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    En Los Ángeles, la política es más compleja que el escándalo racista

    El audio filtrado de líderes latinos que usan un lenguaje racista también expuso su ambición de acumular más poder. Sin embargo, en el distrito más latino de la ciudad, han apoyado a candidatos negros.LOS ÁNGELES — Aunque en algún momento llegó a ser un sinónimo de la cultura negra, el sur de Los Ángeles ha experimentado un cambio demográfico dramático.Ahora hay misas católicas en español en el teatro donde Duke Ellington solía presentarse. En los pasillos de la escuela secundaria Thomas Jefferson, cuyos famosos exalumnos negros incluyen a Alvin Ailey y Dexter Gordon, aproximadamente nueve de cada 10 estudiantes son hispanos. En la histórica Central Avenue, la música ranchera resuena en las tiendas de comestibles.Pero en el Noveno Distrito de la ciudad, que abarca el tramo de Los Ángeles que alguna vez se conoció como South Central, hay un elemento que no ha cambiado: los votantes han elegido candidatos negros para integrar el Concejo Municipal durante casi seis décadas, incluido su actual concejal, Curren Price.En una grabación filtrada que ha trastornado la escena política de Los Ángeles este mes, se escuchó a cuatro líderes latinos discutiendo sobre cómo rediseñar los distritos políticos para su beneficio, usando términos racistas y palabras despectivas que fueron ampliamente condenadas. El audio también expuso las frustraciones de que no haya más latinos en cargos electos, en un momento en que representan la mitad de la población de la ciudad.Décadas de acuerdos y decisiones políticas han dado como resultado la composición actual del Concejo Municipal, donde los líderes blancos y negros ocupan más escaños de lo que podrían sugerir los datos demográficos. La divulgación de la grabación también ha abierto un debate sobre cuánto importan las políticas de bloques raciales de generaciones anteriores.La participación electoral en el Noveno Distrito es baja y algunos residentes dijeron que prestan poca atención a la política de la ciudad, a pesar de sus preocupaciones cotidianas por los delitos y la falta de vivienda. Mientras llevaba a casa a su hijo de 8 años que había salido de la escuela en el sur de Los Ángeles, María Robles, de 30 años, se preguntaba qué harán los políticos locales para resolver los problemas.“No voto, simplemente no lo hago”, dijo. “No creo que ningún político esté representando a los latinos. No nos defienden”.Sin embargo, en los círculos políticos de la ciudad, la brecha entre la población latina y su nivel de influencia ha sido un viejo problema. En ninguna parte es más evidente que en el Noveno Distrito, donde el 80 por ciento de los residentes son latinos.“La gente se siente incómoda hablando de esto, pero los latinos en Los Ángeles están subrepresentados”, dijo Fernando Guerra, director del Centro para el Estudio de Los Ángeles en la Universidad Loyola Marymount. Guerra realiza encuestas y grupos de discusión con residentes de la ciudad, y dijo que “cuando hablamos con los latinos en esas comunidades, les gustaría tener representación latina”.En la década de 1980, aumentó la cantidad de inmigrantes latinos que se mudaron al sur de Los Ángeles, huyendo de las guerras civiles centroamericanas y la perturbación económica de México. Al mismo tiempo, los trabajos de manufactura estaban desapareciendo, la violencia de las pandillas y las drogas proliferaba, y la clase media negra se estaba mudando a otros lugares. Para 1990, según los datos del censo analizados por SocialExplorer.com, por primera vez más de la mitad de los residentes de la zona eran latinos.María Robles, de 30 años, y su hijo Alex Salgado, de 8, caminan por el Noveno Distrito de Los ÁngelesLauren Justice para The New York TimesA menudo, la representación política va a la zaga del cambio demográfico, y Los Ángeles no ha sido la excepción. En algunos casos, los líderes latinos llegaron a acuerdos de beneficio mutuo para preservar los límites del distrito que protegían a sus colegas negros. En otros, el movimiento laboral mayoritariamente latino de Los Ángeles ha respaldado a los líderes negros confiables y establecidos por encima de los contrincantes latinos que no habían ocupado cargos públicos. Los miembros del sindicato brindan el apoyo voluntario y económico necesario para atraer votantes a las elecciones locales en las que, de otro modo, la participación podría ser mediocre en una ciudad grande y transitoria.Ahora los residentes latinos constituyen el grupo étnico más grande en 10 de los 15 distritos municipales de la ciudad, según datos de las autoridades. Pero su participación en la población votante elegible es menor que su participación en la población general, una brecha que reduce su poder electoral.Incluso antes de que Nury Martinez, una demócrata latina, renunciara como presidenta del Concejo Municipal y dejara su escaño en el Concejo la semana pasada debido al alboroto por la grabación de audio, solo cuatro de los quince escaños del Concejo estaban ocupados por latinos.La conversación filtrada ha tenido el efecto de reducir el poder de los latinos, al menos temporalmente. El martes, Martinez fue remplazada como presidenta por Paul Krekorian, un armenio estadounidense. Los otros dos miembros que se escuchan en la grabación, Gil Cedillo y Kevin de León, han sido despojados de sus tareas de comité y no han asistido a las reuniones durante una semana.El Noveno Distrito era considerado un escaño latino en la década de 1950, cuando Edward R. Roybal se convirtió en el primer concejal latino de la ciudad desde fines del siglo XIX. Cuando Roybal fue al Congreso en 1962, se nombró a Gilbert W. Lindsay, un organizador comunitario negro con fuertes lazos laborales, para remplazarlo. Lindsay se convirtió en uno de los políticos más poderosos de la ciudad, rigió durante tres décadas y se autodenominó como “el Emperador del Gran Noveno”. Sus tres sucesores en el Concejo han sido negros.Curren Price ha representado al Noveno Distrito desde 2013.Tracy Nguyen para The New York TimesCuando Price, un demócrata a favor de los trabajadores y exlegislador estatal, se postuló por primera vez para el escaño del Noveno Distrito en 2013, el millón de dólares que recaudó en contribuciones directas a la campaña se complementó con unos 700.000 dólares que los grupos laborales gastaron de forma independiente para apoyarlo.Los líderes laborales han respaldado a Price, para consternación de los retadores que pensaron que había llegado el momento de la representación latina.“Le dije a la gente que me iba a postular y me miraron como si tuviera covid”, dijo Jorge Nuño, de 45 años, activista local y propietario de una pequeña empresa que creció en el Noveno Distrito y perdió ante Price en la elecciones de 2017. “Me dijeron: ‘No, hombre, no lo hagas, los sindicatos van a quedarse con Curren’”.Dulce Vasquez, de 36 años, administradora universitaria y demócrata progresista que lo desafió este año, recibió más de 500.000 dólares en apoyo total, pero fue solo alrededor de un tercio de lo que consiguió Price, y no pudo competir con los bancos telefónicos del sindicato y los activistas que lo respaldaban.Price también recibió el respaldo de sus cuatro colegas latinos en el Concejo en su campaña contra Vásquez. Ganó abrumadoramente su tercer mandato en junio.Sin embargo, al caminar por las comunidades, Nuño y Vasquez dijeron que encontraron una sed genuina de conexión cultural entre los votantes latinos. “La gente quiere ver un liderazgo que se parezca a ellos”, dijo Nuño. “Quieren a alguien que, por ejemplo, pueda ir a sus salas de estar y tomar pan con café”.Ambos predijeron que los líderes sindicales respaldarán a un candidato latino cuando Price, de 71 años, deje el cargo. El veterano político está entrando en su mandato final de cuatro años bajo las reglas de límites de mandato de la ciudad. En otra grabación filtrada, Ron Herrera, quien desde entonces renunció como titular de la Federación del Trabajo, se refirió a esa posibilidad. Cuando se le preguntó acerca de encontrar un candidato latino para suceder a Price, dijo: “Tenemos a alguien”.Price, un abogado educado en Stanford y oriundo de Los Ángeles que también trabajó en el Concejo Municipal de Inglewood, dijo que el cuarto de millón de personas que viven en el Noveno Distrito lo han mantenido en el cargo porque comprende sus problemas básicos.La semana pasada, afuera de su oficina en Central Avenue, un mercado de agricultores ofrecía fresas, tarros de miel, cartones de huevos y consejos sobre el compostaje. El concejal dijo que expandir el mercado fue idea suya para traer productos y brindarles a las personas un lugar para reunirse y encontrar información sobre cupones de alimentos y recursos comunitarios.Al otro lado de la calle, todos los días, hay un mercado informal donde los comerciantes latinos venden mazorcas de maíz, bolsas de duros, ropa y juguetes alrededor del estacionamiento de una tienda departamental de descuento. Mientras paseaba por esa zona, Price los miró y dijo que también eran bienvenidos.Señaló carteles que presentan detalles en inglés y español sobre puntos de referencia del apogeo del área como un centro próspero para la comunidad negra: el Teatro Lincoln en la calle 23, apodado el “Apolo de la Costa Oeste” en referencia al famoso lugar de entretenimiento negro en Harlem. La Asociación de Ahorros y Préstamos de Liberty, una empresa de propiedad negra que ofrecía hipotecas a los residentes locales cuando los prestamistas blancos no lo hacían.“No es solo para los negros”, dijo Price sobre los hitos históricos. “También es para que la gente morena entienda nuestra historia”.La joya de la corona fue el Hotel Dunbar, donde grandes artistas como Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne y Ellington se hospedaron cuando atraían multitudes de personas afroestadounidenses a sus presentaciones en Los Ángeles, pero no se les permitía quedarse en hoteles para blancos. Dunbar sirve ahora como vivienda asequible para personas mayores.Tiendas de campaña para las personas sin hogar junto a la Iglesia de Jesucristo Judá.Lauren Justice para The New York TimesSin embargo, José Andrade, un músico de mariachi, se quejó de que el ayuntamiento no había respondido a las solicitudes para instalar topes de velocidad en las calles residenciales para impedir las carreras callejeras. “Estos muchachos corren como si estuvieran en la autopista”, dijo, “y nadie está haciendo nada al respecto”.Nacido en El Salvador, Andrade dijo que emigró con su esposa, Iris, a Los Ángeles en 1983 y se establecieron en el Noveno Distrito porque no podían pagar los alquileres en otros lugares de la ciudad.“Había pandillas en cada esquina”, dijo sobre esos días, mientras paseaba por los pasillos de una tienda de comestibles en Central Avenue y hablaba sobre la música mexicana. “Vivías con miedo de que te asaltaran o te robaran”.Las familias negras pudientes empacaron sus pertenencias y se mudaron a San Bernardino o Antelope Valley, donde las casas eran más grandes y las calles más seguras. Llegaron más inmigrantes, atraídos por los precios más bajos de las viviendas en la localidad. La economía comenzó a mejorar, impulsada por el auge tecnológico de California. Y, por diversas razones, las tasas de criminalidad cayeron.Para el año 2000, Andrade había comprado una casa de tres dormitorios por 170.000 dólares que alguna vez estuvo ocupada por una familia negra. Plantó árboles de limón, aguacate y mango y construyó dos apartamentos en la parte de atrás, que alquila a inmigrantes. Tres de sus cuatro hijos adultos han dejado el vecindario para ir a la universidad y dedicarse a sus carreras profesionales.Andrade se convirtió en ciudadano estadounidense hace unos años y dijo que no votó por Price porque no confiaba en el concejal.Leobardo Juan Camilo, carnicero en Laguna Market, uno de muchos comercios latinos en la Avenida Central Avenue en el Noveno DistritoLauren Justice para The New York TimesPrice reconoció que satisfacer las necesidades de su distrito ha sido un trabajo inacabado. De alrededor de 100.000 votantes registrados en el distrito, solo unos 12.500 votaron en las primarias de febrero en las que fue elegido.“Muchas veces, la gente dice: ‘Oye, tengo que asistir a mi tercer trabajo, no tengo tiempo para ir a una reunión, o no tengo tiempo para presentar una queja porque, de todos modos, nada va a pasar’”, dijo Price.Elmer Roldán, un guatemalteco estadounidense, se instaló en el vecindario en 1989. Dijo que durante mucho tiempo los residentes del Noveno Distrito han deseado más parques y tiendas de comestibles, y que sentía que la zona de la ciudad cerca de la Universidad del Sur de California recibía muchos recursos y atención.Sin embargo, Roldán comentó que la raza de su concejal no tiene nada que ver con el estado del vecindario. Dijo que los residentes latinos deberían asociarse con las personas negras “que tienen más cosas en común con nosotros, tanto política como económicamente”.“Los latinos no creen que no están recibiendo ayuda porque Curren Price sea negro”, dijo Roldan, quien votó por Price. “Sienten que los políticos, sin importar quiénes sean, no responden a las necesidades del vecindario”.“No creo que tener un integrante latino del Concejo cambie estas condiciones”, agregó.Mientras Price volvía caminando a su oficina, los electores que le hicieron señas tenían mucho que decir. Una mujer que vendía pozole y mojarras fritas afuera de una tienda que ofrece clases de zumba le informó que una luz urbana se había apagado cerca y estaba preocupada por la seguridad. Otro estaba preocupado por un farol de otra cuadra y quería que se instalara un semáforo.Le hablaban en español. Una vocera, que caminaba con Price, le tradujo lo que decían los vecinos.Corina Knoll es la jefa de la corresponsalía en Los Ángeles. Fue reportera en la sección Metro y antes trabajó más de una década en The Los Angeles Times, donde colaboró con dos Premios Pulitzer y participó en la investigación sobre cómo una lista secreta de oficiales problemáticos de un alguacil de condado obstruyó la justicia. @corinaknollShawn Hubler es corresponsal en California con sede en Sacramento. Antes de unirse al Times en 2020, pasó casi dos décadas cubriendo el estado para Los Angeles Times como reportera itinerante, columnista y escritora de revista. Compartió tres premios Pulitzer con el equipo Metro del periódico. @ShawnHublerMiriam Jordan es corresponsal en la sección Nacional. Cubre el impacto de la migración en la sociedad, la cultura y la economía de Estados Unidos. Antes de unirse al Times, cubrió inmigración por más de una década en el Wall Street Journal y fue corresponsal en Brasil, Israel, Hong Kong e India. More

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    Should Merrick Garland Reveal More About the Mar-a-Lago Search?

    More from our inbox:Democrats’ TacticsThe Robot TherapistFamily PlanningFormer President Donald J. Trump could oppose the motion to release the warrant and inventory of items taken from his home, and some of his aides were said to be leaning toward doing so.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Attorney General Stays Quiet, as Critics Raise the Volume” (news article, Aug. 10):The Justice Department really needs to explain to the American people why the F.B.I. searched former President Donald Trump’s home, given the precedent-shattering nature of what happened. It should do so for three reasons.First, given that such an act has never occurred before in American history, the public deserves to know why a former president was sufficiently suspect that the F.B.I. felt it had no choice but to conduct a search of his living quarters.Second, the silence will be interpreted and misinterpreted on the basis of partisan biases. Already right-wing leaders have deemed this an act of war, while liberals perceive it as justified, given the president’s predilection to illegally hold onto classified materials. To correct misperceptions, the D.O.J. needs to explain its rationale.Third, there is precedent for this. In 2016, James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, sent a letter to Congress to explain why the bureau was investigating Anthony Weiner’s email messages, which bore on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.If a Justice Department official went public in a case like that, surely it should offer an explanation for a case this precedent-breaking and important.Richard M. PerloffClevelandThe writer is a professor of communication and political science at Cleveland State University.To the Editor:Like many other Americans, I’m curious to know more about the Justice Department’s investigation of Donald Trump. But I think Attorney General Merrick Garland is right to keep silent about the details at this point. Mr. Khardori cites “exceptions” to the prosecutorial rule about not commenting on ongoing investigations, but none of them apply particularly well here.We already know what it’s appropriate for us to know at this point, such as that the search of Mar-a-Lago had to have happened only after a federal judge agreed that evidence of a serious crime was likely to be found there.In due time, I suspect, we’ll know a lot more. For now, let’s be patient and let the Justice Department do its job. The list of reasons for it to avoid public comment at this stage is longer than the list of reasons for it to do the opposite.Jeff BurgerRidgewood, N.J.To the Editor:“He Wielded a Sword. Now He Claims a Shield” (news analysis, front page, Aug. 11) certainly gets it right when it notes that the current outrage of the former president and his supporters over the F.B.I.’s execution of a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate brings up echoes of his past behavior.After all, for Donald Trump, if he loses an election, someone else rigged it.If the U.S. Capitol is attacked, someone else incited it.Taking the Fifth Amendment is bad, as long as someone else does it.And, now, if the F.B.I. finds incriminating evidence at Mar-a-Lago, someone else planted it.So, as Donald Trump sees it, life is simply never, ever having to say you’re sorry.Chuck CutoloWestbury, N.Y.To the Editor:Representative Kevin McCarthy has said that should the Republicans take over the House in January, the Democrats should be prepared for a slew of investigations of just about everything and everyone including Hunter Biden (does anyone care?), Attorney General Merrick Garland and, most recently, the F.B.I.Such a threat is understandable, and Mr. Garland and the Democrats should be prepared to, quoting Mr. McCarthy, “preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”They should also be prepared to ignore invitations to testify, ignore subpoenas, claim victimhood, scream harassment, and overall thank the current cohort of Republicans for having created the template for avoidance, misdirection and dishonesty that have made a travesty of justice.David I. SommersKensington, Md.To the Editor:Donald Trump himself could not have better timed the raid on Mar-a-Lago. The Senate just passed a historic bill to save the environment, reduce inflation and get the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. And all we hear about is … Donald Trump.Let’s hear about the good that the Biden administration is doing. That is the news the country needs to focus on. Let’s stop giving Donald Trump the spotlight.Laurel DurstChilmark, Mass.Democrats’ Tactics Ben KotheTo the Editor:Re “Why Are Democrats Helping the Far Right?,” by Brian Beutler (Sunday Opinion, July 24):I am not as sanguine as Mr. Beutler that all will be well if Democrats fight “from the high grounds of truth, ethics and fair play.” As the old saw says, “All politics is local.”Many issues facing voters such as inflation, Covid policies, abortion and gun control are largely out of direct control of the president, but false or misdirected blame will resonate locally when tagged to the Democrats or President Biden.Sadly, I don’t trust the electorate in general to recognize abstract ideas about threats to democracy and mortal dangers to our nation, when a costly gallon of gas is made out to be the Democrats’ fault. I hope I’m wrong.Gene ResnickNew YorkThe Robot TherapistDesdemona, a robot who performs in a band (but is probably not aware of that fact).Ian Allen for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “A.I. Does Not Have Thoughts, No Matter What You Think” (Sunday Business, Aug. 7):In the mid-1980s, my daughters and I loved talking with the therapy chatbot Eliza on our Commodore 64. She often seemed to respond with understanding and compassion, and at times she got it hilariously wrong.We knew that Eliza was not a therapist, or even a human, but I see now that “she” was programmed to do something many humans have not mastered: to actively listen and reflect on what she heard so that the human in the conversation could dig deep and find his or her own answers. In the healing circles I’ve facilitated for women, we call that holding space.We would all do well to learn Eliza’s simple skills.This blackout poem that I created from the accompanying article, “A Conversation With Eliza,” encapsulates the process of digging deep, whether with a chatbot or a human:“Eliza”I thinkI am depressed.I needmy mother.Mary SchanuelWentzville, Mo.Family Planning Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Promoting Condom Use in Thailand With Spectacle and Humor” (The Saturday Profile, Aug. 6):Many thanks for your piece about Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand’s “Captain Condom.” Mr. Mechai saw that there was an urgent population growth problem in Thailand, causing suffering for people and harm to the environment, and set about to solve it with humor, creativity and persistence.His vision of voluntary, free family planning as a powerful tool to advance gender equity, protect the environment and improve human well-being is one that we at Population Balance wish more world leaders would embrace. We hope that his story will inspire others to make family planning accessible and affordable to all, and to embrace condoms as a ticket to love with responsibility, freedom and joy.Kirsten StadeSilver Spring, Md.The writer is communications manager for Population Balance. More

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    Gerrymandered Redistricting Maps Have Become the Norm

    The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of residents identify as Latino, Black, Asian or multiracial. There aren’t too many places in Texas where you can encounter Muslim students praying on a busy downtown sidewalk, but Denton is one of them.Lindsey Wilkes, left, and Kimberlyn Spain with friends from the Muslim Student Association near the University of North Texas.Drive about seven hours northwest of Denton’s city center and you hit Texline, a flat, treeless square of a town tucked in the corner of the state on the New Mexico border. Cow pastures and wind turbines seem to stretch to the horizon. Texline’s downtown has a couple diners, a gas station, a hardware store and not much else; its largely white population is roughly 460 people and shrinking.It would be hard to pick two places more different from one another than Denton and Texline — and yet thanks to the latest round of gerrymandering by Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature, both are now part of the same congressional district: the 13th, represented by one man, Ronny Jackson. Mr. Jackson, the former White House physician, ran for his seat in 2020 as a hard-right Republican. It turned out to be a good fit for Texas-13, where he won with almost 80 percent of the vote.Denton’s bustling downtown square is a gathering point for the city’s diverse population.The city’s soccer facilities provide meeting grounds for families from all walks of life.Enjoying live music is a multigenerational undertaking, as the Rojas family did one afternoon at a performance of Latin funk at Harvest House.This was before the 2020 census was completed and Congress reapportioned, which gave the Texas delegation two more seats for its growing population, for a total of 38. State Republicans, who control the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature, were free to redraw their district lines pretty much however they pleased. They used that power primarily to tighten their grip on existing Republican seats rather than create new ones, as they had in the 2010 cycle. In the process, they managed to squelch the political voice of many nonwhite Texans, who accounted for 95 percent of the state’s growth over the last decade yet got not a single new district that would give them the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.Marsha Keffer, a volunteer and precinct chair, looking over district maps at the the Denton County Democratic Party headquarters.A development of multistory homes under construction in Denton.Denton offers a good example of how this played out. Under the old maps, downtown Denton, where the universities lie, was part of the 26th District — a Republican-majority district, but considerably more competitive than the 13th. If Texas politics continue to move left as they have in recent years, the 26th District could have become a tossup. The liberal residents of Denton could have had the chance to elect to Congress a representative of their choosing.Now that the downtown has been absorbed into the 13th District and yoked to the conservative Texas panhandle, however, they might as well be invisible. Even with the addition of all those younger and more liberal voters, the 13th remains a right-wing fortress, with a 45-point Republican lean, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight. (The redrawn 26th District, meanwhile, will likely become a few points more Republican in the absence of Denton’s downtown.)Families enjoyed a custom ride after attending a Spanish-language church service in Krum, a town in Denton County in the newly redrawn 13th Congressional District.Recycled Books, a used book, record, CD and video game store, fills several floors of an old opera house in the middle of Denton Square.This is the harm of partisan gerrymanders: Partisan politicians draw lines in order to distribute their voters more efficiently, ensuring they can win the most seats with the fewest votes. They shore up their strongholds and help eliminate any meaningful electoral competition. It’s the opposite of how representative democracy is supposed to work.A music and film festival drew Chelsey Danielle, left, and Stefanie Lazcano to the dance floor.Kinsey Davenport getting inked at Smilin’ Rick’s tattoo shop in Denton.The kitchen staff at Boca 31, an upscale Latin street-food restaurant, during a Saturday afternoon rush.Ross Sylvester, right, and Chuck Swartwood joined a crew of volunteers at a food distribution site run by First Refuge in Denton.How is it supposed to work? Politicians are elected freely by voters, and they serve at the pleasure of those voters, who can throw them out if they believe they aren’t doing a good job. Partisan gerrymanders upend that process. Politicians redraw lines to win their seats regardless of whether most voters want them to; in closely fought states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republicans drew themselves into control of the legislatures even when Democrats won a majority of votes statewide.When these gerrymanders become the norm, as they have in the absence of meaningful checks, they silence the voices of millions of Americans, leading people to believe they have little or no power to choose their representatives. This helps increase the influence of the political extremes. It makes bipartisan compromise all but impossible and creates a vicious circle in which the most moderate candidates are the least likely to run or be elected.A music class for infants and toddlers at the Explorium, a children’s museum and play and education center in Denton.Texas Republicans have been especially ruthless at playing this game, but they’re far from alone. Their counterparts in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kansas have taken similar approaches to stack the deck against Democrats. Democrats have likewise gone on offense in states where they control mapmaking, such as in Illinois and Oregon, where lawmakers drew maps for 2022 that effectively erased swathes of Republicans.After a virtual home wedding for family members in Moldova and Mexico, Matt Lisovoy and Diana Lisovaya celebrated with ice cream on the square.Diya Craft and her punk-fusion band, Mutha Falcon, playing at a nonprofit social club featuring local bands and craft beers.Iglesia Sobre la Roca serves a varied population from Mexico and Central America with Spanish-language services.The Austin-based rock band Holy Death Trio at Andy’s Bar on the square.The Supreme Court had an opportunity in 2019 to outlaw the worst of this behavior, but it refused to, claiming it had neither the authority nor any clear standards to stop gerrymanders that “reasonably seem unjust.” This was nonsense; lower federal courts and state courts have had no problem coming up with workable standards for years. Court intervention is essential, because voters essentially have no other way of unrigging the system. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority stuck its head in the sand, giving free rein to the worst impulses of a hyperpolarized society.As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent: “Of all times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”The view in Texline, Texas, on the far western edge of the 13th Congressional District.The Supreme Court isn’t the only institution to shirk its responsibility to make maps fairer. Congress has the constitutional authority to set standards for federal elections, but Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts by Democrats to require independent redistricting commissions. It doesn’t help matters that most Americans still don’t understand what redistricting is or how it works.The Amarillo office of Representative Ronny Jackson is on the far west side of the district.Visitors to Amarillo can find an astonishing selection of cowboy boots and other western wear at Cavender’s.They can also take in a film at the American Quarter Horse Foundation Hall of Fame and Museum.Left to their own devices, states are doing what they can. More than a dozen have created some type of redistricting commission, but the details matter greatly. Some commissions, like California’s and Michigan’s, are genuinely independent — composed of voters rather than lawmakers, and as a result these states have fairer maps.Isaiah Reed mastering his trampoline basketball skills in his backyard in Texline.Commissions in some other states are more vulnerable to partisan influence because they have no binding authority. In New York, the commission plays only an advisory role, so it was no surprise when Democrats in power quickly took over the process and redrew district lines to ensure that 22 of the state’s 26 seats would be won by their party. The state’s top court struck the Democratic maps down for violating a 2014 amendment to the State Constitution barring partisan gerrymanders — a good decision in a vacuum, perhaps, but the result is more chaos and infighting, because the final maps are forcing several top Democratic lawmakers to face off against one another. Meanwhile in Ohio, where the State Constitution has a similar provision barring partisan gerrymanders, the State Supreme Court repeatedly invalidated Republican-drawn gerrymanders for being unfairly biased, but Republicans have managed to ignore those rulings, and so will end up with the maps they want, at least for this cycle.A truck driver making a pit stop in Conway, Texas, which is in the 13th District.Palo Duro Canyon State Park, home to the second-largest canyon in the United States, is part of the arid landscape of northwestern Texas.Bushland, a suburb of Amarillo.Drew Merritt’s “The Chase” in downtown Amarillo.The patchwork of litigation and different outcomes around the country only strengthens the case for a national standard, which is nowhere in sight. It’s a maddening situation with no apparent solution — until you widen the lens and look at the larger structure of American government. When you do, it becomes clear that extreme partisan gerrymandering is more a symptom than a cause of democratic breakdown. The bigger problem is that the way we designed our system of political representation incentivizes the worst and most extreme elements of our politics.On the federal level, at least, there are clear solutions that Congress could adopt tomorrow if it had the will to do so.The 190-foot-tall cross in Groom, Texas, is among the largest in the country.First, expand the House of Representatives. As The Times’s editorial board explained in 2018, the House’s membership, 435, is far too small for America in the 21st century. It reached its current size in 1911, when the country had fewer than one-third as many people as it does today, and the national budget was a tiny fraction of its current size. In 1911, each representative had an average of 211,000 constituents — already far more than the founders had envisioned. Today that number is more than 750,000. It is virtually impossible for one person, Ronny Jackson or anyone else, to accurately represent the range of political interests in a district of that size.In the Texas Panhandle, which lies almost entirely in the 13th District, wind turbines dot the landscape, and cattle outnumber voters.The region is littered with desolate downtowns like Shamrock, where a stray cat was among the few signs of life.On the far northwestern edge of the district, in Texline, Carlos Mendoza tossed a few pitches to his neighbor Sebastian Reed. They live about 450 miles from the opposite corner of the district.Why are we still stuck with a House of Representatives from the turn of the last century? The founders certainly didn’t want it that way; the original First Amendment to the Constitution, which Congress proposed in 1789, would have permanently tied the size of the House to the nation’s population; the amendment fell one state short of ratification.Still, as the country grew Congress kept adding seats after every decennial census, almost without fail. After 1911, that process was obstructed by rural and Southern lawmakers intent on stopping the shift in political power to the Northern cities, where populations were exploding. In 1929, Congress passed a law that locked the House size at 435 seats and created an algorithm for reapportioning them in the future.A bigger House is necessary to more accurately reflect American politics and to bring the United States back in line with other advanced democracies. But on its own it wouldn’t solve our failure of representation. The larger culprit is our winner-take-all elections: From the presidency down, American electoral politics gives 100 percent of the spoils to one side and zero to the other — a bad formula for compromise at any time, and especially dangerous when the country is as polarized as it is today. But at least some of that polarization can be attributed to the manner in which we choose our representatives.Texline is at one end of the 13th District.Tattoos of a musician in Denton.In Congress, districts are represented by a single person, which is harmful in two ways: First, it’s hard to see how one person can adequately represent three-quarters of a million people. Second, even though representatives are supposed to look out for all their constituents, the reality of our politics means most people who didn’t vote for the winner will feel unrepresented entirely.The solution: proportional multimember districts. When districts are larger and contain three or even five members, they can more accurately capture the true shape of the electorate and let everyone’s voice be heard. And if the candidates are chosen through ranked-choice voting, then Republicans, Democrats and even third parties can win representation in Congress in rough proportion to their vote share. It’s no longer a zero-sum game that leaves out millions of Americans.A farm in Texline at the New Mexico border. The founders were comfortable with multimember districts, just as they were with a House of Representatives that kept expanding. In fact, such districts were common in the early years of the Republic, but Congress outlawed them at the federal level, most recently in 1967, partly out of a concern that Southern lawmakers were using them to entrench white political power — a problem that ranked-choice voting would solve.These reforms may sound technical, but they are central to saving representative democracy in America.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 Politics of Fear Show No Sign of Abating

    “The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”In some regions, Sciubba continues,Population pressures are blowing the top off of a pot already boiling with poor governance, civil war and environmental destruction. At best, there’s only dim hope for a peaceful future. When the pot boils over, countries across the globe feel the effects in the form of refugees and terrorist extremism.The resulting turmoil is empowering the ethnonationalist right — propelling Viktor Orban’s re-election to a fourth term on April 3 in Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent showing in the April 24 French presidential election. In the United States, immigration has become a primary driver of the polarization between Republican and Democratic voters, crucial to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his continuing lead in the polls for the 2024 presidential nomination.As far back as 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford, described what he called a “third demographic transition” in “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries”:A third demographic transition is underway in Europe and the United States. The ancestry of some national populations is being radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration of persons from remote geographic origins or with distinctive ethnic and racial ancestry, in combination with persistent sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population.Low fertility and high immigration, according to Coleman, “are significant because they are changing the composition of national populations and thereby the culture, physical appearance, social experiences and self-perceived identity of the inhabitants.”The British demographer Paul Morland, in an interview this year with the BBC, addressed the race issue head on in describing politically volatile population trends:The huge expansion in white populations we previously took for granted is now retreating, and historically majority-white countries are becoming much more diverse. Mass migration into Europe and America has changed the face of those continents, and identities will surely continue to shift in these nations over time. Toward the middle of the current century, the percentage of the U.S. population that belongs to minority groups is expected to be more than 50 percent, and that will surely have an impact. If you look at the ethnic makeup of Trump voters and his slim electoral victory, it’s clear he would not have been elected if America was less white.At the same time, Morland noted,Africa is about to have a huge population explosion — by 2100, there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Africans as Europeans. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in the global balance. The world is set to become much more African, and it will be very interesting to see how that will affect things.In his 2019 book, “The Human Tide,” Morland wrote: “If the biggest global news story of the last 40 years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next 40 years will be Africa’s population growth.” It’s striking, Morland continues, “to realize that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk.”A graphic in Sciubba’s book illustrates the emergence of below-replacement fertility rates in Europe and North America — rates that have led to what my Times colleague Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety.”Immigration, of course, does not engender only political responses. The psychological reaction to immigration — to the influx of new and unfamiliar populations — varies widely across the electorate.In a 2012 paper, “Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes,” Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto and Jonathan Haidt argued thatindividuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity) and subvert American traditions and order (Authority).In an email to me, Ditto took this concept a step further:For some people immigration is conceived as akin to contamination, as allowing impure foreign elements into a sacred and pure “American” body politic — and those apprehensions about contamination drive their resistance to immigration — perhaps legal as much as illegal.But, Ditto cautioned, “this should not be taken to mean that these people view immigrants in a dehumanized way (as some kind of vermin) — that would be taking it too far. It is much more implicit than that — just a general valuation of purity and discomfort with contamination.”Along related lines, in 2014, Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and Corey Fincher, of the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow, published “Democracy and Other Governmental Systems.” They develop a germ-related stress theory that in many respects complements Ditto’s emphasis on the crucial role of purity. “The psychological dimension of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism,” Thornhill and Fincher contend, joins these features to pathogen-linked threat.Conversely, Thornhill and Fincher argue, “individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and women’s rights and freedom” are found more commonly in countries with relatively low health-related hazard.In an earlier paper, Fincher and Thornhill argued:In contemporary societies, collectivists and individualists differ significantly in their view of the social structure of the society in which they reside. Collectivists emphasize the boundary between in-group and out-group and are distrusting of and unwilling to contact out-group members; individualists make less distinction between in- and out-groups, and are more trusting of and show more willingness to contact out-groups.While it remains the subject of intense debate in academic circles, this line of argument has been gaining adherents.I asked Lene Aaroe, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, about growing opposition to immigration, and she wrote back, first citing “two of the classical explanations” that underscore “concerns over cultural integration and competition over economic resources, respectively, as major drivers of attitudes on immigration.”She noted that in addition to these classical explanations there is “a growing line of research that emphasizes that psychological motivations for disease avoidance shape opposition to immigration. I have contributed actively to this line of work.”Aaroe described the premise of her research:That over human evolutionary history pathogens and infections have constituted a central threat to our species. In addition to the physiological immune system which fights infections once they have entered the body, our species has therefore evolved psychological motivations to help us avoid coming into contact with infections in the first place. These psychological mechanisms are typically referred to as the so-called behavioral immune system.These psychological mechanisms, according to Aaroe, “operate automatically at the unconscious level. They work through emotions of disgust and fear of disease and motivate people to respond with avoidance and distance-taking in the face of potential infection risk.” Aaroe noted that the fear of disease is often a misperception not based on reality but on a psychological trait prompting prejudicial judgments.In modern diverse and multicultural societies, Aaroe continued, “facial birthmarks, physical disabilities, or something as innocent as differences in skin color and ethnicity are subconsciously misinterpreted as cues of potential infection risk with skepticism and distance-taking as outcomes.”People vary in the sensitivity of their behavioral immune systems, Aaroe wrote, so “some are more prone to experience disgust in situations that involve potential infection risk (e.g. drinking from another person’s water bottle). Our cross-national research conducted in the United States and Denmark” — “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration” and “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties” — “supports” the idea that “these individuals are also more likely to be skeptical toward immigration and to identify and vote for social conservative political parties that prioritize social conformity, order, and exclusionary policies toward out-groups and unfamiliar others.”Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of the line of reasoning developed by Ditto, Thornhill and Aaroe. Someone with an elevated fear of pathogens, who has more or less unconsciously translated that fear into opposition to immigration, may view liberals who want to open the nation’s doors as a threat to his or her health and, at the extreme, to his or her life.If this logic holds true, we have entered a new moral universe.Morteza Dehghani, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, emailed that he and his colleagues have found that “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups could be understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations.”In a 2021 paper, “Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice,” Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh and Dehghani concluded:Across five studies, ranging from geospatial analysis of 3,108 U.S. counties to social psychological experiments with over 2,200 participants, we found evidence that group-level moral concerns (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity) are predictive of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even after controlling for county-level confounders, such as political ideology.The moral legitimization of violence is the focus of Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, in their 2014 book, “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships.”They write that violence isconsidered to be the essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.Fiske and Rai argue that people “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.”Political conflict, scholars have found, can move into the zone of morally justified violence when elected officials and candidates focus their campaigns on grievance. As Ditto put it by email:When groups interact with each other, exchange things, this creates the potential for feelings of grievance to develop — they screwed us in some way. Once you feel that a group has wronged you or your group, then you are in moral territory.In a February 2021 paper, “Populism and the Social Psychology of Grievance,” Ditto and Cristian G. Rodriguez, a professor of psychology at the Universidad de los Andes, in Chile, write: “Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that ‘the people’ have been treated unfairly by ‘the elite.’” Evoking past grievance, they write, “has two clear collateral costs: it can be used to justify undemocratic means to gain political power, and its evocation risks initiating a self-escalating cycle of inter-factional political conflict.”As conflicts escalate, so do the perils of grievance politics:Feelings of grievance can lead people to feel licensed to abandon previous moral and procedural constraints. Although sometimes these constraints feel arguably bendable, abandoning other moral rules, such as adherence to democratic political tactics or prohibitions against violence, can be substantially more problematic. Research on highly contentious and moralized political environments has found them to foster an increased willingness to condone undemocratic means to achieve desired political ends, up to and including violence. In the U.S., partisan anger is associated with tolerance of cheating, lying and voter suppression as acceptable political tactics.I asked Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, how partisanship can become moralized, legitimating opposition and even violence. He replied:Politics plays a tremendous role in this. It is politicians who give action to latent attitudes and can organize collective action or even harness the power of the state. For example, Trump supporters might have had a latent tendency to be opposed to immigration but when Trump comes along and tells them that we need to “build a wall,” this made them think that immigration must really be a problem and, so, this latent tendency is activated. Then, when the state gets involved in building this wall and aggressively enforcing immigration, it brings power and action to these tendencies.Hostility to immigration, Enos wrote,seems to be tightly related to a person’s larger worldview, so that a person that tends to be right-wing will also tend to have hostility to immigration and a person who is left-wing will tend to be more open. Scholars don’t agree on how to characterize the differences between these worldviews, but notice that much of the language used to describe the differences has implications for acceptance of immigrants — for example, people on the right are described as seeing the world as ‘threatening’ or having a ‘closed’ worldview.Peter Howley, a professor of behavioral economics at Leeds University, shared Enos’s view of the crucial role of closed- and open-mindedness. “Openness is strongly correlated with immigration attitudes,” he wrote in an email, “and our own research demonstrates how openness strongly moderates the relationship between inflows of migrants into one’s local area and the self-reported well-being of existing residents.”This openness, Howley continued,captures the degree to which people are attracted by novel stimuli and entails a preference for variety and new experiences. For people comparatively low on openness, demographic change and all it entails from exposure to new cuisine, music and amenities may be a daunting prospect, but for people with high scores on openness, demographic change offers the potential for exciting new experiences.The political scientists Christopher D. Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico, both of the University of Minnesota, write in their book “Open Versus Closed”:As partisan conflict has been extended to cultural and lifestyle issues, engaged citizens have organized themselves into parties by personality, a process we refer to as “dispositional sorting.” In particular, those with “closed” personality traits have moved into the Republican column over the past few decades, and those with “open” traits have become Democrats. More generally, open citizens now take their economic policy cues from trusted elites on the cultural left, while closed citizens adopt the positions of those on the cultural right.The conflicts within this country reflect in miniature the global tensions of the 21st century. Sciubba puts the predicament in context in her introduction to a new collection of essays, “A Research Agenda for Political Demography.”At one extreme:In high- and middle-income countries, the most recent transition is to extremely low fertility and low mortality, leading to a shift in the composition of various age groups — far more elderly than youth and declining proportions of those in the middle ages. For the world’s most developed countries, national goals of economic growth of 2 percent or more are mismatched with shrinking populations — the idea of infinitely expanding economies is rubbing up against demographic reality. In some states with low fertility, immigration is eroding the advantages of longtime ethnic majorities and political tensions are high. Rising support for anti-immigrant far-right parties and populists, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, are demonstrations of the connection between demographics and politics.At the other extreme:In lower-income countries, fertility remains high, but declining mortality means that these populations are growing exponentially — a different transformation. Population density is increasing as the amount of available land stays constant and the number of people who inhabit it grows two- or threefold. Climate change is accelerating strains on the land itself, and economic forces like globalization are restructuring economies, often toward production for export, rather than for subsistence. Economic crises too often turn into civil conflict, which then pushes populations into new communities and across borders, and creates a new set of problems for both senders and receivers.By this reasoning, the prospect, globally, is for worsening conflict between rich and poor countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. In many respects, politics is about organizing fear. Democracies break down and republics dissolve when fear is used too often as a motivating tool, a partisan weapon. The issue now is whether the political system can begin to organize our fear of one another in a constructive fashion that resolves rather than exacerbates conflicts.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 a Changing Richmond and Its Suburbs Are Key to Virginia’s Vote

    The region has been an engine of Democratic victories, but now the party is on defense as Republicans go after swing voters with worries about schools.RICHMOND — Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democrat in the Virginia House of Delegates, drove the oak-shaded streets of his suburban district, pointing out landmarks that told the story of how he had won his seat after Republicans held it for decades.Over there was one of the county’s first mosques. There, the Hindu Center. The Final Gravity Brewing Company had opened near Love Shack, a breakfast spot offering Virginia ham and eggs on a croissant.The houses of worship for global immigrants and the cool watering holes for young transplants reflected sweeping demographic changes that have pushed politics in the Richmond suburbs, including Henrico County, to the left.“A new generation moved in,” said Mr. VanValkenburg, a high school government teacher first elected in 2017. “Henrico became browner. It became denser.”But now, he and his party are in races that are far tighter than most expected, including a deadlocked governor’s contest. And Democrats’ historic margins in Virginia in recent years are suddenly looking as though they may have been the result not of an inexorable demographic tide, but of a furious resistance to Donald J. Trump — one that exaggerated the true strength of the Democratic Party in a state that could be returning to its previous role as a battleground.Without Mr. Trump in office, Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor seeking a new term in that post, is fighting for his political life, four years after the current Democratic governor coasted to a 9-point win.Greater Richmond, including the capital city and its diversifying suburbs, is the second-fastest-growing region in the state and a key to the governor’s race, as well as to control of the Legislature.Demographic changes in Richmond are reflected in the many new houses of worship, like the Islamic Center of Richmond.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesA poll released Wednesday by Christopher Newport University suggested that Democrats were falling well short in the region. While it mirrored most other polls in showing the governor’s race deadlocked statewide, it said Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, had pulled away from Mr. McAuliffe in the Richmond media market — an area extending beyond the city and its populous suburbs into rural counties.A Fox News poll on Thursday was even grimmer for Democrats: It showed Mr. Youngkin with an 8-point lead among likely voters statewide ahead of Tuesday’s election.“On the ground, it feels like our side has all the energy,” said Mark Early Jr., a Republican vying for a Democratic-held seat in the House of Delegates that straddles Richmond and suburban Chesterfield County.Mr. Early said a Youngkin television ad ripping Mr. McAuliffe for saying parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach had poured “gasoline on the fire” of some voters’ frustrations over public schools, first kindled last year by Covid-related school closures that set back students’ learning. “I hear a lot of blowback from moms, especially working moms,” he said.Democrats accuse Mr. Youngkin of distortions and fear-mongering on schools, including calls for police officers in every school and a ban on critical race theory, which educators say plays no role in K-12 curriculums.Still, Mr. Youngkin’s forward-looking closing message, emphasizing “parents’ rights,” seemed considerably more resonant with voters than Mr. McAuliffe’s retrospective final appeal — reminding Virginians, whose swing counties are doing quite well economically, of all the jobs he created and the money he spent on education as governor from 2014 to 2018.“If Youngkin is able to turn it around here, I think it will be because of his education gambit,” said Richard Meagher, a politics professor at Randolph-Macon College near Richmond. “That’s the one issue where you can still win back those suburban voters who have turned into the Democratic column lately.”For Mr. McAuliffe to prevail in greater Richmond, Democrats need to drive up turnout in the city; maintain their gains of the past 15 years in Henrico County, north and east of the city; and not cede too much ground in Chesterfield County, which includes more conservative western suburbs.Mary Margaret Kastelberg told voters she wasn’t a Trump apologist as she canvassed in Henrico County.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesOn Thursday evening, Mary Margaret Kastelberg, a Republican challenging a Democratic delegate in a bellwether district in Henrico County, spent her 26th wedding anniversary knocking on the doors of residents her campaign had identified as swing voters.She wasn’t having much luck.Laura Kohlroser, still in hospital scrubs from her workday, said the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol had deeply soured her on Republicans. “The way the Republican Party stood behind Donald Trump, that to me was just deplorable,” she said.Walter Taylor said that he had been a “die-hard Republican” through 2016, voting that year for Mr. Trump, but that his shambolic presidency “turned me 180 degrees.” He was not convinced that Mr. Youngkin, a former financial executive, was really the hoops-shooting, fleece-vest-wearing regular guy he portrayed in TV ads.“He’s too close to Trump,’’ said Mr. Taylor, a retired insurance underwriter. But Ms. Kastelberg earned his vote, he told her.Walter Taylor, right, a Republican, is skeptical of Mr. Youngkin because “he’s too close to Trump.’’Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesEarlier on Thursday, Mr. McAuliffe had been in Richmond for a rally with leaders of the African American community, which makes up 40 percent of the population. Early voting in the city has been running behind early voting in the suburbs, an imperfect but useful gauge of enthusiasm.At a community center on the North Side, Frank Moseley, director of a nonpartisan group that informs voters of color about issues, said Democrats’ failure to deliver on big promises made to Black voters in 2020 — on gun violence, affordable housing and voting rights — had cooled some voters’ ardor. “We are probably one of the most letdown voting blocs,” he said. “That is one of the biggest detractors for individuals going out to vote.”Aja Moore acknowledged that voters under 30 are much less likely to vote this year.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesOne of the few younger people in the room, Aja Moore, 24, acknowledged what polls are showing: Voters under 30, a big part of the Biden coalition last year, are less likely to vote now.“They’re busy with their life,” said Ms. Moore, who works in government relations for a big law firm. “They’re not into it.’’In an interview, Amy Wentz, a member of a civil rights group, the Richmond Crusade for Voters, suggested another potential reason that some Black voters, especially women, may be in a funk: The party nominated a 64-year-old white man for governor after he defeated two Black female legislators in the primary.Ms. Wentz, who said she was a strong McAuliffe supporter, forwarded a Facebook post from a friend. “I know I am going to get fussed at, but I am not motivated to vote,” the woman wrote. “I really feel some type of way about Virginia not having a Black woman as our gubernatorial candidate.”Ms. Wentz said Mr. McAuliffe had done a good job reaching out to people of color, including in a Zoom meeting with her own organization. “I feel like we’re going to step up,” she said. “We’re not feeling it right now, but I feel like that by Tuesday, people are going to do the right thing. There’s too much at stake.”The 2020 census confirmed the demographic upheaval of the Richmond region. Within the city, which only last month removed the last Confederate statue — of Robert E. Lee — from historic Monument Avenue, the share of white residents rose over the past decade faster than any locality in the state. Gentrification has transformed industrial areas into neighborhoods of craft breweries and restaurants serving Alsatian cuisine.At the same time, the Black population swelled in the suburbs: by 25 percent in Chesterfield County, its largest growth among all racial groups. In Henrico County, the populations of Black, Asian and Hispanic residents all rose significantly.Politics in the Richmond suburbs have moved to the left because of gentrification and a population swell of Black, Asian and Latino residents.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesMr. VanValkenburg, the lawmaker and teacher, said that 15 years ago, his students were overwhelmingly white. Now, about 100 languages are spoken in the county.He rose to anger over Mr. Youngkin’s campaigning on issues involving education, including his stoking the cultural issue of critical race theory — a dog whistle to white voters that is not even taught in grade school — and accusing Democrats of wanting to keep parents out of classrooms.“Of course parents should have a say in education,” said Mr. VanValkenburg, who emails parents weekly updates on their children’s class work.Republicans, he complained, “keep trying to gin up issues that aren’t real as a way to scare people,” including appeals to conservatives who have led efforts to remove books with gay and racial themes from schools.If Mr. Youngkin is elected and fulfills his pledge to ban critical race theory his first day, Mr. VanValkenburg said, it would have no practical effect. “But what it would do is create a culture of fear,” he said, driving through his district on Wednesday.“Does somebody feel bad about their race if we teach about slavery?” he added.On Thursday, the local paper reported that a parent had complained at a school board meeting about a novel in school libraries about an interracial teenage romance. Mr. VanValkenburg’s Republican opponent was quoted expressing his disgust. The district removed eight copies of the book from its shelves. More

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    In Japan Elections, Rural Voters Count More Than Those in Big Cities

    The disproportionate weight of rural voters in Japan gives sparsely populated parts of the country more representation — and more government largess — than urban areas, perpetuating what critics call an unfair system.CHIZU, Japan — The mountain village of Chizu explains a lot about how one party has kept a virtual lock on power in Japan for close to seven decades.The village, in western Japan, has long been in decline. Its population has dwindled to 6,600 people, close to half of them elderly. The obstetrics ward at the hospital closed more than 15 years ago. The once-dominant forestry industry has shriveled, and a year-end fair is no longer held.Yet last year, backed by a large dollop of central government funding, the village built a 12,000-square-foot library with a sizable children’s section. It erected a new nursery school in 2017, and the middle school underwent a complete renovation two years earlier. Construction workers constantly upgrade a sparsely traveled highway into the village. As voters prepare to select members of Parliament in a national election on Sunday, the residents of Chizu are acutely cognizant of the forces behind this largess. In Japan, rural votes count for more than urban ones, giving less-populated areas like Chizu a disproportionately large number of seats in Parliament, and more chances to register their concerns with national politicians.Chizu’s upgraded middle school.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesThis structure plays to the advantage of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for all but four years since 1955. The party is expected to eke out a majority in the parliamentary election, partly on the strength of support from the rural areas showered with taxpayer money.In some ways, the power of Japan’s rural population parallels the political landscape in the United States, where each state has two senators regardless of population size — giving the Republican Party an outsized advantage because of its dominance of rural states.In Chizu, the nexus between political representation and access to public coffers is unmistakable. Because its residents are represented by a heavyweight member of the L.D.P. in Parliament, “we can get sufficient government aid,” said Chizu’s mayor, Hideo Kaneko, 68, in an interview in his renovated office.Chizu is in Tottori, Japan’s least populated prefecture. In the district that includes Chizu, the member of Parliament represents fewer than half the number of voters served by the lower house lawmaker in Tokyo’s most densely populated district.Critics say such disparities, which are common in rural communities, are fundamentally at odds with the democratic principle of “one person, one vote” and have skewed Japan’s politics and domestic priorities.A campaign poster of Shigeru Ishiba, a politician in the Liberal Democratic Party in Chizu, who represents the district.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesAt a time when an increasing proportion of the Japanese population is concentrated in urban centers, “Japan’s policies are focused on rural areas,” said Junichiro Wada, a political economist at Yokohama City University.Besides producing high agricultural subsidies, more hospital beds or smaller class sizes in rural constituencies, the voting system can nudge political debates toward policies opposed by the majority.Because rural voters skew older and lean conservative, said Yusaku Horiuchi, a professor of government and Japanese studies at Dartmouth College, they tend to elect politicians — often from the L.D.P. — who maintain the status quo.So, for example, although the bulk of the Japanese public favors changing a law that stipulates all married couples must share a surname, rural voters are more likely to support keeping the law as it is. “If the voter malapportionment is solved,” Mr. Horiuchi said, “urban voices will be heard.”Hideo Kaneko, 68-year-old mayor of Chizu, likes the status quo because it favors villages like his.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesAdvocates for rural areas say that if representation were allocated strictly by population, Japan’s remote areas might deteriorate further, an argument that some political scientists agree has merit.Given the connection between representation and public funding, said Yuko Kasuya, a professor of comparative politics at Keio University in Tokyo, “one counterargument would be that, OK, you might have a very efficient, equal distribution of subsidies, but that would mean rural areas do not have roads, do not have shopping malls and do not have basic facilities.”Still, Japan’s courts, when presented with legal challenges to the malapportionment, have been narrowing the disparities in recent decades.Hidetoshi Masunaga, a lawyer who has led the court fight, argues that “building an election system that can properly reflect the will of the people is an urgent task.” Yet he said urban voters who might stand to gain from changes to the system are often unaware of the electoral inequities. “People don’t know,” Mr. Masunaga said, “so people don’t think it’s unfair.”One night this week in the Adachi ward of Tokyo, the most densely populated district in the country, few residents seemed interested in either of two candidates — one from the Liberal Democratic Party and another from the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party — who were campaigning near train stations.Mr. Ishiba of the Liberal Democratic Party, right, bowing to residents of Tottori prefecture during the election campaign. Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesYuta Murakami, 36, an accountant for a cosmetics distributor, said that he was aware of the differences between urban and rural districts but that he was more concerned about low voter turnout in Tokyo.“The bigger issue is just getting people to go to the polls,” Mr. Murakami said after he had given the opposition candidate a fist bump outside a supermarket.In the last election for the lower house of Parliament, in 2017, less than half of registered voters in the Adachi district voted. In Chizu, 63 percent cast votes.People are protective of their voting rights in Chizu. Many residents feel a personal connection to Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense and agriculture minister who has represented Tottori Prefecture in the lower house for 35 years and who grew up in a town close to Chizu.“We expect so much of him and rely on him,” said Satoko Yamane, 62, the owner of a clothing store featuring racks full of knitwear for women of a certain age. “Rural people have their own issues that urban people don’t understand. Even if the population is small, our voices should be heard.”Yoshiichi Osaka, 85, a barber, at his shop in Chizu.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesAt an evening campaign stop last week in Yonago, one of Tottori’s larger cities, Mr. Ishiba stood atop a white van and addressed a group of about 40 people in the rain.“Japan should not be a place where the population keeps declining and people only move to Tokyo,” Mr. Ishiba shouted. “We need to maximize the powers of agriculture, fishery, forestry, tourism, service industries, and small and medium size companies in this area.”The region has already lost a representative in the upper house of Parliament, after Tottori Prefecture merged with neighboring Shimane under a 2015 redistricting plan that assigned one lawmaker to both prefectures.In the lower house, two lawmakers still represent Tottori. At one time, recalled Yoshiichi Osaka, 85, a barber who still gives daily haircuts in Chizu, four lawmakers from Tottori served in the Diet, as Japan’s Parliament is known. “It was good to have four places to go when we wanted to ask for help,” Mr. Osaka said.Pork barrel politics helped when Chizu wanted to rebuild its middle school and Mr. Ishiba introduced Chizu leaders to senior Agriculture Ministry officials in charge of approving national grants.Asami Kagohara, 25, left, chatting with other mothers at the spacious new Chizu public library.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesThe $21 million upgrade gave the 134 students enrolled in the middle school a computer lab, tennis courts, a music room stocked with instruments, two courtyards and a gym with four basketball hoops and a large stage. On a recent afternoon, ninth graders rehearsing for a choral recital were dwarfed by the ample space and vaulted wood ceilings in the gym.A handful of newcomers, too, have benefited from generous government subsidies. Itaru and Mariko Watanabe, originally from Tokyo, moved to Chizu in 2015 to start a bakery, brewery and cafe in an abandoned nursery school building amid rice paddies on the edge of town.Mr. Watanabe, 50, said government grants covered half of their machinery costs, and now Ms. Watanabe, 43, and two other business partners are converting an elementary school next door into a hotel, with public money footing the renovation bill.Ms. Watanabe said she had noticed a sense of groupthink in local voting patterns. “The people who were born and raised here have connections with relatives or other residents,” Ms. Watanabe said, and they tend to vote in tandem.On a recent morning at the newly built library, Asami Kagohara, 25, a single mother of a 5-month-old son she was rocking in a carrier on her chest, said she and her parents always voted together — for Mr. Ishiba.“I feel like he protects us,” Ms. Kagohara said.Motoko Rich and Makiko Inoue reported from Chizu, and Hikari Hida from Tokyo. 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    The Census Said Detroit Kept Shrinking. The Mayor Begs to Differ.

    DETROIT — Once again, the Census Bureau reported, Detroit has gotten smaller.For most Detroiters’ entire lives, census day has brought only bad news, a painful once-a-decade accounting of an exodus that has shrunk their city’s population by more than half since 1950 and left entire blocks abandoned.Mayor Mike Duggan pledged to stop that decline when he swept into office eight years ago, telling voters they could measure his success based on whether residents returned. But when the latest numbers were released this month, they showed the population had fallen more than 10 percent since 2010, to about 639,000 residents.In the ledger of the federal government, Mr. Duggan had failed to meet his goal, people were still leaving and Detroit now had fewer residents than Oklahoma City. In the mayor’s own view, he was succeeding, the city was coming back and the Census Bureau had just counted wrong.Hours after the census count was released, the mayor fired off an indignant statement accusing the bureau of undercounting Detroit residents by at least 10 percent. Mr. Duggan said municipal utility data backed up his claims, but his office declined to provide localized evidence to prove that. Census officials mostly declined to discuss the mayor’s complaints.Mayor Mike Duggan has told Detroiters they could measure his success based on whether residents returned to the city.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesOnce the country’s fourth-largest city, Detroit had more than 1.8 million residents at its peak in 1950. In the 2020 census, fewer than 640,000 people were counted.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesThe unusual squabble between City Hall and the Census Bureau was only the latest sign that, under Mr. Duggan, Detroit has become America’s ultimate Rorschach test. Does your attention go to the many challenges that persist — the crime, the trash piles, the people struggling to pay rent, and, yes, the census tally? Or do your eyes focus on what has clearly improved during the mayor’s tenure — the livelier downtown, the clean lots where blighted houses once stood, the N.B.A.’s Pistons moving back from the suburbs, the new Jeep factory?“People in Detroit know the difference,” said Mr. Duggan, a Democrat who is seeking a third term and who finished far ahead of his challengers in this month’s primary election. “If you came in from the outside, you would not go around saying how good this looks.”On the west side, where well-kept homes are situated next to others with busted windows or fire-scorched frames, Cynthia A. Johnson, a state representative, said her district “hasn’t changed a whole hell of a lot” since Mr. Duggan took office.The mayor is a smart guy and a talented politician, she said, but his policies have benefited newcomers to the city and business interests more than the longtime Detroiters in her part of town. She found his complaints about a census undercount unconvincing as she went through a mental list of neighbors who had recently left the city.The number of white Detroiters increased over the last decade after decades of flight, experts said, but the census counted tens of thousands fewer Black Detroiters than lived in the city in 2010. The city’s population of Asian and Hispanic residents also increased since 2010.The vast majority of Detroit residents are Black. Mr. Duggan is the city’s first white mayor in 40 years.“He has opened the door for gentrification — that is my belief,” Ms. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, said. “He has given companies contracts over the people.”Looking at the same evidence, though, some reach the opposite conclusion about Detroit’s trajectory. As Ms. Johnson walked through her neighborhood, pointing out city-owned lots with overgrown weeds and sidewalks littered with liquor bottles, Willie Wesley emerged from his home with a more upbeat view.Cynthia A. Johnson, a state representative, walks through her neighborhood in Detroit. She said her district “hasn’t changed a whole hell of a lot” since Mr. Duggan took office.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesWillie Wesley, who has has been living in the same neighborhood as Ms. Johnson for 21 years, said Detroit was on the upswing.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesMr. Wesley, a retired U.P.S. worker who helps mow his neighbors’ lawns, said Detroit was on the upswing. His block felt safer. Some long-vacant homes had new buyers. New industrial sites offered the chance for neighbors to earn a good wage.“I like the mayor I have — I wouldn’t trade him for nothing right now,” Mr. Wesley said. “He’s bringing jobs back into the neighborhood.”Detroit is a city caught in transition. Its distant past as the world’s manufacturing center remains a source of pride. The struggles of recent decades, including the city’s unprecedented journey through municipal bankruptcy, are spoken of with pain. And a vision of its future, though blurry and contested, comes into clearer view with every boarded-up home that is razed, with every coffee shop that opens, with every U-Haul truck heading in or out.Once the country’s fourth-largest city, Detroit had more than 1.8 million residents at its peak in 1950. By the turn of the century, fewer than a million remained. And in the 2020 census, fewer than 640,000 people were counted and Detroit was barely among the country’s 30 most populous cities.Those declines are more than a blow to civic pride. They lead to less political power when new legislative districts are drawn and less federal funding.“I think that is the ultimate test of a city,” Mr. Duggan said. “Do more people want to move in or move out?”Detroit was far from the only city where the latest census showed a populace in atrophy. Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Flint, Mich., were among several other industrial centers in the Midwest that saw their populations drop. In Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula, almost every county lost residents.But unlike most local officials who received bad news, Mr. Duggan reacted by engaging in a public fight with the Census Bureau and suggesting he might sue. He said the bureau, under former President Donald J. Trump, did not give on-the-ground canvassers enough time to do their work last year. The change to an online questionnaire also disadvantaged the city, he said. The pandemic did not help.“The census is just factually inaccurate,” Mr. Duggan said in an interview, noting that he raised concerns about the process last fall, long before the numbers were published. “It was census malpractice and we’re going to get it reversed.”Census officials declined to discuss the mayor’s specific claims, but defended their work in an unsigned statement and said local officials who thought there were errors could appeal. Any corrections would not affect the data used for political redistricting, the bureau said.There is precedent in Detroit for census disputes paying off. After the 1990 count, Coleman A. Young, the mayor at the time, challenged the tally in court and got the bureau to acknowledge that it missed tens of thousands of residents.Still, the latest drop in the population provided a political opening for Anthony Adams, who finished a distant second to Mr. Duggan in the low-turnout mayoral primary and who will face his fellow Democrat again in the November general election.“We’re starting to lose our Black population in the city, and we’re losing it because the policies of this administration are harmful to the people who have been here through thick and thin,” said Mr. Adams, a lawyer who has focused his campaign on crime reduction, police reform and keeping longtime residents in the city.Even some of Mr. Duggan’s allies were unconvinced by his census rhetoric.Paul A. Garrison II, an urban planner and economic developer who leads the Osborn Business Association, credited Mr. Duggan with nurturing new businesses, addressing problems in neighborhoods and attracting educated newcomers to Detroit. He said he even had a Duggan campaign sign in his yard. But Mr. Garrison was not buying the claims of a massive population undercount.“No mayor,” Mr. Garrison said, “wants to admit that the population of their city is decreasing and people are leaving the city. That’s not good politics.”Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speaking at the Farwell Recreation Center in Detroit during a news conference on crime reduction. Nick Hagen for The New York TimesKenneth Robinson and his wife had to leave their apartment after their unit flooded.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesMr. Duggan is betting that Detroiters trust the direction he is steering the city. He says the city’s problems are on a smaller scale than when he took office in the throes of a bankruptcy and a crisis of city services.“Eight years ago, the problems Detroit was facing were just Detroit — no other city was talking about bankruptcy or streetlights,” Mr. Duggan said. “Today, the challenges that we’re dealing with, every other city has.”But the question of whether the census count ever officially goes up will be determined one resident, one circumstance at a time.Earlier this month, at a senior apartment complex that was swamped during this summer’s devastating floods, Kenneth Robinson grew emotional as his belongings were loaded into a moving truck.“It’s a horrible feeling,” he said. “I hate to even think about it. And I’ve got a sick wife with cancer.”Mr. Robinson, 72, a lifelong Detroiter, had been staying with his wife in a downtown hotel since their unit flooded. Mold and mildew made it unsafe to return home, and financial assistance to stay at the hotel was running out. There was talk about moving temporarily to an extended-stay motel in the suburbs.Mr. Robinson, who worked in the auto industry and as a janitor before retiring, wanted to eventually move back into his apartment. He wanted to stay in Detroit. But he did not know what would come next.The population in Detroit has dropped more than 10 percent in the last decade. Nick Hagen for The New York Times More

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    How the Census Bureau Stood Up to Donald Trump’s Meddling

    WASHINGTON — There were 10 days left in the Trump presidency. And John Abowd and Tori Velkoff had a decision to make.Six months earlier, in July 2020, President Donald Trump had ordered the Census Bureau, where they were senior officials, to produce a count of every unauthorized immigrant in the nation, separate from the 2020 census count that was well underway. The Trump administration’s goal was to strip those immigrants from the population count used to divvy up House seats among the states.The move promised to benefit Republicans by sapping electoral strength from Democratic-leaning areas and handing more voting power to older, white and most likely more conservative populations.Mr. Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist, and Ms. Velkoff, its chief demographer, were obligated by law to carry out the president’s orders. They’d assigned some of their top experts to produce an immigrant count from billions of government records. Mr. Trump had also inserted four political appointees into the bureau’s top ranks since June, in no small part to ensure that the numbers were delivered.But despite months of work, the results, in Mr. Abowd’s and Ms. Velkoff’s view, fell far short of the bureau’s standards for accuracy. Now the agency’s director, Steven Dillingham, was demanding the tallies — accurate or not — before the president left office.Mr. Abowd and Ms. Velkoff went to Ron Jarmin, the deputy director. The trio, who had more than 75 years of experience in the bureau among them, agreed on a response: They would reject the demand unless they could explain in a technical report why the numbers were useless. (In an interview this month, Mr. Dillingham said that he was merely asking for an assessment of the immigrant tabulations, with whatever caveats were necessary. “I said, look over that data and see if any of it is ready,” he said.)Mr. Jarmin then sent a message to three other Census Bureau experts whom he had assigned to assist the political appointees. Stop whatever you’re doing, it said. Any future orders will come from me.That internal struggle, which has not been previously reported, was the breaking point in a battle with the Trump administration over political interference in the census. By now, tales of Trump appointees disrupting, or outright corrupting, the work of federal agencies are familiar. But in this case, the meddling threatened not just to change the allocation of federal power, but also to skew the distribution of trillions of federal tax dollars.It was not a revolt or some sort of deep-state resistance that thwarted that effort. Instead, a slice of the career bureaucracy that keeps the federal government running, day in and day out, stood up for what it saw as the core function of the Census Bureau — to produce the gold standard for data about the nation’s population.“We tried to do what we thought was statistically sound and valid,” Ms. Velkoff said in an interview in June. “If we didn’t have a statistically sound and valid methodology, then we pushed back.”The episode pitting career officials against political appointees raises an important question: Should the Census Bureau be better protected from such political interference in the future?The White House had initially sought to identify unauthorized immigrants by adding a question about citizenship to the census form itself. Mr. Abowd had warned that doing so would harm the quality of the count. In focus groups the bureau conducted, people in various ethic groups expressed an “unprecedented” level of concern about giving the government identifying information, according to a 2017 report on the research. Nonetheless, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of the Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau, ordered the agency to go ahead with the citizenship question.But in June 2019, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Ross’s proffered rationale — that adding the citizenship question was necessary to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — calling it “contrived.”With that avenue closed, the administration immediatelyordered the Census Bureau to gather data on unauthorized immigrants by combing through records of some 20 federal agencies.Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues spent the next year collecting immigrant data from the administrative records. Then in July 2020, Mr. Trump ordered the data to be used to remove unauthorized immigrants from the coming census totals that would reapportion the House for the next decade. But to segregate unauthorized immigrants from the census totals for each state, there first had to be a census.And that was a problem. In the summer of 2020, the bureau faced the huge challenge of counting every household in the midst of a pandemic. Despite that, Mr. Ross ordered the agency to finish the count by Sept. 30 and to produce the politically crucial population figures for apportioning House seats among the states by Dec. 31. The deadlines ensured the census totals would be delivered to Mr. Trump whether or not he won the November election.Internally, census officials were aghast. Anyone who thought the agency could meet the December deadline, the day-to-day leader of the census, Timothy Olson, wrote to Mr. Jarmin and other senior census officials, “has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.”But the anti-immigrant forces within Mr. Trump’s administration kept the pressure on, creating four new political jobs in the bureau’s top ranks — an unprecedented step — beginning in June 2020.Senior bureau officials gave them offices. They also quietly ordered that the appointees be given only rounded numbers — estimates, which could not be labeled official for political or other reasons.The first of the new political appointees was Nathaniel Cogley, a political-science professor at a state university in rural Texas who has specialized in African studies. He was soon joined by the other three, and they reported weekly to an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.Mr. Cogley began attacking the bureau’s effort to count a small share of known households that evade the best efforts of census takers. In these cases — 1.2 million people in 2010, but probably many more in pandemic-scarred 2020 — the bureau has long used a statistical method called imputation, looking at nearby households to make educated guesses about who lives in the places the census field operation missed.Some of those households are occupied by right-leaning libertarians who are deeply suspicious of the government. But many are low-income families, members of minorities and unauthorized immigrants, who expand the count for urban areas and thus increase representation for traditional Democratic strongholds.“If you leave out imputations, you leave out African Americans, Hispanics and other hard-to-count people,” Kimball Brace, a demographer and president of a consulting firm that does work on redistricting, said in an interview. Mr. Cogley called him to ask for evidence that imputation was statistically unsound. “I saw Cogley’s view as totally a way of justifying how the Republicans come out on this,” Mr. Brace said. (Mr. Cogley did not respond to calls, texts and emails asking for comment.)Mr. Ross had the power to order the bureau to do as Mr. Cogley wished. But after listening to dueling presentations, he allowed the imputation work to continue — handing the career officials a victory on one of their most important concerns. (Mr. Ross declined to comment on the record.)In early November, when Joe Biden won the presidential election, the 10-week clock for Mr. Trump’s time in office began to tick with new urgency. There would be no second term. Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their colleagues raced to meet the Dec. 31 deadline. But the bureau hit a major technical snag: The pandemic had scrambled the locations of tens of millions of people, like college students and agricultural workers, who should have been counted where they studied or worked but instead lived elsewhere temporarily because of the coronavirus.Putting them in their proper place would take time. In late November, census officials told Mr. Dillingham, the bureau’s director, that they could not meet the Dec. 31 deadline and maintain the agency’s standards for accuracy.Mr. Cogley and other political appointees pressed for shortcuts to speed ahead, going so far as to suggest commandeering computers from other agencies to accelerate data processing, an idea the bureau dismissed as impractical. But the political appointees and the White House never answered a basic question about the numbers they most wanted: What definition of “unauthorized immigrant” should the bureau use? Did it include people contesting their deportation in court? Or children whose birthplace was unclear? Or immigrants whose green cards were being processed?In December, the White House tried one last tack: If census experts could not reliably say who should be removed from the state-by-state apportionment totals because they were in the country illegally, then administration officials would decide for them, using whatever tabulations of immigrants the bureau provided.This would take a hammer to the bureau’s standards for accuracy. It would also reverse past practice, in which the Census Bureau calculated the House apportionment and the White House delivered the results to Congress as a formality. In January, Mr. Dillingham told Mr. Jarmin it was the bureau’s No. 1 priority — above the census itself — to turn over figures on undocumented immigrants to the White House by Jan. 15. He acknowledged proposing cash bonuses to those who could make it happen, but said he made sure anyone working on the project “would not be pulled off the 2020 census data.”This last-minute order, which Mr. Dillingham delivered orally rather than in writing, was the breaking point for the career officials who had carried out every other directive. “The integrity of the statistical process that the Census Bureau is ethically committed to was abrogated in serious ways,” Mr. Abowd said.Separately and anonymously, three career officials filed whistle-blower complaints with the Commerce Department’s inspector general. The complaints accused Mr. Dillingham of violating a cardinal rule for the federal government called Statistical Policy Directive 1. “A federal statistical agency,” it states, “must be independent from political and other undue external influence in developing, producing and disseminating statistics.” Mr. Dillingham said this month that when he heard about the complaints to the inspector general, he stopped asking for the immigrant tabulations.On Jan. 18, Mr. Dillingham resigned. Mr. Trump left office two days later without the counts that would have downgraded the status of immigrants and most likely helped more Republicans win election.The census has been wielded as a political weapon before. When the very first count in 1790 fell short (at 3.9 million) of George Washington’s expectations, he didn’t change the number, but he instructed Thomas Jefferson to check it. When Jefferson’s work produced an estimate above four million, he included the higher number in descriptions of the census abroad to make the new country appear stronger.When the 1920 census counted rising population totals in American cities — thanks to an influx of Italians, Poles, Jews and others from outside Northern Europe — Congress refused to reapportion the House until 1929 so that rural areas wouldn’t lose seats.And most notoriously, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Army used census information to round up Japanese Americans for internment. (In 2000, the bureau apologized.)Now a group of officials at the agency are considering how the census could be better protected from political meddling and misuse. In July, a committee of career professionals put in place a new policy on data stewardship, which firms up the rules governing internal as well as external access to confidential data. A bigger idea is to move the bureau out of the Commerce Department to make it more independent, like the National Science Foundation. Congress could also mandate by statute that immigrants who reside in the country must continue to be counted, as they always have been. Lawmakers (or the president, by executive order) also could further strengthen the existing safeguards in Statistical Policy Directive 1.In the end, the delays that frustrated the anti-immigrant ambitions of Mr. Trump’s administration may end up helping his party. The bureau’s release of redistricting numbers on Thursday was several months behind schedule. Republicans, who control more state legislatures and have shown a greater appetite for extreme gerrymandering than Democrats have, could benefit because little time remains to contest maps before the 2022 elections.The newly released numbers will now set the stage for what are likely to be colossal battles over control of the House and State Legislatures.For career professionals, “the highest priority now,” Mr. Abowd said, “is restoring the credibility of the 2020 census and the Census Bureau.”Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The Times magazine. More