Midterm Elections (2022)

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      While Democrats Debate ‘Latinx,’ Latinos Head to the G.O.P.

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      Democrats working to save their slim majority in the House in November’s elections have been sounding alarm bells lately over research showing that Republican attacks on culture-war issues are working, particularly with center-left, Hispanic and independent voters. Hispanic voters, many of us alienated by progressive labels and mottos like “Latinx” and “defund the police,” have been drifting rightward as Donald Trump marginally increased the G.O.P. Hispanic vote share in 2016 and again in 2020 — a phenomenon, it should be noted, that goes beyond Mr. Trump or any individual campaign.Democrats now understand that they are losing support among Hispanics on culture as well as pocketbook issues, leaving little in the message arsenal for the party’s candidates to use to stanch what appears to be a long-term bleed.The Democrats’ problems with Hispanics are especially glaring when you consider that Republicans are not exactly flawless when it comes to appealing to these voters. Both parties have committed a mind-boggling form of political malpractice for years: They have consistently failed to understand what motivates Hispanic voters, a crucial and growing part of the electorate.As the growth of the Hispanic eligible electorate continues to outpace other new eligible voting populations, the caricatures and stereotypes of “Hispanic issues” are proving further and further removed from the experience of most Hispanics. Yet, for all the hype and spin about Republican gains with Hispanic voters, the rightward shift of these voters is happening despite Republicans’ best efforts, not because of them.In the eyes of some on the American right, Hispanics are hyper-religious Catholics or evangelicals, entrepreneurial, anti-communist, social conservatives reminiscent of the ethnic white voters of yesteryear. To some on the left, we’re seen as angry, racially oppressed workers of the cultural vanguard who want to upend capitalism while demanding open borders. While none of these caricatures are accurate, in them there are enough grains of truth to lull self-righteous partisans on both sides into believing that they may be on the winning side of the emerging ethnically pluralistic American majority.In our current era of negative partisanship, voters are as often motivated to oppose the party they dislike or view as extreme as they are to support the party with which they align. Latinos, of course, are no different, and it is at the cultural extremes where Democrats face the greatest threat to losing what they have long viewed as the foundational base of their long-term majority prospects. As “culture” grows as a proxy for “race,” the electoral math for Democrats will most likely get bleaker as political campaigns continue as referendums on “critical race theory” and “defunding the police.” It will be worse still if Hispanics increasingly do not view themselves as an aggrieved racial minority.This understanding will help determine which party controls Congress and the White House, beginning with the 2022 midterms. Under newly drawn district lines, four of the most competitive House seats will have Hispanic populations of at least 38 percent and are in California, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Additionally, Hispanic voters will be essential components of Senate and other statewide contests in Arizona and Nevada. The Latino voters in these states and districts are important for both parties. As the Democratic Party drifts away from its working-class roots and emphasizes cultural issues, Republicans are well positioned to pick up these politically untethered voters and with them the reins of power.The recent debate over the term “Latinx” symbolizes the cultural alienation of institutions far removed from the realities of life for an overwhelming number of working-class Hispanics. “Latinx” was created as a gender-neutral alternative term in Spanish, a gendered language, that refers to males as “Latino” and females as “Latina’.”Commonly used by media, political and academic elites as a sign of gender inclusivity, it is virtually nonexistent in the communities it refers to. In 2020 Pew Research revealed that only 3 percent of Latinos use the term, while 9 percent of white liberals think it is the most appropriate term to use. In fact, only 14 percent of Latinos with just a high school degree or less had even heard of it.This was not a sign of intolerance but rather was emblematic of one class with the luxury of being consumed with such matters trying to impose their values on working-class families trying to keep up with paying the rent on Friday. Members of the Democratic Party don’t just live in a distinct cultural bubble removed from the realities of their blue-collar counterparts, they are so removed from the rapidly growing Hispanic working class that many of them are now literally speaking a different language.The growing cultural divide in America, in which Hispanics appear to be increasingly turned off by progressive mottos and movements, is linked to the education divide in America between college-educated and noncollege-educated voters of all ethnicities. According to Pew Research, Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among white noncollege voters, who make up 57 percent of all G.O.P. voters. This in a country where 64 percent of voters do not have a college degree.The Democratic Party is losing its brand among white, working-class voters and Hispanics. This is especially pronounced among Hispanic men and Hispanic noncollege-educated voters, who are trending more Republican, just as their white noncollege-educated peers are. Latinos are increasingly voting similarly to noncollege whites, perhaps because they don’t view themselves all that differently from them. Pew Research studies on Hispanic identity have shown that fully half of the country’s Hispanics view themselves as “a typical American”; fewer responded as identifying as “very different from a typical American.”For all the discussion about diversity within the Latino community, and the now-trite adage that the community is not ‘‘monolithic,’’ in fact what unites most Hispanics is that they are an important share of the blue-collar noncollege-educated work force, and their presence in the labor force is only growing. The “essential workers” of the pandemic are disproportionately Black and Latino, and as a decidedly younger demographic, Hispanic workers are filling the roles of manufacturing, agricultural and construction trades in states with large Hispanic populations.Democrats have increasingly become a party shaped by and reliant upon white voters with college degrees. Compared with 40.1 percent of white adults age 25 and older, only 18.8 percent of Latino adults in this age group have a bachelor’s degree. Latinos are, and increasingly will be, a key part of the blue-collar work force of the future and their politics are reflecting that.From 71 percent support for President Barack Obama in 2012 to 66 percent for Hillary Clinton and 59 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats find themselves slowly but measurably losing hold of Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the electorate. As Latino voters grow in number in key battleground states, they are increasingly rejecting the minority construct promulgated by the media, academia and Democratic politicians and consultants.The party that is able to express the values of a multiethnic working class will be the majority party for the next generation. As we continue to watch the country’s culture war increasingly divided by education levels, it is quite likely that Latino voters will continue to trend, even if marginally, into the ranks of Republican voters. The country stands on the precipice of a significant political shift. As President Ronald Reagan once quipped, quoting a Republican sheriff nominee, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”Mike Madrid is an expert in Latino voting trends, was a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, where he taught “Race, Class and Partisanship,” and is on the board of directors of the League of Minority Voters.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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      If You Think Republicans Are Overplaying Schools, You Aren’t Paying Attention

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      The warning signs are everywhere. For 30 years, polls showed that Americans trusted Democrats over Republicans to invest in public education and strengthen schools. Within the past year, however, Republicans have closed the gap; a recent poll shows the two parties separated on the issue by less than the margin of error.Since the Republican Glenn Youngkin scored an upset win in Virginia’s race for governor by making education a central campaign issue, Republicans in state after state have capitalized on anger over mask mandates, parental rights and teaching about race, and their strategy seems to be working. The culture wars now threatening to consume American schools have produced an unlikely coalition — one that includes populists on the right and a growing number of affluent, educated white parents on the left. Both groups are increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party.For the party leaders tasked with crafting a midterm strategy, this development should set off alarms. Voters who feel looked down on by elites are now finding common cause with those elites, forming an alliance that could not only cost the Democrats the midterm elections but also fundamentally realign American politics.The Democrats know they have a problem. One recent analysis conducted by the Democratic Governors Association put it bluntly: “We need to retake education as a winning issue.” But reclaiming their trustworthiness on education will require more than just savvier messaging. Democrats are going to need to rethink a core assumption: that education is the key to addressing economic inequality.The party’s current education problem reflects a misguided policy shift made decades ago. Eager to reclaim the political center, Democratic politicians increasingly framed education, rather than labor unions or a progressive tax code, as the answer to many of our economic problems, embracing what Barack Obama would later call “ladders of opportunity,” such as “good” public schools and college degrees, which would offer a “hand up” rather than a handout. Bill Clinton famously pronounced, “What you earn depends on what you learn.”But this message has proved to be deeply alienating to the people who once made up the core of the party. As the philosopher Michael Sandel wrote in his recent book “The Tyranny of Merit,” Democrats often seemed to imply that people whose living standards were declining had only themselves to blame. Meanwhile, more affluent voters were congratulated for their smarts and hard work. Tired of being told to pick themselves up and go to college, working people increasingly turned against the Democrats.Today, as the middle class falls further behind the wealthy, the belief in education as the sole remedy for economic inequality appears more and more misguided. And yet, because Democrats have spent the past 30 years framing schooling as the surest route to the good life, any attempt to make our education system fairer is met with fierce resistance from affluent liberals worried that Democratic reforms might threaten their carefully laid plans to help their children get ahead.In California, plans to place less emphasis on calculus in an effort to address persistent racial and socioeconomic disparities in math achievement have spawned furious backlash. So, too, did the announcement last fall that New York City schools would be winding down their gifted and talented program, which has been widely criticized for exacerbating segregation — an announcement that Mayor Eric Adams has begun to walk back.Mr. Youngkin was one of the first to recognize that these anxieties could be used for political gain, and he carefully tailored his messaging to parents from both affluent families and the conservative movement. In his appeals to the Republican base, he railed against critical race theory and claimed that allies of George Soros had inserted “operatives” on local school boards. To centrist parents, he pledged to undo admissions policy changes aimed at bolstering diversity at Virginia’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where graduates regularly go on to attend Ivy League universities.These promises seem to have worked. A recent focus group conducted by a Democratic polling firm showed that education was the top issue cited by Joe Biden supporters who had voted or considered voting for Mr. Youngkin. Participants referred to an array of complaints about education, including a sense that the focus on race and social justice in Virginia’s schools had gone too far, eclipsing core academic subjects. Similar charges echoed through the San Francisco school board election last month as Asian American voters, furious over changes to the admissions process at a highly selective high school, galvanized a movement to oust three school board members.How can Democrats claw out of this bind? In the near term, they can remind voters that Republican efforts to limit what kids are taught in school will hurt students, no matter their background. The College Board’s Advanced Placement program, for example, recently warned that it will remove the AP designation from courses when required topics are banned. Whatever the limitations of the AP program, students from all class backgrounds still use it to earn college credit and demonstrate engagement in rigorous coursework. Democrats could also take a page from Mr. Youngkin’s playbook and pledge, as he did, to invest more “than has ever been invested in education,” an issue that resonates across party lines.But if Democrats want to stop bleeding working-class votes, they need to begin telling a different story about education and what schools can and can’t do. For a generation, Democrats have framed a college degree as the main path to economic mobility, a foolproof way to expand the middle class. But now kids regularly emerge from college burdened with crushing student debt and struggling to find stable jobs. To these graduates and to their parents it is painfully obvious that degrees do not necessarily guarantee success. A generation ago, Mr. Clinton may have been able to make a convincing case that education could solve all people’s problems, but today Democrats risk irrelevance — or worse — by sticking with that tired mantra.So, yes, strong schools are essential for the health and well-being of young people: Schools are where they gain confidence in themselves and build relationships with adults and with one another, where they learn about the world and begin to imagine life beyond their neighborhoods. But schools can’t level a playing field marred by racial inequality and increasingly sharp class distinctions; to pretend otherwise is both bad policy and bad politics. Moreover, the idea that schools alone can foster equal opportunity is a dangerous form of magical thinking that not only justifies existing inequality but also exacerbates our political differences by pitting the winners in our economy against the losers.Democrats can reclaim education as a winning issue. They might even be able to carve out some badly needed common ground, bridging the gap between those who have college degrees and those who don’t by telling a more compelling story about why we have public education in this country. But that story must go beyond the scramble for social mobility if the party is to win back some of the working people it has lost over the past few decades.Schools may not be able to solve inequality. But they can give young people a common set of social and civic values, as well as the kind of education that is valuable in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. We don’t fund education with our tax dollars to wash our hands of whatever we might owe to the next generation. Instead, we do it to strengthen our communities — by preparing students for the wide range of roles they will inevitably play as equal members of a democratic society.Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) is a freelance journalist, and Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) is an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. They are the authors of “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School” and the hosts of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Candidates Are Using TikTok to Secure Younger Voters

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      If all politics is theater, Representative Tim Ryan is one of its subtler actors. A moderate Democrat from Ohio’s 13th district who has represented the state for nearly two decades, his speeches and debate performances are often described as coming out of central casting. His style choices are D.C. standard. He’s not usually the subject of late-night skits or memes.That’s not to say he isn’t trying. Back in the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was overtaking the country and a divided Congress was duking it out over a sweeping stimulus bill, Mr. Ryan, 48, was so frustrated at the stalled legislation that he decided to channel his emotion into a TikTok video.The 15-second clip features Mr. Ryan lounging around his office in a white button-down and dress pants, his tie slightly loose, as he mimes a clean version of “Bored in the House,” by Curtis Roach. It’s a rap song that resonated with cooped-up Americans early on in the pandemic, featuring a refrain (“I’m bored in the house, and I’m in the house bored”) that appears in millions of videos across TikTok. Most of them depict people losing their minds in lockdown. Mr. Ryan’s interpretation was a little more literal: Bored … in the House … get it?

      @reptimryan In the (People’s) House bored. ♬ original sound – curtistootrill Mr. Ryan is not a politician one readily associates with the Zoomers of TikTok. His talking points tend to revolve around issues like reviving American manufacturing rather than, say, defunding the police. But the chino-clad congressman wasn’t naïve to the nontraditional places from which political influence might flow. Years ago he was all in on meditation. Why not try the social platform of the moment?His teenage daughter, Bella, got him up to speed and taught him some of the dances that had gone viral on the app. “I just thought it was hysterical, and that it was something really cool that her and I could do together,” Mr. Ryan said in a phone interview.Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio joined TikTok in 2020. “I started to see it as an opportunity to really speak to an audience that wasn’t watching political talk shows or watching the news,” he said.Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesSoon enough, he was posting on his own account, sharing video montages of his floor speeches and his views on infrastructure legislation, backed by the sound of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” (As any TikTok newbie would quickly learn, popular songs help videos get discovered on the platform.)“I started to see it as an opportunity to really speak to an audience that wasn’t watching political talk shows or watching the news,” Mr. Ryan said. This year, he’s running for Ohio’s open Senate seat; he thinks TikTok could be a crucial part of the race.But as primaries begin for the midterm elections, the real question is: What do voters think?Privacy, Protest and PunditrySocial media has played a role in political campaigning since at least 2007, when Barack Obama, then an Illinois senator, registered his first official Twitter handle. Since then, enormous numbers of political bids have harnessed the power of social platforms, through dramatic announcement videos on YouTube, Twitter debates, Reddit A.M.A.s, fireside chats on Instagram Live and more. TikTok, with its young-skewing active global user base of one billion, would seem a natural next frontier.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.So far, though, compared with other platforms, it has been embraced by relatively few politicians. Their videos run the gamut of cringey — say, normie dads bopping along to viral audio clips — to genuinely connecting with people.“TikTok is still in the novelty phase in terms of social media networks for political candidates,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican political technologist.Republicans in particular have expressed concerns about the app’s parent company, ByteDance, whose headquarters are in China. In the final year of his presidency, Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to ban the app in the United States, citing concerns that user data could be retrieved by the Chinese government. (President Biden revoked the order last summer.)After a brief stint on the app, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, deleted his account. He has since called on President Biden to block the platform entirely. In an email statement, Mr. Rubio, 50, wrote that TikTok “poses a serious threat to U.S. national security and Americans’ — especially children’s — personal privacy.”Senator Marco Rubio of Florida believes that TikTok “poses a serious threat to U.S. national security and Americans’ — especially children’s — personal privacy.”Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThat point has been disputed by national security experts, who think the app would be a relatively inefficient way for Chinese agencies to obtain U.S. intelligence.“They have better ways of getting it,” said Adam Segal, the director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, among them “phishing emails, directed targeted attacks on the staff or the politicians themselves or buying data on the open market.”Regardless, TikTok seems to have empowered a new generation to become more engaged with global issues, try on ideological identities and participate in the political process — even those not old enough to vote.There have been rare but notable examples of TikTok inspiring political action. In 2020, young users encouraged people to register for a Tulsa, Okla., rally in support of former President Donald Trump as a prank to limit turnout. Ahead of the rally, Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, tweeted that there had been more than a million ticket requests, but only 6,200 tickets were scanned at the arena.Such activity is not limited to young liberals on the platform. Ioana Literat, an associate professor of communication at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied young people and political expression on social media with Neta Kligler-Vilenchik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, pointed to the political “hype houses” that became popular on TikTok during the 2020 election. The owners of those accounts have livestreamed debates, debunked misinformation spreading on the app and discussed policy issues.“Young political pundits on both sides of the ideological divide have been very successful in using TikTok to reach their respective audiences,” Ms. Literat said.You’ve Got My Vote, BestieMany of the politicians active on TikTok are Democrats or left-leaning independents, including Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and the mayors of two of America’s largest cities, Lori Lightfoot and Eric Adams (who announced he had joined this week with a video that featured his morning smoothie regimen).This could be because the platform has a large proportion of young users, according to internal company data and documents that were reviewed by The New York Times in 2020, and young people tend to lean liberal. (TikTok would not share current demographic data with The Times.)Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has cultivated a following on TikTok, where young users often refer to him as their “bestie.”Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times“If you are a Democrat running for office, you’re trying to get young voters to go out and support you,” said Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist. “That calculation is different for Republicans, where you’re trying to mobilize a different type of voter” — someone who is likely older and spends time on other platforms.For his part, Mr. Markey has cultivated a following on TikTok with videos that are a mix of silly (such as him boiling pasta in acknowledgment of “Rigatoni Day”), serious (for example, him reintroducing the Green New Deal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush) and seriously stylish (him stepping out in a bomber jacket and Nike high tops). The comments on his videos are filled with fans calling him “bestie” (“go bestie!!”, “i love you bestie,” “YES BESTIE!!!!”).The feeling is mutual. “When I post on TikTok, it’s because I’m having fun online and talking with my friends about the things we all care about,” Mr. Markey, 75, wrote in an email. “I listen and learn from young people on TikTok. They are leading, they know what’s going on and they know where we are headed, especially online. I’m with them.”

      @ed_markey you have to stop ♬ A Moment Apart – ODESZA – Hannah Stater Dafne Valenciano, 19, a college student from California, said that she’s a fan of Mr. Ossoff’s TikTok account. During his campaign season, “he had very funny content and urged young voters to go to the ballots,” Ms. Valenciano said. “Politicians accessing this social media makes it easier for my generation to see their media rather than through news or articles.”Several of the videos posted by Mr. Ossoff, 35, who has moppy brown hair and boyish good looks, have been interpreted by his fans as thirst traps. “YAS DADDY JON,” one user commented on a video of him solemnly discussing climate change. Another wrote, on a post celebrating his first 100 days in office, that Mr. Ossoff was “hot and he knows it,” calling him a “confident king.” The senator has more than half a million followers on TikTok.Some politicians end up on the platform unwittingly. Take, for instance, the viral audio of Kamala Harris declaring, “we did it, Joe” after winning the 2020 election. Though the vice president doesn’t have an account herself, her sound bite has millions of plays.Catering to such viral impulses may seem gimmicky, but it’s a necessary part of any candidate’s TikTok strategy. Political advertising is prohibited on the platform, so politicians can’t promote much of their content to target specific users. And the app pushes videos from all over the world into users’ feeds, making it hard for candidates to reach the ones who might actually vote for them.Daniel Dong, 20, a college student from New Hampshire, said that he often sees posts from politicians in other states in his TikTok feed, but “those races don’t matter to me because I’m never going to be able to vote for a random person from another state.”The Art of the Viral VideoChristina Haswood, a Democratic member of the Kansas House of Representatives, first started her TikTok account in the summer of 2020, when she was running for her seat.“I went to my campaign manager and was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I made a campaign TikTok?’” Ms. Haswood, 27, said.“A lot of folks don’t see an Indigenous politician, a young politician of color,” said Christina Haswood, a member of the Kansas House of Representatives. She hopes to inspire young people to run for office.Arin Yoon for The New York TimesShe won the race, making her one of a handful of Native Americans in the Kansas state legislature. “A lot of folks don’t see an Indigenous politician, a young politician of color. You don’t see that every day across the state, let alone across the country,” Ms. Haswood said. “I want to encourage young people to run for office.”At first, Ms. Haswood created TikToks that were purely informational — videos of her talking directly to the camera, which weren’t getting much traction. When one of the candidates running against her in the primary also started a TikTok, she felt she needed to amp things up.Conner Thrash, at the time a high school student and now a college student at the University of Kansas, started to notice Ms. Haswood’s videos. “I really loved what she stood for,” Mr. Thrash, 19, said. “I realized that I had the ability to bridge the gap between a politician trying to expand their outreach and people like my young, teenage self.”So he reached out to Ms. Haswood, and the two started making content together and perfecting the art of the viral TikTok. A video should strike a careful balance of entertaining but not embarrassing; low-fi without seeming careless; and trendy but innovative, bringing something new to the never-ending scroll.One of their most-watched videos lays out key points of Ms. Haswood’s platform, including the protection of reproductive rights and legalizing recreational marijuana. The video is set to a viral remix of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and follows a trend in which TikTok users push the camera away from themselves midsong. (Ms. Haswood used a Penny skateboard to achieve the effect.)

      @haswoodforks Meet Christina Haswood, the future for democratic politics in Kansas.❤️#kansas #democrat #progressive #vote #fyp #foryoupage ♬ Love Story – Disco Lines TikTok may have helped Ms. Haswood win her race, but few candidates have had her success. Several politicians with large TikTok followings, including Matt Little (a former liberal member of the Minnesota Senate) and Joshua Collins (a socialist who ran for U.S. representative for Washington), lost, “pretty badly — in their respective elections,” Ms. Literat said, “so technically they did not succeed from a political perspective.”The behavior of young voters in particular can be hard to predict. In the 2020 presidential election, about half of Americans between the ages 18 and 29 voted, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University — a record turnout for an age group not known for showing up to the polls.Still, “young people help drive the culture,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, the author of “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” and a professor of information studies at Syracuse University.“Even though they may or may not ever vote for Jon Ossoff, being on TikTok does help shape Ossoff’s image,” she added. “More people are going to know Ossoff’s name today because of his TikTok stunt than they did before.” More

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      Ohio Supreme Court Intensifies a Redistricting Map Standoff

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      Years ago, voters created a commission to make political maps fairer. Now the State Supreme Court is blocking maps drawn by the Republican-led commission, saying nothing has changed.A bipartisan majority of Ohio Supreme Court justices has ratcheted up an extraordinary legal standoff over the state’s political boundaries, rejecting — for the third time in barely two months — new maps of state legislative districts that heavily favor the Republican Party.The decision appears likely to force the state to postpone its primary elections, scheduled to take place on May 3, until new maps of both state legislative seats and districts for the United States House of Representatives pass constitutional muster.The court’s ruling late Wednesday was a blunt rebuff of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a Republican-dominated body that voters established in 2015 explicitly to make political maps fairer, but that now stands accused of trying to fatten already lopsided G.O.P. majorities in the state’s legislature and the U.S. House.Ohio has become the heart of a nationwide battle over political boundaries that has assumed life-or-death proportions for both Republicans and Democrats, one in which courts like Ohio’s have played an increasingly crucial role.With redistricting complete in all but five states, Democrats have erased much of a huge partisan advantage that Republicans had amassed on the House of Representatives map by dominating the last round of redistricting in 2011. Democrats have also rolled back some of the Republican gerrymanders that have allowed the party to dominate state legislatures.The minority justices in the 4-to-3 ruling in Ohio, all Republicans, said in a bitter dissent that the decision “decrees electoral chaos” by upending election plans and fomenting a constitutional crisis. But the four majority justices, led by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, said it was the Redistricting Commission that was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the State Constitution’s mandate for political fairness.Constitutional scholars and Ohio political experts have said the Redistricting Commission had been betting that the high court would be forced to approve its maps so that it would not shoulder blame for disrupting statewide elections. The court has already complained of foot-dragging by the commission, threatening last month to hold its members in contempt for failing to produce a new state legislative map on time.“There’s this attitude that ‘if we can’t get our way with the court, we’re going to try to run out the clock on them,’” Paul De Marco, a Cincinnati lawyer who specializes in appeals cases, said of the Redistricting Commission, which is made up of five Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, and two Democrats.With the ruling this week, the court effectively called the commission’s bluff.“This court is not a rubber stamp,” Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, wrote in a concurring opinion. “By interpreting and enforcing the requirements of the Ohio Constitution, we do not create chaos or a constitutional crisis — we work to promote the trust of Ohio’s voters in the redistricting of Ohio’s legislative districts.”The stalemate is playing out in a state whose 15 House seats — the seventh-largest congressional delegation in the nation — represent the second-largest trove of congressional districts whose boundaries remain to be drawn for this year’s midterm elections. (Florida, with 28 House seats, is the largest.) The delegation’s partisan makeup could determine control of an almost evenly divided House of Representatives.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.The Ohio Supreme Court is also in a standoff with the Redistricting Commission over the state’s congressional map, having already rejected one version in January as too partisan. It is considering a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the commission’s newly redrawn map of Ohio congressional districts, which would create solidly Republican seats in 10 of the 15 districts. The map would leave Democrats with three safe seats and two competitive seats where the party would hold slight edges.The fight over the maps could well move to federal court, where Republicans have asked that a three-judge panel be created to consider instituting the Redistricting Commission’s rejected maps so that elections can proceed. Chief Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio declined to act on Monday, noting that the State Supreme Court was considering the maps.But Judge Marbley, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, indicated that he would step in if there were “serious doubts that state processes will produce a state map in time for the primary election.”In North Carolina, Pennsylvania and some other states, state supreme courts have played decisive roles in redistricting this year, casting aside gerrymanders in favor of fairer maps often drawn by nonpartisan experts. The Ohio court is at an impasse because the State Constitution allows the court to reject maps it deems unconstitutional, but gives it no clear authority to make maps more fair, much less to adopt ones that the commission did not draw. Maureen O’Connor, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and a Republican, said the state’s G.O.P.-dominated Redistricting Commission was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the Ohio Constitution’s mandate for political fairness. Earl Gibson III/Getty ImagesIt wasn’t supposed to be this way.Ohioans thought they had abolished hyperpartisan political maps for good seven years ago, when they resoundingly approved a constitutional amendment that took mapmaking authority away from politicians in the legislature and gave it to the new commission. That referendum ended a long struggle between voting rights advocates and political leaders of both parties, who had resisted any change in the mapmaking process.The two sides struck a compromise that gave politicians control of the Redistricting Commission, filling its seven seats with elected officials and their appointees, generally favoring the party in power. In return, voting rights groups were granted one of their wishes: a constitutional mandate that the commission draw maps that “correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio,” based on the previous decade’s elections.Seven in 10 voters approved the 2015 amendment. Three years later, another amendment effectively extended the deal to congressional maps.“This issue is proof that when you work together in a bipartisan manner, you can accomplish great things,” Matt Huffman, a Republican state representative from Lima who campaigned for the 2015 amendment, said after it passed.Today Mr. Huffman is the president of the State Senate and sits on the Redistricting Commission. But he now says that the constitutional requirement that maps reflect voters’ preferences was only “aspirational” — a view the Supreme Court rejected in January.Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that “we mobilized more than 12,000 Ohioans to advocate for fair maps through emails, phone calls and even submitting their own maps.”She added: “What’s disappointing, and shocking for most of us, is that it’s business as usual. Nothing has changed.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Why Stacey Abrams Is Rejecting Her Democratic Stardom

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      On the campaign trail for Georgia governor, she is talking more about Medicaid expansion than voting rights, betting that a hyperlocal strategy and the state’s leftward tilt can lift her to victory.CUTHBERT, Ga. — As Stacey Abrams began her second campaign for Georgia governor with a speech this week about Medicaid expansion in front of a shuttered rural hospital, the crowd of about 50 peppered her with questions on issues like paving new roads.But Sandra Willis, the mayor pro tem of this town of roughly 3,500 people, had a broader point to make. “Once you get elected, you won’t forget us, will you?” she asked.The question reflected Ms. Abrams’s status as a national Democratic celebrity, who was widely credited with helping to deliver Georgia for her party in the 2020 elections and has made her name synonymous with the fight for voting rights.But she has shown little desire to put ballot access at the center of her bid. Her first days on the campaign trail have been spent largely in small, rural towns like Cuthbert, where she is more interested in discussing Medicaid expansion and aid to small businesses than the flagship issue that helped catapult her to national fame.Ms. Abrams’s strategy amounts to a major bet that her campaign can survive a bleak election year for Democrats by capitalizing on Georgia’s fast-changing demographics and winning over on-the-fence voters who want their governor to largely stay above the fray of national political battles.“I am a Georgian first,” she said in an interview. “And my job is to spend especially these first few months anchoring the conversation about Georgia.”In Cuthbert, where Ms. Abrams was pressed on Monday by Ms. Willis on her commitment to Georgia’s small communities, she reminded onlookers that this was not her first visit to town — and she promised it would not be her last. The town sits in Randolph County, one of a handful of rural, predominantly Black counties that were crucial to Democrats’ victories in Georgia in the last cycle. Upward of 96 percent of Black voters who cast ballots here in the 2020 presidential election voted in the 2021 Senate runoff elections.Randolph has also been held up as an example of the state’s neglect of its low-income, rural residents: The county’s only hospital shut down in October 2020.“I’m here to help,” Ms. Abrams said in her Monday speech in front of the closed hospital. Listing the names of seven counties surrounding Randolph, she promised to be a “governor for all of Georgia, especially southwest Georgia.”Georgia’s population continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, trends that have historically benefited Democrats.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s focus on state and hyperlocal issues reflects an understanding that to win Georgia, any Democrat must capture votes in all corners of the state. That also means knowing the issues closest to voters in every corner.“Everything either happens in Atlanta, or outside of Atlanta in the suburbs,” said Bobby Jenkins, the mayor of Cuthbert and a Democrat. “But as the election in November showed, you’ve got a lot of Democrats, a lot of people in these rural areas, and you cannot overlook them. There aren’t many in this county. But when you band all of these counties together in southwest Georgia, then you can create some impact.”Ms. Abrams has also used visits like the one to Cuthbert and a later meet-and-greet in the central Georgia town of Warner Robins to criticize Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who beat her in the same race in 2018, over what she called his weakening of the state’s public health infrastructure during the pandemic and his underinvestment in rural communities.“If we do not have a governor who sees and focuses on how Georgia can mitigate these harms, how Georgia can bolster opportunity, then the national environment is less relevant, because the deepest pain comes from closer to home,” Ms. Abrams said in the interview.Still, that national environment remains unfriendly to Democrats. Less than eight months before the November midterm elections, the party is staring down a record number of House retirements, a failure to pass the bulk of President Biden’s agenda and a pessimistic electorate that is driving his low approval ratings.Yet Democrats see reasons for hope in Georgia. The state continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, in a boon to the network of organizations that helped turn out the voters who flipped Georgia blue in 2020. Many of those groups remain well-staffed and well-funded. And while Ms. Abrams is running unopposed in the Democratic primary, Mr. Kemp faces four challengers, including a Trump-backed candidate, former Senator David Perdue.All of this is why, while Ms. Abrams’s public image has expanded, she has not deviated much from the campaign strategy she employed in 2018. During her first run for governor, she visited all 159 of Georgia’s counties and aimed for surges in turnout in deep-blue metro Atlanta counties even as she sought to turn out new voters in rural areas that Democrats had historically ceded to Republicans. Several of her 2022 campaign staff members formed her 2018 brain trust.Voting rights activists in the state — many of whom say their relationship with Ms. Abrams and her campaign remains warm — hesitate to question Ms. Abrams’s reduced focus on ballot access, especially since it is so early in the campaign and her strategy could yet shift.“She has a certain star, national spotlight quality that you rarely see with Southern candidates,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter in Georgia. She expressed confidence that Ms. Abrams’s candidacy would “continue to keep the voting rights issue from dying.”In 2021, after Georgia Republicans passed a major law of voting restrictions, Ms. Abrams spoke out against the measure to legislators in Congress.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesStudent supporters danced onstage after a rally for Ms. Abrams in Atlanta on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s organizing for voting rights has its roots in her years as the minority leader in the Georgia Statehouse. She founded the voter enfranchisement group New Georgia Project in 2013 to turn out more young and infrequent voters — a strategy she pitched to national Democrats ahead of the 2020 election amid efforts to persuade white moderate voters.Then, a year ago, after Georgia’s Republican-led legislature passed a sweeping bill of voting restrictions, ballot access again became a central issue for national Democrats. Amid the party’s uproar about the bill and others like it, Ms. Abrams focused on the policy implications of the legislation over the political. During testimony to Republican senators in Washington shortly after the law’s passage, she laid out a laundry list of criticisms of the measure, denouncing its limits on drop boxes and a reduction in election precincts that could deter working people from voting.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 5Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      David McCormick Faces Scrutiny Over Teacher Pension Investments

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      David McCormick, a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, came under attack from his chief rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz, over the underperformance of investments for the state’s teachers.Before he entered Pennsylvania’s Senate race, David McCormick oversaw a giant hedge fund that invested billions of dollars for the retirement plans of the state’s teachers.But Mr. McCormick’s company, Bridgewater Associates, delivered such middling profits and charged such high fees that the Pennsylvania teachers’ retirement fund moved to sell off its Bridgewater holdings beginning two years ago.Overall, Bridgewater’s performance was a contributing factor in nearly a decade of poor returns for the retirement fund, trustees of the fund said in interviews.The impact is now being felt indirectly by thousands of teachers who have to pay more from their paychecks to fund their retirements, an extra $300 annually in some cases.Since jumping into the Republican primary in January, Mr. McCormick has offered his business career as a qualification for the open Senate seat in November, but he has made little mention of his connection to the state’s teacher pension fund, which has long been mired in controversy, nor to the more than $500 million in fees that Bridgewater was paid by the fund.But on Tuesday, Mr. McCormick’s chief Republican rival, the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, sought to use those high fees and Mr. McCormick’s decade on top of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, against him.“We’re stuck with a half-a-billion-dollar bill while he and his colleagues got half a billion in fees,” Dr. Oz said outside the Harrisburg headquarters of the pension fund, the Public School Employees Retirement System, known as PSERS. He addressed a small group of supporters with a large prop check made out for $500 million.“The fact that no one knows this story,” he added, is “shameful.”Until 2019, the retirement fund had nearly $5 billion invested with Bridgewater, among the most of any firm, and it was one of the hedge fund’s top clients.In response to Dr. Oz, the McCormick campaign said that Bridgewater had made plenty of money for the retirement fund and that Mr. McCormick, who served as president and later as chief executive of the hedge fund, was not directly involved in overseeing its relationship or investments with PSERS.The dispute is the latest round in a slugfest between Mr. McCormick and Dr. Oz, whose primary contest will help shape one of the most crucial races this year for control of the Senate. The two candidates and their outside supporters have already spent a state record $30 million in attack ads ahead of the May 17 primary. A Fox News poll this month of potential Republican voters showed Mr. McCormick on top of a five-person field, although many voters are undecided.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.A West Point graduate and former Treasury Department official, Mr. McCormick was recruited by Bridgewater as president in 2009, rose to co-chief executive in 2017 and became sole chief executive in 2020 before leaving in January to run for Senate.The Pennsylvania teachers’ pension fund has been troubled for years. Besides hedge funds, it put its money into highly risky “alternative” investments including trailer park chains, pistachio farms and pay phone systems for prison inmates.In mid-2020, the fund’s annual profits over nine years, a decade when the stock market boomed, amounted to just 6.34 percent, missing a target set by Pennsylvania law.The shortfall prompted $80 million in higher paycheck deductions for about 100,000 teachers and other school employees, as well as higher property taxes for homeowners statewide, to pay for school districts’ makeup contributions to the pension fund, said Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer.Mr. McCormick’s campaign said that he had not directly been involved in overseeing Bridgewater Associates’ relationship with the Pennsylvania teachers’ retirement fund or overseeing the fund’s investments.Libby March for The New York TimesMr. McCormick, who declined to be interviewed, said through a campaign spokeswoman that PSERS’s poor performance was not the fault of its Bridgewater holdings — as Dr. Oz argued — and that those holdings had earned money for the pension fund. “Pennsylvania retirees made $3.9 billion in net profits and did not lose a penny over the life of the relationship under Bridgewater management,” the spokeswoman, Jess Szymanski, said.Still, some Bridgewater investments did miss internal benchmarks that the retirement fund had set, which contributed to the decision by the board of trustees to sell off its Bridgewater investments, along with those in other hedge funds.In the most recent quarterly reporting period, PSERS’s largest Bridgewater investment, the Pure Alpha II fund, underperformed a benchmark for comparable funds over the preceding three-, five- and 10-year periods. It exceeded the benchmark over a one-year period.More important than the individual Bridgewater investments, according to board members, was that Bridgewater’s investment philosophy came to dominate the retirement fund’s broad portfolio, currently valued at more than $72 billion.At a July 2020 meeting with senior retirement fund staff members, Joseph Torsella, the state treasurer at the time, criticized Bridgewater’s poor performance and its wide influence over the pension fund.Mr. Torsella, a Democrat, said in an interview, “I got the sense we were important at the highest level of Bridgewater, and I got the sense at PSERS that Bridgewater was the one true church.”Bridgewater, which manages about $140 billion, largely for institutional clients, is known as much for a culture in which employees bluntly air their differences as it is known for its investing record. It boasts of earning customers tens of billions of dollars over four decades.Its founder, Ray Dalio, is a multibillionaire who popularized an investing strategy known as “risk parity.” It promises to make money in both good and bad economic times by placing bets across different types of assets such as gold, Treasury bonds and sovereign wealth funds.During the 2008 financial crisis, when stocks went into a free-fall, Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha fund gained 9.5 percent. That was the start of an infatuation with Bridgewater by the professional staff at the Pennsylvania teachers’ fund, according to board members and their aides.Walloped by its declining stock holdings, the retirement fund embraced the risk parity model. It not only loaded up on Bridgewater’s own funds, it molded itself into a Bridgewater-like hedge fund.A report for the Pennsylvania legislature in 2018 found that PSERS’s portfolio allocation “reflects a risk parity model.”Mr. McCormick on the campaign trail in Edinboro, Pa. He topped a recent Fox News poll of Republican primary candidates, though many voters were undecided.Libby March for The New York TimesIt was a highly unusual, and risky, approach for a public fund that sends monthly checks to 250,000 former teachers, custodians and other school employees.“The real impact of Bridgewater on PSERS was not just that Bridgewater was one among a couple of hundred managers — they were the guru,” said Mr. Torsella, who was part of a bipartisan group of board members who began challenging the way the pension fund was run. “Too many of the investment team at PSERS became acolytes of Bridgewater. There was too much deference to their way of thinking.”Certainly, no one at Bridgewater was twisting the arms of PSERS’s staff to imitate the hedge fund’s strategy.Still, teams of retirement fund staff members trooped to Bridgewater’s wooded campus in Westport, Conn., or hosted Bridgewater consultants in Harrisburg for daylong seminars. In 2019, top pension fund executives flew to China for two Bridgewater events, including a weeklong “investor summit,” at a cost of $4,467 in travel.Over the decade following the financial crisis, as the stock market recovered and boomed, PSERS’s embrace of a risk parity model of investing had a disastrous impact on the pension fund’s bottom line. As of 2018, the retirement fund’s returns over a decade ranked 50th out of 52 public pension plans nationwide, according to the report for state lawmakers.Although Bridgewater’s funds were promoted as a way to weather a bear market in stocks, the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 proved that the complex financial straddles didn’t live up to the hype. Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha fund was underwater for the year, even as the S&P 500, the broad stock market index, gained more than 16 percent.The dissidents on the PSERS board, who favored a plain-vanilla portfolio of largely public stocks and bonds, succeeded in pushing the pension fund to sell off two of its Bridgewater funds, All Weather and Optimal, and to eventually liquidate all of its hedge fund investments.In July 2021, the pension fund was forced to increase paycheck deductions for 94,400 school employees hired since 2011.Samantha Kreda, who teaches special education to third to fifth graders at the Richard R. Wright School in Philadelphia, was one.Samantha Kreda in her classroom in Philadelphia.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“The PSERS increase amounted to $30 every paycheck, but that’s a huge amount of money considering all the things teachers are expected to pay for,” she said. She buys books, snacks, birthday gifts and school supplies out of her pocket for students in her high-poverty school. Rather than cut back on those extras, she said, she has reconsidered “splurges” like dinner out with her boyfriend.Ms. Kreda, 27, who has a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, knows Ivy League peers who went into law or finance and now make “unfathomable” salaries. “I love my job; I don’t teach for the paycheck,” she said. Still, a $30 deduction from her biweekly pay gives her pause. “It definitely makes a difference,” she said.Maureen Farrell More

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      Just How Liberal Is California? The Answer Matters to Democrats Everywhere.

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      LOS ANGELES — California is awash in money, with so many billions in surplus revenue that the state cannot enact programs fast enough. Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in the Legislature, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has a $25 million campaign war chest to fend off any token opposition in his re-election bid.Yet all is far from tranquil in this sea of blue. Deep fissures divide Democrats, whose control of state government effectively gives them unilateral power to enact programs. As elections approach, intraparty demands, denunciations and purity tests have exposed rifts between progressives and moderates that seem destined to become more vitriolic — and more consequential. We are about to find out just how liberal California is.The answer will shape policy as the most populous state wrestles with conflicts over seemingly intractable problems: too many homeless, too many drug overdoses, too many cars, too many guns, too much poverty. Although some dynamics are peculiar to California, the outcome will also have implications for the parallel debate swirling among national Democrats. Because if progressives here cannot translate their ideology into popular support that wins elections, it will not bode well for their efforts on a national scale.California has long been more centrist than its popular image. The “Mod Squad,” a caucus of moderate Democratic state lawmakers, has had outsize influence for more than a decade. As the Republican Party became increasingly marginal, business interests that had traditionally backed Republican candidates realized they could have more influence by supporting conservative Democrats. That paradigm accelerated with the shift to a system in which the top two finishers in a primary advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Designed to promote more centrist candidates from both parties, it often results in face-offs between two Democrats.A contest emblematic of the California divide is unfolding in Los Angeles. From a crowded field of mayoral candidates, the two most likely to advance offer a stark contrast: Representative Karen Bass, a stalwart liberal embraced for both her politics and her background in community organizing, and the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who has sounded the familiar refrain that it’s time for a businessman to clean up the failures of the political class. In a bow to the overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, Mr. Caruso, best known for his high-end shopping malls, recently changed his registration from no party preference to Democrat — even though the race is nonpartisan. For her part, Ms. Bass has called for freeing up more police officers for patrol (and hiring replacements for administrative duties) and equivocated on abolishing cash bail, positions that alarmed some of her natural allies.It is hard to know just how much the pandemic, on top of the Trump years, has scrambled the political calculus. We have traffic jams at the ports that rival those on the roads, restaurant tables where cars once parked, hotels that catered to tourists now sheltering the homeless. Anger over closed schools and mask mandates has triggered a record number of recalls (most notably the landslide that recalled three San Francisco school board members, on which progressives and moderates agreed). In the far northern county of Shasta, a group including members of a local militia won control of the board of supervisors by recalling a Republican ex-police chief who had not been sufficiently anti-mask or pro-gun. A prominent anti-Trump Republican consultant called the vote a “canary in a coal mine” for the direction of his state party.If mask and vaccine mandates have become the litmus test for the far right, the left has chosen as its defining issue a far more complex — but seemingly unattainable — goal: single-payer health care. When a bill (with an estimated price of more than $300 billion a year) made it to the Assembly floor, progressives threatened to deny party support to any Democrat who voted no. Far short of the necessary yes votes, the sponsor, Ash Kalra of San Jose, a progressive Democrat, pulled the bill rather than force a vote that could be used against his colleagues. He was pilloried as a traitor by activists.The Working Families Party, which has pushed for progressive priorities in the New York State Legislature, recently established a branch in California in hopes of having similar influence and endorsing and supporting progressive Democrats. The group’s state director, Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor who lost the 2018 mayoral race to the moderate London Breed and then helped Bernie Sanders win the California primary, argues that the state’s electorate is more liberal than its elected officials, who are beholden to the influence of large corporate donors. Still, in the 2020 general election — with a record-setting turnout — voters defeated almost all ballot initiatives that were priorities of the progressives, opting not to restore affirmative action, nor impose higher taxes on commercial and industrial properties, nor abolish cash bail, nor expand rent control.In the arena of criminal justice, where voters and lawmakers have consistently made progressive changes in recent years, the growing concern about crime (some justified by data and some not) will soon test the commitment to move away from draconian sentences and mass incarceration. The conservative Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, is running for state attorney general on the slogan “Stop the Chaos,” tying her opponent, the incumbent Rob Bonta, to what she calls “rogue prosecutors” like the progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are targets of recall campaigns.In June, San Franciscans will decide whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a referendum on his performance as well as a vote that moderates have framed as a cornerstone of the fight to “take back” their city from progressives. In a city decidedly less liberal than its reputation, Mayor Breed has referred to members of the board of supervisors as “a very, very extremely left group of people.”With near-record office turnover — a result of reapportionment, term limits, frustration and fatigue — the winners of the coming elections will collectively reshape the political landscape for many years. A quarter of the 120 state legislative districts will have new representatives next year, and among those departing are some of the most influential lawmakers.It would be nice to think that change will usher in a new generation of leaders, one that builds on the excitement and enthusiasm generated, especially among young people, by the 2020 Sanders campaign. It is hard not to root for young activists. They will live or die with the consequences of decisions being made today on air, water, housing, schools.In a recent poll, young adults who were asked the most pressing issue for the governor and Legislature to work on this year were twice as likely as those over 35 to cite jobs and the economy, and were far less concerned about crime. They were also more optimistic, with more than half saying California was headed in the right direction.The pandemic might yet prove to be the disruption needed to trigger big political shifts, comparable with those triggered in the arena of jobs and work. So far, it seems to have driven people further into their corners. The next generation will have to find a way to fill in that hollowed-out middle, just as they will have to bridge the ever-growing chasms in wealth, which in turn drive so much of the political divide.Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel) is the author of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Republicans in Nevada Are Targeting Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s Seat

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      Seizing on signs that suggest Democrats are losing support among Hispanic voters nationwide, Republicans are targeting Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s seat.When Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and her allies unveiled their first paid ads of the 2022 election cycle, the Nevada Democrat’s intended audience was clear: the state’s quarter-of-a-million Latino voters, a critical swing vote.Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the Senate Democratic super PAC, has a Spanish-language ad called “Siga Protegiendo” — “Keep Protecting” — airing on Telemundo in Las Vegas. It hails Cortez Masto for her work as Nevada attorney general and in the Senate to “fight sex trafficking rings” and “protect our children.”Another ad, titled “Led the Fight,” shows Cortez Masto speaking with Gladis Blanco, a Las Vegas hotel worker.“When Covid first hit, there was a lot to worry about,” Blanco says as she wheels a cart of clean towels down a hallway. “My first priority was keeping my family safe, and I was very worried about making a living.”“In times like that,” she added, “you want someone looking out for you. That’s what Catherine Cortez Masto did.”It’s hardly the first time Nevada Democrats have made the Latino community a priority. In many ways, the state’s Latino voters are the backbone of the political machine built by Harry Reid, the Nevada senator and former majority leader who died in December. Nevada’s economy is powered by tourism, and the state’s powerful service-sector unions are closely intertwined with Latino politics.Allies of Cortez Masto, the first Latina to serve in the U.S. Senate, also insist that it’s not usual to communicate this early in an election cycle with Latino voters. Their experience, they say, shows the importance of making persuasive arguments to the Hispanic community throughout a campaign — and not just toward the end.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.“Nevada’s a state where you need a bilingual strategy,” said Arturo Vargas, the chief executive of the NALEO Educational Fund, a national civic engagement organization. He noted that service-industry workers had suffered heavily during the Great Recession, and again during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Las Vegas casinos were forced to shut down their operations. He said it made sense for Democrats to speak to their economic concerns.But Republicans now sense an opportunity to peel away many of those votes, and in ways that could have national political reverberations. Some data in the latest Wall Street Journal poll suggest why. According to the poll, Republicans enjoy a 9-point advantage over Democrats in the so-called congressional generic ballot among Latino voters — meaning that, by a 9 percentage-point margin, respondents said they would prefer to elect a Republican to Congress.There are reasons to be skeptical of these specific numbers: The poll sampled only 165 Latino voters, and the margin of error was plus or minus 7.6 percentage points. And Latino voters are hardly a monolith — the anti-socialism messages that have appealed to Cuban Americans in Florida differ widely from the jobs and health care-themed proposals that are effective with Mexican Americans elsewhere.Plenty of other data suggests Democrats ought to be concerned, however. John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who helped to conduct The Journal’s poll and a previous one in December, has called Hispanics “a swing vote that we’re going to have to fight for.”Last year, a study by the Democratically-aligned firm Equis Labs found that Democrats had lost support among key Latino communities during the 2020 election. In 2020, exit-poll data showed that Donald Trump had made gains among Latino voters in Nevada specifically, even as he lost the state in that year’s presidential election. And more recently, our colleague, Jennifer Medina, reported that the shift toward Republicans among Latino voters in South Texas has continued.“It’s not in question whether the Democrats are going to get a majority of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and 2024,” said Fernand R. Amandi, a managing partner of the Miami-based polling firm Bendixen and Amandi. “The problem for Democrats is they keep leaking oil against Republicans, and that is a trend that I think has been borne out over the last five years.”Republican challenger seeks Latino voteAdam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general whose campaign has the backing of both Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, launched “Latinos for Laxalt” in an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe bigger problem for Cortez Masto may be the low approval ratings of President Biden, which are dragging Democrats down with voters in general.Public polls of the Senate race put her ahead of her likely opponent, Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general and the scion of a Nevada political dynasty. But even in one January survey, showing Cortez Masto up 9 points over Laxalt in a head-to-head matchup, registered voters said they disapproved of Biden’s performance, 52 percent to 41 percent.Last week, the Laxalt campaign — which has the backing of both Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader — launched “Latinos for Laxalt” in an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters. Cortez Masto’s allies have made sure to use Spanish-language criticism by Latinos against Laxalt — what they say is just smart, hard-nosed campaigning.The Democratic Party in Nevada is also suffering from an unusual schism. In effect, the party has split in two between a group aligned with former allies of Reid, the late senator, and a smaller faction led by allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive.The state’s top Democrats — including Cortez Masto, Senator Jacky Rosen and Gov. Steve Sisolak — are all working through a new entity called Nevada Democratic Victory, which is coordinating field operations and other statewide campaign spending with the Democratic National Committee in Washington.It’s not completely clear what role the official Nevada State Democratic Party will play in the 2022 midterms. That group, which is led by Judith Whitmer, a Sanders ally, announced it had just half a million dollars on hand at the outset of the campaign season — money that it, nonetheless, said would be used to “mount a huge field campaign.” And while Cortez Masto’s allies insist that everything is running smoothly and that any tensions between the two groups have been ironed out, several also confess to having little idea of what the state party is doing.The Cortez Masto campaign says it is taking no community in the state for granted, and is simply continuing the senator’s longstanding efforts to engage with an important constituency that was hit hard by the economic disruptions of the last few years.“While Senator Cortez Masto continues to build on her strong record of fighting for the Latino community in Nevada, Adam Laxalt continues to show he can’t be trusted,” Josh Marcus-Blank, a spokesman for the Cortez Masto campaign, said in a statement.Vargas, the head of the NALEO Educational Fund, said that mobilizing Latino voters, especially younger voters, will be a critical factor in November. His group has projected that turnout among Latinos will grow by 5.8 percent in Nevada during the 2022 midterms, but he declined to speculate as to which party might benefit.“In the past, we’ve seen Latino voters express greater support for some candidates at the national level, but then it plummeted with other candidates,” he said. “The most recent election did suggest that, but it takes more than one election to determine a trend.”What to read President Biden said the United States would strip Russia of normal trade relations, joining the European Union and other allies in doing so, Ana Swanson reports. Keep up with our live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.A well-timed congressional endorsement by Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina created some distance from Donald Trump, even as she was embracing him at the same time. Jonathan Weisman reports.The Democratic National Committee is expected to work on the sequence of presidential primary states. Astead W. Herndon reports.viewfinderJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, met with Senator Cory Booker at his office in Washington on Tuesday.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesLayers of historyOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Michael A. McCoy captured the photo above on Tuesday, as Senator Cory Booker met with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, in his office. Here’s what McCoy told us about capturing that moment:I was amazed by his book collection (and his Star Wars collection). One book was called Picturing Frederick Douglass, who was the most photographed person in the 19th century. I moved to the right side of Booker’s office, and once I was there, I saw how Jackson and Booker were speaking next to that photograph of Frederick Douglass. There were so many layers on top of layers in that photo. If it weren’t for Frederick Douglass, there would be no Cory Booker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Mike McCoy, or anyone else of color who works in politics. My body, my soul — that picture just caught me.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More