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      The ‘Sleeping Giant’ That May Decide the Midterms

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      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

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      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

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      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?

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      Cómo fue que cuentas rusas ayudaron a desmantelar la Marcha de las Mujeres

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      Linda Sarsour despertó el 23 de enero de 2017, entró a internet y sintió náuseas.El fin de semana anterior, había ido a Washington para estar al frente de la Marcha de las Mujeres, una movilización contra el entonces presidente Donald Trump que superó todas las expectativas. Las multitudes se habían congregado antes del amanecer y para cuando ella subió al escenario, se extendían a lo lejos.Más de cuatro millones de personas de todo Estados Unidos habían participado, según cálculos posteriores de los expertos, que decían que esta marcha era una de las protestas de un solo día más grandes en la historia del país.Pero luego algo cambió, al parecer de la noche a la mañana. Lo que ella vio en Twitter ese lunes fue un torrente de quejas centradas en ella. En sus 15 años de activista, en su mayoría defendiendo los derechos de las personas musulmanas, había enfrentado respuestas negativas, pero esto era de otra magnitud. Una pregunta comenzó a formarse en su mente: ¿realmente me odian tanto?Esa mañana, sucedían cosas que Sarsour no podía ni imaginarse.A casi 6500 kilómetros de distancia, organizaciones vinculadas con el gobierno ruso habían asignado equipos para actuar en contra de la Marcha de las Mujeres. En los escritorios de las anodinas oficinas de San Petersburgo, los redactores estaban probando mensajes en las redes sociales que criticaban el movimiento de la Marcha de las Mujeres, haciéndose pasar por estadounidenses comunes y corrientes.Publicaron mensajes como mujeres negras que criticaban el feminismo blanco, mujeres conservadoras que se sentían excluidas y hombres que se burlaban de las participantes como mujeres quejumbrosas de piernas peludas. Pero uno de los mensajes funcionó mejor con el público que cualquier otro.En él se destacaba un elemento de la Marcha de las Mujeres que, en principio, podría parecer un simple detalle: entre las cuatro copresidentas del evento estaba Sarsour, una activista palestinoestadounidense cuyo hiyab la señalaba como musulmana practicante.Linda Sarsour, una de las líderes de la Marcha de las Mujeres, en enero de 2017. A los pocos días, los troles rusos la atacaron en internet.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesDurante los 18 meses siguientes, las fábricas rusas de troles y su servicio de inteligencia militar se esforzaron por desacreditar el movimiento mediante la difusión de relatos condenatorios, a menudo inventados, en torno a Sarsour, cuyo activismo la convirtió en un pararrayos para la base deTrump y también para algunos de sus más ardientes opositores.Ciento cincuenta y dos cuentas rusas distintas produjeron material sobre ella. Los archivos públicos de las cuentas de Twitter que se ha comprobado que son rusas contienen 2642 tuits sobre Sarsour, muchos de los cuales llegaron a grandes audiencias, según un análisis de Advance Democracy Inc., una organización sin fines de lucro y apartidista que realiza investigaciones y estudios de interés público.Muchas personas conocen la historia sobre cómo se fracturó el movimiento de la Marcha de las Mujeres, que dejó cicatrices perdurables en la izquierda estadounidense.Una coalición frágil al principio, entró en crisis por la asociación de sus copresidentas con Louis Farrakhan, el líder de la Nación del Islam, ampliamente condenado por sus declaraciones antisemitas. Cuando esto salió a la luz, los grupos progresistas se distanciaron de Sarsour y de las copresidentas de la marcha, Carmen Pérez, Tamika Mallory y Bob Bland, y algunos pidieron que dimitieran.Pero también hay una historia que no se ha contado, que solo apareció años después en la investigación académica, de cómo Rusia se insertó en este momento.Durante más de un siglo, Rusia y la Unión Soviética trataron de debilitar a sus adversarios en Occidente al avivar las tensiones raciales y étnicas. En la década de 1960, oficiales de la KGB con base en Estados Unidos pagaron a agentes para que pintaran esvásticas en las sinagogas y profanaran los cementerios judíos. Falsificaron cartas racistas, supuestamente de supremacistas blancos, a diplomáticos africanos.No inventaron estas divisiones sociales, Estados Unidos ya las tenía. Ladislav Bittman, quien trabajó para la policía secreta en Checoslovaquia antes de desertar a Estados Unidos, comparó los programas de desinformación soviéticos con un médico malvado que diagnostica con pericia las vulnerabilidades del paciente y las explota, “prolonga su enfermedad y lo acelera hasta una muerte prematura en lugar de curarlo”.Hace una década, el presidente de Rusia, Vladimir Putin, supervisó un renacimiento de estas tácticas, con el fin de socavar las democracias de todo el mundo desde las sombras.Las redes sociales proporcionaban ahora una forma fácil de alimentar las ideas en el discurso estadounidense, algo que, durante medio siglo, la KGB había luchado por hacer. Y el gobierno ruso canalizó secretamente más de 300 millones de dólares a partidos políticos en más de dos docenas de países en un esfuerzo por influir en sus políticas a favor de Moscú desde 2014, según una revisión de la inteligencia estadounidense hecha pública la semana pasada.El efecto que estas intrusiones tuvieron en la democracia estadounidense es una cuestión que nos acompañará durante años. Las redes sociales ya estaban amplificando los impulsos políticos de los estadounidenses, dejando tras de sí un rastro de comunidades dañadas. La confianza en las instituciones estaba disminuyendo y la rabia aumentaba en la vida pública. Estas cosas habrían sido ciertas aun sin la interferencia rusa.Pero rastrear las intrusiones rusas durante los meses que siguieron a esa primera Marcha de las Mujeres es ser testigo de un persistente esfuerzo por empeorarlas todas.Después de las elecciones de 2016, la operación de desinformación rusa de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet cambió el enfoque de Donald Trump y Hillary Clinton a objetivos más amplios de Estados Unidos.James Hill para The New York Times‘Refrigeradores y clavos’A principios de 2017, la operación de troleo se encontraba en su fase imperial y rebosaba confianza.Las cuentas de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet, una organización cuya sede se encuentra en San Petersburgo y es controlada por un aliado de Putin, se había ufanado de impulsar a Trump a la victoria. Ese año, el presupuesto del grupo casi se había duplicado, según comunicaciones internas hechas públicas por los fiscales estadounidenses. Pasó más de un año antes de que las plataformas de las redes sociales realizaran una amplia purga de cuentas de títeres respaldados por Rusia.Para los troles, era una hora clave.En estas condiciones propicias, sus objetivos pasaron de la política electoral a algo más general: la meta de agudizar las fisuras en la sociedad estadounidense, dijo Alex Iftimie, un exfiscal federal que trabajó en un caso de 2018 contra un administrador del Proyecto Lakhta, que supervisaba la Agencia de Investigación de Internet y otras operaciones de troleo ruso.“Ya no se trataba exclusivamente de Trump y Clinton”, dijo Iftimie, ahora socio de Morrison Foerster. “Era más profundo y más siniestro y más difuso en su enfoque de explotar las divisiones dentro de la sociedad en cualquier número de niveles diferentes”.Había una rutina: al llegar a su turno, los trabajadores escudriñaban los medios de comunicación de los márgenes ideológicos, de la extrema izquierda y de la extrema derecha, en busca de contenido extremo que pudieran publicar y amplificar en las plataformas, alimentando las opiniones extremas en las conversaciones principales.Artyom Baranov, quien trabajó en una de las filiales del Proyecto Lakhta de 2018 a 2020, concluyó que sus compañeros de trabajo eran, en su mayoría, personas que necesitaban el dinero, indiferentes a los temas sobre los que se les pedía que escribieran.“Si se les asignaba un texto sobre refrigeradores, escribían sobre refrigeradores, o, digamos, sobre clavos, escribían sobre clavos”, dijo Baranov, uno de un puñado de antiguos troles que han hablado públicamente sobre sus actividades. Pero en lugar de refrigeradores y clavos, era “Putin, Putin, luego Putin, y luego sobre Navalny”, en referencia a Alekséi Navalny, el líder de la oposición encarcelado.El trabajo no consistía en exponer argumentos, sino en provocar una reacción visceral y emocional, idealmente de “indignación”, explicó Baranov, psicoanalista de formación, a quien se le asignó escribir publicaciones en línea sobre política rusa. “La tarea es hacer una especie de explosión, causar controversia”, agregó.Cuando una publicación lograba enfurecer a un lector, dijo, un compañero de trabajo comentaba a veces, con satisfacción, Liberala razorvala. Un liberal fue destrozado. “No se trataba de discutir hechos o dar nuevos argumentos”, dijo. “Siempre es una forma de hurgar en los trapos sucios”.El feminismo era un objetivo obvio, porque se consideraba una “agenda occidental” y hostil a los valores tradicionales que representaba Rusia, dijo Baranov, quien habló de su trabajo con la esperanza de advertir a las personas de que fueran más escépticas con el material que hay en línea. Desde hace meses, las cuentas rusas que pretenden pertenecer a mujeres negras han estado investigando las divisiones raciales dentro del feminismo estadounidense:“El feminismo blanco parece ser la tendencia más estúpida del 2k16”“Mira cómo Muhammad Ali calla a una feminista blanca que critica su arrogancia”“No tengo tiempo para tu basura de feminista blanca”“Por qué las feministas negras no le deben su apoyo a Hillary Clinton”“UN POCO MÁS FUERTE PARA LAS FEMINISTAS BLANCAS DE ATRÁS”En enero de 2017, mientras se acercaba la Marcha de las Mujeres, probaron distintos enfoques con distintas audiencias, como lo habían hecho previo a las elecciones presidenciales de 2016. Publicaban como mujeres trans resentidas, mujeres pobres y mujeres contra el aborto. Desacreditaban a quienes marchaban por ser peones del multimillonario judío George Soros.Y se burlaron de las mujeres que planeaban participar, a menudo en términos crudamente sexuales. En coordinación, a partir del 19 de enero, 46 cuentas rusas lanzaron 459 sugerencias originales para #RenameMillionWomenMarch, un hashtag creado por un conductor de pódcast de derecha de Indiana:La Marcha de: ¿Por qué nadie me quiere?La marcha de las mujeres fuertes que se hacen las víctimas constantementeLa Marcha de la Solitaria Señora de los GatosEl campamento de los cólicosLa Convención de Mujeres BarbudasViejas rotas arengandoEl camino de las lágrimas liberalesEl festival de las perras de Coyote UglyMientras tanto, otra línea de mensajes más efectiva se desarrollaba.Sarsour recordó el abrumador torrente de ataques. “Imagínese que todos los días al levantarse son un monstruo”, dijo.Brad Ogbonna/Redux‘Fue como una avalancha’Como una de las cuatro copresidentas de la Marcha de las Mujeres, Sarsour llegó con un historial, y con carga.Sarsour, hija de un tendero palestinoestadounidense de Crown Heights, en Nueva York, se había convertido en la voz de los derechos de los musulmanes después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre. En 2015, cuando tenía 35 años, un perfil del New York Times la ungió —“una chica de Brooklyn con hiyab”— como algo raro: una potencial candidata araboestadounidense a un cargo de elección pública.En 2016, el senador Bernie Sanders la invitó a un evento de campaña, un sello de aprobación de uno de los progresistas más influyentes del país. Eso molestó a los políticos pro-Israel en Nueva York, que señalaron su apoyo al movimiento de boicot, desinversión y sanciones, que busca asegurar los derechos de los palestinos aislando a Israel. Los críticos del movimiento sostienen que amenaza la existencia de Israel.Rory Lancman, entonces concejal de la ciudad del barrio de Queens, recuerda su inquietud cada vez mayor cuando ella comenzó a aparecer con regularidad en los eventos en los que se apoyaban causas de izquierda no relacionadas con Israel, como los salarios justos, donde, en su opinión, “su verdadera agenda estaba tratando de casar una agenda antiisraelí con diferentes causas progresistas”.Para Lancman, demócrata, la noticia de que Sarsour era una de las líderes de la Marcha de las Mujeres le pareció “desgarrador —esa es la palabra—, que el antisemitismo se tolere y racionalice en espacios progresistas”.Eso era la política de siempre, y Sarsour estaba acostumbrada a ello: la larga disputa entre los demócratas sobre las implicaciones de criticar a Israel.Pero 48 horas después de la marcha, hubo un cambio de tono en línea, con el surgimiento de publicaciones que describían a Sarsour como una yihadista radical que se había infiltrado en el feminismo estadounidense. Sarsour lo recuerda muy bien, porque se despertó con un mensaje de texto preocupado de una amiga y fue en Twitter para descubrir que era tendencia.No todas las respuestas negativas fueron orgánicas. Esa semana, las cuentas rusas de amplificación comenzaron a circular publicaciones centradas en Sarsour, muchas de las cuales eran incendiarias y se basaban en falsedades, ya que afirmaban que era una islamista radical: “Una musulmana que odiaba a los judíos y estaba a favor del Estado Islámico y en contra de Estados Unidos”, a la que “se había visto mostrando el cartel del Estado Islámico”.Algunas de estas publicaciones fueron vistas por muchas personas. A las 7 p. m. del 21 de enero, una cuenta de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet identificada como @TEN_GOP, un supuesto estadounidense de derecha originario del sur del país, tuiteó que Sarsour estaba a favor de imponer sharía o ley islámica en Estados Unidos, haciendo eco de una popular teoría de la conspiración antimusulmana que Trump había ayudado a popularizar en la campaña.Este mensaje cobró impulso y acumuló 1686 respuestas, se retuiteó 8046 veces y obtuvo 6256 “me gusta”. Al día siguiente, casi de manera simultánea, un pequeño ejército de 1157 cuentas de derecha retomó la narrativa y publicó 1659 mensajes sobre el tema, según un análisis realizado por la empresa de análisis online Graphika en nombre del Times.Vladimir Barash, jefe científico de Graphika, dijo que el patrón de interferencia era “estratégicamente similar” a la actividad de los troles en las vastas protestas anti-Putin de 2011 y 2012, con cuentas falsas “tratando de secuestrar la conversación de manera similar, a veces con éxito”.“Hay algunas pruebas circunstanciales de que aprendieron en un contexto doméstico y luego trataron de replicar su éxito en un contexto extranjero”, dijo Barash.Las cosas estaban cambiando sobre el terreno en Nueva York. En la Asociación Árabe Estadounidense de Nueva York, la organización sin fines de lucro de defensa a los migrantes que Sarsour dirigía en Bay Ridge, comenzó a llegar una gran cantidad de correo de odio: tarjetas postales, reclamos escritos a mano en papel de cuaderno, su foto impresa y desfigurada con equis rojas.“Se trataba de un nivel totalmente nuevo, y se sentía extraño, porque venía de todo el país”, dijo Kayla Santosuosso, entonces subdirectora de la organización sin fines de lucro, que recuerda haber llevado el correo a Sarsour en cajas de zapatos. Sarsour, a quien preocupaba haberse convertido en “un lastre”, renunció a su puesto en febrero de ese año.Para la primavera, la respuesta contra Sarsour se había convertido en un espectáculo de política divisoria. “Era como una avalancha”, dijo. “Como si estuviera nadando en ella todos los días. Era como si nunca saliera de ella”.Cuando fue invitada a dar el discurso de graduación de la Facultad de Salud Pública de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York (CUNY, por su sigla en inglés), el furor comenzó con semanas de antelación. Llamó la atención del polemista de extrema derecha Milo Yiannopoulos, quien viajó a Nueva York para una protesta que atrajo, como escribió un reportero del Times, “una extraña mezcla, incluyendo judíos y sionistas de derecha, comentaristas como Pamela Geller y algunos miembros de la extrema derecha”.“Linda Sarsour es una bomba de relojería del horror progresista, amante de la sharia, que odia a los judíos”, dijo Yiannopoulos a la multitud.Sarsour recuerda el momento previo al discurso de graduación como particularmente estresante. A medida que se acercaba, tuvo visiones de una figura que salía de las sombras para matarla, “alguna pobre persona desquiciada que se consumía en los rincones oscuros de internet, que sería alimentada por el odio”.Las cuentas de los troles rusos formaron parte de ese clamor; desde más de un mes antes de su discurso, un puñado de cuentas de amplificación gestionadas por la mayor agencia de inteligencia militar de Rusia, el GRU, hicieron circular expresiones de indignación por su elección, a menudo con el hashtag #CancelSarsour.Cuando Yiannopoulos habló, @TEN_GOP tuiteó las frases más jugosas —la línea “bomba de relojería del horror progresista”— y acumuló 3954 retuits y 5967 likes.Pronunció su discurso de graduación sin incidentes. Después, parece ser que los troles esperaron que dijera o hiciera algo divisorio. Y eso sucedió a principios de julio cuando, envalentonada tras su aparición en la CUNY, exhortó a la audiencia musulmana fuera de Chicago a rebelarse contra las políticas injustas del gobierno, que describió como “la mejor forma de yihad”.En el islam, la palabra “yihad” puede denotar cualquier lucha virtuosa, pero en el contexto político estadounidense es inextricable del concepto de guerra santa. Un político más pragmático podría haber evitado utilizarla, pero Sarsour se sentía como la de antes. “Así es como soy en la vida real”, dijo. “Soy de Brooklyn y soy palestina. Es mi personalidad”.Para los troles rusos, era una oportunidad.La semana siguiente, las cuentas rusas aumentaron de manera considerable su volumen de mensajes sobre Sarsour y produjeron 184 publicaciones en un solo día, según Advance Democracy Inc.Una vez más, el público respondió: cuando @TEN_GOP tuiteó: “Linda Sarsour pide abiertamente a los musulmanes que hagan la yihad contra Trump, por favor, investiguen este asunto”, recibió 6222 retuits y 6549 me gusta. Las cuentas mantuvieron un intenso enfoque en ella durante el mes de julio, cuando produjeron 894 publicaciones durante el mes siguiente y continuaron hasta el otoño, descubrió el grupo.Y una vez más, la reacción se extendió por las redes sociales. Los manifestantes acamparon frente al restaurante de parrilla kosher donde su hermano, Mohammed, trabajaba como gerente, exigiendo que fuera despedido. Dejó el trabajo y, finalmente, Nueva York.Su madre abrió un paquete que le llegó por correo y gritó: era un extraño libro autopublicado, titulado A Jihad Grows in Brooklyn, que pretendía ser la autobiografía de Sarsour y estaba ilustrado con fotografías familiares.“Digo, imagínense que todos los días al levantarse son un monstruo”, comentó Sarsour”.Los grupos progresistas se distanciaron de Sarsour, a la izquierda, y de sus compañeras copresidentas de la marcha, Tamika Mallory y Carmen Pérez.Erin Scott/ReutersA la caza de fantasmasResulta enloquecedoramente difícil decir con certeza qué efecto han tenido las operaciones de influencia rusas en Estados Unidos, porque cuando se afianzaron se apoyaron en divisiones sociales reales. Una vez introducidas en el discurso estadounidense, el rastro ruso desaparece, como el agua que se ha añadido a una piscina.Esto crea un enigma para los especialistas en desinformación, muchos de los cuales dicen que se ha exagerado el impacto de las intervenciones rusas. Después de las elecciones presidenciales de 2016, culpar a Rusia de los resultados no deseados se convirtió en “la salida emocional”, dijo Thomas Rid, autor de Desinformación y guerra política: historia de un siglo de falsificaciones y engaños.“Te juegan una mala pasada”, dijo Rid, profesor de la Escuela de Estudios Internacionales Avanzados de la Universidad Johns Hopkins. “Te conviertes en un idiota útil si ignoras las operaciones de información eficaces. Pero también si la ensalzas contando una historia, si la haces más poderosa de lo que es. Es un truco”.Las divisiones al interior de la Macha de las Mujeres ya existían.Las discusiones intestinas sobre la identidad y el antisemitismo habían tensado al grupo desde sus primeros días, cuando una de sus organizadoras, Vanessa Wruble, quien es judía, fue expulsada después de lo que describió como tensas conversaciones con Pérez y Mallory sobre el papel de los judíos en el racismo estructural. Pérez y Mallory han rebatido esa versión.Y la incomodidad con Sarsour había disminuido el entusiasmo entre algunos progresistas judíos, dijo Rachel Timoner, la rabina principal de la Congregación Beth Elohim en Park Slope, Brooklyn.Recordó haber salido en defensa de Sarsour contra los ataques “racistas e islamófobos”, solo para descubrir, cada vez, que surgía una nueva tormenta de fuego, a menudo como resultado de algo inflamatorio y “en última instancia indefendible” que Sarsour había dicho.A medida que pasaban los meses, dijo la rabina Timoner, los judíos comenzaron a preguntarse si estaban siendo excluidos de los movimientos progresistas.En 2018, se desató una nueva crisis interna por la asistencia de Mallory al Día del Salvador, una reunión anual de la Nación del Islam encabezada por Farrakhan.Mallory creció en Harlem, donde muchos veían positivamente a la Nación del Islam y a su fundador, como cruzados contra la violencia urbana. La presionaron para que rechazara a Farrakhan, a lo que se negó, aunque dijo que no compartía sus posturas antisemitas. Después del asesinato del padre de su hijo, explicó: “Fueron las mujeres de la Nación del Islam quienes me apoyaron”.“Siempre las he llevado cerca de mi corazón por esa razón”, dijo.Después de eso, el tejido de la coalición se rompió, de manera lenta y dolorosa. Sarsour y Perez se mantuvieron al lado de Mallory, y en poco tiempo, los grupos progresistas comenzaron a distanciarse de las tres. Bajo una intensa presión para que dejaran de ser las líderes, Sarsour, Perez y una tercera copresidenta, Bland, lo hicieron en 2019, un movimiento que, según dicen, estaba planeado desde hace tiempo.Las cuentas rusas aumentaron su producción en torno a Farrakhan y las lideresas de la Marcha de las Mujeres esa primavera, con 10 a 20 publicaciones al día, pero no hay pruebas de que fueran un motor principal de la conversación.Más o menos en ese momento, perdemos de vista la mayoría de los mensajes rusos. En el verano de 2018, Twitter suspendió 3841 cuentas vinculadas a la Agencia de Investigación de Internet y conservó 10 millones de sus tuits para que pudieran ser estudiados por los investigadores. Unos meses después, la plataforma suspendió y guardó el trabajo de 414 cuentas producidas por el GRU, la agencia de inteligencia militar.Con ello, se silenció un coro de voces que, durante años, habían ayudado a dar forma a las conversaciones estadounidenses sobre Black Lives Matter, la investigación de Mueller y los jugadores de la NFL arrodillados durante el himno nacional. El registro de los mensajes en torno a la Marcha de las Mujeres también se rompe ahí, congelado en el tiempo.La explotación rusa de Sarsour como figura divisoria debe entenderse como parte de la historia de la Marcha de las Mujeres, dijo Shireen Mitchell, una analista de tecnología que ha estudiado la interferencia rusa en el discurso afroestadounidense en línea.Ella comentó que las campañas rusas eran expertas en sembrar ideas que fluían hacia el discurso principal, después de lo cual, agregó, podían “solo sentarse y esperar”.“Es la preparación de todo eso, empezando por el principio”, dijo Mitchell, fundadora de Stop Online Violence Against Women. “Si esos miles de tuits causan una división entre los grupos que importan, si abren y permiten esa división, ya no es una grieta. Se convierte en un valle”.Otros consideraron que el papel de Rusia era marginal y entraba en los límites de un debate estadounidense necesario.“Es una pena que Linda Sarsour haya dañado ese movimiento intentando inyectar en él ideas nocivas que no tenían razón de ser en la Marcha de las Mujeres”, dijo Lancman, el exconcejal. “Por desgracia”, añadió, los rusos “parecen muy adeptos a explotar esas fisuras”.La rabina Timoner sonaba triste, al recordar todo lo que había pasado. Las heridas que se abrieron entre los progresistas aquel año nunca han terminado de cicatrizar, dijo.“Hay mucho dolor judío aquí”, dijo. “Esos bots rusos estaban hurgando en ese dolor”.La Marcha de las Mujeres continuó bajo un nuevo liderazgo, pero durante los meses de controversia, muchas mujeres que habían sido impulsadas por la primera marcha se alejaron.“No puedo recordar todas las historias negativas, solo recuerdo que había muchas”, dijo Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, una mujer de Seattle que, después de la marcha de 2017, dejó su trabajo en Microsoft y fundó The Electorette, un pódcast orientado a las mujeres progresistas. Ella nunca ha recuperado ese sentimiento de unidad.“Solo de pensarlo, todavía me siento un poco desvinculada de cualquier movimiento central”, dijo. “Aquí se estaba formando una posible coalición que se ha roto”.Una réplicaSarsour, de 42 años, había regresado a su oficina en Bay Ridge la primavera pasada, cinco años después de la primera Marcha de las Mujeres, cuando se enteró, por un reportero, de que había sido víctima del gobierno ruso.En la actualidad, rara vez la invitan a las plataformas nacionales y, cuando lo hacen, suele haber protestas. El rumor que había en torno a ella como futura candidata política se ha calmado. Sabe cómo se la ve, como una figura polarizadora. Se ha adaptado a esta realidad, y se ve a sí misma más como una activista, en el molde de Angela Davis.“Nunca voy a conseguir un trabajo de verdad” en una organización sin fines de lucro o corporación importante, comentó. “Ese es el tipo de impacto que estas cosas tienen en nuestras vidas”.Los datos sobre los mensajes rusos relacionados con la Marcha de las Mujeres aparecieron por primera vez a finales del año pasado en una revista académica, donde Samantha R. Bradshaw, experta en desinformación de la American University, revisó la injerencia del Estado en los movimientos feministas.Ella y su coautora, Amélie Henle, descubrieron un patrón de mensajes por parte de influentes cuentas de amplificadores que buscaban desmovilizar el activismo de la sociedad civil, impulsando las críticas interseccionales al feminismo y atacando a los organizadoras.Los movimientos, sostiene Bradshaw, son estructuras frágiles, que a menudo no están preparadas para hacer frente a campañas de sabotaje con buenos recursos y respaldadas por el Estado, especialmente cuando se combinan con algoritmos que promueven contenidos negativos. Pero los movimientos sociales saludables son esenciales para las democracias, dijo.“No vamos a tener una esfera pública robusta si nadie quiere organizar protestas”, dijo.Sarsour no es una académica, pero lo entendió bastante bien.“Señor, ten piedad”, dijo, al echar un vistazo a las conclusiones de Bradshaw.Sarsour trató de entenderlo: todo ese tiempo, el gobierno ruso la tenía en la mira. Hacía tiempo que creía saber de dónde venían sus críticos: la derecha estadounidense y los partidarios de Israel. Nunca se le ocurrió que pudieran provenir de un gobierno extranjero.“Pensar que Rusia va a usarme es mucho más peligroso y siniestro”, comentó. “Me pregunto cómo se beneficia Rusia de aprovechar mi identidad para debilitar movimientos contra Trump en Estados Unidos, me parece”, hizo un pausa. “Es solo que… vaya”.Entender lo que hicieron los troles rusos no cambiaría su posición.Aun así, la ayudó a entender esa época de su vida, en la que había estado en el centro de una tormenta. No eran únicamente sus compatriotas los que la odiaban. No fueron solamente sus aliados los que la repudiaron. Eso había pasado. Pero no era toda la historia.Llamó a Mallory.“No estábamos locas”, dijo.Aaron Krolik More

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      Jury Rules Against Project Veritas in Lawsuit

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      The conservative group was found to have violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself to a Democratic consulting firm, to which it was ordered to pay $120,000.WASHINGTON — A jury in a federal civil case on Thursday found that Project Veritas, a conservative group known for its deceptive tactics, had violated wiretapping laws and fraudulently misrepresented itself as part of a lengthy sting operation against Democratic political consultants.The jury awarded the consulting firm, Democracy Partners, $120,000. The decision amounted to a sharp rebuke of the practices that Project Veritas and its founder, James O’Keefe, have relied on. During the trial, lawyers for Project Veritas portrayed the operation as news gathering and its employees as journalists following the facts.“Hopefully, the decision today will help to discourage Mr. O’Keefe and others from conducting these kind of political spy operations and publishing selectively edited, misleading videos in the future,” Robert Creamer, a co-founder of Democracy Partners, said in a statement after the jury had reached a verdict.Project Veritas said it would appeal the decision.In 2016, according to testimony and documents introduced at the trial, Project Veritas carried out a plan to infiltrate Democracy Partners, which worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through the Democratic National Committee.As part of the ruse, a Project Veritas operative posing as a wealthy donor named Charles Roth mentioned to Mr. Creamer that he wanted to make a $20,000 donation to a progressive group that was also a client of Mr. Creamer.Later, the man posing as Mr. Roth told Mr. Creamer that his niece was interested in continuing her work in Democratic circles. After the money was wired from an offshore account in Belize to the group, Mr. Creamer spoke with the woman playing the role of Mr. Roth’s niece and offered her an unpaid internship at Democracy Partners.The niece used a fake name and email account along with a bogus résumé. In his book, “American Pravda,” Mr. O’Keefe wrote that the “donation certainly greased the wheels.”The operative, whose real name is Allison Maass, secretly taped conversations and took documents while working at Democracy Partners. She then supplied the information to her superiors at Project Veritas, which edited the videos and made them public.The videos suggested that Mr. Creamer and another man, Scott Foval, were developing a plan to provoke violence by supporters of Donald J. Trump at his rallies. Mr. Creamer’s lawsuit said the “video was heavily edited and contained commentary by O’Keefe that drew false conclusions.” According to documents filed with the court in the case, the man playing Mr. Roth had proposed an “illegal voter registration scheme, and Creamer rejected it outright as illegal.”The lawsuit contended that Mr. Creamer had lost more than $500,000 worth of contracts because of the deceptions behind the Project Veritas operation..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.Joseph E. Sandler, a lawyer for Democracy Partners, said during opening arguments last week that Mr. O’Keefe was a “strong supporter” of Mr. Trump and had tried to tip the scales in favor of him during the 2016 election. The operation, Mr. Sandler said, was “all carried out for the principal purpose of embarrassing Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump.”He described the elaborate operation as a “painstaking web of lies conjured up by Project Veritas.”According to a Project Veritas email and trial exhibit, Mr. O’Keefe offered cash bonuses to his employees to obtain incriminating statements, and $2,500 bonuses if Mr. Trump mentioned their videos in the presidential debates later that October. The email is marked “highly confidential.”At the trial, Mr. Sandler said Project Veritas was trying to “uncover what they themselves concocted.”Paul A. Calli, a lawyer for Project Veritas, argued that the videos were newsworthy and pointed out that media outlets had published stories about the undercover operation. He said the lawsuit was just “sour grapes.”In his closing statement, Mr. Calli said Project Veritas had engaged in “deceit, deception and dishonesty.” The group used those tactics, he said, so Project Veritas “can speak truth to power.”He said there was no evidence this was a political spying operation and that the lawsuit was an attack on journalism.“The sole purpose of the operation was journalism,” Mr. Calli said.Before the trial, a federal judge ruled that Democracy Partners could refer to Project Veritas’s conduct as a “political spying operation.”Project Veritas is facing legal fights on several fronts. In August, some of its former employees sued the group, depicting a “highly sexualized” work culture in which daytime drinking and drug use were common and employees worked additional hours without pay.That same month, two Florida residents pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to stealing a diary belonging to the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, and selling it to Project Veritas. According to court documents, prosecutors asserted that an employee of Project Veritas had directed the defendants to steal additional items to authenticate the diary and paid them additional money after receiving them.No charges have been filed against Project Veritas or any of its operatives in the Ashley Biden case, and the group never published the diary. But in a sign that the investigation into the group will continue, the authorities said one of the Florida residents had agreed to cooperate. As part of that investigation, F.B.I. agents conducted court-authorized searches last year at three homes of Project Veritas employees, including Mr. O’Keefe.Project Veritas was also ordered in August to pay Stanford University about $150,000 in legal fees after a federal judge tossed the defamation lawsuit the group filed in 2021.Project Veritas also has an ongoing defamation suit against The New York Times. More