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      While Democrats Debate ‘Latinx,’ Latinos Head to the G.O.P.

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      Democrats working to save their slim majority in the House in November’s elections have been sounding alarm bells lately over research showing that Republican attacks on culture-war issues are working, particularly with center-left, Hispanic and independent voters. Hispanic voters, many of us alienated by progressive labels and mottos like “Latinx” and “defund the police,” have been drifting rightward as Donald Trump marginally increased the G.O.P. Hispanic vote share in 2016 and again in 2020 — a phenomenon, it should be noted, that goes beyond Mr. Trump or any individual campaign.Democrats now understand that they are losing support among Hispanics on culture as well as pocketbook issues, leaving little in the message arsenal for the party’s candidates to use to stanch what appears to be a long-term bleed.The Democrats’ problems with Hispanics are especially glaring when you consider that Republicans are not exactly flawless when it comes to appealing to these voters. Both parties have committed a mind-boggling form of political malpractice for years: They have consistently failed to understand what motivates Hispanic voters, a crucial and growing part of the electorate.As the growth of the Hispanic eligible electorate continues to outpace other new eligible voting populations, the caricatures and stereotypes of “Hispanic issues” are proving further and further removed from the experience of most Hispanics. Yet, for all the hype and spin about Republican gains with Hispanic voters, the rightward shift of these voters is happening despite Republicans’ best efforts, not because of them.In the eyes of some on the American right, Hispanics are hyper-religious Catholics or evangelicals, entrepreneurial, anti-communist, social conservatives reminiscent of the ethnic white voters of yesteryear. To some on the left, we’re seen as angry, racially oppressed workers of the cultural vanguard who want to upend capitalism while demanding open borders. While none of these caricatures are accurate, in them there are enough grains of truth to lull self-righteous partisans on both sides into believing that they may be on the winning side of the emerging ethnically pluralistic American majority.In our current era of negative partisanship, voters are as often motivated to oppose the party they dislike or view as extreme as they are to support the party with which they align. Latinos, of course, are no different, and it is at the cultural extremes where Democrats face the greatest threat to losing what they have long viewed as the foundational base of their long-term majority prospects. As “culture” grows as a proxy for “race,” the electoral math for Democrats will most likely get bleaker as political campaigns continue as referendums on “critical race theory” and “defunding the police.” It will be worse still if Hispanics increasingly do not view themselves as an aggrieved racial minority.This understanding will help determine which party controls Congress and the White House, beginning with the 2022 midterms. Under newly drawn district lines, four of the most competitive House seats will have Hispanic populations of at least 38 percent and are in California, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Additionally, Hispanic voters will be essential components of Senate and other statewide contests in Arizona and Nevada. The Latino voters in these states and districts are important for both parties. As the Democratic Party drifts away from its working-class roots and emphasizes cultural issues, Republicans are well positioned to pick up these politically untethered voters and with them the reins of power.The recent debate over the term “Latinx” symbolizes the cultural alienation of institutions far removed from the realities of life for an overwhelming number of working-class Hispanics. “Latinx” was created as a gender-neutral alternative term in Spanish, a gendered language, that refers to males as “Latino” and females as “Latina’.”Commonly used by media, political and academic elites as a sign of gender inclusivity, it is virtually nonexistent in the communities it refers to. In 2020 Pew Research revealed that only 3 percent of Latinos use the term, while 9 percent of white liberals think it is the most appropriate term to use. In fact, only 14 percent of Latinos with just a high school degree or less had even heard of it.This was not a sign of intolerance but rather was emblematic of one class with the luxury of being consumed with such matters trying to impose their values on working-class families trying to keep up with paying the rent on Friday. Members of the Democratic Party don’t just live in a distinct cultural bubble removed from the realities of their blue-collar counterparts, they are so removed from the rapidly growing Hispanic working class that many of them are now literally speaking a different language.The growing cultural divide in America, in which Hispanics appear to be increasingly turned off by progressive mottos and movements, is linked to the education divide in America between college-educated and noncollege-educated voters of all ethnicities. According to Pew Research, Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among white noncollege voters, who make up 57 percent of all G.O.P. voters. This in a country where 64 percent of voters do not have a college degree.The Democratic Party is losing its brand among white, working-class voters and Hispanics. This is especially pronounced among Hispanic men and Hispanic noncollege-educated voters, who are trending more Republican, just as their white noncollege-educated peers are. Latinos are increasingly voting similarly to noncollege whites, perhaps because they don’t view themselves all that differently from them. Pew Research studies on Hispanic identity have shown that fully half of the country’s Hispanics view themselves as “a typical American”; fewer responded as identifying as “very different from a typical American.”For all the discussion about diversity within the Latino community, and the now-trite adage that the community is not ‘‘monolithic,’’ in fact what unites most Hispanics is that they are an important share of the blue-collar noncollege-educated work force, and their presence in the labor force is only growing. The “essential workers” of the pandemic are disproportionately Black and Latino, and as a decidedly younger demographic, Hispanic workers are filling the roles of manufacturing, agricultural and construction trades in states with large Hispanic populations.Democrats have increasingly become a party shaped by and reliant upon white voters with college degrees. Compared with 40.1 percent of white adults age 25 and older, only 18.8 percent of Latino adults in this age group have a bachelor’s degree. Latinos are, and increasingly will be, a key part of the blue-collar work force of the future and their politics are reflecting that.From 71 percent support for President Barack Obama in 2012 to 66 percent for Hillary Clinton and 59 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats find themselves slowly but measurably losing hold of Latinos, the fastest-growing segment of the electorate. As Latino voters grow in number in key battleground states, they are increasingly rejecting the minority construct promulgated by the media, academia and Democratic politicians and consultants.The party that is able to express the values of a multiethnic working class will be the majority party for the next generation. As we continue to watch the country’s culture war increasingly divided by education levels, it is quite likely that Latino voters will continue to trend, even if marginally, into the ranks of Republican voters. The country stands on the precipice of a significant political shift. As President Ronald Reagan once quipped, quoting a Republican sheriff nominee, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”Mike Madrid is an expert in Latino voting trends, was a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, where he taught “Race, Class and Partisanship,” and is on the board of directors of the League of Minority Voters.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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      Shadows of Algerian War Loom Over Election Campaign in France

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      As President Emmanuel Macron addresses his country’s colonial history, echoes of that past have pervaded the messaging of right-wing candidates ahead of the voting in April.PARIS — Grim conspiracy theories about replacing white, Christian French with Muslims from North Africa. Vows to limit immigration from the region. And the evocation of memories of a supposedly glorious colonial past in Algeria.While President Emmanuel Macron of France has tried over the past year to address the painful memories of his country’s colonial history in Algeria, the long shadows of that past — provoked by such messages — have increasingly pervaded the campaigns of right-wing candidates in next month’s presidential elections.In the fall, one far-right candidate, Éric Zemmour, said, “France does not have to welcome and keep all the criminals from North Africa.” Another, Marine Le Pen, said on Friday that memories could not be reconciled “by scourging ourselves in front of Algeria.”Mr. Macron’s attempts to heal the wounds of France’s colonization of Algeria have included acknowledging crimes committed by the French military and by the police, recognizing France’s lack of regard for former settlers and Algerians who had fought for the country, and easing access to archives related to the war.Those efforts continued on Saturday with an official commemoration on the 60th anniversary of the Évian Accords, which brought an end to the war for Algerian independence, and with a speech by Mr. Macron at the Élysée Palace in which he said, “The Algerian war, its unsaid things, had become — and still are when I listen to our news — the matrix of resentments.”Karim Amellal, a French-Algerian member of the government’s so-called Memories and Truth Commission on Algeria, said that Mr. Macron wanted to “untangle a knot that is the source of many problems, many stereotypes, many tensions.”But those reconciliation efforts have been mainly drowned out in a presidential campaign that has been dominated by heated debates on immigration and identity, themes heavily entwined with France’s colonial past in Algeria.Éric Zemmour, a far-right presidential candidate in France, has cited the “great replacement” conspiracy theory during the election campaign. Valentine Chapuis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe legacy of Algeria has perhaps been most evident in the phrase “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory claiming that white Christians were being replaced by nonwhite immigrants. The concept was popularized during the campaign by Mr. Zemmour, whose Jewish family comes from Algeria, and then picked up by Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the mainstream right, in coded attacks on Muslim immigrants.Sylvie Thénault, a historian of the Algerian war at CNRS, a national public research organization, said, “Today, behind the support for the great replacement idea, there is this past of French Algeria which is at play.” She described such notions as the “legacy of this French minority in Algeria for whom Algerian population growth was a threat.”Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On Stage: As the vote approaches, theaters and comedy venues are tackling the campaign with one message: Don’t trust politicians. Behind the Scene: In France, where political finance laws are strict, control over the media has provided an avenue for billionaires to influence the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.Green Concerns: Despite the increasing prominence of environmental themes in France, the Green Party’s campaign has failed to generate excitement among voters.At the end of the 1950s, there were about 8.5 million Muslim residents of Algeria, and about a million settlers of European descent, known as Pieds-Noirs.The colonization of Algeria, and the 1954-62 war of independence that followed, ripped French society apart, opening up crises of identity that continue to shape France and drive its politics, with nostalgia and resentment still brewing among the seven million residents of the country who have ties to Algeria, including war veterans, families of immigrants and descendants of colonists.Mr. Zemmour, whose parents left Algeria just before the war, said in 2018 that immigration and the rise of Islam in France were like a “second episode of the Algerian war.” At a news conference in January, he said that “there is no French guilt” regarding colonization, claiming that it had brought roads, hospitals and oil wells to Algeria.Repatriated people arriving in Marseille, France, in July 1962, after fleeing Algeria.Gamma-Keystone, via Getty ImagesMany of the ideological conflicts that colored the war — such as the struggle over whether French identity could expand to include Muslim Algerians — have been imported onto French soil. Benjamin Stora, a French historian of colonial Algeria, has compared this phenomenon to the legacy of the American Civil War, which still impacts race issues in the United States.Central to what Mr. Stora calls a “memory transfer” from colonial Algeria to contemporary France are the political figures that today drive the public debate. Many of them are intimately tied to Algeria, like Mr. Zemmour is.The father of Ms. Le Pen fought as a paratrooper during the Algerian war and was accused of torturing prisoners. The far-right party he founded, today known as the National Rally, was rooted in popular opposition to the end of colonial Algeria, and several of its current leaders are descendants of French settlers.Even inside Mr. Macron’s government, some ministers have expressed concerns about attempts to examine France’s colonial legacy. Prime Minister Jean Castex, whose father fought in the war, criticized those who say “we should blame ourselves, regret colonization.” The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, whose father was a prominent leader of the Pieds-Noirs community, has long opposed post-colonial studies, saying that they undermined French society.The far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, center, in Armentières, France, last week. Her National Rally party has its roots in popular opposition to the end of colonial Algeria.Jaak Moineau/Hans Lucas, via ReutersPolitical campaigns, according to Mr. Amellal of the Memories and Truth Commission, “are fields of expression where Algeria comes back obsessively within the far right” — but not only there.Mr. Macron said on Saturday that his efforts over the past year had been intended “to forget nothing, to deny nothing of the irreducible nature of the sufferings, of the pains, of what has been experienced, but to assume that they are all French.”Who Is Running for President of France?Card 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      Australia Asks: How Far Is Too Far in Making China a Campaign Weapon?

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      Australia’s conservative government has claimed, without evidence, that the political opposition would cozy up to Beijing. To many, it has crossed a red line.MELBOURNE, Australia — A group of middle-aged Chinese Australians logged onto Zoom to step, kick and punch through their regular exercise class one day late last month. Then they lingered online to despair at the government’s attempt to turn China into a campaign weapon.After years of deteriorating relations between the two countries, the seven men and women in Melbourne were resigned to the fact that China would become a political wedge in the federal election due by May. But when Prime Minister Scott Morrison questioned the allegiance of a leader of the opposition Labor Party by accusing him of being a “Manchurian candidate,” that felt like a step too far.“I was shocked and surprised that he would go so low,” said Anne Pang, 63, the class’s instructor, who runs the Barry Pang Kung Fu School with her husband and is a leader in the Chinese Australian community. “It was totally uncalled-for and totally un-Australian.”The concern across Melbourne and the rest of Australia’s large Chinese diaspora reflects the intense emotions and risks associated with the Morrison government’s attempt to exploit rising fears of China.For months, Australia’s governing conservative coalition has been trying to deflect from its domestic vulnerabilities by laying out a case for re-election that suggests its opponents will cozy up to a powerful and dangerous Chinese government.Prime Minister Scott Morrison, left, and the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Anthony Albanese.Sam Mooy/Getty ImagesRecent evidence says otherwise: Labor has been a partner in toughening foreign interference laws and joined the coalition in every recent standoff with China, over tariffs, detentions and human rights. The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, has said his party would deal with Beijing “in a mature way” but would not significantly alter the government’s approach.That has not stopped the coalition from issuing louder and more ominous claims about foreign threats and supposed domestic collusion as it has faced criticism over its handling of the Omicron outbreak and sexual harassment cases in Parliament.It’s led to whisper campaigns against Labor candidates of Chinese descent in Sydney, along with intense disappointment among those who generally support the government’s desire to stand up to Beijing, but want Australia to dig deeper into the policy challenges that Xi Jinping’s China represents.“It’s unhealthy and unhelpful,” said Wai Ling Yeung, a former head of Chinese studies at Curtin University in Perth who contributed to a new report about Chinese influence. “The kind of reflection we need to have is about how much have we in Australia made our economy reliant on China? How did we not diversify, and what are the lessons we could learn now from this experience?”Mr. Morrison — often celebrated by American officials for his handling of Beijing — “has lost control of any prudent or rational dimension in his approach to China,” said James Curran, a history professor at the University of Sydney who is writing a book about Australia’s China debate.“What’s going on here is a mark of sheer desperation,” he added. “He’s on the political back foot, and he’s looking for anything that will work.”Mr. Morrison’s rush down what Mr. Curran called “the new Cold Warrior’s path” has mostly involved following the hawks within his own center-right and often divided Liberal Party. Peter Dutton, Australia’s defense minister and a rival of Mr. Morrison’s, has led the charge, warning that Chinese missiles could reach Australia, then declaring in Parliament in February that Chinese officials see Mr. Albanese, the Labor Party leader, “as their pick.”Mongolian construction workers last week at Wentworth Point in Sydney, an area with a significant Asian population.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesMr. Morrison, after previously resisting such language, seemed eager to outdo Mr. Dutton, tossing out the “Manchurian candidate” line, which he later retracted, only to repeat his claim (without evidence) that the Chinese government wants Labor to win.In an isolated country with a history of xenophobia, the political gambit is built on a mix of tried-and-true scare tactics and cherry-picked facts.The Australian authorities, in public statements and leaks, reported last month that China was behind a recent plot to influence the election. But the officials also said that the plot had been foiled before any politicians or parties knew about it, and that foreign interference efforts had targeted both parties in the past.Mr. Morrison and his coalition are nonetheless seeking to make voters skeptical of Mr. Albanese, who has little international experience, and focus on their own efforts to counter China — including a partnership with Britain and the United States for nuclear submarines.The Morrison-Dutton pitch arrives at a moment of deep unease, with Russia invading Ukraine after announcing a closer partnership with Beijing. (This week, the prime minister accused China of abetting the bloodshed through its “chilling silence.”) And it builds on polls showing that Australians’ distrust of China has increasingly blurred the line between the Chinese government and anyone with links to the country.Australians in recent years have — often unfairly — blamed Chinese investors for rising property prices. And after Covid first spread from China, racist abuse against Asian Australians followed.In Melbourne, the men and women from the kung fu group told of receiving cold stares from strangers. Others who hadn’t personally had negative experiences pointed to stories from friends and in the media. They worried that the government’s heated language could embolden those who are not interested in distinguishing between the Chinese Communist Party and anyone who looks Chinese.Sally Sitou, second from right, a Labor candidate, meeting with local councillors and residents in Wentworth Point.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesIn Sydney, too, Chinese Australians said they saw perceptions change, hurting their sense of belonging.Sally Sitou, 39, a Labor candidate who is running for the federal Parliament, said that when Mr. Dutton and Mr. Morrison linked her party to Chinese Communists, her greatest fears about running for office had come to life.She was heartbroken again when conservative media outlets started attacking Mr. Albanese with a video of him at an event in 2018 speaking a few words of Mandarin, a language she wishes she spoke better and wants her young son to respect and learn.“It made me realize the depths to which they’re willing to go,” she said, “and how nasty this campaign is likely to get.”Craig Chung, a former Sydney city councilor and Liberal Party member whose family moved to Australia from China in 1882, said it had been “a difficult couple of years” for Chinese Australians. What people often forget, he added, is that “there’s a difference between sticking it to the Chinese people and sticking it to the Chinese government.”Mr. Dutton and Mr. Morrison have at times tried to make that distinction clear. About 5 percent of Australia’s population — 1.2 million people — claim Chinese heritage, and it’s a diverse group. It includes those who fled China after Tiananmen Square, others from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Vietnam, along with recent arrivals who came to Australia for college.But as Australia has challenged China and it has responded with punishing tariffs on Australian products including coal and wine, that complexity has been ironed flat.Jason Yat-sen Li, 50, a Labor candidate for the New South Wales state legislature, said his campaign saw the impact firsthand in his by-election victory last month. Volunteers for his Liberal Party opponent were overheard telling voters to question his loyalty to Australia even though he’d been born and educated in Sydney.“It wasn’t overt. It was done quietly,” Mr. Li said. “They were picking who they thought would be receptive to that message, and they would whisper things like ‘If you vote for Jason, you might be voting for the Chinese government.’”Chinese Australians say they have seen perceptions change in Sydney, hurting their sense of belonging.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesCriticism of the government’s tone extends beyond the political opposition.Dennis Richardson, a retired intelligence official who led several federal departments, said in an interview that by falsely suggesting that Labor favored appeasement, the government had crossed a “red line.”“China would like to see division, and it’s important that we not have that division,” he said.Whether the effort will work at the polls, no one yet knows.In the Melbourne kung fu group, some thought the situation might improve under a new government, but others worried that the ugly language could be dredged up again if either side needed help in the polls.Ms. Pang recalled the hostility she experienced when her family migrated to Australia from Taiwan in 1970, an era when policies that had restricted nonwhite immigration for decades were ending. Australia has become much more multicultural since then, but recently, she said, it has started to feel as if it is slipping backward.“I thought the times of the 1970s was gone in terms of racial discrimination,” she said. “But now I can see it quite vividly.”Yan Zhuang reported from Melbourne, and Damien Cave from Sydney. Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Sydney. More

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      Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?

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      Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — according to Pew, the fastest growing group in the country — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues.The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students.There is little question of the depth of liberal commitments among Asian Americans.“Do Asian Americans, a group marked by crosscutting demographic cleavages and distinct settlement histories, constitute a meaningful political category with shared policy views?” ask Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, and Sono Shah, a computer scientist at the Pew Research Center, in their 2021 paper “Convergence Across Difference: Understanding the Political Ties That Bind with the 2016 National Asian American Survey.”Their answer: “Political differences within the Asian American community are between those who are progressive and those who are even more so.”Wong and Shah cite a 2016 New York Times article by my news-side colleague Jeremy W. Peters, “Donald Trump Is Seen as Helping Push Asian Americans Into Democratic Arms”:In 1992, the year national exit polls started reporting Asian American sentiment, the group leaned Republican, supporting George Bush over Bill Clinton 55 percent to 31 percent. But by 2012, that had reversed. Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported President Obama over Mitt Romney — 73 percent to 26 percent.In their paper, Wong and Shah note that “despite critical differences in national origin, generation, class, and even partisanship, Asian Americans demonstrate a surprising degree of political commonality.”With regard to taxes, for example, “More than 75 percent of both Asian American Democrats and Republicans support increasing taxes on the rich to provide a tax cut for the middle class.”Or take support for strong emissions regulations to address environmental concerns. This has 78.3 percent support among Asian American Democrats and 76.9 percent among Asian American Republicans.In a 2021 paper, “Fault Lines Among Asian Americans,” Sunmin Kim — a sociologist at Dartmouth — found that Asian Americans took decisively liberal stands on Obamacare, admission of Syrian refugees, free college tuition, opposition to the Muslim immigration ban, environmental restrictions on power plants and government assistance to Black Americans. The only exception was legalization of marijuana, which received less support from Asian Americans than from any other group.In an email, Kim cited the declining importance of communism as a key factor in the changing partisan allegiance of Asian American voters. In the 1970s and 80s, he said, “Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese chose the party that had a reputation of being tougher on communism. Obviously, it was the Republican Party. Chinese immigrants, many of whom retained the memory of the Cultural Revolution, were not too different.” After the 1990s, he continued, “the children of immigrants who grew up and received education in the United States replace the first generation, and their outlook on politics is much different from their parents. They see themselves as a racial minority, and their high education level pushes them towards liberalism on many issues.”In short, Kim wrote: “the Cold War ended and a generational shift occurred.”Despite many shared values, there are divergences of opinion among Asian Americans on a number of issues, in part depending on the country of origin. These differences are clear in the results of the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, which was released in September 2020.Asked for their preference for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 54 percent of all Asian Americans chose Biden to 30 percent for Trump. Biden had majority support from Indian (65-28), Japanese (61-24), Korean (57-26), Chinese (56-20) and Filipino Americans (52-34). Vietnamese Americans were the lone exception, supporting Trump 48-36.At the moment, affirmative action admissions policies are a key issue testing Asian American support for the Democratic Party. In educational institutions as diverse as Harvard, San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Loudon County’s Thomas Jefferson High School and the most prestigious selective high schools in New York and Boston, conflict over educational resources between Asian American students and parents on one side and Black and Hispanic students and parents on the other has become endemic. Policies designed to increase Black and Hispanic access to high quality schools often result in a reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted.Despite this, the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey cited above found that 70 percent of Asian Americans said they “favor affirmative action programs designed to help Blacks, women and other minorities,” with 16 percent opposed. Indian Americans were strongest in their support, 86-9, while Chinese Americans were lowest, 56-25.These numbers appear to mask considerable ambivalence over affirmative action among Asian Americans when the question was posed not in the abstract but in the real world. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209 prohibiting government from implementing affirmative action policies, declaring that “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”In 2020, California voters were asked to support or oppose repeal of the anti-affirmative action measure — that is, to restore affirmative action. 36 percent of all Asian American voters said they would support restoration of affirmative action, 22 percent were opposed and 36 percent were undecided. A plurality of Chinese Americans, 38 percent, on the other hand, opposed restoration of affirmative action, 30 percent were in favor, and 28 percent were undecided.The debate over affirmative action admission policies has deep roots. In 2009, Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociologist at Princeton, and Alexandria Walton Radford, of the Center for Applied Research in Postsecondary Education, wrote in their paper. “A New Manhattan Project” thatCompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.In 2018, the Harvard Crimson studied the average SAT scores of students admitted to Harvard from 1995 to 2013. It found that Asian Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections, while whites averaged 745 across all sections, Hispanic American 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian 712 and African-American 704.Scholars of Asian American politics have found that Asian American voters have remained relatively strong supporters of affirmative action policies, with one exception: Chinese Americans, who constitute nearly a quarter of all Asian Americans.In “Asian Americans and Race-Conscious Admissions: Understanding the Conservative Opposition’s Strategy of Misinformation, Intimidation & Racial Division,” Liliana M. Garces and OiYan Poon, professors of educational leadership at the University of Texas-Austin and Colorado State University, give the following reasons for the concentration of anti-affirmative action sentiment among Chinese Americans.Garces and Poon write that 1990 changes in the U.S. Immigration Act “increased by threefold the number of visas for highly skilled, professional-class immigrants, privileging highly educated and skilled immigrants” while “migration policy changes in China advantaged more structurally-privileged Chinese to emigrate.”Second, “growing up in mainland China, many of these more recent Chinese American immigrants were systemically and culturally socialized to strongly believe that a single examination is a valid measure of merit for elite college access.”Third, “The residential and employment patterns among more recent immigrants suggest that their social lives remain limited to middle and upper-middle class Chinese American immigrants and whites.”And finally,The social media platform, WeChat, plays an important role in fostering opposition to affirmative action among some Chinese American immigrants. Some studies have found that WeChat plays a central role in the distribution of information among the Chinese diasporic community, including fake news, to politically motivate and organize Chinese immigrants for conservative causes, especially against affirmative action and ethnic data disaggregation.Another issue with the potential to push Asian American voters to the right is crime.The 2018 Crime Victimization report issued in September 2019 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice found that a total of 182,230 violent crimes were committed against Asian Americans in 2018. 27.5 percent were committed by African Americans, 24.1 percent by whites, 24.1 percent by Asian Americans, 7.0 percent by Hispanics, and the rest undetermined.The New York City police report on 2021 hate crime arrestees shows that 30 of the 56 men and women charged with hate crimes against Asian Americans were Black, 14 were Hispanic, 7 were white and five were Asian American/Pacific Islanders.While most of the experts on Asian American politics I contacted voiced confidence in the continued commitment of Asian Americans to the Democratic Party and its candidates, there were some danger signals — for example, in the 2021 New York City mayoral election.That year, Eric Adams, the Democrat, decisively beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, 65.5 to 27.1, but support for Sliwa — an anti-crime stalwart who pledged to take on “the spineless politicians who vote to defund police” — shot up to 44 percent “in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian,” according to The City.The story was headlined “Chinese voters came out in force for the GOP in NYC, shaking up politics” and the subhead read “From Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Elmhurst and Flushing in Queens, frustrations over Democratic stances on schools and crime helped mobilize votes for Republican Curtis Sliwa for mayor and conservative Council candidates.”A crucial catalyst in the surge of support for Sliwa, according to The City, was his “proposed reforms to specialized high school admissions and gifted and talented programs” — ignoring the fact that Adams had also pledged to do this. More generally, the City reported,A wave of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has heightened a sense of urgency about public safety and law enforcement. Asian anger and frustration have, for the first time, left a visible dent in a city election.Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from Queens, tweeted on Nov. 4, 2021:Pending paper ballot counts, the assembly districts of @nily, @edbraunstein, @Barnwell30, @Rontkim and @Stacey23AD all went Republican. Our party better start giving more of a sh*t about #aapi (Asian American-Pacific Island) voters and communities. No other community turned out at a faster pace than AAPIs in 2020.Similarly, Asian Americans led the drive to oust three San Francisco School Board members — all progressive Democrats — last month. As Times colleague Amelia Nierenberg wrote on Feb. 16:The recall also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power. In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board changed the admission system for the district’s most prestigious institution, Lowell High School. It abolished requirements based primarily on grades and test scores, instead implementing a lottery system.In their March 2021 paper, “Why the trope of Black-Asian conflict in the face of anti-Asian violence dismisses solidarity,” Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, sociologists at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, point out that “there have been over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned.”While “these senseless acts of anti-Asian violence have finally garnered the national attention they deserve,” Lee and Huang continue, “they have also invoked anti-Black sentiment and reignited the trope of Black-Asian conflict. Because some of the videotaped perpetrators appear to have been Black, some observers immediately reduced anti-Asian violence to Black-Asian conflict.”Working against such Black-Asian conflict, the two authors argue, is a besieged but “real-world solidarity” demonstrated instudies showing that Black Americans are more likely than white or Hispanic Americans to recognize racism toward Asian Americans, and that Asian Americans who experience discrimination are more likely to recognize political commonality with Black Americans. Covid-related anti-Asian bias is not inevitable. While “China virus” rhetoric has been linked to violence and hostility, new research shows that priming Americans about the coronavirus did not increase anger among the majority of Americans toward Asian Americans.Lee and Huang warn, however, that “anger among a minority has invoked fear among the majority of Asian Americans.”In “Asian Americans, Affirmative Action & the Rise in Anti-Asian Hate,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Daedalus, a journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lee makes the case that Asian American are at a political tipping point. She argues that:The changing selectivity of contemporary U.S. Asian immigration has recast Asian Americans from ‘unassimilable to exceptional,’ resulting in their rapid racial mobility. This mobility combined with their minoritized status places them in a unique group position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, conveniently wedged between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy (affirmative action) and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. It also marks Asians as compelling victims of affirmative action who are penalized because of their race.In recent years, “a new brand of Asian immigrants has entered the political sphere whose attitudes depart from the Asian American college student activists of the 1960s,” Lee writes. “This faction of politically conservative Asian immigrants has no intention of following their liberal-leaning predecessors, nor do they intend to stay silent.”The issue is “whether more Asian Americans will choose to side with conservatives,” Lee writes, “or whether they will choose to forge a collective Asian American alliance will depend on whether U.S. Asians recognize and embrace their ethnic and class diversity. Will they forge a sense of linked fate akin to that which has guided the political attitudes and voting behavior of Black Americans?”The outcome may well have a major impact on the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans.Catalyst, the liberal voter analysis firm, found that from 2016 to 2020, Asian Americans increased their voter turnout by 39 percent, more than any other racial or ethnic constituency, including Hispanic Americans (up 31 percent) and African Americans (up 14 percent). This turnout increase worked decisively in favor of the Democratic Party as Asian Americans voted two to one for the party in both elections.The April 2021 Pew Research report cited above found that from 2000 to 2019, “The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81 percent from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million, surpassing the 70 percent growth rate of the nation’s Hispanic population. Furthermore, by 2060, the number of U.S. Asians is projected to rise to 35.8 million, more than triple their 2000 population.”What this means is that Republicans are certain to intensify their use affirmative action, crime, especially hate crime, and the movement away from merit testing to lotteries for admission to high caliber public schools as wedge issues to try to pry Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party. Indeed, they are already at it. For its part, the Democratic Party will need to add significant muscle to Jennifer Lee’s call for a “linked fate” among Asian and African Americans to fend off the challenge.The strong commitment of Asian Americans to education has been a source of allegiance to a Democratic Party that has become the preferred home for voters with college and advanced degrees. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, at the same time, testing the strength of that allegiance by supporting education policies that reduce opportunities for Asian Americans at elite schools while increasing opportunity for two larger Democratic constituencies, made up of Black and Hispanic voters. This is the kind of problem inherent in a diverse coalition comprising a segmented electorate with competing agendas. For the foreseeable future, the ability of the party to manage these conflicts will be a key factor in its success or failure.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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      Progressive Jessica Cisneros Challenges Rep. Cuellar in Texas

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      LAREDO, Texas — Two years ago, a 26-year-old immigration lawyer named Jessica Cisneros came within 3.6 percentage points of pushing out the longtime Democratic congressman here, running aggressively on the progressive vision of the national liberals who had bankrolled her insurgent campaign.This time around, at the ripe age of 28, she’s scorching the already brown earth of South Texas, attacking Representative Henry Cuellar not so much for his conservative policy positions, but for being what she describes as a corrupt politician — rich, out of touch with his poor constituents, and quite possibly a felon.“We’re going after him,” Ms. Cisneros said at a picnic table outside the taqueria next to her campaign headquarters, with the confidence of a seasoned political street fighter. “Everything we’ve been doing has been very intentional.”Texas will kick off the 2022 primary season on Tuesday, launching what promises to be a grueling series of contests that could pull both Democrats and Republicans toward their political extremes, while testing the grips that President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump have over their respective parties.In South Texas, another test is developing over the power of identity politics and whether liberals can answer the fears that conservatives are stoking about “open borders,” “critical race theory” and rising crime. In the primary campaign for Texas’ 28th district, it is Mr. Cuellar’s experience versus Ms. Cisneros’s storytelling: the powerful and connected versus the underdogs, the community, the “pueblo.”There have been many changes here since Ms. Cisneros first challenged Mr. Cuellar, but the most significant may have been the shock for both parties of seeing Hispanic voters lurch toward Mr. Trump in 2020. Zapata County, just south of here, is heavily Latino; Hillary Clinton won it by more than 30 points in 2016, then it went to Mr. Trump by about five points. Ms. Clinton’s 60-point margin in Starr County, which is 96 percent Latino, shriveled to a five-point advantage for Mr. Biden.In response, Ms. Cisneros is running a campaign against the 17-year incumbent that could easily have been engineered by a Republican. She still favors Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, more liberal immigration policies and abortion rights, but those have not been her focus.Instead, she has played up her biography and hit Mr. Cuellar hard on rising prices. She has portrayed him as a Washington insider, greasing his pockets with money from big corporations, and presented herself as embodying the struggling community he left behind.“My medicines cost more, insurance more,” intones an older Latina in one of Ms. Cisneros’s most recent ads, as the woman sweeps the stoop of her modest house and laments that nothing has changed in Laredo. “Now it’s food and gas, but we don’t make more. If you ask me, Henry Cuellar has been in Washington too long.”The mysterious raid last month by the F.B.I. of Mr. Cuellar’s Laredo home and campaign office presented a late, potentially devastating twist that seemed to confirm all that Ms. Cisneros had been saying of the congressman — and she pounced on it.Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a fellow progressive, campaigned recently for congressional candidate Jessica Cisneros in San Antonio.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesJustice Democrats, the progressive insurgent group that has greatly bolstered her campaign, has piled on with a decidedly nonideological advertisement blanketing South Texas that accuses Mr. Cuellar of hitching rides on donors’ private jets, fixing his BMW with campaign cash and drawing that raid by the F.B.I.Progressives have been on a losing streak of late. In August, a hero of the left, Nina Turner, lost a special election in Cleveland to a candidate backed by establishment Democrats. Representative Marie Newman of Illinois, who in 2020 defeated one of the last House Democrats who opposed abortion, is under an ethics investigation, accused of enticing a primary rival out of the race two years ago with a promised job in her congressional office. Democratic leaders have struggled to distance themselves from the sloganeering of “Defund the police,” while Republicans have demonized progressive views on race and gender.A Guide to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Like Ms. Cisneros, liberal organizations are trying to adjust.“We are definitely aware of the Trump swing,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman and strategist for Justice Democrats, which helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts defeat veteran Democratic incumbents over the past four years.Mr. Cuellar and his supporters have greeted the onslaught with disbelief. The veteran Democrat may be the last in the House who opposes abortion, and he has taken a tougher line on immigration, border security and law enforcement than many of his colleagues. But that is not what the campaign seems to be about.“They really don’t talk much about what they want to do, except in general terms,” Mr. Cuellar said. Instead, he said, “it’s attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.”He said in January in a video statement on Twitter that the ongoing investigation — which appears linked to a broader inquiry into the political influence of Azerbaijan — will show “no wrongdoing on my part.”Supporters of Ms. Cisneros — and some Democratic thinkers — see in her shift a model for the party in the Trump era of personal politics. Republicans, and to some extent Mr. Cuellar, have created a frightening narrative that feels more urgent than any policy debates in Washington. That story contends that decent, hard-working people are playing by the rules, but strangers are pounding at the door, and neighbors are grabbing all they can from the government.Ian Haney López, a public law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the Hispanic shift in South Texas, said Ms. Cisneros is using identity to try to galvanize support without alienating the white voters who remain the majority nationwide — though not in the 28th district of Texas.Since the rise of Trumpism, with its appeals to white grievance and fears, he said, Democrats have taken two approaches, both of which have failed. The progressive wing has called out Mr. Trump and his supporters as racist, and urged voters to band together to fight white racism.“That identity story casts the majority of Democratic voters as part of the problem,” he said. In addition, 2020 proved that tactic was also not helpful to the Democratic cause with people of color, especially Latinos. “You’re not going to get them to sign on to a story that says you’re on the margins, you’re widely hated, and your children’s lives will be truncated by racism.”Jessica Cisneros hands out campaign flyers in Laredo, Texas. She is supported by the same progressive group that helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts defeat veteran Democratic incumbents.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesMore centrist Democrats, recognizing the perils of that approach, have eschewed identity politics altogether and stuck with dry policy arguments — a strategy Mr. Lopez called “nonsense on stilts.”In Ms. Cisneros’s campaign, he sees an identity-first approach, in which she casually toggles between English and Spanish, speaks of identifying with South Texas and its struggles, contrasts that to the outsiders in Washington, then pivots to issues like health care and reproductive rights.After the Trump shake-up, the region could be ready for a new approach, said Cecilia Ballí, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Houston who did extensive interviews in South Texas after Mr. Trump’s 2020 gains. For decades, the region has been run by insular political families like Mr. Cuellar’s. His brother is the sheriff of Laredo’s Webb County; his sister is a former municipal judge and tax collector there.Ms. Ballí said that with no real competition between the parties, Democrats have won loyalty with rallies and free food, but no emphasis on issues or retail politics. Mr. Trump’s brand of personality-driven, outsider bombast broke through to many disillusioned Hispanic voters.Ms. Cisneros agreed: “They’ve been voting Democrat for such a long time, and obviously, the poverty rate hasn’t gone down, the uninsurance rate hasn’t gone down. People still have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet.” she said. Add the pandemic and a shutdown of border crossings that crippled Laredo commerce, “and I think that just led to the perfect storm.”Mr. Cuellar has weapons of his own: an unrivaled network of backers in the political establishment and a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, from which he has plied the sprawling district with federal largess, from $45,520,000 in transportation projects for Atascosa County in the district’s north to $15,142,000 for cattle health in Zapata County in the south.Then there are the fears that a Cisneros victory March 1 would hand newly confident Republicans the seat. Ms. Cisneros insists that she is the answer to the Republican rise, an outsider voice to give hope to the region’s frustrations. Redistricting changes actually made the 28th slightly more Democratic, with more voters from San Antonio’s Bexar County, a potential boon to Ms. Cisneros’s chances — on Tuesday and in November. The district shifted from 76.9 percent Hispanic to 75.3 percent, but a slight rise in Anglo voters could actually help Ms. Cisneros if those new voters are San Antonio liberals.But Mr. Cuellar beat his Republican challenger handily in 2020, with 58 percent of the vote, while Mr. Biden eked out 51.5 percent. Those Trump-Cuellar voters could move to the Republican House candidate that emerges from the seven-candidate primary.“If Henry loses, then they have won this seat,” Anna Cavazos Ramirez, a former Webb County attorney, said of the Republicans.The negative tone of Ms. Cisneros’s campaign has turned off some voters, who speculated that the raid last month — still unexplained — was somehow the work of her supporters. Pastor Tim Rowley, who ministers at one of Laredo’s largest evangelical congregations, Grace Bible Church, said the campaign had left him saddened.“Whether you’re Democrat or Republican, rather than getting up and fully debating the issues, it just seems to be a smear campaign,” he said, suggesting he would likely vote for Mr. Cuellar because “this has to stop.”Miguel Sanchez, 35, was not so quick to dismiss what he called “that incident,” when F.B.I. agents were seen carrying items from Mr. Cuellar’s Laredo home. Mr. Sanchez had come to a rally at Texas A&M International University for Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat running for Texas governor, but the longtime Cuellar supporter was giving the House primary a lot of thought.“Cisneros, she seems to be a breath of fresh air,” he said, adding, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a grassroots-type Democrat.” As for the incumbent, Ms. Cisneros’s message has gotten through.“I don’t know,” Mr. Sanchez said, shaking his head. “We don’t need politicians like that in Washington.” More

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      Defeat Trump, Now More Than Ever

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      The democratic nations of the world are in a global struggle against authoritarianism. That struggle has international fronts — starting with the need to confront, repel and weaken Vladimir Putin.But that struggle also has domestic fronts — the need to defeat the mini-Putins now found across the Western democracies. These are the demagogues who lie with Putinesque brazenness, who shred democratic institutions with Putinesque bravado, who strut the world’s stage with Putin’s amoral schoolboy machismo while pretending to represent all that is traditional and holy.In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again. As democracy is threatened from abroad it can’t also be cannibalized from within.Thinking has to be crystal clear. What are the crucial battlegrounds in the struggle against Trump? He won the White House by winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with strong support from white voters without a college degree. Joe Biden ousted Trump by winning back those states and carrying the new swing states, Arizona and Georgia.So for the next three years Democrats need to wake up with one overriding political thought: What are we doing to appeal to all working-class voters in those five states? Are we doing anything today that might alienate these voters?Are the Democrats winning the contest for these voters right now? No.At the start of 2021 Democrats had a nine-point advantage when you asked voters to name their party preference. By the end of 2021 Republicans had a five-point advantage. Among swing voters, things are particularly grim. A February 2022 Economist/YouGov survey found that a pathetic 30 percent of independents approve of Biden’s job performance. Working-class voters are turning against Biden. According to a January Pew survey, 54 percent of Americans with graduate degrees approved of Biden’s performance, but only 37 percent of those without any college experience did.Are Democrats thinking clearly about how to win those voters? No.This week two veteran Democratic strategists, William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck, issued a report for the Progressive Policy Institute arguing that Democrats need to get over at least three delusions.The first Democratic myth is, “People of color think and act alike.” In fact, there have been differences between Hispanics and Black Americans on issues like the economy, foreign policy and policing. Meanwhile working-class people have been moving toward the G.O.P. across racial lines.“Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers,” the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in The American Prospect. “The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics.”The second Democratic myth is, “Economics trumps culture.” This is the idea that if Democrats can shower working- and middle-class voters with material benefits then that will overwhelm any differences they may have with them on religious, social and cultural issues — on guns, crime and immigration, etc. This crude economic determinism has been rebutted by history time and time again.The third myth is, “A progressive ascendancy is emerging.” The fact is that only 7 percent of the electorate considers itself “very liberal.” I would have thought the Biden economic agenda, which basically consists of handing money to the people who need it most, would be astoundingly popular. It’s popular, but not that popular. I would have thought Americans would scream bloody murder when the expansion of the existing child tax credit expired. They haven’t. Distrust in government is still astoundingly high, undercutting the progressive project at every turn.What do Democrats need to do now? Well, one thing they are really good at. Over the past few years a wide range of thinkers — across the political spectrum — have congregated around a neo-Hamiltonian agenda that stands for the idea that we need to build more things — roads, houses, colleges, green technologies and ports. Democrats need to hammer home this Builders agenda, which would provide good-paying jobs and renew American dynamism.But Democrats also have to do something they’re really bad at: Craft a cultural narrative around the theme of social order. The Democrats have been blamed for fringe ideas like “defund the police” and a zeal for “critical race theory” because the party doesn’t have its own mainstream social and cultural narrative.With war in Europe, crime rising on our streets, disarray at the border, social unraveling in many of our broken communities, perceived ideological unmooring in our schools, moral decay everywhere, Democrats need to tell us which cultural and moral values they stand for that will hold this country together.The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman. Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.It doesn’t matter how many nice programs you have; people won’t support you if they think your path is the path to chaos.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 Supreme Court Is Just Doing What the Supreme Court Does

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      Under a traditionally liberal view of the Supreme Court, its decision on Monday to uphold, at least for this year, a Congressional map in Alabama that intentionally weakens the voting strength of Black people in the state is a betrayal of its duty to protect the rights of minorities, racial and otherwise.Under a more historical view, it is the court doing what the court does.First, a little background on Monday’s decision. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bars any voting law or procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race,” as the Department of Justice puts it. This includes situations where lawmakers have “cracked” minority communities into multiple districts in order to dilute the strength of their voters. To remedy this, courts can require states to create “majority-minority” districts in which these voters can then elect the candidates of their choice. This is especially important in places where voting is so polarized by race that minority communities are rarely, if ever, able to shape the outcome of an election.Last year, Alabama’s Republican-controlled Legislature drew and passed a Congressional map that packed a large number of Black voters into a single district encompassing the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery, while spreading the remaining voters throughout six majority white districts. By “packing” one group of Black voters and dispersing the rest, Alabama Republicans successfully reduced the voting strength of the entire Black community in the state, which accounts for 27 percent of its population.Black Alabamians filed suit. In January, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from both sides, a three-judge district court panel (with two Trump appointees) agreed that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act. It ordered the Legislature to draw a new map containing a second majority-minority district. Republicans appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, where five members voted to stay the order, reinstating the original map.This, wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted with the majority, was not done “on the merits.” It was merely an attempt to keep the courts from disrupting the upcoming election which, he said, was “close at hand.” Except Alabama’s primary is not until May and its general election is not until November. There was, and there still is, plenty of time to draw new maps.In the view of Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted with the minority despite his hostility to the Voting Rights Act, “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction.” By granting a stay, the conservative majority has effectively changed the law, freeing Alabama (and other states) to devise the kinds of racial gerrymanders that the Voting Rights Act was in part written to prohibit. That is one reason my colleague Linda Greenhouse called the decision a “raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point.”But again, historically speaking, we should not see this as an exception to the rule, but as the rule.On July 9, 1868, the United States ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. As the historian Eric Foner explains in “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution,” the amendment was written, among other things, to “establish general principles about the rights of the freed people and of all Americans.” Within a decade, however, the Court had radically narrowed the scope of that amendment, construing it as “a vehicle for protecting corporate rights rather than those of the former slaves.”On Feb. 3, 1870, the United States ratified the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. It prohibited the national government and states from denying the right to vote on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and gave Congress the power to enforce that prohibition with “appropriate legislation.” It was written, specifically, to extend suffrage to Black men. But in 1876, Foner notes, the Supreme Court “overturned the convictions of Kentucky officials who had conspired to prevent blacks from voting in a local election.”Writing for an 8-1 majority of the court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite conceded that the amendment grants “an exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of race,” but denied that it conferred the “right of suffrage” on anyone. His opinion opened the door to the kinds of restrictions — poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses — that Southern states would eventually use to disenfranchise their Black populations.In the 1870s, Congress passed laws to punish acts of violence meant to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights, to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations and to prohibit exclusion from jury service. In the 1880s, the Supreme Court either invalidated those laws or rendered them a dead letter. In his 1883 opinion for the majority in the Civil Rights Cases, which held that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendments gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals, Justice Joseph P. Bradley declared that, “When a man has emerged from slavery” there must be “some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.”It is Congress, and not the Supreme Court, that has, over time, done more to defend the civil and voting rights of all Americans. To do the same, the court has had to reverse its own work. As Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor of law at Harvard, has written, “As a matter of historical practice, the Court has wielded an antidemocratic influence on American law, one that has undermined federal attempts to eliminate hierarchies of race, wealth, and status.”Barring the unexpected, and assuming the presidency continues to swing evenly between the two parties, conservatives can expect to hold the Supreme Court for at least a generation. But this won’t be a new frontier as much as a return to form.For most of its history, the Supreme Court — the 16 years of the Warren court notwithstanding — has been a friend to hierarchy and reaction. Thus, for Americans who want a more equal society, the Supreme Court has been, is and will continue to be an adversary, not an ally. Understanding that fact is the first step toward doing something about it.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 Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”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