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      America’s Toxic Gun Culture Is Invading Our Politics

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      This editorial is the fifth in a series, “The Danger Within,” urging readers to understand the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions. Read more about the series in a note from Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times Opinion editor.

      A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.” More

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      This Case Should Never Have Made It to the Supreme Court

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      “The most important case for American democracy” in the nation’s history — that’s how the former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig described Moore v. Harper, an extraordinary lawsuit that the Supreme Court considered in oral arguments Wednesday morning. Judge Luttig, a conservative and a widely respected legal thinker, is not one for overstatement. Yet most Americans aren’t paying attention to the case because it involves some confusing terminology and an arcane legal theory. It is essential that people understand just how dangerous this case is to the fundamental structure of American government, and that enough justices see the legal fallacies and protect our democracy.First, the back story on the case: In 2021, North Carolina lawmakers redrew their congressional maps. The state had 13 districts at the time, and its voters were more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But the Republicans who are in control of North Carolina’s legislature didn’t want fair maps; they wanted power. In one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the nation, they drew 10 seats intended to favor themselves.The North Carolina courts were not amused. A panel of three trial judges found that the 2021 maps were “intentionally and carefully designed to maximize Republican advantage” — so much so that Republicans could win legislative majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. The State Supreme Court struck down the maps, finding they violated the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free elections, free speech, free assembly and equal protection.That should have been the end of it: A state court applying the state Constitution to strike down a state law. But North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers appealed, arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not give state courts authority to rule on their congressional maps — even though the legislature had passed a law authorizing the courts to review redistricting plans like these. Instead, the lawmakers are relying on an untested theory that asserts that state legislatures enjoy nearly unlimited power to set and change rules for federal elections.In 2000 the chief justice at the time, William H. Rehnquist, proposed the idea in his concurring opinion on Bush v. Gore, and the independent state legislature theory has been floating around the fringes of right-wing legal circles ever since.To be clear, this is a political power grab in the guise of a legal theory. Republicans are trying to see if they can turn state legislatures — 30 of which are controlled by Republicans — into omnipotent, unaccountable election bosses with the help of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The theory has no basis in law, history or precedent. The idea that state lawmakers exist free of any constraints imposed by their constitution and state courts makes a mockery of the separation of powers, which is foundational to the American system of government. By the North Carolina lawmakers’ logic, they possess infinite power to gerrymander districts and otherwise control federal elections. It is a Constitution-free zone where no one else in the state — not the governor, not the courts, not the voters through ballot initiatives — has any say.On Wednesday morning, Justice Elena Kagan rejected the theory out of hand, saying it “gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”In practice, the theory that the petitioners in the case are seeking to use would turn hundreds of state constitutional provisions into dead letters in federal elections. For instance, 48 states affirmatively guarantee a right to vote in their constitutions. (The federal Constitution still does not.) Most state constitutions guarantee free, fair, equal or open elections. Even the secret ballot — so fundamental to American democracy — is a creature of state constitutions. If the justices accept the most aggressive version of the independent state legislature theory that the petitioners want them to and even if they accept a weaker version, provisions like these could become invalid overnight, because the theory holds that state constitutions have no authority to impose any regulations on federal elections. (The Constitution and federal law remain supreme, so challenges to state legislative actions could still be brought in federal courts.)Some of the justices insist that they don’t — they can’t — pay attention to the real-world outcomes of their rulings. They’re just interpreting law. By that logic, this case should be rejected on its merits.First, the theory is based on bad legal interpretation. The Constitution uses the word “legislature” in describing who has the power to regulate federal elections. Because of this word, the theory’s supporters claim, state legislatures have nearly unlimited power in that realm. But as Judge Luttig has noted, the theory has “literally no support” in the Constitution. To the contrary, the framers who wrote the Constitution were concerned that state legislatures had too much power, not too little. The text they wrote makes many references to the powers of those legislatures and of Congress, but it never says or implies that they are immune to review by the judicial branch.Second, the theory is based on bad history. The best evidence its supporters offer is a two-century-old document that has long been known to be fraudulent. Written in 1818 by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, a founding father, it is purported to be a replica of the plan for government that he introduced three decades earlier at the Constitutional Convention. But what he submitted in 1818 was not the real deal. James Madison suspected this immediately, as have virtually all historians to examine it in the years since.When the theory’s supporters sought to claim that the practices of early state legislatures proved that their side should win, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded, “Yes. If you rewrite history, it’s very easy to do.”Third, if the Supreme Court accepts this theory, it will create a logistical nightmare in states across the country. That’s because the theory applies only to federal elections, not state elections, in which state courts unquestionably have a role to play. As a result, there would be two sets of rules operating at the same time, one for federal elections and one for state elections. Chaos and confusion would reign.Most important, the Supreme Court has already implicitly rejected the theory many times over. In precedents stretching back decades, the court has made clear that state courts have the power to set limits on what lawmakers can do when it comes to federal elections. As recently as 2019, the court rejected a plea for it to stop the extreme partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and other states. In doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that this is exactly the role that state courts should play. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” he wrote.At Wednesday’s argument, Justice Samuel Alito appeared to reject that premise. He accused elected state court judges, like those in North Carolina, of being political actors themselves. “There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of this decision on democracy,” said Justice Alito, who has given openly partisan speeches to outside groups and voted consistently in alignment with Republican policy priorities. “Do you think that it furthers democracy to transfer the political controversy about districting from the legislature to elected supreme courts where the candidates are permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting?”Another way to appreciate the absurdity of the theory is to consider who has come out for and against it. On one side, a large and bipartisan group of judges, government officials, former lawmakers, leading historians and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have rejected it. These include a co-founder of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, the chief justices of all 50 states, multiple Republican former governors and secretaries of state and civil rights organizations.On the other side, you will find a far smaller and less bipartisan cast of characters — among them, the Republican National Committee, a group of Republican state attorneys general and John Eastman, a former law professor last seen helping Donald Trump plan an illegal and unconstitutional coup to stay in office (an act that has exposed Mr. Eastman to a real risk of criminal prosecution).That so many justices would take the theory seriously is bad enough. Three of them — Justices Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — appear to favor the independent state legislature theory, as they suggested in an opinion in an earlier stage of the case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has also indicated his openness to it. It’s worse when the public trust in and approval of the court have fallen to historic lows, thanks largely to aggressively partisan recent opinions, as this board has argued.There’s an old saying that only close cases make it to the Supreme Court. If they weren’t close, they would have been resolved in the lower courts. But Moore v. Harper isn’t a remotely close case. A ruling for the North Carolina lawmakers would flood the federal courts with election litigation that normally plays out in the states, upending the balance of federalism that defines American government. That’s not a conservative result; it’s a dangerously radical one.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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      Losing Another Runoff, Georgia Republicans Weigh an Election Shake-Up

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      Some in the party said that additional changes to election rules were likely, after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory put a new spotlight on a major 2021 voting law passed by the G.O.P.As Georgia Democrats won their third Senate runoff election in two years, the party proved it had crafted an effective strategy for triumphing in a decades-old system created to sustain segregationist power and for overcoming an array of efforts to making voting more difficult. Republicans, meanwhile, were quietly cursing the runoff system, or at least their strategy for winning under a state law they wrote after losing the last election.The various post-mortems over how Georgia’s runoff rules shaped the state’s Senate outcome on Tuesday put a spotlight on a major voting law passed by the Republican-led General Assembly last year. Some Republicans acknowledged that their efforts to limit in-person early voting days might have backfired, while others encouraged lawmakers to consider additional restrictions next year.With Georgia poised to remain a critical political battleground and with Republicans holding gerrymandered majorities in both chambers of its state legislature, some in the party said that additional election law changes were likely.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who oversees the state’s voting procedures, said in an interview on Wednesday that there would be a debate next year over potential adjustments to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory.Mr. Raffensperger said he would present three proposals to lawmakers. They include forcing large counties to open more early-voting locations to reduce hourslong lines like the ones that formed at many Metro Atlanta sites last week; lowering the threshold candidates must achieve to avoid a runoff to 45 percent from 50 percent; and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to come back to the polls again after the general election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there would be a debate next year over potential changes to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures. Audra Melton for The New York Times“The elected legislators need to have information so they can look at all the different options that they have and really see what they’re comfortable with,” Mr. Raffensperger said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Republicans are not the only ones hoping to end Georgia’s requirement that a runoff take place if no candidate in a general election wins at least half of the vote. Democrats have long viewed the practice — a vestige of racist 1960s efforts to keep Black candidates or candidates backed by Black voters from taking office — as an additional hurdle for working-class people of color.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative from Atlanta who was arrested last year after knocking on the closed door behind which Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s voting law, said that last Friday, she had driven for 30 minutes and then waited an hour to vote early in person.Runoffs, Ms. Cannon said, “are not to the benefit of working families.” She added, “It’s very difficult to, within four weeks of taking time off to vote, have to do that again.”Since the law was passed in 2021, Georgia Democrats have criticized the new barriers to voting that it set in place. During the runoff, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, spared no opportunity to highlight the law and characterize it as the latest in a decades-long push to minimize the influence of Black voters and anyone who opposed Republican control.His stump speech featured a regular refrain reminding supporters that Georgia Republicans had sought to prohibit counties from opening for in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, after the state’s Republican attorney general and Mr. Raffensperger concluded that doing so was in violation of state law. Mr. Warnock and Democrats sued, and a state judge agreed to allow for the Saturday voting.“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place.”Because of the new voting law, Tuesday’s runoff was held four weeks after the general election, rather than the nine-week runoff period under which Georgia’s high-profile Senate races in early 2021 unfolded. The nine-week runoff period that year had been ordered by a federal judge; runoff contests for state elections have always operated on a four-week timeline.Tuesday’s contest also included fewer days to vote and new restrictions on absentee ballots — and it ended with virtually the same result.The 3.5 million votes cast in Tuesday’s runoff amounted to 90 percent of the general-election turnout in the Senate race on Nov. 8. In 2021, when Mr. Warnock first won his seat, runoff turnout was 91 percent of the general-election turnout, which was higher because 2020 was a presidential year. The outpouring of voters in both years was orders of magnitude higher than in any prior Georgia runoff.A get-out-the-vote event on Tuesday near a polling site in Atlanta.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesThe booming turnout this year has led Georgia Republicans to insist that their voting law was not suppressive.“We had what I think was a nearly flawless execution of two huge elections in terms of turnout and in terms of accuracy and integrity,” said Butch Miller, a Republican leader in the Georgia State Senate who helped write the voting law and is leaving the chamber after losing the primary for lieutenant governor.Mr. Miller said he “didn’t care for” the way that some counties, including large Democratic-leaning ones in the Atlanta area, had opened for extra early voting days, a sentiment echoed by other Georgia Republicans after Mr. Warnock’s victory.The new law evidently had an effect on how Georgians voted. In the January 2021 runoffs, 24 percent of the vote came via absentee ballots that had been mailed to voters. On Tuesday, just 5 percent of the vote came through the mail, a result of restrictions on who could receive an absentee ballot and the shortening of the runoff period, which made it more difficult to request and receive a ballot within the allotted time period.The 2021 law also cut the amount of in-person early voting days to a minimum of five, but allowed Georgia’s counties to add more days before the state’s mandated early-voting week. The Warnock campaign pressed the state’s Democratic counties to open for early voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, giving voters who were more likely to vote for the senator extra days to do so.But then Mr. Raffensperger sought to enforce a state law that forbids in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, leading to Mr. Warnock’s successful lawsuit.Jason Shepherd, a former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said the push to stop Saturday voting “wasn’t worth the fight” and served to energize Democratic voters.“You can be completely right and it can send the wrong message, because it plays into the Democrats’ narrative about voter suppression,” Mr. Shepherd said on Wednesday.In the end, 28 of Georgia’s 159 counties opened for extra in-person early voting days. Of those, 17 ended up backing Mr. Warnock and 11 went for his Republican challenger, the former football star Herschel Walker.Compared with weekdays, when the entire state was open for in-person early voting, relatively few votes were cast on the extra voting days. Just over 167,000 votes in all were cast combined on the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, along with the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday, when just two counties opened for voting. By contrast, 285,000 to 352,000 votes were cast statewide on each day of weekday early voting.But voters who cast ballots during those extra in-person early voting days were likely to tilt heavily toward Mr. Warnock.The largest 14 counties to back Mr. Warnock — including seven in metropolitan Atlanta — all opened for extra early voting days. Just two of the 11 largest counties to back Mr. Walker opened for extra in-person early voting days.Maya King More

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      A Times Square Hotel Was Set To Become Affordable Housing. Then the Union Stepped In.

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      At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Paramount Hotel, sitting empty in Times Square, was on the verge of turning into a residential building, offering a rare opportunity to create affordable housing in Midtown Manhattan.A nonprofit was planning to convert the hotel into apartments for people facing homelessness. But after 18 months of negotiations, the plan collapsed this year when a powerful political player intervened: the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the union representing about 35,000 hotel and casino workers in New York and New Jersey.The union blocked the conversion, which threatened the jobs of the workers waiting to return to the 597-room hotel. Under the union’s contract, the deal could not proceed without its consent.The Paramount reopened as a hotel this fall, an illustration of how the union has wielded its outsized political power to steer economic development projects at a critical juncture in New York City’s recovery.The pandemic presented a devastating crisis for the city’s hotel workers, more than 90 percent of whom were laid off. But as the union has fought harder to protect them, its political muscle has also drawn the ire of hotel operators and housing advocates, who say the group’s interests can be at odds with broader economic goals.After the conversion failed, the Paramount reopened this fall, saving about 160 hotel jobs.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesThe union’s impact ripples throughout New York. It can block or facilitate the conversion of large hotels into housing and homeless shelters, a consequential role in a year when homelessness in the city reached a record high of about 64,000 people. The union pushed for the accelerated expansion of casinos, which could transform the neighborhoods of the winning bids. And it was a driving force behind a new hotel regulation that some officials warned could cost the city billions in tax revenue.The union’s influence stems from its loyal membership and its deep pockets, both of which it puts to strategic use in local elections. Its political strength has resulted in more leverage over hotel owners, leading to stronger contracts and higher wages for workers.In this year’s New York governor’s race, the union was the first major labor group to endorse Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose winning campaign received about $440,000 from groups tied to the union. The group was also an early backer of Eric Adams, whose mayoral campaign was managed by the union’s former political director.“H.T.C. is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers,” said Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist, referring to the union’s more common name, the Hotel Trades Council. “They’re just operating on a higher playing field.”Origins of the union’s powerHistorically, the Hotel Trades Council avoided politics until its former president, Peter Ward, started a political operation around 2008.Mr. Ward and the union’s first political director, Neal Kwatra, built a database with information about where members lived and worshiped and the languages they spoke. This allowed the union to quickly deploy Spanish speakers, for instance, to canvass in Latino neighborhoods during campaigns.Candidates noticed when the Hotel Trades Council, a relatively small union, would send 100 members to a campaign event while larger unions would send only a handful, Mr. Kwatra said.The Aftermath of New York’s Midterms ElectionsWho’s at Fault?: As New York Democrats sought to spread blame for their dismal performance in the elections, a fair share was directed toward Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.Hochul’s New Challenges: Gov. Kathy Hochul managed to repel late momentum by Representative Lee Zeldin. Now she must govern over a fractured New York electorate.How Maloney Lost: Democrats won tough races across the country. But Sean Patrick Maloney, a party leader and a five-term congressman, lost his Hudson Valley seat. What happened?A Weak Link: If Democrats lose the House, they may have New York to blame. Republicans flipped four seats in the state, the most of any state in the country.To recruit members into political activism, the union hosted seminars explaining why success in local elections would lead to better job protections. Afterward, members voted to increase their dues to support the union’s political fights, building a robust fund for campaign contributions. Rich Maroko, the president of the Hotel Trades Council, said the union’s “first, second and third priority is our members.”Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesThe Hotel Trades Council ranked among the top independent spenders in the election cycle of 2017, when all 26 City Council candidates endorsed by the union won. Some of these officials ended up on powerful land use and zoning committees, giving the union influence over important building decisions in New York.In a huge victory before the pandemic, the union fought the expansion of Airbnb in New York, successfully pressuring local officials to curb short-term rentals, which the union saw as a threat to hotel jobs.Mr. Ward stepped down in August 2020, making way for the union’s current president and longtime general counsel, Rich Maroko, who earned about $394,000 last year in total salary, according to federal filings.The union’s sway has continued to grow. Some hotel owners, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say they are fearful of crossing the union, which has a $22 million fund that can compensate workers during strikes. In an interview, Mr. Maroko pointed out that the hotel industry is particularly vulnerable to boycotts.“The customer has to walk through that picket line,” he said, “and then they have to try to get a good night’s rest while there are people chanting in front of the building.”The Hotel Trades Council’s contract is the strongest for hotel workers nationwide, labor experts say. In New York City, where the minimum wage is $15 an hour, housekeepers in the union earn about $37 an hour. Union members pay almost nothing for health care and can get up to 45 paid days off.During the pandemic, the union negotiated health care benefits for laid-off workers, suspended their union dues and offered $1,000 payments to the landlords of workers facing eviction.Along the way, the union has become known for its take-no-prisoners approach to politics, willing to ally with progressives or conservatives, with developers or nonprofits — as long as they support the union’s goals.“There may be no union which has more discrete asks of city government on behalf of its members,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, who was endorsed by the union. “You can’t placate them with nice rhetoric. To be a partner with them, you really need to produce.”Political wins during the pandemicLast year, the union scored a victory it had sought for more than a decade, successfully lobbying city officials to require a special permit for any new hotel in New York City.The new regulation allows community members, including the union, to have a bigger say over which hotels get built. The move is expected to restrict the construction of new hotels, which are often nonunion and long viewed by the Hotel Trades Council as the biggest threat to its bargaining power.Budget officials warned that the regulation could cost the city billions in future tax revenue, and some developers and city planners criticized the rule as a political payback from Mayor Bill de Blasio in the waning months of his administration after the union endorsed his short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. Mr. de Blasio, who did not return a request for comment, has previously denied that the union influenced his position.In the next mayoral race, the union made a big early bet on Mr. Adams, spending more than $1 million from its super PAC to boost his campaign. Jason Ortiz, a consultant for the union, helped to manage a separate super PAC to support Mr. Adams that spent $6.9 million.Mr. Ortiz is now a lobbyist for the super PAC’s biggest contributor, Steven Cohen, the New York Mets owner who is expected to bid for a casino in Queens.The union, which shares many of the same lobbyists and consultants with gambling companies, will play an important role in the upcoming application process for casino licenses in the New York City area. State law requires that casinos enter “labor peace” agreements, effectively ensuring that new casino workers will be part of the union.A new threatDuring the pandemic, as tourism stalled, there was growing pressure to repurpose vacant hotels. With New York rents soaring, advocates pointed to hotel conversions as a relatively fast and inexpensive way to house low-income residents.But the union’s contract, which covers about 70 percent of hotels citywide, presented an obstacle. A hotel that is sold or repurposed must maintain the contract and keep its workers — or offer a severance package that often exceeds tens of millions of dollars, a steep cost that only for-profit developers can typically afford.A plan to convert a Best Western hotel in Chinatown into a homeless drop-in center was scuttled by city officials after the effort failed to win the union’s endorsement.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesEarlier this year, Housing Works, a social services nonprofit, planned to convert a vacant Best Western hotel in Chinatown into a homeless drop-in center. There was opposition from Chinatown residents, but city officials signed off on the deal. It was set to open in May.Right before then, however, the Hotel Trades Council learned of the plan and argued that it violated the union’s contract.Soon, the same city officials withdrew their support, said Charles King, the chief executive of Housing Works. He said they told him that Mr. Adams would not approve it without the union’s endorsement. Mr. King was stunned.“Clearly they have the mayor’s ear,” Mr. King said, “and he gave them the power to veto.”A spokesman for the mayor said the city “decided to re-evaluate this shelter capacity to an area with fewer services,” declining to comment on whether the union influenced the decision.The Chinatown hotel remains empty.An obstacle to affordable housingIn the spring of 2021, state legislators rallied behind a bill that would incentivize nonprofit groups to buy distressed hotels and convert them into affordable housing. They sought the Hotel Trades Council’s input early, recognizing that the group had the clout to push then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to oppose the bill, according to people involved in the discussions.The union supported the conversions, but only if they targeted nonunion hotels outside Manhattan. Housing groups have said that, unlike large Midtown hotels, nonunion hotels are not ideal candidates for housing because they tend to be much smaller and inaccessible to public transit.As a compromise to gain the union’s support, the bill allowed the Hotel Trades Council to veto any conversions of union hotels.“While we certainly support the vision of finding shelters and supportive housing for the people that need it,” Mr. Maroko said, “our first, second and third priority is our members.”One housing advocate involved in the legislation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she warned elected officials that the veto provision would diminish the law’s effectiveness.The law, which passed last year, came with $200 million for conversions. Housing experts criticized the legislation for not sufficiently loosening zoning restrictions, prompting another law this spring that made conversions easier.Still, no hotels have been converted under the new law.Now, with tourism rebounding, housing nonprofits say the window of opportunity has largely passed.“It’s not like hotel owners are clamoring to sell the way they were two years ago,” said Paul Woody, vice president of real estate at Project Renewal, a homeless services nonprofit.How the Paramount deal endedIn the fall of 2020, the owners of the Paramount Hotel began discussing a plan to sell the property at a discount to Breaking Ground, a nonprofit developer that wanted to turn it into rent-stabilized apartments for people facing homelessness.But as the deal neared the finish line, Breaking Ground failed to anticipate pushback from the Hotel Trades Council. In a series of meetings last year, the union said its obligation was to fight for every hotel job and it proposed a range of solutions, including keeping union employees as housekeepers for residents. Breaking Ground, however, said the cost was too high.The nonprofit even asked Mr. Ward, the union’s former president, to help facilitate the conversion. Mr. Ward said he agreed to call Mr. Maroko to gauge his interest in Breaking Ground’s severance offer.This spring, lobbying records show, union representatives met with Jessica Katz, Mr. Adams’s chief housing officer, and other officials about the Paramount. Soon after, Ms. Katz called Breaking Ground and said city officials would not be able to make the conversion happen, according to a person familiar with the conversation. A spokesman for the mayor said the city “cannot choose between creating the housing the city needs and bringing back our tourism economy,” declining to comment on whether the union swayed the decision on the Paramount.The failed conversion saved about 160 hotel jobs, and the Paramount reopened to guests in September.It was a relief for workers like Sheena Jobe-Davis, who lost her job there in March 2020 as a front-desk attendant. She temporarily worked at a nonunion Manhattan hotel, making $20 less per hour than at the Paramount. She was ecstatic to get her old job back.“It is something I prayed and prayed for daily,” she said. More

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      For Sunak, Like Biden, Dullness Could Be a Secret Weapon

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      For all their differences, President Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain share a challenge: operating in the wake of a larger-than-life predecessor. They have tactics in common, too.LONDON — For years, Boris Johnson and Donald J. Trump were viewed as populist twins — flamboyant, scandal-scarred, norm-busting figures, acting in a trans-Atlantic political drama. With both out of office, at least for now, a more timely and intriguing comparison is between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and President Biden.Though they differ by obvious metrics — young vs. old, conservative vs. liberal — Mr. Sunak and Mr. Biden are using strikingly similar methods to govern in the wake of their larger-than-life predecessors. Both have tried to let the steam out of their countries’ hothouse politics by making a virtue of being, well, a little boring.The similarities are more than stylistic: Both lead parties that are divided between centrist and more extreme forces, whether to the right, for Mr. Sunak, or the left, for the American president. And both are dogged by poor poll numbers, in part because of economic ills but also because their pragmatic, undramatic style can seem ill-suited to the polarized politics of post-Brexit Britain and post-Trump America.For Mr. Sunak, who took office in October amid an economic crisis and after months of political upheaval that left his Conservative Party exhausted and unpopular, Mr. Biden might offer a blueprint for political rehabilitation.Two years into his term, Mr. Biden has confounded the skeptics, with the Democratic Party performing unexpectedly well in the midterm elections, in defiance of historical trends that typically punish the party in power.“Boris and Trump were generalists, short on details and ideologically flexible, but the sheer force of their personality brought them to the top, and eventually led to their downfalls,” said Frank Luntz, an American political strategist and pollster who was a classmate of Mr. Johnson’s at Oxford University.“Rishi and Biden are the exact opposite,” Mr. Luntz continued. “Not particularly great communicators, quite often trapped in the weeds of details, but able to move their governments forward because of their detailed knowledge and experience.”President Biden and Jill Biden after returning from Camp David on Sunday.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesCircumstances forced both leaders to press for emergency legislation right off the bat: Mr. Biden, to cushion the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic; Mr. Sunak, to counter the disastrous foray into trickle-down tax policy engineered by his immediate predecessor, Liz Truss. That spooked financial markets, sent the British pound into a tailspin and drove up interest rates.After passing his Covid relief bill, Mr. Biden managed to push through ambitious legislation to combat climate change. With narrow majorities in the House and especially in the Senate, he had to fend off progressives in his party and win over centrists like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who held up that bill until he negotiated compromises with the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York.The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands after the midterm elections.A Defining Issue: The shape of Russia’s war in Ukraine — and its effects on global markets —  in the months and years to come could determine President Biden’s political fate.Beating the Odds: Mr. Biden had the best midterms of any president in 20 years, but he still faces the sobering reality of a Republican-controlled House for the next two years.2024 Questions: Mr. Biden feels buoyant after the better-than-expected midterms, but as he turns 80, he confronts a decision on whether to run again that has some Democrats uncomfortable.Legislative Agenda: The Times analyzed every detail of Mr. Biden’s major legislative victories and his foiled ambitions. Here’s what we found.Mr. Sunak, who has a more than 70-seat majority in Parliament, may not face as much legislative needle-threading in passing his package of tax increases and spending cuts. But he does have to contend with an increasingly unruly Tory Party, which is making it difficult for him to settle a trade dispute with the European Union over Northern Ireland, overhaul Britain’s cumbersome planning rules for home building, or even construct onshore windmills.“He’s being pushed around by various factions in the Tory Party,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the United States. “Biden, by contrast, is quite resolute about his moderate, centrist principles.”While Mr. Sunak’s allies make no explicit comparisons between him and Mr. Biden, several have claimed his quiet, unflashy competence is restoring stability after the political roller-coaster of the last three months. On returning to the cabinet as a senior minister, Michael Gove declared “boring is back,” and joked that it was the government’s “utter determination to try to be as dull as possible.”Asked in an interview whether the motif of Mr. Sunak’s leadership was that “boring is the new sexy,” Mark Harper, the transport secretary, smiled and replied: “What he’s about is a government that’s grown up, that grips the issues that people are concerned about and gets on with governing.”Mr. Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, returning to 10 Downing Street last month after visiting a food and drinks market promoting British small businesses.Pool photo by Toby MelvilleUnlike Mr. Biden, 80, whose aides still periodically find themselves having to clean up unguarded statements, Mr. Sunak, 42, rarely commits a gaffe. His cautious persona and stilted speaking style have drawn comparisons to John Major, who in 1990 succeeded a more forceful prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.Mr. Major’s electoral record was mixed: He surprised many by winning a modest majority of 21 in the general election in 1992. But that victory was followed swiftly by a financial crisis that sapped his reputation and paved the way for a landslide victory five years later by the Labour Party leader, Tony Blair.This time, the crisis struck before Mr. Sunak took office. But it leaves him with no more than two years to rescue his party before the next election, and he faces the headwinds of soaring inflation, rising interest rates, labor unrest and a recession. Depending on when Mr. Sunak chooses to call that vote, there is a chance that American voters could be electing a president around the same time.Will Mr. Biden be in that race? The chances of his running again rose after the midterms, not to mention the president’s proposal to rearrange the Democratic Party’s primary calendar, so that South Carolina, which resurrected his presidential fortunes in 2020, will now vote first, ahead of the Iowa caucus.There is no evidence that Mr. Biden and Mr. Sunak talked politics in their first face-to-face meeting as leaders at a summit in Indonesia last month. Indeed, given their disparity in age, background and politics, there is little indication they will develop the kind of rapport enjoyed by, say, Mr. Blair and President Bill Clinton. When the Tories elected Mr. Sunak as leader, Mr. Biden hailed it as a “groundbreaking milestone,” though he added, “As my brother would say, ‘Go figure.’”At the moment, the oddsmakers are betting against Mr. Sunak. There is even speculation that if the Conservatives get thrashed in local elections next May, his enemies might move against him and try to reinstall Mr. Johnson. But Mr. Sunak’s allies hope for a Biden-like surprise, which could give him a solid base for the next general election (it must take place by January 2025).Given Labour’s formidable lead in opinion polls — and a Labour leader, Keir Starmer, who rivals Mr. Sunak in competence over charisma — few analysts see a path for Mr. Sunak to a convincing victory. But some think the outcome could be much closer than some of Labour’s supporters now expect. For one thing, Mr. Sunak’s poll ratings exceed those of his battered party, which is the reverse of Mr. Biden and the Democrats before the midterm elections.“There is a big difference between what voters think of the Conservative Party and what voters think of Sunak,” said Peter Kellner, a polling expert. “The big question now is whether the Tory Party drags Sunak’s ratings down, or Sunak drags the Tory Party’s ratings up.”Those are the same questions handicappers were asking about Mr. Biden in the anxious days leading up to the midterms. If both he and Mr. Sunak are in still office in 2025, it will be proof that boring is not only back, but political gold. More

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      In New Law, Indonesia Criminalizes Sex Outside of Marriage

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      Parliament also approved a law that criminalizes criticism of the government, delivering a blow to the country’s progressive reputation.Indonesia has long been known as a widely tolerant nation at the forefront of establishing democratic reforms throughout Southeast Asia. That progressive reputation took a hit on Tuesday when Parliament cleared a sweeping overhaul of the country’s criminal code.According to the new rules, sex outside of marriage is now illegal in Indonesia, as is defamation of the president. The overhaul also sharply expanded laws against blasphemy in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Opponents said the rules posed significant risks to religious minorities by outlawing extramarital sex and tacitly targeting critics of Islam. Extramarital sex criminalization also targets the L.G.B.T. community, as gay marriage is illegal in Indonesia. The new laws could also curtail freedom of expression and assembly.The new laws are almost certain to revive a debate around democratic backsliding in the nation of 276 million. After the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, the country had prided itself as a thriving democracy. Most Indonesians held fairly relaxed views about homosexuality, which was never officially banned.But in recent years, conservative Islam has gained ground in the country, and now some fear its influence is growing, even as its ranks remain a minority in Parliament. In the lead-up to the next presidential election in 2024, few officials appear willing to upset the religious right, which helped paved the way for Tuesday’s overhaul of the criminal code.“It is a very significant encroachment on rights and liberties in Indonesia,” said Tim Lindsey, director of the Center for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne. Critics warned that the new rules, which also apply to foreigners, will make Indonesia less appealing to investors, tourists and students.Muhamad Isnur, chairman of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, said the laws run “contrary to international human rights norms. We are in a new paradigm,” he said.The bill was approved unanimously in Parliament on Tuesday. The government has tried for decades to overhaul the law but has never succeeded. In 2019, it tried to pass a similar draft law, but President Joko Widodo shelved it after tens of thousands of young people protested in the streets, arguing that the law threatened their civil liberties. This time, activists said they were blindsided when lawmakers suddenly announced on Nov. 30 that they were handing a draft to Parliament to ratify, giving the activists very little time to organize demonstrations.Indonesia officials said they had engaged in monthslong conversations with several human rights groups before submitting the new draft. The lawmakers said they added revisions based on feedback, such as stating that blasphemy does not only apply to religion but all belief systems. Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, Indonesia’s deputy minister of law and human rights, said that the government tried to accommodate as many parties as possible, but acknowledged that the overhaul “won’t satisfy everyone.”“If there are citizens who feel that their constitutional rights have been violated, the door of the constitutional court is wide open for that,” Mr. Edward told reporters last month. The laws, which are set to take effect after three years, will likely be challenged in the country’s Constitutional Court. On Tuesday, there were calls for protests outside Parliament. (The new rules state that people who demonstrate without a permit can also be penalized.)Officials say upgrading the existing criminal code, which dates back to 1918 when Indonesia was a Dutch colony, was long overdue. Among the raft of new laws, penalties around consensual sex outside marriage have drawn the most criticism. According to the revisions, unmarried couples who live together could be jailed for six months or face a maximum fine of 10 million rupiah ($710)..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Though the penalties apply to foreigners, the new law states that the police can only make an arrest after a report is filed by a close family member, such as a parent, spouse or child, making it extremely unlikely that foreigners would be prosecuted, Mr. Lindsey said. “But gay and lesbian Indonesians, who, of course, are couples and they can’t be married, they are completely exposed.”Police have previously arrested dozens of gay men for violating an anti-pornography law, but now, all gay couples who live together are subject to possible arrest.The push for the overhaul was backed by Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, an Islamic cleric and the former chair of the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top body for Islamic scholars, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the details of private conversations. Mr. Ma’ruf had previously called for “stern regulations” on the sexual activities of homosexuals.In a reversal, lawmakers on Tuesday reinstated a provision making it illegal to attack “the honor or dignity” of both Indonesia’s president and vice president, a rule that was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2006. In recent years, however, tolerance for such criticism has waned. Last year, the authorities arrested an artist who created a mural criticizing Mr. Joko, and activists say they have been harassed and charged with defamation for speaking up on rights abuses.Mr. Joko — known as a moderate, secular leader — has spoken out repeatedly against intolerant views in his country. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said Indonesia has a vibrant democracy with frequent peaceful protests outside the presidential palace. “Even today, everyone can criticize the president and the government,” Mr. Joko said, speaking before the Group of 20 summit in Bali last month. “I believe that Indonesia’s democracy is moving on the right track.”Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that the laws would give the police greater opportunities to extort bribes, and lead to more corruption. Politicians would also have more excuses to target political opponents, he added. “The danger of oppressive laws is not that they will be broadly applied — no, they won’t be — it is that they provide an avenue for selective enforcement,” Mr. Harsono said.The new penal code expands the country’s blasphemy law from one to six provisions, stating for the first time that apostasy — anyone who “persuades someone to be a nonbeliever” — can be charged as a criminal offense.Religious minorities are most at risk of running afoul of this law. Roughly 87 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, while the rest are Christian, Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist. According to Mr. Harsono, the use of the blasphemy law has been most commonly used against people who have criticized Islam.In 2017, former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian and an ally of Mr. Joko, was sentenced to two years in prison on blasphemy charges after he was accused of insulting Islam by jokingly referring to a verse in the Quran in a campaign speech.Willy Aditya, a lawmaker from the left-leaning NasDem party, rejected claims that Indonesia was “turning into an Islamic country” but said that the new law was written based on emotion, not research. The law shows that the officials have failed to distinguish the difference between public and private affairs, he said, “which is the most elementary thing in democracy.”Muktita Suhartono More

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      There’s Been a Massive Change in Where American Policy Gets Made

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      Since 2021, Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, and they’ve used that power to pass consequential legislation, from the American Rescue Plan to the Inflation Reduction Act. That state of affairs was exceptional: In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, the U.S. House, Senate and presidency were only under unified party control for 14 years. Divided government has become the norm in American politics. And since Republicans won back the House in November, it is about to become the reality once again.But that doesn’t mean policymaking is going to stop — far from it. As America’s national politics have become more and more gridlocked in recent decades, many consequential policy decisions have been increasingly pushed down to the state level. The ability to receive a legal abortion or use recreational marijuana; how easy it is to join a union, purchase a firearm or vote in elections; the tax rates we pay and the kind of health insurance we have access to: These decisions are being determined at the state level to an extent not seen since before the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Jake Grumbach is a political scientist at the University of Washington and the author of the book “Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics.” In it, Grumbach tracks this shift in policymaking to the states and explores its implications for American politics. Our national mythologies present state government as less polarizing, more accountable to voters and a hedge against anti-democratic forces amassing too much power. But, as Grumbach shows, in an era of national political media, parties and identities, the truth is a lot more complicated.So this conversation is a guide to the level of government that we tend to pay the least attention to, even as it shapes our lives more than any other.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Courtesy of Jacob Grumbach“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. More

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      Turnout Was Strong in Georgia, but Mail Voting Plummets After New Law

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      An analysis of November turnout data shows that voting by mail dropped as Georgians increasingly cast ballots in person. The shift hints at the possible impact of a 2021 voting overhaul.While voter turnout remained strong, absentee voting in Georgia dropped off drastically in this year’s midterm election, the first major test of an expansive 2021 voting law that added restrictions for casting ballots by mail.Data released by the Georgia secretary of state showed that mail voting in the state’s November general election plunged by 81 percent from the level of the 2020 contest. While a drop was expected after the height of the pandemic, Georgia had a far greater decrease than any other state with competitive statewide races, according to a New York Times analysis.Turnout data suggests that a large majority of people who voted by mail in 2020 found another way to cast their ballots this year — turning to in-person voting, either early or on Election Day. Turnout in the state was 56 percent of all active voters, shy of the 2018 high-water mark for a midterm election.The numbers are the first sign of how the 2021 law may have affected the election in Georgia, which has recently established itself as a battleground state. The law was signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, and backed by G.O.P. state lawmakers who said that the changes would make it “easier to vote, harder to cheat.” It significantly limited drop boxes, added voter identification requirements and prevented election officials from proactively mailing out absentee ballot applications.But civil rights groups, voting rights advocates and Democrats noted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in elections. They viewed the law, known as S.B. 202, as an attempt to suppress Democratic-leaning voters, especially people of color, who had just helped flip Georgia blue in a presidential election for the first time in decades.President Biden called the law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Major League Baseball moved its All-Star game out of suburban Atlanta in protest.This year, after a mostly smooth and high-turnout general election under the new rules, both sides saw validation in their arguments. Republicans pointed to the strong overall turnout as evidence that the law had not suppressed votes. Democrats and civil rights groups argued that their sprawling voter education and mobilization efforts had helped people overcome the new hurdles.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More