Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Matt DePerno, Trump Meddler in Michigan, Is Charged in Election Breach

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      A key figure in a multistate effort to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. DePerno lost his race for Michigan attorney general in 2022. He later finished second to lead the state’s Republican Party.Matthew DePerno, a key orchestrator of efforts to help former President Donald J. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan and an unsuccessful candidate for state attorney general last year, was arraigned on four felony charges on Tuesday, according to documents released by D.J. Hilson, the special prosecutor handling the investigation.The charges against Mr. DePerno, which include undue possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system, come after a nearly yearlong investigation in one of the battleground states that cemented the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Former State Representative Daire Rendon was also charged with two crimes, including a conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine and false pretenses.Both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Rendon were arraigned remotely on Tuesday before Chief Judge Jeffery Matis, according to Richard Lynch, the court administrator for Oakland County’s Sixth Circuit, and remained free on bond.The charges were first reported by The Detroit News.Mr. DePerno denied any wrongdoing and said that his efforts “uncovered significant security flaws” in a statement from his lawyer, Paul Stablein.“He maintains his innocence and firmly believes that these charges are not based upon any actual truth and are motivated primarily by politics rather than evidence,” Mr. Stablein said.The criminal inquiry in Michigan has largely been overshadowed by developments in Georgia, where a grand jury is weighing charges against Mr. Trump for trying to subvert the election, but both are part of the ongoing reckoning over the conspiracy theories about election machines promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies.The efforts to legitimize the falsehoods and conspiracy theories promoted widely by Mr. Trump and his allies continued long after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and after Mr. Biden took office. In Arizona, such efforts included the discredited election audit of Maricopa County led by Republicans in the state legislature.In a statement, Mr. Hilson said, “Although our office made no recommendations to the grand jury as to whether an indictment should be issued or not, we support the grand jury’s decision and we will prosecute each of the cases as they have directed in the sole interests of justice.”Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general and a Democrat who went on to defeat Mr. DePerno in the November election, has not been involved in the investigation since the appointment of a special prosecutor in August last year. In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Nessel said that the allegations “caused undeniable harm to our democracy” and issued a warning for the future.“The 2024 presidential election will soon be upon us. The lies espoused by attorneys involved in this matter, and those who worked in concert with them across the nation, wreaked havoc and sowed distrust within our democratic institutions and processes,” Ms. Nessel said. “We hope for swift justice in the courts.”The charges stemmed from a bizarre plot hatched by a group of conservative activists in early 2021 to pick apart voting machines in at least three Michigan counties, in some cases taking them to hotels and Airbnb rentals as they hunted for evidence of election fraud.In the weeks after the 2020 election, he drew widespread attention and the admiration of Mr. Trump when he filed a lawsuit challenging the vote tallies in Antrim County, a rural area in Northern Michigan where a minor clerical error fueled conspiracy theories.He falsely claimed that voting machines there had been rigged, a premise that was rejected as “idiotic” by William P. Barr, an attorney general under Mr. Trump, and “demonstrably false” by Republicans in the Michigan Senate.Mr. Hilson, the prosecutor in Muskegon County appointed as special prosecutor, had initially delayed bringing charges, asking a state judge to determine whether it was against state law to take possession of a voting machine without the secretary of state’s permission or a court order. A judge determined last month that doing so was against the law, clearing the way for charges.Democrats swept the governor’s race and other statewide contests last fall, in addition to flipping the full Legislature for the first time in decades. Mr. DePerno, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, lost the attorney general’s race by eight percentage points.This year, Mr. DePerno had been a front-runner to lead the Michigan Republican Party after its disappointing showing in last year’s midterm election, but he finished second to another election-denier: Kristina Karamo.In his campaign to lead the G.O.P. in Michigan, Mr. DePerno had vowed to pack the party’s leadership ranks with Trump loyalists, close primaries to just Republicans and ratchet up the distribution of absentee ballot applications to party members — despite what he said was lingering opposition to voting by mail within the party’s ranks.His candidacy was supported by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spread conspiracy theories about election fraud and appeared at a fund-raising reception for Mr. DePerno in Lansing on the night before the chairmanship vote.Mr. DePerno lost to Ms. Karamo after three rounds of balloting at the state party convention, a process that was slowed for several hours by the use of paper ballots and hand counting.Danny Hakim More

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      How Did We Do? A Review of 2022 Before Our First Poll of 2023.

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      Trying to learn from a strong midterm run as we start surveying the G.O.P. primary.It was a good year. Getty ImagesHere’s a list of survey results of the 2022 midterm elections, all from the same pollster. As you read them, think about whether you think this pollster’s results were good or bad or whatever adjective you’d like.Poll: D+6; result: D+2.4Poll: R+4; result R+1.5Poll: D+5, result D+4.9Poll: R+5; result R+7.5Poll: EVEN; result D+0.8Poll: D+3, result D+1All right, what did you think?I hope you thought they were at least good, because this is a sample of about half of our final New York Times/Siena College polls in 2022. On average, the final Times/Siena polls differed from the actual results by 1.9 percentage points — the most accurate our polls have ever been. Believe it or not, they’re the most accurate results by any pollster with at least 10 final survey results in the FiveThirtyEight database dating to 1998. We were already an A+ pollster by its measure, but now we’ve been deemed the best pollster in the country.My hope is that most of you thought those poll results were good, but I’d guess you didn’t think they were incredible. They’re not perfect, after all. And I can imagine many reasonable standards by which these polls might not be considered especially accurate. They certainly weren’t objective truth, which we might usually think of as the standard for Times journalism.Even so, this level of accuracy is about as good as it can get in political polling. We may never be this accurate again. There may be room to debate whether “great for political polling” is the same as “great,” but if you’re judging polls against perfection it may be worth scaling back your expectations. Even perfectly designed surveys will not yield perfect results.Nonetheless, we try to be perfect anyway. With the data from 2022 in and final, we’ve been poring over the data — including our experiment in Wisconsin — to identify opportunities for improvement. I must admit this has been a less urgent (and more pleasant!) experience than similar exercises after prior election cycles, which have felt more like an “autopsy” or “post-mortem” than a routine doctor’s visit.Still, I did make sure to get our polls in for their biennial checkup ahead of our first national survey of the cycle, which is in the field as I type. More on that later, but for today here’s the good news and some bad news from our dive into last year’s polling.Good newsOur polls were right for the right reasons. With one interesting exception (which we’ll discuss later), they nailed the composition of the electorate, the geographic breakdown of the results and the apparent results by subgroup.The raw data was quite a bit cleaner, for lack of a better word, than it was in 2020. Back then, the statistical adjustments we made to ensure a representative sample made a big difference; without them, our polls would have been far worse. This time, the final results were only about a point different from our raw data. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because of refinements to our sampling or because survey respondents have become more representative in the wake of the pandemic or with Donald J. Trump off the ballot, but it’s a nice change either way.The big Wisconsin mail experiment — where we paid voters up to $25 dollars to take a mail survey — didn’t reveal anything especially alarming about our typical Times/Siena polls. There was no evidence to support many of our deepest fears, like the idea that polls only reach voters who are high in social trust. There was no sign of the MAGA base abstaining from polling, either. On many measures — gun ownership, evangelical Christianity, vaccination status — the Times/Siena poll looked more conservative than the mail poll.OK, now the bad newsThe Wisconsin study didn’t offer easy answers to the problems in polling. Yes, it’s good news that the problems aren’t as bad as we feared, but we went to the doctor’s office for a reason — the state of polling isn’t completely healthy, and we’re looking to get better. We may have ruled out many worst-case diagnoses, but a clearer diagnosis and a prescription would have been nice.The Wisconsin study did offer ambiguous evidence that Times/Siena phone respondents lean a bit farther to the left than the respondents to the mail survey. I say ambiguous partly because the Times/Siena telephone survey isn’t large enough to be sure, and partly because it doesn’t show up in the top-line numbers. But if you account for the extra tools at the disposal of the Times/Siena survey (like ensuring the right number of absentee vs. mail voters), the mail data does lean more conservative — enough to feel justified in going to the doctor.This modest tilt toward the left appears mostly explained by two factors I’ve written about before. One: The less politically engaged voters lured by a financial incentive appear to be ever so slightly more conservative than highly engaged voters. Two: People who provide their telephone numbers when they register to vote are ever so slightly more Democratic than those who do not, and they respond to surveys at disproportionate rates as well. It’s not clear whether these issues would be so problematic in other states where there’s additional information on the partisanship of a voter compared with Wisconsin.We did get lucky in one big case: Kansas’ Third District. Our respondents there wound up being far too liberal, yet our overall result was mostly saved by grossly underestimating the vigor of the Democratic turnout. In a higher-turnout election in 2024 — when there’s far less room for turnout to surprise — we wouldn’t be so lucky.Mr. Trump wasn’t on the ballot. That’s not exactly bad news, but it might be in 2024 if his presence in some way increases the risk of survey error by energizing Democrats to take polls while dissuading the already less engaged and irregular conservatives who only turn out and vote for him.What we’ve changed/what we’re changingWe’ll make a number of fairly modest and arcane changes to our Wisconsin and state polls, reflecting a series of modest and arcane lessons from the Wisconsin study. But so far none of these insights have yielded fundamental changes to our surveys heading into 2024. That said, there are a few larger tweaks worth mentioning:When deciding whether someone is likely to vote, we will rely even less on whether voters say they’ll vote, and more on their demographics and whether they’ve actually voted in the past. This is the third cycle in four — with the exception being 2018 — when we would have been better off largely ignoring whether voters say they will vote in favor of estimates based on their demographics and voting record. We won’t ignore what voters tell us, but we will look at it that much more skeptically when estimating how likely someone is to vote.We’re reordering our questionnaires to let us look at and potentially use respondents who drop out of a survey early. This isn’t usually an issue for us — our state and district polls have never taken longer than eight minutes or so to complete — but about 15 percent of respondents who made it to the major political questions on our longer national polls and the Wisconsin study later decided to stop taking the survey. Not surprisingly, they’re the kind of low-interest voters we need the most.When it comes to Republican primary polling, we might adjust our sample — or weight it — using a new category: home value. In our two national polls with the Republican primary ballot last year, home value was an exceptionally strong predictor of support or opposition to Mr. Trump, even after controlling for education.Overall, Mr. Trump had a lead of 60 percent to 17 percent among people whose homes were worth less than $200,000, based on L2 data, while Ron DeSantis led, 47-24, among respondents whose homes were worth more than $500,000.I don’t think these changes will make very much of a difference, but we’re putting it to the test in the Republican primary now.There’s one last change to mention, one with no effect on the qualify of our polls: For candidates who receive less than 1 percent of the vote but over 0.5 percent, we will record them as less than 1 percent ( More

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      Democrats and Republicans Are Living in Different Worlds

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      Competing partisan views on how we see men and masculinity are emerging as key factors in the run-up to the 2024 election.Two books published last year, very different in tone — Senator Josh Hawley’s “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” and Richard Reeves’s “Of Boys and Men” — have focused public attention on this debate.Hawley approached the subject from a decidedly conservative point of view.“No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood,” he declared, placing full blame “on the American left. In fact they have helped drive it. In power centers they control, places like the press, the academy and politics, they blame masculinity for America’s woes.”Hawley added:More and more young men are living at home with their parents, apparently incapable of coping with life on their own. As for jobs, fewer and fewer young men have them. In 2015, nearly a quarter of men between the ages of 21 and 30, historically a cohort strongly attached to work and the labor force, had no work to speak of. These men had not engaged in labor during the previous 12 months. At all.Reeves painted a similarly downbeat picture of the state of men but contended that the solutions lie in an expansion of the liberal agenda. “Men account for two out of three ‘deaths of despair’ either from a suicide or overdose,” Reeves wrote, andyoung men are five times more likely to commit suicide than young women. The wages of the typical man are lower today than in 1979. Boys and men of color, and those from poorer families, are suffering most. In part, this reflects a dramatic reversal of the gender gap in education. In fact, the gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, just in the opposite direction. But there is also a big gap in what might be called personal agency: Men are now only about half as likely as women to study abroad or sign up for the Peace Corps, much less likely to buy their own home as a single adult and half as likely to initiate a divorce. In advanced economies today, women are propelling themselves through life. Men are drifting.Reeves and Hawley had quite dissimilar causal explanations for this phenomenon — as do so many Republicans and Democrats. Let’s take a look at a July survey, conducted by Ipsos for Politico, “The Best Way to Find Out if Someone Is a Trump Voter? Ask Them What They Think About Manhood.”“It turns out ideas about gender and masculinity can be reliable indicators of how people vote by party and by candidate,” Katelyn Fossett, an associate editor at Politico Magazine, wrote in an article describing the poll.In blunt terms, the poll asked, “Do you agree or disagree with the statement ‘The Democratic Party is hostile to masculine values’?” Republicans agreed, 68 to 8 percent; Democrats disagreed, 62 to 6 percent.One of the core differences between Republicans and Democrats lies in their views on family structure. Ipsos asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “Traditional family structure with a wage-earning father and a homemaking mother best equips children to succeed.”Republicans agreed 52 to 24 percent; Democrats disagreed 59 to 16 percent — once again almost mirror images of each other.A similar level of partisan disagreement emerged in responses to the statement “The MeToo movement has made it harder for men to feel they can speak freely at work.” Republicans agreed 65 to 10 percent; Democrats disagreed 43 to 21 percent.These differences were then reflected in key policy issues. For example, “Do you support or oppose increased military spending?” Republicans supported it, 81 to 11 percent; Democrats modestly opposed it, 47 to 40 percent. “Laws that limit access to firearms”? Republicans opposed them, 67 to 28 percent; Democrats supported them, 87 to 10 percent.The substantial 22-point gender gap found in the 2022 election pales in comparison with the policy and attitudinal differences found in the current Ipsos/Politico survey.Other polls provide further illumination.In its 2022 American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asked a related question: “Has American society as a whole become too soft and feminine?” Among those surveyed, 42 percent agreed, and 53 percent disagreed.There was, however, P.R.R.I. noted, a “partisan divide on this question of nearly 50 percentage points: Approximately two-thirds of Republicans (68 percent) say society has become too soft and feminine, compared with 44 percent of independents and less than one in five Democrats (19 percent).”What’s not clear in the data from the Ipsos/Politico poll is how these partisan differences on gender-linked issues will play out in November 2024.There are a number of additional emerging trends that have clear partisan implications, including generational schisms.In a July 10 Washington Post essay, “2024 Won’t Be a Trump-Biden Replay. You Can Thank Gen Z for That,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, and Mac Heller, a producer of political documentaries, described the growing strength of young Democratic-leaning voters. “Every year,” they wrote,About four million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters. Also every year, two and a half million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.Why is that significant? These Gen Z voters are turning out in higher percentages than similar-age voters in the past, and their commitment to a liberal or even progressive agenda has “led young people in recent years to vote more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age — as recent elections in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown,” Lake and Heller wrote.Ideologically and demographically, these voters tilt sharply left.The Lake-Heller essay continued:About 48 percent of Gen Z voters identify as a person of color, while the boomers they’re replacing in the electorate are 72 percent white. Gen Z voters are on track to be the most educated group in our history, and the majority of college graduates are now female. Because voting participation correlates positively with education, expect women to speak with a bigger voice in our coming elections. Gen Z voters are much more likely to cite gender fluidity as a value, and they list racism among their greatest concerns. Further, they are the least religious generation in our history.A February 2023 Brookings report, “How Younger Voters Will Impact Elections: Younger Voters Are Poised to Upend American Politics,” noted, “Younger voters should be a source of electoral strength for Democrats for some years to come.”The authors, Morley Winograd, a senior fellow at the U.S.C. Center on Communication Leadership and Policy; Michael Hais, a consultant; and Doug Ross, a former Michigan state senator, argued that “younger Americans are tilting the electoral playing field strongly toward the Democrats” and “their influence enabled the Democrats to win almost every battleground state contest” in 2022.The authors cited 2022 exit poll data for Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania showing a consistent pattern: Voters 45 and older cast majorities for Republicans, while those 18 to 44 backed Democrats by larger margins.There are, conversely, developments suggesting gains for the Republican Party.On June 8, Gallup reported a steady increase in the percentage of Americans who described themselves as “social conservatives” — from 30 percent in 2021 to 33 percent in 2022 to 38 percent this year. The percentage describing themselves as very liberal on social issues fell from 34 to 29 percent.Among Republicans, the percentage describing themselves as social issue conservatives rose from 60 in 2021 to 74 in 2023. More important politically, social issue conservatism among independents, who are most likely to be swing voters, grew from 24 to 29 percent from 2021 to 2023. The share of social issue conservative Democrats remained unchanged at 10 percent.In another signal of possible troubles for Democrats, Gallup reported this month that the percentage of Americans describing immigration as “a good thing for the county” had fallen to 68 percent this year from 77 percent in 2020. The percentage describing immigration as a “bad thing for the country” rose from 19 to 27 percent over the same period.On a different and perhaps more revealing question, Gallup asked whether immigration should be increased, kept the same or decreased. From 2020 to 2023, the percentage saying “decreased” grew sharply to 41 percent from 28 percent. The share supporting an increase fell to 26 percent from 34 percent.Gallup created a measure it called “net support for increased immigration” by subtracting the percentage of those calling for a decrease in immigration from the percentage of those calling for an increase.From 2020 to 2023, net support among Democrats fell from plus 38 to plus 22 percent. For Republicans, net support fell from minus 34 to minus 63 percent. Among the crucial block of self-identified independents, support fell from plus 6 to minus 12 percent.Exit polls from 2022 showed that voters who took conservative stands on social issues and those who were opposed to immigration voted by decisive margins for Republican candidates.There are other forces pushing voters to the right. One unanticipated consequence of the opioid epidemic, for example, has been an increase in Republican support in the areas that suffered the most.In a paper published this month, “Democracy and the Opioid Epidemic,” Carolina Arteaga and Victoria Barone, economists at the University of Toronto and Notre Dame, found that an analysis of House elections from 1982 to 2020 revealed that “greater exposure to the opioid epidemic continuously increased the Republican vote share in the House starting in 2006. This higher vote share translated into additional seats won by Republicans from 2014 and until 2020.”Not only did exposure to increased opioid usage correlate with higher Republican margins; it “was accompanied by an increase in conservative views on immigration, abortion and gun control and in conservative ideology in general,” Arteaga and Barone wrote.The two economists used an ingenious, if depressing, method quantifying opioid use by measuring different geographic levels of cancer deaths: “The opioid epidemic began with the introduction of OxyContin to the market in 1996,” they wrote. One of the key marketing strategies to increase sales of OxyContin was to concentrate on doctors treating cancer patients:We start by showing the evolution of prescription opioids per capita by cancer mortality in 1996. Commuting zones in the top quartile of cancer mortality in 1996 saw an increase of 2,900 percent in oxycodone grams per capita, while areas in the lowest quartile experienced growth that was one-third of that magnitude.There is, Arteaga and Barone wrote, “a positive and statistically significant relationship between mid-1990s cancer mortality and shipments of prescription opioids per capita. The connection between cancer mortality and opioid shipments tracks opioid-related mortality.”This linkage allowed Arteaga and Barone to use cancer mortality rates as a proxy for opioid use, so that they could show that “a rise of one standard deviation in the 1996 cancer mortality rate corresponds to an increase in the Republican vote share of 13.8 percentage points in the 2020 congressional elections.”There are other, less disturbing but significant developments emerging from growing partisan hostility.As Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly polarized, three political scientists have found that partisan schadenfreude has gained strength among both Democrats and Republicans.In another paper from July, “Partisan Schadenfreude and Candidate Cruelty,” Steven W. Webster, Adam N. Glynn and Matthew P. Motta of Indiana, Emory and Oklahoma State Universities wrote:Partisan schadenfreude is a powerful predictor of voting intentions in the United States. Moving from below the median to above the median on our schadenfreude measure predicts an increase of approximately 13 points.American voters “are not averse to supporting cruel candidates,” according to Webster, Glynn and Motta. “A significant portion — over one-third — of the mass public is willing to vote for a candidate of unknown ideological leanings who promises to pass policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing political party.”Among those high in schadenfreude, they continued, “cruel candidates are not merely passively accepted. On the contrary, for this subset of Americans, candidate cruelty is sought out.”I asked Webster whether schadenfreude was stronger in either party, and he replied by email:It is hard to say whether Democrats or Republicans are more prone to partisan schadenfreude. This is because we measured schadenfreude in slightly different ways according to one’s partisan identification. Democratic schadenfreude was measured after subjects saw a vignette of a Democrat losing government-provided health insurance following a vote for a Republican; Republican schadenfreude was measured after seeing a vignette about voting for a Democrat and losing take-home pay in the wake of tax increases.There was, Webster continued, “a clear pattern: Both Democrats and Republicans express partisan schadenfreude, and this attitude is most pronounced among those who are ideologically extreme (i.e., liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans).”I also asked whether a candidate signaling willingness to punish opponents would see a net gain or loss of votes. Webster replied:We find that most Americans do not register an intention to vote for candidates who promise legislative cruelty. It is only among those individuals who exhibit the greatest amount of schadenfreude that we see an acceptance of these candidates (as measured by a willingness to vote for them). So there is certainly a trade-off here. If political consultants and candidates think that their constituency is prone to exhibiting high amounts of schadenfreude, then campaigning on promises of legislative cruelty could be a successful tactic. As in most cases, the composition of the electorate matters a great deal.While partisan schadenfreude is present among voters on both sides, among politicians the two most prominent champions of its use are Republicans — Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — and they share the honor of being most willing to adopt policies to hurt Democratic constituencies to win support.Given the assumption that turnout will be critical in 2024, the 2022 elections sent some warning signals to Democrats. In an analysis published this month, “Voting Patterns in the 2022 Elections,” Pew Research found:The G.O.P. improved its performance in 2022 across most voting subgroups relative to 2018 — due almost entirely to differential partisan turnout. Voters who were more favorable to Republican candidates turned out at higher rates compared with those who typically support Democrats.These trends were visible in Hispanic voting patterns:A higher share of Hispanic voters supported G.O.P. candidates in the 2022 election compared with in 2018. In November 2022, 60 percent of Hispanic voters cast ballots for Democrats compared with 39 percent who supported Republicans. This 21-point margin is smaller than in 2018, when 72 percent of Hispanic voters favored Democrats and 25 percent supported Republicans.Crucially, Hannah Hartig, Andrew Daniller, Scott Keeter and Ted Van Green, the authors of the report, wrote:among Hispanic voters who cast ballots in the 2018 election, 37 percent did not vote in the 2022 midterms. Those who did not vote had tilted heavily Democratic in 2018 — reflecting asymmetric changes in voter turnout among Hispanic adults.If Joe Biden and the Democratic Party allow the turnout patterns of 2022 to define turnout in 2024, Biden will lose, and Republicans will be odds-on favorites to control the House and Senate.Trump is a master of turnout. In large part because of Trump, voter turnout in 2020 — measured as a percentage of the voting-eligible population — was the highest in 120 years, at 66.7 percent.Trump is the Democrats’ best hope. In the past three elections — 2018, 2020 and 2022 — when he was on the ballot either literally or through candidate surrogates, he brought out Democratic voters by the millions, reminding a majority of Americans just what it is that they do not want.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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      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

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      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

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      It’s Getting Really Awkward for Speaker Kevin McCarthy

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      Some days, Speaker Kevin McCarthy must look out over his House conference in awe and think: Are you maniacs trying to lose us the majority?Thursday may well have been one of those days, as hard-right crusaders larded up the National Defense Authorization Act with divisive, culture-warring amendments taking aim at abortion access, transgender medical care and diversity training. The annual N.D.A.A. usually garners solid bipartisan support, passing without excessive turbulence for the past 60 years. Last week, the House Freedom Caucus and its allies labored to insert more poison pills into the package than a back-alley fentanyl mill. After much drama, and much futile pleading by Mr. McCarthy with his right flank, the House passed the bill Friday, 219-210, on a mostly party-line vote.Rest assured, the spectacle is far from over.The odds of the bill’s extreme measures passing muster with the Democratic Senate and White House are worse than Mike Pence’s odds of winning the presidency next year. So, less than zero. But House conservatives aren’t aiming to make serious policy gains here — at least, not the ones who understand how a divided government works. They are looking to make trouble, to prove they are loud, uncompromising fighters for the conservative cause. They are also looking to make a point, one directed in no small part at Mr. McCarthy, with whom they remain spitting mad over the debt-ceiling deal he negotiated with Democrats in May. And if they need to imperil their nascent majority to make that point, then so be it. Life is full of difficult trade-offs.Mr. McCarthy’s debt-deal machinations this spring won plaudits from many political watchers: What leadership skill! Maybe we underestimated him! Maybe he really can keep his conference in line! But his hard-liners raged that he had sold them out and promptly committed to making the House as dysfunctional as possible, even if it meant bogging down their own team’s policy goals. Their hostage-taking and acting-out have been a warning to Mr. McCarthy: Fool us once, and we’ll turn this chamber into a do-nothing freak show just to teach you a lesson. Try to fool us twice, and things will get really dark and weird.This purity-over-progress approach isn’t just making life awkward for the speaker. It is making the entire Republican conference look like a pack of obstructionist zealots. This may play well in deep-MAGA districts, but not so much in battleground areas. Those are, admittedly, increasingly rare. But with a majority this scrawny, House conservatives are playing with fire. All Democrats need to do is flip a handful of seats to snatch the gavel from Mr. McCarthy’s hand. They could, say, claw back some of the ground unexpectedly lost to Republicans in New York in the midterms (starting with George Santos’s district). And they could pick up a seat or two thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act that may lead to various Southern states redrawing their congressional districts to address sketchy gerrymandering. (Alabama has already been given its marching orders.)Even if Republicans hold on to the House — where, to be fair, a certain level of crazy has come to be expected — the wingers’ shenanigans are doing nothing to help the party’s brand. Many, many Americans are weary of political chaos and performative jerkiness. And many are particular tired of it on the issue of abortion, which drew key numbers of swing voters to Democrats in last year’s midterms. But time and again, Mr. McCarthy’s troops seem dead set on signaling that the G.O.P. is a pack of bomb-throwing fringe-dwellers actively trying not to govern. Swing voters aren’t generally all that keen on posturing, do-nothing Congresses, either.Some Republican House members are cheesed off over these political games. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for instance, was overheard Thursday dropping all kinds of colorful language, including an “f” bomb or two, about people being forced to vote on the abortion amendment, according to Politico. Though Ms. Mace did not bother abbreviating her pejorative. Nor, it should be noted, did she risk voting against the offending amendment, much less the overall bill. “It’s not going to pass the Senate anyway; it doesn’t matter,” she told The Hill.It doesn’t matter. Well, except that, going forward, Ms. Mace can expect the situation to get so much worse. However much blood and tears get shed in passing the N.D.A.A., they are nothing compared to the carnage anticipated in the coming cage match over funding the government. Already, the hard-liners have made clear that they are going to cause as much trouble as possible in pursuit of their outside-the-mainstream aims. In protest of the debt deal, a pack of conservatives ground action on the House floor to a halt for several days in June while lobbying (or, if you prefer, blackmailing) the speaker to give them more power — including more leeway to slash spending beyond the levels set in the debt-ceiling agreement. With the conservative knife at his throat, Mr. McCarthy has been allowing the conference to move ahead with appropriations proposals that do just that.Ramping up the drama, a passel of conservative members sent a letter to Mr. McCarthy last week, laying out their conditions, including much lower spending levels, for funding the government. Spoiler alert: None were aimed at making the process easier or more efficient.But, after getting crosswise with his wingers on the debt deal, the speaker now seems to have retreated back into a policy of appeasement. This bodes ill for keeping the government running smoothly in the coming months — and for any future legislative efforts.There is no point in feeling sorry for Mr. McCarthy. He’s a political creature. Coming into this job, he knew the risks of negotiating with, and bowing to, ideological terrorists. And he was apparently cool with that. His party is earning whatever electoral comeuppance it gets. But it is shameful that the rest of America may wind up forced to pay a price as well.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. 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      What Really Happened in the Midterms?

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      A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesMore than eight months later, all the data from the 2022 midterm elections is — finally — final. The two most rigorous reports, from the Pew Research Center and Catalist, are finished.And yet despite all the data, there is a piece of the midterm puzzle that still hasn’t quite been resolved: How exactly did the Democrats manage to nearly sweep every competitive House and Senate race, even though they often fared quite miserably elsewhere?The Catalist report suggested it was the turnout, finding that Democrats won “with electorates in these contests looking more like the 2020 and 2018 electorates than a typical midterm.” Pew also pointed to turnout, but with a different interpretation, writing that Republicans won control of the House “largely on the strength of higher turnout,” and found that disproportionate numbers of Biden voters and Democrats from 2018 stayed home.You might imagine ways to square the two claims, but neither report offers a clear way to reconcile these competing stories. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, doesn’t mention a word on the partisan makeup of the electorate, despite possessing the data to do so. The Pew report, meanwhile, is framed around explaining how Republicans won the House popular vote by three points — an important outcome, but one overshadowed by the Democratic hold in the Senate and the razor-thin Republican House majority.Fortunately, our data at The New York Times can help piece together what remains of the puzzle. Over the last few years via Times/Siena College polls, we’ve interviewed tens of thousands of voters nationwide and in the crucial battleground states and districts. This data can be linked to voter registration files — the backbone of both the Catalist and Pew reports — that show exactly who voted and who did not (though not whom they voted for, of course), including in the states and districts that decided the midterm election.The findings suggest that the turnout was mostly typical of a midterm election and helped Republicans nationwide, but there are good reasons to doubt whether it was as helpful to the party out of power as it had been in previous midterms.It certainly wasn’t enough to overcome what truly distinguished the 2022 midterm election: the critical sliver of voters who were repelled by specific Republican nominees, Donald J. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.At a glance, a typical midterm electorateTo some degree, every midterm leans toward the party out of power, and has an older, whiter electorate. Last November was no exception. Just consider these figures on 2022 voters nationwide:73 percent of registered Republicans (defined by whether someone is registered as a Republican or participated in a recent Republican primary) turned out in 2022, compared with 63 percent of registered Democrats. The 10-point turnout advantage meant Republicans narrowly outnumbered Democrats among 2022 voters given that there are about five percentage points more registered Democrats than registered Republicans by this measure.Just 45 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic voters turned out, compared with 58 percent of non-Hispanic whites, according to data from the Census Bureau. The findings are consistent with data from voter registration files and the actual results, as we reported last fall, along with the Pew and Catalist reports, in showing a weak turnout among Black voters.Voters over 65 represented 33 percent of the electorate, according to the L2 data, compared with just 10 percent for those 18 to 29.All of these patterns are consistent with a typical midterm turnout.The size of the Republican registration advantage is almost exactly in line with the available historical data. It also aligns neatly with our pre-election estimates, which you can see for yourself in our final (and highly accurate) Times/Siena polls.And as we reported in December, this basic story holds up in the battleground states as well. Republicans outvoted Democrats everywhere, including in the very states where Democrats excelled.A hidden Democratic turnout advantage?All of this seems to add up to a stark Republican turnout advantage, powered by an older, whiter and more Republican electorate.But perhaps surprisingly, there are reasons to think the actual turnout advantage for Republican candidates might not have been nearly so large as these figures suggest.Just start with the Pew report, which found that Trump voters were four points likelier to turn out than Biden voters, 71 percent to 67 percent. That’s an important advantage, but it’s less than half the size of the 10-point Republican turnout advantage by registration. The Pew figures actually suggest the 2022 midterm electorate backed Joe Biden in 2020, even though registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats.The Times data suggests something similar. According to our estimates, 69.1 percent of Trump voters turned out compared with 66.7 percent of Biden voters — essentially the same as the Pew figures, though edging even closer to parity.These estimates are based on a statistical model that marries Times/Siena polling data and voter records (including someone’s party registration) to predict how registrants voted in the 2020 election. I’ve forced you through that wonky sentence because it means that these estimates are entirely consistent with and inclusive of all of those various Republican-friendly turnout figures offered earlier: Our estimate is that Republicans outvoted Democrats by 10 points but that Trump voters nonetheless outvoted Biden voters by only two points.Looking at the data more carefully, the source of this disparity is mostly among Democrats. The registered Democrats who stayed home in 2022 were disproportionately likely to be those who sometimes vote Republican. The Democrats who turned out, on the other hand, were especially loyal Democrats who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. This is partly because of education — midterm voters are more highly educated — but the survey data suggests that this Democratic advantage ran a lot deeper.It’s worth being cautious about this finding. The 10-point G.O.P. turnout advantage cited earlier is essentially a fact. The possibility that the practical turnout advantage for Republican candidates might have been only a third of that or less is an estimate based on fallible survey data. It’s also dependent on accurately surveying a group of people — nonvoters — who are very difficult for pollsters to measure.But the Times and Pew data tell a very similar story, despite very different methodologies, and the accurate topline results of the pre-election surveys add additional harmony. The possibility of some kind of hidden underlying Democratic advantage in motivation is also consistent with other data points on 2022, like Democrats’ astonishing success in ultra-low-turnout special elections.Close to parity in the battlegrounds?The 2022 midterm election was not a simple election decided by a national electorate. It was unusually heterogenous, with Republicans enjoying a “red wave” in states like Florida or New York while other states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could be argued to have ridden a “blue wave.”As we’ll see, nowhere near all of the difference between these states can be attributed to turnout. But part of the difference was the disparate turnout, with Republicans enjoying a far larger turnout advantage than they did nationwide in states like Florida, while Democrats did better than they did nationwide in states like Pennsylvania. And since our estimates suggest that the Republican turnout advantage nationwide was fairly modest — more modest than the party registration figures suggest — the estimates also show that neither party enjoyed a significant turnout advantage in many battleground states where Democrats turned in above-average performances.In Northern battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Ohio, Biden and Trump voters turned out at nearly identical rates, according to our estimates.In contrast, Trump voters were likelier to turn out than Biden voters by around 10 percentage points or more in states like Florida and New York. In practice, this meant that the Florida electorate most likely voted for Mr. Trump by double digits, even though he carried the state by just three points in 2020.Most states, including the key Sun Belt battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia, fell in between the Northern battlegrounds and the red-wave states like New York or Florida.A decisive advantage among swing votersThe resilient Democratic turnout in many key Northern battleground states might seem like a key that unlocks what happened in 2022, but it explains less than you might think.According to our estimates, Biden voters only narrowly outnumbered Trump voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Democratic candidates for Senate and governor won in landslides that greatly exceeded Mr. Biden’s margin of victory. Similarly, Trump voters outnumbered Biden voters in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where Democrats posted crucial wins that assured control of the Senate.Ultimately, the Democratic performance depended on something that went far beyond turnout: A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.For all the talk about turnout, this is what distinguished the 2022 midterms from any other in recent memory. Looking back over 15 years, the party out of power has typically won independent voters by an average margin of 14 points, as a crucial segment of voters either has soured on the president or has acted as a check against the excesses of the party in power.This did not happen in 2022. Every major study — the exit polls, the AP/VoteCast study, the Pew study published this week — showed Democrats narrowly won self-identified independent voters, despite an unfavorable national political environment and an older, whiter group of independent voters. A post-election analysis of Times/Siena surveys adjusted to match the final vote count and the validated electorate show the same thing. It took the Democratic resilience among swing voters together with the Democratic resilience in turnout, especially in the Northern battlegrounds, to nearly allow Democrats to hold the U.S. House.In many crucial states, Democratic candidates for Senate and governor often outright excelled among swing voters, plainly winning over a sliver of voters who probably backed Mr. Trump for president in 2020 and certainly supported Republican candidates for U.S. House in 2022. This was most pronounced in the states where Republicans nominated stop-the-steal candidates or where the abortion issue was prominent, like Michigan.Democratic strength among swing voters in key states allowed the party to overcome an important turnout disadvantage in states like Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. That strength turned Pennsylvania and Michigan into landslides. And it ensured that the 2022 midterm election would not go down as an easy Republican victory, despite their takeover of the House, but would instead seem like a setback for conservatives. More

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      Polls Were Great in 2022. Can They Repeat Their Success in 2024?

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      Experiments that yielded promising results in 2022 may not be enough if Trump is on the ballot again.With a highly successful polling cycle behind them, some pollsters believe a tactic that gained widespread adoption in 2022 may help carry them through the next presidential election. But even the tactic’s adherents say it may not be a panacea, particularly if former President Donald J. Trump is once again on the ballot.Pollsters have increasingly been weighting surveys based on whom respondents recall voting for in a previous election, in addition to adjusting for standard demographics such as race and age. This tactic has long been used in other countries to improve poll accuracy, but has become widely used in the United States only in recent years.“We are all terrified,” said Cameron McPhee, the chief methodologist at SSRS, CNN’s polling partner and a pollster that weighted some of its polls on recalled vote in 2022. She added, “We all feel good about the changes we made in 2022, but I think there is still a big question mark” headed into 2024.By weighting on recalled vote, pollsters can more easily correct partisan imbalances in who responds to polls, and in recent years Democrats have tended to respond to polls at higher rates than Republicans. Perhaps more important, weighting on recalled vote can specifically increase the influence of Trump supporters, a group that polls struggled to measure accurately in 2016 and 2020.The tactic’s adoption by pollsters in the United States remains far from universal. Several prominent pollsters achieved accurate results without it — including The New York Times/Siena College, which was named America’s most accurate political pollster by FiveThirtyEight after the 2022 cycle.Overall, 2022 was one of the most accurate years for polling in recent history, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. Many pollsters “probably would have gotten 2022 right even without that extra weighting step, because we did,” said Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Poll.After 2016, post-election analyses found that polls had consistently underrepresented less educated voters, who tended to disproportionately support Mr. Trump. To fix this, pollsters widely adopted education as an additional survey weight, and a cycle of accurate polls in 2018 seemed to reflect a return to normalcy.But in 2020, polls were more biased than they had been in any modern election, over-representing Democratic support by nearly five percentage points, as opposed to three percentage points — a more normal amount of error — in 2016.“I think one of the reasons 2022 was successful — and even to some extent 2018 — was that Trump himself was not on the ballot.” Mr. Murray said. “If history is any guide, we are probably going to see that nonresponse going into 2024 based on how the Republican nomination is going.”The 2020 election presented another distinct challenge — it took place amid the pandemic. Pollsters found that some Americans, stuck at home and lonely, were more likely to respond to surveys. While that was initially seen as a boon, it might have led to even more bias if it meant the uneven adherence to stay-at-home orders added another source of bias to who picked up the phone.Weighting on recalled vote is not without its concerns.Voters have been shown to have poor recall of whom they voted for or even whether they voted at all, typically being more likely to recall voting for the winner. One study of Canadian voters found up to a quarter of voters were inconsistent when recalling whom they had voted for.This misrepresentation of past vote can push polls in different directions depending on who won the most recent election. In 2022, that meant respondents were more likely to say they had supported Joe Biden, and pollsters using recalled vote would end up giving them less weight, meaning Republican support was bolstered.But with a prior winner from a different party, the effect would be reversed. An assessment by The Times found that weighting its 2020 polls using recalled 2016 vote would have made them even more biased toward Mr. Biden. And a report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examining how 2020 polls could have been improved found that polls that weighted on recalled vote were no better than those that didn’t.Similarly, in 2022, weighting by recalled vote would have made Times/Siena polls less accurate. As published, without weighting on recalled vote, the final polls of Senate, governor and House races had an average error of less than two percentage points and zero bias toward Democrats or Republicans. When weighted using recalled vote to 2020 election results, average error would have increased by a percentage point, and overall the polls would have been slightly biased toward Republicans.But that might have been a consequence of other decisions The Times makes, which includes weighting to demographic information available on the voter file that is not always available to other pollsters.Other pollsters have found the recalled vote method to yield significant improvements over typical weighting schemes. SSRS used a range of weighting methods in 2022, including recalled vote for some of its polls, and also experimented with weighting on political identification. Its post-election analysis found that using recalled vote as a weight would have been the most accurate overall approach, increasing average accuracy by more than three percentage points over just weighting on standard demographics.“It’s a brute force method,” said Clifford Young, the president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “That is, we don’t really know what it corrects for. Does it correct for only nonignorable nonresponse? Or does it correct for coverage bias? Or maybe a likely voter problem? Maybe all three.”Even so, pollsters are generally optimistic. “What the evidence is showing is that it gets us in a much better place in our polls than not using it,” Mr. Young said, noting that he believed most pollsters would be weighting on past vote in 2024. “I think the evidence thus far suggests it does more good than harm.” He added, “If we use the same weighting and correction methods that we used in 2020 in 2024, we’re going to miss the mark.” More

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      Republican Midterm Turnout Is a Warning for Democrats in 2024, Report Finds

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      Even though Democrats held the Senate and other key offices, Republican turnout was more robust, and the party showed strength among women, Latinos and rural voters, a new report found.Even though Democrats held off a widely expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, Republican turnout was in fact stronger, and the party energized key demographic groups including women, Latinos and rural voters, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.And for all the Democratic emphasis on finding Republican voters who could be persuaded to buck their party in the Trump era, Pew found that a vast majority of voters stuck with the same party through the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections. Just 6 percent of voters cast ballots for more than one party over those three elections — and those voters were more likely to be Democrats flipping to Republican candidates than Republicans to Democratic candidates.“An eternal debate among political analysts after each election is what was a bigger factor in the outcome — persuading voters to switch their allegiance, or getting more of their core party loyalists to vote,” said Hannah Hartig, one of the authors of the Pew report.Voters who cast a ballot in 2018 but skipped the 2022 midterms had favored Democrats by two to one in the 2018 election.Democrats tried last year to energize these voters, seeking to inflate Mr. Trump’s profile and tie other Republicans to him. Mr. Biden coined the phrase “ultra-MAGA” to describe Republicans in an effort to engage Democratic voters.In the end, what most likely drove Democrats to the polls was less about Mr. Biden’s actions than a broader reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Dan Sena, a former executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the Pew results suggested that the key to 2024 would be persuading independent and moderate Republican voters who dislike both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to support Democrats. Abortion rights, he said, is the issue most likely to do so.“There is a group of persuadable Republicans that the Democrats were able to win over,” Mr. Sena said. “Those voters align very closely with those who see choice and personal freedom on health care in alignment.”Pew’s analysis is based on a panel of over 7,000 Americans whose attitudes and voting behavior the group has tracked through multiple election cycles. Pew also compared voters to state voting rolls to verify that they actually cast ballots in 2022. Taken together, this provides a portrait of the 2022 electorate.In most midterm years, the party that is not in the White House fares well. And while Republicans enjoyed a turnout advantage in 2022, they nevertheless fell short of expectations and did not match Democrats’ turnout advantage in 2018, the first midterm election after Mr. Trump took office.Still, midterm voters historically skew older and whiter than voters in presidential years, a phenomenon that tends to benefit Republicans. The 2018 midterms were, in many ways, the exception to that rule, with increased turnout across age groups, but especially among young people. The 2022 electorate was more in line with historical trends.Much of the narrative around the 2022 election has centered on Democratic energy after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. And while that played out in key governor’s races in states where abortion was on the ballot, nationally, Democrats appear to have lost ground with a crucial group: women.In the 2018 election cycle, when increased activism — including the Women’s March — fueled record turnout among women, Democrats had an advantage of 18 percentage points. That edge shrunk to just three points in 2022, Pew found.However, the study found that few women actually switched the party they were supporting. Instead, most of the drop for Democrats stemmed from the fact that Republican women voted at a higher rate than Democratic women.Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats overall, but by a much smaller margin than four years earlier. In 2018, Democrats won 72 percent of Hispanic voters, but in 2022 they won only 60 percent. The decline began in 2020, when Democrats also won about 60 percent of Hispanic voters.And Republicans also continued to increase their support from rural voters. The party made gains with them not only through increased turnout, but also among rural voters who had voted for Democrats in the past but cast ballots for Republicans in 2022.“The Trump base continues to be motivated,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who ran the party’s House super PAC in 2018.Yet, Mr. Bliss added, “In a handful of races that really matter, we had bad candidates, and in all the races that matter, we were dramatically outspent.” More