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    Ilhan Omar faces a primary challenge in her Minnesota House district.

    Representative Ilhan Omar, one of Congress’s most prominent lawmakers, is facing four Democratic primary challengers in Minnesota as she seeks her third term, making her the latest member of the progressive group known as the “squad” to defend her seat this year.Ms. Omar, whose election in 2018 shook up the Democratic establishment, is favored to win her primary. She has racked up endorsements from Democratic state and federal lawmakers and has been a prolific fund-raiser, hauling in more than $2.3 million in total contributions, according to the latest federal elections filings. If she gets the nomination, she would enter the general election with nearly $500,000 cash on hand.But she is facing a strong centrist opponent in Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis city councilman and school board member. Mr. Samuels has the support of some of the Democratic establishment and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. Mr. Samuels has raised more than $1 million and has more than $250,000 cash on hand, according to federal filings.Ms. Omar, 39, has become a powerful voice on issues like racial justice and police reform. But she has been cast as divisive by her opponents and has at times found herself at odds with the Democratic establishment. Central to her primary clashes has been the issue of policing, as calls for reform have reverberated in Minneapolis since George Floyd was killed by the police in 2020, sparking national uproar over the treatment of Black Americans by law enforcement and the nation at large.Last year, Ms. Omar supported a ballot measure to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety. Minneapolis voters struck it down. Mr. Samuels, who campaigned to defeat it, has told The Star Tribune that Ms. Omar’s support for the measure motivated him to run against her. He also notes that he was among eight Minneapolis residents who successfully sued to increase the number of officers.Ms. Omar’s other opponents include A.J. Kern, Albert T. Ross and Nate Schluter, all of whom are considered nominal challengers and have raised little, if any, funds.On the Republican side, Cicely Davis is expected to emerge as the nominee. Ms. Davis, who has the endorsement of the state’s Republican Party, served as the state director of BLEXIT Minnesota, an organization founded by Candace Owens, a far-right firebrand, to encourage Black voters to leave the Democratic Party. Ms. Davis has raised $2.2 million and ended the cycle with more than $100,000 cash on hand, according to federal filings.Two members of the “squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — did not draw any primary challengers this cycle. In Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s case, that might have been in part because of her large fund-raising haul, a total of more than $10.2 million. Two other “squad” members, Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, recently beat back their primary challengers. A sixth member, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, is facing three primary challengers later this month.Ms. Omar was the first woman of color elected to Congress from Minnesota, as well as one of the first two Muslim-American women elected to Congress. She is a favorite of progressives and beat her last well-financed challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, a lawyer and self-described progressive, by 20 percentage points. He drew the backing of pro-Israel groups and centrist Democrats who saw Ms. Omar’s election as a proxy fight over the Democratic Party’s direction on Israel policy. Pro-Israel groups also spent heavily against Ms. Tlaib, who has condemned Israel over the conflict with Palestinians and voiced support for the Palestinian cause. More

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    The Vanishing Moderate Democrat

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

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    Ocasio-Cortez to Endorse Ana María Archila in NY Lt. Governor Race

    Ana María Archila, who would be the first Latina elected statewide, gained national attention after she confronted a senator over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.For much of her first term, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised her profile by fighting for nationwide initiatives favored by the far left, like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.But in recent months, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, has shown a strong interest in more local issues, and in lifting the profile of people far closer to home.On Wednesday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will make her first statewide endorsement in the contest for lieutenant governor, backing Ana María Archila, an activist who some on the left believe has a chance of becoming the first Latina elected to statewide office.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is expected to appear at a rally for Ms. Archila on Monday, one day before the June 28 primary, and will also send out a fund-raising email. Ms. Archila’s campaign believes the endorsement will increase donors, volunteers and energize left-leaning Democrats to vote.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement, which was confirmed by her spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, may also encourage other national progressive Democratic leaders to take more interest in the contest.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent, will face off against Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi in a Democratic primary on June 28.Adams’s Endorsement: The New York City mayor gave Ms. Hochul a valuable, if belated, endorsement that could help her shore up support among Black and Latino voters.15 Democrats, 1 Seat: A Trump prosecutor. An ex-congressman. Bill de Blasio. A newly redrawn House district in New York City may be one of the largest and most freewheeling primaries in the nation.Maloney vs. Nadler: The new congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.Offensive Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.“What A.O.C. represents is a constituency of young people who are so tired of the passivity of mainstream Democrats on the issues of our moment, whether it is climate, making progress on dismantling the racist structure in our legal system or standing with workers,” Ms. Archila said in an interview. “The future of the Democratic Party is this new wave and this new generation.”Ms. Archila, who is running in tandem with Jumaane D. Williams, the New York City public advocate, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, know each other. In 2019, Ms. Archila was Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s guest at the State of the Union address, after she got national attention for confronting Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona in an elevator over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.Ms. Archila and another Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Diana Reyna, face an uphill challenge in trying to defeat the newly installed incumbent, Antonio Delgado, a former congressman who left his House seat last month.Some elected officials and union leaders are worried that Gov. Kathy Hochul is running too low-key of a primary campaign, and that it could hurt the chances of Mr. Delgado, even though he has much more money than Ms. Archila.“While the opposition might want to take advantage of a sleepy electorate that is not aware of Election Day, we want as many voters as possible to know what is at stake in this race,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the head of the New York State Working Families Party, which has endorsed Ms. Archila.An endorsement from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez does not guarantee victory. Last year, she endorsed Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former counsel for Mayor Bill de Blasio, in the race for mayor of New York City. Ms. Wiley came in third place in the Democratic primary.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez recently endorsed Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, in her primary challenge to Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a moderate Democrat.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez also has been willing to weigh in on local controversies, recently accusing the speaker of the New York City Council, Adrienne Adams, of playing “dirty politics,” amid accusations that she eliminated discretionary funding under her control of the left-leaning members who voted against the $101 billion budget.In May, she announced that she would be endorsing the entire slate of the New York Democratic Socialists’ candidates, as well as some backed by the progressive Working Families Party. The two left-leaning parties have occasionally been at odds with one another. This year they have aligned in support of a handful of challengers hoping to pick off long-serving incumbents in the State Legislature, in much the same way that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez herself did in 2018.In several races young women of color are challenging long-serving male incumbents in districts whose demographics have evolved during their time in office. Others are challenging heavy hitters such as Senate energy chair Kevin Parker. Opponents claim these veterans have not been responsive enough to progressive demands.The bulk of these challengers are looking for seats in the State Assembly, which some on the left have portrayed as an impediment to pushing a transformative agenda through the state legislature.There are national echoes in some of these races. Jonathan Soto, a former organizer for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez running with her endorsement, is hoping to unseat Assemblyman Michael Benedetto in the East Bronx. While campaigning to increase parental control over schools and expand access to health care, Mr. Soto has accused Mr. Benedetto of carrying water for conservatives, including the former president Donald J. Trump, who donated to him several years ago.Mr. Benedetto, who is backed by the state’s Democratic establishment, strongly rejected these claims. In a video posted to Twitter he announced, “Benedetto a Trump supporter? Garbage!” before tossing Mr. Soto’s campaign literature into an awaiting bin.Mr. Benedetto has echoed some conservative attacks on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in pushing back at his opponent, whom he has sought to paint as an out-of-touch extremist.Assemblywoman Inez E. Dickens, who is facing a challenger backed by the congresswoman, took aim at Ms. Ocasio-Cortez directly: “She needs to really think about coming into my district because I will stand up and I will push back,” she said. More

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    Ocasio-Cortez Turns a New York Brawl into a National Democratic Proxy Battle

    Sean Patrick Maloney is a Democratic Party stalwart who declares himself a “practical, mainstream guy.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a political outsider-turned-left-wing star with a powerful social media megaphone.Perhaps no two House Democrats better represent the dueling factions of a party at war with itself — over matters of ideology and institutions, how to amass power and, most of all, how to beat Republicans. Mr. Maloney, who represents a Hudson Valley-area district, is the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tasked with protecting incumbents and making him a pillar of the establishment. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the Bronx and Queens, has made it her mission to push that establishment to the left, one endorsement of a liberal challenger at a time.The two forces collided this week when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez handed her endorsement to Mr. Maloney’s primary opponent, Alessandra Biaggi, a left-leaning state senator with a political pedigree. It is often frowned upon for incumbents of the same party to back primary challengers, and it is especially unusual within a state’s delegation. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who toppled a Democratic incumbent herself in 2018, has never been one to abide by such rules, and her muscle and fund-raising savvy could be a major factor in the race.The move turned a contest already filled with powerful New Yorkers and divided loyalties into a messy national Democratic proxy battle. There are clear tensions on issues that have divided the moderate and left wings of the party, including public safety, Medicare for All and fund-raising tactics. Driving those disputes are more existential questions, like how to pursue political survival in a climate that appears increasingly catastrophic for the party in power.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York at the Capitol in 2021. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images“It’s a fight between two Democrats: one is younger and dynamic and wants to make changes quickly,” said former Governor David Paterson, for whom Mr. Maloney once worked and who has remained neutral in the race. By contrast, he said, Mr. Maloney “is now emerging in the leadership of the House, and is thinking more about the entire party and how things will go in November this year.”The fight will play out in New York’s 17th District, which under new boundaries includes parts of wealthy Westchester County, outside New York City, and conservative Hudson Valley hamlets. The district was recently redrawn as part of a redistricting fight that left some Democrats seething at Mr. Maloney. It also left the 17th District more competitive — raising the stakes for a primary fight that may turn on which candidate voters think can hold the seat. Mike Lawler, a state assemblyman, is expected to be the Republican front-runner in the primary on Aug. 23.“We have an incredible opportunity to be able to win against Republicans in November by being bold on our positions for working people,” Ms. Biaggi said in an interview.But that may not happen with an Ocasio-Cortez endorsement, warned Suzanne Berger, the chairwoman of the Westchester County Democratic Committee, who is backing Mr. Maloney.“They misjudged the voters of New York-17 if they think that is helpful to winning in November, which is the main point,” she said. “Republicans will use that endorsement as a weapon in November.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez declined an interview request. Her spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, said that the district would be competitive regardless and that “with Roe and gun safety on voters’ minds, Senator Biaggi’s record makes her uniquely positioned to drive out enthusiastic voters in the midterms.”Ms. Biaggi and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez have been political allies since they both rose to prominence by defeating Democratic incumbents in 2018. Ms. Biaggi, 36, is the granddaughter of Mario Biaggi, who was a 10-term congressman from New York. Hillary Clinton, whose Chappaqua home is now in the district, helped lead Ms. Biaggi’s wedding ceremony. Mr. Maloney, 55, has his own Clinton connections. He worked in former President Bill Clinton’s White House as a staff secretary, and he recently marched with Mrs. Clinton in a Memorial Day parade in Chappaqua, according to a photo he posted on Twitter. Spokesmen for the Clintons had no comment on their plans to endorse in the race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hugging Alessandra Biaggi in the Bronx on Election Day in 2020.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMr. Maloney, who calls himself a “pragmatic progressive who gets things done,” is regarded as the favorite in the race, though local party officials say both candidates have work to do in introducing themselves across a newly configured district. Ms. Biaggi, for her part, argued that Mr. Maloney had been too timid on issues like health care — she supports Medicare for All and said that “ideally private insurance would not be part of that.” She casts Mr. Maloney as too close to corporate interests.And, at a moment of overlapping national crises and frequent stalemate on Capitol Hill, where Democrats hold narrow majorities, she suggested that voters were in the mood for candidates who would “fight like hell for them.”When Mr. Maloney first arrived in Congress after flipping a Republican seat in 2012, he was unquestionably more of a centrist. But his allies now dismiss the idea that the congressman — New York’s first openly gay member of Congress who has long fought for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and supported climate proposals backed by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — is a moderate.In an interview, he said he believed “in mainstream policies that can get done right now, on things like protecting our kids from gun violence, protecting reproductive freedom and climate change.” (The Senate has stymied most of those priorities.)He noted several times that he had “nothing but respect” or “tremendous respect” for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, despite her endorsement of Ms. Biaggi.“I’m an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, and we have spoken about that — I speak to her all the time,” he said.But as of Thursday, he confirmed, they had not spoken since she raised the prospect last month that he should step aside as D.C.C.C. chairman, amid a battle over redistricting that threatened to tear the delegation apart. According to people in and around the delegation, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, there have not been efforts to mediate between the two representatives.Ms. Hitt, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s spokeswoman, said that they were “collegial despite their differences.”After the state’s high court struck down a congressional map drawn by Democrats and a new map was announced, Mr. Maloney declared that he would be running not in the redrawn version of his current 18th Congressional District but in the slightly safer 17th District. He lives there — and Ms. Biaggi does not, although she is planning to move to it — but the area is largely represented by Representative Mondaire Jones.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi of New York speaking outside Rikers Island prison last year in support of legislation aimed at reducing the prison population.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesThe leader of the campaign committee entertaining a challenge to a fellow incumbent drew explosive backlash, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, citing a conflict of interest, suggested that Mr. Maloney should step down as chairman should he pursue such a challenge. Ultimately, Mr. Jones decided to run in a different district and a primary was averted, but some members still privately bristle at the episode.Asked about his message to disgruntled colleagues, Mr. Maloney acknowledged that he “could have done things better,” even as he stressed that the district he selected was only marginally safer for Democrats than the alternative.“I also thought there was a way for it to work out and avoid a primary between members and that’s just what we did,” he said.He also promised that, as chairman of the committee, his “heart” and his “focus” would be on protecting the Democratic majority even as he navigated his own race.At the same time, Mr. Maloney noted that he ended a policy that blacklisted consultants or political groups that backed candidates who ran against incumbents. The policy had been a point of contention between left-leaning members and the D.C.C.C.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has backed several challengers this year — one lost and one narrowly trails in a race that is headed to a recount — much to the annoyance of some Democrats.“New York’s post-redistricting fiasco is a clear demonstration of why a sitting member of Congress should not lead the political arm of the Democratic Party,” said Representative Kathleen Rice of New York. But she also seemed to criticize Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, complaining about “certain members with their own long history of challenging incumbents” who are stirring the pot.“When the stakes are this high, Democrats should be coming together to keep the majority, rather than promoting Dem-on-Dem violence,” she said.Asked about criticism that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is overly eager to take on her colleagues, Ms. Hitt said that the congresswoman believed that no one was entitled to re-election “by default.”Some nationally prominent House Democrats have rallied around Mr. Maloney, who is close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The list includes the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who said in an interview Thursday that she was supporting him.Some of the criticism Mr. Maloney is getting, she noted, comes with the job.“You’re never going to make everybody happy, and you’re judged on victory,” she said.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, called Mr. Maloney “a hard-working and well-respected member of Congress who has won multiple hotly contested elections,” and expressed confidence that voters “will once again send him back to Washington.”Asked if that was an endorsement, he said only that the comment spoke for itself. But it reflected an unmistakable sign of encouragement from party leadership.The primary is scheduled for August. But for all the drama around the contest, some Democrats in the delegation and beyond are already consumed by bigger problems amid an ever-worsening political climate.“When you’re facing the possibility of a tornado,” said former Representative Steve Israel, a former D.C.C.C. chairman, “the angry breezes don’t really matter.” More

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    How Much Damage Have Marjorie Taylor Greene and the ‘Bullies’ Done to the G.O.P.?

    Curious to know how the two more extreme wings of the Democrats and Republicans in the House differ, I asked a high-ranking Republican staff member with decades of government experience — who requested anonymity in order to speak openly — for his take:They are different in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” seem to me to be more “idealist.” They actually do want to legislate/accomplish the very far-left social ideas they propose. They are willing to cause Pelosi headaches, but they have shown they are not going to go so far as to jeopardize the government (operations) and safety net that so many families depend on from a working government.On the other hand, the staff member continued,I hate to use a loaded word here but I can’t think of another one, the “MAGA Caucus” members operate more like bullies — legislative bullies. If they have the opportunity, they will gladly hold bills/government funding hostage for the sake of populism and social media. They would take pride in “shooting the hostage” as that would be very popular with their tribal base and their social media.Both blocs have thrived in an era of social media and small-dollar funding, skilled in winning publicity, often shaping public perceptions of partisan competition on Capitol Hill. In this respect, the Squad and the MAGA caucus have come to epitomize partisan hostility, the refusal of the parties to cooperate, and, more broadly, the intense political polarization that afflicts America today.The Squad and the MAGA caucus are best known for their most visible members, Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.Both factions have caused major headaches for their respective party leaders.Centrist Democrats contend — citing poll data from USA Today Ipsos, Pew Research, a FiveThirtyEight polling summary and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Survey — that support from members of the Squad and their allies for defunding the police has undermined the re-election chances of moderate House Democrats running in purple districts.The participation of members of the MAGA caucus in events linked to white supremacists have increased the vulnerability of the Republican Party to charges of racism, alienating moderate suburban voters.But these are hardly equivalent in the first place, and there are other, major dissimilarities.John Lawrence, who retired in 2013 as chief of staff for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, took a position to my Republican informant’s in his email contrasting the two blocs:The MAGA people seem far more focused on personal celebrity and staking out extremist stances whereas the Squad, while pushing the policy envelope to some extent, remain reliable party members.The difference, Lawrence argued,comes from a fundamental distinction between the parties at this point in history: Democrats approach government as an agent of making public policy across a wide swath of subjects whereas Republicans — and the MAGA people are the extreme example of this — not only have a very hostile view of government but embrace inaction (and therefore obstruction), especially at the national level.Here are some examples that illuminate the differences to which the political veterans I spoke to were referring.In a widely publicized struggle that continued for over two months in the fall of 2021, the Squad, along with the House Progressive Caucus, held the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a centerpiece of the Biden agenda, hostage in order to force House Democrats to pass a separate but more controversial measure, the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill (for spending on education, the environment, health care and in other areas).The tactic worked — in part. On Nov. 15, the House and Senate both voted to enact, and send to President Biden, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — with the support of a majority of the Progressive Caucus. Four days later, the House approved the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill by a slim vote (220-213). Although House Democratic leaders kept their promise to pass the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill, it remains stalled in the Senate as negotiations between the administration and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who at times allies himself with the Republican Party, have failed to bear fruit.Compare that lengthy struggle, to which the Squad lent its strength, to the more frivolous votes cast by members of the Republican MAGA caucus — not a formal organization in the manner of the Progressive Caucus but a loose collection of representatives on the hard right.On May 18, the House voted 414-9 to pass the Access to Baby Formula Act, which would authorize the Department of Agriculture “to waive certain requirements so that vulnerable families can continue purchasing safe infant formula with their WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).”Who cast the nine votes against the infant formula bill? The core of the MAGA caucus: House Republican Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas.Or take the House vote last year to fast-track visas for Afghans who provided crucial assistance to the U.S. military, which went 407-16. “Those Afghans knew the risk that their service posed to them and their families, and yet they signed up to help because they believed that we would have their back,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, told the House. “They have earned a path to safety.”Who cast the 16 no votes? Five of the nine who voted against the baby formula bill — Biggs, Boebert, Gosar, Greene and Roy, plus Mo Brooks, Scott DesJarlais, Jeff Duncan, Bob Good, Kevin Hern, Jody Hice, Barry Moore, Scott Perry, Bill Posey and Matt Rosendale.Philip Bump, a Washington Post reporter, has covered what he calls the “Nay caucus,” writing “The emerging far-right ‘no’ caucus in the House” on March 19, 2021; “What’s the unifying force behind the House’s far-right ‘nay’ caucus?” on June 16, 2021; and “The House Republican ‘no’ caucus is at it again” on April 6, 2022.In his most recent article, Bump wrote:Perhaps the best description of this group is that it constitutes a highly pro-Trump, deeply conservative and often individualistic subset of a very pro-Trump, very conservative and very individualistic Republican caucus. It is a group that includes a number of legislators who go out of their way to draw attention to themselves; one way to do so is to oppose overwhelmingly popular measures.Bump ranked members of this caucus on the basis of voting no on a roll-callin which no more than a tenth of the House cast a vote in opposition. The top ten were Massie, who cast 99 such votes, Roy 93, Biggs 85, Greene 79, Ralph Norman 73, Good 57, Rosendale 56, Boebert 56, Matt Gaetz 51 and Perry 49.Members of the MAGA caucus have been sharply critical of the Squad, to put it mildly. In November 2021, Gosar posted an animated video in which, as CNN put it, he is “portrayed as a cartoon anime-type hero and is seen attacking a giant with Ocasio-Cortez’s face with a sword from behind. The giant can then be seen crumbling to the ground.”Gosar issued a statement defending the video, which shows the cartoon image of himself flying by jetpack to slay the giant Ocasio-Cortez: “The cartoon depicts the symbolic nature of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies and in no way intended to be a targeted attack against Representative Cortez,” it says, before adding, “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life. Congressman Gosar cannot fly.”Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, outlined in an email the differences between the Squad and the MAGA caucus:There are a lot of ways that lawmakers can be extreme. They can be extremist in their policy preferences, extremist in their preferred tactics, and extremist in their political messaging. When it comes to policy, it isn’t exactly clear what folks like Greene and Gosar want — they aren’t exactly policy wonks. Members of the Squad have done more to communicate their policy priorities — e.g., on issues like policing and climate change — and there, what they want is generally more liberal than what some (perhaps many) in the party are likely to support.In terms of political messaging, Rubin argued, “it is undeniable that Greene and Gosar have done more to deviate from normal politics — likening vaccination requirements to Nazi rule or running violent ad campaigns — than anything ever said by any member of the Squad.”I asked Rubin which group has done more damage to its own party:If/when the Democrats lose big in the midterms, I think it likely that the Squad will face a lot of criticism for pushing progressive policies that are not sufficiently popular with voters (police reform) over those that have greater public support (expanding Medicare, for example).But, Rubin contended, Biden will also bear responsibility if Democrats suffer badly in November:In this day and age, it is unreasonable to expect that you can be an FDR-figure without the kind of sizable and stable majorities in Congress he benefited from. The upshot of being an experienced politicians is that you should anticipate this and plan accordingly.Conversely, Rubin continued:There is little evidence that Republicans like Gosar and Greene are doing any short-term damage to the Republican Party — long-term damage is less clear. And one way we can tell is that Republican leaders (and voters) wasted no time getting rid of the one member whose conduct wasn’t burnishing the party’s brand: Madison Cawthorne. The fact that this hasn’t happened to Greene or Gosar or other MAGAish members suggests they aren’t perceived to be enough of a problem.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argued in an email that extremists can in fact play a constructive role in legislative proceedings:While not defending the excesses and demagoguery that some of the members you list have engaged in, a couple examples come to mind:Massie has strenuously objected to the continued use of proxy voting in Congress two+ years into the pandemic as undermining the traditions and character of the institution. For those of us who have long worried about the huge share of members who are only in Washington from Tuesday to Thursday, are such perspectives out of bounds?Was there any value in Massie’s insistence on holding public debate before Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, a stance that drew harsh denunciation from President Trump himself?Lee acknowledged:Members who incite violence against other members or the institution cannot be countenanced. But I would encourage a tolerant attitude toward legitimately elected representatives, even those who hold views far outside the mainstream. It’s always worth considering what their constituents see in them and what, if anything, they contribute to debate. Such members do make Congress a more fully representative body.Michael B. Levy, who served as chief of staff to former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, pointed out, “There are many similarities in that both groups live and die by their primaries because their districts are one-party districts and neither has to worry much about the median voter in their states.”Beyond that, Levy continued, there are significant differences: “The Squad’s agenda is a basic international social democratic left agenda which joins an expanding social welfare state to an expanding realm of cultural liberalism and identity politics.”The Squad, Levy wrote, “while willing to attack members of their own party and support candidates in primaries running against incumbents in their own party, continues to exhibit loyalty to basic democratic norms in the system at large.”In contrast, Levy argued, “The MAGA caucus has a less coherent ideology, even if it has a very distinct angry populist tone.” That may be temporary, Levy suggested,as more and more intellectuals try to create a type of coherent “integralist” ideology joining protectionism, cultural and religious traditionalism, and an isolationist but nationalist foreign policy. Arguably theirs is also a variant of identity politics, but that is less clearly articulated. As best I can tell, they do not have a coherent approach to economic policy or the welfare state.Two scholars who have been highly critical of developments in the Republican Party, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, co-authors of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” were both far more critical of the MAGA caucus than of the Squad.Mann was adamant in his email:The MAGA Caucus is antidemocratic, authoritarian, and completely divorced from reality and truth. The Squad embraces left views well within the democratic spectrum. What’s striking about the MAGA Caucus is that they are closer to the Republican mainstream these days, given the reticence of Republican officeholders to challenge Trump. We worry about the future of American democracy because the entire Republican Party has gone AWOL. The crazy extremists have taken over one of our two major parties.The MAGA group, Ornstein wrote by email, is composed ofthe true believers, who think Trump won, that there is rampant voter fraud, the country needs a caudillo, we have to crack down on trans people, critical race theory is an evil sweeping the country and more. The Squad is certainly on the left end of the party, but they do not have authoritarian tendencies and views.Ocasio-Cortez, Ornstein wrote, “is smart, capable, and has handled her five minutes of questioning in committees like a master.”William Galston, a senior fellow at Brooking and a co-author with Elaine Kamarck, also of Brookings, of “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy,” wrote by email:How does one measure “extreme”? By two metrics — detachment from reality and threats to the democratic process — the nod goes to the MAGA crowd over the Squad, whose extremism is only in the realm of policy. I could argue that the Squad’s policy stances — defund the police, abolish ICE, institute a Green New Deal — have done more damage to the Democratic Party than the MAGA crowd has to the Republicans. President Biden has been forced to back away from these policies, while Republicans sail along unscathed. By refusing to criticize — let alone break from — the ultra-MAGA representatives, Donald Trump has set the tone for his party. A majority of rank-and-file Democrats disagree with the Squad’s position. There’s no evidence that the Republican grassroots is troubled by the extremism in their own ranks.I asked Galston what the implications were of Marjorie Taylor Greene winning renomination on May 24 with 69.5 percent of the primary vote.He replied:Trumpists hold a strong majority within the Republican Party, and in many districts the battle is to be seen as the Trumpiest Republican candidate. This is especially true in deep-red districts where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. A similar dynamic is at work in deep-blue districts, where the most left-leaning candidate often has the advantage. Candidates like these rarely succeed in swing districts, where shifts among moderate and independent voters determine general election winners. In both parties, there has been a swing away from candidates who care about the governance process, and toward candidates whose skills are oratorical rather than legislative. I could hypothesize that in an era of hyperpolarization in which gridlock is the default option, the preference for talkers over doers may be oddly rational.They may be talkers rather than doers, but if, as currently expected, Republicans win control of the House on Nov. 8, 2022, the MAGA faction will be positioned to wield real power.Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, explained in an email that there has beenchange in lawmaking that amplifies the extremes of majority parties. In previous generations, extreme progressives or conservatives were more easily excluded from rooms where policy and procedural decisions were made. Either committee leaders would craft deals away from their party caucuses or leaders had an easier time finding moderates in the other party to craft solutions that the extreme wings of their caucus might oppose.In contrast, Huder wrote:Today’s partisan-cohort legislative style inherently incorporates more extreme voices. Decisions are made within the caucus or negotiated with various caucus factions through leadership offices. Put simply, the influence of extreme wings of each party are more intimately woven into legislative negotiations. And as a result, intense partisan warfare is more common.In this environment, Huder continued, “undeniably, their influence on congressional decision making has grown. They don’t get what they want all the time, but many congressional fights and tactics can be explained by the influence of the more extreme wings of each party.”Recent history suggests that the MAGA caucus and the overlapping but larger Freedom Caucus have Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican minority leader who is favored to become speaker of the House if his party takes control, firmly in their grip. The Freedom Caucus played a key role in forcing Speaker John Boehner out of office in 2015 and a central role in pushing Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, to retire three years later.“The Freedom Caucus has become the political home of right-wing troublemakers who often embarrass and even defy the party leadership,” Ed Kilgore wrote in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine. “A group of experienced ideological extortionists answering to gangster leadership of Trump is going to be hard to handle for the poor schmoes trying to keep the G.O.P. from falling into a moral and political abyss.”If McCarthy takes the speaker’s gavel next year, he will be in the unenviable position of constantly addressing the demands of a body of legislators who at any moment could turn on him and cut him off at the knees.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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    California Sends Democrats and the Nation a Message on Crime

    LOS ANGELES — Voters in California delivered a stark warning to the Democratic Party on Tuesday about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022, as a Republican-turned-Democrat campaigning as a crime-fighter vaulted into a runoff in the mayoral primary in Los Angeles and a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco was recalled in a landslide.The two results made vivid the depths of voter frustration over rising crime and rampant homelessness in even the most progressive corners of the country — and are the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that was promised a return to normalcy under President Biden and yet remains unsatisfied with the nation’s state of affairs.“People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. “It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”The West Coast contests were being monitored closely by strategists and leaders in both parties around the country, as Democrats seek to hold together a fractious and diverse political coalition that can be divided both by race and ideology over criminal justice.In Los Angeles, Rick Caruso, a billionaire luxury mall developer, spent nearly $41 million telling voters how he would restore order in the city, vowing to add 1,500 officers to the police department and promoting the endorsement of William J. Bratton, the former police chief famous for his broken-windows policy. The race now heads to a November runoff. Mr. Caruso will face Representative Karen Bass, the Democratic former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Mr. Caruso had about 42 percent of the vote and Ms. Bass had around 37 percent early Wednesday morning.In San Francisco, about 60 percent of voters recalled Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who became district attorney in 2019 in a huge win for the progressive left. He promised then that “the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of the 1990s and early 2000s are on their way out.” Instead, he is.Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney, making final campaign appearances on Tuesday.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe elections on Tuesday showed the extent to which the political winds have shifted even in Democratic cities in the two years since George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. The initial rally cry on the left then — “defund the police” — has since become so politically toxic that it is now more often used by Republicans as an epithet than by Democrats as an earnest policy proposal. And the crusading energy to overhaul policing in the face of rising crime has waned.For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder threatens to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies, as some voters demand action on racial and systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.“People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,” said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco.But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats do not want to talk about “what cops do” for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending “A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,” he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive.In a sign of how crime can divide the party in unusual ways, public and internal polling showed how the crime-and-homelessness campaign of Mr. Caruso, who is white, helped him make inroads with a large swath of Black men, even as he ran against Ms. Bass, who is Black. In one May survey, Mr. Caruso was performing more than 30 percentage points better among Black men than women.Mr. Caruso found traction in the heavily Democratic city despite being a longtime Republican who then became an independent and only joined the Democratic Party just before running for office. He ran a campaign promising to “clean up” the city and hailed Tuesday’s results as “a great awakening.”Jefrey Pollock, a pollster for Mr. Caruso, said the results should be a take-heed moment for the party.“If the Democratic primary electorate is showing a shift toward the middle on police and crime issues, then it is an even larger concern when thinking about the November general elections,” said Mr. Pollock, who also works for at-risk Democratic congressional candidates in other states.Turnout was low on Tuesday across California. And there is always a risk of over-interpreting local races where distinctly local dynamics are often at play. Mr. Caruso’s vast financial advantage — he outspent Ms. Bass by more than 10-to-1 — is not replicable in most races, and he still faces a fierce fight in the fall.Steve Soboroff, a Los Angeles police commissioner who himself ran for mayor in 2001 and endorsed Ms. Bass this year, was unimpressed by Mr. Caruso’s “basic guttural knee-jerk messages” on crime and his final showing, given his vast spending.“Caruso hit a glass ceiling made of Waterford crystal,” he said.In her own election night speech, Ms. Bass referenced the tilted financial playing field. “All of us stood strong against an onslaught,” she said.Election workers wait for voters at the Avalon Carver Community Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Pollock noted that vulnerable congressional Democrats are already hearing about crime back home and racing to show how they differ with the “progressive trends on handling crime.” In Washington, House Democrats boosted funding and grants for local and state law enforcement by more than $500 million in this year’s appropriations package, delivering Democratic lawmakers a talking point to rebuff “defund” attacks from Republicans.And at the White House, Mr. Biden has made a point of outright rejecting the most severe rhetoric embraced by the activist left.“The answer is not to defund the police,” Mr. Biden said in February when he visited New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams, who won in 2021 primarily on a crime-fighting message, has been held up as an example of how to approach the issue.Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, met privately with Mr. Adams this spring in part to strategize on approaches to public safety. “He was empathetic to the plight and the issue that we’re all facing,” Frank Carone, Mr. Adams’s chief of staff, said of Mr. Klain.The extent to which crime is actually up depends on the category being measured and the particular jurisdiction. But strategists in both parties said that whatever the data shows, there is a widespread sense that daily life in big-city America is no longer as safe as it once was.“There are voters in the suburbs and exurbs all across this country — they’re seeing what’s happening in cities,” said Dan Conston, who heads the leading super PAC for House Republicans. “They’re both aghast and concerned for their communities.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Endorses Nina Turner for Ohio House Seat

    Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the nation’s most prominent left-wing officials, endorsed Nina Turner’s congressional bid in the final hours of a divisive Ohio contest that has increasingly attracted national Democratic attention. Ms. Turner, a former state senator who was a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is challenging Representative Shontel Brown from the left in Tuesday’s primary election, a rematch after Ms. Brown won a bitterly fought special election last year in what was widely seen as a victory for the institutional Democratic Party.“Nina is exactly the kind of progressive leader we need more of in Congress,” read a fund-raising email from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s team that was released widely Monday evening, on the eve of the primary, and was first reported by The New York Times. “She will be a powerful voice for policies that will make a meaningful difference in the lives of working people across this country — like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and a Green New Deal.”For her part, Ms. Brown has been endorsed by President Biden and has campaigned in recent days with high-ranking party officials including Representatives James E. Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries.“Shontel Brown is about results, not insults,” Mr. Jeffries said in a video. “She is about bringing people together, not tearing folks apart.”Ms. Brown was also endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s political arm, a dynamic that prompted left-wing backlash in some corners and debate about the group’s endorsement process on Capitol Hill, Punchbowl News reported Monday morning.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Brown are both members of the caucus. Mr. Sanders, another member of the caucus, has also backed Ms. Turner. Both he and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez supported her in her previous primary.Until recently, the latest battle for the Cleveland-area congressional district largely flew under the national radar in comparison to last summer’s high-energy, high-profile and highly polarizing contest, and it is not clear how many voters have tuned into what may be a low-turnout race.“Together we will change what is possible in our political system,” Ms. Turner wrote on Twitter in promoting Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement. “Thank you, sister.” More

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    What Rashida Tlaib Represents

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last May, following protests in East Jerusalem over planned evictions of Palestinians, Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv, and Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after, a group of nine Democratic lawmakers, all longstanding Israel supporters, took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to reaffirm the country’s right to defend itself. “We have a duty as Americans to stand by the side of Israel in the face of attacks from terrorists,” Elaine Luria, a representative from Virginia, said, “who again, have the same goal in mind: to kill Jews.”Later that evening, about a dozen other Democrats spoke as well — to question the justice of funneling almost $4 billion a year to a country that was in the midst of bombing civilians. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said. “Do we believe that? And, if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”The speeches were a rare occasion when Palestinian rights have been addressed at such length on the House floor. They were introduced by Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. But the driving message of the session came from Rashida Tlaib, the 45-year-old second-term congresswoman from Detroit, who, according to several people familiar with the discussions, played a significant role in making the speeches happen. “How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?” Tlaib said in her own remarks, fighting back tears.Tlaib is the only Palestinian American now serving in the House of Representatives, and the first with family currently living in the West Bank, whose three million inhabitants’ lives are intimately shaped by American support for Israel. As the May fighting intensified, colleagues approached Tlaib to ask if her family was safe. “It’s a voice that hasn’t been heard before,” Betty McCollum, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, told me.Tlaib has been criticized, sometimes viciously, by Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats for calling Israel an “apartheid regime,” and for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel. She has been called anti-Semitic for her criticism of Israeli policies, and has become a favored quarry of Fox News. Tony Paris, a close friend and former colleague of Tlaib’s, told me that in conversations with some of his relatives, conservative Democrats, he has “tiptoed around the Rashida thing.”But Tlaib’s arrival on the national stage has also coincided with an opening, albeit a small one, within the Democratic Party to challenge the United States’ Israel policy. The Palestinian cause has become a significant part of the politics of the American left at the same time that the left has gained a legible footing on the national stage. Tlaib, a democratic socialist who is if anything more outspoken on domestic issues than she is on the Palestinian cause, has found herself at the center of this turn. She appeared in a traditional Palestinian dress made by her mother during her swearing in, sometimes wears a kaffiyeh (symbolically tied to the Palestinian resistance) on the House floor and speaks often about her grandmother in the West Bank. Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer and longtime Arab American activist, told me that the simple fact of Tlaib’s presence on the Hill means that “we are now actual people to them.”Yet Tlaib is wary of adopting the role of the only Palestinian voice in the room. “I feel like no one wants to see me as anyone but Palestinian,” she told me. “I’m a mother, I’m a woman, I have gone through a lot being the daughter of two immigrants in the United States. I’m also the big sister of 13 younger siblings. I’m also a neighbor in a predominantly Black city.”Tlaib’s pitch is that the roads to a fairer Israel policy and to fix the problems that plague her district — poverty, water access, pollution — are not so different. She didn’t run for Congress with a strategic plan to shift the Israeli-Palestinian debate, or even a coherent vision to do so. Sometimes she even seemed to equivocate. “We need to be not choosing a side,” she told The Washington Post during her 2018 campaign. But over her three years in Washington, Tlaib’s argument has sharpened: If the United States cares about democratic values, then upholding Palestinian rights is inherently American.I first met Tlaib last summer at a cafe in the Midtown neighborhood of Detroit, a gentrifying area of dive bars and boutiques. Two days of thunderstorms had left 850,000 people without power, and several restaurants were still closed. Tlaib was in a white summer dress and sneakers (“My mother hates when I wear them”); a congressional pin hung around her neck. I had ambitiously ordered a cinnamon roll, and as we sat down, Tlaib, who had gotten a coffee, eyed it and brought me a fork and napkins. “I’m such a mom,” she said. Shortly after they arrived in Washington, Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, gave bracelets to fellow members of “the Squad”: the young, left-leaning congress members of color that at the time included Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, all of whom were elected in 2018. Omar had Tlaib’s inscribed “Mama Bear.”Tlaib grew up caring for her seven brothers and six sisters, balancing diapers with homework. Her father, Harbi Elabed, was born in East Jerusalem, and her mother, Fatima, grew up in Beit Ur al-Fouqa, a village in the West Bank. They arrived in Detroit shortly before Tlaib was born, in 1976, as the city was reeling from years of deindustrialization and redlining and the deadly unrest of 1967. Capital had fled in search of cheap labor, as had white residents, leaving the city majority Black.Michigan’s 13th District, which Tlaib represents, cuts through most of working-class Detroit before veering abruptly west into slices of three other cities: Dearborn Heights, Romulus and Wayne. It is the second-poorest district in the country. Tlaib, who grew up relying on food assistance, came to Congress at a time when more than half its members were millionaires. She recalls voicing her frustrations about finding an affordable place in Washington to a freshman colleague, who nonchalantly mentioned that he’d bought an apartment nearby. “That’s like $800,000, isn’t it?” she said in amazement.Tlaib’s father, who died in 2017, was an assembly-line worker at the Ford Motor Company and a United Auto Workers member. They had a difficult relationship, but she credits him with introducing her to politics. When she turned 18, instead of wishing her a happy birthday, he told her to register to vote. “I think it’s because maybe he knew it’s a privilege, because he didn’t have that opportunity anywhere else,” she told me.After law school, she worked at a nonprofit serving the Arab American community, then moved to the Statehouse as a staff member. In 2008, she won an eight-way primary race to become a state representative — a surprise to her father, who was skeptical Americans would elect an Arab after 9/11. (Soon after the attacks, like many Muslims, Tlaib’s parents were interrogated for hours by F.B.I. agents about their travel and whom they knew among potential suspects on the agency’s radar, according to Tlaib.) In office, she developed a reputation for taking matters into her own hands. When plumes of black dust appeared over the Detroit River, in 2013, she and a few environmental activists drove to the river’s edge, marched past a “No Trespassing” sign and crossed old train tracks to the source: an industrial site where petroleum coke was piled in 40-foot-high black dunes. Tlaib scooped the substance into Ziploc bags and sent it off to a lab. A storage company was stockpiling the petcoke — prolonged exposure to which at high concentrations can cause lung disease — without a city permit. For weeks, Tlaib held up a bag of the residue in interviews, and the company was later ordered to remove the piles. A building in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, which Tlaib represents — the second poorest in the country.Dave JordanoIn 2017, John Conyers, Detroit’s longtime congressman, resigned following a sexual-harassment scandal, opening up a House seat in the city for the first time in 52 years. Many residents believed the seat should go to another Black person, and the mayor and the Wayne County executive endorsed Tlaib’s primary rival, Brenda Jones, the City Council president at the time, who is Black. But Tlaib won the primary against Jones the following August, and with it, the near guarantee of winning the general election.When she and the Somalia-born Omar were elected that November, they became the first Muslim women in the House. “I guess I was naïve,” Tlaib told me, “in not understanding how bipartisan Islamophobia is in Congress.” It was the subtle things, she said: colleagues shocked to know that most American Muslims are Black, or stereotypes of Muslim women being submissive. One colleague approached Omar and touched her hijab. Besides ignorance, Tlaib said, “I think there’s a tremendous amount of fear.”Her election also made her the third Palestinian American in the House after Justin Amash, a Republican representative from Michigan, and John E. Sununu, a Republican representative from New Hampshire. Amash at times bucked his party, which he left before exiting Congress in 2021, on Israel. In 2014, he voted against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, which has been significantly financed by the United States since it was established in 2011. Amash, a libertarian, explained his opposition on the grounds of government spending. Tlaib’s views, by contrast, are deeply and openly personal. She grew up hearing stories of family members being forced out of their homes. At age 12, she visited the West Bank and saw for herself the walls and checkpoints.Still, foreign policy had hardly come up in her years as state representative. Shortly after her bid for Congress, Steve Tobocman, a former state representative for whom she worked early in her career, sat down with her. The two had discussed the conflict in the past, but now Tobocman, who was working on her campaign, wanted to further understand her views.Tlaib, he recalls, offered few specifics for a policy agenda, but told him about playing with children of Israeli settlers when she visited her grandmother, and recognizing the humanity of people on both sides. Ultimately, she told him, her position on the conflict would be driven by values of equality, peace and justice. She reminded Tobocman of Barbara Lee, the California Democratic congresswoman who cast the sole vote against the authorization of force in Afghanistan in 2001, quoting in her floor speech a clergy member’s warning to “not become the evil we deplore.”“I said, ‘You aspire to be like Barbara Lee,’” Tobocman told me. “And she said, ‘Absolutely.’”In the fall of 1973, shortly before Tlaib’s parents arrived in Michigan, almost 3,000 Arab American U.A.W. members marched to the U.A.W. Dearborn office and demanded that the local union liquidate about $300,000 in bonds it had purchased from the State of Israel with money collected from union dues. At another protest, workers waved signs that read: “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No.” The U.A.W. later liquidated some Israeli bonds.Only recently had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fully entered American politics. In 1967, after a six-day war with its Arab neighbors, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; swaths of Palestinian land were now under Israeli control, and so were one million additional Palestinians. To American leaders, Israel proved itself a capable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in Egypt and Syria. By 1976, Israel had become the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid.Around the same time, James Zogby, who is now president of the Arab American Institute, helped found the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, part of a nascent Palestinian rights movement that had a few allies in the Capitol. But its efforts were dwarfed by those of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded over a decade earlier, which helped form pro-Israel political action committees that fund-raised for both parties. Israel also successfully framed the Middle East conflict for American audiences as a battle between the West and Soviet-sponsored terrorism. In 1988, Zogby, who advised Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign that year, was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He tried to persuade the party’s leadership to include language about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian people” in the party platform, but failed. “Palestinian became the prefix for the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’” Zogby told me. “You couldn’t say one without the other.”Since then, the question of U.S. aid to Israel, in the words of Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has remained “sacrosanct.” Barack Obama committed the United States to an additional $33 billion in military aid, even as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, brazenly waded into American politics on the side of the Republican Party and presided over Israeli politics’ lurch to the right. Israel legitimized settlement expansion despite international condemnation and, in 2018, passed a controversial “nation-state” law that in part affirms that only Jewish people have the “right to national self-determination.”But beneath the unbroken surface of U.S. policy, the consensus has begun to slip. According to Gallup polling, Americans’ views of the conflict have changed significantly since 2013, with sympathy for the Israelis falling slightly and sympathy for the Palestinians more than doubling. The shift has overwhelmingly been on account of Democrats; while Republican opinion has changed little, Democrats have gone from sympathizing more with Israel by a margin of 30 points in 2002 to being more or less evenly split today.The beginning of this shift roughly coincides with the resumption of the active conflict in 2014, when Israel launched a major military operation in the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli teenagers by the Hamas militant organization. Social media was flooded with testimonials and videos of Israeli airstrikes, which killed nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians (six Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas rockets).The American Jewish community, which is broadly Democratic, has meanwhile begun to fracture in its support for Israel. According to a recent poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute, 43 percent of Jewish voters under 40 say that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is comparable to racism in the United States, versus 27 percent of those over 64. And pro-Palestinian activists have more successfully integrated their cause with the last decades’ currents of American activism, most notably marching alongside Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, while halfway around the world, Palestinians tweeted tactical advice (“Don’t keep much distance from the Police, if you’re close to them they can’t tear gas”).Although most Democratic lawmakers continue to side with Israel when the conflict finds its way into Congress, a handful have begun to reflect the shifting sympathies of the party’s base. In 2017, McCollum introduced the first piece of legislation to directly support Palestinian rights, a bill that would have restricted U.S. aid from being used to detain Palestinian children in military prisons. The bill never came up for a vote, but it garnered 30 co-sponsors. “It’s a bit of new space that might be cracking open,” says Brad Parker, a senior policy adviser for Defense for Children International — Palestine. He added, “We’re trying to force it open.”In interviews, Tlaib speaks about the occupied Palestinian territories in the context of Detroit, pointing to issues of water access in both, comparing their patterns of segregation and poverty. “I don’t separate them,” Tlaib told me. Both places have “what I call ‘othering’ politics,” she said, “or feeling like government or systems are making us feel ‘less than.”’In 2013, Detroit entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It came under emergency management, which granted a governor-appointed trustee, a bankruptcy lawyer from the Jones Day law firm, authority to overhaul spending on city services. At the time, the city’s unemployment rate hovered around 15 percent, and more than a third of the population was living under the poverty line. Widespread power outages followed; people opened their faucets to find them dry. Today, a quarter of the city’s population is unemployed. In office, Tlaib has been more focused on the affairs of her district than of the Middle East, including persuading the House to pass a national moratorium on utility shut-offs when the pandemic started, as well as pushing legislation to replace lead water pipes. But from her first days in office, it was Tlaib’s positions on Israel that attracted both attention and criticism.In January 2019, on the day that Tlaib and Omar were sworn in, Senate Republicans added language to a bipartisan bill reauthorizing aid to Israel that affirmed state and local governments’ right to sever ties with companies that boycotted or divested from the country. This was a nod to the more than two dozen state legislatures that already had laws responding to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Tlaib is a member, endorsed B.D.S. in 2017, and both Tlaib and Omar had voiced support for the movement. In response to the Republicans’ bill, a version of which was previously introduced in 2017, Tlaib tweeted that the sponsors “forgot what country they represent,” which critics charged was perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope accusing Jews of dual loyalty.Tlaib’s timing couldn’t have been worse: The Democrats had recently taken control of the House, and Republicans had already zeroed in on the Squad’s left-wing politics. “I don’t see much hope for changing where Tlaib and Omar are, but there is a battle in the Democratic Party,” Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota who now presides over the Republican Jewish Coalition, said at the time. House Democrats “will have to make choices about whether they’ll quiet those voices or whether they’ll remain quiet.”Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, admonished Democratic leadership for not “taking action” against the anti-Israel stance of Tlaib and Omar, to which Omar tweeted in reply, “It’s all about the Benjamins” — $100 bills. The ensuing maelstrom defined Tlaib’s career for the next several months. Tlaib came to the defense of Omar (who apologized the next day) even as Democratic leaders issued a statement to condemn Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The party was already sharply divided on B.D.S.; Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it as a “dangerous” ideology “masquerading as policy.” By that summer, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution to oppose boycott efforts targeting Israel; Pressley broke with her Squadmates and voted in favor. The anti-Semitism charge, Lara Friedman told me, was a “sharp knife” that Republicans could throw “and watch Democrats attack each other.”According to Tlaib’s friends and staff, she hadn’t expected the level of vitriol flung at her and her colleagues. Yet, at times, even her critics seemed unsure of how to respond to Tlaib’s unique position as a Palestinian American member of Congress. Shortly after her election in 2018, Tlaib announced plans to lead a congressional delegation to the Palestinian territories, a tour that would focus on poverty and water access. The trip would coincide with the annual AIPAC-sponsored congressional visit to Israel led by Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. After public encouragement from Donald Trump, Netanyahu announced on Twitter that Tlaib and Omar, who planned to join the trip, were barred from entering because of their support for B.D.S. The move drew criticism from Hoyer, and even AIPAC and several Republicans. Tlaib asked permission to at least visit her grandmother in the West Bank, who was 90 years old at the time, promising to not promote boycotts while there. Israel acceded to the terms, but in a sudden about-face, Tlaib decided not to go. In a statement, Tlaib said that visiting under “oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother’s heart.”One aide to a Squad member, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, told me that wanting to show solidarity with Tlaib gave their boss more courage to speak on the issue. McCollum told me she receives less pushback from colleagues now than she did for her earlier efforts to recognize basic rights of Palestinians. “If I can speak out about what’s happening at home,” she said, “why can’t I point out when another democracy is not behaving in a way that I think lives up to human rights norms?”Even President Biden, who during the May 2021 conflict reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself, made a point of speaking to Tlaib about the situation when he met her on an airport tarmac during a trip to Michigan. According to Tlaib, Biden brought up the conflict first, asking how her family was doing in the West Bank. Over the course of the eight-minute conversation that followed, the president listened as Tlaib spoke about the dire situation in the West Bank. “Everything you’re doing is enabling it more,” she later said she told him. Tlaib speaking with President Biden on the airport tarmac in Detroit about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last May.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTlaib arrived in Washington with one genuinely vanguard position on the conflict. During the 1990s the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the United States, agreed that the best solution to the conflict was the establishment of two states: a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel coexisting side by side. Though the borders have never been agreed upon, the two-state outcome remains a “core U.S. policy objective,” according to the State Department. But since then, settlements have grown steadily, while military occupation of the Palestinian territories continues. Today, nearly 700,000 Jewish settlers occupy land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has not only cut off some residents’ access to water and electricity but also left Palestinians with less — and more fragmented — territory for a Palestinian state in any hypothetical future negotiation. This has led Middle East experts like Zaha Hassan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Steven Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations and commentators like Peter Beinart to publicly give up on a two-state solution as a fair or realistic outcome and turn toward what was once considered a radical prospect in the debate: a single democratic state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews.Tlaib didn’t seem to have a firm view on the best road to peace before her election. During her 2018 campaign, the liberal pro-Israel group J Street endorsed her candidacy based on a meeting and a policy paper that her team submitted, which argued that a two-state outcome, while increasingly difficult to achieve, was the best aim. Soon after, in an interview with the left-wing magazine In These Times, she reversed herself, questioning the two-state solution. After seeking clarification from Tlaib about her position, J Street pulled its endorsement. By the time Tlaib reached Washington, she was the only member of Congress to publicly back a single, fully democratic state.This position has put Tlaib out of step with most of her Democratic colleagues. Hoyer, with whom she has grown close and who calls her “my Palestinian daughter,” told me she has not swayed him on his views on Israel. Even her progressive colleagues like Omar support a two-state solution.To other congressional Democrats, talk of a secular one-state outcome, which by definition rejects the idea of Jewish nationalism, is tantamount to calling for the eradication of a Jewish state. “The whole idea of a one state solution denies either party the right to self-determination,” Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism and is a staunch Israel supporter, told me. If you advocate getting rid of a Jewish state, he said, “that’s when you end up on the path to anti-Semitism.”Deutch clashed directly with Tlaib on the House floor in September, when Hoyer forced a vote on a bill that would provide Israel with an additional $1 billion for its Iron Dome program. Tlaib has long seen U.S. aid as a crucial source of leverage in the fight for Palestinian rights. She argued against the resolution, declaring Israel to be an “apartheid regime.” (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have all taken the position that Israel has committed the crime of “apartheid,” but Human Rights Watch has stopped short of calling it an “apartheid regime.”) Chuck Fleischmann, the Tennessee Republican representative who was floor manager during the debate, urged Democrats to condemn Tlaib’s words. Deutch spoke up, saying the House would always stand by Israel and suggesting that Tlaib’s position was anti-Semitic.Afterward, Tlaib told me, her colleagues “whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ The whispering needs to stop,” she said, “and they need to speak up and say, ‘That was wrong.’” Hoyer told me he didn’t consider Tlaib’s remarks anti-Semitic, but thought they were “harsher than they needed to be.”Some Palestinian rights advocates, including McCollum, didn’t join Tlaib’s nay. Only nine lawmakers voted against the measure. Ocasio-Cortez, who the previous May introduced legislation to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, was about to join them, but ultimately changed her vote to present, crying as she did so. She didn’t give a clear reason for the switch but later said there were pressures of “vitriol, disingenuous framing, deeply racist accusations” and “lack of substantive discussion.” Tlaib spoke with her privately after, but wouldn’t reveal details. She had conversations with several others too. “People were really sincere about the guard rails they felt were present,” Tlaib told me. “They kept saying ‘guard rails.’”The pro-Palestinian cohort in Congress remains only informally organized. The House has nearly 400 caucuses, including one for rum and another for candy, but none focused on Palestinian rights. Staff members of about a dozen current House and Senate members meet informally to discuss the latest efforts to advance Palestinian rights and their long-term objectives, according to several participants in the discussions. But no one has yet filed the paperwork to start a formal caucus. “They’re kind of looking at me, and I’m like, ‘I’m not doing it by myself!’” Tlaib told me. “You all cared before I came here.”Tlaib at a pro-Palestinian rally in Dearborn, Mich., last spring.Antranik Tavitian/Detroit Free Press, via ZUMA
    In the years since Tlaib’s election, several Democratic battles involving the left have included fights over Palestinian rights — a difference that maps onto wider fights over the future of the Democratic Party. Cori Bush, the Missouri Black Lives Matter activist elected in 2020 to Congress, and Pressley now often link the Palestinian cause to issues of police brutality and segregation at home. Jamaal Bowman, who beat the longtime (and pro-Israel) incumbent Eliot Engel for a New York congressional seat in 2020, recently came under criticism from some in the D.S.A., which endorsed him, for his vote to support Iron Dome funding and for visiting Israel on a J Street-sponsored trip. In North Carolina, Nida Allam, the Durham County commissioner who is running for Congress on a platform of environmental justice, has called for conditioning military aid to Israel on Palestinian rights; she was recently endorsed by Tlaib.In 2020, meanwhile, Zogby, who had been attending the D.N.C. for nearly four decades, finally succeeded in inserting changes to the party’s platform. Party leaders wouldn’t accept the word “occupation,” but for the first time, allowed the phrase “we oppose settlement expansion.”Sensing a shift, however small, a new pro-Israel organization called the Democratic Majority for Israel was formed in 2019 to campaign for Democratic candidates who would uphold current U.S. Israel policy. “We thought it was important,” Mark Mellman, its founding president, told me, “before things get out of hand, if you will, to be a force in the Democratic Party and maintain support for Israel.”D.M.F.I.’s political action committee has targeted primary races that often involve candidates backed by Justice Democrats, an influential left-wing PAC that recruited Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman. Last summer, D.M.F.I. PAC injected more than $2 million into the Democratic primary of a congressional special election in Ohio, and aired ads against Nina Turner, who supports placing conditions on military aid. (Turner lost.) Notably, the ads focused less on Turner’s position on Israel and more on her disagreements with party leadership. “In the super PAC business, one is about winning elections,” Mellman told me.According to D.M.F.I., 28 out of its 29 candidates won their primaries in the last cycle. Among them was Ritchie Torres, a congressman representing the South Bronx, the poorest district in the country. Some Israel advocates see Torres as the model for bringing disaffected Democrats back into the fold: a self-described progressive who maintains support for Israel. For the first time since its founding, AIPAC is starting two political action committees. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC lobbyist, said the group will “probably accelerate its ad campaign against” Omar and Tlaib, as well as “a few others on its enemies list.”The politics of Tlaib’s own position on the Palestinian question, however, may be improving for other reasons. Detroit’s population has fallen again, and congressional lines were recently redrawn into another jigsaw piece of a district, costing Michigan a seat. In January, Tlaib announced she would run for the new District 12, which includes only two-thirds of her old constituents, but now also includes Dearborn, a city with a large concentrated Arab American population. Tlaib’s challenger, Shanelle Jackson, has already tried to wield her identity against her, telling Jewish Insider: “She obviously is carrying the water of Palestine in all that she does.”In 2019, days after telling the Squad to “go back” to their countries, Donald Trump called Tlaib a “crazed lunatic.” Denzel McCampbell, Tlaib’s communication director, told me that whenever there is an uptick in hateful calls and threats at the office, he knows that Fox News must have mentioned her. A Republican political tracker — an operative who regularly films the activities of a politician — follows her around regularly, a practice usually reserved for campaign season.In her Washington office, Tlaib keeps a sample of the petroleum coke she collected in Detroit in a glass cabinet. A framed photo of Tlaib’s grandmother, whom she hasn’t seen in more than 10 years, looks over her desk. “You know how some people take naps?” she told me. “I quit in my head for 20 minutes, and pretend I’m not the Congressmember for the 13,” she said, referring to her district. “Not because of them, but because of this place.”Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at the magazine. She is working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Jarod Lew is an artist and a photographer based in Detroit. His works explore community, identity and displacement and have been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Design Museum of London and the Philharmonie de Paris. More