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      Jackson Confirmation Aside, G.O.P. Sees an Opening With Black Voters

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      With inflation, war and the pandemic looming larger, Democrats who hope that the browbeating of Ketanji Brown Jackson will rally Black voters behind their candidates may be disappointed.The spectacle created by Republican senators with presidential ambitions as they browbeat the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court — after which 47 Republicans voted against her on Thursday — might have seemed like glaring evidence that the G.O.P. had written off the Black vote this November.Far from it. In rising inflation, stratospheric gas prices, lingering frustrations over Covid and new anxieties over the war in Ukraine, Republicans see a fresh opening, after the Obama and Trump eras, to peel away some Black voters who polls show are increasingly disenchanted with the Biden administration.Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans need not win over too many Black voters to affect a handful of races, and dozens of Black Republican House candidates — a record number of them — are reshaping the party’s pitch.If anything, the G.O.P.’s treatment of the Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, was a testimony to the party’s confidence that amid so many more powerful political forces and more consuming objects of public attention, their handling of her confirmation simply didn’t matter much.“I think the Black people that this would turn off weren’t voting for Republicans anyway, no matter what,” said Wesley Hunt, a Black Army veteran and a Republican newcomer to politics who is running for a deep-red Texas House seat.Senate Republican leaders had warned colleagues before the confirmation fight to keep the proceedings civil and cordial, clearly worried that the sight of a phalanx of white Republican inquisitors would turn voters off in an election year. But if Democrats still believe that Judge Jackson’s rough treatment will energize Black voters to come out this November and vote Democratic in big numbers, it appears likely that they will be disappointed.For frustrated voters of all colors who are struggling to pay their bills and fill their tanks, November’s vote may simply be a chance to vote against the party in power.“We are not a monolith,” said Jennifer-Ruth Green, a Black Air Force veteran who is running for Congress in Northwestern Indiana as a Republican. “We see inflation and gas prices. Voters are not stupid.”In Gary, Ind., Roshaun Knowles, 42, a cosmetologist taking a break at the Billco Barber Shop, summed up how the confirmation hearings would play as she considered her vote this fall. She said she had felt despair as an accomplished Black woman was interrogated by white senators who, she believed, lacked Judge Jackson’s intellect and poise.Roshaun Knowles said she had felt despair at the grilling of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by Republican senators but was unhappy with President Biden. “He hasn’t been doing anything,” she said. “What has he done?Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York Times“To be in a room full of white people asking her questions about where she learned what she learned and what she is capable of — you know, it didn’t sit well with me,” Ms. Knowles said. “She should have been treated as a white man would have been treated,” she added.But, she said, vaccine mandates cost her a job as a property manager for a housing authority after she refused to get the shot. Stimulus checks kept too many people out of the work force. And President Biden? “He hasn’t been doing anything,” she said. “What has he done?”Ms. Knowles said she was leaning toward voting Republican this fall, as she did in 2020, when she voted for Donald J. Trump, after voting for Hillary Clinton four years before and for Barack Obama twice.Republicans on the campaign trail and over the airwaves are pressing the image of a faltering Democratic leadership that has no clue how to handle economic uncertainty, the persistent pandemic and rising crime. When Republican officials are asked about the party’s strategy toward Black voters, they invariably call on the few Black Republican elected officials and candidates to make the pitch. But tellingly, Black Republican candidates such as Ms. Green and John James, who is running for a Michigan House seat, are not advertising their party affiliations, just their biographies — a sign that the G.O.P. brand remains toxic in some corners.And Republican outreach efforts amount to little more than seizing on Black disaffection with Democrats.Paris Dennard, director of Black media affairs for the Republican National Committee, said the party had opened eight community centers nationwide to engage Black voters. Candidates like Mr. Hunt are proof that the party’s message is inspiring Black Republicans to run, he said.But a message focused on Democrats’ shortcomings deprives Black voters of hearing about policies they actually want, said Leah Wright Rigueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.”“It’s an incredibly effective strategy, but it’s also insidious,” said Dr. Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “It only works when there’s that dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.”It does work, however, even with Black voters who during the Obama and Trump years were remarkably united behind the Democratic Party.“I don’t think Biden’s really even in office,” Robert Sanders scoffed as he cut hair in Gary, echoing criticism from the political right about the 79-year-old president. “I think he’s being escorted through office.”The softening of Mr. Biden’s approval among Black voters is a clear warning to Democrats. Approval of the president among Black registered voters slid to 62 percent in March from 83 percent last summer in an NBC News poll and was not affected by the Supreme Court fight, said Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that conducted the survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research.The percentage of Black voters in the poll who said they strongly approved of the president’s performance fell to 28 percent last month, from 46 percent between April and August of last year. And intensity of support predicts turnout in elections.Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who is Black, said polls were picking up a reversion to the days before Mr. Obama energized Black voters positively and Mr. Trump then energized them negatively. Before 2008, he noted, it was normal for 12 percent to 14 percent of the Black electorate to vote Republican.“What is more problematic is the lack of energy levels among younger voters, particularly younger African Americans,” Mr. Belcher said, noting that young voters of color in 2018 had delivered Democrats the House. “It’s a not-excited, disenchanted, frustrated, younger electorate right now, more like the electorate of 2014 and 2010 than 2018 — and that’s disastrous.”Democratic officials say they are responding with Black voter mobilization projects that have started earlier than in previous midterm cycles. Last spring, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hired organizers in five battleground states to focus on key Democratic constituencies. On Thursday, the committee announced a new round of ad purchases with Black news outlets.Chris Taylor, a committee spokesman, said efforts by Republicans to court Black voters were disingenuous given the voting records among those in the party on pandemic relief, criminal justice reform and clean air and water legislation.“Nearly every Republican in Congress opposed our priorities,” said Mr. Taylor, who is Black.Because of gerrymandered district lines, most Republican candidates for the House do not need many — if any — Black voters. But in districts like Indiana’s First, with its narrow Democratic lean and a Republican target on its back, a Republican challenger will need to make inroads with Black voters, or at least hope for soft turnout for Democrats.Mr. Cruz talking with Senator Josh Hawley and Senator Marsha Blackburn during a break in the confirmation hearing for Judge Jackson last month.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJudge Jackson’s rough reception does not appear to be a threat to that hope. Even Black voters who watched the hearings attentively were surprisingly forgiving of her Republican inquisitors.“I don’t think she was treated fairly,” said Greg Fleming, 72, a financial adviser in Gary. “But that’s the way things are in this country. In today’s climate, unfortunately, it’s to be expected.”Like Indiana’s First, Georgia’s Second District still leans Democratic, but if a candidate can chip into its rural Black vote, he has a strong chance. For Jeremy Hunt, an Army veteran and Black candidate running in the Republican primary to challenge Representative Sanford Bishop, a long-serving Democrat who is also Black, the Supreme Court is not part of his calculus.“We can talk about Republicans versus Democrats, but ultimately, that’s not what voters want to hear from us as leaders,” Mr. Hunt said. “There is a huge temptation to get into national-level stuff and make it about what’s going on, you know, on different levels, but a big part of our campaign is keeping it local.”Still, when he talks about what is afflicting local farmers and truckers, Mr. Hunt said, he invariably comes back around to the economy, gas prices and inflation.Black voters were the most likely to say they were personally falling behind because of inflation, according to the NBC News poll. And that is producing anxieties that Republicans are eager to exploit.Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, one of two Black Republicans in the House, said Republicans had nothing to apologize for in the Jackson confirmation process.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesRepresentative Byron Donalds of Florida, one of two Black Republicans in the House, said: “We’ve got rich Black people. We’ve got rich white people. We have poor Black people. We have poor white people. If you’re poor in the United States, you’re feeling the effects of $4.30 gasoline. You’re feeling the effects of home heating oil prices that have gone up 60 percent. You’re feeling the impacts of meat and bread and milk, all going up dramatically.”Mr. Donalds said he had watched most of Judge Jackson’s hearings and had seen nothing that Republicans needed to apologize for.“Never once did they go into her personal life,” he said. “Never once did they go into her personal background. Never once were their accusations about her character.”With Democrats disappointing and Republicans offering a weak alternative, some Black voters said they didn’t know where to turn politically.In Gary, Mr. Fleming said he worried about the rising power of the Democratic left wing. But until more Republicans drop their “conspiracy theories” and extreme comments, he said, they weren’t much of an option.“I mean, they thought everything that happened on Jan. 6 was AOK? That’s crazy,” Mr. Fleming said. “If a Mitt Romney-type Republican ran, I could go for that. But Republicans, they’re on another planet right now. I can’t even call them far right. They’re defying gravity.” More

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      Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American Politics

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      Lawmakers in Ohio this week proposed legislation that would restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, borrowing from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. It’s the latest in a raft of culture-war legislation in Republican statehouses aimed against abortion, transgender rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and critical race theory.Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling to advance a national agenda amid spiraling inflation and energy prices.The Times columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ezra Klein join the Times Opinion podcast hosts Jane Coaston and Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss these and other issues.Their conversation, recorded Thursday morning, is available in the audio file and the transcript below.Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American PoliticsThe following conversation has been edited.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra, I’m going to start with you. The thing that strikes me about these Republican bills is that they’re staking ground on some things that are not necessarily popular with the majority of voters. That would seem to suggest to me that there’s political risk in doing them, but instead these laws have been copied from G.O.P. statehouse to G.O.P. statehouse. Why do you think that’s happening, in your view?Ezra Klein: So I think there are a couple of levels you can think about these bills on. One is to think about what you might imagine as the modal Republican strategy for a year like this. Every Republican could spend the next couple of months just saying, “Huh, gas prices are pretty high, aren’t they?” And that would be it. They would win the midterms. It would be done.And instead, the Republican Party, in part due to the incentives of modern media, in part due to the example offered by Donald Trump and how he shot to prominence and then ultimately to the presidency, has become extraordinarily attention-hungry among its rank-and-file legislators. And so if you can create the next culture-war kernel by passing a really brutal piece of legislation — and these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help — then you can catapult to the center of the national debate.So I don’t think Mitch McConnell wants to be having this conversation. I don’t think Kevin McCarthy wants to be having this conversation. I think they want to talk about how Joe Biden is a failure. But the Republican Party doesn’t have that kind of control over its own structure and its own institutional members now. And so at a time when there’s a lot of tailwinds for them, they are nevertheless pulled along by the more extreme and attention-driven members of their own caucus.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: It’s kind of like applying the attention economy to legislation. Jamelle, what are your thoughts?Jamelle Bouie: I largely agree that this is an attempt to do something like what Trump did: capture attention, generate energy amongst one’s most fervent supporters. Sort of draw the opposition into an argument and hope that you’re able to frame the argument in your direction, and capture the attention of people who may just be marginally paying attention to the whole thing.There’s a good case to make that Republicans can be successful at this precisely because they have this very sophisticated media apparatus: not just Fox News, but a broad constellation of outlets and different modes of delivery that allow them to, if not shape a message from its inception, then shape how its supporters receive any given message or any given piece of information.Having said that, I do think that Republicans are making something of a strategic mistake based on a misunderstanding of how Donald Trump was able to get into a position to win the presidency in the first place. And that is, Trump — as much as he calibrates anything — calibrated the kinds of offense that he caused. And so he both leveraged and utilized nativism, and racism, and these sorts of things, but he also presented himself as pretty liberally minded on L.G.B.T. rights, even though that his likely appointments and nominations were not going to be that. He himself presented himself as, I’m a New York libertine, so of course I have no problem with the L.G.B.T. community.He presented himself obviously as more of a moderate on economic policy, on the social safety net, which also appealed to voters who like Medicare, and like Medicaid, and like Social Security, and don’t want to give those things up to vote for a Republican. And I think that the Republican politicians, Republican officials, they may be generating a lot of fervent enthusiasm amongst their strongest supporters. But it’s unclear to me whether this is going to really make an impact with voters at large.I mean, I live in Virginia, and we just had our gubernatorial election last year. And for as much attention as the C.R.T. stuff got in the Virginia gubernatorial race, later analysis suggests that it wasn’t the C.R.T. stuff that drove Glenn Youngkin’s victory. It was traditional kind of midterm backlash to the party in power. And also, Youngkin ran on lowering the grocery tax and increasing teacher pay. So, bread-and-butter issues are what helped attract a lot of voters to him.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: So you’re saying that maybe these very controversial things that the G.O.P. is enacting are kind of a sideshow to what really matters for voters. Jane, I want you to jump in, because G.O.P. strategy aside, these laws are having real-world consequences, as Ezra said, that will be hard to undo. It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country, and it seemed that things had turned a corner. Why do you think this is the issue the G.O.P. are trying to mainstream, and where do you think it’s going?Jane Coaston: Well, I mean it’s because we live in hell.But it is interesting how repetitive this strategy is. I went back to some old Times pieces talking about the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney, because Disney started offering same-sex health care benefits in 1995. I think that for anyone who is L.G.B.T. and over the age of 30, this all seems very repetitive.Ezra noted that one of the challenges that the G.O.P. is having now is that they’ve got this wave of people who are just screaming, “OK, groomer,” at literally any L.G.B.T. person on the internet. And then you’re having National Review articles, like, “Maybe don’t say that?” And no one’s listening.But I think that part of this is because these issues have to do, one, with a conceit of what L.G.B.T. people are and how L.G.B.T. people become L.G.B.T. I think we’ve seen over the last couple of days, some social conservatives who essentially argue that bills like in Florida, which keep being posited as being about sex ed — they aren’t about sex ed. There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.I guess I just keep thinking, like, I saw the movie “Mannequin” once when I was a kid. And that was it! It just did it. I saw Kim Cattrall and that was it, I was off to the races.But I also think that for as much as Trump held a Pride flag and made some bones out of performatively not caring about the “debate” about L.G.B.T. rights and L.G.B.T. people, that’s not to say that people within the conservative caucus stopped caring. They are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell.For people who are troubled by trans rights, and specifically the rights of trans kids, I think that you’re seeing a lot of people who are like, “Oh, you’re just being homophobic. You’re yelling at teachers who mention that they’re gay. You’re very upset about gay and lesbian kids, gay and lesbian parents.” That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: You all seem to agree on this fundamental point that there’s a great deal of danger for the G.O.P. in pushing these culture-war issues.Jane Coaston: I mean, I want to be clear here because I don’t think that the danger is not to the Republican Party. I think that there’s a good chance that at the end of this year they win in the midterms having an entirely different messaging set. What I do think is that the real risk is to L.G.B.T. people and to see L.G.B.T. people as a danger once again. This is the caravan, but even more so because this has been going on for 50 years.Ezra Klein: I want to add something also to that, that Jane’s comments jogged for me, because one of the dangers is the composition and motivating energies of the Republican coalition. And I think a story you could tell about conservatives over the past 10, 15, 20 years is this constant mainstreaming, this constant effort to figure out how to harness the energy of the most toxic parts of their coalition that two years earlier they were pushing to the side. So birtherism is a relatively fringe movement that becomes the core of the party. They nominate the guy who is leading the birther charge a few years after most of the more sober politicians are pushing it to the side. And this, “OK, groomer” stuff, this is the mainstreaming of QAnon. I think it’s important to be very clear about this.I mean, to coin a term here — I’m in California, so there’s a fair amount, or was a fair amount, of Woo-Anon out there, like yoga-doing QAnon followers — but this is “Trad-Anon,” right? This is a point where the traditional Christian conservative coalition is finding a way to meet the QAnon energy and come up with this strange —Jane Coaston: It’s a secular fundamentalist religion. It’s QAnon, but they’ve taken — you don’t hear talk about traditional marriage anymore. You don’t hear talking about sincerely held religious beliefs. This is not the RFRA fight of 2015, 2016. This is QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.Ezra Klein: Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else.And so this is just one of the dimensions of it that I find really unnerving. Countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes in their political parties. And the Republican Party is so unbelievably bad at doing it. And every two years you think they can’t possibly be worse at not keeping out the worst elements of their party. And they show you, no, no, no, no, they’re going to bring those people into the core, too.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jamelle, I want to ask you this, though, because we’ve been talking a lot about the G.O.P., but what can be said about the Democrats? Because what is always fascinating to me is that you have Democrats that have policies that enjoy broad support. But they can’t seem to get their agenda passed while they are in power. I mean, one thing is the G.O.P. and what they’re doing. But it seems like the Democrats can’t seem to get traction on things that enjoy broad support.Jamelle Bouie: I think there are a few things here. I mean, in terms of getting policies through Congress, they just don’t have the votes. They’re reliant on their majority in the Senate — in particular on one senator, Joe Manchin, whose entire political brand kind of depends on him publicly being an obstacle to Democratic priorities, and then another senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who seems to want to try to cultivate a kind of John McCain maverick energy, which for her also means publicly and visibly standing in the way of Democratic priorities.And so I think this picture would look very different if there was one more or two more senators, right? If Cal Cunningham in North Carolina had won, if Susan Collins’s opponent in Maine had won, we’d be looking at a very different situation than we are now.But I think beyond the problem of winning elections and having a larger majority, which is just ultimately what the issue is here, I do think Democrats have adopted a faulty idea of what is going to drive political success. It’s very clear that the idea Democrats had going into 2021 was if they just delivered economic growth, and they delivered policies, and they kept their heads down and did hard work, then that would produce a public that was inclined to re-elect Democrats.But what seems to be happening, what Republicans seemed to have figured out, is that the actual popularity of the things you’re saying may be a little less important than your ability to seize attention, drive conversations, create a strong impression in the minds of people. And I don’t think Democrats have really been doing that. And I think that the arguments over these bills are actually a good example of it.I think the Democratic Party is having a hard time figuring out exactly how to go about pushing against this stuff because it runs into this theory of the case they have. There doesn’t seem to be an inclination to really just swing — to make what may sound like outlandish accusations, but that push strongly against the messaging and the rhetoric coming from the Republican Party.Ezra Klein: I think that Jamelle gets that right, on both the levels. The reason the Democrats can’t pass bills is they don’t have enough votes to pass them. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a messaging problem, fundamentally. Although, I will say that the point of Joe Biden is that he was going to be good at negotiating with egotistical, hard-to-deal-with members of the U.S. Senate.And I do worry about a sense of resignation that has set in at the White House around Joe Manchin. I would like to see more constant efforts at trying than I’m currently seeing. They seem to be letting their poor relationship with Manchin simply deteriorate when they need to be figuring out how to fix it. And at least from my reporting, what I can tell, I’m not seeing it.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: But Ezra, I want to ask you this about the Democrats. I mean, it is a numbers game. Of course it is. But on the other hand, I don’t see Democratic leaders really standing up and saying, this is the ground that I’m going to die on, this is the hill that has to be crested, in the same way that the Republicans are on these very controversial bills.Ezra Klein: So, one, I don’t think that it’s the national Republicans who are trying to make the controversial bills the center of it. But to this broader point you’re making, and to something Jamelle said, the Democratic leaders have had a theory that they’re going to push popular bills. They’re going to try to pass those bills and they’re going to try to run on them.And that theory basically has failed. They passed the American Rescue Plan. It was a very popular bill. They tried to run using it to generate more momentum for Build Back Better. They did not get Build Back Better passed, and now the child tax credit is expiring. And now they’ve fundamentally lost agenda control.So it’s like, the agenda is now Russia, which is a world event. They can’t do anything about that. And I think broadly speaking, Joe Biden’s been doing a good job, with the exception of occasional ad-libs. And then there’s inflation, which they’re also really struggling with and to some degree bear some responsibility for.What they are not doing is the other side of populism, which I think of as unpopularism. And agenda control in American politics comes from courting, choosing, engaging in controversy. For something to dominate the news, it needs the energy of not just support but opposition. That’s why some of these G.O.P. bills in Florida and elsewhere are dominating the news in the way they are.There are things that Joe Biden could do that would have that internal electricity. They could cancel student loan debt. I don’t know that they think that’s a good idea at the moment. But if they decided to actually try, which is something Chuck Schumer wants them to do, something Elizabeth Warren wants them to do, that would be controversial enough that it would reshape the agenda. American politics would be seized by arguments over whether or not canceling student loan debt is a good idea, and that might be territory more favorable to them. I do not myself understand what fights Democrats want the 2022 election to be over. They seem to me to be in a fundamentally quite reactive place right now —Jamelle Bouie: Yes.Ezra Klein: — responding to world events, responding to every month’s economic news drop. And at some point, if they want to do anything differently than that, they’re not just going to have to choose which popular things they say. They’re going to have to choose which controversial things they say, such that Republicans and others engage on the other side, and the locus of American political conflict moves back onto ground they’ve chosen.Jamelle Bouie: An example of this, pulling from what we’ve been talking about, is if Joe Biden were to, on Friday, give a national speech — from the Oval Office, from the Rose Garden, wherever, a big national set piece speech denouncing the Republican Party as embracing gross homophobia, this would be controversial. People would get upset. But it would seize the agenda. It would reorient things toward talking about these issues on ground that might be more favorable to Democrats. And I see no indication that Democratic leaders are even thinking in those terms.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, I want to think about this idea of unpopularism, that the Democrats, as Ezra says, are not wanting to push something that might not have broad support. But of course, there is someone who loves to do that a lot: Trump. And I am wondering about what you see his role is coming up in the 2022 midterms. Because we have him endorsing a lot of candidates, including Sarah Palin for Congress this week, targeting some major G.O.P. incumbents who have stood up to him, like Lisa Murkowski and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, all the while still peddling the big lie. How much influence do you see him having these days? And how should we regard Trump as a force in politics, a force in society — and, I guess, are those two the same thing?Jane Coaston: I know that I’m probably the only extreme sports fan on here. But I feel like sometimes when we’re talking about Democratic strategy, it’s like, if only they would run the offense we think they should run, they would win. I actually don’t know what Democrats should do or what would be best. There’s what I would want them to do, and I don’t know if it would work.But as to Trump, I think what you’re going to see is actually a decline in his influence, because he absolutely will not move on past the 2020 election. He can’t do it. He is physically unable to do so. And you’re seeing with his endorsements in the upcoming cycle — actually a number of his endorsements aren’t doing very well.You’re seeing this in Georgia. You’re seeing this in other places, with Herschel Walker or something like that where, yes, Mitch McConnell has said that he’s got his support, but there is some concern, I think, on the ground that that could be another losing race. Because, again, if your litmus test for Trump has nothing to do with anything that is taking place in 2022, but all has to do with whether or not you’re willing to say that Trump actually won the 2020 election …He is a losing one-term president who is existing interminably as a losing one-term president. It is important to note that Democrats want him to be more influential than he actually is because he is a major vote-driver for Democrats, as we’ve seen in Georgia and elsewhere.And so I think that you’re seeing a lot of Republicans who are like, “Can we move on, can we move on,” and Donald Trump will not. Donald Trump will talk about how, oh, Ron DeSantis is fine, but I would absolutely beat him in 2024. He will do interviews. He will put out very bad failing social media networks. And so I think how he should be considered is, he is an angry man who won’t move on and who won’t go away. And no matter what Republicans want him to say or want him to do, he will not be on any party line that is not his own.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Trump’s influence is solidified in one very particular place, and that’s on the conservative Supreme Court. And today, a big win for Democrats — the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. I want to bring her into this because it actually fits into what we’ve been discussing. Because the G.O.P. slammed her in the hearings with a lot of partisan attacks about C.R.T., asking her to define what a woman is and QAnon-adjacent questions about child pornography. And yet, in polling, people said that they hated the attacks, and she has a majority of support. So, Jamelle, what should we take away from that?Jamelle Bouie: We should take away from that that these attacks are not some sort of, pardon the expression, trump card. That when you have someone like Judge Jackson, who looks like a perfectly lovely woman, and is obviously very qualified and obviously very successful, and you have Ted Cruz shouting about how she is friendly to criminals and child pornographers. I think that for ordinary people who aren’t paying super close attention — they’re really just taking in images and impressions — it just looks ridiculous. And it seems unconvincing.To go back to what we’ve been talking about, I think that something similar may happen with these bills. Screaming that your kids’ gay third-grade teacher is a pedophile or a groomer when you know that this person has been absolutely lovely to you, your child and your family — it’s not going to fly, I think, for most people or for people outside of this narrow bubble.One thing I will say about the experience of Judge Jackson and her nomination and how this has all played out, is I think it is a point in favor of the argument that back in 2016 President Barack Obama made a grave mistake in nominating Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court in an attempt to find bipartisan support. Not because Garland was not qualified to be on the court — although I think I have somewhat idiosyncratic views about what it means to be qualified — but because Garland didn’t engender really any kind of popular support in his favor. No one was excited by him. Just another boring guy you put on the Supreme Court.I think what Jackson has in her favor is simply that she’d be the first Black woman on the court. And that excites people. That makes people enthusiastic. And that makes people much more willing to buckle down in her defense than they would otherwise be.And so I think one lesson to take away from this, should Joe Biden get another Supreme Court nomination, either in the next two years or if he serves another term, is that for as much as it’s clear that Democratic Party elites and people at the highest echelons of this stuff very much believe that a Supreme Court nominee must be someone with a lot of judicial experience, etc., etc., they should also be looking for people who would actually excite the public, who would get people interested and excited about what’s going on in the court. Those are the sorts of nominees they should be looking for and putting forth and putting in public. Even if that nominee may fail, the mere fact of generating that enthusiasm is an important thing.I think this actually connects to our broader conversation about Democrats, which is that Democrats need to stop thinking of politics as some sort of mechanistic system in which, like, Good Input A gets you Good Result B. It’s much more fluid, much more chaotic in that oftentimes you just need to swing. You need to aim at people’s passions and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. But I think connecting the people’s passions and their enthusiasms, can be much more successful than trying to be openly and outwardly and ostentatiously respectable.Ezra Klein: Democrats are very taken, I think in general at the moment, with something political scientists like to call the median voter theorem, which is to say that the key thing in politics is getting to that median voter, the voter right in the middle, who’s the most ideologically moderate, and convincing them. And if you get that 50 percent plus one, or maybe you correct for the Senate bias, or it’s 55 percent plus one — whatever it might be — then you win.And there is some truth to that. I think that a lot of folks on the left and critics of Democrats underrate the importance of ideology and policy positioning in politics. There really are moderates. But the flip side of that, to what Jamelle is saying, is that you have to reach the median voter. They have to hear what it is you’re saying. And the thing about the voters you need to reach is they’re often not paying super close attention. The people who are paying super close attention almost, by definition, have already made up their minds, otherwise they would not be paying such close attention because they wouldn’t care that much.And so you need to do things that don’t just control the agenda but actually echo through the country. And that requires you to have not just a theory of what it is voters will find popular, but what it is that they will talk about, what it is the media will talk about. And this maybe goes to a big through line of this whole conversation. Democrats have a lot of theories of policy. They have a lot of theories of politics. They just do not have a theory of attention. And what I would say for the Trumpist Republican Party is it mostly doesn’t have a theory of policy. It has a middling theory of politics, and it is overwhelmed by its own theory of attention. And I don’t think there’s some kind of grand strategic plan happening over there.But I think that one way to think about the asymmetry, or maybe the inversion of the two sides right now, is that Republicans know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to be strategic about it. And Democrats know how to be strategic, but they don’t know how to get attention.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to pivot to a piece of news that is less domestic culture wars, and more of a global culture war. The Boston Marathon announced this week that Belarusian and Russian citizens who reside in those countries are not allowed to run in the race as a response to the war. The Boston Athletic Association, which runs the Boston Marathon, announced that they were “horrified and outraged” by the war, and they believe that they must do what they can to “support the people of Ukraine.”I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’d like to hear yours. I’m going to start with Jane, as I know you’re a sports aficionado. So I want your thoughts on this.Jane Coaston: I personally think that this is not quite like freedom fries territory. But I do think it seems to be targeted at a very small group of people — as you said, it was Belarusian and Russian citizens who do reside in those countries. But Belarusian and Russian citizens who don’t reside in those countries will be allowed to run, but they’re not going to recognize their affiliation or flags.I think it’s worth remembering that the process to enter or qualify for the Boston Marathon started for many people a year ago. You do not just decide to run the Boston Marathon. You are either running for a charity or you have a time in another marathon that qualifies you to run in Boston. And I’m trying to think, what is this going to do? Vladimir Putin is not going to be like, “Oh, no, a Russian citizen was not able to run a 2:03 at the Boston Marathon. I will ne’er sin no more!”I think that there is an element to so much of our politics, especially on foreign policy, where we’ve got the “we got to do something” impulse. But one of the challenges is that there isn’t something that the Boston Marathon organizers, or people who run an opera house, or people who work in the art world — there’s not something they could do exactly that will in their view adequately punish the aggressions of the Russian government. It falls flat. And I think it’s kind of repulsive.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I have to say, Jane, I agree with you. I think this was a real misstep. I don’t know that banning citizens of particular countries because they actually live in the countries of their citizenship, and those leaders are autocratic and there isn’t the freedom to protest or do any of the things that you would think of in a democracy, is actually beneficial to the cause of freeing Ukraine. But I’m interested in, Jamelle, your thoughts, and then Ezra.Jamelle Bouie: I don’t disagree. It makes no real conceptual sense why you would do this. So Russian and Belarusian citizens who live in their countries cannot run in the Boston Marathon. OK. That doesn’t put any pressure on the leaders of those countries. If anything, it may encourage the view amongst the citizenry that the West is against them, that the West isn’t simply against the government or to the government’s actions, but actually actively against the citizens themselves. And it may prompt people to double down in their support for the government. So it just seems counterproductive.Issue a statement. Condemn. Say that government officials can’t participate, they can’t watch, they can’t be there. If you want to go as far as to say, you can’t fly the flag, I actually think that’s probably fair because the flag is a symbol of the government as well. But banning the citizens, like Jane said, it seems like just doing something for the sake of doing something, and it doesn’t really seem very constructive. It doesn’t even seem like it was particularly well thought-out, like anyone was thinking about what you actually are trying to accomplish by doing this.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra?Ezra Klein: I have a hard-and-fast rule that on any sports story I just think whatever Jane thinks. So on the specifics of this, I think whatever Jane thinks, and everything she said sounded correct to me.From a consequentialist perspective, we need to think a bit about whether we are creating pressure on citizens in these countries to pressure their governments, or whether we are hardening their support for their governments. And recognizing that they live in highly censored, highly manipulated media ecosystems, I think we have to be pretty thoughtful about whether we’re just giving grist to their leaders to manipulate them more. And for the people who are only half in and out of that ecosystem — because Russian and Belarusian control over media is not absolute — whether we’re actually doing things that are going to make those wavering feel more nationalistic.There’s a very big difference between strategically trying to win over a population and just trying to punish a country because it at a certain point just feels like we need to keep punishing. And, look, I want to punish Putin and those behind this war in every way that is possible. And I broadly support the sanctions, despite the tremendous pain they’re causing, because I do think that they are creating pressure in the long-run for Putin to end this. But I don’t know that doing things that actually target Russian citizens — without any obvious mechanism for pressuring the regime — makes a lot of sense.And I’m worried about some of the news I hear and some of the polling I see coming out of Russia. You can only believe what you can believe in it, but that there is rising support for Putin, that there is a rising belief that the entire West is arrayed against Russia. And that this might actually, in terms of the domestic political pressures Putin faces, be making him more worried about the hard-liners who think he needs to go further, further, further and show Russian strength in the face of Western opposition rather than what our initial effort was, which was to try to get the more Westernized Russians — these oligarchs with their lofts in London — to pressure Putin to bring an end to this. So I worry that our view of this has, without anybody noting it, kind of flipped. And we may not be creating the incentive system that we had hoped to.Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Ezra Klein is the host of “The Ezra Klein Show” and a Times columnist. Jane Coaston is the host of “The Argument” podcast. Jamelle Bouie is a Times columnist.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.Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Alison Bruzek and Phoebe Lett. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, and editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Lauren Kelley and Patrick Healy. More

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      How Chuck Schumer Avoided a Primary Challenge From the Left

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      Despite months of speculation, no prominent progressive has so far come forward to challenge the Democratic majority leader, who has worked hard to shore up his left flank.Democrats were floundering, and Senator Chuck Schumer had a lot on his plate.His party couldn’t pass its legislative agenda, it had just suffered major electoral losses, and he had a long list of Biden administration nominees to shepherd through.But despite his busy schedule, Schumer, the majority leader and a Democrat who embodies the party establishment, still took the time for a warm gesture to his native New York’s strong progressive left. Appearing live via video, he showed up at an inauguration celebration in December for the New York City Council’s most prominent incoming left-wing member, Tiffany Cabán, who took the oath of office with the help of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Schumer’s attendance was in some ways just another stop on his always-packed New York itinerary. But the moment also vividly illustrated why — barring some extraordinary development — Schumer has attracted no serious left-wing challenger to his Senate re-election bid as Thursday’s primary filing deadline arrives, despite months of speculation about who might emerge.“He’s been really relational,” said Cabán, who is a favorite of the New York City Democratic Socialists. “He shows up.”Indeed, he is a highly visible presence from Brooklyn to Buffalo, building relationships with elected officials at every level of the ballot and across the Democratic ideological spectrum. But Schumer’s efforts to engage the farthest-left faction of his party have been particularly consequential in New York, a state where several top Democratic officials have lost primaries in recent years.He has often teamed up on local issues with left-wing lawmakers including Ocasio-Cortez and Cabán. (He also recently schmoozed over empanadas at a Cabán office opening, she said on Wednesday.)In the Buffalo mayor’s race, he endorsed the Democratic nominee, a democratic socialist, while other prominent elected officials stayed on the sidelines (the candidate lost, but good will for Schumer remains). And in New York and nationally, he loudly champions progressive priorities including canceling student debt.More broadly, he helped secure significant federal aid for New York, he has an overwhelming fund-raising advantage and polls show that he is popular at home. Challenging him in a pricey statewide race would be a daunting task.Certainly, the Senate majority leader is not an obvious favorite for New York’s left-wing grass-roots. Democrats of all stripes remain frustrated by the pace of progress in the divided Senate, while moderate donors have at times been discomfited by his overtures to the left.But Ocasio-Cortez, who long drew chatter about a possible Senate bid, has said she is running for re-election. Schumer received his party’s backing by acclamation at the Democratic convention. And he secured the endorsement of the left-wing New York Working Families Party.“Chuck Schumer is everywhere, he always will be,” said Angelo Roefaro, Schumer’s spokesman. “Plain and simple: omnipresence.”What to read tonightJazmine Ulloa reports from Ohio on how Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, is trying to win back white, working-class voters in his Senate bid.A group of conservative megadonors — including figures like Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer — has quietly formed a coalition to shape the midterms and the Republican Party.President Biden’s decision to extend a moratorium on student debt payments is the latest example of a bigger political challenge: The policies that help households stretch their budgets could complicate messaging on curbing inflation.Executives from six large oil companies appeared before a House committee and defended themselves against criticism over higher gas prices, a top concern for Democrats ahead of the midterms.Representative Bob Gibbs, an Ohio Republican, is retiring rather than taking on a Trump-endorsed challenger.Briefing bookRebecca Kleefisch, a former Wisconsin lieutenant governor who is running to oust Tony Evers, the Democratic incumbent, endorsed a slate of 48 candidates in school board contests. Thirty-four of them won.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesSchool-board elections — an early midterms test?Those looking for clues to the November midterm elections got some fresh data points last night. And the clues are coming from an unlikely place: school boards.This year, Wisconsin held some of the earliest school-board elections in the country. Like everything else in American politics, these normally sleepy contests have become sharply polarized — and closely watched.Nationally, Republicans see an opportunity to erode the Democrats’ traditional advantage on education, capitalizing on widespread frustration over schooling during the coronavirus pandemic. Under the banner of “parents’ rights,” they’ve stoked controversies over L.G.B.T.Q. issues and critical race theory, an academic legal concept that has become a loose shorthand for a contentious debate on how schools teach about race.It’s a strategy that complements Republicans’ emphasis on local elections as a means of energizing the base of the party. Last year, Senator Ron Johnson urged Wisconsin voters to “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”So how did it go? Republicans in Wisconsin invested more than $70,000 in school-board races this year, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Rebecca Kleefisch, a former lieutenant governor who is running to oust Gov. Tony Evers, the Democratic incumbent, endorsed a slate of 48 candidates in school board contests. Thirty-four of them won.But the raw numbers can be misleading. Republicans picked up seats in Waukesha County, a longtime G.O.P. stronghold, but failed to make inroads in most contested areas. Scarlett Johnson, a conservative activist who drew national attention for organizing a recall of her local school board last fall, lost her election bid in a suburb north of Milwaukee.In contested Eau Claire, two incumbents backed by Democrats and teachers’ unions, Tim Nordin and Marquell Johnson, were narrowly re-elected with some help from the state party. Both had complained of receiving harassment during the campaign, during which conservative candidates criticized school training materials on how to discuss children’s sexual identities.In an email, Nordin said the results were a repudiation of “false narratives about race and identity.” He added, “Our community saw through dog whistles and rejected barely disguised attacks on our children.”Michael Ford, a professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who tracks school board elections, noted that Republican-backed candidates had done well in the suburbs of Milwaukee, though the results elsewhere were more of a wash.“In the last presidential election, there were many conservative-leaning suburban voters who were uncomfortable with Trumpism,” Ford said. Last night’s results could be a sign that education issues are returning those voters to the G.O.P. fold, he said.Wisconsin is one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the nation, and each party will be poring over the outcome of these races for weeks to come. Republicans viewed the elections as a tuneup ahead of November, when they are keen to replace Evers and defend Ron Johnson’s Senate seat. The state party praised last night’s results as “a testament to the strength of the grass-roots Republican operation.”Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said that Republicans had “fizzled out completely” outside suburban Milwaukee by “making fringe arguments to an evenly divided electorate.”He hailed the results as a good sign for Evers, a former science teacher who has made his handling of education issues central to his re-election pitch.“If the far-right candidates had won, I’d be worried,” Wikler said.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority

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      Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question.NILES, OHIO — Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too.Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County.Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades.Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country.Many national Democratic pollsters and pundits have written off Mr. Ryan’s pursuit as a near-impossible task. They see Ohio as too red and too white to change course. But as his Republican opponents have been veering farther to the right and aggressively pursuing former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, Mr. Ryan is betting voters have had enough of the extremism in American politics. He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans.“I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.”Like other Democrats in long-shot races, Mr. Ryan must stay firmly within a narrow lane as he vies to replace Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring. Mr. Ryan does not tout Medicare for All and other transformative policies that tend to energize progressives, and he does not want to talk about transgender women in sports and other divisive issues. Instead, he wants to campaign strictly on jobs, manufacturing and taking on China. His first television commercial — part of a $3.3 million ad buy — almost sounds like it came from a Republican, squarely centering on the nation’s fight to beat China on manufacturing.“It’s us versus them,” he says in a digital one-minute version of the ad, during which he mentions “China” eight times in 60 seconds. The ad has drawn criticism from some Asian advocacy groups and elected officials, who described it as racist and called on him to take it down.Shekar Narasimhan, the chairman of AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee that mobilizes Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, urged Mr. Ryan to not use hate or fear to win votes. “That’s what the Trump Republicans do and why we fight them everywhere,” he said in a statement.Mr. Ryan condemned anti-Asian violence but said that he was speaking specifically about government policies of the Chinese Communist Party that have hurt Ohio workers and that he was not backing down.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Seven months before the November election, it is too early to say whether the Ryan playbook is working. Interviews with voters, former elected officials and community leaders in Niles, Warren and other towns in the industrial region known as the Mahoning Valley showed just how hard the midterms will be for Democrats, and for Mr. Ryan. His jobs-and-the-economy message clashes with the prices working-class voters have been paying at the grocery store and at the gas pump.Many Republican voters in this part of the Mahoning Valley were quick to dismiss any Democrat as unviable, citing gas prices, inflation and the U.S.-Mexico border as Democratic problems that needed Republican solutions. Democrats tended to be split between those who supported Mr. Ryan and those wary he had become too much a part of the Democratic establishment. Even anti-Trump voters have been in an anti-establishment frame of mind.Outside the Hot Dog Shoppe in Warren, Royce VanDervort, 76, who worked for the Packard electric division at General Motors, said he understood why people grew tired of the Democratic political machine amid factory closures and job losses, but was surprised by just how strong and enduring the Trump appeal has been. He is a die-hard Democrat and said he supports Mr. Ryan. “Too old to change now,” he added.But Mr. VanDervort’s friend and neighbor, Dennis Garito, 57, was the kind of voter Mr. Ryan has been trying to win back. A retired fabrication worker and a Democrat for 35 years, Mr. Garito now describes himself as an independent. On the one hand, he said, he worries Mr. Ryan and other Democrats have lost touch with the people they represent. On the other, he has grown sick of far-right Republicans who argue, he said, like “kids fighting.”He plans to vote for Mr. Ryan in the Democratic primary in May. But if an anti-Trump Republican, State Senator Matt Dolan, wins the Republican primary and makes it on the ballot in November, Mr. Ryan will likely lose Mr. Garito’s vote. “If it comes down between Dolan and Ryan, I’m probably going to vote for Dolan,” Mr. Garito said. Mr. Ryan, he added, had become “too much of a career politician.”In the industrial region known as the Mahoning Valley, interviews with voters in Warren and other towns showed just how hard the midterm elections will be for Democrats.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesRoyce VanDervort, 76, a retired General Motors worker in Warren, said he was supporting Mr. Ryan in the Senate race.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesDennis Garito, 57, a retired fabrication worker who describes himself as an independent, said he worries that Mr. Ryan and other Democrats have lost touch with the people they represent.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAsked later about Mr. Garito’s comments, Mr. Ryan said Mr. Garito reflected those voters in the middle who are without a home politically. His role model has been Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who has weathered Republican waves by focusing on rebuilding the middle class.“I am telling everyone right now — ‘Just hear us out, come listen to us,’” the congressman said.On a blustery, snowy day in early spring, Mr. Ryan sat in Giuseppe’s Italian Market, one of his favorite Italian delis in Niles, dressed down in jeans and a gray pullover with a United Steelworkers logo. In the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan is the front-runner, but he will face Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer, and Traci Johnson, a tech executive.Mr. Ryan has been on a rigorous tour of the state, aiming to visit with voters in all 88 counties. So far, he has hit 82. He met with union workers in town halls, diners and factories along the Ohio River. He hosted round tables with business owners and home health care aides in Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities. He picketed with aerospace workers north of Dayton.“I want to see these folks,” Mr. Ryan said. “I want to be in their communities.”Mr. Ryan’s visit-every-county tactic echoes Beto O’Rourke’s driving tour of Texas in 2017 and 2018, when Mr. O’Rourke made campaign stops in all 254 counties in Texas during his unsuccessful bid to defeat Senator Ted Cruz.The Mahoning Valley where Mr. Ryan still lives stretches across northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania, and was once a thriving zone of steel factories and manufacturing plants. But Mr. Ryan saw the region transform amid job losses, bad trade deals and disinvestment, he said.“Growing up, you think it is just happening here, but when you travel Ohio, you realize that it is the vast majority of Ohio,” he said.In Youngstown in the Mahoning Valley, the exodus of white blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party accelerated with the arrival of Donald Trump.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesDemocrats’ struggles in Youngstown and other blue-collar Ohio cities extend beyond Donald Trump.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe exodus of white blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party accelerated here with the arrival of Mr. Trump, who stirred populist anger as he pledged to bring back manufacturing jobs and companies, as well as to aid struggling workers who had been laid off or reassigned. Many of his promises never materialized, but that didn’t hurt the former president’s well of support among the workers who saw him as their champion. Ohio went to Mr. Trump in the past two presidential elections, and it appears to be trending in Republicans’ favor, as President Biden’s low approval ratings are expected to hurt Democrats.The diminishing support for Mr. Ryan in 2020 in Trumbull County was part of a larger wave of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump that knocked out other well-known Democrats in the Mahoning Valley, said Bill Padisak, who works in Niles and serves as president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Central Labor Council in Mahoning and Trumbull Counties. But he said it was too early to tell whether many of those people would remain Republicans.“A lot of the union members I talk to, I think they will swing back,” Mr. Padisak said.Democrats’ struggles go far beyond Mr. Trump. The outrage, racial resentment and white grievances harnessed by Republicans have proven too salient for some voters who see their identity and way of life under attack. Others blame the Biden administration and Democrats for the troubles with the economy and illegal immigration.On a visit to Warren for her 18-year-old daughter’s dance competition, Kristen Moll, 54, echoed a common refrain among Republicans. “Right now, regardless of if you’re running for Senate or governor or any public office, I would feel the Democratic Party in general is leading the country down the wrong path,” Ms. Moll said.David and Jennifer Raspanti, at a restaurant in Boardman Township with their family, said they did not care whether the next senator was a Republican or a Democrat as long as the candidate was not extreme.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“Some of that Trump support has waned, but I don’t know if it has waned enough,” said Charlene W. Allen, 76, a community activist and legislative aide to the Youngstown Warren Black Caucus.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAt her home, Charlene W. Allen, 76, a community activist and legislative aide to the Youngstown Warren Black Caucus, believed Mr. Ryan had a shot. But she said he could not win the seat without doing more to repel Republicans’ attempts to sow division, like proactively taking on issues of race and crime.“Some of that Trump support has waned, but I don’t know if it has waned enough,” she said.David and Jennifer Raspanti, who are the owners of a painting company in Trumbull County and who are Republicans, said they did not care whether the next senator was a Republican or a Democrat as long as the candidate was not extreme and could make clearheaded decisions.“We need to come back to the middle,” Ms. Raspanti, 44, said at a restaurant in Boardman Township, where the family was having breakfast with their two sons after church. “We need to listen to each other better.” More

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      More Evidence Bolsters Durham’s Case Against Michael Sussman

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      Separately, defense lawyers asked a judge to block the Trump-era special counsel from making the Steele dossier a focus of next month’s trial.WASHINGTON — The Trump-era special counsel scrutinizing the Russia investigation has acquired additional evidence that may bolster his case against a Democratic-linked lawyer accused of lying to the F.B.I. at a September 2016 meeting about Donald J. Trump’s possible ties to Russia, a new court filing revealed.In the politically high-profile case, the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is facing trial next month on a charge that he falsely told an F.B.I. official that he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client. There he relayed suspicions data scientists had about odd internet data they thought might indicate hidden Trump-Russia links.The new filing by the special counsel, John H. Durham, says that the night before Mr. Sussmann’s meeting, he had texted the F.B.I. official stating that “I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the bureau.”The charge against Mr. Sussmann, which he denies, is narrow. But the case has attracted significant attention because Mr. Durham has used filings to put forward large amounts of information, insinuating there was a conspiracy involving the Hillary Clinton campaign to amplify suspicions of Trump-Russia collusion. Mr. Durham has not charged any such conspiracy, however.The disclosure of the text to the F.B.I. official in question, James A. Baker, then the bureau’s general counsel, was part of a flurry of late-night filings on Monday by prosecutors and the defense centering on what evidence and arguments the judge should permit in the trial.At the same time, the filings suggest that the special counsel may use the trial to continue to examine larger efforts linked to the Clinton campaign that raised suspicions about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — including the so-called Steele dossier.The dossier is a notorious compendium of opposition research about purported Trump-Russia ties, since revealed to be thinly sourced and dubious. It was written by Christopher Steele, a subcontractor for Fusion GPS, a research firm that Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, had hired to scrutinize such matters.Mr. Sussmann, a cybersecurity specialist, had worked for the Democratic Party on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers. One of his partners at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, a campaign law specialist, was representing the Clinton campaign and hired Fusion GPS.Mr. Durham’s new filing refers to the dossier and Mr. Steele — including a meeting with Mr. Sussmann that Mr. Steele has said involved the suspicions about the odd internet data — and Mr. Sussmann’s legal team said that Mr. Durham appears to be planning to bring up the dossier at the trial even though the indictment does not mention it.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers accused Mr. Durham of promoting a “baseless narrative that the Clinton campaign conspired with others to trick the federal government into investigating ties between President Trump and Russia,” asking the judge to block prosecutors from making arguments and introducing evidence related to the Steele dossier.“But there was no such conspiracy; the special counsel hasn’t charged such a crime; and the special counsel should not be permitted to turn Mr. Sussmann’s trial on a narrow false statement charge into a circus full of sideshows that will only fuel partisan fervor,” they wrote.The Durham team’s filing also asked the judge to bar the defense from making arguments and presenting evidence “that depict the special counsel as politically motived or biased based on his appointment” by the Trump administration.“The only purpose in advancing these arguments would be to stir the pot of political polarization, garner public attention and, most inappropriately, confuse jurors or encourage jury nullification,” it said. “Put bluntly, the defense wishes to make the special counsel out to be a political actor when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”In the spring of 2019, the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign and Russia, Robert S. Mueller III, detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” but did not charge any Trump associate with conspiring with Russia. As Mr. Trump continued to claim that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy, the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, assigned Mr. Durham to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.But Mr. Durham has not developed any cases against high-level officials. Instead, he has brought false-statements charges involving two efforts by outsiders to hunt for signs of Trump-Russia links, both of which were thin and involved Perkins Coie in some way. He has used the indictments to insinuate that the Clinton campaign may have orchestrated the concoction of false smears against Mr. Trump, but without charging such a conspiracy.One such effort was the Steele dossier, and the other was the suspicions that Mr. Sussmann relayed to Mr. Baker. The latter suspicions had been developed by a group of data scientists who analyzed odd internet data they thought might suggest clandestine communications between a server for the Trump Organization and a server for Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.The F.B.I. — which had already opened the investigation that would evolve into the Mueller inquiry — looked into the Alfa Bank matter but decided the suspicions were unfounded.After Mr. Sussmann’s indictment, several criminal law specialists said the charge was an unusually thin basis for a federal case because it boiled down to a dispute over what was said at a one-on-one meeting at which there were no other witnesses and there was no recording. But the newly disclosed text message from Mr. Sussmann could bolster prosecutors’ case.In accusing Mr. Sussmann of falsely saying he was not conveying the suspicions on behalf of any client, the indictment also contended that he was concealing that he was actually representing two clients at that meeting — the Clinton campaign and a technology executive, Rodney Joffe, who worked with the cyberspecialists who analyzed the Alfa Bank data. Law firm billing records show that Mr. Sussmann listed the campaign for time working on Alfa Bank issues.Mr. Sussmann’s legal team has denied that he told Mr. Baker he was not conveying the information on behalf of any client. They also insisted to the Justice Department before the indictment that Mr. Sussmann was not there at the direction or on behalf of the campaign. In court filings, they have acknowledged that Mr. Sussmann “arranged for this meeting on behalf of his client,” referring to Mr. Joffe.The defense for Mr. Sussmann therefore may turn in part on what it means to be somewhere on behalf of a client. In a separate filing on Monday night, the defense asked the judge, Christopher Cooper of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, to dismiss the case if Mr. Durham does not grant immunity to Mr. Joffe, so that the technology executive can testify about his interactions with Mr. Sussmann regarding the meeting.In that filing, they said Mr. Joffe would offer “critical exculpatory testimony on behalf of Mr. Sussmann,” including that the two agreed that he should take the information to the F.B.I. “to help the government, not to benefit Mr. Joffe.” They also said that “contrary to the special counsel’s entire theory,” Mr. Joffe’s work with the data scientists was not connected to the campaign.A spokeswoman for Mr. Joffe did not provide a comment. But a letter from Mr. Joffe’s lawyer included in the filings said that while Mr. Joffe “can provide exculpatory information concerning the allegations against” Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Joffe still faced the possible risk of indictment and would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights not to testify. More

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      Judge Keeps New York’s New Electoral Map Intact for Now

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      The stay by an appellate judge puts on hold a lower-court ruling that New York’s newly drawn congressional and legislative districts were unconstitutional.A New York appellate judge on Monday hit the brakes on a sweeping lower-court decision that invalidated newly drawn legislative districts favorable to Democrats and threatened to throw the state’s election season into turmoil.Justice Stephen K. Lindley of New York’s Fourth Appellate Department in Rochester issued the temporary stay after state Democratic leaders formally contested the lower court’s opinion last week that the maps were unconstitutional and, in some cases, gerrymandered for partisan gain.He did not address the merits of the case but indicated that he hoped to expedite his own ruling on whether the lines were constitutional.“The appeal will be greatly accelerated for obvious reasons, and I anticipate that a decision could be rendered within the next three weeks, if not sooner,” Justice Lindley wrote in a note instructing both Democrats and the Republicans challenging the maps to attend a Thursday hearing.In the short term, the stay means that the maps approved by the Democrat-led Legislature in February, as well as the state’s June primary calendar, will remain in effect. But it remains to be seen whether the maps will survive the appeals process.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Analysts generally believe the Appellate Division is more likely to defer to the Legislature’s prerogative to draw the maps and less likely to intercede in a way that would blow up this year’s elections calendar than was the lower court judge, Patrick F. McAllister, a State Supreme Court justice in rural Steuben County and a Republican.The outcome in New York has attracted intense national interest, with partisan control of three to four seats in the House of Representatives hanging in the balance at a time when the two parties are vying for the majority from coast to coast. The New York lines as currently construed promise to boost House Democrats while also safeguarding the party’s State Senate majority, prompting national Republicans to spend richly on the legal challenge.Inside New York, the tangled legal machinations have had a more immediate effect on candidates for office from both parties, who are watching the proceedings carefully.Before it was stayed, Justice McAllister’s decision had set campaigns racing to determine what districts — if any — they were actually running in. Candidates who had already spent a month gathering petitions to run in the newly drawn congressional, State Senate and Assembly districts faced the prospect that the lines would be erased, their costly work temporarily nullified and June’s primary elections postponed just days before the petitioning process was scheduled to end.“On the eve of the petitioning deadline, candidates — incumbents and insurgents alike — were thrown for a loop,” said Jerry H.​ Goldfeder, an elections lawyer at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan who advises Democratic candidates.He called it “a perfect example of why courts shouldn’t interfere with election procedures at the 11th hour.”Though Justice McAllister did not explicitly delay the primary, his order for lawmakers to redraw new district lines that could win bipartisan support almost certainly would have required the primary to be rescheduled.The ruling prompted the State Board of Elections to issue guidance late last week that prematurely said the decision had been stayed and advised candidates that “all other deadlines provided for by law are still in effect pending further court determinations and the petitions would still be due this week.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      These Days, ‘Help Wanted’ Has So Many Meanings

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      Gail Collins: Bret, let’s relax and talk about long-term goals that we totally do not share. For instance, how would you feel about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?Bret Stephens: Why not raise the standard of living for everyone by making the minimum wage $100? Just kidding. I think the correct figure is $0.Gail: If your goal is a self-supporting populace that doesn’t depend on government aid, you’ve got to make sure employers are shelling out at least minimal survival salaries. The current bottom line is $7.25 an hour. Nobody can live on that.Bret: I’m taking my $0 cue from a famous Times editorial from 1987, which made the case that “those at greatest risk from a higher minimum wage would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.” The editorial may be old but the economic logic is right. Raising the minimum wage is a well-intentioned idea that won’t help its intended beneficiaries. It will hurt them by giving companies like McDonald’s additional incentives to move toward even more automation.Tell me why I’m wrong.Gail: Well, I could quote an editorial from 2020 that said raising the minimum wage “ought to be a priority of economic policymakers ….”And you know, I was once the Times Opinion editor, and the editorial page does evolve in its outlook. Back when the Civil Rights Act passed in the 1960s, our editorial writers made fun of the idea of applying it to gender employment discrimination, theorizing that federal enforcers “may find it would have been better if Congress had just abolished sex itself” and warning it could lead to male Bunnies at the Playboy clubs.Bret: I’m sure we agree that The Times has been wrong about many things in the past — and might even be wrong about a thing or two in the present. I’m still not seeing how the economics have changed since the 1980s.Gail: A higher minimum wage might cause some employers to reduce the number of jobs, at least temporarily. But the danger there is always way overplayed, and those higher-paid minimum wage workers will be spending their new money to lift the economy.Bret: We are living through a period of deep labor shortages, especially in service industries, that allows workers to bargain for higher wages. That makes raising the minimum wage a faulty solution to a fading problem. But I see your point, and this is one of those issues on which conservatives and liberals will argue forever — or at least until automation and robots make it moot.Gail: Meanwhile, on a totally completely different subject, last week we missed the chance to converse about The Slap. Any lingering thoughts about Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at the Oscars?Bret: The truly nauseating part was the standing ovation Smith got for his interminable, self-pitying acceptance speech after hitting Rock. It’s a good reminder of why the American romance with Hollywood is coming to an end, as our colleague Ross Douthat reminded us recently. The best thing the Oscars could do now is to cancel itself.Gail: I have to confess, my husband and I are really into the Oscars. Not the program, which I acknowledge is frequently dreadful. But all the run-up publicity encourages us to catch some fine movies in the more obscure categories like foreign films. I’ll bet you haven’t seen “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.”Bret: Should I? The only movie I’ve seen in ages is “King Richard,” which, I have to admit, I liked.Gail: I truly hated Will Smith’s performance in “King Richard.”Bret: Really?Gail: Really, from the start. Don’t know why he turned me off, but acting-wise, I’d go with the yak from Lunana every time.As to The Slap, one of the many things that ticked me off was the whole gender aspect. If a female comedian made fun of an actor’s hair loss, would anybody expect his wife to come storming up and slug the offender? No, in part because a guy going semi-bald is regarded as normal. In part because physical violence is still sort of accepted for men.Bret: If the other Rock, Dwayne Johnson, had made the same joke in Chris Rock’s place, it would have been interesting to watch Smith try to slap him.Gail: Chris Rock’s joke was in bad taste the way a lot of the jokes you hear in public performances are in bad taste. It’s presumed that some people’s feelings may get hurt. Someday I’m going to make a list of all the age-related laugh lines comics in their 40s make about people who are older.Bret: Speaking of tasteless jokes, how about Madison Cawthorn?Gail: You mean the part when the young congressman from North Carolina claimed Washington was a wild place where people he admired invited him to orgies and snorted cocaine? I want to say right off the bat that Cawthorn’s behavior should not be a blot on the reputation of 26-year-olds in general.Bret: To fall afoul of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, as Cawthorn did, is like having George Carlin rebuke you for an excessively foul mouth.Gail: Cawthorn’s Republican colleagues in the House sure are ready to dump him, but Donald Trump seems to still be in his corner.Sort of amazing how consistent our former president is in gravitating to the worst politicians imaginable.Bret: If by some miracle Democrats hang on to one or both houses of Congress this November, it will be because of Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and other would-be G.O.P. candidates trying to be just like them — the Radioactive Republicans. Trump’s embrace of these characters diminishes his chances of being renominated in 2024.In that respect, my money is on Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, winning the Republican nomination and facing the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, in the general, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado as their respective running mates. Placing any bets of your own?Gail: Impressed by your long-range thinking. If for some reason Trump doesn’t run again — which I can’t really imagine — DeSantis certainly has positioned himself to be next in line. By being as loathsome as possible. I find him completely appalling, but you’re mainly opposed to him as a Trump backer, right? How would you rate him as governor?Bret: I’m no fan of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But Democrats underestimate DeSantis at their peril. Florida is hopping, Miami feels like the hottest destination in the country and, barring some scandal or mishandled crisis, DeSantis is going to crush his most likely Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, in his race for re-election this fall. He also has a genius for baiting liberals and the media and he’s figured out a way to triangulate between the evangelical, business and Trumpian wings of the Republican Party.Long and short of it: If Biden doesn’t dramatically turn his presidency around to boost the Democratic brand and Trump doesn’t torpedo DeSantis’s candidacy out of spite — two big ifs, I’ll admit — DeSantis is going to be awfully hard to defeat in a general election. How would you propose to beat him?Gail: As far as his current re-election race in Florida goes, this is one of those contests where the impartial experts, asked to comment on the opposition’s chances, say things like “There’s always hope.” Don’t think I’m going to invest any energy in dreaming of a DeSantis defeat this year. But definitely going to keep watching him warily on the national level. I’m kinda fascinated that right now he’s at war with Disney over the Magic Kingdom’s defense of gay rights. Who’d have thought?Bret: Strange to say this, but one of the few things Trump did to the G.O.P. that I liked was try to push it to embrace gay rights. So much for that.The larger question here is how far private companies like Disney should go to take politically divisive positions, especially when corporate executives are dealing with a more politically active work force. My general sense is that it’s a bad idea for them to do so — but an even worse idea for politicians to punish them for essentially making business decisions. If people are offended by Disney’s stances, they’re free to skip Disney World.Gail: Florida aside, it’s gonna be a heck of an election year. One of my own fascination points is Ohio, my old home state, where there seem to be more Republicans running for the Senate than squirrels in Central Park. Recently one of them tweeted that when it comes to Ukraine, “We’ve got our own problems.”Bret: You’re referring to J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame, whose political views seem to spin about as fast as the revolving doors at Macy’s. The last time I saw him, right before the election in 2016, we were on Fareed Zakaria’s show agreeing that Donald Trump should lose. One of us stuck to his guns.Gail: Any contest you’re focused on at the moment? If you want a break until the end of March Madness, I would totally understand …Bret: The only contest that really matters to me right now is the one between Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, between democracy and darkness. On this, I’m happy that you and I and most Americans are on the same page — whatever people like Vance, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the mental wet-burp gang happen to think.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why the Jan. 6 Investigation Is a Test for Biden and Merrick Garland

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      WASHINGTON — Immediately after Merrick B. Garland was sworn in as attorney general in March of last year, he summoned top Justice Department officials and the F.B.I. director to his office. He wanted a detailed briefing on the case that will, in all likelihood, come to define his legacy: the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.Even though hundreds of people had already been charged, Mr. Garland asked to go over the indictments in detail, according to two people familiar with the meeting. What were the charges? What evidence did they have? How had they built such a sprawling investigation, involving all 50 states, so fast? What was the plan now?The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.Speaking to reporters on Friday, Mr. Garland said that he and the career prosecutors working on the case felt only the pressure “to do the right thing,” which meant that they “follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead.”Still, Democrats’ increasingly urgent calls for the Justice Department to take more aggressive action highlight the tension between the frenetic demands of politics and the methodical pace of one of the biggest prosecutions in the department’s history.“The Department of Justice must move swiftly,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House committee investigating the riot, said this past week. She and others on the panel want the department to charge Trump allies with contempt for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoenas.“Attorney General Garland,” Ms. Luria said during a committee hearing, “do your job so that we can do ours.”This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including officials in the Biden administration and people with knowledge of the president’s thinking, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.In a statement, Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the president believed that Mr. Garland had “decisively restored” the independence of the Justice Department.“President Biden is immensely proud of the attorney general’s service in this administration and has no role in investigative priorities or decisions,” Mr. Bates said.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.The Jan. 6 investigation is a test not just for Mr. Garland, but for Mr. Biden as well. Both men came into office promising to restore the independence and reputation of a Justice Department that Mr. Trump had tried to weaponize for political gain.For Mr. Biden, keeping that promise means inviting the ire of supporters who say they will hold the president to the remarks he made on the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, when he vowed to make sure “the past isn’t buried” and said that the people who planned the siege “held a dagger at the throat of America.”President Biden and Mr. Garland are managing a relationship between the White House and the Justice Department unlike any other in American history. Doug Mills/The New York TimesComplicating matters for Mr. Biden is the fact that his two children are entangled in federal investigations, making it all the more important that he stay out of the Justice Department’s affairs or risk being seen as interfering for his own family’s gain.The department is investigating whether Ashley Biden was the victim of pro-Trump political operatives who obtained her diary at a critical moment in the 2020 presidential campaign, and Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for tax avoidance and his international business dealings. Hunter Biden has not been charged with a crime and has said he handled his affairs appropriately.Justice Department officials do not keep Mr. Biden abreast of any investigation, including those involving his children, several people familiar with the situation said. The cases involving Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden are worked on by career officials, and people close to the president, including Dana Remus, the White House counsel, have no visibility into them, those people said.Still, the situation crystallizes the delicate ground that Mr. Biden and Mr. Garland are navigating.When it comes to Jan. 6, Justice Department officials emphasize that their investigation has produced substantial results already, including more than 775 arrests and a charge of seditious conspiracy against the leader of a far-right militia. More than 280 people have been charged with obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the election results.And federal prosecutors have widened the investigation to include a broad range of figures associated with Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power. According to people familiar with the inquiry, it now encompasses planning for pro-Trump rallies ahead of the riot and the push by some Trump allies to promote slates of fake electors.The Justice Department’s Jan. 6 inquiry has led to more than 775 arrests. More than 280 people have been charged with obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the election results.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Justice Department has given no public indication about its timeline or whether prosecutors might be considering a case against Mr. Trump.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack can send criminal referrals to the Justice Department, but only the department can bring charges. The panel is working with a sense of urgency to build its case ahead of this year’s midterm elections, when Republicans could retake the House and dissolve the committee.Mr. Biden, a longtime creature of the Senate, is aghast that people close to Mr. Trump have defied congressional subpoenas and has told people close to him that he does not understand how they think they can do so, according to two people familiar with his thinking.Mr. Garland has not changed his approach to criminal prosecutions in order to placate his critics, according to several Justice Department officials who have discussed the matter with him. He is regularly briefed on the Jan. 6 investigation, but he has remained reticent in public.“The best way to undermine an investigation is to say things out of court,” Mr. Garland said on Friday.Even in private, he relies on a stock phrase: “Rule of law,” he says, “means there not be one rule for friends and another for foes.”He did seem to acknowledge Democrats’ frustrations in a speech in January, when he reiterated that the department “remains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.”Quiet and reserved, Mr. Garland is well known for the job he was denied: a seat on the Supreme Court. President Barack Obama nominated him in March 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, but Senate Republicans blockaded the nomination.Mr. Garland’s peers regard him as a formidable legal mind and a political centrist. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for a federal appeals court judge and Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court before becoming a top official in the Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno. There, he prosecuted domestic terrorism cases and supervised the federal investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing.His critics say that his subsequent years as an appeals court judge made him slow and overly deliberative. But his defenders say that he has always carefully considered legal issues, particularly if the stakes were very high — a trait that most likely helped the Justice Department secure a conviction against Timothy J. McVeigh two years after the Oklahoma City attack.During the presidential transition after the 2020 election, Mr. Biden took his time mulling over candidates to be attorney general, according to a senior member of the transition team. He had promised the American people that he would reestablish the department as an independent arbiter within the government, not the president’s partisan brawler.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Justice Department widens inquiry. More