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      Iowa: How to Vote, Where to Vote and What’s on the Ballot

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      Senator Charles E. Grassley, at 88 years old, is standing for re-election, as is Representative Cindy Axne. Here’s what to know about voting in today’s primary elections in Iowa:How to voteThe deadline to request an absentee ballot was about two weeks ago (here’s the form). You can track the status of your absentee ballot on this site.Iowa permits people to register to vote on Election Day. Just go to your polling place with proof of ID and proof of residence. If you do not have the documents election officials require, “a registered voter from your precinct may attest for you,” according to the website for Iowa’s secretary of state. Look up whether you are already registered here.Where to voteYou can look up your polling location here. If you voted by mail, your ballot will be counted as long as it is received by officials before 8 p.m. local time on Election Day (which is also when polls close), or hand-delivered to your county auditor by that deadline.What’s on the ballotYou’ll be asked to pick candidates for U.S. Senate, as well as local offices. (Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and Diedre DeJear, the Democratic nominee for governor, are not facing primary challenges.) Enter your address on this website to see what else is on your ballot today. More

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      States Turn to Tax Cuts as Inflation Stays Hot

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      WASHINGTON — In Kansas, the Democratic governor has been pushing to slash the state’s grocery sales tax. Last month, New Mexico lawmakers provided $1,000 tax rebates to households hobbled by high gas prices. Legislatures in Iowa, Indiana and Idaho have all cut state income taxes this year.A combination of flush state budget coffers and rapid inflation has lawmakers across the country looking for ways to ease the pain of rising prices, with nearly three dozen states enacting or considering some form of tax relief, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank.The efforts are blurring typical party lines when it comes to tax policy. In many cases, Democrats are joining Republicans in supporting permanently lower taxes or temporary cuts, including for high earners.But while the policies are aimed at helping Americans weather the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years, economists warn that, paradoxically, cutting taxes could exacerbate the very problem lawmakers are trying to address. By putting more money in people’s pockets, policymakers risk further stimulating already rampant consumer demand, pushing prices higher nationally.Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University who was an economic adviser under the Obama administration, said that the United States economy was producing at full capacity right now and that any additional spending power would only drive up demand and prices. But when it comes to cutting taxes, he acknowledged, the incentives for states do not always appear to be aligned with what is best for the national economy.“I think all these tax cuts in states are adding to inflation,” Mr. Furman said. “The problem is, from any governor’s perspective, a lot of the inflation it is adding is nationwide and a lot of the benefits of the tax cuts are to the states.”States are awash in cash after a faster-than-expected economic rebound in 2021 and a $350 billion infusion of stimulus funds that Congress allocated to states and cities last year. While the Biden administration has restricted states from using relief money to directly subsidize tax cuts, many governments have been able to find budgetary workarounds to do just that without violating the rules.Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a $1.2 billion tax cut that was made possible by budget surpluses. The state’s coffers were bolstered by $8.8 billion in federal pandemic relief money. Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, hailed the tax cuts as the largest in the state’s history.“Florida’s economy has consistently outpaced the nation, but we are still fighting against inflationary policies imposed on us by the Biden administration,” he said.Adding to the urgency is the political calendar: Many governors and state legislators face elections in November, and voters have made clear they are concerned about rising prices for gas, food and rent.“It’s very difficult for policymakers to see the inflationary pressures that taxpayers are burdened by right now while sitting on significant cash reserves without some desire to return that,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects with the Center for State Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation. “The challenge for policymakers is that simply cutting checks to taxpayers can feed the inflationary environment rather than offsetting it.”The tax cuts are coming in a variety of forms and sizes. According to the Tax Foundation, which has been tracking proposals this year, some would be phased in, some would be permanent and others would be temporary “holidays.”Next month, New York will suspend some of its state gas taxes through the end of the year, a move that Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said would save families and businesses an estimated $585 million.In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has called for gradually lowering the state’s corporate tax rate to 5 percent from 10 percent — taking a decidedly different stance from many of his political peers in Congress, who have called for raising corporate taxes. Mr. Wolf said in April that the proposal was intended to make Pennsylvania more business friendly.States are acting on a fresh appetite for tax cuts as inflation is running at a 40-year high.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Furman pointed to the budget surpluses as evidence that the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package handed too much money to local governments. “The problem was there was just too much money for states and localities.”A new report from the Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, said total state revenues rose by about 17.6 percent last year. State rainy day funds — money that is set aside to cover unexpected costs — have reached “new record levels,” according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.Yet those rosy budget balances may not last if the economy slows, as expected. The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates in an attempt to cool economic growth, and there are growing concerns about the potential for another recession. Stocks fell for another session on Monday, with the S&P 500 down 3.2 percent, as investors fretted about a slowdown in global growth, high inflation and other economic woes.Cutting taxes too deeply now could put states on weaker financial footing.The Tax Policy Center said its state tax revenue forecasts for the rest of this year and next year were “alarmingly weak” as states enacted tax cuts and spending plans. Fitch, the credit rating agency, said recently that immediate and permanent tax cuts could be risky in light of evolving economic conditions.“Substantial tax policy changes can negatively affect revenues and lead to long-term structural budget challenges, especially when enacted all at once in an uncertain economic environment,” Fitch said.The state tax cuts are taking place as the Biden administration struggles to respond to rising prices. So far, the White House has resisted calls for a gas tax holiday, though Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in April that President Biden was open to the idea. The administration has responded by primarily trying to ease supply chain logjams that have created shortages of goods and cracking down on price gouging, but taming inflation falls largely to the Fed.The White House declined to assess the merits of states’ cutting taxes but pointed to the administration’s measures to expand fuel supplies and proposals for strengthening supply chains and lowering health and child care costs as evidence that Mr. Biden was taking inflation seriously.“President Biden is taking aggressive action to lower costs for American families and address inflation,” Emilie Simons, a White House spokeswoman, said.The degree to which state tax relief fuels inflation depends in large part on how quickly the moves go into effect.Gov. Laura Kelly backed a bill last month that would phase out the 6.5 percent grocery sales tax in Kansas, lowering it next January and bringing it to zero by 2025. Republicans in the state pushed for the gradual reduction despite calls from Democrats to cut the tax to zero by July.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

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      Could Iowa and New Hampshire Lose First Spots in Primary Calendar?

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      After complaints about disenfranchisement and logistical snafus, the party is reconsidering Iowa and New Hampshire’s coveted spots in the presidential nominating process.For years, Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have battled criticism from others in the party who argued that the two states are not racially diverse enough to kick off the Democratic nomination process.But after a disastrous 2020 cycle, in which Iowa officials struggled to tabulate votes and neither state proved predictive of President Biden’s eventual victory, Democratic leaders are exploring with new urgency whether to strip the two states of what has been a priceless political entitlement: their traditional perch at the start of the party’s presidential calendar.Several ideas are expected to be heard on Friday by the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee, which governs the nominating process. One calls for an application process for states based on several criteria, including diversity. Another idea, raised at a meeting in January, would consolidate all four of the current early-voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — into a single first voting day before Super Tuesday.The debate has taken on new urgency in response to a steady drumbeat of criticism by activists, elected officials and some members of the rules and bylaws committee. The concerns raised include fears that Iowa’s caucus system disenfranchises some voters and that neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is racially diverse enough to act as a stand-in for the Democratic voting base.In the last election cycle, logistical challenges including late-arriving votes and inaccurate data also highlighted the shortcomings of Iowa’s caucus process and muddied its ability to name a winner.“To me it’s not about one state, it’s not about punishing,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee and for Hillary Clinton who serves on the rules and bylaws committee.“We have a chance to show our values in our process,” Mr. Elleithee said. “Diversity, inclusion, and, given the job of the D.N.C. is to elect Democrats, by putting our people in front of as many battleground states as possible.”Members of the rules and bylaws committee, several of whom did not respond to requests for comment, have been told to expect to work on the issue throughout the summer with the intention of setting a firm nomination calendar by the fall.“We are not close to making a decision,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee who also serves on the rules and bylaws committee. On Friday, she said, “we start the conversation.”In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primaries.David Degner for The New York TimesIn January, during a virtual meeting of the same body, Mr. Elleithee and others made the case for overhauling the nominating calendar and were met with relatively little pushback — which some members took as a sign that even the delegations from Iowa and New Hampshire recognized that some change may be inevitable.State officials in Iowa and New Hampshire have fiercely resisted previous proposals to downgrade their primacy in the party’s nominating calendar, publicly and privately whipping allies to their side, but they have not yet begun to do so, according to committee members. Still, they said that any change to the system would be expected to demonstrate the party’s acknowledgment of the importance of smaller states and rural voters.Scott Brennan, an Iowan who sits on the rules and bylaws committee, did not respond to a request for comment but argued after the January meeting that Iowa’s small-state status has allowed barrier-breaking politicians to thrive.“Barack Obama was able to come to Iowa, the little-known senator from Illinois, and ultimately become the nominee,” Mr. Brennan said then.Mr. Brennan also referenced Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who is now the secretary of transportation. When Iowa’s caucuses were eventually tabulated in 2020, Mr. Buttigieg became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, with a narrow victory over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.“Folks like that have chances to really shine,” Mr. Brennan said. “If Iowa is not first in the process, I think that goes away.”Ms. Brazile, who in 2000 became the first Black woman to direct a major presidential campaign, said the party benefited when states like Nevada and South Carolina were added to the early nominating schedule to improve the representation of Black and Latino voters.Supporters in South Carolina waited to meet President Biden before the state’s Democratic primary in February 2020.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“It’s very important that our primary calendar reflect those values,” Ms. Brazile said at the rules and bylaws committee meeting in January. “We need to thank South Carolina and Nevada for giving us quality nominees over the years. That diversity has uplifted the party and also the values we hold as American citizens.”Previous efforts to change the nomination calendar to minimize the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire have hit political roadblocks. Ambitious elected officials, often eyeing the next presidential cycle, have sought to avoid upsetting state officials in Iowa and New Hampshire, who have historically guarded their first-in-the-nation status with extreme urgency. Presidents have often felt indebted to voters in those states, quelling criticisms before they reach the highest levels of the party.But Mr. Biden owes no such obligation. In 2020, he became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either in Iowa or New Hampshire. On the night of the New Hampshire primary — where Mr. Biden finished fifth — he fled to South Carolina and argued against the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, highlighting the dearth of Black voters in those states as a reason the results should be downplayed.“Tonight, I’ve just heard from the first two states, not all the nation,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “Up till now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency in the Democratic Party — the African American community.”He went on to win the South Carolina primary in a landslide. More

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      Silicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartland

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      InterviewSilicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartlandLauren Gambino in Washington As part of his drive to use tech to close social divides, the California Democrat has written a book, Dignity in the Digital AgeShortly after Silicon Valley sent him to Washington, Ro Khanna visited “Silicon Holler”, a name coined by a colleague, Hal Rogers, for the fledgling tech sector in eastern Kentucky.Gentrification destroyed the San Francisco I knew. Austin is next | Patrick BresnanRead moreThe two congressmen’s districts had little in common. Khanna’s was among the wealthiest, most diverse and most Democratic. Rogers’ was among the poorest, whitest and most Republican.But when he visited Rogers’ district, in once-prosperous coal country, the California Democrat did not meet with resentment. Desire to participate in the digital revolution was there. Only opportunity was lacking.“In my district, young people wake up optimistic about the future – there’s $11tn in market value in the district and surrounding areas,” Khanna said.“But for many working-class Americans, across the country, globalization has not worked. It’s meant jobs going offshore. It’s meant the shuttering of communities and it’s meant that their kids have to leave their hometowns.“We need to figure out how to bring economic opportunity for the modern economy to these communities that have been left out.”In his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, Khanna lays out his vision for democratizing the digital economy. He wants the tech industry to expand to places like Paintsville, Kentucky, and Jefferson, Iowa, where the Guardian watched him make his case.Khanna is an intellectual property lawyer who taught economics at Stanford before serving as the congressman for California’s 17th district, home to companies like Apple and Intel. The top contributors to his most recent campaign were employees of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.And yet Khanna is a member of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and was a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. He says tech companies must be held accountable for harm, and has backed regulatory and privacy reforms.Two senators, Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, have introduced legislation to stop tech platforms disadvantaging smaller rivals. Khanna calls it a “promising” start. Despite fierce opposition from large tech companies, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act was voted out of committee this month on a bipartisan vote, 16–6.A House committee passed a version of the bill last year. Khanna, however, was critical of that effort, warning that the language was imprecise and could have unintended consequences. His nuanced views on tech and its impact on the economy and democracy have helped make him a rare figure in Washington and Silicon Valley, taken seriously by politicos and entrepreneurs alike.“You can’t just have the tools of antitrust and think, ‘OK, now we’re going to have jobs in Youngstown or jobs in New Albany,’” Khanna said. “You want to have antitrust so new competitors can emerge but then you also need a strategy for getting jobs into these communities.”Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to comeRead moreKhanna says Silicon Valley has a responsibility to address inequality it helped create. Tech companies would benefit, he argues, from a diversity of talent and lower costs of living. Such a shift, he says, would help revitalize communities devastated by the decline of manufacturing and construction, and by automation and outsourcing, thereby allowing young people to find good jobs without leaving their home towns.For years, Khanna said, the notion met resistance. But millions have transitioned to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic, pushing tech companies to embrace changing practices. He says he has gone from “swimming against the tide” to “skiing down the mountain”, so much so that an industry friend said he had put into practice many of the ideas Khanna outlines in his book.“It’s amazing how people go from, ‘It’s impossible’ to ‘It’s already been done’ as if there are no steps in between,” Khanna said. “The truth is, it’s not impossible, but it hasn’t already been done. My book is sort of an accelerant for what is now taking place.”Early in the pandemic, tech workers fled San Francisco for smaller cities in neighboring states. While the transplants brought new business and wealth, in some places they widened wage gaps and drove up real-estate prices. Growth has to be planned, Khanna says.“It’s important to learn some of the lessons and the mistakes of the Valley. There has to be more housing supply, there has to be proper conditions for workers and fair wages so you don’t have the stark inequality that you see in Silicon Valley, where you have, in certain communities, 50% of people’s income going to rent because rents are so high.”Khanna thinks bridging the digital divide might also begin to alleviate polarization that Donald Trump exploited.“Just having good economic empowerment and prosperity for rural Americans, for Black Americans, for Latino Americans is not a silver bullet for becoming a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy,” he said. “But it could be a starting point.”He has called for billions in federal investments in research, manufacturing and workforce development; building tech hubs that emphasize regional expertise, such as a hub in eastern Washington state to focus on lumber technology; providing tax incentives for federal contractors who employ workers in rural areas; underwriting training programs at historically black colleges; and expanding Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in public schools.Such ideas have captured the attention of Joe Biden’s White House, as it looks to expand opportunity at home and counter China abroad.This week, House Democrats turned to a bill that aims to make the US more competitive with China by strengthening technology, manufacturing and research, including incentives for producing computer chips, which are in short supply.The plan incorporates key planks of Khanna’s Endless Frontier Act, including the establishment of a Directorate for Science and Engineering Solutions. A similar measure passed the Senate with unusual bipartisan support last year but House Republicans seem less amenable.“We need to produce things in this country, including technology, and have the supply chains here,” Khanna said. “Everyone now recognizes that it’s a huge challenge for America to have semiconductors produced in Taiwan and South Korea. With the shipping costs and the disruption with Covid, it has created huge challenges in America from manufacturing cars to making electronics.”‘Can we get more Republicans?’With much of the Democrats’ agenda stalled, Khanna believes the new bill can provide a second major bipartisan accomplishment for the party to tout in a difficult midterms campaign.Billionaire Republican backer donates to Manchin after he killed key Biden billRead more“Can we get more Republicans than voted for the infrastructure bill?” Khanna said, recalling 13 who crossed the aisle. “That’s the barometer.”Khanna, who is also a deputy whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Democrats must be ready to accept a less ambitious version of Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending plan. That is in limbo after Joe Manchin – a senator from West Virginia, the kind of state to which Khanna wants to bring tech jobs – announced his opposition.“A big pillar of [the spending plan] should be climate,” Khanna said, “and then let’s get a couple more things that can get support from Senator Manchin, like establishing universal pre-K and expanding Medicaid.”When it comes to combatting climate change and easing child and healthcare costs, he said, “something is certainly better than nothing”.
      Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      In Iowa, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz Take Trump's Baton

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      At a rally in Des Moines, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz showed that many Republicans do not plan to move on from the Trump era.DES MOINES — Far from Washington, and even farther from their home congressional districts, Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found their people.As the two Republican lawmakers spoke at an “America First” rally in Des Moines, held in an auditorium that often hosts people with presidential aspirations, up was down and misinformation was gospel. Ms. Greene denounced Covid-19 vaccines to applause. Both declared former President Donald J. Trump the rightful winner of the 2020 election.These were facts, argued Eric Riedinger of Des Moines, 62, a small-business owner who attended the event and owns the website BigTrumpFan.com. And he would not vote for any Republican who failed to state this clearly, he said.“My biggest issue looking ahead: Stop the RINOs,” he said, using a pejorative conservative phrase for ‘Republicans in Name Only.’ “If they’re part of that infrastructure bill and supporting it, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”The fringe of the Republican Party is sick of being called the fringe. Led by people like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz, two upstart members of Congress with little legislative power and few allies in their party’s caucus, these conservatives believe they have assets more valuable than Washington clout: a shared language with the party’s base, and a political intuition that echoes Mr. Trump’s.In the months since the former president left the White House, Republican donors and party leaders have flocked to more established figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, stirring buzz for their presidential prospects. At the same time, right-wing Republicans like Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz are loudly making the case that the post-Trump version of the Republican Party won’t swing back toward the center but will double down on the former president’s most controversial qualities.With that in mind, the two Republicans traveled to Iowa with a message about their fellow conservatives. It was not enough, they suggested, to insult Democrats as traitors to America or to cast doubt on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and the legitimacy of the 2020 election. They told rally attendees that winning back the House in 2022 would be useless without more “America First” Republicans and that beating President Biden would require a full embrace of Mr. Trump.They sought to up the rhetorical ante on issue after issue, creating new litmus tests for their conservative rivals in the process.“Last time Republicans had full control, the first year under President Trump, Republicans didn’t fund and build the wall,” Ms. Greene said to the crowd of about 200 people. “Republicans didn’t defund sanctuary cities, they funded them. And this is the one that blows my mind: They did not defund Planned Parenthood.”She added, “This time around, Republicans need to take back the House with people that are going to do as they say.”Mr. Gaetz said that unlike many Republicans in Congress, he and Ms. Greene did not take corporate donations, arguing that many in the party were “too often shills for big business.” (Both of them, especially Ms. Greene, have demonstrated small-dollar fund-raising prowess.)In interviews, Republicans who went to the rally or who have followed Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz from afar said the pair’s efforts should not be discounted. In 2016, Mr. Trump stormed through the Republican primary and swept to power after party leaders underestimated the grass-roots appetite for his openly anti-immigrant language, his insults toward G.O.P. leaders and his economic message that targeted some corporations.Ms. Greene visited the Republican Party booth at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Thursday.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesNow, Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Greene appear intent on doing the same thing, to set the table for another presidential run by Mr. Trump or to send a warning shot to any would-be successors.If their bet is correct and the Republican base has left the Trump era wanting more of his bombastic style, it will have profound effects on the country’s political landscape. At minimum, Trump loyalists have shown themselves to be a stubborn force, threatening to pull additional congressional and presidential candidates into the waters of misinformation and racial intolerance.Kathy Pietraszewski, a 69-year-old rally attendee from Des Moines, said she had formally left the Republican Party after the 2020 election because she believed leaders were insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results. Recently, she has focused on speaking out against Covid vaccines, which is part of the reason she likes Ms. Greene.“I know what the globalist agenda is, and their one world order starts with a vaccine,” Ms. Pietraszewski said. “So my No. 1 issue is freedom.”Polling and voter registration data suggest she is not alone. The Republican base, unlike the Democratic one, has a much higher tolerance for politicians who criticize their own party, and many Republicans still want Mr. Trump to be involved in the party’s future, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll. Vaccine skepticism and distrust in the 2020 election results are also high among conservative Americans. In May, a Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate.However, both Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz face significant hurdles to advancing their political careers.Mr. Gaetz is the subject of a Justice Department investigation of whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, according to people briefed on the matter. Ms. Greene has set off a series of controversies since she took office early this year, repeatedly using antisemitic and Islamophobic language and endorsing the executions of Democrats.Ms. Greene has since been stripped of her House committee assignments, but she has found an audience with Mr. Trump and his allies in the conservative media ecosystem. Several attendees at the Iowa rally said they had heard about her appearance there from a podcast run by Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser.“We know what American people want,” Ms. Greene said. “We know for a fact what you want. We don’t buy into the swamp.”In Washington, the two members of Congress are treated like little more than a media sideshow, a nuisance for Republican leaders. They do not have traditional legislative power, and antics like Ms. Greene’s promise to bring impeachment articles against Mr. Biden gain no traction in Congress.Their words support Mr. Trump’s core policies: cutting immigration, attacking liberal messaging on race and policing, targeting big tech companies. But Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist from Georgia, said there was a big difference between someone who excites activists and someone who has Mr. Trump’s universal name recognition and business-friendly persona.“A person like Marjorie Taylor Greene attracts crowds and attention because they are speaking to an audience that feels marginalized but also mobilized, because they’re angry,” he said.“But revving up certain segments of the party can also alienate other parts of the party,” he added, saying the same thing happens to Democrats.Michael Murphy, a Republican consultant based in California, said, “They fascinate the media,” but added that “as far as real muscle, even in the Republican primary, they’re just one of many factions.”Still, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz may have the next-best thing, according to rally attendees, other close watchers of the Republican Party and even some liberals. They are messengers of the type of white grievance politics that Mr. Trump deployed nationally. They say openly what others will only hint at, no matter its factual basis or the risk of backlash. And they speak with the fearful moral urgency that many Republican voters feel.“It’s hard for me to think about 2024, because I don’t know if we’ll make it there,” Ms. Pietraszewski said, expressing dire worries about the country’s future. “With the Black Lives Matter and Marxism and critical race theory, I don’t know.”At the rally, Ms. Greene called Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is Somali-born, “a traitor to America.” Mr. Gaetz said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first Black person to serve in that role, “might be the stupidest person to have ever served in a presidential cabinet in America’s history.” Ms. Greene declared that the United States faced a new “axis of evil” made up of the news media, Democrats and big tech companies. They both promised to support the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who had been arrested.Each comment drew applause.“I’m not voting for anyone who won’t say Donald Trump had the election stolen from him,” said Ron James, a 68-year-old retiree from Des Moines. “And I don’t think anyone in that room would, either.” More

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      State Election Officials Are Under Attack. We Will Defend Them.

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      Tucked into many of the election laws Republicans are pushing or enacting in states around the country are pernicious provisions threatening punishment of elections officials and workers for just doing their jobs.Laws like those already passed in Republican-controlled states like Georgia and Iowa, no matter their stated intent, will be used as a weapon of intimidation aimed at the people, many of them volunteers, charged with running fair elections at the local and state levels. By subjecting them to invasive, politically motivated control by a state legislative majority, these provisions shift the last word in elections from the pros to the pols. This is a serious attack on the crucial norm that our elections should be run on a professional, nonpartisan basis — and it is deeply wrong.It is so wrong that having once worked together across the partisan divide as co-chairs of the 2013-14 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, we have decided to come together again to mobilize the defense of election officials who may come under siege from these new laws.Bear in mind that this is happening after the 2020 election, run in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, went off much better than expected. Voter turnout was the highest since 1900. A senior official in the Trump administration pronounced it the “most secure election in American history,” with “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.” Multiple recounts, contests and court cases brought by former President Donald Trump and his allies failed to persuade any courts or state officials to overturn the results of any election.The new laws establish civil penalties for technical infractions and subject officials to threats of suspension and even criminal prosecution. Iowa state election officials are now subject to fines of $10,000 and suspension for any actions that “hinder or disregard the object of the law.” They are also subject to criminal penalties when seeking to address disruptive conduct by partisan poll watchers. In Georgia, an election official threatened with suspension may appeal, but the law restricts state-financed support for the individual’s legal defense. The Georgia secretary of state, the chief election official, has been removed from the chairmanship of the State Elections Board, demoted to nonvoting ex officio status.Other states are considering laws containing similar threats to the impartial administration of elections. It can be no surprise that officials around the country are also experiencing threats and harassment ranging from physical confrontation to social media postings of personal information from their Facebook pages. And this dangerous behavior is spreading throughout the electoral process. Last month, election officials in Anchorage, Alaska, issued a report describing the “unprecedented harassment of election officials” during the conduct of a mayoral runoff election.The partisan efforts to control election outcomes will result in the corruption of our system of government, which is rooted in fair, free elections. We say this as longtime election lawyers from opposing political parties. In jointly leading the presidential commission, we worked with numerous local and state elections officials. We saw firsthand the dedication and professionalism they brought to their jobs. They work hard with inadequate resources and are rarely praised for what goes well and are quickly blamed for what goes wrong.In 2020, after the pandemic struck, these officials performed the near-impossible task of locating replacements for thousands of poll workers, reconfiguring polling places to offer safe voting spaces for voters and poll workers and ramping up effective mail voting where allowed under state law.Now their nonpartisan performance of their duties is under attack — even to the point of being criminalized. So we are committed to providing these officials a defense against these attacks and threats by recruiting lawyers around the country, Democrats and Republicans, to establish a network that would provide free legal support to election officials who face threats, fines or suspensions for doing their jobs. This national network will monitor new threats as they develop and publicly report on what it learns.The defense of the electoral process is not a partisan cause, even where there may be reasonable disagreements between the parties about specific voting rules and procedures. The presidential commission we led concluded that “election administration is public administration” and that whenever possible, “the responsible department or agency in every state should have on staff individuals who are chosen and serve solely on the basis of their experience and expertise.” To serve voters, those officials would require independence from partisan political pressures, threats and retaliatory attacks.These state laws, and the blind rage against our election officials that they encourage or reinforce, will corrode our electoral systems and democracy. They will add to the recent lamentable trend of experienced officials’ retiring from their active and vitally needed service — clearing the way for others less qualified and more easily managed by partisans. Early surveys show that in our nation’s larger jurisdictions, up to a quarter of experienced election officials are planning to leave their jobs. A primary reason they cite: “the political environment.”No requirement of our electoral process — of our democracy — is more critical than the commitment to nonpartisanship in the administration of our system for casting and counting of ballots now being degraded by these state laws. This challenge must be strongly and forcefully met in every possible way by Democrats and Republicans alike.Bob Bauer, a former senior adviser to the Biden campaign, is a professor at New York University School of Law and a co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” Ben Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years representing Republican candidates and parties.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 Iowa Has Become Such a Heartbreaker for Democrats

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      BURLINGTON, Iowa — Tom Courtney and Terry Davis are former factory workers in Des Moines County along the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa, two men of similar age who skipped college but thrived in a community where blue-collar jobs used to be an engine of upward mobility.In 2008, Mr. Courtney’s daughter Shawna married Mr. Davis’s son Shannon. They celebrated at a rehearsal dinner at the Drake, a steak restaurant on the riverfront in Burlington. The two men are grandparents to Shawna’s daughters from her first marriage, and they occasionally met on the sidelines of Little League games.But as economic decline and social malaise overtook Des Moines County, and Donald J. Trump was embraced by many as an answer, the two men moved in opposite directions. Today they rarely speak. Mr. Davis has become the chairman of the county Republican Party. Mr. Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. He faced an opponent recruited by Mr. Davis.“This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” Mr. Davis said.Mr. Courtney, who expected a close race, was stunned by the depth of his loss on election night. “As I looked around the state, there were lots of people like me,” he said.“Iowans have changed.”For decades, this state was a reliable wind vane of American politics. In six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, its voters never deviated by more than one percentage point from the national results.Then in 2016, Mr. Trump pulled Iowa more sharply to the right than any state in the country. The trend continued in 2020, when he ran up wider margins against President Biden than he had against Hillary Clinton in most Iowa counties.Some Democrats believe there are pathways to winning back the working-class voters the party has lost here and in places like it. They point to Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the subject of tense negotiations in Washington, which would bring a surge of spending on roads, bridges, child care and clean energy. In Iowa, there are more structurally deficient bridges than any state in the country. Yet, few local Democrats have such high hopes for a political realignment. “There is no short-term elixir,” said Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist in the state.Tom Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in Iowa in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. Soon after the polls closed, he knew he had no chance. “Iowans have changed,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe 2020 carnage for Iowa Democrats was wide and deep. The party lost a Senate race, gave up two congressional seats and lost half a dozen seats in the state legislature. Unified Republican rule in state government has led Gov. Kim Reynolds to sign permissive gun laws and new restrictions on voting this year, and lawmakers are moving to add a constitutional ban on abortion.Many Democrats now believe that Iowa is all but lost to the party, and that it is time to let go, a view driving a fierce debate over whether to drop the state’s presidential caucuses from their leadoff role in 2024 and beyond. Iowa is small and unrepresentative, more than 90 percent white, and the 2020 election showed that Democrats’ future is in the Sun Belt, with its racially diverse electorate and college-educated suburbanites.Other party strategists are quick to note that Mr. Biden barely won his two Sun Belt pickup states last year, Georgia and Arizona, and that the party can’t afford to bleed more of its traditional voters while making only tenuous inroads with a new constituency.What’s the matter with Iowa, and by extension much of the northern Midwest, for Democrats? Many officials say the party’s cataclysmic losses stem from the erosion in quality of life in rural places like Des Moines County and small cities like Burlington, which are a microcosm for a hollowing out that has led to sweeping political realignments in parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.Schools have closed, rural hospitals are cutting all but bare-bones care, and young people with college degrees have fled for opportunities in Des Moines or Chicago. Employers have backfilled jobs with immigrants, often after weakening unions and cutting pay.“There’s just a discontent, an unhappiness here seeing communities shrink,” said Patty Judge, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Iowa. “That makes people very vulnerable to a quick fix. Donald Trump offered that: ‘Let’s make America great again, you’ve lost your voice, let’s have a voice again.’ People have bought into that.”Angela Pforts at her shop in Burlington, Barber and Style. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney, who is one of eight children of a farm couple he called “strong Roosevelt Democrats,” said that most of his nieces and nephews were “Trumpers,” which confounds him. “They’re not millionaires, most of the family works for wages,” he said. “I don’t understand them.”Mr. Davis’s 95-year-old father is a Democrat. He told his son he always votes for who he thinks will do the best job. “I said, ‘Dad, have you ever voted for a Republican?’” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said, ‘Hell no!’”According to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency, 1,700 jobs were shed statewide in 2019 outside Iowa’s major cities. It was the third loss in four years, the agency said, “and highlights a trend that is not uncommon in most of the country.”On top of economic factors, other forces forged the Trump coalition in Iowa, as they did elsewhere in places dominated by the white working class: a resentment of immigrants and people of color, and a narrowing of information sources that has pushed conservatives to radio and social media channels where lies and conspiracy theories flourish.A postal carrier in downtown Burlington. There are embers of a downtown revival, but most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘Those were my voters’On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Courtney, 73, steered his white S.U.V. around Burlington, a riverfront city with a population of 25,600, which is down by 3.5 percent since 2010. A slender figure with a mustache, silver hair and a soft-pitched voice, Mr. Courtney joined the Air Force out of high school and returned home to work at a Case backhoe plant in Burlington. He rose to become the leader of the union bargaining team before he retired and was elected to the State Senate in 2002.“When I worked there and was bargaining chair, we had 2,300 rank-and-file members,” he said as he drove near the Case plant beside the pewter-colored Mississippi. Today the shop floor is down to 350 workers.“Those were my voters,” he said, passing a nearly empty employee parking lot and a shuttered bar that was once crowded at shift changes. “The last five or six years I worked there, it was nothing to make $70,000 a year. Cars and boats — everybody had all that kind of stuff.” Today, starting wages are about $17 an hour. Burlington rose as a railroad and manufacturing center, and the stone mansions of its 19th-century barons still stand on a bluff above the river. The population peaked around 1970. Although there are embers of a downtown renewal, including a yoga studio and a brew pub, Jefferson Street, the main thoroughfare, was largely deserted on a recent weekday. Most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns that are themselves losing their economic cores.The visitor’s entrance at the Case factory in Burlington, Iowa. Case’s backhoe plant used to have more than 3,000 employees. Now it has about 350.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney harks back to a golden era for local Democrats. Des Moines County — not to be confused with the state’s capital city — voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 10 straight elections before 2016, when Mr. Trump flipped it. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Courtney, who was the majority whip in the State Senate, escorted Mr. Biden, then embarking on his second bid for the presidency, to an interview with editors of The Hawk Eye. In the middle of it, Mr. Courtney’s cellphone buzzed: It was Bill Clinton, pestering him to endorse the former president’s wife. (Mr. Courtney remained neutral.)Mr. Courtney grew up in the rural town of Wapello, 25 miles north of Burlington. He recalled how in 2018 he knocked on doors there for Democrats. “I’d go into neighborhoods that when I was a kid were nice middle-income neighborhoods with nice homes,” he said. “Now today there’s old cars in the yards, there’s trash everywhere. People come to the doors who are obviously poor. Those are Trump people. We’re not reaching those people.”He could not think of a single new factory that opened in Burlington during the Trump years. To Democrats, the fact that Iowans did not punish Mr. Trump in November for failing to bring a renewal of blue-collar jobs speaks to the power of perception over reality.“It’s just this constant slide and they don’t feel like anybody’s doing anything for them, but they believe that Trump was trying,” said Mr. Link, the Democratic strategist. “More than anything, Trump resonated with them in that he was indignant and angry about the status quo, and angry about elites. They’re not getting that same perception from Democrats.”High school students hanging out in the parking lot of the abandoned Shopko in Burlington. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesRepublicans on the riseIn many ways, Mr. Davis, 72, is the obverse of Mr. Courtney. Although he, too, started as a blue-collar worker, an electrician for railroads, Mr. Davis climbed the ranks of management. By the early 2000s he was the superintendent of a Burlington Northern locomotive plant. When the railroad shut down the operation, idling hundreds of union workers in Burlington, Mr. Davis helped with the downsizing. He took early retirement.Mr. Davis had promised his own driving tour of Burlington, but instead sat in his double-cab pickup with a reporter for two hours in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods. He wore khaki work pants and a black golf pullover. He spoke in a forceful, folksy voice.Once a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton, Mr. Davis said he became a Republican because he disagreed with Democrats on abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as what he called handouts to the undeserving.He recalled chatting at a railroad reunion with one of his former electricians who had taken a job at Case. The man told him that he, and many other union workers at the plant, had voted for Mr. Trump.Mr. Davis recalled him saying: “We pay 140 bucks a month to the union, every one of us does. They take that money and give it to a political party that gives it to people that don’t work. The more we thought about it, we thought, ‘I ain’t doing that anymore.’”The electrician added, “You’d be surprised how many of those people voted for Trump.”Terry Davis, the chair of the Des Moines County Republican Party. “This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesLike Mr. Courtney, Mr. Davis expressed some puzzlement about why Mr. Trump had done so well despite not delivering on his promise to bring back blue-collar jobs. “It’s kind of hard to figure,” he said. Mr. Davis was born in Missouri and worked in Kansas City before being transferred to Burlington. He agreed that the quality of life in town was lackluster. “My wife — don’t take this wrong — she’s not going to buy clothes here,’’ he said. “We go to the Quad Cities or Iowa City or Chicago or St. Louis to shop and mainly to kind of get out of town.”He readily acknowledged that Mr. Biden had won the presidency. But he also said that most Republicans in Des Moines County probably believed Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election.Democrats say that conservative talk radio, even more than Fox News, has spread conspiracy theories and disinformation to Republican voters. In places like Des Moines County, people now must drive far to see a dentist or buy a pair of shoes, and all of those hours in their cars have increased the influence of right-wing radio.“People are driving all the time, they’ve got their radios on all the time,” Mr. Courtney said. He mentioned a local station, KBUR, “which used to be a nice friendly station.” It was known for a show “to auction things off” and another that was a call-in “question and answer thing,” Mr. Courtney said. Now it broadcasts Sean Hannity for hours each afternoon.Mr. Courtney passed a shuttered middle school. “It’s just hard for me to believe that 15 years ago, we had three big thriving middle schools,” he said, “and today we’re down to nothing like that.”“Folks have left town,” he added.The now-closed Siemens factory in Burlington.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘There was a racism card’But Mr. Courtney acknowledged another reason, too: white flight to schools in West Burlington. “People will tell you it’s not, but there’s no question it is,” he said. Burlington’s population is 8.2 percent Black. Public school enrollment is 19 percent Black.Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Mr. Trump flipped it. It is one of 31 Obama-Trump pivot counties in Iowa, which has more of them than any other state in the country. A study by sociologists at Iowa State University in 2019 concluded that the state’s hard pivot from Mr. Obama was not because of “economic distress.” It pointed instead to Mr. Trump’s “nativist narrative about ‘taking back America.’”The study found that the counties that gyrated most sharply away from Mr. Obama were almost entirely white.Mr. Courtney does not dispute that racism drove part of that swing, and he has his own theory of why some of the same voters had earlier backed Mr. Obama.“I think they wanted to say they voted for a Black man,” he said. After two terms with Mr. Obama in office, however, Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on Mexicans, Muslims and other racial and religious minorities gave people permission to indulge inner grievances, Mr. Courtney said. “There was a racism card that came out and people said, ‘I’m sick of this Black guy, I want to go back to a white guy,’” he said. “I hesitate to say that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’’Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Donald J. Trump flipped it in 2016.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe road back in Iowa for Democrats is long and complicated. The state once prided itself on having more registered independents than Republicans or Democrats, but since 2018, in keeping with national trends toward polarization, independents now rank behind both major parties. Democrats have suffered a net loss of 120,000 registered voters compared with Republicans. Those votes alone are 10 percent of turnout in nonpresidential years.The party’s setbacks have reheated the debate over whether to cancel Iowa’s caucuses as the leadoff nominating contest. Many national Democratic officials argue that a larger and more diverse state should go before either Iowa or New Hampshire. Even some Iowa Democratic strategists have supported killing off the caucuses to focus on local issues and reduce the influence of the national progressive wing of the party.Mr. Courtney said the voters he knew didn’t care much about cultural issues that Democrats elsewhere dwell on, like gun control and immigration. “All they really want to know is where can they get a good job that pays the most money so that they can take care of their family, and we’re not touching on that,” he said.He has cautious hopes for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposal. “If we can put people to work making good money building that stuff, it could be like the W.P.A. back in the day,” said Mr. Courtney, whose parents worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.Even Mr. Davis, the G.O.P. chair, conceded that a robust infrastructure plan that brought jobs to Burlington would make it harder for Republicans to continue their winning streak.“It probably will be tough in four years if things are good,” he said. More