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      ‘One of the Odd and Scary Things About American Politics’ Is What Republicans Are Doing

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      Are democracies providing the rope to hang themselves?From Turkey to Hungary, from India to the United States, authoritarian leaders have gained power under the protective cloak of free elections.“There is no doubt that democratic processes and judicial decisions can be used to limit the power of the people, restructuring governments and institutions to make them less representative, more undemocratic,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania told me, in response to my emailed inquiry.Smith continued:The classic examples are partisan gerrymandering and barriers to voting, but in recent years Republicans have gone further than ever before in using their overrepresentation in state legislatures to shift power to those legislatures, away from officeholders in Democratic-led cities, from officials elected statewide and from voters.Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, made a parallel argument by email:One of the odd and scary things about American politics, more reminiscent of the 19th century than anything in the post-World War II period, is that when the Republicans lost the presidential election in 2020 and did much worse than expected in 2022 (even worse than in a normal midterm contest), they did not abandon the leaders and policies that produced these results. Instead, they have doubled down on even more extreme and broadly unpopular leaders and policies, from Trump to abortion and guns.Goldstone believes that this developmentis a sign that normal politics have been replaced by extreme polarization and factional identity politics, in which the extremes grow stronger and drain the center. As a minority seeking to exercise control of government, it is actually necessary that the Trumpist G.O.P. suppress democratic procedures that normally produce majority control.If enough voters, Goldstone wrote,are deeply anxious or frightened of some real or imagined threat (e.g. socialism, mass immigration, crime, threats to their religion, transgender takeover), they may well vote for someone who promises to stand up to those threats, even if that person has no regard for preserving democracy, no regard for the rights and freedoms of those seen as “enemies.” If such a leader is elected, gets his or her party to control all parts of government, and wants to turn all the elements of government into a weapon to attack their enemies, no laws or other organizations can stop them.Goldstone warned “that should the Republicans manage to gain control of the House, Senate and presidency in 2024, building an electoral autocracy to impose their views without challenge will be their top priority.”There are two distinct mechanisms involved in overturning democracy, Goldstone argued:First, is controlling all elected and appointed elements of the government. If the same political party controls the House, Senate, judiciary and presidency, and disregards the principles of democracy and independence of officials, then sadly none of the institutions of democracy will prevent arbitrary and autocratic government.The second element, according to Goldstone, is unique to this country: “The United States has so many safeguards for minority rights that it is conceivable that a minority party could obtain complete control of all levers of government.”How so?The U.S. Senate is chosen on the basis of territory, not numbers, so that Wyoming and California both have two senators. Gerrymanders mean that states where Democratic and Republican voters are about even, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, have very unequal representation in Congress. Finally, the Electoral College method of aggregating state votes for president has meant that in 2000 and 2016 candidates with a minority of the people’s votes were elected.The consequences?“A determined effort to twist and benefit from these various opportunities and rules means that a party that represents a minority of the people can, in the U.S., control the House, Senate, and presidency,” Goldstone wrote, enabling “an oppressive government restricting freedom and ruling autocratically, and doing so to impose the goals and beliefs of a minority on an unwilling majority.”Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a co-author, with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell, of “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” argued in an email that “Democratic procedure is not a threat to democracy per se, but it is fair to say that it has vulnerabilities.”“Democratic procedures,” he continued, “are intended to provide a means to hold leaders accountable,” which include:Horizontal accountability — institutional checks and balances that enable public officials to hold each other accountable; and vertical accountability — ways for citizens to hold public officials accountable, such as elections or popular mobilization. In a well-functioning democracy, both kinds of accountability work together to limit the concentration of power in the hands of a single party or individual.But Lieberman pointed out, “Democratic procedures can also enable would-be authoritarians to undermine both kinds of accountability under the cloak of democratic legitimacy.”Democratic regimes, he wrote, “are less likely than in the past to be overthrown in a sudden violent burst, as in an overt coup d’état. Instead, democracies are more frequently degraded by leaders who use apparently legal, democratic means to hollow out democratic accountability.”Voter suppression or gerrymandering, Lieberman noted,can limit vertical accountability by making it harder for the opposition to win elections, while maneuvers such as court packing can lower barriers for a party in power to expand its power. And these kind of tactics can reinforce one another, as when the Supreme Court upheld the practice of partisan gerrymandering (in Rucho v. Common Cause). Taken together, these kinds of moves can enable a party to gain and keep power without majority support and increasingly unconstrained by public disapproval.How do authoritarian-leaning politicians gain the power to elude the institutional restraints designed to maintain democracy? Stephan Haggard, a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, emailed me to say that “an important feature of populism is the belief in majoritarian conceptions of democracy: that majorities should not be constrained by horizontal checks, various rights, or even by the rule of law: Majorities should be able to do what they want.”This majoritarian conception of democracy, Haggard continued,is a leitmotif of virtually all democratic backsliding episodes. That the will of “the people” is being thwarted by an elite (read “deep state”) that must be purged. Of course, the definition of “the people” does not refer to everyone, but the favored supporters of the autocrat: whites in the U.S., Muslims in Turkey, Russian traditionalists and so on.One common characteristic of democratic backsliding, according to Haggard, is its incrementalism, which, in turn, mutes the ability of the public to perceive what is happening in front of its eyes:A constant refrain from observers who have weathered these systems is how difficult it is to be clear as to what is transpiring. This comes in part because autocrats lie and distort the truth — that is fundamental — but also because behaviors once thought out of bounds are normalized. Think Trump’s open racism or calls for violence against opponents at his rallies; all of that got normalized.Christina Ewig, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, views contemporary challenges to democracy from another vantage point.In an email responding to my inquiry, Ewig wrote that she disagrees with the premise that democracy is providing the rope to hang itself. Instead, she argued, “Democracy and democratic procedure are not threats to democracy itself. Instead, anti-democratic actors that abuse the state are a threat to democracy.”The United States, Ewig continued, “shows evidence of becoming what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call a ‘competitive authoritarian regime’ — a regime that is civilian, with formal democratic institutions, but in which incumbents ‘abuse’ the state to stay in power.”Prominent examplesinclude former President Trump’s attempts to influence Georgia officials to change election outcomes in November 2020, and then to impede the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to let President Obama nominate a Supreme Court justice is another. At the state level, Wisconsin Republicans, through district gerrymandering, have a chokehold on a purple state.All of these examples, Ewig argued,appear to be abuses of democracy rather than uses of democracy. Democracy requires an acceptance that one’s party will not always be a winner. But the Republican Party in the United States has, on more than one occasion, refused to lose.For now, Ewig wrote, the United States is not a competitive authoritarian regime. The results of the 2020 national elections and the institutional opposition to the insurrection in 2021 “helped to avoid that. But some U.S. states do look suspiciously competitive authoritarian.”Why is democracy under such stress now? There are many answers to that question, including, crucially, the divisiveness inherent in the elevated levels of contemporary polarization that makes democratic consensus so difficult to achieve.In an April 2021 paper, four scholars, Samuel Wang of Princeton, Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon, Bernard Grofman of the University of California-Irvine and Keena Lipsitz of Queens College, address the basic question of what led to the erosion among a substantial number of voters of support for democratic principles in a nation with a two-century-plus commitment to this tradition:In the United States, rules and institutions from 1790, when voters comprised white male landowners and slave owners in a nation of four million, were not designed to address today’s governance needs. Moreover, existing rules and institutions may amplify background conditions that drive polarization. The decline of civic life in America and the pluralism it once nurtured has hastened a collapse of dimensionality in the system.Americans once enjoyed a rich associational life, Wang and his colleagues write, the demise of which contributes to the erosion of democracy: “Nonpolitical associations, such as labor unions, churches, and bowling leagues, were often crosscutting, bringing people from different backgrounds into contact with one another, building trust and teaching tolerance.” In recent years, however, “the groups that once structured a multidimensional issue space in the United States have collapsed.”The erosion of democracy is also the central topic of a Feb. 13 podcast with Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist and the author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Wolf makes the case that “economic changes and the performance of the economy interacting produced quite a large number of people who feared that they were becoming losers. They feared that they risked falling into the condition of people who really were at the bottom.”At the same time, Wolf continued, “the immense growth of the financial sector and the dominance of the financial sector in management generated some simply staggering fortunes at the top.” Instead of helping to drive democratization, the market system “recreated an oligarchy. I think there’s no doubt about that.”Those who suffered, Wolf noted, “felt the parties of the center-left had largely abandoned them and were no longer really interested in their fate.”Two senior fellows at Brookings, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, explore threats to American democracy in a January 2022 analysis, “Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economy at Risk?” Citing data from six surveys, including those by Pew, P.R.R.I., Voter Study Group and CNN, the authors write:Support in the United States for political violence is significant. In February 2021, 39 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” In November, 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats agreed that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Galston and Kamarck observe:Even though constitutional processes prevailed, and Mr. Trump is no longer president, he and his followers continue to weaken American democracy by convincing many Americans to distrust the results of the election. About three-quarters of rank-and-file Republicans believe that there was massive fraud in 2020 and Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.In fact, Galston and Kamarck continue, “the 2020 election revealed structural weaknesses in the institutions designed to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” noting that “if Mr. Pence had yielded to then-President Trump’s pressure to act, the election would have been thrown into chaos and the Constitution placed in jeopardy.”Since then, Galston and Kamarck note, the attack on democracyhas taken a new and dangerous turn. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Trump’s supporters have focused on the obscure world of election machinery. Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws making it harder to vote and weakening the ability of election officials to do their jobs.American democracy, the two authors conclude,is thus under assault from the ground up. The most recent systematic attack on state and local election machinery is much more dangerous than the chaotic statements of a disorganized former president. A movement that relied on Mr. Trump’s organizational skills would pose no threat to constitutional institutions. A movement inspired by him with a clear objective and a detailed plan to achieve it would be another matter altogether.“The chances that this threat will materialize over the next few years,” Galston and Kamarck add, “are high and rising.”If democracy fails in America, they contend,It will not be because a majority of Americans is demanding a nondemocratic form of government. It will be because an organized, purposeful minority seizes strategic positions within the system and subverts the substance of democracy while retaining its shell — while the majority isn’t well organized, or doesn’t care enough, to resist. The possibility that this will occur is far from remote.The anxiety about democratic erosion — even collapse — is widespread among those who think about politics for a living:In his January 2022 article, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joins those who tackle what has become an overriding topic of concern in American universities:For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental and mixed so that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained. By my count, the percentage of states with populations over one million that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.In this country, Diamond continued, “Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished.”He adds: “Even in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy.”At the close of his essay, Diamond goes on to say:It is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy.The next test will be in November 2024.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The ‘Diploma Divide’ Is the New Fault Line in American Politics

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      The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will ebb and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear.Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least one major political realignment: educational attainment is the new fault line in American politics.Educational attainment has not replaced race in that respect, but it is increasingly the best predictor of how Americans will vote, and for whom. It has shaped the political landscape and where the 2024 presidential election almost certainly will be decided. To understand American politics, candidates and voters alike will need to understand this new fundamental.Americans have always viewed education as a key to opportunity, but few predicted the critical role it has come to play in our politics. What makes the “diploma divide,” as it is often called, so fundamental to our politics is how it has been sorting Americans into the Democratic and Republican Parties by educational attainment. College-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees — especially white Americans, but increasingly others as well — are now more likely to support Republicans.It’s both economics and cultureThe impact of education on voting has an economic as well as a cultural component. The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows.According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, since 1989, families headed by college graduates have increased their wealth by 83 percent. For households headed by someone without a college degree, there was relatively little or no increase in wealth.Culturally, a person’s educational attainment increasingly correlates with their views on a wide range of issues like abortion, attitudes about L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the relationship between government and organized religion. It also extends to cultural consumption (movies, TV, books), social media choices and the sources of information that shape voters’ understanding of facts.This is not unique to the United States; the pattern has developed across nearly all Western democracies. Going back to the 2016 Brexit vote and the most recent national elections in Britain and France, education level was the best predictor of how people voted.This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics. It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.The road to political realignmentThe diploma divide really started to emerge in voting in the early 1990s, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 solidified this political realignment. Since then, the trends have deepened.In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Mr. Trump by assembling a coalition different from the one that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Of the 206 counties that Mr. Obama carried in 2008 and 2012 that were won by Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Biden won back only 25 of these areas, which generally had a higher percentage of non-college-educated voters. But overall Mr. Biden carried college-educated voters by 15 points.In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats carried white voters with a college degree by three points, while Republicans won white non-college voters by 34 points (a 10-point improvement from 2018).This has helped establish a new political geography. There are now 42 states firmly controlled by one party or the other. And with 45 out of 50 states voting for the same party in the last two presidential elections, the only states that voted for the winning presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on educational levels — Pennsylvania (23rd in education attainment), Georgia (24th), Wisconsin (26th), Arizona (30th) and Michigan (32nd).In 2020, Mr. Biden received 306 electoral votes, Mr. Trump, 232. In the reapportionment process — which readjusts the Electoral College counts based on the most current census data — the new presidential electoral map is more favorable to Republicans by a net six points.In 2024, Democrats are likely to enter the general election with 222 electoral votes, compared with 219 for Republicans. That leaves only eight states, with 97 electoral votes — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — up for grabs. And for these states, education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.The 2024 mapA presidential candidate will need a three-track strategy to carry these states in 2024. The first goal is to further exploit the trend of education levels driving how people vote. Democrats have been making significant inroads with disaffected Republicans, given much of the party base’s continued embrace of Mr. Trump and his backward-looking grievances, as well as a shift to the hard right on social issues — foremost on abortion. This is particularly true with college-educated Republican women.In this era of straight-party voting, it is notable that Democrats racked up double-digit percentages from Republicans in the 2022 Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania governors’ races. They also made significant inroads with these voters in the Senate races in Arizona (13 percent), Pennsylvania (8 percent), Nevada (7 percent) and Georgia (6 percent).This represents a large and growing pool of voters. In a recent NBC poll, over 30 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they were not supporters of MAGA.At the same time, Republicans have continued to increase their support with non-college-educated voters of color. Between 2012 and 2020, support for Democrats from nonwhite-working-class voters dropped 18 points. The 2022 Associated Press VoteCast exit polls indicated that support for Democrats dropped an additional 14 points compared with the 2020 results.However, since these battleground states largely fall in the middle of education levels in our country, they haven’t followed the same trends as the other 42 states. So there are limits to relying on the education profile of voters to carry these states.This is where the second group of voters comes in: political independents, who were carried by the winning party in the last four election cycles. Following Mr. Trump’s narrow victory with independent voters in 2016, Mr. Biden carried them by nine points in 2020. In 2018, when Democrats took back the House, they carried them by 15 points, and their narrow two-point margin in 2022 enabled them to hold the Senate.The importance of the independent voting bloc continues to rise. This is particularly significant since the margin of victory in these battleground states has been very narrow in recent elections. The 2022 exit polls showed that over 30 percent of voters were independents, the highest percentage since 1980. In Arizona, 40 percent of voters in 2022 considered themselves political independents.These independent voters tend to live disproportionately in suburbs, which are now the most diverse socioeconomic areas in our country. These suburban voters are the third component of a winning strategy. With cities increasingly controlled by Democrats — because of the high level of educated voters there — and Republicans maintaining their dominance in rural areas with large numbers of non-college voters, the suburbs are the last battleground in American politics.Voting in the suburbs has been decisive in determining the outcome of the last two presidential elections: Voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Phoenix determined the winner in the last two presidential elections and are likely to play the same pivotal role in 2024.These voters moved to the suburbs for a higher quality of life: affordable housing, safe streets and good schools. These are the issues that animate these voters, who have a negative view of both parties. They do not embrace a MAGA-driven Republican Party, but they also do not trust Mr. Biden and Democrats, and consider them to be culturally extreme big spenders who aren’t focused enough on issues like immigration and crime.So in addition to education levels, these other factors will have a big impact on the election. The party that can capture the pivotal group of voters in the suburbs of battleground states is likely to prevail. Democrats’ success in the suburbs in recent elections suggests an advantage, but it is not necessarily enduring. Based on post-midterm exit polls from these areas, voters have often voted against a party or candidate — especially Mr. Trump — rather than for one.But in part because of the emergence of the diploma divide, there is an opening for both political parties in 2024 if they are willing to gear their agenda and policies beyond their political base. The party that does that is likely to win the White House.Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and is a senior adviser to the Brunswick Group.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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      Why DeSantis Needs to Run This Year

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      The resurgence of Donald Trump in the 2024 primary polls, the unsurprising evidence that his supporters will stand by him through a prosecution, and the tentativeness of Ron DeSantis’s pre-campaign have combined to create a buzz that maybe DeSantis shouldn’t run at all. It’s been whispered by nervous donors, shouted by Trump’s supporters and lately raised by pundits of the left and right.Thus the liberal Bill Scher, writing in The Washington Monthly, argues that Trump looks too strong, that there isn’t a clear-enough constituency for DeSantis’s promise of Trumpism without the florid drama, and that if DeSantis runs and fails, he’s more likely to end up “viciously humiliated,” like Trump’s 2016 rivals, than to set himself up as the next in line for 2028.Then from the right, writing for The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy channels Niccolò Machiavelli to argue that while DeSantis probably will run, he would be wiser to choose a more dogged, long-term path instead — emphasizing “virtu” rather than chasing Fortune, to use Machiavelli’s language. In 2024 Trump might poison the prospects of any G.O.P. candidate who beats him, while Joe Biden could be a relatively potent incumbent. But if the Florida governor continues to build a record of conservative accomplishment in his home state, “2028 would offer a well-prepared DeSantis a clear shot.”I think they’re both wrong, and that if DeSantis has presidential ambitions he simply has to run right now, notwithstanding all of the obstacles that they identify. My reasoning depends both on the “Fortune” that McCarthy invokes and on an argument that Scher’s piece nods to while rejecting: the idea that presidential candidates are more likely to miss their moment — as Chris Christie did when he passed on running in 2012, as Mario Cuomo did for his entire career — than they are to run too early and suffer a career-ending rebuke.It’s true that fortune doesn’t always favor the bold. (As McCarthy notes, that phrase originates in Virgil’s “Aeneid,” where it’s uttered by an Italian warlord just before he gets killed.) But the key to the don’t-miss-your-moment argument is that when it comes to something as difficult as gaining the presidency, mostly fortune doesn’t favor anybody. Every would-be president, no matter their virtues as a politician, is inevitably a hostage to events, depending on unusual synchronicities to open a path to the White House.A great many successful political careers never have that path open at all. A minority have it open in the narrowest way, where you can imagine threading needles and rolling lucky sixes all the way to the White House. Only a tiny number are confronted with a situation where they seem to have a strong chance, not just a long-shot possibility, before they even announce their candidacy.That’s where DeSantis sits right now. The political betting site PredictIt places his odds of being president in 2024, expressed as a share price, at 23 cents, slightly below Trump and well below Biden, but far above everybody else. Those odds, representing a roughly 20 percent chance at the White House, sound about right to me. If you look at national polls since Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s support has dipped only slightly; if you look at polls of early primary states he’s clearly within striking distance, Trump has a floor of support but also a lot of voters who aren’t eager to rally to him (his indictment may have solidified support, but it didn’t make his numbers soar) and DeSantis has not yet even begun to campaign. He’s in a much better position than any of Trump’s rivals ever were in 2016, and you could argue that he starts out closer to the nomination than any Republican candidate did in 2008 or 2012.Not to run now is to throw this proximity away, in the hopes of starting out even closer four years hence. But DeSantis’s current position is itself a creation of unusual political good fortune. Yes, he’s been skillful, but that skill wouldn’t have gotten him here without events beyond anyone’s control — the Covid-19 pandemic, the woke revolution in liberal institutions, the split between Mike Pence and Trump after Jan. 6, the strength of the Florida economy, and more.It’s obviously possible to imagine a future where fortune continues to favor DeSantis and he goes into 2028 as the prohibitive favorite. But time and chance are cruel, and there are many more paths where events conspire against him, and he wakes up in 2027 staring at PredictIt odds of 5 percent instead.If he were at 5 percent odds right now — if Trump were leading him 75-20 in New Hampshire and Iowa rather than roughly 40-30, or if Biden’s approval ratings stood at 70 percent instead of 43 percent — I would buy the argument for waiting.But DeSantis today is a man already graced by Fortune. And even if the goddess doesn’t always favor boldness, she takes a stern view of those to whom favor is extended who then refuse the gift.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Are Forgetting One Crucial Truth About People and Their Bodies

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      In the homestretch of the epic Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ended last week with a blowout victory for liberals, voters’ cellphones pinged incessantly with text message ads.“Woke trans activists have their candidate,” one text message said, according to Wisconsin Watch, a local nonprofit news site. “Schools across Wisconsin are stripping away parental rights and trans kids behind parents backs. There’s only one candidate for the Supreme Court who will put an end to this. Vote for Judge Daniel Kelly by April 4 and protect your children from trans madness.”For a judicial race that centered on two big issues the Wisconsin Supreme Court is likely to consider soon, abortion and voting, it might seem odd that these ads in support of the conservative candidate chose to focus on an issue nowhere near the top of the agenda on the court’s upcoming docket.For reasons that are now obvious, conservative groups supporting Kelly largely avoided touting his opposition to abortion. That’s a sure loser, as the G.O.P. is rapidly learning. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to run on preserving the right-wing gerrymander that gives conservatives a total lock on Wisconsin’s Legislature and congressional delegation either. So some supporters reached for the wedge issue du jour: transphobia.An article of faith has emerged among hard-right conservatives — and has been worried over by some centrist pundits — that parental concerns about health care and social support for transgender children make for a potent wedge issue. After all, it has all the hallmarks of an effective culture war hot button: It involves strange new social and medical practices and unfamiliar ways of life, and children are sometimes concerned. But it’s not working the way conservatives expected.The end of Roe has reversed the tides of the culture war. The right has now lost it by winning the biggest victory of all. State legislatures across the country are enacting draconian abortion bans that are producing predictably tragic outcomes. Americans don’t have to imagine what the right will do with its power over women’s lives because we see it in every headline about women risking death because a doctor is too scared of running afoul of an anti-abortion law to provide a necessary medical procedure. It has become blindingly obvious what happens when Republicans legislate what Americans do with their sex organs. And voters, understandably, don’t like what they see.For years even before the fall of Roe, conservatives have used hard-edge anti-trans messaging in both red and swing state races, only to come up short. They tried it in North Carolina’s 2016 governor’s race, in the aftermath of a controversial bill requiring people to use the bathroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. The Democrat, Roy Cooper, won despite a hail of anti-trans ads. They tried it against Andy Beshear, the Democratic candidate for governor in deep-red Kentucky in 2019, and failed. In 2022, G.O.P. candidates tried to use L.G.B.T. issues as a wedge in races in swing states from the Midwest to the Sunbelt to New England. The data suggest that opposition to trans rights cannot overcome — or possibly even make a dent in — the advantage that comes to Democrats in swing states for supporting abortion rights. It’s not even close.“Transphobia was, and is, the dog that couldn’t hunt,” wrote the anonymous but eerily prescient polling analyst who writes a Substack newsletter under the name Ettingermentum.Wisconsin was the most recent example of this failure. The American Principles Project, a Virginia organization that is a driving force behind the harsh anti-transgender laws sweeping red states, spent almost $800,000 on ads supporting Kelly in the State Supreme Court race, according to Wisconsin Watch. A video paid for by the organization’s PAC accompanied text messages that described his liberal opponent, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, as “endorsed by all the woke activists that are stripping parents of their rights in Wisconsin schools and forcing transgenderism down our throats,” Wisconsin Watch reported.In one mendacious video advertisement the narrator claims that a 12-year-old was medically transitioned without parental consent. The video shows images of surgical scarring and implies that this child underwent surgery at the behest of school officials. This is absolutely false. The child in question merely changed their name and pronouns.But any hopes that this messaging would drive swing voters seems to have fallen flat. Indeed, the margin of victory in Wisconsin exceeded predictions. Joe Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes in 2020. Protasiewicz won by 200,000.The failure of anti-trans messaging as a wedge issue may seem surprising because the Democratic Party really does seem to have a problem when it comes to parents and schools. Resentment over Democrats’ support for school closures during the pandemic has become a liability for the party among educated suburbanites, as the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia demonstrated.But Republicans seem to be making the grave error of assuming that someone angry about school closures in the fall of 2021 is a potential conscript in their war today against drag queens and trans people. So far there appears to be little appetite among swing-state voters for laws that could — if our worst fears are realized — allow school officials to demand inspections of their child’s genitals before soccer matches and swim meets. Besides, there’s a far more urgent issue when it comes to students’ safety: In a country where child shooting deaths went up 50 percent from 2019 to 2021, who would trust their children to the political party that opposes gun regulation?There is no doubt that attitudes about gender are changing quickly, and changing especially quickly among young people. But it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about how Americans really feel about this. In a Pew poll last June, a large majority of respondents said they favor legal protections for trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. Other findings suggest unease: 43 percent said gender identity norms were changing too quickly. Majorities support requiring athletes to compete as their sex assigned at birth. Depressingly, 46 percent said they supported criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors.But one finding from that same poll stood out to me: 68 percent of respondents aren’t paying close attention to the trans bills popping up across the country, and three-quarters of self-identified moderates said they weren’t following the issue closely. But that doesn’t mean they are interested in restrictive or repressive laws, much less willing to vote on the basis of support for such policies.Of course, this lack of attention can cut both ways. Voters who aren’t paying attention to the issue are unlikely to be drawn to the polls to vote against a transgender care ban, either. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, presumed to be a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has been able to defy post-Roe gravity and increase his support despite prosecuting an aggressive culture war campaign against queer people. It remains to be seen how this would play out in a presidential election, which would run smack into swing states that have recently rejected in statewide elections both anti-abortion and anti-trans candidates.Democrats — and all Americans — should support the rights of all queer people, not just for electoral advantage but as a matter of principle. There is a clear line from the fight over bodily autonomy in reproductive rights to the fight for access to medical care for trans people. It’s a matter of dignity, too. Trans rights, much like abortion, present a profound challenge to the gender binary, which upholds the world’s oldest and most persistent hierarchy. People who don’t want to or cannot fit within their traditionally prescribed roles — mother, father, woman, man, boy, girl — increasingly have the freedom to live their lives beyond those circumscribed identities.The right has responded to this flowering of freedom with a barrage of repression. In states where Republicans have an ironclad grip on power, they have been incredibly successful. There are hundreds of bills passed or pending that vary in their intrusion on personal liberty but share the goal of giving right-wing politicians the power to control the bodies of citizens through law. On Thursday, this frenzy reached cruel new heights when the attorney general of Missouri issued new emergency rules that put up steep barriers to transgender care, not just for children but also for adults. These barriers could amount to a virtual ban on gender-affirming care for most transgender people in the state.In the face of this onslaught, some centrists seem determined to keep flirting with trans skepticism. It is easy to see why trans issues have become the place for certain centrists to try to perform their moderation — queer people have served this purpose for decades. While other forms of open bigotry became taboo, homophobia and the view that queer people’s rights were a marginal concern has persisted. It has happened before. Bill Clinton heavily courted the gay vote to win the presidency in 1992, only to turn around and sign into law two odious policies: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Clinton has since rent his garments over his regrets, but the fact remains that he enshrined discrimination against queer people into federal law.Republicans like to say they are the party of common sense. But what they seem to have forgotten is the commonest sense of all: Most people do not want the government making personal decisions for them. People want to control their own bodies. People want the freedom to decide when and how to form families. Suddenly, after years of pointing fingers at the left for so-called cultural totalitarianism, Republicans have now decisively revealed themselves to be the “jackbooted thugs” wanting details on your teenage daughter’s menstrual cycle. It’s hard to imagine a less appealing message to swing voters than that.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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      Reader Mailbag: Presidential Announcements, That Fox Call and What’s Woke

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      A look at Tim Scott and whether he has an angle to build a base of support.Senator Tim Scott has started an exploratory committee for a 2024 run for president.Charles Krupa/Associated PressThere’s been surprisingly little post-Trump-indictment polling of the Republican race. As a result, we’re still in wait-and-see mode here at the Tilt — and we’ve been waiting long enough that it has become easy to forget what we were even waiting for.In the interim, let’s jump into the mailbag.Off-season?As I wrote a few weeks ago, we’d like the mailbag to be a regular feature during the “off-season,” which brings us to our first question:What is meant by “during the off-season?” Off-season of what? — Jan PanellaI suppose it’s off “election season” or “campaign season.” There’s a predicable ebb and flow to the pace and import of political news, with a slow first half of odd-numbered years ramping up to the heart of the campaign season in the fall of even-numbered years.Reacting to announcementsOf course, it hasn’t exactly been the slowest news week. Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, announced an exploratory presidential committee on Wednesday.What, if anything, do you “do” or look for when you see a presidential announcement from a lesser-known candidate, like Sen. Scott or Nikki Haley? — Kevin in Windsor Terrace, BrooklynI watch a lot of YouTube videos. I watch the speeches the candidates gave at the last party convention. I watch their interviews on Fox News. I watch their victory speeches on election night, and so on. I do not read their books.What am I looking for? A lot of it is entirely superficial: I want to know if they have that “it” factor that might help them catch fire. This is fairly subjective, of course, but there isn’t usually much debate about the truly special candidates, and it usually takes a pretty special candidate to rise from obscurity on the strength of performance on the trail or on the campaign stage.I wouldn’t usually comment on this sort of thing, but Mr. Scott is a fairly typical presidential candidate by these sorts of measures. I would not expect him to break through simply on the strength of his media appearances, campaign speeches and debate performances.What I would comment on, however, is whether candidates have an angle that might help them build a base of support. Usually, the easiest way to build a base is to cater to the needs of a major faction, especially if that faction is out of the grasp of the party’s leading candidate. Most relatively unknown candidates gain a foothold in this way, like Bernie Sanders’s appeal to progressives.These two big questions interact in important ways. A factional candidate might not need to have “it” to play a big role in the race even if they might struggle to win in the end. On the other hand, broadly appealing candidates without a factional base might really need some special performances to break through. Otherwise, they might languish in obscurity alongside the likes of Jay Inslee or Tim Pawlenty.By this measure, Mr. Scott seems likelier to languish. Like a fellow South Carolinian, Nikki Haley, Mr. Scott has positioned himself as an antidote to the “woke” left’s views on race and America. While this is likely to have broad appeal throughout the party, it doesn’t make him the natural favorite of any particular segment of the party. He’s certainly not going to outdo Ron DeSantis in the “anti-woke” department. His announcement video did emphasize his religious faith and opposition to abortion, but it is not obvious that he’s a natural leader of the religious right — like a Mike Huckabee or a Rick Santorum.Front-runnersThis cycle, there’s another consideration: What if the front-runners fade?In the jungle, male lions often battle one another for dominance of the pride. The loser usually departs with his tail between his legs or leaves to go nurse what can be life-threatening injuries. The victorious lion may have incurred some injuries in the battle, which makes him a target for a younger male lion who senses an opportunity.Question: if Trump and DeSantis go at one another viciously, is there a viable Republican candidate on the sidelines who might step in and capitalize on their weakness? — Roger LevineHistorically, it would be pretty unusual for two candidates as strong as Donald J. Trump or Mr. DeSantis to collapse, whether on their own or while locked in hand-to-hand combat. That said, Mr. Trump’s legal issues and Mr. DeSantis’s status as a first-time candidate make this possibility seem likelier than usual for two candidates with good poll numbers.If the front-runners collapse, many viable candidates will jump into the race. But I’m not sure there’s anyone I would describe as “stepping in,” which at least to me implies someone strong, waiting in the wings, and ready to take over and restore order to the situation, sort of like if Joe Biden had stepped in if Hillary Clinton had been sidelined for any reason in 2016. This time, Ted Cruz might be the closest analogue. Perhaps Mike Pence could still play a similar role, too.Questions on what’s wokeOur newsletter on “woke” and the new left received more email feedback than just about any we’ve done. Most of the feedback was positive, though at least a few points of clarification may be in order:What a misleading article to portray the Democratic Party as having been taken over by this entity known as the new left. I don’t think that the elections of 2020 or 2022 indicate a takeover by the new left. — Ira BezozaWhoa, Ira, I did not say the Democratic Party had been taken over by the “new” New Left. Mr. Biden is the president, after all. Mr. Sanders lost, twice. The Squad is not an army. Indeed, one of the biggest reasons Republicans have struggled to capitalize on the rise of the “woke” left may be exactly because the Democrats have tended to nominate relatively moderate candidates.The new left, however, is very real and it’s a focal point of Republican attacks. And while this new left may be out of power, it exercises outsized influence in American life, thanks to its presence in upper echelons of society.About that Fox callThe Fox call on Arizona also elicited a lot of feedback, including plenty who simply wondered why the press is involved in the race-calling business at all:Great piece on Fox … But isn’t there a massive bigger issue missed in this entire debate which is the media stampede to call the election itself? I mean, seriously, isn’t it time someone reflected on all that? — Catherine CusackFor what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a stampede to call the election. Here at The Times, we didn’t call the 2020 presidential election until the Saturday after. We didn’t call control of the House in 2022 for a week.But this is slightly different than the question at hand: Why call races at all? The simple explanation is that there isn’t an “official” winner for a month, and people want and need to know who won well before then. The alternative to media projections isn’t pretty. There would be great uncertainty about the outcome, and bad actors might step in. Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory on election night, for instance, might have been far more confusing and convincing to the public if not for the expectation that the media would call the race if it was truly over. More

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      The One Thing Trump Has That DeSantis Never Will

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is in a trap of his own devising. His path to the Republican presidential nomination depends on convincing Donald Trump’s base that he represents a more committed and disciplined version of the former president, that he shares their populist grievances and aims only to execute the Trump agenda with greater forcefulness and skill. But it also depends on convincing a G.O.P. elite grown weary of Mr. Trump’s erratic bombast (not to mention electoral losses and legal jeopardy) that he, Mr. DeSantis, represents a more responsible alternative: shrewd where Mr. Trump is reckless; bookish where Mr. Trump is philistine; scrupulous, cunning and detail-oriented where Mr. Trump is impetuous and easily bored. In short, to the base, Mr. DeSantis must be more Trump than Trump, and to the donors, less.Thus far, Mr. DeSantis has had greater success with party elites. By pairing aggressive stances on the culture wars with free-market economics and an appeal to his own competence and expertise, Mr. DeSantis has managed to corral key Republican megadonors, Murdoch media empire executives and conservative thought leaders from National Review to the Claremont Institute. He polls considerably higher than Mr. Trump with wealthy, college-educated, city- and suburb-dwelling Republicans. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, retains his grip on blue-collar, less educated and rural conservatives. For the G.O.P., the primary fight has begun to tell an all-too-familiar story: It’s the elites vs. the rabble.Mr. Trump, for his part, appears to have taken notice of this incipient class divide (and perhaps of the dearth of billionaires rushing to his aid). In the past few weeks, he has skewered Mr. DeSantis as a tool for “globalist” plutocrats and the Republican old guard. Since his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, Mr. Trump has sought to further solidify his status as the indispensable people’s champion, attacked on all sides by a conspiracy of liberal elites. While donors and operatives may prefer a more housebroken populism, it is Mr. Trump’s surmise that large parts of the base still want the real thing, warts and all.If his wager pays off, it will be a sign not just of his continued dominance over the Republican Party but also of something deeper: an ongoing revolt against “the best and brightest,” the notion that only certain people, with certain talents, credentials and subject matter expertise, are capable of governing.During his second inaugural speech in Tallahassee in January, Mr. DeSantis embraced the culture wars pugilism that has made him a Fox News favorite; he railed against “open borders,” “identity essentialism,” the “coddling” of criminals and “attacking” of law enforcement. “Florida,” he reminded his audience, with a favored if clunky applause line, “is where woke goes to die!”But the real focus — as with his speech at the National Conservatism conference in Miami in September — was on results (a word he repeated). Mr. DeSantis promised competent leadership; “sanity” and “liberty” were his motifs. For most of the speech, the governor sounded very much the Reaganite conservative from central casting. “We said we would ensure that Florida taxed lightly, regulated reasonably and spent conservatively,” he said, “and we delivered.”In general, Mr. DeSantis’s populism is heavy on cultural grievances and light on economic ones. The maneuvers that tend to endear him to the nationalist crowd — flying a few dozen Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, attempting to ban “critical race theory” at public colleges and retaliating against Disney for criticizing his “Don’t Say Gay” bill — are carefully calibrated to burnish his populist bona fides without unduly provoking G.O.P. elites who long for a return to relative conservative normalcy.Indeed, Republican megadonors like the Koch family and the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin appear to admire Mr. DeSantis in spite of the populist firebrand he periodically plays on TV. Mr. Griffin recently told Politico’s Shia Kapos he aims, as Ms. Kapos described it, to “blunt” the populism that has turned some Republican politicians against the corporate world. Mr. Griffin gave $5 million to Mr. DeSantis’s re-election campaign.Mr. DeSantis’s principal claim to being Mr. Trump’s legitimate heir, perhaps, is his handling of the Covid pandemic in Florida. Mr. DeSantis depicts his decision to reopen the state and ban mask mandates as a bold move against technocrats and scientists, denizens of what he calls the “biomedical security state.”But his disdain for experts is selective. While deciding how to address the pandemic, Mr. DeSantis collaborated with the Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya (“He’d read all the medical literature — all of it, not just the abstracts,” Dr. Bhattacharya told The New Yorker) and followed the recommendations of a group of epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford who pushed for a swifter reopening. Mr. DeSantis’s preference for their recommendations over those of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t signify a rejection of expertise as such, only an embrace of alternative expertise. Mr. DeSantis wanted to save Florida’s tourism economy, and he found experts who would advise him to do so.In reality, Mr. DeSantis is not against elites, exactly; he aims merely to replace the current elite (in academia, corporations and government) with a more conservative one, with experts who have not been infected, as Mr. DeSantis likes to say, by “the woke mind virus.” The goal is not to do away with the technocratic oligarchy, but to repopulate it — with people like Ron DeSantis.Earlier generations of American thinkers had higher aspirations. “The reign of specialized expertise,” wrote the historian Christopher Lasch in 1994, “is the antithesis of democracy.” In the 19th century, European visitors were impressed (and unnerved) to find even farmers and laborers devouring periodicals and participating in the debating societies of early America. The defining feature of America’s democratic experiment, Mr. Lasch insisted, was “not the chance to rise in the social scale” but “the complete absence of a scale that clearly distinguished commoners from gentlemen.”Twentieth-century capitalism, Mr. Lasch thought, had resulted in a perilous maldistribution of intelligence and competence; experts had usurped governance, while the value of practical experience had plummeted.Mr. Lasch briefly came into vogue among conservatives during the Trump years, but they never grasped his central claim: that generating equality of competence would require economic redistribution.In his 2011 book, Mr. DeSantis railed against the “‘leveling’ spirit” that threatens to take hold in a republic, especially among the lower orders. His principal target in the book is “redistributive justice,” by which he apparently means any effort at all to share the benefits of economic growth more equitably — whether using government power to provide for the poor or to guarantee health care, higher wages or jobs.The essential ingredients of his worldview remain the same. Mr. DeSantis has adopted a populist idiom, but he has no more sympathy now than he did 12 years ago for the “‘leveling’ spirit” — the ethos of disdain for expertise that Mr. Trump embodied when he burst onto the national political stage in 2015. In fact, Mr. DeSantis’s posture represents a bulwark against it: an effort to convince G.O.P. voters that their enemies are cultural elites, rather than economic ones; that their liberty is imperiled, not by the existence of an oligarchy but by the oligarchs’ irksome cultural mores.Mr. DeSantis has honed an agenda that attacks progressive orthodoxies where they are most likely to affect and annoy conservative elites: gay and trans inclusion in suburban schools, diversity and equity in corporate bureaucracies, Black studies in A.P. classes and universities. None of these issues have any appreciable impact on the opportunities afforded to working-class people. And yet conservative elites treat it as an article of faith that these issues will motivate the average Republican voter.The conservative movement has staked its viability on the belief that Americans resent liberal elites because they’re “woke” and not because they wield so much power over other people’s lives. Their promise to replace the progressive elite with a conservative one — with men like Ron DeSantis — is premised on the idea that Americans are comfortablewith the notion that only certain men are fit to rule.Mr. Trump, despite what he sometimes represents, is no more likely than Mr. DeSantis to disrupt the American oligarchy. (As president, he largely let the plutocrats in his cabinet run the country.)Few politicians on either side appear eager to unleash — rather than contain — America’s leveling spirit, to give every American the means, and not merely the right, to rule themselves.To break through the elite standoff that is our culture war, politicians must resist the urge to designate a single leader, or group of leaders, distinguished by their brilliance, to shoulder the hard work of making America great. It would mean taking seriously a proverb frequently quoted by Barack Obama, but hardly embodied by his presidency: that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” It would also mean, to quote a line from the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle favored by Christopher Lasch, that the goal of our republic — of any republic — should be to build “a whole world of heroes.”Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) is a writer and a co-host of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast about the conservative movement.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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      To Boldly Go Where No President Has Gone Before

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I have a clear memory of Democrats defending Bill Clinton tooth and nail for lying under oath in the Paula Jones case, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, they said it was “just about sex” and that Clinton lied to protect his family and marriage.Morally speaking, is that better than, worse than or equal to the allegation that Donald Trump falsified business records to cover his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels (and possibly another paramour, too)?Gail Collins: Bret, sex scandal aficionado that I am, I’m sorta tempted to go back and revisit Clinton’s argument that he didn’t lie about Monica Lewinsky because it doesn’t count as having sex if … well, no. Guess not.Bret: To say nothing of Clinton parsing the meaning of the word “is.”Gail: Still, I’d say the Stormy Daniels episode — an ongoing, well-financed cover-up during a presidential campaign — was worse.Bret: Hmm. Trump wasn’t president at the time of the alleged affair the way Clinton was. And Daniels wasn’t a starry-eyed 22-year-old intern whose life got destroyed in the process. And lying under oath is usually a felony, unlike falsifying business records, which is usually treated as a misdemeanor.Gail: If you want to argue that Trump’s not the worst sex-scandal offender, I’m fine with it. Won’t even mention Grover Cleveland …Bret: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” Always liked Grover.Gail: Of all the investigations into Trump’s egregious misconduct, this strikes me as almost minor compared with, say, trying to change presidential election results, urging a crowd of supporters to march on the Capitol or illegally taking, retaining and hiding secret government documents or …OK, taking a rest.Bret: Totally agree. My fear is that the indictment will focus the media spotlight on Trump, motivate his base, paralyze his Republican opponents and ultimately help him win the G.O.P. nomination. In the first poll after the indictment, Trump’s lead over his Republican rivals jumped. Maybe that will make it easier for Democrats to hold the White House next year, but it also potentially means we could get Benito Milhous Caligula back in office.The only thing that will hurt Trump is if he’s ignored in the press and beaten at the polls. Instead, we’re contributing to the problem just by speaking about it.Gail: OK, now I’m changing subjects. It hurts my heart to talk about this, but we have to consider the terrible school shooting in Nashville — it doesn’t seem to have moved the needle one centimeter on issues like banning assault weapons or 30-round magazines. Pro-gun lawmakers, in light of the Covenant School shooting, are once again arguing that schools would be safer if the teachers could have their own pistols.Bret: I’m not opposed to an armed cop or a well-trained security guard on school campuses, who might be able to respond much faster to an emergency than the police could. Teachers? Seems like a really, really bad idea.With respect to everything else, I’m sometimes inclined to simply give up. Gun control isn’t realistic in a country with more guns than people. Even if stringent gun control were somehow enacted, it would function roughly the same way stringent drug laws work: People who wanted to obtain guns illegally could easily get them. I think we ought to repeal the Second Amendment, or at least reinterpret it to mean that anyone who wants a gun must belong to a “well-regulated militia.” But in our lifetimes that’s a political pipe dream.So we’re left in the face of tragedies like Nashville’s feeling heartbroken, furious, speechless and helpless.Gail: Your impulse to give up the fight is probably sensible, but I just can’t go there. Gotta keep pushing; we can’t cave in to folks who think it’s un-American to require loaded weapons be stored where kids can’t get at them.Bret: Another side of me wants to agree with you. Let’s ban high-capacity magazines, raise the age threshold for gun purchases and heavily fine people if they fail to properly store weapons. I just wonder if it will make much of a difference.Gail: Well, it sure as hell wouldn’t hurt.Bret: Very true.Gail: Let’s move on before I get deeply depressed. We’re slowly creeping toward an election year — close enough that people who want to run for office for real have to start mobilizing. Anybody you really love/hate out there now?Bret: Next year is going to be a tough one for Senate Democrats. They’re defending 23 of the 34 seats that are up for grabs, including in ever-redder states like Montana and West Virginia.I’d love to see a serious Democratic challenger to Ted Cruz in Texas, and by serious I mean virtually anyone other than Beto O’Rourke. And I’d love to see Kari Lake run for a Senate seat in Arizona so that she can lose again.You?Gail: Funny, I was thinking the same thing about Ted Cruz the other night. Wonderful the way that man can bring us together.Bret: He even brings me closer to Trump. “Lyin’ Ted” was priceless.Gail: Another Senate Republican I hope gets a very serious challenger is Rick Scott of Florida, who made that first big proposal to consider slashing Social Security and Medicare.Bret: Good luck with that. Florida may now be redder than Texas.Gail: You’re right about the Democrats having to focus on defense. The endangered incumbent I’m rooting hardest for is Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s managed to be a powerful voice for both liberal causes and my reddish home state’s practical interests.Bret: I once got a note from Brown gently reproaching me for using the term Rust Belt about Ohio. The note was so charming, personable and fair that I remember thinking: “This man can’t have a future in American politics.”Gail: And as someone who’s complained bitterly about Joe Manchin over the years, I have to admit that keeping West Virginia in the Democratic column does require very creative and sometimes deeply irritating political performances.Bret: Aha. I knew you’d come around.I don’t know if you’ve followed this, but Manchin is now complaining bitterly that the Biden administration is trying to rewrite the terms of the Inflation Reduction Act, which, with Manchin’s vote, gave the president his biggest legislative win last year. The details are complicated, but the gist is that the administration is hanging him out to dry. Oh, and he’s also skeptical of Trump’s indictment. Don’t be totally surprised if Manchin becomes a Republican in order to save his political skin.Gail: Hmm, my valuation of said skin would certainly drop . …Bret: Which raises the question: How should partisan Democrats, or partisan Republicans, feel about the least ideologically reliable member of their own parties?Gail: Depends. Did they run as freethinkers who shouldn’t be relied on by their party for a vote? Manchin got elected in the first place by promising to be a Democrat who’d “get the federal government off our backs.” But often this explosion of independence comes as a postelection surprise.Bret: Good point. There should be truth in advertising.Gail: Do they — like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — forget their nonpartisanship when it comes to dipping into donations from partisan fund-raisers?And probably most important — is there a better option? If Sinema had to run for re-election this year, which she doesn’t, I would be a super-enthusiastic supporter if the other choice was Lake, that dreadful former talk show host.Any thoughts on your end?Bret: In my younger, more Republican days, I used to dislike ideological mavericks — they made things too complicated. Now that I’m older, I increasingly admire politicians who make things complicated. I know there’s a fair amount of opportunism and posturing in some of their position taking. But they also model a certain independence of thought and spirit that I find healthy in our Age of Lemmings.Gail: Hoping it’s maybe just the Decade of the Lemmings.Bret: If I had to draw up a list of the Senate heroes of my lifetime, they’d be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John McCain, Howard Baker, Bob Kerrey and Joe Lieberman. And lately I’d have to add Mitt Romney. All were willing to break with their parties when it counted. How about you?Gail: Well, you may remember that a while back I was contemplating writing a book called “How Joe Lieberman Ruined Everything.”Bret: I recall you weren’t his biggest fan.Gail: Yeah, still blaming him for failing to give Al Gore the proper support in that 2000 recount. But I’ve come around on Mitt Romney. He’s become a strong, independent voice. Of course it’s easier to be brave when you’re a senator from a state that would keep re-electing you if you took a six-year vacation in the Swiss Alps. Nevertheless, I’ve apologized for all that obsessing about his putting the dog on the car roof.Bret: I came around on him too. I was very hard on him in 2012. Either he got better or I got wiser.Gail: I was a big admirer of John McCain. Will never forget following him on his travels when he first ran for president in 2000. He spent months and months driving around New Hampshire talking about campaign finance reform. From one tiny gathering to another. Of all the ambitious pols I’ve known he was the least focused on his own fortunes.Bret: I traveled with McCain on his international junkets. He was hilarious, gregarious, generous, gossipy — a study in being unstudied. If he had won the presidency, the Republican Party wouldn’t have gone insane, American democracy wouldn’t be at risk and Sarah Palin would be just another lame ex-veep.Gail: So, gotta end this with the obvious question, Bret. Republican presidential race! You’re a fan of Nikki Haley, but her campaign doesn’t seem to be going much of anywhere, is it? I know you’ve come to detest Ron DeSantis. Other options?Bret: Biden, cryonics or some small island in the South Atlantic, like St. Helena. Not necessarily in that order.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Erupt in Outrage Over Trump Indictment, Defending the Defendant

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      Many in the party said Donald Trump could benefit from a wave of sympathy among Republicans, with his base of supporters likely to be energized by a belief in a weaponized justice system.Republican leaders in Congress lamented the moment as a sad day in the annals of United States history. Conservative news outlets issued a call to action for the party’s base. One prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump suggested that the former president’s mug shot should double as a 2024 campaign poster.Even Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, widely viewed as Mr. Trump’s leading potential presidential primary rival, rushed to condemn the prosecutor who brought the Manhattan case that led to the historic indictment of the former president on Thursday. While not naming Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis said Florida would not play a role in extraditing him.“The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head,” Mr. DeSantis said on Twitter.Up and down the Republican Party, anger and accusations of injustice flowed from both backers and critics of the former president, even before the charges had been revealed. Many said Mr. Trump could benefit from a wave of sympathy from across the party, with a base of supporters likely to be energized by a belief that the justice system has been weaponized against him.“The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” former Vice President Mike Pence told CNN.In some quarters, there was a darker reaction. On Fox News, the host Tucker Carlson said the ruling showed it was “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s.”“The rule of law appears to be suspended tonight — not just for Trump, but for anyone who would consider voting for him,” Mr. Carlson said. One of his guests, the conservative media figure Glenn Beck, predicted that the indictment would cause chaos in the years ahead.How the indictment affects Mr. Trump’s bid to remain the nation’s top Republican and capture the party’s 2024 presidential nomination may remain unclear for weeks, if not months. The Manhattan inquiry is one of four criminal investigations involving Mr. Trump, and the outcomes and cumulative political effects of those cases remain to be seen.But David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group seeking a replacement for Mr. Trump as the face of the Republican Party, said the indictment had already generated sympathy for the former president. Mr. McIntosh compared the case to “the old Soviet show trials” and argued that many Americans would view it similarly.“We’re crossing the Rubicon here by mixing politics and law enforcement,” he said in an interview. “It’s a huge, huge mistake and a threat to our democratic process. People can disagree about who our leaders should be, but we have a long tradition of not turning it into a criminal process.”Mr. Trump and his allies also believe the criminal charges carry political upside, at least in a primary race. The former president has spent much of the past two weeks on social media — and his speech on Saturday in Texas at the first major rally of his 2024 campaign — trying to amplify the outrage among his supporters. He had also sought to influence the ultimate decision by Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, on whether to bring charges.“This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s protests of an unfair justice system come after he repeatedly threatened or sought to employ his presidential powers to pursue his real and perceived enemies. He has also long sought to use the existence of investigations into political rivals as a cudgel against them, including in 2016, when he ran television ads declaring Hillary Clinton “unfit to serve” after being “crippled” by the investigation into her emails.And he has spent years persuading supporters to internalize political and legal threats to him as deeply personal attacks on them.In the last month, Mr. Trump improved his standing by 11 percentage points in a hypothetical primary field, according to a Fox News poll released Thursday. The poll found that Mr. Trump was favored by 54 percent of Republican voters, up from 43 percent last month.“It’s the craziest thing,” Mr. Trump said Saturday at his rally in Waco, Texas. “I got bad publicity and my poll numbers have gone through the roof. Would you explain this to me?”On CNN, Mr. Pence, who is considering a 2024 presidential bid, said the indictment had no bearing on his own decision about whether to run. He was one of the few prospective or official candidates to comment..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But the political effects for Mr. Trump could be determined in part by his response to the charges. His recent attempt to fight his legal battle on a political playing field has reignited the kind of behavior that tends to turn off moderate Republicans and independents. The defection of these voters from Mr. Trump, and from his preferred candidates and causes, has resulted in three consecutive disappointing election cycles for the party.Some Republicans, including former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, have said there are limits to the political benefit of an indictment.A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday found that 57 percent of Americans said that criminal charges should disqualify Mr. Trump from seeking office again, while 38 percent disagreed.On Thursday, Mr. Trump absorbed the news from Mar-a-Lago, his South Florida resort, after being informed by his lawyers, according to two Trump associates briefed on the matter.Even though the former president had incorrectly predicted he would be arrested nine days ago, the indictment caught his team off guard, according to several people close to the former president.Trump aides had believed reports by some news outlets that the grand jury in Manhattan was not working on the case on Thursday. Some advisers had been confident that there would be no movement until the end of April at the earliest and were looking at the political implications for Mr. DeSantis, who has not yet announced a campaign.Mr. Trump’s allies see the New York case as the most trivial, and had spent several days adamant that it was falling apart, without explaining why they believed this beyond faith in a defense witness.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, had faced pressure from Trump allies not to bring charges. Dave Sanders for The New York TimesEven the indictment will become the kind of spectacle Mr. Trump often seeks. His legal travails are likely to further suck up media oxygen and blot out other coverage of the presidential race, at a time when his closest prospective rival, Mr. DeSantis, is still introducing himself to voters around the country.“I believe this will help President Trump politically — but it’s horrible for our country and the judicial system,” Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and Trump ally, said in an interview. Mr. Trump has been briefed on the process he will now go through, and is expected to surrender next week, according to people familiar with the discussions.Conservative news networks were brimming with conversations about the mechanics of the indictment after it was announced — and what it meant for the presidential campaign.Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus Harvard law professor, said during an interview on Newsmax that a mug shot of Mr. Trump could serve as a campaign poster.“He will be mug-shot and fingerprinted,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “There’s really no way around that.”On “War Room,” a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, called for supporters to “peacefully protest.”Fox News and other conservative news networks were brimming with conversations about the mechanics of the indictment.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“We are going to see who are the politicians, who are the grifters, and who are the America First patriots,” Mr. Gorka said. “This is a time of sorting.”On Fox News, the host Jesse Watters said that “the country is not going to stand for it,” adding: “And people better be careful. And that’s all I’ll say about that.”Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia wrote on Twitter that “arresting a presidential candidate on a manufactured basis should not happen in America.”In Washington, Republicans continued to circle the wagons in defense of Mr. Trump.Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California said Mr. Bragg had “irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our presidential election.”“As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter. “The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”Representative Elise Stefanik, a top supporter of Mr. Trump and a member of the House Republican leadership, called for people to “peacefully organize,” a notable statement after Mr. Trump urged his supporters to protest ahead of an indictment. That call prompted concerns about echoes of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a pro-Trump mob.Mr. Trump did not reiterate his call for protests in his statement on Thursday.Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, took the extraordinary step last week to involve Congress in an open investigation by sending a letter, along with two other House Republican chairmen, demanding that Mr. Bragg provide communications, documents and testimony about his investigation.After the indictment was announced, Mr. Jordan tweeted one word in response to the news: “Outrageous.”Reporting was contributed by More