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      South Koreans Now Dislike China More Than They Dislike Japan

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      There is growing anti-China sentiment in South Korea, particularly among young voters. Conservative politicians are eager to turn the antipathy into a presidential election issue.SEOUL — The list of election issues set to define South Korea’s presidential race next year is long. The runaway housing prices, the pandemic, North Korea and gender inequality are a start. But an unlikely addition has also emerged in recent weeks: China.South Korea’s decision ​​to let the American military deploy a powerful antimissile radar system on its soil​ in 2017 has been the subject of frequent criticism from China. And last month, a presidential hopeful, Yoon Seok-youl, told the country to stop complaining, unless it wanted to remove its own ​radar systems near the Korean Peninsula.Political elites here are usually careful not to antagonize China, the country’s largest trading partner. But Mr. Yoon’s blunt rhetoric reflected a new phenomenon: a growing antipathy toward Beijing among South Koreans, particularly young voters whom conservative politicians are eager to win over.Anti-Chinese sentiment has grown so much this year that China has replaced Japan — the former colonial ruler — as the country regarded most unfavorably in South Korea, according to a ​joint ​survey by ​the polling company ​Hankook Research​ and the Korean newsmagazine SisaIN. In the same survey, South Koreans said they favored the United States over China six to one.Over 58 percent of the 1,000 respondents called China “close to evil” while only 4.5 percent said that it was “close to good.”Yoon Seok-youl, a conservative politician, on television during a press conference in Seoul in June. He has been openly critical of China.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressNegative views of China have deepened in other advanced countries as well, but among the 14 nations surveyed last year by Pew Research Center, South Korea was the only one in which younger people held more unfavorable views toward China than previous generations.“Until now, hating Japan was such a part of Korean national identity that we have a common saying: You know you are a real Korean when you ​feel hateful toward Japan for no particular reason,” said Jeong Han-wool, a chief analyst at Hankook Research​. “In our survey, people in their 40s and older still disliked Japan more than China. But those in their 20s and 30s, the generation who will lead South Korea in the coming decades, tipped the scale against China.”South Korea elects its next president in March, and observers are watching closely to see how younger people vote on the country’s policy toward Beijing.Conservatives in South Korea have called anything less than full-throated support of the alliance with Washington “pro-North Korean” and “pro-Chinese.” Progressives usually support reconciliation with North Korea and calls for diplomatic “autonomy” between the United States and China. Younger South Koreans have traditionally voted progressive, but millennials are breaking that pattern, and possibly turning into swing voters.An American military vehicle that was part of an antimissile radar system arriving in Seongju, South Korea, in 2017. China railed against South Korea over the deployment of the system.Reuters“We feel frustrated when we see our government act spineless while Beijing behaves like a bully,” said Chang Jae-min, a 29-year-old voter in Seoul. “But we also don’t want too much tension with China or North Korea.”For decades, South Korea has benefited from a military alliance with the United States while cultivating trade ties with China to fuel economic growth. But that balance has become increasingly difficult to maintain as relations between Washington and Beijing deteriorate.President Moon Jae-in’s conservative rivals, like Mr. Yoon, have complained that South Korea’s ambiguous policy on the United States and China made the country the “weakest link” in the American-led coalition of democracies working to confront Chinese aggression.“We cannot remain ambiguous,” Mr. Yoon told JoongAng Ilbo, a South Korean daily, last month during an interview in which he made his critical remarks about China.The conservative opposition has long accused Mr. Moon of being “pro-China.” His government has maintained that South Korea — like other American allies, including those in Europe — should avoid alienating either power. While South Koreans overwhelmingly support the alliance with Washington, the country’s trade with China is almost as big as its trade with the United States, Japan and the European Union combined.Chinese tourists in a shopping district in Seoul last year.Jean Chung for The New York Times“We cannot pick sides,” Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong has said.Yet when Mr. Moon met with President Biden in Washington in May, the two leaders emphasized the importance of preserving “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” and vowed to make their alliance “a linchpin for the regional and global order.” Many analysts saw the statement as a sign that South Korea was aligning itself more closely with Washington at the risk of irritating China, which has called Taiwan a red line.The main conservative opposition, the People Power Party, has already begun harnessing young voters’ anti-China sentiment to secure electoral wins.In April, young voters helped deliver landslide victories for the party in the mayoral races in South Korea’s two largest cities. Last month, the party’s young leader, Lee Jun-seok, 36, said his fellow South Korean millennials would fight against Chinese “cruelty” in places like Hong Kong and Xinjiang, where China has been accused of genocide.Older Koreans, while often anti-Communist, tend to respect Chinese culture, which influenced the Korean Peninsula for millenniums. They have also looked upon the country as a benign giant whose rapid economic growth was a boon for South Korean exporters. Younger South Koreans tend not to share that perspective.President Moon Jae-in of South Korea with President Biden during a press conference at the White House in May.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMost of them grew up proud of their homegrown economic and cultural successes. And as China’s foreign policy became more assertive under President Xi Jinping, they began to see the country’s authoritarianism as a threat to free society. They have also been critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus, its expansionism in the South China Sea and fine-dust pollution from China that regularly blankets Seoul.“They have grown up in a liberal environment the earlier generations built through sweat and blood, so they hold an inherent antipathy toward illiberal countries,” said Ahn Byong-jin, a political scientist at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. “They root for politicians who criticize China.”Nowhere has South Korea’s dilemma between Washington and Beijing been magnified more dramatically than over the deployment of the American antimissile radar, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD.When South Korean officials agreed to the deployment, they called it a necessity in defending against North Korea. China saw it as part of a continuing threat from the United States military presence in the region, and retaliated by curbing tourism to South Korea and boycotting the country’s cars, smartphones, shopping malls and TV shows.South Korean students demonstrated in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, outside the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, in 2019.Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHa Nam-suk, a professor of Chinese politics and economy at the University of Seoul, has monitored how deepening animosity toward Beijing has played out on and off campuses in recent years, as cash-starved South Korean universities began accepting more Chinese students.South Korean and Chinese students clashed over whether to support young pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, he said. They have also gotten into spats online over K-pop and kimchi. In March, many young South Koreans forced a TV station to cancel a drama series after it showed an ancient Korean king dining on Chinese dumplings.“As they watched what China did in places like Hong Kong,” Mr. Ha said, “Koreans began asking themselves what it would be like to live under a greater sphere of Chinese influence.” More

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      Can Gov. Gavin Newsom Keep His Job?

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      The vote is expected to come down to whether Democrats can mobilize enough of the state’s enormous base to counteract Republican enthusiasm for Gavin Newsom’s ouster.President Biden sent an urgent message last week to the most populous state in the nation: Keep Gov. Gavin Newsom “on the job.” On the airwaves, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the prominent progressive from Massachusetts, has been repeatedly warning that “Trump Republicans” are “coming to grab power in California.”Text messages — a half-million a day — are spreading the word on cellphones. Canvassers are making their case at suburban front doors. As some 22 million ballots land in the mailboxes of active registered voters this week in anticipation of the Sept. 14 recall election, Mr. Newsom — a Democrat elected in a 2018 landslide — has been pulling out all the stops just to hold on to his post.The vote is expected to come down to whether Democrats can mobilize enough of the state’s enormous base to counteract Republican enthusiasm for Mr. Newsom’s ouster. Recent polls of likely voters show a dead heat, despite math that suggests the governor should ultimately prevail.Less than a quarter of the electorate is Republican. Mr. Newsom has raised more campaign cash than all four dozen or so of his challengers put together. And the governor’s most serious rival is the talk radio host Larry Elder, who has called global warming “a crock,” says the minimum wage should be “zero-point-zero-zero,” and gave Stephen Miller, the hard-line Trump administration immigration adviser, his first big public platform.But the coronavirus pandemic has not been particularly governor-friendly. Polls this month show that approval for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is sagging as the state writhes under spiking deaths and hospitalizations. And Mr. Newsom’s supporters are encountering a striking degree of ambivalence and distraction.“I think he has done as well in the job as any governor could have, given the last year of the pandemic, but I’m not a fan,” Anamaria Young, 53, said recently in El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento. Removing the governor more than a year before the end of his first term feels undemocratic, Ms. Young, a Democrat, said, but she also dislikes his lack of progress on homelessness and his deference to teachers’ unions.“When my ballot comes,” she said, “I really don’t know how — or if — I am going to vote.”Only one other attempt to recall a California governor has come to a vote, when Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gray Davis in 2003.Mike Blake/ReutersInitiated by Republicans who took issue with Mr. Newsom on the death penalty and immigration, the once long-shot effort to recall the governor gained improbable traction as the coronavirus persisted. First, pandemic-related shutdowns prompted a judge to extend the measure’s signature-gathering deadline, and then word leaked that the governor had dined unmasked with lobbyists at an exclusive restaurant after imploring Californians to cover their faces and stay home.If a majority of voters decide to recall Mr. Newsom, the new governor will be whoever among his 46 challengers gets the most votes, even if no rival gets a majority.Critics of the state’s recall rules have long worried that 49 percent of the electorate could vote to keep an incumbent, only for a tiny plurality of voters to choose a replacement. On Friday, a lawsuit was filed in federal court challenging the recall’s constitutionality, based on that argument. Mr. Newsom has been urging Democrats to vote no on the recall and not even bother to answer the second question, which asks who should replace him. Among likely voters, recent polls show support for Mr. Elder, the current front-runner, at around 20 percent..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“No intellectually honest analysis” would predict the governor’s defeat, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan data firm Political Data Inc. in Sacramento. But state lawmakers in February extended pandemic-related accommodations to voters through the year, dealing a wild card.The rules allow voting by mail at a scale comparable only to the 2020 presidential election — which is seemingly a Democratic advantage, although off-year participation is harder to forecast. Only one other attempt to recall a California governor has come to a vote, and 18 years have passed since the state replaced Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Mitchell noted.“The swing voters in this campaign are not the usual ones choosing which party to vote for,” agreed Nathan Click, a former spokesman for the governor who is now campaigning to defend him. “They’re Democrats who are choosing whether to vote.”Mr. Elder, 69, a Black “small-l libertarian” lawyer who rose to national stature from Los Angeles, where he has been a talk radio fixture for decades, said in an interview that he was not “some wild-eyed radical,” and that he entered the race at the behest of “normal people” such as his barber and dry cleaner as well as like-minded friends such as Dennis Prager, his right-wing broadcast mentor. His priorities — public school choice, high housing costs and rising crime — transcend party labels, he said.Larry Elder, who has been a talk radio fixture in Los Angeles for decades, is the leading Republican candidate in the recall election.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressHe said his opposition to abortion was irrelevant in a state that supports abortion rights as much as California, and his view that a minimum wage deters job creation is mainstream economics. Remarks such as the one he made in 2008 on “Larry King Live” discounting global warming were merely to criticize “alarmism,” he said, acknowledging that climate change is happening but adding, falsely, that “nobody really knows to what degree” it is caused by humans.He said he has voted for every Republican presidential candidate since the 1970s, not just Donald J. Trump.“Why bring up Stephen Miller? Why bring up abortion? Why bring up minimum wage?” Mr. Elder said. “Because Gavin Newsom cannot defend his record.”Polls indicate that majorities of Californians approve of Mr. Newsom’s policies, but when surveys are narrowed to the most likely voters, his margin thins.A statewide poll in mid-July by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, found that likely voters were almost evenly split over whether to oust the governor, with 47 percent saying they would vote to recall him and 50 percent saying they would retain him, an edge that just barely exceeded the poll’s margin of error. Subsequent polls have affirmed those results.So Mr. Newsom has spent big to turn out his party’s 46 percent share of the voters. His recall defense campaign received some $46 million in contributions through July, far more than Mr. Elder ($4.5 million); Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego ($2.1 million); John Cox, the businessman campaigning with a bear ($9.4 million, mostly self-funded); the reality television figure and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner ($750,000); or any other candidate.Canvassers for an immigrant advocacy group pitched Mr. Newsom to voters in Palmdale, Calif., last month.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThe mere reminder that ballots are heading for mailboxes should turn many tuned-out Democrats into likely voters, Mr. Click said, and teams of supporters have been texting some 500,000 Democrats daily. Representative Barbara Lee, co-founder and the co-chair of the group Women Against the Recall, said the national Democratic Party is looking to such grass-roots efforts as a potential model for future campaigns.But Sonja Diaz, the director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Democrats seemed to be playing catch-up as the Delta variant preoccupied voters.“People have been procrastinating,” she said, comparing the governor’s team to overconfident students failing to study for a final. “Delta has made it clear you’re not prepared for the exam.”Northeast of Los Angeles, in Palmdale, canvassers for an immigrant advocacy group pitched the governor to voters last week.Ashley Reyes, 27, a registered Democrat who was watching her toddler and his cousins play in her gated driveway, said she did not realize the recall had qualified for the ballot. Her parents and in-laws were immigrants, she said, adding that she would vote to keep the governor.Ashley Reyes, a registered Democrat, said she would vote to keep the governor.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesPeering into 101-degree heat through his metal screen door, Edgar Robleto, 62, a Republican, replied “I want him gone” when the canvassers mentioned Mr. Newsom. The state G.O.P., which represents 24 candidates, voted last weekend against endorsing one contender, lest any Republican opt not to vote.Experts predict a slugfest. “Negative partisanship is the biggest driver of political decision-making right now,” said Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican adviser.David Townsend, a Democratic consultant, agreed: “This is going to be totally tribal.”“This is not going to be about Newsom,” he said. “It’s going to be about whether Democrats want Trump to have a governor in California.” More

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      Biden’s Honeymoon Is Over, and He Knows It

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      The first seven months of the Biden presidency have been easy compared with what’s coming down the pike.Key provisions of Covid relief legislation came to an end on Aug. 1, with more set to follow — including a cessation of moratoriums on evictions and mortgage foreclosures, termination of extended unemployment benefits (which carried $300-a-week supplemental payments) and a stop to enhanced food stamp subsidies and student loan forbearance.The prospect of millions of families forced from their homes as Covid variants infect growing numbers of people provoked frenzied attempts by the White House and congressional Democrats to take emergency steps to halt or ameliorate the potential chaos and a possible tragedy of national proportions.On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a 60-day freeze on evictions — although the order faces possible rejection by the courts.“Any call for a moratorium, based on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, is likely to face obstacles,” Biden told reporters, adding that the “bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”In a June report, the Census Bureau found that 1,401,801 people 18 and older living in rental housing were “very likely” to be evicted and 2,248,120 were “somewhat likely.” In addition, 345,556 people were “very likely” to lose their homes through mortgage foreclosure, and 746,030 were “somewhat likely” to face foreclosure and the loss of their homes. The combined total was 4.7 million adults.The eviction crisis has come at a time when an additional series of potentially damaging developments have come to the fore.The rate of inflation has been rising at its fastest pace in over a decade — to 5.4 percent in June, from 1.4 percent in January when Biden took office, with no end in sight. The number of homicides grew by 25 percent from 2019 to 2020, and the 2021 rate, 6.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, is on track to become, according to The Washington Post, “the highest recorded in the United States in more than 20 years.”The number of illegal border crossings has more than doubled during Biden’s seven months in office, raising the potential for immigration to become a central campaign issue once again, both next year and in 2024.U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that in June of this year the enforcement agency “encountered 188,829 persons attempting entry along the Southwest Border,” a 142 percent increase from the 78,000 in January 2021 when Biden assumed the presidency.As the 2022 and 2024 elections get closer, Biden is in a race to keep public attention on policies and initiatives favorable to the Democratic Party and its candidates against the continuing threat that inflation, crime, urban disorder and illegal immigration — all issues that favor the Republican Party — take center stage.The danger for Biden if crime and immigration become a primary focus of public attention is clear in polling data. The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent polls shows Biden’s favorability at plus 7.5 points (51.1 positive and 43.6 negative) and that the public generally approves of his handling of the Covid pandemic, of jobs, of the economy and of the environment.Regarding Biden’s handling of crime and immigration, however, the numbers go negative. In the July 17-20 Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of voters approved of his handling of crime, and 45 percent disapproved. In the Economist/YouGov poll taken a week later, Biden’s numbers on immigration were worse: 35 approving, 50 disapproving.The Biden administration has initiated a set of programs designed to “stem the flow of guns into the hands of those responsible for violence” — the centerpiece of its anti-crime program — but the Economist/YouGov poll found in its July 24-27 survey that 30 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of gun issues while 48 percent disapproveWhat does this all portend? Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:The Biden administration has done a good job so far avoiding hard-to-defend, controversial positions on Republican hot button issues. That is really all they need to do. It is more likely that Covid and economic conditions will matter more in determining the Democratic Party’s fate in November.Cain argues thatthe best defense for the Democrats is to go on the offense in 2022 and remind voters about who Trump is and what the Republican Party has become. The resistance to supporting vaccination among Trumpist Republican officials could hurt the party’s national image substantially in 2022 if the unvaccinated are to blame for our inability to put this issue behind us.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, has a very different take. In an email he wrote:The Democrats have lost a great deal of credibility when it comes to crime and policing by thoughtlessly adopting slogans like ‘defund the police’ without considering what the phrase means, how policies based on the idea might lead to surges in crime, or how the slogan might backfire in the face of rising crime and lawlessness.Biden, Westwood continued,was smart to distance himself from these factions, but many of those he needs in Congress and in state houses have been much less careful. Without a serious repositioning on criminal justice policies, the Democrats face the midterms with a gaping self-inflicted wound.Biden received a lift last week in keeping a bread-and-butter agenda front and center from an unexpected source, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. McConnell abandoned his Dr. No stance toward all things Democratic and joined 16 fellow Republicans in support of a key motion to take up a $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill. If enacted into law, the measure would legitimize Biden’s claim that he is capable of restoring a semblance of bipartisanship in the nation’s capital.McConnell has not fully explained his political reasoning, but his tactical shift suggests that he thinks the wind remains at Biden’s back, making the Republican strategy of destruction a much riskier proposition, at least for the moment.Early indicators suggest that in some ways Biden has yet to face the kind of voter opposition that characterized the administrations of his predecessors from both parties at this stage in their presidencies.Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, tweeted on Aug. 2:Still no sign of strong grassroots or conservative media opposition focused on Biden or congressional agenda At this point in Obama admin, it was clear August congressional recess would be full of boisterous town halls. Infrastructure doesn’t get base animated.Similarly, G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist for The Economist, wrote on Aug. 1 that there is a long-term “trend by which the people react in a thermostatic manner against the party in power,” with the public mood shifting to the right during Democratic presidencies and to the left during Republican presidencies.So far during the Biden presidency, Morris wrote, the expected tilt toward conservatism has not materialized:Where we go from here is a big question. As stated, the thermostatic model would predict a reversion in 2021 in the conservative direction. But the issue remains open; the public has not appeared very thermostatic on, say, immigration policy over the last year, and their demand for public spending is still very high.The trickiest issues facing the Biden administration are crime and urban disorder because these are issues that play to the advantage of conservatives, who have demonstrated expertise in weaponizing them.The June 29-July 6 USA Today/Ipsos poll found that “concerns about crime and gun violence have surged to the top of issues that worry Americans” and, in an ominous note for the Biden administration,Crime and public safety is the issue on which the Republican Party now holds its strongest advantage. By 32 percent to 24 percent, those polled said the G.O.P. was better at handling crime.There is considerable disagreement over the optimal strategy for Democrats to adopt when addressing crime — along with widespread concern over the party’s credibility on the issue itself.Rebecca Goldstein, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, emailed to say that she believes “the Biden Administration has correctly read the political winds by doubling the amount they are requesting for police hiring grants in 2022 compared to the 2021 appropriation, and also requesting eight-figure sums for police training and body-worn cameras.”These initiatives, Goldstein continued, are “not the outcome that any of last summer’s activists would have wanted. But the Biden Administration has realized that some of those proposals, particularly defunding or abolishing police agencies, were politically dead on arrival.”The crucial question, in Goldstein’s view, iswhether the administration will be able to convincingly advertise its support for police, and for police oversight and reform, while neither alienating some of the activists who mobilized to help Biden win in 2020 and might be put off from putting in the same sweat equity in 2022 or 2024, nor succumbing to the longstanding critique from the right that Democrats are “soft on crime.” This is a tightrope that even the most skilled politician might not be able to walk.Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, argued in an email that trying to engage voters on crime and other issues that have worked to the advantage of the Republican Party in the past is a fool’s errand:The Democratic Party has been losing voters who want economic benefits from the federal government but who are supporting Republican candidates because of their conservative positions on social and cultural issues. Biden can’t win back voters by engaging on these issues. Any positions he takes will raise the salience of these issues and that’s not helpful for him.Crime and policing, Feldman noted,are largely local concerns. Immigration is a potential minefield so the best he can do is to try to keep it from becoming a major media story. Given his limited options, any attempt to address these concerns would just give Republicans an opportunity to portray him in an unfavorable light. Providing concrete economic benefits to people while reducing the volume on social/cultural issues is the best way forward in 2022 and 2024.Aaron Chalfin, a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that engaging the debate over crime is inherently risky for Democrats:In my view, the political liabilities for the Democrats are probably fairly substantial. The surge in violence is rapid and has reversed 20 years of progress in just 18 short months. While I think the cause of the violence has little to do with Democratic political priorities at the national level, it seems likely that the Democrats will be held to account given the rhetoric around “Defund” that is associated with the left wing of the party.Lawrence Sherman, director of the Cambridge Center for Evidence-Based Policing at the University of Cambridge, agrees that “the greatest threat to Biden on policing and disorder comes from the left,” but he differs from some of his colleagues in arguing that Biden should take the issues of crime and urban dysfunction head on.Sherman contends that public anxieties over crime are just one part of a larger, more comprehensive “fear of chaos.” In that more expansive context, Sherman continued, Biden has strengthened his credentials as an adversary of disorder through his workon Covid and the economy, for which his competence grows more impressive daily in comparison to Trump’s. Climate change will also become a bigger issue (favoring Biden) for the swing vote, with smoke, heat and floods proving more scary than an unprecedented spike in murders. In a politics of fear, the targets of fear become identified with different candidates, and Biden’s fears now seem paramount: Covid, Climate and Chaos.Trump’s actions leading up to and during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump loyalists seeking to disrupt the vote count have opened the door for Biden to take the initiative on law and order and, in doing so, to counter the image of the Democratic Party as soft on crime, Sherman argued:“After what Trump did on Jan. 6, Biden has been able to stress his own historic support for the police as emblematic of his opposition to chaos,” Sherman wrote in an email:The “defund the police” movement probably did help to lose Dem seats in the House in 2020, and may increasingly be blamed for the huge spike in violent crime. But as long as Biden remains strong in his position that policing “works” to prevent crime, and that it is essential to saving Black lives, he will attract the suburban swing vote.Biden should take the initiative, Sherman argues, with “a major policing initiative,” and that initiative should stress “hot spots policing,” the focusing of police resources on small sections of urban areas, “under 5 percent of land in most cities,” while “pulling way back on stop and frisk everywhere else, especially suburban traffic stops, like the late Sandra Bland.”Biden goes into battle with one crucial advantage: He, his appointees and his advisers have more experience in the trenches of elections, legislative fights and bureaucratic maneuvering than the top personnel of any recent administration.On the other hand, if what his voters need is equality — that is, resource redistribution — experienced advisers may not be enough.Mart Trasberg and Hector Bahamonde, of Wake Forest University and the Universidad de O’Higgins in Chile, authors of “Inclusive institutions, unequal outcomes: Democracy, state capacity, and income inequality,” pointed out in an email that redistribution is exceptionally hard to achieve in an advanced democracy like the one in operation in the United States:The increase in inequality through market processes puts pressure on fiscal policy, making it difficult to increase redistribution via taxes and transfers. With increasing foreign investment flows and more developed financial sectors, domestic and international corporate and financial elites become stronger actors in domestic politics. Given that these changes are slow-moving and incremental, disorganized voters are not able to vote for a higher taxation of income-concentrating elites. Of course, other mechanisms are likely at play: political elites trick voters to vote on identity issues that do not concern socio-economic redistribution.In the end, much of the dynamism that powers today’s political competition comes back to — or down to — racial and cultural conflict. Can Biden find a redistributive workaround — and protect voting rights at the same time? The fate of the Democratic Party depends on it.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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      Michael Wolff: I'm Sure Trump Will Run for President in 2024

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      To write three books in four years about Donald Trump has been an immersion into his obsessions and fixations. This is why I know the obvious: Donald Trump will run for president again.This spring, in another of his compulsive bids for attention — indifferent to whether it is good or bad — he hosted me at Mar-a-Lago, even after I had written two unflattering books about him (one whose publication he tried to stop), for an interview and dinner. After dinner, I asked about his plans for a presidential library, the traditional retirement project and fund-raising scheme of ex-presidents. There was a flash of confusion on his uniquely readable face, and then anger, aroused, I figured, by the implication of what I seemed to be saying — that his time in office was past.“No way, no way,” he snarled, “no way.”It is an existential predicament: He can’t be Donald Trump without a claim on the presidency. He can’t hold the attention and devotion of the Republican Party if he is not both once and future king — and why would he ever give that up? Indeed, it seemed to be that I was strategically seated in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago when I arrived precisely so I could overhear the efforts by a Republican delegation to court and grovel before Mr. Trump and to observe his dismissive dominance over them.More than a bit of his subsequent conversation with me was about his contempt for any Republican who might be less than absolute in his or her devotion to him — after all, he had the power to make or break the people who have since disappointed him (like Senator Mitch McConnell and Justice Brett Kavanaugh). He seemed not so much paranoid about challenges to him but warlike, savoring his future retributions.He repeatedly returns to his grudge against his once obsequious vice president with relish; Mike Pence has become more public about his own political ambitions. In his telling, it is Mr. Pence whose actions confirmed “the steal,” by his refusal to overturn the electoral vote count, over which he presided in January in the Senate. I believe he will run again just to stop the men who, in his view, helped take the presidency from him from trying to get it for themselves. The reports that reach him of the West Wing and members of his administration who refuse to subscribe to the idea of “the steal” only feeds his fury and determination to punish all doubters — “some very weak people who have worked for me but won’t in the future,” as he told me.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has become another frequent subject at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where the former president is spending the summer away from the Florida heat. Many members of Trumpworld believe Mr. DeSantis, who came in second to Mr. Trump in a CPAC straw poll this month, might, unbelievably, run for the 2024 nomination even if Mr. Trump runs. The idea that Mr. DeSantis, who Mr. Trump believes he “made” by his endorsement, might not accept his dependence on and obligation to Mr. Trump would be a personal affront that must be met. Mr. Trump pointedly blew off the governor’s request that he postpone a Florida rally in the aftermath of the Surfside building collapse. Clear message: The governor is not the boss of him. (Mr. DeSantis has denied making this request.)The continued career of Mr. McConnell, to whom Mr. Trump has not spoken since vilifying him with a heap of obscenity after Mr. McConnell acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory, is unfinished business. (Trump aides believe the two are likely to never speak again.)Mr. Trump believes that Mr. McConnell retained his Senate seat in 2020 only because of his support. The war against Mr. McConnell is a war about who controls the Republican Party — if it’s Mr. Trump’s party, it can’t be Mr. McConnell’s. If candidates win because of his endorsements, thereby making Mr. Trump himself the ultimate winner, and inevitable front-runner, then it’s surely his party. Mr. Trump, whose political muscle helped oust some Republican enemies from office in 2018, is confident about evicting Mr. McConnell once back in power. (I doubt he pays attention to the fact that Mr. McConnell was re-elected to a six-year term and has a reasonable chance of becoming the Senate majority leader again.)Many Democrats believe that the legal pursuit of the former president’s family business in New York, and other cases, including the investigation of his attempt to overturn election results in Georgia, might seriously impede his political future. But in Mr. Trump’s logic, this will run the opposite way: Running for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.Mr. Trump also believes he has a magic bullet. In his telling, the Republicans almost took back the House in 2020 because of his “telerallies,” telephone conference calls in congressional districts that attracted in some instances tens of thousands of callers. Who has that draw? he asked me, nearly smacking his lips. In 2022, with his draw, the Republicans, he is certain, will retake the House with his chosen slate of candidates. And indeed, this actually might be true.But perhaps most important, there is his classic hucksterism, and his synoptic U.S.P. — unique selling proposition. In 2016 it was “the wall.” For 2022 and 2024 he will have another proposition available: “the steal,” a rallying cry of rage and simplicity.For Democrats, who see him exiled to Mar-a-Lago, stripped of his key social media platforms and facing determined prosecutors, his future seems risible if not pathetic. But this is Donald Trump, always ready to strike back harder than he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to silence any doubts with the sound of his own voice, to take what he believes is his and, most of all, to seize all available attention. Sound the alarm.Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is a journalist and the author, most recently, of “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”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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      German Candidates Fail to Find Footing in Flood Response

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      So far, none of the main contenders to replace Angela Merkel have come across as strong leaders in the aftermath of floods that killed 170 people and caused billions in damages.BERLIN — Floods have had a way of reshaping German politics.Helmut Schmidt made a name for himself responding to deadly floods in Hamburg in 1962, and went on to become chancellor in the 1970s. Images of Gerhard Schröder wading through muddy water along the Elbe River in 2002 are credited with helping him win another term.The floods that ravaged Germany last week — more severe than any in centuries — are already doing their work in this election year. But the striking thing they have revealed, political analysts say, is that none of the major candidates has been able to demonstrate the level of leadership in a crisis the public has grown accustomed to under Chancellor Angela Merkel.While the deadly flash floods have offered the candidates a chance to show their stuff, political experts said that each has struggled to communicate competence and reassurance. Voters seem to agree.The first poll since the flooding showed a drop in popularity for the two leading candidates — the conservative Armin Laschet and his Green party rival, Annalena Baerbock — after what political experts say have been lackluster performances by both this week.“This will not be an election in which the candidates play a deciding role,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at the University of Trier. “None of the candidates have the kind of overwhelming charisma that is able to fully convince voters.”The floods have killed 170 people, with more than 150 still unaccounted for, the police said on Wednesday. The number of missing is significantly lower than figures announced last week, when downed communication networks and blocked roads rendered many people unreachable.In the latest polling, which was carried out from Tuesday to Sunday, Mr. Laschet’s leading Christian Democratic Union dipped below 30 percent support, to 28 percent, while their main rivals, the second-place Greens, held steady at 19 percent.When asked if they could vote for an individual candidate (Germans cast votes only for parties), which one would receive their endorsement, only 23 percent said Mr. Laschet, according to the survey by the Forsa polling group.On Saturday, Mr. Laschet came under fierce public criticism after he was caught on camera chatting and laughing with colleagues, while President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was giving a solemn statement to reporters after the two had met with flood victims in the city of Erftstadt.Mr. Laschet, 60, who is the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, was forced to apologize. On Tuesday he visited another devastated town alongside the chancellor.Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party’s chancellor candidate, Armin Laschet, behind her, visiting the flood-ravaged city of Iversheim on Tuesday. The town is in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Mr. Laschet is governor.Pool photo by Wolfgang RattayIf there is one thing Ms. Merkel has learned in her four terms in offices, it is how to be calm in the face of calamity — whether pledging to keep Germans’ savings safe in 2008, or wading through the flooded streets of eastern Germany five years later.Standing beside her Tuesday after meeting with volunteers in the city of Bad Münstereifel, Mr. Laschet tried a more statesmanlike tone. He offered an open ear and a supportive clap on the shoulder to people cleaning the mud and debris from their homes, as well as condolences for victims.“Nothing we can do can bring them back, and we barely have words for the suffering of those who survived,” he said, pledging to double his state’s contribution to emergency aid. “So that we, too, are doing our part,” he said.Ms. Merkel’s government on Wednesday approved a 200 million euro, or $235 million, package of emergency assistance to be paid out to flood victims immediately. That figure will be matched by the affected states.An estimated 6 billion euros, $7 billion, will be needed to repair the infrastructure that has been damaged, including roads, bridges, homes and buildings.Much of that money will flow through the finance ministry run by Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who is also running for chancellor. Getting financial aid to people quickly could give him an edge, but so far he has failed to translate his position into a political advantage, experts say.“If we need more money, then we will make it available,” Mr. Scholz, 63, told reporters in Berlin, “We will do what we have to do to help everyone who needs it.”Markus Söder, Bavaria’s governor, right, and Olaf Scholz, the country’s finance minister and another chancellor candidate, visited the municipality of Schoenau am Koenigssee on Sunday.Lukas Barth-Tuttas/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Scholz visited stricken communities in Rhineland-Palatinate last week and then headed to the southern state of Bavaria just days after the heavy rains stopped there. But he has failed to connect with voters in a meaningful way, experts said. His party gained only 1 percentage point in the most recent survey and Mr. Scholz’s personal popularity remained unchanged.“He is a candidate that people just can’t really warm up to,” Mr. Jun said.But if any party should be in a position to find a political advantage in the events of the past week, it should be the Greens, who have been pushing for Germany to speed up its transformation to a green economy for decades.Especially popular among the country’s younger voters, climate issues have helped the Greens to replace the Social Democrats as the second most popular party in recent years. But after their candidate for chancellor, Ms. Baerbock, 40, stumbled over accusations of plagiarism in a recently published book and inaccuracies on her résumé, even a deadly weather catastrophe appeared unable to lift the party’s standing significantly.The Greens remained firmly in second place, according to the most recent poll, with 19 percent support — enough to create a majority if they were to agree to join forces in a government led by Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, in a tie-up that many observers believe would be the most likely coalition.Making Ms. Baerbock’s position more difficult is the fact that she currently does not hold a political office that would give her the opportunity to make a public visit to the stricken regions, as do both of her competitors. Last week she decided against taking members of the news media with her when she visited communities in Rhineland-Palatinate afflicted by the severe weather.In several interviews afterward, Ms. Baerbock called for Germany to move more quickly on its exit from coal, currently planned for 2030, and to increase spending to better prepare communities for the dangers posed by extreme weather. She also laid out a three-point plan that included adapting to the changing climate, amid attempts to halt it.“This is not an either-or between climate precaution, climate adaptation and climate protection, but a triad that is actually decided in the same way in all the climate protection treaties worldwide,” Ms. Baerbock told ARD public television.In the wake of last week’s flooding, the Greens are no longer the only party making such calls, but as the images of devastation retreat from the headlines, her party remains in the strongest position to gain voters from the renewed focus on the threat posed by changes to the world’s climate.“I assume that the weather events will indeed raise the issue of climate change to the top of the electorate’s agenda, which will help the Greens,” said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy of Political Education in Tützing, but added that it would not be enough of an advantage to close the gap with the leading conservatives. “It still won’t help Ms. Baerbock into the chancellor’s office.” More

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      Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

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      The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      Why America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More