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      Tim Scott Begins Presidential Campaign, Adding to Trump Challengers

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      The announcement from the South Carolina senator follows a tour of early nominating states. He enters the Republican primary field having raised $22 million.Tim Scott, the first Black Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction, announced his campaign for president on Monday, adding to a growing number of Republicans running as alternatives to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Scott’s decision, which followed a soft rollout in February and the creation of an exploratory committee in April, came this time with a signal to the Republican establishment that he was the candidate to rally around if the party is to stop Mr. Trump’s nomination. He was introduced by the Senate’s No. 2 leader, John Thune of South Dakota, and will immediately begin a $5.5 million advertising blitz in the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire.“Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: Victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness?” he planned to say at a packed and boisterous morning rally in the gym of his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, according to prepared remarks. “I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.”Long considered a rising star in the G.O.P., Mr. Scott, 57, enters the primary field having amassed $22 million in fund-raising and having attracted veteran political operatives to work on his behalf.But the field of Republicans hoping to take the nomination from Mr. Trump is about to grow far more crowded. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, are expected to enter the race in the coming days. Chris Sununu, the popular Republican governor of New Hampshire, hinted over the weekend that he was likely to throw his hat in the ring as well, scrambling the battle for the state with the first Republican primary. Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president, is still mulling a run.With Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers unwilling to abandon their standard-bearer, the former president’s critics worry that more opponents will only split the anti-Trump vote and ensure his victory. Mr. Thune’s presence onstage Monday was an acknowledgment of that concern and a call to other elected Republicans to get on board with Mr. Scott.Aides to the Scott campaign said that his $22 million war chest was more than any presidential candidate in history, and that the $42 million he has raised since 2022 — much of which has been dolled out to other Republicans — had created a depth of loyalties other candidates do not have.The biggest question looming over Mr. Scott’s candidacy may be whether his message of positivity steeped in religiosity can attract enough Republican voters to win in a crowded primary. One of Mr. Scott’s rivals for the nomination is Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor who appointed him to his Senate seat in 2012. The two have split allegiances and in-state support since Ms. Haley started her run in February, potentially complicating their efforts in a must-win early primary state.“I bet there’s room for three or four” candidates from South Carolina, Mr. Scott told the conservative radio personality Joey Hudson during a February interview. Mr. Scott has consolidated support from several top Republican donors and political consultants while touring Iowa and New Hampshire, key early nominating states, along with South Carolina, his home base. The longtime political operative Rob Collins and the former Colorado senator Cory Gardner, two well-known figures in Republican politics, are the leaders of his affiliated super PAC. Last month, two top South Carolina operatives, Matt Moore and Mark Knoop, were tapped to lead the group’s in-state operations.Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina whose political comeback was cut short by his staunch criticism of Mr. Trump, joined the crowd.“I’m a huge fan of Tim Scott,” he said.A North Charleston native, Mr. Scott was raised by a single mother who worked long hours as a nursing assistant to raise him and his brothers. A car crash in high school sank his football dreams, but he attended Presbyterian College on a partial athletic scholarship before ultimately studying political science at Charleston Southern. His first foray into politics was through the Charleston County Council. After serving one term in the State House, he defeated the son of Strom Thurmond and won a seat for the First Congressional District in 2010, making him the first Black Republican House member from the Deep South since Reconstruction. Mr. Scott speaking with Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat. Mr. Scott’s support floats in the single digits, and several other national Republicans are also eyeing a presidential run.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn speeches, he often uses his biography — a story of humble beginnings and rapid rise on the political stage — to underline his view of America as a laudable work in progress rather than an irredeemably racist nation.“This is the freest and fairest land, where you and I can go as high as our character, our grit and our talent will take us,” he was set to say on Monday. “I bear witness to that.”The significance of his position is not lost on him. After a white gunman murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Mr. Scott condemned the act as a “crime of hate” and joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers in supporting Ms. Haley’s removal of the Confederate emblem from South Carolina’s state flag. As the nation reeled from the deaths of several Black men at the hands of the police in 2016, he gave a speech from the Senate floor describing instances when he was racially profiled, including by the Capitol Police.And the next year, after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Scott criticized his words, compelling the former president to invite the senator to the White House for a meeting about it.Mr. Scott was a leading Republican voice on police reform negotiations after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, helping draft Republicans’ proposed legislation that called for narrow reforms but did not ultimately pass. In 2017, he spearheaded the creation of Opportunity Zones, an initiative that offers tax incentives to investors in low-income neighborhoods — many of which are predominantly Black.It’s not clear, however, whether those efforts will result in added support from Black voters on a national stage. For many Black Democrats, Mr. Scott’s race matters little in light of his conservative voting record.The biggest question looming over Mr. Scott’s candidacy is whether his message of positivity steeped in religiosity can attract enough Republican voters to win in a crowded primary.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“The same Black people that would normally vote Republican, those are the people that will vote for Tim Scott,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York. “The majority of Black people, the near majority or new Black voters aren’t going to come out for Tim Scott.”Mr. Scott has already been tested as a presidential candidate. Days after starting his exploratory committee, Mr. Scott waffled on questions about whether he would support a federal abortion ban and did not specify the number of weeks at which he would restrict access to the procedure if elected president.Mr. Scott’s entry to the race also comes amid soul-searching for Republicans on who will carry the party’s mantle in 2024. Mr. Trump has increased his edge in the polls even as he faces new personal and political controversies, including his indictment by a grand jury in Manhattan and subsequent liability in a sexual assault trial involving the columnist E. Jean Carroll. Mr. Scott has pointedly declined to criticize Mr. Trump head-on, preferring oblique references to his own rectitude.The senator’s supporters have lauded that message, mostly positive and peppered with biblical references, as a welcome contrast to the vitriol that has become a feature of national campaigns.“You haven’t seen him burned in effigy because of a side he’s taken,” said Mikee Johnson, a Columbia-area business owner and Scott donor. “He’s more the one who’s seemed to have brought some people together.”Mr. Johnson added, “And I love him, because that’s his place.”During a March presidential forum in Charleston hosted by the conservative Christian Palmetto Family Council, Mr. Scott highlighted themes likely to take center stage during his presidential campaign.“There are two visions: One that feels like it’s pulling us down and another one that wants to restore faith in this nation,” he told the crowd after quoting the Epistle to the Galatians. “We believe that we need more faith in America, more faith in Americans, not less.” More

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      Tim Scott’s Run for President Shines a Spotlight on Black Republicans

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      The South Carolina senator’s bid for the White House — as the sole Black Republican in the Senate — could raise not only his profile, but those of Black conservatives across the country.Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, addressed the Charleston County Republican Party at a dinner in February, offering a stirring message of unity and American redemption that has become the center of his stump speech. The next day, he called the chairman of the county party to ask for his support.Mr. Scott told the chairman that he was considering a presidential run. The chairman, who had planned to endorse former President Donald J. Trump, told the senator he would switch allegiances and back him instead.The exchange was, in some ways, traditional party politicking as Mr. Scott works to build support in his home county and in his home state. But it also underscored a subtle change shaping G.O.P. politics — both men are Black Republicans.“I’m pretty locked in helping Senator Scott in every way that I possibly can,” said the former county party leader, Maurice Washington, who stepped down from his role as chairman in April. It was Mr. Washington, Charleston County’s first Black Republican chairman and a longtime ally of Mr. Scott’s, who first encouraged him to run for a county council seat nearly 30 years ago.Mr. Scott, who plans to formally announce his presidential campaign on Monday, will become one of a handful of Black conservatives to run for president in recent years. Herman Cain made a bid for the White House in 2011 and Ben Carson did so in 2016, but neither garnered widespread support. Mr. Scott will be the second Black conservative to enter the 2024 race: Larry Elder, a talk radio host who ran unsuccessfully for governor in California’s 2021 recall election, announced his long-shot campaign last month.Mr. Scott has been popular among Republicans — and has a sizable campaign fund — but his campaign is seen as a long shot.Patrick Semansky/Associated PressAs a U.S. senator and a former member of the House of Representatives with roughly $22 million in campaign funds, Mr. Scott will begin as more of a contender than most of his predecessors, and he will be one of the best-funded candidates in the 2024 presidential primary. His support is currently in the low single digits, according to public polling. But his candidacy could raise not only his profile, but those of Black conservatives across the country.Black Republicans are a small group of voters and politicians who say they often feel caught in the middle — ignored and subtly discriminated against by some Republicans, ridiculed and ostracized by many Democrats. Those elected to office have expressed frustration that they are viewed not simply as conservatives but as Black conservatives, and they often decry what they describe as the Democratic obsession with identity politics.“I think the commonality of virtually all Black conservatives is that we don’t think we’re victims,” said Mr. Elder, who has emphasized his roots in both California and the segregated South. “We don’t believe we’re oppressed. We don’t believe that we’re owed anything.” He and Mr. Scott share a belief in “hard work and education and self-improvement,” Mr. Elder added. “So it would not surprise me that he and I are saying the same things, if not in different ways.”Other Black Republicans have won state races and primaries since the 2022 midterms. On Tuesday, Daniel Cameron defeated a well-funded opponent in Kentucky’s Republican primary for governor. Mr. Cameron, the first Black man to be elected attorney general in Kentucky, is the Trump-endorsed protégé of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. Last year, a record number of Black Republican candidates ran for state offices. With Mr. Scott in the Senate and four Republicans in the House, there are now five Black Republicans in Congress — the most in more than a century.“I’m pretty locked in helping Senator Scott in every way that I possibly can,” said Maurice Washington, Charleston County’s first Black Republican chairman, who stepped down in April.Travis Dove for The New York TimesStill, the number of Black Republicans who won seats last year is a fraction of the total number who ran for state and local office under the G.O.P. — more than 80. And the Republican Party’s inroads with Black candidates have yet to overcome enduring feelings of distrust among Black voters toward the party. The ascension of Black Republicans such as Mr. Scott and Mr. Cameron comes against the backdrop of a Republican Party that has largely stood by as some of its members have employed overtly racist rhetoric and behavior.Shermichael Singleton, a Black Republican strategist and a former senior adviser to Mr. Carson, said that he spent a lot of time in 2016 determining how Mr. Carson’s hyper-conservative campaign message could remain in step with the party line without alienating critical voting groups. The challenge was twofold: overcoming Black voters’ negative perceptions about Republicans while building a winning coalition that could include some of them.“It’s just more unique and more challenging if you’re a Black person because of our unique experiences politically and the distrust that most of us have for both parties, but the overwhelming distrust that we have is for Republicans,” Mr. Singleton said. “Because they are perceived as being anti-progressive on race.”Much of the party’s base and its presidential contenders have become focused on opposing all things “woke,” using the term as a catchall pejorative for the broader push for equity and social justice. In the party’s embrace of being anti-woke, several Republican-led state legislatures have aimed to ban books written by Black authors and limit conversations about slavery, the civil rights movement and systemic racism in the classroom and elsewhere.For many in the Republican Party, its members of color are proof of its inclusivity. The success of a candidate like Mr. Scott — the first Black Republican to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction — helps in part to rebut claims that the G.O.P. is inherently racist or, more broadly, that systemic racism remains an issue in America, Republicans say.In speeches, Mr. Scott has criticized the “victim mentality” he believes exists in American culture, and has blamed the left for using racial issues as a means of further dividing the electorate. Mr. Elder said racism “has never been a less important factor in American life than today.”Daniel Cameron, the first Black attorney general of Kentucky, won the primary race for governor on Tuesday. He will face Andy Beshear, a popular Democrat who is seeking re-election in a typically deep-red state.Jon Cherry for The New York Times“What Black Republicans have to do is they either have to lean all in and just be an unapologetic, uncritical supporter for where the Republican Party is now, or they have to find a way to walk that tightrope of not alienating the party, but also not alienating their community,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “Somebody like Scott has to find a space to navigate those worlds.”J.C. Watts, who was the first Black Republican to represent Oklahoma in Congress, said he believed Mr. Scott could be “a great asset” to the party’s presidential primary, based on his personal experiences. “Whether or not the party listens,” he added, “that’s something else.”“He will have some that will try to force him to be ‘the Black Republican,’” Mr. Watts continued. “While I don’t think you should run from being Black, or run from being conservative, some will try to force him to play that role.”Nathan Brand, Mr. Scott’s spokesman, pointed to the senator’s remarks at the dinner in Charleston in February, in which he acknowledged “the devastation brought upon African Americans” before extolling America as “defined by our redemption” — themes that have formed the base of his campaign message. The campaign declined to comment further.Like many Black Republicans, Mr. Scott has been reluctant to discuss race as it relates to his party, preferring to focus on policy matters. In recent years, however, he has been called on to weigh in further. In 2020, he was the lead Republican in negotiations on failed police reform legislation.The senator was also a leading conservative voice against Mr. Trump’s comments about a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when the president said there were people to blame on “both sides.” Mr. Scott’s criticisms later spurred Mr. Trump to invite him to the White House.After a series of police killings in the summer of 2016, Mr. Scott gave a detailed speech on the Senate floor about instances when he was racially profiled by law enforcement, including by U.S. Capitol Police. These were moments, he said, when he “felt the pressure applied by the scales of justice when they are slanted.”Now, as he becomes a presidential candidate and the nation’s highest-ranking Black Republican, Mr. Scott will likely have to answer questions about how he and the rest of his party navigate a tenuous relationship with Black voters.“It could be a little bit of a problem to me down the road,” said Cornelius Huff, the Republican mayor of Inman, S.C., who is Black. “You have to have somebody in the family that calls it what it is and straightens those things out.”At a recent town hall in New Hampshire, Mr. Scott told a mostly white audience of supporters that he saw an opportunity to increase the party’s gains with voters of color, particularly men. Despite winning re-election by more than 25 points in 2022, Mr. Scott lost to or narrowly defeated his Democratic challenger in nearly all of South Carolina’s predominantly Black counties. Policy conversations about school choice and economic empowerment, he said, could create an opening with men of color, a group that polling shows has been more open to supporting the Republican Party in recent election cycles.“When we go where we’re not invited, we have conversations with people who may not vote for us,” Mr. Scott said at the event. “We earn their respect. If we earn their respect long enough, we earn their vote. What is disrespectful is to show up 90 days before an election and say, ‘We want your vote.’”The senator appeared to be speaking to a common grievance among Black voters that Democrats often count on and court their votes before major elections, and then fail to deliver on their policy promises. Yet, even as some Black voters bemoan what they see as Democrats’ empty promises on the issues they care most about, they remain the party’s most loyal constituency. More than 90 percent of Black voters voted for President Biden in 2020.Mr. Washington, 62, the former Charleston County Republican chairman, helped found South Carolina State University’s Republican Club while in school there nearly four decades ago. Though he has run for office as a Democrat before, Mr. Washington says his values, and those of many in Black communities, are more conservative and thus more aligned with Republican values. The weeks after Mr. Scott starts his campaign will amount to a waiting game, he added.“Let’s see what happens,” Mr. Washington said. “We’ll know sooner rather than later whether or not that message of unity, of working hard towards rebuilding trust in our nation — in America and its citizenry and in its race relations — is going to be one that is embraced or rejected.” More

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      Supreme Court to Consider South Carolina Voting Map Ruled a Racial Gerrymander

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      A unanimous three-judge panel found that a congressional voting district anchored in Charleston, S.C., violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a congressional voting district in South Carolina should be restored after a lower court struck it down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in January that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”The new House map moved 62 percent of Black voters in Charleston County from the First District to the Sixth District, a seat that Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 30 years.The move helped make the new First District a Republican stronghold. In November, Nancy Mace, the Republican incumbent, won re-election by 14 percentage points.Republican lawmakers acknowledged that they had redrawn the First District for partisan gain. But they said they had not considered race in the process.The panel ruled that the district’s boundaries must be redrawn before future elections are held. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House voting districts, saying that civil rights groups had failed to demonstrate that the districts had been predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power.The Supreme Court has called for very close scrutiny of a state’s actions when race was shown to be the predominant reason in drawing legislative districts. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of districts that empower minority voters.In the new case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., No. 22-807, the challenge came from the opposite direction, saying that the map hurt Black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to allow a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers in Alabama. A lower court had said the map diluted the power of Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act. The South Carolina case poses different questions, centered on the Constitution’s equal protection principles.In their Supreme Court appeal, South Carolina Republicans argued that the panel should have presumed that they had acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the district as a whole.“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, quoting from an earlier decision, “is a thinly reasoned order that presumes bad faith, erroneously equates the purported racial effect of a single line in Charleston County with racial predominance across District 1, and is riddled with ‘legal mistakes’ that improperly relieved plaintiffs of their ‘demanding’ burden to prove that race was the ‘predominant consideration.’”The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the justices that “the panel correctly found that race was the gerrymander’s primary vehicle.”“That predominant reliance on race is impermissible even if mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics,” the challengers’ brief said. More

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      What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters

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      A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.Gov. Ron DeSantis after signing HB7, dubbed the “stop woke” bill, during a news conference in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., last April.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated PressBelieve it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016.Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term.Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase “woke” is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a “woke” part of the federal budget. “Wokeness” was even faulted for the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.But while the definition of “woke” may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting “woke” than any other politician. Like it or not, “woke” will shape this year’s Republican primary.What’s woke?The new left emerged in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. At the time, liberalism seemed utterly triumphant. Yet for young progressives, “hope” and “change” had given way to the realization that Mr. Obama’s presidency hadn’t cured income inequality, racial inequality or climate change. These dynamics opened a space for a new left, as young progressives started to reach for more ambitious politics, just as the triumph of the Obama coalition gave progressives the confidence to embrace ideas that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era.A decade later, this new left is everywhere. On economic issues, there has been the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for Medicare for all; democratic socialism; and the Green New Deal. On race, there has been the Black Lives Matter movement; kneeling in protest during the national anthem; and defund the police. On gender and sex, there has been the Me Too movement and the sharing of preferred pronouns and more.On class and economics, it’s easy to delineate the new left. Mr. Sanders helpfully embraced the democratic socialism label to distinguish himself from those who would incrementally smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. It’s harder to distinguish the new left from Obama-era liberals on race, gender and sexuality. There is no widely shared ideological term like democratic socialism to make it easy.And yet the differences between Obama-era liberals and the new left on race, sexuality and gender are extremely significant, with big consequences for American politics.Here are just a few of those differences:The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”As Obama-era liberalism became dominant, a more righteous progressive discourse emerged — one that didn’t accommodate and even “called out” its opposition. This was partly a reflection of what played well on social media, but it also reflected that progressive values had become uncontested in many highly educated communities.The new left is very conscious of identity. Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions. Mr. Obama was even characterized as “post-racial.”Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.Today’s new left is conscious of identity in policymaking as well, whether it’s arguing against race-neutral policies that entrench racial disparities or advocating race-conscious remedies. Obama-era liberals rarely implemented race-conscious policies or mentioned the racial consequences of racially neutral policies.The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies.Indeed, almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century. Academic jargon like “intersectional” has become commonplace. It can be hard to understand what’s going on if you didn’t read Judith Butler, Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in college.Academic scholarship is also the source of the expanded, academic meanings of “trauma,” “violence,” “safety” and “erasure,” which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.The new left view that racism, sexism and other oppressive hierarchies are deeply embedded in American society all but ensures a pessimistic view of America. This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism. Indeed, Mr. Obama himself was cast as a redeeming figure whose ascent proved American greatness.When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change.In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities.Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values.A protester during a gathering of trans, queer and Black Lives Matter activists in New York in June 2020.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesWhy woke matters for Republicans The rise of the new left on race and gender is already reshuffling conservative politics.For this year’s Republican primary, one of the most important things about this rise is that it has helped bridge the usual divide between the conservative base and the establishment.At least for now, the establishment and the base share the fight against “woke,” for two reasons:The new left is far enough left that there’s room to side with the right while keeping one or both feet in the center. Whether it’s a MAGA fan or a zombie-Reaganite, there’s a path for an enterprising politician to bash “woke” and get on Fox News without alienating donors. Anyone can be a conservative hero, even a private equity magnate who would have been seen as an establishment squish in 2015, like Gov. Glenn Youngkin.Anti-woke politics seems to animate elite conservatives as much as the activist, populist base. After all, the new left is most prevalent in highly educated liberal bastions like New York or Washington, and among the young in highly educated industries like the news media and higher education. Its rise has probably been felt most acutely by highly educated conservatives as well.Whether this dynamic changes is an important question as the primary heats up.Over the last few months, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have staked out farther-right positions that might put this question to the test. Mr. Trump, for instance, said he would pass a federal law recognizing only two genders and would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Mr. DeSantis, for example, would ban gender studies. As the campaign gets underway, they may go further. We will learn whether other candidates match their positions, and whether there’s a cost if they do not. There is even a chance conservatives go too far.Another big question is whether anti-woke politics can supplant older culture war fights, like abortion or immigration. Most anti-new-left conservatives still vigorously oppose the old liberals on immigration, secularism, feminism and more. It remains to be seen whether attacking D.E.I., Disney and university professors, as Mr. DeSantis did in a recent trip to Iowa, is the red meat for rank-and-file conservatives that it is for conservatives in big cities who feel under siege by an increasingly assertive left.Unfortunately, there is almost no survey data that helps answer these questions at this stage. The behavior of Fox News producers and the rise of DeSantis suggest that there’s some kind of mass constituency for this politics, but whether it amounts to 30 percent or 60 percent of the Republican base and whether it’s compelling enough to carry a primary bid is entirely unclear.In the most extreme case for Democrats, the backlash against the new left could end in a repeat of how New Left politics in the 1960s facilitated the marriage of neoconservatives and the religious right in the 1970s. Back then, opposition to the counterculture helped unify Republicans against a new class of highly educated liberals, allowing Southern opponents of civil rights to join old-school liberal intellectuals who opposed Communism and grew skeptical of the Great Society. The parallels are imperfect, but striking.On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility that a populist, working-class conservative base perceives little distinction between “woke” and “liberal,” and would rather hear the old classics on illegal immigration, crime and coarse language about women and Mexicans than fight new battles against “woke capital,” critical race theorists and transgender teenagers. The range of possibilities for the general election are similarly wide. We’ll save the general election for another time. More

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      The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory

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      Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory continues to confound election experts. How could American voters put such a fractious figure into the White House?This is more than an academic question. For the third time, Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.Three books, published in the years following Trump’s election — “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” by John Sides of Vanderbilt, Michael Tesler of the University of California-Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of U.C.L.A.; “White Identity Politics” by Ashley Jardina of George Mason University; and “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity” by Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins — shed light on Trump’s improbable political longevity.Each points to the centrality of racial animosity.Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, for example, cite 2016 American National Election Studies data that asked four questions in order to explore dimensions of white identity: “the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites.”The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level.Now, this earlier scholarship notwithstanding, three political scientists are presenting an alternative interpretation of the 2016 election. In their Feb. 28 paper “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes,” Justin Grimmer of Stanford, William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, also of Stanford, write:We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, 2017; Mason, Wronski and Kane, 2021). Using the ANES, however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012, came from whites with moderate racial resentment. This result holds despite the fact that the relationship between vote choice and racial resentment was stronger in 2016 and 2020 than in other elections.How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true? Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau write:Decomposing the change in support observed in the ANES data, we show that respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views.In an email, Marble provided more detail:Whites with high levels of racial resentment supported Trump at a historically high rate compared to prior Republican presidential candidates. Yet, between 2012 and 2016, the number of people who scored at the high end of the racial resentment scale declined significantly. As a result, there were simply fewer high racial resentment voters for Trump to win in 2016 and 2020 than there were in earlier eras. At the same time, the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.I asked Grimmer to explain the significance of his work with Marble and Tanigawa-Lau.Responding by email, Grimmer wrote:Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.I asked Sides, Tesler and Vavreck for their assessment of the Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau paper. They provided a one-paragraph response affirming, in the phrase “identity-inflected issues,” the crucial role of racial resentment:There are of course many complexities in characterizing changes in aggregate election outcomes over time. Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.John Kane, a political scientist at N.Y.U. and a co-author with Lilliana Mason and Julie Wronski of “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support,” which was cited in the Grimmer paper, suggested that the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:Trump’s surprising win in 2016 was not due to a large increase in Republican votes among the most racially resentful Americans. Instead, Trump’s support grew the most, relative to prior Republican candidates’, among whites with relatively moderate racial resentment scores. This potentially surprising finding is explained by the shifting distribution of racial resentment in the population.Grimmer’s point, Kane wrote, isto highlight the fact that, if we don’t account for a group’s size in the population (e.g., how many racially resentful people there are) and how many of them actually turn out to vote, we could incorrectly infer that certain groups have become more or less supportive of particular parties over time. I fully agree with this point and really do think it’s extremely important for people to understand.That said, Kane continued,The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population, and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).Other scholars who have explored issues of race and politics were generally supportive of the Grimmer paper.Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, wrote by email:I find this argument persuasive because understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?” Along these lines, according to Engelhardt,Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.“I like this piece,” Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote. “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”In his email, Theodoridis argued:Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors. The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means. It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale. Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, was explicitly supportive of the Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau methodology. Writing by email, Westwood argued:It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group. The limitation in Sides-Vavreck-Mason-Jardina is that they find a strong relationship between racial attitudes and Trump support, but while predictive of individual vote choice these results lead to relatively few total votes for Trump.Westwood contends thatthe important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believethat Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate. Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win. Racist appeals can win votes, but it is critical to remember that this number is smaller than the votes gained by speaking on economic concerns of moderate white voters (many of whom were uncomfortable with Trump’s racist rhetoric and were voting solely based on economic policy).Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racists voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”Other scholars were more cautious in their response to the Grimmer paper. Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, commented by email:The 2016 presidential election included ballots cast by more than 128 million Americans, and so any one narrative used to explain that election will be partial and incomplete. So I think it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation. That said, I published an article in 2021 in Political Behavior titled “The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting,” which I entirely stand by.Hopkins said his paper demonstrates thatwhite Americans’ prejudice against Black Americans was more predictive of their vote choice in 2016 than it had been in 2012. Importantly, it also shows that levels of prejudice against Black Americans were more predictive of voting in the 2016 G.O.P. primary than in the 2016 general election. But Grimmer and colleagues are looking at a different question using different data, so I don’t consider the analyses to be contradictory.One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, pointed out in an email that the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining:I think what Justin Grimmer would say is that racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time. Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower. And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment, Hetherington wrote,Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment. In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior. Put another way, racial resentment has a bigger effect. But that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment. In this case, I think it reflects that there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.I began my examination of the Grimmer paper concerned that he and his co-authors might be drawing large conclusions from statistical oddities. After further examining the data and going over the commentary of the scholars I contacted, my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge. Restoring American politics to an even keel will be far tougher than many of us realize.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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      Where Asian Neighborhoods Increased Support of New York’s Republicans

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      In last year’s governor’s election, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. Though these areas remained blue overall, they shifted to the right by 23 percentage points, compared with 2018, after more than a decade of reliably backing Democrats. Governor’s margin of victory since 2006 Source: New York […] More

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      As Trump Inquiry Continues, Republicans Seek Oversight of Georgia Prosecutors

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      The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in district attorneys whom they consider too liberal.ATLANTA — To Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, several bills in the Georgia legislature that would make it easier to remove local prosecutors are racist and perhaps retaliatory for her ongoing investigation of former President Donald J. Trump. To the Republican sponsors of the bills, they are simply a way to ensure that prosecutors enforce the laws of the state, whether they agree with them or not.Two of the measures under consideration would create a new state oversight board that could punish or remove prosecutors for loosely defined reasons, including “willful misconduct.” A third would sharply reduce the number of signatures required to seek a recall of a district attorney. The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in prosecutors whom they consider too liberal, and who in some cases are refusing to prosecute low-level drug crimes or enforce strict new anti-abortion laws.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida last year suspended a Democratic prosecutor in the Tampa area, Andrew Warren, after Mr. Warren said, among other things, that he would not prosecute anyone seeking abortions. The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House voted in November to impeach Larry Krasner, the liberal district attorney in Philadelphia. And a Republican-backed bill currently under consideration in the Indiana legislature would allow a special prosecuting attorney, appointed by the state attorney general, to step in if a local prosecutor is “categorically refusing to prosecute certain crimes.”The debate in Georgia unfolding amid mounting concerns over urban crime, particularly in Atlanta. But Ms. Willis has been a centrist law-and-order prosecutor who has targeted some prominent local rappers in a sprawling gang case. She is also part of the changing face of justice in Georgia: The state now has a record number of minority prosecutors — 14 of them — up from five in 2020, the year Ms. Willis, who is Black, was voted into office. And of course, there is the Trump inquiry, the latest accelerant to the partisan conflagrations that have consumed the increasingly divided state for years. The subject of Ms. Willis’s investigation is whether Mr. Trump and his allies tried to flout Georgia’s democratic process with numerous instances of interference after his narrow 2020 election loss in the state. Ms. Willis, center, with her team during proceedings to seat the special purpose grand jury in Fulton County in May 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Willis has said she is considering building a racketeering or conspiracy case. Anticipation is rising, particularly since the forewoman of a special grand jury charged with looking into the matter spoke publicly last month, saying that the jury’s final report, which is still largely under wraps, recommended indictments for more than a dozen people.Ms. Willis must now decide whether to bring a case to a regular grand jury, which can issue indictments. A decision ‌could come as early as ‌May.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      ‘Different From the Other Southerners’: Jimmy Carter’s Relationship With Black America

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      How a white politician from the South who once supported segregationist policies eventually won the enduring support of Black voters.ATLANTA — Without Black voters, there would have been no President Jimmy Carter.In 1976, African Americans catapulted the underdog Democrat to the White House with 83 percent support. Four years later, they stuck by him, delivering nearly identical numbers even as many white voters abandoned him in favor of his victorious Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.This enduring Black support for Mr. Carter illuminates two intertwined and epochal American stories, each of them powered by themes of pragmatism and redemption. One is the story of a white Georgia politician who began his quest for power in the Jim Crow South — a man who, as late as 1970, declared his respect for the arch-segregationist George Wallace in an effort to attract white votes, but whose personal convictions and political ambitions later pushed him to try to change the racist environment in which he had been raised.The other is the story of a historically oppressed people flexing their growing electoral muscle after the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed obstacles to the ballot box. Certainly, for some Black voters, candidate Carter was simply the least bad option. But for others, the elections of 1976 and 1980 were an opportunity to take the measure of this changing white man, recognizing the opportunity he presented, and even his better angels.“His example in Georgia as a representative of the New South, as one of the new governors from the South, was exciting, and it was appealing,” said Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat whose Georgia congressional district includes Mr. Carter’s home. “It carried the day in terms of people wanting a fresh moral face for the presidency.”Mr. Carter’s support for Black Americans sheds light on the political evolution of the man, who at 98, is America’s longest living president. (Mr. Carter entered hospice care earlier this month.)Mr. Carter at an event in Georgia during the fall 1976 presidential campaign.Guy DeLort/WWD, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesMr. Carter greeting supporters in New York City in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesThe foundation of his relationships with Black voters and leaders was built in his home base of Plains, in rural Sumter County, Ga. Its Black residents can recall his efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies and practices that targeted the majority Black community.Jonathan Alter, in his 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” noted that Mr. Carter, as a school board member, had made a number of moves to accommodate or uphold the local segregationist system of the 1950s, at one point trying to shift resources from Black schools to white schools in the name of sound fiscal management.But Bobby Fuse, 71, a longtime civil rights activist who grew up in Americus, Ga., a few miles from Plains, recalled that Mr. Carter had also shown moments of real character. Among other things, he noted Mr. Carter’s objection to his Baptist church’s refusal to allow Black people to worship there.“I wouldn’t have voted for anybody running against Jimmy Carter, more than likely,” said Mr. Fuse, who said he had first voted for Mr. Carter in his successful 1970 governor’s race. “Because I knew him to be an upright man different from the other Southerners.”There were seeds of this difference early in the life of Mr. Carter. But as a young politician, it did not always translate into action. And the repressive environment of the mid-20th century meant that he had no Black voters to woo when he started his first foray into electoral politics with a 1962 bid for a South Georgia State Senate seat. Due to racist restrictions, hardly any Black people were registered to vote in his district at the time.Mr. Carter waved to the crowd as he and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived at Plains Baptist Church to attend services in 1976.Associated PressPresident Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, with former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Carter at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHistorians say that Mr. Carter, early in his career, was both a creature and a critic of the strict segregationist system he had been born into. He largely kept his head down as civil rights advocates fought and sacrificed to change the status quo, with serious, and sometimes dangerous, protests and crackdowns flaring up in Sumter County.Later, once he had achieved positions of power, he was outspoken about renouncing racial discrimination, seeking means to redress it and trying to live up to those principles. During his presidency, he famously enrolled his daughter, Amy, in a public school in Washington, D.C. Decades after leaving the White House, he offered a full-throated rebuke of Barack Obama’s Republican critics, calling their attacks racism loosely disguised as partisanship during his presidency.“He saw his role as an elder statesman,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. “The fact that you have an elderly white president, from the South, who is there saying, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes; that argument has no weight; that dog won’t hunt,’ is something that he didn’t necessarily have to do.”Mr. Carter had grown up with Black playmates in the tiny community of Archery, Ga. As a boy, his moral and spiritual north star had been a Black woman, Rachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter property. He slept many nights on the floor of her home when his parents were out of town. Mr. Alter, the biographer,  wrote that she had taught him about nature and had impressed him with her selflessness. Mr. Alter wrote that Mr. Carter had even been teased in his all-white elementary school for “sounding Black.”Traffic in Warm Springs, Ga., as visitors arrived to hear Mr. Carter speak in 1976.Gary Settle/The New York TimesRachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter family’s farm, whom Mr. Carter credited with teaching him morals.National Park ServiceBy the mid-1950s, Mr. Carter returned from a stint as a naval officer and settled in Plains, where he built on the family’s successful peanut business. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which dismantled the old separate-but-equal regime for American schools, had inflamed white Southerners. Despite his efforts to appease white parents while on the school board, he was also, Mr. Alter notes, “the only prominent white man in Plains” who declined to join the local chapter of the racist White Citizens’ Council.After winning his 1962 State Senate race, Mr. Carter, a man of searing ambition, set his sights on the governor’s mansion but was defeated in 1966. He ran again and won in 1970, with a campaign full of unsubtle dog whistles to aggrieved white voters that included promises to restore “law and order” to their communities and, according to Mr. Alter, the dissemination of a “fact sheet” that reminded white voters that Mr. Carter’s Democratic opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, had attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.In the Democratic primary, Black voters took notice: Mr. Sanders, in the runoff, garnered roughly 90 percent of their votes. But by the general election, Mr. Carter was campaigning heavily in Black churches.The dog-whistle strategy had generated its share of bitterness and criticism. But a course correction followed, in the form of Mr. Carter’s inaugural address.“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he said.Mr. Carter’s supporters at the Democratic convention.H. Christoph/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMembers of the Concord Baptist Church congregation listening to Mr. Carter speaking in Brooklyn in 1980.Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times“It was really dramatic for all of us, because he said it in that forum, as he was being sworn in,” Mr. Fuse recalled. “And hopefully we were going to see some activity from that.”They did. Mr. Carter expanded the presence of Black Georgians in state government, from senior officials to state troopers, and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office.Black skeptics were converted into allies in other ways. In an interview this week, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who would serve as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Carter, recalled having “a real prejudice to overcome” when the two men first met as Mr. Carter was running for governor.When the matter of Fred Chappell, Sumter County’s notoriously racist sheriff, came up, Mr. Carter called him a “good friend.” Mr. Young was taken aback: Mr. Chappell had once arrested Dr. King after a protest. When Dr. King’s associates tried to bring him blankets to ward off the cold, Mr. Chappell refused them and turned on the fan instead.Later, however, Mr. Young said he had gotten to know Mr. Carter’s family, including his mother, Lillian. Mr. Young, too, came to trust him. “I decided that he was always all right on race,” Mr. Young said. “He never discriminated between his Black friends and white friends.”Mr. Carter, as president, meeting in 1977 with his commission for the appointment of Black Americans to the federal judiciary in the Fifth Circuit.Harvey Georges/Associated PressAndrew Young, right, campaigning for Mr. Carter in Boston in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesIt went the same way with other influential civil rights leaders in Georgia, including Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr. According to the author and journalist Kandy Stroud, the elder Mr. King sent a telegram to voters lauding Mr. Carter’s appointment of Black judges and his support for a fair housing law, among other things. “I know a man I can trust, Blacks can trust, and that man is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.By the time Mr. Carter started his 1976 bid for the White House, it was these leaders who spread the message beyond Georgia voters that Mr. Carter was worthy of their trust. They helped bolster the “peanut brigade,” the nickname for the team of staff members and volunteers spread across the country to campaign for him, making it a mix of Black and white Carter supporters.“They had to tell these people in the rest of the country, ‘Yeah, he’s governor of Georgia, but he’s a different kind of governor of Georgia,’” Mr. Fuse said.In a recent interview, the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled that the King family had lobbied him to support Mr. Carter in 1976. That went a long way, he said, but so did Mr. Carter’s presentation. “A Southern guy that would stand up and talk about racism?” he said. “This was the kind of guy that my uncle trusted down South. And he connected with us for that.”As a presidential candidate, however, Mr. Carter again showed his propensity for trying to have it both ways in a racially divided country.George Skelton, a Los Angeles Times columnist, recently recalled covering the candidate as he campaigned in Wisconsin and watching as he seemed to give contradictory messages on school busing to separate groups of Black and white voters within the span of a single day.Mrs. Coretta King accepting the Presidential Medal on behalf of her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1977.Associated PressMr. Carter, second from right, shaking hands with Black seniors at the Watts Labor Community Action Council in Los Angeles, in 1976.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAnd in a speech about protecting neighborhoods, Mr. Carter used the phrase “ethnic purity,” creating a mini-scandal. Soon after, Mr. Young told him that the use of the phrase had been a “disaster for the campaign.” Mr. Carter issued an apology.But Mr. Carter also found common cultural ground with Black voters nationwide, many of whom shared his Christian faith. They saw how comfortable he was in Black churches. “‘Born again’ is the secret of his success with Blacks,” Ethel Allen, a Black surgeon from Philadelphia, told Ms. Stroud at the time.As president, Mr. Carter sought “to mend the racial divide,” said Kai Bird, another Carter biographer. Mr. Bird noted that food aid was significantly expanded under Mr. Carter, benefiting many poor Black residents in rural areas. Mr. Bird also noted that the Carter administration had toughened rules aimed at preventing racially discriminatory schools from claiming tax-exempt status.If that explains why Black voters stuck with Mr. Carter in 1980, it may have also sown the seeds of his defeat. “I think all of these decisions were too much for white America,” Mr. Bird said. “Ronald Reagan came along and appealed much more to white voters.”Mr. Fuse agrees. All these years later, he still laments the fact that Mr. Carter was denied a second term. Instead of focusing on the problems that plagued Mr. Carter’s time in office — the inflation, the energy crisis, the American hostages stuck in Tehran — Mr. Fuse spoke, instead, about that hope that Mr. Carter had engendered in 1976, and not just for Black voters.“When this white man comes along who’s grinning with a broad smile after Watergate, he lifted our spirits,” Mr. Fuse said. “He lifted everybody’s spirits.” More