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      Rep. Tom Suozzi to Run for Governor of New York

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      Mr. Suozzi will enter a crowded field of Democrats seeking to challenge the incumbent, Gov. Kathy Hochul.Representative Thomas Suozzi, a Long Island Democrat, intends to announce on Monday that he will enter the race for governor of New York, broadening the field of candidates challenging the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, according to five people who have spoken with the congressman and his team in recent days.Mr. Suozzi, who has most recently focused on federal negotiations over raising a cap on state and local tax deductions, has positioned himself as a vocal centrist who is quick to lash what he casts as the excesses of his party’s left wing. His decision to run for governor, which he is expected to announce at an 11 a.m. news conference, will intensify and complicate the battle for moderate voters in one of the nation’s marquee Democratic primary contests next year.Mr. Suozzi, a former Nassau County executive, could cut into parts of the coalition Ms. Hochul is seeking to assemble on Long Island and in suburbs around the state. And in a crowded field, the race increasingly appears to be fluid and unpredictable.Mr. Suozzi, a strong fund-raiser, nevertheless would face steep challenges in a statewide Democratic primary.While early polling has limited value ahead of a primary slated for next June, he was in the single digits in a recent survey. Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female governor who has consistently led the field in early polls, has an overwhelming head start in fund-raising and endorsements.Other candidates in the race also have the kind of history-making potential that Mr. Suozzi, a white man, does not — most notably Attorney General Letitia James, who could be the first Black female governor in the country should she win.“I’ll comment at 11 o’clock,” Mr. Suozzi said, reached by phone.The five people with knowledge of his intentions asked for anonymity to discuss the private deliberations. But on Monday morning, his congressional campaign website was automatically redirecting visitors to a password-protected page for an unspecified statewide campaign, suozziforny.com.Democrats are expected to face a brutally challenging environment in next year’s midterm elections.Mr. Suozzi’s candidacy for governor could put at risk Democrats’ hold on his largely suburban House seat at a time when they are battling nationally to retain control of the chamber.Without a popular incumbent there to defend it, Republicans would likely make the seat a top pickup target in New York. Democrats could find themselves spending large sums to defend the seat or be forced to shore up their claim to it during the once-in-a-decade redistricting process. Diverting more Democratic voters to the district could in turn complicate the party’s efforts to use the process to seize one or two more House seats on Long Island.A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 6A crowded field. More

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      Republicans Have a Golden Opportunity. They Will Probably Blow It.

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      Last weekend I considered what the Democratic Party should expect from politics after Covid — the hope of revived popularity for Joe Biden under return-to-normalcy conditions, the danger that the left-tilting party might be losing ground across multiple different demographic groups. Now, after an interlude of giving thanks, let’s consider how post-Covid politics might look from the Republican side.Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.This pattern seems unlikely to be broken even if Biden’s poll numbers bounce back across 2022 and 2023. In that scenario Republicans will still probably narrowly recapture the House of Representatives, returning to the position that they held immediately after last November’s election — as a minority coalition, but a large one rather than a rump, which thanks to its structural advantages can always hope to hold at least part of Congress and ride a few lucky breaks into the White House.But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the party’s good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue. The problems in the Democratic Party — the danger that its progressive turn is costing it conservative-leaning minority votes, even as anti-Trump suburban voters could swing back to the G.O.P. — create an opportunity for Republicans to win real popular majorities at the national level, on the scale of Bush in 2004 if not quite Ronald Reagan. But the fact that they don’t need to be a majority coalition to exercise a certain power means that they’re more likely to choose badly, and stay roughly where they are.The alternative, the best-case post-Covid scenario for the party, was visible in Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia campaign, which essentially blended elements from Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 with Mitt Romney in 2012, while shedding the baggage that kept both men from winning popular-vote majorities. Youngkin has a Romney-esque persona — the corporate suit and genial family man — but where the man from Bain Capital ended up captive to party dogma on taxes and entitlement cuts, the former Carlyle Group executive promised higher education spending and tax cuts that benefit the lower-middle class, playing against the corporate-Republican and supply-side stereotypes.Meanwhile, Youngkin imitated Trump not just in his relatively populist promises but also in his willingness to pick cultural fights — in this case, on critical race theory in schools — that other moderate Republicans might shy away from. But then in most other ways he was an anti-Trump: decent rather than bullying, reasonable rather than paranoid, keeping conspiracism at a distance, reassuringly competent rather than apocalyptic.So that’s all the G.O.P. needs nationally to fully exploit its post-Covid opportunities — a more populist economic agenda, a willingness to take the fight to the progressive left (but with a smile) and an end to Trumpian conspiracism.But do enough actors in the party really want that combination? At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think they’re on the cusp of imposing one upon the party. But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as they’re restored to power.Among the party’s voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite not for the Youngkin-style appropriation of certain parts of Trumpism, but for Donald Trump in full — nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives can’t entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.And here’s the thing: Between the Democratic Party’s weaknesses, Biden’s age and the unimpressiveness of his possible successors, Republicans could very easily be competitive in 2024 while renominating Trump and campaigning on a purely negative agenda.Sure, they can’t expect to govern effectively that way, and they’d be throwing away a potentially golden opportunity. But in the end the race would be close, there would be some exciting constitutional-crisis possibilities in the aftermath, and if the Democrats pulled it out, well, their majorities would be slim and 2026 would be just around the corner.And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 15 years, it’s that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.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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      Democrats Struggle to Energize Their Base as Frustrations Mount

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      Even as President Biden achieves some significant victories, Democrats are warning that many of their most loyal supporters see inaction and broken campaign promises.Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.Already, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a sharp fall among some of his core constituencies, showing double-digit declines among Black, Latino, female and young voters. Those drops have led to increased tension between the White House and progressives at a time of heightened political anxiety, after Democrats were caught off-guard by the intensity of the backlash against them in elections earlier this month. Mr. Biden’s plummeting national approval ratings have also raised concerns about whether he would — or should — run for re-election in 2024.Not all of the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Biden; a large percentage of frustration is with the Democratic Party itself.“It’s frustrating to see the Democrats spend all of this time fighting against themselves and to give a perception to the country, which the Republicans are seizing on, that the Democrats can’t govern,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads the A.M.E. churches across Georgia. “And some of us are tired of them getting pushed around, because when they get pushed around, African Americans get shoved.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading House progressive, warned that the party is at risk of “breaking trust” with vital constituencies, including young people and people of color.“There’s all this focus on ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but are they delivering on the things that people are asking for the most right now?” she said in an interview. “In communities like mine, the issues that people are loudest and feel most passionately about are the ones that the party is speaking to the least.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats acknowledge that a significant part of the challenge facing their party is structural: With slim congressional majorities, the party cannot pass anything unless the entire caucus agrees. That empowers moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to block some of the biggest promises to their supporters, including a broad voting rights bill.A more aggressive approach may not lead to eventual passage of an immigration or voting rights law, but it would signal to Democrats that Mr. Biden is fighting for them, said Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Shakir and others worry that the focus on the two significant pieces of legislation — infrastructure and the spending bill — won’t be enough to energize supporters skeptical of the federal government’s ability to improve their lives.“I’m a supporter of Biden, a supporter of the agenda, and I’m frustrated and upset with him to allow this to go in the direction it has,” said Mr. Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020. “It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden in this debate.”He added: “It’s made the president look weak.”The divide over how much attention to devote to staunch Democratic constituencies versus moderate swing voters taps into a political debate that’s long roiled the party: Is it more important to energize the base or to persuade swing voters? And can Democrats do both things at once?White House advisers argue that winning swing voters, particularly the suburban independents who play an outsize role in battleground districts, is what will keep Democrats in power — or at least curb the scale of their midterm losses. They see the drop among core groups of Democrats as reflective of a challenging political moment — rising inflation, the continued pandemic, uncertainty about schools — rather than unhappiness with the administration’s priorities.“It’s November of 2021, not September of 2022,” John Anzalone, Mr. Biden’s pollster, said. “If we pass Build Back Better, we have a great message going into the midterms, when the bell rings on Labor Day, about what we’ve done for people.”Even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation that passed the House earlier this month offers proposals transforming child care, elder care, prescription drugs and financial aid for college, as well as making the largest investment ever to slow climate change. But some of the most popular policies will not be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections, nor will the impact of many of the infrastructure projects.Already, Democrats face a challenging education effort with voters. According to a survey conducted by Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, only about a third of white battleground voters think that either infrastructure or the broader spending bill will help them personally. Among white Democratic battleground voters, support for the bills is only 72 percent.Representative James E. Clyburn, the high-ranking House Democrat from South Carolina and a close ally of Mr. Biden, said the way the bills were negotiated and reported in the media had voters in his district asking him about money that was cut from initiatives rather than the sweeping benefits.“People stopped me on the streets saying we cut money from our H.B.C.U.s,” Mr. Clyburn said, pointing out that more funding for historically Black colleges and universities will be added in the coming years of the administration. “So while everybody keeps blaming the Democrats, Democrats, Democrats, it’s the Senate rules that are archaic, and stop us from passing these bills.”Mr. Clyburn and other lawmakers say they struggle to explain the vacillations of congressional wrangling to their voters, who expected that by electing Democrats to the majority they would be able to pass their agenda.“Nobody thought about the filibuster and the realities,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee. “People don’t understand the Byrd rule and the parliamentarian and the things we have to put up with. It does lower their enthusiasm.”Atlanta voters cast their ballots last November. Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia, but inaction on voting rights has weakened their support.Jessica Mcgowan/Getty ImagesAs they’ve begun to do with the infrastructure bill, the White House plans an aggressive approach to sell the social policy legislation once it passes, dispatching Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top officials for events across the country.“There is a real window of opportunity to show the cooperation and competence people expect from us,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and a leader of a moderate wing of lawmakers in congressional negotiations. “It’s up to us to communicate what we just accomplished for families and for the country.”Yet many activists say the White House is to blame for failing to aggressively push for the central promises made to their supporters during the campaign. They said they wanted Mr. Biden to leverage both his bully pulpit and executive powers to tackle student loans, criminal justice, immigration reform and other issues.“We’re talking about democracy in such a crisis and here we are with very few legislative days left and the lack of urgency is deafening,” said Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a minister and civil rights advocate who has helped lead the response from faith leaders on voting rights. “For the president to say he can only do one thing at a time is simply not true.”Lorella Praeli, the president of Community Change Action, a group advocating immigration reform, offered a terse warning to the administration about keeping Latino support: “There are no participation trophies.”Some of the most popular policies in the social safety net bill that passed the House won’t be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAlready, the national environment looks difficult for Democrats, who may lose seats in redistricting and face the historical trend of a president’s party losing seats during his first term in office.Tomás Robles, the co-chair of Lucha, a Latino civil rights group based in Phoenix that is widely credited with helping Democrats win the state in 2020, said people were “disillusioned and unmotivated” by what they had seen in the first 10 months of Democratic governance.“When you’re not passing bold progressive policies, you have to be able to show something,” Mr. Robles said. “President Biden gets the most blame because he’s the most visible, but it’s the party as a whole that has failed its voters.”In Georgia, inaction on voting rights has fueled a steepening decline of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters. The New Georgia Project, a progressive civil rights group, conducted a study last month of Black voters in Georgia, and found that 66 percent approved of the job Mr. Biden was doing, and 51 percent thought that his administration was working to address the concerns of the Black community. In 2020, Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia.Representative Cori Bush, a progressive whose district includes large parts of St. Louis, said the social safety net and climate provisions included in the bill that passed the House could not be pared down any further. And, she added, the White House has to follow through on other provisions if Democrats want to excite Black voters — perhaps the party’s most loyal constituency — ahead of the midterm elections.“Do I believe Black community members will be happy to see these investments? Absolutely. Will they feel like this has changed their lives in some ways? Yes,” Ms. Bush said. “But will this be enough to excite? When you’re excited, that means that you feel like something else is coming. You have hope that more is happening. So what’s next?” More

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      That ‘Team Beto’ Fund-Raising Email? It Might Not Be From Beto.

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      Mimicking official correspondence is an age-old marketing trick. But look-alike emails suggesting links to Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for governor show the tactic has accelerated in the digital era.Kenneth Pennington, a top digital strategist for Beto O’Rourke, had a simple plan.Mr. O’Rourke would announce his bid for governor of Texas early on a recent Monday morning and then Mr. Pennington would break the news via email to Mr. O’Rourke’s lucrative list of supporters, a loyal following that had already raised tens of millions of dollars for Mr. O’Rourke in his past bids for the Senate and the White House.But Mr. Pennington soon noticed something troubling: a parallel wave of look-alike emails from groups completely unaffiliated with the O’Rourke campaign that were designed to capitalize on the Texas Democrat’s moment. The emails used subject lines, sender names and URLs embedded with phrases like “team Beto” and “official Beto.” And in most cases, none of the money these emails eventually raised went directly to the campaign.Mr. O’Rourke still brought in more than $2 million from 31,000 donors, the largest 24-hour sum that any new candidate has announced this year, his campaign said. But for Mr. Pennington and the rest of the campaign, the nagging question was how much more they might have hauled in if other Democratic groups hadn’t been so busy siphoning off their share.“The frustrating thing,” Mr. Pennington said, “is we will never know how much we lost.”Welcome to the sometimes-sketchy world of online campaign fund-raising, where misdirection and misleading everyday Americans — often older Americans — to maximize clicks and cash is increasingly a dark art form.Imitating others and mimicking official correspondence with postage-paid mailers is an age-old trick that marketers have used since long before the internet. The tactic has been adapted and updated for the digital era — and appears to be accelerating in prevalence in the political sphere.At stake can be millions of dollars in an era when mass online political donating is in vogue in both parties. Copycatting Mr. O’Rourke’s brand surged in popularity recently, but on the Republican side, mimicking the brand of former President Donald J. Trump has been common for months.In some cases, established organizations are simply capitalizing on the day’s big news or the politician of the moment to gin up excitement among their own supporters with some verbal sleight-of-hand. In others, political action committees with anodyne names are raising funds in the name of a popular politician that they have no affiliation with at all. Mr. Pennington described such groups as “leeches” and “scam PACs.”Where the money goes from there can be murky, though big payments to the operatives and consulting firms that operate those PACs have drawn increasing scrutiny from political colleagues, regulators and law enforcement alike.Some of these operations are legal, sometimes burying the requisite disclaimers in the fine print. Others may not be. This month, the Justice Department charged three political operatives with running a scheme that prosecutors said defrauded small donors of $3.5 million.“I am not at all surprised that unscrupulous actors are essentially impersonating popular Democratic campaigns to try to raise money,” said Josh Nelson, a Democratic digital strategist who runs a firm, The Juggernaut Project, focused on growing email lists more ethically. “That’s the unfortunate trend we’ve seen.”Mr. Nelson has been publicly pressuring progressives to abandon more deceptive fund-raising tactics, and has asked the leading Democratic technology companies to intervene because new laws are unlikely to stiffen penalties for deception anytime soon.“Ultimately, I think it is going to take technology vendors cracking down on these tactics,” Mr. Nelson said.For now, there seems to be little that the most aggressive politicians and PACs in both parties won’t say to raise more money from online supporters.“Your covid test result,” read the alarming subject line of a fund-raising email from the campaign arm of House conservatives the day before Mr. O’Rourke entered the governor’s race. (The email was about mobilizing opposition to a Covid-19 vaccine mandate.)A new favorite tactic of the Republican National Committee has been making it appear as if supporters have urgent and overdue bills. “WARNING: Payment Incomplete” has been the sender line of more than 15 party emails since August, including one just before Thanksgiving. (A warning this week was about membership status as “Trump Social Media Founding Supporter.”)The day after Mr. O’Rourke’s announcement, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sent an email to supporters who had not ordered anything, using “Your Order Confirmation” as the sender and “Order ID: 73G526S” as the subject line. (The email was an effort to sell “Let’s Go Brandon” wrapping paper, which references a popular conservative phrase that has become a stand-in for an insult aimed at President Biden.)The House Conservatives Fund, the Republican National Committee and Mr. Abbott’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Some of these examples may seem like easily detectable and even harmless deceptions. But strategists in both parties say a huge share of online cash is raised from older Americans who are less adroit online and have a harder time separating fact from hyperbole. The reason that so-called Nigerian prince scams exist, after all, is because people fall for them.When Mr. O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, he shattered Democratic fund-raising records, and his entry into the 2022 governor’s race has been highly anticipated. His campaign team held discussions before the announcement about how to limit the funds that less scrupulous actors might try to cannibalize.Two PACs sent out similar emails suggesting they were raising money for Mr. O’Rourke, using “team beto” and “official beto” in the URLs of their donation links. But all of the funds went directly to the PACs instead of the campaign.And outside groups did pounce almost immediately.“Official: Beto is in!!” came one such message the morning his run was announced. It listed its sender as “Team Beto (BSP).”The “BSP” stood for Blue South PAC, a new political action committee that sprung up this year and was among the more aggressive imitators of Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign. The group sent no less than five emails from a sender that included the phrase “Team Beto” in the campaign’s first three days.“At the very least, they’re trying to trick people into opening the email as if it’s from the campaign,” Mr. Pennington said, adding that he raced to send out the campaign’s first fund-raising message sooner than planned when he saw others already arriving.In one solicitation, the link to the Blue South PAC donation page on ActBlue, the Democratic digital donation-processing site, was highlighted in bright yellow and appeared as if it belonged to the campaign: actblue.com/donate/team-beto.Those who clicked were greeted by a message: “Show your support by donating and joining Team Beto!” Except 100 percent of the funds went to the Blue South PAC, according to the fine print on the donation page.A related group, Defeat Republicans, deployed a nearly identical email, featuring a similar URL highlighted in yellow: actblue.com/donate/official-beto.Both groups are linked to the same digital strategist, Zach Schreiber, who emailed a statement on behalf of both Blue South PAC and Defeat Republicans saying that their digital strategy was “in line with the industry best practices.”“Our community looks to us for news, action alerts, and opportunities to help elect Democrats,” the statement said, adding that the PACs “look forward to working with the Beto campaign.”Founded in the summer of 2020, Defeat Republicans raised almost $1 million in less than a year through the end of June 2021. In that time, federal records show it paid Mr. Schreiber $133,000 and directed another $208,000 to a firm, Opt-In Strategies, that lists him as a consultant on its website. Blue South PAC had spent only about $37,000 through the end of June, with more than one-third of the spending going to another consulting firm, UpWave Digital Solutions, founded by Mr. Schreiber.Federal records show that Defeat Republicans has given more than $400,000 to Democratic campaigns. The biggest chunk, $230,000, went to Jennifer Carroll Foy, who ran for governor of Virginia as a Democrat; Ms. Foy’s campaign paid Opt-In Strategies $67,500 for “list acquisition,” state records show. The PACs also said it had contributed $5,000 to Mr. O’Rourke.Plenty of other groups with missions that bear little relation to Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign seized on his entry into the race. These PACs have no formal affiliation with Mr. O’Rourke, even as they cite his campaign in fund-raising, and have no obligation to spend any of what they collect to help him.One PAC, The Majority Rules, ostensibly devoted to ending partisan gerrymandering, wrote an email to its list on Mr. O’Rourke’s first day that read, “The first 24 hours after a campaign announces are critical to its success. We still need another 103 grassroots Democrats to step up before midnight to give Beto the momentum he needs.”All the funds went to the PAC.A solicitation email sent from a PAC called 314 Action.Another PAC, 314 Action, devoted to electing scientists, sent an email with the subject line “BREAKING: Beto is running for Texas governor” the day he entered the race. The funds went to the PAC. The sender line in that email displayed as “Beto O’Rourke Update” — a format that industry insiders say can make it appear, at a glance, as if the politicians themselves sent the missive. (Directly using a politician’s name alone without consent is generally not allowed because it is seen as writing directly in his or her voice without authorization.)A nonprofit arm of 314 Action has announced it will spend up to $500,000 this year targeting four Republican governors, including Mr. Abbott of Texas. Joshua Morrow, the executive director of the 314 Action groups, did not respond to questions about the group’s fund-raising tactics but said in a statement that Mr. Abbott is “at the top of the list” of “anti-science politicians” they will target into 2022.314 Action uses other techniques to lure potential supporters, including sending three emails so far this month from “BREAKING from NBC News.” Another set of 314 Action emails used “NBC News Alert” in the sender line in September.Mr. Nelson, the Democratic digital strategist pressing his industry to curb such tactics, said groups keep doing it because it works — at least in the short term. But he worries that over time bad actors could poison the well for the whole party if donors stop trusting political groups with their money.“Ultimately there is a real risk that we’re going to push donors away,” he said. More

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      Edward Durr Jr.: The Trump Republican Who’s Riding High in New Jersey

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      “If anything, my election showed nobody’s untouchable,” said Edward Durr Jr., who pulled off a stunning victory to win a New Jersey State Senate seat.Edward Durr Jr., a Republican who this month toppled New Jersey’s second most powerful lawmaker, had three children under 13 when a mortgage company began foreclosure proceedings on his 1,200-square-foot, one-story home in South Jersey in 1997.Within two years, he and his first wife had filed for bankruptcy, identifying $64,784.99 in debts to J.C. Penney, an insurance company and a bank, court records show.“My kids didn’t really know what was going on,” said Mr. Durr, who dropped out of high school when his father, a self-employed carpenter, got sick and needed help at work. “We kind of sheltered them from that.”Two decades later, New Jersey’s high property taxes and cost of living would become centerpieces of Mr. Durr’s campaign, cementing his improbable win against Steve Sweeney, a Democrat who had held a near-final say over all legislation in Trenton as president of the State Senate.A commercial truck driver, he describes himself as a “blue-collar, Christian, Second Amendment supporter.” He is a strong backer of former President Donald J. Trump, who called to congratulate him on his win, and an opponent of vaccine and mask mandates and what he calls government “tyranny.”Mr. Durr’s victory and the region’s strong Republican turnout are considered emblematic of evaporating enthusiasm for Democrats in suburban and rural areas and wide dissatisfaction with President Biden. That mix contributed to a Republican win in Virginia and Gov. Philip D. Murphy’s unexpectedly close re-election in New Jersey, and is seen as an ominous sign for the Democratic Party ahead of next year’s congressional midterms.“If anything, my election showed nobody’s untouchable,” Mr. Durr said.During the campaign, Democratic operatives used mailers and a video ad to highlight Mr. Durr’s past financial troubles, but he won by about 2,300 votes anyway, pulling off one of the biggest political upsets in state history.“Not for nothing,” said Steve Kush, a Republican consultant who worked with Mr. Durr’s campaign, “but those kinds of attacks actually backfired this time. There’s a lot of other people going through some very hard times. Who hasn’t had problems with financing?”Since the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Durr, 58, has become a mini-celebrity, unable to walk through Walmart or ShopRite or pick up chicken wings from his local pub, Wilson’s, without being asked to pose for a selfie.Mr. Durr, a Republican who won an upset race against one of the most powerful Democrats in New Jersey, has said his newfound fame made him queasy.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesHe does not take office until Jan. 11. But he is already using a new domain name, edthetrucker.com, to raise funds for re-election and hawking “Ed the Trucker” hats, “Riding DURRty” bumper stickers and “Dangerous Durr” T-shirts and mugs, co-opting a term Mr. Murphy used to describe him.His campaign flew so far under the radar that it was not until after Election Day that a reporter for WNYC, a public radio station, publicized incendiary comments he had made on Twitter that disparaged the Muslim Prophet Muhammad and called Islam a “false religion.”On the day Mr. Sweeney conceded, Mr. Durr met with Muslim leaders at a masjid near his campaign headquarters, reiterating his public apology for the comments and offering a commitment to “stand against Islamophobia and all forms of hate.”“As long as you know somebody, it’s hard to hate somebody — don’t you think?” he told reporters gathered outside, holding a Quran given to him during a two-hour meeting with members of the state’s Council on American Islamic Relations. “It’s very easy to hate somebody that you don’t know.”At home in Logan Township, 15 miles outside Philadelphia, Mr. Durr himself remains largely unknown. He did not win a majority of votes in the Democrat-led town where he lives near the Delaware River, in an area known as Repaupo.In Penns Grove, where the three-bedroom, one-bath house he lost in foreclosure last sold for $22,000, neighbors said they had not heard of him before Election Day, if at all.“He didn’t win his own town,” said Frank Minor, Logan’s Democratic mayor. “That tells you a lot right there.”“He’s been anti-Muslim, anti-vax,” Mr. Minor added. “He’s a Trump Republican. That’s what he is. That’s what he’s going to do.”After disparaging Islam, Mr. Durr met with Muslim leaders at Al Minhal Academy of Islamic Education in Washington Township, N.J. He left carrying a Quran.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesRural and predominantly white, southern New Jersey is one of the most conservative parts of the state. Democrats in Mr. Durr’s district outnumber Republicans, yet Mr. Trump narrowly won more votes than his Democratic opponent in 2016 and in 2020.Buoyed by Mr. Sweeney and the influence of George E. Norcross III, a well-connected political boss, Democrats controlled most local and state offices. That also changed on Election Day.Mr. Durr’s two Republican running-mates ousted incumbent Democrats in the Assembly, and Republicans flipped two seats on the Gloucester County Board of Commissioners, the legislative body where Mr. Sweeney cut his political teeth.Mr. Durr said he shed 55 pounds during the campaign, weight loss he attributed to walking and knocking on doors in places Republicans seldom consider competitive: Mr. Sweeney’s hometown, West Deptford, and the city of Bridgeton, a tight-knit enclave of mostly Latino immigrants.“People were, like, shocked,” Mr. Durr said. “They’d say, ‘Nobody’s ever been here.’”Mr. Durr said he hoped to keep his job as a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanigan furniture chain, and the health insurance it provides, even after he is sworn in as a senator, a part-time position that pays $49,000. Lawmakers who took office after 2010 are not eligible for health coverage.He rides a 2012 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, spoils his three pit bulls — “I call them my fur babies” — and, with his five siblings, takes care of his mother, a recent widow who lives next door.Before joining the furniture company, he worked in construction and said he often held multiple jobs, including making pastries for Dunkin’ Donuts and working in a farm supply store. During two growing seasons, he drove trucks for East Coast Sod and Seed.“He was on time,” said Andy Mottel, the manager of the Pilesgrove, N.J., farm, which transports sod across the country and provides the field grass for Yankee Stadium. “He worked every day. He has that strong voice — very knowledgeable about sports.”Mr. Durr completed his G.E.D. through Gloucester City High School, and he has made no secret of his unease with his sudden stardom. (“I feel like I’m about to throw up,” he said the day Mr. Sweeney conceded.) He will be a member of the minority party in the State House, making it unlikely he will have significant power to steer or stonewall legislation.When ticking off his legislative priorities, he mentions goals like “bringing jobs here, bringing businesses here,” and he is the first to say he has a lot to learn about how Trenton works. “If it’s an issue that concerns New Jersey citizens, I’m going fight for it,” he said.It was his fourth campaign for public office. He ran for State Assembly as an independent in 2017 and as a Republican in 2019, and he ran last year for Logan Township council.It is unclear how much he spent to win. The latest financial reports show he spent roughly $2,300, but he has said that the final figure will be between $5,000 and $10,000.New Jersey has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and Mr. Durr said he originally decided to run for public office after learning he could not get a license to carry a concealed weapon.“I’ve been on every military base as a truck driver on the East Coast,” he said. “Why am I being refused my right to self-protect? The Second Amendment says I have a right to self-protect.”Mr. Durr’s Islamophobic remarks in 2019 were not his only controversial comments on social media.He also appeared to equate public acquiescence to pandemic-related mandates to remaining silent during the Holocaust. After a violent racist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, he offered comments reflecting the legitimacy of “both sides,” a position similar to Mr. Trump’s initial response.Officials with the Islamic council said that they worried that Mr. Durr’s past hate speech, left unchecked, could lead to violence. During the meeting at the masjid, they offered him examples of relatives who had been targeted for being Muslim.Three people who participated said that he was engaged and appeared genuine in his desire to learn more about the Muslim faith. The group shared snacks, and Mr. Durr observed a 10-minute prayer service.“He was open minded,” said John Starling, the imam of a mosque in Cherry Hill, N.J. “He was without hesitation ready to make the situation right.”Atiya Aftab, who teaches in the Middle Eastern Studies program at Rutgers University and also attended the meeting, said she understood it as the start of an ongoing conversation.“I’m not second-guessing his intent,” Professor Aftab said. “I did feel that it was genuine and authentic. But ultimately it’s actions that will speak louder than words.”Camille Furst contributed reporting and Susan C. Beachy contributed research. More

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      G.O.P. Cements Hold on Legislatures in Battleground States

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      Democrats were once able to count on wave elections to win back key statehouses. Republican gerrymandering is making that all but impossible.Republicans are locking in newly gerrymandered maps for the legislatures in four battleground states that are set to secure the party’s control in the statehouse chambers over the next decade, fortifying the G.O.P. against even the most sweeping potential Democratic wave elections.In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.Although much of the attention on this year’s redistricting process has focused on gerrymandered congressional maps, the new maps being drafted in state legislatures have been just as distorted.And statehouses have taken on towering importance: With the federal government gridlocked, these legislatures now serve as the country’s policy laboratory, crafting bills on abortion, guns, voting restrictions and other issues that shape the national political debate.“This is not your founding fathers’ gerrymander,” said Chris Lamar, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center who focuses on redistricting. “This is something more intense and durable and permanent.”This redistricting cycle, the first one in a decade, builds on a political trend that accelerated in 2011, when Republicans in swing states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan drew highly gerrymandered state legislative maps.Since those maps were enacted, Republicans have held both houses of state government in all three places for the entire decade. They never lost control of a single chamber, even as Democrats won some of the states’ races for president, governor and Senate.All three of those Northern states are likely to see some shift back toward parity this year, with a new independent commission drawing Michigan’s maps, and Democratic governors in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will probably force the process to be completed by the courts.Gerrymandering is a tool used by both parties in swing states as well as less competitive ones. Democrats in deep-blue states like Illinois are moving to increase their advantage in legislatures, and Republicans in deep-red states like Utah and Idaho are doing the same.But in politically contested states where Republicans hold full control, legislators are carefully crafting a G.O.P. future. They are armed with sharper technology, weakened federal voting statutes and the knowledge that legal challenges to their maps may not be resolved in time for the next elections.In Texas, North Carolina and Ohio, Republican governors have signed into law new maps with a significant advantage for the party. Georgia is moving quickly to join them.Republicans say that the growth of such heavily skewed legislatures is both the result of the party’s electoral victories and of where voters choose to live.State legislative districts are by nature much smaller in population than congressional districts, meaning they are often more geographically compact.As Democratic voters have crowded into cities and commuter suburbs, and voters in rural and exurban areas have grown increasingly Republican, G.O.P. mapmakers say that they risk running afoul of other redistricting criteria if they split up those densely populated Democratic areas across multiple state legislative districts.“What you see is reflective of the more even distribution of Republican and right-leaning voters across wider geographic areas,” said Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. Trying to draw more competitive legislative districts, he said, would result in “just a lot of squiggly lines.”He pointed to maps in Wisconsin that were proposed by a commission created by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Under those designs, Republicans would still have a majority in both state legislative chambers (though with significantly smaller margins).“They’re limited by geography,” Mr. Kincaid said. “There’s only so many things you can do to spread that many voters across a wide area.”Democrats note that Republicans are still cracking apart liberal communities — especially in suburbs near Akron and Cleveland in Ohio and in predominantly Black counties in northern and central North Carolina — in a way that helps the G.O.P. and cuts against a geographical argument.“They are carving up Democratic voters where they can’t pack them,” said Garrett Arwa, the director of campaigns at the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He argued that Democratic map proposals “all put forth better and more fair maps that I would say are far from a Rorschach test.”Democrats have fewer opportunities to unilaterally draw state legislative maps, particularly in battleground states. Of the 14 states where the margin of the 2020 presidential race was fewer than 10 percentage points, Democrats are able to draw state legislative maps in just one: Nevada. Republicans control the redistricting process in six of those 14 states. (The rest have divided governments, or their maps are drawn by commissions.)But when Democrats have had an opening, they have also enacted significant gerrymanders at the state legislative level. In Nevada, Democrats are close to finalizing a map that would give them supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature, despite President Biden’s winning just 51 percent of the state’s vote last year.The same holds true in deeply blue states. In Illinois, newly drawn State Senate maps would give Republicans roughly 23 percent of seats in the chamber, even though former President Donald J. Trump won more than 40 percent of voters in the state in 2020.Republicans have taken two approaches to ensure durable majorities in state legislatures. The tactics in Texas and Georgia are more subtle, while Republicans in Ohio and North Carolina have taken more brazen steps.In Texas and Georgia, the party has largely eliminated competitive districts and made both Republican and Democratic seats safer, a move that tends to ward off criticism from at least some incumbents in the minority party.“Out of the 150 seats in the Texas House, only six of them are within seven points or closer,” said Sam Wang, the director of the Princeton Redistricting Project. Republicans now hold a 20-seat advantage in the chamber, 85 to 65, and the new maps will give the party roughly two more seats. So while the G.O.P. lawmakers did not try to draw an aggressive supermajority, “what they really did a good job of there is getting rid of competition and getting a reasonably safe majority for themselves,” Mr. Wang said.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      The Problem of Political Despair

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      On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.My friend Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, uses the phrase “the bad feeling” to describe certain kinds of stories about America’s democratic unraveling. “The bad feeling is that pit of the stomach feeling that we’re not OK, and it’s not clear we’re going to be OK,” he told me.Bill Armstrong, courtesy of ClampArt, New YorkThe problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes. That’s upsetting, but it’s also fairly normal given the tendency of American voters to react against the party in power, and in a democratic system Republicans should prevail when they have public sentiment behind them.What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House. North Carolina, a state Joe Biden lost by 1.3 percentage points, just passed a redistricting map that would create 10 Republican seats, three Democratic ones and one competitive one. “Democrats would have to win North Carolina by 11.4 points just to win half its congressional seats,” FiveThirtyEight reported.There are already lawsuits against the map, but the Supreme Court — which is controlled by conservatives even though Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections — gutted constitutional limitations on gerrymandering in 2019.Things are, if anything, even worse in the Senate, where growing geographic polarization threatens to give Republicans a near lock on the chamber. As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote last month, the Democratic data guru David Shor predicts that if Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote in 2024, they will lose seven seats compared to where we are now.Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again. As Hayes said, there’s an inexorability about what’s coming that is “very hard to watch.”Already, the Republican Party winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies. During the presidential campaign, a right-wing caravan tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, and Senator Marco Rubio cheered them on. School board members and public health offices have sought help from the Justice Department to deal with a barrage of threats and harassment. Three congressional Republicans have said they want to give an internship to the teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. One of those Republicans, Representative Paul Gosar, earlier tweeted an animated video of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the overwhelming majority of his caucus stood by him.I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us. How much comfort you take from this depends on your disposition.Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay. In order to get people to throw themselves into the fight to save this broken country, we need leaders who can convince them that they haven’t already lost.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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      How Higher Prices This Holiday Season Could Cost Democrats, Too

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      Rising prices for gas and a holiday meal could come back to bite Democrats, who fear that inflation may upend their electoral prospects in the 2022 midterms.AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — Samantha Martin, a single mother shopping ahead of Thanksgiving, lamented how rising gas and grocery prices have eaten away at the raise she got this year as a manager at McDonald’s.Gas “is crazy out of hand,” Ms. Martin said as she returned a shopping cart at an Aldi discount market in Auburn Hills, a Detroit suburb, to collect a 25-cent deposit.Her most recent fillup was $3.59 a gallon, about $1 more than the price in the spring. Her raise, to $16 an hour from $14, was “pretty good, but it’s still really hard to manage,” Ms. Martin said. “I got a raise just to have the gas go up, and that’s what my raise went to.”Ms. Martin, 35, a political independent, doesn’t blame either party for inflation, but in a season of discontent, her disapproval fell more heavily on Democrats who run Washington. She voted for President Biden but is disappointed with him and his party. “I think I would probably give somebody else a shot,” she said.As Americans go on the road this week to travel for family gatherings, the higher costs of driving and one of the most expensive meals of the year have alarmed Democrats, who fear that inflation may upend their electoral prospects in the midterms. Republicans are increasingly confident that a rising cost of living — the ultimate kitchen-table issue — will be the most salient factor in delivering a red wave in 2022.Democrats’ passage in quick succession of the $1 trillion infrastructure law and, in the House, of a $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate bill, promise once-in-a-generation investments that Democratic candidates plan to run on next year, with many of the policies in the bills broadly popular.But, despite rising wages and falling unemployment, Democrats are also in danger of being swept aside in a hostile political environment shaped in large part by the highest inflation in 30 years, which has defied early predictions that it would be short-lived as the country pulled out of the pandemic.With control of Congress and many key governor seats at stake, Republicans are pointing to public and private surveys that show inflation is linked to Americans’ falling approval of Mr. Biden. And, given the wholesale gerrymanders drawn, particularly by Republicans, in the current round of congressional redistricting, the Democrats would face a high bar in keeping their paper-thin majority in the House of Representatives, even in a favorable environment. President Biden talking with an assembly line worker as he looks over an electric Hummer by General Motors during a plant visit in Detroit last week. Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe president’s recent tour of ports, bridges and auto plants — which was meant to promote the infrastructure legislation — was overshadowed in part by inflation anxieties. As he test drove an electric Hummer at a General Motors plant in Detroit this week, his message of a future of zero-emission vehicles was eclipsed by a present in which Americans are driving more miles in conventional vehicles, contributing to soaring gas prices.Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a vulnerable House district, wrote to Mr. Biden this week that inflation was the most pressing concern of her constituents. A former C.I.A. analyst in Iraq, she urged the president to pressure Saudi Arabia to increase oil output.Ms. Slotkin, who won her seat in the midterm wave of 2018, is one of two Michigan Democrats in highly competitive districts that include the Detroit suburbs. In the Trump years, Democrats had mixed results in the populous region, advancing in white-collar communities but losing ground with their traditional union supporters.In an interview, Ms. Slotkin said that during a recent visit home, she heard constantly about the high costs of gas and groceries, and experienced them herself. “I buy groceries, I drive a ton,” she said. “Thanksgiving week is going to be more expensive by a long shot than last Thanksgiving.”[This Year’s Thanksgiving Feast Will Wallop the Wallet.]She acknowledged the political peril that rising consumer prices could pose for her party if it continues next year. “Kitchen-table issues affect Michigan and the Midwest more than any other national issue going on in Washington,” she said.In interviews with voters in suburban Detroit, including from Ms. Slotkin’s district and that of the second vulnerable Democrat, Representative Haley Stevens, residents almost universally acknowledged the pain of rising prices on their budgets. But it was unclear, from their accounts, that Democrats would suffer politically. Most voters ascribed blame according to their party leanings — as they do on almost all issues in an era of hyperpolarization.Margie Kulaga of Hazel Park, a Trump voter in 2020, said she paid 49 cents a pound, up from 33 cents a pound last year, for a 23-pound turkey that she had just bought from a Kroger market. Prices for meat and eggs have risen by 11.9 percent in the Midwest from a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.“I blame Biden, his whole administration,’’ Ms. Kulaga, 55, said. “I never used to cut coupons, but now I do.”On the other hand, Gloria Bailey, 63, a special-education teacher who lives in the suburb of Redford, is a Biden supporter who said rising costs should not be laid at his doorstep.“The coronavirus has affected a lot of shipments and deliveries and crops and drivers who bring the food to market,” she said.Container ships waiting to enter the Port of Los Angeles in October.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThis month, Republicans broadly advanced in elections across the country, especially in Virginia, prompting forecasts of a similar tide in 2022. Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship after emphasizing the rights of parents to control how schools operate and what they teach.But Mr. Youngkin’s chief strategist, Jeff Roe, said the “big takeaway” of the election was how the rising cost of living had significantly motivated voters, an issue that was little covered by the news media. He predicted it would drive Senate and House races around the country next year (many of which he and his firm have a hand in).Biden’s ​​Social Policy Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 6A narrow vote. More