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      We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows

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      In August, President Biden met with several historians at the White House to discuss the threats facing American democracy.Most of the conversation, according to a report in The Washington Post, was about “the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.” Those present were people who had “been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.”Now, I was obviously not at this meeting. But I have been thinking about what I would say to Biden about the threats to American democracy. The most acute threat, it’s true, comes from election deniers and the authoritarian mass movement led by the previous president, Donald Trump. But the long-term threat is less an imposition from bad actors and more a constitutive part of our political system. It is, in fact, the Constitution. Specifically, it is a set of fundamental problems with the structure of our government that flow directly from the Constitution as it currently exists.We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.Americans, in short, had forced the Constitution to accommodate their democratic impulses, as would be the case again and again, up to the present. The question, today, is whether there’s any room left to build a truly democratic political system within the present limits of our constitutional order.In his new book “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy says the answer is, essentially, no. “Our mainstream political language still lacks ways of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains,” Purdy writes.This is true in two ways. The first (and obvious) one is that the Constitution has enabled the democratic backsliding of the past six years. Founding-era warnings against demagogues — used often to justify our indirect system of choosing a president — run headfirst into the fact that Donald Trump was selected constitutionally, not elected democratically. (Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist No. 68, “The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” This, it turns out, was wrong.)And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”“If enough people believe it is their responsibility to resist and disable any government they did not help to elect, self-rule can become impossible,” Purdy writes. “Donald Trump’s presidency,” he continues, “arose from all of these dysfunctions.”Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”There is much more to say about the ways that our political system has inhibited democratic life and even enabled forms of tyranny. For now, it suffices to say that a constitution that subverts majority rule, fuels authoritarian movements and renders popular sovereignty inert is not a constitution that can be said to protect, secure or even enable American democracy.In a speech in Philadelphia last month, Biden did speak publicly on the threats to American democracy. He focused, as almost any president would, on the Constitution. “This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.”The problem, and what this country must confront if it ever hopes to turn its deepest democratic aspirations into reality, is that we don’t actually honor the will of the people. We deny it. And it’s this denial that sits at the root of our troubles.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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      Will the Herschel Walker Allegations Actually Matter?

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      The scandal could be decisive even if one in 50 would-be Walker voters change their minds.Why this Herschel Walker episode could be decisive: It’s largely because of the 50-50 nature of Georgia politics. Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockWill the Herschel Walker Allegations Actually Matter?I don’t think there’s a question I’m asked more often than: “Will this matter” on Election Day?Usually, the question follows the latest gaffe or breaking news that casts a candidate in a bad light. And usually, my answer is, “No, it will not matter” — or at least a version of “no.” The country is deeply polarized, and voters have a short memory.This week, I’ve been getting that question about the Georgia Senate race. As you’ve probably heard, the Republican nominee Herschel Walker reportedly paid a woman to have an abortion. The woman, who shared her story with The Daily Beast, said she was not only an ex-girlfriend, but also the mother of one of Mr. Walker’s children. Mr. Walker has denied the allegation.It’s too soon to look to polling to judge the political fallout. So far, there has been only one survey fielded entirely since the allegations, covering only one day. That poll, an Insider Advantage survey, showed the Democrat Raphael Warnock up by three points, which does happen to be an improvement for Mr. Warnock compared with its prior poll. Mr. Walker led that one by four points. (State polling is infrequent, so it’s hard to say when we’ll get a better sense from the polls about how or whether the allegations have changed voters’ views.)But regardless of what the next surveys say, I think my short answer to the familiar “will this matter” question is “yes” — or at least a version of “yes.”That’s not because this represents the absolute worst case for Mr. Walker. His success is so vital to his party — in its chances to retake the Senate — that his fellow Republicans are unlikely to throw him overboard.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.From the standpoint of the party, this might be more like Donald J. Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 than the Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin after his “legitimate rape” comments in 2012. Although denying the allegations of paying for an abortion carries its own risks, it does mean that his party has a way to avoid criticizing him directly. That’s something different from the cases of Mr. Akin or Mr. Trump, who each were captured on tape and so Republicans had to respond to shared facts.One factor that cuts in both directions: The news reinforces a pre-existing narrative about Mr. Walker, who has recently acknowledged he was the father of several children he had not previously mentioned publicly. But for that same reason, he may have already incurred most of the potential reputational damage before this allegation.There’s one other thing that’s odd about this scandal: The voters likeliest to find paying for abortion to be deeply repugnant are also likeliest to be solidly Republican. Many lower-turnout, persuadable or swing voters, in contrast, may be relatively likely to support abortion rights, and may not find this as offensive as another scandal. Hypocrisy is not an unusual accusation for a politician, after all.And yet I’m still inclined to say “yes,” this might really matter. And that’s largely because of the circumstances.First, this was the closest state in the country in 2020: President Biden won Georgia by two-tenths of a point. On paper, this was always likely to be a tight contest — a Democratic incumbent was running in a midterm year in a state slightly more Republican than the nation as a whole. Indeed, the polls showed a very close race (with Mr. Warnock ahead) before the allegations.So in this case, even a modest effect — smaller than a point or two — could be important.Second is the possibility of a runoff election. As you may remember from 2020, Georgia holds runoff elections if no candidate receives at least 50 percent of the vote on Election Day. This race has long seemed poised to go to a runoff (there is a Libertarian candidate, and the Libertarian usually receives a couple of points in Georgia).For Mr. Walker, the runoff would carry some risk and reward. The possible upside: It will be further from this week’s allegations. The downside is that there won’t be anyone else to help carry him to victory. The state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is seemingly likely to defeat Stacey Abrams outright, so a hypothetical Walker-Warnock runoff is likely to be the top of the ticket — the major reason to show up and vote. In the Nov. 8 election by contrast, Mr. Walker may benefit from Kemp supporters and other general election regulars who may reluctantly vote for Mr. Walker, but might not have shown up on his account.If Mr. Walker can’t move past these allegations, would he really be able to get the same Republican turnout he would have otherwise? Wouldn’t Democrats be more motivated to stop him from taking office? Here, the analogy that might be most promising for Democrats is Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican who lost a special election for Senate after numerous women, including several teenagers, accused him of sexual misconduct.I don’t want to start a new Olympic event in “political scandals” for judging Mr. Moore and Mr. Walker. What’s relevant is that Democrats enjoyed a very considerable turnout advantage in that Alabama election, the kind of advantage that can really only happen in a low-turnout special election.The possibility that control of the Senate might be on the line would certainly mitigate the risk of a total collapse in Republican turnout in a runoff. But if the race is as close as the polls and recent electoral history suggest, the scandal might be decisive even if one in 50 would-be Walker voters decide they just don’t need to go out of their way to send him to Washington. More

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      Jan. 6 Defendant Coordinated Volunteers to Help Glenn Youngkin

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      In the election last fall that sent Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s office and propelled him to G.O.P. stardom, the state and local Republican Party tasked Joseph Brody with coordinating volunteers to knock on doors of potential Youngkin voters in the state’s strategically crucial northern suburbs.But eight months earlier, Mr. Brody had been immersed in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, according to the F.B.I., which said that he assaulted a police officer with a metal barricade and breached several restricted areas, including the Senate floor and the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Now, Mr. Brody, 23, who the F.B.I. said was associated with the white nationalist group America First, is facing felony and misdemeanor charges for his role. The candidate he would go on to help, Mr. Youngkin, tried during his campaign to keep himself at arm’s length from former President Donald J. Trump, and he called the Jan. 6 riot a “blight on our democracy.”Shortly after Mr. Brody’s arrest last month, an image scraped from the internet by online sleuths who call themselves “Sedition Hunters” showed a man in a MAGA hat holding a high-powered rifle in front of a Nazi flag, with a bandanna concealing his face. The group, which has provided information that has helped law enforcement officials make hundreds of arrests related to Jan. 6, said the man in the photo was Mr. Brody.A public defender listed for Mr. Brody did not respond to several requests for comment. Messages sent to an email account for Mr. Brody went unanswered. There was no answer at a phone number listed for him.Mr. Youngkin’s office referred questions about Mr. Brody to Kristin Davison, a political consultant for the governor, who said in an email on Friday that Mr. Brody “did not work for or with the Youngkin campaign.”The Fairfax County Republican Committee twice listed Mr. Brody, who is from Springfield, Va., in Fairfax, as helping to coordinate a volunteer effort to knock on doors for “Team Youngkin.” When asked about those online listings, Ms. Davison said, “Those are not posts from the Youngkin campaign.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Youngkin’s campaign logo appeared on both pages, which included an official email address associated with the Republican Party of Virginia for Mr. Brody.“Mr. Brody was employed by the party as a door-knocker for one month last fall,” Ellie Sorensen, a state G.O.P. spokeswoman, said in an email on Monday. “He has not been employed by the Republican Party of Virginia for over a year.”Ms. Sorensen did not comment further about the charges against Mr. Brody or what had led to the end of his employment with the party.The Fairfax Republicans did not respond to multiple requests for comment.According to a criminal affidavit, Mr. Brody recorded and photographed senators’ desks during the Capitol attack, in which he wore a neck gaiter with an American flag pattern. Later, he “assisted another rioter in using a metal barricade against a Capitol Police officer, knocking the officer back as he attempted to secure the north door,” an F.B.I. agent said in the affidavit.Federal investigators said Mr. Brody had previously met four other men who were recently charged in the attack at an event held by America First, whose followers are known as Groypers. The movement’s leader, Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white supremacist who has been denounced by conservative organizations as a Holocaust denier and a racist, was issued a subpoena by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.In one photograph that a group of Sedition Hunters said it had obtained of Mr. Brody, a young political canvasser holds a campaign sign for Mr. Youngkin. The group contrasted that image with other postings it said were from Mr. Brody’s social media accounts, some of which showed Nazi symbols and diatribes against women.Luke Broadwater More

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      A Plan B for Democrats Living in Red States

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      BOZEMAN, Mont. — Before we get to the point, keep in mind that during Montana’s recent primary election, in the Second Congressional District race in Garfield County — a stretch of eastern badlands and prairie nearly the size of Connecticut — 14 Democrats voted. Then again, maybe that is the point.After the 2020 census, Montana regained the second House seat it lost 30 years ago. Here in the western mountains where I live, the First District could be competitive for Democrats if the college towns and Indian reservations can outflank clumps of Trumpists and armed Christian separatists. But when I asked Dorothy Bradley — a Democratic icon since she got elected to the state legislature as a 23-year-old in 1970 — about the Second District, she replied point blank, “A Democrat can’t win in eastern Montana.”She is, however, floating a Plan B. In April, Ms. Bradley invited to the Capitol in Helena her opponent in the 1992 gubernatorial race, Marc Racicot, the two-term governor and former chair of the Republican National Committee. In the contest for the House seat in the eastern district, they endorsed an independent, Gary Buchanan, who is running against Montana’s current at-large representative, Republican Matt Rosendale. The Bradley-Racicot endorsement was a singular milestone in Montana politics, as if the C.E.O.s of Pepsi and Coke called a truce to sell some Dr. Pepper.President Biden’s plea to rational Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats in the midterms, as a ploy to root out authoritarian Republican extremists, could persuade the already persuadable. But winning the popular and electoral votes in 2020 does not change the fact that he lost in about 2,500 of the nation’s 3,000 or so counties. While the Republican Party spurns observable reality, the Democratic Party has alienated most of the continent (which is also unrealistic in a republic if governing is the goal). In landscapes where, as former Senator Conrad Burns described eastern Montana, there is “a lot of dirt between light bulbs,” defending pluralist democracy might require a pluralist task force. Realistic Democrats allying with Republican defectors and the unaffiliated to elect civic-minded independents could look like the bipartisan coalition backing Mr. Buchanan and an experiment south of here in Utah.The Utah Democratic Party decided not to field a U.S. Senate candidate and instead endorsed the independent Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer who ran for president in 2016, to oppose Mike Lee, who initially supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election. That was a stirring, patriotic feat. Still, what did they have to lose? The last Democrat to win the Senate in Utah was born in 1911 and lost to Orrin Hatch in 1976.These independents overlap in ways that could be instructive in future races — levelheaded centrists with establishment support and a sense of place running against mortifying Republican oddballs in regions where Democrats are pariahs. And while Mr. Buchanan has raised about twice as much money as his Democratic opponent, the fact that Mr. McMullin doesn’t have a Democrat to contend with has helped propel him to a statistical tie with Senator Lee, according to a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.No responsible American can vote for congressional Republicans — with few exceptions, like Senator Lisa Murkowski — for the foreseeable future because of the threat that party poses to orderly elections. Montana’s Representative Rosendale, who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, personifies that threat.Mr. Buchanan, who owns an investment advisory firm in Billings, made a last-minute decision to run for the House after Mr. Rosendale voted against a bipartisan resolution titled “Supporting the People of Ukraine.”How do you know if your representative is not the least bit representative? When the House votes 426-3, and yours is among the three.Mr. Buchanan described that vote as the moment “when embarrassment became shame.” It’s worth noting that our right-wing governor, Greg Gianforte, was so offended by the invasion, he started immediately divesting the state’s Russian assets, proclaiming, “Montana stands with Ukraine.” It’s such a near-unanimous position that even I will stand with my journalist-clobbering governor, though I will be 10 yards away wearing my dad’s welding helmet.Pondering Representative Rosendale’s peculiar record (he was also in the minority when the House voted 394-18 to support Sweden and Finland joining NATO), Mr. Racicot summarized his disapproval: “These aren’t necessarily moral judgments. These are almost mathematical judgments.”Though I voted for Dorothy Bradley in 1992, I do find Mr. Racicot, as a former R.N.C. chair who publicly endorsed Joe Biden for president, to be a reliable sherpa in ascending to the ideal of country above party.“I don’t care about the things that are debatable, that thoughtful people can argue about and come to different conclusions,” he told me. “What I care about is betraying the country and betraying the democracy.” Because of fidelity to the Constitution, he argues that “a lot of people are to the point where they can finally say: ‘You know what, I’m not a Democrat first. I’m not a Republican first.’”A man in a bar recently asked Mr. Buchanan if he’s an F.B.I. agent or a Mormon. He looks like he served as Montana’s first Department of Commerce director in the early 1980s. Sounds dull, yet those were desperate years, when much of the old Montana up and died — the Butte copper mine, the Great Falls refinery and the Anaconda smelter shut down, and the farm crisis incited hundreds of farmers in Montana and the Midwest to take their own lives. Mr. Buchanan oversaw “Build Montana,” a program focused on beefing up what’s now the economic pillar of tourism. He created the still ubiquitous “Made in Montana” label to promote homegrown products, a marketing ploy I fall for every time I face life’s jelly and jam dilemmas. Endangered fossil fuel towns might appreciate his experience with tough transitions. And his fealty to the right to privacy in the Montana Constitution, which guarantees abortion rights (for now), provides an alternative to Representative Rosendale’s rigid opposition.Mr. Buchanan told me that when he’s out campaigning in the eastern district, he meets Montanans who have never heard of the category of independent, but they instantly see themselves in that word. More than 40 percent of Americans identify as independents, according to a Gallup poll — the biggest bloc in the country, outnumbering either party. That figure should shame both parties’ leaders into deep self-reflection.When I saw photos of Mr. Racicot and Ms. Bradley standing beside Mr. Buchanan for endorsement, my first reaction was relief that there might be a plausible home remedy to Representative Rosendale and his ilk. Last month, in Livingston, I noticed about a dozen Buchanan yard signs and zero for his major party opponents. I know hardcore liberals in Helena and the Shields Valley who plan to vote for him.While I wish I could reach a comforting conclusion about the improvised communities bucking up these western independents for the greater good, partisans putting aside heartfelt differences is not necessarily a sign of hope but a warning that the two-party system has failed them. Congress is supposed to compromise, not voters.Sarah Vowell is the author of, among other books, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States” and the producer of an oral history of the Montana Constitutional Convention of 1972.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 Run-Up’: Can Democrats Catch up to Years of Republican Unity?

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOn today’s episode: How the Republican grass roots got years ahead of a changing country, and whether the Democrats can catch up.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesGuestsJ. David Goodman, The Times’s Houston bureau chief, covering Texas.Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.Background ReadingPatriot Mobile, a Christian cellphone company, is spending money to promote conservative views on race and gender in schools. Read J. David Goodman’s reporting on how the company has become a rising force in Texas politics.Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, Democrats in difficult re-election races are reorienting their campaigns around abortion rights.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Suddenly, a New Jersey Congressional Race Looks Like a Bellwether

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      SCOTCH PLAINS, N.J. — When New Jersey’s congressional map was redrawn last year, Representative Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat, was widely considered a political goner.President Biden’s popularity had plummeted, gas prices were soaring and Mr. Malinowski’s Seventh Congressional District — in which he barely eked out a re-election victory in 2020 — had been redrawn to include nearly 27,000 more registered Republicans. When Mr. Malinowski announced he would run for a third term, he did so in a terse statement, quoting an ominous Shakespearean battle cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”But 10 months later, as voters have absorbed the impact of the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that Democrats believe the national political momentum has shifted to a degree that even this race, written off by some as a strategic sacrifice, is narrowing.Any path by which Democrats are able to stave off a midterm rout or retain a slim House majority cuts straight through districts like Mr. Malinowski’s, where moderate, well-educated voters helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018 and are seen as crucial to holding it.“I do see it as a bit of a bellwether — an indicator of how things are going to go nationally,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who was a key architect of former Gov. Chris Christie’s victories in 2009 and 2013.Mr. Malinowski is running for a second time against Tom Kean Jr., the namesake of a beloved former New Jersey governor making his fourth run for Congress. Mr. Kean came within about 5,000 votes of winning in 2020 and remains a formidable opponent this year.Still, a national political action committee dedicated to preserving the Democratic majority in the House has suddenly begun buying up its first television time for Malinowski ads. And Democratic loyalists who have been knocking on doors for Mr. Malinowski say concern over abortion rights has grown palpable within the suburban swing district, which stretches from one side of northern New Jersey to the other.“I don’t know a woman who isn’t really angry and really scared,” Jennifer Robinson of Tewksbury, N.J., who supports Mr. Malinowski, said on Sunday night after a forum with both candidates sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey.“Republicans targeted this race thinking Tom Kean Jr. was going to ride a red wave,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Instead, with five weeks to go, this race remains neck and neck.”None of the major independent polling operations in New Jersey have released surveys about the race. A poll conducted in late July, paid for by a group that supports term limits, showed Mr. Kean leading by eight percentage points; 11 percent of the 400 people surveyed said they were undecided.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.On Sunday, an internal poll memo released by Mr. Malinowski’s campaign suggested that the race had narrowed, and that he and Mr. Kean were statistically tied, 48 percent to 48 percent.Mr. Kean’s campaign spokesman dismissed the poll and called its release a “desperate cry for help.”Mr. Malinowski and three other New Jersey Democrats rode a wave of anti-Trump fervor to Congress during the 2018 midterm cycle, temporarily leaving the state with just one Republican in its 12-person congressional delegation. But many of these newly blue swing districts remained highly competitive.Last year, the new congressional map, redrawn to reflect the 2020 census, eased some of the pressure on Democrats. As it added Republican-leaning towns to Mr. Malinowski’s district, it shored up the districts of several other vulnerable incumbents at a time when Democrats were bracing for a midterm shellacking.The districts of Democratic Representatives Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim and Mikie Sherrill all shed Republican-leaning towns — territory that in southern and central New Jersey the state’s two Republican congressmen, Christopher Smith and Jeff Van Drew, mainly absorbed, making their seats safer, too. Only Mr. Malinowski’s race, on paper, got harder.Yet until last month, the Democrats’ House Majority PAC had not made ad buys for Mr. Malinowski’s race, even as Republican special interest groups prepared to pump millions of dollars into Mr. Kean’s.But in late September the political action committee began booking television airtime, and it has now reserved between $100,000 and $185,000 in ads each week until Election Day, according to data maintained by Ad Impact, a company that tracks political advertising.Tom Kean Jr. speaking to voters in Scotch Plains, N.J., on Sunday. He came close to winning in 2020.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Malinowski’s district includes affluent commuter towns close to New York City, communities filled with horse-country estates (and a former president’s golf course) and rural, Republican bastions. Voters in the district backed Mr. Biden by less than four percentage points, even though he beat former President Donald J. Trump by nearly 16 percentage points in New Jersey, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by just over one million voters.Even if it has narrowed, the race remains a decidedly uphill battle for Mr. Malinowski.Inflation has been stubborn, and consumers are still feeling an economic pinch — an issue that a Monmouth University poll released on Monday found is likely to overshadow abortion access as a motivator heading into the midterms. Only 42 percent of voters across the country support Mr. Biden, according to last month’s New York Times/Siena College poll, a threshold that is just as bad or worse than any president whose party went on to lose control of Congress in midterm elections, going back to 1978.And Mr. Malinowski remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations he failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock trades, an error he has taken responsibility for and said resulted from carelessness.“It’s better for Democrats than six months ago,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But it’s still a better political environment for Republicans than it was two years ago — and certainly four years ago.”At the forum on Sunday, questions from an audience filled almost entirely with Malinowski supporters centered largely on Mr. Kean’s position on abortion.Mr. Malinowski supports access to abortion at any point in a pregnancy, and he said on Sunday that he would vote to enshrine a right to abortion into federal law.Mr. Kean, a former state senator and assemblyman, has said he supported a “woman’s right to choose.” But he opposes abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent extenuating circumstances, according to his campaign.“I think there are meaningful exceptions that should be rape, incest, life and the health of the mother,” he said Sunday. “Those are exceptions for a reasonable amount of time.”In the Senate, he voted against a bill affirming abortion as a right in New Jersey. He said he opposed the legislation, which was later signed into law, because it permitted abortion at any point in a pregnancy, including what he called late-term abortion. Abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy are rare, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.A Kean campaign website is less nuanced.“Tom is a fierce defender of the sanctity of life, fighting every step of the way to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws proposed in New Jersey, and will continue to do so in Congress,” it reads.“When I’m talking about the egregious piece of legislation, the ability to choose to terminate, for not valid reasons, when a baby can stay alive, be alive, outside of the womb, is wrong,” he said at the forum.Of the 616,000 registered voters in the district, about a third are not enrolled in either major party. It is these moderate voters who tend to sway elections in New Jersey.Motivating supporters to turn in mail ballots or to show up at polling places during an election year with no statewide races is crucial for any candidate, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.“Elections are about turnout,” Ms. Walsh said. “The people who turn out are the people who feel they have the most at stake.”Ms. Walsh, whose organization studies voting trends among women, said she believed the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly 50 years of abortion rights in the United States would be an “energizer.”“I think it all feels very real to people,” she said.Tracy Keegan, a founder of Summit Marches On, a left-leaning group in Mr. Malinowski’s district that formed after the 2017 Women’s March and includes mainly women with children, said she believed the growing energy among voters extended beyond concern over reproductive rights.“It’s not just about abortion,” she said. “It’s about a government’s willingness to remove freedoms.”A gun control rally in Summit, N.J., after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, drew hundreds of people, said Ms. Keegan. a 51-year-old mother of three.“It wasn’t just Democrats,” she said. More

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      Online Fund-Raising Was Supposed to Save Politics. Instead, It’s Dragging Us to Hell.

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      In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our Yahoo browsers. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Amid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter.Mr. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. “McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days.Mr. McCain and Mr. Dean both lost — but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time.The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “the victory lab.”The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.A warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. Obama for the outburst.But after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign.This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer.The story was similar for Amy McGrath, who ran against Senator Mitch McConnell, and Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who got shaved clean by Bryan Steil. The lesson remains unlearned: This year Marcus Flowers has raised $10 million in his assuredly hopeless race against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — double the receipts of more competitive races. Added together, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates. At a minimum, that money could be used more efficiently by the Democratic Party. But that entire way of thinking might be a reflection of broken politics brain. Aren’t there myriad better uses for all that altruism than pumping out hokey attack ads?As the social media outrage fund-raising model began to come into form, the political parties began to professionalize their grass-roots outreach using email and then text messages. Gone was the decentralized model Mr. Dean had road-tested, whereby supporters organized among themselves, recruiting neighbors and message board friends toward a common cause. By the 2010s, that was displaced by centralized, beta-tested boiler rooms that used powerful digital tools to prey on people’s emotions. The result is very little message variation within the party coalitions. We’ve seen a few exceptions, most notably Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. But overall, it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.To get a sense of just how noxious and stupid the material is that reaches America’s inboxes, I like to peruse The Archive of Political Emails’ The Firehose from time to time. A colleague of mine engineered the site for archival purposes, signing up for various lists and funneling them to the same place. You won’t be surprised to find out that The Firehose is largely devoid of that community-minded hopey-changey stuff that we were promised in the aughts. Instead it’s peppered with conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time. (We all have our weaknesses.)Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?This part is a deep, bipartisan problem. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee might be the longest-running offender when it comes to sending apocalyptic, wheels-off messages demanding voters’ money. It has even been chastised from within its own ranks — to little effect.There is also the more direct grift. Last year I wrote about how the National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation form used a prechecked box scheme, which automatically doubled the dollar amount and made it recurring. A warning aggressively threatened donors if they unchecked the box. Similar tactics resulted in the Trump campaign’s having to return $122 million to supporters who had been duped and, in some cases, financially devastated. If the old fund-raising system was transactional, this new one is dominated by the eternal and emotionally toxic hunt for the small donor.As gross and unethical as those tactics are, the greatest threat resulting from all of this is how the very politicians who are refusing to abide by the results of democratic elections are often being funded: by the once vaunted online donor, even if this one just wants to watch the whole system burn.Senator Josh Hawley raised around $3 million in the first quarter of 2021, mostly after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol. He’s even merchandising this asininity. Most of the Republican leadership has fund-raised on Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-addled social media site. Rank-and-file voters who preferred candidates who promised to decertify the last election or who might certify the next one only if they get their preferred winner (or both) helped fund those candidates in Republican primaries this year.Many of these candidates have struggled to raise what is required for the general elections, in part because Mr. Trump is sucking up nine figures for his PACs, at least one of which spent copiously on legal fees this summer while spending little on supporting Republican candidates. But some wild-eyed insurrectionists might get swept into office during an election cycle in which Republicans perform well, and that is dangerous enough.Maybe, then, given the results of our two-decade experiment in people-powered politics, we might temper rhetoric that glorifies the mighty grass-roots dollar. And reflect on how we might reform our financing system to disincentivize the crazy-making. Empowering the little guy and draining the swamp sounds nice and all, but as it turns out, there is something to be said for a little gatekeeping.And if you don’t believe me, the O.G. disrupter basically admitted as much.Last week I called Mr. Dean to ask him to reflect on the devolution of the netroots model that seemed to offer so much hope for doe-eyed reformers two decades ago.“At the time, it was a way that a young generation could start pushing their way up by using technology,” he said, “and it was incredible.”“But now that technology has been abused,” he continued. “The right-wingers are using it in service of fascism.” He added, “And I just send all my fund-raising emails to junk.”Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”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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      Woman Who Said Herschel Walker Paid for Abortion Is Also Mother of His Child, Report Says

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      ATLANTA — The woman who told The Daily Beast on Monday that Herschel Walker had paid for her abortion in 2009 told the outlet on Wednesday that she was the mother of one of his children, undercutting his defense that he did not know her identity.Mr. Walker, the Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, had swiftly denounced the original Daily Beast article, denying its veracity and pledging to sue the outlet for defamation. So far, the campaign has not pursued any legal action.When asked earlier Wednesday by Brian Kilmeade of Fox News whether he knew the woman’s identity, Mr. Walker said “not at all.”“It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, everyone is leaking. They want you to confess to something you have no clue about,” he said of Democrats and reporters. “But it just shows how desperate they are right now.”The woman, who told The Daily Beast she wished to remain anonymous to preserve her privacy and that of her child with Mr. Walker, provided the outlet with a copy of the receipt from the abortion clinic, a $700 check and a “get well soon” card signed by Mr. Walker. The article includes a photo of the card with what it said was Mr. Walker’s signature.The woman told The Daily Beast she was moved to say more about her relationship with Mr. Walker and the child they had together after he said he did not know her identity. The New York Times has not been able to independently confirm The Daily Beast’s reporting.Representatives for Mr. Walker’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Since beginning his campaign in 2021, Mr. Walker has contended with a flurry of reports scrutinizing his personal and professional life. Mr. Walker, a former University of Georgia football star, has lied about and exaggerated his business dealings, and he failed to disclose three children from previous relationships that he did not mention publicly.More recently, Democrats have put Mr. Walker’s history of domestic violence at the center of their campaign message. One television advertisement from a Democratic-aligned group, Georgia Honor, shows footage of Mr. Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, detailing a moment when he held a gun to her temple and threatened to kill her, calling the episode “not an isolated incident.” The spot has been running in Georgia’s largest media markets for a week. More