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    Reality Winner Tried to Resist and Found Herself Alone

    It was a big deal that Reality Winner’s probation officer let her travel from Texas to her sister’s house in North Carolina over Thanksgiving. She is, after all, a traitor, in the eyes of the law.Ms. Winner was arrested in 2017 for leaking to journalists a classified intelligence report on Russian hacks into U.S. election infrastructure and has been confined ever since — in a Georgia county jail, a federal prison, a halfway house and, most recently, in a probation so strict that she often feels strangled.Still, Ms. Winner viewed the trip with the wariness of an underdog conditioned to expect any small kindnesses to turn back against her.“It wasn’t my idea,” she said flatly by phone. “I preferred not to go.”Oh, and another thing, she said pointedly: She went during Thanksgiving but for her niece’s birthday.“I hate Thanksgiving,” she said. “I hate the food. I hate the vibe.”This side of Ms. Winner becomes familiar after a while: the cranky prison yard impulse to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t care and can’t be hurt. It poorly camouflages the battered idealist who, despite disillusionment and harsh punishment, appears bent on finding some way to make herself useful on a grand scale. She never had much money, education or connections, but in her own way, she has repeatedly tried to save the country — first as a military linguist guiding foreign drone attacks and later by warning the public that Donald Trump was lying to them about Russia.Both efforts went bad, though, which is why I think of Ms. Winner as a sorrowful casualty — not only of our poisoned political culture but also of a contemporary America replete with corruption and amoral bureaucracy. The harder she tried, it seems, the more her ideals soured into disgust.When I first spoke to Ms. Winner, in the summer of 2021, she was still fighting the drug habit she’d picked up behind bars and trying to tamp down the explosive aggression she’d used on the guards. On home confinement at her mother and stepfather’s ranch outside Corpus Christi, Texas, she held forth in meandering, disarmingly frank phone calls about the degradations of prison, the power of linguistics, a surreal childhood crossing back and forth into Mexico on pharmacy runs with her opioid-addicted father.All these months later, Ms. Winner is still on probation, but she’s grown more focused and stable. Most of her energies now are fixed on attracting clients to her CrossFit coaching practice. At 31, she is already a living relic of one of our nation’s most surreal political crises.She still isn’t allowed to talk about her military service or the contents of her leak, leaving me to puzzle over why a young woman who still guards the secrets of the terrorism wars would risk everything to expose a five-page National Security Agency file on efforts to hack voter registration systems.Ms. Winner mailed the report anonymously to The Intercept, where a reporter took the ill-advised step of giving a copy to the N.S.A. for verification. The authorities almost immediately zeroed in on her. She was charged under the Espionage Act, the same laws used to prosecute the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames and pretty much any other 20th-century spy you can name. The act has long been criticized for lumping together leaks motivated by public interest and, say, peddling nuclear secrets to a foreign government. Ms. Winner is considered a prime example of its downside.She pleaded guilty and was given 63 months in prison, the longest federal sentence ever for the unauthorized release of materials to the media. (The former C.I.A. director David Petraeus got off with probation and a fine for sharing eight notebooks full of highly classified information with his biographer, who was also his mistress.)Deemed a flight risk and denied bail, Ms. Winner languished for 16 months in a crammed Georgia county jail cell. While negotiating her plea deal with prosecutors, she said, she plotted suicide and fantasized about federal prison “like I was going away to an elite university — ‘Oh, look, they have a rec center, they have a track, they have a commissary, they sell makeup.’”All of that for nothing or, at least, for very little. Ms. Winner’s intervention hardly registered. She wanted to prove that the White House was lying: U.S. officials knew that Russia had attacked U.S. voting infrastructure just days before the 2016 election. But the revelation hardly scratched public awareness.“Reality Winner is a whistleblower because?” said Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “How many people would give the same answer to that?”“You can’t imagine a more unlikely person to serve the longest-ever sentence under the Espionage Act” for leaking to the media, he added. “It’s perverse.”The hardest part, Ms. Winner said once, is not the punishment but “just knowing that you really didn’t change anything. Nobody cares.”“The people on the left who pretend to champion you. They really didn’t do anything for you,” she said. “The people in the center won’t say your name. And the people on the right still think you’re a terrorist.”Shane Lavalette for The New York TimesWhy did she do it? Ms. Winner bristled at this question. “Come on, you were there, too. You remember how it was. It was such a weird time,” she said.She’s right. I remember.It was Mr. Trump’s first year in the White House, and America was having a nervous breakdown all over the internet — MAGA fanatics in rapturous dreams of banning Muslims and building shark-infested moats along the border and, from others, fevered warnings of impending fascist takeover and Vladimir Putin as Mr. Trump’s puppet master. The thick suspicion that we were drifting toward something intolerable. The hyperbole of it all.Commentators suggested that the president could be a Russian asset; retired government servants openly urged their successors to insubordination; Mr. Trump described a “deep state” within the government working to undermine him. What does it mean, in such times, to be a traitor?Ms. Winner left the Air Force and started a desk job with an N.S.A. contractor in Augusta, Ga. She’d found her house online for just $500 a month and rented it sight unseen because it was close to her gym. The neighborhood proved rough; her dog cowered at gunfire outside. But she didn’t mind. She had her dog and a few guns, including a Glock and a pink AR-15. ( “Georgia has castle laws, so as long as you don’t shoot ’em in the back, you get off. So, duh.”)She practiced yoga and CrossFit and spent her days off wandering downtown, daydreaming about buying a derelict Woolworths and turning it into an ashram where people down on their luck could get a free meal. She had a Sunday morning ritual: chop vegetables to prepare her dinners for the week while talking on the phone with her mother.“It was getting more and more political because, like, we can’t help it,” Ms. Winner recalled.Mr. Trump was a constant theme. According to Ms. Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, her daughter was convinced that he would destroy the country. Ms. Winner told her mother she was glad she’d left the Air Force, because there was no way she could serve under him. When the United States bombed an air base in Syria, Ms. Winner told her mother it was “smoke and mirrors,” Ms. Winner-Davis recalled — Russia was given warning to evacuate the base, her daughter said.Ms. Winner watched Mr. Trump on TV scoffing at suggestions of Russian interference. “He’s lying,” she thought; she’d seen the proof. She recalled that the whole enterprise of government and war had started to seem rotten; she’d thought that she could make a difference working quietly within national security and, eventually, gaining enough authority to make better decisions. Now it felt pointless.“If there’s this jackass in the White House, apparently none of this matters,” she said recently, trying to describe her mind-set when she printed the report and dropped it in the mail. “It was the repeated lies.”For years, Ms. Winner had dreamed of distinguishing herself in a moment of heroism. “I always wanted to be a badass like Carrie from ‘Homeland,’” she said. “Somebody who got something done in counterintelligence or counterterrorism and I think — I don’t know — just kind of being that stand-alone figure.”There was a lot of talk about insurgency that year. Twitter was full of grandstanding and “I am Spartacus” declamations. But Ms. Winner slammed into a hard realization: Despite all the grumbling and proclaiming, the resistance, if it existed, did not rush to defend her.Ms. Winner talks a lot about social media, about its capacity to warp political life and set traps for people — including herself. She is haunted by the experience of watching news stories about politicians’ tweets from inside prison, where she had zero access to social media.Twitter didn’t give the prisoners protective gear during the pandemic. Facebook didn’t prevent inmates from losing family members to street violence. Nothing came of it, she realized, but cluttered minds and wasted time.“When you’re pulled away from it and you see all the energy put into it, it’ll break your heart,” Ms. Winner said. “Nobody is coming to save you, because they’re so busy with a tweet.”Shane Lavalette for The New York TimesIt is hard to understand how Ms. Winner evolved into an ideological insurgent, because she can’t talk freely about the days when she was a loyal service member. The state-imposed silence about the years she spent identifying drone targets and helping to assassinate people casts a fog of ambiguity over a complicated and perhaps even morally compromising part of her story.Everything we know about Ms. Winner’s war contributions comes from an Air Force Commendation Medal praising her for “enemy intelligence exploitation” and geolocating combatants. According to the medal, she aided in 650 captures and 600 kills.That’s a sobering body count for a young woman who, just a few years earlier, was teaching herself Arabic at the public library to better understand the faraway land that her country had invaded. As a teenager, Ms. Winner joined the military to learn more languages and because college looked like “somebody else’s moneymaking machine.” In the Air Force she learned Pashto, Dari and Farsi but ended up sequestered in a Maryland base eavesdropping on the other side of the planet.At times she expressed empathy for the people on the receiving end of the U.S. wars, fantasized about burning the White House down and even told her sister that she hated America. Those expressions of disgust, captured in online messages and private notes seized from Ms. Winner’s home, were eventually resurrected and patched together by prosecutors who seemed, Ms. Winner thought, to imply that she was a terrorist.Ms. Winner-Davis believes her daughter ended up leaking, at least in part, because she had been disillusioned by her military service. She recalled her daughter fretting over the reliability of the intelligence, telling her mother, “When you see somebody go poof on the screen, you’ve got to make sure it’s right.”“Through her work, she saw a lot of lies,” Ms. Winner-Davis said. “Reality saw another side of our country.”In the military and as an N.S.A. contractor, Ms. Winner vanished into the secrecy of federal institutions. It happened again when she went to prison. Each time, it seems, she emerged traumatized and depleted.Ms. Winner lived through both the pandemic and the racial tensions of 2020 in prison, where the social upheaval manifested in flares of violence and harsh recriminations. Covid meant draconian, monthslong quarantines and lockdowns in cells so tightly packed, she said, that inmates had to take turns standing up. As nerves frayed, guards began to randomly engage in collective punishment like tossing the cells and destroying people’s belongings.But it was the death of George Floyd that, to Ms. Winner, made prison life unbearable. Just hours after his murder hit the national consciousness, she said, she watched a white guard assault a Black inmate who’d made a rude comment.It was in those supercharged early days, stressed by increased hostility from prison staff members, Winner said, that she started getting high. Everyone, she said, had stores of psychiatric medications and other pills; you could combine them in different ways and crush and snort them to produce a buzz.“I was very, very aggressive” toward the guards, Ms. Winner said. “I’d just sit at the door punching the glass every time they walked by.”And so it was: a gradual disintegration in situation and morale until, at last, anticlimactically, Ms. Winner was released.Shane Lavalette for The New York TimesMs. Winner landed back where she started — at her mother’s place, saddled with an ankle monitor, dreaming of escape. She couldn’t bear to tell her mother how bad things had been in prison, but she couldn’t act normal, either. Her mother sensed that Ms. Winner had regressed to adolescence.“It definitely feels like there’s been some permanent damage,” Ms. Winner told me around that time. “Coming home and being in a stable environment and trying to have that control day to day — it hasn’t really fixed anything.”In those early weeks, Ms. Winner sought solace with a high school friend who, like her, had struggled with substance abuse and the law.“The scars were still healing from where I cut myself in quarantine,” she said. “He was the only person I could show those to and say, ‘Look, all I want to do is get high.’”In the confusion of those early weeks, she married her friend in secret — a decision that scandalized her disapproving mother and unraveled when the pair split up after just 44 days of marriage. Describing all of this, Ms. Winner suddenly laughed.“I’m obviously a 130 percent person,” she said. “Obviously.”She spent time with her family’s menagerie of four rescue dogs, three cats and a young horse. The Winner-Davis place has long operated as an informal refuge for rejected animals, giving Ms. Winner early lessons in the unforeseen complications of benevolence. She was a teenager when her pet kitten was killed by a pack of 15 dogs. Realizing their good intentions had mushroomed beyond control — and getting no help from the local animal shelter — the family ended up shooting some of the dogs they’d tried to save.Her childhood memories unfolded like tales from the forgotten margins of America, especially when it comes to her father, who bestowed on Ms. Winner her unforgettable name and lectured her at length about the importance of the traitor Judas to Christian theology. She called her father a “forever student”; she also described him as a junkie, gambler, possible draft dodger and would-be minister. His spine was shattered in a car accident before she was born, leading to years of excruciating surgeries and an unshakable dependence on painkillers.“OxyContin became his best friend, and of course nobody saw it as a vice,” Ms. Winner said. “But after that, he was never a competent person.” Eventually he split up with her mother and moved to Harlingen, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border.Still, he kept turning up to collect her and her older sister for allotted custody weekends. As they drove south along the coast, he’d hold forth on mystical and pseudoscientific topics. “Ninety minutes of ancient aliens, the Maya, the enigma of cultures, people coming from the sky,” Ms. Winner recalled.When their father won at cards, they’d take his winnings over the Rio Grande into Nuevo Progreso, Mexico, where he’d drop the girls at the orthodontist to have their braces checked while he sauntered from pharmacy to pharmacy, telling the clerks to keep the change so they’d leave his prescription unmarked. He’d redeem the same prescription at eight or nine shops.“He was a trafficker,” Ms. Winner said. “We learned everything. All the different checkpoints all the way up into Texas.”At first she loved the adventure of these trips, but as she got older, the shine began to wear off. Their father was getting sicker, surviving a few overdoses. Today these trips are the stuff of bad dreams.“I have nightmares about trying to get out of Harlingen, just the anxiety of needing to go home,” she said. “And realizing how many times he was probably high on pain pills and driving us.”Ms. Winner’s father didn’t live long enough to witness her moment of disastrous fame. Incapacitated from a series of heart attacks, he died in 2016. Like his daughter, he’d been radicalized by the Trump era — but in the opposite direction. He had become an ardent MAGA supporter, a development she attributes to incessant exposure to Fox News broadcasts in his nursing home.Relations between the unreliable father and the rest of the family had been strained for years. And yet at the end, Ms. Winner drew close to him.Watching him slip deeper into dementia, she realized that he could offer her a unique gift: He wasn’t lucid enough to repeat her secrets about the Air Force and the wars. So she unburdened herself into the closing door of a fading mind, this unfathomable father figure collapsed into moribund confessor.Back in Texas, Ms. Winner has narrowed her ambitions down to her local community. She said that she wants to do good things there, at home, where she can see them. She wants to coach, to use physical activity to fight addiction and give young people a chance to work through their stress.She’s got her scars — and maybe we do, too — but she’s ready to try, yet again, to turn all this into something good.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Republicans Hate Everything About Trump’s Dinner With Ye and Fuentes Except Trump

    There was a pattern with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. He would say or do something outrageous and often quite offensive. Most people condemned him and the remarks themselves. Republicans took a different approach. They condemned the remarks, but avoided an attack on Trump the person.You saw this in full effect during the Republican primary season, when Trump refused to disavow support from David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Republican candidate for senator and governor in Louisiana. Both leaders of the Republican Party in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, condemned Duke.“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” Ryan said. “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.”“There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the K.K.K., so let me make it perfectly clear,” McConnell said. “That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way.”As for Trump, who led the field for the nomination? “My plan is to support the nominee,” Ryan said. McConnell was not ready to commit at that point, but in short order, he bent the knee too.Trump is once again running for the Republican presidential nomination. Once again, though this time as the former president of the United States, he has the automatic support of a large part of the Republican Party base, as well as a large faction of Republican politicians, from state lawmakers to top members of the House of Representatives. And once again he has forced members of his party to make a choice about his rhetoric and behavior: Will they condemn his actions and cast him out or will they criticize his choices but allow him the privilege of leadership within the party?The offense this time? As you may have heard, Trump held a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with Kanye West, who has turned himself into arguably the nation’s most prominent antisemite, and Nick Fuentes, a far-right provocateur whose supporters, called groypers, were among the crowd that stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Trump, for his part, claims he knew nothing about Fuentes, who is an antisemite, a Holocaust denier and a white supremacist. “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said in a statement on Friday. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.”This is hard to believe. Trump has had links to the far right going back to his first presidential campaign. Whether out of belief or, more likely, out of his extreme narcissism, he has refused to disavow his supporters on the fringes of American politics. And as we all know, he encouraged them outright in his attempt to hold on to power after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Trump may not have known about Fuentes in particular — although I think that is doubtful, given Fuentes’s proximity to Republican politics — but he certainly knows the type.It took Republican leaders a few days to muster the energy to respond to the meeting. But on Monday afternoon, a cascade of high-level Republican officeholders criticized Trump for meeting with Fuentes.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, made a stern statement: “President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table. I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said, “President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites.”John Thune, the Senate minority whip, said that the dinner was “just a bad idea on every level. I don’t know who was advising him on his staff but I hope that whoever that person was got fired.” And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters: “The meeting was bad, he shouldn’t have done it. But again, you know, there’s a double standard about this kind of stuff.”You’ll notice, in all of this, that while Republicans are willing to condemn Fuentes and Ye and Trump’s decision to eat dinner with them, they are not willing to go so far as to draw any conclusions about Trump himself. Even Pence — who had, in this group, the strongest words for Trump — took care not to impute any malice to his former boss. “I don’t believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. I don’t believe he’s a racist or a bigot,” he said. “I think the president demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in giving those individuals a seat at the table.”One of the few Republicans to condemn Trump as a person and a political figure was Mitt Romney, who, notably, no longer has any national ambitions beyond the Senate. “There’s no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter,” said Romney, who also called the dinner “disgusting.”Among those Republicans who have been silent on the matter so far, the most conspicuous is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, where the dinner took place. DeSantis is often eager to jump into national political controversies. But he’s also Trump’s rival for control of the Republican Party and eager to court (and win) the former president’s supporters.Recently, there has been quite a bit of talk about the extent to which Republicans are leaving Trump behind and how they’ve tried to ignore his complaints and keep their distance. But this episode demonstrates the extent to which that distance — the distance between Trump and the Republican establishment — is overstated.Trump can still force the rest of the party to respond to him; he can still force it to contend with his rhetoric and his actions. And most important, his influence still constrains the behavior of other Republicans — rivals, allies and everyone in between. Trump is still at the center of the Republican political universe, exerting his force on everybody around him.I have no doubt that Republican elites want to rid themselves of Trump, especially after their poor performance — historically poor — in the midterm elections. But what we’re seeing right now is how that is easier said than done; how even in the face of the worst transgressions, Trump still has enough power and influence to make the party hesitate before it attempts to take action — and pull punches when it does. It’s the same hesitation and fear that helped Trump win the nomination in 2016. And if Republicans cannot overcome it, it will help him win it again in 2024.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Mike Pence Is Having a Moment He Doesn’t Deserve

    Mike Pence had a go-to line during his time as vice president of the United States. When his boss would ask him to carry out some task or duty — say, take an overseas trip or run the response to a pandemic — Pence would look President Trump in the eye, nod and say, “I’m here to serve.”The phrase recurs in Pence’s new memoir, “So Help Me God,” which covers his years as a congressman, governor of Indiana and vice president, with a focus on Pence’s actions during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It is the tale of the loyalist who finally had enough, of the prayerful stand-taker who insisted that he did not have the power to overturn an election, no matter the arguments concocted by Trump and his air-quote lawyers.With rioters calling for his hanging and Trump tweeting that Pence lacked “the courage to do what should have been done,” the vice president turned to the aides and family members with him in an underground loading dock at the Capitol. “It doesn’t take courage to break the law,” he told them. “It takes courage to uphold the law.” It is an inspiring scene, marred only by Pence then asking his daughter to write down what he said.Pence has been busy promoting “So Help Me God” on television, distancing himself from Trump (urging him to apologize for dining with a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago last week) and even teasing a possible White House run of his own in 2024. The book debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, and the Justice Department is now seeking to question Pence in its investigation of Trump’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. Clearly, the former veep is having his moment.Feel free to buy the book, but don’t buy the redemption tale just yet. Pence was indeed in the White House to serve, but he served the president’s needs more than those of the nation. In “So Help Me God,” Pence rarely contradicts the president, even in private, until the days immediately preceding Jan. 6. He rarely attempts to talk Trump out of his worst decisions or positions. He rarely counters Trump’s lies with the truth.Most damning, Pence failed to tell the president or the public, without hedging or softening the point, that the Trump-Pence ticket had lost the 2020 election, even after Pence had reached that conclusion himself. Americans should be enormously grateful that the vice president did not overstep his authority and attempt to reverse the will of the voters on Jan. 6. But you shouldn’t get the glory for pulling democracy back from the brink if you helped carry it up there in the first place. And, so help me God, Pence did just that.Why wouldn’t Trump — a man Pence invariably calls “my president” and “my friend” — assume that his vice president would help steal the election? Pence had agreed to so much else, had tolerated every other national and personal indignity with that faraway, worshipful gaze.The irony is that Pence’s record of reliable servility was a key reason he was in position to be the hero at the end. And so the vice president became that rarest of Trump-era creatures: a dedicated enabler who nonetheless managed to exit the administration with a plausible claim to partial credit. If Pence got to do the right thing on Jan. 6, it was because he had done the wrong one for so long.The purpose of the vice president, of course, is to serve as second banana, preferably without getting too mottled by lousy assignments, presidential indifference or embarrassing deference. (Pence fills his sycophancy quotas in the book, extolling the president’s physical stamina, likening Trump to Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and noting that he displayed a signed copy of “The Art of the Deal” in his West Wing office during his entire vice presidency.) Still, I searched through the 542 pages of this memoir for any instances in which Pence exercised enough character and independent judgment to tell Trump that he might have been on the wrong course about something, about anything. I found two such cases before the events surrounding Jan. 6. Two.No, it’s not when the president fired F.B.I. director James Comey in May of 2017, an action Trump took not for self-serving reasons, he assured Pence, but because it was “the right thing to do for the country.” (Apparently Pence is so persuaded by this argument that he quotes it twice.) It’s not when Trump praised the “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville tragedy in August 2017. (Any notion of a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and those opposing them, Pence explains, was an unfortunate “narrative” that “smeared” his good friend in the Oval Office.)It’s not when the administration separated children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. (On immigration, Pence writes, Trump “led with law and order but was prepared to follow with compassion.”) It’s not when Trump pressed Ukraine’s leader to investigate a potential Democratic rival in the 2020 election. (“It was a less-than-perfect call,” Pence acknowledges, but its imperfections were stylistic, the product of Trump’s “casual” and “spontaneous” approach to foreign relations.)It’s not when Trump confused a frightened populace with his nonsensical coronavirus briefings in the spring of 2020. In fact, Pence explains away those sessions by suggesting that Trump believed that “seeing him and the press argue was in some way reassuring to the American people that life was going on.” And it’s not when Trump shared a stage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 and accepted the Russian president’s denials about election interference. Pence says he encouraged Trump to “clarify” his views, but the vice president seemed far more troubled by media coverage of the event. “The press and political establishment went wild,” he writes. “It sounded as though the president was taking Putin’s side over that of his national security officials.” If it sounded that way, it was because that was the sound the words made when they left the president’s mouth.That is a standard Pence feint: When Trump says or does something wildly objectionable, Pence remains noncommittal on the matter and just condemns the “ever-divisive press” that covered it. When Trump derided Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole countries” in an Oval Office conversation in early 2018, “the media predictably went into a frenzy,” Pence laments. The former vice president even faults journalists for drawing attention to Covid infection numbers in May 2020, “at a time,” Pence writes, “when cases in more than half of the states were dropping, and case rates were also in decline, numbering 20,000 a day, down from 30,000 in April.” As if 20,000 new Americans infected with a dangerous virus each day was not newsworthy.The two meaningful disagreements that Pence expressed to the president in real time were these: First, Pence demurred when Trump considered inviting Taliban representatives to Camp David; he suggested that the president “reflect on who they are and what they’ve done and if they have truly changed.” Second, the president and vice president had a testy exchange when Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, left a pro-Trump super PAC and joined Pence’s political action committee. Pence reminded Trump that he had encouraged the move, but Trump denied having done so. “By that point I was angry,” Pence acknowledges; he even admits to raising his voice. Somehow, the Taliban and Corey Lewandowski rated equally as lines that shall not be crossed.Between Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, and the tragedy of Jan. 6, 2021, while Trump and his allies propagated the fiction of a stolen vote, Pence enabled and dissembled. Describing the outcome of the vote in his memoir, he offers a gloriously exculpatory euphemism, writing that “we came up short under circumstances that would cause millions of Americans to doubt the outcome of the election.” (Circumstances could not be reached for comment.)When Trump declared victory in the early hours of Nov. 4, Pence stood alongside him in the East Room of the White House, in front of dozens of U.S. flags and behind a single microphone, and “promised that we would remain vigilant to protect the integrity of the vote,” Pence recalls. In the days that followed, Pence addressed conservative audiences and pledged to continue the fight “until every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is thrown out!”Note those slippery, wiggle-room formulations. Pence does not directly state that he believed the election had been stolen, yet his rhetoric still appears fully in line with Trump’s position. The ovations at his speeches were “deafening,” Pence notes. So was his public silence about the truth. Less than a week after the election, Pence had already admitted to Jared Kushner that “although I was sure that some voter fraud had taken place, I wasn’t convinced it had cost us the election.” Why not share that conclusion with the public? Why stand by as the big lie grew bigger and Jan. 6 grew inevitable?The memoir revisits several conversations between Pence and Trump in the weeks immediately preceding Jan. 6 — all missed opportunities to convey the truth to the boss. Instead, Pence reassured Trump that “the campaign was right to defend the integrity of America’s elections.” (Pence often refers obliquely to the actions of “the campaign,” as if he played no role in it, as if his name was not even on the ballot.) He dances around reality, coming closest to it when he advised the president that “if the legal challenges came up short and if he was unwilling to concede, he could simply accept the results of the elections, move forward with the transition, and start a political comeback.”On Dec. 14, 2020, state electors officially voted and delivered an Electoral College majority to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, leading Pence to acknowledge that “for all intents and purposes, at that point the election was over.” He says so now in the memoir; if only he had said it in public at the time. Yes, he told Trump repeatedly that the vice president lacks the authority to overturn the results of the election. But not once in his book does Pence say to the president that, even if I had the authority, I would not exercise it — because we lost.Throughout “So Help Me God,” readers find Pence still running interference for Trump, still minimizing his transgressions. When he quotes the president’s video from the afternoon of Jan. 6, in which Trump finally called on the rioters to stand down, Pence makes a revealing omission. Here is how he quotes Trump: “I know your pain, I know your hurt … but you have to go home now, we have to have peace.” What did Pence erase with that ellipsis? “We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump said in the middle of that passage. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.” So much of Pence’s vice presidency is captured in those three little dots.Sometimes the problem is not the relevant material Pence leaves out, but the dubious material he puts in. Pence writes, with an overconfidence bordering on overcompensation, that he was going to win re-election as Indiana governor in 2016, that his victory “was all but assured.” In fact, Pence’s approval ratings in the final stretch of his governorship were low and polls indicated a tight contest against his Democratic opponent.Pence writes that Trump “never tried to obscure the offensiveness of what he had said” on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, perhaps forgetting that Trump dismissed his words as mere “locker room talk” and later suggested that the voice on the recording might not have been his own.Pence also writes that the White House, busy with its Covid response, did not have “much time for celebrating” after the president’s acquittal in his first Senate impeachment trial in February 2020, even though the next day Trump spoke about it in the White House for more than an hour before a crowd of lawmakers, aides, family members and lawyers. Trump explicitly called the speech a “celebration” and referred to that day, Feb. 6, 2020, as “a day of celebration,” as Pence, sitting in the front row, no doubt heard. The day would indeed prove a high point in the administration’s final year, as a pandemic, electoral defeat and insurrection soon followed.“I prayed for wisdom to know the right thing to do and the courage to do it,” Pence writes of the days before Jan. 6. Unsurprising for a book with this title, Pence’s Christian faith is a constant reference point. Raised Catholic, Pence describes being born again during his college years and joining an evangelical church with his wife. Throughout the memoir, Pence is often praying, and often reminding readers of how often he prays.Each chapter begins with a Bible passage, and Pence highlights individuals he deems particularly “strong” or “devout” Christians, with Representative Julia Carson of Indiana, who died in 2007, Senator Josh Hawley, Representative Jim Jordan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo making the cut. I kept wondering if he would consider the role that his outspoken faith may have played in getting him on the ticket in the first place. If Trump picked him to reassure Christian conservatives, how does Pence feel about that bargain?In the epilogue, Pence provides a clue. Of all the Trump administration’s accomplishments, he writes, the “most important of all” was making possible the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. “The fact that three of the five justices who joined that opinion were appointed during the Trump-Pence administration makes all the hardship we endured from 2016 forward more than worth it.” Pence, in other words, is the ultimate “But Gorsuch!” voter. That is what he got out of the bargain, plus a new national profile that he may leverage into a bid for the only higher office left to seek.In the book’s appendix, Pence reprints several documents that emphasize different aspects of his public service. There is his 2016 Republican convention speech, in which he hailed Trump as both an “uncalculating truth-teller” and “his own man, distinctly American”; his 2016 State of the State of Indiana address; his letter to Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he stated that the vice president’s role in certifying an election is “largely ceremonial”; and his letter to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, six days after the attack on the Capitol, refusing to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Pence also adds two texts in which he takes special pride, and which I imagine him citing in any future presidential run.First is an essay titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” which Pence published in 1991 after his second failed run for Congress. “It is wrong, quite simply, to squander a candidate’s priceless moment in history, a moment in which he or she could have brought critical issues before the citizenry, on partisan bickering,” Pence wrote. He was describing himself, with regret. The second is a speech that Pence, then representing Indiana’s Sixth Congressional District, delivered at Hillsdale College in 2010. “You must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness,” Pence declared. He was describing the Obama presidency, with disdain. The president, he wrote, “does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision.” Pence warned that “if a president joins the power of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.”These documents provide an apt coda to Pence’s vice presidency. One day, he may use them to distinguish himself from his president and his friend, to try to show that Pence, too, can be his own man. For now, he does not make the obvious connection between the sentiments in his essay and speech and his experience campaigning and governing alongside Donald Trump. Or if he does, he is calculating enough to keep it to himself.After all, Mike Pence was there to serve.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 Republican Party Made Trump the Focus of the Midterms

    If Republicans have many things going for them in next week’s elections — an economy that’s like a millstone around Democrats’ necks, fear in the electorate about crime and a chaotic immigration system, President Biden’s low approval ratings — they are also taking what appear to be some enormous risks: having candidates on the ballot who many observers see as too inexperienced, extreme or scandal-burdened to win in November.But they forget that Republicans already took an enormous risk, in 2016, by nominating Donald Trump for president. And not only did they avoid ballot-box suicide to win the election, but it was the beginning of a renaissance for the Republican Party. Mr. Trump’s approach, gleeful culture war combativeness atop core conservative principles, delivered both short-term policy wins and long-sought victories for his party’s base, like tax cuts, a long procession of conservative federal judges, a Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the American Embassy moved to Jerusalem. He also pleased the Republican right by giving the party a new focus on immigration and shifting its foreign policy away from wars and nation-building in the Middle East.The Republican Party’s strategy in 2022 has been to double down on the Trump approach. Its candidates for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania and Georgia, Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz, are celebrities without political experience, as is Kari Lake, a former Phoenix area news anchor who is now the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona.Blake Masters, running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, has never held office and is perhaps best known for his association with Peter Thiel, a billionaire co-founder of PayPal, for whom Mr. Masters once worked and with whom he co-authored the 2014 book “Zero to One.” Also close to Mr. Thiel, and likewise a first-time aspirant to office, is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance, famed for his own best-selling book, the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”Mitch McConnell may question “candidate quality,” but the Republican Party’s embrace of apparently high-risk candidates is a sign of confidence, not weakness. The party’s voters feel strongly enough about the populist, pro-Trump positioning that they have supported them over more experienced and less controversial figures.This reinvention is presenting midterm voters with something that looks fresh and new, at a time when the old party identities, and old norms and institutions, seem feeble and impotent.Joe Biden is a living symbol of that. In 2008, the Democrats branded themselves as the party of hope and change. President Biden is the farthest thing from a face of change, and fear of Mr. Trump has characterized the party’s messaging far more than any sense of hope. The Democrats are defensive, and what they’re defending seems to be naturally decaying — a political consensus that has disappointed Americans, fulfilling neither the demands for justice of the passionate left nor the middle class’s expectations for economic growth and stability at home and abroad.In these crumbling conditions, risk may be more attractive than hopeless defensiveness. And the G.O.P. is exciting, for good and for ill, in a way that the Democratic Party has not been since Barack Obama’s re-election. Boldness pays dividends, especially when the fundamental conditions of a midterm election make the risks smaller than they seem.Nominees like Mr. Masters, Mr. Walker and Ms. Lake have been controversial even in some quarters of the Republican Party. They have staked out hard-right political positions and have not backed down from aligning themselves with Mr. Trump even during an election season in which the former president’s conduct during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is the subject of ongoing congressional hearings and his handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence under scrutiny by the Justice Department. Except for Mr. Walker, these candidates faced early competition in their primaries from experienced Republican officeholders.The party’s gambles look increasingly likely to pay off. Encouraged by recent polls, Republicans expect the right-wing populist approach of 2016 to produce midterm results like those of 1994, when the party picked up both chambers of Congress. Even so, skeptics of Trumpian reinvention of the Republican Party might wonder if its success — assuming it materializes — is not despite, rather than because of, Mr. Trump and his style of politics.Democrats contemplating a “red wave” next week might console themselves with the thought that nothing they could have done would have changed the fundamental forces giving Republicans an advantage this cycle. After all, the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.If Democrats under Bill Clinton could lose both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in 1994, and Republicans under George W. Bush could lose both in 2006, it may seem like destiny for the Democrats to lose their razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate under President Biden this year. Democrats lost the House in Barack Obama’s first midterm elections in 2010 as well, and the Senate in his second in 2014.What’s more, some Republicans who have defied and opposed Mr. Trump, like Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, are also poised to do well on Nov. 8. The former president’s critics in the party might well believe that any version of the Republican Party could do well in this environment, and the they might do even better without the new populist right.These thoughts are a comfort to those who would like to see American politics revert to what had passed for normal in the years before 2016. But they don’t overturn the daunting reality faced by both Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans: The Republican Party has chosen to remake itself in Trump’s image, and the political gestalt he created can win. It won the White House in 2016 and it has held on to the Republican Party as an institution even after the defeats of 2018 and 2020. This year Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates are more Trump-like than ever, from their views on immigration and foreign policy to their disdain for the Republican Party establishment of the time before Mr. Trump. Experience counts far less than before, certainly in Republican primaries, while candidates like Mr. Walker, Mr. Oz, and Ms. Lake suggest that celebrity appeal will play a growing part in Republican politics, and thus the country’s, in the future.Mr. Vance, 38, and Mr. Masters, 36, for their part show that the reinvented Republican Party is attracting highly talented and intelligent young candidates who are likely to further accelerate the party’s ideological transformation. For its supporters, and perhaps for a wider curious public, the Republican Party has become exciting and evolutionary. While Democrats have taken some risks of their own this cycle, with candidates such as Pennsylvania nominee for U.S. Senate, John Fetterman, the party still seems more reactive than creative.The Republican Party has nominated and primed set to elect a wave of right-wing candidates who will shape American politics in the years ahead with or without Mr. Trump.The Republicans, in short, are taking entrepreneurial risks and have the initiative. And while the conditions of the 2022 midterms allow them to capitalize on it, the impetus itself is what matters most for our future.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.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 Democrats’ Last Stand in Wisconsin

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Wisconsin’s 51st Assembly District lies in the southwest part of the state — part of the larger Driftless Area, so named because it was mysteriously spared the drift of the glaciers that flattened much of the Midwest during the last ice age. The resulting landscape is forested and hilly, arable but not easy to farm on an industrial scale. As a result, many of the farms in this region are still small and independently owned, which explains in part why the area is less reliably Republican than many of the state’s other rural regions. Presidential races in the 51st tend to move back and forth between the two parties. On the local level, though, the district has remained a stubbornly elusive target for Wisconsin’s Democrats. Todd Novak, a Republican, has served as its state assemblyman since 2014. In 2016, Novak’s Democratic challenger lost by 723 votes, or less than 3 percent of the total; in 2018, the margin shrank to less than 1.5 percent; then, in 2020, it widened to more than 4 percent.Last spring, as the filing deadline for the 2022 midterms approached, Wisconsin’s Democrats were struggling to find a candidate willing to run for the 51st. It was just one seat, but it carried national implications. Gerrymandering has effectively ensured a G.O.P. majority in the state’s 99-seat Assembly, and the Republicans are only five seats away from establishing a supermajority that would allow them to override the Democratic governor’s vetoes. This would enable the G.O.P. to pass virtually any legislation it wants, even rewriting the most basic rules governing the administration of federal elections.Francesca Hong, the Democrat who represents the 76th District in Wisconsin’s Assembly, sent a message on Instagram to Leah Spicer, gauging her interest in representing the 51st. Spicer, who is 29, had recently been appointed municipal clerk in Clyde, a town of just a few hundred people, filling a vacancy created by an unexpected resignation. She had never run for office, but she had an attractive profile for a local political candidate. She was a small-business owner with deep roots in the district and young children, one of whom attended school in its chronically underfunded system. Spicer grew up in Clyde and moved back home from North Carolina a few years earlier to help her mother and father run their small farm and age in place. She and her husband had just opened a restaurant in a former schoolhouse in the nearby town Spring Green, calling it Homecoming.Spicer canvassing door to door in Wisconsin’s 51st Assembly District.Angie Smith for The New York TimesSpicer’s interest in running for the seat turned out to be nonexistent. Between the farm, the restaurant and her children, she was already stretched thin. So the Democrats called in some bigger guns to try to persuade her. A voice mail message from her district’s representative in Congress, Mark Pocan, was followed by a phone call, late at night, from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who was himself running for the U.S. Senate against the Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson. Tammy Baldwin, who holds Wisconsin’s other Senate seat, tried next. “She was like, You grew up there, so you have a real understanding of what it’s like there,” Spicer told me on a Sunday in mid-September. We were on her family’s farm, in the kitchen of a small house built by one of her brothers, where she lives next to her parents with her husband and their three children. The sleeves of her work shirt were rolled up just high enough to reveal a large image of two cows, a reminder of Wisconsin that she got tattooed on her right forearm when she was managing a restaurant in North Carolina.Spicer again declined. But a few days later, she abruptly changed her mind. By then, a draft of the Supreme Court’s forthcoming opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson had leaked; the court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, leaving it up to states whether to allow or ban abortions. Wisconsin could soon be reverting to an 1849 law criminalizing abortion in almost every instance, including rape and incest. “I was like, Jesus Christ, who’s going to fight for this?” she said. “It’s really hard to stomach going backward instead of forward.” She was one of 19 women who committed to run for Wisconsin’s State Assembly in the weeks after the news broke. The state’s Democratic Party immediately went to work, helping Spicer quickly gather the 300 signatures she needed to get on the ballot, and giving her $2,000 in seed money to build a website and produce yard signs and campaign literature. Because her district had been identified as a battleground, the Democratic caucus inside the State Assembly also gave her the money to bring on a full-time campaign manager at an annualized salary of $48,000. She hired Matthew Jeweler, a 28-year-old line cook at the restaurant she managed in North Carolina who had since worked as a digital organizer on Michael Bloomberg’s brief presidential campaign in 2020. Jeweler and his dog, Murphy, moved in with Spicer and her family on the farm, and he received training from state Democrats in running a political campaign, which included how to canvass in rural areas, where people can be suspicious of strangers knocking on their doors. (First lesson: Try to call first, to give voters a heads-up that you might be stopping by.)By mid-September, Spicer had already raised over $40,000 and personally knocked on more than 2,000 doors. After she introduces herself to whoever answers, she likes to ask what issues they care about most, a question that might just as easily lead to an extended conversation about the safety of the local tap water — a pressing issue in the region because of the agricultural runoff from manure and pesticides — as to an emotional discussion about abortion. When no one is home, Spicer hangs a leaflet on the doorknob with her personal cellphone number on it, inviting residents to call or text her. Some actually do.The state’s Democrats were pleased with how Spicer’s campaign was going, but they were still not sure whether to devote any additional money to the 51st. The party’s resources are limited, and in Wisconsin, these midterms are thick with high-stakes contests, including a well-funded challenge to the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers; the hard-fought Senate campaign between Barnes and Johnson; and a race for attorney general that is likely to determine at least the near-term future of abortion in Wisconsin. Decisions about where to invest the party’s resources rest largely in the hands of Wisconsin’s 41-year-old Democratic Party state chairman, Ben Wikler. Over a late beer and fried cheese curds at a bar near his home on the west side of Madison not long after I left Spicer, Wikler told me that he learned a hard lesson in the 51st in 2020. The polling had been encouraging from the start, and so the Democrats made the district a top priority, pouring more than $500,000 into it, only to be defeated once again. “Leah’s doing a great job, but it’s really on the edge of, ‘Is this one we should prioritize?’” Wikler said.Strictly speaking, the 51st is not a race the Democrats need to win in order to preserve the governor’s veto, as long as they don’t lose five of their existing seats in the Assembly. But what if they do lose five seats, and they hadn’t invested in a race that they perhaps could have won? When it comes to state politics, the Democrats are once again playing defense in the 2022 midterms.Years ago, the Democratic Party took the fateful step of separating national and local politics, increasingly prioritizing federal races while all but ignoring state contests. State parties atrophied, and the Democratic grass roots withered, making it that much more difficult for the party’s candidates to compete for seats like the 51st today, at a moment when state governments like Wisconsin’s are exerting a historic degree of influence over American political life. Ben Wikler, Wisconsin’s Democratic Party state chairman, with Spicer.Angie Smith for The New York TimesThe choices Wikler makes — how to allocate money and organizing muscle, when to saturate local media markets with ads — will affect more than individual candidates or races, or even the midterm cycle as a whole. Wisconsin was central to President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, an effort that continued well into this year. The administration of the state’s elections is currently overseen by a bipartisan group, the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which upheld President Biden’s victory over Trump’s objections a few weeks after the election. But the commission’s future is in jeopardy: Many members of the state’s G.O.P. have been speaking openly about disbanding it and transferring its authority to the Republican-held Legislature or the secretary of state. In Wisconsin, the coming midterms are as much about 2024 — and every subsequent presidential cycle, for that matter — as they are about 2022. For most of the 20th century, the Democratic Party dominated state and local politics across America, and the Republicans had no competing organizational infrastructure to speak of. Then, in 1973, a young conservative activist named Paul Weyrich — a Wisconsinite, as it happens — came up with a scheme that would challenge the liberal hegemony in state governments, helping to found the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. At the time, the Democrats controlled 56 state legislative chambers and the Republicans 38, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. To achieve its goal, ALEC needed conservatives to win control of more of these chambers. Progress was slow. During the presidency of the widely popular Ronald Reagan, the Democrats held even more of America’s statehouses, with 68 legislative chambers in 1988, compared with the Republicans’ 28. A major breakthrough came during the 1994 midterms, when Representative Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America unified Republicans up and down the ballot around a single, national message. Not only did they have control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades; they also recorded striking gains in America’s statehouses, flipping 20 chambers, while not losing any.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.Fifteen years later, with President Barack Obama ensconced in the White House, the G.O.P. doubled down on local politics, seizing on the Tea Party uprising and turning it into a media phenomenon. Republican strategists recognized that they did not need the White House to exert their influence and advance their agenda — state power was national power. And by that point, the G.O.P. had the sprawling infrastructure — right-wing radio, Fox News, gun clubs, church groups — to spread and amplify the party’s message among its base.In 2010, the Republicans unveiled their Redmap campaign to flip state legislatures across the country. The timing was deliberate: 2011 was a decennial redistricting year. Whoever held these legislatures would soon have the opportunity to redraw the congressional and legislative lines in their states. The goal wasn’t just to win control of more statehouses but also to make it as difficult as possible for the Democrats to win them back. Money, mailings and political ads poured into sleepy Democratic districts around the country, and the Republicans soon occupied 56 of the country’s chambers, their highest number since 1952.The G.O.P. followed through on its plan the following year, locking in and expanding on its legislative majorities with new electoral maps that densely packed Democrats into a minimal number of often urban districts, while spreading Republicans across a maximal number of more rural ones. The plan worked: Even in election cycles when Democrats won at the top of the ticket, they continued to lose down ballot. After the 2016 election, Republicans held 67 of the country’s legislative chambers, more than twice as many as the Democrats and a greater number than at any point in at least a hundred years. Heading into the 2022 midterms — after the blue-wave midterms of 2018 and the electing of President Biden in 2020 — the G.O.P. still has 61 chambers, and the Democrats have just 37.It is a stunning political success story. But there’s a less discussed, parallel narrative that played out alongside the Republicans’ takeover of the states: The Democrats’ protracted neglect of them. While national Republican groups and donors were shoveling money into local legislative initiatives and down-ballot races and cultivating their base, the Democratic Party was becoming increasingly Washington-centric, dominated by a closed circle of political consultants, interest groups and megadonors who viewed state and local politics as largely inconsequential. Investments dried up, and the state parties that are responsible for the unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts work of ground-level politics languished.In recent years, a number of young Democratic leaders have sought to redirect the party’s attention toward the states and re-energize the grass roots. Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives, built a coalition of activists and organizers to register more young voters and voters of color. Amanda Litman, the email director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, founded a group that recruits progressives around the country to run for local office. Daniel Squadron stepped down from the New York State Senate to create a political action committee that is spending $60 million to support Democrats in state legislative races in the 2022 midterms.But the Democrats are starting from way behind. Mike Schmuhl, who managed Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, was elected chairman of the Democratic Party of deep red Indiana in March 2021, and he has been traveling around the state nonstop since then, trying to generate interest in the Democratic agenda and enlist volunteers. It’s been slow going, especially in rural areas. “We’re just kind of pushing away the cobwebs,” he told me. Wikler, at least, has the advantage of working in a perennial battleground state; four of the last six presidential elections in Wisconsin were decided by less than a percentage point, and it was the tipping-point state that put the winner over the top in the Electoral College in both 2016 and 2020. “As I often say to voters and volunteers, being in Wisconsin you have a superpower,” Wikler told me over the summer. “Your vote for no good reason has more power in this moment to shape the future of the entire United States than the votes of people anywhere else.” Ben Wikler in his office in Madison, Wis.Angie Smith for The New York TimesRaised in Wisconsin, Wikler ran his first political action when he was 14, a campaign to pressure the Madison school board into canceling an exclusive marketing agreement with Coca-Cola. He objected to the idea of a public-school system going into business with a for-profit corporation and to the terms of the deal, which required a lot of students to buy a lot of soda. His interest in politics continued to deepen from there. After graduating from Harvard in 2004, he helped create and produce a radio show for the future (and now former) Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and worked for the online petition site Change​.org in New York. But like many ambitious and well-connected Democratic activists, Wikler inevitably gravitated toward the Beltway, becoming Washington director of the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org in 2014.By that time, Wisconsin had become ground zero for the Republican takeover of America’s state governments. The location made sense, as the writer Dan Kaufman detailed in his book, “The Fall of Wisconsin.” The state had both a strong Republican base and an enduring progressive legacy, including powerful public-sector unions that bargained aggressively for their members’ wages, benefits and pensions and thus formed a reliable Democratic voting bloc. In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, national groups backed by conservatives like the Koch brothers spent millions of dollars to flip the state’s Legislature and elect as governor the Tea Party hero Scott Walker, who pledged to cut government spending and make Wisconsin more pro-business. The Republicans won the trifecta in Wisconsin in 2010, sweeping the State Assembly and the Senate and electing Walker. The following year, the new G.O.P.-led Legislature redrew Wisconsin’s electoral maps to protect the Republican majority and set about decimating its labor movement. First came the legislation now known as Act 10, which severely curtailed the power of public-sector unions to bargain for their members, significantly reducing their membership and thus their political clout. Then, four years later, came the so-called right-to-work law that made it illegal for unions to require private-sector workers to pay dues, weakening their power even further. Walker’s agenda ignited a strong backlash among Wisconsin’s Democrats, who collected nearly twice as many as the 540,208 signatures required to force a recall election in 2012. But Walker survived, and the Democratic energy soon dissipated. A state that had once been a laboratory for progressive policies became an incubator for conservative ones: A number of states followed Wisconsin’s lead, enacting similar anti-union laws.Spicer with her family on their farm near Spring Green, Wis.Angie Smith for The New York TimesThe 51st is one of five seats Republicans would need to override the Democratic governor’s vetoes in Wisconsin.Angie Smith for The New York TimesWikler flew home occasionally during this period to protest Walker’s policies and campaign for Democratic candidates. He was knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, when Wisconsin’s Democratic Party truly bottomed out. Even after the Republican sweep in 2010, Obama easily won Wisconsin two years later, and Clinton’s advisers viewed it as a sure thing. Clinton opted not to visit the state after the primary to rally supporters, and the campaign put minimal resources and energy into Wisconsin despite the increasingly desperate pleas of longtime field organizers and party activists. “Wisconsinites were all screaming, ‘Hey, this is a crisis here,’ and the campaign basically said, ‘There are other priorities we’re going to focus on,’” Wikler told me. Many of the voters he canvassed in the days before the election — identified by the Clinton campaign as motivated Democrats — were in fact undecided. Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes.After Trump’s inauguration, Wikler was consumed by the monthslong effort to block Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act in his role at MoveOn, helping to lead regular protests outside the U.S. Capitol and organizing hundreds of thousands of voter calls to congressional offices. In late 2018, with the A.C.A. secure, he and his wife packed up their house on Capitol Hill, loaded their three small children into their battered Toyota Highlander and moved back into his childhood home in Madison. It was clear to Wikler that the most important battles now needed to be fought outside the Beltway. He had always dreamed of raising his family in Wisconsin, and he finally had a compelling reason to do so..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.At the time, Wikler’s predecessor as party chair, Martha Laning, was starting to rebuild the state’s network of Democratic activists, using Obama’s model from 2008, which entailed hiring organizers to recruit local volunteers who would engage voters in their own communities. After years of brutal defeats, Wisconsin’s Democrats had just logged a big victory. Tony Evers, the longtime state superintendent of public instruction, had defeated Walker in the governor’s race by a razor-thin margin of 1.1 percent. “It was as though as we were sliding down the cliff face we grabbed a single branch and then managed to pull ourselves up to a fingernail grip on the edge,” Wikler told me.Laning soon announced her intention to step down. Wikler met with local Democratic leaders across the state to ask what they thought of his running to replace her, and he ultimately invited two veteran grass-roots leaders, Felesia Martin and Lee Snodgrass, to join him on the ticket as vice chairs. He was elected in June 2019, about a year and a half before the 2020 election.In a sense, Wikler embodies the tension between the Washington establishment and the Democratic base. More insider than outsider, he has a large Twitter following, appears regularly on MSNBC and is adept at wooing Democratic donors. As the campaign heated up, he transformed Wisconsin’s Democratic Party — WisDems, as it became known in Democratic circles — into a national brand, leveraging the state’s strategic importance to raise large sums to underwrite the party’s efforts to deliver Wisconsin to Biden. Unable to hold in-person fund-raisers during the pandemic, he organized a virtual reunion and script reading by the cast of “The Princess Bride” that brought in more than $4 million. Thousands of Democratic volunteers around the country signed up for phone banks to get out the vote in Wisconsin. Polls showed Biden winning the state by as much as 17 percent. In the end, he won it by less than 1 percent, or fewer than 21,000 votes, basically the same margin by which Clinton lost it four years earlier.Wikler and WisDems are facing what may be an even bigger challenge in this year’s midterms. Even if the Democrats can prevent the Republicans from establishing a veto-proof supermajority in the Legislature, they also need to hold on to the governor’s office in order to block the G.O.P. from advancing its statewide agenda. Over the course of his four years in office, Governor Evers has vetoed almost 150 bills that among other things would have further suppressed voting rights in Wisconsin — for instance, limiting the sites where voters can return absentee ballots — and loosened restrictions on bringing guns onto the grounds of schools. It’s always tough to mobilize voters in off-year elections, and midterms tend to break hard against the party in power in Washington. Not since 1962 has a Democrat won the race for governor in Wisconsin while his party held the White House.Doug La Follette, a democrat, is Wisconsin’s Secretary of State. If he is defeated, Republicans may transfer election powers to the Secretary of State’s Office.Angie Smith for The New York TimesHaving established a seemingly irreversible majority in the State Legislature, Wisconsin’s Republicans have moved on to a new frontier in the 2022 midterms: the secretary of state’s office. The position is currently held by a Democrat, the 82-year-old Doug La Follette. A distant descendant of Robert La Follette, a celebrated Wisconsin governor and Progressive Party senator known as Fighting Bob, he has been in office for nearly four decades. Name recognition has insulated him from any serious Republican challenges, so the G.O.P. has instead stripped his office of all but its most ceremonial duties. It was Governor Walker who delivered the final, most humiliating blow. In 2015, he and the G.O.P. literally banished La Follette to the basement, moving him into a windowless office with drop ceilings and linoleum floors in the state’s majestic Capitol building in Madison. His primary and nearly only remaining responsibility is to stamp the state seal on official government documents. But just as power can be taken away, it can also be given. If the Republicans are able to unseat La Follette in the midterms, they may very well put the secretary of state’s office in charge of Wisconsin’s elections.The Wisconsin Elections Commission played a critical role in preventing Trump from remaining in office after the 2020 election. After Biden won Wisconsin, Trump falsely claimed that many of Biden’s votes there had been cast illegally, and his campaign paid for a recount in the state’s two most heavily Democratic counties. The recount upheld Biden’s victory — in fact, it widened his winning margin — and the elections commission refused to overturn the results.This was just the beginning of Trump’s attempt to reverse Biden’s results in Wisconsin. He then shifted his attention to the courts, suing to have ballots in Democratic counties thrown out. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rejected his lawsuit, 4-3, shortly before the Electoral College was scheduled to meet in mid-December to certify Biden’s victory. The winning party of a state’s popular vote is responsible for sending electors to the Electoral College, but Wisconsin was one of several battleground states that also sent a slate of illegitimate Republican electors to try to subvert the certification process.Even after the electoral votes had been certified, Trump continued his effort in Wisconsin, pressing the state government’s most powerful Republican, Robin Vos, the speaker of the Assembly, to investigate its administration of the election. In June 2021, Vos appointed Michael Gableman, a conservative lawyer and former State Supreme Court justice, to head up the effort. Gableman was not a neutral arbiter; he had already accused the Wisconsin Elections Commission of stealing the election. His 14-month, $1.1 million, taxpayer-funded investigation involved numerous subpoenas, and his demands for closed-door testimony from local officials stoked conspiracy theories about Wisconsin’s electoral process. Gableman’s “second interim investigative” report, issued in March 2022, recommended that the Legislature consider decertifying the 2020 election and abolishing the Wisconsin Elections Commission. A number of local G.O.P. officials also attacked the commission, including Christopher Schmaling, the sheriff of Racine County. Schmaling accused five of the commission’s members of breaking the law by allowing 42 residents of a nursing home to vote absentee during the pandemic without the supervision of an outside election official, even though visitors were barred from the facility at the time.Following Gableman’s report, Trump pressured Vos both personally and privately to decertify Wisconsin’s election results as recently as this past July. Vos declined, saying that it was not legally possible, and so Trump turned on him, blasting him for refusing “to do anything to right the wrongs that were done” and endorsing his opponent in the Republican primary. After Vos narrowly won the Republican nomination in August, he finally fired Gableman. But a number of state Republicans have made clear their intention to follow Gableman’s recommendation to dissolve the elections commission. La Follette in the capitol building in Madison.Angie Smith for The New York TimesLa Follette was intending to retire this year, but he changed his mind last spring when he decided that he was the Democrats’ best chance to prevent the Republicans from transferring oversight of Wisconsin’s elections to the office he would be vacating. His Republican opponent, Amy Loudenbeck, has repeatedly criticized the elections commission and has called for its elimination. A member of the State Assembly, she is the first serious candidate that the Republicans have run for the position in many years. As of the end of August, she had raised nearly $200,000, far more than La Follette. Her donors include the billionaire Liz Uihlein, who along with her husband, Dick, founded the Uline packing supply company; in recent years, the couple donated more than $4 million to the Tea Party Patriots Fund, a political action committee for one of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 in Washington. The Republicans have a number of candidates running in secretary of state races around the country who are part of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement, claiming without any evidence that he rightfully won the 2020 election. National Democratic donors are sending tens of millions of dollars into these races, largely through online platforms like ActBlue, in an effort to stop them from being elected. But because in Wisconsin the secretary of state’s office is currently powerless, only a little bit of this money has found its way to La Follette, sometimes seemingly at random. He recently received a pair of $20,000 donations from Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw. “I’m not a super big movie historian, so it took me a while to register,” La Follette told me, sitting on a bench outside the Capitol in September. He has at least been able to hire a campaign manager for the first time as secretary of state, and while he can’t afford to advertise on TV, he has filmed a couple of digital campaign ads that are posted on his newly created Facebook page.Wikler has made the call not to invest in La Follette’s race, deciding that it’s not the best use of the party’s resources. “Every State Assembly candidate who loses by 100 votes would notice if we diverted money from the legislative races and gave it instead to Doug,” he told me. “We are on the brink of a crisis of democracy if the Republicans win the governorship or get supermajorities in the Legislature, and my job is to prioritize.” It is a tactical decision, born out of financial necessity, that could have serious implications if Loudenbeck wins.A farm near Dodgeville, Wis.Angie Smith for The New York TimesTo understand how the Democrats have found themselves in a defensive posture in states like Wisconsin, it’s necessary to go back some 50 years, to when the social upheaval of the 1960s and the 1970s was spurring a major political realignment across America. Many conservative rural voters were abandoning the Democratic Party — which, in turn, abandoned them, focusing its energy instead on urban areas. And if the Democrats took anything from the civil rights movement, strategically speaking, it was that progress was best made via federal legislation and the courts, not via state governments.During these same years, the party’s center of gravity started shifting toward Washington. With the rise of television, a new breed of media-savvy pollsters and consultants — people like Patrick Caddell, the 26-year-old pollster for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential run — were calling the shots. They were shrewd and calculating in their pursuit of their only goal, which was to advance the prospects of the politicians paying their salaries. Elections became candidate-driven. Rather than trying to expand the party’s base, strategists carved the country into winnable and unwinnable areas, blanketing urban centers and suburban areas with TV ads and mailers. After Al Gore was trounced across rural America in 2000, Democratic consultants grew more convinced than ever that it was a waste of resources to organize in large swaths of the country, and thus to invest in state parties.Increasingly isolated from the national party and its big donors, some states set out to strengthen their Democratic parties on their own. A group of wealthy Coloradans came together to bankroll legislative candidates and create progressive think tanks and public-interest law firms that helped move the formerly red state into the Democratic column. In 2004, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, then the minority leader, unified environmental and pro-immigration groups and unions to not only secure his re-election but also turn his state blue. But these individual efforts only underscored the reality that the Democratic Party had ceased being a national operation, with a national infrastructure that competed for every vote.In 2005, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, tried to rescue the Democratic Party from itself. At the time, Dean, a former governor of Vermont, was fresh off his insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had run as a Washington outsider, promising to wrest power away from the Democratic establishment and return it to the people. His campaign had ended, ignominiously, with the infamous Dean Scream — his protracted yelp on the night of his caucus defeat in Iowa — but in the preceding months he ignited passionate support across the country and raised a fortune in small-dollar donations with his pioneering use of the internet.By the time Dean ran for D.N.C. chairman, the state Democratic Party chairs had grown tired of being ignored by the national party. They told Dean that they would support his candidacy only if he committed to investing heavily in all 50 states. After running a presidential campaign that had revealed, above all, that there were enthusiastic Democrats all over the country, Dean eagerly agreed. He called his plan the “50 state strategy,” and it involved moving resources into places long since written off by Democrats. In many of these places, the goal wasn’t necessarily to win races, at least at first; it was to begin the long process of re-establishing an official Democratic presence there, and to make Republicans fight at least a little bit harder for every vote.Wikler takes a selfie with volunteers before canvassing.Angie Smith for The New York TimesDemocratic strategists thought Dean was mad. Steering resources away from poll-tested “battlegrounds” and into solid red states seemed like a delusional and quite possibly catastrophic folly. Rahm Emanuel, then chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tried to bully Dean into reversing course and investing instead in a targeted list of upcoming House elections. He mocked the young organizers whom Dean was empowering around the country — “They couldn’t find their ass with both hands tied behind their back,” he said, as Ari Berman reported in his 2010 book “Herding Donkeys” — and fed the media negative stories about the 50-state strategy. But Dean held his ground. “I knew I could raise a ton of money, and I wasn’t beholden to Washington,” Dean told me recently. “If you don’t play in every single congressional district and every single Senate district, you’re never going to get anywhere in the future.”The 50-state strategy seeded the country with volunteers who helped lay the foundation for Barack Obama’s historic field operation. Obama’s election in 2008 galvanized an army of Democratic foot soldiers across the country who were ready to transition to campaigning for local candidates. The Democrats seemed poised to again prioritize state-level politics. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Obama, exercising his prerogative as the new leader of the party, appointed Tim Kaine to replace Dean as chairman of the D.N.C. Dean, for his part, wanted a cabinet position in the new administration, according to Berman. But Emanuel, who was now serving as Obama’s chief of staff and was still nursing his grudge against Dean, helped make sure he didn’t get one. As for Obama’s vaunted field operation, it was rechristened Organizing for America and merged into the D.N.C., where its main priority was to promote the president and his agenda.With Obama in office, the Democrats returned their focus to Washington, leaving local politics to the Republicans, who took full advantage of the opening. Between 2008 and 2016, the G.O.P. flipped nearly 1,000 state legislative seats. This was partly a result of the Republicans’ 2011 gerrymander, but it was also a byproduct of a top-down Democratic strategy. “When I became chair in 2015,” says David Pepper, former chairman of Ohio’s Democratic Party, “the big debate at the D.N.C. was whether they should give state parties $5,000 per month or $7,500. I’m thinking, ‘If this is the front line of democracy and that’s the debate we’re having, we’re in a lot of trouble.’”During her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the problem and vowed to address it. She teamed up with the D.N.C. and 32 state party committees to form a joint fund-raising group, the Hillary Victory Fund, promising to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up. “When our state parties are strong, we win,” she said. “That’s what will happen.” The fund tapped Democratic megadonors for big checks at glamorous fund-raisers, collecting an impressive $142 million in less than a year. But a majority of this money was directed to Clinton’s presidential bid and the D.N.C. Less than $800,000, or 0.56 percent, went back to the states, according to an analysis at the time by Politico. Since then, the D.N.C. has increased its support for state parties. When Tom Perez took over as chairman following Clinton’s defeat, he raised their monthly allowance to $10,000, made additional funding available through separate “innovation” awards and upgraded the party’s badly outdated voter database, which was putting Democratic organizers at a significant disadvantage. “We were a little late to the dance,” Perez told me, understating the matter. His successor, the current chairman, Jaime Harrison, gave the parties another modest bump, to $12,500, and created a “red-state fund” for Republican-dominated states. Yet some state party leaders continue to feel neglected by the national party and its donors. They complain privately that Harrison is too beholden to the White House, and thus to the party’s short-term interests, which once again means focusing on the battlegrounds at the expense of expanding the party’s base. Nebraska’s party chairwoman, Jane Kleeb, who gained national acclaim seven years ago after she brought together an unlikely coalition of local ranchers, farmers and environmental activists to block the arrival of the Keystone oil pipeline, told me that she still doesn’t have enough money to do her job full time, let alone start the arduous process of building a robust Democratic operation in her deeply red state. “If I had the money, I would have organizers blanketing every small town,” she said. “But I can only afford four full-time staff members, and I’m not paid.”Staff members for the Mandela Barnes Campaign and the Wisconsin Democratic Party pushing out messages on social media during a debate between Barnes and Senator Ron Johnson in October.Angie Smith for The New York TimesFor most people, partisan politics consists of a series of national contests that take place every two years — or, for many voters, every four years. But as an organizational matter, winning those contests requires year-round attention. That is where the parties are supposed to come in. Politicians do the work of governing, and parties organize voters, working daily to build the infrastructure and community-based relationships that in the scrum of the election can deliver more wins so the politicians can do more work.Political professionals make a distinction between organizing (the year-round work) and mobilizing (the short-term work that takes place once the voting starts). And just as Democrats have focused on national politics at the expense of local politics in recent decades, they have focused on mobilizing at the expense of organizing, furiously stepping up fund-raising and get-out-the-vote drives as Election Day approaches and then abruptly pulling back the moment the votes have been tallied. Republican candidates, too, move into overdrive during the run-up to elections, but they’ve spent decades building durable ideological institutions that ensure that the party’s larger agenda outlasts each individual election cycle. The small-dollar digital fund-raising strategy that Dean pioneered in his 2004 presidential run is now pervasive and vastly more sophisticated, enabling both parties and their candidates to raise huge sums of money with hair-on-fire, 11th-hour appeals to donors. Thanks to its recent technology upgrades, the D.N.C. is now able to access detailed consumer data about voters — What cars do they drive? What magazines do they subscribe to? — that it uses to assign a “partisanship” score to every voter, rating how likely a person is to vote Democratic. The more accurate this information, the easier it is to microtarget a desired demographic, pummeling people with hysterical texts and emails. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which ruled that limiting political spending by corporations was tantamount to restricting their free speech, was a boon for Republicans. But it also led to the proliferation of super PACs, which empowered a new class of Democratic megadonors to play a more influential role in their party. Like corporate chief executives forever chasing quarterly earnings to juice a firm’s stock price, these big donors are generally disinclined to support infrastructure-building efforts whose success can’t be measured in the short term. They would rather give to high-profile progressive organizations, or to individual candidates taking on G.O.P. archenemies. The 2020 election cycle provided a stark lesson in the ineffectiveness of this strategy. Democratic donors sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Senate candidates challenging longtime Republican incumbents. A big chunk of that money wound up in the pockets of well-paid political consultants; even more was steered to media buyers, which earn a large commission for every ad they place on local television or on Google or Facebook. Not only did most of these candidates lose, but some couldn’t even spend all that they raised. In Maine, Sara Gideon, a Democrat who was taking on Senator Susan Collins, raised $74.5 million from local and national donors and still had $14.8 million in the bank after losing by 8.6 percent. She has since been writing checks to local nonprofits and Democratic candidates, while raking in still more money by renting her prodigious fund-raising list to a Washington-based digital consulting firm that she employed during the race.State parties can be an answer to this smash-and-grab approach to politics, but the year-round work they do is expensive and labor-intensive. Wikler devotes a lot of his time to fund-raising. Standing at his desk in WisDems’ office across from the state’s Capitol, he calls individuals who have made large donations to the party — the bar for a personal call is typically $1,000 — and asks them to consider making another, similarly sized donation. Every month, he and his team also run a social media campaign to encourage smaller donors to join the party’s 8,000 regular monthly contributors. The goal is to create a recurring source of revenue to fuel the party’s year-round activities. Much of the money the party raises goes toward individual elections, which take place every year in Wisconsin. But Wikler also wants WisDems to be a regular presence in people’s lives even when it’s not election season. To that end, he directs whatever resources he can to the local Democratic parties in all 72 of Wisconsin’s counties to help them rent out office space, advertise in their local newspapers and, above all, expand their network of volunteers.The volunteers on the ground are the ones who connect issues and policies to the party and its candidates, and in so doing translate the Democratic agenda into electoral victories. To do this effectively, these volunteers can’t just show up at voters’ doors on the eve of an election. They need to earn voters’ trust, which means building relationships with them over time. In rural Wisconsin, the party has been nearly invisible for many years, allowing Republicans to fill the vacuum. Right-wing radio is still a powerful force in many of these areas, with popular hosts like Joe Giganti, who is based in Green Bay, providing a regular platform to guests to air unfounded claims of election fraud.In late June, I attended a Democratic Party event in Wautoma, a rural town in Waushara County, hosted by a group called the Four County Coalition. The organization was founded about a decade ago by Bill Crawford, a third-generation Democrat from Chicago and former fire chief who retired to the area after getting injured on the job. Crawford was discouraged by the party’s anemic presence in his new home. So he reached out to the Democratic leaders in three of its neighboring counties — Marquette, Adams and Green Lake — to suggest that they all join forces to build critical mass and coordinate canvassing. “It lets Democrats see other Democrats, so you don’t feel like orphans in the middle of a red area,” Crawford told me.Until recently, Democrats in these red, rural areas had trouble even getting yard signs. Wikler has created a new distribution network to make that easier. Yard signs fell out of favor years ago among Democratic strategists, who prefer to see campaign funds spent on digital ads, which enable them to quantify how many eyeballs they are reaching. But yard signs have their own value in places where Democrats are trying to re-establish themselves. They aren’t ads paid for by a candidate or party trolling for votes; they are affirmative statements of identity made by members of the community. “People say signs don’t vote, and that’s baloney,” Crawford told me. “Yard signs in rural areas do vote because your neighbors see the signs, and the more signs they see, the more inclined they are to consider why you have a sign out there. If they don’t see a sign, they’re going to vote the way they always voted, which is Republican.” Organizing materials for volunteer canvassers in October. The renewed push by Democrats in local elections contrasts with the Washington-centric focus of recent years.Angie Smith for The New York TimesOn Sept. 22, Wisconsin started sending out absentee ballots to hundreds of thousands of voters, marking the beginning of the actual election season. Whatever organizing could be done was essentially done. The priority now was to mobilize. In an effort to ensure that they didn’t miss any potential votes, WisDems began buying the updated absentee-voter list from the state every week (for $2,000) to keep tabs on and follow up with Democrats who had requested an absentee ballot. When early voting got underway in late October, the party started dispatching thousands of volunteers across the state to urge Democrats to make a plan to vote early or on Election Day.For Democrats, the electoral picture had darkened with the arrival of the fall. In Wisconsin, an influx of donations from billionaires helped Senator Ron Johnson open up a small lead over Mandela Barnes. Worse yet, from Wikler’s perspective, the Republican businessman Tim Michels pulled even with Tony Evers in the governor’s race. Michels, who was endorsed by Trump, has echoed the unfounded claims of voter fraud in 2020 and has declined to say if he would certify the results of the presidential election in 2024. From the beginning, Wikler had viewed Evers’s re-election as the party’s top priority in 2022, and the race, which had become the most expensive gubernatorial contest in the country, was clearly going to be very close. “The risk profile is pretty real,” Wikler told me in early October.By October, WisDems had pulled in more than $28 million in individual donations, about two-thirds of which came from outside the state. It was an unusually large amount for a Democratic state party; by contrast, the equivalent figure for Arizona was about $8 million. And yet WisDems’ cash needs as Election Day approached were seemingly bottomless.Because the Senate contest is a federal race, campaign-finance laws prevent the state party from moving large amounts of money to the Barnes campaign. But in October, Wikler steered an additional $150,000 to the Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, whose opponent, Eric Toney, has said that if he is elected, he may permit doctors to be prosecuted for violating Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. WisDems also directed an additional $2.5 million to the governor’s race, in addition to the $6 million the party had already given to support it.Wikler and the leader of the Democrats in the State Assembly, Greta Neubauer, were making final decisions about which legislative candidates to back. They had updated their modeling on the 51st Assembly District — Leah Spicer’s district — and it appeared to be edging closer toward the Democrats. In early October, Wikler and Neubauer moved the district into the party’s potentially “flippable” column. Spicer would be receiving another $50,000 — $25,000 from WisDems, $25,000 from the caucus — to spend on advertising and billboards in the final weeks of her campaign.After the election, fund-raising will taper off, and Wikler’s staff will shrink from 200-plus to about 70, which is still large for a Democratic state party. WisDems will need to quickly ramp back up for a State Supreme Court election in April, though. The race may not attract much attention outside Wisconsin, but it too has national stakes: The court played its own critical role in the 2020 presidential election, when it rejected Trump’s lawsuit and upheld Biden’s victory by just a single vote.Even as Wikler was preparing for his last frantic push before the midterms, he was hopeful that no matter what happened, on Nov. 9 he would be able to say that the party had made progress. “The basic idea of organizing is that you should come out stronger whether you win or lose,” he told me over the phone from La Guardia Airport in mid-October, on his way back home from a final fund-raising swing in New York. “Every single year, Democrats in Wisconsin win some races that they’re not supposed to win. You don’t know where the forces will come together to make that happen. But if you are always organizing and investing everywhere, and cheering on the folks who are willing to put their names on the ballot and do the work behind the scenes, if you do all that, then you’ll be ready when the opportunity comes.” Political signs near Dodgeville.Angie Smith for The New York TimesAngie Smith is a photographer based in Idaho, Los Angeles and Mexico City. More

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    The Left-Right Divide Might Help Democrats Avoid a Total Wipeout

    With the midterm election less than two weeks away, polling has turned bleak for the Democrats, not only increasing the likelihood that the party will lose control of the House, but also dimming the prospects that it will hold the Senate.The key question is whether Republicans will wipe out Democratic incumbents in a wave election.In a 2021 article, “The presidential and congressional elections of 2020: A national referendum on the Trump presidency,” Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego, described how the Trump administration and its 2020 campaign set the stage for the 2022 midterms:Reacting to the [Black Lives Matter] protests, Trump doubled down on race‐baiting rhetoric, posing as defender of the confederate flag and the statues of rebel generals erected as markers of white dominance in the post‐Reconstruction South, retweeting a video of a supporter shouting “white power” at demonstrators in Florida, and vowing to protect suburbanites from low-income housing that could attract minorities to their neighborhoods.The headline and display copy on my news-side colleague Jonathan Weisman’s Oct. 25 story about the campaign sums up the party’s current strategy:With Ads, Imagery and Words, Republicans Inject Race Into Campaigns: Running ads portraying Black candidates as soft on crime — or as “different” or “dangerous” — Republicans have shed quiet defenses of such tactics for unabashed defiance.Republican strategies that emphasize racially freighted issues are certainly not the only factor moving the electorate. Republican skill in weaponizing inflation is crucial, as is inflation itself. Polarization and the nationalization of elections also matter, particularly in states and districts with otherwise weak Republican candidates.Jacobson is one of a number of political analysts who argue that the calcification of the electorate into two mutually adversarial blocs limits the potential for significant gains for either party. In a recent essay, “The 2022 U.S. Midterm Election: A Conventional Referendum or Something Different?” Jacobson writes:Statistical models using as predictors the president’s most recent job approval ratings and real income growth during the election year, along with the president’s party’s current strength in Congress, can account for midterm seat swings with considerable accuracy. For example, applying such a model to 2018, when President Donald Trump’s approval stood at 40 percent and real income growth at 2.1 percent, Republicans should have ended up with 41 fewer House seats than they held after the 2016 election — improbably, the precise outcome.Applying those same models to the current contests, Jacobson continued,the Democrats stand to lose about 45 House seats, giving the Republicans a 258-177 majority, their largest since the 1920s. For multiple reasons (e.g., inflation, the broken immigration system, the humiliating exit from Afghanistan) Biden’s approval ratings have been in the low 40s for the entire year. High inflation has led to negative real income growth.No wonder then, Jacobson writes, that “the consensus expectation at the beginning of the year was an electoral tsunami that would put Republicans in solid control of both chambers.” Now, however, “this consensus no longer prevails.”Why?Partisans of both parties report extremely high levels of party loyalty in recent surveys, with more than 96 percent opting for their own party’s candidate. Most self-identified independents also lean toward one of the parties, and those who do are just as loyal as self-identified partisans. Party line voting has been increasing for several decades, reaching the 96 percent mark in 2020. This upward trend reflects a rise in negative partisanship — growing dislike for the other party — rather than increasing regard for the voter’s own side. Partisan antipathies keep the vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents from voting for Republican candidates regardless of their opinions of Biden and the economy.Jacobson noted in an email that over the past weekthe numbers have moved against the Democrats, and they should definitely be worried. The latest inflation figures were very bad news for them. But I still doubt that their House losses will approach the 45 predicted by the models and I think they still have some hope of retaining the Senate — or at least, their tie.Jacobson points out that in the current lead-up to the midterms, there is an exceptionally “wide gap between presidential approval and voting intentions, with the Democrats’ support on average 9.2 percentage points higher than Biden’s approval ratings.” He also notes that in previous wave elections, the spread between presidential approval and vote intention was much closer, 5 points in 1994, 4.9 in 2006, 0.3 in 2010 and 4.1 in 2018.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued in an email that polarization has in very recent years changed the way voters evaluate presidents and, in turn, how they cast their ballots in midterm contests. “There is a higher floor and lower ceiling in presidential approval,” she said:If anything, approval is fairly resistant to external shocks in ways that look very different from either George W. Bush or Obama. An approval rating below 50 percent seems to be the new norm. But if we think about this from a partisan lens, an overwhelming percent of Democrats will always support the Democratic president, while an overwhelming percent of Republicans will oppose him.Put another way, Wronski said, “it wouldn’t matter what Biden does or doesn’t do to curb inflation, Democrats will largely support, and Republicans will largely oppose.”In this context, “partisanship serves as lens through which economic conditions are evaluated. The stronger partisanship exists as a social identity, the more likely it will be used as the motivation to view and accept information about economic conditions, like inflation.”Negative partisanship, Wronski wrote, “has emerged in recent elections as a driver of voting turnout and vote choice,” with the resultthat partisan antipathies keep Democrats from voting for Republican candidates. No matter how bad economic conditions may be under Biden, the alternative is seen as much worse. The threat to abortion rights and democracy should Republicans take control of Congress may be a more powerful driver of voting behavior.While polls show growing public fear that adherence to the principles of democracy have declined, Wronski pointed out thatthose concerns do not trump more immediate needs like being able to afford food, housing, and gas. To be fair, people cannot fight for lofty ideals like democracy when their basic needs are not being met. People need to be secure in their food and housing situation before they can advocate for bigger ideas.There is another factor limiting the number of House seats that the Republican Party is likely to gain: gerrymandering.Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, makes the case that in state legislatures both parties “hoped to avoid creating districts that were uncertain for their party and/or winnable for the other party. One upshot of this is that in a neutral or close-to-neutral environment, there aren’t many winnable seats for either party.”Trende elaborates: “In the swingiest of swing seats where Biden won between 51 percent and 53 percent, there are just 19 seats. Of those seats, 10 are held by Democrats, seven are held by Republicans, and one is a newly created district.” In a neutral year when neither party has an advantage in the congressional vote, Trende writes, if “Republicans won all the districts where Joe Biden received 52 percent of the vote or less and lost all of the districts where he did better, they would win 224 seats.Gerrymandering has created what Trende calls “levees” — bulwarks — that limit gains and losses for both parties. The danger for Democrats is the possibility that these levees may be breached, which then turns 2022 into a Republican wave election, as was the case in 1994 and 2010: “In a universe where Republicans win the popular vote by four points, sweeping all of the districts that Biden won with 54 percent of the vote or less, the levee would break and the Republican majority would jump from 232 seats to 245 seats.”When Trende published his analysis on Sept. 29, the generic congressional vote was almost tied, 45.9 Republican to 44.9 Democratic, close to a “neutral” election. Since then, however, Republicans have pulled ahead to a 47.8 to 44.8 advantage on Oct. 22, according to RealClearPolitics. FiveThirtyEight’s measure of the generic vote shows a much closer contest as of Oct. 25, with Republicans ahead 45.2 to 44.7 percent.In 2010, the Republican Party’s generic advantage in late October was 9.4 points, a clear signal that a wave election was building.Educational polarization — with college-educated voters shifting decisively to the Democratic Party and non-college voters, mostly white, shifting to the Republican Party — in recent elections has worked to the advantage of the right because there are substantially more non-college voters than those with degrees.This year, the education divide may work to some extent to the benefit of Democrats.James L. Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, pointed out in an email that not only do “polarization and party loyalty make the election outcomes less likely to depend on immediate economic circumstances,” but also “educational polarization, combined with the fact that better-educated voters tend to turn out at higher rates in midterm elections than do less-educated voters, may help the Democrats despite voter concerns about Biden or the economy.”Even with inflation as one of the Democratic Party’s major liabilities, the intensification of polarization appears to be muting its adverse impact.In their 2019 paper, “Motivated Reasoning, Public Opinion, and Presidential Approval,” Kathleen Donovan, Paul M. Kellstedt, Ellen M. Key and Matthew J. Lebo, of St. John Fisher University, Texas A&M University, Appalachian State University and Western University, wrote that “Polarization has increased partisan motivated reasoning when it comes to evaluations of the president,” as the choices made by voters are “increasingly detached from economic assessments.”As partisanship intensifies, voters are less likely to punish incumbents of the same party for failures to improve standards of living or to live up to other campaign promises.Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communication and a co-director of the polarization lab at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email that “people (particularly partisans) are far less likely to, for instance, rely on retrospective voting — that is, they won’t throw the bums out for poor economic conditions or problematic policies.”In the early 1970s, Lelkes wrote, “partisanship explained less than 30 percent of the variance in vote choice. Today, partisanship explains more than 70 percent of the variance in vote choice.”This trend grows out of both identity-based partisanship and closely related patterns of media and information usage.As Lelkes put it:There are various explanations for this. There is an identity/motivated reasoning perspective, where people think better us than them and would prefer a lampshade to an out partisan. Another possibility is that people get skewed information. If I watch lots of Fox News or pay even marginal attention to Republican candidates, I’ll hear lots about the economy. If I watch MSNBC and pay attention to Democratic candidates, I’ll hear a lot about abortion, but less about the economy.Not everyone agrees that polarization will limit Democratic losses this year.John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote by email that “it is absolutely true that party loyalty in congressional elections has increased. But this does not stop large seat swings from occurring.”There is, Sides continued, “some evidence that midterm seat swings can be driven by people actually switching their votes from the previous presidential election,” suggesting that “clearly not every voter is a die-hard partisan.”Sides remained cautious, however, about his expectations for the results on Nov. 8: “The recent poll trends are pushing toward larger G.O.P. gains but I am not sure those trends suggest the 40+ House seat gains that the national environment would forecast.” A narrow win, he wrote, would mean that Republican leaders in the House will face “a very delicate task. On the one hand, they have to appease Freedom Caucus types. But they also have to protect potentially vulnerable G.O.P. members in swing districts. I do not know how you manage that task, and so I do not envy Kevin McCarthy.”Dritan Nesho, a co-director of the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, was distinctly pessimistic concerning Democratic prospects:An empirical analysis of the 2022 midterm polls in the final stretch suggests that this election will tip both the House and the Senate toward Republicans, and it’s no exception to historical trends suggesting the incumbent party tends to lose an average of 28 seats in the House and 3 or so seats in the Senate. Key numbers around lack of confidence in the economy, the pervasive impact of inflation, and a worsening personal financial situation among a majority of voters today, actually suggest a stronger loss than the average.The two best predictive variables for election outcomes, Nesho writes,are presidential approval and the direction of personal finances. Both are severely underwater for Democrats. In our October Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, Biden has plateaued at 42 percent job approval and 54 percent of voters report their personal financial situation as getting worse. 55 percent blame the Biden administration for inflation rather than other factors (including 42 percent of Democratic respondents), and 73 percent expect prices to further increase rather than come down. 84 percent of voters think the U.S. is in a recession now or will be in one by next year.If that were not enough, Nesho continued,at the same time Democrats are seen as disconnected from the key issues of concern for the median voter. Republicans are connecting better with general voters on inflation and the economy, crime, and immigration; Democrats are seen as preoccupied with Jan. 6, women’s rights/abortion, and the environment, which are further down the list of concerns.Republicans, in turn, have pulled out all the stops in activating racially divisive wedge issues, relentlessly pressing immigration, crime and the specter of generalized disorder.In Missouri, for example, Brian Seitz, a state representative, is determined to “shut down” critical race theory, declaring, “There is a huge red wave coming.” Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, ran a Facebook ad that read: “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate, contends that Democrats are recruiting immigrants and “have decided that they can’t win re-election in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Blake Masters, the Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, warns that Democrats want to increase immigration “to change the demographics of our country.”Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, observed in an email: “By all rights this should be a debacle for the incumbent party based on the fundamentals — the relative bad news about the economy — inflation — crime, the southern border, and the lingering Afghanistan fiasco.”But, Shapiro added:There are mitigating factors: a very important one is that the Republicans picked up many seats in the House in 2020 so those seats are not at risk now for the Democrats, thanks to around 11 million more Republican voters in 2020 than in 2016. The other factor is the Dobbs abortion decision that led to a surge in Democratic voter registration, very likely significantly women and younger voters. This at best has just helped the Democrats to catch up to Republicans.The crucial question in these circumstances, in Shapiro’s view, “will be relative partisan turnout — will this be more like 2010 or 2018? I sense the enthusiasm and anger here is at least a bit greater among Republicans than Democrats for House voting.”Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, emailed me to say that he agrees “with those who think the Democrats will lose the House,” but with Republicans seeing “a below historical average seat gain, i.e. under the 40-45 seats that some models are predicting.”Cain argued that a Democratic setback will not be as consequential as many on both the left and right argue: “It’s not like either party needs to worry about being locked out of power for very long. The electoral winds will shift, and the window to power and policy will open again soon enough.” Polarization, Cain noted, “has made it clear to both parties that you have to grab the policy prizes while you have trifecta control” — as both Trump and Biden have done during their first two years in office.One difference between the current election and the wave election of 1994 is that this time around Republicans have no attention-getting, mobilizing agenda comparable to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. They have contented themselves with hammering away on the economy, race and immigration.Republicans are fixated on an ethnically and racially freighted agenda of gridlock and revenge. They propose to reduce immigration and to roll back as much as they can of the civil rights revolution, the women’s rights revolution and the gay rights revolution. They threaten to hound Biden appointees, not to mention the president’s son Hunter, with endless hearings and inquiries. The party has also signaled its refusal to raise the debt ceiling and promised to shut down the government in order to force major concessions on spending.While this agenda may win Republicans the House and perhaps the Senate this year, it contains too many contradictions to achieve a durable Republican realignment.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