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      The ‘Sleeping Giant’ That May Decide the Midterms

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      The choices made by Latino voters on Nov. 8 will be crucial to the outcome in a disproportionate share of Senate battleground states, like Arizona (31.5 percent of the population), Nevada (28.9), Florida (25.8), Colorado (21.7), Georgia (9.6) and North Carolina (9.5).According to most analysts, there is no question that a majority of Hispanic voters will continue to support Democratic candidates. The question going into the coming election is how large that margin will be.In terms of the battle for control of the House, three Hispanic-majority congressional districts in South Texas — the 15th, 28th and 34th — have become proving grounds for Republican candidates challenging decades of Democratic dominance. In a special election in the 34th district in June, the Republican candidate, Mayra Flores, prevailed.Two weeks ago, The Texas Tribune reported that:Since Labor Day, outside G.O.P. groups have blasted the Democratic nominees on multiple fronts, criticizing them all as weak on border issues and then zeroing in on candidate-specific vulnerabilities. Democratic groups are countering in two of the races, though for now, it is Republicans who appear to be in a more offensive posture.Last week, Axios reported that in the 15th Congressional district, which is 81.9 percent Hispanic, national Democratic groups had begun to abandon its nominee as a lost cause:Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, a progressive running in a majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley district against Republican Monica de la Cruz, isn’t getting any Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee support in her Trump +3 district. House Majority PAC is planning to cancel the scheduled ad reservations for her at the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the group’s plans.Across a wide range of studies and exit poll data analyses, there is general agreement that President Donald Trump significantly improved his 2016 margin among Hispanic voters in 2020, although there is less agreement on how large his gain was, on the demographics of his new supporters, or on whether the movement was related to Trump himself, Trump-era Covid payments or to a secular trend.In their July 2022 paper “Reversion to the Mean, or their Version of the Dream? An Analysis of Latino Voting in 2020,” Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil R. Velez and Emily A. West, political scientists at Emory, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh, write that there isan increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos. Moreover, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among newly-engaged U.S.-born Latino children of immigrants and Catholic Latinos. The results point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.That is, the more Hispanic voters subordinate traditional party and ethnic solidarity in favor of voting based on conservative or moderate policy preferences, the more likely that are to defect to the Republican Party.The authors caution, however, that nothing is fixed in stone:On the one hand, there is evidence that working-class Latino voters became more supportive of Trump in 2020, mirroring increases in educational polarization among the mass public. If similar processes are at play for Latinos — and if such polarization is not Trump-specific — then this could mean a durable change in partisan loyalties.On the other hand, they continue,Historical voting patterns among Latinos reveal natural ebbs and flows. Using exit poll data from 1984-2020, political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that the pro-Democratic margin among Latinos ranges from +9 in 2004 to +51 in 1996, with an average margin of +35 points. Instead of reflecting a durable shift, 2020 could be a “reversion to the mean,” with 2016 serving as a recent high-water mark for the Democrats.In an email responding to my inquiry about future trends, Fraga wrote:My sense is that most of the Latinos who shifted to the Republican Party in 2020 have not returned to the Democratic Party. Many of these new Republican converts were ideologically conservative pre-2020, so Republicans didn’t have to shift their policy message very much to win them over.“Portrait of a Persuadable Latino” — an April 2021 study by the nonprofit Equis Research of Hispanic defections from the Democratic Party — found similar overall trends to those reported in the Fraga-Velez-West paper, but revealed slightly different demographic patterns.The Equis survey found that the largest percentage tilt toward Trump was among women, at plus 8 percent, compared with men, at 3 percent; among non-college Latinos, plus 6, compared with just 1 percent among the college educated; among Protestants, plus seven compared with plus 5 among Catholics and plus 15 percent among conservative Hispanics — compared with no tilt among liberals and a plus 4 percent tilt among moderates.Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Labs, a nonprofit committed “to massively increase civic participation among Latinos in this country,” emailed a response to my query about Hispanic voter trends:While Latinos shifted toward Republicans between 2016 and 2020, an 8-point swing toward Trump, we do not see evidence of a further decrease in Democratic support since Biden’s win. In most states, things do not look worse for Dems with Latinos than they did in the last election, nor do they look better.But, Odio pointedly cautioned,The political environment has the potential to lead to further erosion of Democratic support among Latinos. A meaningful share of Latino voters remain on the fence, having not firmly chosen a side in the election. These late breakers could move toward either party, or toward the couch, before the midterms are over.Odio sent me a September 2022 Equis report, “Latino Voters in Limbo — A Midterm Update,” which found thatYoung Latinos (18-34), Latino men, and self-identified conservatives are overrepresented among the 2020 Biden voters who today disapprove of the president’s job performance. Among the most likely to be undecided today are ideological holdouts: conservative and moderate Latinos who have held back from Republicans, despite seeming to share some characteristics with their G.O.P.-supporting white counterparts. Notably Republicans have not increased support among these Latinos in the last year in almost any state — likely because a large majority of conservative or moderate Latinos who don’t yet vote Republican believe Democrats “care more about people like them.”Today, the report continues, “what keeps many Latinos on the fence is again concerns about the economy and fears that Democrats don’t consistently prioritize the economy, handle it as decisively as business-obsessed Republicans, or value hard work.”A separate Equis study, “2020 Post-Mortem: The American Dream Voter,” found that a negative attitude toward socialism was a factor among Hispanics nationwide, especially among those who stress the importance of working hard to get ahead:There isn’t one overriding concern about “socialism”— but a package of complaints usually rises to the top around government control over people’s lives, raising taxes, and money going to ‘undeserving’ recipients. If a through line exists, it is a worry over people becoming “lazy and dependent on government’ by those who highly value hard work.”The American Dream Voter study found that the declining salience of immigration in 2020 compared with either 2016 or 2018, combined with the debate in 2020 over Covid lockdowns versus reopening the economy, diminished ethnic solidarity in 2020, allowing conservative Hispanics to shift their allegiance to the Republican Party:The economy unlocked a door: the issue landscape shifted to more favorable ground for Trump, opening a way for some Latinos who found it unacceptable to vote for him in 2016. The socialism attack broke through: it created a space for defection,” according to the report’s authors. “Democrats retain some natural credibility with Latino voters but have lost ground on workers, work and the American Dream; they’re also open to attack for taking Hispanics for granted; Republicans have some openings but are still held back by their image as the uncaring party of big corporations.In 2016, the study continued,some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican — based on their demographics, partisanship and ideology — were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hard-line immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity. By the middle of 2020, neither views on immigration nor the role of Hispanic identity were showing a major effect on vote choice — they were no longer cleanly differentiating Trump voters from Democratic voters.In 2018, according to the study, “Trump lost even the conservatives on family separation. But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the (2020) election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”A 2021 Pew Research report found that Latinos view anti-Hispanic discrimination differently from anti-Black discrimination. Hispanic voters were asked whether “there was ‘too much,’ ‘about the right amount’ or ‘too little’ attention paid to race and racial issues” when it comes to Hispanics and then asked the same question about Black Americans.Just over half, 51 percent, of Latino respondents said, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination against Hispanics, 28 percent said, “about the right amount” and 19 percent said, “too much.” Conversely, 30 percent of Latino respondents said that in the case of Black Americans, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination, 23 percent said, “about the right amount” and 45 percent said, “too much.”The American Dream Voter survey Equis performed found that when Hispanics were asked “which concerns you more, Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies or Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies,” 42 percent of Latinos said socialism/leftist policies and 38 percent said fascist/anti-democratic politics.Equis did find substantial Democratic advantages when Hispanics were asked which party is “better for Hispanics” (53-31), which “is the party of fairness and equality” (51-31) and which party “cares about people like you” (49-32). But the Democratic advantage shrank to statistical insignificance on key bread-and- butter issues: which party “values hard work” 42-40 and “which is the party of the American dream” 41-39, and a dead 42-42 heat on “which party is better for the American worker?”Last month, Pew Research released a survey that showed continuing Democratic strength among Hispanics, “Most Latinos Say Democrats Care About Them and Work Hard for Their Vote, Far Fewer Say So of G.O.P.”Pew found that over the past four years, Democrats experienced a modest gain in partisan identification among Hispanics over Republicans, going from 62-34 (+28) in 2018 to 63-32 (+31) in 2022.From March 2022 to August 2022, the share of Latinos identifying abortion as a “very important issue” shot up from 42 to 57 percent in response to the Supreme Court’s decision’s decision in Dobbs in June. Hispanics favor abortion rights by a 57-40 margin, slightly smaller than the split among all voters, 62-36, according to Pew.At the same time, the percentage of Latino respondents listing violent crime among the most important issues rose from 61 to 70 percent; support for gun control rose from 59 to 66 percent; and concern over voter suppression rose from 51 to 59 percent.Registered Latino voters split 53-26 in favor of voting for a generic Democratic congressional candidate over a generic Republican, according to Pew, but there were striking religious differences: Catholics, who make up 47 percent of the Hispanic electorate, favored a generic Democratic House candidate 59-26; evangelical Protestants, 24 percent of Hispanics, backed Republicans 50-32; Latinos with little or no religious affiliation, 23 percent, backed Democrats 60-17.Matt A. Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at U.C.L.A, pointed to data in the Oct. 2 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials weekly Latino voter poll:Indeed if you look at issues like access to abortion, student debt, immigrant rights and gun violence, there are no signs at all that Latinos are becoming more conservative. When asked about government policy, 70 to 80 percent of Latino voters give support to the Democratic Party policy agenda. Indeed for the fourth week in a row, the NALEO tracking poll shows that abortion rights are the number two most important issue to Latino voters in 2022 and issues such as mass shootings and lowering the costs of health care are top 5 issues as well.Trump’s 2020 gains reflected “a clear pattern that concern over the Covid economic slowdown helped Trump make temporary gains with Latino voters,” Barreto argued. “Because so many were negatively impacted by the slumping economy in 2020, Trump was able to convince at least some Latinos that he would reopen the economy faster.”Despite those improvements, Barreto contended, “the reality is that Trump’s gains in 2020 were not part of any pattern of realignment or ideological shift among Latinos. As the national economy continues to recover and improve, Biden favorability continues to recover among Latinos.”In September 2020. Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at the University of California- Berkeley, wrote an essay for The Times with Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a liberal advocacy group. They wrote that when they asked white, Black and Hispanic votershow “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. The message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs “and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.In other words, Haney López and Gavito wrote, “Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.” Progressives, they continued,commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.I asked Haney López about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 election. He emailed me his reply:As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status. Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.Some Latinos, Haney López continued,are susceptible to Republican propaganda promoting social conflict and distrust. The greatest failure of the Democratic Party with respect to Latinos, and indeed the polity generally, is its failure to pursue policies and to stress stories that build social solidarity, especially across lines of race, class, and other wedge identities, including gender and sexual identity.Asked the same set of questions, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a former dean of the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, had a somewhat different take.By email, Suárez-Orozco wrote:I am unpersuaded by the claim that Hispanics are becoming more conservative. To be more precise, over time, they are becoming more American. The holy trinity of integration: language, marriage patterns, and connectivity to the labor market tell a powerful story. Over time, Hispanics mimic mainstream norms. They are learning English much faster than Italians did a century and a half ago, they are marrying outside their ethnicity at very significant rates, and their connectivity to the labor market is very muscular.To Suárez-Orozco, Latinos in the United States are primed to play an ever more significant role — in politics and everywhere else: “The dominant metaphor on Hispanics qua elections over the last half-century has been ‘the sleeping giant.’ When the sleeping giants wakes up: Alas, s/he is us.”The question is whether this sleeping giant will move to the right or to the left. The evidence points both ways — but this is not a contest the Democrats can afford lose.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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      There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

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      The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and –0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”There are, Graham argues,long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021, that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”In addition, the authors write:Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.For the past two decades, white working-class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point whereEducation divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.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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      Ron DeSantis’s Race Problem

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      In July, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appointed Jeffery Moore, a former tax law specialist with the Florida Department of Revenue, to be a county commissioner in Gadsden, the blackest county in the state.On Friday, Moore resigned after a picture emerged that appeared to show him dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia.Neither Moore nor DeSantis have confirmed that Moore is in fact the man in the picture. When Politico reached out to Desantis’s office for comment, his communication director responded, “We are in the middle of hurricane prep, I’m not aware of the photo you sent but Jeff did submit his resignation last week.” This is not the first, shall I say, “awkward” racial issue DeSantis had encountered. But throughout, he has had much the same response: Instead of addressing the issue directly, he — or his office — claims to be oblivious. That’s the DeSantis M.O.In a 2018 gubernatorial debate, the moderator asked DeSantis why he had spoken at several conferences hosted by David Horowitz, a conservative writer who the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Black movements.” Horowitz once said that President Barack Obama was an “evil man” who “will send emissaries to Ferguson for a street thug who got himself killed attempting to disarm a police officer, resisting arrest.”There, too, DeSantis claimed obliviousness, responding, “How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?”It was in that debate that his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum said, “Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”The problem, of course, is that DeSantis’s unfortunate associations keep stacking up.In 2018, he appointed Michael Ertel, then a county elections supervisor, to be his secretary of state. The following year, Ertel resigned after a picture emerged of him in blackface wearing a T-shirt that read “Katrina Victim.” He appeared to be mocking Black women in particular, because he wore fake breasts, a scarf wrapped around his head and large gold earrings.Hurricane Katrina killed more than a thousand people, a slight majority of whom were Black.DeSantis responded to the controversy by saying: “It’s unfortunate. I think he’s done a lot of good work.” He continued, “I don’t want to get mired into kind of side controversies, and so I felt it was best to just accept the resignation and move on.” Not a word of condemnation for the act or sympathy for the victims of the storm. Also, not a word of his own personal regret for appointing him.Now, maybe the pool of possible Republican appointees in Florida is hopelessly polluted with white men who like to dress in racist costumes. That’s damning, if true. Maybe DeSantis is simply doomed by appalling options. That could well be the harvest of the Republican Party sowing hatred. Or maybe DeSantis is just too dense to do his homework. That may well be true, although I have no sympathy for it.This is a man who championed and signed Florida’s ridiculous “Stop WOKE Act,” restricting how race can be discussed in the state’s schools and workplaces. You can’t live in the dark on race and then try to drag your whole state into the darkness with you.I have always thought of DeSantis as reading the rules of villainy from a coloring book and acting them out. Nothing about him says clever and tactical. He seems to me the kind of man who must conjure confidence, who is fragile and feisty because of it, a beta male trying desperately to convince the world that he’s an alpha.But there is a way in which race policy reaches far beyond being merely racist-adjacent. DeSantis, for instance, has actually tried to strip Black Floridians of their power and voice.In 2010, Florida voters, by a strong majority, approved a constitutional amendment rejecting gerrymandering. The amendment made clear that “districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.”Yet Florida’s Republican-led Legislature produced a gerrymandered map anyway. In 2015, the state Supreme Court struck down much of the Legislature’s proposed map, and demanded that eight House districts be redrawn. Among them was the Fifth District, which at the time snaked up the state from Orlando to Jacksonville. The redrawn map allowed Black voters to elect four Black representatives.In the decade between 2010 and 2020, there was a 14.6 percent increase in the population of the state, nearly twice the rate of growth of the country — and enough to earn Florida a 28th congressional district.But when the Legislature drew its map this cycle, it didn’t increase the number of minority districts, even though minorities had driven 90 percent of the population growth in the state — growth that had earned Florida its new district. (Most of that growth was among Hispanics.)As the staff director of the Florida Senate’s Committee on Reapportionment told The Tampa Bay Times, state legislators initially set out to keep the number of Black- and Hispanic-majority districts the same as they had been for the past few years.That wouldn’t have been fair, but at least the number of minority seats wouldn’t be cut. That wasn’t enough for DeSantis. He submitted his own redistricting map that cut the number of Black-controlled districts in half, taking them from four to two. The legislature went along and approved DeSantis’s map.DeSantis may pretend to be oblivious to the racial acts and statements of the people he associates with and appoints, but eliminating Black power and representation was a conscious act.Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying this: He has targeted Black people, Black power and Black history.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Lessons Learned, Israel’s Unlikely Islamist Kingmaker Looks Ahead

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      Mansour Abbas, the first Arab politician to lead his party into an Israeli governing coalition, says the yearlong experiment was just a beginning.KAFR QASSEM, Israel — As Israel heads this fall into yet another election campaign, with the likelihood of yet another stalemate looming, one potential kingmaker is sitting on the sidelines eager to take part in the country’s next government.The question is whether he will get the chance.Mansour Abbas, the leader of a small Islamist party called Raam that made history last year by becoming the first independent Arab party to enter an Israeli governing coalition, says he would do so again.“The process has just begun,” he said in a recent interview, discussing his political ambitions and his experience helping the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, now the caretaker leader, form a coalition with a razor-thin majority in 2021.“We proved we can manage a country together,” Mr. Abbas said.But many Jewish and Arab politicians now balk at the idea of Mr. Abbas acting as a linchpin of any future government, as debate rages in Israel over an Arab party joining another Israeli coalition.Hailed by many as a model of national unity and healing, the Bennett government imploded after a year, and Mr. Abbas became a lightning rod for criticism from all sides.Mr. Abbas last year with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, then the head of the Yamina party, at the Knesset.Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe has drawn fire from Palestinians for accepting Israel as a de facto Jewish state and for rejecting accusations that it practices apartheid. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties that sits in opposition in the Israeli Parliament, denounced Raam’s politicians as “pet Arabs.”Right-wing Jews have attacked Mr. Abbas for alleged affiliations with Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. But he has denied any connections to Hamas, and Yihye Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, has called him a traitor.“There is still fear and suspicion on both sides,” Mr. Abbas said in the interview, speaking in a borrowed office at the headquarters of an Islamic charitable organization, the 48 Association, in Kafr Qassem, an Arab town in central Israel.As a divided Israel prepares for its fifth election in under four years on Nov. 1, many polls have been predicting another impasse, with neither of the main contenders for the premiership — the conservative front-runner Benjamin Netanyahu or Mr. Lapid, his centrist rival — seen as being easily able to form a majority coalition.Most pre-election polls predict that Raam will win the same four seats in November as it did last year, the minimum threshold for entering Parliament.That could be enough for the party to play kingmaker again — if a future government were also willing to do business with Mr. Abbas, 48, who was a little-known Galilee dentist and imam before he entered national politics and shot to prominence with Raam in the last election.The departing coalition is unlikely to regroup in the same format after the next election and in any case is far from gaining a majority, according to most polls, even including Raam’s four seats.Mr. Netanyahu was the first to start negotiating with Mr. Abbas, ahead of the 2021 elections, but after that effort fell through, he and his Likud party demonized Mr. Abbas and Raam.Protesting Mr. Abbas in April in Jerusalem.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen a Likud lawmaker recently suggested that Raam could join a Netanyahu-led coalition if Likud managed to muster 61 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, making it less dependent on the Arab party, Mr. Netanyahu denied such a plan was afoot. Indeed, he denounced Raam as an “antisemitic, anti-Zionist party that supports terrorism and represents the Muslim Brothers who aspire to destroy Israel.”Mr. Abbas said that Mr. Netanyahu’s comments were “disappointing” and derived from his “narrow political interests,” but he has not ruled out sitting in a Netanyahu-led coalition in the future. His primary purpose, Mr. Abbas said, would be to create “new politics” and a “brave partnership” in national decision-making and to help improve the lot of Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up a fifth of the population, from the inside.“When you are dividing up the resources, deciding for our public, I want to sit in,” he said.For decades, neither the predominantly Arab parties nor the Jewish parties were eager to join forces in Israeli governments. The Jewish parties were wary of relying on Arab partners for decisions pertaining to national security, and the Arab parties did not want to be held responsible for Israeli wars or for its occupation of the territories conquered by Israel in 1967.Mr. Abbas took a middle way, joining the coalition after the 2021 election but not becoming a minister. Made up of eight ideologically diverse parties from the left and right, religious and secular, Jewish and Arab, the coalition was mainly bound by a desire to oust Mr. Netanyahu after 12 consecutive years in office and as he battles corruption charges in court.Mr. Abbas cautions against rushing to characterize the experiment as a failure or a success.“You can’t expect to solve all the problems in a few months,” he said. “A year ago, we were on the brink of civil war,” he added, referring to the spasm of violence that shook Israel in May 2021, an explosion of Arab resentment over decades of discrimination and racial tensions.The coalition deal with Raam included a pledge of 30 billion shekels, about $9 billion, to fund a five-year plan to improve conditions in Arab society and to contend with the gun violence plaguing the community.Benjamin Netanyahu has denounced Raam as an “antisemitic, anti-Zionist party that supports terrorism and represents the Muslim Brothers who aspire to destroy Israel.”Amir Levy/Getty ImagesMr. Abbas said that about 70 percent of the money had been allocated for specific projects, but that government approval for the plans had been late in coming.His said his priority in a future government would be to see those plans through and to focus on civic issues affecting Israel’s Arab minority, like housing and education, and encouraging employment of Arab citizens in the high-tech industry.Mr. Abbas also said that he had learned valuable lessons during his first time in government.He cited an episode in which he suspended Raam’s participation in the coalition after Israeli-Palestinian tensions over a Jerusalem holy site and a deadly wave of Arab terrorist attacks. With the fate of the government in the balance, the country was forced to wait on a decision of the Shura Council, Raam’s Islamic-style advisory body, before the party could rejoin the coalition.The episode illustrated how pivotal Mr. Abbas and Raam had become, but it also exposed the precarious nature of their positions. Mr. Netanyahu exploited the fears of many Jewish Israelis worried about the Arab influence in the government, saying it had been “held hostage by the Shura Council.”“I admit it was an own goal,” Mr. Abbas said. “We didn’t have any experience of how to be in a coalition.”In the future, he said, such political decisions should be left up to the elected representatives to avoid any impression “that the Islamic Movement is running the country.”In Kafr Qassem, where 62.7 percent of the vote went to Raam in the last election, residents appeared to accept the limitations of what could be achieved in a year and to be in favor of having an Arab party sitting in government.Mr. Abbas at a meeting for Arab sector mayors and heads of councils last year in Umm Al-Fahm. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times“If you go backward, you’ll have no future,” said Muhammad Zbeida, 40, a grocery store owner. “If we want to live together, you need to have your people everywhere.”“The young generation — Jews and Arabs — want a better life,” he said. “Everything takes time. You don’t build something new overnight.”Nazir Magally, a veteran Arab Israeli journalist and author of a new book, “The Responsibility of the Minority,” praised the diverse coalition as “a good start.” But he criticized Mr. Abbas for failing to invest political capital in advocating for Palestinians in the occupied territories while sitting in a government that had ruled out peace negotiations from the outset.He also criticized the bickering among the Arab parties in Israel, saying it was likely to drive Arab voters away.Mr. Abbas, a married father of three who still preaches at a mosque in his hometown on Fridays, said he viewed his political path in historical terms.“We are not the only ones having difficulty,” he said of the Arab minority in Israel.He cited Israel’s Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who faced discrimination in the early years after Israel’s creation in 1948 and gained political influence only in the 1970s, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who became influential players in Israeli politics.“Now it’s our turn,” he said. 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      How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground

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      A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase “the American dream,” is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.”To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack.President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.”For decades, politicians have used the phrase “the American dream” to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. It has been a promise so powerful that it drew immigrants from around the world, who went on to fulfill it generation after generation. Political figures in both parties employed the phrase to promote both their own policies and their own biographies.Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies. Many of these Republicans are people of color — including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.To politicians of old, “the American dream” was a supremely optimistic rhetorical device, albeit one that often obscured the economic and racial barriers that made achieving it impossible for many. To the Republican candidates embracing it today, the phrase has taken on an ominous and more pessimistic tone, echoing the party’s leader, former President Donald J. Trump, who said in 2015 that “the American dream is dead.” In the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.A crowd at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., waited for former President Donald J. Trump to speak.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesPoliticians have long warned that the American dream was slipping away, a note struck from time to time by former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. What has changed is that some Republicans now cast the situation more starkly, using the dream-is-in-danger rhetoric as a widespread line of attack, arguing that Democrats have turned patriotism itself into something contentious.“Both parties used to celebrate the fact that America is an exceptional country — now you only have one that celebrates that fact,” said Jason Miyares, a Republican and the child of Cuban immigrants. The American dream was a part of his successful campaign to become Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.In Texas, Representative Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who became the state’s first Latina Republican in Congress, ran an ad that declared, “Democrats are destroying the American dream.” Antonio Swad, an Italian-Lebanese immigrant running for a House seat in the Dallas suburbs, said in an ad that he washed dishes at the age of 15 before opening two restaurants, telling voters the American dream does not “come from a government handout.”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid. But her mission to thwart Donald J. Trump presents challenges.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.Television ads for more than a dozen Republican candidates in statewide, House and Senate campaigns — more than half of whom are people of color — cite the phrase, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm. Several other House hopefuls, many of them Latinas, frequently cite the words in social media posts, digital ads, campaign literature and speeches.“In Congress, I will fight to defend the American dream,” said Yesli Vega, a former police officer who is the daughter of civil-war refugees from El Salvador and who is running for a House seat in Virginia, posted on Twitter.“The American dream” was a marquee theme in two winning Republican campaigns in Virginia last year: the races by Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaica-born Marine veteran who is now the first woman of color to serve as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Mr. Miyares, the attorney general.“On the campaign trail, I used to say, if your family came to this country seeking hope there is a good chance that your family is a lot like my family, and it would be the biggest honor of my life to be your attorney general,” said Mr. Miyares.Attorney General Jason Miyares of Virginia during the inaugural celebration in January.Steve Helber/Associated PressThe Republicans relying on the phrase show the extent to which the party is diversifying its ranks and recruiting candidates with powerful come-from-behind stories. But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”Republicans dispute that their references to “the American dream” promote exclusion and say they are using the phrase the same way politicians have used it for decades — to signal hope and opportunity. “I think the left is far more pessimistic than Republicans are about the American dream,” said Representative Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico Republican who is Cherokee and the third Native American woman ever elected to Congress.But this latest iteration of the dream has become a rhetorical catchall for Republicans’ policy positions.Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican state lawmaker in Colorado running in a heated House race, embraces the American dream as the theme of her personal story. Ms. Kirkmeyer grew up on a dairy farm, the sixth of seven children in a family that often struggled. She paid her way through college by raising and selling a herd of eight milk cows, yearlings and heifer calves.The American dream, Ms. Kirkmeyer said, was not only about economic opportunity but freedom, connecting the words with Republican opposition to Covid-related mask mandates. “I don’t see the mandates as part of the American dream,” she said. “People felt that was an infringement on their rights and personal dreams.”The earliest mention in print of the words “American dream” appears to have been in a 1930 ad for a $13.50 marked-down bed spring from an American mattress company.Historians and economists, however, credit the writer James Truslow Adams with popularizing the phrase in his best seller published a year later in 1931, “The Epic of America.” His Depression-era definition was a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” To Mr. Adams, it was part of a liberal vision in which government was seen as a force to fight big business. His symbol of the American dream at the time was the Library of Congress.For decades, politicians have used the phrase the American dream to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. Bettman, via Getty ImagesFor later generations, Mr. Adams’ phrase came to be defined by an image — a house with a white picket fence — as presidents, companies and popular culture pushed homeownership. But with the chances of owning a home diminishing after the 2008 economic crash, Democrats and Republicans once more sought to redefine it. Now, much of the phrase’s progressive history has been lost, as Republicans argue that big government is the enemy.“That has been the real shift,” said Sarah Churchwell, the author of a 2018 book, “Behold, America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream.’”The roots of this more conservative vision of the American dream can be traced to Ronald Reagan, who often invoked the phrase and also used it in his appeals to Latino voters, extolling family, religion and an opposition to government handouts. It was a strategy later followed by George W. Bush.“It married conservative values with economic opportunity: ‘We recognize you for your contribution to America and we will give you the opportunity to get ahead if you are willing to do the work,’” said Lionel Sosa, a retired media consultant in San Antonio who is a Republican and who created ads for Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush.Republicans still use the American dream in the way Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush did, underscoring a strong work ethic, Christian values and entrepreneurialism. But many Hispanic Republicans now add a harder edge — stressing that they came to the country legally, decrying “open borders” and calling for the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.“In all the time we worked on it, we didn’t say anything having to do with building a wall,” Mr. Sosa said of the past messaging aimed at Hispanic Republicans. “There was no message that you have to be here legally or that if you are not here legally, we don’t want you here.”The politicization of the phrase comes as studies show the American public has become more pessimistic about achieving the American dream. Historians say that in recent years Republicans have been using the phrase far more frequently than Democrats in ads and speeches. While more than a dozen Republican candidates across the country cite the phrase in their TV ads this midterm season, only four Democrats have done so, according to AdImpact.One of the Democratic candidates who has relied on the theme in his ads is Shri Thanedar, an Indian American state lawmaker in Michigan and the Democratic nominee for a House seat. “We have ceded that ground to Republicans and other corporate politicians,” Mr. Thanedar said, referring to areluctance by some Democrats to emphasize the phrase.To Gabe Vasquez, a Democratic congressional candidate in Albuquerque, N.M., the American dream is about ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesGabe Vasquez, a Democrat who is facing Ms. Herrell in New Mexico in the fall, has also embraced the phrase. He tells supporters that his late grandfather — Javier Bañuelos, who taught himself to fix broken televisions with an old manual and eventually opened his own repair shop — made it possible for him to run for Congress. The American dream is not about buying a house, but ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you,” he said.Yet even Democrats find themselves speaking of the dream as pessimistically as Republicans. Just as Republicans blame Democrats for destroying the American dream, Democrats believe the fault lies with Republicans. They say Republicans are making it harder to obtain by attacking the social safety net and blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage, and that they have co-opted the symbols of patriotism — including words like patriot — and turned them into partisan weapons.“That American dream,” Mr. Vasquez said, “is becoming a hallucination.” More

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      Red and Blue America Will Never Be the Same

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      Donald Trump’s dominance of the political stage for the past seven years galvanized what had been a slow-burning realignment, creating a profound upheaval in the electorate and in both the Democratic and Republican parties.The support Trump received in rural communities and the animosity he provoked among well-educated suburbanites accelerated the ongoing inversion — on measures of income, education and geographic region — of white Democratic and Republican voters. (White voters make up 67 percent of the electorate.)In 2018, according to ProximityOne, a website that analyzes the demographics of congressional districts, Democratic members of Congress represented 74 of the 100 most affluent districts, including 24 of the top 25. Conversely, Republican members of Congress represented 54 of the 100 districts with the lowest household income. The median household income in districts represented by Democrats was $66,829, which is $10,324 more than the median for districts represented by Republicans, at $56,505.The 2018 data stands in contrast to the income pattern a half-century ago. In 1973, Republicans held 63 of the 100 highest-income districts and Democrats held 73 of the 100 lowest-income districts.These trends prompted Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, to comment in an email that the Democratsare mostly the party of the master’s degree — modestly advantaged economically but not exactly elite. On the flip side, the Republicans are the party of the associate degree (a two-year college degree), less educated than the Democrats but not exactly the proletariat.Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., argued thatpolitics throughout the Western democracies is in recent years in the midst of the most dramatic reconfiguration of the political parties and their bases of support in seventy or so years. Since the New Deal in the United States and WWII in Western Europe, the base of the dominant parties of the left was less affluent, less highly educated voters; the dominant parties of the right drew their primary support from higher income, more highly educated voters.Now, Pildes continued, “we are witnessing the complete inversion of that pattern, and the question is whether this is a temporary or more enduring realignment of the political parties throughout the West.”In his email, Pildes noted that in the 1940sDemocratic candidates received twenty-two points less support from voters in the top ten percent of the income bracket than from those in the bottom ninety percent. By 2012, that gap had dropped to only an eight-point difference and in 2016, voters in the top ten percent had become eight points more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Similarly, in the 1940s, those with university degrees in the United States were twenty points less likely to vote for Democrats, while in 2000 there was no difference and by 2016, they were thirteen points more likely to vote for Democrats.The ramifications of these developments, which predate Trump’s entry into presidential politics in 2015, “radiate throughout the electoral process in the United States,” Pildes argued:Take the Electoral College: for most of the time from the 1950s until 2016, it was actually biased toward the Democrats. But in 2016, it suddenly became strongly biased toward the Republicans, and 2020 added even more to that bias.At the same time, there are counter-developments more favorable to the left.Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends, argued in an email that “the country’s political geography is now less pro-Republican.” While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he continued, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Trump, Stephanopoulos continued,modestly reduced the enormous Democratic edge in cities, thus undoing some of this packing of Democratic voters. Trump also did significantly better in rural areas, to the point that some of them are about as red (and so as packed with Republicans) as cities are blue. And Trump bled support in the suburbs, so that the country’s most populous and competitive areas now lean toward the Democrats instead of the Republicans.As a result, Stephanopoulos argued,the U.S. House will likely be close to unbiased in partisan terms in 2022. A group of scholars peg the likely bias at around 3 percent pro-Republican, while Nate Silver’s model, which incorporates additional variables like incumbency and polling, thinks the likely bias will be around 1 percent pro-Democratic.Republicans won 234 seats in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won, by 2 percent, a majority of votes cast in House elections, according to Stephanopoulos, “but Nate Silver now thinks that Republicans will win the national House vote by 5 percent in 2022, yet only pick up the same 234 seats they got in 2012.”Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice University, agrees with Stephanopolous and cites trends in Texas to show the pro-Democratic shift:Consider the Texas Republican Party’s redistricting plan in 2010 and its durability over the last decade. Beginning in 2010 Republicans held a 100 to 50 seat advantage in the Texas House of Representatives. By 2020, this margin had shrunk to 83-67. In each biennial election since 2010, Democrats picked up House seats, mostly in suburban and exurban areas of the state.The shift, Stein continued,was largely driven by the changing demography of the state. Another source of this shift can be laid at the feet of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The result, at least in Texas, is that some of the most competitive areas (districts) in the state are not the big cities, but exurban and suburban counties including Collin, Denton, Fort Bend and Williamson. Prior to 2016 voters in these counties were trending Republican; now they are leaning Democratic or tossups.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited surveys conducted by the Cooperative Election Study from 2010 to 2020 showing that “one of the most significant shifts we see in our data is increasing Democratic strength in suburbs, especially since the early 2010s.”Schaffner provided data from the study showing that the Democratic share of the two-party vote rose from 54.5 to 63.5 percent in urban areas over the decade and remained low — 35.2 to 36.1 percent — in rural America. The biggest shift, 12.5 points, was in suburban areas, which went from 41.8 percent Democratic in 2010 to 54.3 percent in 2020.Nolan McCarty suggested that these trends may prove beneficial to the Democratic Party:The natural tilt of our single-member district system has shifted away from the Republicans as the rural vote moves toward the Republicans and the suburbs move toward the Democrats. But it is not clear what the aggregate effects of those shifts will be. It should help the House Democrats in November but it is not clear how much.The effects of these shifts on the Senate and Electoral College, McCarty continued, will be slower in the short term but could eventually become significant: “Once such changes push states like Georgia, Texas and North Carolina sufficiently toward the Democrats, they would be the party with the structural advantage in the Electoral College and Senate.”Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email the possibility that very recent changes in suburban voting will hurt the future prospects of the Republican Party:The most noteworthy change to political geography in 2020 was the success of Biden in pivotal suburban areas. In the most recent round of redistricting, when examining proposed districting plans — whether drawn by computer simulations or humans — the number of Democratic-leaning districts in a state was often greater if one added up the votes of Biden and Trump in 2020 than if one used past presidential results, Senate results, gubernatorial results, or some other down-ballot elections.The geographic distribution of Biden votes, Rodden continued, “was more ‘efficient’ for the Democrats than that of other recent Democratic candidates.” But, he cautioned,what is unclear is whether this was a specific reaction to Donald Trump as a candidate in relatively educated suburbs, or a lasting trend in political geography that will outlive the Trump era. The latter is at least plausible, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision, but it is too early to tell. Even in 2020, a non-trivial number of these suburban Biden voters split their tickets and voted for Republican House candidates.I asked Rodden what it means for statewide elections in contested states if these trends continue. He replied:This really depends on the numbers in each state, but in sun-belt states that are gaining educated and/or minority in-migrants, like Georgia and Arizona, we already have evidence that this was a pretty good trade for statewide Democrats, but in other states where in-migration is limited, like those in the Upper Midwest, this trade might work out better for statewide Republicans.Along similar lines, William Frey, a demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings, emphasized in an email that “Biden won the suburbs in 2020, I believe largely due to his gains among minorities and college whites.” Even if Republicans and Trump made marginal gains among minority voters, the support of these voters for Democrats remained overwhelming.In a 2021 Brookings paper, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs,” Frey pointed to Georgia, whereDemographic shifts — including brisk growth in the state’s Democratic-leaning Black population, gains in Latino/Hispanic, and Asian Americans voters, and an increase in white college graduates, especially in the Atlanta metropolitan area — served to make the state competitive for Democrats this year.In a separate 2022 paper, “Today’s suburbs are symbolic of America’s rising diversity: A 2020 census portrait,” Frey focuses on the continuing stream of minorities moving into the suburbs. From 1990 to 2020, Frey found, the percentage of Asian Americans living in suburbs grew from 53.4 to 63.1 percent, of Hispanics from 49.5 to 61.4 percent and of African Americans, from 36.6 to 54.3 percent, the largest increase.Has geographic division, pitting a disproportionately rural Republican Party against an urban Democratic Party, added a new dimension to polarization making consensus and cooperation even more difficult?I posed a series of questions to an eclectic group of political scholars.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, replied by email:Rather than claiming that the G.O.P. is becoming the party of the working class, what I see is a long-term trend away from a party system organized along class lines. Knowing that a person is wealthy (or low income) isn’t very predictive of what party that person will prefer. The parties are much better sorted by other factors — region, religion, race — than by social class.This isn’t a new phenomenon, Lee noted, but Trump intensified these divisions: “Trump’s candidacy and presidency accelerated pre-existing trends undercutting the class basis of the parties. For a Republican, Trump had unusual appeal to working-class voters and was unusually alienating to well-off suburbanites.”James Druckman, a political scientist at Northwestern University, draws an interesting distinction: “I do think the perception in the country is that Republicans are working class but not necessarily for economic reasons directly but rather because of diffuse feelings of injustice translated into rhetoric about mistreatment, unfairness and immigrants taking jobs.”At the same time, Druckman contended:Democrats are vulnerable to charges of being the party of the elite for two reasons — one is that a small strain of the party is made up of extreme progressives who offer rhetoric that can be alienating when too wrapped up in politically correct language. Second, the growing anti-intellectualism in parts of the Republican Party reflects the significant degree of education polarization we observe.Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, rejects some recent attempts at classification:Are the Democrats the party of the elites? Yes and no. It is the case that high-income high-education professionals in the last 20 years have moved increasingly to the Democratic Party but these are people most of whom are on the moderate wing of the party. That is to say, they embrace a mildly redistributive agenda on economic issues such as Social Security, universal health care, and support for families with children, and a mildly libertarian social agenda on questions of abortion, family relations, gender relations and ethnic relations.These moderate, mainstream Democrats arefar removed from the more radical, progressive wing and its agenda on identity, diversity, equity, and social transformation. The real driving force of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are occupational strata that are characterized by low- to middle-incomes and high education. These progressive voters primarily work in social and cultural services, in large urban areas.This progressive constituency, Kitschelt argued, isquantitatively more important for the Democratic electorate than the high-education high-income more moderate segment. By embracing the agenda of “defund the police” and cultural transformation of the schools, this progressive constituency puts itself at odds with many lower- and middle-income families across all ethnic groups.Insofar as the Democratic Party adopts the progressive agenda, Kitschelt wrote, it endangers “its electoral rainbow coalition,” noting that both African American and Hispanic families “are highly concerned about improving the police, not dismantling the police” and about “the quality of basic school instruction.”On the Republican side, Kitschelt argues thatthe core element is not “working class” in any conventional sense of the phrase at all: It is low education, but relatively high-income people. These voters are overwhelmingly white, and many are of the evangelical religious conviction. In occupational terms, they are concentrated in small business, both owners and core employees, in sectors such as construction, crafts, real estate, small retail, personal services and agriculture.Kitschelt continued: “Many of these citizens tend to live in suburban and rural areas. They are the true spearhead of Republican activism, and especially of the Trumpist persuasion.”Pildes addressed these issues in his October 2021 paper, “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West.”“The domination of the parties of the left by the more highly educated,” he wrote, “in combination with these cultural conflicts and policy differences, are an important element in the shift of the less educated, less affluent voters away from the parties of the left.”Pildes cites American National Elections Studies data on white voters in the 2016 election showing that Trump won among all income categories of whites making less than $175,000, while Hillary Clinton won only among whites who made in excess of $175,000.Pildes contended that defections from the Democratic Party among conservative and moderate minority voters pose a significant threat to the long-term viability of the party:Democratic support plunged from 49 percent to 27 percent among Hispanic conservatives between 2012 and 2020 and from 69 percent to 65 percent among Hispanic moderates. These changes suggest that ideology, rather than identity, is beginning to provide more of a voting basis among some Hispanics. If a marginally greater number of working-class Latino or Black voters start to vote the way that white working-class voters do, the ability of the Democratic Party to win national elections will be severely weakened.Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology and politics at N.Y.U., noted in an email that “the claim that the Republicans are becoming a party of the ‘working class’ is mistaken.” Not only are a majority of working class African Americans and Hispanics Democratic, but, “more accurately, the Republicans have become a party of disaffected white voters, many of whom hold resentments against ethnoracial minorities and a waning commitment to liberal democratic values.” Given “the built-in biases of the Electoral College and Senate — along with gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement — states with larger shares of noncollege whites will continue to exert outsized influence on U.S. politics, persistently disadvantaging Democrats even when their candidates and policies are broadly popular.”Robert Saldin, a political scientist at the University of Montana, argued by email that “Geographic polarization, or the urban-rural divide, is arguably the most defining feature of American politics.” Over the past 20 years, he continued, “the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged support in the countryside. They’ve got a five-alarm fire in rural America, but much of the party’s elite doesn’t even see the smoke.”For the Democrats, in Saldin’s view,trading the countryside for the cities has come at a political cost even if the party routinely wins many more total votes than the G.O.P. nationally. That’s because geography plays an outsized role in our political system, particularly in the Electoral College and the Senate.Consider the Dakotas, Saldin wrote:It wasn’t that long ago that their congressional delegations were packed with Democrats, but that’s inconceivable now. And to the extent that the same thing is happening in other low-population states, this presents a real problem for Democrats in the Senate.Saldin suggested:Here’s another way of conceptualizing it. Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming have less than 2 percent of the national population, but their ten senators have the same collective power in the Senate as those representing the five most populous states, California, Texas, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania. If a party managed a clean sweep in those five big-box states in flyover country, that would comprise 20 percent of what you need for a Senate majority before you even look at the other 98 percent of the country. The G.O.P. is now very close to accomplishing that feat, with Montana’s Jon Tester the last Senate Democrat standing in those states.Barring an extraordinary economic turnaround or still more explosive disclosures of criminal malfeasance by Trump, these demographic trends may have a modest effect on the outcome on Election Day in November. They do, however, suggest that the balance of political power is more fluid than widely recognized. It should undermine the confidence of those predicting victory for either the left or the right in 2024.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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      Republicans Elevate Diverse Recruits in Bid to Win House Majority

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      The G.O.P.’s plan to win back the House rests on candidates of color who leaders hope can help broaden the party’s appeal. TUCSON, Ariz. — When Juan Ciscomani first brought his family to his new congressional campaign office in the Catalina foothills, his father asked him: “Do you know where we are?”This was the same upscale neighborhood where a teenage Juan and his father, who immigrated from Mexico and took a job driving city buses, used to come early in the mornings to wash expensive cars to help make ends meet. Years later, the younger Mr. Ciscomani is one of House Republicans’ top recruits in the country, running to flip a key congressional seat just blocks from where they once worked to scrape by. “Two blocks away — it dawned on us,” Mr. Ciscomani recalled in an interview. “Then he said his favorite phrase: ‘Only in America.’”If Republicans win back the House majority in the November elections, it will be because of candidates like Mr. Ciscomani. In the nation’s most competitive congressional districts, Republicans have aggressively recruited people of color with powerful personal stories to tell, betting that compelling candidates, equipped with disciplined messages that focus on kitchen table issues like inflation and public safety, will deliver them control of the House.Republicans saw the potency of the strategy in 2020, when handicappers and pollsters predicted that Democrats would expand their majority. Instead, Democrats did not gain a single new seat while Republican candidates — women, minorities and veterans — won 15. Party operatives attributed the success to their decision to follow Democrats’ winning formula in 2018, recruiting a diverse group of candidates who helped propel them to gaining control of the House. Now, Republicans say it is a crucial component of their strategy to build a lasting majority. “We made a significant effort to not just say we would do recruitment differently but to actually get stronger recruits, and forcefully engaging on behalf of stronger recruits, more diverse recruits, recruits that reflect their electorates and the country,” said Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, House Republicans’ super PAC. Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarAfter key races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states, here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Invincibility in Doubt: With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates failing to win, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.G.O.P. Governors Emboldened: Many Republican governors are in strong political shape. And some are openly opposing Mr. Trump.Voter Fraud Claims Fade: Republicans have been accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss.The Politics of Guns: Republicans have been far more likely than Democrats to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms. Here’s why.It is a striking strategy for a party whose ranks are overwhelmingly white and male, and include some lawmakers who have lionized the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and embraced nativist, anti-immigrant language. The House Democrats’ campaign arm has spotlighted the influence of the hard right among Republicans, and has criticized Republican leaders for failing to confront extremists within their own conference. Republicans know that to meet predictions that they will win back the House this year, they must appeal not only to their core political base of right-wing and conservative voters, but also to college-educated people and independents in the suburbs who are likely to be alienated by such statements and stances. And party leaders are eager to continue to fix their diversity problem, with women composing only about 16 percent of the conference and people of color composing nine percent.In Texas, three Latina women are running in the Rio Grande Valley, including Mayra Flores, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico at six years old, worked on the frontline of the pandemic as a respiratory therapist, and is married to a Border Patrol officer. Ms. Flores could come to Congress as early as this month if she wins the special election to replace former Representative Filemon Vela, a Democrat who retired before the end of his term.Black Republicans with records of military service are running for several other key seats, in districts that Mr. Biden won by only a few points. There is John James in Michigan and Wesley Hunt in Texas, who both graduated from West Point and flew Apache helicopters in Iraq; and in Georgia, Jeremy Hunt, the son of two ministers who also graduated from West Point and who served as an active-duty Army intelligence officer in Ukraine. Wesley Hunt, a Republican candidate and Iraq war veteran, speaking to community members in Cibolo, Texas.Christian K. Lee for The New York TimesIn Indiana, Jennifer-Ruth Green, an Air Force veteran who deployed to Baghdad and served as a mission commander for counterintelligence activities, is looking to unseat Democrat Frank Mrvan in his northern district. Should all four prevail, they would triple the number of Black Republicans serving in the House.Here in Arizona, Mr. Ciscomani, a senior adviser to Gov. Doug Ducey, is vying to win the Tucson-based district held by Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat who is retiring at the end of the year. In a district evenly populated by Democratic, Republican, and independent voters, Mr. Ciscomani is running with a laserlike focus on inflation, border security, and an explicit appeal for unity. “We have to be very disciplined in saying there are more things we agree on than disagree on,” he said. “And if we stay focused on that — I think that’s what the voters want to see right now. They’re tired of the infighting and bickering. They want government to go do their job. To go actually protect our border, to handle this inflation, stop the overspending, and get things under control.”That type of message would put Mr. Ciscomani in the minority among his Republican colleagues should he be elected in November, and it stands in sharp contrast to the language used by other Republicans in the Arizona delegation. Representative Paul Gosar, who represents much of rural western Arizona, has allied himself with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and was censured last year for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman. Representative Andy Biggs, whose district is in the eastern portion of the state, has described the influx of migrants at the southwestern border as an “invasion,” and, like Mr. Gosar, participated in the “Stop the Steal” campaign backing former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Defeat Trump, Now More Than Ever

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      The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism. That struggle has international fronts — starting with the need to confront, repel and weaken Vladimir Putin.But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy.In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again. As democracy is threatened from abroad it can’t also be cannibalized from within.Thinking has to be crystal clear. What are the crucial battlegrounds in the struggle against Trump? He won the White House by winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with strong support from white voters without a college degree. Joe Biden ousted Trump by winning back those states and carrying the new swing states, Arizona and Georgia.So for the next three years Democrats need to wake up with one overriding political thought: What are we doing to appeal to all working-class voters in those five states? Are we doing anything today that might alienate these voters?Are the Democrats winning the contest for these voters right now? No.At the start of 2021 Democrats had a nine-point advantage when you asked voters to name their party preference. By the end of 2021 Republicans had a five-point advantage. Among swing voters, things are particularly grim. A February 2022 Economist/YouGov survey found that a pathetic 30 percent of independents approve of Biden’s job performance. Working-class voters are turning against Biden. According to a January Pew survey, 54 percent of Americans with graduate degrees approved of Biden’s performance, but only 37 percent of those without any college experience did.Are Democrats thinking clearly about how to win those voters? No.This week two veteran Democratic strategists, William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck, issued a report for the Progressive Policy Institute arguing that Democrats need to get over at least three delusions.The first Democratic myth is, “People of color think and act alike.” In fact, there have been differences between Hispanics and Black Americans on issues like the economy, foreign policy and policing. Meanwhile working-class people have been moving toward the G.O.P. across racial lines.“Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers,” the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in The American Prospect. “The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics.”The second Democratic myth is, “Economics trumps culture.” This is the idea that if Democrats can shower working- and middle-class voters with material benefits then that will overwhelm any differences they may have with them on religious, social and cultural issues — on guns, crime and immigration, etc. This crude economic determinism has been rebutted by history time and time again.The third myth is, “A progressive ascendancy is emerging.” The fact is that only 7 percent of the electorate considers itself “very liberal.” I would have thought the Biden economic agenda, which basically consists of handing money to the people who need it most, would be astoundingly popular. It’s popular, but not that popular. I would have thought Americans would scream bloody murder when the expansion of the existing child tax credit expired. They haven’t. Distrust in government is still astoundingly high, undercutting the progressive project at every turn.What do Democrats need to do now? Well, one thing they are really good at. Over the past few years a wide range of thinkers — across the political spectrum — have congregated around a neo-Hamiltonian agenda that stands for the idea that we need to build more things — roads, houses, colleges, green technologies and ports. Democrats need to hammer home this Builders agenda, which would provide good-paying jobs and renew American dynamism.But Democrats also have to do something they’re really bad at: Craft a cultural narrative around the theme of social order. The Democrats have been blamed for fringe ideas like “defund the police” and a zeal for “critical race theory” because the party doesn’t have its own mainstream social and cultural narrative.With war in Europe, crime rising on our streets, disarray at the border, social unraveling in many of our broken communities, perceived ideological unmooring in our schools, moral decay everywhere, Democrats need to tell us which cultural and moral values they stand for that will hold this country together.The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman. Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.It doesn’t matter how many nice programs you have; people won’t support you if they think your path is the path to chaos.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