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      How G.O.P. Election Reviews Created a New Security Threat

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      As Republicans continue to challenge the 2020 results, voting equipment is being compromised when partisan insiders and unvetted operatives gain access.Late one night in May, after surveillance cameras had inexplicably been turned off, three people entered the secure area of a warehouse in Mesa County, Colo., where crucial election equipment was stored. They copied hard drives and election-management software from voting machines, the authorities said, and then fled.The identity of one of the people dismayed state election officials: It was Tina Peters, the Republican county clerk responsible for overseeing Mesa County’s elections.How the incident came to public light was stranger still. Last month in South Dakota, Ms. Peters spoke at a disinformation-drenched gathering of people determined to show that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump. And another of the presenters, a leading proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories, projected a portion of the Colorado software — a tool meant to be restricted to election officials only — onto a big screen for all the attendees to see.The security of American elections has been the focus of enormous concern and scrutiny for several years, first over possible interference or mischief-making by foreign adversaries like Russia or Iran, and later, as Mr. Trump stoked baseless fears of fraud in last year’s election, over possible domestic attempts to tamper with the democratic process.But as Republican state and county officials and their allies mount a relentless effort to discredit the result of the 2020 contest, the torrent of election falsehoods has led to unusual episodes like the one in Mesa County, as well as to a wave of G.O.P.-driven reviews of the vote count conducted by uncredentialed and partisan companies or people. Roughly half a dozen reviews are underway or completed, and more are being proposed.These reviews — carried out under the banner of making elections more secure, and misleadingly labeled audits to lend an air of official sanction — have given rise to their own new set of threats to the integrity of the voting machines, software and other equipment that make up the nation’s election infrastructure.Election officials and security experts say the reviews have created problems ranging from the expensive inconvenience of replacing equipment or software whose security has been compromised to what they describe as a graver risk: that previously unknown technical vulnerabilities could be discovered by partisan malefactors and exploited in future elections.In Arizona, election officials have moved to replace voting machines in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, after conservative political operatives and other unaccredited people gained extensive access to them as they conducted a widely criticized review of the 2020 results. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state decertified voting equipment in rural Fulton County after officials there allowed a private company to participate in a similar review.And in Antrim County, Mich., a right-wing lawyer publicized a video showing a technical consultant with the same vote tabulator the county had used — alarming county officials who said that the consultant should not have had access to the device or its software.Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, Colo., during a news conference in June 2020.Mckenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, via Associated PressWhen such machines fall into the wrong hands — those of unaccredited people lacking proper supervision — the chain of custody is broken, making it impossible for election officials to guarantee that the machines have not been tampered with, for example by having malware installed. The only solution, frequently, is to reprogram or replace them. At least three secretaries of state, in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have had to decertify voting machines this year.Far from urging panic, experts caution that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to meddle with voting results on a nationwide scale because of the decentralized nature of American elections.But experts say that the chain of custody for election machines exists for good reason.Already this year, three federal agencies — the Justice Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission — have issued updated guidance on how to handle election machines and preserve the chain of custody.“There are some serious security risks,” said J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan who studies election security. “Especially given the constellation of actors who are receiving such access.”Republicans say they are simply looking for the answers their constituents are demanding about the 2020 election.“This has always been about election integrity,” Karen Fann, the Republican leader of the Arizona Senate, which authorized that state’s election review, said in an interview posted on the state party’s website last month. “Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. This is about making sure that our votes are counted.”Security experts say that election hardware and software should be subjected to transparency and rigorous testing, but only by credentialed professionals. Yet nearly all of the partisan reviews have flouted such protocols and focused on the 2020 results rather than hunting for security flaws.In Arizona, the firm chosen by the Republican-led Legislature, Cyber Ninjas, had no previous experience auditing elections, and its chief executive has promoted conspiracy theories claiming that rigged voting machines cost Mr. Trump the state. The company also used Republican partisans to help conduct its review in Maricopa County, including one former lawmaker who was at the Jan. 6 protest in Washington that preceded the Capitol riot..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-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In Wisconsin, the Republican Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, is pushing for a review of the 2020 results to be led by a former State Supreme Court justice who claimed in November that the election had been stolen. And in Pennsylvania, the Republican leader of the State Senate has announced hearings that he likened to a “forensic investigation” of the election, saying it could include issuing subpoenas to seize voting machines and ballots.Christopher Krebs, the former head of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said such reviews could easily compromise voting machines. “The main concern is having someone unqualified come in and introduce risk, introduce something or some malware into a system,” he said. “You have someone that accesses these things, has no idea what to do, and once you’ve reached that point, it’s incredibly difficult to kind of roll back the certification of the machine.”Decertifying machines effectively means replacing them, often in a hurry and at great cost. Philadelphia’s elections board rejected an earlier G.O.P. request for access to the city’s election machines, saying it would cost more than $35 million to buy new ones.In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Maricopa County in May that her office would decertify 385 machines and nine vote tabulators that had been handed over for the G.O.P.-led election review.“The issue with the equipment is that the chain of custody was lost,” Ms. Hobbs said in an interview. “The chain of custody ensures that only authorized people have access to it, so that that vulnerability can’t be exploited.”Pulling compromised machines out of service and replacing them is not a foolproof solution, however.The equipment could have as-yet-undiscovered security weaknesses, Mr. Halderman said. “And this is what really keeps me up at night,” he said. “That the knowledge that comes from direct access to it could be misused to attack the same equipment wherever else it’s used.”A polling place in Philadelphia in November. Subpoenas could be issued to seize voting machines and ballots as part of a Republican-led investigation into Pennsylvania’s results in the 2020 election.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAs an example of his concerns, Mr. Halderman pointed to Antrim County in northern Michigan, where, months after a court-ordered forensic audit in the county, a lawyer involved with the case who has frequently shared election conspiracy theories still appeared to have access to a Dominion Voting Systems ballot-scanning device and its software.The lawyer, Michael DePerno, posted a video from a conservative news site featuring a technical consultant who went to elaborate and highly implausible lengths to try to show that votes in the county — which Mr. Trump carried by a wide margin — could have been switched. (County officials said this could not have happened.)The device and its software are only supposed to be in the possession of accredited officials or local governments. “I was shocked when I saw they had a tabulator in their video,” said Sheryl Guy, the county clerk, who is a Republican.Neither Mr. DePerno nor Dominion Voting Systems responded to requests for comment.Easily the most bizarre breakdown of election security so far this year was the incident in Mesa County, Colo.The first sign of suspicious activity surfaced in early August, when a conservative news site, Gateway Pundit, posted passwords for the county’s election machines, the result of a separate breach in the county from the same month.A week later, the machines’ software showed up on large monitors at the South Dakota election symposium, organized by the conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said her office had concluded that the passwords leaked out when Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, enlisted a staff member to accompany her to and surreptitiously record a routine voting-machine maintenance procedure. Gateway Pundit published the passwords a week before the gathering in South Dakota.Ms. Griswold’s office is investigating and has said that Ms. Peters will not be allowed to oversee elections in November.Ms. Peters, who has called the investigation politically motivated, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In an online interview with Mr. Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, she admitted to copying the hard drives and software but insisted she had simply backed them up because of some perceived but unspecified threat to the data. She also cited unfounded conspiracy theories about Dominion equipment.“I was concerned that vital statistics and information was being deleted from the system or could be deleted from the system, and I wanted to preserve that,” she said.But she flatly denied leaking the passwords or software. “I did not post, did not authorize anyone to post, any election data or software or passwords online,” she said.Even so, the secretary of state’s office said that Colorado counties had never been advised to make copies of their election machines’ hard drives.“It is a serious security breach,” Ms. Griswold said in an interview. “This is election officials, trusted to safeguard democracy, turning into an internal security breach.”The local district attorney has opened a separate inquiry into the episode and is being assisted by the F.B.I. and the Colorado attorney general’s office. Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, said she had also alerted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.But Ms. Griswold said she worried that with so many Republican leaders “leaning into the big lie,” the risks of what she called an “insider security issue” were growing.“I think it’s incredibly time-sensitive that elections are set up to guard both from external and internal threats,” she said. More

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      How Andrew Cuomo’s Exit Tarnished a Legacy and Dimmed a Dynasty

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      Andrew M. Cuomo always cared about his place in history.And so, early in his governorship, he invited Robert Caro, the Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and historian of power, for a private audience in Albany. The pitch had been for Mr. Caro to share lessons from the legacy of Robert Moses, the master builder who ruthlessly rolled over his opponents to remake New York in the past century.But over cookies at the Capitol, it quickly became clear that Mr. Cuomo would be doing most of the talking. For close to two hours, he spoke admiringly about Mr. Moses, outlined his own governing philosophy and regaled Mr. Caro with his ambitions to build big — overhauling bridges, airports and more. Then, the governor politely declared the meeting over.“It was an arrogant and angering thing to do,” Mr. Caro, now 85, recalled in an interview. “To think I had given a day of my life to have him lecture me.”Imposing his will on others to accommodate his agenda and ambitions has been a hallmark of Mr. Cuomo’s career, from his role as chief enforcer for his father, the three-term governor Mario Cuomo, through his own decade-plus reign as New York’s unrelenting chief executive. He trampled lawmakers, lashed his own staff and browbeat political officials — in both parties, but often fellow Democrats — throughout a steady rise that saw him accumulate power and enemies in almost equal measure.His strong-arming often worked. Mr. Cuomo pushed through some of the very infrastructure projects he foretold in his talk with Mr. Caro, including replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge and overhauling La Guardia Airport.For more than 40 years, the Cuomo name has been almost synonymous with Democratic governance in New York, with a Cuomo running for statewide office in every election but one since 1974.Now, suddenly, it stands for something else.The first accusation of sexual harassment against Mr. Cuomo came in December, then another in late February, and then another, and then calls for investigations and resignations and ultimately, an independent investigation from the office of the state attorney general. The damning final report on Aug. 3 corroborated or lent credence to the accounts of 11 women alleging various degrees of harassment and misconduct by Mr. Cuomo, including one accusation of groping.Facing almost certain impeachment, Mr. Cuomo announced his resignation on Tuesday, even as he denied the harassment claims and any inappropriate touching.“It’s a stain that’s always going to be there,” said Robert Abrams, who served as New York attorney general while Mr. Cuomo’s father was governor. The accusations and his stepping down, Mr. Abrams said, would surely be etched into the opening lines of Mr. Cuomo’s eventual obituary.Andrew Cuomo, far right, was preparing to run for a fourth term, which would have surpassed his father, the three-term New York governor Mario Cuomo.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIt was a fall so swift that observers could be forgiven for alternating between calling it a Greek and a Shakespearean tragedy. An upscale sweater shop that a year ago had hawked “Cuomosexual” and “Cuomo for president” wares was now offering free embroidery to remove that stitching and replace it with “Believe survivors” (or any other phrase).Mr. Cuomo will no longer equal the 12-year tenure served by his late father, whose reputation as an orator and icon of liberalism has forever shadowed his son’s career. The younger Mr. Cuomo wore a pair of his late father’s shoes for his own third inauguration, and in recent days his aspiration for a fourth term — to be the longest-serving Cuomo — evaporated.“I love New York,” Mr. Cuomo said in his resignation speech on Tuesday. “Everything I have ever done has been motivated by that love.”Mr. Cuomo and his allies have argued that his methods were in service of taming a notoriously unruly state apparatus. Most prominently, he quarterbacked same-sex marriage through the divided Legislature in his first six months as governor, corralling conservative Democrats and recalcitrant Republicans alike to make New York then the largest state to allow it.There would be more: a gun-safety package and timely balanced budgets, a phased-in $15 minimum wage and other crucial infrastructure investments, including the new Moynihan Train Hall and the Second Avenue subway.“Historians are going to have to be honest about the accomplishments that he notched,” said Harold Holzer, who worked for Mr. Cuomo’s father and drove Mr. Caro to the meeting in Albany. Now the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, Mr. Holzer summed up the younger Mr. Cuomo’s legacy as: “Flawed human being and a great governor.”But where exactly Mr. Cuomo’s love of the state ended, and his pursuit of power and control began, has long been a blurry line. Former advisers have grappled with that question in recent therapy sessions, text chains and over drinks.“Toxic, hostile, abusive,” Joon H. Kim, one of the lawyers who led the inquiry, quoted witnesses describing the Cuomo office culture. “Fear, intimidation, bullying, vindictive.”Mr. Cuomo announced his resignation at his Manhattan office, attributing his behavior with women to generational differences. Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesAmong Mr. Cuomo’s former closest confidantes, there has been a recent reconsideration of how necessary his tactics truly were. “Did we all create a patina around the governor that gave him more latitude than he deserved?” said Christine Quinn, the former New York City Council speaker and a former Cuomo ally.Mr. Cuomo has been characteristically unrepentant about his style. In his first post-resignation interview, with New York Magazine, he said: “You can’t charm the nail into a board. It has to be hit with a hammer.”Still, that heavy-handedness had a crucial side effect: The governor was fatally isolated at his time of political need.In resigning, Mr. Cuomo said he “didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn” on sexual harassment. He left out that, as governor, he had done some of the redrawing as he signed legislation to impose new protections against sexual harassment. A day after the bill-signing, Mr. Cuomo asked a female state trooper why she did not wear a dress, according to the report.Now the 63-year-old governor is days away from unemployment and still facing criminal investigations into his conduct with women. Federal authorities also have been examining his administration’s handling of nursing home deaths during the pandemic, and the state attorney general is looking into the use of state resources for Mr. Cuomo’s memoir last year.“I am sure he feels like he has enormous unfinished business left to do,” said Charlie King, Mr. Cuomo’s running mate for lieutenant governor in 2002 and one of the few people who counseled Mr. Cuomo to the end. “And that, more than anything, will stick with him as he closes the gates at Eagle Street and says goodbye to the governor’s mansion.”Eyeing the history booksAndrew Cuomo in 1988, when he was president of Help Inc., a nonprofit agency that helped provide housing to the homeless.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesFrom the start, Andrew Mark Cuomo had a knack for vivid political imagery and a flair for exuding his dominance. He conducted interviews while lighting cigarettes in his office in the 1980s and puffing cigars in a Manhattan park in the early 2000s. Behind the scenes, he was known to shape stories with off-the-record chats.His first run for office, in 2002, was a flop, when he dropped out of the primary even before getting a chance to match up against the Republican, Gov. George Pataki, who had ousted his father in 1994.But he quickly spun a comeback narrative of contrition that propelled him to become attorney general four years later. Successive implosions of Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Gov. David Paterson in scandal put him on a glide path to the governor’s mansion by 2010.Even before he had won, Mr. Cuomo was eyeing the history books — sending copies of a biography of former Gov. Hugh L. Carey to labor leaders that October. He said he had learned from the hard-charging Mr. Spitzer’s mistakes, too.“Lesson 1 from Spitzer,” Mr. Cuomo said then. “Don’t alienate the Legislature on Day 1.”“It’s a stain that’s always going to be there,” Robert Abrams, who served as attorney general during Mario Cuomo’s governorship, said of Andrew Cuomo’s legacy. Nathaniel Brooks for The New York TimesIt took Mr. Cuomo a little longer, but by this year, he had precious few friends in Albany.His winner-take-all approach to politics — with the executive always winning — grew wearisome for legislators as they saw their ideas either repeatedly stomped on or co-opted (and sometimes both).A centrist, especially on fiscal policy, Mr. Cuomo triangulated between the parties to curb the most progressive elements of his party.For years, he had tacitly backed a division among Democrats in Albany, when a breakaway faction of Senate Democrats formed a power-sharing agreement with the Republicans. Mr. Cuomo long claimed he was powerless to reunite the party — until he helped broker an accord to do just that in 2018.The Path to Governor Cuomo’s ResignationCard 1 of 6Plans to resign. More

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      Don’t Be Fooled By Mitch McConnell’s Sudden Bout of Bipartisanship

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      Are we entering a new era of bipartisanship? On the surface, the news from Washington seems remarkably encouraging. The Senate is close to passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, with $550 billion in new spending on everything from transit to highways to broadband to climate change mitigation. Political insiders are hailing the bill as a breakthrough, with the Senate poised, at last, to overcome the partisan gridlock that has ground its legislative machinery to a halt. Many thought that President Biden’s belief that he could get Republican votes was naïve, but he delivered. In a surprise, even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, voted to move the compromise to a vote.Of course, this is the same Mitch McConnell who said of Mr. Biden, “100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.” The same Mr. McConnell who made sure Donald Trump’s impeachment did not result in conviction, who filibustered the bipartisan plan for a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 violent insurrection until it died, who kept all of his Republican senators in line against the American Rescue Plan early in the Biden presidency. And the same Mr. McConnell who said that he would not confirm a Biden nominee to the Supreme Court if Republicans recaptured the Senate in 2022.So why the reversal on infrastructure? Why dare the brickbats of Donald Trump after the former president bashed the effort and tried to kill it? Mr. McConnell has one overriding goal: regaining a majority in the Senate in 2022. Republicans must defend 20 of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs next year; there are open seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina; and Senator Ron Johnson, if he runs again, could easily lose his seat in Wisconsin. Attempting to block a popular infrastructure bill that later gets enacted by Democrats alone would give them all the credit. Republicans would be left with the lame defense of crowing about projects they had voted against and tried to block, something that did not work at all with the popular American Rescue Plan.You don’t have to be a Machiavellian to understand another reason Mr. McConnell was willing to hand Mr. Biden a victory on infrastructure: By looking reasonable on this popular plan, claiming a mantle of the kind of bipartisanship that pleases Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and that mollifies suburban moderate Republicans in key states, Mr. McConnell can more easily rally his troops behind their goal of obstruction and delay for every other important Democratic priority, including the blockbuster reconciliation bill, as well as voting rights and election reform.For Mr. Biden, this bill is a political victory; the fact that he worked across party lines distinguishes him from his Republican predecessor, which should give the president a powerful appeal among independents and moderate Republicans. But for congressional Democrats, despite the true achievement of persuading 10 Republicans to sign on to an ambitious infrastructure plan, the road ahead is bumpy, winding and complicated.If this bill is signed into law, the Democrats will still need to face hard reality: This will be their last major bipartisan piece of legislation.Of course, there may be other issues below the partisan radar, like criminal justice reform and mental health reform, that can secure significant Republican support. But thanks to Mr. McConnell, everything else will face a wall of obstruction. Since the midterms will take all the focus off policymaking in Congress, the Democrats need to achieve democracy reforms and move on with the rest of their agenda using reconciliation. (The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will also be navigating another confrontation over the debt ceiling, but he might be able to include eliminating the ceiling within reconciliation, taking it off the table as a hostage once and for all.)The two key words are discipline and filibuster. Overcoming Mr. McConnell’s obstruction will require all 50 Senate Democrats to stick together, to swallow hard with necessary compromises — and of course, the same is true for House Democrats, who cannot afford to lose the votes of even four of their members. To achieve anything else will require a change in the Senate rules. It does not have to be elimination of the filibuster, or what Senator Manchin would define as a “weakening” of the rule. It will require a way to put the burden on Mr. McConnell and the minority instead of where it is now, entirely on Mr. Schumer and the majority.Norman J. Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, which he wrote with E.J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann, is “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet Deported.”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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      German Candidates Fail to Find Footing in Flood Response

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      So far, none of the main contenders to replace Angela Merkel have come across as strong leaders in the aftermath of floods that killed 170 people and caused billions in damages.BERLIN — Floods have had a way of reshaping German politics.Helmut Schmidt made a name for himself responding to deadly floods in Hamburg in 1962, and went on to become chancellor in the 1970s. Images of Gerhard Schröder wading through muddy water along the Elbe River in 2002 are credited with helping him win another term.The floods that ravaged Germany last week — more severe than any in centuries — are already doing their work in this election year. But the striking thing they have revealed, political analysts say, is that none of the major candidates has been able to demonstrate the level of leadership in a crisis the public has grown accustomed to under Chancellor Angela Merkel.While the deadly flash floods have offered the candidates a chance to show their stuff, political experts said that each has struggled to communicate competence and reassurance. Voters seem to agree.The first poll since the flooding showed a drop in popularity for the two leading candidates — the conservative Armin Laschet and his Green party rival, Annalena Baerbock — after what political experts say have been lackluster performances by both this week.“This will not be an election in which the candidates play a deciding role,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at the University of Trier. “None of the candidates have the kind of overwhelming charisma that is able to fully convince voters.”The floods have killed 170 people, with more than 150 still unaccounted for, the police said on Wednesday. The number of missing is significantly lower than figures announced last week, when downed communication networks and blocked roads rendered many people unreachable.In the latest polling, which was carried out from Tuesday to Sunday, Mr. Laschet’s leading Christian Democratic Union dipped below 30 percent support, to 28 percent, while their main rivals, the second-place Greens, held steady at 19 percent.When asked if they could vote for an individual candidate (Germans cast votes only for parties), which one would receive their endorsement, only 23 percent said Mr. Laschet, according to the survey by the Forsa polling group.On Saturday, Mr. Laschet came under fierce public criticism after he was caught on camera chatting and laughing with colleagues, while President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was giving a solemn statement to reporters after the two had met with flood victims in the city of Erftstadt.Mr. Laschet, 60, who is the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, was forced to apologize. On Tuesday he visited another devastated town alongside the chancellor.Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party’s chancellor candidate, Armin Laschet, behind her, visiting the flood-ravaged city of Iversheim on Tuesday. The town is in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Mr. Laschet is governor.Pool photo by Wolfgang RattayIf there is one thing Ms. Merkel has learned in her four terms in offices, it is how to be calm in the face of calamity — whether pledging to keep Germans’ savings safe in 2008, or wading through the flooded streets of eastern Germany five years later.Standing beside her Tuesday after meeting with volunteers in the city of Bad Münstereifel, Mr. Laschet tried a more statesmanlike tone. He offered an open ear and a supportive clap on the shoulder to people cleaning the mud and debris from their homes, as well as condolences for victims.“Nothing we can do can bring them back, and we barely have words for the suffering of those who survived,” he said, pledging to double his state’s contribution to emergency aid. “So that we, too, are doing our part,” he said.Ms. Merkel’s government on Wednesday approved a 200 million euro, or $235 million, package of emergency assistance to be paid out to flood victims immediately. That figure will be matched by the affected states.An estimated 6 billion euros, $7 billion, will be needed to repair the infrastructure that has been damaged, including roads, bridges, homes and buildings.Much of that money will flow through the finance ministry run by Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who is also running for chancellor. Getting financial aid to people quickly could give him an edge, but so far he has failed to translate his position into a political advantage, experts say.“If we need more money, then we will make it available,” Mr. Scholz, 63, told reporters in Berlin, “We will do what we have to do to help everyone who needs it.”Markus Söder, Bavaria’s governor, right, and Olaf Scholz, the country’s finance minister and another chancellor candidate, visited the municipality of Schoenau am Koenigssee on Sunday.Lukas Barth-Tuttas/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Scholz visited stricken communities in Rhineland-Palatinate last week and then headed to the southern state of Bavaria just days after the heavy rains stopped there. But he has failed to connect with voters in a meaningful way, experts said. His party gained only 1 percentage point in the most recent survey and Mr. Scholz’s personal popularity remained unchanged.“He is a candidate that people just can’t really warm up to,” Mr. Jun said.But if any party should be in a position to find a political advantage in the events of the past week, it should be the Greens, who have been pushing for Germany to speed up its transformation to a green economy for decades.Especially popular among the country’s younger voters, climate issues have helped the Greens to replace the Social Democrats as the second most popular party in recent years. But after their candidate for chancellor, Ms. Baerbock, 40, stumbled over accusations of plagiarism in a recently published book and inaccuracies on her résumé, even a deadly weather catastrophe appeared unable to lift the party’s standing significantly.The Greens remained firmly in second place, according to the most recent poll, with 19 percent support — enough to create a majority if they were to agree to join forces in a government led by Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, in a tie-up that many observers believe would be the most likely coalition.Making Ms. Baerbock’s position more difficult is the fact that she currently does not hold a political office that would give her the opportunity to make a public visit to the stricken regions, as do both of her competitors. Last week she decided against taking members of the news media with her when she visited communities in Rhineland-Palatinate afflicted by the severe weather.In several interviews afterward, Ms. Baerbock called for Germany to move more quickly on its exit from coal, currently planned for 2030, and to increase spending to better prepare communities for the dangers posed by extreme weather. She also laid out a three-point plan that included adapting to the changing climate, amid attempts to halt it.“This is not an either-or between climate precaution, climate adaptation and climate protection, but a triad that is actually decided in the same way in all the climate protection treaties worldwide,” Ms. Baerbock told ARD public television.In the wake of last week’s flooding, the Greens are no longer the only party making such calls, but as the images of devastation retreat from the headlines, her party remains in the strongest position to gain voters from the renewed focus on the threat posed by changes to the world’s climate.“I assume that the weather events will indeed raise the issue of climate change to the top of the electorate’s agenda, which will help the Greens,” said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy of Political Education in Tützing, but added that it would not be enough of an advantage to close the gap with the leading conservatives. “It still won’t help Ms. Baerbock into the chancellor’s office.” More

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      In New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan May Face a High-Profile Fight

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      Senator Maggie Hassan, a former governor of her state, is working to burnish her centrist image without making political waves.MEREDITH, N.H. — At the Twin Barns Brewing Co., perched near the shoreline of Lake Winnipesaukee, Senator Maggie Hassan sampled some of the signature product on a recent afternoon, then chased it with a promise to fight for more reliable internet service, which the owners said they needed to maintain their customer base.“If you are a young professional and you’ve discovered over the 18 months of the pandemic that you don’t actually have to be in the office — you can work remotely — this is a perfect work-life balance,” said Dave Picarillo, co-owner of the brewery and restaurant, which has seen an uptick in business as people have decamped to New Hampshire’s Lakes Region during the pandemic. “But without broadband and cellular, that will never happen.”As she tried a tasty blonde ale, Ms. Hassan assured Mr. Picarillo and his partner, Bruce Walton, that she was on the case. She was part of a bipartisan group of senators who were working to speed a compromise infrastructure plan that included new broadband funding to President Biden’s desk — whether or not her party was able to push through a second, broader package of Democratic initiatives.“I think you’ve got to get things done when you have the opportunity,” said Ms. Hassan, a former two-term governor seeking a second Senate term.Ms. Hassan is the moderate Senate Democrat and potential swing vote who few people in Washington talk about. She does not make waves or grab headlines like Joe Manchin III or Kyrsten Sinema, her colleagues from West Virginia and Arizona who draw much of the attention as the centrists most likely to defect from their party. Her every utterance is not parsed for significance about what it means for legislative progress. Reporters don’t throng around her.And that’s no accident, she said: “I just like to keep my head down and get work done.”Yet while she tries to fly under the radar, what happens in Congress in the next few months as Democrats and Mr. Biden try to enact their ambitious agenda will probably do more to determine her future than either Mr. Manchin’s or Ms. Sinema’s. Unlike those two Democrats, Ms. Hassan will be on the ballot in a swing state next year, during a midterm cycle that is traditionally unkind to members of the president’s party.“I think she will, to a large extent next year, rise or fall with Joe Biden, his numbers and how New Hampshire voters will feel about the economy,” said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.Even more than those factors, her political future could turn on whether Chris Sununu, the popular Republican governor and a member of one of the state’s most prominent political families, decides to answer the call from his party to jump into the race. He would be a formidable opponent and immediately transform the New Hampshire race into a marquee contest, placing Ms. Hassan among the most threatened incumbents as Democrats try to retain their extremely fragile hold on the Senate.“If the race is with Sununu — and I don’t know if it is Sununu — it is going to be a tough one,” said Thomas D. Rath, a former state attorney general in New Hampshire and a longtime Republican force in the state.Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican and a member of a prominent New Hampshire political family, could challenge Ms. Hassan for her Senate seat in 2022.Pool photo by David LaneMr. Sununu, whose father was a former governor and White House chief of staff and whose brother was a U.S. senator, has not tipped his hand on whether he will run despite entreaties from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and others who believe he gives them by far the best chance of taking the seat as they battle for the majority. He has expressed some qualms about jumping into the Washington maelstrom, including losing the executive power that comes with being a governor to join a legislative body.“I’m a manager, I’m an executive,” Governor Sununu said last week on the New Hampshire Journal podcast. “There are very few of those in Washington,” he said, adding that he also has to determine, “is it the right path for my family? I have kids to put through college, and all that kind of stuff.”Still, the betting in both New Hampshire and Washington is that the governor, whose office declined an interview request, will make the race, finding it too hard to resist the opportunity.As for Mr. Hassan, she said the governor’s plans were not a factor in her own.“I don’t know, and it doesn’t really change my work,” she said last week when asked whether she thought Mr. Sununu would run. “I’m proud of what I’ve done and I will make my case to the people of New Hampshire.”While she may be low-key in Washington, Ms. Hassan has been a fixture in New Hampshire politics for almost two decades, serving in the State Senate as majority leader and twice winning races for governor before toppling Kelly Ayotte, the incumbent Republican senator, by just over 1,000 votes in 2016. Her allies say that Republicans have consistently underestimated Ms. Hassan, and will likely do so again.“She has got chops when it comes to winning tough races, and it has not just been one tough race,” said Kathy Sullivan, a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. “She works very hard at it.”Republicans are already trying to paint Ms. Hassan as a loyal acolyte of Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader. They say her low profile — one called her “invisible” — is a sign of ineffectiveness.“We think with the way things are trending with the Democratic Party moving hard to the left, the outlook for 2022 and potentially a very strong challenger that this is a very winnable race for us,” said T.W. Arrighi, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Ms. Hassan has been a fixture in New Hampshire politics for two decades.John Tully for The New York TimesAs she prepares for a likely onslaught, Ms. Hassan is emphasizing her bipartisan record, hoping it resonates with the famously independent voters of New Hampshire. As governor, Ms. Hassan found ways to work with Republican-controlled legislatures to approve state budgets and expand Medicaid coverage. She said she was now trying to apply that same approach in the Senate.She has teamed up with Republicans on a variety of issues, including tax assistance for small businesses, money for rural broadband and a crackdown on surprise medical billing included in a major funding bill last year. Now she is part of the group negotiating a bipartisan public works bill that Mr. Biden has hailed as a breakthrough.“We think it is really important for the country to see where we have common ground and see us really trying to work across party lines,” she said.But the bipartisan package is just one piece of the equation facing Congress. Democrats also want to force through a much larger measure that includes an expansive array of costly proposals, using a special budget maneuver known as reconciliation to shield it from a Republican filibuster. Many top Democrats believe the two bills should be linked and approved only in tandem to assure that both pass.But Ms. Hassan appears ready to push forward with the public works bill even as the reconciliation plan takes shape — a stance that could put her at odds with some colleagues. She says Congress needs to strike while it can.“I think it’s important that when you do have agreement on something as major as this level of infrastructure, which we need so desperately, that when there’s common ground, you come together,” she said at the brewery.Ms. Hassan is generally supportive of a second bill to advance other elements of Mr. Biden’s plan, some of which she said would be “critical to building a foundation for a modern 21st-century leading economy,” but first she wanted to see what was in it. She has balked in the past at using reconciliation to accomplish far-reaching progressive priorities. She was one of seven Democratic senators who voted against including a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the nearly $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill passed under reconciliation with solely Democratic votes and enacted in March.Despite the legislative difficulties ahead, Ms. Hassan said she and her colleagues were in position to get much of what they sought, with a bipartisan imprint on some of it as a bonus.“You know, there are always some white-knuckle moments,” said Ms. Hassan about the coming legislative drama. “But I’m feeling optimistic.” More

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      Trump Is Gone, Sort of. The Fireworks Are Still Going Off.

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Hope you had a nice Fourth of July. Politically speaking, most of the fireworks seemed to be coming from the Supreme Court. Any thoughts on how the term ended?Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve never been too romantic about Independence Day. I guess in my youth I learned to regard a successful Fourth as one in which nobody got a finger blown off.Bret: Where I grew up, Independence Day was on Sept. 16, though festivities began the night before with a famous shout. Anyone who knows the country to which I’m referring without help from Google gets a salted margarita.Gail: Well, Sept. 16 is Mexican Independence Day — you know, we haven’t had nearly enough talks about your life south of the border. Putting that down for a summer diversion.I admit I did have to look up the famous shout, which I assume is the Cry of Dolores, calling for freedom from Spain, equality and land redistribution.Bret: Mexico was always progressive, though more in theory than practice. And if you really want to nerd out, next month marks the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Córdoba, when Mexico gained its formal independence.Gail: And Sept. 16 is also the day the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower. We need to set aside a fall conversation about history.But right now we’re going to talk about the Supreme Court’s performance. Given its current makeup, I tend to see success in any get-together that concludes without total disaster. (The Affordable Care Act survives!) But I’m very worried about the way the majority is siding with the bad guys on voting rights issues.How about you?Bret: Not that it will surprise you, but I was with the bad guys on that Arizona voting case. It isn’t at all tough for anyone to vote in the Grand Canyon State, in person or, for a full 27 days before an election, by mail. I don’t think it violates the Voting Rights Act to require people to vote in their precinct, or to ban ballot harvesting, which is susceptible to fraud.Gail: One person’s ballot harvesting is another person’s helping their homebound neighbors vote. But I’m not as concerned about what the court’s done so far as where it will take us. We’ve got Republican states eagerly dismantling many procedures that make it easier for poor folks — read Democratic folks — to vote. And some have also been very protective of political leaders’ right to squish their voters into districts that are most favorable to their interests, even if some of them look like two-headed iguanas.Bret: There’s a perception that ballot harvesting mainly helps Democrats. Maybe that’s true, though there are plenty of poor Republicans. But the most notorious example of ballot harvesting being used to steal an election was in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018, where the fraudster was working for the Republican. But I’m with you on those two-headed iguanas. Democracy would be much better off if we could find our way out of the partisan gerrymanders.Gail: Very tricky, since both parties tend to be in favor of creative district-drawing when their folks get the advantage.Bret: On the whole, though, I think the court had a pretty good term considering the fears people had about a 6-3 conservative-liberal split. Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts voted with the court’s liberals to uphold a federal moratorium on evictions. Amy Coney Barrett voted to uphold Obamacare. And every justice except Clarence Thomas upheld a cheerleader’s right to use a certain four-letter epithet in connection to the words “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything” that we’re usually not allowed to write in this newspaper.Gail: Yeah, we’ve moved into a world in which, for teenagers, posting that word on Snapchat or Instagram is getting to be as common as … buying sneakers or Googling the answers to a take-home quiz. If every student who did it got punished, we might have to replace all after-school activities with detention.Bret: I think the culture crossed the curse-word Rubicon a long time ago. Like, around the time of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” monologue in 1972.Gail: Although I do have to admit it’d be nicer if the cool kids were the ones who thought of the most creative non-four-letter ways to express their dissatisfaction with life.Maybe bird metaphors? (“Family reunion? I’d rather hang out with a flock of starlings!”) Or … well, let this be an ongoing project.Bret: Flocked if I know how that’ll ever happen.Gail: Let’s talk about something cheerful — the Trump indictments. Or rather, the indictment of the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization for failure to pay taxes on about $1.76 million worth of perks.Have to admit, the part I liked best was the family, particularly Eric, treating perks like a luxury apartment and car and $359,000 in private school tuition as normal life. I mean, if your neighbor brought you over a plate of cookies, would you have to pay taxes on that?Do you think this is going to lead to something bigger? The chief financial officer in question, Allen Weisselberg, is a longtime Trump loyalist. Of course, he’s also 73 …Bret: You know that I hold the Trump Organization in the same high regard in which I hold toxic sludge, K.G.B. poisoned underpants or James Patterson novels. But I’m a little dubious about this prosecution. After all this investigating, this is the worst they can come up with? I’m not excusing it, assuming the charges stick. But it seems like the sort of sneaky and unethical corporate self-dealing that usually results in heavy civil penalties but not criminal charges.Gail: There’s been so much anticipation of an indictment of Donald Trump himself, for overvaluing his properties at sale time, and undervaluing them for tax assessments. Instead, we’ve got a guy nobody’s ever heard of getting a tax-free Mercedes. You’re right — it is kind of a downer.Presumably this is just an early step. Remember there’s that grand jury in Manhattan that’s committed to spending six months looking into possible Trump misdeeds. And they’ve hardly begun.Bret: The larger point is that it has more of the feel of a political prosecution, of the sort that Trump was always threatening against his political opponents, starting with Hillary Clinton. It’s a game at which two can play.Gail: The challenge for the prosecutors is to come up with something bad enough to shock New Yorkers. Or something so very likely to lead to jail time that Trump will come around and make the kind of deal that would freeze him out of politics forever.Bret: My general theory of Trump is that the best thing we can do is starve him of the things he most craves, which is publicity (doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad), plus the opportunity to play the martyr.As for something that could shock New Yorkers — either he skins cats for pleasure or he’s a fan of the owners of the Knicks.Gail: Hey, give the Knicks a break. And let’s change the subject. Give me a snappy summary of your feelings about the never-ending negotiations over Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.Bret: The result is going to be good, I think. And popular, too. We need a program that’s ambitious and forward-looking, that allows for projects like the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges — projects that will last for centuries — to be built, except this time with greater environmental sensitivity.Gail: Readers, please get out your Twitters and quote this.Bret: I’d also love to see the Biden administration resurrect some of the more inspiring programs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works of Art Project. I don’t just mean creating programs as employment schemes, but also as a way of channeling civic energies toward active, participatory environmental stewardship and aesthetic creation. I also think the art project should be open to foreigners, so that future Diego Riveras can leave their imprint on American buildings and parks and boulevards.Gail: We are in total agreement. But — just checking — are you equally enthusiastic about the other side of Biden’s plan, which would shore up and expand critical social infrastructure like early childhood education and community colleges?Bret: Sure. Why not? You’ve worn me into submission — I mean, agreement!Gail: Pardon me one more time while I pour a glass of champagne. Are you listening, moderate Republicans?Bret: Final topic, Gail. July 4 was supposed to mark the date when Americans could finally mark their independence from the Covid pandemic. Do you finally feel free of it?Gail: Pretty much, Bret. I guess for most people it depends on the things they liked to do that weren’t doable during the shutdown. For me a lot of the loss was not being able to go with my husband to crowded public places like theaters or jazz clubs and not seeing the friends who weren’t real comfortable interacting outside their families.Bret: And I missed the foreign travel.Gail: Now pretty much everything we like is back. The one thing I still really miss is being at work in the real physical office. The work gets done digitally but it really isn’t the same. As much as I love hanging out with you in these conversations, I’d like it better if I could walk over to your desk and make fun of Mitch McConnell.Bret: That, and putting the office’s fancy coffee machines to regular use.Gail: But soon, right? See you in September!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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      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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      Biden Courts Democrats and Republican Leaders on Infrastructure

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      The meeting produced little progress, underscoring the political challenge for President Biden as he seeks to exploit the narrowest of majorities in Congress to revive the country’s economy.WASHINGTON — To hear the participants tell it, President Biden’s first-ever meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress was 90 minutes of productive conversation. It was cordial. There were no explosions of anger. More