Elections, Governors

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      The Democrats’ No Good, Very Bad Day Changes the Landscape

      by

      Gail Collins: Gee, Bret, the Democrats lose a gubernatorial election in Virginia and the next thing you know, the nation has a brand-new $1 trillion public works program. Who says democracy isn’t efficient?Bret Stephens: Defeat has a wonderful way of concentrating the political mind.Gail: You’ve always been a fan of the infrastructure bill, right? Any reservations on that front now that it’s going to be signed into law?Bret: As someone who occasionally drives the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey — gripping the wheel with both hands while idly wondering if a bridge that was built in the Hoover administration will hold for another five minutes or collapse into the Hackensack River — I remain a committed fan of the infrastructure bill.Gail: Bridges of America, rejoice!You wrote a terrific column about the elections last week, Bret. Can’t say I agreed with all your conclusions but it was, as always, very smart. If you were on the phone with Nancy Pelosi today, what would you advise her to do next?Bret: First, madam speaker, please don’t hang up on me.Second, put the social spending bill in the basement ice box and don’t take it out until Democrats have the kind of majorities that can pass it.Third, look for a bipartisan win on immigration reform, starting with a trade on citizenship for Dreamers in exchange for more border security and a firm “Remain in Mexico” policy for migrants.And finally, find ways to separate the Democratic Party brand from Toxic Wokeness.Gail: I’m with President Biden that the next stop is his social spending program. Admittedly it’ll be carved down, but it has to include support for workers who temporarily need to stay home to take care of newborns or aging family members. And of course that universal preschool education.Bret: Maybe you’re right and over time those programs will prove wildly popular and successful. But I’m struggling to see how anything the Democrats are doing these days directly addresses the sorts of issues that average voters worry about day to day. Inflation is at a 30-year high, while personal incomes are down. Gas prices (at least where I live in the far suburbs) are close to $4 a gallon. Illegal crossings at the southern border are the highest they’ve been since at least 1960.Gail: As a person who very seldom attempts to justify her positions by pointing to the stock market I will refrain from noting that the Dow Jones rose on better-than-expected job numbers.Bret: Hehe. We should all enjoy this tulip mania while it lasts.Gail: And I’m with you on some of your immigration points — certainly citizenship for Dreamers. As far as the message of the election goes, I think the biggest lesson for the Democrats after Virginia is not to run against Donald Trump unless Donald Trump is running. And to remember that when voters decide if they like their governor, they don’t necessarily think much about national issues.Bret: Also: Don’t infuriate that itty-bitty voting bloc known as “parents of school-age children.”But I also think Democrats need to take a step back and see the broader message of the election, which is that the party has shifted waaaaaaay too far to the left. How else did the Republican Ann Davison get elected city attorney in Seattle? Or the Republican Jack Ciattarelli nearly win the governor’s race in deep-blue New Jersey?Gail: For me, New Jersey was mainly about people yearning for a fresh face now and then. And in Seattle I guess you have a point — if your message is that the voters shouldn’t have picked a candidate for city attorney who had once praised whoever had apparently set off explosives inside a police precinct. Duh.And local elections are … local. Some of our Seattle readers were quick to point out that their mayor-elect was far from a traditional law-and-order candidate. That’s the guy who promised to “put Seattle on fire with our love.”Bret: True, though he was the least-leftist candidate in the race.Gail: Pretty clear that the future, for local government, lies in candidates who promise to reform the police while also giving them strong budgetary support. Our own incoming mayor Eric Adams comes to mind.Bret: Hope Adams can save the city. He’s got a big job ahead of him. The city hasn’t seemed so dirty in decades. There’s an infestation of giant rats. The other day I watched a drug deal go down on Eighth Avenue in sight of two cops who stood around pretending nothing was going on. (For the record, I was not part of the deal.) Addicts are shooting up near our office in broad daylight. All of this brought to you by the Worst-Mayor-Ever-From-The-Rosy-Fingered-Dawn-Till-The-Bitter-End-Of-Time-Bill-expletive deleted-de Blasio.Gail: Hehehehe. That would make a great nickname if de Blasio ever tried, God help us, to run for president again.Bret: Or governor! Also, many Americans don’t take well to being lectured on, say, MSNBC about how Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia is a sign of a racist white backlash when Virginians also elected a Republican, Winsome Sears, to become the first Black woman to serve as lieutenant governor.Gail: Well, the results from Virginia’s governor’s race were pretty normal given the state’s history of voting against the party of a new president. Looking at that, I didn’t make the racist backlash argument.However, I would say that given the Republicans’ crazed howling about teaching the history of racism in America, voters were being misled in the way they were being urged to think there was something wrong with the schools.Bret: We agree on teaching the history of racism. I’m less keen on using teachers to propagate the ideological legerdemain that goes by the name of “antiracism.”But leaving aside the policy issues themselves, all of these Democratic fixations are gifts to the populist right. Someone needs to start a “Sanity Democrats” caucus to save the party from the progressive “Justice Democrats.”Gail: Certainly important for prominent Democrats not to sound didactic or obsessive when it comes to race and racism, but I sure as heck don’t want to discourage them from taking it into context when they’re passing legislation.Bret: In the meantime, Gail, have I ever mentioned how relieved I am never to have used Facebook?Gail: This doesn’t count the fact that your column goes up there, right? I’m all for using Facebook to pass along written pieces you like. But I haven’t had time to engage in any conversations there for years.Bret: Does my column really post on Facebook? Didn’t know that.This probably sounds horribly misanthropic, but when Facebook came around I feared it would be a handy way of connecting with people … to whom I didn’t particularly want to be connected. So-and-so from graduate school? Maybe we fell out of touch for a reason. Second cousin, twice removed in Melbourne? Hope they’re having a nice life. It’s hard enough to be a good friend to people in our real lives to waste time on virtual friendships in digital spaces.Now I’ve been reading a multipart investigation in The Wall Street Journal on the perils of the platform, which include less sleep, worse parenting, the abandonment of creative hobbies and so on. Facebook’s own researchers estimate that 1 in 8 people on the platform suffer from some of these symptoms, which amounts to 360 million people worldwide. As someone pointed out, the word “user” applies to people on social media just as much as it does to people on meth.I guess the question is whether the government should regulate it and if so, how?Gail: This takes me back to early America, when most people lived in small towns or on farms and had very little input from the outside world.They were very tight-knit, protective, familial — and very inclined to stick to their clan and isolate, discriminate, persecute and yes, enslave, the folks who weren’t part of the group. You had a lot of good qualities of togetherness and helping the team, but a lot of clannishness and injustice to nonmembers.Bret: Almost sounds like an academic department at a placid New England college. Sorry, go on.Gail: The Postal Service brought newspapers and letters and changed all that. And of course there were also unfortunate effects — a lot of mobilizing to fight against the newly discovered outside world.I think the digital revolution is maybe as important — people are making new friends around the globe, discovering tons and tons of new information, but also ganging up on folks they don’t like. Discriminating not only against minority groups but also the less popular members of their own.Bret: The moral of the story is that there’s no substitute for in-person relationships, whether it’s between colleagues, acquaintances, friends, family members or even two columnists who agree about 40 percent of the time. Which reminds me that there’s this cabernet that we still need to share, so that we can mourn — or celebrate — last week’s news.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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Election Results in Virginia Prove Things Can Get Worse for Democrats

      by

      Republicans ran up the margins in rural Virginia counties, the latest sign that Democrats, as one lawmaker put it, “continue to tank in small-town America.”HOT SPRINGS, Va. — The increasingly liberal politics of Virginia had been a sore spot for residents of this conservative town of 499 people nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. But this past week, as Republicans stormed to marquee victories powered in part by turnout in rural areas like Bath County, local voters cheered.“We got our Virginia back,” said Elaine Neff, a 61-year-old resident. “And we haven’t had a win in a long time.”Ms. Neff said she cried from a mix of happiness and relief after the election. She does not want to take the coronavirus vaccine and believes Glenn Youngkin, the winning Republican candidate for governor, will relax state mandates. Outside a nearby grocery store, Charles Hamilton taunted the Democrats.“We’re a county of old country folk who want to do what they want,” said Mr. Hamilton, 74. “They found out the hard way.”Charles Hamilton said his vote for Glenn Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Donald Trump.Eze Amos for The New York TimesIn the jigsaw puzzle that is electoral politics, Democrats have often focused their energy on swingy suburbs and voter-rich cities, content to mostly ignore many white, rural communities that lean conservative. The belief was, in part, that the party had already bottomed out there, especially during the Trump era, when Republicans had run up the numbers of white voters in rural areas to dizzying new heights.Virginia, however, is proof: It can get worse.In 2008, there were only four small Virginia counties where Republicans won 70 percent or more of the vote in that year’s presidential race. Nowhere was the party above 75 percent. This year, Mr. Youngkin was above 70 percent in 45 counties — and he surpassed 80 percent in 15 of them.“Look at some of those rural counties in Virginia as a wake-up call,” said Steve Bullock, the Democratic former governor of Montana who made a long-shot 2020 presidential run, partly on a message that his party needed to compete in more conservative parts of the country. “Folks don’t feel like we’re offering them anything, or hearing or listening to them.”Mr. Youngkin not only won less populated areas by record margins — he was outpacing former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 showing in even the reddest counties, including by six percentage points in Bath County — but he also successfully rolled back Democratic gains in the bedroom communities outside Washington and Richmond, where many college-educated white voters had rejected Republicanism under Mr. Trump.The twin results raise a foreboding possibility for Democrats: that the party had simply leased the suburbs in the Trump era, while Republicans may have bought and now own even more of rural America.Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a group that delivers as many as nine out of 10 votes for the party. But some Democratic leaders are now sounding the alarm: What if rural, white voters — of which there are many — start voting that reliably Republican?Hot Springs, population 499, is a conservative place nestled in the Allegheny Mountains.Eze Amos for The New York Times“It’s not sustainable for our party to continue to tank in small-town America,” said Representative Cheri Bustos, the Illinois congresswoman who led the House Democratic campaign arm in 2020.“We’ve got a branding problem as Democrats in way too many parts of our country,” said Ms. Bustos, who is retiring from a downstate and heavily rural Illinois seat that Mr. Trump carried twice. She called it “political malpractice” and “disrespectful to think it’s OK to run up the score in big cities and just neglect the smaller towns.”There is no easy solution.Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life. Voters in Bath County, many of whom are avid hunters and conservative evangelicals, have long opposed liberal stances on gun rights and abortions. Some Democrats urge the party to just show up more. Some believe liberal ideas can gain traction, such as universal health care and free community college. Others urge a refocus on kitchen-table economics like jobs programs and rural broadband to improve connectivity. But it is not clear how open voters are to even listening.Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat outside Minneapolis in 2018, said that when it comes to issues that concern rural America, his party is afflicted with a “disease of disinterest.”He especially lamented how his party’s strategists routinely tell candidates “to fish where the Democratic fish are instead of taking that canoe out a little further out on the lake.”“For a party that predicates itself on inclusivity,” he added, “I’m afraid we’re acting awfully exclusive.”Mr. Phillips called for Democrats to include “geographic equity” in their agenda along with racial and economic equity, noting that he is a proud member of the state’s Democratic Party, which is formally known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “I’m a D.F.L.-er and yet the F’s and the L’ers aren’t voting for us,” he said..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The rural share of the vote in America has been steadily shrinking, but remains sizable enough to be politically potent. National exit polling in 2020 estimated that one in five voters lived in rural or small-town America. The Democratic data firm TargetSmart, which categorized voters based on population density, labeled 30 percent of the electorate as rural.But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.A Confederate statue stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs.Eze Amos for The New York TimesA monument to Confederate soldiers stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs, a visual representation of the cultural gap between its residents and the Democratic base. The town is accessible only by a two-lane highway that winds through mountains near the West Virginia border. It’s best known for The Homestead, a luxury resort founded in the late 1800s that has hosted golf tournaments, conferences for the United Nations and presidents, including William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.White children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters,” Ms. Williams said.Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump. Of President Biden, he said, “the best thing that can happen is to get him and that woman out of there.”John Wright said he had become so frustrated with the mainstream media that he consumes only pro-Trump programming.Eze Amos for The New York TimesJohn Wright, a 68-year-old retiree, said he listened only to pro-Trump programming.“I don’t care if the media said the moon was full of cheese, and there was an astronaut who brought back some cheese,” Mr. Wright said. “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril

      by

      Tuesday’s election result trend lines were a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and no Democrat who cares about winning elections in 2022 and the presidential race in 2024 should see them as anything less.Familiar takeaways like “wake-up call” and “warning shot” don’t do justice here because the danger of ignoring those trends is too great. What would do justice, and what is badly needed, is an honest conversation in the Democratic Party about how to return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.Given the stakes for the country, from urgent climate and social spending needs to the future of democracy, Americans badly need a rolling conversation today and in the coming weeks and months about how moderate voters of all affiliations can coalesce behind and guide the only party right now that shows an interest in governing and preserving democratic norms.The results in Virginia are a grave marker of political peril. Virginia is a blue state; it hasn’t been a battleground in years. Mr. Biden won there in 2020 by 10 points; a year later, the Democratic nominee for governor just lost by 2.5 percentage points, and Republicans flipped two other statewide offices — lieutenant governor and attorney general — that they have not won in 12 years.Virginia is a cross-section of suburbs, education levels and racial diversity that is a mirror of what a winning, coalition-driven Democratic Party should be. Democrats lost there — even with a longtime moderate as their candidate for governor — because the party has become distracted from crucial issues like the economy, inflation, ending the coronavirus pandemic and restoring normalcy in schools and isn’t offering moderate, unifying solutions to them. Republicans now have a playbook for future elections, based on ways their nominee for governor, Glenn Youngkin, overperformed with independents and cut into Democrats’ support in the suburbs and among women.In true-blue New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy barely held onto his seat, while the powerful State Senate leader, Steve Sweeney, lost to a Republican truck driver whose campaign worked with a shoestring budget. Republicans flipped a House seat in a traditionally Democratic area of San Antonio. In Seattle, voters appear to have chosen a Republican for city attorney over a police abolitionist running on the Democratic line.Bill Clinton’s mantra from 1992 of “it’s the economy, stupid” is rarely out of vogue, and it certainly isn’t now. But Democrats, looking left on so many priorities and so much messaging, have lost sight of what can unite the largest number of Americans. A national Democratic Party that talks up progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas, and that dwells on Donald Trump at the expense of forward-looking ideas, is at risk of becoming a marginal Democratic Party appealing only to the left.Broader trends were also working against the Democrats. Perhaps chief among these: When voters are feeling surly and unhappy about the direction of the country — as polls show that a majority of them are — they tend to blame the party in power. President Biden’s poll numbers have been on the slide for months, for a blend of reasons ranging from the ugly withdrawal from Afghanistan to the seemingly endless burdens of the pandemic. In an era of nationalized elections, that exerts a drag on his entire party.Many in the president’s party point to Tuesday as proof that congressional Democrats need to stop their left-center squabbling and clock some legislative wins ASAP by passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a robust version of the Build Back Better plan, the larger social spending and environmental proposal. They believe this will give their candidates concrete achievements to run on next year and help re-energize their base.But Tuesday’s results are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag. The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.Tuesday was not just about Republicans reclaiming electoral ground from Democrats. Even in many blue enclaves, voters showed an interest in moving toward the center. In Buffalo, N.Y., the democratic socialist who bested the current mayor, Byron Brown, in the Democratic primary appears to be losing to Mr. Brown’s write-in campaign. In Minneapolis, a referendum to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety went down in flames. In the New York mayoral race, voters went with Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat who ran with a focus on law and order. “Progressives on the ropes?” asked The Seattle Times, in a postelection piece noting that “the more moderate, business-backed candidates in the city’s three most watched races surged to huge and likely insurmountable leads.”Progressives notched some notable wins for mayor in Boston, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. But progressive wins in deep-blue cities aren’t evidence of broad, national support.Many Americans, across party lines, are concerned about crime and border security and inflation. The high price of gas is causing particular pain. More than 60 percent of voters hold the Biden administration responsible for inflation. Polls show that many independents already think that the government is trying to do too much to deal with the nation’s problems.For many voters — especially those who don’t vote regularly — the 2020 election was about removing Mr. Trump from the White House. It was less about policy or ideology. Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination — and the presidency — because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday’s drubbing. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people. Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office.Democrats agree about far more than they disagree about. But it doesn’t look that way to voters after months and months of intraparty squabbling. Time to focus on — and pass — policies with broad support. Or risk getting run out of office.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

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege

      by

      One of the Democratic Party’s core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.Democrats dominate society’s culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.As the Democrats have become more culturally and economically dominant, many people at tippy-top private schools and super-expensive colleges have flamboyantly associated themselves with the oppressed. Thankfully, that has moved society to more aggressively pursue social and racial justice. Unfortunately, a tacit ideology — sometimes called wokeness — has been grafted on to this pursuit.It includes the notions that society is essentially a zone of conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups, that a person’s identity is predominantly about group identity and that slavery is the defining fact of American history.Because they dominate the cultural commanding heights, including some departments of education and the largest teachers’ unions, progressive views permeate schools, museums, movies and increasingly the public stances of large corporations.The Republican Party, like many right-populist parties across the Western world, has become a giant vessel of resistance against cultural, urban and information-age elites. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who was just elected governor of Virginia, expressed that resistance when he said, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”When Democrats seem to be magnifying the education establishment’s control of the classroom and minimizing the role of parents, there’s going to be a reaction. Some of the reaction is pure racism, but a lot of it is pushback against elite domination and the tacit ideology.The results of Tuesday’s elections show again that resistance against the elites can be a powerful force propelling Republicans to victory. In the final weeks leading up to Youngkin’s victory, education became one of the top issues for Virginia voters.The results also put the Donald Trump phenomenon in a new perspective. Trump was necessary to smash the old G.O.P. and to turn the party into a vanguard of anti-elite resistance. But by 2020, with his moral degradation and all the rest, he was also holding back Republicans. If Republicans can find candidates who oppose the blue oligarchy but without too much Trumpian baggage, they can win over some former Biden voters in places like Virginia and New Jersey.Democrats would be wise to accept the fact that they have immense social and cultural power, and accept the responsibilities that entails by adopting what I’d call a Whole Nation Progressivism.America is ferociously divided on economic, regional, racial and creedal lines. The job of leaders is to stand above these divides and seek to heal them. The job of leaders is not to impose their values on everyone else; it is to defend a pluralistic order in which different communities can work out their own values.From F.D.R. and L.B.J. on down, Democrats have been good at healing economic divides. The watered-down spending bill struggling its way through Congress would be an important step to redistribute resources to people and places that have been left behind.But Democrats are not good at thinking about culture, even though cultural issues drive our politics. You can’t win a culture war by raising the minimum wage. In fact, if politics are going to be all culture war — as Republicans have tried to make them — I suspect Democrats can’t win it at all.Democrats need a positive moral vision that would start by rejecting the idea that we are locked into incessant conflict along class, cultural, racial and ideological lines. It would reject all the appurtenances of the culture warrior pose — the us/them thinking, exaggerating the malevolence of the other half of the country, relying on crude essentialist stereotypes to categorize yourself and others.It would instead offer a vision of unity, unity, unity. That unity is based on a recognition of the complex humanity of each person — that each person is in the act of creating a meaningful life. It would reject racism, the ultimate dehumanizing force, but also reject any act that seeks to control the marketplace of ideas or intimidate those with opposing views. It would reject ideas and movements that seek to reduce complex humans to their group identities. It would stand for racial, economic and ideological integration, and against separatism, criticizing, for example, the way conservatives are often shut out from elite cultural institutions.Democrats will be outvoted if they are seen to be standing with elite culture warriors against mass culture warriors, or imposing the values of metropolitan centers. On the cultural front especially, they have to be seen as champions of the whole nation.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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Will Murphy Turn to the Center After Barely Winning Re-Election in N.J.?

      by

      The Democratic governor won re-election in a surprisingly close race that has raised questions about his ability to enact liberal measures on gun control and abortion.For much of his first term, Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey governed his largely suburban state as a steadfast liberal, winning an increase in the minimum wage, a tax hike on the wealthy and the legalization of marijuana.But when he ran for re-election this year on that unabashedly left-leaning record, Mr. Murphy, a Democrat who just weeks ago seemed destined for an easy victory, came surprisingly close to losing to a conservative Republican, Jack Ciattarelli.Mr. Murphy’s narrow victory, combined with a Republican upset in the Virginia governor’s race and Republican gains in the New Jersey State Legislature, suggest the nation’s political winds may have shifted rightward. And that has raised a major question in Trenton: Will Mr. Murphy still push forward with liberal initiatives on issues like abortion and gun control, as he had once planned?Republicans and even some Democrats say a left-leaning agenda will face stiff opposition, predicting that Mr. Murphy and Democratic legislators will become increasingly mindful of independent suburban voters whose party loyalty is famously fluid and whose political ideology tends toward the center.The key to courting those voters will be to focus on “affordability,” some officials say, in particular, containing the state’s property taxes, which are among the nation’s highest.“This is not that complicated,” said Assemblyman Jon M. Bramnick, a Republican who was elected Tuesday to the State Senate. “Most people are kind of in the middle.”But where moderates may see the need for a course correction and heightened attention to issues like the cost of living and safe streets, Mr. Murphy’s progressive allies speak mainly of opportunity.On Tuesday, voters in South Jersey ousted the state’s second most powerful lawmaker, the Senate president, Steve Sweeney, a Democrat who was also Mr. Murphy’s main political rival. Mr. Sweeney’s loss simultaneously created an unexpected power vacuum in the State House and eroded the influence of the most conservative region of the state — without making a significant dent in the Democrats’ majority in Trenton.That could clear an easier pathway for the governor’s unfinished legislative priorities, some analysts and legislators say. Despite losing some seats, Democrats will still control both houses of the Legislature.“Politically, it’s an incredible opportunity for Murphy,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “Sweeney keeping his seat and Murphy winning by 10 would be nowhere near as good.”Still, the day after the election, few Democrats were talking much about Mr. Murphy’s most contentious policy goals: codifying abortion rights to protect against the possibility of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade; expanding gun control laws to allow victims to sue gun manufacturers; reducing long mandatory sentences for nonviolent crimes.“We’re going to obviously revisit what we’ve been doing,” said Senator Nick Scutari, a Democrat from northern New Jersey who led the fight to legalize marijuana in the state and is seen as a contender to become the next Senate president.Mr. Scutari, a former municipal prosecutor in Linden, N.J., said he expected more discussion about “kitchen table issues.”“Making sure there’s a strong economy,” he said. “Good strong job prospects. Making sure the taxes are stable and we do provide services because of those taxes.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}George E. Norcross, an insurance executive and powerful Democratic power broker strongly allied with Mr. Sweeney, said the most potent issue in New Jersey has always been taxes.“If you look at New Jersey history from a political way, you see Democrats and Republicans alternating as governors, and it always happens over the same issue, which is taxes,” Mr. Norcross said. “It’s taxes, taxes, taxes. And people move back and forth between parties in that regard, and that’s the way in which it historically has happened.”George Helmy, Mr. Murphy’s chief of staff, said the governor’s economic agenda had always been rooted in making life more affordable for working families.But he said he anticipated the party “wanting to focus more” on bread-and-butter economic issues, as well as better communicating the benefits of Mr. Murphy’s progressive policies for working-class families.“I think we need to continue to focus on the affordability picture and the progress we’ve made for working families,” he said.“People need to hear that message more,” he added. “We have to be more focused on speaking to what we have delivered for working families and the bold vision going forward.”On Thursday, Mr. Murphy spoke at a convention in Atlantic City, N.J., organized by one of his strongest allies, the New Jersey Education Association.Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How Virginia’s Governor Race Unraveled the Democratic Turnout Myth

      by

      It was long thought that surges in voting would help Democrats. So how does the party explain Glenn Youngkin’s victory?Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Ever since Barack Obama swept into the White House on the strength of record turnout, it has been an article of faith among Democrats that the more people who vote, the better the party will fare.When turnout sagged, during the 2010 and the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans won wave elections. In 2016, fewer people voted than in 2012 and Donald J. Trump won the presidency, shocking Democrats and turbocharging a more explicit Republican argument that making voting harder would make it easier for the G.O.P. to win elections.Then turnout jumped again in the Trump years — in Virginia four years ago, in special elections and in the 2018 midterms. Joseph R. Biden Jr. ousted Mr. Trump in a national election with record-high turnout. Republicans spent the next year, in states they control, fighting to make it harder to vote and promoting lies that the 2020 turnout had been stocked with fraudulent Democratic votes.How then to explain the election on Tuesday in Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin, now the Republican governor-elect, beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a contest in which at least 25 percent more votes were cast than in any governor’s race in the state’s history? (The number will go up; mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day will be counted as long as they are received by this Friday.)Mr. Youngkin won the first governor’s race contested under new voting laws adopted by the Democratic majorities elected in 2019 to the state’s General Assembly.Virginia Democrats and Gov. Ralph Northam repealed the state’s voter ID law, enacted 45 days of no-excuse absentee voting, made Election Day a state holiday and enacted automatic voter registration for anyone who receives a driver’s license in Virginia.Making it easier to vote worked.In this week’s election, Mr. McAuliffe won 200,000 votes more than Northam did when he won the 2017 election in a blowout. He won nearly 600,000 more votes than he did in 2013 when he beat Kenneth Cuccinelli II to become governor. He beat his internal turnout targets in Northern Virginia, Richmond and the Norfolk area. Turnout was strong in Black precincts, college towns and the suburbs, all traditional areas of strength for Democratic candidates.Yet Mr. Youngkin still got more votes, buoyed by turnout near presidential-election levels across rural Virginia and better than anticipated numbers in the outer suburbs of Washington. He won far more votes than Mr. McAuliffe’s team or virtually any of the public polling had anticipated.“We’re at a dangerous inflection point where we have one group of people who assumes turnout solves all of our problems and another group that wants to tune out whole swaths of voters,” said Guy Cecil, the chairman of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA. “There are millions of people across the country who are inclined to vote for Trump or Republicans who don’t vote.”In some of the most important battleground states, like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Mr. Cecil said, a majority of the voting-age public is white people without college degrees, a demographic that has been trending away from Democrats since 2008 and broke strongly against Mr. McAuliffe in Virginia, according to exit polling.If turnout in the 2022 midterms spikes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which both have Senate and governor’s races on the ballot, it may not necessarily benefit the Democratic candidates..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Higher turnout among Democrats increases our chances of winning,” Mr. Cecil said. “Higher turnout overall does not do that.”For Republicans who have spent the last year proffering the false claim that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election only because of a major fraud scheme, the Virginia results required a bit of rhetorical gymnastics.Amanda Chase, the conspiracy-theory-minded Virginia state senator, said on Twitter on Wednesday that she would draft legislation to “put the guardrails back on our elections” and added that she hoped Mr. Youngkin agreed to “a full forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential election.Mr. Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who lost to Mr. McAuliffe in 2013, late Wednesday called for Mr. Youngkin and the incoming Republican majority in the state’s House of Delegates to “reverse the Democrat-inflicted damage to voter integrity in our state.”And John Fredericks, the conservative talk radio host who was chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, credited Mr. Youngkin’s victory to his building an “election integrity task force” to monitor polling places across the state.“If you have a voter integrity operation in place on the front end and you have 93 percent of your precincts covered with trained poll watchers and election workers, the opportunity for voter irregularities drops dramatically,” Mr. Fredericks said. “The voter integrity team here will be used as model for the midterms.”Takeaways From the 2021 ElectionsCard 1 of 5A G.O.P. pathway in Virginia. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Did Ciattarelli Lawn Signs Predict his New Jersey Election Performance?

      by

      I told people on Monday that I thought Jack Ciattarelli would do better in the race for governor of New Jersey than the polls were indicating. My unscientific rationale was that Mr. Ciattarelli, the Republican challenger, had many more lawn signs than Gov. Phil Murphy where I live, northeastern Bergen County. I would estimate that Mr. Ciattarelli had at least 10 times as many signs.Mr. Ciattarelli did lose, but by only about 1 percentage point, defying a Rutgers-Eagleton poll showing him 8 percentage points down in late October. That didn’t make my lawn sign theory correct, of course. But the result was surprising. So I decided to look into the matter more closely.One theory might be that lawn signs influence election outcomes by increasing candidates’ name recognition. There might have been some of that going on. A 2016 study in the journal Electoral Studies by Donald Green, a political scientist at Columbia University, pooled the results of four experiments that involved placing lawn signs in randomly selected voting precincts and found that the signs had a small but not negligible effect — “probably greater than zero,” as he put it, “but unlikely to be large enough to alter the outcome of a contest that would otherwise be decided by more than a few percentage points.”Another theory might be that lawn signs are a sensitive indicator of voters’ preferences: If you care enough to have a sign in your yard, you probably care enough to vote for the candidate and maybe get others to do so. (Handmade signs presumably convey even more conviction.) In the 2016 presidential race, Michael Koenig of ABC News saw signs that Donald Trump would win — literally, about 20 lawn signs for every Hillary Clinton sign he encountered while bicycling through the countryside of swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.Professor Green told me by email that there is “a long history of trying to use the preponderance of lawn signs as a quasi poll to predict outcomes.” One study he sent me, from a 1979 issue of the journal Political Methodology, analyzed seven political races in a small, unnamed California city in 1978. It found that “candidates with the greatest number of signs received the greatest number of votes in six of the seven races.”In the U.S. presidential election of 2012, another study, by an undergraduate researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, found a high correlation in Eau Claire between the numbers of lawn signs for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and the candidates’ vote totals by ward.Keith Srakocic/Associated PressI’d call that research inconclusive. What’s conclusive is the sea change in the vote in northeastern Bergen County between the presidential election of 2020 and this year’s election for state and local offices. Using data from the Bergen County Board of Elections, I totaled up the votes from seven of the county’s 56 boroughs: Alpine, Closter, Cresskill, Demarest, Northvale, Norwood and Tenafly. These boroughs range from prosperous to outright rich. (The median listing price of houses for sale in Alpine is $5.7 million, according to Realtor.com.)In 2020, Joe Biden walloped Donald Trump in these boroughs, capturing 61.9 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 36.6 percent. This year, according to early results that don’t include write-ins and provisional ballots, Mr. Murphy got 49.6 percent of the vote to Mr. Ciattarelli’s 50.3 percent.To me that says two things: Mr. Trump is highly disliked in the area, and Mr. Ciattarelli didn’t suffer by association with him. Mr. Ciattarelli’s signature issue was cutting taxes and reallocating state school aid, which now largely goes to troubled urban schools, to what he described as “struggling suburban, shore area and rural schools.”I’d like to say that my lawn sign detector was picking up on that big swing in voter preference. On Wednesday, though, I came upon another possible explanation for the profusion of Ciattarelli signs. I spoke with Richard Kurtz, a wealthy real estate investor who owns property in Alpine. He’s the chief executive of the Kamson Corporation of Englewood Cliffs, N.J., which owns and operates apartment complexes in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. He told me that he bought more than 100,000 Ciattarelli signs and had them put up all over the state, including on his own apartment properties.“I met Jack four or five months ago and I said, ‘This is a solid citizen,’” Mr. Kurtz told me. “His keen interest in the state. Everything he wants to do is positive, most of all lower taxes and do the right thing.”Campaign signs on property in Alpine, N.J., owned by Richard Kurtz, a real estate investor.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesAs for the signs, he added: “For some reason I always remember in my experience of voting, lawn signs are so special. If I had more time and energy, I would have liked to do even more.”Mr. Kurtz said that a man who works for him part-time put up dozens of signs on a heavily traveled stretch of Closter Dock Road in Alpine where Mr. Kurtz owns a sprawling property once owned by descendants of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. It was that stretch of signage that first caught my attention. “They probably overdid it here in Alpine,” Mr. Kurtz said with a laugh.When I told Professor Green about the Kurtz blitz, he thought of comparing vote totals in precincts where Mr. Kurtz put up signs on his properties with precincts where he didn’t to see if the signs made a difference. “That would be a lot of fun,” he said, imagining getting a nice research paper out of it. But since Mr. Kurtz spread the signs all over the state, that experiment won’t be possible.What originally looked to me like an indication of a groundswell of support for Mr. Ciattarelli doesn’t look so grass-roots anymore. On the other hand, Mr. Kurtz wasn’t responsible for all of those Ciattarelli signs I spotted. I’d say my lawn sign theory may still have something to recommend it.Peter Coy (@petercoy) writes a regular newsletter about economics for Opinion. You can sign up for his newsletter here.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

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      A Rough Election Night for the Democrats

      by

      Asthaa Chaturvedi, Neena Pathak, Diana Nguyen and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAt first, most of the attention on a major night of elections across the United States on Tuesday was on an unexpectedly close contest in the Virginia governor’s race.Once it became clear that the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, had successfully faced down Terry McAuliffe, a Democratic former governor, the focus switched to problems for the Democrats elsewhere.As the night went on, it became clear that the contest in Virginia was not a singular event — Republicans were doing well in several unlikely places.What do the results tell us about the current direction of American politics?On today’s episodeAlexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate and former Virginian governor, lost his contest against the Republican’s Glenn Youngkin.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingReeling from a barrage of unexpected losses, an array of Democrats have pleaded with President Biden and his party’s lawmakers to address the quality-of-life issues that plagued their candidates in Tuesday’s elections.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Alexander Burns contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie and Rowan Niemisto.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. More