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      Elisabeth Kopp, Swiss Politician Who Made History, Dies at 86

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      In 1984 she became the first woman elected to the country’s governing council, but a scandal prevented her from being the first woman to serve as president.Elisabeth Kopp, who in 1984 overcame accusations involving her husband to become the first woman elected to Switzerland’s governing Federal Council — but who could not overcome another scandal a few years later, also related to her husband, and resigned when she had seemed likely to be the country’s first female president — died on April 7 in Zumikon, southeast of Zurich. She was 86.Her death was announced on April 14 by the federal chancellery, The Associated Press reported. The cause was not specified.Mrs. Kopp had been mayor of Zumikon for a decade and had served two terms in Parliament when a retirement opened up a seat on the seven-member Federal Council, which runs the main government departments and whose members take turns serving a one-year term as the country’s president.Mrs. Kopp was one of the more left-leaning members of the conservative Radical Democratic Party, known for her work on environmental issues as well as for advancing women’s causes, and polls showed her to be popular. But the effort to elevate her to the council prompted her political enemies to stir up dirt on her husband, Hans Kopp, a lawyer.The attacks riled Mrs. Kopp’s supporters.“Swiss feminists and liberal politicians have reacted with indignation to press reports that the husband of Switzerland’s first woman candidate for the country’s highest political office was suspended from legal practice for six months in 1972 after charges that he spanked secretaries in his firm,” The Guardian reported in 1984.“In 1971,” the newspaper continued, “a lawyer in Mr. Kopp’s firm said that Mr. Kopp had punished misdemeanors in the office by wielding a bamboo cane on bare bottoms.”His right to practice law was suspended for six months by a Zurich lawyers watchdog commission. But the mudslinging backfired: In early October 1984, Mrs. Kopp won election to the council anyway, with Parliament voting 124 to 95 to select her over a male candidate, Bruno Hunziker. Commentators at the time said that the attempts to undermine Mrs. Kopp’s candidacy probably only strengthened it.Her election was an important moment in the push for women’s equality in Switzerland, a country that had lagged behind most of Europe in that area; women did not gain the right to vote in federal elections there until 1971.Mrs. Kopp was the first woman to serve in the seven-member cabinet. She told The A.P. at the time that her election was a sign that “equality of the sexes is taken seriously now.”But, she said, being a woman in the largely male universe of politics — only about a tenth of the members of Parliament were women at the time — meant extra challenges.“In politics, women must do better than men if they want to succeed,” she said.Mrs. Kopp in 2010. She had been one of the more left-leaning members of the conservative Radical Democratic Party, known for her work on environmental issues as well as for advancing women’s causes.Gaetan Bally/Keystone, via Associated PressEach council member heads a federal department, and during her tenure Mrs. Kopp’s titles included justice minister and interior minister. In 1988, it was her turn to rotate into the vice presidency, and she was duly elected by Parliament late that year. But she never took the post, because of another scandal related to her husband.Reports came to light that Mrs. Kopp, who was minister of justice at the time, had recently tipped off her husband that a company he was involved with was the focus of a money-laundering investigation and urged him to cut his ties, which he did. She at first denied any impropriety — “I wouldn’t like one to think that I could have committed or tolerated wrongdoing,” she said at the time — but she resigned from the council because of what she called “unbearable pressure.”She eventually acknowledged providing information to her husband, and in 1989 she was indicted on charges of violating official secrecy laws. During her trial in February 1990, admirers applauded her as she left the courthouse each day. A Supreme Court jury acquitted her. Had she not resigned, she would have become president that same year.Elisabeth Ikle was born on Dec. 16, 1936, in Zurich to Max and Beatrix Ikle. Her father was a director general of the Swiss National Bank, and her mother helped establish a nursery school.Mrs. Kopp was a skilled figure skater in her youth. She studied law at Zurich University and graduated with honors. She met Mr. Kopp while doing volunteer work on behalf of Hungarians who fled to Switzerland in 1956 after the Soviet Union crushed a popular uprising in Hungary.As interior minister, Mrs. Kopp was often the government’s public voice on immigration — a contentious issue in Switzerland, especially as people from countries like Sri Lanka sought to come there. She was seen by some as taking an anti-immigrant stance, although she said her concern was about “false” asylum seekers — people seeking to move for economic reasons rather than because of political persecution.“This leads to an increase in xenophobia,” she said in 1987, “which makes it harder for us to fulfill our human obligations.”After her political career, Mrs. Kopp did postgraduate studies in European law and human rights law and worked at her husband’s law firm. Mr. Kopp died in 2009. Information about Mrs. Kopp’s survivors was not immediately available.The first woman to serve as Switzerland’s president, Ruth Dreifuss, was elected in December 1998. More

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      Democrats’ Numbers Problem

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      We look at the costs of Dianne Feinstein’s absence to the Democratic Party’s agenda.President Biden and Senate Democrats have a numbers problem.With Republicans controlling the House — and showing little interest in bipartisan legislation there — the appointment of judges is one of the few ways that Biden can get something done on Capitol Hill: The Senate confirms federal judges, and the Democrats narrowly control the Senate.But Senator Dianne Feinstein’s failing health has frozen the Senate Judiciary Committee, the group that must consider any judicial nominees before the full Senate votes on them. Feinstein, who’s 89 and has represented California since 1992, has been ill with shingles since February. She has also been struggling with her ability to hold conversations and the deterioration of her short term memory for more than a year. It is unclear when she will return to the Senate.Biden and other Democrats had hoped for the appointment of judges — both to federal trial courts (known as District Courts) and to appeals courts (known as Circuit Courts) — to be a major accomplishment this year. That plan is now in doubt because Democrats do not have the votes to confirm judges without Feinstein.Instead, about 20 Biden nominees are in limbo, and 9 percent of District Court and Circuit Court judgeships remain vacant. Among Biden’s unconfirmed nominees: Mónica Ramírez Almadani, a civil rights lawyer; Robert Kirsch, a former prosecutor who focused on white collar crime; and Kato Crews, an expert in labor law.Trump’s recordUntil recently, Republicans often put more emphasis on appointing judges than Democrats did. That focus has contributed to conservative policy victories, with federal courts stymying liberal policies on climate change, immigration and workers’ rights.The past few weeks have brought another such issue — abortion. Republican-appointed judges have issued rulings that would restrict the distribution of pills used to end pregnancies, an increasingly important part of abortion practice. The Supreme Court has paused the effect of those rulings through Friday while it considers the case.Donald Trump, with help from Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans, was especially aggressive about appointing judges. Trump appointed more federal judges in his four-year term than any other recent president did in his first term:Judicial appointments in presidents’ first terms More

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      ‘One of the Odd and Scary Things About American Politics’ Is What Republicans Are Doing

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      Are democracies providing the rope to hang themselves?From Turkey to Hungary, from India to the United States, authoritarian leaders have gained power under the protective cloak of free elections.“There is no doubt that democratic processes and judicial decisions can be used to limit the power of the people, restructuring governments and institutions to make them less representative, more undemocratic,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania told me, in response to my emailed inquiry.Smith continued:The classic examples are partisan gerrymandering and barriers to voting, but in recent years Republicans have gone further than ever before in using their overrepresentation in state legislatures to shift power to those legislatures, away from officeholders in Democratic-led cities, from officials elected statewide and from voters.Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, made a parallel argument by email:One of the odd and scary things about American politics, more reminiscent of the 19th century than anything in the post-World War II period, is that when the Republicans lost the presidential election in 2020 and did much worse than expected in 2022 (even worse than in a normal midterm contest), they did not abandon the leaders and policies that produced these results. Instead, they have doubled down on even more extreme and broadly unpopular leaders and policies, from Trump to abortion and guns.Goldstone believes that this developmentis a sign that normal politics have been replaced by extreme polarization and factional identity politics, in which the extremes grow stronger and drain the center. As a minority seeking to exercise control of government, it is actually necessary that the Trumpist G.O.P. suppress democratic procedures that normally produce majority control.If enough voters, Goldstone wrote,are deeply anxious or frightened of some real or imagined threat (e.g. socialism, mass immigration, crime, threats to their religion, transgender takeover), they may well vote for someone who promises to stand up to those threats, even if that person has no regard for preserving democracy, no regard for the rights and freedoms of those seen as “enemies.” If such a leader is elected, gets his or her party to control all parts of government, and wants to turn all the elements of government into a weapon to attack their enemies, no laws or other organizations can stop them.Goldstone warned “that should the Republicans manage to gain control of the House, Senate and presidency in 2024, building an electoral autocracy to impose their views without challenge will be their top priority.”There are two distinct mechanisms involved in overturning democracy, Goldstone argued:First, is controlling all elected and appointed elements of the government. If the same political party controls the House, Senate, judiciary and presidency, and disregards the principles of democracy and independence of officials, then sadly none of the institutions of democracy will prevent arbitrary and autocratic government.The second element, according to Goldstone, is unique to this country: “The United States has so many safeguards for minority rights that it is conceivable that a minority party could obtain complete control of all levers of government.”How so?The U.S. Senate is chosen on the basis of territory, not numbers, so that Wyoming and California both have two senators. Gerrymanders mean that states where Democratic and Republican voters are about even, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, have very unequal representation in Congress. Finally, the Electoral College method of aggregating state votes for president has meant that in 2000 and 2016 candidates with a minority of the people’s votes were elected.The consequences?“A determined effort to twist and benefit from these various opportunities and rules means that a party that represents a minority of the people can, in the U.S., control the House, Senate, and presidency,” Goldstone wrote, enabling “an oppressive government restricting freedom and ruling autocratically, and doing so to impose the goals and beliefs of a minority on an unwilling majority.”Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a co-author, with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell, of “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” argued in an email that “Democratic procedure is not a threat to democracy per se, but it is fair to say that it has vulnerabilities.”“Democratic procedures,” he continued, “are intended to provide a means to hold leaders accountable,” which include:Horizontal accountability — institutional checks and balances that enable public officials to hold each other accountable; and vertical accountability — ways for citizens to hold public officials accountable, such as elections or popular mobilization. In a well-functioning democracy, both kinds of accountability work together to limit the concentration of power in the hands of a single party or individual.But Lieberman pointed out, “Democratic procedures can also enable would-be authoritarians to undermine both kinds of accountability under the cloak of democratic legitimacy.”Democratic regimes, he wrote, “are less likely than in the past to be overthrown in a sudden violent burst, as in an overt coup d’état. Instead, democracies are more frequently degraded by leaders who use apparently legal, democratic means to hollow out democratic accountability.”Voter suppression or gerrymandering, Lieberman noted,can limit vertical accountability by making it harder for the opposition to win elections, while maneuvers such as court packing can lower barriers for a party in power to expand its power. And these kind of tactics can reinforce one another, as when the Supreme Court upheld the practice of partisan gerrymandering (in Rucho v. Common Cause). Taken together, these kinds of moves can enable a party to gain and keep power without majority support and increasingly unconstrained by public disapproval.How do authoritarian-leaning politicians gain the power to elude the institutional restraints designed to maintain democracy? Stephan Haggard, a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, emailed me to say that “an important feature of populism is the belief in majoritarian conceptions of democracy: that majorities should not be constrained by horizontal checks, various rights, or even by the rule of law: Majorities should be able to do what they want.”This majoritarian conception of democracy, Haggard continued,is a leitmotif of virtually all democratic backsliding episodes. That the will of “the people” is being thwarted by an elite (read “deep state”) that must be purged. Of course, the definition of “the people” does not refer to everyone, but the favored supporters of the autocrat: whites in the U.S., Muslims in Turkey, Russian traditionalists and so on.One common characteristic of democratic backsliding, according to Haggard, is its incrementalism, which, in turn, mutes the ability of the public to perceive what is happening in front of its eyes:A constant refrain from observers who have weathered these systems is how difficult it is to be clear as to what is transpiring. This comes in part because autocrats lie and distort the truth — that is fundamental — but also because behaviors once thought out of bounds are normalized. Think Trump’s open racism or calls for violence against opponents at his rallies; all of that got normalized.Christina Ewig, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, views contemporary challenges to democracy from another vantage point.In an email responding to my inquiry, Ewig wrote that she disagrees with the premise that democracy is providing the rope to hang itself. Instead, she argued, “Democracy and democratic procedure are not threats to democracy itself. Instead, anti-democratic actors that abuse the state are a threat to democracy.”The United States, Ewig continued, “shows evidence of becoming what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call a ‘competitive authoritarian regime’ — a regime that is civilian, with formal democratic institutions, but in which incumbents ‘abuse’ the state to stay in power.”Prominent examplesinclude former President Trump’s attempts to influence Georgia officials to change election outcomes in November 2020, and then to impede the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to let President Obama nominate a Supreme Court justice is another. At the state level, Wisconsin Republicans, through district gerrymandering, have a chokehold on a purple state.All of these examples, Ewig argued,appear to be abuses of democracy rather than uses of democracy. Democracy requires an acceptance that one’s party will not always be a winner. But the Republican Party in the United States has, on more than one occasion, refused to lose.For now, Ewig wrote, the United States is not a competitive authoritarian regime. The results of the 2020 national elections and the institutional opposition to the insurrection in 2021 “helped to avoid that. But some U.S. states do look suspiciously competitive authoritarian.”Why is democracy under such stress now? There are many answers to that question, including, crucially, the divisiveness inherent in the elevated levels of contemporary polarization that makes democratic consensus so difficult to achieve.In an April 2021 paper, four scholars, Samuel Wang of Princeton, Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon, Bernard Grofman of the University of California-Irvine and Keena Lipsitz of Queens College, address the basic question of what led to the erosion among a substantial number of voters of support for democratic principles in a nation with a two-century-plus commitment to this tradition:In the United States, rules and institutions from 1790, when voters comprised white male landowners and slave owners in a nation of four million, were not designed to address today’s governance needs. Moreover, existing rules and institutions may amplify background conditions that drive polarization. The decline of civic life in America and the pluralism it once nurtured has hastened a collapse of dimensionality in the system.Americans once enjoyed a rich associational life, Wang and his colleagues write, the demise of which contributes to the erosion of democracy: “Nonpolitical associations, such as labor unions, churches, and bowling leagues, were often crosscutting, bringing people from different backgrounds into contact with one another, building trust and teaching tolerance.” In recent years, however, “the groups that once structured a multidimensional issue space in the United States have collapsed.”The erosion of democracy is also the central topic of a Feb. 13 podcast with Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist and the author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Wolf makes the case that “economic changes and the performance of the economy interacting produced quite a large number of people who feared that they were becoming losers. They feared that they risked falling into the condition of people who really were at the bottom.”At the same time, Wolf continued, “the immense growth of the financial sector and the dominance of the financial sector in management generated some simply staggering fortunes at the top.” Instead of helping to drive democratization, the market system “recreated an oligarchy. I think there’s no doubt about that.”Those who suffered, Wolf noted, “felt the parties of the center-left had largely abandoned them and were no longer really interested in their fate.”Two senior fellows at Brookings, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, explore threats to American democracy in a January 2022 analysis, “Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economy at Risk?” Citing data from six surveys, including those by Pew, P.R.R.I., Voter Study Group and CNN, the authors write:Support in the United States for political violence is significant. In February 2021, 39 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” In November, 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats agreed that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Galston and Kamarck observe:Even though constitutional processes prevailed, and Mr. Trump is no longer president, he and his followers continue to weaken American democracy by convincing many Americans to distrust the results of the election. About three-quarters of rank-and-file Republicans believe that there was massive fraud in 2020 and Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.In fact, Galston and Kamarck continue, “the 2020 election revealed structural weaknesses in the institutions designed to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” noting that “if Mr. Pence had yielded to then-President Trump’s pressure to act, the election would have been thrown into chaos and the Constitution placed in jeopardy.”Since then, Galston and Kamarck note, the attack on democracyhas taken a new and dangerous turn. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Trump’s supporters have focused on the obscure world of election machinery. Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws making it harder to vote and weakening the ability of election officials to do their jobs.American democracy, the two authors conclude,is thus under assault from the ground up. The most recent systematic attack on state and local election machinery is much more dangerous than the chaotic statements of a disorganized former president. A movement that relied on Mr. Trump’s organizational skills would pose no threat to constitutional institutions. A movement inspired by him with a clear objective and a detailed plan to achieve it would be another matter altogether.“The chances that this threat will materialize over the next few years,” Galston and Kamarck add, “are high and rising.”If democracy fails in America, they contend,It will not be because a majority of Americans is demanding a nondemocratic form of government. It will be because an organized, purposeful minority seizes strategic positions within the system and subverts the substance of democracy while retaining its shell — while the majority isn’t well organized, or doesn’t care enough, to resist. The possibility that this will occur is far from remote.The anxiety about democratic erosion — even collapse — is widespread among those who think about politics for a living:In his January 2022 article, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joins those who tackle what has become an overriding topic of concern in American universities:For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental and mixed so that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained. By my count, the percentage of states with populations over one million that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.In this country, Diamond continued, “Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished.”He adds: “Even in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy.”At the close of his essay, Diamond goes on to say:It is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy.The next test will be in November 2024.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 Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Fox Settlement

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      The election technology company has several more defamation lawsuits pending against public figures and news outlets.Dominion Voting Systems did more on Tuesday than settle its lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million: It also set the tone for the many related defamation cases it has filed. Legal experts say the settlement with Fox News, one of the largest defamation payouts in American history, could embolden Dominion as it continues to defend its reputation, which it says was savaged by conspiracy theories about vote fraud during the 2020 election. The company has several cases pending against public figures including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, and news outlets such as Newsmax.The targets of Dominion’s remaining lawsuits, few of which have deep pockets and legal firepower at Fox’s level, will likely take a cue from Dominion and Fox’s face-off, legal experts said.“Even though it was a settlement, it certainly was a victory for Dominion,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “For other possible defendants, I don’t think this will make them double down; it will make them fearful.”Dominion is the second-largest election technology company operating in the United States, where there are few other major players. The company, whose majority owner is the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, was made “toxic” by the false fraud narratives in 2020, one of Staple Street’s founders said in court documents. At one point, Dominion estimated that misinformation cost it $600 million in profits.Fox said in its court filings that Dominion did not have to lay off employees, close offices or default on any debts, nor did it suffer any canceled business contracts as a result of the news network’s coverage. Fox said in one filing that Dominion had projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, which would make Tuesday’s settlement the equivalent of eight years of sales.Dominion’s customers are largely officials who oversee voting in states and counties around the country; the company served 28 states, as well as Puerto Rico, in the 2020 election. The false stories about fraud that were directed at the company were embraced by some local election officials.In court documents, an expert enlisted by Dominion said that the company had very low early contract termination rates and very high contract renewal rates before the 2020 election, but blamed the preoccupation with the false fraud claims for prompting some clients to exit deals after the vote.Now, Dominion has emerged from its tussle with Fox in a stronger position to win back any skittish clients or score new business, legal experts said.Last month, the judge in Dominion’s case against Fox reviewed evidence of the false claims and wrote that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” effectively confirming that the company was aboveboard.The secretary of state of New Mexico, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, applauded Tuesday’s settlement.“The harm done by election lies/denialism since 2020 is immeasurable, but this settlement against Fox News provides accountability & sends a strong message we’re happy to see,” Ms. Toulouse Oliver wrote on Twitter. During the midterm primaries last year, she blamed “unfounded conspiracy theories” when she sued officials in Otero county who had cited concerns about Dominion machines in their refusal to certify election results.Fox acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that some of the claims it had made about Dominion were false, saying that the admission “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday that Fox caused “enormous damage” to his company and “nothing can ever make up for that.” He also thanked the election officials who make up Dominion’s clientele, and nodded to Staple Street’s support. “Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDominion drew some complaints that by settling, it had given up the opportunity to extract an apology from Fox or force it through a potentially embarrassing trial. An opinion article in the Daily Beast bemoaned that the voting technology company had “decided to step out of the ring with a bag of money instead of vanquishing one of the country’s most destructive and influential peddlers of hate and disinformation.”Mr. Poulos called the settlement “a big step forward for democracy” in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday.Legal experts noted that even if Dominion had prevailed in a jury verdict, it would have risked years of expensive battles over appeals from Fox.“The tort of defamation is not about saving democracy from liars,” said Enrique Armijo, a professor and First Amendment expert at Elon University School of Law. “It’s about saving the reputation of the people who have been lied about and making those liars compensate them for the harms to their reputations.”Fox still faces other legal challenges, including a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from another election technology company, Smartmatic. Fox said it planned to defend freedom of the press in the case and called Smartmatic’s damages claims “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis.” Smartmatic said in a statement that, after the Dominion settlement, it “will expose the rest” of the “misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign.”Dominion, too, has more cases pending, including against the pro-Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and One America News Network. Although the lawsuits involve similar false claims of election fraud, the facts of each case vary, experts said.Attorneys for Mr. Lindell and Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Newsmax or OAN.For the individuals and smaller companies facing legal claims, for whom a substantial jury judgment could be an “existential” threat, settlement may seem more attractive after Tuesday, Mr. Armijo said.“They’re not going to be able to put up the same level of defense that Fox did; they just don’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to see the other defamation defendants in the remaining cases getting any further than Fox did, which, as we saw, is not very far.” More

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      Another Texas Election Official Quits After Threats From Trump Supporters

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      Heider Garcia, the top election official in deep-red Tarrant County, had previously testified about being harassed by the former president’s right-wing supporters.Heider Garcia, the head of elections in Tarrant County, Texas, announced this week that he would resign after facing death threats, joining other beleaguered election officials across the nation who have quit under similar circumstances.Mr. Garcia oversees elections in a county where, in 2020, Donald J. Trump became only the second Republican presidential candidate to lose in more than 50 years. Right-wing skepticism of the election results fueled threats against him, even though the county received acclaim from state auditors for its handling of the 2020 voting. Why it’s importantWith Mr. Trump persistently repeating the lie that he won the 2020 election, many of his supporters and those in right-wing media have latched on to conspiracy theories and joined him in spreading disinformation about election security. Those tasked with running elections, even in deeply Republican areas that did vote for Mr. Trump in 2020, have borne the brunt of vitriol and threats from people persuaded by baseless claims of fraud.The threats made against himMr. Garcia detailed a series of threats as part of his written testimony last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he urged to pass better protections for election officials.One of the threats made online that he cited: “hang him when convicted from fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out his mouth.”He testified that he had repeatedly been the target of a doxxing campaign, including the posting of his home address on Twitter after Sidney Powell, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, falsely accused him on television and social media of manipulating election results.Mr. Garcia also testified that he received direct messages on Facebook with death threats calling him a “traitor,” and one election denier used Twitter to urge others to “hunt him down.”Heider Garcia’s backgroundMr. Garcia, whose political affiliation is not listed on public voting records, has overseen elections in Tarrant County since 2018. Before that, he had a similar role outside Sacramento in Placer County, Calif.He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.Election deniers have fixated on Mr. Garcia’s previous employment with Smartmatic, an election technology company that faced baseless accusations of rigging the 2020 election and filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News that is similar to one brought by the voting machine company Dominion, which was settled on Tuesday. He had several roles with Smartmatic over more than a dozen years, ending in 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. His work for the company in Venezuela, a favorite foil of the right wing because of its troubled socialist government, has been a focus of conspiracy theorists.What he said about the threats“I could not sleep that night, I just sat in the living room, until around 3:00 a.m., just waiting to see if anyone had read this and decided to act on it.”— From Mr. Garcia’s written testimony last year, describing the toll that the posting of his address online, along with other threats, had taken on him and his family.Other election officials who have quitAll three election officials resigned last year in another Texas county, Gillespie — at least one of whom cited repeated death threats and stalking.A rural Virginia county about 70 miles west of Richmond lost its entire elections staff this year after an onslaught of baseless voter fraud claims, NBC News reported.Read moreElection officials have resorted to an array of heightened security measures as threats against them have intensified, including hiring private security, fireproofing and erecting fencing around a vote tabulation center.The threats have led to several arrests by a Justice Department task force that was created in 2021 to focus on attempts to intimidate election officials. More

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      The ‘Diploma Divide’ Is the New Fault Line in American Politics

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      The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will ebb and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear.Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least one major political realignment: educational attainment is the new fault line in American politics.Educational attainment has not replaced race in that respect, but it is increasingly the best predictor of how Americans will vote, and for whom. It has shaped the political landscape and where the 2024 presidential election almost certainly will be decided. To understand American politics, candidates and voters alike will need to understand this new fundamental.Americans have always viewed education as a key to opportunity, but few predicted the critical role it has come to play in our politics. What makes the “diploma divide,” as it is often called, so fundamental to our politics is how it has been sorting Americans into the Democratic and Republican Parties by educational attainment. College-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees — especially white Americans, but increasingly others as well — are now more likely to support Republicans.It’s both economics and cultureThe impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.The road to political realignmentThe diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.In 2024, Democrats are likely to enter the general election with 222 electoral votes, compared with 219 for Republicans. That leaves only eight states, with 97 electoral votes — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — up for grabs. And for these states, education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.The 2024 mapA presidential candidate will need a three-track strategy to carry these states in 2024. The first goal is to further exploit the trend of education levels driving how people vote. Democrats have been making significant inroads with disaffected Republicans, given much of the party base’s continued embrace of Mr. Trump and his backward-looking grievances, as well as a shift to the hard right on social issues — foremost on abortion. This is particularly true with college-educated Republican women.In this era of straight-party voting, it is notable that Democrats racked up double-digit percentages from Republicans in the 2022 Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania governors’ races. They also made significant inroads with these voters in the Senate races in Arizona (13 percent), Pennsylvania (8 percent), Nevada (7 percent) and Georgia (6 percent).This represents a large and growing pool of voters. In a recent NBC poll, over 30 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they were not supporters of MAGA.At the same time, Republicans have continued to increase their support with non-college-educated voters of color. Between 2012 and 2020, support for Democrats from nonwhite-working-class voters dropped 18 points. The 2022 Associated Press VoteCast exit polls indicated that support for Democrats dropped an additional 14 points compared with the 2020 results.However, since these battleground states largely fall in the middle of education levels in our country, they haven’t followed the same trends as the other 42 states. So there are limits to relying on the education profile of voters to carry these states.This is where the second group of voters comes in: political independents, who were carried by the winning party in the last four election cycles. Following Mr. Trump’s narrow victory with independent voters in 2016, Mr. Biden carried them by nine points in 2020. In 2018, when Democrats took back the House, they carried them by 15 points, and their narrow two-point margin in 2022 enabled them to hold the Senate.The importance of the independent voting bloc continues to rise. This is particularly significant since the margin of victory in these battleground states has been very narrow in recent elections. The 2022 exit polls showed that over 30 percent of voters were independents, the highest percentage since 1980. In Arizona, 40 percent of voters in 2022 considered themselves political independents.These independent voters tend to live disproportionately in suburbs, which are now the most diverse socioeconomic areas in our country. These suburban voters are the third component of a winning strategy. With cities increasingly controlled by Democrats — because of the high level of educated voters there — and Republicans maintaining their dominance in rural areas with large numbers of non-college voters, the suburbs are the last battleground in American politics.Voting in the suburbs has been decisive in determining the outcome of the last two presidential elections: Voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Phoenix determined the winner in the last two presidential elections and are likely to play the same pivotal role in 2024.These voters moved to the suburbs for a higher quality of life: affordable housing, safe streets and good schools. These are the issues that animate these voters, who have a negative view of both parties. They do not embrace a MAGA-driven Republican Party, but they also do not trust Mr. Biden and Democrats, and consider them to be culturally extreme big spenders who aren’t focused enough on issues like immigration and crime.So in addition to education levels, these other factors will have a big impact on the election. The party that can capture the pivotal group of voters in the suburbs of battleground states is likely to prevail. Democrats’ success in the suburbs in recent elections suggests an advantage, but it is not necessarily enduring. Based on post-midterm exit polls from these areas, voters have often voted against a party or candidate — especially Mr. Trump — rather than for one.But in part because of the emergence of the diploma divide, there is an opening for both political parties in 2024 if they are willing to gear their agenda and policies beyond their political base. The party that does that is likely to win the White House.Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and is a senior adviser to the Brunswick Group.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Dan Powell and Dan Farrell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati received a request on LinkedIn. The engineer, Hua, is in his 40s, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look a decade younger. He moved to the United States from China in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering.The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in eastern China. Days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to the university to give a research presentation. Hua arranged to arrive in May, so he could attend a nephew’s wedding and his college reunion at Harbin Institute of Technology. There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. He went to Nanjing, and flew back to the United States after the presentation. He thought that would be the end of the matter.Many scientists and engineers of Chinese origin in the United States are invited to China to give presentations about their fields. Hua couldn’t have known that his trip to Nanjing would prove to be the start of a series of events that would end up giving the U.S. government an unprecedented look inside China’s widespread and tireless campaign of economic espionage targeting the United States, culminating in the first-ever conviction of a Chinese intelligence official on American soil.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Jack D’Isidoro, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Pérez, Marion Lozano, Naomi Noury, Krish Seenivasan, Corey Schreppel, Kate Winslett and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner. More

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      Ahead of Elections, Turkish Opposition Leader Takes on Erdogan’s Legacy

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      Ahead of next month’s elections, Kemal Kilicdaroglu has pledged to undo President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s legacy with a focus on tackling inflation and strengthening democracy.ISTANBUL — The main opposition candidate aiming to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections next month has pledged to undo the legacy of the longtime Turkish leader and focus on strengthening democracy, easing a cost of living crisis and battling corruption.The candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is aiming to attract voters who may have tired of the president’s bombastic rhetoric and tough-guy persona, campaigning not just as an anti-Erdogan, but also as his polar opposite: a calm everyman who says he plans to retire after a single five-year term.While Mr. Erdogan, 69, thrives in settings that showcase his power and put him among other world leaders, Mr. Kilicdaroglu, 74, addresses voters from his modest kitchen with a glass of tea at his elbow and dish towels hanging from the oven behind him.“Our democracy, economy, judicial system and freedoms are under heavy threat from Erdogan,” the former civil servant said in a recent kitchen campaign video. “I will put the state on its feet again and heal the wounds, and I will give back the joy of life to the people.”The presidential and parliamentary elections set for May 14 could drastically reshape Turkey, one of the world’s 20 largest economies and a NATO ally of the United States, not least because opinion polls suggest Mr. Erdogan is more vulnerable at the ballot box than at any other time in his 20 years as Turkey’s predominate politician.Chronic inflation that many economists attribute to his financial management stands at 50 percent and has eroded family budgets, angering voters. Devastating earthquakes in February, which killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey, sparked anger at the slow response and raised questions about whether the government’s failure to curb lax building practices increased the death toll.Rescue workers carried the body of a resident from a collapsed building in Antakya in February. Earthquakes that struck on Feb. 6 killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesMr. Erdogan’s years at the helm have made him the face of Turkish foreign policy, with supporters saying he has boosted Turkey’s global stature and critics accusing him of over-personalizing foreign relations, weakening the diplomatic corps. He has maintained ties with Ukraine while meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, despite the war between them. He has used Turkey’s veto to snarl the expansion of NATO, making allies question his loyalties.Mr. Kilicdaroglu has promised to to run the country differently, and is betting that many Turks are ready for a change.But first, he must face Mr. Erdogan, a deft campaigner who has tightened his control of the state and can marshal its resources for his campaign.“Kilicdaroglu is the antithesis of Erdogan,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkey scholar at the Brookings Institution. “To Erdogan’s virile political aggression, he is a soft-spoken gentleman. In terms of his platform, he is not just a democrat, but is promising to be a uniter.”Recent opinion polls suggest a slight lead for Mr. Kilicdaroglu. Two other candidates are also running. One is not expected to get many votes. The other is a former member of Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s party who could siphon away opposition votes, denying Mr. Kilicdaroglu a majority in the first round and forcing a runoff with Mr. Erdogan on May 28, according to some projections.Mr. Erdogan is seeking his third five-year term. Mr. Kilicdaroglu has promised to retire after a single term so he can spend time with his grandchildren.Since 2010, Mr. Kilicdaroglu has been the leader of the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., the largest opposition party, which has been regularly trounced at the ballot box by Mr. Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party.A meeting of the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., in December, with a banner with images of Mr. Kilicdaroglu, right, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state.Erdem Sahin/EPA, via ShutterstockIn 2009, Mr. Kilicdaroglu lost the race for mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city and economic engine. His party’s candidates also lost in Istanbul in 2014 and in presidential races against Mr. Erdogan in 2014 and 2018.The C.H.P. has failed to significantly increase its seats in Parliament in four elections since 2011 and twice failed to block referendums that expanded Mr. Erdogan’s powers.Mr. Erdogan took aim at Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s record before nationwide municipal elections in 2019.“You could not even herd a sheep,” he said, rhetorically addressing Mr. Kilicdaroglu. “You lost nine elections. Now you will lose the 10th.”Opposition supporters counter that the 2019 elections provide a template for victory because the opposition defeated Mr. Erdogan’s candidates in a number of cities, including Turkey’s two largest, Ankara, the capital, and Istanbul, where Mr. Erdogan launched his own political career as mayor in the 1990s.Offering perhaps another glimpse at the future, the government’s electoral commission voided the 2019 results in Istanbul, alleging irregularities and calling for a redo. The opposition won that, too.Mr. Kilicdaroglu rarely attacks Mr. Erdogan by name to avoid galvanizing the president’s loyalists. But after the devastating earthquakes in southern Turkey on Feb. 6, he accused Mr. Erdogan of pursuing policies that left the country vulnerable to such disasters. Construction has played a large role in economic policies during Mr. Erdogan’s tenure, raising questions about whether safety standards were ignored amid a push for economic growth.“There is one person fully responsible for all of this: Erdogan,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said during a visit to the quake zone. “Whenever Erdogan brings this country down, he makes calls for unity. Spare me.”He often accuses Mr. Erdogan’s government of misusing state funds and has vowed to investigate accusations of sweetheart deals with companies close to the president.The vote on May 14 will determine if Mr. Erdogan, shown in March, who has dominated the country’s politics for 20 years, will remain in power.Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf he wins, he has said, he will return the country to a parliamentary system, undoing constitutional changes that allowed Mr. Erdogan to expand his powers. He has vowed to restore the independence of the judiciary, the central bank and the foreign ministry, which he and other critics say have fallen under Mr. Erdogan’s control.Mr. Kilicdaroglu represents six opposition parties that have united against Mr. Erdogan, broadening his base. He also has the tacit support of Turkey’s largest Kurdish party, which could give him about an additional 10 percent of the electorate.Both Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Kilicdaroglu grew up poor, the first in a scrappy Istanbul neighborhood, the second in an isolated village in central Turkey.As a child, Mr. Kilicdaroglu wore the same pair of shoes for years, he has said. While studying economics in university in Ankara, he walked everywhere to save money on transport. He often writes his speeches on the backs of used sheets of paper.After university, he worked for nearly 30 years as a civil servant and ran Turkey’s social security administration.Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s conspicuous financial modesty distinguishes him from Mr. Erdogan, who exudes a flashiness and had hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a new presidential palace that is larger than the White House, the Kremlin and Buckingham Palace.After retiring from the civil service, Mr. Kilicdaroglu won a seat in Parliament and caught the nation’s eye by confronting executives and officials with corruption allegations on live TV.In 2010, after a sex tape scandal forced his predecessor to resign, Mr. Kilicdaroglu became the head of the C.H.P., the party of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago this year.C.H.P. campaign posters in Diyarbakir, Turkey, last month. Recent opinion polls suggest a slight lead for Mr. Kilicdaroglu. Sedat Suna/EPA, via ShutterstockIn 2017, at age 69, he protested the arrest of a fellow parliamentarian on what he dismissed as bogus espionage charges by walking more than 250 miles from Ankara to Istanbul in 23 days holding a sign that read “justice.” The march concluded with a large rally, but the momentum he generated to challenge what he called Mr. Erdogan’s weaponization of the judiciary quickly fizzled.Critics noted that Mr. Kilicdaroglu had voted for the law that had lifted legal immunity for members of Parliament, paving the way for the arrest of his colleague and other political figures.That same year, the results of a referendum that expanded Mr. Erdogan’s powers were marred by claims of fraud, but Mr. Kilicdaroglu did not mount a significant challenge.Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s often-tepid challenges to Mr. Erdogan’s government have raised questions about his ability to stand up to maneuvers he could face from Mr. Erdogan in the election.“We are in the hands of a bureaucrat who is overcautious most of the time,” said Soli Ozel, a lecturer in international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.But for now, Mr. Kilicdaroglu is the only hope for Turks seeking a change from Mr. Erdogan.“This is not the election to open the gates of heaven,” Mr. Ozel said. “It is the election to close the gates of hell.”Safak Timur More