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      Why Andrew Yang’s New Third Party Is Bound to Fail

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      Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.Why am I so confident that the Forward Party will amount to nothing? Because there is a recipe for third-party success in the United States, but neither Yang nor his allies have the right ingredients.First, let’s talk about the program of the Forward Party. Writing for The Washington Post, Yang, Whitman and Jolly say that their party is a response to “divisiveness” and “extremism.”“In a system torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes,” they write, “you must reintroduce choice and competition.”The Forward Party, they say, will “reflect the moderate, common-sense majority.” If, they argue, most third parties in U.S. history failed to take off because they were “ideologically too narrow,” then theirs is primed to reach deep into the disgruntled masses, especially since, they say, “voters are calling for a new party now more than ever.”It is not clear that we can make a conclusion about the public’s appetite for a specific third party on the basis of its general appetite for a third party. But that’s a minor issue. The bigger problem for Yang, Whitman and Jolly is their assessment of the history of American third parties. It’s wrong.The most successful third parties in American history have been precisely those that galvanized a narrow slice of the public over a specific set of issues. They further polarized the electorate, changed the political landscape and forced the established parties to reckon with their influence.This also gets to the meaning of success in the American system. The two-party system in the United States is a natural result of the rules of the game. The combination of single-member districts and single-ballot, “first past the post” elections means that in any election with more than two candidates, there’s a chance the winner won’t have a majority. There might be four or five or six (or even nine) distinct factions in an electorate, but the drive to prevent a plurality winner will very likely lead to the creation of two parties that take the shape of loose coalitions, each capable of winning that majority outright.To this dynamic add the fact of the presidency, which cannot be won without a majority of electoral votes. It’s this requirement of the Electoral College that puts additional pressure on political actors to form coalitions with each other in pursuit of the highest prize of American politics. In fact, for most of American history after the Civil War, the two parties were less coherent national organizations than clearinghouses for information and influence trading among state parties and urban machines.This is all to say that in the United States, a successful third party isn’t necessarily one that wins national office. Instead, a successful third party is one that integrates itself or its program into one of the two major parties, either by forcing key issues onto the agenda or revealing the existence of a potent new electorate.Take the Free Soil Party.During the presidential election of 1848, following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of antislavery politicians from the Democratic, Liberty and Whig Parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!”The Free Soil Party, notes the historian Frederick J. Blue in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” “endorsed the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to extend slavery and must in fact prohibit its extension, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, declared its platform, “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject and is thus responsible for its existence.”This was controversial, to put it mildly. The entire “second” party system (the first being the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) had been built to sidestep the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party — which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, for president in the 1848 election — fought to put that conflict at the center of American politics.It succeeded. In many respects, the emergence of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of mass antislavery politics in the United States. They elected several members to Congress, helped fracture the Whig Party along sectional lines and pushed antislavery “Free” Democrats to abandon their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few short years they transformed American party politics. And when the Whig Party finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, after General Winfield Scott’s defeat in the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil Party would become, in 1854, the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which brought an even larger coalition of former Whigs and ex-Democrats together with Free Soil radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, antislavery party.There are a few other examples of third-party success. The Populist Party failed to win high office after endorsing the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, for president in 1896, but went on to shape the next two decades of American political life. “In the wake of the defeat of the People’s party, a wave of reform soon swept the country,” the historian Charles Postel writes in “The Populist Vision”: “Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”“By turn of fate,” Postel continues, “Populism proved far more successful dead than alive.”On a more sinister note, the segregationist George Wallace won five states and nearly 10 million ballots in his 1968 campaign for president under the banner of the American Independent Party. His run was proof of concept for Richard Nixon’s effort to fracture the Democratic Party coalition along racial and regional lines. Wallace pioneered a style of politics that Republicans would deploy to their own ends for decades, eventually culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.This is all to say that there’s nothing about the Forward Party that, as announced, would have this kind of impact on American politics. It doesn’t speak to anything that matters other than a vague sense that the system should have more choices and that there’s a center out there that rejects the extremes, a problem the Democratic Party addressed by nominating Joe Biden for president and shaping most of its agenda to satisfy its most conservative members in Congress.The Forward Party doesn’t even appear to advocate the kinds of changes that would enable more choices across the political system: approval voting where voters can choose multiple candidates for office, multimember districts for Congress and fundamental reform to the Electoral College. Even something as simple as fusion voting — where two or more parties on the ballot share the same candidate — doesn’t appear to be on the radar of the Forward Party.The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. “On every issue facing this nation,” they write, “we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”No, we can’t. When an issue becomes live — when it becomes salient, as political scientists put it — people disagree. The question is how to handle and structure that disagreement within the political system. Will it fuel the process of government or will it paralyze it? Something tells me that neither Yang nor his allies have the answer.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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      Eric Greitens Faces Ad Blitz and a Growing Threat to His Political Future

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      If Eric Greitens, a retired Navy SEAL and former Rhodes scholar who resigned in disgrace four years ago as governor of Missouri, loses his bid for a Senate seat in next week’s Republican primary, his defeat will be a lesson that the laws of political gravity do, in fact, still apply.A late advertising onslaught highlighting Mr. Greitens’s past scandals blanketed the airwaves over the last few weeks, funded by donors from his own party. The barrage of attack ads has taken the former governor from a seemingly invulnerable lead in the polls to a position somewhere behind Eric Schmitt, the state’s attorney general.Mr. Greitens, a political chameleon who first ran for office in 2016 as an anti-establishment outsider, only to lose his perch two years later, reinvented himself as an “ultra-MAGA” warrior as he sought to replace Senator Roy Blunt, who is retiring.But his past conduct and aggressive campaign posture have alienated many traditional conservatives in Missouri, while failing to attract their intended audience of one: former President Donald J. Trump, who has not endorsed anyone in the bitterly contested Aug. 2 primary.That decision has left a vacuum that has been filled by Mr. Greitens’s many adversaries, who pooled their resources in a last-ditch attempt to end his political career once and for all. Local donors enlisted Johnny DeStefano, a Kansas City-bred political operative who worked in Mr. Trump’s White House, to lead Show Me Values, a super PAC whose negative ads appear to have done real damage to Mr. Greitens’s standing with voters.Rene Artman, the chairwoman of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee, said Mr. Greitens’s biggest liability was his treatment of women, after allegations of abuse from his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, and a former hairdresser with whom he had a sexual relationship.Ms. Artman and other female Republican leaders in the state had tried and failed to pressure the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party to come out more forcefully against Mr. Greitens’s candidacy.“We are not to stand in judgment, but marriage vows are the most sacred,” she said. “If you can’t keep those vows, if you have betrayed those vows, how can I believe any promises you make to me as a senator?”At campaign events like this one in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Greitens has cast himself as a political outsider being targeted by establishment enemies.Chase Castor for The New York TimesIn response, Mr. Greitens has lashed out against his perceived enemies, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whom he accused without evidence of scheming in Washington to defeat him; Karl Rove, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush who has quietly encouraged donors and political operatives in Missouri to ensure that Mr. Greitens is defeated; and his own ex-wife, who finalized their divorce in 2020 and moved to Texas, where she is now seeking to relocate the ongoing battle over custody of their two children.She has made sworn allegations of domestic abuse that have reverberated during the campaign, underscoring Mr. Greitens’s image in Missouri as a man with a history of violent behavior.Asked for comment, Mr. Greitens’s lawyer in the custody dispute said only that “Eric’s primary focus is on protecting the children” and pointed to a statement from March that questioned Ms. Greitens’s motives.Dylan Johnson, a spokesman for Mr. Greitens’s campaign, said, “Governor Greitens has received tremendous support from the grass-roots,” adding, “We have seen biased and fake polling throughout U.S. Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and these same pollsters are playing the same game in Missouri.”Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      These Republican Governors Are Delivering Results, and Many Voters Like Them for It

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      Republican flamethrowers and culture warriors like Donald Trump and Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene typically draw an outsize amount of media attention.Americans may conclude from this that there is a striking, and perhaps unfortunate, relationship between extremism and political success.But Republicans aren’t hoping for a red wave in the midterms only because norm-thrashing or scandal sells. The truth is much more banal — yet also important for parties to internalize and better for politics generally: In states across the country, Republican governors are delivering real results for people they are physically more proximate to than federal officials.Now, it’s true that the party that controls the presidency nearly always gets whipped in midterm elections, and inflation would be a huge drag on any party in power. And it’s also true that among those governors are culture warriors like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.But people too often overlook the idea that actual results, especially ones related to pocketbook issues, can often be as important as rhetoric. Looked at that way, lots of Republicans — some with high public profiles, and some who fly below the radar — are excelling.Start with the simplest measure: popularity. Across the country, 13 of the 15 most popular governors are Republicans. That list does not just include red states. In fact, blue-state Republican governors like Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland are among the most popular.There are many reasons that G.O.P. governors seem to be succeeding. It’s true that governors can’t take credit for everything. Sometimes they just get lucky. But they do make policy choices, and particularly those made by governors since the start of Covid have made a difference.For example, take a look at the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data on unemployment. In the 10 states with the lowest rates as of June, eight were led by Republican governors. Several governors who don’t make frequent appearances in national news stand out, like Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Spencer Cox of Utah and Phil Scott of Vermont. Their states have unemployment rates under 2.5 percent, and of the 20 states with the lowest unemployment rates, just four are led by Democrats.States with Republican governors have also excelled in economic recovery since the start of the pandemic. Standouts in this measure include Mr. Abbott and Doug Ducey of Arizona.These results reflect many things — some states have grown and others have shrunk, for example — but are at least in part a result of policy choices made by their elected leaders since the start of the pandemic. For example, governors like Kristi Noem in South Dakota often rejected lockdowns and economic closures.Republican governors were also far more likely to get children back to in-person school, despite intense criticism.Covid policy doesn’t explain everything. Fiscal governance has also made a difference. The Cato Institute’s Fiscal Report Card on America’s governors for 2020 (the most recent edition available), which grades them on tax and spending records, gives high marks to many Republicans. Nearly all of the top-ranked states in this report have Republican governors, like Kim Reynolds of Iowa or Mr. Ricketts. (Some Democratic governors also ranked highly, including Steve Sisolak of Nevada and Roy Cooper of North Carolina.) Some have made their mark with employer-attracting tax cuts; others with spending controls; others with a mixture.Most states mandate a balanced budget, so taxing and spending policies are important for fiscal stability. Low taxes tend to attract and keep employers and employees. Restrained budgets help ensure that taxes can be kept low, without sacrificing bond ratings, which may matter if debt-financed spending is needed in a crisis or to try to stimulate businesses to hire more.Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has cut taxes for individuals, reduced the number of tax brackets and cut the corporate income tax rate. Mr. Sununu has restrained spending, vetoed a payroll tax proposal and cut business taxes. Brian Kemp of Georgia, by contrast, actually paused some tax cuts that had been scheduled — and focused almost exclusively on spending restraint, issuing a directive for state agencies to generate budget cuts and keeping 2020 general fund growth to a tiny 1 percent.Even in blue Vermont, Mr. Scott has constrained general fund spending — despite being an odd duck out among governors in that he is not constrained by a balanced-budget amendment — to rise by an annual average of just 2.4 percent between 2017 and 2020, and he has also cut taxes. He signed a bill to ensure that the federal tax reform instituted under Mr. Trump and limiting state and local tax deductions wouldn’t result in Vermonters getting hammered. He has also cut individual income tax rates, reduced the number of tax brackets and resisted new payroll taxes in favor of voluntary paid leave plans for private-sector employers.Republicans who have a big impact on the day-to-day lives of many Americans — unlike, say, Representative Kevin McCarthy or certainly Mr. Trump, and in terms of the quality of state economies, the local job market and education — are delivering. In our federalist system, a lot of power still sits with states and not the federal government and determines much about citizens’ lives.This is a big reason that Republicans are well-positioned heading into the midterms. It should be a warning to Joe Biden and Democrats — and to some of the culture warriors. Cable-news combat over whatever the outrage of the day is may deliver politicians the spotlight. But sound economic policy and focusing on the job, not theatrics, is delivering basic day-to-day results Americans want, need and will reward.Liz Mair (@LizMair), a strategist for campaigns by Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, is the founder and president of Mair Strategies.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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      Alex Lasry Ends His Senate Bid in Wisconsin

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      Alex Lasry, a Milwaukee Bucks executive who largely self-funded a Senate campaign in Wisconsin, dropped out of the Democratic primary on Wednesday, leaving Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes as the favorite for the nomination to face Senator Ron Johnson.Mr. Lasry, 35, whose billionaire father is a co-owner of the Milwaukee N.B.A. franchise, spent more than $12 million on his primary campaign but never eclipsed Mr. Barnes in polling. With less than two weeks to go before the state’s Aug. 9 primary, Mr. Lasry concluded he could not win the race.“It’s become clear in the last few weeks that Wisconsin voters have decided they want Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes to be our Democratic nominee,” Mr. Lasry said on Wednesday. Mr. Lasry formally endorsed Mr. Barnes at an event outside the Bucks’ arena in downtown Milwaukee on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Lasry’s decision was first reported by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Another candidate, Tom Nelson, the Outagamie County executive, who ran a spirited but underfunded campaign, dropped out on Monday and endorsed Mr. Barnes. Mr. Lasry was Mr. Barnes’s chief rival for the nomination, though Sarah Godlewski, the state treasurer, and several other candidates remain in the race.The primary was a relatively tame affair, with few negative attacks and little animosity between the candidates as they vied to face Mr. Johnson, a Republican loathed by the Democratic base for his amplification of false theories about the coronavirus pandemic and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.But Mr. Barnes, 35, has ample political vulnerabilities of his own. He has been cited for paying his property taxes late and has taken a variety of positions on immigration, at one point holding an “abolish ICE” shirt and more recently opposing the Biden administration’s proposal to end Title 42, a Trump-era policy that was introduced during the pandemic and was used to turn away migrants at the Mexican border. More

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      Class Divisions Harden Into Battle Lines in Arizona’s Republican Primary

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      PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. — As Shardé Walter’s family cut back on everything from camping trips to Eggo waffles to balance their inflation-strained budget this summer, she became more and more fed up with the Republicans who have governed Arizona for more than a decade.“You’ve got those hoity-toity Republicans, and then you’ve got ones like me — just trying to live,” Ms. Walter, 36, said as she waited for former President Donald J. Trump to arrive at a rally on Friday for his slate of candidates in Arizona’s bitterly fought Republican primaries.“We’re busting our asses off,” she continued, “but we’re broke for no reason.”The Aug. 2 Republican primary in Arizona has been cast as a party-defining contest between traditional Republicans and Trump loyalists, with the power to reshape a political battleground at the heart of fights over voting rights and fair elections. Several leading Republican candidates in Arizona for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate have made lies about the “stolen” 2020 election a centerpiece of their campaigns.But the choice between traditional conservatives and Trump-backed firebrands is also tapping into working-class conservatives’ frustrations with a state economic and political system firmly controlled by Republicans, highlighting the gap between voters who have profited from Arizona’s rising home values and tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, and those who feel left out and are eager to punish the Republican establishment at the ballot box.“It’s like ‘The Great Gatsby’ — old versus new,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research with the polling firm OH Predictive Insights, which is based in Phoenix. “It’s a very telling moment for the G.O.P. Are they going the way of MAGA, or the McCain-Goldwater conservative way that gave them dominance over the state?”Supporters watched Mr. Trump speak on an outdoor screen at the Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSeveral leading Republican candidates in Arizona for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate have made lies about the “stolen” 2020 election a centerpiece of their campaigns.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesNational surveys of Republicans show that voters’ views of Mr. Trump and the 2020 election are fracturing along lines of education.A New York Times/Siena College poll released this month found that 64 percent of Republican primary voters without a college degree believed that Mr. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Forty-four percent of Republican voters with a bachelor’s degree or more said Mr. Trump was the winner.Mr. Trump was still a clear favorite for Republican voters with a high school degree or less, with 62 percent saying they would vote for him in the 2024 Republican presidential primary if the election were held today. Less than 30 percent of Republican primary voters with college degrees said they would vote for Mr. Trump.In Arizona’s race for governor, the Republican establishment has coalesced around Karrin Taylor Robson, a wealthy real estate developer pitching herself as a competent leader who has been reliably conservative ever since her days as a staff member in the Reagan White House.The Trump wing of the party is locked in behind Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed former news anchor who has stoked an anti-establishment rebellion fueled by falsehoods about the 2020 election and provocations like vowing to bomb smuggling tunnels on the southern border.Ms. Robson has cut into Ms. Lake’s early lead in the polls, but recent surveys suggest that Ms. Lake is still ahead.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      Red and Blue America Will Never Be the Same

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      Donald Trump’s dominance of the political stage for the past seven years galvanized what had been a slow-burning realignment, creating a profound upheaval in the electorate and in both the Democratic and Republican parties.The support Trump received in rural communities and the animosity he provoked among well-educated suburbanites accelerated the ongoing inversion — on measures of income, education and geographic region — of white Democratic and Republican voters. (White voters make up 67 percent of the electorate.)In 2018, according to ProximityOne, a website that analyzes the demographics of congressional districts, Democratic members of Congress represented 74 of the 100 most affluent districts, including 24 of the top 25. Conversely, Republican members of Congress represented 54 of the 100 districts with the lowest household income. The median household income in districts represented by Democrats was $66,829, which is $10,324 more than the median for districts represented by Republicans, at $56,505.The 2018 data stands in contrast to the income pattern a half-century ago. In 1973, Republicans held 63 of the 100 highest-income districts and Democrats held 73 of the 100 lowest-income districts.These trends prompted Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, to comment in an email that the Democratsare mostly the party of the master’s degree — modestly advantaged economically but not exactly elite. On the flip side, the Republicans are the party of the associate degree (a two-year college degree), less educated than the Democrats but not exactly the proletariat.Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., argued thatpolitics throughout the Western democracies is in recent years in the midst of the most dramatic reconfiguration of the political parties and their bases of support in seventy or so years. Since the New Deal in the United States and WWII in Western Europe, the base of the dominant parties of the left was less affluent, less highly educated voters; the dominant parties of the right drew their primary support from higher income, more highly educated voters.Now, Pildes continued, “we are witnessing the complete inversion of that pattern, and the question is whether this is a temporary or more enduring realignment of the political parties throughout the West.”In his email, Pildes noted that in the 1940sDemocratic candidates received twenty-two points less support from voters in the top ten percent of the income bracket than from those in the bottom ninety percent. By 2012, that gap had dropped to only an eight-point difference and in 2016, voters in the top ten percent had become eight points more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Similarly, in the 1940s, those with university degrees in the United States were twenty points less likely to vote for Democrats, while in 2000 there was no difference and by 2016, they were thirteen points more likely to vote for Democrats.The ramifications of these developments, which predate Trump’s entry into presidential politics in 2015, “radiate throughout the electoral process in the United States,” Pildes argued:Take the Electoral College: for most of the time from the 1950s until 2016, it was actually biased toward the Democrats. But in 2016, it suddenly became strongly biased toward the Republicans, and 2020 added even more to that bias.At the same time, there are counter-developments more favorable to the left.Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends, argued in an email that “the country’s political geography is now less pro-Republican.” While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he continued, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Trump, Stephanopoulos continued,modestly reduced the enormous Democratic edge in cities, thus undoing some of this packing of Democratic voters. Trump also did significantly better in rural areas, to the point that some of them are about as red (and so as packed with Republicans) as cities are blue. And Trump bled support in the suburbs, so that the country’s most populous and competitive areas now lean toward the Democrats instead of the Republicans.As a result, Stephanopoulos argued,the U.S. House will likely be close to unbiased in partisan terms in 2022. A group of scholars peg the likely bias at around 3 percent pro-Republican, while Nate Silver’s model, which incorporates additional variables like incumbency and polling, thinks the likely bias will be around 1 percent pro-Democratic.Republicans won 234 seats in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won, by 2 percent, a majority of votes cast in House elections, according to Stephanopoulos, “but Nate Silver now thinks that Republicans will win the national House vote by 5 percent in 2022, yet only pick up the same 234 seats they got in 2012.”Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice University, agrees with Stephanopolous and cites trends in Texas to show the pro-Democratic shift:Consider the Texas Republican Party’s redistricting plan in 2010 and its durability over the last decade. Beginning in 2010 Republicans held a 100 to 50 seat advantage in the Texas House of Representatives. By 2020, this margin had shrunk to 83-67. In each biennial election since 2010, Democrats picked up House seats, mostly in suburban and exurban areas of the state.The shift, Stein continued,was largely driven by the changing demography of the state. Another source of this shift can be laid at the feet of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The result, at least in Texas, is that some of the most competitive areas (districts) in the state are not the big cities, but exurban and suburban counties including Collin, Denton, Fort Bend and Williamson. Prior to 2016 voters in these counties were trending Republican; now they are leaning Democratic or tossups.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, cited surveys conducted by the Cooperative Election Study from 2010 to 2020 showing that “one of the most significant shifts we see in our data is increasing Democratic strength in suburbs, especially since the early 2010s.”Schaffner provided data from the study showing that the Democratic share of the two-party vote rose from 54.5 to 63.5 percent in urban areas over the decade and remained low — 35.2 to 36.1 percent — in rural America. The biggest shift, 12.5 points, was in suburban areas, which went from 41.8 percent Democratic in 2010 to 54.3 percent in 2020.Nolan McCarty suggested that these trends may prove beneficial to the Democratic Party:The natural tilt of our single-member district system has shifted away from the Republicans as the rural vote moves toward the Republicans and the suburbs move toward the Democrats. But it is not clear what the aggregate effects of those shifts will be. It should help the House Democrats in November but it is not clear how much.The effects of these shifts on the Senate and Electoral College, McCarty continued, will be slower in the short term but could eventually become significant: “Once such changes push states like Georgia, Texas and North Carolina sufficiently toward the Democrats, they would be the party with the structural advantage in the Electoral College and Senate.”Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email the possibility that very recent changes in suburban voting will hurt the future prospects of the Republican Party:The most noteworthy change to political geography in 2020 was the success of Biden in pivotal suburban areas. In the most recent round of redistricting, when examining proposed districting plans — whether drawn by computer simulations or humans — the number of Democratic-leaning districts in a state was often greater if one added up the votes of Biden and Trump in 2020 than if one used past presidential results, Senate results, gubernatorial results, or some other down-ballot elections.The geographic distribution of Biden votes, Rodden continued, “was more ‘efficient’ for the Democrats than that of other recent Democratic candidates.” But, he cautioned,what is unclear is whether this was a specific reaction to Donald Trump as a candidate in relatively educated suburbs, or a lasting trend in political geography that will outlive the Trump era. The latter is at least plausible, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision, but it is too early to tell. Even in 2020, a non-trivial number of these suburban Biden voters split their tickets and voted for Republican House candidates.I asked Rodden what it means for statewide elections in contested states if these trends continue. He replied:This really depends on the numbers in each state, but in sun-belt states that are gaining educated and/or minority in-migrants, like Georgia and Arizona, we already have evidence that this was a pretty good trade for statewide Democrats, but in other states where in-migration is limited, like those in the Upper Midwest, this trade might work out better for statewide Republicans.Along similar lines, William Frey, a demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings, emphasized in an email that “Biden won the suburbs in 2020, I believe largely due to his gains among minorities and college whites.” Even if Republicans and Trump made marginal gains among minority voters, the support of these voters for Democrats remained overwhelming.In a 2021 Brookings paper, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs,” Frey pointed to Georgia, whereDemographic shifts — including brisk growth in the state’s Democratic-leaning Black population, gains in Latino/Hispanic, and Asian Americans voters, and an increase in white college graduates, especially in the Atlanta metropolitan area — served to make the state competitive for Democrats this year.In a separate 2022 paper, “Today’s suburbs are symbolic of America’s rising diversity: A 2020 census portrait,” Frey focuses on the continuing stream of minorities moving into the suburbs. From 1990 to 2020, Frey found, the percentage of Asian Americans living in suburbs grew from 53.4 to 63.1 percent, of Hispanics from 49.5 to 61.4 percent and of African Americans, from 36.6 to 54.3 percent, the largest increase.Has geographic division, pitting a disproportionately rural Republican Party against an urban Democratic Party, added a new dimension to polarization making consensus and cooperation even more difficult?I posed a series of questions to an eclectic group of political scholars.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, replied by email:Rather than claiming that the G.O.P. is becoming the party of the working class, what I see is a long-term trend away from a party system organized along class lines. Knowing that a person is wealthy (or low income) isn’t very predictive of what party that person will prefer. The parties are much better sorted by other factors — region, religion, race — than by social class.This isn’t a new phenomenon, Lee noted, but Trump intensified these divisions: “Trump’s candidacy and presidency accelerated pre-existing trends undercutting the class basis of the parties. For a Republican, Trump had unusual appeal to working-class voters and was unusually alienating to well-off suburbanites.”James Druckman, a political scientist at Northwestern University, draws an interesting distinction: “I do think the perception in the country is that Republicans are working class but not necessarily for economic reasons directly but rather because of diffuse feelings of injustice translated into rhetoric about mistreatment, unfairness and immigrants taking jobs.”At the same time, Druckman contended:Democrats are vulnerable to charges of being the party of the elite for two reasons — one is that a small strain of the party is made up of extreme progressives who offer rhetoric that can be alienating when too wrapped up in politically correct language. Second, the growing anti-intellectualism in parts of the Republican Party reflects the significant degree of education polarization we observe.Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, rejects some recent attempts at classification:Are the Democrats the party of the elites? Yes and no. It is the case that high-income high-education professionals in the last 20 years have moved increasingly to the Democratic Party but these are people most of whom are on the moderate wing of the party. That is to say, they embrace a mildly redistributive agenda on economic issues such as Social Security, universal health care, and support for families with children, and a mildly libertarian social agenda on questions of abortion, family relations, gender relations and ethnic relations.These moderate, mainstream Democrats arefar removed from the more radical, progressive wing and its agenda on identity, diversity, equity, and social transformation. The real driving force of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are occupational strata that are characterized by low- to middle-incomes and high education. These progressive voters primarily work in social and cultural services, in large urban areas.This progressive constituency, Kitschelt argued, isquantitatively more important for the Democratic electorate than the high-education high-income more moderate segment. By embracing the agenda of “defund the police” and cultural transformation of the schools, this progressive constituency puts itself at odds with many lower- and middle-income families across all ethnic groups.Insofar as the Democratic Party adopts the progressive agenda, Kitschelt wrote, it endangers “its electoral rainbow coalition,” noting that both African American and Hispanic families “are highly concerned about improving the police, not dismantling the police” and about “the quality of basic school instruction.”On the Republican side, Kitschelt argues thatthe core element is not “working class” in any conventional sense of the phrase at all: It is low education, but relatively high-income people. These voters are overwhelmingly white, and many are of the evangelical religious conviction. In occupational terms, they are concentrated in small business, both owners and core employees, in sectors such as construction, crafts, real estate, small retail, personal services and agriculture.Kitschelt continued: “Many of these citizens tend to live in suburban and rural areas. They are the true spearhead of Republican activism, and especially of the Trumpist persuasion.”Pildes addressed these issues in his October 2021 paper, “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West.”“The domination of the parties of the left by the more highly educated,” he wrote, “in combination with these cultural conflicts and policy differences, are an important element in the shift of the less educated, less affluent voters away from the parties of the left.”Pildes cites American National Elections Studies data on white voters in the 2016 election showing that Trump won among all income categories of whites making less than $175,000, while Hillary Clinton won only among whites who made in excess of $175,000.Pildes contended that defections from the Democratic Party among conservative and moderate minority voters pose a significant threat to the long-term viability of the party:Democratic support plunged from 49 percent to 27 percent among Hispanic conservatives between 2012 and 2020 and from 69 percent to 65 percent among Hispanic moderates. These changes suggest that ideology, rather than identity, is beginning to provide more of a voting basis among some Hispanics. If a marginally greater number of working-class Latino or Black voters start to vote the way that white working-class voters do, the ability of the Democratic Party to win national elections will be severely weakened.Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology and politics at N.Y.U., noted in an email that “the claim that the Republicans are becoming a party of the ‘working class’ is mistaken.” Not only are a majority of working class African Americans and Hispanics Democratic, but, “more accurately, the Republicans have become a party of disaffected white voters, many of whom hold resentments against ethnoracial minorities and a waning commitment to liberal democratic values.” Given “the built-in biases of the Electoral College and Senate — along with gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement — states with larger shares of noncollege whites will continue to exert outsized influence on U.S. politics, persistently disadvantaging Democrats even when their candidates and policies are broadly popular.”Robert Saldin, a political scientist at the University of Montana, argued by email that “Geographic polarization, or the urban-rural divide, is arguably the most defining feature of American politics.” Over the past 20 years, he continued, “the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged support in the countryside. They’ve got a five-alarm fire in rural America, but much of the party’s elite doesn’t even see the smoke.”For the Democrats, in Saldin’s view,trading the countryside for the cities has come at a political cost even if the party routinely wins many more total votes than the G.O.P. nationally. That’s because geography plays an outsized role in our political system, particularly in the Electoral College and the Senate.Consider the Dakotas, Saldin wrote:It wasn’t that long ago that their congressional delegations were packed with Democrats, but that’s inconceivable now. And to the extent that the same thing is happening in other low-population states, this presents a real problem for Democrats in the Senate.Saldin suggested:Here’s another way of conceptualizing it. Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming have less than 2 percent of the national population, but their ten senators have the same collective power in the Senate as those representing the five most populous states, California, Texas, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania. If a party managed a clean sweep in those five big-box states in flyover country, that would comprise 20 percent of what you need for a Senate majority before you even look at the other 98 percent of the country. The G.O.P. is now very close to accomplishing that feat, with Montana’s Jon Tester the last Senate Democrat standing in those states.Barring an extraordinary economic turnaround or still more explosive disclosures of criminal malfeasance by Trump, these demographic trends may have a modest effect on the outcome on Election Day in November. They do, however, suggest that the balance of political power is more fluid than widely recognized. It should undermine the confidence of those predicting victory for either the left or the right in 2024.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump-Pence Ticket, Torn by Jan. 6, Becomes an Unequal Rivalry

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      WASHINGTON — Eighteen months after departing the nation’s capital for the final time as president, Donald J. Trump returned on Tuesday confronting federal investigations, fresh doubts about his viability in an increasingly likely third White House bid and an emerging rivalry with his erstwhile running mate.In addresses from two hotel ballrooms less than a mile apart in Washington, Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, the vice president whom he had left at the mercy of a mob of his supporters during the Capitol riot, put on clear display one of the most uncomfortable splits inside their party.The competing speeches on the same day would have been inconceivable for a former president and his own vice president not long ago. But the demise of precedent has long been a hallmark of the Trump era.The strange tableau also illustrated many Republicans’ frustrations and reservations about a 2024 Trump campaign, which a recent New York Times/Siena College poll suggested could cause large numbers of Republican voters to defect from the party in a general election.In his 90-minute speech, Mr. Trump repeatedly veered off script to complain about “hoax” investigations, boast about surviving two impeachments and lie about his 2020 election loss. Mr. Pence, by contrast, urged the party to look ahead and unite for the next political battles.“Some people may choose to focus on the past, but elections are about the future,” Mr. Pence said.A scowling Mr. Trump leaned on menacing imagery of an America besieged by violent crime and in desperate need of a rescue that only he could provide.“Our country is going to hell,” he said. “It’s a very unsafe place.”The two appearances also underscored the wide gap in enthusiasm among Republicans between Mr. Trump and any other potential primary rival in 2024.While Mr. Pence drew tepid applause during his 30-minute address to about 250 attendees at an event hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, Mr. Trump commanded numerous standing ovations from an audience of about 800 people at a gathering of the America First Policy Institute. The former president’s speech seemed to double as a reunion for former administration officials, campaign aides and informal advisers.Nearly everyone, that is, except Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence has been a recurring target of criticism from Mr. Trump, who has denounced the former vice president’s refusal to delay the certification of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021. In his speech, Mr. Pence made only passing reference to the ensuing attack on the Capitol — when he was forced into hiding as rioters chanted for him to be hanged — as a “tragic day.”Last week, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot detailed Mr. Trump’s decisions not to call off the violence, and the fear that members of Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail felt for their lives.Donald Trump, Post-PresidencyThe former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.Grip on G.O.P.: Donald J. Trump is still a looming figure in his party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Losing Support: Nearly half of G.O.P. primary voters prefer someone other than Mr. Trump for president in 2024, a Times/Siena College poll showed.Looking for Cover: Republicans are bracing for Mr. Trump to announce an unusually early 2024 bid, a move intended in part to shield him from the damaging revelations emerging from the Jan. 6 investigations.Endorsement Record: While Mr. Trump has helped propel some G.O.P. candidates to primary victories, he’s also had notable defeats. Here’s where his record stands so far in 2022.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.The hearing prompted a striking shift in the conservative media. In scathing editorials from two newspapers controlled by the Murdoch family, The New York Post said Mr. Trump was “unworthy” to be president again, while The Wall Street Journal opined that he had “utterly failed” his duty to handle the crisis.And on Monday, news emerged that two of Mr. Pence’s top aides had testified to a federal grand jury in Washington as part of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the events surrounding the riot. Furthermore, reports emerged on Tuesday saying that federal prosecutors had sought information about the former president’s role in the efforts to overturn the election as the Justice Department’s inquiry accelerates.While Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence were in somewhat regular contact immediately after leaving office — speaking several times by phone in conversations that avoided the subject of the Capitol riot — they have not held similar discussions in months, according to their advisers. In an interview last year, Mr. Trump said that he had never told Mr. Pence he was sorry for not acting quicker to stop the attack — and that Mr. Pence had never asked for an apology.But a rivalry has flared up behind the scenes.One source of tension has been the book Mr. Pence is writing about his time in the administration. When Mr. Trump learned about the memoir, titled “So Help Me God” and set to be published on Nov. 15, the former president was still musing about obtaining a deal of his own.But in most parts of the publishing industry, Mr. Trump was broadly seen as a risk. The former president appeared stung that Mr. Pence had gotten a multimillion-dollar deal, and within days of learning about it, he attacked the former vice president while speaking to donors at a Republican National Committee event at Mar-a-Lago, seizing on Mr. Pence’s refusal to do what Mr. Trump wanted on Jan. 6.Speaking before a gathering of young conservatives in Washington on Tuesday, former Vice President Mike Pence said that “some people may choose to focus on the past, but elections are about the future.”Patrick Semansky/Associated PressThis year, the two men have veered from each other on the midterm campaign trail. They have backed opposing candidates in several primary races, including the Republican governor’s contest next week in Arizona, and the party’s primary for governor in Georgia in June, when Mr. Pence’s pick, Gov. Brian Kemp, easily defeated his Trump-backed challenger, David Perdue.Mr. Pence, meanwhile, left out of his speech the kind of effusive praise for Mr. Trump that he had regularly injected into his addresses as vice president and instead referred to the “Trump-Pence” administration’s accomplishments.A mild-mannered former governor of Indiana, Mr. Pence remains a reviled figure among much of the Republican base — largely because he resisted Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election.In a New York Times/Siena College poll of Republican voters this month, just 6 percent said they would vote for Mr. Pence if he ran for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, compared with 49 percent who said they backed Mr. Trump and 25 percent who supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Still, Mr. Pence has been praised by some fellow Republicans for his steadfastness during, and after, the Capitol riot. Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel, told House investigators that Mr. Pence deserved the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest honors, for withstanding Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign — and remaining on Capitol grounds amid the violence — to certify the election.Mr. Pence also defended himself, and directly contradicted Mr. Trump, in a February speech to the Federalist Society in Florida where he said the former president incorrectly believed that the vice president had the authority to overturn election results.“President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said at the time. “I had no right to overturn the election.”But the former vice president has been reluctant to revisit the issue. On Tuesday he drew subtle distinctions between Mr. Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election and his own preference to focus more broadly on his hopes for the conservative movement.In his speech, Mr. Trump received some of his biggest applause when he strayed from his prepared remarks, including his call to keep transgender women from playing in women’s sports — and again when he claimed he had won the presidency a second time.Mr. Trump also called for creating sprawling homeless encampments outside cities, which would have bathrooms and medical staff, and he urged aggressive policies to combat crime. He renewed his support for the death penalty for drug dealers and for controversial stop-and-frisk law enforcement tactics that, he said, would help “give police back their power and prestige.”“Leave our police alone,” Mr. Trump said. “Each time they do something, they’re afraid they’re going to be destroyed, their pensions are going to be taken away, they’ll be fired, they’ll be put in jail. Let them do their job.”In his speech, Mr. Pence celebrated the Supreme Court’s recent ruling eliminating the federal right to abortion and called for a movement of cultural conservatives to turn back a “pernicious woke agenda” that was, he argued, “allowing the radical left to continue dumping toxic waste into the headwaters of our culture.”“We save the babies, we’ll save America,” he said.Still, Mr. Pence couldn’t escape the direct contrast with Mr. Trump. When Mr. Pence finished his speech, the first question from the audience of young conservatives was about the former president “and the divide between the two of you.”“I don’t know that our movement is that divided,” Mr. Pence said. “I don’t know that the president and I differ on issues, but we may differ on focus.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown

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      Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.The overall Democratic fund-raising edge online widened by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period, records show.Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.The current political climate favors Republicans as President Biden’s approval rating plumbs new lows. But nearly a dozen Republican strategists directly involved in fund-raising or overseeing campaigns have expressed concerns about how the fund-raising downturn might limit their party’s gains.Working in the party’s favor is that Wall Street billionaires and other industry titans have cut seven- and eight-figure checks to Republican super PACs, offsetting some of the party’s small-dollar struggles, which some attributed to inflation and others to deceptive tactics that are turning off supporters over time.“We’ve got to raise the money,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said repeatedly on Fox News on Friday when pressed about the 2022 landscape. “We get the money, we win.”For the Senate Republican committee, online fund-raising plunged by $6.7 million in the most recent quarter, to $11 million, from $17.7 million. Top Republican Senate candidates, even those whose fund-raising ticked up, are falling well behind their Democratic rivals in the cash race.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia raised $12.3 million online last quarter.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe money gap is so pronounced that Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, an endangered Democratic incumbent, raised more online last quarter — $12.3 million — than the combined WinRed quarterly hauls of the Republican Senate nominees or presumptive nominees in seven key contests: Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.Money alone does not win political races and, for years, Republicans have grown accustomed to trailing Democrats in online fund-raising. Democratic donors, for instance, poured more than $200 million into losing Senate races in Kentucky and South Carolina last cycle — and neither contest ended up even close.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More