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      Sunak’s Ascent Is a Breakthrough for Diversity, With Privilege

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      Rishi Sunak’s ascent to the prime minister’s office is a significant milestone for Britain’s Indian diaspora. But for many, his immense personal wealth has made him less relatable.LONDON — In northwest London, home to one of Britain’s largest Hindu communities, celebrations for Diwali, a festive holiday, were well underway on Monday. Children tossed small fireworks that popped as they slammed into the sidewalk. Bright lights strung across the street twinkled overhead. Families bought sweets and candles.But many who were gathered with their families said that they suddenly had something new to celebrate — the news that Rishi Sunak, the eldest son of a doctor and pharmacist of Indian descent, will become prime minister, the first person of color to hold Britain’s highest political office.Britain is home to a vibrant and diverse community of people with roots in India, which it ruled as a colony for nearly a century before India won independence in 1947. As many as 1.5 million people of Indian descent live in England and Wales, making them the largest ethnic group after white Britons.That makes Mr. Sunak’s triumph a significant milestone for Britain’s Indian diaspora, whose long struggle against racism and prejudice is rarely a prominent issue in British politics.“We are so proud and happy,” said Hemal Joshi, 43, who lives in northwest London with his wife and son. “I’ve got so many messages from India already. So he has a lot of expectation now from all over the world. Let’s see what he will do.”Mr. Sunak, 42, has always expressed pride in his Indian roots, and he regularly points to his upbringing as the son of immigrants. But he has not put his heritage at the center of his political message, focusing instead on his experience in finance, and the British news media has not dwelled on his ethnicity.Instead, it is Mr. Sunak’s elite education and extreme wealth that have drawn scrutiny — and become something of a political liability in a society famously divided by tensions over class.Mr. Sunak is also a practicing Hindu, and when he took his oath of office as a member of Parliament, he did so on the Gita, a book of Hindu scripture. As chancellor of the Exchequer, he celebrated Diwali, known as the festival of lights, by putting lights outside his official residence at 11 Downing St.Rishi Sunak lighting Diwali candles outside his official residence, 11 Downing Street, in 2020.John Sibley/Reuters“We are very proud and very excited, being Hindus from India,” said Priya Gohil, who was just leaving the temple with her family in the borough of Harrow after offering Diwali prayers. “It’s just very relatable.”What was less relatable to many was the air of privilege attached to him.Mr. Sunak attended the elite Winchester College, a private boarding school in Britain, then went to Oxford University and Stanford. He made a fortune in finance, working for Goldman Sachs and two hedge funds before his political career began. He is also married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of one of India’s wealthiest men.More on the Political Turmoil in BritainBrexit Fault Lines: Some experts link Liz Truss’s downfall to the ripple effect of Britain’s departure from the European Union and the bitter factions it created in her Conservative Party.Boris Johnson Drops Out: The former prime minister pulled out of the race to succeed Ms. Truss, ending a bid to reclaim the job he lost three months ago amid a cascade of scandals.Political Primaries: Are American-style primary elections driving Britain’s dysfunction? The rise and fall of Ms. Truss may hint at deeper changes caused by putting party leaders to a vote.Lifelong Allowance: Ms. Truss is eligible for a taxpayer-funded annual payout for the rest of her life. Some say she shouldn’t be allowed to receive it.Skepticism about his wealth has followed him throughout his bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party, though many of his predecessors have also come from privileged backgrounds. The issue remains resonant even after he emerged on Monday as the winner of the contest to lead the country.“I think it’s great that we have a person of color as the prime minister for the first time,” said Shivani Dasani, 22, who was leaving a temple in northwest London. But she added, “He’s a rich, upper-class man, so he can’t speak for the entire community in that way.”Those concerns persisted beyond London’s Indian communities. In some neighborhoods, many people were too busy finishing the workday to even know that Mr. Sunak had been chosen as prime minister. But those who did cited Mr. Sunak’s sizable wealth as one of the only things they knew about him, even as they hoped he would address the problems of inflation and soaring housing prices.Ealing Road in London, on Monday. Some in the British capital said they were hoping that the new prime minister would address the problems of inflation and soaring housing prices.Andrew Testa for The New York Times“He won’t know how normal people live — the working class,” said Samuel Shan, who was sweeping the floor near his fruit and vegetable stall at a market in Dalston, a diverse neighborhood that has become more gentrified in recent years. “We’ll see what he can do for us.”Brano Gabani, a council worker originally from Slovakia, laughed humorlessly as he noted that he had “no choice’’ in the selection of Mr. Sunak. He said he did not know enough about the incoming prime minister’s character to assess him. But, like many others, he pointed to slow wage growth and the rising cost of living as major issues.“Every month we lose salary; we are more poor,” he said. “I want to see him doing something, something for English people.”Narendra H. Thakrar, the chairman of the Shri Sanatan Hindu Mandir Temple in the Wembley area of London, said he believed that Mr. Sunak was the right man to steer the nation during a time of uncertainty, and that his appeal transcended any particular ethnic or religious community.“There are many difficulties this country is facing at the moment economically, and I think that Rishi Sunak is the right person to take over as prime minister,” he said. “He has proved himself to be a good chancellor, and let’s hope he will do justice to the country. I am sure he will.”Celebrating Diwali at the Shri Santa Hindu Mandir Temple in London on Monday.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesAs he stood alongside the tan, intricately carved sandstone temple on Monday, Mr. Thakrar rejoiced in the confluence of the Diwali holiday and Mr. Sunak’s victory, calling it “a great day.” Mr. Sunak, he said, was “a devout Hindu and he loves his community.”Around the same time, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was congratulating Mr. Sunak and describing the Indian community in Britain as a “living bridge” between the two nations.Zubaida Haque, the former executive director of the Equality Trust, a British charity, said that the pride Mr. Sunak’s victory might inspire needed to be placed in context. While representation matters, “that doesn’t mean that Britain has great social mobility,” she said, pointing to his wealthy upbringing.“It’s still a great achievement that Rishi Sunak will get the top job in this country, but let’s not pretend that racial inequality is no longer a barrier,” she said.Ms. Dasani, who was at the temple in Wembley with her family, expressed a similar sentiment, saying she believed that the earlier leadership race lost by Mr. Sunak brought to light “a lot of racism that still exists in the U.K.”She said she felt that people questioned his Britishness in a way they never did with his white counterparts.Ms. Dasani also cited Conservative Party policies that she said were hostile to immigrants and asylum seekers. Human rights groups, for example, condemned a policy initiated under Mr. Johnson aimed at sending some refugees arriving in Britain to Rwanda.The chairman of the Shri Sanatan Hindu Mandir Temple said he believed that Mr. Sunak was the right man to steer the nation during a time of uncertainty.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesBut she said she still believed that having broader cultural representation on such a prominent stage could have a positive effect on the national psyche.“I think there is a worry among South Asian people in the U.K. that if we are too loud about our culture people will see us as not properly British,” she said. “So I think it is a good thing that he is so open about his culture and his religion.”Halima Begum, chief executive of Runnymede Trust, a research institute focusing on racial equality, called Mr. Sunak’s triumph a defining moment.“It is a poignant and symbolic moment for a grandchild of the British Empire to take up the highest office of the land,” she said.Still, Dr. Begum said that she hoped Mr. Sunak would put his skills as former chancellor to use to address problems affecting minority ethnic groups in Britain, including inflation and rising interest rates that have driven up household mortgages.“The rest of the British public will be looking at what immediate actions Sunak will take to weather the storm,” she said.Mujib Mashal More

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      The Mess in Los Angeles Points to Trouble for Democrats

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      Democrats in cities across America are having trouble holding their coalitions together.In Los Angeles, the battle is over power in the form of representation on the City Council; in San Francisco and New York, it’s over affordable housing and access to public schools; across the nation, it’s over tough versus tolerant criminal prosecution and lenient versus punitive approaches to homelessness.These tensions are, in turn, aggravated by white gentrification and have one thing in common: limited or declining resources, with shuttered businesses no longer paying taxes evident on downtown streets. An absence of growth prevents elected officials from expanding benefits for some without paring them for others.Political tensions between African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white communities in Los Angeles are now on full display as a result of the publication of a secretly taped conversation that exposed the crude, racist scheming of three Hispanic City Council officials and a Hispanic labor leader — who were, in the main, angling to enhance their power at the expense of Black competitors.These zero-sum conflicts epitomize the problem for liberals struggling to sustain a viable political alliance encompassing core minority constituencies.“In general, conflict among groups is more likely to emerge when resources are scarce,” Vasiliki Fouka, a political scientist at Stanford, and Marco Tabellini, a professor at Harvard Business School, said by email, in response to my inquiry about Democratic intraparty tensions. “This is especially true when groups perceive each other as different and have different priorities and preferences.”Fouka and Tabellini, authors of the 2021 paper “Changing In-Group Boundaries: The Effect of Immigration on Race Relations in the United States” noted in their email that “when the size of the pie is growing, everyone enjoys larger benefits and groups are less likely to view each other as competitors.”“Education,” they added,is a case where we have recently seen such zero-sum dynamics. One example is the controversy over the admissions system of Lowell High School in San Francisco — from selective criteria based on grades, which led to higher representation of Asian and white students, to a lottery system that increased admissions of Black and Latino students. That case ended with the recall of school board members, due to pressure exerted largely by Chinese American voters. The San Francisco case demonstrates that political power is key for settling disputes and allocating resources across other battlegrounds like education and housing.The City Council redistricting process in Los Angeles epitomizes “I win-you-lose” politics. Fifteen districts of equal population must be drawn every 10 years within the confines of a city with rapidly changing demographics. The gains of one group almost inevitably come at the expense of another.Nearly 60 years ago — in 1963 — Los Angeles became “almost a parable of rainbow politics,” Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, wrote last week in “L.A. Backstory: The History Behind the City Council’s Racist Tirades.”That year, Meyerson explains, three Black Democrats, including Tom Bradley, a former police lieutenant, won seats on the City Council. In 1973, Bradley was elected mayor, winning the first of five elections with a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that kept him in office for a record 20 years.In order to maintain this bloc, “a delicate dance ensued,” Meyerson continues:Since the 1960s, the three of the city’s 15 council districts located in and around heavily Black South Central had been informally designated as Black seats, and Latino political leaders agreed not to contest them, even as the Black share of the city’s population shrank from 15 percent in the 1970 census to 8 percent in the 2020 census, and even as the city’s share of Latinos rose to 48 percent in 2020.I asked Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, about the history of racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles as well as the current situation. He wrote back by email: “Between 1900 and 1949, there were no City Council members who were African American, Latino, Jewish or Asian American.” In 1949, Ed Roybal became the first Hispanic member of the council and held his seat until 1962 when he successfully ran for Congress, Sonenshein noted. But “then there was a long hiatus with no Latino members until 1985, all during the heyday of the Bradley Black-Jewish coalition.”Now, according to Sonenshein, “there are three African American and four Latino ‘seats’ on the council,” with the strong possibility of a fifth Hispanic seat depending on the outcome of a Nov. 8 runoff. Black Democrats have held three council seats every cycle since 1963 despite the sharp decline in the African American share of the city’s electorate, the result, Sonenshein wrote, of “a long-term Black-Latino détente and at times strong alliance.”I asked Sonenshein about the all-or-nothing element of redistricting in Los Angeles, and he replied that the unusually strong powers held by the City Council make the competition for seats particularly intense:The conflict is further enhanced by the unique nature of the L.A. council. It is certainly the most powerful council in any city with a mayor-council system. The relatively small size of the council and the visibility of the council as the most public-facing institution in the city government make each seat immensely valuable. L.A.’s growing stature as a key political force in California and even national Democratic politics causes state legislators to consider abandoning their seats when a council position opens up. (Can you imagine that happening in N.Y.C. or Chicago?)Conversely, Sonenshein argued, there are two factors mitigating conflict: “strong incentives in communities to build and maintain progressive cross-racial and cross-ethnic coalitions on the Tom Bradley model and crosscutting elite political alliances that link together members in different communities.”Sonenshein described the current situation in Los Angeles as themirror image of the 1990s. As the Latino population grew in the 1980s and 1990s in what was then known as South Central Los Angeles, there was considerable intergroup tension at the street level. Jobs, housing, services, all played a role. It took a while for those tensions to bubble up to the political level.David Sears, an emeritus professor of psychology and political science at U.C.L.A., emailed his response to my query about racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles:The zero-sum character of redistricting surely exacerbates intergroup conflict. In L.A., such conflicts are barely below the surface in general. Especially Black-brown. Latinos have moved into historically Black neighborhoods in large numbers in L.A. and now generally outnumber Blacks. City Council representation has not adjusted to reflect that change. Black-brown political coalitions do form but they can be evanescent, with the tensions generally sub rosa rather than displayed out in public.In peaceful times, Sears wrote, “the theory of ‘common in-group identity’ argues that coalitions can form around a common superordinate identity. One example would be the Democratic Party in the California legislature,” where there are “lots of pressures to bind the coalition together — e.g., maintaining a supermajority.”Sears cautioned, however, that “subordinate group identities can sometimes fracture that common identity when subordinate group identities are made salient, as in redistricting (or ticket composition) decisions. The current controversy is a textbook example of these dynamics.”Sears pointed out possible future developments. On one hand, he again mentioned “lots of pressures to bind the coalition together.” At the same time, however, he noted:Centrifugal pressures include upward mobility among Latinos, who are rapidly moving into being small-business entrepreneurs. The younger generation is getting a lot better educated: e.g., the numbers of Latinos admitted to U.C.L.A. are rising rapidly. And intermarriage with whites is very common in post-immigrant generations.“Expect more ethnic conflicts,” Sears concluded,despite the incentives for coalition building. The fragmentation of neighborhoods leads to fragmentation in the schools. Many lighter-skinned Latinos have an easier road of it than African Americans in terms of upward mobility. I believe that broken families are still much more common in the Black community, which has its costs.Redistricting is a redistribution of political power, and political power determines the allocation of crucial resources. Cecilia Menjívar, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., emailed me her analysis of the role of scarcity in the struggle for power:Ethnic conflict does not happen in a vacuum of other social forces, especially material resources such as income and especially inequality — absolutely and relative — in personal income but also resources such as housing and school funding, etc., which varies quite a bit by place, neighborhood, etc. This is important because it’s not just income and material resources but increased inequality — the uneven distribution of resources that shapes perceptions about a sense of scarcity that groups (and individuals) perceive.Income and access to resources and benefits are all key, Menjívar continued, “but inequality, the uneven distribution and access to resources and society’s benefits, is absolutely vital to consider here because it is perceptions of unequal access, unequal distribution of benefits, etc., that I see more than income distribution alone.”Along similar lines, Betina Wilkinson, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, emailed me to say that her survey and focus group data “reveal that for some Blacks and Latinxs, social, economic and political opportunities are zero-sum since they feel that their sociopolitical power and struggles are comparable to those of the other minoritized group, that there are limited resources and opportunities and thus that the other group poses a threat to them.”Limited economic opportunities granted to Black and Hispanic Americans, Wilkinson argued,along with many employers’ deep-seated racism against Blacks and favorability toward Latinxs prompts some Blacks to regard Latinxs as economic threats. What matters is perceptions. Perceptions of one’s sociopolitical standing and perception of the opportunities and resources that one and one’s group has to move up the socioeconomic ladder.Karen Kaufmann, a lecturer at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., argued in a 2007 paper, “Immigration and the Future of Black Power in U.S. Cities,” that biracial and multiethnic coalitions in Los Angeles and other cities have produced only modest gains for minorities in patronage and set-aside contracts, posing little threat to the white establishment:Scholars assume that Blacks and Latinos would obviously be individually and collectively better off if they governed in unity. This perspective assumes that minority mayors and legislators are particularly responsive to poor urban communities, especially in contrast to white-led administrations. This assumption, regardless of how reasonable it appears, is not a matter of fact. The preponderance of evidence to date suggests that minority representation does quite little to advance minority interests above and beyond policies and programs that already exist under White regimes.Since “minority-specific rewards in the realm of local government are largely inelastic,” Kaufmann argued, “Blacks and Latinos have powerful incentives to compete with one another for control of these resources.”To the extent “that the pool of minority benefits such as government jobs, appointments, contracts and redistributive monies will not be appreciably larger under a minority-led regime than it is under a White-led government,” Kaufman continued, “minority groups will be better off as the most powerful minority in a coalition with Anglos than as the second most powerful in a minority-led administration.”For Black and Hispanic Americans, according to Kaufmann, “the impetus for political inclusion is not so much about opening up new sources of minority opportunity as it is about controlling those already established. From this perspective, the absence of minority coalition building at both the elite and the mass level generally constitutes rational, group-interested behavior.”A series of Public Opinion surveys of Los Angeles residents conducted by Loyola Marymount University in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2022 suggested a recent deterioration in race relations in the city.The Loyola study found a sharp drop in optimism concerning race relations in 2022. For example, from 2017 to 2022, the percentage of Los Angeles residents saying race relations had improved fell from 40.6 to 19.3 percent. The percentage saying relations had worsened grew from 18.0 to 38.5 percent.Similarly, the percentage of resident saying riots were likely to happen in the near future grew from 40.8 in 2015 to 64.7 percent in 2022. From 2019 to 2022, the percentage of residents saying racial and ethnic groups were getting along well fell from 72.4 to 61.2 percent.Los Angeles and cities everywhere can look forward to constrained budgets restricting spending on everything from schools to housing to street repairs to policing. These limits drive relentless competition, foment resentment and ravage coalitions.in “Nury Martinez’s Racism Feeds Into Black Angelenos’ Worst Fear. It’s Us Versus Them,” Erika D. Smith, a Los Angeles Times columnist, describes the brutal realpolitik in the covertly recorded conversation I mentioned earlier, which included Nury Martinez, then the City Council president:It wasn’t just a forum for swapping the kind of racist remarks and “jokes” you might hear at a Trump rally. It was ostensibly convened to talk about the redistricting of City Council seats that was happening at the time. But it very quickly veered into strategies for manipulating district maps to deprive Black people of political power and provide it to Latinos instead.The controversy in Los Angeles raises a key question: Is the City Council debacle an exception or is it a warning sign that the bitter, if often submerged, battles involving intraparty competition — part of the package of tensions continually inflamed by Donald Trump — will further endanger Democratic prospects this year and in 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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      How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground

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      A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase “the American dream,” is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.”To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack.President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.”For decades, politicians have used the phrase “the American dream” to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. It has been a promise so powerful that it drew immigrants from around the world, who went on to fulfill it generation after generation. Political figures in both parties employed the phrase to promote both their own policies and their own biographies.Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies. Many of these Republicans are people of color — including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.To politicians of old, “the American dream” was a supremely optimistic rhetorical device, albeit one that often obscured the economic and racial barriers that made achieving it impossible for many. To the Republican candidates embracing it today, the phrase has taken on an ominous and more pessimistic tone, echoing the party’s leader, former President Donald J. Trump, who said in 2015 that “the American dream is dead.” In the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.A crowd at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., waited for former President Donald J. Trump to speak.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesPoliticians have long warned that the American dream was slipping away, a note struck from time to time by former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. What has changed is that some Republicans now cast the situation more starkly, using the dream-is-in-danger rhetoric as a widespread line of attack, arguing that Democrats have turned patriotism itself into something contentious.“Both parties used to celebrate the fact that America is an exceptional country — now you only have one that celebrates that fact,” said Jason Miyares, a Republican and the child of Cuban immigrants. The American dream was a part of his successful campaign to become Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.In Texas, Representative Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who became the state’s first Latina Republican in Congress, ran an ad that declared, “Democrats are destroying the American dream.” Antonio Swad, an Italian-Lebanese immigrant running for a House seat in the Dallas suburbs, said in an ad that he washed dishes at the age of 15 before opening two restaurants, telling voters the American dream does not “come from a government handout.”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid. But her mission to thwart Donald J. Trump presents challenges.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.Television ads for more than a dozen Republican candidates in statewide, House and Senate campaigns — more than half of whom are people of color — cite the phrase, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm. Several other House hopefuls, many of them Latinas, frequently cite the words in social media posts, digital ads, campaign literature and speeches.“In Congress, I will fight to defend the American dream,” said Yesli Vega, a former police officer who is the daughter of civil-war refugees from El Salvador and who is running for a House seat in Virginia, posted on Twitter.“The American dream” was a marquee theme in two winning Republican campaigns in Virginia last year: the races by Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaica-born Marine veteran who is now the first woman of color to serve as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Mr. Miyares, the attorney general.“On the campaign trail, I used to say, if your family came to this country seeking hope there is a good chance that your family is a lot like my family, and it would be the biggest honor of my life to be your attorney general,” said Mr. Miyares.Attorney General Jason Miyares of Virginia during the inaugural celebration in January.Steve Helber/Associated PressThe Republicans relying on the phrase show the extent to which the party is diversifying its ranks and recruiting candidates with powerful come-from-behind stories. But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”Republicans dispute that their references to “the American dream” promote exclusion and say they are using the phrase the same way politicians have used it for decades — to signal hope and opportunity. “I think the left is far more pessimistic than Republicans are about the American dream,” said Representative Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico Republican who is Cherokee and the third Native American woman ever elected to Congress.But this latest iteration of the dream has become a rhetorical catchall for Republicans’ policy positions.Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican state lawmaker in Colorado running in a heated House race, embraces the American dream as the theme of her personal story. Ms. Kirkmeyer grew up on a dairy farm, the sixth of seven children in a family that often struggled. She paid her way through college by raising and selling a herd of eight milk cows, yearlings and heifer calves.The American dream, Ms. Kirkmeyer said, was not only about economic opportunity but freedom, connecting the words with Republican opposition to Covid-related mask mandates. “I don’t see the mandates as part of the American dream,” she said. “People felt that was an infringement on their rights and personal dreams.”The earliest mention in print of the words “American dream” appears to have been in a 1930 ad for a $13.50 marked-down bed spring from an American mattress company.Historians and economists, however, credit the writer James Truslow Adams with popularizing the phrase in his best seller published a year later in 1931, “The Epic of America.” His Depression-era definition was a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” To Mr. Adams, it was part of a liberal vision in which government was seen as a force to fight big business. His symbol of the American dream at the time was the Library of Congress.For decades, politicians have used the phrase the American dream to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. Bettman, via Getty ImagesFor later generations, Mr. Adams’ phrase came to be defined by an image — a house with a white picket fence — as presidents, companies and popular culture pushed homeownership. But with the chances of owning a home diminishing after the 2008 economic crash, Democrats and Republicans once more sought to redefine it. Now, much of the phrase’s progressive history has been lost, as Republicans argue that big government is the enemy.“That has been the real shift,” said Sarah Churchwell, the author of a 2018 book, “Behold, America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream.’”The roots of this more conservative vision of the American dream can be traced to Ronald Reagan, who often invoked the phrase and also used it in his appeals to Latino voters, extolling family, religion and an opposition to government handouts. It was a strategy later followed by George W. Bush.“It married conservative values with economic opportunity: ‘We recognize you for your contribution to America and we will give you the opportunity to get ahead if you are willing to do the work,’” said Lionel Sosa, a retired media consultant in San Antonio who is a Republican and who created ads for Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush.Republicans still use the American dream in the way Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush did, underscoring a strong work ethic, Christian values and entrepreneurialism. But many Hispanic Republicans now add a harder edge — stressing that they came to the country legally, decrying “open borders” and calling for the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.“In all the time we worked on it, we didn’t say anything having to do with building a wall,” Mr. Sosa said of the past messaging aimed at Hispanic Republicans. “There was no message that you have to be here legally or that if you are not here legally, we don’t want you here.”The politicization of the phrase comes as studies show the American public has become more pessimistic about achieving the American dream. Historians say that in recent years Republicans have been using the phrase far more frequently than Democrats in ads and speeches. While more than a dozen Republican candidates across the country cite the phrase in their TV ads this midterm season, only four Democrats have done so, according to AdImpact.One of the Democratic candidates who has relied on the theme in his ads is Shri Thanedar, an Indian American state lawmaker in Michigan and the Democratic nominee for a House seat. “We have ceded that ground to Republicans and other corporate politicians,” Mr. Thanedar said, referring to areluctance by some Democrats to emphasize the phrase.To Gabe Vasquez, a Democratic congressional candidate in Albuquerque, N.M., the American dream is about ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesGabe Vasquez, a Democrat who is facing Ms. Herrell in New Mexico in the fall, has also embraced the phrase. He tells supporters that his late grandfather — Javier Bañuelos, who taught himself to fix broken televisions with an old manual and eventually opened his own repair shop — made it possible for him to run for Congress. The American dream is not about buying a house, but ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you,” he said.Yet even Democrats find themselves speaking of the dream as pessimistically as Republicans. Just as Republicans blame Democrats for destroying the American dream, Democrats believe the fault lies with Republicans. They say Republicans are making it harder to obtain by attacking the social safety net and blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage, and that they have co-opted the symbols of patriotism — including words like patriot — and turned them into partisan weapons.“That American dream,” Mr. Vasquez said, “is becoming a hallucination.” More

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      How We Think About Politics Changes What We Think About Politics

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      When so many voters — a majority, in fact — say that they prefer consensus to conflict, why does polarization continue to intensify?In a paper that came out in June, “Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980 — 2020,” Elizabeth Suhay and Mark Tenenbaum, political scientists at American University, and Austin Bartola, of Quadrant Strategies, provide insight into why so much discord permeates American politics:Scholars who research polarization have almost exclusively focused on the relationship between Americans’ policy opinions and their partisanship. In this article, we discuss a different type of partisan polarization underappreciated by scholars: “belief polarization,” or disagreements over what people perceive to be true.The concept of belief polarization has been defined in a number of ways.In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarization in a complex world,” Alan Jern, Kai-min Kevin Chang and Charles Kemp — of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Melbourne — write: “Belief polarization occurs when two people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data.”There is, they continue, “ample evidence that people sustain different beliefs even when faced with the same information, and they interpret that information differently.” They also note that “stark differences in beliefs can arise and endure due to human limitations in interpreting complex information.”Kristoffer Nimark, an economist at Cornell, and Savitar Sundaresan, of Imperial College London, describe belief polarization this way: “The beliefs of ex ante identical agents over time can cluster in two distinct groups at opposite ends of the belief space.”Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, professors of philosophy at Vanderbilt, argue in their 2019 paper, “How Does Belief Polarization Work”:Part of what makes belief polarization so disconcerting is its ubiquity. It has been extensively studied for more than 50 years and found to be operative within groups of all kinds, formal and informal. Furthermore, belief polarization does not discriminate between different kinds of belief. Like-minded groups polarize regardless of whether they are discussing banal matters of fact, matters of personal taste, or questions about value. What’s more, the phenomenon operates regardless of the explicit point of the group’s discussion. Like-minded groups polarize when they are trying to decide an action that the group will take; and they polarize also when there is no specific decision to be reached. Finally, the phenomenon is prevalent regardless of group members’ nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of education.Talisse, writing separately, observes:The social environment itself can trigger extremity shifts. These prompts need not be verbal, explicit, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members that some belief is prevalent among them — hats, pins, campaign signs, logos, and gestures are all potential initiators of belief polarization. Further, as corroboration is really a matter of numbers, those with the power to present the appearance of widespread acceptance among a particular social group of some idea thereby have the power to induce extremity shifts among those who identify with that group.Perhaps the most salient recent illustration of belief polarization is the diametrically opposed views of Trump loyalists and of their Democratic adversaries over the legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump supporters are convinced it was stolen; Democrats and independents are certain that Joe Biden is the legitimate president.Similarly, politicians on the right — and Fox News — are treating the F.B.I. raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago on Monday as a corrupt politicization of federal investigative authority, while liberals — and CNN — counter that the raid demonstrates that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.Suhay and her colleagues expand the scope of belief polarization to look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats over the causes of inequality:We illustrate large, and increasing, partisan divides in beliefs regarding whether an unequal society, or unequal behavior, is the cause of socioeconomic inequality. Republican politicians and citizens are optimistic about the American dream and pessimistic about poor people’s behavior; Democratic politicians and citizens are pessimistic about the dream and optimistic about poor people’s ability to succeed if given the chance.These patterns, Suhay and her collaborators continue,hold for beliefs about economic inequality along both class and race lines. Variation in societal versus individual blame is consistently associated with views on social welfare, taxation, and affirmative action. We conclude that Americans’ beliefs about the fairness of the economy represent a crucial component of a redistributive versus anti-redistributive ideology that is increasingly associated with the two political parties.Suhay writes:The Democratic Party has long justified its left-leaning economic policies with two central claims: significant economic inequality exists between individuals and social groups, and these great inequalities are unfair because society, not individuals, are to blame for them. The latter proposition is especially important. It is difficult to deny that many harsh inequalities exist in the United States. Exorbitant wealth as well as homelessness are plain to see. However, such inequalities might be tolerated if they are viewed as the outcome of a meritocratic system. Democrats argue instead that “the American dream” — success via hard work — is not a reality for many. Thus, low-income people deserve government assistance.Conversely, Suhay continues, Republicans emphasizeaggregate economic growth and downplay the extent of inequality. Second, Republicans argue that existing inequalities are fair — successful people have achieved success via hard work or ingenuity, and those facing difficult economic circumstances are to blame for them. Third, in response to Democrats’ instinct to use government to combat inequality, Republicans argue government efforts to intervene in business affairs, redistribute wealth, and assist those in need often do more harm than good, depressing the economic output of both firms and individuals. These narratives justify Republicans’ conservative economic agenda by insisting that the status quo is fine: inequality is minimal; inequalities that do exist are “just deserts”; and, even if one wished to help, government intervention in fact undermines individual and aggregate prosperity.Suhay, Tenenbaum and Bartola cite data from American National Election Studies and the Pew Research Center to track the increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats on various questions, which require respondents to agree or disagree with statements like these: “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance”; “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard”; and “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”In 1997, 68 percent of Republican and 43 percent of Democratic survey respondents chose “have it easy,” a 25-point difference. By 2017, 73 percent of Republicans said the poor “have it easy,” while 19 percent of Democrats shared that view, a 54-point difference.In an email, Suhay noted thatmany social scientists today are focused on misinformed and extreme beliefs in the Republican Party, including Republicans’ greater likelihood of rejecting climate science and Covid-19 vaccination and their embrace of Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election.But, Suhay wrote, many of those same scholars “are missing growing extremity on the political left. It may be more benign or even beneficial in some cases, but it is still a phenomenon worth study.” In addition to “a surge of claims on the left that the economy is extremely unequal and that this is because our country does not provide equal opportunity to all of its inhabitants,” there has been a parallel surge among liberals on the issue of “racial justice — in both the economic and criminal justice arena.”A third development on the left, Suhay added, and onewhere we have seen the most rapid change, is around gender identity. Democrats increasingly say society ought to protect the rights of transgender people and the expression of transgender identity because gender fluidity is a natural part of the human condition and trying to curb its expression causes people harm. The popularity of each of these views has surged on the left recently.There is further evidence that even people who are knowledgeable about complex issues are sharply polarized along partisan lines.Nathan Lee at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth, Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter and D.J. Flynn at IE University in Madrid argue in their paper “More Accurate, but No Less Polarized: Comparing the Factual Beliefs of Government Officials and the Public” that while “political elites are consistently more accurately informed than the public,” the “increase in accuracy does not translate into reduced factual belief polarization. These findings demonstrate that a more informed political elite does not necessarily mitigate partisan factual disagreement in policymaking.”Lee, Nyhan, Reifler and Flynn assessed the views of elites through a survey in 2017 of 743 “elected policymakers, legislative staffers, and top administrative positions in local and state government in the United States.” Three-quarters of the sample held elective office. The survey tested belief accuracy by partisanship and elite status on eight issues including health care, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, climate change and voter fraud.Their conclusions run counter to assumptions that elites are less polarized than the general public because “they tend to be more knowledgeable, which is associated with greater belief accuracy” and because they “possess domain expertise in politics and public policy that could reduce the influence of cognitive biases.”In fact, Lee and colleagues counter, “belief polarization can be unchanged or widen when belief accuracy increases.”I asked Nyhan about the consequences of the findings and he wrote back by email:The most important contribution of our study is to challenge the assumption that we will disagree less about the facts if we know more. Elites are better informed than the public on average but Democrats and Republicans still are still deeply divided in their beliefs about those facts. In some ways, the conclusion of our study is optimistic — government officials are better informed than the public. That’s what most of us would hope to be true. But the findings do suggest we should avoid thinking that people becoming more informed will make the factual divides in our society go away. Belief polarization is a reality that is not easily overcome.One theme that emerges repeatedly in looking at belief polarization is the role race plays as a central factor:Peter K. Enns and Ashley Jardina, political scientists at Cornell and Duke, make the case in their October 2021 paper, “Complicating the role of White racial attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” thatMost of the research on the relationship between white racial attitudes and Trump support is part of a tradition that assumes that racial attitudes are fairly stable predispositions that form early in life and then later become important for political reasoning. Implied in this line of research is that politicians or political campaigns do not change levels of prejudice, but they can prime these attitudes, or make them more or less salient and therefore more or less politically relevant.Enns and Jardina write that in contrast to this view, over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign “many whites shifted their survey responses on questions related to race and immigration to align with their support for Trump or Clinton.”To test their argument, the authors used “a unique panel data set from surveys conducted by YouGov of more than 5,000 respondents interviewed at multiple points during the 2016 presidential election campaign.” From that study, they found:The strong link between white attitudes toward Black Americans and Trump support observed in prior studies is likely due as much to white Trump supporters updating their survey responses to report opinions more consistent with Trump’s as it is to Trump drawing support from more racially antagonistic white voters. Similar results emerge with respect to whites’ immigration opinions.They found, for example, that from January 2016 to August 2016, the percentage of Trump supporters voicing strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by roughly 15 percentage points.In an email, Enns contended thatregardless of the precise underlying mechanisms (and multiple mechanisms could be at work), the evidence suggests that Trump’s rhetoric had a meaningful effect on the views his supporters expressed about these issues. We are definitely arguing that the attitudes individuals express can be changed by what candidates they support say and do. Although we cannot observe actual beliefs, to the extent that expressing previously unexpressed beliefs has a reinforcing effect, that would also provide evidence of a deepening or potential changing of racial attitudes.The strong association between Trump support and whites’ views on racial issues, Enns and Jardina argue in their paper,was not merely a result of Trump attracting racist whites by way of his own racist rhetoric or a reflection of partisan racial sorting that had already occurred; it was also a result of white Trump supporters changing their views to be more in line with Trump’s over the course of his presidential campaign. In other words, Trump not only attracted whites with more conservative views on race; he also made his white supporters more likely to espouse increasingly extreme views on issues related to immigration and on issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police killings of African Americans.Andrew M. Engelhardt, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, developed a similar line of analysis in his January 2020 paper, “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.”In an email, Engelhardt wrote:Part of the reason White Democrats and White Republicans hold increasingly different views about Black Americans is due to their partisanship. It’s not just that Democrats with negative views became Republicans, or Republicans with more positive views became Democrats. Rather, people are changing their attitudes, and part of this, I argue, is due to how politicians talk about Black Americans. Republicans, for instance, could have internalized Trump’s negative rhetoric, and increasingly held more negative views. Democrats, similarly, hear Trump say these negative things and they move opposite, holding more positive views.In his paper, Engelhardt wrote that undergirding past studies of the role of race in politics and policymakingis an assumption that racial animus feeds political conflict. I turn this conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that political conflict can shape racial attitudes — people’s views and beliefs about groups understood to be racial. Political scientists have failed to examine this possibility, perhaps because racial attitudes are seen as persistent and influential predispositions that form during childhood, long before most Americans become political animals. According to this line of reasoning, individuals use these early formed attitudes to make sense of politics; racial attitudes lead to partisanship.The ever-growing divide between left and right extends well beyond racial issues and attitudes. In his email, Engelhardt wrote that his results are “suggestive of partisanship motivating changes in other orientations which we might presumably see as more stable and core to individuals.” He cited research showing that “partisanship influences religiosity and religious affiliation” and other studies linking “political concerns to changes in racial self-identification.” Engelhardt added that he has “some unpublished results where I find partisanship leads Democrats to hold more positive views of gay men and lesbians, transgender individuals, and feminists, over time, with Republicans holding more negative views of these groups in the same period (data range 2016-2020).”In their January 2022 paper, “The Origins and Consequences of Racialized Schemas about U.S. Parties,” Kirill Zhirkov and Nicholas Valentino, political scientists at the Universities of Virginia and Michigan, make an interesting argument that, in effect, “Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts.”Zhirkov and Valentino continue:Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic candidates in presidential elections started to attract large shares of nonwhite voters whereas Republicans increasingly relied on votes of racially conservative whites. Over the same period, voters’ positions on seemingly nonracial political issues have gradually become more intertwined with racial resentment.Overall, the two scholars write,the growing racial gap between the Democratic and Republican support bases leads to formation of racialized stereotypes about the two parties. Specifically, a non-trivial share of American electorate currently views the Democratic Party as nonwhite and the Republican Party as white, though in reality whites continue to be a majority of both parties.This “imagined racial coalition of each party,” in the view of Zhirkov and Valentino,carries profound implications for the ongoing discussion in the discipline about affective polarization in American politics: whites feel colder toward the Democratic Party when they imagine its coalition to be more heavily made up on nonwhites and feel warmer toward the Republican Party when they perceive it to be dominated by their racial group. As a consequence, rather than a cause, they may then come to accept a more conservative issue package advocated by the modern Republican Party.Racial attitudes, the authors argue persuasively, “are now important predictors of opinions about electoral fairness, gun control, policing, international trade and health care.”There are, Zhirkov and Valentino note, long-range implications for the future of democracy here:As soon as ethnic parties start to compete for political power, winning — rather than implementing a certain policy — becomes the goal in and of itself due to associated boost in group status and self-esteem of its members. Moreover, comparative evidence suggests that U.S. plurality-based electoral system contributes to politicization of ethnic cleavages rather than mitigates them. Therefore, the racialization of American parties is likely to continue, and the intensity of political conflict in the United States is likely to grow.I asked the authors how they would characterize the importance of race in contemporary American politics. In a jointly written email, they replied that in research to be published in the future, “we show that race is at least as strong, and often stronger, than cleavages such as religion, ideology, and class.”The pessimistic outlook for the prospect of a return to less divisive politics revealed in many of the papers cited here, and the key role of racial conflict in driving polarization, suggest that the ability of the United States to come to terms with its increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population remains in question. This country has been a full-fledged democracy for less than 60 years — since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the changes wrought by three additional revolutions: in civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. These developments — or upheavals — and especially the reaction to them have tested the viability of our democracy and suggest, at the very least, an uphill climb ahead.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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      To Defeat Boebert, Some Colorado Democrats Change Their Registration

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      BASALT, Colo. — Claudia Cunningham had never voted for a Republican in her life. She swore she couldn’t or her father would roll over in his grave. But ahead of the Colorado primary on Tuesday, she did the once-unthinkable: registered as unaffiliated so that she could vote in the G.O.P. primary against her congresswoman, Lauren Boebert.So did Ward Hauenstein, the mayor pro tem of Aspen; Sara Sanderman, a teacher from Glenwood Springs; Christopher Arndt, a writer and financier in Telluride; Gayle Frazzetta, a primary care doctor in Montrose; and Karen Zink, a nurse practitioner south of Durango.Driven by fears of extremism and worries about what they see as an authoritarianism embodied in Ms. Boebert, thousands of Democrats in the sprawling third congressional district of Colorado have rushed to shore up her Republican challenger, State Senator Don Coram. Their aim is not to do what is best for Democrats but to do what they think is best for democracy.Ms. Boebert speaking at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Casper, Wyo., in May.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesIt is a long shot: Mr. Coram has raised about $226,000 in a late-starting, largely invisible bid to oust a national figure who has raked in $5 million.But as Mr. Arndt noted, anti-Trump Republicans have put aside stark differences with liberal policies and voted for Democrats since 2016. It is time, he said, that Democrats return the favor and put preservation of democracy above all other causes.The Colorado crossover voters are part of a broader trend of Democrats intervening to try to beat back the extremes of the G.O.P., in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah and elsewhere.“The center has got to re-emerge,” said Tom Morrison, a lifelong Democrat in rural Pitkin County who voted for Mr. Coram, not only in protest of Ms. Boebert but also of what he calls a rising concern about his party’s leftward drift.A nascent infrastructure is supporting the trend. The Country First Political Action Committee, established by Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican from Illinois, has used text messages and online advertising to rally opposition against what the congressman has called the most “toxic” and partisan Republicans. Those include Representatives Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, and Jody Hice, Republican of Georgia, who, with Donald J. Trump’s backing, tried to defeat Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after he resisted Mr. Trump’s push to “find” the votes to nullify President Biden’s victory there.In Utah, rather than backing a Democrat in a strongly Republican state, 57 percent of the delegates to the state’s Democratic convention, including Jenny Wilson, the Salt Lake City mayor and the state’s most powerful Democrat, endorsed Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer and an anti-Trump Republican. He is running an uphill independent campaign against Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who initially worked to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory.In Colorado, a constellation of small political groups have sprung up to oppose Ms. Boebert’s re-election ahead of next week’s primary, such as Rural Colorado United and the Better Than Boebert PAC, formed by Joel Dyar, a liberal community organizer in Grand Junction, and James Light, an affluent Republican developer who helped create the mega ski resort Snowmass in the 1970s.“Jan. 6 was the breaking point for me,” Mr. Light said. “I couldn’t get anywhere with the national party, so I got behind Don Coram.”Jim Light decided to support Don Coram after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesAdvocates for the strategy point to some success stories. In the Georgia secretary of state race, at least 67,000 people who voted in Georgia’s Democratic primary two years ago cast ballots in the Republican primary, an unusually high number. Mr. Raffensperger cleared the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff by just over 27,000 votes.More than 5,400 early or absentee votes cast in the western North Carolina primary that included Mr. Cawthorn similarly came from Democrats who had voted in their party’s primary two years earlier. Mr. Cawthorn lost by fewer than 1,500.In Colorado, voters can cast ballots in the Republican primary if they are registered with the party or as unaffiliated. In Ms. Boebert’s district, Democratic Party officials have tallied about 3,700 more unaffiliated voters in this year’s Republican primary compared with two years ago. They are largely concentrated in the Democratic hubs of Pitkin County, home of Aspen, where one can never be too rich or too liberal, and La Plata County, where Durango is filling with young people.Mike Hudson, a Durango activist who worked for Democratic luminaries like Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman before “disaffiliating” in January to go to work for Mr. Coram, said the number of independents from both parties mobilizing against Ms. Boebert was “grossly underestimated.”Ms. Boebert’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. She remains a prohibitive favorite on Tuesday.Almost no one would say that the influx of Democratic voters into Republican primaries this year has been driven by an organized effort.“What did we do to reach out to Democrats? The answer is nothing,” said J.D. Key, Mr. Coram’s campaign manager. “This is completely organic.”Some Democratic officials have tried to stem the effort, worried in part that Mr. Coram will be the more difficult Republican to beat in November, and in part that the newly disaffiliated might not come back. Dr. Frazzetta has emailed patients, left literature in her office, even pressed the compounding pharmacists she works with to consider voting in the Republican primary. Among the blizzard of positive responses was one harshly negative reaction, she said, from a local Democratic Party official.Judy Wender is voting in the Democratic primary to ensure the best candidate will run against Representative Lauren Boebert in the fall.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesA new map has made the district more Republican, but Mr. Trump won the old district with 52 percent of the vote in 2020, not a staggering total. Judy Wender, an Aspen Democrat who has resisted entreaties from friends to disaffiliate, said there was good reason to vote next week in the Democratic primary: Three very different Democrats will be on the ballot, and the right one could be a threat to Ms. Boebert in the fall.Howard Wallach, a retired high school teacher from Brooklyn who runs the Pitkin County Democratic Party with his wife, Betty, was similarly disapproving. The Republican primary ballot includes several candidates from Ms. Boebert’s wing of the party, including a Senate candidate, State Senator Ron Hanks, who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6; a secretary of state candidate, Tina Peters, who was indicted in March on 10 charges related to allegations that she tampered with election equipment after the 2020 election; and a candidate for governor, Greg Lopez, who has stood by Ms. Peters’s false election claims and said he would pardon her if elected.Mr. Wallach asked: Will these voters new to Republican politics come prepared to choose in those races?Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More

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      Colombia Election: Angry, Mobilized and Voting for Gustavo Petro

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      A large and loud youth electorate hungry to transform one of Latin America’s most unequal societies could propel Gustavo Petro, a former rebel, to the presidency.May 26, 2022FUSAGASUGÁ, Colombia — The man onstage surrounded by a screaming, sweating, fawning crowd seemed like an odd choice for a youth icon. Gustavo Petro is gray-haired, 62, and, in his speeches, he’s more roaring preacher than conversational TikTok star.But after an improbable rise from clandestine rebel to Bogotá mayor and bullish face of the Colombian opposition, Mr. Petro could soon become the country’s first leftist president, a watershed moment for one of the most politically conservative societies in Latin America.And his ascent has, in no small part, been propelled by the biggest, loudest and possibly angriest youth electorate in Colombia’s history, demanding the transformation of a country long cleaved by deep social and racial inequality.There are now nearly nine million Colombian voters 28 or younger, the most in history, and a quarter of the electorate. They are restive, raised on promises of higher education and good jobs, disillusioned by current prospects, more digitally connected and arguably more empowered than any previous generation.“Petro is change,” said Camila Riveros, 30, wrapped in a Colombian flag at a campaign event this month outside Bogotá, the capital. “People are tired of eating dirt.”Gustavo Petro this month in Santa Marta. He has held a steady lead in most polls, though he may not have enough support to avoid a runoff. As Colombians prepare to vote on Sunday, Mr. Petro has promised to overhaul the country’s capitalist economic model and vastly expand social programs, pledging to introduce guaranteed work with a basic income, shift the country to a publicly controlled health system and increase access to higher education, in part by raising taxes on the rich.Mr. Petro has been ahead in the polls for months — though surveys suggest he will face a runoff in June — and his popularity reflects both leftist gains across Latin America and an anti-incumbent fervor that has intensified as the pandemic has battered the region.“We have a decision to make,” Mr. Petro said at another campaign event this month in the Caribbean city of Cartagena. “We maintain things the way they are, or we scream: Freedom!”But critics say Mr. Petro is ill-suited for office, arguing that his policies, which include a plan to halt all new oil exploration in a country where fuel is a critical export, would ruin the economy.He has also taken direct swings at the country’s major institutions — most notably the armed forces — escalating tensions with military leaders and leading to concerns about the stability of Colombia’s longstanding but vulnerable democracy.Mr. Petro’s main opponent, Federico Gutiérrez, 47, a former mayor of Medellín, the country’s second largest city, and the candidate of the conservative establishment, proposes a more modest path forward.“Of course we need to change many things,” he said in an interview, citing a plan that would ramp up fracking for oil, steer more money to local governments and create a special unit to fight urban crime. “But changes can never mean a leap into the void without a parachute.”A third candidate, Rodolfo Hernández, 77, a former mayor with a populist, anti-corruption platform has been climbing in the polls.Mr. Petro’s main opponent, Federico Gutiérrez, is a former mayor of Medellín, the country’s second largest city, and the candidate of the conservative establishment.The election comes at a difficult moment for the country. Polls show widespread dissatisfaction with the government of the current president, Iván Duque, who is backed by the same political coalition as Mr. Gutiérrez, and frustration over chronic poverty, a widening income gap and insecurity, all of which have worsened during the pandemic.Among those hurt the most by these problems are younger Colombians, who are likely to play a big role in determining whether the country takes a major lurch to the left.Young people led anti-government protests that filled the streets of Colombia last year, dominating the national conversation for weeks. At least 46 people died — many of them young, unarmed protesters and many at the hands of the police — in what became referred to as the “national strike.”Some analysts expect young people to vote in record numbers, energized not just by Mr. Petro, but by his running mate, Francia Márquez, 40, an environmental activist with a gender, race and class-conscious focus who would be the country’s first Black vice president.“The TikTok generation that is very connected to Francia, that is very connected to Petro, is going to be decisive,” said Fernando Posada, 30, a political analyst.Some analysts expect young people to vote in record numbers, energized not just by Mr. Petro but by his running mate, Francia Márquez, an environmental activist.Today’s younger generation is the most educated in Colombian history, but is also grappling with 10 percent annual inflation, a 20 percent youth unemployment rate and a 40 percent poverty rate. Many — both supporters and critics of Mr. Petro — say they feel betrayed by decades of leaders who have promised opportunity but delivered little.In a May poll by the firm Invamer, more than 53 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 and about 45 percent of voters ages 25 to 34 said they were planning to vote for Mr. Petro. In both age categories, less than half those numbers said they would vote for Mr. Gutierrez or Mr. Hernández.Natalia Arévalo, 30, a single mother of three, marched for days during protests last year, with her daughter, Lizeth, 10, wearing a placard around her neck that read: “What awaits us children?”“You have to choose between paying your debts and feeding your kids,” said Ms. Arévalo, who supports Mr. Petro.“You can’t eat eggs, you can’t eat meat, you can’t eat anything,” she added. “We have to give a 180-degree turn to all that we’ve had for the last 20 years.”José Fernando Mazo, a law student, waving in the crowd at a rally for Mr. Petro in Cartagena on May 14.To be sure, many young voters are skeptical of Mr. Petro’s ability to deliver on his promises.In Fusagasugá, Nina Cruz, 27, a cafe worker, said Mr. Petro would fail Colombia’s struggling families, and she was particularly repulsed by his past as a member of a leftist rebel group.The country has a long history of violent militias that claim to help the indigent — and end up terrorizing them.“What he is saying is: ‘I’m going to help the poor,’” she said. “That’s a total lie.”Mr. Petro, an economist, grew up outside Bogotá. As a teenager, he joined the M-19, a leftist urban militia that sought to seize power and claimed to promote social justice.The group was never as large or as violent as the country’s main guerrilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But in 1985, the M-19 occupied a national judicial building, sparking a battle with the police and the military that left 94 people dead.Mr. Petro, who did not participate in the takeover, ended up in prison for his involvement with the group.He eventually demobilized and ran for a senate seat, emerging as the combative face of the left, pushing open conversations about corruption and wrongdoing.Some critics have warned that Mr. Petro’s energy proposals would bankrupt the country. Oil represents 40 percent of Colombia’s exports and Juan Carlos Echeverry, a former finance minister, has said that halting oil exploration “would be economic suicide.’’Ballistic shields on stage during Mr. Petro’s appearance in Cartagena. He has been the recent target of death threats. Mr. Petro also has a reputation for an authoritarian streak. As mayor of Bogotá, he circumvented the City Council and often failed to listen to advisers, said Daniel Garcia-Peña, who worked with Mr. Petro for a decade before quitting in 2012. In his resignation letter Mr. Garcia-Peña called Mr. Petro “a despot.”The election comes as polls show growing distrust in the country’s democratic institutions, including the country’s national registrar, an election body that bungled the initial vote count in a congressional election in March.The error, which the registrar called procedural, has led to concerns that losing candidates will declare fraud, setting off a legitimacy crisis.The country is also being roiled by rising violence, threatening to undermine the democratic process. The Mission for Electoral Observation, a local group, called this pre-election period the most violent in 12 years.Candidates pushing change have been murdered on the campaign trail before.Both Mr. Petro and Ms. Márquez have received death threats, and at his campaign event in Cartagena, he took the stage flanked by men holding bulletproof shields.Young supporters of Mr. Petro at a rally in Cartagena on May 14. A recent poll found that Mr. Petro was the leading candidate among voters 18 to 34.Some voters held signs that read “Black children’s lives matter,” and “if it’s not Petro, we’re screwed.”There was excitement — but also trepidation.“What we want are opportunities for everyone,” said Lauren Jiménez, 21, a university student.But “if Petro can’t follow through, I know we will see the same thing that happened with the Duque government: a social explosion,” she warned. “Because we’re tired of staying quiet.”Sofía Villamil More

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      White House announces internet program for low-income Americans

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      White House announces internet program for low-income AmericansWith new commitment from 20 internet providers, about 48m households will be eligible for $30 monthly plans The Biden administration announced on Monday that 20 internet companies have agreed to provide discounted service to people with low incomes, a program that could effectively make tens of millions of households eligible for free service through an already existing federal subsidy.The $1tn infrastructure package passed by Congress last year included $14.2bn in funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 monthly subsidies ($75 in tribal areas) on internet service for millions of lower-income households.Jill Biden makes unannounced visit to Ukraine and meets first ladyRead moreWith the new commitment from the internet providers, about 48m households will be eligible for $30 monthly plans for 100 megabits per second, or higher speed, service – making internet service fully paid for with the government subsidy if they sign up with one of the providers participating in the program.Biden, during his White House run and the push for the infrastructure bill, made expanding high-speed internet access in rural and low-income areas a priority. He has repeatedly spoken out about low-income families have struggled to find reliable wifi, so their children could take part in remote schooling and complete homework assignments early in the coronavirus pandemic.“If we didn’t know it before, we know now: high-speed internet is essential,” the Democratic president said during a White House event last month honoring the National Teacher of the Year.The 20 internet companies that have agreed to lower their rates for eligible consumers provide service in areas where 80% of the US population, including 50% of the rural population, live, according to the White House. Participating companies that offer service on tribal lands are providing $75 rates in those areas, the equivalent of the federal government subsidy in those areas.Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on Monday were set to meet with telecom executives, members of Congress and others to spotlight the effort to improve access to high-speed internet for low-income households.The providers are Allo Communications, AltaFiber (and Hawaiian Telecom), Altice USA (Optimum and Suddenlink), Astound, AT&T, Breezeline, Comcast, Comporium, Frontier, IdeaTek, Cox Communications, Jackson Energy Authority, MediaCom, MLGC, Spectrum (Charter Communications), Starry, Verizon (Fios only), Vermont Telephone Co, Vexus Fiber and Wow! Internet, Cable and TV.American households are eligible for subsidies through the Affordable Connectivity Program if their income is at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, or if a member of their family participates in one of several programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), Federal Public Housing Assistance (FPHA) and Veterans Pension and Survivors Benefit.TopicsUS newsBroadbandInternetBiden administrationIncome inequalityTelecommunications industryUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      French Candidates’ Economic Programs Hold Key to the Election

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      Promising tax cuts, higher wages and changes in the retirement age, President Macron and Marine Le Pen vie for undecided voters.PARIS — As President Emmanuel Macron wove through crowds during a campaign stop in northern France last week, an elderly voter got in his face to protest one of his most unpopular economic proposals: raising the retirement age to 65 from 62 to fund France’s national pension system.“Retirement at 65, no, no!” the woman shouted, jabbing a finger at Mr. Macron’s chest as he tried to assuage her. The boisterous exchange was caught on camera. Two hours later, he retreated, saying he would consider tweaking the age to 64. “I don’t want to divide the country,” he said on French television.Mr. Macron’s reversal on a key element of his economic platform, in an industrial region backing the far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen ahead of France’s presidential election next Sunday, was a reminder of the social distress dominating the minds of voters. He and Ms. Le Pen have starkly divergent visions of how to address these concerns.As they cross the country in a whirlwind of last-minute campaigning, their runoff will hinge to a large extent on perceptions of the economy. Worries about widening economic insecurity, and the surging cost of living amid the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, have become top issues in the race, ahead of security and immigration.Ms. Le Pen won by a comfortable margin in the first round of voting last Sunday in places that have lost jobs to deindustrialization, where she has found a ready audience for her pledges to bolster purchasing power, create employment through “intelligent” protectionism and shield France from European policies that expanded globalization.An open-air produce market in Paris, in December. Economic insecurity and the cost of living have become top issues for voters in the presidential runoff.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Macron is still expected to win in a tight race, workers in restless blue-collar bastions may yet prove a liability. Despite a robust recovery in France from Covid lockdowns — the economy is now growing at around 7 percent, and unemployment has fallen to a 10-year low of 7.4 percent — many feel inequality has widened, rather than narrowed, as he pledged, in the five years since Mr. Macron took office.After France’s traditional left-wing and right-wing parties collapsed in the first round of voting, both candidates are scrambling to lure the undecided and voters who gravitated to their opponents — especially the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon — in large part by recasting major planks of their economic programs to appeal to those struggling to get by.Pensions is a case in point. Mr. Macron has worked to recalibrate his image as a president who favors France’s wealthy classes, the business establishment and white-collar voters as he set about overhauling the economy to bolster competitiveness.In 2019 he was forced to set aside plans to raise the retirement age to 65 after raucous nationwide strikes shut down much of France. He had sought to streamline France’s complex system of public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan to close a shortfall of 18 billion euros, or about $19 billion.Following his confrontation in northern France last week, Mr. Macron insisted that he would continue to push back the retirement age incrementally — by four months per year starting next year — but that he was open to discussing an easing of the plan in its later stages.“It’s not dogma,” he said of the policy. “I have to listen to what people are saying to me.” Mr. Macron has struggled to achieve his goal of raising the retirement age to 65.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen accused Mr. Macron of engaging in a policy of “social wreckage” and of blowing with the wind to capture votes, although she has also shifted gears after the protectionist economic platform she advanced five years ago spooked businesses. She dropped plans to withdraw from the European Union and the eurozone.Today, Ms. Le Pen favors maintaining the current retirement age of 62, abandoning a previous push to reduce it to 60 — although certain workers engaged in intensive manual labor like construction could retire at the lower age.As Ms. Le Pen seeks to rebrand her far-right National Rally party as a kinder, gentler party than the one she steered in 2017, albeit with a clear anti-immigrant message, she has focused on economic issues close to blue-collar voters’ hearts.She got out front on one of the biggest issues of the campaign: a surge in the cost of living.While Mr. Macron was trying to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen was visiting towns and rural areas across France, promising increased subsidies for vulnerable households.She has pledged a 10 percent hike in France’s monthly minimum wage of 1,603 euros. She is also vowing to slash sales taxes to 5.5 percent from 20 percent on fuel, oil, gas and electricity, and to cut them altogether on 100 “essential” goods. Workers under 30 would be exempt from income tax, and young couples would get interest-free housing loans.Her France-first policy extends even further: To make up for increased spending on social programs, she has said she would slash billions in social spending on “foreigners.”Marine Le Pen speaking to supporters on April 10 after the first round of the French election. She has tried to recast her far-right party in a kinder, gentler form.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesShe has also vowed to create jobs and re-industrialize the country by prioritizing French companies for government contracts over foreign investors and dangling a host of expensive tax incentives to encourage French companies that have branched out overseas to return to France.While she has abandoned talk of a so-called Frexit — a French exit from the European Union — some of her proposals to protect the economy would amount to essentially that, including a pledge to ignore some European Union laws, including on internal free trade. She has said she would withhold some French payments to the bloc.Mr. Macron has branded such promises “pure fantasy” and is proposing to retain many of his pro-business policies, with modifications.Having vowed to lure jobs and investment, under his watch foreign companies have poured billions of euros into industrial projects and research and development, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country that has not easily embraced change.At the same time, he has faced a challenge in discarding the image of an aloof president whose policies tended to benefit the most affluent. His abolition of a wealth tax and the introduction of a 30 percent flat tax on capital gains has mainly lifted incomes for the richest 0.1 percent and increased the distribution of dividends, according to the government’s own analysis.After a growing wealth divide helped set off the Yellow Vest movement in 2019, bringing struggling working-class people into the streets, Mr. Macron increased the minimum wage and made it easier for companies to give workers “purchasing power bonuses” of up to 3,000 euros annually without being taxed, a policy he has pledged to beef up.The candidates have tried to address concerns about rising fuel prices in blue-collar areas like Stiring-Wendel, a former coal mining town in France’s northeast.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAs inflation has surged recently, Mr. Macron has also authorized billions of euros in subsidies for energy bills and at the gas pump and has promised to peg pension payments to inflation starting this summer. He has vowed new tax cuts for both households and businesses.His economic platform also aims for “full employment,” in part by pressing ahead with a series of pro-business reforms that has continued to lure the support of France’s biggest employers’ organization, Medef.“Emmanuel Macron’s program is the most favorable to ensure the growth of the economy and employment,” the group said last week, adding that Ms. Le Pen’s platform “would lead the country to stall compared to its neighbors and to put it on the sidelines of the European Union.”For all the differences, the pledges by Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen have one thing in common: more public spending, and less savings. According to estimates by the Institut Montaigne, a French economic think tank, Mr. Macron’s economic plan would worsen the public deficit by 44 billion euros, while Ms. Le Pen’s would widen it by 102 billion euros.“These shifts are significant enough to think that some of their proposals cannot actually be applied — except if they put in place budget austerity measures that they are not talking about,” Victor Poirier, director of publications at the Institut Montaigne, said. More