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      Senate Democrats Hold Hearing on Voting in Georgia

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      ATLANTA — Senate Democrats took their campaign for far-reaching federal voting rights legislation on the road to Georgia on Monday, convening a rare hearing in a state at the center of a national fight over elections.At a field hearing in Atlanta, lawmakers and voters decried the restrictive new voting law signed this spring by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as an attempt to disenfranchise Black and young voters and consolidate Republicans tenuous grip on power.“There is much talk about not being able to give food and water to voters on line, but the actual law is much more abhorrent than that,” said Representative Billy Mitchell, the chairman of the Georgia House Democratic caucus. “What I am most concerned about — and hope you come up with a solution for — is cheating umpires that these laws are creating.”But the hearing’s real aim is to sway a debate more than 500 miles away in Washington, where Democrats are trying to revive a stalled elections overhaul in the Senate to make it easier to vote and offset many of the changes Republicans have pushed through in states like Georgia.“If you just stay in Washington and get doused down and gridlocked out by our archaic procedures in the Senate, you lose sight of what you are fighting for,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which is convening the session, said in an interview.An initial attempt by Democrats to debate their overhaul, the For the People Act, failed in the Senate last month in the face of unified Republican opposition. Now, Democrats are trying to retool, but it is unclear if their chances of success will improve as long as key moderate senators refuse to alter the Senate’s filibuster rule, which in effect gives Republicans veto power over their agenda.Party leaders are working with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the measure, to draft a narrower compromise bill, which could come up for another vote in August or the fall. They are also readying additional legislation, named after the late civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, too, could come to a vote in the fall.Given the likelihood that both those efforts would fall amid Republican opposition, Democrats have begun work to try to include more modest voting rights measures in the party’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, which they are working to muscle through the Senate on a simple majority vote.The hearing at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights here is the first time in two decades the Rules Committee has convened outside the Capitol. Ms. Klobuchar has said additional field hearings will follow.Among the witnesses are Sally Harrell, a Democratic state senator from suburban Atlanta; Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; and José Segarra, a voter from south-central Georgia. Senator Raphael Warnock, whose improbable victory in a runoff election here in January delivered control of the Senate to Democrats, also addressed the panel.Republicans on the Rules Committee, who have fought to stymie Democrats’ election overhaul in the Senate, did not attend the hearing.“This silly stunt is based on the same lie as all the Democrats’ phony hysteria from Georgia to Texas to Washington, D.C., and beyond — their efforts to pretend that moderate, mainstream state voting laws with more generous early voting provisions than blue states like New York are some kind of evil assault on our democracy,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said in a statement. More

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      2022 Midterm Elections: Democrats See Early Edge in Senate Map

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      Early fund-raising has given Democrats cause for optimism in key states as Republicans split over how closely to align with Donald Trump’s preferences. Six months into the Biden administration, Senate Democrats are expressing a cautious optimism that the party can keep control of the chamber in the 2022 midterm elections, enjoying large fund-raising hauls in marquee races as they plot to exploit Republican retirements in key battlegrounds and a divisive series of unsettled G.O.P. primaries.Swing-state Democratic incumbents, like Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, restocked their war chests with multimillion-dollar sums ($7.2 million and $6 million, respectively), according to new financial filings this week. That gives them an early financial head start in two key states where Republicans’ disagreements over former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020 are threatening to distract and fracture the party.But Democratic officials are all too aware of the foreboding political history they confront: that in a president’s first midterms, the party occupying the White House typically loses seats — often in bunches. For now, Democrats hold power by only the narrowest of margins in a 50-50 split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker to push through President Biden’s expansive agenda on the economy, the pandemic and infrastructure.The midterms are still more than 15 months away, but the ability to enact new policy throughout Mr. Biden’s first term hinges heavily on his party’s ability to hold the Senate and House.Four Senate Democratic incumbents are up for re-election in swing states next year — making them prime targets for Republican gains. But in none of those four states — New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia — has a dominant Republican candidate emerged to consolidate support from the party’s divergent wings. Out of office and banished from social media, Mr. Trump continues to insist on putting his imprint on the party with rallies and regular missives imposing an agenda of rewarding loyalists and exacting retribution against perceived enemies. That does not align with Senate Republican strategists who are focused singularly on retaking the majority and honing messages against the Democrats who now fully control Washington.“The only way we win these races is with top-notch candidates,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who used to work on Senate races. “Are Republicans able to recruit top-notch candidates in the Trump era?”Of the seven contests that political handicappers consider most competitive in 2022, all but one are in states that Mr. Biden carried last year.“We’re running in Biden country,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster involved in Senate races. “That doesn’t make any of these races easy. But we’re running in Biden country.”The campaign filings this week provided an early financial snapshot of the state of play in the Senate battlefield, where the total costs could easily top $1 billion. Other than the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, the top fund-raiser among all senators in the last three months was Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. Mr. Scott collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response, an eye-opening sum that has stoked questions about his 2024 ambitions.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut critical races remain unsettled for Republicans. The party is still trying to find compelling Senate candidates in several states, with Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, considered the highest priority for recruitment, to challenge Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who raised $3.25 million in the last three months. A bevy of Republican senators have lobbied Mr. Sununu to enter the race, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, went so far as to ask activists at a conservative conference last week to “call Chris Sununu” and urge him to run.“If he does, we will win,” Mr. Scott said.Mr. Scott has similarly pursued the former attorney general of Nevada, Adam Laxalt, saying last month that he expected Mr. Laxalt to run against Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, the Democratic incumbent.The unexpected retirements of Republican senators in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have opened seats and opportunities for Democrats in those swing states, but the path to victory is complicated. In both, Democrats must navigate competitive primaries that pit candidates who represent disparate elements of the party’s racial and ideological coalition: Black and white; moderate and progressive; urban, suburban and more rural.In Pennsylvania, the Democratic lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raising newcomers, taking in $2.5 million in the quarter. Val Arkoosh, a county commissioner in a Philadelphia suburb, raised $1 million, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a state legislator seeking to become the nation’s first openly gay Black senator, raised $500,000. Representative Conor Lamb, a moderate from outside Pittsburgh, is also considering a run.In Wisconsin, a third Republican incumbent, Senator Ron Johnson, has wavered for months over whether he will seek a third term. Mr. Johnson raised only $1.2 million in the last quarter, just enough to carry on but not quite enough to dispel questions about his intentions.Whether or not Mr. Johnson runs, Wisconsin is among the top Democratic targets in 2022 because Mr. Biden carried it narrowly in 2020. Perhaps nothing has better predicted the outcome of Senate races in recent cycles than a state’s presidential preferences.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raisers among newcomers as he pursues the state’s open Senate seat.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Florida, national Democrats have all but anointed Representative Val Demings, a Black former police chief in Orlando who was vetted by the Biden team for vice president, in a state that has repeatedly proved just out of reach.Ms. Demings raised $4.6 million in her first three weeks, topping Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent, who raised $4 million over three months. (Ms. Demings spent more than $2.2 million on digital ads raising that sum, records show.)Two other G.O.P. retirements in redder states, Ohio and Missouri, have further destabilized the Republican map, providing at least a modicum of opportunity for Democrats in Trump territory. Republicans face heated primaries in both states.In Ohio, the Republican candidates include the former party chair, Jane Timken; the former state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who has run for Senate before; the best-selling author J.D. Vance; and two business executives, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons.The leading Democrat is Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate who ran briefly for president in 2020, and who entered July with $2.5 million in the bank.In Missouri, the early efforts to woo Mr. Trump have been plentiful, and that includes spending at his Florida resort.Two potential candidates have trekked to Mar-a-Lago for fund-raisers or to meet with the former president, including Representatives Billy Long and Jason Smith. Mr. Long reported spending $28,633.20 at the club, filings show; Mr. Smith, who also attended a colleague’s fund-raiser on Thursday at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster property in New Jersey, according to a person familiar with the matter, paid $4,198.59 to Mar-a-Lago.“I’m expecting someone to start flying over Bedminster with a banner at some point,” said one Republican strategist involved in Senate races, who requested anonymity because, he said half-jokingly, it could end up being one of his candidates buying the banner.Representative Val Demings of Florida is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe biggest name in Missouri is Eric Greitens, the former governor who resigned after accusations of abuse by a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. He raised less than $450,000. Among his fund-raisers is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., and his campaign also made payments to Mar-a-Lago.Three other Republicans in the race out-raised Mr. Greitens: Representative Vicky Hartzler, Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Mark McCloskey, the man best known for waving his gun outside his St. Louis home as protesters marched last year. Some national Republican strategists are worried that if Mr. Greitens survives a crowded primary, he could prove toxic even in a heavily Republican state.Mr. Scott has pledged to remain neutral in party primaries, but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has long preferred promoting candidates he believes can win in November.“The only thing I care about is electability,” Mr. McConnell told Politico this year. With Mr. Scott on the sidelines, a McConnell-aligned super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, is expected to do most of the intervening.Mr. Trump, who is often at cross-purposes with Mr. McConnell, has appeared especially engaged in the Arizona and Georgia races, largely because of his own narrow losses there. He has publicly urged the former football player Herschel Walker to run in Georgia — Mr. Walker has not committed to a campaign — and attacked the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, even after Mr. Ducey has said he is not running for Senate. Some Republican operatives continue to hope to tug Mr. Ducey into the race.Mr. Trump delivered one early Senate endorsement in North Carolina, to Representative Ted Budd, who raised $953,000, which is less than the $1.25 million that former Gov. Pat McCrory pulled in. Some Republicans see Mr. McCrory as the stronger potential nominee because of his track record of winning statewide. In Alaska, Kelly Tshibaka is running as a pro-Trump primary challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Mr. Trump after his second impeachment. Ms. Murkowski, who has not formally said if she is running again, raised more than double Ms. Tshibaka in the most recent quarter, $1.15 million to $544,000.In Alabama, Mr. Trump gave another early endorsement to Representative Mo Brooks and recently attacked one of his rivals, Katie Britt, who is the former chief of staff of the retiring incumbent, Senator Richard Shelby. Ms. Britt entered the race in June, but she out-raised Mr. Brooks, $2.2 million to $824,000. A third candidate, Lynda Blanchard, is a former Trump-appointed ambassador who has lent her campaign $5 million.Mr. Brooks won over Mr. Trump for being among the earliest and most vocal objectors to Mr. Biden’s victory. The photo splashed across Mr. Brooks’s Senate website is him speaking at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. In his recent filing, one of Mr. Brooks’s larger expenses was a $25,799 tab at Mar-a-Lago.“The map tilts slightly toward the Democrats just based on the seats that are up,” said Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races. “But the political environment is the big unknown, and the landscape can shift quickly.”Rachel Shorey More

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      Republicans Now Have Two Ways to Threaten Elections

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      The story of voting rights in the United States looks less like a graph of exponential growth and more like a sine wave; there are highs and lows, peaks and plateaus.President Biden captured this reality in his address on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where he spoke on the gathering threat to our democracy from the Republican Party’s twin efforts to suppress rival constituencies and seize control of state voting apparatuses.“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” Biden said. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”Biden is right. Americans today are witness to a ferocious attack on voting rights and majority rule. And as he points out, it is as focused on “who gets to count the vote” as it is on “who gets to vote.”Biden is also right to say, as he did throughout the speech, that these attacks are “not unprecedented.” He points to Jim Crow and the “poll taxes and literacy tests and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s.”For obvious reasons, Jim Crow takes center stage in these discussions. But we should remember that it was part of a wave of suffrage restrictions aimed at working-class groups across the country: Black people in the South, Chinese Americans in the West and European immigrants in the North.“The tide of democratic faith was at low ebb on all American shores after the Grant administration, and it would be a mistake to fix upon a reactionary temper in the South as a sectional peculiarity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913.”For as much as Jim Crow dominates our collective memory of voting restrictions, it is the attack on suffrage in the North in those last decades of the 19th century that might actually be more relevant to our present situation.The current assault on voting is a backlash, in part, to the greater access that marked the 2020 presidential election. More mail-in and greater early voting helped push turnout to modern highs. In the same way, the turn against universal manhood suffrage came after its expansion in the wake of the Civil War.A growing number of voters were foreign-born, the result of mass immigration and the rapid growth of an immigrant working class in the industrial centers of the North. “Between 1865 and World War I,” writes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” “nearly twenty-five million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nation’s World War I population of roughly one hundred million.”A vast majority arrived without property or the means to acquire it. Some were the Irish and Germans of previous waves of immigration, but many more were eastern and southern Europeans, with alien languages, exotic customs and unfamiliar faiths.“By 1910,” notes Keyssar, “most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nation’s huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents, or Black.”To Americans of older stock, this was a disaster in waiting. And it fueled, among them, a backlash to the democratic expansion that followed the Civil War.“A New England village of the olden time — that is to say, of some forty years ago — would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it,” Francis Parkman, a prominent historian and a member in good standing of the Boston elite, wrote in an 1878 essay called “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.”Parkman went on:but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.In “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910,” the historian J. Morgan Kousser takes note of William L. Scruggs, a turn-of-the-century scholar and diplomat who gave a similarly colorful assessment of universal suffrage in an 1884 article, “Restriction of the Suffrage”:The idea of unqualified or “tramp” suffrage, like communism, with which it is closely allied, seems to be of modern origin; and, like that and kindred isms, it usually finds advocates and apologists in the ranks of the discontented, improvident, ignorant, vicious, depraved, and dangerous classes of society. It is not indigenous to the soil of the United States. It originated in the slums of European cities, and, like the viper in the fable, has been nurtured into formidable activity in this country by misdirected kindness.Beyond their presumed immorality and vice, the problem with new immigrant voters — from the perspective of these elites — was that they undermined so-called good government. “There is not the slightest doubt in my own mind that our prodigality with the suffrage has been the chief source of the corruption of our elections,” wrote the Progressive-era political scientist John W. Burgess in an 1895 article titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth.”This claim, that Black and immigrant voters were venal and corrupt — that they voted either illegally or irresponsibly — was common.Here’s Keyssar:Charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly: electoral outcomes were twisted by “naturalization mills” that, with the aid of “professional perjurers and political manipulators,” transformed thousands of immigrants into citizens in the weeks before elections.Out of this furious attack on universal male suffrage (and also, in other corners, the rising call for women’s suffrage) came a host of efforts to purify the electorate, spearheaded by progressive reformers in both parties. Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed “pauper exclusions” that disqualified from voting any men who received public relief on the day of the election. Republican lawmakers in New Jersey, targeting immigrant-dominated urban political machines in the state, required naturalized citizens to show naturalization documents to election officials before voting, intentionally burdening immigrants who did not have their papers or could not find them.Lawmakers in Connecticut endorsed an English literacy requirement, and California voters amended their state Constitution to disenfranchise any person “who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his name,” a move meant to keep Chinese and Mexican Americans from the ballot box. The introduction of the secret ballot and the polling booth made voting less communal and put an additional premium on literacy — if you couldn’t read the ballot, and if no one was allowed to assist, then how were you supposed to make a choice?If suffrage restriction in the South was a blunt weapon meant to cleave entire communities from the body politic, then suffrage restriction in the North was a twisting maze of obstacles meant to block anyone without the means or education to overcome them.There were opponents of this effort to shrink democracy. They lost. Voter turnout crashed in the first decades of the 20th century. Just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election, an all-time low. “There were fewer Republicans in the South because of Jim Crow voter suppression, and fewer Democrats in the North because of the active discouragement of working-class urban immigrant voters,” the historian Jon Grinspan notes in “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.” “The efforts of fifty years of restrainers had succeeded. A new political culture had been born: one that had been cleaned and calmed, stifled and squelched.”It would take decades, and an epochal movement for civil rights, before the United States even came close to the democratic highs it reached in the years after Appomattox.With all of that in mind, let’s return to Biden’s speech.There was an urgency in what the president said in defense of voting rights, a sense that now is the only time left to act. “Look how close it came,” he said in reference to the attack on Congress on Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the election. “We’re going to face another test in 2022: a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”Right now, of course, there is no path to passage for a voting bill that could address the challenges ahead. Not every Democrat feels the same sense of urgency as the president, and key Democrats aren’t willing to change the rules of the Senate in order to send a bill to Biden’s desk.It is possible that this is the right call, that there are other ways to block this assault on the franchise and that the attack on free and fair elections will stay confined to Republican-controlled states — meaning Democrats would need only a strategy of containment and not a plan to roll back the assault. But as we’ve seen, there is a certain momentum to political life and no guarantee of a stable equilibrium. The assault on voting might stay behind a partisan border or it might not.In other words, to borrow a turn of phrase from Abraham Lincoln on the question of democracy, this government will either become all of one thing or all of the other.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 Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

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      The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is 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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      Cuomo and Adams Make First Appearance Since Primary Win

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      Eric Adams’s appearance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, like his visit to the White House on Monday, was centered on combating gun violence.The contours of the most important, complex and delicate relationship in New York politics began to take shape inside a Brooklyn church on Wednesday, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, made their first public appearance together since Mr. Adams secured the Democratic nomination last week.In a news conference that spanned around 40 minutes, Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo sought to highlight areas of common ground — namely, promoting public safety while claiming the mantle of progressivism — amid an undercurrent of uncertainty around Mr. Cuomo’s future as he awaits investigations into his conduct as governor.“Eric and I come from the same political philosophy,” Mr. Cuomo declared. “We are progressive Democrats. And we have the same definition of what it means to be a progressive Democrat.”The appearance marked the second time this week that Mr. Adams moved to cement his relationships with the forces that will have extraordinary sway over his ability to govern — the federal and state governments — as he embraces the role of mayor-in-waiting ahead of a November general election that he is almost certain to win.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, outlined plans on Wednesday for reducing gun violence, calling the matter an epidemic.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesOn Monday, he visited the White House in Washington, meeting with President Biden and later appearing in a White House-promoted video to discuss public safety and justice. And Mr. Adams’s joint appearance with Mr. Cuomo underscored an effort to improve the relationship between the offices of governor and mayor of New York; the current occupant of Gracie Mansion, Mayor Bill de Blasio, has had a notoriously toxic dynamic with Mr. Cuomo and was absent from both the Washington and Brooklyn meetings.Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo are not thought to have any deep personal bonds, but Mr. Adams’s familiarity with Albany — the two overlapped briefly while he was a state senator — may ease the early stages of their new relationship, and could help Mr. Adams as he seeks to build allies in the Legislature.Mr. Cuomo, for his part, is heavily reliant on support from Black voters, and a strong relationship with Mr. Adams, who is poised to be the second Black mayor in New York City’s history, may also be in Mr. Cuomo’s political interests as he heads into an election year.Of course, Mr. Cuomo also greeted Mr. de Blasio warmly when he was the Democratic nominee in 2013, but that relationship deteriorated quickly — and Albany still has so much control over major municipal issues that it is nearly impossible that the next mayor and governor would not clash, as mayors and governors often have throughout history.But on Wednesday in Brooklyn, Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo alternated between speaking from behind a lectern, and listening to each other from the side.The two men both prevailed in their most recent elections over skeptical left-wing forces in the party. They appeared at their most simpatico on Wednesday when speaking about the urgent need for improved public safety and quality of life — reaching for strikingly grim, sometimes hyperbolic terms to describe life in America’s largest cities — while taking veiled swipes at those who deal in “theoretical progress,” as Mr. Cuomo framed it, rather than the difficult realities facing New York City.A progressive, Mr. Cuomo claimed, is one “who actually makes progress for people.” “I’m happy that you touched on ‘progressive,’ what it means to be progressive,” a slightly hoarse Mr. Adams said as he began his introductory remarks following Mr. Cuomo, who smiled as Mr. Adams started in. “We’ve allowed the term ‘being progressive’ to be hijacked by those who do not have a track record of putting in place real progressive changes. And I am not going to surrender my progressive credentials.”Their policy focus was gun violence and combating a spike in shootings that has rattled neighborhoods across the city. Mr. Cuomo recently declared a gun violence emergency in the state, and on Wednesday he called the violence a “civil rights issue,” noting that victims in New York have disproportionately been Black and Latino residents. Mr. Adams stressed the importance of combating handgun violence, and urged a “holistic” approach to promoting public safety, rather than one rooted in “heavy-handed policing”— though he supported a more expansive role for the police than some of his primary opponents did. As he has done before, he linked combating crime to the city’s economic recovery. Throughout their appearance, there were plenty of united-front moments. Mr. Cuomo, who made references to their shared roots in boroughs outside of Manhattan, appeared to murmur his assent as Mr. Adams warned of high-income New Yorkers fleeing to Miami if they felt the city was too unsafe — though rates of violent crime today are far lower than in earlier eras in New York. Mr. Adams, as he noted their efforts to enact marriage equality in the state, turned to face Mr. Cuomo, demanding, “Did people forget? That was our bill.”And when a journalist remarked that it sounded like Mr. Adams wanted to put more people in jail, Mr. Adams rejected that characterization — and Mr. Cuomo then leapt to the lectern to criticize the question.But there were also reminders of potential tensions to come at a time of deep uncertainty in Mr. Cuomo’s political career.“I said it then and I’ll say it again,” Mr. Adams said as Mr. Cuomo, a leader of the National Governors Association, looked on. “I am the face of the Democratic Party.”Until recently, Mr. Cuomo was a national celebrity following his prolific public appearances during the early months of the pandemic, and at one point some Democrats dreamed of putting him on the presidential ticket.But he now faces a moment of grave political peril, amid the threat of impeachment and still-outstanding investigations, including a closely watched report from the state attorney general, Letitia James, that is set to examine harassment allegations.His appearance with Mr. Adams, and a later news conference that included state lawmakers — some of whom have been sharply critical of Mr. Cuomo, but flanked him to discuss combating gun violence on Wednesday — appeared designed to send a message that he remains firmly in command of the most pressing problems facing the state, despite significant questions about his political future.Most of the state’s top Democrats have called on Mr. Cuomo to resign, but he has refused. Instead, he has spent the last few months seeking to rehabilitate his image after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment; standing side by side with the presumed next mayor of New York City was seen as part and parcel of Mr. Cuomo’s larger effort to assert his leadership and portray a semblance of normalcy. For his part, Mr. Adams was one of the few Democratic mayoral candidates who did not call on Mr. Cuomo to immediately resign and he said during the primary campaign that he would accept an endorsement from the governor — though during a June debate, he did not raise his hand when the contenders were asked if they would want Mr. Cuomo’s endorsement. Mr. Adams has also said he supports an independent investigation into the harassment allegations and believes in due process, even as he has said “swift action must be taken” against powerful men who prey on women.At the news conference, a reporter pressed Mr. Adams on that dynamic ahead of Ms. James’s report, one that may set the terms for how Mr. Cuomo’s re-election prospects will unfold.“The governor said that he would work with me,” Mr. Adams said. “I’m sure he would have worked with any mayor that is in office.” “Let the investigation go to its outcome,” he continued. “I mean, that’s the system of justice that I protected in the city and will continue to do so. And the system of an investigation will determine the outcome.”Luis Ferré-Sadurní More

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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      Biden Speaks on Voting Rights in Philadelphia

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      WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Tuesday that the fight against restrictive voting laws was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” and called Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election “a big lie.”In an impassioned speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden tried to reinvigorate the stalled Democratic effort to pass federal voting rights legislation and called on Republicans “in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up, for God’s sake.”“Help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” the president said in remarks at the National Constitution Center. “Have you no shame?”But his words collided with reality: Even as Republican-led bills meant to restrict voting access make their way through statehouses across the country, two bills aiming to expand voting rights nationwide are languishing in Congress. And Mr. Biden has bucked increasing pressure from Democrats to support pushing the legislation through the Senate by eliminating the filibuster, no matter the political cost.In fact, the president seemed to acknowledge that the legislation had little hope of passing as he shifted his focus to the midterm elections.“We’re going to face another test in 2022,” Mr. Biden said. “A new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”He said he would start an effort “to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote and then get the vote out.”The partisan fight over voting rights was playing out even as the president spoke, with a group of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass new voting restrictions there.In his speech, Mr. Biden characterized the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — hatched and spread by his predecessor, Mr. Trump — as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name but warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” had posed an existential threat to democracy.“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”About a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this spring to restrict voting or significantly change election rules, in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 results.Republicans, who have called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic, argue that laws are needed to tamp down on voter fraud, despite evidence that it is not a widespread problem. They have mounted an aggressive campaign to portray Mr. Biden’s voting-rights efforts as self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats.The president’s speech, delivered against the backdrop of the birthplace of American democracy, was intended to present the right to vote as a shared ideal, despite the realities of a deeply fractured political landscape.Democratic efforts to pass voting rights legislation in Washington have stalled in the evenly divided Senate. Last month, Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act, and they are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure — the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named for a former Georgia congressman and civil rights icon — which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.In a statement, Danielle Álvarez, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that Mr. Biden’s speech amounted to “lies and theatrics.” Republicans had unanimously rejected the For the People Act as a Democratic attempt to “pass their federal takeover of our elections,” she said.There were also concerns among more moderate members of Mr. Biden’s party that the legislation was too partisan. Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have publicly said they would not support rolling back the filibuster to enact it.But other Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight encroachments on voting rights.A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said last year that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities after taking office; but on Tuesday, he sought to shift responsibility to lawmakers.“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” the president said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and want the whole world to see it.”His rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task: Neither bill currently has a path to his desk.Activists who had wondered whether Mr. Biden would stake out a public position on the filibuster got their answer on Tuesday: “I’m not filibustering now,” the president told reporters who shouted questions after his speech.“It was strange to hear,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said after watching the speech. “He did a great job of laying out the problem, but then stopped short of talking about the actual solution that would be needed to passing legislation to address the problem.”As Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia, the group of Texas Democrats had traveled to Washington, where they were trying to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures.Representative Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas, speaking at a press conference with Democratic members of the Texas Legislature on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBoth measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending absentee ballot applications to voters who had not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit the types of assistance that can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.In Austin, Republicans vented their anger at the fleeing group, and Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill passed. The handful of Democratic lawmakers who did not go to Washington were rounded up and ordered onto the Statehouse floor. Shawn Thierry, a Democratic state representative from Houston, posted to Twitter a video of a Statehouse sergeant-at-arms and a state trooper entering her office to order her to be locked in the House chamber.“This is not an issue about Democrats or Republicans,” Vice President Kamala Harris told the Texas lawmakers when she met with them on Tuesday. “This is about Americans and how Americans are experiencing this issue.”James Talarico, 32, the youngest member of the Texas Legislature, said the group of Democrats had gone to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.“We can’t listen to more speeches,” Mr. Talarico said. “I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office. But protecting our democracy should have been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”The restrictions in the Texas bills mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed this year in Georgia, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the party to suspend county election officials. In June, the Justice Department sued Georgia over the law, the Biden administration’s first significant move to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.“The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” Mr. Biden said as he listed the details of the Texas bills. “It’s unrelenting, and we are going to challenge it vigorously.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More