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      How Republicans Have an Edge in the Emerging 2022 Congressional Maps

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      On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.WASHINGTON — A year before the polls open in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are already poised to flip at least five seats in the closely divided House thanks to redrawn district maps that are more distorted, more disjointed and more gerrymandered than any since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.The rapidly forming congressional map, a quarter of which has taken shape as districts are redrawn this year, represents an even more extreme warping of American political architecture, with state legislators in many places moving aggressively to cement their partisan dominance.The flood of gerrymandering, carried out by both parties but predominantly by Republicans, is likely to leave the country ever more divided by further eroding competitive elections and making representatives more beholden to their party’s base.At the same time, Republicans’ upper hand in the redistricting process, combined with plunging approval ratings for President Biden and the Democratic Party, provides the party with what could be a nearly insurmountable advantage in the 2022 midterm elections and the next decade of House races.“The floor for Republicans has been raised,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of House Republicans’ campaign committee, said in an interview. “Our incumbents actually are getting stronger districts.”Congressional maps serve, perhaps more than ever before, as a predictor of which party will control the House of Representatives, where Democrats now hold 221 seats to Republicans’ 213. In the 12 states that have completed the mapping process, Republicans have gained an advantage for seats in Iowa, North Carolina, Texas and Montana, and Democrats have lost the advantage in districts in North Carolina and Iowa.All told, Republicans have added a net of five seats that the party can expect to hold while Democrats are down one. Republicans need to flip just five Democratic-held seats next year to seize a House majority.“They’re really taking a whack at competition,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The path back to a majority for Democrats if they lose in 2022 has to run through states like Texas, and they’re just taking that off the table.”Competition in House races has decreased for years. In 2020, The New York Times considered just 61 of the 435 House elections to be “battleground” contests. The trend is starkest in places like Texas, where 14 congressional districts in 2020 had a presidential vote that was separated by 10 percentage points or less. With the state’s new maps, only three are projected to be decided by a similar margin.Redistricting, which happens every 10 years, began late this summer after states received the much-delayed results of the 2020 census. The process will continue, state by state, through the winter and spring and is to be completed before the primary contests for next year’s midterm elections.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.In most states, the map drawing is controlled by state legislators, who often resort to far-reaching gerrymanders. Republicans have control over the redistricting process in states that represent 187 congressional seats, compared with just 84 for Democrats. The rest are to be drawn by outside panels or are in states where the two parties must agree on maps or have them decided by the courts.Gerrymandering is carried out in many ways, but the two most common forms are “cracking” and “packing.” Cracking is when mapmakers spread a cluster of a certain type of voters — for example, those affiliated with the opposing party — among several districts to dilute their vote. Packing is when members of a demographic group, like Black voters, or voters in the opposing political party, are crammed into as few districts as possible.The Republican gains this year build on what was already a significant cartographic advantage. The existing maps were heavily gerrymandered by statehouse Republicans after the G.O.P.’s wave election in 2010, in a rapid escalation of the congressional map-drawing wars. This year, both parties are starting from a highly contorted map amid a zero-sum political environment. With advancements in both voter data and software, they have been able to take a more surgical approach to the process.Republicans are cautious about doing a premature victory lap in case the country’s political mood shifts again over the next year. Democrats believe that while keeping their House majority will be an uphill battle, they have a stronger chance of maintaining control in the Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris currently breaks a 50-50 tie.Republicans also argue that there could in fact be many newly competitive House districts if Mr. Biden’s approval ratings remain in the doldrums and voters replicate the G.O.P.’s successes in elections this month.Democrats, without much to brag about, accuse Republicans of being afraid of competitive elections.“Fear is driving all of this,” David Pepper, a former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, said on Wednesday at a hearing to discuss a proposed map that would give Republicans 13 of the state’s 15 congressional seats. “Fear of what would happen if we actually had a real democracy.”More districts are certain to shift from Democratic to Republican in the coming weeks. Republican lawmakers in Georgia and Florida will soon begin debating new maps..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-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{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-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.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;}Several other states have completed maps for the 2020s that entrench existing Republican advantages. Republicans in Alabama and Indiana shored up G.O.P.-held congressional districts while packing their state’s pockets of Democrats into uncompetitive enclaves. In Utah, a new map eliminates a competitive district in Salt Lake City that Democrats won in 2018. Republicans have made an Oklahoma City seat much safer, while Colorado’s independent redistricting commission shored up the district of Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican and Trump ally, so much that her leading Democratic opponent, who had raised $1.9 million, dropped out of the contest to defeat her.And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a map that protects the state’s 23 Republican incumbents while adding two safely red seats, a year after the party spent $22 million to protect vulnerable House members.“The competitive Republican seats are off the board,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s clearinghouse for designing new maps.Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, at an event on redistricting this month. Democrats in the state may draw its lone Republican congressman out of a district.Brian Witte/Associated PressIn one of the few states where Democrats are on offense, Illinois will eliminate two Republican seats from its delegation and add one Democratic one when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the map that the state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved last month. New York is likely to add seats to the Democratic column once the party’s lawmakers complete maps next year, and Maryland Democrats may draw their state’s lone Republican congressman out of a district. Democrats in Nebraska also managed to preserve a competitive district that includes Omaha after initial Republican proposals sought to split the city in two.Calling the Republican moves an “unprecedented power grab,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said that the G.O.P. was “not successfully taking over the battleground” but instead “proactively and intentionally trying to remove competitive seats.”Several other states where Republicans drew advantageous districts for themselves a decade ago will now have outside commissions or courts determining their maps.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      How Likely Is a Democratic Comeback Next Year?

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      The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it.There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020.This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag).Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating.When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and the author of “The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in U.S. House Elections.”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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      In New Jersey, Stephen Sweeney Concedes Election to Edward Durr

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      The loss by Mr. Sweeney, a Democrat and the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey, suggest an erosion of Democratic support in suburban and rural areas.Stephen M. Sweeney, the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey, admitted defeat on Wednesday, eight days after voters elected a Republican truck driver who ran on a shoestring budget in one of the biggest political upsets in state history.Mr. Sweeney, the Democratic Senate president and a union leader, blamed his loss on overwhelming Republican turnout in his South Jersey district, which is about 15 miles outside Philadelphia.“It was a red wave,” he said in the State House complex in Trenton where he has governed with an iron fist since 2010, when he first took over as president of the Senate.Mr. Sweeney, who has made overtures about running for governor and holds a crucial role on a state redistricting committee, said that he planned to remain active in public life.“What the voters said in this election is New Jersey is a state filled with hardworking people who want to provide for their families and as leaders we need to speak directly to the concerns of all voters,” said Mr. Sweeney, an ironworker who has been in the State Senate since 2002. “I plan to keep speaking to those concerns.”Two hours later, the Republican who beat him, Edward Durr, stood in front of a microphone in the headquarters of the Gloucester County Republican Party, after pulling off one of the country’s most talked about upsets from a strip mall storefront next to a Batteries Plus shop.“I feel like I’m about to throw up,” Edward Durr said as he faced a phalanx of reporters after pulling off one of the biggest political upset in New Jersey history.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times“I feel like I’m about to throw up,” Mr. Durr, who has logged more than two million miles as a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanigan furniture chain, said of the media glare.Former President Donald J. Trump had called to congratulate him on Sunday, and Mr. Durr’s win was featured on cable and network news, quickly becoming fodder for comedians on “Saturday Night Live” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”His successful campaign was seen as emblematic of a surge of Republican voters coupled with a disenchantment with Democrats that also led to a Republican win for governor in Virginia and an unexpectedly narrow re-election victory for Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, in New Jersey.The statewide races are considered barometers of voter sentiment as Democrats struggle to hold on to a slim majority in Congress during next year’s midterm elections and illustrates the erosion of support for the party, especially in suburban and rural areas.Mr. Durr’s improbable victory has also led to an immediate shift in the discussion of priorities in Trenton.“I give the voters my promise I will fight the tyranny that Phil Murphy is, beginning on Day 1,” he said.Mr. Durr has spoken about his opposition to Mr. Murphy’s mandates related to mask-wearing and vaccination, and he would not say whether he had been inoculated against Covid-19.Before Election Day, Mr. Durr remained largely unvetted and unknown to the general public, and he continued doing damage control on Wednesday for comments he had made on social media, including one reflecting support for “both sides” of a violent racist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and another condemning Islam and disparaging the Prophet Muhammad.After speaking at the G.O.P. headquarters, he was driven two miles to Al Minhal Academy of Islamic Education, a Muslim masjid in Washington Township, to talk with members of the mosque and leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New Jersey. The group remained inside for about two hours; Mr. Durr left carrying a paperback copy of the Quran.“We wanted to dispel any of the beliefs he has about our community,” Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the council, said before the meeting.“We also want to remind him of his responsibility as an elected official,” Mr. Maksut said. “He represents Muslims as well. It’s his responsibility to keep their safety in mind.”Mr. Durr wrote a note on Al Minhal stationery, committing to working with the Muslim community “going forward.” “I stand against Islamophobia and all forms of hate,” the note read.Mr. Durr has also apologized for his comments on social media.“You get behind a keyboard, you don’t see a person and you don’t consider the other person,” he said on Wednesday.“These are things I’ve done in the past,” he added. “It doesn’t define me as a person.”Mr. Durr’s two Republican running-mates, Beth Sawyer and Bethanne McCarthy Patrick, also ousted two Democratic members of the State Assembly, Adam Taliaferro and John J. Burzichelli, a former mayor of Paulsboro first elected to the State House in 2001.Mr. Durr and Ms. Sawyer ran unsuccessfully for State Assembly in 2019, and they were recruited to compete again by Jacci Vigilante, a trial lawyer who serves as the Republican chairwoman for Gloucester County.“He was honored to be asked,” Ms. Vigilante said of Mr. Durr. “He accepted readily.”Ms. Sawyer, a real estate broker who also runs her own home renovation construction company, said voters spoke mainly of the high cost of living as she campaigned door to door. She said she expected to focus on containing taxes when she gets to Trenton.“Taxes, taxes, taxes,” Ms. Sawyer said. “And cut government bloating.”Over the past three years, the Gloucester County G.O.P. joined with other neighboring county parties to lease space for a headquarters and they have built an email list from scratch that now includes thousands of names, Ms. Vigilante said.The group has held weekly happy hours and breakfasts, and it has organized trips to Atlantic City, to try to generate support for Republican candidates in a region that for decades has been dominated by Democrats.“It’s hard to raise money, and it’s hard to build an organization when you can’t produce wins,” she said.After last Tuesday, that may be less of a problem. More

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      Redistricting Explained: Your Questions Answered

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      Suppose a state has 25 voters who live in a perfect grid. Sixty percent of them belong to the Blue party, and 40 percent to the Red party.

      Say the state has five House seats. We need districts roughly the same size. We can draw them to fairly reflect the population: Blue gets three seats, Red gets two seats.

      But what if we want to give Blue the advantage? If we draw the districts like this, Blue holds a majority in all five districts.

      Now, let’s draw a map that helps the Red party. We’ll need to get creative, since it’s in the minority. But check out what happens if we draw the districts this way. More

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      Trapped in a Pandemic Funk: Millions of Americans Can’t Shake a Gloomy Outlook

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      Despite signals that the economy is improving and the virus is waning, many Americans said they were frustrated by polarized politics and a sense of stagnancy.A year ago, Michael Macey, a barber who lives in the suburbs outside Atlanta, was thrilled to help propel President Biden to victory, hopeful that Democrats would move swiftly to tackle policing laws and other big issues. But then he watched his hopes for sweeping changes wither in Washington.Now, Mr. Macey’s sense of optimism — like that of millions of Americans — has been dashed. By the pain of an unending pandemic. By rising prices. By nationwide bickering that stretches from school board meetings to the United States Capitol.“I don’t like the division,” Mr. Macey, 63, said. “I don’t like the standstill. We need something to get accomplished.”For so many voters in this November of discontent, the state of the union is just … blech.Despite many signals that things are improving — the stock market is hitting record highs, hiring is accelerating sharply with 531,000 jobs added in October, workers are earning more, and Covid hospitalizations and deaths are dropping from their autumn peaks — many Americans seem stuck in a pandemic hangover of pessimism.More than 60 percent of voters in opinion surveys say that the country is heading in the wrong direction — a national funk that has pummeled Mr. Biden’s approval ratings and fueled a backlash against Democrats that could cost them control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.More than 60 percent of voters in opinion surveys say that the country is heading in the wrong direction — a national funk that has pummeled Mr. Biden’s approval ratings.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn more than two dozen interviews across the country, voters ticked off a snowballing list of grievances that had undercut their faith in a president who ran on a pledge of normalcy and competence: The chaotic, deadly pullout from Afghanistan. A spike in migrants crossing the southern border. A legislative agenda stymied by Republican opposition and Democratic infighting.The complaints are not just coming from conservatives. Voters who supported Mr. Biden said they had grown dispirited about his ability to muscle through campaign pledges to address climate change, voting rights and economic fairness while also confronting rising prices and other disruptions to daily life exacerbated by the pandemic.“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Daniel Sanchez, who lost his teaching contract at a community college in suburban Phoenix when enrollment plunged during the pandemic. Now, he is making minimum wage at an organic market and searching for full-time teaching work.Mr. Sanchez, 36, said he still supported Mr. Biden, echoing many Democratic voters who said they believed the president was being unfairly blamed by Republicans and the news media for problems beyond his control, such as the price of gasoline or Covid spikes among Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.But Mr. Sanchez has grown exasperated with the endless melodrama in Washington as a Democratic effort to confront climate change and strengthen the social safety net has stalled amid intraparty disputes. He is particularly frustrated with two moderate Democratic senators — Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Mr. Sanchez’s own senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.“It seems like the answers are right in front of them, and people are willing to do nothing about it,” he said.Daniel Sanchez has grown exasperated with the endless melodrama in Washington as a Democratic effort to confront climate change and strengthen the social safety net has stalled. Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMr. Biden came into office vowing to “build back better.” But voters said little was getting built as Democrats fight over multitrillion-dollar measures to strengthen the country’s social safety net and improve physical infrastructure. Normal life was not back, and might never be. And voters said so many things just felt worse.It is not just the federal government they blame. Trash is piling up on city streets because of a dearth of garbage haulers. School bus services are being canceled and delayed for want of drivers. Americans who have been hurt economically by the pandemic are still struggling to get rental assistance and unemployment benefits, sometimes months after applying.“Our political system — it’s almost completely a failure,” said Carla Haney, a 65-year-old swimming instructor who has yet to receive about 14 weeks of unemployment benefits from the State of Florida that she applied for in May 2020. “I don’t see it getting better at all.”With the global supply chain gummed up, voters around the Phoenix metro area said they were paying the price in lost money and wasted time. A restaurant chef in Phoenix is once again struggling to buy paper plates and napkins. A plumbing supplier in Tempe is losing commissions because he cannot fill orders.And at gas stations across the country, drivers cringe at paying an average of $3.40 a gallon — prices that have risen by more than $1 a gallon from a year ago.“Everything goes up, and pay pretty much stays the same,” said Brandon Hendrix, 39, of Athens, Ga., who works in security for an auto plant.Even with the unemployment rate at 4.6 percent, falling but still above its prepandemic levels, Mr. Hendrix, said job security is not his top concern. Instead, it is the rising of prices for “gas, grocery stores, rent — just about everything you can think of” that worry him. Still, he blames much of the country’s grim state on the pandemic, Republicans’ obstruction and relentless criticism of the Biden administration.“They instigated too much division,” Mr. Hendrix said of Republicans. “Basically, they’ve kind of boiled it down to politics and power play. They’re not really solving issues. They’re just keeping you divided so they can do whatever they want.”A gas station in Queens. The rising of prices for “gas, grocery stores, rent — just about everything you can think of,” worry Brandon Hendrix, 39, of Athens, Ga.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWorries around trash piling up, flights canceled because of staff shortages and rising grocery prices may be small compared with a global pandemic that has killed five million people, or a fast-warming climate that has contributed to floods inundating towns and wildfires burning the American West. But they are stuck like pebbles in voters’ shoes: Tiny, but impossible to ignore.“Every day or so, my younger one will say, ‘Dad, there’s no bus. Can you come get me?’” said John Radanovich, 58, the father of an eighth-grader and an 11th-grader in Lake Worth, Fla., near West Palm Beach.Mr. Radanovich, a Democrat, said he believed the increasingly vocal dissatisfaction in the country — on vivid displays as Republicans won the governorship in Virginia, flipped a Democratic State House seat in San Antonio and routed Democrats in New York’s suburbs — were likely to doom Democrats in 2022.“There’s so much hatred,” Mr. Radanovich said, adding that he hoped to leave the country once his younger son finished high school. “You can see it in the schools, the diet, our lifestyle, the stress. How expensive things are. It’s a mystery that life has become so much worse in the U.S. It’s just worse and worse and worse.”In Colorado, where hospitals are being overwhelmed by a new surge of largely unvaccinated patients, some communities have reimposed mask mandates. Amanda Rumsey said she was losing patience with the shifting requirements that she worried were now simply antagonizing a divided electorate.Ms. Rumsey, a crisis therapist who has seen a spike in young and teenage patients with suicidal thoughts during the pandemic, voted for Mr. Biden, but now found herself unhappy with his leadership.“It doesn’t seem like he is doing anything to help us be more unified,” she said as she stood outside a Walmart in the fast-growing suburban community of Lafayette, north of Denver.Protesting against a proposed mask mandate in Anchorage in September.Ash Adams for The New York TimesAs the world slumps toward a third year of the pandemic, through more mask fights and breakthrough infections and grim new death milestones, some mental health experts said the country’s sour political mood reflected a condition called languishing. Different from depression or hopelessness, it is a sense of stagnant drift.Even if the pandemic does ease, many Americans said they were resigned to another year of polarized politics. One example they cited was the prospect of Republicans making schools the heart of their midterm-election strategy, seizing on divisions over how students should learn about race and how teachers should confront the pandemic in the classroom.“It’s just not a civilized country,” said Ted Laarkamp, 76, a retired businessman from Media, Penn., just outside Philadelphia. “It’s just a bunch of people that think they can go it alone — like a bunch of lone rangers. Nobody trusts anybody; everything is a conspiracy.”The atmosphere was gray as Mr. Laarkamp and other shoppers shared their views outside a supermarket in downtown Media.“It’s unfortunate because we have serious tasks ahead of us, and we need all hands on deck,” said Eve Miari, 44, who voted for Mr. Biden but faulted him for publicly criticizing Americans who resisted mask and vaccine mandates. “We are talking about getting out of a global pandemic and resolving big issues like climate change. You can’t have everybody divided.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Why We Have to Wave the ‘Bloody Shirt’ of Jan. 6

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      Policy is rational. Politics are not. It takes a story to move voters, an emotional connection that tells them something about themselves and the world in which they live or, alternately, the world in which they would like to live.Without a story to tell — without a way to make the issues of an election speak to the values of an electorate — even strong candidates with popular policies can fall flat. And the reverse is also true: A divisive figure with unpopular beliefs can go far if he or she can tell the right kind of story to the right number of people.It’s tempting to treat this reality as evidence of decline, as a sign that in the 21st century we are much less sophisticated than our forebears in democracy and self-government. Somehow, we imagine that the politics of the past were more civil, more genteel, more rational. But they weren’t. Politics have always been about passion, and the most successful parties in our history have always used that to their advantage.The Republican Party, in the wake of the Civil War, was not as politically secure as one might think. It won, in 1860, with a minority of the popular vote and needed a unity ticket — with the Tennessee Democratic unionist and slaveholder Andrew Johnson as vice president — to win in 1864. Republicans did win a majority in Congress that year, but only because the South did not take part in the election.For the first two elections after Appomattox, Republicans held their majorities, winning comfortable margins in 1866 and 1868 (and also excluding former rebels from Congress). But Democrats would soon begin to catch up. Although still in the minority, the party ultimately gained 37 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1870 midterm elections (when the House was just over half the size it is today).Anxious to retain power in Washington, Republicans took every opportunity to pin the late rebellion on their Democratic opponents, north and south. None of it was subtle.Supporters of Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election, for example, urged Unionists to “Vote as you shot.” Likewise, in a speech for Grant, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, referring to violence against Republicans and freed Blacks in the states of the former Confederacy, attacked the Democratic nominee, Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York, as “emphatically the leader of the new rebellion as Robert E. Lee was of the old.”Throughout that race, which ended in a modest victory for Grant as far as the popular vote went, Republicans invoked the memory of the war as a cudgel against their Democratic opponents. They did it again, in 1870, to repel the Democratic advance I mentioned, but also to help resolve emerging tensions within the party. Republicans might disagree on questions of patronage and economic policy; they could still agree, at this point at least, that the South must stay defeated.Democrats, and conservative white Southerners in particular, would come to call this the “bloody shirt” strategy, after an apocryphal story in which Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts used the bloodied shirt of a wounded soldier in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. “The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era,” writes Stephen Budiansky in “The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox”: “It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had.”If the “bloody shirt” enraged Democratic partisans — if the term itself became, as Budiansky writes, “a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery” aimed at “stirring old enmities” — it was because it worked.The “bloody shirt” helped President Grant win his 1872 race for re-election, as his supporters and surrogates hammered Democrats as recalcitrant rebels. One cartoon, by the great Thomas Nast, depicts the Democratic presidential nominee, Horace Greeley, reaching across a barren field labeled “Andersonville Prison” — the notoriously deadly Confederate prisoner of war camp — while he makes a plea for sectional unity: “Let us clasp hands over the bloody chasm.” The message was clear: A vote for Greeley was a vote for the rebels who starved their captives to death.The “bloody shirt” shaped the 1876 campaign as well. The Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, counseled his supporter and surrogate James G. Blaine, then a senator from Maine, to use the tactic as much as possible. “Our strong ground is the dread of a solid South, rebel rule, etc., etc.,” he wrote. “I hope you will make these topics prominent in your speeches. It leads people away from ‘hard times’ which is our deadliest foe.”For a typical expression of this way of campaigning, look to Benjamin Harrison of Indiana (then a candidate for governor, soon to be president of the United States), speaking on behalf of Hayes and the Republican Party. “For one, I accept the banner of the bloody shirt,” he said to a small crowd of veterans, responding to Democratic complaints that he refused to talk substance. “I am willing to take as our ensign the tattered, worn out old gray shirt, worn by some gallant Union hero; stained with his blood as he gave up his life for his country.”Hayes’s running mate, Representative William A. Wheeler of New York, even went as far as to urge an audience to “Let your ballots protect the work so effectually done by your bayonets at Gettysburg.”Republicans kept on “waving the bloody shirt,” kept on tying their candidates to patriotic feeling and memories of the war. It was part of the 1880 campaign on behalf of James Garfield (which he won by a small margin of the popular vote), part of the 1884 race on behalf of Blaine (lost by a small margin), and part of the 1888 effort on behalf of Harrison (who lost the popular vote but won a narrow victory in the Electoral College).There were, of course, limits to the use of the “bloody shirt” — no rhetorical flourish could overcome, for example, the electoral headwinds from the panic of 1873, which swept Democrats into a House majority the following year — but that is just to say that there are limits to what any form of rhetoric can do in the face of a poor economy and the pendulum swing of American politics.What is important is that the Republican Party never took for granted that voters would blame the Democratic Party for its role in the rebellion and vote accordingly. Republican politicians had to make salient the public’s memory of, and anger over, the war. And, I should say, they were right to do so. It was right to “wave the bloody shirt” in the wake of a brutal, catastrophic war that according to recent estimates claimed close to a million lives. That we, as modern Americans, learn the phrase as a negative is an astounding coup of postwar Southern propaganda.The lesson here, for the present, is straightforward. Democrats who want the Republican Party to pay for the events of Jan. 6 — to suffer at the ballot box for their allegiance to Donald Trump — have to tie those events to a language and a narrative that speaks to the fear, anger and anxiety of the public at large. They have to tell a story. And not just once, or twice — they have to do it constantly. It must become a fixture of the party’s rhetorical landscape.And yet, while emotional appeals can move voters, they cannot work miracles. Even the strongest message can’t turn lead into gold. And there’s no rhetoric that can make up for poor performance on the job. A “bloody shirt” won’t save a party that can’t govern.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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      Election Day Silver Linings!

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      Walking to the polls on Election Day, I suddenly had a vision of all my neighbors trying to break out of the doldrums by voting for Curtis Sliwa for mayor.Sliwa was the nominee of the desperate, massively outnumbered New York City Republican Party, and while he has plenty of conservative positions on issues like mandatory vaccinations (no), he is better known as an animal lover who has 17 cats in a studio apartment he shares with his wife.On Tuesday, Sliwa’s big moment involved an attempt to bring a kitty into the polling site. It was one of several dust-ups between the candidate and the election workers that ended with his ballot jamming the scanning machine.At about that point I suddenly wondered: What if this guy wins? It was not an outcome most people had ever considered, for obvious reasons. But gee, the country was in such a foul mood, the status of the Biden administration so subterranean. The image of Congress wasn’t really much better than that apartment full of cats. What if, just to show their profound irritation, the voters went Sliwa?Didn’t happen. The winner, Eric Adams, a Democrat, is a former police officer who ran a smooth campaign about his plans for reforming crime-fighting in New York. Early results suggest Sliwa will be very, very lucky to get a third of the vote. I am sharing this because I know a lot of you need some happy political news to tell friends over the weekend.Some Possible Post-Election Conversational Strategies for Liberal Democrats:— Find a few next-generation stars to burble over, even if they just got elected to your town’s zoning board of appeals.— Funny stories about other cats.— Ranting about Joe Manchin.Perhaps you noticed that, just before Election Day, Senator Manchin called a press conference to announce that he wasn’t sure he could support Joe Biden’s social services program because of his concern about the “impact it’ll have on our national debt.”Given Manchin’s super-status as a Democratic swing vote, we certainly have to pay attention to his fiscal conservatism and obsession with the national debt. After we stop to muse — just for a minute — that his state, West Virginia, gets about $2.15 in federal aid for every dollar its residents send to Washington.But back to the positive side of the elections — or at least the less-depressing-than-originally-perceived side. That big governor’s race in Virginia, won by the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, was maybe the worst blow of the evening for Democrats. But when you’re having those dinner table conversations — or, hey, drinking heavily at a bar — be sure to point out that the loser, Terry McAuliffe, is a former Virginia governor. His state seems to have a real problem with chief executives who hang around, and there’s a law that makes it impossible for a sitting governor to run for re-election. McAuliffe was trying for a comeback after his enforced retirement — a feat that’s been achieved only once since the Civil War.Didn’t work. Will you be surprised to hear that Donald Trump is taking credit?The other governor’s race, in New Jersey, was way more dramatic than expected, with incumbent Philip Murphy fighting off a surprisingly strong challenge from Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman. Very possible this one could still be in recount purgatory during the holidays.I really hope Murphy, a rather fearless leader in the war against Covid, is not being punished for vaccine mandates and mandatory school masking, which Ciattarelli complained about endlessly. Or that the irritable voters wanted to get back at their governor for remarking, a few years ago, that if you’re a person whose only concern is tax rates, New Jersey is “probably not your state.”Ciattarelli reportedly spent about $736,000 running that quote in a 10-day broadside of ads. But I’ll bet most New Jersey voters accept the governor’s view, however grudgingly. Almost all of them must have some state concerns besides taxes — schools? Street lighting? The end of black bear hunting?Fortunately, you won’t be expected to argue that Tuesday was one of the great days in the history of American democracy. Otherwise, some detail-oriented colleague might mention that a House district near Columbus was won by the chairman of the Ohio Coal Association.Yeah, and Minneapolis failed to pass its public safety program. It seems that Seattle will end up with a new law-and-order mayor rather than criminal justice reform.On the other hand, there were loads of stories to remind you how our country, for all its multitudinous failures to live up to the American dream, still also manages to come through. A lot. Boston elected its first woman and first person of color as mayor. Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Kan., each elected its first Black mayor. Cincinnati chose an Asian American mayor, and Dearborn, Mich.’s next mayor is going to be an Arab American Muslim.Cheer up, people. We made it through another election. Take the holidays off from politics if you want. Just ignore the new flood of emails asking you to donate to some worthy candidate’s quest for a House seat in 2022. What’s the rush? You’ll hear from them again next week. And the week after that. …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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      What We Did the Last Time We Broke America

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      What happened to normal politics? I’ve spent the past five years commuting between two centuries, trying to find out.As a curator of political history at the Smithsonian, I have attended protests and primaries, talked politics at Bernie Sanders rallies and with armed Ohio militiamen. Again and again, 21st-century Americans wonder at a democracy that looks nothing like the one they grew up with.I’ve asked the 19th century the same question. Heading into the Smithsonian’s secure collections, past recently collected riot shields and tiki torches, I’ve dug into the evidence of a similar crisis in the late 1800s. Ballots from stolen elections. Paramilitary uniforms from midnight rallies. Diaries and letters, stored elsewhere, of senators and saloonkeepers and seamstresses, all asking: Is democracy a failure?These artifacts suggest that we’re not posing the right question today. If we want to understand what happened to 20th-century politics, we need to stop considering it standard. We need to look deeper into our past and ask how we got normal politics to begin with.The answer is that we had to fight for them. From the 1860s through 1900, America was embroiled in a generation-long, culturewide war over democracy, fought through the loudest, roughest, closest elections in our history. An age of acrimony when engaged, enraged participation came to seem less like a “perversion of traditional American institutions,” as one memoirist observed, and more like “their normal operation.”The partisan combat of that era politicized race, class and religion but often came down to a fundamental debate about behavior. How should Americans participate in their democracy? What was out of bounds? Were fraud, violence and voter suppression the result of bad actors, or were there certain dangerous tendencies inherent in the very idea of self-government? Was reform even possible?Ultimately, Americans decided to simmer down. After 1900, a movement of well-to-do reformers invented a style of politics, a Great Quieting aiming for what The Los Angeles Times called “more thinking and less shouting.” But “less shouting” also meant less turnout, less participation, less of a voice for working people. “Normal” politics was invented to calm our democracy the last time it broke.Over a century of relative peace, politically speaking, this model came to seem standard, but our embattled norms are really the cease-fire terms of a forgotten war.This period from the Civil War to World War I is often quickly explained with history textbook abstractions like “industrialization,” “urbanization” and “immigration,” but those big social forces had intimate effects on Americans. Living in a time of incredible disruption, instability and inequality pushed unsteady citizens into partisan combat. Nervous people make nasty politics, and the churn of Gilded Age life left millions feeling cut loose and unprotected. During this era, Americans saw weaker family ties, had fewer communal institutions and spent more time alone. Though we associate the Gilded Age with packed factories and tenements, loneliness and isolation were driving social and political forces in this shaken nation. Americans “had to cling to something,” observed the writer Walter Weyl, and in the absence of their old folk customs or local institutions, “the temptation to cling to party became ruthless.”The parties were willing to oblige. The only thing Gilded Age life seemed to want from struggling Americans was their hard labor. But the Democratic and Republican Parties wanted their voices at rallies, their boots on the cobblestones, their stomachs at barbecues, their fists at riots and their votes on Election Day. Richard Croker, a Tammany Hall boss — once jailed for an Election Day stabbing — called his machine America’s “great digestive apparatus,” capable of converting lonely immigrants into active citizens.Likewise, people needed the parties. Some had concrete goals, like the Black politician and Philadelphia barber Isaiah C. Wears, who explained that he did not love the Republican Party — it was merely the most useful tool in his community, the “knife which has the sharpest edge and does my cutting.” Others needed something more emotional. Many sought the community that came from marching together or sharing the party’s lager or guffawing at the same political cartoons. And because participation was so social and so saturating, even the women, young people and minorities denied the right to vote could still feel palpably engaged without ever casting a ballot.But their efforts resolved little. Voter turnouts climbed higher than in any other period in American history, and the results were closer than ever, too, but neither party won lasting mandates or addressed systemic problems. Every few years, some bold new movement pointed to the issues Americans were not addressing — inequality, immigration, white supremacy, monopoly — only to be laughed off as cranks by swelling multitudes that preferred parties that, as one Tammany operative said, did not “trouble them with political arguments.”Even those on the front lines of the era’s violent politics wondered what it was all for. One African American reverend pointedly asked Black Republicans fighting to hold on to voting rights, “With all your speaking, organizing, parading in the streets, ballyhooing, voting and sometimes fighting, what do you get?”The more demands Americans put on their democracy, the less they got. By centering politics on what The Atlantic Monthly called “the theater, the opera, the baseball game, the intellectual gymnasium, almost the church of the people,” by making it the locus for a culture war, a race war and a class war, by asking it to provide public entertainment and small talk and family bonding, progress became impossible. Little changed because so many were participating, not in spite of that.“Government by party is not a means of settling things,” as the muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd said. “It is the best of devices for keeping them unsettled.”Over the years, politics alienated widening circles. On the right, America’s old aristocrats — like the revered Boston historian Francis Parkman — hissed that the very idea of majority rule was a scheme to steal power from “superior to inferior types of men.” On the left, Populists and socialists denounced political machines that had hoodwinked working-class voters. These populations would never agree on what should come next but had a consensus on what had to end.After 1890 or so, a new alliance began working toward the secret cause of making politics so dry and quiet that fewer of those “inferior types” wanted to participate, often explicitly viewing mass turnout as harmful. Many cities, scarred by the rising labor movement, banned public rallies without permits, hoping to shove public political expressions back into “the private home,” as the Republican National Convention chairman put it. They closed saloons on Election Day, shuttering those key working-class political hubs. And they replaced public ballot boxes with private voting booths, turning polling places from vibrant, violent gatherings into a confessional box.Though each change felt small, taken together, they amounted to a revolution in political labor. Campaign work once done in the streets by many ordinary volunteers was now done in private by a few paid professionals.What came next was predictable. Voter turnout crashed by nearly a third in presidential elections from the 1890s through the 1920s, falling from roughly 80 percent to under 50 percent. Voting decreased most among working-class, young, immigrant and Black citizens (even in Northern states where African Americans maintained the ability to vote). For the first time, wealth and education correlated with turnout. To this day, class remains the largest determiner of participation, above race or age.There were some benefits to these quieter elections. Political violence became rare and shocking. Between 1859 and 1905, one congressman was murdered every seven years, and three presidents were killed in just 36 years. In the subsequent century, the nation suffered one presidential assassination and the murder of a congressman every 25 years. In this cooler political environment, lawmakers were finally able to pass long-delayed Progressive reforms. Women’s suffrage, federal protections for workers, direct elections of senators, progressive income taxes and regulations on industry, transportation, food and drugs all finally passed — after decades of failure — once electoral politics quieted. American lives improved more in this period than in any other, and yet it all coincided with a crash in participation.But this early-20th-century democracy was also more distant from ordinary life. These are the years when it became impolite to talk politics at the dinner table, when growing numbers struggled to distinguish between the parties, when incumbent politicians began to hold on to office for decades. The number of seats in Congress, which had always expanded with the population, permanently froze in 1911 at 435, even though our population has tripled since then.And this is the same ugly era when Southern states began an onslaught on the million Black voters who participated in many elections during Reconstruction. States from Mississippi to Virginia passed repressive new constitutions between 1890 and 1910, essentially killing democratic participation in much of the South. Though that was far more extreme, all these changes grew from a new climate of restraint that quieted politics nationwide in the new century.Political objects can tell the story of this change. From 1860 to 1900, parties held torch-lit midnight marches to rally the faithful. In 1900, after a sweltering Republican convention in Philadelphia where participants wore straw hats, the jaunty boater became the new icon of a cooler approach to politics. A glance at political cartoons from 1920 or 1960 or even 2000 finds caricatures still wearing boaters — a style far removed from the torch-lit democracy of the 1800s.The Smithsonian has steel drawers full of such boaters (made from straw, plastic and Wisconsin cheesehead foam). My colleagues and I have spent the past few years shuttling between these collections and contemporary political events, trying to identify objects that might embody the change we’ve witnessed in our democracy, that might go behind museum glass in a century to help explain 2016 or 2021. And wondering what these eras might say to each other. When it comes to electoral politics, our problems are different from those Americans dealt with 150 years ago, but the 19th century does have a surprisingly hopeful takeaway to offer the 21st.We’re not the first generation to worry about the death of our democracy. Grappling with this demanding system of government is, well, normal. It’s partly because we’re following the unusually calmed 20th century that we don’t feel up to the task today. Our deep history shows that reform is possible, that previous generations identified flaws in their politics and made deliberate changes to correct them. We’re not just helplessly hurtling toward inevitable civil war; we can be actors in this story. The first step is acknowledging the dangers inherent in democracy. To move forward, we should look backward and see that we’re struggling not with a collapse but with a relapse.Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is the author of “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.”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