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      Palestinian Voters Debate Staying Home for Israeli Election

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      As Israel prepares to go to the polls again, some of the voters who helped propel an Arab party into the governing coalition for the first time are worried about a lack of results.KHASHAM ZANA, Israel — A new school in portable buildings, a paved road that reaches only halfway into the village and a sign in Arabic, English and Hebrew are the only indications of recent improvement in the Bedouin village of Khasham Zana in southern Israel.Like many other Palestinian Bedouin villages in Israel, it has existed for decades without state recognition of land ownership claims, leaving residents at constant risk of home demolitions and without basic services and infrastructure.Last year, when an independent Arab party, Raam, made history as the first to join an Israeli governing coalition, it pledged to address the plight of these villages.But when the government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett collapsed in June, precipitating Israel’s fifth national election in less than four years on Tuesday, Raam and its leader, Mansour Abbas, had delivered on few of their electoral promises. And in places like Khasam Zana, the impact has been minimal.Raam’s inclusion in the government was welcomed by many Palestinian citizens of Israel who saw it as an important step in securing their rights. But now, many Palestinian-Israeli voters say they are disillusioned. Some are questioning how much they can realistically benefit from political engagement in a parliament that, four years ago, passed a controversial law that enshrined the right of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people” rather than all Israeli citizens.Palestinians as well as Israeli centrists and leftists condemned the law as racist and anti-democratic, and it was criticized by the European Union and rights groups including Human Rights Watch. Mansour Abbas, the leader of Raam, which last year became the first independent Arab party to enter an Israeli governing coalition.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesTuesday’s elections for the 120-seat Parliament, or Knesset, could see record low turnout among Israel’s one million Palestinian voters who hold Israeli citizenship. They account for about 17 percent of the country’s possible voters, but a public opinion poll in early October for Israeli public television’s Arabic-language Makan channel found that less than 40 percent of Arab voters planned to take part in the election.“The frustration is at its highest, maybe because we tried to enter the government and nothing changed,” said Mirvat Abu Hadoba-Freh, 33, a former high school civics teacher now earning a doctorate on political awareness among minority communities, including Palestinians.“This election, I hear educated people say they have gotten fed up. They don’t feel like there is anything encouraging them to vote,” she said.Though the majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel are in favor of integration and greater involvement in government, voter turnout has largely been on a downward trend over the past decade, said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a polling organization in Ramallah.“More and more people say what is the point in participating if nothing changes, essentially,” he said. “Obviously, it’s not fair to judge what Mansour Abbas and his party have done in a single year, but that’s what people have to go by and people’s assessment is it wasn’t worth it,” he added, referring to the leader of Raam.Raam’s green campaign banners hang along the entrance of Khasham Zana village, with different slogans playing off its campaign theme of being closer to the pulse of the street.“Closer to be effective,” reads one. “Closer to combating racism,” reads another.Palestinian Bedouin villages in the Negev Desert. Many such villages have gone unrecognized by the state for decades, leaving them without basic services. Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesThe largely conservative Palestinian communities in Israel’s Negev constitute a Raam stronghold and helped put the party into office last year.But Ms. Abu Hadoba-Freh says Raam’s brief time in office has helped put into perspective for Palestinian voters what can realistically be accomplished.“We as Arab voters, we may be able to send our leaders to the Knesset, but we don’t know if it will have much of an impact,” she said. “It may affect local budgets and services, but things like the discrimination against Arabs, this is impossible to change unless the country changes.”Raam promised to secure the official recognition of Khasham Zana and two other villages — homes to Bedouin, Palestinian communities that were once seminomadic — and said it also intended to prepare a plan to deal with dozens of other unrecognized villages in Israel’s Negev Desert.But that has not happened, and few other improvements have taken place in a village where, besides the school and half-finished road, there is no other infrastructure. Though power lines run alongside the edges of Khasham Zana, there is no state-supplied electricity, and residents must rely on solar power. There are no sewers or garbage collection. Running water comes from water tanks and pipes that residents installed themselves.Ms. Abu Hadoba-Freh comes from another unrecognized village, Wadi Samara, where residents face home demolitions and must rely on themselves for almost all services, including setting up solar panels for electricity.She voted in the past four elections. But she is questioning whether she will vote again this time.Even before Raam, more Palestinian voters were beginning to question their involvement in the Parliament, said Mansour Nasasra, a professor of politics at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, especially as there has been no progress on other key issues of importance to the Palestinians, including rising violence within the Arab community and increased attacks and police raids on holy sites.Those reservations have only increased with an Arab party in government, he said.When the government of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, center, collapsed in June, few of Raam’s promises had been fulfilled.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Bennett’s governing coalition needed Mr. Abbas and his party to form a coalition, hailed at the time as a sign of national unity. But some Palestinians say they don’t feel they got enough in return for one of their parties’ joining the government.“The number of Palestinians killed has increased. The number of home demolitions increased in Abbas’s presence. The number of raids and closures of Al Aqsa increased in Abbas’s presence,” Mr. Nasasra said, referring to Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam. “And Abbas couldn’t say one word about it.”Dr. Kayed al-Athamen, a hematologist and community leader from Khasham Zana who supports Raam, acknowledges that the past year’s accomplishments have been minimal. But he still encourages his fellow villagers to vote. He said he explains to them that political engagement is a long game and that they cannot be discouraged because the first Arab party in government was not as successful as they may have hoped.“We’re not going to solve the Palestinian cause in the Knesset,” he said. “But if we have four or five parliamentarians, we can make progress in terms of getting services.”Mr. al-Athamen, 43, is also banking on the idea that even if some Palestinians might not be motivated by progress, they might vote anyway because of the potential negative consequences of staying away from the polls.A campaign rally for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month. A comeback for him could bring more right-wing figures into government.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesThis election could lead to a political comeback for Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister who left office last year amid corruption charges, and to his bringing even more radical figures into government, namely Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right lawmaker.If Arab voter turnout surpasses 50 percent, they would constitute an important voting bloc that could help decide what the future government looks like, Mr. al-Athamen said he tells people. That might include keeping Mr. Ben-Gvir out of government, he said.“If not, then it will be a government for Netanyahu, and the situation for Arabs will be even worse,” he said. More

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      As Republicans Campaign on Crime, Racism Is a New Battlefront

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      As Republicans seize on crime as one of their leading issues in the final weeks of the midterm elections, they have deployed a series of attack lines, terms and imagery that have injected race into contests across the country.In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have labeled a Black candidate as “different” and “dangerous” and darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal.Nowhere have these tactics risen to overtake the debate in a major campaign, but a survey of competitive contests, particularly those involving Black candidates, shows they are so widespread as to have become an important weapon in the 2022 Republican arsenal.In Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, is the Democratic nominee for Senate, a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad targeting him ends by juxtaposing his face with those of three Democratic House members, all of them women of color, and the words “different” and “dangerous.”In a mailer sent to several state House districts in New Mexico, the state Republican Party darkened the hands of a barber shown giving a white child a haircut, next to the question, “Do you want a sex offender cutting your child’s hair?”And in North Carolina, an ad against Cheri Beasley, the Democratic candidate for Senate, who is Black, features the anguished brother of a white state trooper killed a quarter-century ago by a Black man whom Ms. Beasley, then a public defender, represented in court. The brother incredulously says that Ms. Beasley, pleading for the killer’s life, said “he was actually a good person.”Appeals to white fears and resentments are an old strategy in American elections, etched into the country’s political consciousness, with ads like George Bush’s ad using the Black convict Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Jesse Helms’s 1990 commercial showing a white man’s hands to denounce his Black opponent’s support for “quotas.”If the intervening decades saw such tactics become harder to defend, the rise of Donald J. Trump shattered taboos, as he spoke of “rapist” immigrants and “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. But while Republicans quietly stood by advertising that Democrats called racist in 2018, this year, they have responded with defiance, saying they see nothing untoward in their imagery and nothing to apologize for.“This is stupid, but not surprising,” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Republican Senatorial Committee, whose ads in North Carolina and Wisconsin have prompted accusations of racism. “We’re using their own words and their own records. If they don’t like it, they should invent a time machine, go back in time and not embrace dumb-ass ideas that voters are rejecting.”Amid pandemic-era crime increases, legitimate policy differences have emerged between the two parties over gun violence, easing access to bail and funding police budgets.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Florida Governor’s Debate: Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger,  had a rowdy exchange on Oct. 24. Here are the main takeaways from their debate.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Last Dance?: As she races to raise money to hand on to her embattled House majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in no mood to contemplate a Democratic defeat, much less her legacy.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.But some of the Republican arguments could scarcely be called serious policy critiques.This month, a Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, said Democrats favored reparations “for the people that do the crime,” suggesting the movement to compensate the descendants of slavery was about paying criminals. And Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans, saying, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.”Such language, as well as ads portraying chaos by depicting Black rioters and Hispanic immigrants illegally racing across the border, have prompted Democrats and their allies to accuse Republicans of resorting to racist fear tactics.“I think that white people should be speaking out. I think that Black people should be speaking out,” said Chris Larson, a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin who is white and has denounced Republican ads against Mr. Barnes. “I think that all people should be speaking out when there is vile racism at work.”When former President Donald J. Trump rallied for Representative Ted Budd in Wilmington, N.C., last month, he made a joke about “the N-word,” saying it meant “nuclear.”Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDemocrats themselves are dealing with intraparty racial strife in Los Angeles caused by a leaked recording in which Latino leaders are heard using racist terms and disparaging words toward their Black constituents.But it is Republicans’ nationwide focus on crime that is fueling many of the attacks that Democrats say cross a line into racism.The conservative group Club for Growth Action, backed by the billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Diane Hendricks and Jeff Yass, pointed with pride to the crime ads it has run against Ms. Beasley. “Democrats across the country are getting called out for their soft-on-crime policies,” said the group’s president, former Representative David McIntosh. “Now that their poor decisions have caught up with them, they’re relying on the liberal media to call criticisms of their politically inconvenient record racist, and it won’t work.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The 2022 midterms include the most diverse slate of Republican congressional candidates ever, competing against Democratic candidates who would add to the House’s representatives of color and improve on the Senate’s lack of diversity. But it is also the first cycle since Mr. Trump’s presidency, when he set a sharply different tone for his party on race.It was at a rally with Mr. Trump in Arizona this month that Mr. Tuberville and Ms. Greene made their incendiary comments. At another rally in Wilmington, N.C., late last month with a Senate Republican candidate, Representative Ted Budd, Mr. Trump told the audience that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had mentioned “the N-word. You know what the N-word is?” When the audience hooted, he corrected them, “No, no, no, it’s the nuclear word.”Representative Alma Adams, Democrat of North Carolina, who is Black, said, “Donald Trump is fueling this fire.”Still, a rise in violence recently has given openings to both parties.Cheri Beasley, a Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina, addressed supporters and patrons during a campaign stop in Charlotte last month.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIn North Florida, a flier distributed by a Democratic group depicts the face of a Black Republican, Corey Simon, who is challenging a white state senator, on what Republicans have called a shooting target and Democrats call a school easel, with bullets shown strewn underneath. The message was about gun control and school shootings, staples of Democratic campaigns, and identical mailers targeted two other Republican candidates, who are white and Latino.Republicans say their attacks are capturing voters’ anxieties, not feeding them. Defending Mr. Tuberville, a former football coach at Auburn University, Byron Donalds of Florida said crime had become a leading issue because of “soft-on-crime policies and progressive prosecutors in liberal cities.” Mr. Donalds, one of two Black Republicans in the House, added, “As a coach and mentor to countless Black men, Tommy Tuberville has done more to advance Black lives than most people, especially in the Democratic Party.”Ms. Greene and Mr. Tuberville did not respond to requests for comment.Then there is the Republican mailer in Wisconsin that clearly darkened the face of Mr. Barnes.“If you can’t hear it when they pick up the bullhorn that used to be a dog whistle, you can see it with your own eyes,” said Mr. Larson, the Wisconsin state senator.The darkening of white hands in a stock photo of a barber on a Republican mailer in New Mexico prompted outrage there. The New Mexico Republican Party said that Democrats were trying to divert attention from their record on crime. A Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, Rod Montoya, told The Albuquerque Journal that the hands were darkened to make the fliers “gloomy.”Some liberal groups do seem intent on discerning racism in any message on crime. After Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who is white, ran an ad opening with a clip of Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, who is Black, calling for defunding the police, Iowa Democrats called it racist because Ms. Reynolds’s Democratic challenger, Deidre DeJear, is also Black, and, as she has said, bears a resemblance to Ms. Bush.Progressive groups say their concern is merited.“Crime in America has always, at least in modern times, been racially charged,” said Christopher Scott, chief political officer at the liberal group Democracy for America. “The ads aren’t getting to policy points. They are images playing on their base’s fears.”But the policy differences between the two parties are real. Democrats have pushed for cashless bail, saying the current system that requires money to free a defendant before trial is unfair to poor people. Republicans say cash bail is meant to get criminals off the streets. Democrats have expressed solidarity with racial justice protesters and helped bail out some who were arrested after demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd turned destructive. Republicans have said those actions condoned and encouraged lawlessness.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesSkin color is beside the point, said Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Mr. Budd’s campaign in North Carolina, as he defended the blitz of crime advertising against Ms. Beasley. One ad toggles between images of white children — victims of brutal crimes — and the face of Ms. Beasley, her expression haughty or bemused.“The images used in the ad match up to the victims of the criminals she went easy on,” Mr. Felts said. “Are you suggesting the ad makers should make up fake victims, or are you suggesting she shouldn’t be held accountable for her judicial and legal record?”In fact, the judicial and legal records portrayed in at least one of the ads have been determined to be distorted, at best. The first version of the Republican Senatorial Committee’s ad, which portrayed child crime victims from different races, was pulled down by North Carolina television stations in June after they agreed that some of the assertions were false. In a later version, the committee made slight word changes to satisfy the channels but added a more overt racial contrast.“All communities are concerned about public safety,” said State Representative Brandon Lofton, a Democratic Black lawmaker whose South Charlotte district is largely white. “There is a way to talk about it that is truthful” and does not cross racial lines, he said.The campaigns themselves have steered clear of charging racism.Dory MacMillan, a spokeswoman for Ms. Beasley, said, “Our race remains a dead heat, despite Congressman Budd and his allies’ spending millions of dollars to distort Cheri’s record of public service.”In Wisconsin, a spokeswoman for Mr. Barnes, Maddy McDaniel, similarly declined to go further than to say that “the G.O.P.’s fear-mongering playbook failed them last cycle, and it will fail again.”Mr. Barnes, for his part, seemed to make playful use of his portrayal in one of the Republican attack ads as “different” during his first debate with Senator Ron Johnson, the two-term incumbent. He was, indeed, different, Mr. Barnes said, “We don’t have enough working-class people in the United States Senate.” More

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      How Much Will the Supreme Court Change the World?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. The Supreme Court is back in session, and this month it will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases challenging affirmative action policies in college admissions. My guess is that the court will end up forbidding universities to consider race in selecting their student bodies. What are your feelings about this?Gail Collins: Bret, I’m sure you will be shocked to hear that I’m totally against this kind of change. Universities consider all sorts of factors when they’re picking their next student body — it’s not as if everybody just takes a test and the top 10 percent get to talk to the admissions folks at Harvard.Bret: That would actually be my preferred approach, but go on.Gail: If you’re moving on to a college career, you’re going to want to meet a lot of different kinds of people — kids with different talents, different histories, different stories to tell. The idea that racial diversity shouldn’t be an admission goal is just crazy.Bret: One of the reasons these cases have proved so effective is that the plaintiffs have amassed a lot of evidence that while elite universities do more to admit some students on the basis of race, they wind up discriminating against other students on the basis of race. For instance, Harvard admits 12.7 percent of Asian Americans with the highest grades and test scores — while it admits 15.3 percent of similarly qualified white applicants, 31.3 percent of Hispanics and 56.1 percent of African Americans. Also, as The Times’s wonderful Anemona Hartocollis reported a few years ago, Asian American students at Harvard were portrayed in the admissions process as “standard strong” and “busy and bright,” which smack of the stereotypes that schools like Harvard or Stanford once used to discriminate against gifted Jewish kids. It’s hard for me to see any possible justification for it.Gail: Some Asian American groups have argued fiercely that Asian American students have actually benefited from schools’ focus on inclusivity. And in general, there’s a very good case to be made that inclusive institutions perform better in general — whether it’s schools, corporations or the military.Bret: Assuming the court rules against Harvard, how would you recommend universities respond?Gail: Whatever they do has to be based on the fact that the country has an education system that discriminates against kids from low-income areas where the tax revenue just isn’t good enough to support high-level schools. Or areas where the citizens just aren’t fair-minded enough to pay what’s necessary.Bret: I would feel much better about affirmative action if it were structured on the basis of class, not race, to lend a hand to poorer young scholars, irrespective of skin tone.Gail: If you want a bottom line on responding to this wrongheaded court, I’d say it’s a signal that taxes need to rise to fund a very sizable rise in education spending, so kids from underprivileged areas get a fair break.Care to rally around a federal tax hike for schools — maybe a Bad Education Elimination Tax? I know something called BEET doesn’t sound intellectual, but at least it’d be memorable.Bret: It’s an attractive suggestion! But the U.S. spends more per student at both the grade school and the university level than most other developed countries, for mediocre results. Money isn’t always the answer, especially when so many of our public and private universities look like country clubs on the outside and feel like conclaves of the Socialist International on the inside. What’s really needed is better academic leadership, especially when it comes to creating environments of genuine intellectual diversity, challenge and freedom. That … and the abolition of college football.Gail: Make killing college football your crusade and you’ll definitely get, um, attention. Although I’m recalling that when I went to Marquette, I arrived around the time it was eliminating the football team. Did not hurt a bit, as far as I could tell — the students and alumni rallied around the much cheaper basketball program.Bret: I went to the University of Chicago. Our first Heisman Trophy winner, Jay Berwanger in 1935, was, mercifully, our last. What we lost in football glory we made up in … atomic reactions, actually. On a different subject, Gail, any lingering thoughts on the Senate race in Georgia, now that we’ve had time to watch the debate?Gail: Been thinking about it a lot. Georgia seems to have put itself in a position where Herschel Walker wins any debate in which he doesn’t simply stare at the camera and moan. He appeared to be pretty well prepared for this one. What’s your reaction?Bret: The debate dynamics reminded me of the paradox that when nothing is expected, much is forgiven, and when much is expected, nothing is forgiven. So in that sense, Walker had the hidden advantage, and he seized it. He also had the advantage of being able to tie Raphael Warnock to the Biden economy, which is … no bueno. I’m afraid it could tip the election to Walker, especially if food, rent and gas prices keep going up. Any feelings about why the Inflation Reduction Act isn’t … working as the name claimed it would?Gail: A lot of the problems have to do with the international scene — Russia-Ukraine and, of course, the Saudi oil price hike. It’s working fine on some levels, although the results will be in the long term. I can’t think of anything more important than encouraging clean energy — and the act addresses this, in part, through your fave, tax reduction.Bret: Ah, “clean energy,” the kind that gets us to stop pumping dirty oil and start digging dirty lithium, copper, cobalt and rare earth metals. Sorry, go on.Gail: Conservatives have made a huge row about the way the bill will increase I.R.S. spending, but in the long run that, too, will be a big plus — making it quicker at helping law-abiding taxpayers and ferreting out the sneaky evaders.The bill will help senior citizens afford prescription drugs, to which I say yay. On the downside, it’s hard to reduce inflation when deficit spending is high, and it’s hard to get that under control without significantly higher taxes on folks like … prescription drug manufacturers.Bret: When Chuck Schumer got Joe Manchin to sign on to the bill, I thought it was clever to put it under the title of inflation reduction, as opposed to climate. Now it looks like political malpractice, since it gives Republicans a campaign punchline as inflation stays high. That and forecasts for a steep recession next year, the migration crisis, the spendthrift and shambolic student-loan forgiveness plan and high crime rates are going to put a lot of wind in Republican sails in the next few weeks. I mean, a Republican might even win the governor’s race in Oregon! And the Democrat who is going to turn around the party’s fortunes is …Gail: Sorry to say it won’t be Joe Biden. I think history will give Biden a lot of points for the way he brought us out of the Trump presidency, but his strong points — good at bipartisanship, powerful history of congressional negotiating, fatherly image — aren’t holding up well in the current still-quite-Trumpian political world.Bret: History will definitely remember him as a transitional president, but whether it’s as George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford or John Adams — all former veeps, I might add — remains to be seen.Gail: I’m still hoping Biden will change his mind about his vow to run again and open up a competition among the more promising Democrats. That would include the names we’ve been tossing around for some time, like Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris — although I absolutely do not think Harris’s position as vice president should give her automatic support.Bret: Of those three, the only one I think of as a strong contender is Klobuchar, who is smart, experienced and competent, her salad-eating habits notwithstanding. Another favorite of mine is the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo. But like so many would-be centrist politicians, she could win handily at the national level but would have no chance of making it through the primaries. It seems to be part of a larger problem we have in this country, which is that in one institution after another, it’s almost impossible for the best people to rise to the top.Gail: The current senatorial races are encouraging me with the show of talent like Tim Ryan in Ohio or already-a-senator Mark Kelly in Arizona — who, of course, has the advantage of a disastrous Republican opponent.And, you know, anything for a silver lining …Bret: Silver lining being that we will have elections in early November and results in early December?On a better note, Gail, please don’t miss our colleague Patrick Healy’s gorgeous reminiscence of the late, great Angela Lansbury and what she meant to Patrick as a person and to his family as an actress. Obit, he wrote. Among the essay’s other virtues, it is a good reminder of how much we can learn from vulnerability — our own, our parents’ and our colleagues’ — and especially the vulnerability of those who, in advancing years, handle it, as she did, with supreme grace. Rest in peace.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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      The ‘Sleeping Giant’ That May Decide the Midterms

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      The choices made by Latino voters on Nov. 8 will be crucial to the outcome in a disproportionate share of Senate battleground states, like Arizona (31.5 percent of the population), Nevada (28.9), Florida (25.8), Colorado (21.7), Georgia (9.6) and North Carolina (9.5).According to most analysts, there is no question that a majority of Hispanic voters will continue to support Democratic candidates. The question going into the coming election is how large that margin will be.In terms of the battle for control of the House, three Hispanic-majority congressional districts in South Texas — the 15th, 28th and 34th — have become proving grounds for Republican candidates challenging decades of Democratic dominance. In a special election in the 34th district in June, the Republican candidate, Mayra Flores, prevailed.Two weeks ago, The Texas Tribune reported that:Since Labor Day, outside G.O.P. groups have blasted the Democratic nominees on multiple fronts, criticizing them all as weak on border issues and then zeroing in on candidate-specific vulnerabilities. Democratic groups are countering in two of the races, though for now, it is Republicans who appear to be in a more offensive posture.Last week, Axios reported that in the 15th Congressional district, which is 81.9 percent Hispanic, national Democratic groups had begun to abandon its nominee as a lost cause:Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, a progressive running in a majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley district against Republican Monica de la Cruz, isn’t getting any Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee support in her Trump +3 district. House Majority PAC is planning to cancel the scheduled ad reservations for her at the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the group’s plans.Across a wide range of studies and exit poll data analyses, there is general agreement that President Donald Trump significantly improved his 2016 margin among Hispanic voters in 2020, although there is less agreement on how large his gain was, on the demographics of his new supporters, or on whether the movement was related to Trump himself, Trump-era Covid payments or to a secular trend.In their July 2022 paper “Reversion to the Mean, or their Version of the Dream? An Analysis of Latino Voting in 2020,” Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil R. Velez and Emily A. West, political scientists at Emory, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh, write that there isan increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos. Moreover, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among newly-engaged U.S.-born Latino children of immigrants and Catholic Latinos. The results point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.That is, the more Hispanic voters subordinate traditional party and ethnic solidarity in favor of voting based on conservative or moderate policy preferences, the more likely that are to defect to the Republican Party.The authors caution, however, that nothing is fixed in stone:On the one hand, there is evidence that working-class Latino voters became more supportive of Trump in 2020, mirroring increases in educational polarization among the mass public. If similar processes are at play for Latinos — and if such polarization is not Trump-specific — then this could mean a durable change in partisan loyalties.On the other hand, they continue,Historical voting patterns among Latinos reveal natural ebbs and flows. Using exit poll data from 1984-2020, political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that the pro-Democratic margin among Latinos ranges from +9 in 2004 to +51 in 1996, with an average margin of +35 points. Instead of reflecting a durable shift, 2020 could be a “reversion to the mean,” with 2016 serving as a recent high-water mark for the Democrats.In an email responding to my inquiry about future trends, Fraga wrote:My sense is that most of the Latinos who shifted to the Republican Party in 2020 have not returned to the Democratic Party. Many of these new Republican converts were ideologically conservative pre-2020, so Republicans didn’t have to shift their policy message very much to win them over.“Portrait of a Persuadable Latino” — an April 2021 study by the nonprofit Equis Research of Hispanic defections from the Democratic Party — found similar overall trends to those reported in the Fraga-Velez-West paper, but revealed slightly different demographic patterns.The Equis survey found that the largest percentage tilt toward Trump was among women, at plus 8 percent, compared with men, at 3 percent; among non-college Latinos, plus 6, compared with just 1 percent among the college educated; among Protestants, plus seven compared with plus 5 among Catholics and plus 15 percent among conservative Hispanics — compared with no tilt among liberals and a plus 4 percent tilt among moderates.Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Labs, a nonprofit committed “to massively increase civic participation among Latinos in this country,” emailed a response to my query about Hispanic voter trends:While Latinos shifted toward Republicans between 2016 and 2020, an 8-point swing toward Trump, we do not see evidence of a further decrease in Democratic support since Biden’s win. In most states, things do not look worse for Dems with Latinos than they did in the last election, nor do they look better.But, Odio pointedly cautioned,The political environment has the potential to lead to further erosion of Democratic support among Latinos. A meaningful share of Latino voters remain on the fence, having not firmly chosen a side in the election. These late breakers could move toward either party, or toward the couch, before the midterms are over.Odio sent me a September 2022 Equis report, “Latino Voters in Limbo — A Midterm Update,” which found thatYoung Latinos (18-34), Latino men, and self-identified conservatives are overrepresented among the 2020 Biden voters who today disapprove of the president’s job performance. Among the most likely to be undecided today are ideological holdouts: conservative and moderate Latinos who have held back from Republicans, despite seeming to share some characteristics with their G.O.P.-supporting white counterparts. Notably Republicans have not increased support among these Latinos in the last year in almost any state — likely because a large majority of conservative or moderate Latinos who don’t yet vote Republican believe Democrats “care more about people like them.”Today, the report continues, “what keeps many Latinos on the fence is again concerns about the economy and fears that Democrats don’t consistently prioritize the economy, handle it as decisively as business-obsessed Republicans, or value hard work.”A separate Equis study, “2020 Post-Mortem: The American Dream Voter,” found that a negative attitude toward socialism was a factor among Hispanics nationwide, especially among those who stress the importance of working hard to get ahead:There isn’t one overriding concern about “socialism”— but a package of complaints usually rises to the top around government control over people’s lives, raising taxes, and money going to ‘undeserving’ recipients. If a through line exists, it is a worry over people becoming “lazy and dependent on government’ by those who highly value hard work.”The American Dream Voter study found that the declining salience of immigration in 2020 compared with either 2016 or 2018, combined with the debate in 2020 over Covid lockdowns versus reopening the economy, diminished ethnic solidarity in 2020, allowing conservative Hispanics to shift their allegiance to the Republican Party:The economy unlocked a door: the issue landscape shifted to more favorable ground for Trump, opening a way for some Latinos who found it unacceptable to vote for him in 2016. The socialism attack broke through: it created a space for defection,” according to the report’s authors. “Democrats retain some natural credibility with Latino voters but have lost ground on workers, work and the American Dream; they’re also open to attack for taking Hispanics for granted; Republicans have some openings but are still held back by their image as the uncaring party of big corporations.In 2016, the study continued,some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican — based on their demographics, partisanship and ideology — were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hard-line immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity. By the middle of 2020, neither views on immigration nor the role of Hispanic identity were showing a major effect on vote choice — they were no longer cleanly differentiating Trump voters from Democratic voters.In 2018, according to the study, “Trump lost even the conservatives on family separation. But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the (2020) election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”A 2021 Pew Research report found that Latinos view anti-Hispanic discrimination differently from anti-Black discrimination. Hispanic voters were asked whether “there was ‘too much,’ ‘about the right amount’ or ‘too little’ attention paid to race and racial issues” when it comes to Hispanics and then asked the same question about Black Americans.Just over half, 51 percent, of Latino respondents said, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination against Hispanics, 28 percent said, “about the right amount” and 19 percent said, “too much.” Conversely, 30 percent of Latino respondents said that in the case of Black Americans, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination, 23 percent said, “about the right amount” and 45 percent said, “too much.”The American Dream Voter survey Equis performed found that when Hispanics were asked “which concerns you more, Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies or Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies,” 42 percent of Latinos said socialism/leftist policies and 38 percent said fascist/anti-democratic politics.Equis did find substantial Democratic advantages when Hispanics were asked which party is “better for Hispanics” (53-31), which “is the party of fairness and equality” (51-31) and which party “cares about people like you” (49-32). But the Democratic advantage shrank to statistical insignificance on key bread-and- butter issues: which party “values hard work” 42-40 and “which is the party of the American dream” 41-39, and a dead 42-42 heat on “which party is better for the American worker?”Last month, Pew Research released a survey that showed continuing Democratic strength among Hispanics, “Most Latinos Say Democrats Care About Them and Work Hard for Their Vote, Far Fewer Say So of G.O.P.”Pew found that over the past four years, Democrats experienced a modest gain in partisan identification among Hispanics over Republicans, going from 62-34 (+28) in 2018 to 63-32 (+31) in 2022.From March 2022 to August 2022, the share of Latinos identifying abortion as a “very important issue” shot up from 42 to 57 percent in response to the Supreme Court’s decision’s decision in Dobbs in June. Hispanics favor abortion rights by a 57-40 margin, slightly smaller than the split among all voters, 62-36, according to Pew.At the same time, the percentage of Latino respondents listing violent crime among the most important issues rose from 61 to 70 percent; support for gun control rose from 59 to 66 percent; and concern over voter suppression rose from 51 to 59 percent.Registered Latino voters split 53-26 in favor of voting for a generic Democratic congressional candidate over a generic Republican, according to Pew, but there were striking religious differences: Catholics, who make up 47 percent of the Hispanic electorate, favored a generic Democratic House candidate 59-26; evangelical Protestants, 24 percent of Hispanics, backed Republicans 50-32; Latinos with little or no religious affiliation, 23 percent, backed Democrats 60-17.Matt A. Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at U.C.L.A, pointed to data in the Oct. 2 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials weekly Latino voter poll:Indeed if you look at issues like access to abortion, student debt, immigrant rights and gun violence, there are no signs at all that Latinos are becoming more conservative. When asked about government policy, 70 to 80 percent of Latino voters give support to the Democratic Party policy agenda. Indeed for the fourth week in a row, the NALEO tracking poll shows that abortion rights are the number two most important issue to Latino voters in 2022 and issues such as mass shootings and lowering the costs of health care are top 5 issues as well.Trump’s 2020 gains reflected “a clear pattern that concern over the Covid economic slowdown helped Trump make temporary gains with Latino voters,” Barreto argued. “Because so many were negatively impacted by the slumping economy in 2020, Trump was able to convince at least some Latinos that he would reopen the economy faster.”Despite those improvements, Barreto contended, “the reality is that Trump’s gains in 2020 were not part of any pattern of realignment or ideological shift among Latinos. As the national economy continues to recover and improve, Biden favorability continues to recover among Latinos.”In September 2020. Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at the University of California- Berkeley, wrote an essay for The Times with Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a liberal advocacy group. They wrote that when they asked white, Black and Hispanic votershow “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. The message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs “and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.In other words, Haney López and Gavito wrote, “Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.” Progressives, they continued,commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.I asked Haney López about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 election. He emailed me his reply:As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status. Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.Some Latinos, Haney López continued,are susceptible to Republican propaganda promoting social conflict and distrust. The greatest failure of the Democratic Party with respect to Latinos, and indeed the polity generally, is its failure to pursue policies and to stress stories that build social solidarity, especially across lines of race, class, and other wedge identities, including gender and sexual identity.Asked the same set of questions, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a former dean of the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, had a somewhat different take.By email, Suárez-Orozco wrote:I am unpersuaded by the claim that Hispanics are becoming more conservative. To be more precise, over time, they are becoming more American. The holy trinity of integration: language, marriage patterns, and connectivity to the labor market tell a powerful story. Over time, Hispanics mimic mainstream norms. They are learning English much faster than Italians did a century and a half ago, they are marrying outside their ethnicity at very significant rates, and their connectivity to the labor market is very muscular.To Suárez-Orozco, Latinos in the United States are primed to play an ever more significant role — in politics and everywhere else: “The dominant metaphor on Hispanics qua elections over the last half-century has been ‘the sleeping giant.’ When the sleeping giants wakes up: Alas, s/he is us.”The question is whether this sleeping giant will move to the right or to the left. The evidence points both ways — but this is not a contest the Democrats can afford lose.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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      Dozens of Candidates of Color Give House Republicans a Path to Diversity

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      House Republicans are fielding a slate of 67 Black, Latino, Asian or Native American candidates on the ballot in November, by the party’s count, raising an opportunity to change the composition of a House G.O.P. conference that now has only a dozen members of color.Depending on the outcome, those Republican candidates say, they could challenge the notion that theirs is the party of white voters.The lineup of Republican candidates is historic — 32 Latinos, 22 Black candidates, 11 Asian Americans and two Native Americans, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. (Of those candidates, four identify as more than one race.) Many of them are long shots in heavily Democratic districts, but with so few Republicans of color now in Congress, the party’s complexion will almost certainly look different next year.More remarkable, perhaps, is that the Republican candidates are nearing the finish line even as some of the party’s white lawmakers have ratcheted up racist language or lines of attack — a sign that some party leaders remain unconcerned about racial sensitivity.This weekend, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, rallied with former President Donald J. Trump in Nevada and told the crowd that Democrats were “pro-crime” and wanted reparations — widely understood as a reference to slavery — for “the people that do the crime.” At the same event, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, invoked the racist “great replacement theory” when she said, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.”Elsewhere, including in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democrats have accused Republicans of darkening the skin of Black candidates in campaign materials and of running ads brazenly trying to tether Black politicians to Black criminals.The 2022 candidates do not want such issues to derail their groundbreaking runs. After watching the comments from Ms. Greene and Mr. Tuberville, Anna Paulina Luna, a Latina favored to win a House seat in Florida, responded carefully but did not condemn them, instead saying, “Establishment Democrats are exploiting illegals as political currency.”“Many times, illegal immigrants are employed under the table. Many Americans are not offered fair wages because some choose to pay illegals under the table at lower cost,” she said, continuing, “During the naturalization process, individuals are required to learn about our history and culture. That is important as a nation.”Still, the numbers speak for themselves. The only two Black Republicans in the House, Representatives Burgess Owens of Utah and Byron Donalds of Florida, are likely to be joined by Wesley Hunt of Texas and John James of Michigan, Black G.O.P. candidates who are favored to win on Nov. 8. The numbers of this small group could rise further with victories by Jennifer-Ruth Green in Indiana, John Gibbs in Michigan and George Logan in Connecticut, all of whom have a chance.The ranks of the seven incumbent Latino Republicans in the House could nearly double if all six Latino candidates in tight races triumph. And Allan Fung, a Republican in a tossup contest in Rhode Island, could lift the number of Asian American Republicans by 50 percent if he wins and two Southern California incumbents, Representatives Young Kim and Michelle Steel, beat back Democratic challengers.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“It’s Hispanic people, Black people, Black women, Black men, Asian men, Asian women,” Mr. Hunt of Texas said in an interview. “It has been outstanding to see our party get to the point where, yeah, we’re conservatives, but guess what: We’re also not monolithic.”Michelle Steel, right, became one of the first Korean American women in Congress when she won a House race in California in 2020. She is seeking to defend her seat.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesRepublicans have a long way to go to match the Democrats in diversity. A strong G.O.P. showing in November could bring the number of Black Republicans in the House to seven. House Democrats have 56 Black members, including influential leaders.If Republicans end up with 13 Latino members in the House, they still will not measure up to the 34 Hispanic Democrats.And with the right political breaks, Democrats could end up bolstering their already diverse caucus. Fourteen out of the 36 Democrats aiming for competitive Republican seats are candidates of color.Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the House Democratic campaign arm, said that “Republicans are mistaken if they think finally engaging with communities of color in the year 2022 with flawed candidates” would distance their party from what he called an “unpopular, extreme agenda.”“While Republicans attempt to dilute the number of white supremacists within their ranks, their politics of dividing Americans and promoting hate remains,” he said.Republicans, however, see a virtuous circle in the gains they are making: As more candidates of color triumph, the thinking goes, more will enter future races, and more voters of color will see a home in the Republican Party. .css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“We’re narrative busters,” said Mr. Donalds, who helped the National Republican Congressional Committee with recruiting candidates. “We break up the dogma of Democratic politics, in terms of how to view Republicans.”Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the group’s chairman, said this year’s slate was no accident. Four years ago, when he took over the committee, he set about changing the way Republicans recruited candidates, seeking far more diversity. The group would de-emphasize the Washington-based consultants who had a financial stake in promoting their candidates and instead rely on members to seek out talent in their districts.John James speaking to supporters in 2020, when he lost a close race for Senate in Michigan. Republicans recruited him to run for the House in 2022.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York TimesTwo years ago was a dry run; House Republicans gained an unexpected 14 seats, and every seat they flipped from Democrats was captured by a woman or a candidate of color.Mr. Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters and Black men — which he made despite his stream of racist and xenophobic comments while in office — inspired a fresh push by Republicans.Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, who helped with Latino recruitment, said it was not a difficult pitch. More Hispanic candidates were galvanized to run by soaring inflation rates, a surge of migrants in heavily Latino border districts and a growing sense that Democrats were now the party of the educated elite, he said.“Democrats, one could argue, have done a good job with their rhetoric, but their policies have been disastrous, and they’ve been particularly disastrous for the working class,” Mr. Diaz-Balart said. “Was Trump’s rhetoric the words that would be ideal to get Latino voters? No, but the policies were.”Mr. Donalds insisted the former president was not a racist but said, “The question is really silly at this point.”“Republicans now are far more open and far more direct about talking to every voter, not just Republican voters, quote, unquote,” he said. “I think that that’s what’s given the impetus for people to decide to run.”That and a lot of pushing. Mr. Emmer spoke of meeting a trade expert who worked for Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona two years ago, then telling Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, to persuade Juan Ciscomani to run.Mr. Ciscomani recalled talking over the possibility with his wife and Mr. Ducey in 2018 and 2020 before backing away. In the spring of 2021, the one-two push from Mr. Emmer and Mr. McCarthy sealed the deal.“Democrats have taken the Hispanic vote for granted,” he said. “They pandered to the Hispanic community, saying what they wanted to hear and doing nothing about it.” He added: “But Republicans never made an effort. They never tried to get their votes.”Mr. Ciscomani is now favored to win back Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District from the Democrats.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican, is favored to win his House race in Arizona.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesIn 2020, Mr. James — a Black Republican whom Mr. Emmer called “a candidate that only comes along once in a while” — fell short in a surprisingly close race to unseat Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan. Afterward, the N.R.C.C. chairman cleared a path for Mr. James to run for the House.“I told him, ‘To learn to really refine your ability when it comes to campaigning and to understand the business of campaigning, there’s nothing wrong with starting in the House,’” Mr. Emmer said.Mr. Hunt had also tried to run for office and failed — in 2020, for a House seat in the Houston suburbs. In 2018, Mr. McCarthy had been in Houston for a fund-raiser when he met Mr. Hunt, a veteran West Point graduate with a conservative bent, and pressed him to run.Mr. Hunt recalled that after his 2020 loss, “Kevin McCarthy called me the next day, and he said: ‘Hang in there. Let’s see what happens after redistricting. We need you up here. Please don’t give up the fight.’”Mr. Hunt added, “It changed everything.”Ms. Luna had been a conservative activist and political commentator when she decided on her own to run for a Tampa-area House seat in 2020. She said she did not hear from Republicans in Washington until after she won the Republican primary. But when she came up short against Representative Charlie Crist, the hard sell descended.Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, called her days after her defeat, seeing her as a potential recruit for the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich followed, and then Mr. Donalds took her under his wing. “When people see that we are conservatives, we are Republicans, and there’s not this stereotype of what it means to be Republican, I think it empowers them to own their convictions, to own their ideologies,” she said on Friday.Democrats have made it clear that they will not shy away from criticizing Republican candidates for their positions just because of their backgrounds. They have highlighted college writings by Mr. Gibbs suggesting women should not have the right to vote. Representative Mayra Flores of Texas, who won a special election in June but faces a tough race in a more Democratic district, has promoted QAnon conspiracy theories.Representative Burgess Owens, left, and Representative Victoria Spartz after Ms. Spartz made an emotional speech about Ukraine in March. Mr. Owens is one of two Black Republicans in the House.Win McNamee/Getty ImagesRepublicans who want to diversify their ranks say they also hope to change the views of some G.O.P. voters. Mr. Hunt told of a young man who talked with him after a campaign event, then handed his phone over so he could talk to the man’s white grandfather.“He said: ‘Mr. Hunt, you’re the first Black person I ever voted for my entire life. I’m here to tell you that I was racist, and I grew up racist, and there have been times in my life that I have not treated Black people fairly,’” Mr. Hunt recounted. “‘I met you and I said, I have to get behind this guy, in spite of my prejudice.’” More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Race Problem

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      In July, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appointed Jeffery Moore, a former tax law specialist with the Florida Department of Revenue, to be a county commissioner in Gadsden, the blackest county in the state.On Friday, Moore resigned after a picture emerged that appeared to show him dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia.Neither Moore nor DeSantis have confirmed that Moore is in fact the man in the picture. When Politico reached out to Desantis’s office for comment, his communication director responded, “We are in the middle of hurricane prep, I’m not aware of the photo you sent but Jeff did submit his resignation last week.” This is not the first, shall I say, “awkward” racial issue DeSantis had encountered. But throughout, he has had much the same response: Instead of addressing the issue directly, he — or his office — claims to be oblivious. That’s the DeSantis M.O.In a 2018 gubernatorial debate, the moderator asked DeSantis why he had spoken at several conferences hosted by David Horowitz, a conservative writer who the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Black movements.” Horowitz once said that President Barack Obama was an “evil man” who “will send emissaries to Ferguson for a street thug who got himself killed attempting to disarm a police officer, resisting arrest.”There, too, DeSantis claimed obliviousness, responding, “How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?”It was in that debate that his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum said, “Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”The problem, of course, is that DeSantis’s unfortunate associations keep stacking up.In 2018, he appointed Michael Ertel, then a county elections supervisor, to be his secretary of state. The following year, Ertel resigned after a picture emerged of him in blackface wearing a T-shirt that read “Katrina Victim.” He appeared to be mocking Black women in particular, because he wore fake breasts, a scarf wrapped around his head and large gold earrings.Hurricane Katrina killed more than a thousand people, a slight majority of whom were Black.DeSantis responded to the controversy by saying: “It’s unfortunate. I think he’s done a lot of good work.” He continued, “I don’t want to get mired into kind of side controversies, and so I felt it was best to just accept the resignation and move on.” Not a word of condemnation for the act or sympathy for the victims of the storm. Also, not a word of his own personal regret for appointing him.Now, maybe the pool of possible Republican appointees in Florida is hopelessly polluted with white men who like to dress in racist costumes. That’s damning, if true. Maybe DeSantis is simply doomed by appalling options. That could well be the harvest of the Republican Party sowing hatred. Or maybe DeSantis is just too dense to do his homework. That may well be true, although I have no sympathy for it.This is a man who championed and signed Florida’s ridiculous “Stop WOKE Act,” restricting how race can be discussed in the state’s schools and workplaces. You can’t live in the dark on race and then try to drag your whole state into the darkness with you.I have always thought of DeSantis as reading the rules of villainy from a coloring book and acting them out. Nothing about him says clever and tactical. He seems to me the kind of man who must conjure confidence, who is fragile and feisty because of it, a beta male trying desperately to convince the world that he’s an alpha.But there is a way in which race policy reaches far beyond being merely racist-adjacent. DeSantis, for instance, has actually tried to strip Black Floridians of their power and voice.In 2010, Florida voters, by a strong majority, approved a constitutional amendment rejecting gerrymandering. The amendment made clear that “districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.”Yet Florida’s Republican-led Legislature produced a gerrymandered map anyway. In 2015, the state Supreme Court struck down much of the Legislature’s proposed map, and demanded that eight House districts be redrawn. Among them was the Fifth District, which at the time snaked up the state from Orlando to Jacksonville. The redrawn map allowed Black voters to elect four Black representatives.In the decade between 2010 and 2020, there was a 14.6 percent increase in the population of the state, nearly twice the rate of growth of the country — and enough to earn Florida a 28th congressional district.But when the Legislature drew its map this cycle, it didn’t increase the number of minority districts, even though minorities had driven 90 percent of the population growth in the state — growth that had earned Florida its new district. (Most of that growth was among Hispanics.)As the staff director of the Florida Senate’s Committee on Reapportionment told The Tampa Bay Times, state legislators initially set out to keep the number of Black- and Hispanic-majority districts the same as they had been for the past few years.That wouldn’t have been fair, but at least the number of minority seats wouldn’t be cut. That wasn’t enough for DeSantis. He submitted his own redistricting map that cut the number of Black-controlled districts in half, taking them from four to two. The legislature went along and approved DeSantis’s map.DeSantis may pretend to be oblivious to the racial acts and statements of the people he associates with and appoints, but eliminating Black power and representation was a conscious act.Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying this: He has targeted Black people, Black power and Black history.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Giorgia Meloni’s Adoption Views Worry Gay Parents in Italy

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      When Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to become Italy’s next prime minister, said on Italian TV this month that she opposed adoption by gay couples and that having a mother and a father was best for a child, Luigi, 6, overheard her and asked his father about it.“I wasn’t able to answer very well,” said his father, Francesco Zaccagnini. “I said they are not happy with how we love each other.”In recent weeks, Mr. Zaccagnini, 44, who works for a labor union in the Tuscan city of Pisa and is a gay father, went door to door asking friends and acquaintances to vote in Sunday’s elections to oppose Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy.“My family is at stake,” he said.Mr. Zaccagnini and his partner had Luigi and their 6-month-old daughter, Livia, with two surrogate mothers who live in the United States. In her election campaign, Ms. Meloni pledged to oppose surrogacy and adoption by gay couples. As a member of Parliament, she submitted an amendment to a law that would extend a ban on surrogacy in Italy to Italians who seek the method abroad. It has not yet been approved by Parliament.Francesco Zaccagnini, left, with his partner and their children, Luigi and Livia. Mr. Zaccagnini worries that his son could see some of the hard-right messaging around gay families when he starts reading soon.Courtesy of Francesco ZaccagniniItaly is already an outlier in Western Europe in terms of gay rights — gay marriage is still not recognized by law — but the possibility of Ms. Meloni taking power has prompted fears among gay families that things might get worse.In 2016, Parliament passed a law recognizing civil unions of same-sex couples despite opposition by the Roman Catholic Church, which is influential in Italy.Gay parents remain cut off from the main avenues for adoption, which require a marriage rather than a civil union. And with surrogacy banned and in vitro fertilization only allowed for heterosexual couples, gay couples are effectively forced to travel abroad to become parents, and to navigate complicated — and case by case — paths through bureaucracy, courts and social services.“We hoped that the country would go forward,” said Alessia Crocini, the president of Rainbow Families, an association of gay families. “But we have a dark period ahead.”Ms. Meloni has said that civil unions are good enough for gay couples. She has also repeatedly said that she is not homophobic, and that she is not going to alter existing civil rights, but that what is best for a child is to have both a mother and a father. Her surrogacy proposal scared many gay parents, as did her tone and emphasis on what constitutes a family.“It gives homophobes an excuse and a political support,” Ms. Crocini said.Ms. Meloni has decried what she calls “gender ideology” as aimed at the disappearance of women as mothers, and opposes the teaching of such ideas in schools.Ms. Crocini said she worried that her son, 8, saying he has two mothers at school might be considered gender ideology. She has some reason to think that. Federico Mollicone, the culture spokesman for Ms. Meloni’s party, recently urged the Italian state broadcaster RAI not to air an episode of the popular cartoon “Peppa Pig” that featured a bear with two mothers, calling it “gender indoctrination,” and claiming that young children should not see gay adoption presented as something “natural” or “normal, because it’s not.”Last year, Ms. Meloni campaigned to make surrogacy a “universal crime,” using a picture of a child with a bar code on its hand.Mr. Zaccagnini said he was scared his son would see such images and messages if they kept circulating. Despite his instinct to stay in Italy and fight, Mr. Zaccagnini said he had been thinking about relocating abroad.“My son this year will start reading,” he said. “I need to protect him somehow.” More

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      Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back

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      Some fear that the hard-right politician, whose party is expected to be the big winner in the election on Sunday, will continue policies that have kept women back.ROME — Being a woman, and mother, has been central to the political pitch of Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right politician who is likely to become Italy’s prime minister after elections on Sunday.She once ran for mayor seven months pregnant because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t. Her most famous speech includes the refrain “I am a woman. I am a mother.” She often talks with pride about how she started a party, Brothers of Italy, and rose to the top of national politics without any special treatment.But as happy as women’s rights activists are about that fact that a woman could finally run Italy, many wish it was essentially any other woman in Italy. They fear that Ms. Meloni’s hard-right agenda, her talk about preventing abortions, opposing quotas and other measures will set back the cause of women.“It’s not a gain at all and, indeed, a possible setback from the point of view of women’s rights,” said Giorgia Serughetti, who writes about women’s issues and teaches political philosophy at Bicocca University in Milan.More than in neighboring European Union countries, women in Italy have struggled to emerge in the country’s traditionally patriarchal society. Four out of 10 Italian women don’t work. Unemployment rates are even higher for young women starting careers. Female chief executive officers lead only a tiny percentage of companies listed on Milan’s stock exchange, and there are fewer than 10 female rectors at Italy’s more than 80 universities.And for many Italian women, finding a suitable work-life balance becomes nearly impossible once children enter the equation. Affordable, all-day, public child care is nonexistent in many areas, and women paid the highest price during the pandemic, staying home even after periods of lockdown when schools were shut.All national and international indicators suggest that if women in Italy worked more, gross domestic product would largely benefit and increase.“Half of Italian women do not have economic independence,” said Linda Laura Sabbadini, a statistician and director of new technologies at Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. “That can’t just be cultural; politics clearly hasn’t done enough for women so far.”Ms. Meloni has presented herself as someone who will help, but on key issues to women, the coalition has been vague and short on details. And a coalition partner, Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigrant League party, has admired Victor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, and his family policies. The League’s leader recently said that Mr. Orban had drafted the “most advanced family policy” giving “the best results at the European level.”Matteo Salvini, right, then the Italian interior minister, next to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at a news conference in Milan in 2018.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Orban has encouraged Hungarian mothers to procreate prolifically to counter the dropping birthrate. This month, the Hungarian government passed a decree that would require women seeking an abortion to observe fetal vital signs before moving forward with the procedure.Concerns have emerged in Italy that Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition could make it harder for women to have abortions in a country where the procedure has been legal since 1978 but is still very difficult to obtain.Asked about the law, Ms. Meloni, who has said her mother nearly aborted her, vowed in an interview that she “wouldn’t change it” as prime minister, and that abortion would remain “accessible and safe and legal.” But she added that she wanted to more fully apply a part of the law “about prevention,” which, she said, had been effectively ignored until now.Critics fear that approach would allow anti-abortion organizations to play a more prominent role in family-planning clinics and encourage even more doctors to avoid the procedure. Only about 33 percent of doctors perform legal abortions in Italy, and even less, 10 percent, in some regions.Laura Lattuada, an actress in Rome, said she was concerned that the abortion law could be chipped away with Ms. Meloni in power.“She’s constantly saying she wants to improve it, but I am not sure that her conception of protecting women and the family corresponds to the improvement of women’s rights,” she said.Abortion is hardly the only issue that has given activists pause. Italy introduced and has progressively extended the so-called pink quotas, a mandated percentage of female representation in politics and boardrooms. Many women say quotas in politics better reflect the population, while quotas in companies help overcome “old boys” networks, giving women equal access to higher paying jobs. They also give women greater visibility, they said.A mural in Rome painted by a street artist known as Harry Greb showing Ms. Meloni and other Italian politicians.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Meloni is against the quotas. She argues that as a woman, she climbed the political ladder on her own and is now poised to run the country. She says that she is proof that women don’t need government interference to enforce diversity.Her supporters agreed.“They never gave her anything, she took it. She won on her own,” said Lucia Loddo, 54, who was waving a banner supporting Ms. Meloni at a rally in Cagliari. She said that for women, Ms. Meloni’s ascent “is the most beautiful thing. All of the men have been disasters. She is prepared.”About 25 percent of Italian woman voting on Sunday are expected to cast their ballots for Ms. Meloni, though pollsters failed to ask women whether her gender was a factor in their vote, which is itself telling of the attention given to women voters here. Ms. Meloni is polling at least 25 percent nationally, the highest of any candidate.Ms. Meloni has won voters over with her down-to-earth and straight-talking manner (she often speaks in Roman dialect). But the secret to her popularity has less to do with her personality or policy proposals than that she was essentially the lone leader of a major party to stay in the opposition during the national unity government of Mario Draghi.That allowed her to campaign in a country that is perennially looking for someone new as a fresh face, even though she has been in Parliament for nearly two decades and was a minister in a past government.In that time, Italy has had a lackluster track record in empowering women in the work force, and experts say something else needs to be done.“We have to create the conditions for employment because we are at the bottom of the list in Europe,” said Ida Maggi of Stati Generali delle Donne, an association working to get women’s issues on the electoral agenda. It makes Italy “look bad,” she said.One area where Ms. Meloni and even her most committed critics agree is the need for more nursery schools. The government of Mr. Draghi last year allocated billions of euros to build nurseries and extend child care services. But the problem is by no means solved.In many Italian regions, a shortage of free nursery schools, along with short school days and three-month vacations, make sit difficult for working mothers to juggle their schedules. Even though many women are staying at home, the country has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, something Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition has pledged to redress.Speaking to supporters in Milan this month, Ms. Meloni said that she and her allies would work toward getting free child-care services, part of “a huge plan to boost the birthrate, to support motherhood.” With only 400,000 births last year, Italy was going through more than a demographic winter, she said: “It’s an ice age.”Ms. Meloni addressing supporters in Piazza Duomo in Milan in September.Piero Cruciatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I don’t want this nation to disappear,” she said, adding that the problem should not be solved through immigration. “I want our families to have children,” she added to a roar of applause.But critics are not convinced her party, or likely coalition, is entirely committed to the cause of women.Polls carried out last year show that while the majority of Italians said more should be done to reach gender equality, those numbers were considerably lower among supporters of Brothers of Italy and the League.One campaign video for a candidate from the Forza Italia party, another coalition ally, was roundly mocked for promising a salary to women who don’t work outside the home. The party is led by Silvio Berlusconi, who, Ms. Meloni said in the interview, put her “in difficulty as a woman” with his sex scandals when she was a young minister in his government.After decades of unfulfilled campaign promises, there is skepticism writ large that any of the parties will really champion women’s causes.Promises about “the needs and priorities of women” — including free day care and subsidies for families — tend to vanish once it’s time to actually put measures in place, said Laura Moschini, whose organization, the Gender Interuniversity Observatory, has drafted a “handbook for good government” highlighting women’s concerns.Those issues have discouraged women from voting, and the possibility of electing Ms. Meloni as the first female prime minister is not motivating women. Heading into the election on Sunday, polls suggest that more than a third of Italian women probably won’t vote.Ms. Meloni with Mr. Salvini, left, and Silvio Berlusconi at the center-right coalition’s closing rally in Rome on Thursday.Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press“I’m disgusted by the entire political system,” said Laura Porrega, who described herself as a “desperate housewife” because she wasn’t able to find a job. “When they want your taxes, they remember your name, but I’ve gotten nothing from the country at all.” she said.Ms. Serughetti, the Bicocca professor, said that women “don’t see their interests being represented,” so they’d rather abstain.“The decision of women not to vote is a sort of protest to this order of things,” she said.Jason Horowitz More