. As I wrote in March: “It’s a bit like the adage about Congress: People tend to like their own representatives (that’s why they keep sending them back year after year) but tend to have a dim view of Congress overall.”That said, I’m concerned about what seems to be a creeping loss of faith in public schools. As Anya Kamenetz put it recently, “Extended school closures during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.” For some, that contract has not been repaired, and they still fear that public schools can’t meet an acceptable standard — not just for their children but for everyone.And I’m worried that some proponents of public schooling, and some politicians, have given short shrift to this breakdown. At times, they’ve seemed to wave away parental fears about kids falling behind by characterizing the concept of learning loss as a “hoax” or suggesting that parents shouldn’t have a say in what schools teach. But if, for example, your third grader is now struggling to read because remote first grade was a disaster, that’s very real and could have long-term ramifications.As the midterms rapidly approach, and both houses of Congress have the potential to flip to Republican control, I wonder if Democrats have paid enough attention to disenchanted parents. In July, The 74, a news site that covers education issues, ran a story with the headline: “Rash of New Polls Raises Red Flags for Democrats on Education.” The gist of it is that voters used to trust Democrats more than they trusted Republicans on education, and that trust has eroded significantly over the past few years. Perhaps that’s not fair, but voters get to have the final say.Other polls show that education is a more salient issue than it was before the pandemic. In an overview of issues from the 2018 midterms, Pew Research didn’t include education when surveying voters about what they considered “very big” problems; the closest one mentioned was “affordability of a college education.” In Pew’s 2022 midterm overview, however, education ranked sixth, with 58 percent of registered voters saying it’s a matter that’s “very important” to them. This election year, according to Pew, voters care more about education than abortion, immigration and climate change. (Notably, this poll was conducted during the first two weeks of August, after Roe v. Wade was overturned.)All of this dovetails with what the longtime pollster and communications analyst Frank Luntz, known for his work with Republican candidates and campaigns, has been hearing in focus groups over the past couple of years: Many children are still reeling from the challenges of the pandemic, and not all parents have faith that the public school system can help their kids recover. “I’ve done work with so many education reform efforts, and parents just felt forgotten,” he said.Luntz added that some parents say: “It’s my number one issue, my major source of frustration. I’m furious at the Democrats for turning it into an ideological issue and at the Republicans for dropping it, and for turning to other things.” Even if they don’t change their votes, they are moving with their feet: A recent survey cited by The 74 found: “Between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9 percent drop in families saying their children are enrolled in traditional public schools.”While most children are still educated in the traditional public school system and many parents either can’t afford to pull their kids or have limited options if they do so, I wanted to hear directly from parents about why their children had left traditional public schools for charters, private schools and home schooling in the past few years. I put a call out for these families in one of my newsletters earlier this month and so far 143 readers have responded. Obviously, this wasn’t a scientific poll — there are about 90,000 traditional public schools in the United States. But I read every email and I had follow-up phone conversations with 17 parents.Among the parents who emailed, there was a good deal of racial, religious and geographic diversity. There was less diversity, however, when it came to socioeconomic status and levels of formal education.Nearly every parent I spoke to acknowledged, unprompted, how privileged they were to be able to move their children to a new situation, and lamented that this wasn’t an option for all families. Most described themselves as Democrats, supportive of public schools in general and supportive of teachers in particular. Some described their own experiences as students, and how attending quality public schools had changed their lives for the better.Their reasons for taking their kids out of public schools varied, but I noticed some recurring themes:Parents feel alienated by school board politicization. Parents expressed upset about the heated rhetoric they observed over masking, debates about the perceived influence of critical race theory (C.R.T.) and other hot-button topics, and about school systems they felt no longer shared their values. For instance, some parents, typically in more liberal areas, said they felt their districts were prioritizing things like social and emotional learning over the basics of reading, writing and math. Others, who tended to live in more conservative parts of the country, were offended by book banning and anti-C.R.T. frenzy.Rose Berg, who lives in Bee Cave, Texas, moved her two children to private school for this year. She had moved to an Austin suburb because its public schools were said to be excellent, but after conservative PAC-backed candidates were elected to the school board and “the threat of book banning loomed,” she had no doubt that switching to private school was the right decision. She also said gun violence was a major concern, and her move away from public school was “a direct reaction to Uvalde.”Parents whose children have learning differences feel abandoned. Getting your children’s needs met when they don’t fit the public school mold has always been hard, and the pandemic made it harder. Several parents I spoke to have moved their kids into specialized schools because they felt their children weren’t getting what they needed in public schools, despite the fact that they are legally entitled to appropriate support through the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which in the 2020-21 academic year covered 15 percent of all public school students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.Some of these parents were happier now that their children were in specialized schools. Others expressed that even though their kids were doing well at new schools, cordoning off children with learning differences from everybody else is bad for society as a whole.Jenna Gibilaro’s family moved from Brooklyn to Orlando, Fla., to find schooling that she felt met the needs of her older son, who has autism. She told me over the phone that from her perspective, district officials “set up roadblocks” to getting appropriate services. This has the effect of discouraging families of children with learning differences from staying in the system. “That’s the sense I got,” she said.Parents who are essential workers had to choose between their jobs and public schools. Elizabeth Bell, a nurse who lives in Tulsa and was the director of operations at a hospital group during the pandemic, moved her daughter to private school because neither she nor her husband could work from home for a prolonged period of time to support their child’s remote schooling. Unlike local public schools in her area, she said, private schools were back open with Covid risk mitigation strategies in place. Part of what’s keeping her kid in private school is that public school aftercare options aren’t as available as they were before the pandemic, and their jobs don’t end at 2:30.Private school tuition is a strain on her family and they’ve had to reorganize their finances. She says she still believes in public schools, but worries their mission has been compromised.Of those who identified as Democrats, a handful said they wouldn’t vote for progressive candidates, were less inclined this year to vote at all or would even consider voting for Republicans on the local level who were committed to strengthening schools. There’s still time for politicians up and down the ballot to highlight their plans for and commitment to improving public education, and to make sure parents know their concerns are being heard.But we’re only weeks from Election Day.While I think the leaching of trust in public education may not be so dire that it determines something like control of Congress, Luntz isn’t so sure. “It’s not slow. It’s fast,” he said. “That is the difference between you writing the story three years ago and you writing the story today. They were losing faith in 2020, 2019; they lost faith in 2022. That is a very important distinction.”Want More?This month, Opinion talked to 12 teachers about their experiences over the past few years. One teacher said she resented politicians who’ve never been teachers driving educational policy, “Because we know what happens in our classroom on a day-to-day basis, and others don’t.”The Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat discusses “Who’s doing the ‘quiet leaving’ from the Seattle public schools.”In The New York Times Magazine, Charley Locke investigates what school districts are doing (or not doing) with their pandemic money in “American Schools Got a $190 Billion Covid Windfall. Where Is It Going?”Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.My 2-year-old son temporarily forgot the word “yes.” It was “NO” to everything. So we told him when kids said “YES,” great things happened: A special parade came out and music started playing and everybody cheered. Well, wouldn’t you know it … a few days later an unannounced real parade actually went down our street, with marching bands and everything. My son was so proud. He thought he’d brought the “Yes Parade” on himself!— Beth Gazley, Bloomington, Ind.If you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Will Cheri Beasley’s North Carolina Senate Race Break Democratic Hearts Again?

      by

      Since a blue wave in the state in 2008, winning elections hasn’t been easy for Democrats. But polling is evenly divided as Cheri Beasley and Ted Budd compete.CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The pep rally at the Lenny Boy Brewing Company Friday night was a packed and raucous show of confidence as Democratic officials greeted the “next senator” from North Carolina, Cheri Beasley, and the Mecklenburg County faithful asked about her plans for after her inevitable triumph come Election Day.Then the Rev. Derinzer Johnson, a North Carolina native recently returned from New Jersey, grabbed a microphone, with a worried look, to plead with Ms. Beasley, a former state chief justice: Let him help her.“Being close is not good enough — you’ve got to win,” he said later. “They’re not organized,” he said of Ms. Beasley’s political team. “They’re campaigning, but they’re not organized.”The contest for the seat of Senator Richard M. Burr, a Republican who is retiring, may be 2022’s sleeper race, garnering far less attention than the colorful campaigns in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia. Even Ohio has captured more of the spotlight, though North Carolina is a more evenly divided state and public polling has shown Ms. Beasley knotted in a statistical tie with her Republican opponent, Representative Ted Budd.That may be because the sleeper is also the sleepiest.Representative Ted Budd campaigning at Boxcar Grille in Claremont, N.C. Mr. Budd, hoping to shed his association with former President Donald J. Trump, is trying to come off as a generic Republican.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIf fire is what voters are seeking, they won’t find it here. Neither Ms. Beasley nor Mr. Budd could be called incendiary on the stump, and that appears to be the way they want it: Ms. Beasley is running as a judge above the fray, and Mr. Budd, hoping to shed his association with former President Donald J. Trump, is trying to come off as a generic Republican campaigning against an unpopular Democratic president when the national environment favors his party.For Ms. Beasley, what passes for an attack line is her oft-repeated “This Budd’s not for you,” harking back to a beer ad from 1979.“If things continue as it right now, it’s a coin toss,” said Michael Bitzer, chairman of the politics department at Catawba College in central North Carolina.North Carolina is a state that loves to break Democrats’ hearts, and they can be forgiven their skittishness. A near lock on the governor’s mansion is countered by a heavily gerrymandered State Legislature that has secured Republicans an impenetrable majority. Democrats thought they had a breakthrough in 2008, when Barack Obama won the state, Kay Hagan knocked off then-Senator Elizabeth Dole as an underdog candidate and Ms. Beasley, then a former public defender and district judge, cruised to a seat on the elected North Carolina Court of Appeals.Then Mr. Obama narrowly fell to Mitt Romney in 2012. Ms. Hagan lost her re-election race in 2014 after leading Thom Tillis for months in the polls. Mr. Trump didn’t crack 50 percent but still beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ambitions for the Tarheel State fell short by over a percentage point in 2020. That same year, a well-regarded Democratic Senate candidate, Cal Cunningham, stumbled on a sex scandal and dashed hopes again.The Beasley campaign is quick to note that she has won statewide — twice. But since she rode the 2008 wave, it hasn’t gotten easier. After an appointment to the state’s highest court, Ms. Beasley won a full term in 2014 by 5,400 votes after a recount. She lost her 2020 re-election by 401 votes, joining the ranks of the Democratic brokenhearted.Ms. Beasley spoke with a volunteer at Chosen City Church in Charlotte. She is betting that in her evenly divided state, she can win in November by turning out the Democratic vote in specific regions.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMs. Beasley’s bet this time is that in her evenly divided state, she can win in November by turning out the Democratic vote. Her focuses are the booming counties around Charlotte; the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill; and Greensboro. She also aims to cut into the overwhelming Republican advantage in more rural reaches, especially with Black voters who are less likely to come to the polls. Her calling card is her judicial temperament: She is, she says, not a politician but a judge, who has held people to account in North Carolina and would do the same in Washington.But in a state where Senator Jesse Helms once used openly racist advertising to crush a Democratic challenger, and as the super PAC aligned with the Republican Party leadership goes on the air attacking Ms. Beasley as a big-moneyed lawyer, some Democrats want a little less balance and a little more brimstone.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Times/Siena Poll: Our second survey of the 2022 election cycle found Democrats remain unexpectedly competitive in the battle for Congress, while G.O.P. dreams of a major realignment among Latino voters have failed to materialize.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.Ohio Senate Race: The contest between Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, appears tighter than many once expected.State Senator DeAndrea Salvador explained the stakes for Democrats: Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, could lose his veto power if Republicans in the gerrymandered Legislature pick up just a few seats. “It’s time to stop worrying about being nice,” she said delicately, “and start thinking about being kind” — her diplomatic prescription for a little tough love.And the Rev. Walter L. Bowers, the pastor of Chosen City Church on the edge of Charlotte’s sprawl, said Ms. Beasley was “a wonderful person, but people need to see how tough she is.”“When you have strong leaders that are not flamboyant, people mistake that for weakness,” he said.Playing into those concerns is Mr. Budd, a backbench Republican with six quiet years in the House but the kind of bland look that his party hopes can slide him into the Senate with minimal effort.His record is not all that tame. A gun store owner from outside Winston-Salem, Mr. Budd secured the Senate nomination by winning the endorsement of Mr. Trump.He did so, in part, by questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, voting against its certification and calling the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol “just patriots standing up.” Jonathan Felts, a campaign spokesman, is quick to note that Mr. Budd also said Jan. 6 “was a bad day for America.”“Ted has consistently criticized those who broke the law that day and encouraged full investigations and prosecutions of the rioters,” Mr. Felts said.Mr. Budd at his primary party in Bermuda Run in May. His campaign has declined to say if he will accept the result of the November election.Erin Siegal McIntyre/ReutersMr. Budd’s campaign has declined to say if he will accept the result of the November election and claimed without evidence that Ms. Beasley might try to disenfranchise voters. Mr. Budd also opposed the recent bipartisan infrastructure and gun-control bills that his state’s Republican senators supported.Though Mr. Felts cited “Budd Crew Chiefs” in all 100 of the state’s counties and some 113 events and fund-raisers, Republican whispers of worry about Mr. Budd’s campaign are growing louder as he spends the last weeks of the campaign raising money behind closed doors, attending to Congress and leaving the task of earning votes largely to his advertising.“He’s depending on ‘I’m not a liberal Democrat, I’m a generic Republican, vote for me,’” said Pope McCorkle, known as Mac, a longtime Democratic strategist now at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.No one could accuse Ms. Beasley of letting advertising do the work. On Friday, after two events in Greensboro, she dashed from a family pharmacy in Gastonia to a get-out-the-vote rally at the historically Black Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte to the packed pep rally. The next morning, she kicked off a round of canvassing outside Charlotte, stopped by the Fourth Ward Barber Shop, spoke at a labor rally and greeted canvassers in Matthews before heading, lunch in the car, to Rocky Mount for a full Sunday slate of appearances in the state’s rural northeast.Ms. Beasley at a campaign stop at Fourth Ward Barber just outside uptown Charlotte. In North Carolina, winning might be less about persuading swing voters than about bringing one’s team out in force.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesFor all the talk of “purple” North Carolina, many political scientists say the number of true swing voters is tiny. The state is more a patchwork of deep-blue and deep-red redoubts. Winning might be less about persuading swing voters than about bringing your team out in force.North Carolina lacks a metropolis like the one Atlanta has become in Georgia, southwest of here. Mr. McCorkle points to “countrypolitan” counties that ring North Carolina’s biggest cities, which have remained heavily white and Republican even as the far suburbs of Atlanta have become diverse and politically fluid.Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden in those exurban Carolina counties by a bigger margin than he did in rural counties.But Mr. McCorkle does not count Ms. Beasley out. North Carolina has traditionally been more liberal on abortion than much of the South, and with the Legislature on the edge of a conservative supermajority, the issue will resonate. Last month, a federal judge allowed the reinstatement of a 20-week abortion ban. Mr. Budd has co-sponsored a 15-week abortion ban with no exceptions at the national level.And North Carolinians have recoiled against conservative extremism when there was a sense that it had gone too far, as when Mr. Helms used the images of white hands to say whites were losing their livelihoods to “racial quotas” and people of color.For all his effort to look bland, Mr. Budd will be appearing at a rally in Wilmington on Friday with Mr. Trump.“Budd could rest on the Trump laurels for the primary. I’m not sure that strategy is effective for a general campaign,” Mr. Bitzer said.To stay on her message, Ms. Beasley will need to resist those in her party who want more fire. At Akers Pharmacy in Gastonia, she listened to voters describe their struggles with diabetes, cancer, soaring pharmaceutical costs and fickle insurance companies.Ms. Beasley, second from right, during a discussion about drug cost that included DonnaMarie Woodson, right, in Gastonia.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesThen DonnaMarie Woodson, a two-time cancer survivor and party activist, looked at her plaintively.“I’m not trying to be too controversial,” Ms. Woodson told Ms. Beasley, before laying in. “Health insurance is a right, and I will go down fighting for that, and I know you will, too. I know you will, too.”Ms. Beasley smiled calmly, then expressed her gratitude to everyone there, never uttering the words “Republican” or “Budd” or taking up Ms. Woodson’s invitation. “You’re not pieces of paper or documents,” she said. “This truly is, for you and your children, about saving lives.”Afterward, Ms. Woodson acknowledged that she had been trying to bait Ms. Beasley into a stronger response. She said she backed off after catching the candidate’s gestures toward her.“I didn’t want to open a can that she would be responsible for,” Ms. Woodson said. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Glenn Youngkin Is Playing a Dangerous Game

      by

      It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.From its inception in the late 1820s as the movement to elect Andrew Jackson president, the Democratic Party relied on the Solid South to win national elections. Now it had a choice. Democrats could reject their new civil rights plank, accommodate the Dixiecrats and fight with a unified front against a hungry and energetic Republican Party, shut out of power since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Or they could scorn the so-called States’ Rights Democrats and run as a liberal party committed to equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.They chose the latter and changed American politics forever. And while much of this choice was born of sincere belief, we also should not ignore the powerful force of demographic change.From 1915 to 1965, more than six million Black Americans left their homes in the agrarian South to settle in the cities of the industrial North, from New York and Chicago to Philadelphia and Detroit and beyond.Their arrival marked the beginning of a tectonic shift in American political life. “The difference in laws between the North and the South created a political coming-of-age for Black migrants,” the political scientist Keneshia N. Grant writes in “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.” “Seeing political participation as a badge of honor and hallmark of success in northern life, migrants registered to vote in large numbers. Northern parties and candidates worked to gain Black support through their election campaigns, and the parties expected Black voters to turn out to vote for their nominees on Election Day.”For a Democratic Party whose national fortunes rested on control of urban machines, Black voters could mean the difference between four years in power and four years in the wilderness. With the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, who won an appreciable share of the Black vote in the 1932 presidential election, Northern Democratic politicians began to pay real attention to the interests of Black Americans in cities across the region.By 1948, most Black Americans who could vote were reliable partners in the New Deal coalition, which gave liberals in the Democratic Party some of the political space they needed to buck Jim Crow. Yes, the Dixiecrats would withdraw their support. But for every white vote Harry Truman might lose in Alabama and Mississippi, there was a Black vote he might gain in Ohio and California, the two states that ultimately gave him his victory over the fearsome former prosecutor (and New York governor) Thomas Dewey.Not only did the Dixiecrat rebellion fail; it also demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that Democrats could win national elections without the Solid South. The segregationists were weaker than they looked, and over the next 20 years the Democratic Party would cast them aside. (And even then, with the Dixiecrat exodus, Truman still won most of the states of the former Confederacy.)There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. Parties want to win, and they will almost always shift gears when it’s clear they can’t with their existing platform, positions and leadership.The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system — equal state representation in the Senate, malapportionment in the House of Representatives and winner-take-all distribution of votes in the Electoral College (Nebraska and Maine notwithstanding) — gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.To put it in simple terms, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by seven million ballots in the 2020 presidential election, but if not for roughly 120,000 votes across four states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Donald Trump would still be president.Which is all to say that someone like Glenn Youngkin is only doing what makes sense. To make MAGA politics weak among Republican politicians, you have to make MAGA voters irrelevant in national elections. But that will take a different political system — or a vastly different political landscape — than the one we have now.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