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      Small Donors Are a Big Problem

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      One of the most important developments driving political polarization over the past two decades is the growth in small-dollar contributions.Increasing the share of campaign pledges from modest donors has long been a goal of campaign-finance reformers, but it turns out that small donors hold far more ideologically extreme views than those of the average voter.In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years. (Very recently, in part because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and in part because Joe Biden has not been able to raise voter enthusiasm, low-dollar contributions have declined, although they remain a crucial source of cash for candidates.)Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70.In an email, Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U. and an expert in campaign finance, wrote: “Individual donors and spenders are among the most ideological sources of money (and are far more ideological than the average citizen). That’s particularly true of small donors.”As a case in point, Pildes noted that in the 2022 elections, House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.In a 2019 article, “Small-Donor-Based Campaign-Finance Reform and Political Polarization,” Pildes wrote:It is important to recognize that individuals who donate to campaigns tend, in general, to be considerably more ideologically extreme than the average American. This is one of the most robust empirical findings in the campaign-finance literature, though it is not widely known. The ideological profile for individual donors is bimodal, with most donors clumped at the “very liberal” or “very conservative” poles and many fewer donors in the center, while the ideological profile of other Americans is not bimodal and features strong centrist representation.The rise of the small donor has been a key element driving the continuing decline of the major political parties.Political parties have been steadily losing the power to shape the election process to super PACs, independent expenditure organizations and individual donors. This shift has proved, in turn, to be a major factor in driving polarization, as the newly ascendant sources of campaign contributions push politicians to extremes on the left and on the right.The 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. F.E.C. was a crucial factor in shaping the ideological commitments of elected officials and their challengers.“The role of parties in funding (and thus influencing) campaigns at all levels of government in America has shifted in recent decades,” Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote in an email.“Parties often played a beneficial role,” he added, “helping to bind together broad coalitions on one side or the other and boosting electoral competition by giving in the most competitive races, regardless of a candidate’s ideology. Then much of their power was taken away, and other forces, often more ideologically extreme and always less transparent, were elevated.”This happened, Kousser continued, “through an accretion of campaign finance laws, Supreme Court decisions and F.E.C. actions and inactions. This has led us toward the era of independent expenditures and of dark money, one in which traditional parties have lost so much power that Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in 2016, even though he began with little support among the party’s establishment.”The polarizing effects of changing sources of campaign contributions pose a challenge to traditional reformers.Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Tufts, wrote in their 2015 book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail”:The public intensely dislikes how campaigns are financed in the United States. We can understand why. The system of private financing seems rigged to favor special interests and wealthy donors. Much of the reform community has responded by calling for tighter restrictions on private financing of elections to push the system toward “small donor democracy” and various forms of public financing. These strategies seem to make sense and, in principle, we are not opposed to them.But our research and professional experience as political scientists have led us to speculate that these populist approaches to curtailing money in politics might not be alleviating but contributing to contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan standoffs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans that appear to characterize the current state of U.S. politics.La Raja and Schaffner argued that “a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels. Yet this research seems to have been ignored in the design of post-Watergate reforms.”The counterintuitive result, they wrote,has been a system in which interest groups and intensely ideological — and wealthy — citizens play a disproportionately large role in financing candidates for public office. This dynamic has direct implications for many of the problems facing American government today, including ideological polarization and political gridlock. The campaign finance system is certainly not the only source of polarization and gridlock, but we think it is an important part of the story.Nathan Persily, a professor of law and political science at Stanford, observed in a telephone interview that the trend in campaign finance has been to “move money from accountable actors, the political parties, to unaccountable groups.”“The parties,” he pointed out, “are accountable not only because of more stringent contribution disclosure requirements but also by their role in actual governance with their ties to congressional and executive branch officials and their involvement with legislative decision making.”The appeal of extreme candidates well to the right or left of the average voter can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top five members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle:Bernie Sanders raised $38,310,351, of which $26,913,409, or 70.25 percent, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12,546,634, of which $8,572,027, or 68.32 percent, came from small donors; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12,304,636, of which $8,326,902, or 67.67 percent, came from small donors; Matt Gaetz raised $6,384,832, of which $3,973,659, or 62.24 percent, came from small donors; and Jim Jordan raised a total of $13,975,653, of which $8,113,157, or 58.05 percent, came from small donors.Trump provides an even better example of the appeal of extremist campaigns to small donors.In a February 2020 article, “Participation and Polarization,” Pildes wrote: “In 2016, Donald Trump became the most successful candidate ever in raising money from small donors, measured either in aggregate dollars or in the percentage of his total contributions. In total small-donor dollars for the 2015-16 cycle, Trump brought in $238.6 million.”Significantly, Pildes continued, “small donations ($200 or less) made up 69 percent of the individual contributions to Trump’s campaign and 58 percent of the Trump campaign’s total receipts.”Michael J. Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young, argued in a 2016 paper, “Ideological Donors, Contribution Limits and the Polarization of American Legislatures,” that “higher individual contributions lead to the selection of more polarized legislators, while higher limits on contributions from political action committees (PACs) lead to the selection of more moderate legislators.”In addition to the impact of the small donor on weakening the parties, Pildes wrote in his email,a second major development is the rise of outside spending groups, such as super PACs, that are not aligned with the political parties and often work against the party’s leadership. Many of these 501(c) (tax exempt) groups back more ideologically extreme candidates — particularly during primaries — than either the formal party organizations or traditional PACs. The threat of such funding also drives incumbents to the extreme, to avoid a primary challenger backed by such funding.Details of the process Pildes described can be found in a 2020 study, “Assessing Group Incentives, Independent Spending and Campaign Finance Law,” by Charles R. Hunt, Jaclyn J. Kettler, Michael J. Malbin, Brendan Glavin and Keith E. Hamm.The five authors tracked the role of independent expenditure organizations, many of which operate outside the reach of political parties, in the 15 states with accessible public data from 2006 (before Citizens United) to 2016 (after Citizens United).The authors found that spending by ideological or single-issue independent expenditure organizations, the two most extreme groups, grew from $21.8 million in 2006 to $66 million in 2016.More important, the total spending by these groups was 21.8 percent of independent expenditures in 2006 (including political parties, organized labor, business and other constituencies). Ten years later, in 2016, the amount of money spent by these two types of expenditure group had grown to 35.5 percent.Over the same period, spending by political parties fell from 24 percent of the total to 16.2 percent.Put another way, in 2006, spending by political parties and their allies was modestly more substantial than independent expenditures by more ideologically extreme groups; by 2016, the ideologically extreme groups spent more than double the amount spent by the parties and their partisan allies.On a national scale, Stan Oklobdzija, a political scientist at Tulane, has conducted a detailed study of so-called dark money groups using data from the Federal Election Commission and the I.R.S. to describe the level of influence wielded by these groups.In his April 2023 paper, “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns,” Oklobdzija wrote:Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, an increasingly large sum of money has decamped from the transparent realm of funds governed by the F.E.C. The rise of dark money — or political money routed through Internal Revenue Service (IRS)-governed nonprofit organizations who are subject to far less stringent disclosure rules — in American elections means that a substantial percentage of American campaign cash in the course of the last decade has effectively gone underground.Oklobdzija added that “pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and to create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties.” These dark money networks “channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups” in ways that diminish “the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.”What Oklobdzija showed is that major dark money groups are much more significant than would appear in F.E.C. fund-raising reports. He did so by using separate I.R.S. data revealing financial linkages to smaller dark money groups that together create a powerful network of donors.Using a database of about 2.35 million tax returns filed by these organizations, Oklobdzija found that “these dark money groups are linked via the flow of substantial amounts of grant money — forming distinct network communities within the larger campaign finance landscape.”Intense animosity toward Trump among Democrats and liberals helped drive a partisan upheaval in dark money contributions. “In 2014,” Oklobdzija wrote by email, “dark money was an almost entirely Republican phenomenon. The largest networks — those around Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity — supported almost exclusively conservative candidates.”In 2018, however, with Trump in the White House, Democratic dark money eclipsed its Republican counterpart for the first time, Oklobdzija wrote:In that year’s midterms, liberal groups that did not disclose their donors spent about twice what conservative groups did. Democrats also developed a network similar to those developed by Koches or Karl Rove with the 1630 Fund, which spent about $410 million total in 2020, either directly on elections or propping up liberal groups. In 2020, Democratic-aligned dark money outspent Republican-aligned dark money by almost 2.5 to 1. In 2022, total dark money spending was about 55 percent liberal and 45 percent conservative, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.A separate examination of the views of donors compared with the views of ordinary voters, “What Do Donors Want? Heterogeneity by Party and Policy Domain” by David Broockman and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Berkeley and Stanford, finds:Republican donors’ views are especially conservative on economic issues relative to Republican citizens, but are typically closer to Republican citizens’ views on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors’ views are especially liberal on social issues relative to Democratic citizens’, whereas their views on economic issues are typically closer to Democratic citizens’ views. Finally, both groups of donors are more pro-globalism than citizens are, but especially than Democratic donors.Brookman and Malhotra make the case that these differences between voters and donors help explaina variety of puzzles in contemporary American politics, including: the Republican Party passing fiscally conservative policies that we show donors favor but which are unpopular even with Republican citizens; the focus of many Democratic Party campaigns on progressive social policies popular with donors, but that are less publicly popular than classic New Deal economic policies; and the popularity of anti-globalism candidates opposed by party establishments, such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.Some of Brookman and Malhotra’s specific polling results:52 percent of Republican donors strongly disagree that the government should make sure all Americans have health insurance, versus only 23 percent of Republican citizens. Significant differences were found on taxing millionaires, spending on the poor, enacting programs for those with low incomes — with Republican donors consistently more conservative than Republican voters.On the Democratic side, donors were substantially more liberal than regular voters on abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control and especially on ending capital punishment, with 80 percent of donors in support, compared with 40 percent of regular voters.While most of the discussion of polarization focuses on ideological conflict and partisan animosity, campaign finance is just one example of how the mechanics, regulations and technology of politics can exacerbate the conflict between left and right.The development of microtargeting over the past decade has, for example, contributed to polarization by increasing the emphasis of campaigns on tactics designed to make specific constituencies angry or afraid, primarily by demonizing the opposition.The abrupt rise of social media has, in turn, facilitated the denigration of political adversaries and provided a public forum for false news. “Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter likely are not the root cause of polarization but they do exacerbate it,” according to a 2021 Brookings report.Some of those who study these issues, including La Raja and Schaffner, argue that one step in ameliorating the polarizing effects of campaign financing would be to restore the financial primacy of the political parties.In their book, La Raja and Schaffner propose four basic rules for creating a party-centered system of campaign finance:First, “limits on contributions to the political parties should be relatively high or nonexistent.” Second, “modest limits should be imposed on contributions to candidates.” Third, “no restrictions should be imposed on party support of candidates. Political parties should be permitted to help their candidates as much as desired with direct contributions or in-kind support.” Fourth, “public financing should support party organizations.”Persily, however, voiced strong doubts about the effectiveness of these proposals. “You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube,” he said, noting that polarization is becoming embedded in the personnel and decision-making processes of political parties, especially at the state and local levels, making a return to the parties’ past role as incubators of moderation unlikely.Broockman, Nicholas Carnes, Melody Crowder-Meyer and Christopher Skovron provided support for Persily’s view in their 2019 paper, “Why Local Party Leaders Don’t Support Nominating Centrists.” Broockman and his colleagues surveyed 1,118 county-level party leaders and found that “given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists, with Democrats doing so by about two to one and Republicans by 10 to one.”If what Broockman and his co-authors found about local party leaders is a signal that polarized thinking is gaining strength at all levels of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the prospects for those seeking to restore sanity to American politics — or at least reduce extremism — look increasingly dismal.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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      Who Are Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Debate Moderators?

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      The role of debate moderator carries prestige, but it also brings exacting demands and inherent risks: personal attacks by candidates, grievances about perceived biases and, for the two moderators of Wednesday’s Republican primary debate, a tempestuous cable news network’s reputation.Enter Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Fox News Channel mainstays who drew that assignment and will pose questions to the eight G.O.P. presidential candidates squaring off for the first time, absent former President Donald J. Trump.The party’s front-runner, Mr. Trump will bypass the debate in favor of an online interview with Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April.But that doesn’t mean the debate’s moderators will be under any less of a microscope.Here’s a closer look at who they are:Bret BaierHe is the chief political anchor for Fox News and the host of “Special Report With Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. on weeknights. Mr. Baier, 53, joined the network in 1998, two years after the network debuted, according to his biography.Mr. Baier, like Ms. MacCallum, is no stranger to the debate spotlight.In 2016, he moderated three G.O.P. primary debates for Fox, alongside Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, who have since left the network. He was present when Ms. Kelly grilled Mr. Trump about his treatment of women during a 2015 debate, an exchange that drew Mr. Trump’s ire and led him to boycott the network’s next debate nearly six months later.During the 2012 presidential race, Mr. Baier moderated five Republican primary debates.At a network dominated by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and the departed Mr. Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Baier has generally avoided controversy — but not entirely.After Fox News called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020, becoming the first major news network to do so and enraging Mr. Trump and his supporters, Mr. Baier suggested in an email to network executives the next morning that the outlet should reverse its projection.“It’s hurting us,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Baier was also part of a witness list in the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News over the network’s role in spreading disinformation about the company’s voting equipment. Fox settled the case for $787.5 million before it went to trial.Martha MacCallumShe is the anchor and executive editor of “The Story With Martha MacCallum” at 3 p.m. on weekdays. Ms. MacCallum, 59, joined the network in 2004, according to her biography.During the 2016 election, Ms. MacCallum moderated a Fox News forum for the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders who had not qualified for the party’s first debate in August 2015. She reprised that role in January 2016, just days before the Iowa caucuses.She and Mr. Baier also moderated a series of town halls with individual Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, including one that featured Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.Before joining Fox, she worked for NBC and CNBC.When Fox projected Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in Arizona, effectively indicating that Mr. Biden had clinched the presidency, Ms. MacCallum was similarly drawn into the maelstrom at the network.During a Zoom meeting with network executives and Mr. Baier, she suggested it was not enough to call states based on numerical calculations — the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations — but that viewers’ reactions should be considered.“In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, according to a review of the phone call by The Times, “the game is just very, very different.” More

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      Trump Voters Can See Right Through DeSantis

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      Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appeared to be a formidable challenger to Donald Trump — on paper at least.He didn’t back down from fights with the left; he started them.“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said.He has thumbed his nose at blue state governors, shipping them planeloads of immigrants. He has removed locally elected Democratic prosecutors. Whenever he sees what he believes to be an excess on the left, he stamps it out — from drag shows to critical race theory.He is not just a supporter of the hard-right agenda; he has personally weaponized it. Unlike traditional conservatives, wary of the abuse of state power, DeSantis relishes using his authority to enforce his version of what is moral and what is not.Since declaring his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, however, DeSantis has lost traction: Support for him has fallen from 31.3 percent on Jan. 20 to 20.7 percent on May 15, the day he announced, all the way down to 14.9 percent on Aug. 21, according to RealClearPolitics.As DeSantis prepares for the first Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, the central question he faces is why his support collapsed and whether he can get his campaign back on track.There are a lot of answers to the first question, most of them with a grain or more of truth. DeSantis has turned out to be a stiff on the stump, a man without affect. He speaks in alphabet talk: C.R.T., D.E.I., E.S.G. His attempts to outflank Trump from the right — “We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one” — seem to be more politically calculated than based on conviction. In terms of executive competence, attention to detail and commitment to an agenda, DeSantis stands head and shoulders above Trump, but he has so far been unable to capitalize on these strengths.That much is understood, but is DeSantis burdened by a larger liability? I posed the following question to a cross section of political operatives and political scientists:Ron DeSantis has been noticeably unsuccessful in his challenge to Trump. Why? Is it because DeSantis does not or cannot demonstrate the visceral animosity that Trump exudes?Trump has a talent for embedding language more common to a Queens street corner — in either long, rambling speeches covering a host of subjects, some controversial, some not, or in having seemingly unacceptable rhetoric leaked from private meetings.The net result is that his supporters get to realize Trump is willing to refer to “shithole countries” in Africa and Latin America, to say about immigrants that “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” or to describe Latino gang members: “These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”The response to my inquiries was illuminating.“Trump’s speech style,” Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Law School-San Francisco, wrote by email, “adeptly channels the talk traditions of blue-collar men who pride themselves on not having to suck up and self-edit to get ahead, which is the way they see professionals’ traditions of decorum.”Not only that, Williams continued, “Trump is way ahead of DeSantis in his perceived ability to get things done as a strong leader — that’s Trump cashing in on his enactment of blue-collar traditions of tough, straight-talking manliness. Also Trump is fun while DeSantis is a drip.”Like many Democrats, Williams argued, “DeSantis holds the delusion that politics is chiefly about policy differences” when in practice it is more often “about identity and self-affirmation. Trump understands instinctively that non-college Americans feel distinctly dissed: Non-college grads are 73 percentage points lower than grads to believe they’re treated with dignity.”Williams described DeSantis’s approach to campaigning as “a clumsy color-by-numbers culture-wars formula” accompanied by a speaking style “more Harvard than hard hat, as when he talked about ‘biomedical security restrictions’ in his speech to the Republican Party convention in North Carolina (whatever those are??).”Williams cautioned against categorizing all Trump voters as racist:In 2016, 20 percent of Trump voters were true “grievance voters” who were very identified with being white and Christian and had cold feelings toward people of color and immigrants. But 19 percent were “anti-elites” with economically progressive views and moderate views on race, immigration, the environment and gay marriage. Writing off all Trump voters as mere racists is one of the many ways, alas, the left helps the right.Williams cited a paper published earlier this year, “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes” by Justin Grimmer, William Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, that “showed that, while racial resentment strongly predicts Trump voting, that’s not why he won: He won because he also attracted a much larger group of voters with only moderate levels of racial resentment.”Taking a different, but parallel, tack, Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, wrote by email: “Another alternative is that Trump tends to be all reaction and hot rhetoric, but weak or inconsistent on policy. People can therefore project their preferred policy preferences on him and believe he represents them via ‘gist.’”In Skitka’s view,DeSantis, in contrast, is very specific and consistent about policy, and he is too extreme for many on the right. To ice the cake, he appears to be really bad at retail politics — he just isn’t likable, and certainly isn’t charismatic. Together, I don’t think DeSantis can compete to overcome these obstacles, even if he were to start using Trump-like rhetoric.In a particularly devastating comparison of DeSantis with Trump, David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell, wrote: “Trump is able to speak the language of hate and resentment in a way that everyone believes is real, and not just a calculated act.”Everything about DeSantis,by contrast, seems calculated. He’s the Yale and Harvard guy now complaining about intellectuals and elites. He’s talking about wokism and critical race theory, when no one knows what those are (even Trump noted no one can define woke, though he yells against it himself). When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird. DeSantis saying he’s going to start “slitting throats” reminded me of Romney’s “severely conservative.” While DeSantis’s is a dangerous escalation of violent imagery, they both sound bizarre and unnatural.At a more fundamental level, Bateman wrote:It’s not at all clear that what most Republican voters (rather than donors) want is a mainstream and party-credentialed version of Trump. The fact that Trump legitimately was an outsider to Republican politics was a core part of his appeal. So too was the calculation by donors and party activists that Trump’s being simultaneously aligned with social and racial conservatives, but able to present himself as not tied to Republican orthodoxy, made him a more attractive candidate in a national election.Bateman suggested that insofar as DeSantis is seen as “an establishment Trump, who I expect most voters will see as fully aligned with G.O.P. orthodoxy but even more focused on the priorities of racial and social conservatives (taking over universities, banning books, or attacking transpersons), he starts to look more like a general election loser.”David O. Sears, a professor of psychology at U.C.L.A., wrote by email that he “was inspired by your inquiry to do a free association test” on himself to see what he linked with both Trump and DeSantis.The result for Trump was:Archie Bunker, trash-talking, insulting people, entertaining, male, white, older, angry, impolite on purpose, Roller Derby, raucous, uninhibited, tell it like it is, high school locker room, dirty socks thrown in a corner, telling his locker room buddies that he threw his mom the finger when she told him to clean up his room for the millionth time (but of course didn’t dare).For DeSantis:Serious, boring, no sense of humor, Wimbledon, ladies’ tea party, PBS/NPR, civics class, lecture, Ivy League, expensive suit neatly pressed hanging in the closet. “Yes, Mom.”DeSantis’s drive to displace Trump from his position as the party’s top dog faces a combination of personal and structural hurdles.Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that DeSantis has adopted an approach to the nomination fight that was bound to fail:DeSantis’s strategy, and that of any candidate not named Trump, should be to consolidate the Maybe Trump voters. But DeSantis has seemed like he was going after the Always Trump voters with his aggressive language (“slitting throats”), his comment that Ukraine was just a “territorial dispute,” his suggestion that vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. would be a good candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control, and his doubling down on whether slavery might have been beneficial to some enslaved people.The problem with this approach, Ayres continued, is that “the Always Trump voters are ‘Always Trump’ for a reason — they are not going to settle for the second-best Trump if they can get the real thing.”Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, wrote:There is no room for DeSantis or anyone else to outflank Trump on the right, where Trump has his most loyal base. Candidates can argue that Trump is insufficiently conservative on some issues, but that it not the point for Trump loyalists. Candidates can try to echo the ugliness of Trump’s rhetoric, but that too misses what really draws these voters to Trump.What other candidates cannot replicate, in Garin’s view,is Trump’s persona and style. Nobody else (especially DeSantis) has his performance skills, and no one else conveys the same boldness, naturalness, and authenticity in voicing the grievances of MAGA voters. Trump makes hatred entertaining for his supporters. DeSantis, by contrast, is a boring drag in his meanness.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, places even more emphasis on the built-in challenges facing a Republican running against Trump: “It is extremely difficult to unseat an incumbent party leader in a primary,” Lee wrote by email. “Approval of Trump among Republicans is still high enough to make it extraordinarily difficult for any alternative candidate to make a case against him.”As if that were not daunting enough, Lee added,DeSantis’s difficulties are compounded by the fact that the roughly one third of Republicans who disapprove of Trump disapprove of him for different reasons. Some Republicans would like to see a more moderate alternative, in the mode of the pre-Trump Republican Party. Other Republicans fully embrace the changes Trump brought to the party, but oppose him for various reasons relating to him personally (such as his behavior on Jan. 6, his crude and offensive style, or doubts about his electability). It is extremely difficult for any alternative to consolidate the support of all the Republicans who would like an alternative to Trump. Even if a candidate succeeds in doing so, he or she still would not have a majority among Republicans, unless Trump drops further in support.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, elaborated on the difficulties facing DeSantis’s bid to position himself to the right of Trump. “The DeSantis strategy is weak in that there are not enough Republican voters to be gained to the right of Trump,” he wrote in an email. ” In addition, Shapiro contended, “Trump’s style and language are more authentic and natural.” Trump’s “Queens street-rhetoric style may help, but the point is that Trump sounds real and not staged for political purposes, in contrast to DeSantis’s endless use of ‘woke,’ which is very vague and has had more meaning in liberal-left and educated elite circles and does not have the clear meaning that Trump’s position-taking has. DeSantis sounds staged and forced in discussing this.”Robert Erikson, a colleague of Shapiro’s in the Columbia political science department, wrote by email:DeSantis appears about to become the latest in a long line of promising candidates who failed to convince their party’s base that they should be president. The list includes many seasoned politicians who were otherwise successful at their craft. For the G.O.P., the line runs from George Romney (1968) through Rudy Giuliani (2008) to Jeb Bush and Scott Walker (2016). Democratic examples include Ed Muskie (1972) and John Glenn (1984). All saw an early collapse of their seemingly strong position, with some dropping out before Iowa or New Hampshire.“Can DeSantis overcome this challenge?” Erikson asked in his email. “Underdogs often surprise and win nominations by arousing enthusiasm among a sizable bloc of primary and caucus voters. Jimmy Carter was an example. The more contemporary list includes Obama and Trump.”So far, DeSantis shows no signs of following in the footsteps of past insurgents.Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education, argued that Trump has successfully carved out a special place in the Republican universe and there is no room left for a challenger like DeSantis.“DeSantis’s main problem,” Carnoy wrote by email,is that he is not Trump and Trump is still around largely filling the space that Trump himself has defined and continues to define. This is the “victim” space, where the “victims” are the “forgotten core Americans,” besieged by liberals who want to help everyone but them — migrants, blacks, LGBTQIA, homeless, foreign countries in fights for democracy.Carnoy argued that “large blocs of the U.S. population have not been swept up in the economic growth of the past 40 years, which has largely enriched the top 1 percent of income earners.” Blame Ronald Reagan, he added, “but also blame Democrats, who left this political space to the very Republicans that created it.”While Democrats failed to compete for this space, Carnoy contended that “Trump figured out in 2015 that he could continue to help the rich (including himself) economically through traditional tax reduction policies — stoking inequality — and simultaneously enthuse the forgotten by throwing rich red ‘victim identity’ meat to this bloc of white (and Hispanic) working class voters.”Dianne Pinderhughes, a political scientist at Notre Dame, wrote by email that an image of DeSantis at a campaign event captured for her the weakness of his campaign for the nomination.“He has no affect,” Pinderhughes wrote. “My favorite example is a photo of him. He’s surrounded by a group of people, campaign supporters, but every face in the photo is flat, unexcited, unsmiling (including of course the candidate).”DeSantis’s interests, according to Pinderhughes, “are similar to Trump’s but his persona doesn’t allow or facilitate his emotional engagement with his public, who also want to align with him, but there’s no arousal there. He’s not emotionally down and dirty in the way that Trump’s wild stump speeches arouse support in the broader public.”The 2024 contest for the Republican nomination is exceptional in that the leading candidate is a once successful, once failed candidate seeking to represent his party for the third time.Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out in an email that “the Republican presidential primary is not a typical open-seat race, because Donald Trump occupies an unusual position as a quasi-incumbent. He has extraordinary name recognition and familiarity, having served a term as president and dominated headlines for eight years.”Because of that, “DeSantis needs to do more than simply taking positions that are popular with Republican voters — he needs to give G.O.P. primary voters a reason to leave behind Trump, a figure who remains popular among the party’s activists and voters,” according to Hopkins’s analysis of the contest.It will be very difficult to persuade Republican primary voters to abandon Trump, Hopkins wrote, citing “a nationwide survey I conducted earlier this summer. I found that on key issues from immigration to health care and climate changes, the differences between all Republicans, Trump supporters, and DeSantis supporters were typically fairly minimal. On issues alone, it’s hard to envision DeSantis convincing G.O.P. voters to abandon Trump.”DeSantis’s best shot, Hopkins suggested, “may be to follow Biden’s lead from 2020 and convince primary voters that he’s the most likely to win a general election.”One of the questions I posed to the people I queried for this column was “whether the willingness to give undiluted expressions of views on race and immigration has become the equivalent of a threshold issue on the right” — a must for anyone seeking the Republican nomination.Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, expressed a jaundiced view of the question itself:The premise of the question implies that this is a new phenomenon and I would dispute this characterization. Issues of race and immigration have been significant partisan issues for at least the last 150 years. Trump has not created these issues in the G.O.P., but he has simply harnessed them more effectively than his co-partisan competitors.Trump, in Hutchings’s view, is more than a match for DeSantis:Trump — unlike DeSantis — can perhaps communicate more effectively with the average G.O.P. voter. Also, whatever else one thinks about the former president, as a onetime television personality he is also more telegenic than your typical politician. And, finally, Trump’s status as the primary target of liberals and progressives makes him all the more appealing to many G.O.P. supporters. In short, if the left hates him (Trump) so much, then he must be doing something right from the vantage point of these voters. DeSantis simply can’t match Trump on these various dimensions.Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at Berkeley, succinctly summed up DeSantis’s predicament. “The Republican primary electorate is not especially interested in candidates’ policy positions,” Grumbach wrote by email, citing a 2018 paper, “Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” by Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope.So, Grumbach continued, “it’s unlikely that an alternative policy platform would’ve had DeSantis in the lead at this point. Instead Republican voters see Trump as more effective at combating liberals and Democrats.”Finally, Grumbach added: “You don’t need research to tell you that Trump has charisma, wit, and humor (though it’s not always clear it’s intentional) in a way that DeSantis does not.”Not everybody thinks Trump has charisma, wit and humor, but many of his supporters remain captivated. They want the show to go on.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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      A Conservative on How His Party Has Changed Since 2016

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      The 2024 Republican presidential primary is officially underway, and Donald Trump is dominating the field. But this is a very different contest than it was in 2016. Back then, the Republican Party was the party of foreign policy interventionism, free trade and cutting entitlements, and Trump was the insurgent outsider unafraid to buck the consensus. Today, Trump and his views have become the consensus.The primary, then, raises some important questions: How has Donald Trump changed the Republican Party over the past eight years? Is Trumpism an actual set of policy views or just a political aesthetic? And if Trump does become the nominee again, where does the party go from here?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Ben Domenech is a longtime conservative writer who served as a speechwriter in George W. Bush’s administration and co-founded several right-leaning outlets, including RedState and The Federalist. He’s currently a Fox News contributor, an editor at large at The Spectator and the author of the newsletter The Transom. From these different perches, he has closely traced the various ways the Republican Party has and, crucially, has not changed over the past decade.This conversation explores whether Donald Trump really did break open a G.O.P. policy consensus in 2016, the legacy of what Domenech calls “boomer Republicanism,” how to reconcile Trump’s continued dominance with his surprisingly poor electoral record, the rise of “Barstool conservatism” and other new cultural strands on the right, whether conservatives actually want “National Review conservatism policy” with a “Breitbart conservatism attitude,” what Domenech thinks a G.O.P. candidate would need to do to outperform Trump and more.This episode contains strong language.This episode was hosted by Jane Coaston, a staff writer for Times Opinion. Previously, she hosted “The Argument,” a New York Times Opinion podcast. Before that she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G.O.P.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)UTAThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero. More

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      The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing

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      In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.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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      This Is the Most Frightening Part of the Trump Indictment

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      Buried in the federal indictment of Donald Trump on four counts tied to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election is one of the most chilling paragraphs ever written about the plans and intentions of an American president.It concerns a conversation between Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, and Co-Conspirator 4. On the morning of Jan. 3, 2021, Co-Conspirator 4 accepted the president’s offer to become acting attorney general, a job he ended up never holding. That means Co-Conspirator 4 is almost certainly Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump hoped to install as attorney general because Clark “purportedly agreed to support his claims of election fraud,” as a report in The Times put it.Later that day, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with Philbin, who told him that “there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the defendant” — President Trump — “remained in office nonetheless, there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States.’” To which Co-Conspirator 4 is said to have responded, “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”You may recall that Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act — which enables the use of the military to suppress civil disorder, insurrection or rebellion — to quell the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Trump wanted thousands of troops on the streets of Washington and other cities, and he had repeatedly urged top military and law enforcement officials to confront protesters with force. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump reportedly said. “Crack their skulls!”We don’t know Trump’s exact plans for what he would have done if his schemes to overturn the election had been successful. We don’t even know if he had a plan. But the fact that he surrounded himself with people like Clark suggests that if Trump had actually stolen power, he might well have tried to use the Insurrection Act to suppress the inevitable protests and resistance, which could have killed hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of Americans in an attempt to secure his otherwise illegitimate hold on power.That this was even contemplated is a testament to Trump’s striking contempt for representative self-government itself, much less the Constitution. With his self-obsession, egoism and fundamental rejection of the democratic idea — that power resides with the people and isn’t imbued in a singular person — Trump’s attempt to subvert the American constitutional order was probably overdetermined. And it’s not hard to imagine a world in which his defeat was a little less decisive and key Republicans were a little more willing to bend to his will. There, in that parallel universe, Jan. 6 might have gone in Trump’s favor, if it was even necessary in the first place.The thin line between Trump’s success and failure is why, despite the protests of conservative media personalities and Republican politicians, this indictment had to happen. There was no other choice. Even if his opponents must ultimately defeat him at the ballot box, it would have been untenable for the legal system to stay quiet in the face of an effort to put an end to the American experiment in republican self-government. Trump is the only president in the history of the United States to try to nullify an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Extraordinary actions demand an extraordinary response.The criminal-legal system is now moving, however slowly, to hold Trump accountable. This is a good thing. But as we mark this development, we should also remember that the former president’s attempt to overthrow our institutions would not have been possible without those institutions themselves.Most people who cast a ballot in the 2016 election voted against Trump for president. But in the American system, not all votes are equal. Instead, the rules of the Electoral College gave a small fraction of voters in a few states decisive say over who would win the White House. The will of a majority of the people as a whole — or at least a majority of those who went to the polls — meant nothing compared with the will of a select few who, for reasons not too distant from chance, could decide the election.Trump won fewer votes, but the system, in its wisdom, said he won his first election anyway. Is it any wonder, then, that in 2020, when a majority of the voting public rejected his bid for power a second time, the former president immediately turned his attention to manipulating that system in order to remain in power? And make no mistake, Trump’s plot hinged on the complexities of the Electoral College.“Following the election, President Trump worked ruthlessly to convert loss into victory, exploiting pressure points and ambiguities in the protracted and complex process, partly constitutional and partly statutory, that we refer to collectively as the Electoral College,” observed the legal scholar Kate Shaw, who is also a contributing Opinion writer to this newspaper, in a 2022 article for The Michigan Law Review. This “baroque and multistep process,” she continued, “afforded Trump a number of postelection opportunities to contest or undermine, in terms framed in law and legal process, the results of an election he had plainly lost.”Rather than try to call out the Army or foment a mob, Trump’s opening gambit in his attempt to overturn the election was to contest our strange and byzantine system for choosing presidents — a system that runs as much on the good faith of the various participants as it does on law and procedure. And so, before Jan. 6, there was the attempt to delay certification of electors, the attempt to find new electors who would vote in Trump’s favor, the attempt to pressure Republican-led state legislatures into seizing the process and deciding their elections for Trump and the attempt to pressure the vice president into throwing the election to the House of Representatives, where statewide Republican delegations would give Trump the victory he couldn’t win himself.But it’s not just that our process for choosing presidents is less resilient than it looks. In addition to its structural flaws, the Electoral College also inculcates a set of political fictions — like the idea that a “red” state is uniformly Republican or that a “blue” one is uniformly Democratic — that can make it easier, for some voters, to believe claims of fraud.There is also the broader problem of the American political system when taken in its entirety. There is the inequality of voting power among citizens I mentioned earlier — some votes are worth much more than others, whether it’s a vote for president, senator or member of the House — and the way that that inequality can encourage some voters to think of themselves as “more equal” and more entitled to power than others.Trump is pathological, and our political system, to say nothing of one of our two major political parties, has enabled his pathology. We do not know how the former president will fare in the courts, and it is still too early to say how he will do in the next election if he stands, for a third time, as the Republican nominee for president.But one thing is clear, if not obvious: If we truly hope to avoid another Jan. 6, or something worse, we have to deal with our undemocratic system as much as we do with the perpetrators of that particular incident. Whatever benefits our unusual rules and procedures are supposed to have are more than outweighed, at this point in our history, by the danger they pose to the entire American experiment. The threat to the integrity of the Republic is coming, as it often has, from inside the house.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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      ‘Gut-level Hatred’ Is Consuming Our Political Life

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      Divisions between Democrats and Republicans have expanded far beyond the traditional fault lines based on race, education, gender, the urban-rural divide and economic ideology.Polarization now encompasses sharp disagreements over the significance of patriotism and nationalism as well as a fundamental split between those seeking to restore perceived past glories and those who embrace the future.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be — challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.Democrats are determined not only to block any drive to restore the America of 1963 — one year before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — but also to press the liberal agenda forward.Toward the end of the 20th century, Republicans moved rightward at a faster pace than Democrats moved leftward. In recent decades, however, Democrats have accelerated their shift toward more liberal positions while Republican movement to the right has slowed, in part because the party had reached the outer boundaries of conservatism.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, released a study in June, “Polarization and a Deep Dive on Issues by Party,” that documents the shifting views of Democratic and Republican voters.Among the findings based on the firm’s polling for NBC News:From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as “very liberal” grew to 29 percent from 19.In 2013, when asked their religion, 10 percent of Democrats said “none”; in 2023, it was 38 percent. The percentage of Republicans giving this answer was 7 percent in 2012 and 12 in 2023.The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” grew from 45 percent in 1995 to 67 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2021, a 37-point gain. Over the same period, Republican agreement rose from 17 to 23 percent, a six-point increase.“The most stable finding over a decade,” McInturff reports, is that “Republicans barely budge on a host of issues while Democrats’ positions on abortion, climate change, immigration, and affirmative action have fundamentally shifted.”The Democrats’ move to the left provoked an intensely hostile reaction from the right, as you may have noticed.I asked Arlie Hochschild — a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land” who has been working on a new book about Eastern Kentucky — about the threatening policies conservatives believe liberals are imposing on them.She wrote back: “Regarding ‘threats felt by the right’ I’d say, all of them — especially ‘trans’ issues — evoke a sense that ‘this is the last straw.’” In their minds, “the left is now unhinged, talking to itself in front of us, while trying to put us under its cultural rule.”For example, Hochschild continued:When I asked a Pikeville, Ky., businessman why he thought the Democratic Party had become “unhinged,” Henry, as I’ll call him here, studied his cellphone, then held it for me to see a video of two transgender activists standing on the White House lawn in Pride week. One was laughingly shaking her naked prosthetic breasts, the other bare-chested, showing scars where breasts had been cut away. The clip then moved to President Biden saying, “these are the bravest people I know.”The sense of loss is acute among many Republican voters. Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me to say:They see the face of America changing, with white people set to become a minority of Americans in the not-too-distant future. They see church membership declining and some churches closing. They see interracial and same-sex couples in TV commercials. They support Trump because they think he is the last, best hope for bringing back the America they knew and loved.Republican aversion to the contemporary Democratic agenda has intensified, according to two sociologists, Rachel Wetts of Brown and Robb Willer of Stanford.In the abstract of their 2022 paper, “Antiracism and Its Discontents: The Prevalence and Political Influence of Opposition to Antiracism Among White Americans,” Wetts and Willer write:From calls to ban critical race theory to concerns about “woke culture,” American conservatives have mobilized in opposition to antiracist claims and movements. Here, we propose that this opposition has crystallized into a distinct racial ideology among white Americans, profoundly shaping contemporary racial politics.Wetts and Willer call this ideology “anti-antiracism” and argue that it “is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with — though conceptually distinct from — various measures of anti-Black prejudice.”Sympathy versus opposition to antiracism, they continue, “may have cohered into a distinct axis of ideological disagreement which uniquely shapes contemporary racial views that divide partisan groups.”They propose a three-part definition of anti-antiracism:Opposition to antiracism involves (1) rejecting factual claims about the prevalence and severity of anti-Black racism, discrimination and racial inequality; (2) disagreeing with normative beliefs that racism, discrimination and racial inequality are important moral concerns that society and/or government should address; and (3) displaying affective reactions of frustration, anger and fatigue with these factual and normative claims as well as the activists and movements who make them.The degree to which the partisan divide has become still more deeply ingrained was captured by three political scientists, John Sides of Vanderbilt and Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck, both of U.C.L.A., in their 2022 book, “The Bitter End.”Vavreck wrote by email that she and her co-authors describedthe state of American politics as “calcified.” Calcification sounds like polarization but it is more like “polarization-plus.” Calcification derives from an increased homogeneity within parties, an increased heterogeneity between the parties (on average, the parties are getting farther apart on policy ideas), the rise in importance of issues based on identity (like immigration, abortion, or transgender policies) instead of, for example, economic issues (like tax rates and trade), and finally, the near balance in the electorate between Democrats and Republicans. The last item makes every election a high-stakes election — since the other side wants to build a world that is quite different from the one your side wants to build.The Sides-Tausanovitch-Vavreck argument receives support in a new paper by the psychologists Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick in Ireland. The authors demonstrate not only how ingrained polarization has become, but also how attuned voters have become to signals of partisanship and how adept they now are at using cues to determine whether a stranger is a Democrat or Republican.“Learning a single attitude (e.g., one’s standpoint toward abortion rights),” they write, “allows people to estimate an interlocutor’s partisan identity with striking accuracy. Additionally, we show that people not only use attitudes to categorize others as in-group and out-group members, but also to evaluate a person more or less favorably.”The three conducted survey experiments testing whether Americans could determine the partisanship of people who agreed or disagreed with any one of the following eight statements:1) Abortion should be illegal.2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.The results?“Participants were able to categorize a person as Democrat or Republican based on a single attitude with remarkable accuracy (reflected by a correlation index of r = .90).”While partisan differences over racial issues have a long history, contemporary polarization has politicized virtually everything within its reach.Take patriotism.A March Wall Street Journal/NORC poll at the University of Chicago found that over the 25-year period since 1998, the percentage of adults who said patriotism was “very important” to them fell to 38 percent from 70.Much of the decline was driven by Democrats and independents, among whom 23 and 29 percent said patriotism was very important, less than half of the 59 percent of Republicans.A similar pattern emerged regarding the decline in the percentage of adults who said religion was very important to them, which fell to 39 percent from 62 percent in 1998. Democrats fell to 27 percent, independents to 38 percent and Republicans to 53 percent.Or take the question of nationalism.In their 2021 paper, “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein and Sean Bock, sociologists at N.Y.U., the University of Haifa and Harvard, argue that the United States has become increasingly divided by disagreement over conceptions of nationalism.“Nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” they write. “The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties.”In addition, Bonikowski, Feinstein and Bock argue, “over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms, and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of nationhood.” These trends “suggest a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions.”Bonikowski and his co-authors contend that there are four distinct types of American nationalism.The first, creedal nationalism, is the only version supported by voters who tend to back Democratic candidates:Creedal nationalists favor elective criteria of national belonging, rating subjective identification with the nation and respect for American laws and institutions as very important; they are more equivocal than others about the importance of lifelong residence and language skills and view birth in the country, having American ancestry, and being Christian as not very important.The other three types of nationalism trend right, according to Bonikowski and his colleagues.Disengaged nationalists, “characterized by an arm’s-length relationship to the nation, which for some may verge on dissatisfaction with and perhaps even animus toward it,” are drawn to “Trump’s darkly dystopian depiction of America.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists both apply “elective and ascriptive criteria of national belonging,” including the “importance of Christian faith.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists differ, according to the authors, “in their degree of attachment to the nation, pride in America’s accomplishments, and evaluation of the country’s relative standing in the world.” For example, 11 percent of restrictive nationalists voice strong “pride in the way the country’s democracy works” compared with 70 percent of ardent nationalists.These and other divisions provide William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who studies how well governments work, the grounds from which to paint a bleak picture of American politics.“Issues of individual and group identity — especially along the dimensions of race and gender — have moved to the center of our politics at every level of the federal system,” Galston wrote by email. “The economic axis that defined our politics from the beginning of New Deal liberalism to the end of Reagan conservatism has been displaced.”How does that affect governing?When the core political issues are matters of right and wrong rather than more and less, compromise becomes much more difficult, and disagreement becomes more intense. If I think we should spend X on farm programs and you think it should be 2X, neither of us thinks the other is immoral or evil. But if you think I’m murdering babies and I think you’re oppressing women, it’s hard for each of us not to characterize the other in morally negative terms.Despite — or perhaps because of — the changing character of politics described by Galston, interest in the outcome of elections has surged.Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, cited trends in polling data on voter interest in elections in an email:In 2000, only 45 percent of Americans said that it really matters who wins that year’s presidential election. Since then, increasing shares of Americans say that who wins presidential elections has important consequences for addressing the major issues of the day: about 63 percent of registered voters provided this response in each of the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, which then increased to 74 percent in 2016 and 83 percent in 2020.Why?As the parties have become increasingly differentiated over the last several decades, and as presidential candidates have offered increasingly distinct political visions, it is no surprise that greater shares of Americans perceive greater stakes in which party wins the presidential election.Where does all this leave us going into the 2024 election?Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided the following answer by email: “When partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people’s basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans.”Weiler cited poll data showing:In 2016, 35 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral than Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral. In 2022, those numbers had jumped dramatically — 63 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral, and 72 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral.In this context, Weiler continued:It’s not that the specific issues are unimportant. Our daily political debates still revolve around them, whether D.E.I., abortion, etc. But they become secondary, in a sense, to the gut-level hatred and mistrust that now defines our politics, so that almost whatever issue one party puts in front of its voters will rouse the strongest passions. What matters now isn’t the specific objects of scorn but the intensity with which partisans are likely to feel that those targets threaten them existentially.Perhaps Bill Galston’s assessment was not bleak enough.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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      Trump’s Judges: More Religious Ties and More N.R.A. Memberships

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      A new study also found that judges appointed by the former president were more likely to vote for claims of religious freedom — unless they came from Muslims.When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Three justices and six years later, he made good on that promise.Mr. Trump also made a more general pledge during that campaign, about religion. At a Republican debate, a moderator asked whether he would “commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint, not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts.”Mr. Trump said he would, and a new study has found that he largely delivered on that assurance, too. Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower federal courts, the study found, voted in favor of claims of religious liberty more often than not only Democratic appointees and but also judges named by other Republican presidents.There was an exception: Muslim plaintiffs fared worse before Trump appointees than before other judges.“There seems to be a very big difference on how these cases come out, depending on the specific religion in question,” said Stephen J. Choi, a law professor at New York University, who conducted the study with Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia and Eric A. Posner of the University of Chicago.Another part of the study explored what was distinctive about Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower courts, considering 807 judges named by seven presidents as of late 2020.The study found, for instance, that judges named by Mr. Trump had “stronger or more numerous religious affiliations” with churches and other houses of worship, with religious schools, and with groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, which have won a series of major Supreme Court cases for conservative Christians.Trump appointees were also much more likely to be members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, than other Republican appointees: 56 percent versus 22 percent.For appeals court nominations in the Trump administration, the study found that membership in the group was “virtually required,” with a rate of more than 88 percent, compared with 44 percent for other Republican appointees.Mr. Trump made another pledge at another 2016 debate about the judges he would appoint. “They’ll respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for, what it represents,” he said.The new study did not try to measure how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in gun rights cases. But it did find that more than 9 percent of Trump appointees were members of the National Rifle Association, compared with less than 2 percent of other Republican appointees and less than 1 percent of Democratic appointees.“In light of the polarizing nature of gun rights and the N.R.A.’s association with extreme views on gun ownership,” the study’s authors wrote, “jurists who seek a reputation for impartiality would normally want to avoid membership in the N.R.A.”The study did document how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in cases on claims of religious liberty, examining some 1,600 votes in more than 500 cases in the federal appeals courts from 2000 to 2022.Trump appointees voted in favor of plaintiffs claiming that their right to free exercise of religion had been violated about 45 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent for other Republican appointees and 33 percent of Democratic appointees. The gap grew for cases that involved only Christians, to more than 56 percent, compared with 42 percent for other Republican appointees and 29 percent for Democratic ones.And the numbers flipped when it came to Muslims, with Trump appointees at 19 percent, compared with 34 percent for other Republican appointees and 48 percent for Democratic ones.“The pattern that emerges,” the study said, “is consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism).”The study considered a common critique of Trump appointees: that they are less qualified than other judges. It found that the evidence did not support the charge, at least on average and at least as measured by the prestige of the law schools the judges attended, whether they had served as law clerks and ratings from the American Bar Association.“We find little evidence that Trump judges break the historical pattern of judicial appointments,” the study’s authors wrote. “Women and minorities are less well represented among Trump judges than among Democratic judges, but that reflects a historical partisan difference; Trump judges do not differ much from Republican judges in this respect.”“A few more Trump judges received top A.B.A. ratings, but not quite as many Trump judges attended top-10 law schools,” the study said. “Our view is that the data do not support the view that Trump’s judges were less qualified than judges appointed by other presidents.”But the study’s main finding, on religion, was that Mr. Trump was true to his word.“Trump is not known to be personally religious,” the study’s authors wrote, “but he appears to have believed that he could obtain votes by promising to appoint religious judges, and he kept his promise.” More