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      2022 Midterm Elections: Democrats See Early Edge in Senate Map

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      Early fund-raising has given Democrats cause for optimism in key states as Republicans split over how closely to align with Donald Trump’s preferences. Six months into the Biden administration, Senate Democrats are expressing a cautious optimism that the party can keep control of the chamber in the 2022 midterm elections, enjoying large fund-raising hauls in marquee races as they plot to exploit Republican retirements in key battlegrounds and a divisive series of unsettled G.O.P. primaries.Swing-state Democratic incumbents, like Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, restocked their war chests with multimillion-dollar sums ($7.2 million and $6 million, respectively), according to new financial filings this week. That gives them an early financial head start in two key states where Republicans’ disagreements over former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020 are threatening to distract and fracture the party.But Democratic officials are all too aware of the foreboding political history they confront: that in a president’s first midterms, the party occupying the White House typically loses seats — often in bunches. For now, Democrats hold power by only the narrowest of margins in a 50-50 split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker to push through President Biden’s expansive agenda on the economy, the pandemic and infrastructure.The midterms are still more than 15 months away, but the ability to enact new policy throughout Mr. Biden’s first term hinges heavily on his party’s ability to hold the Senate and House.Four Senate Democratic incumbents are up for re-election in swing states next year — making them prime targets for Republican gains. But in none of those four states — New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia — has a dominant Republican candidate emerged to consolidate support from the party’s divergent wings. Out of office and banished from social media, Mr. Trump continues to insist on putting his imprint on the party with rallies and regular missives imposing an agenda of rewarding loyalists and exacting retribution against perceived enemies. That does not align with Senate Republican strategists who are focused singularly on retaking the majority and honing messages against the Democrats who now fully control Washington.“The only way we win these races is with top-notch candidates,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who used to work on Senate races. “Are Republicans able to recruit top-notch candidates in the Trump era?”Of the seven contests that political handicappers consider most competitive in 2022, all but one are in states that Mr. Biden carried last year.“We’re running in Biden country,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster involved in Senate races. “That doesn’t make any of these races easy. But we’re running in Biden country.”The campaign filings this week provided an early financial snapshot of the state of play in the Senate battlefield, where the total costs could easily top $1 billion. Other than the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, the top fund-raiser among all senators in the last three months was Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. Mr. Scott collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response, an eye-opening sum that has stoked questions about his 2024 ambitions.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut critical races remain unsettled for Republicans. The party is still trying to find compelling Senate candidates in several states, with Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, considered the highest priority for recruitment, to challenge Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who raised $3.25 million in the last three months. A bevy of Republican senators have lobbied Mr. Sununu to enter the race, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, went so far as to ask activists at a conservative conference last week to “call Chris Sununu” and urge him to run.“If he does, we will win,” Mr. Scott said.Mr. Scott has similarly pursued the former attorney general of Nevada, Adam Laxalt, saying last month that he expected Mr. Laxalt to run against Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, the Democratic incumbent.The unexpected retirements of Republican senators in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have opened seats and opportunities for Democrats in those swing states, but the path to victory is complicated. In both, Democrats must navigate competitive primaries that pit candidates who represent disparate elements of the party’s racial and ideological coalition: Black and white; moderate and progressive; urban, suburban and more rural.In Pennsylvania, the Democratic lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raising newcomers, taking in $2.5 million in the quarter. Val Arkoosh, a county commissioner in a Philadelphia suburb, raised $1 million, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a state legislator seeking to become the nation’s first openly gay Black senator, raised $500,000. Representative Conor Lamb, a moderate from outside Pittsburgh, is also considering a run.In Wisconsin, a third Republican incumbent, Senator Ron Johnson, has wavered for months over whether he will seek a third term. Mr. Johnson raised only $1.2 million in the last quarter, just enough to carry on but not quite enough to dispel questions about his intentions.Whether or not Mr. Johnson runs, Wisconsin is among the top Democratic targets in 2022 because Mr. Biden carried it narrowly in 2020. Perhaps nothing has better predicted the outcome of Senate races in recent cycles than a state’s presidential preferences.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raisers among newcomers as he pursues the state’s open Senate seat.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Florida, national Democrats have all but anointed Representative Val Demings, a Black former police chief in Orlando who was vetted by the Biden team for vice president, in a state that has repeatedly proved just out of reach.Ms. Demings raised $4.6 million in her first three weeks, topping Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent, who raised $4 million over three months. (Ms. Demings spent more than $2.2 million on digital ads raising that sum, records show.)Two other G.O.P. retirements in redder states, Ohio and Missouri, have further destabilized the Republican map, providing at least a modicum of opportunity for Democrats in Trump territory. Republicans face heated primaries in both states.In Ohio, the Republican candidates include the former party chair, Jane Timken; the former state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who has run for Senate before; the best-selling author J.D. Vance; and two business executives, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons.The leading Democrat is Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate who ran briefly for president in 2020, and who entered July with $2.5 million in the bank.In Missouri, the early efforts to woo Mr. Trump have been plentiful, and that includes spending at his Florida resort.Two potential candidates have trekked to Mar-a-Lago for fund-raisers or to meet with the former president, including Representatives Billy Long and Jason Smith. Mr. Long reported spending $28,633.20 at the club, filings show; Mr. Smith, who also attended a colleague’s fund-raiser on Thursday at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster property in New Jersey, according to a person familiar with the matter, paid $4,198.59 to Mar-a-Lago.“I’m expecting someone to start flying over Bedminster with a banner at some point,” said one Republican strategist involved in Senate races, who requested anonymity because, he said half-jokingly, it could end up being one of his candidates buying the banner.Representative Val Demings of Florida is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe biggest name in Missouri is Eric Greitens, the former governor who resigned after accusations of abuse by a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. He raised less than $450,000. Among his fund-raisers is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., and his campaign also made payments to Mar-a-Lago.Three other Republicans in the race out-raised Mr. Greitens: Representative Vicky Hartzler, Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Mark McCloskey, the man best known for waving his gun outside his St. Louis home as protesters marched last year. Some national Republican strategists are worried that if Mr. Greitens survives a crowded primary, he could prove toxic even in a heavily Republican state.Mr. Scott has pledged to remain neutral in party primaries, but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has long preferred promoting candidates he believes can win in November.“The only thing I care about is electability,” Mr. McConnell told Politico this year. With Mr. Scott on the sidelines, a McConnell-aligned super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, is expected to do most of the intervening.Mr. Trump, who is often at cross-purposes with Mr. McConnell, has appeared especially engaged in the Arizona and Georgia races, largely because of his own narrow losses there. He has publicly urged the former football player Herschel Walker to run in Georgia — Mr. Walker has not committed to a campaign — and attacked the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, even after Mr. Ducey has said he is not running for Senate. Some Republican operatives continue to hope to tug Mr. Ducey into the race.Mr. Trump delivered one early Senate endorsement in North Carolina, to Representative Ted Budd, who raised $953,000, which is less than the $1.25 million that former Gov. Pat McCrory pulled in. Some Republicans see Mr. McCrory as the stronger potential nominee because of his track record of winning statewide. In Alaska, Kelly Tshibaka is running as a pro-Trump primary challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Mr. Trump after his second impeachment. Ms. Murkowski, who has not formally said if she is running again, raised more than double Ms. Tshibaka in the most recent quarter, $1.15 million to $544,000.In Alabama, Mr. Trump gave another early endorsement to Representative Mo Brooks and recently attacked one of his rivals, Katie Britt, who is the former chief of staff of the retiring incumbent, Senator Richard Shelby. Ms. Britt entered the race in June, but she out-raised Mr. Brooks, $2.2 million to $824,000. A third candidate, Lynda Blanchard, is a former Trump-appointed ambassador who has lent her campaign $5 million.Mr. Brooks won over Mr. Trump for being among the earliest and most vocal objectors to Mr. Biden’s victory. The photo splashed across Mr. Brooks’s Senate website is him speaking at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. In his recent filing, one of Mr. Brooks’s larger expenses was a $25,799 tab at Mar-a-Lago.“The map tilts slightly toward the Democrats just based on the seats that are up,” said Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races. “But the political environment is the big unknown, and the landscape can shift quickly.”Rachel Shorey More

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      Two Men Charged With Plotting to Blow Up California Democratic Headquarters

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      The men consulted with an antigovernment paramilitary organization and hoped to start a “movement” that could keep former President Donald J. Trump in office.Angered by the results of the 2020 presidential election, two men in Northern California plotted for months to blow up the state Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, according to federal authorities.The men, who face conspiracy and weapons charges, consulted with an antigovernment paramilitary organization, hoping to start a “movement” that could keep former President Donald J. Trump in office. Using encrypted messaging apps, they discussed various targets, including the Governor’s Mansion as well as Twitter and Facebook offices, court documents said.“I want to blow up a democrat building bad,” documents quoted one defendant, Ian Benjamin Rogers, 45, as texting to the other man, Jarrod Copeland, 37.The suspected plot is the latest in a range of antigovernment activity linked to the 2020 election and its aftermath, some of it involving paramilitary groups.Mr. Rogers was arrested on Jan. 15 on state weapons charges after a search of his home and business turned up some 50 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and five pipe bombs, court papers said. He has been held in jail in Napa County since his arrest.Black powder, pipes and other bomb-making material as well as various military manuals like the “U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook” were also found, prosecutors said. Mr. Copeland was arrested on Thursday, when he and Mr. Rogers were indicted in federal court in San Francisco on charges of conspiring to attack the Democratic headquarters. Mr. Rogers also faces federal weapons charges.Mr. Copeland is accused of obstruction of justice charges and is suspected of erasing his communications about the plot after he learned that Mr. Rogers had been arrested. The charges of conspiracy to commit arson carry potential jail sentences of up to 20 years.Colin L. Cooper, a lawyer for Mr. Rogers, denied the charges. “He had nothing to do whatsoever with planning to storm the Democratic headquarters up in Sacramento,” Mr. Cooper said.John A. Ambrosio, Mr. Copeland’s lawyer, said he had entered a plea of not guilty and declined further comment. Mr. Copeland said in the documents that he thought Mr. Rogers just wanted to “blow off steam,” and that he did not take the threats seriously.In late November, according to the indictment, the two men began using text messages to discuss possible Democratic targets, including George Soros, a high-profile donor, before settling on the John L. Burton Democratic Headquarters in Sacramento.A month later, Mr. Copeland messaged to say he had contacted an antigovernment paramilitary group with the aim of gathering support for their “movement.” The two groups he mentioned in seeking help were the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters.Court papers said both Mr. Copeland and Mr. Rogers had been previously affiliated with the Three Percenters, whose name is based on the false premise that just 3 percent of American colonists fought the British in the Revolutionary War.A photograph of a Three Percenters sticker on a vehicle said to belong to Mr. Rogers was included in the documents.In text messages, Mr. Rogers said the two men should begin their attacks after the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20.In one of the texts obtained by the federal agents, Mr. Rogers wrote, “The democrats need to pay.” In reference to Mr. Trump, he added, “I hope 45 goes to war if he doesn’t I will.”Mr. Rogers ran an auto repair company in the city of Napa that specialized in servicing high-end British vehicles. When asked in a 2014 interview with a local news organization which person he admired most, his first response was Mr. Trump.Mr. Copeland, from Vallejo, joined the military in December 2013 but was arrested on desertion charges in both 2014 and 2016, when he received a dishonorable discharge, the court papers said. He is the manager at a tool company.The two men discussed the probability that they would be labeled terrorists but waved off the issue. “We will get tagged as domestic terrorists,” Mr. Copeland wrote at one point. Mr. Rogers responded, according to the court documents, “Like I care what we are labeled,” adding, “I just hope our actions will make others to get involved.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Republicans Now Have Two Ways to Threaten Elections

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      The story of voting rights in the United States looks less like a graph of exponential growth and more like a sine wave; there are highs and lows, peaks and plateaus.President Biden captured this reality in his address on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where he spoke on the gathering threat to our democracy from the Republican Party’s twin efforts to suppress rival constituencies and seize control of state voting apparatuses.“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” Biden said. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”Biden is right. Americans today are witness to a ferocious attack on voting rights and majority rule. And as he points out, it is as focused on “who gets to count the vote” as it is on “who gets to vote.”Biden is also right to say, as he did throughout the speech, that these attacks are “not unprecedented.” He points to Jim Crow and the “poll taxes and literacy tests and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s.”For obvious reasons, Jim Crow takes center stage in these discussions. But we should remember that it was part of a wave of suffrage restrictions aimed at working-class groups across the country: Black people in the South, Chinese Americans in the West and European immigrants in the North.“The tide of democratic faith was at low ebb on all American shores after the Grant administration, and it would be a mistake to fix upon a reactionary temper in the South as a sectional peculiarity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913.”For as much as Jim Crow dominates our collective memory of voting restrictions, it is the attack on suffrage in the North in those last decades of the 19th century that might actually be more relevant to our present situation.The current assault on voting is a backlash, in part, to the greater access that marked the 2020 presidential election. More mail-in and greater early voting helped push turnout to modern highs. In the same way, the turn against universal manhood suffrage came after its expansion in the wake of the Civil War.A growing number of voters were foreign-born, the result of mass immigration and the rapid growth of an immigrant working class in the industrial centers of the North. “Between 1865 and World War I,” writes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” “nearly twenty-five million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nation’s World War I population of roughly one hundred million.”A vast majority arrived without property or the means to acquire it. Some were the Irish and Germans of previous waves of immigration, but many more were eastern and southern Europeans, with alien languages, exotic customs and unfamiliar faiths.“By 1910,” notes Keyssar, “most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nation’s huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents, or Black.”To Americans of older stock, this was a disaster in waiting. And it fueled, among them, a backlash to the democratic expansion that followed the Civil War.“A New England village of the olden time — that is to say, of some forty years ago — would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it,” Francis Parkman, a prominent historian and a member in good standing of the Boston elite, wrote in an 1878 essay called “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.”Parkman went on:but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.In “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910,” the historian J. Morgan Kousser takes note of William L. Scruggs, a turn-of-the-century scholar and diplomat who gave a similarly colorful assessment of universal suffrage in an 1884 article, “Restriction of the Suffrage”:The idea of unqualified or “tramp” suffrage, like communism, with which it is closely allied, seems to be of modern origin; and, like that and kindred isms, it usually finds advocates and apologists in the ranks of the discontented, improvident, ignorant, vicious, depraved, and dangerous classes of society. It is not indigenous to the soil of the United States. It originated in the slums of European cities, and, like the viper in the fable, has been nurtured into formidable activity in this country by misdirected kindness.Beyond their presumed immorality and vice, the problem with new immigrant voters — from the perspective of these elites — was that they undermined so-called good government. “There is not the slightest doubt in my own mind that our prodigality with the suffrage has been the chief source of the corruption of our elections,” wrote the Progressive-era political scientist John W. Burgess in an 1895 article titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth.”This claim, that Black and immigrant voters were venal and corrupt — that they voted either illegally or irresponsibly — was common.Here’s Keyssar:Charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly: electoral outcomes were twisted by “naturalization mills” that, with the aid of “professional perjurers and political manipulators,” transformed thousands of immigrants into citizens in the weeks before elections.Out of this furious attack on universal male suffrage (and also, in other corners, the rising call for women’s suffrage) came a host of efforts to purify the electorate, spearheaded by progressive reformers in both parties. Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed “pauper exclusions” that disqualified from voting any men who received public relief on the day of the election. Republican lawmakers in New Jersey, targeting immigrant-dominated urban political machines in the state, required naturalized citizens to show naturalization documents to election officials before voting, intentionally burdening immigrants who did not have their papers or could not find them.Lawmakers in Connecticut endorsed an English literacy requirement, and California voters amended their state Constitution to disenfranchise any person “who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his name,” a move meant to keep Chinese and Mexican Americans from the ballot box. The introduction of the secret ballot and the polling booth made voting less communal and put an additional premium on literacy — if you couldn’t read the ballot, and if no one was allowed to assist, then how were you supposed to make a choice?If suffrage restriction in the South was a blunt weapon meant to cleave entire communities from the body politic, then suffrage restriction in the North was a twisting maze of obstacles meant to block anyone without the means or education to overcome them.There were opponents of this effort to shrink democracy. They lost. Voter turnout crashed in the first decades of the 20th century. Just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election, an all-time low. “There were fewer Republicans in the South because of Jim Crow voter suppression, and fewer Democrats in the North because of the active discouragement of working-class urban immigrant voters,” the historian Jon Grinspan notes in “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.” “The efforts of fifty years of restrainers had succeeded. A new political culture had been born: one that had been cleaned and calmed, stifled and squelched.”It would take decades, and an epochal movement for civil rights, before the United States even came close to the democratic highs it reached in the years after Appomattox.With all of that in mind, let’s return to Biden’s speech.There was an urgency in what the president said in defense of voting rights, a sense that now is the only time left to act. “Look how close it came,” he said in reference to the attack on Congress on Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the election. “We’re going to face another test in 2022: a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”Right now, of course, there is no path to passage for a voting bill that could address the challenges ahead. Not every Democrat feels the same sense of urgency as the president, and key Democrats aren’t willing to change the rules of the Senate in order to send a bill to Biden’s desk.It is possible that this is the right call, that there are other ways to block this assault on the franchise and that the attack on free and fair elections will stay confined to Republican-controlled states — meaning Democrats would need only a strategy of containment and not a plan to roll back the assault. But as we’ve seen, there is a certain momentum to political life and no guarantee of a stable equilibrium. The assault on voting might stay behind a partisan border or it might not.In other words, to borrow a turn of phrase from Abraham Lincoln on the question of democracy, this government will either become all of one thing or all of the other.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Married Men Might Be an Overlooked but Crucial Voting Bloc

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      The gender gap is well known in politics. The marriage gap is more obscure — but could inform how campaigns think about key groups of voters in the next elections.The gender gap is one of the best-known dynamics in American politics. Put simply: Women lean liberal, men lean conservative. (As a character in “The West Wing” put it: “If women were the only voters, the Democrats would win in a landslide every time. If men were the only voters, the G.O.P. would be the left-wing party.”)Similar, but more obscure, is the “marriage gap,” which describes the fact that single people trend liberal while married people skew conservative.If both men and married people lean to the right, one would expect married men to be an extremely reliable Republican constituency. That is why it has been so surprising that recent analyses of the 2020 election show that in the past five years, married men, though still more Republican than not, significantly shifted in the direction of Democrats.What’s going on here? And what could it mean for the political future?“Democrats are going to have to figure out if this shift is permanent,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.Recent data from the Pew Research Center revealed that married men went from voting 62 percent for Donald J. Trump and 32 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to 54 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year. That sizable shift — a 30-percentage-point margin sliced to 10 points, and a 12-point jump for the Democratic candidate — was underscored by the much lower movement Pew found among unmarried men, married women and unmarried women.Both the Cooperative Election Study and the Democratic data firm Catalist found smaller but still notable four-point shifts toward Mr. Biden among married men in the two-party vote share, or the total tally excluding votes for third-party candidates.“That’s definitely statistically significant,” said Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at Tufts University who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study. “Married men are a pretty big group,” he added, “so that’s pretty meaningful in terms of the ultimate margin.”A partial explanation for this shift, and the simplest, is that the gender gap itself got smaller in 2020. Mr. Biden won 48 percent of men while Mrs. Clinton won 41 percent, according to Pew, even as female voters in aggregate hardly budged. Mr. Biden also improved on Mrs. Clinton’s margins among white voters; his movement among white married men was responsible for the shift among all married men, according to Catalist.Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that Mr. Biden’s outperforming Mrs. Clinton among this group “doesn’t surprise me at all.”In other words, this story may have less to do with Mr. Biden, and may even be the rare Trump-related story that has less to do with Mr. Trump. Rather, it is a story about Mrs. Clinton and sexism — a “gendered” view of the candidate, as Ms. Greenberg put it — in which the potential of the first woman president raised the importance of issues like feminism, abortion and the culture wars, all of which help explain the gender gap in the first place.“She was not well-liked by large numbers of the public, but especially by independent and Republican men,” said Eric Plutzer, a professor of political science at Penn State University. “There were opportunities for Biden to win back some of that demographic.”The pool of married men was also very different last year than in 2016. The Cooperative Election Study asked respondents whom they had supported in both 2016 and 2020, and found that married men were not particularly likely to have switched between the parties, Dr. Schaffner said. However, because of death, divorce and marriage, the composition of this group changed. It got younger and more millennial. And that meant it got more Democratic.“This is not your father’s married man,” Dr. Schaffner said.Indeed, the elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich floated a theory on a recent podcast that the sharp increase in mail-in voting last year — when, thanks to Covid-19, numerous states made that option easier and unprecedented numbers of voters chose it — led to more married couples discussing their votes, perhaps even seeing each other’s ballots, and that this, in turn, led to more straight-ticket household voting. And if married men moved toward the Democrat while married women were consistent, it would seem likelier that husbands acceded to their wives rather than the opposite. “Wife Guys” for Biden?Ms. Greenberg said it was impossible to know if this had happened, but noted that “vote-by-mail was heavily Democratic.”Finally, a big story of the election was a divide among voters based on education, as those with college degrees moved toward Mr. Biden and those without headed toward Mr. Trump. That could help explain the shift among married men, who are likely to be middle class, Dr. Schaffner said.For Dr. Plutzer, the shift of the married men carries an indisputable lesson: Swing voters may be an endangered species, but they are not mythical. “This was something we debated a great deal in the run-up to the last election: whether campaigns only needed to focus on mobilization,” he said. “This shows that there are groups that actually do swing, that are responsive to what a president does in office, and responsive enough that they look for alternatives.”Mr. Anderson, the Republican pollster, cautioned that Democratic momentum with this group might be fleeting: “Since Biden’s taken office,” he said, “in our own polling, Republican liability among college-educated suburbanites has decreased since last fall.”To Ms. Greenberg, the thought of deliberately targeting married men — and white married men especially — is unfamiliar to say the least. Democratic campaigns tend to target different kinds of female voters and voters of color, she said.But that could change as soon as the midterms. “There certainly are heavily suburban districts that are going to be heavily contested next year,” Ms. Greenberg added, “where they definitely are going to take a look at some of these suburban well-educated married men.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Trump’s ‘Team Kraken’ Lands in Hot Water

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      L. Lin Wood played a starring role in the failed legal effort to alter the results of the 2020 election on behalf of former President Donald Trump. But Mr. Wood, a lawyer, now wants everyone to know that he had no real involvement in the suit to decertify the vote in Michigan, despite his name appearing on it.“I do not specifically recall being asked about the Michigan complaint,” he said on Monday, “but I had generally indicated to Sidney Powell that if she needed a quote-unquote trial lawyer, I would certainly be willing or available to help her.” Ms. Powell, you may recall, is the legal eagle who vowed to “release the Kraken” on supposed 2020 election fraudsters, thus earning the pro-Trump legal crusade its mythic nickname.Mr. Wood was just trying to support his Kraken co-counsel.Mr. Wood’s, um, clarifications were made to a federal judge during a hearing on whether he, Ms. Powell and several other lawyers should be sanctioned over the Michigan case. The city of Detroit, among other entities, has accused the pro-Trump legal team of abusing the court system by pursuing a frivolous, error-riddled case. The city wants the offending lawyers punished financially and referred for possible disbarment.Sidney PowellElijah Nouvelage/ReutersMonday’s virtual proceedings did not bode well for Team Kraken. U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker expressed skepticism bordering on dismay about some of the evidence and experts from the original case. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps,” she marveled at one point. “How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?”Generally speaking, it’s not a good sign when a judge is characterizing one’s evidence in terms such as “fantastical,” “speculative,” “bad faith,” “obviously questionable” and “layers of hearsay.” Judge Parker brushed back Ms. Powell’s assertion that the complaint’s 960 pages of affidavits proved “due diligence,” countering, “Volume, certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity.”The hearing ground on for six hours, with so much back talk and smack talk that the court reporter had to ask the participants to tone things down so that she could do her job. At day’s end, all parties were given two weeks to submit additional arguments.Mr. Wood was not the only defendant eager to downplay his role. The lawyer for Emily Newman, another member of the Michigan Kraken team, said his client spent a mere five hours on the case and that her role was “de minimis.” More generally, the defendants maintain that the entire hearing is outrageous and baseless and — surprise! — that they are being unjustly persecuted. “I have practiced law for 43 years and have never witnessed a proceeding like this,” Ms. Powell said.But here’s where the political and legal paths diverge for those perpetuating Mr. Trump’s election lies. The legal world has ethical, professional standards by which members are expected to abide. When they violate said standards, they can’t simply whine or bluster their way out of trouble with partisan demagogy. They need to justify their actions to judges and professional groups who have a clear grasp of the issues — and who deal with slick talkers for a living.This is the situation in which Team Kraken and some other Trump legal enablers find themselves. Michigan is just one of several states where suits are underway against the lawyers who pursued baseless election-fraud complaints. Last month, a New York appellate court suspended the law license of Rudy Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive apparatchiks, for making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the 2020 election. The Texas bar is looking into whether the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, committed professional misconduct in challenging the election results. The state bar of Georgia, where Mr. Wood’s practice is based, is investigating his behavior.No doubt, the legal system hosts an abundance of carnival barkers and political hacks. Just this week, Jenna Ellis, a former Trump campaign legal adviser, announced her departure from the Republican Party, accusing its leaders of failing to stand up for Mr. Trump and for “true conservatives.” She is particularly miffed at the Republican National Committee’s chief legal counsel, Justin Riemer, for having reportedly spoken ill of her push to invalidate the 2020 results. “What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” Mr. Riemer wrote in a November email, according to a new book by Michael Wolff. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”Ms. Ellis has demanded the resignation of top party officials, including Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C.’s chairwoman, and says she will not return to the fold until the party “comes back home to conservatives.”Such theatrics may thrill MAGA fans — and even more so the former president. But they are unlikely to sway jurists or other arbiters tasked with reviewing the behavior of officers of the court.Mr. Trump’s alternative facts hold less sway over some realms than others.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Battle Over State Voting Rights Is About the Future of Texas

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      The current skirmish is the latest in a tug of war being waged between the state’s increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas.HOUSTON — The flight of Texas Democrats to Washington, a last-ditch effort this week to stop Republicans from passing new statewide voting rules, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a broad national fight over access to the ballot.But it is something more than that in Texas. The battle over voting rights is also the latest in a tug of war over the future of what it means to be Texan, one being waged between the state’s rapidly diversifying and increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas, which wield overwhelming power in the State Capitol.The tension grew during the coronavirus pandemic, when cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin clashed with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over mask mandates and business restrictions. But it had already been increasing for years, with each political session marked by Republican state officials rolling back progressive changes made in cities led by Democrats.The most direct new restrictions sought by Texas Republicans, who have maintained control of the state for nearly two decades, are a reaction to local polling innovations, notably in Houston, the state’s largest city, and surrounding Harris County.The county introduced drive-through voting for the first time in November, when people were concerned that traditional polling places would spread the coronavirus, and it proved popular, accounting for more than 130,000 votes. Access also expanded at eight polling sites that held a day of 24-hour voting.Officials believed that drive-through polling, which has been used in three subsequent municipal and state elections in Harris County, would soon expand to other areas. “In a place like Houston and Texas that loves cars so much, why shouldn’t we offer drive-through voting?” said Christopher Hollins, who served as interim election chief in the county last year and oversaw the expansion of voting options during the presidential election.Turnout increased in Harris County as it did throughout the state, and out of more than 11 million votes cast, President Biden got within about 600,000 votes of winning Texas — the closest a Democrat has come in decades.Now Texas cities are ground zero in the fight over whether to expand access to the vote, as state Democrats did during the pandemic, or curtail it, as Republicans are seeking to do with a measure that would ban 24-hour and drive-through polling.Drive-through voting was offered in Harris County, which includes Houston, last fall.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesThe conflict is a national one, heightened by former President Donald J. Trump’s false insistence that he lost in 2020 because of voter fraud. On Wednesday, Democratic members of the Texas House met with senators in Washington and urged the passage of bills aimed at expanding and safeguarding voter access.The group fled Austin on chartered planes this week, just days into a 30-day special legislative session, to delay passage of the state’s voting measure. They vowed to stay out of Texas until early August, when the session expires.But in Texas, the fight over voting is only the latest skirmish in the deepening chasm between progressive and conservative versions of the state.“Harris County is being attacked already at a base level because it is one of the most diverse counties in the country,” Mr. Hollins said. “This certainly predates the pandemic.”Elected officials in Texas cities have found themselves forced to govern with the knowledge that many of the things they do in their backyard will be undone the next time lawmakers meet in the Capitol, which they do every other year.“I see a lot of our job as to do 50 good things a year, knowing that the Legislature will only have time, while it’s in session, to undo half of it,” said Greg Casar, a progressive Democratic councilman in Austin.“Each marquee issue over the last three sessions has been the state wanting to attack local governments,” he added, listing efforts to protect immigrants, transgender Texans and workers that each faced stiff resistance at the state level.Texas House Democrats at an airport outside Washington after fleeing Texas in an effort to block a voting restrictions bill.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThat view is something more than a hunch on the part of Democrats. Before the previous legislative session, in 2019, the speaker of the Texas House at the time shared an animus toward cities in a private conversation with a Republican lawmaker and a conservative activist.“My goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” the speaker, Dennis Bonnen, a Republican who represented a district just south of Houston, said in a conversation that was secretly recorded.His comments about cities reflect a commonplace view among some Republicans in Texas, even if they are not always as pointedly expressed. Republican operatives and officials described the dynamic as one of concern over the progressive turn in the state’s cities, a change in culture and politics that has accelerated rapidly over the past decade.And the changes have begun spreading into the suburbs. Populous counties outside of Houston and Austin that once reliably voted Republican have swung in recent years toward the Democrats, said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.“With the bluing of the major urban counties and the blushing of many of the major suburbs, what has allowed the G.O.P. to continue to win statewide has been its increasing dominance in the state’s rural counties,” Dr. Jones said.Most states have similar divisions between blue cities and red rural areas. But in Texas, the divisions have taken hold only relatively recently — Houston voted for a Republican, George W. Bush, for president in 2004 — adding to the alarm among Republicans and anticipation among Democrats that the state could soon be up for grabs.In the meantime, said Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic state representative from Laredo, cities are being punished by the Republican majority in the Capitol for daring to extend voting opportunities, particularly in places where it benefited low-income communities of color and disabled people.“They are trying to thin out the crowd,” Mr. Raymond said of the Republicans in the state. “And that’s just wrong.”Republicans have disputed such characterizations. They have said their efforts to pass the voting bill are a way to instill confidence in future elections and to make uniform the rules that govern Texas elections.“It increases transparency and ensures the voting rules are the same in every county across the state,” the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said in a statement after the State Senate passed its version of the voting measure on Tuesday.Signage in Austin ahead of the presidential election.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe Senate bill, and one before the House, includes provisions to ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; limit third-party collection of ballots; increase criminal penalties on election workers for violating regulations; grant more freedom of movement to partisan poll watchers; and require large counties — which include the state’s largest cities — to make available a livestream video during vote counting.Democratic lawmakers have described the changes as a means of voter suppression in a state with a long history of such tactics.But without enough votes to block the bills, more than 50 Democrats, representing the state’s largest cities and suburbs, opted to leave the state in order to deny Republicans the quorum necessary for the House of Representatives to conduct its business. Mr. Abbott has threatened to arrest Democrats to bring them back to the State Capitol, though his jurisdiction to do so stops at the state line.“Everything that the Democratic cities do, particularly if it’s progressive, they attack it and they say cities can’t do that,” Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat representing Austin, said on Wednesday as he rushed between meetings in Washington. “Which is ironic because they were the party of local control.”Like other Democrats, he vowed to remain outside Texas until Aug. 7, when the 30-day special session ends.Back in Austin, Mayes Middleton, a Republican representing Galveston, awaited the Democrats’ return and bemoaned their flight as hypocritical.“The Democrats say that the state should not dictate how counties run their election laws, but at the same time, they’re in Washington trying to have the federal government dictate how Texas should run its elections,” Mr. Middleton said. “We’ve got to let Texas run Texas.”Edgar Sandoval More

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      ‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

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      Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.He emailed me his reply:It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.Galston put it like this:When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”A Nation DividedDemocrats and Republicans have drifted further apart over the years, as measured by a 10-point scale of political values. More

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      Here's a Look Inside Facebook's Data Wars

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      Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day.The announcement, which left CrowdTangle’s employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings.On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.An internal battle over data transparency might seem low on the list of worthy Facebook investigations. And it’s a column I’ve hesitated to write for months, in part because I’m uncomfortably close to the action. (More on that in a minute.)But the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform. And it gets to the heart of one of the central tensions confronting Facebook in the post-Trump era. The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image. The question of what to do about CrowdTangle has vexed some of Facebook’s top executives for months, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Facebook employees, as well as internal emails and posts.These people, most of whom would speak only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss internal conversations, said Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.Facebook disputes this characterization. It says that the CrowdTangle reorganization was meant to integrate the service with its other transparency tools, not weaken it, and that top executives are still committed to increasing transparency.“CrowdTangle is part of a growing suite of transparency resources we’ve made available for people, including academics and journalists,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman. “With CrowdTangle moving into our integrity team, we’re developing a more comprehensive strategy for how we build on some of these transparency efforts moving forward.”But the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.“One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.“People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”Brian Boland, a former vice president in charge of partnerships strategy and an advocate for more transparency, left Facebook in November. Christian Sorensen Hansen for The New York TimesThe Twitter Account That Launched 1,000 MeetingsHere’s where I, somewhat reluctantly, come in.I started using CrowdTangle a few years ago. I’d been looking for a way to see which news stories gained the most traction on Facebook, and CrowdTangle — a tool used mainly by audience teams at news publishers and marketers who want to track the performance of their posts — filled the bill. I figured out that through a kludgey workaround, I could use its search feature to rank Facebook link posts — that is, posts that include a link to a non-Facebook site — in order of the number of reactions, shares and comments they got. Link posts weren’t a perfect proxy for news, engagement wasn’t a perfect proxy for popularity and CrowdTangle’s data was limited in other ways, but it was the closest I’d come to finding a kind of cross-Facebook news leaderboard, so I ran with it.At first, Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)The lists also attracted plenty of Facebook haters. Liberals shared them as evidence that the company was a swamp of toxicity that needed to be broken up; progressive advertisers bristled at the idea that their content was appearing next to pro-Trump propaganda. The account was even cited at a congressional hearing on tech and antitrust by Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who said it proved that “if Facebook is out there trying to suppress conservative speech, they’re doing a terrible job at it.”Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.As the election approached last year, Facebook executives held meetings to figure out what to do, according to three people who attended them. They set out to determine whether the information on @FacebooksTop10 was accurate (it was), and discussed starting a competing Twitter account that would post more balanced lists based on Facebook’s internal data.They never did that, but several executives — including John Hegeman, the head of Facebook’s news feed — were dispatched to argue with me on Twitter. These executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees have access to it.)Last September, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told Axios that while right-wing content garnered a lot of engagement, the idea that Facebook was a right-wing echo chamber was “just wrong.”“I think it’s important to differentiate that from, broadly, what people are seeing and reading and learning about on our service,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.But Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”The Trouble With CrowdTangleAround the same time that Mr. Zuckerberg made his comments to Axios, the tensions came to a head. The Economist had just published an article claiming that Facebook “offers a distorted view of American news.”The article, which cited CrowdTangle data, showed that the most-engaged American news sites on Facebook were Fox News and Breitbart, and claimed that Facebook’s overall news ecosystem skewed right wing. John Pinette, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, emailed a link to the article to a group of executives with the subject line “The trouble with CrowdTangle.”“The Economist steps onto the Kevin Roose bandwagon,” Mr. Pinette wrote. (See? Told you it was uncomfortably close to home.)Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, replied, lamenting that “our own tools are helping journos to consolidate the wrong narrative.”Other executives chimed in, adding their worries that CrowdTangle data was being used to paint Facebook as a right-wing echo chamber.David Ginsberg, Facebook’s vice president of choice and competition, wrote that if Mr. Trump won re-election in November, “the media and our critics will quickly point to this ‘echo chamber’ as a prime driver of the outcome.”Fidji Simo, the head of the Facebook app at the time, agreed.“I really worry that this could be one of the worst narratives for us,” she wrote.Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said Mr. Schultz and the other executives were discussing how to correct misrepresentations of CrowdTangle data, not strategizing about killing off the tool.A few days after the election in November, Mr. Schultz wrote a post for the company blog, called “What Do People Actually See on Facebook in the U.S.?” He explained that if you ranked Facebook posts based on which got the most reach, rather than the most engagement — his preferred method of slicing the data — you’d end up with a more mainstream, less sharply partisan list of sources.“We believe this paints a more complete picture than the CrowdTangle data alone,” he wrote.That may be true, but there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.Tweaking VariablesMr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.“Facebook would love full transparency if there was a guarantee of positive stories and outcomes,” Mr. Boland said. “But when transparency creates uncomfortable moments, their reaction is often to shut down the transparency.” More