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      Who Might Be the Next Chair of the Democratic Party?

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      The current leader of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, won’t seek re-election. His successor will need to revive a distressed party.As the Democratic Party reels from devastating losses — in the presidential contest, the race to control the Senate and its bid to regain control of the House — its national committee is searching for a new chair. Whoever lands that critical role will be charged with shepherding the party out of the woods and into a new era.Jaime Harrison, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee, has decided not to seek re-election. The party’s 448 committee members, who include party officials and politicians from across the country, are expected to vote on his replacement on Feb. 1.Two contenders have already entered the race. Several others have either suggested publicly that they are considering a run, or are quietly holding conversations with party members to gauge potential support. The private deliberations were described by several people who have participated in them and insisted on anonymity.Here’s a look at the Democrats in the mix.Who’s already joined the race?Martin O’MalleyMr. O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland and a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, was the race’s first entrant.He has a long record of public service, getting his start on the Baltimore City Council before becoming the city’s mayor in 1999. During his tenure as governor, an office he held from 2007 to 2015, he led the Democratic Governors Association.In 2023, President Biden tapped him to lead the Social Security Administration. Mr. O’Malley has said he will resign from the post on Friday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There Is No Excuse for the Bullying of Sarah McBride

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      It’s hard to imagine how terrifying it must be to be a trans person, or the parent of one, in America right now.Donald Trump and his party, having triumphed in an election in which they demonized trans people, seem hellbent on driving them out of public life. Democrats, some of whom blame the party for staking out positions on trans issues that they couldn’t publicly defend, are shellshocked and confused. Democratic leaders have been far too quiet as congressional Republicans, giddy and vengeful in victory, seek to humiliate their new colleague, Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, by barring her and other trans people from using the appropriate single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol.I say this as someone who has been called a TERF, a contemptuous acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, more times than I can count. For a decade now, I’ve been trying to balance a belief in the rights of trans people with my skepticism of some trans activist positions. I’ve written with a degree of sympathy about feminists who’ve been ostracized for wanting to maintain women’s-only spaces. I believe that the science behind youth gender medicine is unsettled, and I dislike jargon like “sex assigned at birth” that tries to mystify or elide the reality of biological sex. (Except for rare exceptions, doctors don’t “assign” sex, they identify it.) I care very little about sports, but it seems dishonest to deny that male puberty tends to confer advantages on trans women athletes.Occasionally, I receive angry or plaintive messages from trans people accusing me of helping America down a slippery slope that has brought us to our lamentable present, when discrimination against trans people has been normalized to a degree that recently seemed unthinkable. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he said his trans supporter Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. At the time, North Carolina’s bathroom bill, which resulted in economically painful boycotts of the state, was widely seen as a self-inflicted wound.Eight years later, anti-trans rhetoric was a central part of the Trump campaign; between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, more than 41 percent of pro-Trump ads promoted anti-trans messages. Over a dozen states now have laws restricting trans people’s access to single-sex bathrooms. In the face of this onslaught against a tiny and vulnerable group of people, there’s pressure on liberals to keep any qualms we might have about elements of progressive gender ideology to ourselves.That’s one reason, despite my interest in sex and gender, I haven’t written about these debates as much as I otherwise might have. But I’m increasingly convinced that this widespread reticence hasn’t served anyone very well. The basic right of trans people to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination, should be uncontested. But evolving ideas about sex and gender create new complexities and conflicts, and when progressives refuse to talk about them forthrightly, instead defaulting to clichés like “trans women are women,” people can feel lied to and become radicalized.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Newsom Heads to California Counties That Voted for Trump

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged that residents were frustrated by economic problems and said that Democrats needed to address their concerns.On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom will make the first of three post-election visits to California counties that Donald J. Trump won in the presidential race, reaching out to working-class voters in the Central Valley who remain frustrated by economic woes.The appearance in Fresno, to unveil a new economic development system, comes as interviews and polls have shown that economic and class divisions were key to Mr. Trump’s return to power.With Democrats still mulling over their presidential and congressional losses, Mr. Newsom said in an interview on Wednesday that his party needed to learn from the recent election and to address the struggles of American workers.“A lot of people feel like they’re losing their identity or losing their future,” Mr. Newsom said. “Message received.”A leading Democrat who has been viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, California’s governor has long been a pointed critic of Mr. Trump. Over the past two and a half weeks, he has indicated that he expects his state and the Trump administration to repeat the pitched battle they waged during Mr. Trump’s first term, when California sued the federal government more than 120 times.The governor’s immediate response after the Nov. 5 election was to call his state’s Democrat-dominated legislature into an emergency special session that would start in December. Mr. Newsom urged Democrats to “stand firm” against expected efforts by Mr. Trump to deport immigrants, further limit reproductive rights and weaken environmental regulation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies

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      It’s such a bother when politicians have to go and complicate your clean narrative about why they’re succeeding.Last week, I spoke to Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Polis’s state was, if not a bright spot for Democrats, a less-dark one. In New York, Democrats lost 11 points off their 2020 margin; in New Jersey, 10 points; in Massachusetts, nine and a half points; in California, nine points (though votes are still being counted); in Illinois, seven points. In Colorado, the difference was two and a half points. What is Polis, who won re-election in 2022 by a 19-point margin, doing right?One answer — and this, to be honest, was the answer I’d gone looking for — is focusing relentlessly on the cost of living. “You can’t just do one policy and expect, somehow, people will know it,” Polis told me. “But they generally understand the drumbeat of 30, 40 things you’re doing, each of which reduces costs in a different way. And so that’s been our strategy: to flood the zone with this work to reduce costs.”Polis points with pride to his successful efforts to expand pre-K and kindergarten and get a public insurance option onto the Colorado health exchanges — but also to his rejection of proposals to add benefits that would drive up costs. He’s happy to brag about reducing the tax rate for both businesses and individuals, walking me through every decimal-point reduction he achieved, and the many bills he’s signed to make it easier to build homes.“When you say something a lot, it means you generally believe it,” Polis said. “So here’s a line I often use: We want the best solutions from the left and the right to save people money.”But during our conversation, and in the days after, another answer emerged — and for Democrats this one is a little more challenging. Polis is a dissenter from the trends that swept through Democratic governance during the pandemic. He was unusual among Democratic governors for the emphasis he put on both personal responsibility and personal liberty. Colorado opened early, sparking a tourism boom, and Polis tried to rely more on information than compulsion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Policies Offer a Starting Point for Trump’s Border Crackdown

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      Mr. Trump has criticized the Biden administration for what he calls its lax handling of the border — but it has left him with tools he can use to shut down the border.President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last year railing against the Biden administration’s immigration policies, saying they left the border wide open and risked American security.But actions taken by President Biden in the past year, including a sweeping asylum ban and more streamlined deportation procedures, may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.To be sure, Mr. Biden’s vision for immigration is different from Mr. Trump’s. While the White House has enacted stricter regulations at the border, it has also emphasized legal pathways to enter the country and offered temporary legal status to migrants from certain troubled countries.After promising a more humane immigration policy when he took office in 2021, Mr. Biden was confronted with a worldwide surge in migration that put pressure on the southern U.S. border. By his second year in office, annual border arrests topped 2 million.As chaotic scenes emerged of migrants crowding at the border, Republicans like Mr. Trump argued that the Democrats were unable to govern and protect American cities, and they urged a crackdown on immigration. Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent thousands of migrants by bus and plane to Democratic northern cities to highlight the border crisis.President Biden visiting Brownsville, Texas, in February, where he received an operational briefing from U.S. border officials. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.

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      Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?

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      When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Diploma Divide’ and the 2024 Election

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      Readers discuss a David Brooks column about how the less educated are being left behind.To the Editor:Re “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?,” by David Brooks (column, Nov. 8):Mr. Brooks is exactly right, but he doesn’t carry his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. Yes, Donald Trump won the election because of a strong showing by the non-college-educated population. And yes, that segment is disadvantaged in many ways.But why did that segment vote for Mr. Trump? I would suggest there is a reason that people go to college. And contrary to what many believe, it is not just to get a better job. It is to become a better and more informed citizen, and to learn to distinguish truth from falsehood. And that is not easy when confronted with constant disinformation and outright lies.Partly as a result, the non-college-educated do not see that they have been duped. They have voted for a man and a party that have consistently worked to keep them suppressed, that have been against universal health care, against efforts to control global warming, against monopolistic practices, etc., etc.Democrats should stop flagellating themselves for having done something wrong. It is not they who have betrayed the non-college-educated. As global warming, hurricanes and flooding increase; as privatized health care grows more expensive, and epidemics again kill thousands because of vaccine skeptics; as inflation shoots up from tariffs and tax reduction, the non-college-educated will suffer disproportionately.Let them look to their elected Republicans. They have broken it, and now they own it.Robert H. PalmerNew YorkTo the Editor:Trying to blame the Democrats’ loss on their supposed disrespect of voters and behaving like elites is old and tired.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More