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      Polls Were Great in 2022. Can They Repeat Their Success in 2024?

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      Experiments that yielded promising results in 2022 may not be enough if Trump is on the ballot again.With a highly successful polling cycle behind them, some pollsters believe a tactic that gained widespread adoption in 2022 may help carry them through the next presidential election. But even the tactic’s adherents say it may not be a panacea, particularly if former President Donald J. Trump is once again on the ballot.Pollsters have increasingly been weighting surveys based on whom respondents recall voting for in a previous election, in addition to adjusting for standard demographics such as race and age. This tactic has long been used in other countries to improve poll accuracy, but has become widely used in the United States only in recent years.“We are all terrified,” said Cameron McPhee, the chief methodologist at SSRS, CNN’s polling partner and a pollster that weighted some of its polls on recalled vote in 2022. She added, “We all feel good about the changes we made in 2022, but I think there is still a big question mark” headed into 2024.By weighting on recalled vote, pollsters can more easily correct partisan imbalances in who responds to polls, and in recent years Democrats have tended to respond to polls at higher rates than Republicans. Perhaps more important, weighting on recalled vote can specifically increase the influence of Trump supporters, a group that polls struggled to measure accurately in 2016 and 2020.The tactic’s adoption by pollsters in the United States remains far from universal. Several prominent pollsters achieved accurate results without it — including The New York Times/Siena College, which was named America’s most accurate political pollster by FiveThirtyEight after the 2022 cycle.Overall, 2022 was one of the most accurate years for polling in recent history, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. Many pollsters “probably would have gotten 2022 right even without that extra weighting step, because we did,” said Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Poll.After 2016, post-election analyses found that polls had consistently underrepresented less educated voters, who tended to disproportionately support Mr. Trump. To fix this, pollsters widely adopted education as an additional survey weight, and a cycle of accurate polls in 2018 seemed to reflect a return to normalcy.But in 2020, polls were more biased than they had been in any modern election, over-representing Democratic support by nearly five percentage points, as opposed to three percentage points — a more normal amount of error — in 2016.“I think one of the reasons 2022 was successful — and even to some extent 2018 — was that Trump himself was not on the ballot.” Mr. Murray said. “If history is any guide, we are probably going to see that nonresponse going into 2024 based on how the Republican nomination is going.”The 2020 election presented another distinct challenge — it took place amid the pandemic. Pollsters found that some Americans, stuck at home and lonely, were more likely to respond to surveys. While that was initially seen as a boon, it might have led to even more bias if it meant the uneven adherence to stay-at-home orders added another source of bias to who picked up the phone.Weighting on recalled vote is not without its concerns.Voters have been shown to have poor recall of whom they voted for or even whether they voted at all, typically being more likely to recall voting for the winner. One study of Canadian voters found up to a quarter of voters were inconsistent when recalling whom they had voted for.This misrepresentation of past vote can push polls in different directions depending on who won the most recent election. In 2022, that meant respondents were more likely to say they had supported Joe Biden, and pollsters using recalled vote would end up giving them less weight, meaning Republican support was bolstered.But with a prior winner from a different party, the effect would be reversed. An assessment by The Times found that weighting its 2020 polls using recalled 2016 vote would have made them even more biased toward Mr. Biden. And a report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examining how 2020 polls could have been improved found that polls that weighted on recalled vote were no better than those that didn’t.Similarly, in 2022, weighting by recalled vote would have made Times/Siena polls less accurate. As published, without weighting on recalled vote, the final polls of Senate, governor and House races had an average error of less than two percentage points and zero bias toward Democrats or Republicans. When weighted using recalled vote to 2020 election results, average error would have increased by a percentage point, and overall the polls would have been slightly biased toward Republicans.But that might have been a consequence of other decisions The Times makes, which includes weighting to demographic information available on the voter file that is not always available to other pollsters.Other pollsters have found the recalled vote method to yield significant improvements over typical weighting schemes. SSRS used a range of weighting methods in 2022, including recalled vote for some of its polls, and also experimented with weighting on political identification. Its post-election analysis found that using recalled vote as a weight would have been the most accurate overall approach, increasing average accuracy by more than three percentage points over just weighting on standard demographics.“It’s a brute force method,” said Clifford Young, the president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “That is, we don’t really know what it corrects for. Does it correct for only nonignorable nonresponse? Or does it correct for coverage bias? Or maybe a likely voter problem? Maybe all three.”Even so, pollsters are generally optimistic. “What the evidence is showing is that it gets us in a much better place in our polls than not using it,” Mr. Young said, noting that he believed most pollsters would be weighting on past vote in 2024. “I think the evidence thus far suggests it does more good than harm.” He added, “If we use the same weighting and correction methods that we used in 2020 in 2024, we’re going to miss the mark.” More

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      Finnish Right-Wing Party Leader Apologizes After Racist Posts Surface

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      Riikka Purra, who leads the nationalist Finns party, was the second member of her faction to come under fire for offensive comments since the government was formed a month ago.Finland’s deputy prime minister apologized on Tuesday for “stupid social media comments” after a series of racist and sometimes violent remarks posted in 2008 surfaced in the Finnish press — the latest scandal for the party she leads, the right-wing Finns, since it joined the country’s governing coalition less than a month ago.Though the deputy prime minister, Riikka Purra, did not say the posts, published under the user name “riikka,” were hers, she said in a Twitter thread, “I apologize for my stupid social media comments 15 years ago and for the harm and resentment that they understandably caused. I’m not a perfect person, I’ve made mistakes.”According to local news media reports, in posts on a right-wing blog in 2008, “riikka” repeatedly used a racist Finnish slur against Black people, described Turkish people in derogatory terms and asked if there were any like-minded people in the city on a particular day to beat Black children. The blog was hosted by the former Finns party leader Jussi Halla-aho, who was fined by Finland’s highest court for racist incitement in 2012. The comments attributed to “riikka” are not currently on the blog. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat tracked Ms. Purra’s whereabouts in one instance and linked it to a post from that location.Ms. Purra did acknowledge on Tuesday that she had posted on the blog “in ways and with words that today I absolutely do not accept and would not use,” though she did not identify specific posts.Her apology came as Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, was attending the country’s first NATO meeting as a full member of the alliance. In reference to the incident at home, Mr. Niinistö urged the governing coalition to adopt a “clear zero-tolerance position to racism,” although he added that racial prejudice was different than opposing immigration.In Finland’s recent elections, Ms. Purra’s Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party took 46 seats in the country’s 200-strong Parliament, the faction’s strongest-ever showing. Last month, Finns joined a four-party ruling coalition and picked up seven cabinet positions under Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the National Coalition Party.Mr. Orpo thanked Ms. Purra for “making the right decision” and gave no indication that she would be forced to resign. “The government will not fall because of this,” Mr. Orpo said.“The government has jointly committed to the principles of nondiscrimination and equality,” Mr. Orpo wrote on Twitter. “Everyone in Finland must feel that they are safe.”Johanna Vuorelma, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, said the recurring scandals had weakened Mr. Orpo’s coalition, although it was not in imminent danger of collapse. Mr. Orpo’s alliance unseated the former prime minister, Sanna Marin, who now leads the country’s opposition. She wrote on Twitter, “Nothing that has come up about the party over the last few weeks has been new or surprising,” and called on the government to “directly and unequivocally renounce racism, hate speech and violence.”Ms. Purra is not the first Finns member to have the past catch up with her.Vilhelm Junnila, another Finns minister, resigned last month after reports in the Finnish news media of his far-right sympathies, which included him joking about a Finns candidate’s electoral number, 88, a well-known neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Takes Aim at Political Fund-raising Oligopoly

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      The longshot Republican candidate is seeking to raise an army of fund-raisers — by giving them a cut of any money they collect for his campaign.The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wants to disrupt the “oligopoly” of political fund-raising.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesRamaswamy rethinks political giving As a biotech entrepreneur, investor and conservative activist, Vivek Ramaswamy cuts a different profile from the veteran politicians who are also seeking the Republican presidential nomination.With the plan that he announced on Monday — in which fund-raisers will get 10 percent of what they drum up for him — Mr. Ramaswamy told DealBook that he’s trying to shake up the business of politics now, too.How it works: Called “Vivek’s Kitchen Cabinet,” the system will give participants a personal link they can share with others, and the campaign will pay them as independent contractors.Mr. Ramaswamy said he’s taking aim at a political norm. After announcing his candidacy in February, he said he had met with professional fund-raisers who promised that they could find wealthy donors in Palm Beach, Fla., in Silicon Valley, and on Wall Street.He wasn’t impressed with their work, he said, but he found their fee structure, in which they are paid up to 20 percent of what donors give, interesting. That got him thinking about disrupting the model: “Anytime there’s an oligopoly, there’s a need and an opportunity to break it up,” he said.It’s a novel way of attracting support, since it goes against how candidates traditionally spend money to get donors. (Most campaigns will spend heavily on marketing to draw donors, though the Republican hopeful Doug Burgum is trying something different by doling out $20 gift cards.) News coverage of the plan could also help bump up awareness of Ramaswamy, who’s currently polling at about 4 percent.Drawing more donors isn’t necessary for Mr. Ramaswamy to qualify for the first Republican presidential debate — he told DealBook that he had amassed about 65,000 already, more than the 40,000 minimum. But it could help alleviate his need to self-fund his campaign, to which he has given more than $10.5 million in loans and contributions as of the first quarter.Is it legal? Campaign finance experts told DealBook that the plan didn’t appear to raise any legal issues. Ramaswamy said that it had been vetted by the Federal Election Commission.But some experts see other problems. For instance, supporters may pressure and coerce others in their networks to give to the candidate, according to Saurav Ghosh, director of campaign finance reform at the advocacy group Campaign Legal Center and a former F.E.C. enforcement attorney. (Some on social media have jokingly compared it to a multilevel marketing campaign.)HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING China reportedly plans tighter rules for artificial intelligence. Beijing officials will compel companies developing A.I. services to obtain a license before releasing their products to the public, according to The Financial Times. Regulators are seeking a balance between controlling content while allowing domestic tech companies to innovate.Foxconn withdraws from a $19.5 billion chip venture in India. The electronic components giant said it wouldn’t move forward with plans to partner with the conglomerate Vedanta to build factories in Gujarat. The decision is a blow to India’s efforts to become a hub for chip making and to seize on desires by Apple and others to diversify their supply chains away from China.Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show isn’t holding onto its audience. Views of his broadcasts on the social network have fallen as much as 85 percent since their debut last month. It’s bad news for Carlson, who had counted on his strong viewership at Fox News to carry over to his Twitter show after the network fired him this spring.Hollywood faces the prospect of a second strike. Actors are set to join writers on the picket lines if their union, SAG-AFTRA, doesn’t reach a deal with studios by midnight on Wednesday. Another strike could completely shut down Hollywood, disrupting local communities depending on movie and TV production. At issue are disagreements over streaming payments and the use of artificial intelligence.The heat grows on Twitter’s chief Just a month into the job as the social media platform’s C.E.O., Linda Yaccarino has had to deal with a major new competitor, unpopular limits placed on power users and the unpredictability of Elon Musk. It hasn’t been a smooth debut by any means.She has set herself a tough task. Ms. Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal aims to repair relations with Madison Avenue, no small feat in the middle of a global ad slump. In her favor is her strong reputation: “Linda was a good hire and the right hire as long as she has the freedom to do what’s necessary,” Martin Sorrell, an advertising mogul, told DealBook last week.But many suspect that Twitter’s owner will be reluctant to relinquish control. Indeed, Mr. Musk hasn’t made things easier for Ms. Yaccarino, tweeting juvenile content and apparently neglecting to copy her on his threat to sue Threads, Meta’s rival short-messaging platform. (Referring to Ms. Yaccarino, Bill Grueskin, a Columbia Journalism School professor, tweeted that he was “trying to think of a worse career decision.”)A request for comment to Twitter’s P.R. team was answered with an auto-reply of a poop emoji.And Threads keeps growing. The Twitter competitor has now surpassed 100 million users, setting a record for an app to reach that milestone. Analysts at Evercore ISI have estimated that Threads could add $8 billion to Meta’s annual revenue by 2025. It’s worth noting that Threads currently doesn’t feature any advertising.Its rise appears to be hurting Twitter: Traf­fic to Twit­ter’s web­site fell 5 percent week-on-week in the first two days of Thread’s existence, ac­cord­ing to The Wall Street Journal, citing Sim­i­lar­Web.Ms. Yaccarino sought to rally the Twitter faithful. “Twitter, you really outdid yourselves!” she posted on Monday. “Last week we had our largest usage day since February. There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it. 🎤” (That said, the tech journalist Casey Newton expressed skepticism of her claim.)Inflation nation Americans’ spending spree on cars, airline tickets and hotel stays appears to be cooling off. Markets are anxiously waiting to see if that restraint will be born out in Wednesday’s Consumer Price Index reading.What to watch: Economists polled by Bloomberg expect the headline inflation number to drop to 3.1 percent, a huge decline from last July’s reading of 9 percent. (That said, more frugal consumers could crimp Amazon’s annual Prime Day shopping bonanza, which starts today.)But progress from here is expected to be tough. Core inflation, which excludes more volatile food and fuel prices, is predicted to drop to 5 percent, well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. In an investor note on Monday co-written by Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs’s chief economist, the firm said that it expected further gradual progress in the inflation fight in the coming months, but didn’t see core inflation dipping below 3 percent until 2025.The Fed is also still worried about inflation. On Monday, three officials said that more interest rate increases were needed to bring down prices. “Inflation is our No. 1 problem,” said Mary Daly, president of the San Francisco Fed and a nonvoting member of the central bank. She added that she believed two more rate raises were needed this year.The futures market is betting on that as well, pricing in a quarter-percentage-point increase at this month’s Fed rate-setting meeting and, increasingly, anticipating another raise this fall.But that uncertainty over inflation, as well as worries about recession and a slowing labor market, has led some on Wall Street to warn that the S&P 500 is overvalued and that a stock sell-off is coming. (Investors will keep an eye on corporate earning reports, which begin this week, for more clues on how businesses are faring.)“It’s also important to set the record straight: This is not a merger. The PGA Tour remains intact.” — Ron Price, the C.O.O. of the PGA Tour, in a preview of his testimony today before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations about the proposed tie-up with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit. Price added that there would be no changes to the PGA Tour’s C.E.O. or on the board level should the framework deal move forward.A fight over banking rules draws closerThe Fed’s top banking overseer, Michael Barr, outlined on Monday major parts of his plan to update regulations in the wake of the regional lender crisis that was prompted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank this spring.Among them are tougher capital requirements meant to make banks more resilient in turbulent times — but the financial industry is warning that the proposals go too far.Mr. Barr wants banks to hold more in capital reserves, to the tune of an additional $2 for every $100 of risk-weighted assets, he said in a speech. He also wants to extend his stricter rules to all institutions with $100 billion or more in assets; the toughest requirements currently apply only to lenders that are internationally active or have at least $700 billion in assets.It’s a recognition of “gaps in the current rules,” he said, since even midsize lenders — which are more lightly regulated — can pose dangers to the American financial system.Banks are threatening a fight. Washington and Wall Street appear to have been surprised by how tough Mr. Barr is being: “It’s definitely meaty,” Ian Katz, an analyst at Capital Alpha, told The Times. But industry figures said that tougher restrictions would come at a price. “Further capital requirements on the largest U.S. banks will lead to higher borrowing costs and fewer loans for consumers and businesses,” said Kevin Fromer, head of the banking group Financial Services Forum.The rules aren’t a done deal yet. Up next is the public comment period. If the Fed’s board approves, it will still take time to implement the rules.THE SPEED READ DealsBerkshire Hathaway will buy control of a liquefied natural gas export project in Maryland for $3.3 billion. (Bloomberg)Banks including Citigroup, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are said to be seeking potential investors for the seed giant Syngenta’s $9 billion I.P.O. in China, which is expected to be the biggest market debut this year. (Bloomberg)Morgan Stanley has reportedly hired Marco Caggiano, JPMorgan’s head of North American mergers, as a vice chairman of M.&A. (Reuters)PolicyThe United States and the European Union reached a deal to let tech giants continue sharing user data between their jurisdictions. (NYT)Jay Clayton, former head of the S.E.C., and Tim Massad, former chair of the C.F.T.C., offered a road map to regulating the crypto markets. (WSJ)Best of the restEuropean regulators are investigating whether the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Saxenda increase the risk of suicidal thoughts among users. (WSJ)India’s economy could surpass that of the United States in size by 2075, Goldman Sachs predicts — though high taxes and bureaucracy could stand in the way. (Insider)“Disney World Hasn’t Felt This Empty in Years” (WSJ)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Cambodia Strongman Hun Sen Wields Facebook to Undermine Democracy

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      The Cambodian People’s Party created its Cyber War Room about a decade ago. The goal was to support Prime Minister Hun Sen’s regime through social media propagandizing. Led by the prime minister’s son Hun Manet, a troll army used Facebook and other digital platforms to attack his father’s opposition with disinformation and even allegedly wield death threats.Fast forward to the Cambodian election taking place next month. The CPP’s Cyber War Room is back up and running. General Manet, commander of the Cambodian Army and most likely the country’s next prime minister, is reportedly back at the helm, this time defending his father’s legacy and himself.Facebook is extremely popular in Cambodia, with roughly 12 million of the country’s almost 17 million people on the site. Many people in Cambodia use Facebook as a core means of getting information, and social media platforms are critical for the few journalists still producing independent reporting. The populations of many other countries where governments have continually used social media for manipulation, including the Philippines and Turkey, rely heavily on Facebook as well. So why has state-sponsored trolling like this been allowed to endure for 10 years?It will come as no surprise when I say that Big Tech has a lot of problems on its plate, including fury about transnational digital propaganda campaigns, a global outcry about networked disinformation during the pandemic and panic about both real and hypothetic threats of generative A.I.But as one issue pops into the immediate view, the others don’t go anywhere. Instead, the global problems with our online information ecosystem compound. And while society and tech’s most powerful firms jump from one issue to the next, the abusive disinformation practices in places like Cambodia become entrenched. Governments refine their techniques, and opposition groups become less and less present because they are either trolled into submission, arrested, exiled or killed. It all benefits Big Tech, from Meta to Alphabet, which publicly seizes upon the idea du jour while cutting staffs and curbing efforts aimed at combating standing informational issues.What does this mean for the people of Cambodia? For a people who, in living memory, endured the horrors of genocide and totalitarianism?The Cambodian news ecosystem and the lives of Cambodians are controlled by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has led them in some capacity for 38 years. He is quick to justify his long reign by pointing to economic gains before Covid — by which time the country achieved lower-middle-income status through tourism, textile exports and a growing relationship with China. His people have languished in many other ways, however: Environmental degradation is rife, corruption is commonplace, and human rights abuses are worsening.Mr. Sen and his cronies own or control all but the thinnest sliver of the country’s media outlets. They recently banned the main opposition party from running in the coming election because of an alleged clerical error. And curtailing speech on social media has been critical to the consolidation of their power. Facebook, Telegram and other platforms have been central to the CPP’s illicit, strategic and authoritarian control of Cambodia’s information space and, consequently, public opinion.Other despots have made use of highly organized state-sponsored trolling outfits to quash dissent. Some, like Mr. Sen, have also hired their kids to run them. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s Office of Hate, run by his sons, used social media to defame journalists and threaten opposition. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the autocrat recently re-elected as president of Turkey, benefited greatly from organized troll armies operating on Twitter. Back in Southeast Asia, the increasingly tyrannical regimes of Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar have all deployed cyber-troops to do their oppressive bidding.Another factor is central to understanding why social media firms have failed to curb state-sponsored trolling around the globe: language.Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms have overwhelmingly focused their efforts to counter harmful and purposely misleading content in English. One reason is that they are based in the United States. Another is the malignant supremacy of Western concerns. But the larger reason is that social media companies cannot or will not supply the resources necessary to moderating content in other languages — particularly those such as Cambodia’s Khmer, which is complex and spoken by about 18 million people worldwide. That’s a small number when compared with the roughly 1.5 billion who speak English.This issue is a major problem for our own democracy too. During the 2020 and 2022 elections, social media platforms failed spectacularly in quashing hateful and disenfranchising content aimed at the tens of millions of Americans who speak Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and a variety of other languages. This resulted in communities of color and groups already marginalized in our political system bearing the brunt of digital hate and purposely false information about these contests. According to my research and work with community leaders, this structural disinformation causes apathy, anger and civic disenchantment among minority voters, and as a result, many don’t show up to vote.The strength of global democracy is tied to the number of countries around the world that truly practice it. And while the leaders of relatively strong democracies like the United States obsess over information technology problems and political spectacle in Washington, they fail to do their duty to protect the less fortunate, both in their own country and elsewhere. This, in turn, lets social media companies off the hook.I recently returned from a lecture tour in Cambodia, where I spoke to more than 12 groups of professional journalists, citizen reporters, scholars, students and activists about the informational and political challenges they face online and offline. All told me that they still use platforms like Facebook and Telegram to coordinate, organize and share information about breaking news and elections.Facebook is especially popular in the country, in part because of its controversial Free Basics program, which offers free internet in a number of developing countries via a constrained number of websites (including, naturally, Facebook). Critics derided this as less a benevolent bid to connect the world and more a heavy-handed effort to “capture more of the market in the name of connectivity.” The promise of social media — that it can be the conduit for communication in countries with controlled media systems — remains true for the people I spoke to in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. But this potential is quickly dwindling as people lose faith in the safety of online communication. Meanwhile, Facebook remains a potent means for disseminating propaganda.If Meta, Alphabet and other tech firms do not take swift action to curb state-sponsored trolling, and if policymakers and civil society groups in the United States and other democracies don’t put more pressure on authoritarians like Hun Sen, then Cambodians and many others around the world will lose one of their last means of fighting back. We must speak out about the oppression surrounding the Cambodian election, which takes place on July 23 — and speak out about digital injustice.Samuel Woolley is the author of “Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity” and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin.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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      Utah Supreme Court to Hear Arguments Over G.O.P. Map Splitting Salt Lake County

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      The Utah Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether a congressional map drawn to dilute Democratic votes is subject to judicial review, or a political issue beyond its reach.The 550,000 voters in Salt Lake County, Utah’s most populous, handed Joseph R. Biden Jr. an 11-percentage point victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 contest for president. A year later, in November 2021, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature drew a new political map that carved up the county, putting pieces of it in each of the state’s four congressional districts — and ensuring that Republican voters would outnumber Democrats in all of them.On Tuesday, the Utah Supreme Court will consider whether to wade into the increasingly pitched nationwide battle over partisan gerrymanders. The justices will decide whether the state’s courts can hear a lawsuit challenging the House map, or whether partisan maps are a political issue beyond their jurisdiction.The U.S. Supreme Court considered the same question in 2019 and decided that the maps were beyond its purview. But voting rights advocates say Utah’s Constitution offers a stronger case than the federal one for reining in political maps.“There’s a very clear provision in the State Constitution that says all power is inherent in the people, and that they have the right to alter and reform their government,” said Mark Gaber, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based advocacy group representing the plaintiffs. He said other relevant provisions in the State Constitution, but absent from the federal Constitution, include guarantees of free elections and the right to vote.State Senator Scott D. Sandall, Republican co-chair of the State Legislature redistricting committee that drew the House map, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.In court filings, legislators said that the State Constitution gave them exclusive authority to draw political maps, and that the plaintiffs were trying to impose “illusory standards of political equality” on the mapmaking process.Though Utah is a conservative state, no one argues that four Republican-dominated districts are inevitable. “If you just draw a very compact circle around the middle of Salt Lake County, you’re going to get a Democratic district,” Mr. Gaber said.Rather, the central issue in the case is whether Republican legislators had a constitutional right to maintain their party’s monopoly on the four seats through a map that was beyond the purview of judges to review.The Utah case could have national implications — not merely for the political balance in the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives but also for the emerging body of legal precedents that influence how courts rule in other states.With the Supreme Court removing the federal courts from deciding partisan gerrymander cases, state courts are becoming a crucial battleground for opponents of skewed maps. Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on state constitution protections for voting at the University of Kentucky, said the growing body of legal precedents in state gerrymandering cases was important because many state constitutions share similar protections for elections and voters, often derived from one another.Courts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Alaska, New York and, last week, New Mexico have ruled that partisan gerrymanders can be unconstitutional. So have courts in Ohio and North Carolina. However, the Ohio court proved unable to force the Legislature to comply with its rulings, and the North Carolina decision was overturned in April after elections shifted the court’s partisan balance from Democratic to Republican.The Kentucky Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that state’s congressional and legislative maps in September. And a lawsuit contesting an extreme Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature is widely expected after an April election gave progressives a majority on the state’s high court.Perhaps the closest analogy to the Utah gerrymander is in Nashville, where the Republican-run state legislature’s latest congressional map divided the city’s onetime Democratic-majority House district among three heavily Republican districts. Democrats have not challenged the map in state courts, presumably because they see little prospect of winning in a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.In Utah’s case, however, the State Supreme Court’s five justices do not have reputations for bending easily to political winds. They are chosen through a merit-based selection process.The Utah plaintiffs — the state chapter of the League of Women Voters; the advocacy group Mormon Women for Ethical Government and a handful of Utah voters — accuse the State Legislature not just of illegally gerrymandering the state’s congressional map but of ignoring voters’ explicit instructions not to do so.The State Constitution allows voters to enact new laws, and to repeal ones that the Legislature enacted, through ballot initiatives. In 2018, voters narrowly approved a law outlawing maps that were unduly skewed to favor a candidate or party, and allowing voters to enforce that mandate through lawsuits. The Legislature later repealed that law and then drew the congressional map that quartered Salt Lake County. Plaintiffs in the suit argue that the repeal violated a provision in the State Constitution stating that citizens “have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” And they say that the gerrymandered map ignores a host of state constitutional provisions, including guarantees of free speech, free association and equal protection — provisions that they say should be read to prohibit partisan maps.For their part, Republican legislators contend that they had the right to repeal the redistricting law, just as they can any other state law. And they say the plaintiffs’ aim is no different than their own: to tilt the playing field in their favor.Katie Wright, the executive director of Better Boundaries — the grass-roots group that led the successful effort to pass the 2018 redistricting law and is backing the lawsuit — said there is a difference between the two. She noted that the Legislature’s disclosure of its new maps in 2021 sparked an unusually large public outcry that continues even today.“The reason we have these maps is to keep the people who are in power in power,” she said. “Utahns have not given up.” More

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      Amazon Union Group, Challenging Christian Smalls, Seeks Vote

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      A split over the stewardship of the union’s high-profile president, Christian Smalls, has led a rival faction to file a lawsuit seeking an election.A dissident group within the Amazon Labor Union, the only certified union in the country representing Amazon employees, filed a complaint in federal court Monday seeking to force the union to hold a leadership election.The union won an election at a Staten Island warehouse with more than 8,000 employees in April 2022, but Amazon has challenged the result and has yet to begin bargaining on a contract.The rise of the dissident group, which calls itself the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus and includes a co-founder and former treasurer of the union, reflects a growing split within the union that appears to have undermined its ability to pressure Amazon. The split has also threatened to sap the broader labor movement of the momentum generated by last year’s high-profile victory.In its complaint, the reform caucus argues that the union and its president, Christian Smalls, illegally “refuse to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”The complaint asks a federal judge to schedule an election of the union’s top officers for no later than Aug. 30 and to appoint a neutral monitor to oversee the election.Mr. Smalls said in a text message Monday that the complaint was “a ridiculous claim with zero facts or merit,” and a law firm representing the union said it would seek legal sanctions against the reform group’s lawyer if the complaint was filed.The complaint states that under an earlier version of the union’s constitution, a leadership election was required within 60 days of the National Labor Relations Board’s certification of its victory.But in December, the month before the labor board certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership that scheduled elections after the union ratifies a contract with Amazon — an accomplishment that could take years, if it happens at all.On Friday, the reform caucus sent the union’s leadership a letter laying out its proposal to hold prompt elections, saying it would go to court Monday if the leadership didn’t embrace the proposal.The reform group is made of up more than 40 active organizers who are also plaintiffs in the legal complaint, including Connor Spence, a union co-founder and former treasurer; Brett Daniels, the union’s former organizing director; and Brima Sylla, a prominent organizer at the Staten Island warehouse.The group said in its letter that enacting the proposal could “mean the difference between an A.L.U. which is strong, effective, and a beacon of democracy in the labor movement” and “an A.L.U. which, in the end, became exactly what Amazon warned workers it would become: a business that takes away the workers’ voices.”Mr. Smalls said in his text that the union leadership had worked closely with its law firm to ensure that its actions were legal, as well as with the U.S. Labor Department.Jeanne Mirer, a lawyer for the union, wrote to a lawyer for the reform caucus that the lawsuit was frivolous and based on falsehoods. She said that Mr. Spence had “improperly and unilaterally” replaced the union’s founding constitution with a revised version in June 2022, and that the revision, which called for elections after certification, had never been formally adopted by the union’s board.Retu Singla, another lawyer for the union, said in an interview that the constitution was never made final because there were disagreements about it within the union’s leadership.Mr. Spence said he and other members of the union’s board had revised the constitution while consulting extensively with the union’s lawyers. A second union official involved in the discussions corroborated his account.The split within the union dates from last fall, when several longtime Amazon Labor Union organizers became frustrated with Mr. Smalls after a lopsided loss in a union election at an Amazon warehouse near Albany, N.Y.In a meeting shortly after the election, organizers argued that control of the union rested in too few hands and that the leadership should be elected, giving rank-and-file workers more input.The skeptics also complained that Mr. Smalls was committing the union to elections without a plan for how to win them, and that the union needed a better process for determining which organizing efforts to support. Many organizers worried that Mr. Smalls spent too much time traveling the country to make public appearances rather than focus on the contract fight on Staten Island.Mr. Smalls later said in an interview that his travel was necessary to help raise money for the union and that the critics’ preferred approach — building up worker support for a potential strike that could bring Amazon to the bargaining table — was counterproductive because it could alarm workers who feared losing their livelihoods.He said a worker-led movement shouldn’t turn its back on workers at other warehouses if they sought to unionize. A top union official hired by Mr. Smalls also argued that holding an election before the union had a more systematic way of reaching out to workers would be undemocratic because only the most committed activists would vote.When Mr. Smalls unveiled the new union constitution in December, scheduling elections after a contract was ratified, many of the skeptics walked out. The two factions have operated independently this year, with both sides holding regular meetings with members.In April, the reform caucus began circulating a petition among workers at the Staten Island warehouse calling on the leadership to amend the constitution and hold prompt elections. The petition has been signed by hundreds of workers at the facility.The petition soon became a point of tension with Mr. Smalls. In an exchange with a member of the reform caucus on WhatsApp in early May, copies of which are included in Monday’s legal complaint, Mr. Smalls said the union would “take legal action against you” if the caucus did not abandon the petition.The tensions appeared to ease later that month after the union leadership under Mr. Smalls proposed that the two sides enter mediation. The reform caucus accepted the invitation and suspended the petition campaign.But according to a memo that the mediator, Bill Fletcher Jr., sent both sides on June 29 and that was viewed by The New York Times, the union leadership backed out of the mediation process on June 18 without explanation.“I am concerned that the apparent turmoil within the ALU E. Board means that little is being done to organize the workers and prepare for the battle with Amazon,” Mr. Fletcher wrote in the memo, referring to the union’s executive board. “This situation seriously weakens support among the workers.”Colin Moynihan More

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      Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

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      Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week, I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that … wow.Bret Stephens: “Wow” just about covers it.Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was very clearly supposed to make viewers … hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that “literally threaten trans existence.” Followed by a super-duper weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Trojan-warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightning flashes coming out of his eyes.Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden’s secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.”Any thoughts?Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool. Not what I would have expected out of the Florida governor six months ago, but here’s where I confess: You were right about him, and I was wrong.Gail: My other takeaway is that Republicans are focusing more on L.G.B.T.Q. issues now that they’ve come to understand that attacking abortion isn’t a national winner — or even a state winner in most places.In the long run, stomping on gay rights isn’t going to do it either, because such a huge number of people — even conservative Republicans — have friends, family, colleagues who are gay. May take a while to come to grips with that, but once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive.Just recalling how my conservative Catholic mother wound up, in old age, riding on a float in Cincinnati’s Gay Pride parade.Bret: As you mentioned last year in that wonderful column you wrote about Allen Ginsberg.Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. But a lot of people — including many Democrats and independents — have honest and serious concerns about some aspects of the trans issue, especially as it concerns the integrity of women’s sports, the morality of drastic medical interventions in teenagers and the anti-scientific denial of basic biology when it comes to questions of sex. I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian.DeSantis could have addressed these issues in a sober and nuanced way. Instead, he went full Trojan, and I suspect his campaign will meet a similar fate to Troy’s.Gail: Full Trojan? Just like Brad Pitt in that ad!Bret: Switching topics, Gail, can we talk about homelessness? The problem just keeps getting worse, particularly out west, and it’s doing real damage to urban life. Your thoughts on what does and does not work?Gail: What works is pretty simple: more housing and outreach for the mentally ill. Both are difficult, of course, ranging from pretty darned to stupendously.Bret: What also works are ordinances forbidding “camping” on public lands so that homeless people are required to use shelter beds, which some liberal judges have blocked cities from doing. One of the problems of our public discussion of the issue is that we treat homelessness as a problem of the homeless only. It’s also a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. People ought to have a right to walk down urban sidewalks that haven’t been turned into tent cities and open-air toilets.Gail: New York is still dealing with a flood of new migrants, mainly from Latin America, who have been coming in huge numbers for more than a year. Most of them are ambitious and hopeful, and they could be a great shot to our local economy — if they had permanent places to stay.Bret: Completely agree. I also think the migrant problem is qualitatively different from the kind of homelessness issues that cities like San Francisco or Portland, Ore., are experiencing. Migrants are struggling with poverty but not, generally, mental health or drug-dependency issues. What migrants typically need is a room and a job.Gail: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has talked about finding some of them homes in the suburbs, where there’s obviously more room and housing prices are sometimes a lot lower. Said suburbs rose up in rage to stop an incursion of needy people. It’s so irritating, although I have to admit that my liberal Manhattan neighborhood — which has plenty of programs for the homeless — consistently rebels against talk of any big new housing projects for any income group.Your turn.Bret: I’m skeptical of the theory that we could solve the crisis just by building a lot more housing. First, because we can’t build quickly and cheaply enough to keep up with the growing number of homeless people. Second, because even when the homeless are housed, they often fall back into the kinds of behaviors that ultimately lead them to return to the streets.My own view is that people living on the street should be required to go into shelters, which can be built much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, be required to get mental health screenings and be required to be treated if they have drug or alcohol dependencies.Gail: Well, if the mental health treatments were great, that might be an argument. But they often aren’t — just because there’s a terrific shortage of personnel.And the shelters are no picnic either. A lot of the people you see on the street have been, at one time or another, threatened by a mentally troubled co-resident, gotten into a fight as a result of shared emotional problems or in some other way come to feel that living on the street is safer.Bret: The other big story from last week, Gail, is the ruling by a federal judge that forbade the Biden administration to work with social media companies to remove content it didn’t like, mainly connected to alleged Covid misinformation. What the administration was doing seems to me like a serious infringement on people’s freedom of speech, but I’d like to know your view.Gail: Gee, I was under the impression one of the jobs of the executive branch was to make sure people were getting the right information about health issues. And it’s not as if the Biden folks marched in and removed a bunch of posts themselves. Conferring with the social media companies seems like something they ought to do.Bret: One good way of thinking about the issue is putting the shoe on the other foot. For instance, we now know that the Steele dossier was malicious partisan misinformation, secretly and illicitly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that some of its most salacious allegations, like the pee-tape stuff, were false. How would you react if you had learned that the Trump administration had been putting heavy pressure on executives at MSNBC to forbid Rachel Maddow from ever mentioning it back when she had her show?Gail: Hey, it’s hot and humid outside. No fair trying to take me down the Hillary Clinton road. Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.Bret: I’m pretty sure we could get the word out that milk is generally fine for babies or vaccines are generally safe without setting a precedent that the federal government can work with Big Tech to censor individual speech.Gail: Of course I agree with you about freedom of expression. But in the process of protecting it, it’s natural to argue about specific cases with particular details. We will pursue this again soon. Well, forever probably.But let me be boring for a second and ask you about Congress. Just got through that deficit crisis, and another one will be coming around the bend this summer. What’s your long-term advice? Spend less? Tax more? Ignore the whole thing and figure it’ll work out somehow like it always does?Bret: My advice: Talk less, smile more. Seriously, what we need from Congress and the president is to get through the next 18 months without another manufactured domestic crisis. Between the war in Ukraine, Iran’s creeping nuclearization and China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, we have more than enough to worry about abroad.Gail: Hmm. One writer’s manufactured domestic crisis is maybe another’s reasonable disagreement. And while Congress isn’t always fascinating, it’s at the top of the critical-if-possibly-boring ladder.Bret: Before we go, Gail, I have to put in a word for Penelope Green’s funny, fabulous obituary in The Times of Sue Johanson, a Canadian sex educator who died last month at 92. It has the single most memorable paragraph to appear in the paper for at least a month, if not a year. I have to quote it in full:Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.I mean, after that, what else is there to say?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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      Mark Rutte, Netherlands Prime Minister, Says He Will Leave Politics

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      Mr. Rutte, the country’s leader since 2010, announced the collapse of his government on Friday. New elections are expected this fall.Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the Netherlands’s longest-serving prime minister, said on Monday that he would step aside as his party’s leader and would be leaving politics in the coming months after his governing coalition collapsed last week.Mr. Rutte came to power in 2010 and earned the name “Teflon Mark” for his ability to weather political storms, but the failure of the four parties in his coalition to come to an agreement on the country’s migration policies set the stage for elections in the fall.The leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, Mr. Rutte, 56, remains in charge of a caretaker government.“This isn’t entirely without emotion,” he told reporters, according to the broadcaster NOS. “But it feels good to pass the baton.”Caroline van der Plas, leader of the Farmer-Citizen Movement, a pro-farmer party that swept local elections in the Netherlands this year, said that she welcomed the chance for voters to go to the polls this fall. Attje Kuiken, leader of the Labor Party, said on Twitter this weekend that “Mark Rutte is done governing.”Mr. Rutte’s coalition collapsed after he failed to convince the more centrist members of his coalition to back more restrictive migration policies, a sign of the potency of that issue in European politics.The government had been negotiating the terms of family reunification for refugees and also whether to create two classes of asylum: a temporary one for people fleeing conflicts, and a permanent one for people fleeing persecution.The goal of both proposals was to reduce the number of refugees, a reflection of the desire to head off right-wing parties outside the coalition who have been making political inroads by tapping into voter concerns about immigration.The other coalition parties were ready to agree to the two-tier asylum system, but they would not endorse Mr. Rutte’s proposal for a two-year waiting period before refugees already living in the Netherlands could be joined by their children.That impasse ultimately led Mr. Rutte to offer the resignation of his government to King Willem-Alexander in writing on Friday night.Mr. Rutte has long been known for a no-nonsense approach to politics and a modest lifestyle. He pays for his own coffees. When attending public events, he stands in line with everyone else. In true Dutch fashion, he prefers to ride his bicycle to work. On Saturday, Mr. Rutte drove himself to see the king in a Saab he has had for years.Mr. Rutte’s tenure has not been without scandal. In 2021, his government collapsed after a report showed a systemic failure by his government to protect thousands of families from overzealous tax inspectors. More