Presidential Election of 2020

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      Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

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      Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mount.Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.Many researchers have begun to focus on this question: Is there a causal relationship between the intensification of hostility between Democrats and Republicans and the deterioration of support for democratic standards?“Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship,” Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State University and Koç University-Istanbul, write in a 2019 essay, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,”contribute to a perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”Mason argues that “threats to a party’s status tend to drive anger, while reassurances drive enthusiasm” so thata party loss generates very negative, particularly angry, emotional reactions. This anger is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.One optimistic proposal to reduce partisan animosity is to focus public attention on the commonality of Democratic and Republican voters in their shared identity as Americans. Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on this subject, including in his 2018 paper “Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?” and in his soon-to-be-published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide.”“I show,” Levendusky contends in his 2018 paper, “that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization.”There are serious problems, however, with a depolarization strategy based on American identity, problems that go to the heart of the relentless power of issues of race, ethnicity and immigration­ to splinter the electorate.In their December 2022 paper, “ ‘American’ Is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans,” Ryan Dawkins and Abigail Hanson write thatWhite Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.Dawkins and Hanson acknowledge that “national identity is perhaps the only superordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans,” but, they continue,If conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.I asked Levendusky about the Dawkins-Hanson paper. He replied by email that he was now “convinced that there is no simple path from animosity (or affective polarization) to far downstream outcomes (albeit important ones)” — adding that “there’s a long way from ‘I dislike members of the other party’ to ‘I will vote for a candidate who broke democratic norms rather than a candidate from the other party’ and the process is likely complex and subtle.”In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.”Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”Broockman and his co-authors measured the effect of reducing affective polarization on five domains: “electoral accountability, adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”“Our results,” they write, “run contrary to the literature’s widespread speculation: in these political domains, our estimates of the causal effects of reducing affective polarization are consistently null.”In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well-taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist-vs-postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues, report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”Why?Because much prior work has focused on treating affective polarization itself, and assumed that these interventions would in turn improve downstream outcomes that pose consequential threats to democracy. Although this assumption may seem reasonable, there is little evidence evaluating its implications for the benefits of depolarization interventions.In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.The first is known as the “Braley intervention” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”“To our knowledge,” Willer wrote in his email, “this is the first evidence that the same stimuli could both reduce affective polarization and improve some aspect of Americans’ democratic attitudes, and it suggests these two factors may be causally linked, more than prior work — including our own — would suggest.”Kalla disputed the conclusions Willer drew from the megastudy:The most successful interventions in the megastudy for reducing anti-democratic views were interventions that directly targeted those anti-democratic views. For example, Braley et al.’s successful intervention was able to reduce anti-democratic views by correcting misperceptions about the other party’s willingness to subvert democracy.This intervention, Kalla continued,was not about affective polarization. What this suggests is that for practitioners interested in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, they should use interventions that directly speak to and target those anti-democratic views. As our work finds and Voelkel et al. replicates, obliquely attempting to reduce anti-democratic views through the causal pathway of affective polarization does not appear to be a successful strategy.I sent Kalla’s critique to Willer, who replied:I agree with Josh’s point that the most effective interventions for reducing support for undemocratic practices and candidates were interventions that were pretty clearly crafted with the primary goal in mind of targeting democratic attitudes. And while we find some relationships here that suggest there is a path to reducing support for undemocratic candidates via reducing affective polarization, the larger point that most interventions reducing affective polarization do not affect anti-democratic attitudes still stands, and our evidence continues to contradict the widespread popular assumption that affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes are closely linked. We continue to find evidence in this newest study against that idea.One scholar, Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended that too much of the debate over affective polarization and democratic backsliding has been restricted to the analysis of competing psychological pressures, when in fact the scope in much larger. “The United States,” Kitschelt wrote in an email,has experienced a “black swan” confluence, interaction and mutual reinforcement of general factors that affect all advanced knowledge societies with specific historical and institutional factors unique to the U.S. that have created a poisonous concoction threatening U.S. democracy more so than that of any other Western society. Taken together, these conditions have created the scenario in which affective polarization thrives.Like most of the developed world, the United States is undergoing three disruptive transformations compounded by three additional historical factors specific to the United States, Kitschelt suggests. These transformations, he wrote, are:“The postindustrial change of the occupational structure expanding higher education and the income and status educational dividend, together with a transformation of gender and family relations, dismantling the paternalist family and improving the bargaining power of women, making less educated people — and especially males — the more likely socio-economic and cultural losers of the process.”“The expansion of education goes together with a secularization of society that has undercut the ideological foundations of paternalism, but created fierce resistance in certain quarters.”“The sociocultural and economic divisions furthermore correlate with residential patterns in which the growing higher educated, younger, secular and more gender-egalitarian share of the population lives in metropolitan and suburban areas, while the declining, less educated, older, more religious and more paternalists share of the population lives in exurbia or the countryside.”The three factors unique to this country, in his view, are:“The legacy of enslavement and racial oppression in the United States in which — following W.E.B. DuBois — the white lower class of less skilled laborers derived a ‘quasi-wage’ satisfaction from racist subordination of the minority, the satisfaction of enjoying a higher rank in society than African Americans.”“The vibrancy of evangelical ‘born again’ Christianity, sharply separated from the old European moderate, cerebral mainline Protestantism. The former attracts support over-proportionally among less educated people, and strictly segregates churches by race, thereby making it possible to convert white Evangelical churches into platforms of white racism. They have become political transmission belts of right-wing populism in the United States, with 80 percent of those whites who consider themselves ‘born again’ voting for the Trump presidential candidacy.”“The institutional particularities of the U.S. voting system that tends to divide populations into two rival parties, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the U.S. legislature and the directly elected presidency. While received wisdom has claimed that it moderates divisions, under conditions of mutually reinforcing economic, social, and cultural divides, it is likely to have the opposite effect. The most important additional upshot of this system is the overrepresentation of the countryside (i.e. the areas where the social, economic, and cultural losers of knowledge society tend to be located) in the legislative process and presidential elections/Electoral College.”Kitschelt argues that in order to understand affective polarization it is necessary to go “beyond the myopic and US-centric narrow vision field of American political psychologists.” The incentives “for politicians to prime this polarization and stoke the divides, including fanning the flames of affective polarization, can be understood only against the backdrop of these underlying socio-economic and cultural legacies and processes.”Kitschelt is not alone in this view. He pointed to a 2020 book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” by Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, political scientists at Harvard, the University of California-Davis and Georgia State University, in which they make a case thatAmericans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly than in most other Western publics. We show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high, when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions.Writing just before the 2020 election, Gidron, Adams and Horne point out that theissue of cultural disagreements appears highly pertinent in light of the ongoing nationwide protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement which has sparked a wider cultural debate over questions relating to race, police funding and broader questions over interpretations of America’s history. In a July 4th speech delivered at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump starkly framed these types of “culture war” debates as a defining political and social divide in America, asserting “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”The study of affective polarization sheds light on how vicious American politics has become, and on how this viciousness has enabled Trump and those Republicans who have followed his lead, while hurting Democrats whose policy and legislative initiatives have been obstructed as much as they have succeeded.Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., addressed this point when he delivered the following remarks from his paper “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West” in 2021 at a legal colloquium in New York:There is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government, whether measured in the number of important bills Congress is able to enact, the proportion of all issues people identity as most important that Congress manages to address, or the number of enacted bills that update old policies enacted many decades earlier. Social scientists now write books with titles like Can America Govern Itself? Longitudinal data confirm the obvious, which is the more polarized Congress is, the less it enacts significant legislation; in the ten most polarized congressional terms, a bit more than 10.6 significant laws were enacted, while in the ten least polarized terms, that number goes up 60 percent, to around 16 significant enactments per term. The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues their populations care most about poses serious risks.What are the chances of reversing this trend?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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      Sweep in 3 Special Elections Gives Democrats Control of Pennsylvania House

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      Three Democratic victories flipped the House for the first time in a dozen years by a single seat in the battleground state.Democrats swept three special elections in solidly blue House districts in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, putting the party in the majority by a single seat and breaking a Republican legislative monopoly that has recently focused on election restrictions and anti-abortion bills.All three races were in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh and is the state’s No. 2 county by population, after Philadelphia.Control of the Pennsylvania House had been shrouded by uncertainty since the midterms in November, grinding legislative business to a halt while the parties clashed over ground rules and the timing of the special elections.Democrats had appeared to flip the chamber in the fall for the first time in a dozen years, but one lawmaker’s death and the election of two others to higher offices delayed the final outcome.The party’s majority — 102 seats to 101 seats — brings clarity to the last unresolved legislative races in a fiercely contested state.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsDeepfake Rules: In most of the world, the authorities can’t do much about deepfakes, as few laws exist to regulate the technology. China hopes to be the exception.Lessons for a New Generation: Finland is testing new ways to teach students about propaganda. Here’s what other countries can learn from its success.Covid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutionsA ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. In the 32nd District, Joe McAndrew, a former executive director of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, defeated Clayton Walker, a Republican pastor. The seat had been held by Tony DeLuca, a Democrat who was the longest-serving member of the Pennsylvania House before his death in October from lymphoma. Still, Mr. DeLuca was overwhelmingly re-elected in the heavily Democratic district.In the 34th District, Abigail Salisbury, a Democratic lawyer, prevailed against Robert Pagane, a Republican security guard and former police officer. Ms. Salisbury will fill the seat of Summer Lee, a Democrat who in November became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. Last year, Ms. Salisbury had previously lost to Ms. Lee in a Democratic primary for the legislature..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In the 35th District, Matt Gergely, a Democrat who is the chief revenue officer of McKeesport, Pa., defeated Don Nevills, a Republican who operates a tattoo shop and ran unsuccessfully for the seat in November. Austin Davis, a Democrat who previously represented the district, was elected as lieutenant governor in the fall.The power shift dealt another blow to Republicans coming off the midterms, when the party failed to meet heightened expectations in Pennsylvania and nationally that were generated by economic turmoil and President Biden’s lackluster job approval ratings.In November, Pennsylvania voters consistently rejected Republicans in marquee races featuring candidates endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, who espoused false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.Democrats flipped a U.S. Senate seat and held onto the governor’s office when Josh Shapiro, who was previously Pennsylvania’s attorney general, defeated Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator and an election denier, in an open-seat race.After losing control of the House, Republicans will be unable to override a veto by the governor.In a potential end-run around the governor, G.O.P. lawmakers have resorted to trying to amend the state Constitution in order to pass a voter ID bill. The complex amendment process, which ultimately requires putting the question to voters, is the subject of pending litigation.But both chambers of the General Assembly need to pass the bill this session in order to place it on the ballot.First-time voters and those applying for absentee ballots are currently required to present identification in Pennsylvania, but Republicans want to expand the requirement to all voters in every election and have proposed issuing voter ID cards. Critics say the proposal would make it harder to vote and could be a privacy risk.Mr. Shapiro has not ruled out compromising with Republicans on some voting rules, but has said that he would not support any proposal that hinders voting.Republicans, now likely to be thwarted legislatively, have also sought to use the constitutional amendment process to place new restrictions on abortion in Pennsylvania. More

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      Politicians Everywhere All at Once

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. President Biden will give his State of the Union address on Tuesday. I’m going to watch it as a professional obligation. But to be honest, I’m about as excited about it as I am for the Oscars, at least in its more recent incarnation. I just hope Lauren Boebert doesn’t go after Biden the way Will Smith went for Chris Rock.Is it crazy that I think we could dispense with the tradition altogether and go back to written messages delivered “from time to time,” as the Constitution puts it?Gail Collins: Oh, Bret, don’t be cynical. Remember waiting for the Donald Trump State of the Unions? No complaints about boredom then, since people were always waiting expectantly to see if he’d say something crazy.Bret: Well, you’re kinda making my point. And the switch from Trump to Biden isn’t exactly an upgrade in the rhetorical thrills department.Gail: OK, Biden isn’t an exciting orator. And now he’s stuck with that Chinese balloon distraction. But still, he’s got some things to celebrate with the economy going well, don’t you think? A cheerful State of the Union would definitely be more interesting than the Oscars. I warn you that before we’re done today, I’m gonna ask you what you think should win Best Picture.Bret: Other than the “Top Gun” sequel?About the State of the Union: Biden can look back at a year of some significant legislative and foreign policy accomplishments. But given the reality of a Republican House, what does he do next? Are there bipartisan compromises to propose?Gail: Guess Biden is discovering there’s no bipartisan G.O.P. to compromise with. I’m sure — or at least I can imagine — that Kevin McCarthy would be happy to come up with a deal to avoid default by simply raising the debt limit. But hard to imagine he could corral the crazy segment of his caucus, which wants to show off its muscles by forcing some serious cuts in spending.Bret: You may be right. Then again, it only takes a few moderate Republicans to break ranks and vote with Democrats to raise the ceiling. In a crunch, I could see that.Gail: You’re my interpreter of conservative spending dogma — what’s going to happen? What should happen?Bret: I won’t make any predictions because they’re bound to be proved wrong. What should happen? I like a proposal made by Phil Gramm, the former Texas senator — and Democrat turned Republican — in The Wall Street Journal: Raise the debt ceiling but “claw back unspent funds” from the $6 trillion in pandemic-related spending, which he and his co-writer, Michael Solon, believe could save $255 billion in 2023-24. That seems like a compromise a lot of Americans could get behind. What do you think?Gail: First, I’d like to see those pandemic funds directed to research, continued free testing in high-risk areas and short-term support for service industries like restaurants and hotels that haven’t recovered from a huge pandemic whack in business.Bret: That doesn’t sound like much of a compromise on the spending side.Gail: But maybe there’s a little give there. If the Republicans are willing to offer up some cost savings from their favorite programs — like military spending — I could imagine the Democrats compromising a bit on the pandemic funding. Have to admit $6 trillion is a sizable amount to spend.Bret: Doubt there will be any cuts in defense budgets in an era of rampaging Russians and Chinese spy balloons. But a good way for Democrats to test Republican seriousness on spending could be to insist on cuts in farm subsidies, which, of course, aren’t likely to happen either. So we’ll probably end up, at the last possible second, with a clean debt-ceiling raise — but, as the great Rick Bragg might say, only when it’s “all over but the shoutin’.”Gail: Now let me stoop to pure politics, Bret. Nikki Haley is set to announce that she’s running for the Republican presidential nomination. Besides being the former governor of South Carolina, she was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Remember the time she called Jared a “hidden genius”? Any thoughts?Bret: I think she’s the best of the Republican field by a mile — and I don’t just mean Trump. She was a good U.N. ambassador and understands foreign policy. She was a reasonable governor of South Carolina and is a moderate in today’s field of Republicans. She has an inspiring personal story as the daughter of Indian immigrants. She was among the first Republicans to put some distance between herself and Trump after Jan. 6. She connects with audiences. What’s not to like?Gail: Well, all that time she claimed she wouldn’t run against Trump. Her longstanding opposition to abortion rights. But she would probably be the strongest woman to enter the Republican presidential field since … wow, do you think I’ll get to revisit Margaret Chase Smith?Bret: Gail, you know how you now regret giving Mitt Romney (and his dog Seamus) such a hard time, considering what the party came up with next? I bet Haley is the one Republican you’d more or less be all right with as president.Gail: Hmm. Does she have any pet-transportation stories?Bret: Hehehe.Gail: Most of all, her entry has me wondering how many other candidates we’ll see lining up here. Never thought Ron DeSantis could beat Trump one on one, but if we’ve got a whole bunch of people in the Republican race, it might give DeSantis time to become more of a household name — and maybe even less of a doltish-sounding campaigner.Bret: What Republicans most want for 2024 is to win. And I think they realize that nominating Trump is a ticket to failure.That said, the problem for Republicans is that as more of them jump into the fray, they make Trump relatively stronger simply by carving up the anti-Trump vote in the G.O.P.’s winner-take-all primaries. I can see a scenario in which Trump maintains a steady base of support at around 35 percent, and then Haley, DeSantis, Pious Pence and Pompous Pompeo — and yes, I’m giving Trump ideas for nicknames here — carve up the remaining 65 percent.Gail: And Dippy DeSantis? Doofus DeSantis?Bret: Ron DeSantos?Can we pivot to Democrats for a moment here, Gail? It looks like the party is about to change its primary calendar, so that it would start with South Carolina, then move to New Hampshire and Nevada, then Georgia and then Michigan. Do you think this is an improvement?Gail: I do feel sorta sad for Iowa — being the tip-off was so important to the people there. But they screwed up their caucus system in 2020, and it’s pretty clear their time is over.Bret: I’m guessing that a lot of reporters with memories of freezing Januaries in Ames or Storm Lake aren’t too sorry for the change.Gail: New Hampshire is great at running primaries, and I have fond memories of many winter days in Concord — but truly, it does make sense to let states with more diverse populations have their turn at going early. And I’m sure Joe Biden hasn’t forgotten for a nanosecond that it was Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina’s endorsement that put him over the top in the nomination race. So yeah, I think it’s a good plan. How about you?Bret: My guess is that it makes no real difference what order the states go in. Biden came in fourth place in Iowa last time and still won. Bernie Sanders won in New Hampshire in 2016 and still lost. Not sure what switching the order achieves in the long run. In the end, the parties tend to get the nominees they want.Which, by the way, increasingly looks like it will be Biden on the Democratic side. We’ve talked about this so often before, but it just seems to me the worst idea. Do you think he might at least switch out Kamala Harris for another vice-presidential nominee? I think it might … reassure some voters.Gail: Yeah, we are in agreement here, but I’m sorry to say we’re both going to be disappointed. Biden is very clearly planning to run and there’s no way in the world he won’t keep Harris.Bret: Well, there goes my vote, at least assuming it’s not Trump on the other side. The chances that Biden couldn’t complete a second term are too great. And she’s shown no evidence of growing in office or being qualified to take over.Gail: Let me be clear that if Biden were, say, 65, I’d be in total support of another run at the White House. He’s not an inspiring president, but he’s been a good one.However, he’d be 86 at the end of his second term and that’s just too old. Not too old to be in public service — have to admit Jimmy Carter’s activism has slowed down lately, but hey, he’s 98. It’d be great if Biden moved on to new projects.But he won’t do that, and he’d never get rid of Harris. As someone who’s very, very eager to see a woman elected president, I still dread the idea that she’ll become an automatic heir apparent.Bret: When people observe that Harris hasn’t exactly wowed as veep, there’s usually someone who says that opposition to her is on account of her color or gender. So let me note that I just endorsed an Indian woman as a potential president, just as I supported the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.Gail: You did indeed.Bret: The problem with Harris is that she was a bad senator — she missed 30.2 percent of her roll call votes, compared with an average of 2.4 percent for her peers. She was a terrible presidential candidate, whose campaign fell apart before even reaching the Iowa caucus. As vice president, she has had no apparent accomplishments other than saying dumb and untrue things — like when she told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “we have a secure border.” In Washington she’s mostly famous for running a dysfunctional office with frequent staff turnover. So, do I want her a heartbeat away from a president who is the oldest in history? As Bill Maher likes to say, “Sorry, not sorry.”As for my Oscar pick, I’m going to have to go with “Tár.”Gail: Well, we’re in the cheerful disagreement business, so put me down for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” At least my title’s the longest.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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      How Much Longer Can ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who!’ Last?

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      Over the past four decades, the percentage of white Democrats who identify themselves as liberal has more than doubled, growing at a much faster pace than Black or Hispanic Democrats.In 1984, according to American National Election Studies data, 29.8 percent of white Democrats identified as liberal; by 2020, that percentage grew to 68.5 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of liberals among Black Democrats grew from 19.1 percent to 27.8 percent, and among Hispanic Democrats from 18 percent to 41 percent.This shift raises once again a question that people have been asking since the advent of Reagan Democrats in the 1980s: What does it mean for a party that was once the home of the white working class to become a coalition of relatively comfortable white liberals and less well off minority constituencies?I posed this and other questions to a range of scholars and political strategists, including William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, who recently cited similar (though not identical) trends in Gallup data. In an essay last month, “The Polarization Paradox: Elected Officials and Voters Have Shifted in Opposite Directions,” Galston wrote:In 1994, White, Black and Hispanic Democrats were equally likely to think of themselves as liberal. But during the next three decades, the share of White Democrats who identify as liberal rose by 37 points, from 26 percent to 63 percent, while Black and Hispanic Democrats rose by less than half as much, to 39 percent and 41 percent, respectively.Galston argued in an email that Black Democrats have assumed an unanticipated role in the party:African Americans are now a moderating force within the party. It was no accident that they rallied around the most moderate candidate with a serious chance of winning the nomination in 2020, or that the leader of the pro-Biden forces took the lead in rejecting the “defund the police” slogan.The coalition of upper-middle-class liberals and minority voters, Galston wrote, “has been sustainable because the former believe in the active use of government to fight disadvantage of various kinds and are willing, within limits, to vote against their economic self-interest.”Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, wrote back by email:Underlying the liberal shift among white Democrats is their tendency to hold more liberal racial attitudes. In the Voter Study Group’s Racing Apart report, the percentage of white Democrats that hold the most liberal positions on the standard racial resentment measure has increased over the last decade to such a large extent that their racial resentment views match those of Black Democrats.The Democratic Party, Wronski continued, has becomea coalition of racial minorities (especially Blacks), and whites who are sympathetic to the inequities and challenges faced by minority groups in America. Racial identities and attitudes are the common thread that link wealthier, more educated whites with poorer minority constituencies.The Democrats’ biracial working-class coalition during the mid-20th century, in Wronski’s view, “was successful because racial issues were off the table.” Once those issues moved front and center, the coalition split: “Simply put, the parties are divided in terms of which portion of the working class they support — the white working class or the poorer minority communities.” The level of educational attainment is the line of demarcation between the two groups of white voters.By 2020, the white working class — defined by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis as “whites without four-year college degrees” — voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden 67-32, according to network exit polls. In the 2022 election, white working-class voters backed Republican House candidates by almost the identical margin, 66-32.The shift of non-college white working class support to the Republican candidates, Wronski wrote,was driven by racial group animus. Trump was particularly able to attract members of the white working class on the basis of racial (and other) group sentiments — with those disliking minority groups being uniquely attracted to Trump, in a continuation of the division of the working class along racial lines.There are those who argue, however, that the contemporary Democratic coalition is more fragile than Wronski suggests. Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, emailed to say, “If you’re a Democrat, you might worry that the coalition is not stable.”Over the long haul, Enos wrote:College-educated whites, especially those with higher incomes, are not clear coalitional partners for anyone — they don’t favor economic policies, such as increasing housing supply or even higher taxes on the rich, that are beneficial to the working class, of any race. And many college-educated whites are motivated by social issues that are also not largely supported by the working class, of any race. It’s not clear that, with their current ideological positions, socially liberal and economically centrist or rightist college-educated whites are natural coalition partners with anybody but themselves.Enos went so far as to challenge the depth of elite support for a liberal agenda:My sense is that much of the college-educated liberal political rhetoric is focused on social signaling to satisfy their own psychological needs and improve their social standing with other college educated liberals, rather than policies that would actually reduce racial gaps in economic well-being, civil rights protections, and other quality of life issues.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, is an explicit critic of the left wing of the party. “It is plain to me that the Democrats’ greatest challenge is the progressive left,” Begala wrote in an email:Pew Research shows they are the most liberal, most educated, and most white subgroup in the Democratic coalition. They constitute 12 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democrat — which means 88 percent of us are not on their ideological team.In contrast, Begala continued:Black voters are both the most loyal Democrats and the most sensible, practical, strategic, and moderate voters. This is why it was important, politically and even morally, for President Biden to move the African-American-rich South Carolina primary ahead of overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire.In the November 2021 study of the composition of the Democratic Party that Begala referred to, Pew Research reported:The Progressive Left makes up a relatively small share of the party, 12 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. However, this group is the most politically engaged segment of the coalition, extremely liberal in every policy domain and, notably, 68 percent White non-Hispanic. In contrast, the three other Democratic-oriented groups are no more than about half White non-Hispanic.This disproportionally white wing of the party, as I have previously discussed, provided crucial support for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley when they ran for Congress in 2018, putting them over the top in their first primary victories over powerful Democratic incumbents.A variety of forces is straining the center-left coalition.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiries:Many White liberals live in enclaves of affluence, sheltered from the economic and personal insecurity of the low-income communities. They are more strongly motivated by identity issues around gender and race, but are less concerned with poverty or economic insecurity issues than liberals in the sixties.As a result, in Cain’s view:Parts of the Democratic coalition are talking past each other and sometimes clashing. In the case of climate change, white liberals want to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles that most low-income nonwhites cannot afford. During Covid, affluent white liberals could work at home and have food delivered to them by nonwhite workers who left the food packages at their doorstep or who had to go to work and suffer higher rates of illness.When all said and done, “White liberals are still a better deal for nonwhites than the Republican Party,” Cain contended, “but it is revealing that the African Americans in South Carolina preferred Biden to Sanders or Warren.”The liberalism of white Democrats cuts across a wide range of issues. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited data collected by the Cooperative Election Study:In 2020 white Democrats scored similarly low on racial resentment as Black Democrats. And white Democrats actually have significantly lower levels of sexism than Black or Hispanic Democrats. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party was indeed fairly divided on issues of race in particular, but that no longer seems to be the case.Now, Schaffner continued, “white Democrats appear to be the most liberal group in the party on a range of issues, including immigration, climate, crime/policing, abortion, health care, gun control and economic/social welfare.”I asked James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, how the meaning of “liberal” changed over the past 40 years. He replied:The term has become infused with racial content. That may be the key to the conversion of educated suburban voters into liberals and Democrats. Trump’s open racism must surely have added greatly to the new meaning of liberalism. Perhaps the L-word has become a way to say, “I am not a bigot.”Along similar lines, Viviana Rivera-Burgos, a political scientist at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pointed out how much the liberal agenda has transformed in a relatively short time:Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, and immigration have become important ideological cleavages in the past 40 years or so. Being a liberal today means you’re most likely pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-restrictive or punitive immigration laws. These issue positions couldn’t be inferred based on someone’s ideology alone 40 years ago.Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, argued in an email that there is a danger of overemphasizing the liberal tilt of the Democratic electorate:Although the percentage of Democrats calling themselves liberal has grown over the past three decades, it still remains true that only about half of self-described party members identify that way — in contrast to Republican voters, about 80 percent of whom call themselves conservative. So Democrats have long had and continue to have a more ideologically diverse coalition to assemble, with nearly half of the party calling themselves moderate or conservative.Erickson did not hesitate, however, to describe the party’s educated left wing asoverrepresented in the media, on Twitter, and in positions of power. That group is loud and more culturally liberal, though they often purport to speak or act on behalf of communities of color. Meanwhile, the African American and Latino voters who deliver victories to Democratic candidates in nearly every race have remained much more ideologically mixed.“If we continue to let white liberals on Twitter define what it means to be a Democrat,” Erickson warned her fellow Democrats, “we are going to continue to alienate the voters of color who are essential majority makers in our coalition. While the Twitterati wants to ‘Defund the Police,’ communities of color want their neighborhoods to be safe — both from police violence AND violent crime.”To build her case, Erickson cited that role of minority voters in the last New York City mayoral election: “They elected Eric Adams and rejected the far-left candidates whose voting blocs were made up primarily of white liberals,” noting that “Adams outpaced Maya Wiley by 23 points with Black voters and 10 points with Hispanic voters.”In local elections in 2021, Erickson continued, Black voters “rejected a measure in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, to defund the police: According to ward-level data, the predominantly Black Wards 4 and 5 rejected the Minneapolis ballot measure by wide margins (over 60 percent voted no), while predominantly white wards drove the measure’s support.Erickson suggested that the culturally liberal tilt of the party’s left wing was a factor in declining minority support:Case in point: Democrats dropped nine percentage points with non-college voters of color between 2012 and 2020, falling from 84 percent support in 2012 to 75 percent in 2020, according to Catalist. This was most pronounced with non-college men of color who went from 81 percent Democratic in 2012 to 69 percent in 2020.These losses reflect “a divergence in priorities and values,” Erickson wrote, citing poll data showing thatwhile Democratic primary voters say hard work is no guarantee of success, Black voters disagree — saying most people can get ahead in America if they work hard, and that by a two-to-one margin, Black Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to have good morals. Democratic primary voters of all races disagree with that statement by similar margins.While the party is divided on values and priorities, Erickson pointed out that Democrats in Congress have reached general agreement on many issues that were highly divisive in the past:There is only one pro-life Democrat left in Congress, and today’s moderate Democrats are loudly supportive of reproductive rights. There are no more NRA-endorsed Democrats on the Hill, and if gun safety legislation were brought up tomorrow, every single Democrat in federal office would support it. Similarly, every Democrat not only supported the Respect for Marriage Act but would’ve likely gone further to explicitly codify marriage equality into law at the federal level.The major intraparty conflicts that remain, Erickson wrote,are concentrated around two big questions. One is a process question: Do you believe progress is achieved by incremental steps or revolutionary change? The other is a values question: do you believe that, with some basic policy reforms, our economic system can deliver a good life to those who work hard in this country, or rather that it needs to be torn down and fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up?The transition from a partisan division among white voters based on economic class to one based on level of educational attainment has had substantial consequences for the legislative priorities of the Democratic Party.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out in an email that “the class base of the parties has atrophied” with the result that “the party system in the U.S. simply does not represent that ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots.’ Both parties represent a mix of haves and have-nots in economic terms.”Because the Democratic Party must hold down “a coalition of upper-income whites and minority constituencies across all income groups,” Lee wrote, party leadersare likely to prioritize issues that do not pit the well-off against the poor very directly, such as the rights agenda (e.g., voting rights, abortion, gays and lesbians) and climate/environment. Democrats in government are unlikely to genuinely prioritize the economic interests of low-income and working-class voters, because those voters simply do not represent a majority of their party’s coalition.As an example, Lee wrote, “Current Democrats are much more concerned about forgiving student loans than about the majority of voters who will not or did not go to college.”What, then, is likely to happen in the Democratic ranks?The reality, as summed up by Ryan Enos, is that for all their problems,The Democrats are clearly the majority party and may be a experiencing an unparalleled period of dominance: since 1992, a period of 30 years, Republicans have only won a majority of popular presidential votes once — in 2004 and that was during the extraordinary time of two overseas wars.For the moment, the Democratic coalition — with all its built-in conflicts between a relatively affluent, well-educated, largely white wing, on the one hand, and an economically precarious, heavily minority, but to some degree ascendant electorate on the other — remains a functional political institution.“In this sense,” Enos told me, “it’s important not to overstate the damage that some perceive liberalism as having done to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes.”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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      Donald Trump Isn’t the Only One to Blame for the Capitol Riot. I’d Know.

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      I spent 12 months holed up in a windowless cubical den or locked in my home office investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol and working on a report that my fellow investigators and I thought would blow open the story. When it was released, the press described it as “monumental.” This paper called it “damning.” And it was — for former President Donald Trump, since he bears primary responsibility for the attempted insurrection. But the report could only tell part of the story.Other political, social, economic and technological forces beyond the former president had a hand, whether intentionally or not, in radicalizing thousands of people into thinking they needed to attack the seat of American democracy. Only by understanding how those people lost faith in our governing institutions can we as a country figure out how to protect our democracy from threats like the attack on the Capitol.As an investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 Committee’s “Red” Team, which investigated the people who planned and attended the riot, as well as the domestic extremist groups responsible for much of the violence, I tracked more than 900 individuals charged by the Department of Justice with everything from parading in the Capitol to seditious conspiracy. We interviewed roughly 30 of those defendants about their motives. What my team and I learned, and what we did not have the capacity to detail with specificity in the report, is how distrust of the political establishment led many of the rioters to believe that only revolution could save America.It wasn’t just that they wanted to contest a supposedly stolen election as Mr. Trump called them to do, they wanted to punish the judges, members of Congress, and law enforcement agencies — the so-called political elites — who had discredited Mr. Trump’s claims. One rioter wondered why he should trust anything the F.B.I., D.O.J., or any other federal entity said about the results. The federal government had worked against everyday Americans for years, the rioters told us, favoring entrenched elites with its policies. For many defendants — both those awash in conspiracy theories, as well as some of the more reasonable Trump supporters at the Capitol that day — a stolen election was simply the logical conclusion of years of federal malfeasance.With the legitimacy of democracy so degraded, revolution appeared logical. As Russell James Peterson, a rioter who pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in the Capitol, said on Dec. 4, 2020, “the only way to restore balance and peace is through war. Too much trust has been lost in our great nation.” Guy Reffitt, who earned seven years in prison for leading the charge up the Capitol steps while carrying a firearm, made a similar case later that month: “The government has spent decades committing treason.” The following week, he drove 20 hours to “do what needs to be done” because there were “bad people,” “disgusting people,” in the Capitol. Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes, like their leader Stewart Rhodes, had long believed that a corrupt group of left-wing elites were preparing to upend American freedoms and that only militias like themselves could save the Constitution. Their loss of faith in the federal government had led them to the delusion that their seditious behavior to keep Mr. Trump in power was patriotic.Strikingly, these comments came not only from domestic violent extremists; some came from people who appeared to be ordinary Americans. Dona Sue Bissey, a grandmother and hair salon owner from Indiana, said shortly after the attack that she was “very glad” to have been a part of the insurrection; Anthony Robert Williams, a painter from Michigan, called Jan. 6 the “proudest day of my life.”Since the 1960s, political scientists have surveyed Americans and measured the steady decline of public faith in the federal government. Again and again, they have described the predictable consequences of people believing that the deliberative system has lost its legitimacy; almost always, they will turn to alternative means to get what they want, even if it means destroying their government in the process. The attack on the Capitol was a perfect example. William Dunfee, an Ohio pastor facing felony and misdemeanor charges, told his congregation on Dec. 27, 2020, that settling “your differences at the ballot” did not work, so they should make the “government, the tyrants, the socialists, the Marxists, the progressives, the RINOs” in Washington “fear” them.Some have criticized our report because it focused on Mr. Trump and his Big Lie instead of diving more deeply into other causes, such as declining faith in government or racial resentment or economic inequality, which pushed people to believe patriotism required storming the Capitol. Far from ignoring those concepts, we have released many of our documents publicly and archived the rest so that historians, political scientists, sociologists and many others can scrutinize our findings in ways we could not, examining the causes and consequences of Jan. 6 with a longer time horizon than we had.Our report proposed several straightforward fixes to prevent another sitting president from contesting a fair election. But solving the core problem — lost faith in government — will take more time, and a battery of far more complex remedies.The most important step elected officials can take — aside from choosing not to undermine our institutions for their own political gain — is to advance a comprehensive set of election and campaign finance reforms to make politicians more responsive to their constituents than to the money and voices of the few. Congress could also create universal election rules that encourage all citizens to vote while reassuring a skeptical public that the elections are secure. But beyond that, our leaders need to build trust broadly by tackling economic inequality and reinvesting in communities devastated by globalization and technological changes. At the most basic level, politicians should refocus locally on building roads, lowering crime and revitalizing small business districts, instead of looking for votes by harping on divisive national topics.Such reforms would not be a silver bullet. A few of the defendants we interviewed complained of being misled by social media, which seems to have pushed them into conspiracy theory rabbit holes like QAnon. Many also had not-quite-veiled racial resentments that drove their lack of faith in government. But at the very least, these reforms might begin to convince citizens that their government works for them, not just the rich and powerful. Once we can restore that baseline trust, we can better avoid future attacks, both physical and intangible, on our democracy.Mr. Trump did not appear out of a vacuum to upend democracy. His presidency was the culmination of years of political degradation during which voters watched our political institutions rust to the point of breaking. Like any good liar, Mr. Trump succeeded by building his lies off a truth; people no longer trust the federal government because they see its corroded institutions as corrupted for the few against the many. Until we fix that problem, we will not free ourselves from the threat of future political violence and upheaval worse than Jan. 6.James Sasso served as senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee.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 Support Is Eroding in an Republican National Committee He Remade

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      Interviews with more than a third of the Republican National Committee’s members point to a desire for an alternative presidential nominee to emerge from a competitive primary.As Donald J. Trump prepares for his first public events since announcing his presidential campaign, dozens of members of the Republican Party’s governing body are expressing doubts about his ability to win back the White House and are calling for a competitive primary to produce a stronger nominee in 2024.The 168 members of the Republican National Committee are gathering in Southern California to select their own leader on Friday, and interviews this week with 59 of them — more than one-third of the committee’s membership — found few eager to crown Mr. Trump their nominee for a third time. While they praised his policies and accomplishments as president, many expressed deep concerns about his age (he’s 76), temperament and ability to win a general election, often in unusually blunt terms.“This isn’t 2016,” said Mac Brown, the chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky. “People have moved on.”Jonathan Barnett, an R.N.C. member from Arkansas who claims to have been the first member of the committee to endorse Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the party would benefit from its nominee being forced to navigate a crowded primary field.“I’ve been a supporter of Donald Trump in the past,” Mr. Barnett said. “I just think that we need choices this time. We’ve got to look at all of our options.”The motivation to leave Mr. Trump behind is not ideological but political, the party leaders said: They worry he can’t win.“Everybody is very appreciative of Trump, and he did a lot of great things,” said Art Wittich, an R.N.C. member from Montana who said Mr. Trump was not best positioned to win the general election. “There’s this burning desire to win in 2024, and that’s what’s going to drive a lot of the action.”One year before the first presidential nominating contests are set to begin, Republicans eager for Trump alternatives are seeking candidates who could capture the populism animating his base without replicating the chaos that characterized his administration. First mentioned is almost always Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, though members cited other would-be rivals, including Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, both alumni of the Trump administration.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is viewed as Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, a year before any voting will be held.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe departure of many R.N.C. members from the former president, after moving in lock step with him for more than six years, is even more extraordinary given how many of them owe their own positions to him and his supporters.The R.N.C. has been transformed during the Trump era: Of the 168 members, 99 joined the committee since Mr. Trump seized the party’s presidential nomination in 2016. Dozens of the establishment-minded members with ties to the Bush and McCain political dynasties were cast aside by their state parties and replaced by Trump loyalists. That left the former president with what was seen as rock-solid standing during his time in and out of office.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.G.O.P. Power Struggle: In rural Pennsylvania, a fight between three warring factions is a microcosm of the national struggle for control over the Republican Party.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.A Key Senate Contest: Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat, said that he would run for the Senate in 2024 in a potential face-off with Senator Kyrsten Sinema.Democratic Trifectas: After winning full power in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.“Did I vote for Trump in 2016? You bet. Did I vote for him in 2020? You bet,” said Hank McCann, who joined the R.N.C. from Delaware in 2020. “Now, I don’t know. I think we’ve got probably 10 candidates that can win.”The New York Times called, emailed or texted all 168 R.N.C. members. Just four offered an unabashed endorsement of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign. Twenty said the former president should not be the party’s nominee. An additional 35 said they would like to see a big primary field or declined to state their position on Mr. Trump. The remainder did not respond to messages.In interviews, some R.N.C. members estimated that between 120 and 140 of them preferred someone besides Mr. Trump to be their party’s presidential nominee.The defections of so many are particularly striking given the R.N.C.’s leading role in defending Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — last February the party declared the events that led to the attack “legitimate political discourse.” Now, committee members complained about the decision to fund Mr. Trump’s personal legal defense bills, including attorneys’ fees for criminal investigations into his businesses in New York, for months until he announced his candidacy in November.Mr. Trump was the first candidate to announce a 2024 campaign, in November at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersMr. Trump’s polarized political standing and effort to return to the White House have plunged the party into a deeply unpredictable landscape, a situation unlike any since 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt to recapture the presidency split the Republican Party four years after he left office.Mr. Trump enters the race as the party’s front-runner and owns by far the most robust fund-raising apparatus. Yet many R.N.C. members said he had nonetheless taken on the image of a loser after his 2020 defeat to President Biden, who is expected to announce his own re-election bid in the coming months. Mr. Trump’s subsequent refusal to accept the results and his endorsements of G.O.P. candidates in 2022 who stressed their devotion to him — and then lost seats in key battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — have some saying they are ready for a divorce.“To win 50 percent plus one in the Electoral College requires us to find an alternative and I think we’ve got plenty of good choices,” said John Hammond, an R.N.C. member from Indiana. “We can’t be a cult of personality any longer.”Speaking to one another, members of the committee can be even more blunt. The R.N.C.’s rules dictate that it is neutral in primaries, but members are free to back whomever they like.“I supported Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, but it is clearly time for the Republican Party to move on from Donald Trump,” Oscar Brock, an R.N.C. member from Tennessee, wrote last week in a mass email to other members that was first reported by The Washington Post. “I know many of you feel the same way I do.”Mr. Trump still maintains a loyal following. Already, he has picked up endorsements in South Carolina from Gov. Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham and will be delivering a keynote address Saturday to the New Hampshire Republican Party, whose chairman, Stephen Stepanek, remains a key supporter. The most recent polling shows Mr. Trump leading Mr. DeSantis in the primary, a shift from late last year when Mr. DeSantis had a small lead.Those seeking a new nominee say they object to Mr. Trump’s temperament and his focus on the 2020 election. By and large, they remain supportive of the stances on foreign policy, immigration, trade and cultural issues that powered his campaign and transformed the party’s ideology.Mr. Trump lost support last year as his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were broadcast to millions by a House committee.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Trump has been counted out so many times it has become a political cliché. Republican lawmakers, officials and strategists predicted his political demise after he made racist remarks about a federal judge’s ancestry, after the release of video in which he crudely boasted about grabbing women, when he authorized a program to separate migrant children from their families and following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.“President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and anyone who questions that is simply living in a false reality,” said Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman. “President Trump leads in the polls by wide margins and there is no other person who can generate the type of excitement and enthusiasm as he can.”The openness with which some R.N.C. members are now willing to speak out against Mr. Trump is new. Officials who once rolled their eyes and privately criticized Mr. Trump no longer fear repercussions from doing so publicly.There are other signs that Mr. Trump may face cracks in the foundation of his political coalition. His support has been wavering among evangelical voters, whose backing provided a crucial push in his 2016 victory. The divides with evangelicals over abortion and other issues burst into the open this month when Mr. Trump accused them of “disloyalty.” And Mr. Trump lost some support last year as his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were broadcast to millions by a House committee.Surveys show, and strategists note, that Mr. Trump commands the loyalty of roughly one-third to 40 percent of Republican primary voters. Even as some former supporters say he should not be the nominee, Mr. Trump’s loyalists cannot fathom the idea of someone else taking the reins from him as the party’s leader.“He needs to come back and finish what he started,” said Fanchon Blythe, an R.N.C. member from Nebraska who helped lead a Trumpian takeover of the Nebraska G.O.P. last summer. “DeSantis, stay in your own lane. Stay in Florida. Come back in 2028 if you want to run for president.”Mr. Trump is “an icon,” Shelly Gibson, an R.N.C. member from Guam, said in an interview during a layover in her 30-hour trip to California. “He sets a tone of pride. He has touched the hearts of citizens who felt forgotten and found a place they fit.”Surveys and strategists say Mr. Trump still commands the loyalty of roughly one-third to 40 percent of Republican primary voters.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s support, along with an implicit threat that his backers would abandon any other nominee, could be enough to fend off a crowded field, a strategy that lifted him to the nomination in 2016.Party officials and front-runner candidates often worry about a crowded primary field, fearing such contests could weaken the eventual nominee by forcing the candidate to court their party’s fringe with positions that hurt them in the general election. But for candidates untested in the combative sport of presidential politics, primaries can serve as a crucial testing ground. The strongest candidates typically improve over the course of a primary and enter the general election ready to compete.Even R.N.C. members who have been among the biggest Trump cheerleaders are reluctant to get behind his latest presidential campaign.Ed Broyhill, a North Carolina R.N.C. member who was the state’s finance chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign, said he had met with both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Pence, and plans to contribute to them should they run. Cindy Costa, who served as a Trump elector from South Carolina in 2020, said she was going into the primary with an open mind prepared to back the winner.Carson Jorgensen, the Utah G.O.P. chairman, said, “I was a big supporter of the president in 2016 and in 2020.” But now, Mr. Jorgensen said, he’s staying out of the primary. “I just want to keep my thumb off of it and let the people decide.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      Atlanta D.A. Wants Grand Jury Findings Kept Private in Trump Inquiry

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      The prosecutor asked that a report on efforts to overturn former President Donald J. Trump’s election loss not be released, saying that she was “mindful of protecting future defendants’ rights.”Fani T. Willis, the local prosecutor overseeing the investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, asked a judge in Atlanta on Tuesday not to make public the findings of a special grand jury that heard months of testimony in the case, saying that she was “mindful of protecting future defendants’ rights.”In a two-hour hearing before Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, Ms. Willis argued that disclosing the jury’s recently completed investigative report could complicate potential efforts to seek indictments.“We want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly,” Ms. Willis said, “and we think for future defendants to be treated fairly it is not appropriate at this time to have this report released.”Judge McBurney said he would rule on the matter at a later date. The Trump team did not send a lawyer to the hearing, but a lawyer representing a coalition of news organizations asked Judge McBurney to make the report public.Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the criminal investigation, as well as others, could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Will Trump Face Criminal Charges in Georgia Election Inquiry?

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      The House Jan. 6 committee report offered fresh evidence that former President Donald J. Trump was at the center of efforts to overturn election results in Georgia.A few weeks after losing the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, with a plan for keeping himself in office. During the call, he asked John C. Eastman, an architect of the strategy, to lay it out: Trump supporters in states that the president had lost would act as if they were official Electoral College delegates, an audacious scheme to circumvent voters.After the plan was put in motion, Ms. McDaniel forwarded an “elector recap” report to Mr. Trump’s executive assistant, who replied soon after, “It’s in front of him!”Such details, from the report released in December by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, offer fresh evidence that Mr. Trump was not on the periphery of the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia but at the center of it.For the last two years, prosecutors in Atlanta have been conducting a criminal investigation into whether the Trump team interfered in the presidential election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. With the wide-ranging inquiry now entering the indictment phase, the central question is whether Mr. Trump himself will face criminal charges.Legal analysts who have followed the case say there are two areas of considerable risk for Mr. Trump. The first are the calls that he made to state officials, including one to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he needed to “find” 11,780 votes. But the recently released Jan. 6 committee transcripts shed new light on the other area of potential legal jeopardy for the former president: his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors in the weeks after the 2020 election.The Atlanta prosecutors have moved more quickly than the Department of Justice, where a special counsel, Jack Smith, was recently appointed to oversee Trump-related investigations. This month, the Fulton County Superior Court disbanded a special grand jury after it produced an investigative report on the case, concluding months of private testimony from dozens of Trump allies, state officials and other witnesses.Election personnel count absentee ballots in Atlanta in November 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe report remains secret, although a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine if any or all of it will be made public. Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the investigation could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, will need to make her case to a regular grand jury if she seeks indictments, which would likely come by May. That means the nation could be in for months more waiting and speculating, particularly if a judge decides after this week’s hearing not to make public the report’s recommendations.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in a statement Monday that they would not be at Tuesday’s hearing, adding that Mr. Trump “was never subpoenaed nor asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More