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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

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    The ‘Sleeping Giant’ That May Decide the Midterms

    The choices made by Latino voters on Nov. 8 will be crucial to the outcome in a disproportionate share of Senate battleground states, like Arizona (31.5 percent of the population), Nevada (28.9), Florida (25.8), Colorado (21.7), Georgia (9.6) and North Carolina (9.5).According to most analysts, there is no question that a majority of Hispanic voters will continue to support Democratic candidates. The question going into the coming election is how large that margin will be.In terms of the battle for control of the House, three Hispanic-majority congressional districts in South Texas — the 15th, 28th and 34th — have become proving grounds for Republican candidates challenging decades of Democratic dominance. In a special election in the 34th district in June, the Republican candidate, Mayra Flores, prevailed.Two weeks ago, The Texas Tribune reported that:Since Labor Day, outside G.O.P. groups have blasted the Democratic nominees on multiple fronts, criticizing them all as weak on border issues and then zeroing in on candidate-specific vulnerabilities. Democratic groups are countering in two of the races, though for now, it is Republicans who appear to be in a more offensive posture.Last week, Axios reported that in the 15th Congressional district, which is 81.9 percent Hispanic, national Democratic groups had begun to abandon its nominee as a lost cause:Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, a progressive running in a majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley district against Republican Monica de la Cruz, isn’t getting any Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee support in her Trump +3 district. House Majority PAC is planning to cancel the scheduled ad reservations for her at the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the group’s plans.Across a wide range of studies and exit poll data analyses, there is general agreement that President Donald Trump significantly improved his 2016 margin among Hispanic voters in 2020, although there is less agreement on how large his gain was, on the demographics of his new supporters, or on whether the movement was related to Trump himself, Trump-era Covid payments or to a secular trend.In their July 2022 paper “Reversion to the Mean, or their Version of the Dream? An Analysis of Latino Voting in 2020,” Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil R. Velez and Emily A. West, political scientists at Emory, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh, write that there isan increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos. Moreover, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among newly-engaged U.S.-born Latino children of immigrants and Catholic Latinos. The results point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.That is, the more Hispanic voters subordinate traditional party and ethnic solidarity in favor of voting based on conservative or moderate policy preferences, the more likely that are to defect to the Republican Party.The authors caution, however, that nothing is fixed in stone:On the one hand, there is evidence that working-class Latino voters became more supportive of Trump in 2020, mirroring increases in educational polarization among the mass public. If similar processes are at play for Latinos — and if such polarization is not Trump-specific — then this could mean a durable change in partisan loyalties.On the other hand, they continue,Historical voting patterns among Latinos reveal natural ebbs and flows. Using exit poll data from 1984-2020, political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that the pro-Democratic margin among Latinos ranges from +9 in 2004 to +51 in 1996, with an average margin of +35 points. Instead of reflecting a durable shift, 2020 could be a “reversion to the mean,” with 2016 serving as a recent high-water mark for the Democrats.In an email responding to my inquiry about future trends, Fraga wrote:My sense is that most of the Latinos who shifted to the Republican Party in 2020 have not returned to the Democratic Party. Many of these new Republican converts were ideologically conservative pre-2020, so Republicans didn’t have to shift their policy message very much to win them over.“Portrait of a Persuadable Latino” — an April 2021 study by the nonprofit Equis Research of Hispanic defections from the Democratic Party — found similar overall trends to those reported in the Fraga-Velez-West paper, but revealed slightly different demographic patterns.The Equis survey found that the largest percentage tilt toward Trump was among women, at plus 8 percent, compared with men, at 3 percent; among non-college Latinos, plus 6, compared with just 1 percent among the college educated; among Protestants, plus seven compared with plus 5 among Catholics and plus 15 percent among conservative Hispanics — compared with no tilt among liberals and a plus 4 percent tilt among moderates.Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Labs, a nonprofit committed “to massively increase civic participation among Latinos in this country,” emailed a response to my query about Hispanic voter trends:While Latinos shifted toward Republicans between 2016 and 2020, an 8-point swing toward Trump, we do not see evidence of a further decrease in Democratic support since Biden’s win. In most states, things do not look worse for Dems with Latinos than they did in the last election, nor do they look better.But, Odio pointedly cautioned,The political environment has the potential to lead to further erosion of Democratic support among Latinos. A meaningful share of Latino voters remain on the fence, having not firmly chosen a side in the election. These late breakers could move toward either party, or toward the couch, before the midterms are over.Odio sent me a September 2022 Equis report, “Latino Voters in Limbo — A Midterm Update,” which found thatYoung Latinos (18-34), Latino men, and self-identified conservatives are overrepresented among the 2020 Biden voters who today disapprove of the president’s job performance. Among the most likely to be undecided today are ideological holdouts: conservative and moderate Latinos who have held back from Republicans, despite seeming to share some characteristics with their G.O.P.-supporting white counterparts. Notably Republicans have not increased support among these Latinos in the last year in almost any state — likely because a large majority of conservative or moderate Latinos who don’t yet vote Republican believe Democrats “care more about people like them.”Today, the report continues, “what keeps many Latinos on the fence is again concerns about the economy and fears that Democrats don’t consistently prioritize the economy, handle it as decisively as business-obsessed Republicans, or value hard work.”A separate Equis study, “2020 Post-Mortem: The American Dream Voter,” found that a negative attitude toward socialism was a factor among Hispanics nationwide, especially among those who stress the importance of working hard to get ahead:There isn’t one overriding concern about “socialism”— but a package of complaints usually rises to the top around government control over people’s lives, raising taxes, and money going to ‘undeserving’ recipients. If a through line exists, it is a worry over people becoming “lazy and dependent on government’ by those who highly value hard work.”The American Dream Voter study found that the declining salience of immigration in 2020 compared with either 2016 or 2018, combined with the debate in 2020 over Covid lockdowns versus reopening the economy, diminished ethnic solidarity in 2020, allowing conservative Hispanics to shift their allegiance to the Republican Party:The economy unlocked a door: the issue landscape shifted to more favorable ground for Trump, opening a way for some Latinos who found it unacceptable to vote for him in 2016. The socialism attack broke through: it created a space for defection,” according to the report’s authors. “Democrats retain some natural credibility with Latino voters but have lost ground on workers, work and the American Dream; they’re also open to attack for taking Hispanics for granted; Republicans have some openings but are still held back by their image as the uncaring party of big corporations.In 2016, the study continued,some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican — based on their demographics, partisanship and ideology — were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hard-line immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity. By the middle of 2020, neither views on immigration nor the role of Hispanic identity were showing a major effect on vote choice — they were no longer cleanly differentiating Trump voters from Democratic voters.In 2018, according to the study, “Trump lost even the conservatives on family separation. But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the (2020) election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”A 2021 Pew Research report found that Latinos view anti-Hispanic discrimination differently from anti-Black discrimination. Hispanic voters were asked whether “there was ‘too much,’ ‘about the right amount’ or ‘too little’ attention paid to race and racial issues” when it comes to Hispanics and then asked the same question about Black Americans.Just over half, 51 percent, of Latino respondents said, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination against Hispanics, 28 percent said, “about the right amount” and 19 percent said, “too much.” Conversely, 30 percent of Latino respondents said that in the case of Black Americans, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination, 23 percent said, “about the right amount” and 45 percent said, “too much.”The American Dream Voter survey Equis performed found that when Hispanics were asked “which concerns you more, Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies or Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies,” 42 percent of Latinos said socialism/leftist policies and 38 percent said fascist/anti-democratic politics.Equis did find substantial Democratic advantages when Hispanics were asked which party is “better for Hispanics” (53-31), which “is the party of fairness and equality” (51-31) and which party “cares about people like you” (49-32). But the Democratic advantage shrank to statistical insignificance on key bread-and- butter issues: which party “values hard work” 42-40 and “which is the party of the American dream” 41-39, and a dead 42-42 heat on “which party is better for the American worker?”Last month, Pew Research released a survey that showed continuing Democratic strength among Hispanics, “Most Latinos Say Democrats Care About Them and Work Hard for Their Vote, Far Fewer Say So of G.O.P.”Pew found that over the past four years, Democrats experienced a modest gain in partisan identification among Hispanics over Republicans, going from 62-34 (+28) in 2018 to 63-32 (+31) in 2022.From March 2022 to August 2022, the share of Latinos identifying abortion as a “very important issue” shot up from 42 to 57 percent in response to the Supreme Court’s decision’s decision in Dobbs in June. Hispanics favor abortion rights by a 57-40 margin, slightly smaller than the split among all voters, 62-36, according to Pew.At the same time, the percentage of Latino respondents listing violent crime among the most important issues rose from 61 to 70 percent; support for gun control rose from 59 to 66 percent; and concern over voter suppression rose from 51 to 59 percent.Registered Latino voters split 53-26 in favor of voting for a generic Democratic congressional candidate over a generic Republican, according to Pew, but there were striking religious differences: Catholics, who make up 47 percent of the Hispanic electorate, favored a generic Democratic House candidate 59-26; evangelical Protestants, 24 percent of Hispanics, backed Republicans 50-32; Latinos with little or no religious affiliation, 23 percent, backed Democrats 60-17.Matt A. Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at U.C.L.A, pointed to data in the Oct. 2 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials weekly Latino voter poll:Indeed if you look at issues like access to abortion, student debt, immigrant rights and gun violence, there are no signs at all that Latinos are becoming more conservative. When asked about government policy, 70 to 80 percent of Latino voters give support to the Democratic Party policy agenda. Indeed for the fourth week in a row, the NALEO tracking poll shows that abortion rights are the number two most important issue to Latino voters in 2022 and issues such as mass shootings and lowering the costs of health care are top 5 issues as well.Trump’s 2020 gains reflected “a clear pattern that concern over the Covid economic slowdown helped Trump make temporary gains with Latino voters,” Barreto argued. “Because so many were negatively impacted by the slumping economy in 2020, Trump was able to convince at least some Latinos that he would reopen the economy faster.”Despite those improvements, Barreto contended, “the reality is that Trump’s gains in 2020 were not part of any pattern of realignment or ideological shift among Latinos. As the national economy continues to recover and improve, Biden favorability continues to recover among Latinos.”In September 2020. Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at the University of California- Berkeley, wrote an essay for The Times with Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a liberal advocacy group. They wrote that when they asked white, Black and Hispanic votershow “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. The message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs “and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.In other words, Haney López and Gavito wrote, “Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.” Progressives, they continued,commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.I asked Haney López about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 election. He emailed me his reply:As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status. Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.Some Latinos, Haney López continued,are susceptible to Republican propaganda promoting social conflict and distrust. The greatest failure of the Democratic Party with respect to Latinos, and indeed the polity generally, is its failure to pursue policies and to stress stories that build social solidarity, especially across lines of race, class, and other wedge identities, including gender and sexual identity.Asked the same set of questions, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a former dean of the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, had a somewhat different take.By email, Suárez-Orozco wrote:I am unpersuaded by the claim that Hispanics are becoming more conservative. To be more precise, over time, they are becoming more American. The holy trinity of integration: language, marriage patterns, and connectivity to the labor market tell a powerful story. Over time, Hispanics mimic mainstream norms. They are learning English much faster than Italians did a century and a half ago, they are marrying outside their ethnicity at very significant rates, and their connectivity to the labor market is very muscular.To Suárez-Orozco, Latinos in the United States are primed to play an ever more significant role — in politics and everywhere else: “The dominant metaphor on Hispanics qua elections over the last half-century has been ‘the sleeping giant.’ When the sleeping giants wakes up: Alas, s/he is us.”The question is whether this sleeping giant will move to the right or to the left. The evidence points both ways — but this is not a contest the Democrats can afford lose.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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    Walter Dean Burnham, Who Traced Political Parties’ Shifts, Dies at 92

    A noted political scientist, he saw parties periodically realigning themselves in stark fashion, presaging the rise of Donald Trump.Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist who theorized that political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts that he called “America’s surrogate for revolution,” died on Oct. 4 in San Antonio. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Burnham.Professor Burnham, who taught most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, Austin, suggested that realignments of political parties had occurred roughly every three to four decades since 1896.With this in mind, he said, Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, while “shockingly unexpected” by the news media and professional pollsters, should not have been so surprising, coming as it did 36 years after the sharp turn to the right known as the Reagan revolution.“This was a ‘change’ election,” Professor Burnham wrote in the wake of it on the London School of Economics website. “Say what one wishes about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency which he has now won, he was obviously the ‘change candidate,’ promising reactionary revitalization in response to a present deemed by himself to be intolerable.”Enough voters agreed with Mr. Trump to give him a majority in the Electoral College, though not in the popular vote. But turnout still sagged below 60 percent of voting age Americans, a benchmark that it last topped in 1968 after falling from highs of 80 percent in the 19th century.Professor Burnham long lamented declining turnout rates, acknowledging that while some people were undoubtedly discouraged by legal and bureaucratic hurdles to registration and voting, removing those hurdles did not necessarily improve turnout dramatically.Instead, he attributed the historic decline in participation rates to an expanding gulf between Americans and their government, to the withering of party loyalty, and to the absence of a European-type social democratic party representing the poor and blue-collar workers.“The growing political problem is found where the degeneration of political parties intersects with the rise of television advertising, continuous polling, media consultants and consent-massaging election operatives,” he wrote in 1988 in a letter to The New York Times.In the presidential race that year, he added, “non-Southern turnout levels fell to their lowest point in 164 years — since before the democratization of the presidency in the Andrew Jackson era. This, I think, is the fruit of the corruption, pollution and trivialization of the electoral process in our time.”He later found that by 2014, regional differences in turnout between the South and the rest of country had virtually vanished, for the first time since 1872.Professor Burnham explored his ideas on political realignment and declining voter turnout in his influential article “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” published in 1965 in The American Political Science Review.He expanded those themes into a book, “Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics” (1970), which held that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.In this 1970 book, Professor Burnham argued that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.After the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans won their largest majority in nearly a century, Professor Burnham forecast the dynamics of the presidential campaign two years later.“Many are convinced that a few big interests control policy,” he and Thomas Ferguson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote of voters on AlterNet, a progressive website, weeks after the 2014 elections. “They crave effective action to reverse long term economic decline and runaway economic inequality, but nothing on the scale required will be offered to them by either of America’s money-driven major parties.”Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University School of Law, called Professor Burnham “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation on the role and nature of political parties in American democracy.”“Americans,” he added, “have gone through frequent eras of disdain for parties, including now, yet Burnham’s work still provides some of the most compelling rejoinders to that disdain and a powerful argument that insists on the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democratic politics. In particular, he asserted that weak parties creates weak, vulnerable legislators, which enables even greater domination of government by private interests.”Walter Dean Burnham was born on June 15, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio, to Alfred H. Burnham Jr., an engineer for General Electric, and Gertrude (Hamburger) Burnham, a homemaker.He received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and then served in the Army as a translator of intercepted communications in Russian. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard, where his mentor was the historian V.O. Key Jr.He taught at Boston, Kenyon and Haverford Colleges and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the M.I.T. faculty in 1971 and the government department of the University of Texas in 1988. He became professor emeritus in 2004.In addition to his daughter Anne, he is also survived by a son, John, and four grandchildren. His wife, Patricia (Mullan) Burnham, died in 2018.Professor Burnham noted that political parties, for all their shortcomings, “are the only devices thus far invented which generate power on behalf of the many.”“I guess I would like to go back not to the smoke-filled room, but to the smoke-free room,” Professor Burnham told The Times in 1988. “After all, the first president of the United States was chosen by a search process. I don’t believe the open primary system is a democratic process. A few thousand activists push the Republican Party to the right and the Democratic Party to the left.”Alex Traub More

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    We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows

    In August, President Biden met with several historians at the White House to discuss the threats facing American democracy.Most of the conversation, according to a report in The Washington Post, was about “the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.” Those present were people who had “been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.”Now, I was obviously not at this meeting. But I have been thinking about what I would say to Biden about the threats to American democracy. The most acute threat, it’s true, comes from election deniers and the authoritarian mass movement led by the previous president, Donald Trump. But the long-term threat is less an imposition from bad actors and more a constitutive part of our political system. It is, in fact, the Constitution. Specifically, it is a set of fundamental problems with the structure of our government that flow directly from the Constitution as it currently exists.We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.Americans, in short, had forced the Constitution to accommodate their democratic impulses, as would be the case again and again, up to the present. The question, today, is whether there’s any room left to build a truly democratic political system within the present limits of our constitutional order.In his new book “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy says the answer is, essentially, no. “Our mainstream political language still lacks ways of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains,” Purdy writes.This is true in two ways. The first (and obvious) one is that the Constitution has enabled the democratic backsliding of the past six years. Founding-era warnings against demagogues — used often to justify our indirect system of choosing a president — run headfirst into the fact that Donald Trump was selected constitutionally, not elected democratically. (Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist No. 68, “The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” This, it turns out, was wrong.)And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”“If enough people believe it is their responsibility to resist and disable any government they did not help to elect, self-rule can become impossible,” Purdy writes. “Donald Trump’s presidency,” he continues, “arose from all of these dysfunctions.”Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”There is much more to say about the ways that our political system has inhibited democratic life and even enabled forms of tyranny. For now, it suffices to say that a constitution that subverts majority rule, fuels authoritarian movements and renders popular sovereignty inert is not a constitution that can be said to protect, secure or even enable American democracy.In a speech in Philadelphia last month, Biden did speak publicly on the threats to American democracy. He focused, as almost any president would, on the Constitution. “This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.”The problem, and what this country must confront if it ever hopes to turn its deepest democratic aspirations into reality, is that we don’t actually honor the will of the people. We deny it. And it’s this denial that sits at the root of our troubles.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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    Which Midterm Polls Should We Be Taking With a Grain of Salt?

    Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, to discuss the state of polling and of Democratic anxiety about polls ahead of the midterms.Frank Bruni: Amy, Patrick, as if the people over at Politico knew that the three of us would be huddling to discuss polling, it just published a long article about the midterms with the gloomy, spooky headline “Pollsters Fear They’re Blowing It Again in 2022.”Do you two fear that pollsters are blowing it again in 2022?Patrick Ruffini: It’s certainly possible that they could. The best evidence we have so far that something might be afoot comes from The Times’s own Nate Cohn, who finds that some of the Democratic overperformances seem to be coming in states that saw large polling errors in 2016 and 2020.Amy Walter: I do worry that we are asking more from polling than it is able to provide. Many competitive Senate races are in states — like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that Joe Biden won by supernarrow margins in 2020. The reality is that they are going to be very close again. And so an error of just three to four points is the difference between Democratic and Republican control of the Senate.Ruffini: This also doesn’t mean we can predict that polls will miss in any given direction. But it does suggest taking polls in states like Ohio, which Donald Trump won comfortably but where the Republican J.D. Vance is tied or slightly behind, with a grain of salt.Bruni: So what would you say specifically to Democrats? Are they getting their hopes up — again — in a reckless fashion?Walter: Democrats are definitely suffering from political PTSD. After 2016 and 2020, I don’t think Democrats are getting their hopes up. In fact, the ones I talk with are hoping for the best but not expecting such.Ruffini: In any election, you have the polls themselves, and then you have the polls as filtered through the partisan media environment. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. On Twitter, there’s a huge incentive to hype individual polling results that are good for your side while ignoring the average. I don’t expect this to let up, because maintaining this hype is important for low-dollar fund-raising. But I do think this has led to a perhaps exaggerated sense of Democratic optimism.Bruni: Great point, Patrick — in these fractured and hyperpartisan times of information curation, polls aren’t so much sets of numbers as they are Rorschachs.But I want to pick up on something else that you said — “polls will miss in any given direction” — to ask why the worry seems only to be about overstatement of Democratic support and prospects. Is it possible that the error could be in the other direction and we are understating Republican problems and worries?Ruffini: In politics, we always tend to fight the last war. Historically, polling misses have been pretty random, happening about equally on both sides. But the last big example of them missing in a pro-Republican direction was 2012. The more recent examples stick in our minds, 2020 specifically, which was actually worse in percentage terms than 2016.Walter: Patrick’s point about the last war is so important. This is especially true when we are living in a time when we have little overlap with people from different political tribes. The two sides have very little appreciation for what motivates, interests or worries the other side, so the two sides over- or underestimate each other a lot.As our politics continue to break along educational attainment — those who have a college degree are increasingly more Democratic-leaning, those with less education increasingly more Republican-leaning — polls are likely to overstate the Democratic advantage, since we know that there’s a really clear connection between civic voting behavior and education levels.Ruffini: And we may be missing a certain kind of Trump voter, who may not be answering polls out of a distrust for the media, polling and institutions generally.Bruni: Regarding 2016 and 2020, Trump was on the ballot both of those years. He’s not — um, technically — this time around. So is there a greater possibility of accuracy, of a repeat of 2018, when polling came closer to the mark?Ruffini: The frustrating thing about all of this is that we just don’t have a very good sample size to answer this. In polls, that’s called an n size, like n = 1,000 registered voters. There have been n = 2 elections where Trump has been on the ballot and n = 1 midterm election in the Trump era. That’s not a lot.Bruni: We’ve mentioned 2016 and 2020 versus 2018. Are there reasons to believe that none of those points of reference are all that illuminating — that 2022 is entirely its own cat, with its own inimitable wrinkles? There are cats that have wrinkles, right? I’m a dog guy, but I feel certain that I’ve seen shar-pei-style cats in pictures.Walter: First, let’s be clear. Dogs are the best. So let’s change this to “Is this an entirely different breed?”I’m a big believer in the aphorism that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.Ruffini: Right. Every election is different, and seeing each new election through the lens of the previous election is usually a bad analytical strategy.Walter: But there are important fundamentals that can’t be dismissed. Midterms are about the party in charge. It is hard to make a midterm election about the out-party — the party not in charge — especially when Democrats control not just the White House but the House and Senate as well.However, the combination of overturning Roe v. Wade plus the ubiquitous presence of Trump has indeed made the out-party — the G.O.P. — a key element of this election. To me, the question is whether that focus on the stuff the Republicans are doing and have done is enough to counter frustration with the Democrats.Ruffini: 2022 is unique in that it’s a midterm cycle where both sides have reasons to be energized — Republicans by running against an unpopular president in a time of high economic uncertainty and Democrats by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. It’s really unique in the sweep of midterm elections historically. To the extent there is still an energized Republican base, polls could miss if they aren’t capturing this new kind of non-college, low-turnout voter that Trump brought into the process.Bruni: Patrick, this one’s for you, as you’re the one among us who’s actually in the polling business. In the context of Amy’s terrific observation about education levels and the Democratic Party and who’s more readily responsive to pollsters, what are you and what is your firm doing to make sure you reach and sample enough Republican and Trump-inclined voters?Ruffini: That’s a great question. Nearly all of our polls are off the voter file, which means we have a much larger set of variables — like voting history and partisan primary participation — to weight on than you might typically see in a media poll (with the exception of the Times/Siena polls, which do a great job in this regard). We’ve developed targets for the right number of college or non-college voters among likely voters in each congressional district. We’re also making sure that our samples have the right proportions of people who have registered with either party or have participated in a specific party’s primary before.But none of this is a silver bullet. After 2016, pollsters figured out we needed to weight on education. In 2020 we weighted on education — and we got a worse polling error. All the correct weighting decisions won’t matter if the non-college or low-turnout voter you’re getting to take surveys isn’t representative of those people who will actually show up to vote.Bruni: Does the taking of polls and the reporting on polls and the consciousness of polls inevitably queer what would have happened in their absence? I will go to my grave believing that if so many voters hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton had victory in the bag, she would have won. Some 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the margin of her Electoral College loss — are easily accounted for by overconfident, complacent Clinton supporters.Walter: In 2016, there were two key groups of people that determined the election. Those who never liked Clinton and those who disliked Trump and Clinton equally. At the end, those who disliked both equally broke overwhelmingly for Trump. And, those Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t like her at all were never fully convinced that she was a worthy candidate.Ruffini: I don’t worry about this too much since the people most likely to be paying attention to the daily movement of the polls are people who are 100 percent sure to vote. It can also work in the other direction. If the polls are showing a race in a red or blue state is close, that can motivate a majority of the party’s voters to get out and vote, and that might be why close races in those states usually resolve to the state fundamentals.Bruni: Evaluate the news media in all of this, and be brutal if you like. For as long as I’ve been a reporter, I’ve listened to news leaders say our political coverage should be less attentive to polls. It remains plenty attentive to polls. Should we reform? Is there any hope of that? Does it matter?Ruffini: I don’t think there’s any hope of this getting better, and that’s not the media’s fault. It’s the fault of readers (sorry, readers!) who have an insatiable appetite for staring at the scoreboard.Walter: We do pay too much attention to polls, but polls are the tool we have to capture the opinions of an incredibly diverse society. A reporter could go knock on 3,000 doors and miss a lot because they weren’t able to get the kind of cross-section of voters a poll does.Ruffini: Where I do hope the media gets better is in conducting more polls the way campaigns conduct them, which are not mostly about who is winning but showing a candidate how to win.In those polls, we test the impact of messages on the electorate and show how their standing moved as a result. It’s possible to do this in a balanced way, and it would be illuminating for readers to see, starting with “Here’s where the race stands today, but here’s the impact of this Democratic attack or this Republican response,” etc.Bruni: Let’s finish with a lightning round. Please answer these quickly and in a sentence or less, starting with this: Which issue will ultimately have greater effect, even if just by a bit, in the outcome of the midterms — abortion or gas prices?Walter: Abortion. Only because gas prices are linked to overall economic worries.Ruffini: Gas prices, because they’re a microcosm about concerns about inflation. When we asked voters a head-to-head about what’s more important to their vote, reducing inflation comes out ahead of protecting abortion rights by 67 to 29 percent.Bruni: Which of the competitive Senate races will have an outcome that’s most tightly tethered to — and thus most indicative of — the country’s mood and leanings right now?Walter: Arizona and Georgia were the two closest races for Senate and president in 2020. They should both be indicative. But Georgia is much closer because the G.O.P. candidate, Herschel Walker, while he’s still got some problems, has much less baggage and much better name recognition than the G.O.P. candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.Ruffini: If Republicans are going to flip the Senate, Georgia is most likely to be the tipping-point state.Bruni: If there’s a Senate upset, which race is it? Who’s the unpredicted victor?Walter: For Republicans, it would be Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. They’ve argued that the incumbent, Senator Maggie Hassan, has low approval ratings and is very weak. It would be an upset because Bolduc is a flawed candidate with very little money or history of strong fund-raising.Ruffini: I’d agree about New Hampshire. The polling has shown a single-digit race. Republicans are also hoping they can execute a bit of a sneak attack in Colorado with Joe O’Dea, though the state fundamentals look more challenging.Bruni: You (hypothetically) have to place a bet with serious money on the line. Is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or “other”?Walter: It’s always a safer bet to pick “other.” One of the most difficult things to do in politics is what DeSantis is trying to do: not just to upend someone like Trump but to remain a front-runner for another year-plus.Ruffini: I’d place some money on DeSantis and some on “other.” DeSantis is in a strong position right now, relative to the other non-Trumps, but he hasn’t taken many punches. And Trump’s position is soft for a former president who’s supposedly loved by the base and who has remained in the fray. Time has not been his friend. About as many Republicans in the ABC/Washington Post poll this weekend said they didn’t want him to run as did.Bruni: Same deal with the Democratic presidential nominee — but don’t be safe. Live large. To the daredevil go the spoils. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or “other”?Walter: History tells us that Biden will run. If he doesn’t, history tells us that it will be Harris. But I feel very uncomfortable with either answer right now.Ruffini: “Other.” Our own polling shows Biden in a weaker position for renomination than Trump and Democrats less sure about who the alternative would be if he doesn’t run. I also think we’re underestimating the possibility that he doesn’t run at the age of 81.Bruni: OK, final question. Name a politician, on either side of the aisle, who has not yet been mentioned in our conversation but whose future is much brighter than most people realize.Walter: If you talk to Republicans, Representative Patrick McHenry is someone they see as perhaps the next leader for the party. There’s a lot of focus on Kevin McCarthy now, but many people see McHenry as a speaker in waiting.Ruffini: He’s stayed out of the presidential conversation (probably wisely until Trump has passed from the scene), but I think Dan Crenshaw remains an enormously compelling future leader for the G.O.P. Also in Texas, should we see Republicans capitalize on their gains with Hispanic voters and take at least one seat in the Rio Grande Valley, one of those candidates — Mayra Flores, Monica De La Cruz or Cassy Garcia — will easily be in the conversation for statewide office.Bruni: Thank you, both. I just took a poll, and 90 percent of respondents said they’d want to read your thoughts at twice this length. Then again, the margin of error was plus or minus 50 percent, and I’m not sure I sampled enough rural voters in the West.Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) is a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter and can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) is a co-founder of the Republican research firm Echelon Insights. Amy Walter (@amyewalter) is the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report.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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    Turkish Author Ece Temelkuran Sees a Contested U.S. Election Through the Lens of an Attempted Coup

    Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish author, sees parallels between Donald Trump’s claims of election theft and the 2016 attempt to depose Recep Tayyip Erdogan.This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which convenes this week in the Greek capital to examine the ways in which self-governance might evolve.When President Donald J. Trump announced in November 2020 that he had been robbed of victory in the presidential election that month, the author and political commentator Ece Temelkuran (pronounced eh-jeh) drew direct parallels with her homeland, Turkey.“Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup,” she wrote in an editorial for The Guardian. “If it were happening in Turkey, the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.”Ms. Temelkuran spoke from experience. She lived through the July 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and left the country to avoid the crackdown that followed. Three years later, she published “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” a nonfiction book that charted a democratic country’s potential slide into authoritarianism.Ms. Temelkuran was born into a political family. Her mother was a student activist who was imprisoned after a military coup in Turkey in the 1970s and rescued by a young lawyer whom she would go on to marry.When she was 16, Ms. Temelkuran started writing for a feminist magazine and went on to become one of Turkey’s most widely read political commentators.She remains a high-profile commentator today while she lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.In a recent interview, Ms. Temelkuran spoke of the threats to democracy in the West and in her native Turkey. This conversation has been edited and condensed.Since you published your book “How to Lose Your Country,” a few things have happened. Mr. Trump is no longer in power. Nor is the British prime minister Boris Johnson, who championed Britain’s exit from the European Union. How do you view the world today?I think there’s too much optimism, and also too much pessimism. The optimists think that if they get rid of Boris Johnson or Trump, everything will be back to normal in terms of democracy — that we can just fix a few mechanisms in the democratic machine, and we will be fine after that. I think this is a deeper crisis: a cluster of crises, actually, that we have to look deeper into.The crisis of democracy is very much intertwined with the crisis of capitalism. There is no way out, unless we address the issue of social equality.Ece Temelkuran is an author and political commentator who lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesYou say democracy in its present form is dead, because capitalism is essentially incompatible with democracy. Can you explain?Right-wing populist movements did not suddenly appear in the last 10 years. We have to go back to the 1980s to understand what really is happening in the world today, especially in terms of democracy.Democracy stands on the fundamental promise of equality and social justice. Capitalism does not promise social justice. If people are not equal in real terms, meaning financially and economically, how can you promise them equality as citizens?Why do you believe that capitalism is at odds with social justice?People pretend as if the rights that workers enjoy — Sundays off, eight-hour work days, etc. — are all thanks to capitalism. In fact, whatever the working classes have achieved or earned has come after a very long and hard struggle against the ruling classes.The depoliticization of society in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to an infantilization of citizens — to their perception of politics as being dirty. This massive depoliticization contributed to the right-wing populist movements of today. That’s why we have all these masses who believe that Trump is the savior, or that Brexit will make Britain great again.Another consequence was that we were made to be afraid of words like socialism, social democracy, regulation, financial regulation. These words became taboo after the 1970s.We’ve ended up in a place where we don’t even allow ourselves to think of a better system than capitalism. It is as if the end of capitalism were to lead to the end of the world.You use the word fascism to describe political realities in the West. That word has serious historical resonance. Why use it?Because I think we should use that word. We were made to believe that fascism was buried in the battlefields of the Second World War. The version that wears boots and uniform was buried, yes. But fascism does not just come in a uniform and boots, marching in goose step. If freedom of speech, freedom of organization, and the rights of the working classes are oppressed, that builds up to fascism.In countries such as the United States and Britain, the democratic establishment is powerful enough to protect itself. But in countries where the political and democratic establishment is not mature enough, you see fully formed oppression. There is no doubt that these are regimes that we can easily call fascism — in Turkey, in India, and in several other countries.Parliamentary democracies aren’t suddenly going to turn Hitlerian, are they?They don’t need to. At the time of Hitler, there was a need to be oppressive and violent because there was a massive union movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, a socialist movement. Nowadays, there is no such thing. So why use violence? They can use post-truths or social media to manipulate people, to spread misinformation and so on.If we can shift global politics to being more progressive, then we can get rid of these movements. At the moment, the center of the political spectrum is empty. Centrist politicians don’t have a story with which to mobilize and organize people. There’s a vacuum.Take French President Emmanuel Macron, for example. Why is he there? Because everybody is so afraid of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. For the last decade, at least, voting has become a tool to protect us from the worst.This is not politics. It’s a survival reaction.Unless the center opens its arms to the left and to progressives, there is no way out for democracy in the world.Turkey was for a long time a model when it came to the transition to democracy in the Muslim world. What’s going on there now?It’s a massive form of dictatorship. But then these dictatorships do not have to use violence. Now they’re using a different political tool, which is this very wide web of political money that spans the entire country. Even the smallest sympathizer to the party is getting this money. They have a good life. If you are part of the party, or in the party circle, you have a life. Otherwise, it’s not just economic transactions that are impossible. You cannot exercise your basic rights as a citizen.There are first-class citizens who are submissive to the party or Erdogan, and the others. The others, as Erdogan has said, are welcome to leave, and they are leaving. There is a massive brain drain from Turkey at the moment. It’s another tragic story. Doctors, nurses, well-educated people, academics: They’re all leaving.What’s the way out?The way out, which Turkish political forces are in a very inadequate way trying at the moment, is coming together: for all the opposition parties, despite their political differences, to come together and, in the interests of democracy, participate in elections. More

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    Lost Hope of Lasting Democratic Majority

    Revisiting an influential book and the notion that demographics are destiny.Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, when a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority” seemed prophetic.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday we wish a belated and maybe not-so-Happy 20th Birthday to “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the book that famously argued Democrats would gain an enduring advantage in a multiracial, postindustrial America.There are countless explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and the growing dysfunction of American political life. This book does not necessarily rank at the top of that list. But when historians look back on this era, the book’s effect on American politics might be worth a mention.The thesis that Democrats were on the cusp of a lasting advantage in national politics helped shape the hopes, fears and, ultimately, the conduct of the two major parties — especially once the Obama presidency appeared to confirm the book’s prophecy.It transformed modest Democratic wins into harbingers of perpetual liberal rule. It fueled conservative anxiety about America’s growing racial diversity, even as it encouraged the Republican establishment to reach out to Hispanic voters and pursue immigration reform. The increasingly popular notion that “demographics are destiny” made it easier for the progressive base to argue against moderation and in favor of mobilizing a new coalition of young and nonwhite voters. All of this helped set the stage for the rise of Mr. Trump.This is a lot to attribute to a single book, especially since the book does not really resemble the Obama-era caricature advanced by its supporters. The book does not put forward what became a commonly held view that racial demographic shifts would allow Democrats to win through mobilization, a more leftist politics or without the support of white working-class voters.Instead, the book argued — not persuasively, as we’ll see — that Democrats could build a majority with a (still ill-defined) “centrist” politics of the Clinton-Gore variety, so long as they got “close to an even split” of white working-class voters.“We were clearly overly optimistic about that prospect, to say the least,” said John Judis, one of the authors of the book, of the prospect of such high levels of Democratic support.One easy way to see the divergence between reality and the expectations promoted by the book is to look at its projections for the Electoral College, compared with how the nation actually voted over the next 20 years: More