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    JD Vance’s home town is bouncing back – and it’s largely thanks to immigrants

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    When Daniel Cárdenas from Coahuila, Mexico, first arrived in Middletown, a post-industrial city of 50,000 people in south-west Ohio, he was immediately enamored.“It’s a small town with friendly people. You have shops, big stores; there’s no traffic,” he says.“I really fell in love with Middletown. It’s awesome.”A pastor at the First United Methodist church since 2022, Cárdenas is one of a growing number of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Honduras who have moved to the home town of Vice-President JD Vance in recent years. And while Vance has been at the forefront of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US, the story of immigration’s impact on Middletown is one of rebirth and success.Dominated for decades by a huge steel plant on the south side of town, Middletown has felt the effects of the decline of American manufacturing more than most. A 2006 lockout at the steel plant that lasted for more than a year saw AK Steel lay off nearly a thousand workers. The ramifications of the Great Recession that followed in 2008 can still be felt, fueling a population decline of more than 10% between 2010 and 2020.But today, the city is bouncing back, with immigrants such as Cárdenas playing a central role. Nearly all of its population growth since 2010 can be attributed to its foreign-born population, which stands at more than 2,000 people.Its Hispanic communities have helped turn Middletown into one of the few regional cities in the state with a growing population. Homes and commercial spaces on the city’s south side have been revitalized, creating new sources of property and income tax revenue for city authorities. Mexican food trucks dot the city’s street corners and Spanish chatter fills its local chain restaurants.In November, Middletown’s mayor, Elizabeth Slamka, was elected without having any political experience, and is the daughter of an immigrant mother from Colombia.“After the pandemic, everything was closed,” says Cárdenas. “And now we are having a kind of boost in our community, and the Hispanic communities are helping with that.” Many, he says, work in construction and landscaping jobs – industries that have suffered chronic staffing shortages since the pandemic and which represent a wider midwestern trend.The midwest is set to be one of the regions most affected by population decline in the decades ahead. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan currently make up four of the 10 most populous states in the country, but all four are expected to experience population decline by 2050.Shrinking populations for communities in the industrial midwest mean fewer resources for infrastructure, maintenance and other basic needs.Vance, however, has made criticizing immigrants a central theme of his political career.Since before his election win last November, he has claimed immigrants undercut American workers, and in recent weeks has claimed that uncontrolled immigration is the “greatest threat” to the US.And he’s not alone.For decades Middletown’s Butler county sheriff, Richard Jones, who sports a Stetson hat, has been known for taking an anti-immigrant stance. The same week Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Jones installed a sign outside the county jail that reads: “illegal aliens here.” Recently Jones, who has had a grip on the sheriff’s office for more than 20 years, began renting out jail cells to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency at a rate of $68 per person a day and $36 an hour for transportation, or in his own words for “as much as I can get”.This month, the sheriff’s office and a city neighboring Middletown were ordered to pay a $1.2m settlement for the wrongful detention of about 500 people over a two-year period beginning in 2017.The anti-immigrant rhetoric from Vance, Jones and Trump has hit home.After mass, some people have approached Cárdenas expressing fear of Ice raids, following one such incident that saw two people detained 20 miles north of Middletown just days after Trump took office in January.“People are saying they are seeing undercover police cars; people are afraid, they don’t know what to believe; there are a lot of rumors,” he says. “In my sermons, I try to give some hope.”Two years ago, Alexandra Gomez established the Latinos Unidos de Middletown Ohio organization to serve as a venue for Latino immigrants to find education, housing and employment resources. “At our first festival in 2023 we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” she says.But statements from the new administration in recent weeks have fueled concern.“It was real here; people were scared, they did not want to go out. They were afraid to go to work,” she says.“And it isn’t that people were afraid that Ice would show up [at their gatherings] but that someone who felt the right to be rude shows up. The biggest concerns people have are: ‘How do I go to work?’”One of the biggest effects of the recent rise in immigration has been seen in the city’s schools.Over the last 15 years, the number of students taking English language classes has more than doubled. Today, nearly one-in-five students are Hispanic or Latino, their presence helping to keep the wider school system funded and operating. The winner of last year’s Middletown Community Foundation’s volunteer of the year award was a high school teacher originally from Colombia.Gomez and Cárdenas say a source of comfort for immigrants has come from a surprising source: the local police force.Cárdenas says his and other churches recently had a meeting with the city police force and was told that it wouldn’t be working with Ice to request visa documents or detain suspected illegal immigrants. “They said: ‘We are not going to profile anybody; we are just going to do our job.’”That was echoed by Gomez.“They reached out to us and basically said: ‘We’ve got other things to do. It’s not our job to be chasing paperwork.’”Such has been the growth in Middletown – about three-fourths of the city’s foreign-born population are from Latin American countries, according to the US Census Bureau – that Roberto Vargas from Guadalajara, Mexico, saw on opportunity to open the Cancun Mexican restaurant on the city’s eastern edge in December 2023.“I have good people working for me; I haven’t heard anyone have issues with [deportations or Ice activity],” he says.For him, it’s the state of the economy that is the major concern.“Restaurants all over the place are closing down. It’s scary,” he says. Since Trump took office, the US economy has been on unsteady ground, with the stock market losing 7% of its value.“I don’t know what’s going on.” More

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      Ro Khanna Wants to Take On JD Vance

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      Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, sees the vice president — a likely heir to President Trump’s political movement — as a unique threat to the constitutional order.Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, has been busy in the early months of 2025 trying out ways to make himself a counterweight to the Trump administration.In a social-media skirmish in February over the administration’s hiring and firing of an official who had written racist posts, Mr. Khanna drew the ire of Vice President JD Vance, who told him, “You disgust me.” More recently, Mr. Khanna has been staging town halls in Republican districts across California with a parade of progressive co-sponsors.Now, he is planning to shine an even brighter spotlight on Mr. Vance — and on himself — with speeches aimed directly at the vice president in April in Ohio, Mr. Vance’s home state, and at their shared alma mater, Yale Law School.In an interview, Mr. Khanna, 48, said he intended to cast Mr. Vance as a unique threat to America’s constitutional order, and argued that there was no time to waste in building the case against Mr. Vance, a likely heir to President Trump’s right-wing political movement.His speaking tour of several cities in Ohio, and on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., is also an effort to nudge himself into the national conversation about the Democratic Party’s future.For Mr. Khanna, who has represented much of Silicon Valley since unseating a Democratic incumbent in 2016, that has been a long-term project. He makes a cascade of cable news appearances and travels widely; his repeated trips to New Hampshire before the 2024 election included appearances as a surrogate for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and an unusual debate with Vivek Ramaswamy. At last year’s Democratic convention, he arranged to meet with delegates from 15 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Midwestern cities fear fallout of Trump revoking Haitian residents’ status

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      Like so many midwestern manufacturing-centric communities, Lima, Ohio, has dealt with slow-motion decline for decades. Famed for producing oil in the late 1800s and the Abrams army tank, its population has been on the wane since the 1970s.But in recent years, the city has experienced a small turnaround.A Procter & Gamble chemical plant east of the city has recently undergone a $500m expansion, adding more than 100 new jobs. Part of the chemical giant’s expansion has seen it donate tens of thousands of dollars in college scholarships to local students and millions of dollars to local road projects.One 2024 real estate report suggested Lima was one of the hottest property markets in the country for young people.That’s despite states such as Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, once the heart of industrial America, finding themselves fighting a shrinking homegrown population.Immigrants from Haiti such as Amos Mercelin, who is one of several thousand people from the devastated Caribbean country now living in the Lima area, have stepped in to fill the labor shortage.“I worked first at a plastics factory, then I did 12-hour shifts at a Fedex [warehouse]. Now I work with a healthcare organization,” he says.“It was hard, but I knew these were just first steps.” Many Haitians, he says, work at food production plants scattered around the area, where cold temperatures and harsh physical conditions are a part of the job.But come August, when temporary protected status (TPS) for more than half a million Haitians is set to end following an announcement by the Department of Homeland Security on 20 February, that growth could be jeopardized. For Mercelin, thousands of other Haitians and the businesses that depend on them, that could be catastrophic.Cities such as Lima and Haitians such as Mercelin aren’t alone.In a part of the country hit hard in the aftermath of the Great Recession, about 1,000 Haitians are believed to live in the Findlay area, a city 30 miles north-east of Lima, where one automotive company reportedly relies on immigrants for half its workforce.Ninety miles to the south, in Springfield, about 15,000 Haitians have contributed to the city’s housing and financial revival. While the city’s property tax revenue was less than $800m in 2018, in 2023, it reached $1bn for the first time. Last year, it grew again, by 40%. While the property tax revenue increase has in part been fueled by rising property valuations, it also coincides with the growth in the number of tax-paying Haitians.The Trump administration’s move to end TPS has led to worry among city officials in Springfield.“They have strengthened our local economy by filling key roles in manufacturing and healthcare, even as their rapid arrival has strained public services and housing,” Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, a Republican, said in a statement.“I firmly believe in protecting our borders and reforming our immigration policies. Hasty changes and swift deportation will cause hardworking immigrants to be lost, negatively impacting our economy.”In Lima, where Haitians have been blamed by some for rising rents and housing shortages, some are expressing similar concerns.“I’m worried for our workforces if there should be a mass exodus [of Haitian immigrants] because some of our plants and factories need them,” says Carla Thompson, a city council representative.“People are making money from renting to them, providing services, employing them. All of that is going to go away and those were jobs that our plants and factories needed filled. If we go back to the same population that we had, how do those jobs get filled in the future?”Voicemails and emails sent to several businesses in Lima, Springfield and Dayton – areas with broadly high levels of support for Donald Trump – known to employ Haitian immigrants were not responded to or comment was declined on whether they would be affected by the end of TPS for Haitians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA representative of a Springfield-based company that employed Haitian workers and whose owner faced death threats last fall at the height of the Trump-induced anti-immigrant controversy said its leadership had stopped taking media requests.For Thompson in Lima, it’s not only businesses that could lose out if Haitians are forced to leave the country in August.“I know the landlords have been loving it because I haven’t heard any complaints about [Haitians] not paying rent,” she says.While larger midwestern cities such as Columbus, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh have mostly weathered the long-term regional population decline and the 2008 Great Recession that followed, smaller cities such as Lima, Springfield and Dayton have struggled.Residents say that’s why the influx of immigrant communities in recent years seeking a low cost of living and plentiful job opportunities have played such an important economic role.Thompson says she got word from the mayor of Findlay that crime in areas that Haitians had moved to had fallen. But she believes there is a racist undertone to the plan to end the TPS program for Haitians, which the Department for Homeland Security claims “has been exploited and abused” for decades.“The backlash against this group has been ridiculous and there’s no way in my mind that it’s not connected to the fact that they are brown-skinned,” she says.“Racism has been an issue. Some people are probably excited that TPS is being stopped.”For Mercelin, who has been in Lima for a year, the prospect of the end of TPS is disastrous.“Some Haitians are talking about applying for asylum to help them stay here, but I can’t,” he says. “I have a daughter in Haiti and if I apply for asylum, it means I can’t go back there for something like seven years.“That’s something I just cannot do.” More

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      Springfield, Ohio, Sues Neo-Nazi Group, Saying It Intimidated Haitians

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      In the lawsuit, the city states that people associated with the group made death threats last year against those who expressed support for Haitian residents.The city of Springfield, Ohio, which was singled out by Donald J. Trump and JD Vance during the presidential campaign with false and outrageous claims about Haitian immigrants, has sued a neo-Nazi group that helped draw national attention to the small city in the first place.The suit, filed in federal court on Thursday, was brought by the mayor, Rob Rue, along with several city commissioners and Springfield residents. It says that Blood Tribe, a four-year-old neo-Nazi group, began a campaign of intimidation focused on Haitian immigrants in the city. It culminated last summer in “a torrent of hateful conduct, including acts of harassment, bomb threats and death threats” against locals who spoke in support of the Haitian residents.The plaintiffs cite the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which makes it a crime to deny individuals their civil rights, and accuses Blood Tribe of ethnic intimidation and inciting violence. With the legal support of the Anti-Defamation League, the plaintiffs are seeking punitive damages and compensation for the thousands of dollars spent on extra security as Blood Tribe’s campaign unfolded.The suit does not mention Mr. Trump, who falsely claimed at a presidential debate in September that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and cats, nor Mr. Vance, who urged his “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing.” But the suit says that Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of Blood Tribe, “gleefully took credit for the growing notoriety” of the false claims about Haitians in the city, “bragging on social media that the Blood Tribe had ‘pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.’”The suit did not name a lawyer for Mr. Pohlhaus, who could not be reached for comment.In recent years, between 10,000 and 20,000 Haitians had come to Springfield, a city of about 60,000 in southwestern Ohio, attracted by the substantial labor needs of the warehouses and manufacturing businesses in the area. While “the vast majority” of the Haitians are in the country lawfully and were “welcomed” by the city, the suit says, the arrival of so many newcomers in such a short time brought a range of challenges, putting serious demand on local hospitals, schools and housing.In posts on its social media accounts last July, Blood Tribe called the arrival of large numbers of Haitians an “act of demographic warfare,” that had “caused a significant strain on the good White residents of the city.” The suit charges that Blood Tribe members, who were masked, armed and brandishing swastikas, gathered at a local jazz festival and later outside the mayor’s home. It adds that the group spread the personal information of people who supported the Haitian community, in some cases putting home addresses on websites that drew men looking for drugs or sex.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ohio Governor Signs Bathroom Restrictions for Transgender Students

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      The state is one of at least a dozen states to set restrictions on bathrooms for transgender students at public schools.Transgender students in Ohio, from kindergarten through college, will be prohibited from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity after Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed a bill on Wednesday imposing the restrictions. Ohio is among at least a dozen states in recent years to adopt laws setting restrictions on bathrooms for transgender students at public schools.Passage of the Ohio bill comes as transgender issues are increasingly seen by Republicans as an effective tool to divide Democrats, and some Democrats are worrying that their party’s support of trans rights may be a political liability.Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio was one of several Democrats to lose races this year after being targeted in Republican television ads referencing transgender people’s access to bathrooms and involvement in sports. Earlier this month, after Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, Republicans in Congress moved to bar transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity on Capitol Hill.The Ohio measure goes beyond several other states’ laws regulating bathroom use by transgender people by extending the restrictions to individuals over the age of 18, and by including private schools and colleges. The law classifies individuals as “male” or “female” based on how they were identified at birth, and requires schools to designate separate bathrooms, locker rooms and overnight accommodations “for the exclusive use by students of the male biological sex only or by students of the female biological sex only.’’Schools may designate facilities for single-use or for families, the law says, but are prohibited from providing “a multi-occupancy facility that is designated as nongendered, multigendered, or open to all genders.’’ The measure says that higher education institutions may “not knowingly permit” a “member of the female biological sex” to use a facility designated for males, or vice versa. The measure, which is to take effect in 90 days, does not include penalties or other details of how it should be enforced.Last year, Governor DeWine vetoed a measure that bans gender-transition medical treatments for minors and blocks transgender girls and women from participating on high school or college sports teams that match their gender identity. However, his veto was overridden. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio had urged the governor to not sign the bathroom measure, saying in a statement that it “ignores the material reality that transgender people endure higher rates of sexual violence and assaults, particularly while using public restrooms, than people who are not transgender.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haitian immigrants flee Springfield, Ohio, in droves after Trump election win

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      From a tiny office behind a Haitian grocery store on Springfield’s South Limestone Street, Margery Koveleski has spent years helping local Haitians overcome bureaucratic red tape to make their lives in the Ohio city a little bit easier.But Koveleski – whose family is Haitian – has noticed a major change recently.Haitians are now coming to her to figure out how to leave.“Some folks don’t have credit cards or access to the internet, and they want to buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket, so we help them book a flight,” she told the Guardian recently. “People are leaving.”Koveleski, leaders in Springfield’s Haitian community, and others have relayed reports of Haitians fleeing the city of 60,000 people in recent days for fear of being rounded up and deported after Donald Trump’s victory in the 5 November presidential election.“The owner of one store is wondering if he should move back to New York or to Chicago – he says his business is way down,” Koveleski remarked.Trump has repeatedly said he would end immigrants’ temporary protected status (TPS) – the provision through which many Haitians are legally allowed to live and work in the US – and deport Haitians from Springfield once in office.For many, the threats are real.A sheriff in Sidney, a town 40 miles (64km) north-west of Springfield that is home to several dozen Haitian immigrants, allegedly told local police in September to “get a hold of these people and arrest them”.“Bring them – I’ll figure out if they’re legal,” he said, referencing Haitian immigrants in the area.As Jacob Payen, a co-founder of the Haitian Community Alliance who runs a business that includes helping Haitians in Springfield to file tax returns, said: “People are fully aware of the election result, and that is why they are leaving; they are afraid of a mass deportation.“Several of my customers have left. One guy with his family went to New Jersey; others have gone to Boston. I know three families that have gone to Canada.”Some are thought to have moved to nearby cities such as Dayton, where they believe they would be less visible to law enforcement. Others who had temporary asylum in Brazil are pondering going back to the South American country, community leaders say.Springfield’s Haitian community has been in the spotlight since Trump falsely accused immigrants here of eating pets during a presidential debate in September. Since then, the city has seen false bomb threats and marches by neo-Nazi groups after having experienced a revival in recent years in large part because of Haitians who took jobs in local produce packaging and machining factories that many previously there found undesirable.Unofficial results from the presidential election found that Trump beat Harris by fewer than 150 votes in Springfield despite his making false claims about immigrants in the Ohio city a cornerstone of his anti-immigration election campaign.A policy that has been around since 1990, the TPS program currently sees more than 800,000 immigrants who have fled conflict or humanitarian emergencies in 16 countries to live and work legally in the US for a limited time. About 300,000 Haitians fleeing widespread violence in the Caribbean country have been authorized to remain in the US through TPS until at least 3 February 2026.But while it once enjoyed support from both sides of the political aisle, Trump’s first term saw a California court rule in 2020 that his administration could end TPS for citizens of Haiti and three other countries.TPS is granted – and often renewed – by the secretary of homeland security. On Tuesday, reports emerged that Trump had chosen to give the post to the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, who has deployed state national guard troops to the US-Mexico border several times in recent years.Trump’s deportation threats are happening at a time when Haiti is experiencing renewed violence from politically connected gangs. The country’s main airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed periodically and was shuttered again on Tuesday after gunfire hit a commercial passenger airplane flying in from the US. That was the second time since October that gunfire had hit an aircraft over Haiti.Though Trump may ultimately succeed in ending TPS for some immigrants, some legal experts believe that is unlikely to happen during the early days of his administration after his second presidency begins on 20 January.“There’s a fear among the Haitian community that TPS is going to end on 20 January, and I don’t think that is very likely for a number of reasons,” said Katie Kersh, a senior attorney at the non-profit law firm Advocates for Basic Legal Equality.“The strain any deportation effort would place on an already stretched immigration court system would be significant.”Even if the program was ended, Kersh says, current law allows for a court hearing that could take months or years to take place. Similarly, immigrants who have asylum applications filed also have an opportunity to have that application heard.By ending TPS, Trump could in fact make the issue of undocumented immigration even worse.“TPS provides employment authorization and a right to reside in the US, so when a TPS grant ends, the people who have it immediately lose employment authorization unless another status which provides it is available to them,” said Ahilan Arulanantham of UCLA’s School of Law, who was among several lawyers to successfully challenge an earlier attempt by Trump to end TPS for Haitians as well as others in 2018.“That effect occurs regardless of whether they later face deportation.”For companies in Springfield and in nearby communities that depend on Haitian labor, Trump’s comments could prove damaging. The Haitians who filled thousands of jobs at area packaging and auto plants have helped rejuvenate once-blighted neighborhoods and contributed to the local economy in myriad ways.While many food products lining the shelves of Springfield’s Caribbean stores are imported, many items – bread from Florida and pinto beans from Nebraska – are American. Chicken, beef and eggs served at Haitian restaurants are regularly sourced from local farms.Recently, a Haitian community organization bought a former fire station it hopes to turn into a facility for English language classes, drivers’ education and a meeting spot.“I pay thousands of dollars in income and property taxes every year,” said Payen, “and – because I work with Haitians to file their taxes – I see their W-2s and so on. If these people leave, that money is gone from the city and the local economy.”Curiously, some Haitians, who do not have the right to vote unless they are citizens, have blamed prominent Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton for destroying their country after a devastating 2010 earthquake killed about a quarter of a million people – and displaced in excess of a million more.Their Clinton Foundation, which ran dozens of projects in the country, had helped raise billions of dollars to assist with reconstruction efforts. But many Haitians believe the funds were siphoned off, which the Clintons deny.Huge numbers of US guns have been trafficked to Haiti in recent years – a fact that is not lost on some in the Springfield community, according to Koveleski.“They don’t have any faith in the Democratic party,” she said. “Some believe that if Donald Trump says, ‘leave Haiti alone,’ he’s going to leave us alone.” More

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      The Republican and Democratic parties are killing electoral reform across the US | David Daley

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      Ohio’s extreme gerrymanders have enabled more than a decade of corruption, lawless behavior and unpopular legislation passed by lawmakers safely insulated from the ballot box.Voters tried to fix it by bringing a citizen-led independent redistricting commission to the ballot. Due to Republican subterfuge, they ended up voting against themselves. With breathtakingly Orwellian tactics, Ohio Republicans twisted the ballot language and presented it to voters as an initiative that would require gerrymandering rather than end it.When Ohioians arrived at Issue One on their ballots, they were told that a yes vote would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering”. Voters were understandably confused. So while redistricting reform won huge wins in the Buckeye state in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70% of the vote, this year 54% of Ohio voters rejected it.Most analyses of the 2024 elections have focused on the swing toward Republicans at the top of the ballot. But another trend could be more consequential: when citizens stood up across red, blue and purple states this year with reforms designed to strengthen democracy and make all elections more meaningful and competitive, the parties undermined them with brutal, deceptive tactics and submerged them in a swamp of dark money.It worked nearly every time. Unlike 2018, when pro-democracy reforms won big nationwide, this time, reformers were routed.This is frightening news. The vast majority of states – even the purple ones – are either safely Republican or Democratic, or have been gerrymandered that way. Ballot initiatives and citizen-driven reforms uniting voters across party lines have been a rare bright spot and showed a possible path to defeat extremism and entrenched one-party control. But not this year.This year brought defeats – and Ohio-style trickery – across the map, and on a wide variety of pro-voter reforms, including redistricting reform, ranked-choice voting and open primaries. One state, Missouri, even jumped ahead of reformers and banned them in advance with a new prohibition on ranked-choice voting and open primaries – cleverly rolled into an amendment headlined by a ban on “noncitizen voting”, which, of course, isn’t actually happening there or anywhere.Voters in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho advanced initiatives that would have created open primaries and advanced either four or five candidates to a ranked-choice general election. Reformers hoped to give growing numbers of independent voters a say in which candidates are on the ballot in November, and ensure that candidates need a majority to win – instead of a fraction of a fraction of voters in low-turnout, closed primaries.The parties and their dark-money allies pushed back, hard. In Idaho, rightwingers determined to maintain their grip on power ran ads filled with both lies and red meat to outrage the base. “They have open borders. They want open bathrooms. They need open primaries,” claimed one of the most ridiculous and misleading, but effective, mailers.Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar dark-money network – which, after capturing the US supreme court and multiple levels of the judiciary, has now cast its eye on locking in far-right minority rule in the states – dispatched its operatives to mislead voters with one dishonest claim after another about ranked-choice voting. In one especially rich claim, opponents funded by billionaires and the wealthiest rightwing foundations have created front groups to argue that ranked-choice voting would make it easier for the wealthy to buy elections.The true agenda is clear: to protect and defend extreme lawmakers who perform best in base-driven primaries with multiple candidates and a small, divided electorate. That’s why a constellation of groups with ever-shifting names – but with the same far-right foundations and even election deniers behind them – have engaged in this multimillion-dollar scare operation.In Nevada, both Democrats and Republicans (and their aligned groups) spent millions in a successful effort to defeat open primaries and ranked choice. The state’s political elites – the still powerful machine built by the late senator Harry Reid and the Maga state Republican apparatus – built an odd coalition to brand a heretofore popular political reform, incorrectly, as “unproven” and “complicated”.Some Colorado Democrats, and even advocates of ranked-choice voting elsewhere such as Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, sadly swallowed Leo’s talking points whole to ensure the party retained power in this growing Democratic bastion where a record half of registered voters are unaffiliated.Perhaps what’s happening here is no surprise. Citizens want to reclaim state legislatures that have been distorted by gerrymandering and captured by unrepresentative winners of party primaries. The powerful want to close off one of the last avenues for reform.After all, Ohio’s unbreakable gerrymander, now in its 14th year, is so extreme that only four of 99 state house races were within five points this year, and just one of 17 state senate races. Uncompetitive elections push all the action to low-turnout primaries, where the tiniest percentage of the base can select unrepresentative candidates to coast into the general – and then advance unpopular legislation such a six-week abortion ban once in office.Ohio’s supreme court rejected the state house and congressional maps as unconstitutional not once, not twice, but seven times. A cowed governor, Mike DeWine, conceded that the maps could have been “more clearly constitutional”, but went along with the party line anyway. Lawmakers lawlessly disobeyed, ran out the clock, then found Trump-appointed federal judges with longstanding ties to Leo and the Federalist Society to impose the gerrymandered maps.“It is hard to recognize Ohio,” the former governor Bob Taft, a Republican, told me. “The consequences of extreme gerrymandering have been obvious here.”Idaho’s far right, meanwhile, has captured much of a once-traditional Republican machinery and moved to relentlessly consolidate power. In 2018, voters found an end run around the legislature and used the initiative process to expand Medicaid. More than 60% of voters supported the measure, after lawmakers refused to accept Affordable Care Act dollars during multiple sessions.Lawmakers, recognizing that the initiative represented a last opportunity for the public to check a hijacked legislature, endeavored time and again to make one of the nation’s most difficult initiative processes even more onerous and to oppose efforts to open Idaho’s system to voices beyond their own. Then, when courts and determined citizens pushed forward anyway, the legislature drowned them out with the support of organizations funded not only by Leonard Leo but also the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust (“the dark-money ATM of the right”).There was one significant bright spot last Tuesday: Washington DC, which overwhelmingly adopted ranked-choice voting despite some misleading efforts by officials from the district’s dominant Democratic party.But the simple truth is that the structural reform we so desperately need has become harder, as those from both the left and the right who prefer to govern without majorities, and without persuading everyone to their side, recognize it as a threat. They won’t stop here, and they have said so.Leo and his henchmen, armed with dark money, having grabbed control of election machinery, will stop at nothing to expand their ill-won and ill-held power. These fights will arrive in more state capitols and in Congress. They are trying to steal control while hiding behind phoney names and untold billions.The good news is that their scam is easy to see through. The test for our democracy – and for reformers – will be how to rise to this new challenge in a polarized, partisan moment. No task will be harder. None is more important.

      David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      in Elections

      Ohio Voters Reject Ban on Partisan Gerrymanders

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      Voters in Ohio rejected a ban on partisan gerrymandering of state legislative and congressional districts on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, after a ferocious battle that included accusations of political trickery.The Ohio ban was perhaps the most closely watched in an unusually consequential list of democracy-related issues presented to voters in ballot initiatives and amendments to state constitutions.Before the proposed amendment appeared on voters’ ballots, polls showed that the idea had broad approval among the state’s voters. But Republicans, who dominate Ohio politics, pushed back, crafting what critics called a misleading summary of the proposal that appeared on the ballots. It said the measure would establish a “taxpayer funded” commission that would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts.”The Ohio Supreme Court’s four Republicans voted to uphold the language; the three Democrats voted to strike it down. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘Their Son’s Death Was Devastating. Then Politics Made It Worse.’

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      Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioWarning: This episode contains racist language.A sheriff’s deputy arrived at Nathan and Danielle Clark’s front door on the outskirts of Springfield, Ohio, in September with the latest memento of what their son’s death had become. “I’m sorry that I have to show you this,” she said and handed them a flier with a picture of Aiden, 11, smiling at the camera after his last baseball game. It was the same image the Clarks had chosen for his funeral program and then made into Christmas ornaments for his classmates, but this time the photograph was printed alongside threats and racial slurs.“Killed by a Haitian invader,” the flier read. “They didn’t care about Aiden. They don’t care about you. They are pieces of human trash that deserve not your sympathy, but utter scorn. Give it to them … and then some.”“They have no right to speak for him like this,” Danielle said. “It’s making me sick. There must be some way to stop it.”This was the version of the country the Clarks and their two teenage children had encountered during the last year, ever since Aiden died in a school bus crash in August 2023 on the way to his first day of sixth grade. The crash was ruled an accident, caused by a legally registered Haitian immigrant who veered into the bus while driving without a valid license. But as the presidential campaign intensified, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, began to tell a different story.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More