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      The Republic

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn kicking off the midterms, Joe Biden talked about American democracy as a shared value, enshrined in the country’s founding — a value that both Democrats and Republicans should join together in defending. But there is another possible view of this moment. One that is shared by two very different groups: the voters who propelled Biden to the presidency … and the conservative activists who are rejecting democracy altogether.Photo Illustration by The New York Times. Photo by Travis Dove for The New York TimesOn today’s episodeRepresentative James E. Clyburn of South CarolinaRobert Draper, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.”About ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is back. The host, Astead Herndon, will grapple with the big ideas animating the 2022 midterm election cycle — and explore how we got to this fraught moment in American politics.Elections are about more than who wins and who loses. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Herschel Walker Says He’s ‘Not That Smart.’ I Believe Him.

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      For months, Herschel Walker refused to agree to debate Senator Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate race. Walker had also not debated any of his Republican primary challengers. He was riding a Donald Trump endorsement and the widespread resentment aimed at Warnock. There was no need for debate.Also, based on his incoherent, often incomprehensible public statements, he was bound to be horrible at it.Now the two candidates have finally agreed to a debate — on Oct. 14, in Savannah — and Walker has already begun to do what Republicans unprepared for the roles they run for often do: lower expectations for himself and raise them for his opponent.Walker said last week about the debate:“I’m this country boy, you know. I’m not that smart. And he’s a preacher. He’s a smart man, wears these nice suits. So he is going to show up and embarrass me at the debate Oct. 14, and I’m just waiting to show up and I’m going to do my best.”Mr. Walker, I’m also a country boy. In fact, there were about 2,000 people in your hometown, Wrightsville, Ga., when you were born in 1962. My hometown, Gibsland, La., had about 1,400 people when I was born in 1970.What does this mean as it relates to wisdom and intellect? Absolutely nothing.Many American presidents were so-called country boys from small towns. Bill Clinton was from a small Arkansas town, Hope, which had a population of about 9,000 in 2020. Jimmy Carter’s hometown is Plains, Ga., with a 2020 population of about 760. And Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Ill., with a 2020 population of about 770.Mr. Walker, I believe you when you say that you’re not smart. But intelligence has nothing to do with the size of your hometown or the quality of your suit. You are the personification of a game being played by Georgia Republicans: a wager that any Black Republican — in your case, an empty intellectual vessel — can beat the Black Democrat, a man who is thoroughly qualified and utterly decent.Walker is Georgia Republicans’ attempt to undermine the image of Black competence, by making a mockery of Black people, by replacing a thinker with a toady.It seems clear to me that Walker will inflate or deflate his intellect to fit a function. The truth is irrelevant. This is at the heart of Trumpism.And this is all political strategy. Walker for years claimed to have graduated from the University of Georgia in the top 1 percent of his class, although he didn’t graduate from the school at all.But when he was there, The Times reported, he had “a B average in criminal justice.”Now he’s framing himself as not at all smart.It is all an attempt to lower the bar of the debate so low that anyone, even Walker, can clear it.This is the same approach that George W. Bush’s team used against Al Gore. As Karen Hughes, the Bush adviser overseeing his debate prep, told The New York Times in 2016: “Keeping quiet was a way to keep expectations low for Governor Bush. In debates, you run against expectations almost as much as you run against your opponent.”The debate was scored by many as a win by Bush, who came across as “relatable,” while the clearly more knowledgeable Gore was chastised for sighing during the debate and appearing exasperated with Bush, a dynamic that Politico magazine ranked as one of “the eight biggest unforced errors in debate history.”It is the same tactic Trump used against Hillary Clinton, clearly the most qualified of the two for the presidency. As The Atlantic wrote at the time:“Through a combination of months of campaigning, leaks about his debate prep, and aggressive working of the referees, Trump has set expectations so low that it’s hard to imagine how he finishes the debate without getting positive reviews from mainstream commentators.”And sure enough, that’s what happened. As a Times article put it the day after the debate:“By the standards Mr. Trump, his team and we in the news media seemed to have set for the Republican nominee, Mr. Trump cleared the bar. He stayed more or less in control, never directly insulted Mrs. Clinton and did not create new controversies over policy.”Now it’s time for Walker to take a swing, playing the same game, and the media is playing into it in predictable ways.As Georgia Public Broadcasting wrote last week: “Simply appearing on the debate stage is more than what many politics watchers expected of Walker, and even a tepid debate performance could assuage some fears about his campaign and could reiterate his message and celebrity status just two days before in-person early voting begins.”Enough of this foolishness. Enough giving the unqualified undue lenience. Enough of giving laurels for simply bare-minimum composure and demerits for knowledge and acumen.Whether Warnock embarrasses Walker or Walker embarrasses himself or there is no embarrassment to be had during the debate is not the point. The point is that Warnock is a serious, competent candidate, and Walker is clearly a tool of his party — a Black former athlete handpicked by Trump to take down a highly educated Black clergyman who was elected by a coalition led by an ascendant Black electorate in the state.No one on the night of debate — no matter how it unfolds, no matter how much the media sacrifices message to mannerism — can change these truths. When Herschel Walker tells you he’s not that smart, believe him.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Elise Stefanik Says She’s Confident a Republican Wave Is Coming to the House

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      Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, also spoke about her PAC’s success in backing female candidates, 23 of whom are running in the fall.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent in Washington.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, predicted on Wednesday that her party would pick up as many as three dozen House seats in November, despite signs that the red wave many predicted months ago might not form after all.And, brushing aside concerns from many Republicans that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has saddled them with an unpopular position that is energizing Democrats all over the country, Stefanik told reporters defiantly at a news conference that “we will have a pro-life Republican majority in the next Congress.”Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014 to her upstate New York seat as a relative moderate, became a star of the MAGA universe thanks to her role as President Donald J. Trump’s chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during his first impeachment trial.She has translated her Trump-refracted fame into a fund-raising boon for female Republican candidates she is boosting in critical House races — a move that is also helping build a base in the G.O.P. House conference for a politician with big ambitions.“My own experience going through impeachment No. 1, where I played an outsized role on the House Intelligence Committee — we built up a national donor list,” Stefanik said Wednesday at a briefing at the Republican National Committee about the midterm elections. “We’ve been able to have that donor list support other women candidates across the country.”Stefanik, 38, founded her political action committee, Elevate PAC, or E-PAC, in 2018, when only 13 Republican women served in the House of Representatives. At the time, her goal was to elect more conservative women to Congress.In 2020, 11 of the 15 House seats that Republicans flipped were won by women that E-PAC had endorsed. Today, there are 34 Republican women in the House.During this campaign cycle, Stefanik’s organization has raised and donated more than $1 million directly to female Republican candidates, and 23 women endorsed by E-PAC are running in the general election. Since its creation, E-PAC has raised $4 million to date.Another part of Stefanik’s aim is to help with news coverage. “One thing that is very clear to me is Democrat women get outsized coverage in the media,” Stefanik said. “They get magazine covers.” Those she helps, she said, “deserve glossy magazines as well.”The outcome of those races will help determine Stefanik’s clout as a queenmaker in the current, Trump-controlled version of the Republican Party. Her activities are also a key part of the G.O.P.’s overall midterm strategy to expand beyond the core political base of right-wing and conservative voters with a more diverse slate.The push to elevate female candidates comes as the Republican Party struggles to overcome political gains Democrats have made on the issue of abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In an election year when political tensions are running high over gender and social issues, liberal groups are willing to give Stefanik only so much credit for helping to elect women.“There are challenges that all women face in running for office,” said Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. “I understand why there’s a need for this on both sides of the aisle.”But she added, “To support women’s rights, to support our freedoms, we think it’s critical that we elect Democratic, pro-choice women.”Stefanik shrugged off questions about how the issue of abortion will affect the midterms. Her party has struggled to unite behind a strategy on a fraught social issue that is reshaping campaigns across the country and, in some cases, forcing Republicans to backpedal on hard-line positions they took to win their primaries.“On the issue of abortion, Democrats are working overtime to force the American people to rethink what their top priorities are,” Stefanik said. “In every poll, inflation is the No. 1 issue. In my district, Second Amendment issues are second. Our candidates know how to communicate on this issue.”Stefanik also emphasized that many of the candidates she is backing are mothers. “I think that’s a very compelling message to voters,” she said, noting that one congressional candidate in Ohio, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, gave birth just days ago.E-PAC’s slate of candidates includes seven who are Hispanic, four who are veterans and one who is Black. Stefanik said it was the most diverse group of candidates her PAC had supported to date.Stefanik said she had no ideological litmus test for candidates to gain her organization’s financial backing and endorsement.This cycle, she has backed candidates who falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, like Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District and Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh District.Vega has come under attack for questioning on tape whether a woman was less likely to become pregnant after a rape.Stefanik also supported Representative Mayra Flores, who won a special election in Texas’s 34th District after saying, falsely, that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was stoked by members of Antifa and used a hashtag associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in tweets that were later deleted.At the same time, Stefanik is backing Barbara Kirkmeyer, a state senator running in Colorado’s competitive Eighth District, who said President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.Stefanik simply interviews candidates who are able to raise $250,000 in their first quarter, she said, and decides which of them have what it takes, based on her gut feeling and experience.“I interview and talk with everyone,” she said. “I put candidates through their paces. I ask how they would answer certain questions from the media.”After meeting hundreds of candidates across the country over the years, she said, “I’m able to tell pretty quickly, No. 1, if they have the fire in the belly, and also if they’re speaking from the heart on behalf of their district. I don’t do any ideological litmus test. These are all strong, conservative Republicans.”Karoline Leavitt with Senator Ted Cruz before her primary. “When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said of Stefanik’s political action committee.Brian Snyder/ReutersIn some cases, Stefanik’s endorsements have put her at odds with leadership. She endorsed Leavitt, a 25-year-old hard-right Republican who served as an assistant in Trump’s White House press office before winning the G.O.P. nomination for a House seat in New Hampshire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was backing Leavitt’s rival, Matt Mowers, in the primary.“When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said on Wednesday, joining Stefanik briefly as an example of an E-PAC success story. She said that Stefanik, whom she once worked for, was “someone that I leaned on, not only for financial support through E-PAC but also for advice and support.”Republicans are expected to win back control of the House next year, although in recent weeks, the political winds that once favored them have shifted toward Democrats.Still, for Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to hold virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold.Stefanik said she remains bullish about a red wave.“I remember on election night in 2020 when people said Nancy Pelosi would pick up 15 seats,” she said, referring to the House speaker. “Well, Republicans picked up 15 seats.”She added: “Eighty percent of their dollars are on defense. Do I think we have the opportunity to earn that historic majority of 35 seats? I do. I’ve always thought that this cycle.”What to readToday’s big story: Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization, former President Trump and three of his children of what she called “staggering fraud.” Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess wrote the main article examining the 220-page claim, and I have a short piece on the politics at play.The House voted mostly along party lines to overhaul the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump tried to exploit to overturn his defeat, Carl Hulse reports.At the United Nations, President Biden called on countries to unify in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Moscow’s goal, he said, is “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state.” Follow our live coverage of the U.N. General Assembly here.The Federal Reserve tightened interest rates by a further three-quarters of a percentage point fewer than seven weeks before the November elections, an effort to stem inflation that remains stubbornly high. Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was fundamentally healthy, however. The Times’s economic team covered all the angles here.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How Republicans Could Win Control of the House

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      The political winds that once favored Republicans in the coming midterm elections appear to have shifted in the Democrats’ favor, but in the quest for the House, geography may be destiny. Many congressional district lines were redrawn this year to favor one party or the other so much that even a hurricane-force gale cannot overcome […] More

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      Glenn Youngkin Is Playing a Dangerous Game

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      It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.From its inception in the late 1820s as the movement to elect Andrew Jackson president, the Democratic Party relied on the Solid South to win national elections. Now it had a choice. Democrats could reject their new civil rights plank, accommodate the Dixiecrats and fight with a unified front against a hungry and energetic Republican Party, shut out of power since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Or they could scorn the so-called States’ Rights Democrats and run as a liberal party committed to equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.They chose the latter and changed American politics forever. And while much of this choice was born of sincere belief, we also should not ignore the powerful force of demographic change.From 1915 to 1965, more than six million Black Americans left their homes in the agrarian South to settle in the cities of the industrial North, from New York and Chicago to Philadelphia and Detroit and beyond.Their arrival marked the beginning of a tectonic shift in American political life. “The difference in laws between the North and the South created a political coming-of-age for Black migrants,” the political scientist Keneshia N. Grant writes in “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.” “Seeing political participation as a badge of honor and hallmark of success in northern life, migrants registered to vote in large numbers. Northern parties and candidates worked to gain Black support through their election campaigns, and the parties expected Black voters to turn out to vote for their nominees on Election Day.”For a Democratic Party whose national fortunes rested on control of urban machines, Black voters could mean the difference between four years in power and four years in the wilderness. With the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, who won an appreciable share of the Black vote in the 1932 presidential election, Northern Democratic politicians began to pay real attention to the interests of Black Americans in cities across the region.By 1948, most Black Americans who could vote were reliable partners in the New Deal coalition, which gave liberals in the Democratic Party some of the political space they needed to buck Jim Crow. Yes, the Dixiecrats would withdraw their support. But for every white vote Harry Truman might lose in Alabama and Mississippi, there was a Black vote he might gain in Ohio and California, the two states that ultimately gave him his victory over the fearsome former prosecutor (and New York governor) Thomas Dewey.Not only did the Dixiecrat rebellion fail; it also demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that Democrats could win national elections without the Solid South. The segregationists were weaker than they looked, and over the next 20 years the Democratic Party would cast them aside. (And even then, with the Dixiecrat exodus, Truman still won most of the states of the former Confederacy.)There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. Parties want to win, and they will almost always shift gears when it’s clear they can’t with their existing platform, positions and leadership.The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system — equal state representation in the Senate, malapportionment in the House of Representatives and winner-take-all distribution of votes in the Electoral College (Nebraska and Maine notwithstanding) — gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.To put it in simple terms, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by seven million ballots in the 2020 presidential election, but if not for roughly 120,000 votes across four states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Donald Trump would still be president.Which is all to say that someone like Glenn Youngkin is only doing what makes sense. To make MAGA politics weak among Republican politicians, you have to make MAGA voters irrelevant in national elections. But that will take a different political system — or a vastly different political landscape — than the one we have now.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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      Los votantes latinos y el Partido Republicano frente a las elecciones

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      Una encuesta de The New York Times/Siena College revela que los demócratas están mucho peor que en el pasado con los votantes hispanos. Pero, en general, el partido ha mantenido el control sobre el electorado latino.Han pasado casi dos años desde que Donald Trump logró algunos avances sorpresivos con los electores latinos. Pero según un nuevo sondeo de The New York Times y Siena College, no se han logrado materializar los sueños de los republicanos sobre una importante reorientación de los votantes latinos hacia las posturas de su partido sobre los problemas sociales y la delincuencia.Este sondeo —una de las encuestas no partidistas más grandes relacionadas con los electores latinos desde las elecciones de 2020— reveló que los demócratas habían mantenido un control sobre la mayoría de los electores latinos, motivados en parte por mujeres y por la creencia de que los demócratas seguían siendo el partido de la clase trabajadora. En general, es más probable que los votantes latinos estén de acuerdo con los demócratas en muchos temas: inmigración, política sobre el control de armas, cambio climático. También es más probable que vean a los republicanos como el partido de la élite y como el movimiento que tiene posturas extremas. Además, una mayoría de los electores latinos, el 56 por ciento, piensa votar por los demócratas este otoño, en comparación con el 32 por ciento que pretende votar por los republicanos.Pero en la consulta también se ven señales preocupantes para el futuro del mensaje de los demócratas. Pese a esa cómoda ventaja, el sondeo revela que los demócratas están mucho peor que en los años anteriores a las elecciones de 2020. Parece que los electores latinos más jóvenes, sobre todo los del sur, se están alejando del partido, un cambio que es impulsado por las enormes inquietudes en materia económica. En las elecciones intermedias de este año, deficiencias en el sur y entre los electores de las zonas rurales se podrían interponer en los triunfos importantísimos de Texas y Florida.Anthony Saiz, de 24 años, quien reseña el contenido de una plataforma de redes sociales en Tucson, Arizona, comentó que, para salir adelante, tuvo que aceptar un segundo empleo como pizzero en una cervecería. Saiz votó por Joe Biden en 2020 y se considera demócrata porque creció dentro de una familia demócrata. Pero cree que durante el mandato de Biden el costo de la vida se duplicó, pese a que se mudó a un apartamento más pequeño.“Las decisiones que ha tomado para el país me han puesto en una situación muy difícil”, comentó acerca del presidente.La manera en que voten los latinos será un asunto fundamental en las elecciones de noviembre y para el futuro de la política estadounidense. La participación de los electores latinos es decisiva en la lucha por el control del Congreso y conforman una parte considerable de los votantes —hasta el 20 por ciento— en dos de los estados que más probabilidades tienen de decidir el control del Senado: Arizona y Nevada. Los latinos también representan más del 20 por ciento de los electores registrados en más de una decena de contiendas muy competitivas para la Cámara de Representantes en California, Colorado, Florida y Texas, entre otros estados.Desde hace mucho tiempo, los demócratas han pensado que el creciente electorado latino condenaría a los republicanos, y las posibilidades de que haya un electorado cada vez más diverso han avivado las preocupaciones de los conservadores. Los resultados de las elecciones de 2020 —en las cuales, en comparación con 2016, Trump ganó más o menos unos ocho puntos porcentuales entre los votantes latinos— comenzaron a cambiar el panorama de ambos partidos. La encuesta del Times/Siena revela que siguen arraigadas las creencias y las lealtades históricas con respecto a los temas centrales, aunque hay algunos cambios que llaman mucho la atención.Aunque las mayorías de los votantes hispanos apoyan a los demócratas en temas sociales y culturales, una parte muy considerable sigue teniendo creencias que se alinean con los republicanos: más de una tercera parte de los electores hispanos afirman que están más de acuerdo con el Partido Republicano en los temas relacionados con la delincuencia y la vigilancia policial, y a cuatro de cada diez votantes hispanos les preocupa que el Partido Demócrata haya ido demasiado lejos en materia de raza y género. Los votantes latinos consideran que los problemas económicos son el factor más importante que determinará su voto este año y están divididos de manera uniforme acerca de con qué partido están más de acuerdo en lo que se refiere a la economía.Los electores latinos en Estados Unidos nunca han sido un bloque de votación monolítico y con frecuencia desconciertan a los estrategas políticos que tratan de entender su comportamiento. Los 32 millones de latinos que pueden votar son inmigrantes recientes y ciudadanos de cuarta generación, habitantes de las ciudades y de las zonas rurales, católicos y ateos.Ambos partidos se han llenado de fanfarronerías y han disparado sus expectativas respecto a los votantes latinos, recaudando y gastando millones de dólares para atraer su apoyo, pero hay pocos datos concretos no partidistas que respalden sus especulaciones. La encuesta ofrece una visión de una parte del electorado que muchos estrategas han denominado como el nuevo voto indeciso y cuyas opiniones suelen ser complicadas por las contradicciones entre subgrupos.Para Dani Bernal, una empresaria de Los Ángeles, los temas económicos ocupan un lugar destacado en sus decisiones.Jenna Schoenefeld para The New York TimesDani Bernal, de 35 años, que se dedica al mercadeo digital y es empresaria en Los Ángeles, dijo que alterna entre los candidatos de ambos partidos, en gran parte basándose en sus políticas económicas. Dijo que su madre llegó a Florida desde Bolivia con solo una bolsa de ropa y 500 dólares, y pudo prosperar porque los impuestos eran bajos y el costo de la vida era asequible. Bernal dijo que los temas económicos tienen una gran importancia en sus decisiones.“Estoy registrada como republicana, pero soy exactamente igual que Florida: voy de un lado a otro”, dijo.Los republicanos están teniendo un mejor desempeño con los votantes latinos que viven en el sur, una zona que incluye estados como Florida y Texas, donde los republicanos han logrado victorias importantes en las elecciones recientes con los votantes latinos. En el sur, 46 por ciento de los electores latinos dicen que piensan votar por los demócratas, mientras que el 45 por ciento afirman que planean votar por los republicanos. Por el contrario, en otras zonas del país, los demócratas tienen del 62 al 24 por ciento entre los electores latinos.Es posible que una brecha generacional también lleve a los republicanos a obtener más triunfos. La encuesta reveló que los demócratas gozaban de un gran respaldo sobre todo entre los electores latinos de mayor edad, pero el 46 por ciento de los votantes menores de 30 años apoyan el manejo de la economía por parte de los republicanos, en comparación con el 43 por ciento que están a favor de los demócratas.Los republicanos también tienen fuerza entre los varones latinos, quienes apoyan más a los demócratas en las elecciones intermedias, pero, por un margen de cinco puntos, dicen que votarían por Trump si volviera a contender en 2024. Parece que los varones jóvenes, sobre todo, están dando un giro hacia los republicanos. Son un importante punto débil para los demócratas quienes, con los varones menores de 45 años, mantienen una ventaja de solo cuatro puntos en las elecciones intermedias.La encuesta del Times/Siena ofrece una visión de los votantes latinos que tradicionalmente han apoyado a los demócratas en el pasado pero que planean votar a los republicanos este otoño: son desproporcionadamente votantes sin título universitario que se centran en la economía, y es más probable que sean jóvenes, hombres y nacidos en Estados Unidos, pero que viven en zonas con gran presencia de hispanos.La inmigración sigue siendo un tema primordial para los electores latinos, y ambos partidos tienen un atractivo particular. Mientras que los demócratas han presionado para reformar el sistema de inmigración legal y ofrecen una vía para que muchos inmigrantes que viven de manera ilegal en el país obtengan la ciudadanía, los republicanos se han enfocado en tomar medidas enérgicas contra la inmigración ilegal y en usar la política fronteriza para impulsar sus bases.Los demócratas conservan una gran ventaja en el tema de la inmigración legal y el 55 por ciento de los electores latinos afirman estar de acuerdo con este partido, en comparación con el 29 por ciento que dicen estar de acuerdo con los republicanos. Pero el Partido Republicano ha avanzado cuando ha acentuado la retórica y la política antiinmigración: 37 por ciento de los electores latinos apoyan las posturas de los republicanos con respecto a la inmigración ilegal. Y aproximadamente una tercera parte de estos respalda la construcción de un muro en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos.Amelia Alonso Tarancón, de 69 años, quien emigró de Cuba hace 14 años y ahora vive en las afueras de Fort Lauderdale, Florida, quiere que el Congreso le proporcione estatus legal a los trabajadores que viven en el país de manera ilegal y que han estado ahí durante décadas. Pero concuerda con los republicanos en sus posturas radicales contra la inmigración ilegal. Esta idea la motivó a votar por Trump, pese a que es una demócrata registrada.Amelia Alonso Tarancón, que vive cerca de Fort Lauderdale, Florida, no se considera demócrata ni republicana.Saul Martinez para The New York Times“Sé que este país es un país de inmigrantes, pero deben migrar de forma legal”, dijo. Pero Alonso Tarancón dijo que ya no apoyaba al expresidente después de que se negó a entregar la presidencia, impulsó el ataque al Capitolio de Estados Unidos y “se llevó todos esos documentos” a Mar-a-Lago.“No me considero ni demócrata ni republicana, ahora mismo estoy en espera hasta las próximas elecciones”, dijo.En su esfuerzo por atraer nuevos votantes, los republicanos han criticado con frecuencia a los demócratas por ser demasiado “concienciados” o woke. Esa acusación resuena entre muchos votantes hispanos porque el 40 por ciento dice que el partido ha ido demasiado lejos al impulsar una ideología “concienciada” en materia de raza y género. Pero hay una clara división: el 37 por ciento opina lo contrario y dice que el partido no ha ido lo suficientemente lejos. Y casi uno de cada cinco votantes hispanos encuestados dijo que no sabía si los demócratas eran demasiado woke, un término que no se puede traducir fácilmente al español.En lo que se refiere a muchos temas sociales y culturales, los electores latinos siguen estando alineados con el Partido Republicano.La mayoría, un 58 por ciento, tiene una buena opinión del movimiento “Las vidas negras importan”, mientras que el 45 por ciento también apoyan el movimiento “Las vidas azules importan”, el cual defiende al personal de la policía. Una mayoría cree que el aborto debe ser legal en casi todos los casos; incluso entre los latinos republicanos, cuatro de cada diez personas rechazan la decisión de la Corte Suprema de anular la sentencia del caso Roe contra Wade. El apoyo a “Las vidas negras importan” y al derecho al aborto es impulsado principalmente por los jóvenes. Al preguntarles con quién están más de acuerdo en el caso de la política sobre el control de armas, el 49 por ciento dijo que con los demócratas, mientras que el 34 por ciento afirmó que con los republicanos.En repetidas ocasiones, los republicanos que intentan ganarse a los electores latinos han descrito a los demócratas como elitistas y alejados de la realidad, pero la encuesta indica que esta estrategia está teniendo un éxito limitado.Casi seis de cada 10 votantes latinos siguen viendo al Partido Demócrata como el partido de la clase trabajadora. Aunque los republicanos blancos se consideran de modo uniforme como el partido de la clase trabajadora, incluso algunos republicanos latinos creen que esa es una característica de los demócratas. Además, en la encuesta no se obtuvieron pruebas de que los republicanos estuvieran teniendo un mejor desempeño entre la población latina sin estudios universitarios ni entre los latinos de las zonas rurales, dos grupos demográficos fundamentales a los que han querido acercarse. Uno de cada cuatro votantes latinos de las zonas rurales sigue sin decidir por quién votar en noviembre.Los demócratas han sido criticados con contundencia por su aceptación del término Latinx, que tiene el propósito de ser más inclusivo que las palabras “latino” y “latina”, las cuales marcan el género. Encuestas anteriores han revelado que solo una pequeña minoría de votantes latinos prefieren ese término. Pero la encuesta indicaba que Latinx no es, en absoluto, el tema más polarizador; solo el 18 por ciento señaló que ese término le parecía ofensivo.La encuesta del Times/Siena, realizada a 1399 votantes registrados en todo el país, incluida una sobremuestra de 522 votantes hispanos, se llevó a cabo por teléfono con operadores en directo del 6 al 14 de septiembre de 2022. El margen de error de muestreo es de más o menos 3,6 puntos porcentuales para la muestra completa y de 5,9 puntos porcentuales entre los votantes hispanos. Las tabulaciones cruzadas y la metodología están disponibles para todos los votantes registrados y para los votantes hispanos.Nate Cohn More

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      DeSantis’s Migrant Flights Aim to Jolt Midterms, and Lay Groundwork for 2024

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      The Florida governor’s move sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas brought liberals’ condemnation, and more such flights may follow.For months, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona have been busing migrants across the country, using immigrants as political props as they try to score points in the midterm elections and bolster their conservative bona fides.But last week, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, supercharged the tactic, flying two chartered planeloads of undocumented migrants out of Texas — about 700 miles from the Florida state line — to Martha’s Vineyard, the moneyed Massachusetts vacation spot frequented by liberal celebrities and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.The migrants had not set foot in Florida and said they were misled about their destination. The island was unprepared to handle the influx. But Mr. DeSantis got exactly the reaction he wanted.Liberal condemnation. Conservative applause. And national attention.Days after the migrants got off their planes, Mr. DeSantis flew across the country himself — to events for Republican candidates for governor in Wisconsin and Kansas where he promoted his stunt. He received standing ovations.“They were homeless,” he said about the migrants, at an event on Sunday in Green Bay, Wis. “They were hungry. And they hit the jackpot to be able to be in the wealthiest sanctuary city in the world.”The ambitious governor is betting that the tactic will not hurt his re-election race in Florida, long the nation’s largest political battleground, and will reinject the issue of border security into the midterm contest. As voters remain focused on economic uncertainty and abortion rights, it remains unclear whether immigration will gain a major foothold in the final weeks before the election in November.Yet the move signals that Mr. DeSantis could be eyeing a future beyond Florida and aiming to secure his place in the conversation of potential presidential candidates. Polls show that former President Donald J. Trump is the party’s overwhelming pick in 2024, with Mr. DeSantis as the clear second choice.“This is a sign of someone who is acting with political impunity because he believes he has political impunity in Florida,” said Fernand R. Amandi, a Democratic pollster in Miami. “I don’t think he makes this move if he didn’t already anticipate it was not a roadblock to him winning re-election.”Long considered to harbor presidential ambitions, Mr. DeSantis ripped this move directly from the playbook of Mr. Trump, whose rhetoric and political style he has adopted.The idea of transporting migrants to Democratic strongholds was considered by the Trump administration. Stephen Miller, the former president’s policy adviser, and others in the Trump White House pushed the move as a way to strike back against sanctuary cities that refused to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The plan was rejected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials over liability and budgetary concerns.Migrants being transported from Martha’s Vineyard on the ferry headed to the mainland on Friday.Matt Cosby for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis secured $12 million in the state budget to transport unauthorized immigrants planning to come to Florida, an amount that suggested more flights are to come. He said the migrants had to sign a release form and had been given an informational packet that included a map of Martha’s Vineyard.But Mr. DeSantis has also been clear that the effort was part of a political strategy intended to lift his party in the midterms. Republican strategists say he and the other governors are simply pointing out the hypocrisy of Democratic Party leaders, who they see as far removed from the surge of migrants and their impact on local communities..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.A spokeswoman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment for this article.The public investigations of Mr. Trump and the fight over the fate of legal abortion heightened Democratic hopes for the midterms over the summer, leaving Republicans scrambling to return the race to issues that break more in their favor — high inflation, economic uncertainty, public safety, immigration.Polling shows that a majority of voters — 51 percent — say they agree more with the Republican Party than the Democrats on illegal immigration, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College. On the issue of legal immigration, they are evenly split.“This border is now an issue in these elections,” Mr. DeSantis said on Sunday, at the event in Wisconsin. “And I think it’s something that our candidates need to take.”Democrats moved quickly to cast Mr. DeSantis as heartless and “un-American.”“Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props,” President Biden said on Thursday at the Hispanic Caucus Institute Gala in Washington. “What they’re doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American, it’s reckless and we have a process in place to manage migrants at the border.”The Democrat who is Mr. DeSantis’s opponent in the Florida governor’s race, former Representative Charlie Crist, released a digital ad calling the migrant flights “a cruel political stunt to appeal to his base.”“My faith teaches me that we’re all children of God,” Mr. Crist said in the ad. “That is lost on Ron DeSantis. For him, it’s always putting politics over peoples’ lives.”Democrats see an opportunity in part because the migrants he sent to Martha’s Vineyard were overwhelmingly from Venezuela. Florida is home to the largest population of Venezuelan immigrants in the country. And Venezuelan voters are an important demographic in the perennial swing state that helped cement Mr. Trump’s victory in the state in the 2020 election.But Mr. DeSantis’s move suggests that he believes his re-election effort is operating from such a position of strength that he can afford to potentially repel some moderates in his state, a longtime destination for immigrants.Some strategists say the governor may not be focused on swing voters in his home state at all.“My guess is that it seems pretty favorable, at least in terms of the one audience he has right now, which is Republican voters,” said Ed Goeas, a longtime Republican strategist. More

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      Don’t Let Republicans Off the Hook on Same-Sex Marriage

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      Why is it always on the Democrats to compromise?To be the nice ones? To take the high road to nowhere?On Thursday, the bipartisan group of senators behind the Respect for Marriage Act, which would have enshrined federal protections for same-sex marriage, announced a delay on putting the measure to a vote, which had been expected to take place this week.According to the bill’s lead sponsor, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, postponing the vote until after the November elections would increase the likelihood of getting the 10 Republicans on board necessary to push it through today’s filibustery Senate, where 60 votes would be needed for it to advance.Baldwin, and Democrats generally, are essentially conceding that it will be hard to get Republicans to commit to a measure that’s anathema to their base prior to the midterm elections. That in the interest of actually passing the bill, as opposed to putting Republicans on the record with an unpopular, anti-same-sex-marriage vote, Democrats should be generous and allow Republicans more time to muster support.Really? We’re supposed to believe it will be easier to bring Republicans on board after the election? If the Democrats retain the Senate post-election, Republicans will have little reason to vote against their base. If the Republicans retake the Senate, they’ll have less incentive still.Please. This just makes things easier on Republican lawmakers: A vote would force them to dissatisfy either swing voters, with whom same-sex marriage is highly popular, or their extremist base, with whom (to put it mildly) it is not. Easier for Republicans to scurry away from a proposal that’s politically risky, just as they did earlier last week with Lindsey Graham’s unpopular bill on abortion. And they’re doing this at the expense of the many Americans in same-sex relationships — married, engaged or on the cusp of commitment — for whom this just makes life harder and more precarious.This is exactly the moment to hold Republicans’ feet to the fire. It’s the moment for those Republicans who are in favor of gay marriage to stand up for what has become a clear majority position in the country, or to cave spectacularly to the prejudices of their base. As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it: “Every single member of Congress should be willing to go on the record. And if there are Republicans who don’t want to vote on that before the election, I assume it is because they are on the wrong side of history.”Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. They could be true believers, or they could simply be selling their souls in the interest of staying in office. But those who do support gay marriage need to act. Particularly given the ominous words of Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which many interpreted as a threat to revisit the landmark 2015 decision establishing the right to same-sex marriage.If that right is no longer settled law, as had previously been assumed, it’s certainly a settled moral principle. Over the past seven short years and following the course of many long ones, same-sex marriage has reached the status of a basic and bedrock civil right. Currently 71 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. This not only includes the vast majority of Democrats, but as of 2021, 55 percent of Republicans according to Gallup. That is the definition of bipartisan consensus.In theory, I’m as much in favor of bipartisanship as the next pragmatist, despite the consistent battering the practice has gotten, especially from Obama’s failed efforts to woo Republicans on the Affordable Care Act onward. It’s hard to hold much hope in the ideal.When it comes to polarizing culture war issues, gay marriage may be the most unifying policy there is. Even under the capacious L.G.B.T.Q. umbrella, where disparate issues around sexual orientation, gay rights and gender identity split Americans across the political spectrum, you can’t get much closer to consensus than same-sex marriage. It may be the one clear-cut policy here that unites people rather than divides them.Alas, and unsurprisingly, it was Republican senators who requested the delay. According to Politico, a number of Republican senators complained that if Chuck Schumer forced a vote on the measure on Monday, they’d view it as politically motivated. As if delaying the vote for explicitly political reasons wasn’t politically motivated?What’s on Democrats here is the failure, once again, to play hardball — in the same way Republicans have done repeatedly and without remorse. To take just one recent and brazen example, Republicans pushed through a vote on Amy Coney Barrett days before an election, despite Democrats’ simmering fury over McConnell refusing to even consider Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination eight months before an election.Instead, Democrats are effectively joining Republicans in putting politics ahead of principle — and purely on behalf of Republicans. If politics were remotely fair play, Republicans would return the favor by voting overwhelmingly in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act during the post-midterm lame-duck session.Who here is holding their breath?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