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      It’s Not Your Father’s Democratic Party. But Whose Party Is It?

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      Has the left’s half-century struggle to return the Democratic Party to its working-class roots become an exercise in futility? This is perhaps the most vexing question facing the party of liberal America.It is not an easy one to answer. In recent years, the Democratic electorate has moved in two directions.First: The percentage of Democrats with a college degree has almost doubled, growing to 41 percent in 2019 from 22 percent in 1996.Second: While the percentage of Democrats who are non-Hispanic and white has fallen to 59 percent from 76 percent over the same period, according to Pew Research, nonwhite Democrats — Black, Hispanic, Asian American or members of other minority groups — have grown to 41 percent from 24 percent.In terms of the entire U.S. population (as of July 2022), those described by the census as “white alone, not Hispanic or Latino” made up 58.9 percent of the United States — down from 69.1 percent in 2000 — while the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Asian American and other minorities increased to 41.1 percent from 30.9 percent over the same period.Have American politics reached a tipping point?Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah, political scientists at Tufts and Berkeley, contended in their Aug. 1 paper, “The Partisan Realignment of American Business,” that both the Democratic and the Republican Parties have undergone radical reorientations:The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labor but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working-class social conservatives, represents a major, perhaps the major, American political development of the 21st century.In an email, Hersh elaborated on their analysis: “This is one of the most important developments in recent American political history because we seem to be in the midst of a realignment, and that doesn’t happen every day or even every decade.”One reflection of this trend, according to Hersh, is the growing common ground that cultural liberals and corporate America are finding on social issues:A company taking a position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights may at first seem like it’s a company not staying in its lane and getting into political questions unrelated to its core business. But if the company needs to take a position in order to satisfy its work force or because potential new hires demand political activism, then the decision is no longer just social; it’s economic.Another example: For a while it looked like the Republican Party could appeal to social conservatives but maintain the economic policy supported by business elites. But now, you start to see real attempts by Republican thought leaders to be more assertive in meeting the economic needs of their constituencies.As a result of this realignment, Hersh argued, a crucial battleground in elections held in the near future will be an intensifying competition for the support of minority voters:Democrats can win with college-educated whites plus nonwhite voters. They can’t win with more defection from nonwhite voters. The Republicans are making the argument that their cultural and economic values are consistent with working-class Americans and that their positions transcend racial categories.If the Republican Party “could move beyond Trump and focus on this vision (which, of course, is impossible with Trump there making everything about Trump), they’d be presenting a set of arguments and policies that will be very compelling to a large number of Americans,” Hersh wrote.Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long argued that Democrats need to regain support from white voters without college degrees and to stop defections among working-class Black and Hispanic voters, argued that the socioeconomic elite — well-educated, largely white liberals — are imposing damaging policies on the Democratic Party.In a recent essay, “Brahmin Left vs. Populist Right,” Teixeira wrote:The fact is that the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and, of course, race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working-class voter (including the median nonwhite working-class voter).Instead, Teixeira contended:Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working-class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.I asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working-class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., agreed that “There is no way to define ‘socioeconomic elites’ in which it isn’t obvious that both parties are dominated by socioeconomic elites.” He added that “since the 1970s, both left and right parties now represent different factions within the socioeconomic elites.”In the process, Podhorzer argued, “Labor and working people have been demoted from a seat at the table to a constituency to be appealed to.”The idea that the Democratic Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China W.T.O., proposed T.P.P., etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic elites, as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masksbillionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call inequality. This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural elites, like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.For that reason, Podhorzer continued,centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke elite unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which cultural, rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments.However these disputes are resolved, there is clear evidence of the demographic realignment of the Democratic Party.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, writing by email, demonstrated the evolution of the Democratic and Republican electorates by citing data from the Cooperative Election Study, which he oversees:We ask workers what industries they work in, and just between 2014 and 2020 we saw some notable shifts, depending on the category. In 2014, 42 percent of people working in construction identified as Republican, and 38 percent called themselves Democrats, a four-point advantage for Republicans. Just six years later, that group was 49 percent Republican and 29 percent Democratic, a 20-point gap. By contrast, Republicans had a nine-point edge among people who work in finance and insurance in 2014 (48 percent Republican, 39 percent Democratic), but by 2020, Democrats held a three-point edge (45 percent Democratic, 42 percent Republican).The Republican advantage among manufacturing workers has grown to 13 points from seven points over those six years, according to Schaffner, and the four-point Democratic advantage among transportation and warehouse workers has turned into an eight-point Republican edge. Workers in professional, scientific and technical industries were evenly split in 2014, but by 2020, Democrats had gained a 15-point advantage. In the education industry, Democrats increased their advantage from a 14-point gap in 2014 to a 22-point advantage in 2020.Schaffner wrote that “these are pretty sizable shifts in partisanship, which fit the narrative that white-collar workers are shifting more Democratic at the same time that blue-collar industries are becoming more Republican.”There are, however, strong arguments that despite the ascendance of well-educated, relatively comfortable Democrats, the party has retained its commitment to the less well off, as evidenced by the policies enacted by the Biden administration.Most of those who challenged the Hersh-Shah thesis did not dispute the ascendance of the well educated in Democratic ranks; instead they argued that the party has retained its ideological commitments to the bottom half of the income distribution and to organized labor.Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, expressed strong disagreement with the Hersh-Shah paper in an email responding to my inquiry.“There is no question that the class profile of Democratic voters has become U-shaped, with both poorer and higher-income voters siding most strongly with the party,” Hacker wrote, but he went on to say:Even as the Democratic Party has come to rely more heavily on affluent suburban voters, its platform, legislative agenda and national elected representatives’ communications via Twitter have all remained highly focused on economic issues. In fact, the national platform and Democratic agenda have become substantially bolder — that is, bigger in scope, broader in policy instruments (e.g., industrial policy), and generally more redistributive overall.Hacker specifically challenged Hersh and Shah’s claim that corporate America is shifting to the Democratic Party, citing evidence of the Republican tilt of contributions by Fortune 1,500 C.E.O.s, by the Forbes Wealthiest 100 and in the distribution pattern of dark money.Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who is now a political consultant, agreed with Hacker on the pro-labor commitment of the Biden administration, despite the severe weakening of the labor movement in recent decades. Biden, he wrote by email, “has been the most pro-union, pro-worker president we have had in my lifetime.”Rosenthal acknowledged, however, that the union movement has suffered terrible setbacks in recent years, especially in Midwest battleground states:For decades, we’ve been saying both parties are too accommodating to corporate America. Perhaps the biggest change is not in how the parties operate or what they stand for but the decline in the labor movement. In the mid-90s, between 30 and 40 percent of the electorate in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio came from union households, and they were voting 60 percent-plus Democratic. I used to say even back then that the only white working-class voters who were voting Democratic were in unions.Since then, Rosenthal wrote, “their vote share has decreased precipitously, to a low of now something like 14 percent in Wisconsin to the mid-20 percent in the other states.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, contended that the Hersh-Shah paper creates a false dichotomy:The partisan business and labor interests are an either-or scenario. The Democratic Party can be the party of labor and the party of socioeconomic elites. The Republican Party can be the party of business and working-class social conservatives.Democrats can support labor interests, Wronski wrote by email,through initiatives to raise the minimum wage and bolster unions and can support the more progressive social issues of socioeconomic elites that relate to D.E.I. initiatives. Republicans can provide tax breaks and the like to businesses while still firmly espousing socially conservative positions on issues related to racial, religious and gender identity. Republicans can be the party of supporting red state businesses, while Democrats can be the party of supporting blue state businesses.Business, Wronski argued, is not so much realigning with the Democratic Party as it is polarizing into different camps based on “cleavages in how businesses interact with the political realm based upon social issues,” with “partisan polarization of businesses based on social issues and the group identities of the company’s stakeholders, employees and clients.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, agreed by email thatthere is definitely a significant change in the party coalitions, though it has occurred slowly rather than in one critical election. The main demographic change is in education among white Americans: College-educated whites are moving toward Democrats, while non-college-educated whites are moving toward Republicans.This has not reversed the traditional class divide of the parties, Grossmann argued, “because high-income, low-education voters are the most Republican and low-income, high-education voters are the most Democratic,” while “nonwhite voters also remain much more Democratic.”Despite these shifts, Grossmann wrote that he does not “see evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned redistributive politics or changed its positions on business regulation. Instead, they are increasingly emphasizing social issues and combining social concerns with their traditional economic concerns.”David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, is writing a book with Grossmann. Hopkins argued in an email that “we are in the midst of a realignment, in the sense that the education gap between the two parties (separating degree-holding Democrats from degree-lacking Republicans) is now much larger than the income gap.”But, Hopkins stressed,party change on economic policy is the dog that hasn’t barked here. For all its conspicuously populist style, the Trump presidency’s biggest legislative achievement was a tax reform package that provided most of its benefits to wealthy and corporate taxpayers. And the Democrats show no signs of rethinking their traditional advocacy of an expanded welfare state funded by redistributing wealth downward from rich individuals and businesses — with Biden’s policy agenda ranging from greater education spending to a federal child tax credit to subsidized child care and prescription drug costs.Despite their new source of support among the well-educated affluent, Hopkins continued,Democrats still fundamentally see themselves as the defenders of the interests of the socially underprivileged. And despite their own contemporary popularity among the white working class, Republicans still define themselves as the champions of capitalism and entrepreneurship.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, cast doubt on Hersh and Shah’s claims in an emailed response to my inquiry: “There are clearly changes in the role of socioeconomic elites in the Democratic Party and the role of the working class in the Republican Party, but the evidence doesn’t show that either party has abandoned its traditional base.”On average, Westwood continued,the Republican Party still maintains a wealthier base than Democrats, and Democrats still capture more support from labor than Republicans. Similarly, Republicans continue to vote for business interests, and Democrats continue to back pro-labor regulation. It is hard to say we are at a turning point in party composition and focus while these things are still true.It is possible, Westwood wrote, that the Hersh-Shah paper “could be prophetic, but a complete picture of American politics suggests it is too early to assess if we have truly seen a major development in American politics.”In the meantime, as the Democratic Party continues to win college-educated white voters by larger and larger numbers, the development of most concern to those determined to maintain the party’s commitment to the less well off is the incremental but steady decline in Democratic support from nonwhite voters.Over the past three presidential elections, according to a detailed Catalist analysis of recent elections, Democratic margins among Black voters without college degrees have steadily fallen: Barack Obama 97 to 3 percent, or a 94-point advantage in 2012; Hillary Clinton 93 to 6 percent, or an 87-point advantage in 2016; and Biden 90 to 8 percent, or an 82-point edge in 2020. The same pattern was true for Hispanic voters without degrees: Obama 70 to 27 percent, or 43 points; Clinton 68 to 27 percent, or 41 points; and Biden 60 to 38 percent, or 22 points.The current Democratic Party may actually be the best coalition that the left can piece together at a time when American politics is notable for contradictory, crosscutting economic, racial and cultural issues. But can the party, with its many factions, outcompete the contemporary Republican Party, a party that has its own enormous liabilities — most notably Donald Trump himself?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 Affirmative Action Changed Their Lives

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      Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Liz O. Baylen, Lisa Chow and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Alyssa Moxley and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTwo weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.Today, three people whose lives were changed by affirmative action discuss the complicated feelings they have about the policy.On today’s episodeSabrina Tavernise, a co-host of The Daily.Opponents of the ruling marching this month in Cambridge, Mass.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesBackground readingFor many of the Black, Hispanic and Native Americans whose lives were shaped by affirmative action, the moment has prompted a personal reckoning with its legacy.In earlier decisions, the court had endorsed taking account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Sabrina Tavernise More

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      This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off

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      In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.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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      While We Wait for the Supreme Court to Make Up Its Mind …

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, I hope your summer is off to a great start. We’re in the season of Supreme Court decisions, waiting any day for the Harvard and U.N.C. ruling to come down. Assuming the court overturns affirmative action for private and public universities, and maybe beyond that, what do you think the effect will be?Gail Collins: Bret, I guess we’ll have to see the how and the why of the much-dreaded decision before it’s possible to tell.Bret: The fine print is what has really mattered in past affirmative action cases, going back to the Bakke decision in 1978, which ruled that explicit racial quotas were unconstitutional, but that race could be considered a plus factor in admissions.Gail: I’m hoping the court will leave some room for schools and employers to continue taking race into account — and also things like economic background, childhood home environment — factors that help produce a diverse America where people who come from impoverished communities and disadvantaged homes can get some breaks.Bret: I’d have a much easier time accepting affirmative action if the principal criterion was class, not race. If universities thought of themselves more as ladders of social mobility and less as curators of racial rebalancing, they could still give a lot of poorer minorities a lift while also opening their doors to larger numbers of low-income white students who might otherwise have been denied a shot at admission.Gail: You can’t leave race out, but yes, it’s important to mix it with other parts of a biography. We have to protect schools’ right to create a diverse freshman class every year — one that will help students learn the joys and struggles and fun and exasperation that comes from living with people who aren’t like you in color, creed or background.Bret: Or viewpoint. Diversity is also about making sure universities don’t become ideological monocultures where people look different but share nearly all the same opinions and assumptions.Gail: To me, diversity is a very, very important goal — you don’t want to be living in a world in which all the folks of one race or class never interact with folks from another.How about you?Bret: Diversity can be a virtue, but it doesn’t have to apply in every conceivable setting or override other considerations, especially academic excellence. I don’t think it’s any secret that students whose families are from East and South Asia outperform many of their peers in high school academics, just as Jewish kids from immigrant backgrounds did a couple of generations ago. If the end of affirmative action means that top-tier universities will be demographically overrepresented with students of Asian background for the simple reason that they worked that much harder to get there, should that be considered a problem?Gail: Of course we have to include, and celebrate, the many fabulous students with East and South Asian backgrounds. And part of the educational opportunities they deserve is a chance to be in school with kids from other backgrounds. So that they graduate with the ability to work with, supervise and take directions from Black, white and Hispanic colleagues.It’s a win-win.Bret: It would be win-win if universities vastly expanded their enrollments, perhaps by doing more of the coursework online, so that every academically qualified student got in. For now it’s zero-sum: At Harvard in 2013, according to the initial lawsuit, the admission rate for Asian American students was 19 percent, even though 43 percent of the admitted class would have been Asians if based on academic performance alone.Gail: Have a feeling this isn’t going to be the last time we debate this issue. But Bret, we’ve had a busy news week and I want to check in on some of the big developments. Starting with … Hunter Biden! Am I right in recalling he’s not your favorite presidential offspring?Bret: He’s running neck-and-neck with Don Jr. and Eric in that contest, though I hear that James Madison’s stepson, Payne Todd, may have been the worst of them all.Gail: Hunter’s legal issues seem to have been pretty much resolved — he’s pleading guilty to two far-from-major tax crimes, getting probation and pledging to remain drug-free for two years.Bret: For which we wish him well.Gail: Two questions: Is this resolution fair? And what political impact will it have? Some Republicans are acting as if this is gonna be a large cloud over the Biden administration. That the president won’t be able to campaign for re-election without being followed by “Huckster Hunter’s Dad” banners.Bret: Hard to judge without seeing all the evidence. The U.S. attorney in the case, David Weiss, was appointed by Donald Trump and kept in his job by Merrick Garland to complete the investigation, so this hardly seems a case of partisan favoritism. And Weiss says the investigation is “ongoing,” which I have to assume means he’s taking a close look at Hunter’s fishy foreign business deals.But the political timing is lousy and plays into Donald Trump’s narrative that the Biden administration is weaponizing the Justice Department against him while letting off Biden’s son with a slap on the wrist.Gail: I’ve always believed that as long as there was no reasonable evidence that Joe was actually involved in any of Hunter’s smarmy let’s-make-a-deal-did-you-happen-to-notice-my-last-name schemes, the whole thing has no political impact whatsoever. Nobody but desperate Republicans cares about Hunter’s misdeeds, and if anything, I think he stirs sympathy for his father.Bret: Well, desperate Republicans means tens of millions of Americans. But since we keep touching on the subject of errant children of famous politicians, your thoughts on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?Gail: I know the polls suggest he might be a problem for Biden. A good chunk of that is just boredom with the current election picture and name recognition for Junior. Once voters take a serious look at him, his anti-vaccine craziness and overall right-wing loopiness, I’m confident those polls will plummet.Bret: I would call it left-wing loopiness, but go on.Gail: Nevertheless, if he runs as a third-party candidate, he always has the potential to screw things up — just a sliver of votes in a swing state could do the trick. Which is why I’m so hostile to third-party presidential candidates.Bret: I don’t see him running, Nader-like, as a third-party candidate. But I think one reason some Democrats are rallying to him is because they are wary of the idea of a second Biden term, even if they think he’s done a decent job in his first.Gail: We were both hoping Biden wouldn’t run again because of the age issue, but here we are. And he’s still a thousand leagues better than Trump, who’s only a few years younger. So Joe’s the one.Bret: They see him as old and faltering, they don’t think Kamala Harris is up to the job if she needs to succeed him, and they worry that any Republican save Trump could defeat him. If Bobby Jr. wins in New Hampshire because Biden isn’t even on the ballot, it could shake things up, and he could wind up being the Eugene McCarthy of this political season: not the nominee, but the catalyst for change. I’ve been saying this for months, and I’m still willing to bet you a good Zinfandel that Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, is the surprise Democratic nominee next summer. Mark Leibovich seems to agree, by the way.Gail: All I will say is that I am looking forward to the Zinfandel.Bret: And speaking of catalysts, how about that Chris Christie?Gail: He’s not going to be elected president, but gosh I would so love to see him in the Republican primary debate this August. Think there’s a chance he’ll raise enough money to qualify?Bret: For sure. He’ll get it because he’s a bring-the-popcorn sort of candidate who will make the debates interesting and because a lot of the big Republican donors long ago soured on Trump and because all the other Republicans in the race look like a bunch of moral midgets auditioning for cabinet-level jobs in the next G.O.P. administration and because the choice of Ron DeSantis or Trump is starting to look about as appetizing as the choice between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin — scorpions in the proverbial bottle who really deserve each other.Gail: This is the reason you’re my favorite Republican.Bret: Ex-Republican. Still conservative.Christie’s essential theory of the race is that the only way to defeat Trump is the “They pull a knife, you pull a gun” theory that Sean Connery espoused as the best way to defeat Al Capone in “The Untouchables.” Except Christie aims to bring a .44 magnum, a rocket-propelled grenade and maybe even some HIMARS artillery — rhetorically speaking, of course.Gail: Of course.Bret: Which is all another way of saying that he’ll tell the truth about Trump. It will be a joy to watch, however it turns out.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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      The Trump Case and the Bathroom Files

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      More from our inbox:Affirmative Action in College Admissions: Race or Class?The Slow Runner via Department of JusticeTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law” (news analysis, front page, June 11):Contrary to this analysis of the documents case against former President Donald Trump, what is being tested is not the credibility of the justice system. Mr. Trump’s completely predictable efforts to undermine confidence in the legal process are pure bluster.What is actually at stake is the credibility of the political system. At any other time in United States history, a candidate for president charged with serious federal crimes that led to profound questions about his judgment and commitment to protecting the nation’s secrets would be decisively rejected by the voters.Instead, early indications are that Mr. Trump’s base remains staunchly loyal to him. American democracy is imperiled if a significant segment of the voting public cannot see through dangerous, self-serving posturing.In Abraham Lincoln’s first great speech, the Lyceum Address in 1838, he predicted that an aspiring tyrant would someday seek power, and he warned, “It will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”Nearly 190 years later, Lincoln’s wisdom is truer than ever.Steven S. BerizziNorwalk, Conn.To the Editor:Re “Trump Put U.S. at Risk, Indictment Says” (front page, June 10):As the mother of a U.S. Marine reservist, I am sickened beyond belief to read that U.S. government top-secret information was stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.Our son and tens of thousands of other servicemen and women put their lives on the line in service and sacrifice to this country. To think that a man who was elected president could be so malevolent as to break the law for his own selfish reasons is incomprehensible.Kathryn KleekampSandwich, Mass.To the Editor:It is at once not surprising and mind-boggling to read the indictment of Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified documents (“The Trump Classified Document Indictment, Annotated,” June 10).It is not surprising because his alleged misconduct is consistent with his arrogant quip years ago that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. And it is mind-boggling because so many Republicans — no doubt celebrating in private — continue to publicly support Mr. Trump in order to not alienate his base.There are certain moments that are, or should be, above politics. This is one of them. This is a time for somber reflection and a commitment to, and respect for, the rule of law.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkTo the Editor:Re “The Greater Trump’s Opposition, the Greater His Support as a Martyr,” by Damon Linker (Opinion guest essay, June 10):I consider myself a liberal, but I am not feeling “giddy,” as Mr. Linker puts it, over the former president’s indictment. I am not gloating or smacking my lips but feeling sad, because the Republican Party has let it come to this low point.I’m sad because Republicans have let themselves be guided by political polls rather than common sense and a regard for ethics and patriotism. They have followed Donald Trump down this dismal road, which has sullied the office of the presidency, and there seems to be no end in sight.Chase WebbPortland, Ore.To the Editor:Re “Trump Appointee Was Randomly Assigned to Case, Clerk Says” (news article, June 11):The supposedly random assignment of Judge Aileen Cannon to the Trump criminal case will be another test of the frequent pronouncements by members of the federal judiciary, including several Supreme Court justices, that politics never crosses the courtroom threshold.Will Judge Cannon have learned nothing from the surprisingly strident appeals court slap-down of her troubling and seemingly politically based previous rulings, or will she proceed as the fair and impartial judge she swore to be?It is not only the public’s perception of the judiciary but also the future direction of the country that may hang in the balance.Stephen F. GladstoneShaker Heights, OhioThe writer is a lawyer.Affirmative Action in College Admissions: Race or Class? Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “I’m in High School. I Hope Affirmative Action Is Rejected and Replaced With Something Stronger,” by Sophia Lam (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, June 5):The facts are clear: The vast majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action. Amplifying the voices of the Asian American minority that oppose affirmative action without this essential context privileges their position at the expense of the 69 percent of Asian Americans who believe that affirmative action offers communities of color better access to higher education.Regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling, we will continue to stand in solidarity with communities of color and fight for policies that increase equal access to educational opportunities for all, particularly the underrepresented children of our multiracial society.Michelle BoykinsNiyati ShahWashingtonMs. Boykins is the senior director of strategic communications at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC. Ms. Shah is its director of litigation.To the Editor:Sophia Lam is entirely right. What is most puzzling about college admissions is that no colleges, including the most prestigious, are focused on diversity in such a socioeconomic-based way. “Underprivileged” includes many immigrants, people of color and all Americans from working-class backgrounds.If a socioeconomic standard were applied, clearly African Americans and other students of color would benefit, but it would not be solely for their skin color.Soft or hard quotas make Americans (and the Supreme Court for more than 40 years) uncomfortable. Why doesn’t Harvard, Princeton or Yale take this common-sense step?Howard FishmanHaddon Township, N.J.The Slow Runner Desiree Rios for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “For This Runner, There Is No Shame in Bringing Up the Rear” (front page, June 3):I enjoyed reading about Martinus Evans, the founder of Slow AF Run Club. I am now 71 and have been running since 1980 and used to be near the front in races. But now I’ve slowed to be near the back of the pack.I too have been taunted by people in the crowds during the New York City Marathon about going too slow. His encouragement to all runners is excellent.I too tell every slow runner in my club (New Hyde Park/Mineola Runners) to just get out there. I will stay with any runner, even if they have to walk. I’ve competed in marathons, half-marathons and triathlons and believe that no runner is too slow.Some people in clubs have become elitist and don’t want to be bothered with slower runners. Shame on them. Once they were very slow too. How soon they forget.This article is very important to show that there is support for all types and shapes of runners. Running is life-changing and lifesaving.Jeffrey SalgoQueens More

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      The Suburbs Are Still Driving American Politics, but Where Are They Taking Us?

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      Over the past half century, the percentage of Black Americans living in the nation’s suburbs has doubled, a shift that is changing the balance of political power in key regions of the country.This transition is simultaneously raising the living standards of better-off African Americans and leaving the poor behind in deteriorating urban neighborhoods.“Since 1970, the share of Black individuals living in suburbs of large cities has risen from 16 to 36 percent,” Alexander W. Bartik and Evan Mast, economists at the University of Illinois and Notre Dame, write in their 2021 paper “Black Suburbanization: Causes and Consequences of a Transformation of American Cities.”“This shift,” they point out, “is as large as the post-World War II wave of the Great Migration.”In contrast, the Black population in “central cities remained flat until 2000 and then declined significantly, leading their share of the national African American total to fall from 41 to 24 percent.” Urban census tracts that were majority Black and had a poverty rate above 20 percent in 1970, according to their data, “have since lost 60 percent of their Black population.”The two authors continue: “Black suburbanization has led to major changes in neighborhoods, accounting for a large share of recent increases in both the average Black individual’s neighborhood quality and within-Black income segregation.”In their paper, Bartik and Mast provide data showing that “suburbanization plays a major role in both rising income segregation within the Black population and a growing divergence in neighborhood quality of Black suburbanites and city dwellers,” which “has increased within-Black stratification due to a lack of low-cost suburban housing and relatively low white flight.”The exodus to the suburbs, according to the two economists,has accounted for most gains in Black households’ neighborhood characteristics, with Black city dwellers in some cases experiencing relative declines. For example, while the neighborhood median income of the average Black individual has modestly improved from 61 to 66 percent of the average White individual’s neighborhood income, the figure has fallen from 58 to 50 percent for Black city dwellers.Bartik and Mast’s analysis confirms the prescient warning of William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard, who famously wrote in his 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” that before the enactment of fair housing legislation, “lower class, working class and middle class Black families all lived more or less in the same communities, sent their children to the same schools, availed themselves of the same recreational facilities and shopped at the same stores.” The Black middle and working classes “were confined in communities also inhabited by the lower class; their very presence provided stability to inner-city neighborhoods and reinforced and perpetuated mainstream patterns of norms and behaviors.”The impoverished neighborhoods they leave behind now, Wilson continued, “are populated almost exclusively by the most disadvantaged segments of the Black community, that heterogeneous grouping of families and individuals who are outside the mainstream of the American occupational system.”A separate February 2023 study of Black suburbanization, “Racial Diversity and Segregation: Comparing Principal Cities, Inner-Ring Suburbs, Outlying Suburbs, and the Suburban Fringe,” by Daniel T. Lichter, Brian C. Thiede and Matthew M. Brooks of Cornell, Penn State and Florida State, confirmed many of the findings in the Bartik-Mast paper.One of the most striking shifts they report involves the degree of integration:The extraordinary increases in Black, Hispanic and Asian suburbanization since 1990 have changed the racial makeup of suburbia overall. Multiracial diversity is suffusing America’s suburbs as never before. We show, for example, that there is a 53 percent probability today that any two people randomly drawn from inner-ring suburban areas would be from different ethnoracial groups.At the same time, they write, one geographic region of suburbia — the outer rings — stands out from the rest:Not surprisingly, the least diverse part of suburbia is its fringe — formerly rural — counties, where the average likelihood of drawing two people of different races is only 34 percent overall. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis, untested empirically, that the exurbs may be providing “refuge” for suburban Whites fleeing growing racial diversity.Lichter and his co-authors measured different geographic areas from those used by Bartik and Mast, so the numbers vary, but the trends are similar.Lichter, Thiede and Brooks demonstrate that the rapid rate of increase in Black suburbanization between 1990 and 2020 far outpaced that of other demographic groups.In 1990, 33.9 percent of Black Americans in what are known as metropolitan statistical areas lived in the suburbs. By 2020, that grew to 51.2 percent, a 17.3-point shift over the same period; the share of Asian Americans in metropolitan statistical areas living in suburbs grew by 13.2 percentage points; and the share of Hispanics by 13.8 percentage points.While Black and other minority suburbanites have made economic gains, the suburbs, Lichter and his two colleagues argue,are likely to be infused with racial politics over the foreseeable future. School boards and local communities are increasingly divided on issues of inclusion and exclusion, on the racial gerrymandering of municipal and school district boundaries, and on restrictive zoning laws on housing and commercial activities. The suburbs are arguably at the frontline of America’s “diversity explosion,” where economic integration and cultural assimilation occur or are contested.In this context, Lichter, Thiede and Brooks contend:The idea of “melting-pot suburbs,” which signals residential integration, hardly seems apt. To be sure, the largest declines in Black-white segregation over the past decade were found in the suburbs. But any optimism from this result is countered by declines over the last decade in the exposure index between the Black and white populations in both inner-ring and outlying suburbs.What that means, they explain, is thatBlack individuals are no more likely to be living with White neighbors today than in the past. In fact, Black exposure to Whites in the suburbs seems to have declined, at least in those parts of the suburbs where most of the metro Black population lives.They call this — the fact that “declines in Black-white segregation occurred even as Blacks have become less exposed to whites” — a statistical paradox. One reason for it, they write, is “rooted mostly in white depopulation rather than white flight since 2010.”Past declines “in suburban segregation among Hispanics and Asians seem to have stagnated, or even reversed, over the past decade,” Lichter, Thiede and Brooks write.This finding, they continue,is potentially significant because it raises prospects of growing suburban fragmentation and spatial inequality. Suburbs may be less likely than in the past to connote entry into mainstream society or social mobility. Our findings suggest the formation of new ethnoburbs among the Asian and Hispanic populations — perhaps especially among first- and second-generation immigrants.A study of the shifting politics of suburbia from the 1950s to the present, “Not Just White Soccer Moms: Voting in Suburbia in the 2016 and 2020 Elections,” by Ankit Rastogi and Michael Jones-Correa, both at the University of Pennsylvania, found that from the 1950s to the start of the 1990s,Residing in racially homogeneous, middle-class enclaves, White suburban voters embraced a set of policy positions that perpetuated their racial and class position. Since the 1990s, however, the demographics of suburbs have been changing, with consequent political shifts.As a result, by 2020, “suburban voters were more likely to back Biden, the Democratic candidate, than his Republican counterpart Trump.”Why, the authors ask?White suburban precincts showed greater support for Biden in 2020 than for Clinton in 2016. Our analysis indicates, however, that if all suburban voters had voted like white suburbanite precincts, Trump would have carried metropolitan suburbs in 2020.So what saved the day for Biden? “Democrats carried metropolitan suburbs in 2020 because of suburban voters of color.”While suburban whites have moved to the left over the past three decades, there is continuing evidence of white resistance to suburban integration.Erica Frankenberg, Christopher S. Fowler, Sarah Asson and Ruth Krebs Buck, all of Penn State, studied declining white enrollment in public schools in their February 2023 paper, “Demographic and School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes: Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia, Between 1990 and 2010.”They found that from 1990 to 2010, there was “a steep decline in white, school-age children and an increase in Black, Hispanic, and Asian children in both neighborhoods and the schools that serve them,” which, they argue, suggests that “white households reluctant to send their children to diversifying schools are exiting (or never entering) these districts entirely.”The decrease in white students, they write, “may reflect two potential factors: either white families are leaving these public school districts or white households with school-age children are choosing not to enter these districts, perhaps opting for more distant and homogeneous districts.”Along similar lines, Lichter and Domenico Parisi, a sociologist at Stanford, and Michael C. Taquino of Mississippi State examine the response of whites to suburban integration in their 2019 paper, “Remaking Metropolitan America? Residential Mobility and Racial Integration in the Suburbs.”“The exodus of whites,” they write, “is significantly lower in predominantly white suburbs than in places with racially diverse populations. Most suburban whites have mostly white neighbors, a pattern reinforced by white residential mobility.”In addition, they continue, “suburban whites who move tend to choose predominantly white communities with mostly white neighbors.” Affluent whites, they note, are “better positioned to leave diversifying places for mostly white communities with white neighbors.”Their analysis shows that “white mobility rates were lowest in predominantly white places and blocks and highest in suburban places and blocks with significant Black populations.”The rates of white mobility, they add,were especially large if neighbors tended to be Black. Nearly 28 percent of whites moved away from predominantly Black neighbors, compared with an overall average of only 19.25 percent. In suburban blocks with mostly white neighbors, the mobility rate was even lower at 17.45 percent.Even more strikingly, they report:Whites living in predominantly Black blocks are 78 percent more likely to leave the place altogether than move to another block in the same place. Similarly, whites living in places with high concentrations of Blacks are 51 percent more likely to leave the place altogether than move to another block within the same place.A key measure of motivation in deciding to move is the composition of the neighborhood a white family moves to, according to their analysis.“A significant majority of white inter-suburban place moves,” they write,involve movement to predominantly white places (60.1 percent). Only a tiny fraction involved moves to places with predominantly Black populations (7.1 percent). Moves to mixed-race places, however, accounted for a significant minority share of all destinations (32.8 percent).In their conclusion, Parisi, Lichter and Taquino point to the choice of many suburbanizing whites of outer-ring neighborhoods: “Minority suburbanization has been countered demographically by white population shifts between suburban places, to outlying exurban areas and back to the city.”More specifically, they argue, “Our analyses show, at the block level, that suburban whites overwhelmingly have white rather than racially diverse neighbors, regardless of the overall racial composition of the particular suburban place they live.”In addition, “Whites are moving to other suburbs, gentrifying central cities, and exurban fringe areas that seem to set them apart spatially from newly arriving suburban minorities.”Despite the pessimism inherent in their analysis, the authors leave unanswered a question they pose at the end of their article: “Will white suburbanites join the new American racial mosaic? Or instead, will they leave areas of rapid racial and ethnic change, including the suburbs that no longer provide a ‘safe haven’ from racial minorities and immigrants?”From a different vantage point, an analysis of racial “tipping points” — the percentage of minorities in a neighborhood that precipitates rapid declines in the white population — suggests that the threat of white flight in the suburbs may be lessening.In “Beyond Racial Attitudes: The Role of Outside Options in the Dynamics of White Flight,” Peter Q. Blair, a professor of education at Harvard, develops a method for calculating tipping points that shows a steady and significant lessening of opposition to racial integration from 1970 to 2010. “The census tract tipping points,” Blair notes, “have a mean of 15 percent in 1970, 22 percent in 1980, 28 percent in 1990, 36 percent in 2000 and 41 percent in 2010.” He found that the median-tract tipping point also rose, but at a slower pace, from 13 percent in 1970 to 34 percent in 2010.Regionally, the mean tipping point shifted at the slowest pace in the Northeast (9 percent in 1970, 28 percent in 2010) and the Midwest (10 to 24 percent), and fastest in the West (12 to 43) and the South (17 to 41).Blair writes that his data are “consistent with white households becoming more tolerant of living with minorities.”At the same time, race continues to influence housing prices.In a December 2022 paper, “Quantifying Taste-Based Discrimination with Transaction-level Housing Data,” Tin Cheuk Leung, Xiaojin Sun and Kwok Ping Tsang, economists at Wake Forest University, the University of Texas at El Paso and Virginia Tech, explore “the impact of a marginal change of racial composition in a neighborhood by looking at price impacts for transactions that happen immediately after.” They find that “an additional nonwhite household within a radius of 0.2 miles reduces the price appreciation of a house by 0.08 percentage points.”Racial-prejudice effects, they calculate, “translate into a decrease in home value, for a typical house of $380,000 in Virginia, of $3,100 for every ten extra nonwhite neighbors.”These effects are strongest in rich neighborhoods: “The negative effects of a nonwhite neighbor in a rich neighborhood is 0.06 percentage points higher than in a poor neighborhood.”When selling homes, the race and ethnicity of the seller also influences the ultimate price, Leung and his colleagues write: “Compared to white sellers, nonwhite sellers receive significantly less, by more than three percentage points.”Tsang wrote by email, however, that he and his co-authorsdid find some evidence of declining racial prejudice over time. For example, according to our estimates, the price appreciation of a house between its repeated sales would be lower by about 1.1 percentage points for every ten nonwhite neighbors moving into its immediate neighborhood (within 0.2 miles) prior to 2017. After 2017, this number is only 0.65 percentage points.There is a more immediate issue closely tied to the question of whether white racial and ethnic hostility is declining or rising: the 2024 election.Running as an incumbent president, Donald Trump repeatedly sought to exacerbate racial conflict during the 2020 campaign, promising “People living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” as he put it in a June 20, 2020, Twitter post, that they would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” adding, for good measure, that “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down.”Trump’s campaign — based on driving increased racial hostility — did not succeed in 2020, but if he wins the Republican nomination for a third time, no one can predict the mood of the electorate on Nov. 5, 2024. That is especially true in the six to 10 battleground states that will determine the outcome — in a handful of which Trump won and lost by very small margins in both 2016 and 2020.In what may be a sign of lessening racial tension, however, a November 2022 analysis of census data published in The Washington Post — “How Mixed-race Neighborhoods Quietly Became the Norm in the U.S.,” by Ted Mellnik and Andrew Van Dam — reached a striking conclusion:Deep in the bowels of the nation’s 2020 census lurks a quiet milestone: For the first time in modern American history, most White people live in mixed-race neighborhoods. This marks a tectonic shift from just a generation ago.Back in 1990, 78 percent of white people lived in predominantly white neighborhoods, where at least four of every five people were also white. In the 2020 census, that’s plunged to 44 percent.In quite a few states, the change from 1990 to 2020 in the share of the population living in mixed-race neighborhoods is remarkable: Washington went from 14 to 77 percent; Utah, from 5 to 50 percent; Oklahoma, from 31 to 93 percent; and New Jersey, from 26 to 61 percent.America is undergoing a racial and ethnic upheaval that will profoundly shape election outcomes. On first glance, the trends would appear to favor Democrats, but there is no guarantee.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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      Talk of Racism Proves Thorny for GOP Candidates of Color

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      As candidates like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley bolster their biographies with stories of discrimination, they have often denied the existence of systemic racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina opened his presidential candidacy with a story of the nation’s bitter, racist past. It is one that he tells often, of a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South.A rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, speaks of the loneliness and isolation of growing up in small-town South Carolina as the child of immigrants and part of the only Indian family around. Larry Elder, a conservative commentator and long-shot presidential candidate, talks to all-white audiences about his father, a Pullman porter in the segregated South, who carried tinned fish and crackers in his pockets “because he never knew whether he’d be able to get a meal.”Such biographical details are useful reminders of how far the G.O.P.’s candidates of color have come to reach the pinnacle of national politics, a run for the presidency. But in bolstering their own bootstrap biographies with stories of discrimination, they have put forth views about race that at times appear at odds with their view of the country — often denying the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.“I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” Mr. Scott says in a new campaign advertisement running in Iowa, though he has spoken of his grandfather’s forced illiteracy and his own experiences being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car.”The clashing views of the role that race plays in America are a major theme of the 2024 election, underpinning cultural battles over “wokeness.”Yet behind the debate over structural racism — a codified program of segregation and subjugation that suppressed minority achievement long ago and, many scholars say, has left people of color still struggling — is a secondary debate over the meaning of the stories politicians tell about themselves.Mr. Scott has spoken of being pulled over frequently by the police, including seven times in one year.Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesThat has sometimes made the discussion of race in this presidential primary awkward but also revealing, and has underscored a central difference between the two parties. Republican candidates of color don’t see their pasts in their present, even if the two front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, are elevating racial grievance to the center of conservative politics, through overt or covert appeals to white anger.“I know Nikki and Tim — both are brilliant — but for them not to be able to make the logical jump is troubling: Systemic racism is the issue,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic political commentator who served with Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley in the South Carolina legislature. “For them to recount their own experiences but close their eyes to the bigger picture, it’s troubling.”Mr. Elder, at an April gathering of evangelical Christians in West Des Moines, Iowa, spoke of his father, the Pullman porter who later became a cook in a segregated Marine Corps unit. When he returned from World War II, his father found he could not get a job in the whites-only restaurants of Chattanooga, Tenn., and struggled to find work in Los Angeles because he had no references from Tennessee.Mr. Elder’s father even asked to cook in Los Angeles restaurants for free, just to get references, and again was refused. He ended up with two jobs scrubbing toilets.“There was something called slavery, the K.K.K., Jim Crow — that was codified,” Mr. Elder said in an interview. “Of course there was systemic racism.”But now?No, he replied, recalling the election and re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama.In the early years of the Obama presidency, talk of a post-racial society — where the color of one’s skin has no bearing on stature or success — was common. But later, an upsurge of white supremacist violence, including the massacre of Black parishioners at a Charleston church in 2015 during Mr. Obama’s second term, along with the murder of George Floyd in 2020, shattered that idealized post-racial notion for many people of color from all political persuasions.Larry Elder, a conservative commentator and long-shot presidential candidate, often talks to all-white audiences about his father, a Pullman porter in the segregated South. Rachel Mummey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“That’s part of the problem with Scott and Haley declaring there’s no racism,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of a book on Mr. Obama’s symbolism as a Black president. “You could have argued in 2006 and 2007 that racism was waning. That’s a lot less credible today.”Candidates of color are not the only ones who rely on bootstrap biographies to bolster their appeal. Stories of struggle, impoverished childhoods, working-class roots or ethnic identity are staples for candidates in both parties, from Abraham Lincoln to Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. DeSantis and his “family of steelworkers.” But tales of racism and discrimination lend political biographies an added element of authenticity. Mr. Scott’s family story — “from cotton to Congress” — was the subject of his first campaign ad, unveiled last week.For Republican candidates of color, whose audiences are often almost entirely white, there is another factor, according to strategists: Placing racism safely in the past and trumpeting the racial progress of their own lifetimes relieves today’s G.O.P. voters from having to confront any racial animosity in their party. That can be a soothing message to Republicans who feel defensive about the party’s racial makeup and policies.“They’re saying this to make an overwhelmingly white Republican audience feel better about themselves,” said Stuart Stevens, a former Republican consultant who guided the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. “It’s a variation, oddly enough, of victim politics. People accuse you of being racist? ‘That’s unfair. Vote for me, therefore you’ll prove you’re not racist.’”Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party accommodated white nationalists in its ranks and embraced once-taboo ideas like replacement theory.A Haley campaign spokeswoman, Chaney Denton, said: “In Nikki Haley’s experience, America is not a racist country, and she’s proud to say it. That’s fact, not strategy.” She added that “the only people who seem bothered by that” are “liberal race baiters.”Ms. Haley in New Hampshire in April. “I was the first minority female governor in the country,” Ms. Haley told an Iowa crowd this year. “I am telling you America is not a racist country. It’s a blessed country.”Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAt an event on Wednesday morning sponsored by the news site Axios, Mr. Scott was pressed to describe racism that he had recently experienced, to which he had a ready response: being pulled over by police officers more than 20 times for “driving while Black,” which he said “weighs heavy on the shoulders.”“You find yourself in a position where you’ve done nothing wrong, but you are assumed guilty before proven innocent,” Mr. Scott said on Wednesday. But he added, “Racism is embedded in the hearts of individuals.”Many white Republicans also reject the idea that America is systemically racist.At a Haley event in February in Iowa, Charles Strange, a retired construction worker from North Liberty, Iowa, was more apt to see systemic issues impeding white people such as himself. “Structural barriers, let’s see,” Mr. Strange said. “Here’s a structural barrier: You got quotas for Blacks for education — a structural barrier for a white person.”The downplaying of systemic racism by candidates of color fits with the party’s push to stop the influence of “critical race theory” in how American history is taught and to defund programs that advance diversity in public colleges.Mr. DeSantis, who joined the presidential race last week, recently signed a law eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education and paring back what he called “woke” academic programs. The Florida Department of Education blocked high schools in January from teaching an advanced placement course on African American studies, part of what the governor called an effort to combat “indoctrination” by the left. Elsewhere, Republican-led state and local governments are rewriting textbooks and ridding public libraries of stark racial lessons from the nation’s past.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has often made appeals to the grievances of white voters. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“Of all the threats, there is this national loathing that has taken over our country, where people are saying America is bad or it’s rotten or it’s racist,” Ms. Haley told an Iowa crowd earlier this year. “I was the first minority female governor in the country. I am telling you America is not a racist country. It’s a blessed country.”Many Republican voters and local officials agree.“I’m not more racist than any Democrat, but they like to label and push that against us,” Gloria Mazza, the Republican chairwoman in Polk County, Iowa, said at a Scott event in West Des Moines. But Black audiences, even Republican ones, are far less receptive. Such difficulties for the party were on display recently for another Republican candidate of color, the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy.Mr. Ramaswamy held a town-hall meeting on May 19 on the South Side of Chicago, ostensibly to discuss the migrant crisis that has divided the city. He often talks of his feelings of isolation as the son of Indian immigrants growing up in suburban Cincinnati, but says that the experience made him stronger, not a victim. He has also made eliminating affirmative action a central plank of a candidacy that centers on a critique of identity politics.Vivek Ramaswamy often talks of his feelings of isolation as the son of Indian immigrants growing up in suburban Cincinnati, but says that the experience made him stronger, not a victim. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesBut Black voters made clear they believed strongly that systemic issues, past and present, were holding them back. The discussion kept shifting from immigration to reparations for Black Americans, mass incarceration, disinvestment in Black neighborhoods and easily accessible, high-powered weaponry promoted by the firearms industry.“There’s all the money in the world to incarcerate us, and nothing to integrate us back into society,” Tyrone F. Muhammad, founder of the group Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, said while looking straight at Mr. Ramaswamy, a fabulously wealthy investor. Mr. Muhammad added, “There are too many billionaires and millionaires in this country for it to look the way it looks.”Then Cornel Darden Jr. of the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry stood to confront Mr. Ramaswamy on affirmative action. “Those laws have been in place for 70 years,” Dr. Darden said, “and we’re going to defend them.”After months of telling largely white audiences America is not a racist society, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged bigotry and said race-based preferences were exacerbating it.“I do think anti-Black racism is on the rise in America today,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “I don’t want to throw kerosene on that.”Maya King More

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      Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?

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      There is a lot about the American electorate that we are only now beginning to see. These developments have profound implications for the future of both the Republican and the Democratic coalitions.Two key Democratic constituencies — the young and the religiously unobservant — have substantially increased as a share of the electorate.This shift is striking.In 2012, for example, white evangelicals — a hard-core Republican constituency — made up the same proportion of the electorate as the religiously unaffiliated: agnostics, atheists and the nonreligious. Both groups stood at roughly 19 percent of the population.By 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (better known as P.R.R.I.), the percentage of white evangelicals had fallen to 13.6 percent, while those with little or no interest in religion and more progressive inclinations had surged to 26.8 percent of the population.Defying the adage among practitioners and scholars of politics that voters become more conservative as they age — millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (those born in 1997 and afterward) have in fact become decidedly more Democratic over time, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study.The graphic below, which is derived from the study, shows a significant increase in voting for House Democratic candidates among Millennials and Gen Z. More