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    Trump Was a Gift That Might Not Keep Giving

    The 2022 midterm election revealed dangerous cracks in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that the party held the Senate and kept House losses to a minimum.Turnout fell in a number of key Democratic cities. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the city’s “vote count dropped 33 percent from 2020, more than any other county and the statewide average of 22 percent. It’s not just a 2020 comparison: This year saw a stark divergence between Philly turnout and the rest of the state compared to every federal election since at least 2000.”The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners reported that turnout of registered voters in 2022 was 46.1 percent, down from 60.67 percent in the previous 2018 midterm.According to the Board of Elections in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, turnout fell from 54.5 percent in 2018 to 46.1 percent in 2022.The Gotham Gazette reported that from 2018 to 2022, turnout fell from 41 to 33 percent in New York City.The drop in turnout was disturbing to Democratic strategists, but so too was the change in sentiment of many of the voters who did show up, as support for the party’s nominees continued to erode among Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters. As The Washington Post reported:While more than 8 in 10 Black voters supported Democrats for Congress, their level of support fell between four and seven percentage points during the 2022 midterms compared with 2018, according to network exit polling and the AP VoteCast poll, respectively. Among Latinos, support for Democrats declined between nine and 10 percentage points, with between 56 percent and 60 percent backing Democrats.In the 2018 midterms, 77 percent of Asians voted for House Democratic candidates, according to network exit polls, compared with 58 percent this year — although data from AP VoteCast showed a smaller decline in Asian American support for Democrats from 2018 to 2022: 71 percent to 64 percent.Perhaps most important, the 2022 results revealed that voters did not fully turn against the Republican Party; in fact, Republican House candidates got 3.5 million more votes nationwide than Democrats did, 53.9 million, or 51.7 percent of the two-party vote to the Democrats’ 50.4 million, or 48.3 percent. This represents just over a six-point swing in favor of Republicans this year compared with the 2020 House results.Instead, voters, in the main, turned against the specific candidates endorsed by Donald Trump — candidates who in competitive races backed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.“Candidate quality and the toxicity of former President Trump and the MAGA movement hurt certain Republicans where it mattered most,” wrote Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, in “GOP Won the Votes, but Not the Seats,” a Nov. 17 analysis. “Some of these ‘nontraditional’ candidates managed to win over the support of G.O.P. primary voters but were unable to appeal to that narrow slice of voters in the middle of the broader November electorate.”Two days after the election, Karl Rove, who was the chief political strategist during the administration of George W. Bush, wrote in The Wall Street Journal:The losers Tuesday were often the candidates who closely followed the former president’s rally-speech scripts — campaigning on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump by fraud on a massive scale. Of the Republican candidates for secretary of state or attorney general who based their campaign on this falsehood, only one has pulled through, and he was in deep red territory.What then are the odds that Republican voters will still nominate Trump?If they do, Democrats’ chances of keeping the presidency, retaking the House and holding losses in the Senate to a minimum all improve. If the Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley or a dark horse, chances are Democrats will face a tough fight on all fronts in 2024.While there is general agreement that midterm returns are not reliable predictors of the next presidential election, the 2022 results do not uniformly suggest a weakened national Republican Party.“Overall, it’s a strange election,” wrote Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, in “What Happened.” “Had you showed any major analyst these results, along with exit poll findings that Biden would be at 44 percent job approval, no one would have expected this outcome.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, noted in an email:The negative Trump effect seems even more clear now. Trump-endorsed candidates fared worse, often on the same ballot with Republicans who separated themselves from Trump and performed better. So I see it as more of the same warning to Republicans: tying themselves to Trump is not a winning general election strategy.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, made a similar case by email. “Swing voters in swing states and districts didn’t marry the Democrats; they just dumped the Republicans,” he wrote. “In the post-Dobbs environment, extremism is not a theoretical concern anymore. The two most valuable players of this cycle for the Democrats are Sam Alito and Donald Trump. Democrats should send them each a fruit basket.”“I cannot think of a worse way for the House G.O.P. to introduce themselves as a governing party than braying about investigations into Hunter Biden and Anthony Fauci,” Begala argued. “Their candidates won by promising action on inflation, crime and borders.”To counter the House Republican agenda, Begala wrote,Biden needs to say, “They’re obsessed with my family’s past; I’m obsessed with your family’s future.” At every hearing in which the Republicans are tormenting Hunter Biden or Dr. Fauci, I would have Democratic members ask, “How will this hearing lower the price of gas at the pump? How will it reduce crime? How will it secure the border?”Data pointing to the vulnerability of the Trump-endorsed Republicans running for federal and state offices raises an interesting question: Should Democrats repeat a tactic used successfully this year to lift the chances that Republicans nominate their weakest general election candidate?Last September, Annie Linskey reported in The Washington Post that Democratic candidates and committees “have spent nearly $19 million across eight states in primaries this year amplifying far-right Republican candidates.” A postelection analysis by Ellen Ioanes of Vox concluded that the strategy “appears to have paid off in the midterm. Six Democratic challengers in races where Democratic organizations donated to extremist Republican candidates have so far won their contests.”A number of Democratic strategists and scholars, however, firmly rejected continuing the strategy of purposely investing during the Republican primaries in advertising promoting Trump to Republican voters premised on the calculation that Trump would be the easiest to beat of the most likely Republican nominees in the general election.Both Begala and Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, stood firmly opposed. “We should leave this to Republicans to nominate their own Trump,” Lake said by email.Begala gave three reasons for his opposition. First, “it undermines President Biden’s powerful message that Trump leads a mega-MAGA fanatical fringe that is a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Second, “Trump is still a massive, major force in American politics — especially in the Republican Party. I don’t want Trump anywhere near the White House.” Third, “while I respect the political success of governors like DeSantis, Youngkin, Hogan and Christie, if the Democrats can’t beat them, we don’t deserve the White House.”Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, was adamant in his opposition to the tactic:If Democrats truly worry about the fragility of American democracy, they should not take any steps that would facilitate Trump’s return to office, even if that means a higher chance that they lose the presidency. The slightly higher probability of holding the presidency with Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is surely outweighed by concerns about the threats to democracy should he win election.In an email, Hopkins suggested that Democrats should not view the outcome of the 2022 election as a clear victory:Republicans are likely to have won significantly more votes for their U.S. House candidates than Democrats, but the Democrats benefited from the geographic distribution of their support and the strength of several of their House incumbents in hard-fought races. Turnout in cities like Philadelphia was down relative to elsewhere, and the Democrats have not returned their strong showings with Latino voters from 2012 and 2016. The Republicans’ strength in Florida as well as New York was remarkable — and those are two of the largest states in the country. So absolutely, both parties have outcomes to celebrate and liabilities to watch.One of Hopkins’s political science colleagues, Matthew Levendusky, noted in an email:There is not one narrative to come out of this election. While we usually think about nationalization, in this election, we saw quite significant differences across states. Pennsylvania and Michigan — and even Wisconsin and Arizona — ended up somewhat better than the pre-election polls suggested (in some cases, quite a bit better). From this perspective, Democrats should be happy. But they did much worse than expected in Florida and New York. So which lesson is the right one?Levendusky pointed out that there “seem to be two trends that might be working against Republicans’ recent advantage in translating votes into seats”:If Republicans are doing better (at least in some areas) with Black and Latino voters, that erodes Democrats’ edge in urban districts, but not nearly enough to put those seats into jeopardy. But if they’re also strengthening their support with rural white voters, then that means they’re “wasting” more votes in those districts (shifting heavily rural parts of the country from R+20 to R+30 does not help them win more seats). So shifting demographic and geographic patterns might now make Republicans (just like Democrats) somewhat less well distributed.Sean Trende makes essentially the same point, writing that “Republicans made gains among African Americans, and significant gains among Hispanics” but, with a few exceptions, “these extra votes did not translate to seats. Because the Voting Rights Act requires that these voters be placed into heavily Hispanic/Black districts, which become overwhelmingly Democratic districts, it takes huge shifts in vote performance among these voters to win a district outright, and Republicans aren’t there right now.”Conversely, “Republicans may be suffering a representational penalty in rural areas similar to the penalty Democrats have suffered in urban districts,” Trende wrote, noting thatthe G.O.P. puts up stunning vote percentages in rural America, margins that would not have been deemed possible a decade ago, to say nothing of three decades ago. But this means that a large number of those votes are effectively wasted. As the suburbs become more competitive for Democrats and the cities become somewhat less competitive (but not enough to lose seats) as the minority vote percentage moves, Democrats lose the penalty they’ve suffered for running up overwhelming vote shares in urban districts in the past.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, wrote by email that the election in many respectsmoved in ways predicted by the fundamentals — a Republican shift with a Democratic president who has low approval ratings and governs during poor economic indicators. However, in a few keys states and races Democratic candidates outperformed those indicators. The story seems like Republicans defeated themselves relative to the fundamentals by running low-quality candidates in some key races.For Republicans, Wronski wrote, “appealing to Trump voters without Trump on the ballot may not be a winning strategy. The types of voters who are enthusiastic for Trump do not seem equally enthusiastic for his endorsees.”In other words, it isn’t just that moderates and independents were scared off by extremist candidates; MAGA voters themselves were not fully animated by their own candidates. The candidate they want is Trump, not a Don Bolduc or a Kari Lake or a Mehmet Oz.In addition, Wronski argued:Not all Republicans want or positively respond to Trump’s preferences or persona. Trump endorsees trying to follow this playbook were not as successful as more mainstream Republican candidates. A prime example of this is the difference between the Georgia Senate and governor races.Neither party, in Wronski’s view,should take comfort in their prospects or feel in good shape nationally. The national electorate is polarized with close elections. Ultimately, I believe turnout is going to matter more than persuasion.Chris Tausanovitch, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., downplayed the success of the Democrats:This was in many ways an expected result. The polls and models performed well. The Democrats overperformed expectations slightly, but as others have pointed out, their performance is better in seats than in votes.The parties, Tausanovitch continued, “are very evenly matched and this doesn’t look like it is on a path to change quickly. This election was close. I expect the next presidential election to be close as well.” Trump-endorsed candidates, he acknowledged,did poorly, but this does not mean that a Trump-centric Republican Party cannot win or that Trump himself cannot win. He almost did in 2020. If he is the nominee, I still expect the election to be close in 2024.Republican Party elites are, in turn, increasingly voicing their concerns over the prospect of a 2024 Trump bid. I asked Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, what would happen if Trump is the nominee, and he replied by email: “Assuming that the economy is out of the ditch by the end of ’23, I would have to believe a Trump nomination would be devastating.”In a clear slap at Trump, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — the Republican who handily won re-election while Maggie Hassan, the Democratic senator, beat the Trump protégé Don Bolduc, her Republican challenger — told a Nov. 18 meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition: “I have a great policy for the Republican Party. Let’s stop supporting crazy, unelectable candidates in our primaries and start getting behind winners that can close the deal in November.”At the same gathering, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie declared: “It is time to stop whispering. It is time to stop being afraid of any one person. It is time to stand up for the principles and the beliefs that we have founded this party on and this country on.”For two successive presidential elections, Trump has stymied the most ambitious members of his party, and now this group is becoming increasingly assertive. DeSantis, Youngkin, Haley, Mike Pompeo, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Mike Pence are engaged in the process of challenging the current occupant of the throne — making national appearances, courting donors, wooing party loyalists and generating media coverage, all with an eye on drawing blood. The question is, how vulnerable is Trump?Earlier this month, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer reported in The Washington Post, “In private conversations among donors, operatives and other 2024 presidential hopefuls, a growing number of Republicans are trying to seize what they believe may be their best opportunity to sideline Trump and usher in a new generation of party leaders.”Republicans might be playing with fire.Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told The Washington Post that there are now three key constituencies in the Republican electorate:A small group, roughly 10 percent, are “Never Trumpers,” Republicans who have long and vocally opposed Trump. A far larger group, about 40 percent, are “Always Trumpers,” his hard-core base that will be reluctant to abandon him. The remaining 50 percent or so are “Maybe Trumpers” — Republicans who voted for him twice, who generally like his policies but who are now eager to escape the chaos that accompanies him.If Trump faces two or more serious challengers in the primaries, his 40 percent core support plus whatever he can pick up from the “Maybe Trumpers” would prove to be a major asset, especially in the early contests, which often provide crucial momentum to the front-runner, setting up the scenario sought by Democrats: a Republican presidential nominee whom they believe may have some chance of prevailing in the primaries, but who has little chance of winning in November.“One of the reasons Trump’s base adores him is that he overcame overwhelming odds — including both party establishments — to win,” Nate Hochman, a staff writer for National Review, tweeted on Nov. 19. “The more Republican elites consolidate against him, the more otherwise persuadable Trump voters are going to remember why they loved him in the first place.”Democrats could not hope for more.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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    For Abrams and Kemp, a Debate Rematch Recalls a 2018 Exchange

    ATLANTA — When they meet on the debate stage on Monday evening, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, and Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent, will mount a rematch from the 2018 campaign for governor.Their 2018 debate took place during Georgia’s early voting period, as it is again this year, against the backdrop of heightened attention to voting rights and access to the ballot. As Georgians took to the polls, many complained of hourslong lines and faulty voting equipment. According to an investigation by The Associated Press, thousands found their voter registrations in limbo as they tried to cast ballots. A majority of them were Black.Ms. Abrams, who founded the voting rights group New Georgia Project before running for governor, underlined those faults and placed the blame on Mr. Kemp, further criticizing him for remaining in his post as secretary of state while also running for office. But it was a back-and-forth exchange between Ms. Abrams and Mr. Kemp on who they believed should have access to the ballot that caught the most attention then and is still reverberating four years later.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With elections next month, a Times/Siena poll shows that independents, especially women, are swinging toward the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights as voters worry about the economy.Questioning 2020: Hundreds of Republicans on the ballot this November have cast doubt on the 2020 election, a Times analysis found. Many of these candidates are favored to win their races.Georgia Senate Race: The contest, which could determine whether Democrats keep control of the Senate, has become increasingly focused on the private life and alleged hypocrisy of Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee.Jill Biden: The first lady, who has become a lifeline for Democratic candidates trying to draw attention and money in the midterms, is the most popular surrogate in the Biden administration.During the 2018 debate, Mr. Kemp accused Ms. Abrams of “encouraging people to break the law” on her behalf, suggesting that she had asked undocumented immigrants to vote for her in a video clip that was widely circulated in Republican circles. Ms. Abrams responded with a full-throated rebuke of the accusation and referred to a 2016 lawsuit that she and several voting rights groups had brought against Mr. Kemp to challenge his office’s voter registration regulations.“I have never in my life asked for anyone who is not legally eligible to vote to be able to cast a ballot. What I have asked for is that you allow those who are legally eligible to vote — to allow them to cast their ballots,” Ms. Abrams responded in the debate.“I realize that in the next response you’re going to say that it’s a function of my organization,” she continued, referring to the New Georgia Project, “because your tendency is to blame everyone else for the mistakes that you make. My responsibility as a leader is to see a problem and try to solve it.”For his part, Mr. Kemp responded by asking viewers to look up the video clip of her remarks, calling them “outrageous.” The moment in the debate exploded onto social media sites. It still draws attention, including in early September, when many social media users mistakenly believed a resurfaced clip came from a 2022 debate.Ms. Abrams lost to Mr. Kemp in November 2018 by fewer than 60,000 votes — a loss she owed in part to what she described as unfair voting laws. This year, the two candidates have paid less attention to ballot access as a campaign issue and focused more on abortion and the economy.Still, Georgia remains a battleground state after Ms. Abrams’s narrow loss in the 2018 race and Democrats’ winning both the presidency and two Senate seats in the state during the 2020 cycle. And the specter of Georgia’s new voting law, S.B. 202, looms large as voting rights groups and Ms. Abrams’s campaign warn that is disenfranchising voters.Monday’s debate also coincides with the first day of Georgia’s early voting period. Ms. Abrams, who is trailing Mr. Kemp by five to 10 points in most polls, has joined state Democrats in encouraging voters to cast ballots before Election Day. At the same time, Mr. Kemp has implored Republicans in the state not to trust the polls and instead to turn out en masse as his campaign works to shore up the party’s voter outreach strategy.The debate between Mr. Kemp, Ms. Abrams and the Libertarian candidate, Shane Hazel, will be broadcast on Georgia public television at 7 p.m. Eastern time. It will also be livestreamed on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website and The Atlanta Press Club’s Facebook page. More

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    Elise Stefanik Says She’s Confident a Republican Wave Is Coming to the House

    Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, also spoke about her PAC’s success in backing female candidates, 23 of whom are running in the fall.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent in Washington.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, predicted on Wednesday that her party would pick up as many as three dozen House seats in November, despite signs that the red wave many predicted months ago might not form after all.And, brushing aside concerns from many Republicans that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has saddled them with an unpopular position that is energizing Democrats all over the country, Stefanik told reporters defiantly at a news conference that “we will have a pro-life Republican majority in the next Congress.”Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014 to her upstate New York seat as a relative moderate, became a star of the MAGA universe thanks to her role as President Donald J. Trump’s chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during his first impeachment trial.She has translated her Trump-refracted fame into a fund-raising boon for female Republican candidates she is boosting in critical House races — a move that is also helping build a base in the G.O.P. House conference for a politician with big ambitions.“My own experience going through impeachment No. 1, where I played an outsized role on the House Intelligence Committee — we built up a national donor list,” Stefanik said Wednesday at a briefing at the Republican National Committee about the midterm elections. “We’ve been able to have that donor list support other women candidates across the country.”Stefanik, 38, founded her political action committee, Elevate PAC, or E-PAC, in 2018, when only 13 Republican women served in the House of Representatives. At the time, her goal was to elect more conservative women to Congress.In 2020, 11 of the 15 House seats that Republicans flipped were won by women that E-PAC had endorsed. Today, there are 34 Republican women in the House.During this campaign cycle, Stefanik’s organization has raised and donated more than $1 million directly to female Republican candidates, and 23 women endorsed by E-PAC are running in the general election. Since its creation, E-PAC has raised $4 million to date.Another part of Stefanik’s aim is to help with news coverage. “One thing that is very clear to me is Democrat women get outsized coverage in the media,” Stefanik said. “They get magazine covers.” Those she helps, she said, “deserve glossy magazines as well.”The outcome of those races will help determine Stefanik’s clout as a queenmaker in the current, Trump-controlled version of the Republican Party. Her activities are also a key part of the G.O.P.’s overall midterm strategy to expand beyond the core political base of right-wing and conservative voters with a more diverse slate.The push to elevate female candidates comes as the Republican Party struggles to overcome political gains Democrats have made on the issue of abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In an election year when political tensions are running high over gender and social issues, liberal groups are willing to give Stefanik only so much credit for helping to elect women.“There are challenges that all women face in running for office,” said Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. “I understand why there’s a need for this on both sides of the aisle.”But she added, “To support women’s rights, to support our freedoms, we think it’s critical that we elect Democratic, pro-choice women.”Stefanik shrugged off questions about how the issue of abortion will affect the midterms. Her party has struggled to unite behind a strategy on a fraught social issue that is reshaping campaigns across the country and, in some cases, forcing Republicans to backpedal on hard-line positions they took to win their primaries.“On the issue of abortion, Democrats are working overtime to force the American people to rethink what their top priorities are,” Stefanik said. “In every poll, inflation is the No. 1 issue. In my district, Second Amendment issues are second. Our candidates know how to communicate on this issue.”Stefanik also emphasized that many of the candidates she is backing are mothers. “I think that’s a very compelling message to voters,” she said, noting that one congressional candidate in Ohio, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, gave birth just days ago.E-PAC’s slate of candidates includes seven who are Hispanic, four who are veterans and one who is Black. Stefanik said it was the most diverse group of candidates her PAC had supported to date.Stefanik said she had no ideological litmus test for candidates to gain her organization’s financial backing and endorsement.This cycle, she has backed candidates who falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, like Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District and Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh District.Vega has come under attack for questioning on tape whether a woman was less likely to become pregnant after a rape.Stefanik also supported Representative Mayra Flores, who won a special election in Texas’s 34th District after saying, falsely, that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was stoked by members of Antifa and used a hashtag associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in tweets that were later deleted.At the same time, Stefanik is backing Barbara Kirkmeyer, a state senator running in Colorado’s competitive Eighth District, who said President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.Stefanik simply interviews candidates who are able to raise $250,000 in their first quarter, she said, and decides which of them have what it takes, based on her gut feeling and experience.“I interview and talk with everyone,” she said. “I put candidates through their paces. I ask how they would answer certain questions from the media.”After meeting hundreds of candidates across the country over the years, she said, “I’m able to tell pretty quickly, No. 1, if they have the fire in the belly, and also if they’re speaking from the heart on behalf of their district. I don’t do any ideological litmus test. These are all strong, conservative Republicans.”Karoline Leavitt with Senator Ted Cruz before her primary. “When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said of Stefanik’s political action committee.Brian Snyder/ReutersIn some cases, Stefanik’s endorsements have put her at odds with leadership. She endorsed Leavitt, a 25-year-old hard-right Republican who served as an assistant in Trump’s White House press office before winning the G.O.P. nomination for a House seat in New Hampshire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was backing Leavitt’s rival, Matt Mowers, in the primary.“When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said on Wednesday, joining Stefanik briefly as an example of an E-PAC success story. She said that Stefanik, whom she once worked for, was “someone that I leaned on, not only for financial support through E-PAC but also for advice and support.”Republicans are expected to win back control of the House next year, although in recent weeks, the political winds that once favored them have shifted toward Democrats.Still, for Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to hold virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold.Stefanik said she remains bullish about a red wave.“I remember on election night in 2020 when people said Nancy Pelosi would pick up 15 seats,” she said, referring to the House speaker. “Well, Republicans picked up 15 seats.”She added: “Eighty percent of their dollars are on defense. Do I think we have the opportunity to earn that historic majority of 35 seats? I do. I’ve always thought that this cycle.”What to readToday’s big story: Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization, former President Trump and three of his children of what she called “staggering fraud.” Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess wrote the main article examining the 220-page claim, and I have a short piece on the politics at play.The House voted mostly along party lines to overhaul the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump tried to exploit to overturn his defeat, Carl Hulse reports.At the United Nations, President Biden called on countries to unify in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Moscow’s goal, he said, is “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state.” Follow our live coverage of the U.N. General Assembly here.The Federal Reserve tightened interest rates by a further three-quarters of a percentage point fewer than seven weeks before the November elections, an effort to stem inflation that remains stubbornly high. Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was fundamentally healthy, however. The Times’s economic team covered all the angles here.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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    The Vanishing Moderate Democrat

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Early last year, as Democrats were preparing to control the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade, Josh Gottheimer met with Nancy Pelosi to discuss their party’s message. Sitting in the House speaker’s office in the U.S. Capitol, he opened up the YouTube app on his iPhone. There was something he wanted to show her.Gottheimer, who represents a wealthy suburban and exurban House district in northern New Jersey, was first elected to Congress in 2016; his victory over a seven-term Republican incumbent, in a district in which Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton, was one of the Democrats’ few bright spots that year. Since his arrival in Washington, however, Gottheimer has been the cause of more headaches than celebrations for Pelosi and her leadership team.As co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus — a group of 29 Democrats and 29 Republicans that quixotically aspires to the goal of bipartisan compromise — he has frequently found himself at odds with his fellow Democrats on everything from foreign policy to President Biden’s domestic agenda to Pelosi’s leadership. In 2018, Gottheimer and eight other Problem Solver Democrats threatened to reject Pelosi’s bid for speaker if she didn’t concede to their demands for rules changes that would make it easier for bipartisan ideas to be considered, angering colleagues who viewed it as yet another instance of Gottheimer and his group’s engaging in pointless grandstanding rather than constructive behind-the-scenes work. “Tell me a problem they’ve solved,” Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, says.Pelosi, however, had agreed to their demands and secured their support. Now she was willing to hear Gottheimer out about how the new Democratic majority should position itself. He pressed play and his iPhone screen filled with waving American flags as an old but familiar voice emerged, proclaiming, “I am honored to have been given the opportunity to stand up for the values and the interests of ordinary Americans.” The video was a television advertisement from Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Over images of construction workers and children and police officers, a series of bold captions touted Clinton’s first-term accomplishments: “WELFARE REFORM, WOREK REQUIREMENTS”; “TAXES CUT FOR 15,000,000 FAMILIES”; “DEATH PENALTY FOR DRUG KINGPINS.” His promises for a second term followed: “BAN ‘COP-KILLER’ BULLETS”; “CAPITAL GAINS TAX CUT FOR HOME OWNERS”; “BALANCE THE BUDGET FOR A GROWING ECONOMY” “We are safer, we are more secure, we are more prosperous,” Clinton said. When the ad was over, Gottheimer says, he looked at Pelosi. “This is how we won,” he told her, “and this is how we win again.”Representative Josh Gottheimer of northern New Jersey, a co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus.Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty ImagesIn April, almost a year and a half later, Gottheimer screened the ad again, this time for me. He provided his own color commentary as it played. “Fiscal responsibility … jobs … tax cuts … he put cops in the ad!” Gottheimer, who served as a White House speechwriter during Clinton’s second term, exclaimed. When it was over, he sighed. “Think about how different that message is,” he said. I asked him what Pelosi’s reaction was when he played it for her. Gottheimer demurred. But the answer seemed obvious. The message that Pelosi and the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership had chosen for their party, the message that Democrats would be carrying into the 2022 midterm elections, was not the one that Gottheimer, and the disembodied voice of Bill Clinton, had counseled.Gottheimer and I were eating breakfast at a diner on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J. In a month, he told me, the busy state highway outside would be lined with campaign signs that read “Josh Gottheimer for Congress: Lower Taxes, Jersey Values.” “I’m the only Democrat in the country who puts ‘lower taxes’ on his signs,” he said. “ ‘Jersey values’ are about cops, firefighters, vets — I’ll get your back.” Although the old Clinton ad wasn’t his party’s current message, it was certainly his. “These are the issues that I continue to stress back home in my district,” he said. It would not be hyperbole to say that Gottheimer runs his political life there according to Clinton’s tenets.The most immediate question for Gottheimer and other moderate Democrats is whether that will be enough come November. Midterm elections have been historically brutal for the party that controls the White House. In 2006, Republicans took a “thumping,” as George W. Bush described it at the time, losing 30 seats in the House, six seats in the Senate and control of both chambers. Four years later, it was the Democrats’ turn to suffer a “shellacking,” as Barack Obama put it, with Republicans gaining 63 seats and a new majority in the House. In 2018, Democrats capitalized on resistance to Donald Trump and gained 41 seats on their way to taking back the House.This year, with Democrats clinging to a 10-seat majority in the House (almost guaranteed to drop to nine with a special election in Nebraska on June 28), most political handicappers expect Republicans to reclaim control of the chamber easily; the only real uncertainty is just how big the Red Wave will be, with predictions about the number of seats Republicans will gain ranging from less than 20 to more than 60. (Despite the public hearings of the House committee investigating Jan. 6, most Democrats running for election are not attempting to make the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election a referendum on Republicans.)The bigger, more consequential question — not just for the moderates but for all Democrats — is whether this projected midterm wipeout is merely a cyclical occurrence or the manifestation of a much deeper and more intractable problem. Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has moved significantly to the left on almost every salient political issue. Some of these shifts in a more ambitiously progressive direction, especially as they pertain to economic issues, have largely tracked with public opinion: While socialism might not poll well with voters, Democratic proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and lower the age of Medicare eligibility do.But on social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party’s base cheer but the rest of the electorate does not. “The Democratic Party moved left,” says Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, “but the country as a whole hasn’t.”Republicans have sought to exploit this gap by waging an aggressive culture war against Democrats. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and frequent Fox News guest who has turned critical race theory into a right-wing cudgel, wrote on Twitter last year that he intended to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” More recently, he has attacked Democrats for, he charged, attempting to indoctrinate school children with “trans ideology.” Rick Scott, the Florida senator who heads the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, told reporters in June, “The election is going to be about inflation, critical race theory, funding the police — that’s what it’s going to be about.” The result, fair or not, is that the Democratic Party is now perceived by a growing segment of American voters as espousing the furthest left position possible on many of the country’s most fraught and most divisive issues.“There’s a sense among voters that Democrats are too focused on social issues,” says Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, “and those are more left-wing social issues that people think they’re too focused on.” In May, CNN asked 1,007 American voters for their opinions on the country’s two major political parties. After four years of Trump in the White House, an insurrection and unsuccessful attempt to overturn a presidential election and now a Republican Party that can be fairly described as a cult of personality and is moving further right on many of the same social issues, 46 percent of those surveyed considered the G.O.P. to be “too extreme.” But 48 percent of them viewed the Democratic Party the same way.All of which has occasioned not just the normal midterm agita but something closer to an existential crisis among moderate Democrats. While some of them remain reluctant to publicly concede the reality that the Democratic Party has indeed shifted left — either out of fear of angering their fellow Democrats or validating Republican attacks — they will readily acknowledge that voters perceive the party as having drifted out of the mainstream. And they are convinced that this is threatening their political survival. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party has a problem as a toxic brand,” says Max Rose, a moderate New York Democrat who lost re-election to his House seat in Staten Island in 2020 — his Republican opponent characterized Rose’s attendance at a George Floyd protest march as anti-police — and is running to reclaim the seat this year. “There’s a perception that the party is not on the side of working people, that it’s not on the side of the middle class.”That perception has penetrated even the immediate families of Democratic politicians. “My own mother-in-law, a Republican, believes I’m some sort of unicorn because I can put sentences together and I’m not rabid and left-leaning,” says Chrissy Houlahan, a moderate Democratic congresswoman who represents a swing district in the swing state of Pennsylvania. “I believe the national Democratic Party is where I am. I don’t believe that the way people perceive the national Democratic Party is where I am.”But the Democrats’ leftward trend, whether real or perceived, is resoundingly popular with, and often reinforced by, the party’s staff members and activists and especially its donors, who fund a slew of nonprofits and super PACs that relentlessly push the progressive line. In America’s very blue and very online precincts, performative positioning is often accepted as a substitute for the compromises that can be necessary to secure legislation — whether it’s Schumer and Pelosi donning kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol to demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in lieu of actual police reform or Biden traveling to Atlanta to attack Republicans as supporters of “Jim Crow 2.0” in a speech on behalf of voting rights legislation that had no chance of passage.The problem, says Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist who most recently worked for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, is that “in today’s world, what happens on Twitter or in a D-plus-40 district doesn’t stay there. It travels to every race across the country.” And it inherently limits the appeal of Democrats in those races. “If we become a party of the elite-elites, there death awaits,” says Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.), the House Democrats’ campaign arm, pointing to the influence of college activists. “We’ll all agree with each other right into extinction.”The Democrats most at risk of extinction this November are Gottheimer and his fellow House moderates, who typically represent the sorts of swing districts where being painted as an identitarian socialist is the political kiss of death. “We are, almost by definition, the low-hanging fruit in every election,” says Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and member of the Problem Solvers. Although Biden won Gottheimer’s district by more than five points in 2020, and the district got even bluer under New Jersey’s newly drawn congressional maps so that Democrats now have a seven-point edge there, the D.C.C.C. has put him on its “Frontline” list of vulnerable incumbents. Of the 37 Frontliners, the overwhelming majority belong to the Problem Solvers or one of the other two groups for moderate House Democrats: the New Democrat Coalition and the Blue Dog Coalition. And then there are the two dozen or so moderate House Democrats who have decided not to run at all in 2022, quitting before they could be fired.It’s enough to drive Gottheimer, 47, to frustration — and to send him searching nearly three decades back in time for answers. In Congress, he has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from his more liberal Democratic colleagues, whom he has privately derided as “the herbal tea party.” The enmity has been mutual. After The Intercept reported the “herbal tea party” insult in 2019, the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a link to the article and wrote, “What’s funny is that there *are* Dems that do act like the Tea Party — but they’re conservative.” It was not the first or last time Gottheimer found himself at the bottom of an online pile-on. Two years ago, his clashes with liberals earned him a left-wing primary challenger who branded him “Trump’s favorite Democrat.” Gottheimer won by 33 points. “The social media Democrats are not the Democrats back home,” he told me during another conversation in his congressional office. “Those aren’t my constituents.”But now, he complained, “the far right is trying to do everything they can to equate many of us to the socialist left,” and he’s worried his constituents will start to believe it. The challenge for Gottheimer and his fellow moderates, however, is not just to define what they are not, but what they actually are. While there is a growing group of Democrats who believe that their party needs to become more moderate, it’s not clear that any of them agree on — or, in some cases, even know — what it means to be a moderate Democrat anymore.In January 1989, Al From invited Bill Galston to breakfast at La Colline, a French restaurant on Capitol Hill. From was a former congressional staff member who, four years earlier, co-founded the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.), a group of mostly Southern and Western Democrats who were trying to remake the party in their moderate image. They called themselves the New Democrats.Galston was a University of Maryland public-policy professor who moonlighted as an adviser to Democratic presidential campaigns — in 1988, working for Al Gore’s ill-fated campaign. The previous November, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 percentage points and 315 electoral votes, the Democrats’ third straight landslide presidential defeat. At La Colline, From asked Galston what was wrong with their party. Democrats, Galston answered, were in denial — focusing on the chimeras of higher turnout and better fund-raising when, in fact, it was their “unacceptably liberal” positions that was the problem. By not grappling with that fact, Galston told From, Democrats were engaging in “the politics of evasion.”From commissioned Galston and the political scientist Elaine Kamarck to write up the argument for the D.L.C.’s new think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, which published “The Politics of Evasion” that September. Galston and Kamarck did not mince words. “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote. The Democratic Party was “increasingly dominated by minority groups and white elites — a coalition viewed by the middle class as unsympathetic to its interests and its values.” Unless Democrats convinced those middle-class voters (who at that time were predominantly white) that they were tough on crime, trustworthy on foreign policy and disciplined about government spending, they would continue to wander the political wilderness.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D.C.C.C.).Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty ImagesIn the past, the New Democrats shied away from outright conflict with the party’s liberal wing — refusing to return fire, for instance, when Jesse Jackson dubbed the D.L.C. “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” But “The Politics of Evasion” counseled that internecine fighting was good: “Only conflict and controversy over basic economic, social and defense issues are likely to attract the attention needed to convince the public that the party still has something to offer the great middle of the American electorate.” Bill Clinton, who as Arkansas governor became the D.L.C. chairman in 1990, took that message to heart in his 1992 presidential campaign.That summer, shortly after he cinched the Democratic nomination, Clinton gave a speech to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition group — in which he attacked the group for also hosting a relatively obscure rapper named Sister Souljah, who in the wake of that year’s Los Angeles riots said in an interview, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton told the Rainbow Coalition that “if you took the words ‘white’ and ‘Black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Jackson was furious and called on Clinton to apologize — exactly the response Clinton was hoping for. The Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page later wrote that by picking the fight, Clinton “impressed swing voters, particularly white suburbanites, with a confident independence from Jackson that other Democratic presidential candidates had not shown.” A loudly performed repudiation of a putative far-left extremist would come to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment.”Clinton ran for president as a factional candidate, against the Republicans but also against his party’s liberal wing, so that when he won, he remade the Democratic Party in his own — and the D.L.C.’s — image. In 1995, midway through Clinton’s first term, 23 moderate House Democrats formed the Blue Dog Caucus to, in their words, “represent the middle of the partisan spectrum.” By 2010, halfway through Barack Obama’s first term, the Blue Dogs had grown to 54 members. “To my surprise, ‘The Politics of Evasion’ had some impact,” Galston recently told me. “With the election of Bill Clinton, this little insurgency within the Democratic Party succeeded.” He paused. “Temporarily.”This February, more than three decades after their original salvo, Galston and Kamarck, now both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, published “The New Politics of Evasion.” Once again, they argued Democrats have swerved too far to the left: “A substantial portion of the Democratic Party has convinced itself that Americans are ready for a political revolution that transforms every aspect of their lives. This assumption has crashed into a stubborn reality: Most Americans want evolutionary, not revolutionary, change.” Once again, they argued that Democrats have ignored the political salience of cultural issues to their detriment: “For Americans across the political spectrum, social, cultural and religious issues are real and — in many cases — more important to them than economic considerations. These issues reflect their deepest convictions and shape their identity.”But unlike three decades ago, Galston and Kamarck were actually a little late to the fight. In the past few years, a growing and increasingly vocal cohort of strategists, policy wonks and intellectuals has been arguing that Democrats have overreached on social and cultural issues and that, as a result, the party has become unable to appeal to voters without college degrees — and, increasingly, not just white voters in that group but Hispanic, Asian American and Black voters too. From 2012 to 2020, the support of nonwhite voters without college degrees for the Democratic presidential candidate decreased by 10 percentage points. Much as in the early 1990s, the most vibrant and urgent discussion in Democratic circles currently revolves around why and how the party needs to steer itself back to the center.“For Democrats to win, we have to cater a lot more to moderates,” Sean McElwee told me recently at an Australian coffee shop in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood. Just 29 years old, with a baby face that makes him appear even younger, McElwee runs Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling firm and think tank that in only four years has come to occupy a central place in the Democratic Party firmament. Its ascent is especially remarkable considering where the firm — and McElwee — started.He burst onto the political scene early in Donald Trump’s presidency as a Resistance Twitter personality who popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” and hosted a weekly East Village happy hour for New York’s left-wing activists and writers. He started Data for Progress in 2018 with the express intent of driving the Democratic Party to the left. As a self-proclaimed socialist, McElwee’s early activism revolved around helping far-left candidates win Democratic primaries in safe blue districts. He was an adviser to the left-wing political group Justice Democrats, which fueled the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a.k.a. the Squad. He liked to call himself an “Overton window mover.” (The term refers to a reframing of what is politically possible.)But during the 2020 presidential primaries, just when practically every Democratic candidate except Joe Biden was jumping through that window by promising to abolish ICE and provide Medicare for all and eliminate student debt, McElwee himself started favoring what he calls “a more pragmatic approach.” The reason? While he personally still supported many of these left-wing policy proposals, Data for Progress’s polling showed that they weren’t actually popular with voters — or at least not with the working-class, non-college-educated voters Democrats need to win outside those safe blue districts.McElwee concluded that if Democrats ever want to accomplish their progressive goals, they need to get elected first — and the way to do that is to do a lot of polling to determine the popularity of various policy proposals. Then, when talking to voters, Democratic candidates should emphasize the popular ideas and de-emphasize the unpopular ones, even if that means emphasizing smaller, more incremental, more moderate policies. “I’m now just interested in a fundamentally different set of tactics and tools than I was six or seven years ago,” McElwee told me.The electoral theory to which McElwee now subscribes has come to be known as “popularism.” Its most prominent proponent is David Shor, one of McElwee’s best friends. A 30-year-old data analyst, Shor crunched numbers for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and later went to work for the progressive data firm Civis Analytics. In 2020, during the widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon,” citing a study by the Black political scientist Omar Wasow, and noted that nonviolence was more politically effective. Online activists were furious, with some branding his tweet racist, and after a pressure campaign from outside and inside the firm, Civis fired him — making Shor a political martyr for those who believed the Democratic Party and progressive institutions had become too beholden to far-left activists and liberal political staff members.Now free to speak his mind, Shor co-founded the data-analytics firm Blue Rose Research and began tweeting more and giving lengthy interviews that expanded on his theory. “I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that,” he told The Times’s Ezra Klein last October. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.”Joining Shor and McElwee in the effort to propagate popularism are a host of other liberal-but-tacking-to-the-center writers and thinkers. Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the influential 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” writes for a Substack newsletter called “The Liberal Patriot,” publishing missives on “The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem,” “The Democrats’ Working Class Voter Problem” and “The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party Left.” Matthew Yglesias, a prodigious pundit who co-founded Vox in 2014 before leaving in 2020 because he felt hemmed in by the “young-college-graduate bubble” at the website, now writes his own Substack newsletter, “Slow Boring.” “Part of what we’re doing here is rediscovering old ideas,” Yglesias told me. “I sometimes use the phrase ‘the wisdom of the ancients.’ None of these popularism ideas are particularly original or say anything that people haven’t said for a long time. They just became unfashionable briefly.”Writing in The Nation last October, Elie Mystal accused Shor and his comrades of counseling Democrats to “figure out what the racists want and give it to them.” The popularists, Mystal continued, “would have us believe that by not addressing Black concerns, by refusing to deliver on promises to fix the election system, the immigration system and the police system, Democrats are actually helping themselves attract white voters and counterintuitively, shoring up support from non-college-educated Black people.”Other popularism critics question the wisdom of relying on polls to develop a “popular” agenda at a time when political polling has never been more unreliable. They also point out that popularism’s most prominent preachers are New York- and Washington-based college-educated white guys themselves, whose evidence for what working-class voters want is, the Johns Hopkins University political scientist Daniel Schlozman says, “either survey data or the limited interactions that fancy people have with not-fancy people.” Instead of trying to win over voters who most likely aren’t winnable, the liberal critique of popularism holds, Democrats should instead redouble their efforts to bring Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college-educated white voters, to the polls. “Overpowering Republicans with enthusiasm and turnout is the only way to beat them,” Mystal wrote, “because trying to appease them is both morally intolerable and strategically foolish.”Popularists argue that Democrats have already tried and failed to win elections with the enthusiasm-and-turnout model. “The other side gets to vote too,” Teixeira wrote in January, “and the very stark choices favored by those on the left may mobilize the other side just as much — maybe more! — than the left’s side.” (A recent review of 400 million voting records by the political scientist Michael Barber and the public-policy scholar John B. Holbein found that “minority citizens, young people and those who support the Democratic Party are much less likely to vote than whites, older citizens and Republican Party supporters.”) Over a recent lunch at a Chinese-Korean restaurant near Dupont Circle in Washington, Teixeira held out hope that after November, the wisdom of the popularists’ case will be even more apparent. “We’re probably going to have a very rough midterms, and the appetite for change among Democrats will grow,” he said. “Defeat tends to concentrate a party’s mind.”No matter how likely the prospect of humiliating defeat, it’s a job requirement of the D.C.C.C. chairman to exude pugnacious confidence. As even his harshest critics would concede, Sean Patrick Maloney, the first openly gay person to hold the post, has a knack for that part of the job. “Sean makes me think of the old adage about Irishmen,” says Representative Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, the only Democrat to win in a Trump district in 2016, 2018 and 2020 and one of three Frontliners from the Keystone State. “They see two people fighting, and they ask, ‘Is this a private fight or can anybody get in?’”Now in his sixth term representing a congressional district in the Hudson Valley, Maloney, 55, angled to run the House Democratic campaign arm for years: In 2017, he conducted an autopsy of the group’s poor performance in the previous year’s election; in 2018, he ran for its chairmanship before abandoning the race because of a medical emergency. That Maloney, a close ally of Pelosi’s, was finally elected D.C.C.C. chairman in late 2020, just in time to preside over the Democratic debacle that’s shaping up to be the 2022 midterms, can make him seem like the dog that caught the car — an analogy that he naturally rejected. “You’re not the first person who’s suggested that,” he said. “But I like that people are underestimating us.”Maloney was enjoying himself — sipping the remnants of a soda from Shake Shack, gesturing to the three aides monitoring our conversation — when we talked in the middle of March in the D.C.C.C.’s new Washington headquarters, where cubicle name plates provide both the job title and preferred pronouns of the mostly Gen Z employees.There was no denying the political headwinds Democrats were facing, but Maloney’s exuberance at the time didn’t seem entirely irrational: The D.C.C.C. was finishing up a record-breaking fund-raising quarter that would ultimately bring in north of $50 million — $11.5 million more than its Republican counterpart raised during the same stretch. Maloney pointed to the State of the Union address Biden gave earlier that month — “the first time in a long time the American people got to see, without a filter, the guy they actually voted for” — and the job Biden was doing marshaling international support for Ukraine — “the most impressive presidential performance since the first Gulf War.” He believed both would improve Biden’s languishing support, which in turn would redound to the Democrats’ benefit in November. (Since then, Biden’s approval rating has dipped below 40 percent and the number of House seats Democrats are predicted to lose has increased.)More than money and polls, what was fueling Maloney’s swagger that afternoon was maps. At the start of the redistricting process that followed the 2020 census, Republicans appeared to hold the upper hand, with total control of the process in 19 states. Indeed, some election experts predicted that the G.O.P. would be able to retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly redrawn congressional maps. But working closely with Democratic officials in the handful of states where they controlled redistricting — including Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico — Maloney and the D.C.C.C. were able to engineer Democratic gains through aggressive gerrymandering of their own. Maloney’s most audacious move was in his home state of New York. There, Democratic legislators went around an independent redistricting commission and approved a heavily gerrymandered map. Their party gained an advantage in 22 out of 26 House districts, halving the number of safe Republican seats from eight to four.When I met with Maloney at the D.C.C.C., it looked as if Democrats had not just fought Republicans to a draw in the redistricting battle but had actually gained a few seats. “We beat ’em,” Maloney crowed. Of course, one driver of the political polarization that Maloney and other moderate Democrats denounce is the sort of aggressive gerrymandering that creates so many safe seats and so few competitive ones: In 2022, fewer than 40 seats out of 435 are considered competitive — in other words, seats in districts that Biden or Trump won by 5 percent or less in 2020.“Competitive districts marginalize ideological extremism and foster moderation in Congress,” Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor, has written. “Safe seats foster extremism.” Given that reality, I asked Maloney if he had any mixed feelings about the victory, considering the Democrats achieved it with such extreme gerrymanders — noting, of course, that Republicans would have done the same thing if given the opportunity. “They did have the opportunity and they [expletive] it up,” he shot back. “That’s what beating them means.”But the beatdown would prove ephemeral. Later that month, a Maryland judge threw out the state’s congressional map, calling it an “extreme partisan gerrymander.” A week after that, a judge in New York ruled that state’s new map unconstitutional. In May, the New York judge approved a new congressional map, drawn by a Carnegie Mellon political scientist, that undid all of the Democratic gains by creating what experts deemed 15 safely Democratic seats, five safely Republican seats and six tossups. Adding to New York Democrats’ misery, the new map either eliminated or drastically altered the districts of at least six Democratic incumbents.One of them was Maloney. An hour after the new, court-ordered maps were released, he announced on Twitter that he was switching from the Hudson Valley district he has represented since 2013 to a neighboring, now bluer district rooted in Westchester County but extending north to Putnam County, where he lives. (Members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent.) The only problem? Much of the district he was moving to is currently represented by his Democratic colleague Mondaire Jones. The prospect of the Democrats’ midterms chief forcing a member-on-member primary — much less a member-on-member primary involving a Black freshman incumbent like Jones — did not go over well with many House Democrats. Suddenly, all the internecine Democratic tensions that were Maloney’s job to resolve, or at the very least elide, were focused squarely on him.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones told Politico. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, a Black freshman member like Jones, complained about the “thinly veiled racism” of Maloney’s maneuverings. Others noted the presumption of Maloney, the man tasked with protecting the Democrats’ House majority, creating an open seat and giving Republicans a better opportunity to win his current district this fall. Ocasio-Cortez called on Maloney to step down as D.C.C.C. chairman if he wound up in a primary versus Jones.In the end, Jones switched from his Westchester district to a new one miles away in New York City. But that didn’t completely defuse the situation. Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive New York state senator from Westchester, decided to challenge Maloney in the August primary, securing the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Biaggi attacked Maloney not just as “an establishment, corporatist” Democrat but for putting his own political fortunes above those of the Democratic Party’s. “What hurt the party was having the head of the campaign arm not stay in his district,” she told reporters, “not maximize the number of seats New York can have to hold the majority.”“This is so counterproductive,” Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, wrote on Twitter about Ocasio-Cortez’s support of Biaggi’s primary challenge to Maloney. “The Supreme Court is about to outlaw abortion. We could lose both houses. So we are going to focus our time running against each other. Now we’re primarying committed progressives because … why? If we lose the House it’s because of dumb [expletive] like this.”With their majority or their own re-elections in doubt, many House Democrats are already heading for the exits in a pre-midterm exodus. So far, 33 House Democrats have announced that they will not compete for their seats in November. Some are leaving to run for other offices, but most are retiring. And while some Democratic retirees represent solidly blue districts and will almost certainly be replaced by other Democrats, many of them hold the sort of purple — or even red — seats that Democrats have little chance of keeping unless they have an incumbent running.In the middle of March, the mood was funereal in the office of Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida who announced last December that she would not be running again for her purple Orlando-area seat. She had just watched the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky give a video address to a joint session of Congress, during which he shared footage of Ukrainian women and children packing bags and weeping as they said goodbye to their husbands and fathers who were staying to fight the Russians. Murphy, whose family escaped Vietnam by boat when she was an infant, wiped away tears. “I’m a little emotional about it,” she explained. “Those images have been hard for me to watch.”As Murphy reflected on her time in Congress, her emotions seemed no less raw. She was first elected to the House in 2016, defeating a 12-term Republican incumbent whose district had become more Democratic after the state Supreme Court made lawmakers redraw Florida’s congressional lines. But it was hardly blue and Murphy won by hewing to the center on fiscal issues and foreign policy.Once in Washington, she joined the Blue Dogs. In the group’s early years, most of its members were older white men from the South who were not just fiscal conservatives but cultural ones as well — firm in their opposition to gun control, abortion and gay people serving in the military. In 2018, when Murphy, an Asian American woman who just turned 40, became the group’s co-chairwoman, it was a sign of how even the Blue Dogs had changed amid the Democratic Party’s leftward march. “I’d love for the world to stop using ‘conservative Democrat’ to define Blue Dogs,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “Because I am pro-choice, I am unabashedly pro-L.G.B.T.Q., I am pro-gun-safety.” (In addition to Murphy, the Blue Dogs also now have two Black and four Hispanic members.)Stephanie Murphy, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMurphy preferred to describe herself as a moderate; her main areas of disagreement with her fellow House Democrats were about national security and pocketbook issues (she supported a law that toughened penalties for deported immigrants who try to re-enter the United States and another that allows new businesses to deduct more of their start-up expenses). For her first two years in Congress, with Trump as president and Democrats in the minority, she was able to stake out moderate positions with little pushback from members of her caucus. But after 2018, when Democrats took back the House, her moderation became a sore point.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More

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    Congress Is Paralyzed on Guns. Here’s Why Chris Murphy Is Still Hopeful.

    The Democrat from Connecticut, who has spent his decade in the Senate trying and failing to enact gun safety bills, says his party should make the issue the core of its 2022 midterm message.WASHINGTON — It did not take long after the racist gun massacre in Buffalo for a familiar sense of resignation to set in on Capitol Hill about the chance that Congress would be able to muster the will to act on meaningful legislation to combat gun violence in America.In emotional remarks at the scene of the mass shooting on Tuesday, President Biden made no direct call for Congress to take such action. Afterward, he told reporters that he intended to do so, but was frank about his belief that persuading lawmakers to move would be “very difficult.”Around the same time, top Democrats on Capitol Hill were publicly conceding that their paper-thin majority in the Senate meant there was little they would be able to do to prevent the next tragedy.“We’re kind of stuck where we are, for the time being,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, playing down the chance that even a modest bill to strengthen background checks for gun purchases could overcome a Republican blockade.Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, shares his colleagues’ skepticism that any legislation can move. But he is also concerned that Democrats may squander a chance to turn the issue of gun safety into a rallying cry for the midterm elections.For a decade, the issue of gun violence has defined Mr. Murphy’s career; the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., took place a month after he won his seat.Mr. Murphy spoke to The New York Times from a Senate cloakroom about the chances for legislative action on guns, what Mr. Biden should do and why he thinks Democrats will lose control of Congress if they don’t make combating gun violence the core of their 2022 appeal to voters.The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when 20 young children and six adults were killed, did Democrats and President Barack Obama miss the opportunity to pass meaningful gun safety legislation?There was this popular meme in 2013, which said that if the killing of 20 children didn’t result in any action, nothing will. That’s fundamentally the wrong way to look at how Washington works. There are few epiphanies here. It’s all about political power, and political muscle, and we’re in the process of building our own.The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby was ready for us, and for those parents, in 2013. The anti-gun-violence movement was essentially nonexistent, and the N.R.A. was at its peak power.From Opinion: The Buffalo ShootingCommentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.The Times Editorial Board: The mass shooting in Buffalo was an extreme expression of a political worldview that has become increasingly central to the G.O.P.’s identity.Jamelle Bouie: G.O.P. politicians and conservative media personalities did not create the idea of the “great replacement,” but they have adopted it.Paul Krugman: There is a direct line from Republicans’ embrace of crank economics, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.Sway: In the latest episode of her podcast, Kara Swisher hosts a discussion on the role of internet platforms like 4chan, Facebook and Twitch in the attack.We needed time to build up a movement that is stronger than the gun lobby.My worry is that a lot of my colleagues still believe in the mythology of 1994, when everyone thought Democrats lost Congress over the assault weapons ban. That’s not true — that’s not why Congress flipped. Ever since then, Democrats are under the illusion that it’s a losing issue for us.It’s one of the most important wedge issues, and if we don’t talk about it, then we’re going to lose.Many are urging Senator Chuck Schumer and Mr. Durbin to bring up a bill to expand background checks. Even if it couldn’t pass, it would force Republicans to defend their opposition to a policy that polls show has broad support. Should they?There are times when show votes help define the parties. I’m not confident this is one of those moments, given the fact that it’s already pretty clear which side Republicans fall on and which side Democrats fall on.My main recommendation is for Democrats to go out and run on this issue, proudly and strongly. My worry is we would have a vote on the Senate floor, but then Democrats would not be willing to go out and talk about that vote in campaigns.The only way we actually change the dynamic on this issue is to make Republicans show we believe this is a winning electoral issue. That’s what we did in 2018. My worry is, we don’t feel the same confidence in this issue as a winning electoral issue in 2022.I don’t know why we don’t learn a lesson from 2018, that when we run strongly on the issue of guns, universal background checks, banning assault weapons, we turn out voters that otherwise would stay home in the midterms. I’ve talked to Senator Schumer about bringing a vote to the Senate floor. I’m not interested in taking a vote on the Senate floor if we don’t talk about it.If legislation can’t pass, what executive actions are you pushing the administration to take?There is still a ton of harmful gray area around the question of who needs to be a licensed gun dealer. There are a lot of folks peddling guns online and at gun shows who are truly in the business of selling guns, and should be required to do background checks. President Obama put out helpful, but not binding, guidance. The administration could put some real meat on the existing statute and define what it means to be in the business of selling guns.Have you pitched that to them?I have. There has been significant interest from the White House in pursuing that line of policy. I don’t know that they have made a commitment or issued any directive to the Justice Department.Do you support eliminating the filibuster in order to pass gun reforms?One hundred percent. The reason we can’t get this done is the rules of the Senate, not because the American people haven’t made a choice.Guns were one of the most important issues for voters in 2018; it ranked second behind health care. When voters came to the polls in 2018 and elected a Democratic majority in the House, it was with the explicit purpose of getting gun legislation passed. The same voters came back and elected a Democratic president. It’s simply the rules of the Senate that stopped the will of the American people from becoming law.Is there anything happening in terms of discussions with Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, about trying to revive their bill to tighten background checks?There’s nothing new happening now. Manchin-Toomey doesn’t have 60 votes. I spent much of the last two years trying to find a piece of Manchin-Toomey that could get 60 votes. Ultimately, we couldn’t find a landing place. I’ll continue to try any creative avenue to find an expansion of background checks.Does a weakened National Rifle Association create any opening for Republicans to move off their opposition to gun safety measures?This N.R.A. stamp of approval still really matters to them. Inside a Republican Party that has become bereft of big ideas, they’ve only got one left, which is the destruction of government. Nothing signals that more than the endorsement of the organization that supports people arming themselves against the government. In this era of anti-government fervor, it’s more important than ever.Eventually, we have to figure out a way for Republicans to show how much they hate government other than the N.R.A. endorsement. Maybe I should be rooting for the Club for Growth to be a more effective voice within the Republican Party.Can guns really be a winning issue for Democrats in a year when Republicans are attacking your party over inflation, rising gas prices and not meeting the basic needs of American families?I think voters are emotionally moved by the slaughter of innocents. And I think they find it a little weird when Democrats who claim to care about this don’t actually talk about it.We live in an era where authenticity is the coin of the realm. You just have to show voters who you are. I don’t think there’s any more potent means by which to translate who you are, and what you care about, than this issue. I think when you leave this out when you list your priorities as a candidate, it causes voters to scratch their heads a bit.What grade would you give the Biden administration on this issue?The administration could have moved faster on executive actions and the appointment of a new A.T.F. director. I want them to keep going. There’s still more regulatory and executive action that this administration can take and more things the team can do to use the bully pulpit to make sure this is an election issue.Would you give the administration a grade?No.A number of gun violence prevention organizations have called on Mr. Biden to open a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Do you think that would make a difference?I do. It’s become clear to me we need a specific, driving focus on gun violence. The president is clearly personally committed to this issue, but he’s stretched thin due to myriad international and domestic crises. He would be best served by a high-level senior official who wakes up every day and coordinates the issue.After another mass shooting like the one in Buffalo, do you find yourself becoming resigned to the idea that nothing can be done on gun violence?I’ve studied enough great social change movements to know they often take decades to succeed. It was a full 10 years from the shooting of James Brady to the passage of the Brady handgun bill. I think I am part of one of these great social change movements, and I’m confident that you have to put up with a lot of failures before you’re met with success.I also don’t think democracy can allow for 80 percent of the American people to not get their way, forever. Eventually we will be able to break through. We just have not been able to find that pathway yet.This is an exhausting issue to work on, but I have this very deep sense that I will see my time in public service as a failure if I don’t meet the expectations of those parents in Sandy Hook, and Hartford and Bridgeport. And fear is a powerful motivator. More

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    The Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Gerrymander Battles Loom, as G.O.P. Looks to Press Its Advantage With new census results coming, Republicans control redistricting in key states, while Democrats prepare for legal challenges and look to redraw some maps of their own. Demonstrators at a rally protesting gerrymandering outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in 2019.Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersReid J. Epstein and Jan. 31, 2021Updated 6:37 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — With the election over and Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, officials in both parties are bracing for a bruising new battle with a different balance of power: the redrawing of congressional maps, where Republicans hold the advantage in many state legislatures across the country, including in key battleground states.Republicans hold total control of redistricting in 18 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Texas, which are growing in population and expected to gain seats after the 2020 census is tabulated. Some election experts believe the G.O.P. could retake the House in 2022 based solely on gains from newly drawn districts.Already, Republicans are discussing redrawing two suburban Atlanta districts held by Democrats to make one of them more Republican; slicing Democratic sections out of a Houston district that Republicans lost in 2018; and carving up a northeastern Ohio district held by Democrats since 1985.“I would say that the national vote could be the same as this year two years from now, and redistricting by itself would easily be enough to alter who controls the chamber,” said Samuel S. Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. He estimated that reapportionment alone could net the Republicans three seats, and gerrymandering in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida another five seats.With Democrats holding a 222-211 edge, Republicans would probably need to flip just six seats to win back the majority. But Dr. Wang and other good-government experts cautioned that other factors could determine the majority.Democrats will try to redraw districts in their favor in states like New York, Illinois and Maryland, they said. Some battleground states have adopted nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions. And President Biden did not create a wave of downballot victories for Democrats in the November elections, so there are fewer surprise winners who could easily lose their seats in 2022.While partisan warfare on Capitol Hill draws most of the national attention, the battles over redistricting are among the fiercest and most consequential in American government. Reapportionment and redistricting occurs every 10 years after the census, with states with the fastest-growing populations gaining seats in Congress at the expense of those with slower-growing or shrinking populations. The balance of power established by gerrymandering can give either party an edge that lasts through several election cycles; court challenges — even if successful — can take years to unwind those advantages.Outside of the State Capitol in Austin. Texas is expected to pick up House seats after the 2020 census results are tabulated.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThis year, Texas (with potentially three new seats) and Florida (two) are expected to be the biggest winners, while Illinois, New York and, for the first time, California will each lose seats once the Census Bureau makes the reapportionment figures official. That could give Republicans an inherent advantage in the midterm elections in November 2022 — regardless of Mr. Biden’s popularity then.The bureau is not expected to deliver its data until late July, several months behind schedule, giving state lawmakers and redistricting commissions far less time than usual to draw the maps and deal with inevitable court challenges before the 2022 primaries begin.Democrats have been fighting on slanted terrain with redistricting ever since Republicans ran the table during the 2010 midterm elections and drew themselves favorable gerrymandered maps in 2011 and 2012. Though courts invalidated them in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, many still remain.Even though Democrats won control of the House in 2018, “the lingering effects of partisan gerrymandering, disproportionately by Republican controlled legislatures, make it harder for the Democrats to hold onto control or win control,” said Bernard Grofman, a professor of politics at the University of California, Irvine, “because they have to win probably closer to 52 percent of the national vote, or definitely more than 51 percent.”A host of states have adopted independent commissions to draw maps, arguing that people without a vested interest would be more likely to draw fairer maps. Some good-government groups and political scientists have lobbied for more changes, such as the use of algorithms to determine district boundaries, though there is broad debate about what would be effective in erasing the partisan tilt of the process.Adam Kincaid, director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, is preparing for legal challenges to redistricting.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesRepublicans have, for the most part, adopted an elections-have-consequences attitude toward the mapping process. Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said his energy will be directed toward the inevitable legal battles that will follow this year’s partisan map-drawing.“If it wasn’t for lawsuits that were brought in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Florida, Republicans would be in the majority today,” Mr. Kincaid said. The things to focus on, he said, were “defending maps drawn by Republican legislatures and also being more aggressive about going after Democrat gerrymanders in the blue states.”As they look to reframe the electoral maps, Republicans are debating how aggressive they should be. They can push the boundaries and try to win the most seats possible in 2022, which puts them at risk of losing more seats in future years in the growing suburbs that are attracting waves of Democrats. Or they can aim for a smaller number of Republican districts that can create a more durable majority, with the potential to last the decade.The central redistricting battlegrounds will be in Texas and Florida. Though both states are controlled by Republicans, the population growth has come largely from people of color and suburbanites — demographics that have trended toward Democrats during the Trump era.“Their ability to manipulate the map to the tune of 30 seats like they did last time is no longer on the table,” said Kelly Ward Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “If the map plays out fairly, we will end up with more competitive seats than we have now.’’Kelly Ward Burton, the executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, at her Santa Barbara home.Credit…Damon Casarez for The New York TimesStill, the combination of sophisticated mapmaking software and the abbreviated map-drawing period will give Republican lawmakers a far freer hand to put into effect favorable districts in the next year. And Republicans in states like Texas and Georgia will benefit from the Supreme Court decision in 2013 on the Voting Rights Act, which lifted the requirement that they get federal approval for redistricting.“I’m very concerned,” said Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor who this month became the new chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. He is spending his first weeks as chairman devising a plan to challenge and offset Republican efforts.A decade ago, Mr. Diaz led the Fair Districts Now effort, which proposed a constitutional amendment offering guidelines for redistricting in Florida. Voters approved the measure in 2010, in time for the 2011 redistricting. But Republicans in the legislature ignored many of the principles, installing a highly gerrymandered map that helped Republicans win 17 of the 27 House seats in 2012 while President Barack Obama won re-election.Although there were near immediate legal challenges, it was not until 2015 that the State Supreme Court struck down the redrawn map, saying eight districts had been aggressively gerrymandered to favor Republicans.In Texas, a similar concern is rippling through the electorate. On Thursday, the State Senate’s redistricting committee held a virtual hearing, welcoming public commentary. For over two hours, pleas came in from across the state: please draw fair maps.“I believe that gerrymandering is an existential threat to the nation,” said Rick Kennedy, who lives in Austin and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2018 and 2020.Though the data for reapportionment is still outstanding, Phil King, the Republican who leads the redistricting committee in the Texas State House, said almost all of the population growth had come from the triangle between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. He noted that the committee was probably going to have to extend some rural districts into urban areas to keep the population at roughly 850,000 per district.“If you’re in West Texas where most of the counties are 10 to 20,000 people, you’ve got to reach into those urban areas to pick up some population,” Mr. King said.Yet those slivers into urban areas are what Democrats and good-government groups denounce as a contorted form of gerrymandering, weakening one area’s political voice by spreading it among other districts — and one that disproportionately affects people of color.“We’ll continue to see racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering in terms of packing in the urban areas,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, referring to a gerrymandering tactic of creating a heavily partisan district by “packing” it with supporters. Ms. Riggs argued gerrymandering lawsuits against the 2010 Republican-drawn maps in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.Members listening as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, delivers an address in the House Chambers on the opening day of the 117th Congress in the Capitol Building.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDemocrats will draw lines for far fewer congressional seats. The biggest Democratic state, California, outsources redistricting to a commission, as do Colorado, Virginia and Washington. And Mr. Kincaid said Republicans were preparing to challenge Democratic maps in states like Illinois, Maryland and New Mexico.In New York, where Democrats control redistricting for the first time since 1991, half of the Republican congressional delegation — either seven or eight members, depending on the outcome of one undecided race — could see their districts disappear if Democrats pursue the most aggressive gerrymandering available.“It’s reasonable to expect that when the voters of New York have given Democrats a supermajority control of both houses of the legislature, that might create an opportunity that didn’t exist in the past,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Some election experts argued that Republicans were so successful at drawing gerrymandered maps 10 years ago that it would be difficult for them to add to their advantage now.“The Democrats were able to win the House in 2018 despite the fact that there were some very gerrymandered states,” said Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University who studies gerrymandering.Democrats are also in stronger position nationally then they were in 2011. Key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have divided government with Democratic governors who could veto maps, setting up likely court battles. In Virginia, Democrats won control of the state government in 2019 and in 2020 voters approved a nonpartisan redistricting commission, eliminating the ability of either party to dominate the redrawing of districts.Other battleground states like Michigan and Arizona have established independent commissions, rather than partisan legislatures, that will draw the new maps.Ben Diamond, a Florida state representative who leads the Democratic redistricting efforts there, is calling on his colleagues in the legislature to commit “to transparency and public engagement” and “a meaningful scheduled way of doing this.”He added: “The sooner we can lay out how this work is going to be done, from a public engagement and a transparency perspective, the better,”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Knocking on Two Million Doors in Georgia

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    Electoral College Results

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