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      Democrats' Infighting Only Helps Republicans

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      The other day, something extraordinary happened. I went six hours — maybe even seven — without seeing anything on the internet about what a disaster Kamala Harris is.I must have been haunting the wrong sites. I’d clearly failed to check in with Twitter. Whatever the reason, I had a reprieve from Democratic carping about Democratic crises that reflected Democratic disunity and brimmed with Democratic doomsaying. Being briefly starved of it made me even more aware of the usual buffet — and of Democrats’ insatiable hunger for devouring their own.To follow Harris’s media coverage, made possible by the keening and wailing of her Democratic colleagues and Democratic analysts, she’s not merely mismanaging an apparently restless, frustrated staff. She’s bursting into flames and incinerating everything in her midst, including Democrats’ hopes of holding on to the White House in 2024.The chatter around Joe Biden is hardly cheerier. Riveted by low approval ratings for him that they’ve helped to create, Democrats in government murmur to Democrats in the media that he’s in dire political straits — which is partly true, thanks in some measure to all those fellow Democrats. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently in a cover story for New York magazine, Biden is trapped “between a well-funded left wing that has poisoned the party’s image with many of its former supporters and centrists unable to conceive of their job in any terms save as valets for the business elite.”“Biden’s party has not veered too far left or too far right so much as it has simply come apart,” Chait added. And it has done so noisily, its internal discontents as public as can be.These intraparty recriminations aren’t unusual in and of themselves: Democrats have never possessed Republicans’ talent for unity. But the intensity of the anger and angst are striking, especially given the stakes. A Republican takeover of Congress in 2022 and of the presidency two years later would endanger more than the social safety net. It would imperil democracy itself.“Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real,” Barton Gellman wrote for The Atlantic this month. “Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.”Gellman’s article, titled “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” had an apocalyptic tone, matched by an accompanying note by the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. He wrote that while he prefers to avoid “partisan entanglement,” he and the rest of us must confront the truth: “The leaders of the Republican Party — the soul-blighted Donald Trump and the satraps and lackeys who abet his nefarious behavior — are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy. This must be stated clearly, and repeatedly.”Chait put it this way: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the fate of American democracy may hinge on President Joe Biden’s success.”But the media is drawn to, and amplifies, Biden’s failures. The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently collaborated with the data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote to measure journalists’ treatment of Biden versus Trump, and he concluded that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy,” he wrote, later adding: “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”That news media includes more Democrats than Republicans. And its naysaying depends on the irascibility and volubility of Democratic officials complaining about other Democratic officials. Democrats don’t need Pelotons: They’ve turned finger pointing into an aerobic workout.Such self-examination and self-criticism are healthy to a point. And Democratic pessimism isn’t unfounded: Polls show real frustration and impatience among Americans, who reliably pin the blame on whoever is in charge. Additionally, the party’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race — and the implications of that — can’t be ignored.But neither can the potential consequences of some Democratic politicians’ refusals to compromise and come together. None of the ideological rifts within the party matter as much as what the current crop of Trump-coddling Republicans might do if given the chance.So enough about Biden’s age, about Harris’s unpopularity, about the impossibility of figuring out precisely the right note of Omicron caution, about lions and tigers and bears, oh my! It’s scary out there, sure. But it’ll be scarier still if Democrats can’t successfully project cooperation, confidence and hope.For the Love of SentencesPismo Beach, Calif., in 1951.Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty ImagesYou’re going to giggle or groan at this line by Justin Ray, in The Los Angeles Times, about the disappearance of bivalves from a California beach: “The clam community’s crash created a calamity.” (Thanks to Roy Oldenkamp of West Hollywood, Calif., for spotting and nominating this.)Same goes for this headline on an article in The Bulwark about a certain physician’s recently announced Senate bid: “Dr. Oz Quacks the Code of Republican Politics.” (Steve Read, Nice, France)Here’s Derek Thompson in The Atlantic on the devolution of Congress: “From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters, or less than one per year. Since 2010, it has had an average of 80 such votes annually. The Senate was once known as the ‘cooling saucer of democracy,’ where populist notions went to chill out a bit. Now it’s the icebox of democracy, where legislation dies of hypothermia.” (Weigang Qiu, Queens, N.Y.) Derek’s entire article is insightful, thought-provoking and very much worth reading.Here’s Michael J. Lewis in The Wall Street Journal on some of the more untraditional proposals for restoring the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, damaged from that 2019 fire: “Is that lovely victim, saved in the nick of time and made whole again, now to be whisked, still groggy, straight from the hospital into the tattoo parlor of contemporary art?” (Jim Lader, Bronxville, N.Y., and Kathleen Hopkins, Oak Park, Ill.)In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek commentary in The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri advocated the banning of all books: “They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows.” (Irma Wolfson, Irvine, Calif.) I was equally fond of these additional snippets: “Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside.” They “replace your answers with questions or questions with answers.” “They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again.”Moving on to standouts from The Times: Reggie Ugwu profiled Ron Cephas Jones, noting that he’s “the kind of actor who works like chipotle mayo — you don’t always think to look for him, but you’re happy when he shows up.” (Peggy Sweeney, Sarasota, Fla.)Following his return to an area of Alaska that he hadn’t visited in more than 35 years, Jon Waterman contemplated climate change and caribou: “We didn’t see many, but we knew they were out there, somewhere, cantering in synchronized, thousandfold troupes, inches apart yet never jostling one another, their leg tendons a veritable orchestra of clicking castanets, their hooves clattering on stones.” (Harriet Odlum, Bloomfield, Conn., and Robert Lakatos, Glenmoore, Pa.)Adam Friedlander for The New York TimesIn Bret Stephens’s weekly online conversation with Gail Collins, he noted: “The supply-chain situation has gotten so out of hand that there’s even a cream-cheese shortage at New York City bagel shops, which is like one of the 10 biblical plagues as reimagined by Mel Brooks.” (Susan Gregory, Bala Cynwyd, Pa., and Deborah Paulus-Jagric, Landvetter, Sweden, among others)In a review of the Mel Brooks memoir “All About Me!,” Alexandra Jacobs trots out the technical term for fear of heights to fashion this gem: “Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock.” (Jennifer Finney Boylan, Rome, Maine)And in a preview of the new limited series on HBO Max “And Just Like That,” which continues and updates “Sex and the City,” Alexis Soloski noted how little about its plot was revealed or known in advance: “Eager fans have analyzed that 30-second teaser clip with the exegetical rigor typically reserved for ancient hieroglyphs.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Mike ValerioMany of you chide me if I go two weeks or more without publishing an image of my furry companion. I love you for that. So here she is, during our walk on Sunday morning. We covered five miles, mostly in the woods, which we had to ourselves, because we headed out early and the weather was cold. She looked for deer and settled for squirrels, sprinting madly toward many of those she spotted. Much about dogs fascinates me but nothing more than their mix of tameness and wildness — of gentleness and ferocity — and the suddenness with which they shift between the two. One minute, a hugger. The next, a huntress. Regal all the while.What I’m Reading (and Watching, and Listening To)The director Jane Campion, right, on the set of “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixPeople are often more complicated than you imagine. So is life. Both of those truisms animate Bill Adair’s engrossing, moving account, in Air Mail, of Stephen Glass’s journey after he was exposed as one of contemporary journalism’s most prolific and audacious fabulists. Glass went on to tell another big lie. But you may find yourself cheering him for it.Moral complexity: It’s present in the elegant, addictive novels of Amor Towles, and I’m currently listening to, and relishing, his latest, “The Lincoln Highway.” The Times’s adoring review of it is precisely right.A friend and I have argued fiercely over the director Jane Campion’s latest film, “The Power of the Dog,” which is streaming on Netflix. He thinks that it’s genius. I think that it’s overrated — and that, like some of Campion’s other work, it plods at times, more cerebral than visceral, a bid for your admiration rather than your involvement. But the intensity of our back-and-forth means that there’s plenty in “Dog” to chew on. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I’m glad I watched it.On a Personal NoteI’m sick of the sound of my own voice.I know, I know: Writing those words is like wearing a “kick me” sign. The obvious rejoinder is that you’re sick of my voice, too. But you’d mean my musings, my opinions, and I mean the actual sound of my audible voice. I mean that I’ve been in a recording studio for much of this week, talking and talking and talking into a microphone.My next book is done — more on that below — and for the audio format, the publishers asked me to be the one to read it aloud. That made abundant sense: The book is largely about my own experiences, with long stretches in the first person. But, still, I was hoping they’d recruit someone else.That’s because I’ve done this twice previously, for earlier books, and it’s no cakewalk. (Or should that be caketalk?) You have to go slowly and enunciate clearly, and if you bobble a word, you redo much of the sentence or even paragraph. Forward, backward, forward, backward. You’re a Sisyphus of syllables.For my memoir “Born Round,” I was in a studio in Manhattan devoted to audiobooks. I noticed a basket of muffins and bagels right outside the airless, soundproof booth in which the reader sits. “How hospitable!” I thought.No. How strategic. Many readers, like me, have skipped breakfast and may be planning, for efficiency’s sake, to skip lunch. Their stomachs growl. Mine did. And the microphone picked it up. The solution was a chunk of sound-muffling starch.The studio’s technicians told me that some of the actors hired to record novels refuse those calories. So blankets are wrapped around their tiny waists, to silence hunger’s roar.The studio I’ve been using this week is here in Chapel Hill, N.C., just a 15-minute drive from my house. I’ve eaten a light breakfast each morning; my stomach has behaved. And so the audio should be ready for release, along with hardcover and digital versions, on March 1.The book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” is about my brush with the prospect of blindness and how that changed the way I look at setbacks and limits and aging. And I mention it in part as a segue into an update on my eyes, which many of you kindly and regularly ask about.My right eye will forever be useless for reading, computer work and the like, but my left eye hangs in there, undiminished. The nature of what happened to me, a kind of stroke of the optic nerve, is such that if my left eye does fail me, it is likely to do so in an instant. There’s perhaps a 20 percent chance of that.So I’ll be good until I’m not. But even then, I’ll manage. That’s what I’ve come to see. That’s what the book is really about: acceptance, resilience, optimism. It describes the honing of those qualities. It’s also the fruit of them.It’s alchemy — trepidation into determination — or at least intends to be. And the opportunity to tell my story is a privilege, as is the invitation to perform it, no matter how Sisyphean. I shush my stomach. I clear my throat. I raise my voice. I even make peace with it. More

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      Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?

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      There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or else loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to American democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.This view, that media “neutrality” has a tacit pro-Trump tilt, is associated with prominent press critics like Jay Rosen of New York University and the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan (formerly this newspaper’s public editor) and it recently found data-driven expression in a column by The Post’s Dana Milbank. In a study “using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story,” Milbank reported that after a honeymoon, Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative, or even more negative, than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Given the perils of a Trump resurgence, Milbank warned, this negativity means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”I think this point of view is very wrong. Indeed, I think it’s this view of the press’s role that actually empowers demagogues, feeds polarization and makes crises in our system much more likely.To understand why, let’s look at a case study where, at one level, the people emphasizing the press’s obligation to defend democracy have a point. This would be the Georgia Republican primary for governor, which will pit David Perdue, a former senator who lost his re-election bid in a 2021 runoff, against Brian Kemp, the conservative incumbent who is famously hated by Donald Trump.That hatred is the only reason this primary matchup exists: He is angry at Kemp for fulfilling his obligations as Georgia’s governor instead of going along with the “Stop the Steal” charade, he’s eager to see the incumbent beaten, and he’s hoping that either Perdue or Vernon Jones, a more overtly MAGA-ish candidate, can do the job for him.As a result, the Georgia governor’s primary will effectively be a referendum not just on Trump’s general power in the G.O.P. but also on his specific ability to bully Republican elected officials in the event of a contested election. And reporters have an obligation to cover the campaign with that reality in mind, to stress the reasons this matchup is happening and its dangerous implications for how Republican officials might respond to a future attempt to overturn a presidential vote.But now comes the question: Is that the only thing that a responsible press is allowed to report during the campaign? Suppose, for instance, that midway through the race, some huge scandal erupts, involving obvious corruption that implicates Kemp. Should Georgia journalists decline to cover it, because a Kemp loss would empower anti-democratic forces? Or suppose the economy in Georgia tanks just before the primary, or Covid cases surge. Should civic-minded reporters highlight those stories, knowing that they may help Perdue win, or should they bury them, because democracy itself is in the balance?Or suppose a woman comes forward with an allegation of harassment against Perdue that doesn’t meet the normal standards for publication. Should journalists run with it anyway, on the theory that it would be good for American democracy if Perdue goes the way of Roy Moore, and that they can always correct the record later if the story falls apart?You can guess my answers to these questions. They are principled answers, reflecting a journalistic obligation to the truth that cannot be set aside for the sake of certain political results, however desirable for democracy those results may seem.But they are also pragmatic answers, because a journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will inevitably lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting, in the process, the very democratic order that it’s setting out to save.I think this has happened already. There were ways in which the national news media helped Trump in his path through the Republican primaries in 2016, by giving him constant celebrity-level hype at every other candidate’s expense. But from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the self-understanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump — positioning itself as the guardian of democracy, a moral arbiter rather than a neutral referee, determined to make Trump’s abnormal qualities and authoritarian tendencies the central story of his presidency.The results of this mind-set, unfortunately, included a lot of not particularly great journalism. The emergency mentality conflated Trumpian sordidness with something world-historical and treasonous, as in the overwrought Russia coverage seeded by the Steele dossier. It turned figures peripheral to national politics, from Nick Sandmann to Kyle Rittenhouse, into temporary avatars of incipient fascism. It invented anti-Trump paladins, from Michael Avenatti to Andrew Cuomo, who turned out to embody their own sort of moral turpitude. And it instilled an industrywide fear, palpable throughout the 2020 election, of any kind of coverage that might give too much aid and comfort to Trumpism — whether it touched on the summertime riots or Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Now you could argue that at least this mind-set achieved practical success, since Trump did lose in 2020. But he didn’t lose overwhelmingly, he gained voters in places the establishment did not expect, and he was able to turn media hostility to his advantage in his quest to keep control of his party, even in defeat. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era and became radically more polarized, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents maintaining a certain degree of confidence in the media and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents going very much the other way.This points to the essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place. You can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full.Which brings us to Joe Biden’s press coverage. I have a lot of doubts about the Milbank negativity algorithms, both because of the methodological problems identified by analysts like Nate Silver and also because, as a newsreader, my sense is that Trump’s negative coverage reflected more stalwart opposition (the president we oppose is being terrible again) while in Biden’s case the negativity often coexists with implicit sympathy (the president we support is blowing it, and we’re upset). But still, there’s no question that the current administration’s coverage has been pretty grim of late.But it’s turned grim for reasons that an objective and serious press corps would need to acknowledge in order to have any credibility at all. Piece by piece, you can critique the media’s handling of the past few months — I think the press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal was overwrought, for instance — but here’s the overall picture: A president who ran on restoring normalcy is dealing with a pandemic that stubbornly refuses to depart, rising inflation that his own White House didn’t predict, a border-crossing crisis that was likewise unanticipated, increasing military bellicosity from our major adversaries, stubbornly high homicide rates in liberal cities, a party that just lost a critical gubernatorial race and a stalled legislative agenda.And moreover, he’s confronting all of this while very palpably showing the effects of advancing age, even as his semi-anointed successor appears more and more like the protagonist of her own private “Veep.”Can some of these challenges recede and Biden’s situation improve? No doubt. But a news media charged with describing reality would accomplish absolutely nothing for the country if it tried to bury all these problems under headlines that were always and only about Trump.And one of the people for whom this approach would accomplish nothing is Biden himself. We just had an object lesson in what happens when the public dissatisfied with liberal governance gets a long lecture on why it should never vote Republican because of Trump: That was Terry McAuliffe’s argument in a state that went for Biden by 10 points, and McAuliffe lost. Having the media deliver that lecture nationally is likely to yield the same result for Democrats — not Trumpism’s defeat but their own.Far wiser, instead, to treat negative coverage as an example of the press living up to its primary mission, the accurate description of reality — which is still the place where the Biden administration and liberalism need a better strategy if they hope to keep the country on their side.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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      Virginia Governor's Race: McAuliffe Faces Democratic Apathy

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      Though the state is getting bluer, voters’ exhaustion is imperiling the former governor’s comeback attempt against his Republican rival, Glenn Youngkin.RICHMOND, Va. — Terry McAuliffe doesn’t do subtext well.So when Mr. McAuliffe appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC this week, it wasn’t long before the Democrat let slip the biggest challenge he’s facing next month in his bid to reclaim Virginia’s governorship. “People got to understand, Joe, this is about turnout,” he told the show’s co-host, Joe Scarborough.Mr. McAuliffe could be forgiven for effectively reading his stage directions out loud. While he is running against a self-funding, and hazily defined, Republican, polls and interviews show that Mr. McAuliffe is confronting an equally daunting obstacle: Democratic apathy.With former President Donald Trump out of office, congressional Democrats in a bitter standoff and Virginia Democrats having claimed every political prize, Mr. McAuliffe is straining to motivate the liberal voters in his increasingly blue state.At the moment — one that is being watched closely by both parties for clues about the elections next year — he is bumping up against a fatigued electorate.Virginia has elections every year, because its state campaigns are in odd-numbered years while its federal elections are, as everywhere, in even years. But voters here are drained from the Trump administration’s round-the-clock drama, which they felt more acutely because of their proximity to Washington, where the local news is also national news.Then there is the 19-month fog of Covid-19, which has not only disrupted jobs, schools and daily life but also diverted attention from state politics — which had already been dimmed by the decline of local news outlets and eclipsed by national political news.“A lot of folks are dealing with so many other things, I’m not sure that the broader community knows this is taking place, or that it’s rising to the level of importance,” said Sean Miller, who runs the Boys & Girls Club in a largely Black part of Richmond and who gave Mr. McAuliffe a tour of his center this week.Mr. McAuliffe’s former education secretary, Anne Holton — the daughter of one former governor and the wife of another — was more succinct.“People are a little exhausted,” Ms. Holton said after a round-table discussion about education in Alexandria. Still, she predicted “very high turnout.”Mr. McAuliffe, in his well-caffeinated way, is doing all he can to sound the alarm.He is stepping up his appearances on national cable news programs and summoning the biggest names in his party to cross the Potomac. Former President Barack Obama is coming to Virginia later this month, President Biden is expected soon after, and a parade of other surrogates, including Vice President Kamala Harris, are also on the way.The once and potentially future governor, who by state law could not run for re-election after his term ended in 2018, is also trying to rouse complacent Democrats by amping up his rhetoric against his Republican rival, Glenn Youngkin.Just as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California did before his larger-than-expected recall victory last month, Mr. McAuliffe is calling Democrats to the barricades by warning that Mr. Youngkin would build a liberal house of horrors in Virginia: Texas’ abortion laws, Florida’s Covid policies and, most ominous of all, Mr. Trump’s rebirth.“We cannot let Trump off the mat — his comeback is not starting in Virginia,” Mr. McAuliffe told reporters outside Fairfax County’s main early-voting site on Wednesday. Then he paused for just a moment before adding, “Only if Democrats get out and vote.”Democratic leadership in the state has loosened voting access so any resident can vote in person or by mail from Sept. 17 to Oct. 30.Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesA pro-business Democrat with an unparalleled donor network, Mr. McAuliffe was seen by state Democrats as their safest choice. But with his decades of political experience as a fund-raiser and party leader, he’s not exactly a fresh face who will rally a new generation of voters to the polls.In recent weeks, he has made no effort to hide his frustration that his party’s warring factions in Congress have held up a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And his aides fear that without some good news from Washington, the race could slip away.While Mr. Biden carried the state by 10 points last year, public and private polling indicates the president’s approval rating has fallen to or below 50 percent in Virginia. Those same surveys suggest that Mr. McAuliffe and Mr. Youngkin are locked in a close race but that more of Mr. Youngkin’s voters are enthusiastic about voting compared with Mr. McAuliffe’s voters.Tellingly, though, the greater the turnout projections, the wider Mr. McAuliffe’s lead grows in the polls.That’s because of Virginia’s significant transformation from a Republican redoubt and hotbed of social rest to a multiracial archipelago of cities and suburbs that are as progressive as the rest of the country’s metropolitan areas. However, if voters in these population hubs, which are filled with immigrants and transplants, do not show up to the polls, Virginia may return a Republican to the governor’s mansion for the first time since 2009.That was also the last time Virginians went to the polls in the first year under a new Democratic president, Mr. Obama, whose approval ratings, like Mr. Biden’s today, had sagged since he was sworn in. Turnout in Virginia collapsed to the lowest level for a governor’s race in four decades.Unlike today, though, the previous unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush, had moved happily into retirement and ceded the spotlight fully to his successor.The question now is if the accelerating demographic shift in Virginia — no Republican has won a statewide race since 2009 — and Mr. Trump’s continued presence on the political scene are enough to lift Democrats even in a less than favorable environment.There are signs that those two factors could prove sufficient for Mr. McAuliffe, so long as he can galvanize Democrats in the same fashion as Mr. Newsom did.While Virginia Democrats may in some ways be victims of their own success, having claimed every major office and taken control of the legislature, their dominance has also allowed them to loosen voting laws. While other Southern states have been tightening voting access, Virginia enacted expansive early voting this year. Residents can vote in person or by mail between Sept. 17 and Oct. 30.What’s more, Northern Virginia has become increasingly hostile to Republicans. Fairfax County, the state’s most populous, split about evenly between Mr. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Last year, Mr. Trump won just 28 percent of the vote there.Mr. Youngkin, who, like Mr. McAuliffe, lives in Fairfax, is positioned to perform far better there. But the threat of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has clearly alarmed voters in the affluent and well-educated county.In interviews outside Fairfax’s early-voting site, every McAuliffe voter cited Mr. Trump as a reason for supporting the Democrat. Transportation, education and taxes — longtime core issues of Virginia governor’s races — were scarcely mentioned.Paul Erickson, an architect from Vienna, Va., summoned a reporter back after revealing his concerns about Mr. Trump and said in an urgent tone that he had more to share.“What I didn’t say is, for the first time in my adult life I fear for our nation,” Mr. Erickson said. “We’re tearing ourselves apart from within.”Others were less expansive but equally to the point.“I don’t like Trump, and I believe Youngkin is equal to Trump,” said Carol Myers, a retiree who, with her husband, was voting before playing a round of golf at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington.Democrats are portraying Glenn Youngkin as a Trump clone.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Youngkin’s aides are skeptical that their candidate, whom they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars painting as an inoffensive suburban dad, can be MAGA-fied.On Thursday, though, the Republican received a reminder that Mr. Trump and his supporters are determined to make him take sides between them and Virginia’s broader, anti-Trump electorate.Mr. Youngkin had so far avoided inviting Mr. Trump to the state — and avoided a Trumpian attack for the stiff arm. But the former president called into a Virginia political rally on Wednesday night and said, “I hope Glenn gets in there.” More problematic for Mr. Youngkin, event organizers pledged allegiance to a flag that had been present at the Jan. 6 rally after which supporters of Mr. Trump attacked the Capitol.By the end of the day Thursday, Mr. Youngkin — who had skipped the rally to deny Democrats an opening to link him to Mr. Trump — issued a statement calling the use of the flag “weird and wrong.”To Mr. McAuliffe it was something else: a political gift.Mr. McAuliffe has tried to lash Mr. Youngkin to Mr. Trump, noting that he had gladly accepted the former president’s endorsement, and derides him as “a Trump wannabe,.”If that Trumpification strategy works for Mr. McAuliffe, it will most likely be replicated by other Democrats running in blue and purple states next year.In Virginia, it’s easy to understand why Democrats have gone back to the same well: Mr. Trump was a one-man turnout machine for them. In 2019, when only state House and Senate races were on the ballot, turnout reached almost the same level as in 2013, when Mr. McAuliffe won the governorship. During the 2018 congressional midterms, when Virginia Democrats picked up two House seats, turnout was at nearly 60 percent. Four years earlier, in a pre-Trump midterm, turnout here was less than 42 percent.In Richmond’s Black community, Mr. Trump is still on the minds of some voters.“It’s crazy to think that a president that lost still has such a hold on a certain group of people,” said Herman Baskerville, who owns Big Herm’s restaurant in the city’s historic Jackson Ward.Standing outside his restaurant as dusk fell on quiet streets, however, Mr. Baskerville was more focused on the slowdown in foot traffic around Richmond during the coronavirus pandemic. Fewer people working in their offices has meant fewer customers.“Many of us feel like we’re near normal, but there are a lot of folks who are still suffering,” said Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond. Then Mr. Stoney, a protégé of Mr. McAuliffe’s, got back on message.“My fear is, the policies you see in Florida and Texas, that could take Virginia backwards,” he said. More

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      As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response

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      A speech by President Biden on Tuesday could be a signal of how hard the Democrats will fight to protect voting rights. WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party pledged millions for it last week, grass-roots groups are campaigning for it nationwide and, as recently as Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said the fight for it had only begun.But behind the brave words are rising concerns among voting-rights advocates and Democrats that the counterattack against the aggressive push by Republicans to restrict ballot access is faltering, and at a potentially pivotal moment.President Biden is expected to put his political muscle behind the issue in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. But in Congress, Democratic senators have been unable to move voting and election bills that would address what many of them call a fundamental attack on American democracy that could lock in a new era of Republican minority rule. And in the courts, attacks on voting restrictions face an increasingly hostile judiciary and narrowing legal options.Texas seems poised, absent another walkout by Democratic legislators, to become the latest Republican-controlled state to pass a sweeping legislative agenda placing new barriers to the ability to cast a ballot. That comes on the heels of a major Supreme Court ruling this month further weakening the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court nullified its major provision in 2012. The decision arrived as advocacy groups were pressing lawsuits against restrictive voting laws enacted in roughly a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures.“One more arrow has been taken out of the quiver of voting-rights plaintiffs to strike down these new laws passed since the 2020 election,” said Nathaniel Persily, an election-law scholar at Stanford. “And it’s not like they had all that many arrows in the quiver to begin with.”Roughly a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this past spring restricting voting or significantly changing election rules, ostensibly in response to President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him the November election. Many made it harder to vote early or by mail, banned or restricted drop boxes, shortened early or absentee voting periods or gave more leeway to partisan poll watchers. Some laws made it easier to replace local election officials with partisans, something voting rights advocates say might make it possible even to invalidate or sway election results. Atop that, Republican filibuster threats have bottled up the flagship effort by congressional Democrats to counter such restrictions — a sweeping overhaul of federal election laws and a beefed-up revision of the Voting Rights Act. Despite controlling the Senate, Democrats have failed to unite behind a change in filibuster rules that would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote. That is a painful reversal for Democrats, who had labeled the bills their top priority, and for Mr. Biden, who said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House. It also has far-reaching ramifications: The election-overhaul bill would set minimum standards for ballot access, potentially undoing some provisions of the newly enacted laws, and ban gerrymandering just as states begin drawing new boundaries for House seats and local political districts.Democrats worry that failing to act will empower states led by Republicans to impose more restrictions before the 2024 presidential election — a genuine concern, they say, given that Mr. Biden carried the Electoral College by fewer than 43,000 votes in three key states, despite outpolling Mr. Trump by seven million votes nationwide. President Biden said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAnd some worry that a Republican Party that still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the last presidential vote sets the stage for a constitutional crisis should red states, or even a Republican-led House of Representatives, contest the next close election. “There’s not a caucus meeting that goes by that our leadership doesn’t talk about S. 1 and how our democracy is on the verge of disappearing,” U.S. Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who has spent 14 years in the House, said in an interview, using shorthand for voting legislation stalled in the Senate. “There’s plenty to be scared about.”Republicans argue that it’s Democrats who are the threat to democracy. “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said at a hearing on the bill to overhaul voting laws, called the For the People Act. “It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically.”Mr. McConnell has called the proposal “a craven political calculation” that shows “disdain for the American people.”In the states, Republican legislators have frequently taken a similar tack, charging that Democrats oppose tightening voting rules because they benefit from voter fraud.More common among voting experts, though, is a view that Republicans, facing unfavorable demographic tides, see their future linked to limiting Democratic turnout. “They’re going to do everything they can to hold on to power, and one essential of that is limiting the Democratic vote,” said Larry J. Sabato, a veteran political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Voting-rights advocates and the Biden administration are not without weapons. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has already sued to block voting legislation enacted by the Georgia General Assembly this past spring, and more lawsuits are likely.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Democratic National Committee planned to spend $25 million before the 2022 midterms to organize and educate voters.And a number of voting rights advocates said they believed that the breadth and the audacity of Republican voting restrictions was igniting a backlash that would power a grass-roots voting movement and increase Democratic turnout in the midterms.“It could well have a significant pushback,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard. “The extra motivation of ‘You’re not going to take away my vote’ could end up with very, very heavy turnout come 2022 and 2024.”But voting issues could be a motivator for both parties and, in a highly polarized electorate, the moral high ground can be hard to establish. “I think a lot of this from the other side is political theater,” Representative Briscoe Cain, the Republican House Elections Committee chairman in Texas said in a phone interview on Sunday night. The goal, he said, is to “win elections and make Republicans look bad.”Advocacy groups and Democrats also are in the courts. In Georgia alone, eight lawsuits are challenging Republican election laws enacted in the spring. Marc Elias, a longtime lawyer for Democratic Party interests, is opposing new election laws in seven Republican-dominated states.How badly the Supreme Court ruling will hinder such efforts is unclear. The 6-to-3 decision, covering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, made it much harder to attack a voting restriction based principally on its lopsided impact on a minority group.Mr. Elias called the ruling “a terrible decision,” but added that most election lawsuits claim violations of the Constitution, not the Voting Rights Act.Richard L. Hasen, a leading election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, was less sanguine, arguing that one part of the ruling has given states wide latitude to defend restrictions as necessary to prevent fraud — even if there is no evidence of fraud. Stopping fraud is by far the leading reason cited by Republican legislators sponsoring curbs on voting.“There’s no question that the road is much tougher for voting rights plaintiffs in federal courts,” he said. “These battles will have to be fought within each state, mustering coalitions among business groups, civil leaders and voters from all parties who care about the sanctity of the right to vote.”Legal options also exist outside the federal judiciary. Mr. Elias recently won a suit claiming discrimination against college-age voters in the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is challenging North Carolina’s voter ID requirements in that state’s Supreme Court. Demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., in June to protest for equal voting rights.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesAnd Alison Riggs, a voting-rights lawyer and co-executive director of the coalition, noted that Congress could easily address concerns with the court’s ruling in any revision of the Voting Rights Act.Mr. Biden’s speech on Tuesday may signal whether he intends to become involved in pushing that legislation and the overhaul of voting laws to passage. Mr. Biden made voting issues a priority in his campaign, but as president he has emphasized bread-and-butter issues like infrastructure spending and coronavirus relief. He was largely absent in June when Democrats in the Senate tried and failed to bring up the For the People Act for debate — in part, perhaps, because even Democrats realized that it must be stripped down to a more basic bill to have a chance of passing.The president is unlikely to have that option again. Over the weekend, a close ally, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, told Politico that Mr. Biden must push to modify the filibuster so both voting bills could pass.So did civil rights leaders in a meeting with the president on Thursday. “We will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to Black citizenship, voting and political participation,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said later. “We need legislation to be passed in Congress.”The consequences of doing that — or not — could be profound, said Dr. Sabato. “If there was ever a moment to act, it would be now, because Republican legislatures with Republican governors are going to go even further as we move into the future,” he said.“For years, Democrats will point to this as a missed moment. And they’ll be right.”David Montgomery contributed reporting. More

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      Why America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More

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      Kamala Harris Isn’t Being Helped by Joe Biden

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      On Sunday, after Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to the southern border, the White House felt the need to issue a statement calling her trip a “success.” The statement cited as supporting evidence five tweets by Democratic allies of hers and some neutral media accounts. That’s a relatively modest definition of success, but then again, there were no defensive moments like during the NBC News interview in Guatemala in which she called a border visit a “grand gesture” and noted that she hadn’t visited Europe as vice president, either.Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration’s voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles.It’s gotten to the point that every time I see Ms. Harris, I immediately think of “The Wiz” and hear Michael Jackson singing:You can’t win, you can’t break evenAnd you can’t get out of the gamePeople keep sayin’ things are gonna changeBut they look just like they’re stayin’ the sameMs. Harris, at this point, can’t seem to win for trying. She is a historic yet inexperienced vice president who is taking on work that can easily backfire as so many people sit in judgment, with critics sniping (especially right-wing commentators) and allies spinning (like with official statements about “success”).And all the while, the clock is ticking. Most political observers think that if Mr. Biden decides not to run for re-election in 2024 (when he will be 81), Ms. Harris most definitely will. He had to know that in choosing her as his vice president, he was making her his heir apparent. But based on how things look now, her work as his No. 2 could end up being baggage more than a boon. Mr. Biden and his team aren’t giving her chances to get some wins and more experience on her ledger. Rather, it’s the hardest of the hard stuff.Ms. Harris is a complicated figure. She is not a progressive darling — never has been. As with Barack Obama, the only thing radical about her is her skin color and gender in the Oval Office. On a more substantive level, how Ms. Harris deals with her portfolio will surely alienate the left and centrist factions of the Democratic Party. She was far from a diversity hire for Mr. Biden, and she has clear potential as a national leader, but she needs the time, support and right combination of goals to learn and grow. She needs a mix of tough targets and ones that show her ideas and creativity, as Al Gore had with his Reinventing Government effort, rather than a portfolio consisting of the most difficult policy challenges in 21st-century America.The way things are going, if Mr. Biden decides not to run again in 2024, countless male Democratic senators and governors would challenge Ms. Harris for the nomination. On one level, there are far too many male leaders who wake up each morning, brush their teeth, look in the mirror and say, “I can do this job I am wholly unqualified for. Let’s go!” But there are also other reasons she would face competition — ones we aren’t talking about.This country has yet to have an honest conversation and reflection on the ways in which race and gender play out in electoral politics. There are voters who look at Ms. Harris and immediately believe she is unqualified for the job because of her gender, her immigrant parents and the color of her skin. Republicans tend to say the quiet part loud, but if we are being honest, far too many Democrats would never be able to vote for a Black woman at the top of the ticket, no matter how qualified.Many white liberals like racial and gender equality in theory but get a little gun shy when asked to make room at the table for others on a long list of issues — school integration, housing, homelessness, incarceration, policing and executive leadership among them. And for those of you scoffing, ask yourself why you can list almost every major and minor flaw of Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name just a few. Many liberals struggle with issues of gender and race in practice; they may not admit to having a problem with Ms. Harris per se, but many still expect her to conform to certain standards and judge her harshly when she struggles on issues that are difficult to begin with.Many voters do not see women of color, and Black women specifically, as capable of executive leadership, as evidenced by the lack of any Black female governors in the history of the United States. We must also wrestle with the fact that there have been only two Black female U.S. senators in history. Therefore, for Mr. Biden to select an African American woman from the traditional pool of acceptable vice-presidential candidates of senators and governors, he had an N of one. As brilliant as Stacey Abrams has proved herself to be, the political imagination in this country has yet to evolve to the point that many voters would support a selection of a brilliant politician and policy expert whose highest elected office was minority leader of the Georgia House.No one has been able to solve the complicated issue of immigration and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. border, yet Ms. Harris is charged with solving it. As the child of not one but two immigrants and the No. 2 leader of an imperial nation, she is the one charged with telling people in Guatemala “do not come” to the United States. She undertakes tasks at the pleasure of the president, but this particular role reminds me of Admiral Ackbar’s declaration in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!” If she is somehow miraculously able to detangle the complex “immigration crisis,” she will be heralded by some, but not all, as a success and worthy of the Democratic nomination in 2024. If she becomes only the latest leader (in either party) who cannot solve the problem, she specifically will be viewed as a failure.The role of the vice president has always been undefined, left largely up to the president to shape. Ms. Harris is clearly not a yes man like Mike Pence, the one completely running the show like Dick Cheney or an institutional encyclopedia and counsel the way Mr. Biden was to Mr. Obama.Ms. Harris’s political aspirations clearly extend beyond the vice presidency, but the way the Biden team seems to be playing out the old Life cereal commercial here — “Let’s get Mikey” — makes her political future uncertain. There will be no shortage of Democratic colleagues gunning for her, not to mention Republican politicians and the right-wing media that together revel in misinformation and caricature. I can imagine a scenario in which she is the face that launches a thousand ships but all of those ships will be fighting against her, not for her.Until then, Ms. Harris will do what any faithful vice president does: put her head down, let the president shine and work on her vast portfolio with the staff she has. Hopefully for her, those lyrics from “The Wiz” won’t ring true.Christina Greer is a political scientist at Fordham University. She is political editor at TheGrio and a co-host of the podcast “What’s in It for Us?” More

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      Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats

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      All 50 G.O.P. senators opposed the sweeping elections overhaul, leaving a long-shot bid to eliminate the filibuster as Democrats’ best remaining hope to enact legal changes.WASHINGTON — Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.President Biden and Democratic leaders said the defeat was only the beginning of their drive to steer federal voting rights legislation into law, and vowed to redouble their efforts in the weeks ahead.“In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die. This voter suppression cannot stand.”But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states. For now, it will largely be left to the Justice Department to decide whether to challenge any of the state laws in court — a time-consuming process with limited chances of success — and to a coalition of outside groups to help voters navigate the shifting rules.Democrats’ best remaining hope to enact legal changes rests on a long-shot bid to eliminate the legislative filibuster, which Republicans used on Tuesday to block the measure, called the For the People Act. Seething progressive activists pointed to the Republicans’ refusal to even allow debate on the issue as a glaring example of why Democrats in the Senate must move to eliminate the rule and bypass the G.O.P. on a range of liberal priorities while they still control Congress and the presidency.They argued that with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to press the false claim that the election was stolen from him — a narrative that many Republicans have perpetuated as they have pushed for new voting restrictions — Democrats in Congress could not afford to allow the voting bill to languish.Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, denounced any attempt to gut the filibuster.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on Twitter. “Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”Liberal activists promised a well-funded summertime blitz, replete with home-state rallies and million-dollar ad campaigns, to try to ramp up pressure on a handful of Senate Democrats opposed to changing the rules. Mounting frustration with Republicans could accelerate a growing rift between liberals and more moderate lawmakers over whether to try to pass a bipartisan infrastructure and jobs package or move unilaterally on a far more ambitious plan.But key Democratic moderates who have defended the filibuster rule — led by Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — appeared unmoved and said their leaders should try to find narrower compromises, including on voting and infrastructure bills.Ms. Sinema dug in against eliminating the filibuster on the eve of the vote, writing an op-ed in The Washington Post defending the 60-vote threshold. Without the rule there to force broad consensus, she argued, Congress could swing wildly every two years between enacting and then reversing liberal and conservative agenda items.“The filibuster is needed to protect democracy, I can tell you that,” Mr. Manchin told reporters on Tuesday.In their defeat, top Democrats appeared keen to at least claim Republicans’ unwillingness to take up the bill as a political issue. They planned to use it in the weeks and months ahead to stoke enthusiasm with their progressive base by highlighting congressional Republicans’ refusal to act to preserve voting rights at a time when their colleagues around the country are racing to clamp down on ballot access.Vice President Kamala Harris spent the afternoon on Capitol Hill trying to drum up support for the bill and craft some areas of bipartisan compromise.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“Once again, Senate Republicans have signed their names in the ledger of history alongside Donald Trump, the big lie and voter suppression — to their enduring disgrace,” Mr. Schumer said. “This vote, I’m ashamed to say, is further evidence that voter suppression has become part of the official platform of the Republican Party.”Democrats’ bill, which passed the House in March, would have ushered in the largest federally mandated expansion of voting rights since the 1960s, ended the practice of partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, forced super PACs to disclose their big donors and created a new public campaign financing system.It would have pushed back against more than a dozen Republican-led states that have enacted laws that experts say will make it harder for people of color and young people to vote, or shift power over elections to G.O.P. legislators. Other states appear poised to follow suit, including Texas, whose Republican governor on Tuesday called a special legislative session in July, when lawmakers are expected to complete work on a voting bill Democrats temporarily blocked last month.After months of partisan wrangling over the role of the federal government in elections, the outcome on Tuesday was hardly a surprise to either party. All 50 Senate Democrats voted to advance the federal legislation and open debate on other competing voting bills. All 50 Republicans united to deny it the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster, deriding it as a bloated federal overreach.Republicans never seriously considered the legislation, or a narrower alternative proposed in recent days by Mr. Manchin. They mounted an aggressive campaign in congressional committees, on television and finally on the floor to portray the bill as a self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats. They called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic. And they defended their state counterparts, including arguments that the laws were needed to address nonexistent “election integrity” issues Mr. Trump raised about the 2020 election.“The filibuster is needed to protect democracy, I can tell you that,” Senator Joe Manchin III said.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSenate Republicans particularly savaged provisions restructuring the Federal Election Commission to avoid deadlocks and the proposed creation of a public campaign financing system for congressional campaigns.“These same rotten proposals have sometimes been called a massive overhaul for a broken democracy, sometimes just a modest package of tweaks for a democracy that’s working perfectly and sometimes a response to state actions, which this bill actually predates by many years,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader. “But whatever label Democrats slap on the bill, the substance remains the same.”His top deputy, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, also threw cold water on any suggestion the two parties could come together on a narrower voting bill as long as Democrats wanted Congress to overpower the states.“I don’t think there’s anything I’ve seen yet that doesn’t fundamentally change the way states conduct elections,” he said. “It’s sort of a line in the sand for most of our members.”At more than 800 pages, the For the People Act was remarkably broad. It was first assembled in 2019 as a compendium of long-sought liberal election changes and campaign pledges that had energized Democrats’ anti-corruption campaign platform in the 2018 midterm elections. At the time, Democrats did not control the Senate or the White House, and so the bill served more as a statement of values than a viable piece of legislation..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When Democrats improbably won control of them, proponents insisted that what had essentially been a messaging bill become a top legislative priority. But the approach was always flawed. Mr. Manchin did not support the legislation, and other Democrats privately expressed concerns over key provisions. State election administrators from both parties said some of its mandates were simply unworkable (Democrats proposed tweaks to alleviate their concerns). Republicans felt little pressure to back a bill of its size and partisan origins.Senator Amy Klobuchar, right, announced that she would use her gavel on the Rules Committee to hold a series of hearings on election issues.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesDemocratic leaders won Mr. Manchin’s vote on Tuesday by agreeing to consider a narrower compromise proposal he drafted in case the debate had proceeded. Mr. Manchin’s alternative would have expanded early and mail-in voting, made Election Day a federal holiday, and imposed new campaign and government ethics rules. But it cut out proposals slammed by Republicans, including one that would have neutered state voter identification laws popular with voters and another to set up a public campaign financing system.Mr. Manchin was not the only Democrat keen on Tuesday to project a sense of optimism and purpose, even as the party’s options dwindled. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, announced she would use her gavel on the Rules Committee to hold a series of hearings on election issues, including a field hearing in Georgia to highlight the state’s restrictive new voting law.Vice President Kamala Harris, who asked to take the lead on voting issues for Mr. Biden, spent the afternoon on Capitol Hill trying to drum up support for the bill and craft some areas of bipartisan compromise. She later presided over the vote.“The fight is not over,” she told reporters afterward.Facing criticism from party activists who accused him of taking too passive a role on the issue, Mr. Biden said he would have more to say on the issue next week but vowed to fight on against the dawning of a “Jim Crow era in the 21st century.”“I’ve been engaged in this work my whole career, and we are going to be ramping up our efforts to overcome again — for the people, for our very democracy,” he said in a statement.But privately, top Democrats in Congress conceded they had few compelling options and dwindling time to act — particularly if they cannot persuade all 50 of their members to scrap the filibuster rule. The Senate will leave later this week for a two-week break. When senators return, Democratic leaders, including Mr. Biden, are eager to quickly shift to consideration of an infrastructure and jobs package that could easily consume the rest of the summer.They have also been advised by Democratic elections lawyers that unless a voting overhaul is signed into law by Labor Day, it stands little chance of taking effect before the 2022 midterm elections.Both the House and the Senate are still expected to vote this fall on another marquee voting bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would put teeth back into a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that made it harder for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to enact voting restrictions, which was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2013. While it does have some modest Republican support, it too appears to be likely doomed by the filibuster.“This place can always make you despondent,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “The whole exercise of being a member of this body is convincing yourself to get up another day to convince yourself that the fight is worth engaging in. But yeah, this certainly feels like an existential fight.”Jonathan Weisman More