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How Bruce Blakeman Used a Mask Rebellion to Revive His Career
by Aurelia Butler 10 February 2022, 11:06
Since a surprise win on Long Island, Bruce Blakeman has been on a seemingly single-minded mission to challenge and defy Gov. Kathy Hochul over mask mandates.Bruce Blakeman, who has emerged as the leader of suburban Long Island’s revolt against mask mandates, has lost his fair share of elections.In 1998, Mr. Blakeman — a lifelong Republican — was trounced in a statewide election for comptroller. A year later, he was stunned to be voted out of the Nassau County Legislature, losing his perch as its presiding officer and majority leader. After toying with a run for New York City mayor in 2009, he then lost a congressional race to Representative Kathleen Rice of Long Island in 2014.But Mr. Blakeman’s surprising November win in the race for Nassau County executive — upsetting Laura Curran, a moderate, first-term Democrat — has led, after so many races, to his informal anointment as the state party’s unlikeliest new star.Helping to fuel his rise has been Mr. Blakeman’s seemingly single-minded political mission to challenge and defy Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state’s top Democrat, over her mask mandates, as well as rising crime rates and bail reform, which have proved potent issues for Republicans.“Bruce Blakeman is on the scene; he’s a major Republican leader in this state,” said Nick Langworthy, New York’s Republican Party chairman. “Everybody counted him out, but now Bruce has a great platform. And what I admire about him is he really wants to use it.”Mr. Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, in Mineola. His victory was part of a wave of Republican wins in the county.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Ms. Hochul announced that she would end some rules on indoor masking. Infection rates and hospitalizations have rapidly declined as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has waned. She added that counties and individual businesses could still require masks, framing that decision as empowering for local leaders.Extending that sort of restriction seems unlikely in Nassau, at least as far as the county government is concerned. Shortly after being inaugurated in early January, Mr. Blakeman made headlines by issuing a flurry of executive orders directing county agencies to stop enforcing mask mandates, and proclaiming that local school districts had to vote on whether or not to grant children what he called “the constitutional right” to cast off masks in the classroom.Whether those orders are legal or not — and Ms. Hochul says they clearly weren’t, considering that state orders outweigh local dictums — the defiant stance resulted in Mr. Blakeman’s ascension to the role of sought-after rabble-rouser, complete with repeated appearances on Fox News and a hero’s welcome in Republican circles in Albany.All of which, Mr. Blakeman insists, stems from a genuine concern for parental rights, not political gain.“I think good government is good politics,” Mr. Blakeman said in a recent interview in the State Capitol. “And part of good government is listening to your constituents.”Mr. Blakeman’s opponents counter that such platitudes are a mere disguise for an ambitious and oft-thwarted politician who has found his moment amid the polarization of the Trump era.“He’s following the tried-and-true Republican playbook,” said Jay Jacobs, who serves as both the Nassau County Democratic Party chair, as well as state chairman for the party. “You either scare the voters or make them angry.”Mr. Blakeman’s sudden celebrity has already paid dividends in one way: Less than a week after he announced his executive orders, his party selected Nassau County as the host for its 2022 convention later this month, noting the “historic Republican resurgence” in the county.Mr. Blakeman’s victory was part of a wave of Republican wins in Nassau, including by Anne Donnelly in the race for Nassau County district attorney, the first time that a Republican has held that position since 2005.White-maned, blue-eyed and fond of snazzy three-piece suits, Mr. Blakeman, 66, exudes a kind of old-school New York political swagger, complete with providing Page Six fodder, in part because his ex-wife, Nancy Shevell, is married to Paul McCartney.Politics is a bit of a Blakeman family business: Mr. Blakeman’s father, Robert, was a state assemblyman, and his younger brother, Bradley, was on President George W. Bush’s White House staff. One of five siblings who grew up in Valley Stream, on the Queens border, Mr. Blakeman recalls using Halloween as a campaign outing for his father.“I’d go out with an empty bag and a full bag of literature,” Mr. Blakeman said. “I came back home with a full bag of candy and an empty bag of literature.”After college and law school stints in Arizona and California — working for Republican campaigns and as a driver and aide to the former first lady Nancy Reagan — Mr. Blakeman returned to Long Island to serve as a partner in his father’s firm before being appointed Hempstead town councilman in 1993. He won a full term on the council later that same year, before being elected to the County Legislature in 1995.Mr. Blakeman at a meeting of the Nassau County Legislature in 1996. His father, Robert, was a state assemblyman.Vic DeLucia/The New York TimesLast winter, he had come full circle, once again serving as a member of the Hempstead Town council, when the Nassau County Republican chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., approached him about taking on Ms. Curran.He was ambivalent, he said, because he was in “a very comfortable place in my life” and “wasn’t sure I wanted to go into that kind of a battle.”But, Mr. Blakeman said, he saw an opening as he looked at polling, saying that while Ms. Curran was popular, “she was upside-down on every important issue,” including bail reform. A 2019 law passed by Democrats in Albany had effectively abolished bail for many nonviolent felonies and most misdemeanors.To that end, Mr. Blakeman ran a law-and-order and anti-tax campaign. He seemingly galvanized concerned suburbanites and die-hard Trump conservatives into a winning coalition, despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans by about 25,000 in the county, with a tranche of some 200,000 independent voters.The margin was thin, with Mr. Blakeman beating Ms. Curran by less than 1 percent, or about 2,100 votes.Mr. Cairo said that Mr. Blakeman’s opponents “tried to portray him as being a loser, and that he’s only doing this because he’s Cairo’s friend.”Mr. Blakeman proved to a dogged campaigner, however, impressing even some Democrats.“I would see him along the way and he’d say, ‘Tom, we’re going to win this.’ And I would say, ‘Really?’” said Thomas DiNapoli, the state’s comptroller, a Democrat, and a figure in Nassau County politics for more than three decades. “But he believed in himself.”Mr. Blakeman also won, said Lawrence Levy, the dean of suburban studies at Hofstra University, because he “leveraged concerns over bail reform and property tax assessments in ways that appealed both to his base and the sort of moderate independent who abandoned Trump in 2020.”That combination, however, will prove to be difficult to maintain, Mr. Levy said.“He is trying to thread a political and ideological needle,” he said. “He is getting a lot of attention for taking very conservative populist positions with Trump-style rhetoric, ostensibly to deliver on promises he made to his base. But he’s also trying not to entirely alienate the sort of suburban swing voter that decides national and local elections.”Mr. Blakeman spoke at a press conference in Mineola about the funeral of Officer Wilbert D. Mora of the New York Police Department in February.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Blakeman’s victory gave particular hope to Republicans on Long Island, where liberals had celebrated in 2018, after an anti-Trump sentiment led to four State Senate seats flipping to Democrats on the island. The party then took control of the chamber for the first time in nearly a decade.And while new redistricting maps may dash any Republican dreams of seizing the State Senate — the Democrats hold a 23-seat advantage in a 63-seat chamber — Robert Ortt, the Republican minority leader, said Mr. Blakeman showed the potential potency of “bail reform and crime and public safety” in elections all across the state.“It’s a template from the standpoint that it’s a huge issue,” Mr. Ortt said, adding that “public safety is an issue we all campaign on.”Even before taking office, Mr. Blakeman was invited to Albany in mid-December to headline an anti-bail-reform rally in the State Capitol and once again took an opportunity to criticize Ms. Hochul as someone “who likes to lecture me on the law.”“When you look at this bail reform law it is nothing more than a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, citing examples of gun charges in his county related to defendants released without bail. “It’s madness, it’s crazy and enough is enough.”In a county in which President Biden won, of course, Mr. Blakeman may well have to walk a fine line between appealing to moderates and the Republican base. Asked about President Donald J. Trump, he said he was “a very effective president,” but added: “Our personalities and delivery style are very different.”His ascension in Republican ranks has fostered some chatter that perhaps Mr. Blakeman — who lives in the well-to-do enclave of Atlantic Beach with his wife, Segal Blakeman, a lawyer — might want to challenge Ms. Hochul at some point.But Mr. Blakeman denies this, saying he supports this year’s front-runner for the Republican nomination, Representative Lee Zeldin, and is happy staying put in Nassau.“I have zero plans,” he said. “This is a great job, I love it. And I get to stay home.” More
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Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails
by Aurelia Butler 9 February 2022, 13:40
What is the role of status discontent in the emergence of right-wing populism? If it does play a key role, does it matter more where someone stands at any given moment or whether someone is moving up the ladder or down?In the struggle for status, Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, Denmark and the lead author of “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” argues thatEducation has emerged as a clear cleavage in addition to more traditional indicators of social class. The highly educated fare better in a more globalized world that puts a premium on human capital. Since the 1980s the highly educated left in the U.S. and elsewhere have been forging alliances with minority groups (e.g., racial, ethnic and sexual minorities), who also have been increasing their status in society. This, in turn, pushes those with lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards the right.It is hardly a secret that the white working class has struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive world?Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline troops.Over the past six decades, according to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: “In the 1960s and 1970s the left was associated with an anti-systemic stance but this position is now more aligned with the right-wing.”Those trapped in a downward spiral undergo a devastating experience.Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany wrote in an email:Those falling behind face a serious threat to their self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their own lack of hard work or merit.Instead of focusing on the economic system and its elites, Hartwich continued,Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal elites in culture, politics and the media as the “enemies of the people.” Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along cultural, rather than economic lines.In a January 2021 paper — “Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness” — Hartwich, Julia C. Becker, also of Osnabrueck, and S. Alexander Haslam of Queensland University found that “exposure to neoliberal ideology,” which they describe as the belief that “economies and societies should be organized along the principles of the free market,” results in “loneliness and, through this, decreases well-being. We found that exposure to neoliberal ideology increased loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others.”Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the political consequences of white status decline in her 2018 paper, “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.”“Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups,” Mutz wrote. “Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”Mutz found that:Change in financial well-being had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority-minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.In fact, status decline and economic decline, which have fueled the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party, are closely linked both psychologically and politically.Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard and the author of “Economic and Political Consequences of Trade-Induced Manufacturing Decline,” emailed me that before the 2016 election, the assumption was that “the political consequences of regionally concentrated manufacturing job loss” would be that “left-leaning politicians” would be “the primary beneficiaries.” Trump’s victory “dramatically altered our thinking on the matter.”Instead, Hanson continued, “large scale job loss led to greater tribalism (as represented by the populist nationalism of Trump and his acolytes) rather than greater support for redistribution (as represented by your run-of-the-mill Democrat).” There was, in fact, “precedence for this outcome,” he wrote, citing a 2013 paper, “Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize?” by Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke, economists at Queen’s University Belfast, Berkeley and N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi.The three economists wrote:Consistent with German experience, we find a link between right-wing political extremism and economic conditions, as captured by the change in G.D.P. Importantly, however, what mattered for right-wing anti-system party support was not just deterioration in economic conditions lasting a year or two, but economic conditions over the longer run.Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016 and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the 2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue to plague those regions decades later.Hanson and his co-authors, David Autor and David Dorn, economists at M.I.T. and the University of Zurich, found in their October 2021 paper “On the Persistence of the China Shock” thatLocal labor markets more exposed to import competition from China suffered larger declines in manufacturing jobs, employment-population ratios, and personal income per capita. These effects persist for nearly two decades beyond the intensification of the trade shock after 2001, and almost a decade beyond the shock reaching peak intensity.They go on:Even using higher-end estimates of the consumer benefits of rising trade with China, a substantial fraction of commuting zones appears to have suffered absolute declines in average real incomes.In their oft-cited 2020 paper, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Kaveh Majlesi, an economist at Monash University, found that in majority white regions, adverse economic developments resulting from trade imports produced a sharp shift to the right.Autor and his co-authors describe “an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News Channel, stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”Counties with a majority white population “became more likely to elect a G.O.P. conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat,” Autor and his colleagues write.They continue:In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate. These results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and economic policy.The trade-induced shift to the right has deeper roots dating back to at least the early 1990s.In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections.The trade agreement with Mexico and Canada “led to lasting, negative effects on Democratic identification among regions and demographic groups that were once loyal to the party,” Choi and her co-authors write.Before enactment, the Republican share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the national average, but “by 1998, these once-solidly Democratic counties voted as or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country,” according to Choi and her colleagues.Before NAFTA, the authors write, Democratic Party support for protectionist policies had been the glue binding millions of white working-class voters to the party, overcoming the appeal of the Republican Party on racial and cultural issues. Democratic support for the free trade agreement effectively broke that bond: “For many white Democrats in the 1980s, economic issues such as trade policy were key to their party loyalty because on social issues such as guns, affirmative action and abortion they sided with the G.O.P.”The consequences of trade shocks have been devastating both to whole regions and to the individuals living in them.Katheryn Russ — co-author along with Katherine Eriksson and Minfei Xu, economists at the University of California-Davis, Jay C. Shambaugh, an economist at George Washington University of the 2020 paper “Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing” — wrote in an email that trade induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high-school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”Even worse, these counties “do not bounce back out with the same frequency that counties with the highest fraction of high-school and college-educated workers do. So we aren’t just talking about a phenomenon that may influence the self-perceived status of individual workers, but of entire communities.”Russ cited a separate 2017 study, “Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods” by Leo Feler and Mine Z. Senses, economists at U.C.LA. and Johns Hopkins, which finds that “increased competition from Chinese imports negatively affects local finances and the provision of public services across US localities.”Specifically, “a $1,000 increase in Chinese imports per worker results in a relative decline in per capita expenditures on public welfare, 7.7 percent, on public transport, 2.4 percent, on public housing, 6.8 percent, and on public education, 0.9 percent.”These shortfalls emerge just as demand increases, Feler and Senses write: “The demand for local public goods such as education, public safety, and public welfare is increasing more in trade-affected localities when resources for these services are declining or remaining constant.”For example,Public safety expenditures remain constant at a time when local poverty and unemployment rates are rising, resulting in higher property crime rates by 3.5 percent. Similarly, a relative decline in education spending coincides with an increase in the demand for education as students respond to a deterioration in employment prospects for low-skilled workers by remaining in school longer.As if that were not enough,In localities that are more exposed to trade shocks, we also document an increase in the share of poor and low-income households, which tend to rely more on government services such as public housing and public transportation, both of which experience spending cuts.Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of more authoritarian, anti-immigrant and anti-democratic policies.Rui Costa Lopes, a research fellow at the University of Lisbon, emailed in response to my inquiry about the roots of right-wing populism: “As we’re talking more about those who suffer from relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness, then we’re talking more about the phenomenon of ‘politics of resentment’ and there is a link between those types of resentment and adhesion to right populist movements.”Lopes continued: “Recent research shows that the link between relative deprivation, status insecurity or powerlessness and political populist ideas (such as Euroscepticism) occurs through cultural (anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions.”“The promise of economic well-being achieved through meritocratic means lies at the very heart of Western liberal economies,” write three authors — Elena Cristina Mitrea of the University of Sibiu in Romania, Monika Mühlböck and Julia Warmuth, of the University of Vienna — in “Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults.” In reality, “the experience of upward mobility has become less common, while the fear of downward mobility is no longer confined to the lower bound of the social strata, but pervades the whole society.”Status anxiety has become a driving force, Mitrea and her colleagues note: “It is not so much current economic standing, but rather anxiety concerning future socioeconomic decline and déclassement, that influences electoral behavior.”“Socially disadvantaged and economically insecure citizens are more susceptible to the appeals of the radical right,” Mitrea, Mühlböck and Warmuth observe, citing data showing “that far-right parties were able to increase their vote share by 30 percent in the aftermath of financial crises.Economic insecurity translates into support for the far-right through feelings of relative deprivation, which arise from negative comparisons drawn between actual economic well-being and one’s expectations or a social reference group. Coping with such feelings increases the likelihood of rejecting political elites and nurturing anti-foreign sentiments.The concentration of despair in the United States among low-income whites without college degrees compared with their Black and Hispanic counterparts is striking.Carol Graham, a Brookings senior fellow, and Sergio Pinto, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, document this divide in “The Geography of Desperation in America: Labor Force Participation, Mobility Trends, Place, and Well-being,” a paper presented at a 2019 conference sponsored by the Boston Federal Reserve:Poor blacks are by far the most optimistic group compared to poor whites: they are 0.9 points higher on the 0-10 scale (0.43 standard deviations). Poor blacks are also 14 percentage points (0.28 standard deviations) less likely to report stress the previous day, half as likely as poor whites to report stress in the previous day, while poor Hispanics fall somewhere in the middle.Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found “that blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”Graham and Pinto write:The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.That this is dangerous does not need repeating.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Where’s Liz Cheney? The Republican’s Exile From Wyoming Republicans
by Aurelia Butler 9 February 2022, 09:00
The congresswoman hasn’t attended Republican Party events in person in her state in years, amid a wave of local conservative hostility. “I’m not going to convince the crazies,” she said.ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo. — The women arrived in red formal gowns, the men in suits and tuxedos. They posed in a photo booth with a cardboard cutout of former President Donald J. Trump and bid on auction items including a Glock pistol in a gift basket.Saturday was the biggest night of the year for Republicans in southwest Wyoming — a prom-themed fund-raiser at a Holiday Inn that drew 150 of the most active conservatives in Carbon, Sweetwater and Uinta counties.But Representative Liz Cheney, the Republican who has represented Wyoming since 2017, was nowhere to be found. She spent Saturday night 230 miles away with a group certain to give her a friendlier reception: reporters and media executives at the annual gathering of the Wyoming Press Association.The wrath that national Republicans have unleashed on Ms. Cheney — the Republican National Committee voted to censure her the day before the Rock Springs gala — is nothing compared to the fury she is encountering from Wyoming Republicans. The state party not only censured her but adopted a resolution to effectively disown her.The biggest night of the year for Republicans in southwest Wyoming was the Conservatives in Crimson Gala on Feb. 5.Kim Raff for The New York TimesYet her response has been to become strangely invisible in her home state.Ms. Cheney hasn’t appeared at a state Republican Party function in more than two years and hasn’t been to an in-person event for any of the party’s 23 county chapters since 2020. Her vote to impeach Mr. Trump last January and her decision to take part in the House investigation of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 have forced her into a kind of exile from Wyoming’s Republican Party apparatus, in a state where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote in 2020, the highest percentage in the country.“She speaks about her conscience, but you weren’t elected to do what you think is right, you were elected to do what the people want you do to,” said Sam Eliopoulos, a Cheyenne businessman and Republican who is running for a seat in the State House. “She didn’t do what the people want her to do. At the end of the day, that’s it.”Ms. Cheney’s focus on events in Washington rather than Wyoming is all the more striking given that she faces a well-known primary opponent who has been endorsed by Mr. Trump and the state Republican Party. And it is raising questions in Wyoming about whether she is counting on Democrats to bail her out in the August primary — or even whether she really is battling to hold on to her office.In an interview on Saturday in Cheyenne, Ms. Cheney tried to put to rest those questions and resisted the suggestion that she cared more about the fight with Mr. Trump than about running for re-election.“I’m not going to convince the crazies and I reject the crazies,” Ms. Cheney said of Wyoming’s Republican leadership. “I reject the notion that somehow we don’t have to abide by the rule of law. And the people right now who are in the leadership of our state party, I’m not trying to get their support because they’ve abandoned the Constitution.”On Saturday, Ms. Cheney skipped the conservative gala in Rock Springs, Wyo., and went to the annual gathering of the Wyoming Press Association in Casper.Stephen Speranza for The New York TimesThe heated Trump antagonism and Ms. Cheney’s light public schedule — she skipped the state fair and has appeared at just one in-person Wyoming event between Veterans Day and the press association gathering, according to a calendar provided by her office — has prompted an open discussion in the state about the possibility that she might abandon her seat and instead mount a run for the White House in 2024.Bill Sniffin, a longtime Wyoming newspaper executive who is now the publisher of the news website Cowboy State Daily, said he’s bet five cigars that Ms. Cheney will eventually drop out of the House contest.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.“She understands she has to campaign and earn the trust of voters — I would certainly like to see her here more,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative from Cheyenne who is the only Republican in the Wyoming State House publicly supporting Ms. Cheney. For that, he has been denied funding by the state party and expects his own primary challenge for the first time since he took office in 2017.Ms. Cheney insisted she would be on the ballot in August and dismissed a question about pivoting to a 2024 primary contest against Mr. Trump. She’s held dozens of meetings with Wyomingites via videoconference and said she planned to attend a Lincoln Day dinner later this month in Natrona County, which includes Casper and is home to her strongest base of support. And she described a silent majority of Wyoming Republicans who she said do not embrace Mr. Trump’s lies about the election.Speaking to the Wyoming Press Association in Casper, Ms. Cheney joked in response to a question about her political headwinds (“There’s a backlash against me? Wait, what?”) while trying to stress that her post-Jan. 6 opposition to Mr. Trump is not akin to endorsing Democratic policies.“I was pro-Trump, and I am proud of the policies of the Trump administration,” she told the crowd of journalists. “But he crossed a line you can never cross. Some people, I think, interpreted my vote to impeach him as a vote in favor of Biden or Biden’s policies, which it wasn’t.”Last summer, Mr. Trump and his allies recruited and vetted candidates to oppose Ms. Cheney. They ended up choosing Harriet Hageman, a Cheyenne land-use attorney and former Cheney adviser who was then a member of the Republican National Committee. Ms. Hageman had plotted against Mr. Trump during the 2016 election, but after Mr. Trump endorsed her she declared him the best president in her lifetime.Over a sausage quiche breakfast she cooked at her home near the State Capitol in Cheyenne, Ms. Hageman said in an interview that she could not name any issue on which she differs from the former president. And she said that Ms. Cheney’s break with Mr. Trump has left her incapable of being an effective advocate for Wyoming in Washington.“She’s using her seat as Wyoming’s representative to pursue her own agenda,” Ms. Hageman said. “That’s not our agenda. We don’t agree with what Liz Cheney is doing.”“We don’t agree with what Liz Cheney is doing,” said Harriet Hageman, left. She is Ms. Cheney’s Republican opponent in an August primary.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Hageman’s campaign sponsored the dessert table, which offered brownies, cheesecake and pie at the gala in Rock Springs, Wyo.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Hageman said she didn’t know who the legitimate winner of the 2020 election was (“I don’t know the answer”) and couldn’t say if former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to block congressional certification of President Biden’s election (“I’m not an elections attorney”).“I wasn’t there on Jan. 6,” she said. “I can’t tell you everything Pence did or didn’t do. What you need to understand is that, for most people out in the real world, none of us really care that much about what happened on Jan. 6.”Ms. Hageman has taken full advantage of Ms. Cheney’s diminished profile in the state. While Ms. Cheney’s movements are complicated by the presence of a Capitol Police detail she was assigned since she began receiving threats after joining the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Hageman has clocked more than 11,000 miles driving to Wyoming events since she entered the race in September. And she was a star of the Rock Springs conservative prom, where her campaign sponsored the dessert table of brownies, cheesecake and pie.At the gala, the master of ceremonies was Joey Correnti IV, chairman of the Carbon County Republican Party, which censured Ms. Cheney four days after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump last January. Mr. Correnti pushed the state party to issue a similar censure weeks later and, in November, to adopt a resolution to no longer recognize Ms. Cheney as a Republican.Mr. Correnti wore a bright red tuxedo jacket and a gold lapel pin with the “Let’s Go Brandon” phrase that has become a stand-in for an insult against Mr. Biden. He celebrated from the stage the Republican National Committee’s censure of Ms. Cheney, which described the attack on the Capitol and events that led up to it as “legitimate political discourse.”Many Republicans in attendance agreed.Anita Vonder Embse had just finished taking a picture with her husband and the cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump — all three of them flashing the signature thumbs-up — when she said there was “nothing wrong” with the rioters’ attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.“People had every right to go in there,” said Ms. Vonder Embse, a retiree from nearby Green River. “Push came to shove and they shoved. It went to an extreme because it had to.”Private polling in January found just 31 percent of Wyoming Republican primary voters had a favorable view of Ms. Cheney, compared to 60 percent who saw her unfavorably. More than half the state’s Republican primary electorate described themselves as strong supporters of Mr. Trump who would not vote for a candidate he opposes.Ms. Cheney told journalists in Casper that some people interpreted her vote to impeach Mr. Trump “as a vote in favor of Biden or Biden’s policies, which it wasn’t.”Stephen Speranza for The New York TimesThe state Republican Party chairman, Frank Eathorne, announced at a meeting in November that Mr. Trump plans to hold a rally in Wyoming with Ms. Hageman on May 28, according to WyoFile, a political news website in Wyoming. Mr. Eathorne did not respond to messages, nor did Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman.Ms. Cheney’s hope for political survival may rest in Wyoming’s lenient rules for primary elections. Democrats and independents can change their party affiliation at the polls, then switch back the next day.Four years ago, more than 10,000 Wyomingites switched their party registration to Republican to vote in a contested governor’s primary, according to data from the Wyoming secretary of state. Mark Gordon beat a field of more conservative candidates, including Ms. Hageman, by about 9,000 votes.Ms. Cheney said she will not organize “Democrats for Cheney” groups, encourage party switching or bless a political action committee to encourage Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. She did have a one-on-one meeting last summer with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the billionaire Hollywood mogul and Democratic megadonor. After the meeting, Mr. Katzenberg and his wife each made maximum contributions to Ms. Cheney’s campaign.There are no declared Democratic candidates for Ms. Cheney’s seat or for governor, limiting the appeal of participating in a Democratic primary.Teresa and Island Richards were named “Republi-Queen” and “Republi-King” of 2022 at the fundraiser in Rock Springs, Wyo.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Richards was the only gala participant, among more than three dozen interviewed, who admitted being a Cheney supporter.Kim Raff for The New York TimesToward the end of the gala in Rock Springs, five nominees each for “Republi-King” and “Republi-Queen” gathered on the dance floor for the announcement of the winners. Throughout the night, attendees had signaled their preferred candidates by placing cash into bags.Mr. Correnti announced the winners: Island and Teresa Richards. Mr. Richards, a former Sweetwater County Republican chairman, wouldn’t reveal his position on Ms. Cheney. Ms. Richards, as it turned out, was the only admitted Cheney supporter among more than three dozen people interviewed at the gala.“This whole crowd is not representative of what’s going on with Liz Cheney,” Ms. Richards said. “She does have support.”Katie Klingsporn contributed reporting from Casper, Wyo. More
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Censuring Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger Sets Off Republican Food Fight
by Aurelia Butler 8 February 2022, 23:00
Punishing Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger was a blunder, many in the party say.Republicans had Democrats right where they wanted them: on the ropes.Then on Friday, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two House Republicans on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The text of the resolution made no distinction between peaceful protesters and those who stormed the Capitol, referring to that day’s events simply as “legitimate political discourse.” The R.N.C. also backed a primary challenge against Cheney, whose high-profile criticism of Donald Trump has made her a top target on the right.It was one of those polarizing moments that forced other Republicans to react, with some — notably, a bunch of sitting U.S. senators — denouncing the national committee’s move as “wrong” and “absurd.”In the view of many Republicans, censuring two of their own was much like that old saw attributed to Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord, the 19th-century French diplomat: Worse than a crime, it was also a mistake.As President Biden grapples with soaring inflation, a pandemic that isn’t yet over and general public malaise over the two, why change the subject?“Certainly it wasn’t the right thing to do, and certainly it wasn’t the politically smart thing to do,” said Josh Venable, a former deputy finance director for the R.N.C. “It doesn’t take David Axelrod or Karl Rove to figure that out.”Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and a man who chooses his words carefully, rejected the R.N.C.’s decision on Tuesday.“We saw what happened,” he said. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”‘When we became the news’This is the kind of intramural food fight that the press loves — and political operatives despise when their own party is on the proverbial menu.“When I was at the R.N.C. in 2010, our worst days were when we became the news,” said Doug Heye, a Republican communications consultant. “G.O.P. senators and members know this, and it’s why you’re seeing them speak out.”But while Cheney has Republican friends in the Senate, she has few, if any, in the House. Allies of Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, see her as a political opportunist who has made their lives more difficult — a thoughtless colleague who failed to appreciate his attempts after the 2020 election to shield her from the wrath of her colleagues on the right.Fielding a question on the controversy on Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican last year, offered a curt response. “My reaction is the R.N.C. has every right to take any action,” she said, “and the position I have is that you’re ultimately held accountable to voters in your district.”Translation: Cheney deserves to lose her seat, and if the Republican Party wants to aid in the process, so be it.The Trump questionThere’s a lot going on here worth unpacking.One obvious motive behind censuring Cheney and Kinzinger was to place them outside the bounds of respectable Republican Party company. Their presence on the Jan. 6 committee is a constant source of irritation for the party, giving Democrats bipartisan cover for an investigation that Republicans have sought to cast as a partisan vendetta.But the larger point of tension is the same existential question that the Republican Party has been wrestling with since 2015, when a certain New York real estate mogul glided down that golden escalator: What to do about Donald Trump? And whose view of the party should prevail — his, or those of establishment leaders like McConnell?Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as former communications director in Trump’s White House before quitting over his stolen election claims, said the R.N.C.’s censure of Cheney and Kinzinger would “damage the Republican Party more broadly and going into 2024.”She’s among around 150 Republicans who signed a statement this week condemning the move as a betrayal of the party’s “founding principles” and a signal that it “no longer welcomes people of conscience.”‘An opportunity lost’Then there are Republicans who express a more parochial concern — a party consumed with internal strife will have a harder time defeating Democrats in the upcoming midterms.“Americans are scared of the future because of inflation, because of crime, and what do we talk about? A stolen election,” said Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist in Colorado.As Matt Continetti, the former editor of the Free Beacon, a conservative website, put it, “Any minute Republicans spend re-litigating 2020 or downplaying the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is an opportunity lost.”Chris Stirewalt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the censure could be a sign that Republicans are getting too confident about the prospects of a “red wave” election in the fall.“Democrats are certainly still in line for a serious thumping this year, but it is now possible to see how — if the economy and virus keep moving in the right direction — divisions of this kind of ugliness could screw up Republicans’ chances at a big win,” he said.What to read tonightNate Cohn analyzes recent polling that found that “the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about” Covid-19 itself.Prosecutors released a “revealing glimpse of their strategy” for the first trial stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Alan Feuer reports. Their evidence includes surveillance videos and text messages.The Secret Service escorted Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, out of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., because of a bomb threat. The school was also evacuated.LISTENING POSTA protest in Brooklyn on Monday showed solidarity with Canadian truckers.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockTruckin’Fox News was of one mind on Monday evening: America needs a movement of disaffected truckers just like the one in Canada.Tucker Carlson used his monologue to celebrate the Canadian truckers, whose protests against vaccine mandates have paralyzed Ottawa and threatened the flow of trade with the United States. Tech companies, Carlson complained, are censoring their online organizing efforts while mainstream media outlets are supposedly ignoring the story.“Instead, everyone in New York and D.C. and Los Angeles is cheering on the national security state and its alliance with Silicon Valley as they come together to crush a human rights movement,” he said.Laura Ingraham used the truckers mainly to criticize CNN for its coverage of what she lauded as “Canada’s expanding freedom convoy.”“The regime media knows exactly what’s happening in Canada and it scares the heck out of them,” Ingraham said. “Just think: Honking, really loud honking, may keep Joe from his 12 hours of sleep a night.”It’s hard to say how many people are ready to take up the cause.One of the main groups calling for a truckers’ protest in Washington, which calls itself “The People’s Convoy,” has nearly 50,000 followers on Facebook and another 40,000 on Telegram. Another group, “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” had more than 130,000 members before Facebook shut it down for violating the site’s policies on vaccine misinformation. Several truckers’ groups have announced plans to drive to Washington to protest vaccine mandates on March 1.Canadian researchers have linked the truckers to conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists, and have noted how much of the support for their sit-in has come from the United States.Jared Holt, a researcher who studies extremist movements, said the online activity appeared to be aimed at “manufacturing sentiment” that wasn’t fully organic. It reminded him of the recent demonstration by anti-vaccine advocates on the National Mall, which drew a modest crowd in late January.“They’re hoping they can animate the imagination of similarly minded people here,” Holt said.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More
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Republicans Step Up Attacks on Fauci to Woo Trump Voters
by Aurelia Butler 7 February 2022, 09:00
G.O.P. candidates, tapping into voters’ frustrations with a seemingly endless pandemic, are stepping up their attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Jane Timken kicked off an eight-week advertising campaign on the Fox News Channel in her bid for the Republican nomination for Senate, she did not focus on immigration, health care or the economy. Her first ad was titled “Fire Fauci.”Her target — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus — is also under attack in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, a television doctor who has entered the Republican Senate primary there, calls him a “petty tyrant.” Dr. Oz recently ran a Twitter ad calling for a debate — not between candidates, but between him and Dr. Fauci.In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis released an advertisement last month telling Dr. Fauci to “pound sand” via the beach sandals the governor’s re-election campaign is now selling: “Freedom Over Fauci Flip-Flops.” In Wisconsin, Kevin Nicholson, a onetime Democrat running for governor as a conservative outsider, says Dr. Fauci “should be fired and referred to prosecutors.”Republican attacks on Dr. Fauci are not new; former President Donald J. Trump, irked that the doctor publicly corrected his falsehoods about the virus, called him “a disaster” and repeatedly threatened to fire him. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, has grilled Dr. Fauci in nationally televised hearings, and Dr. Fauci — true to his fighter-from-Brooklyn roots — has punched back.But as the 2022 midterm elections approach, the attacks have spread across the nation, intensifying as Dr. Fauci draws outsize attention in some of the most important state and local races on the ballot in November.The Republican war on Dr. Fauci is partly a sign of Mr. Trump’s strong grip on the party. But Dr. Fauci, both his friends and detractors agree, has also become a symbol of something deeper — the deep schism in the country, mistrust in government and a brewing populist resentment of the elites, all made worse by the pandemic.And Dr. Fauci, whose perpetual television appearances have made him the face of the Covid-19 response — and who is viewed by his critics as a high-and-mighty know-it-all who enjoys his celebrity — seems an obvious person to blame.Dr. Anthony S. Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and has advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation. Tom Brenner for The New York Times“Populism is essentially anti: anti-establishment, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual and anti-media,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding that Dr. Fauci “is an establishment expert intellectual who is in the media.”For the 81-year-old immunologist, a venerated figure in the world of science, it is a jarring last chapter of a government career that has spanned half a century. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post he has held since 1984, he has helped lead the response to various public health crises, including AIDS and Ebola, and advised eight presidents. He has never revealed a party affiliation. President George H.W. Bush once cited him as a hero..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Now, though, some voters are parroting right-wing commentators who compare Dr. Fauci to the brutal Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Candidates in hotly contested Republican primaries like Ohio’s are trying to out-Trump one another by supplanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Dr. Fauci as a political boogeyman. Mr. DeSantis has coined a new term: “Faucism.” In Washington, lawmakers are taking aim at Dr. Fauci’s salary, finances and influence.“I didn’t make myself a polarizing figure,” Dr. Fauci declared in an interview. “I’ve been demonized by people who are running away from the truth.”The anti-Fauci fervor has taken its toll on his personal life; he has received death threats, his family has been harassed and his home in Washington is guarded by a security detail. His standing with the public has also suffered. In a recent NBC News Poll, just 40 percent of respondents said they trusted Dr. Fauci, down from 60 percent in April 2020.Still, Mr. Ayres said, Dr. Fauci remains for many Americans “one of the most trusted voices regarding the pandemic.” In a Gallup poll at the end of 2021, his job approval rating was 52 percent. On a list of 10 officials, including Mr. Biden and congressional leaders, only two scored higher: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.Republican strategists are split on whether attacking Dr. Fauci is a smart strategy. Mr. Ayres said it could help rev up the base in a primary but backfire in a general election, especially in a swing state like Ohio. But John Feehery, another strategist, said many pandemic-weary Americans viewed Dr. Fauci as “Mr. Lockdown,” and it made sense for Republicans “to run against both Fauci and lockdowns.”Here in Ohio, Ms. Timken, a Harvard graduate and former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party who promises to “advance the Trump agenda without fear or hesitation,” is doing just that. Her ad shows a parent struggling to put a mask on a screaming toddler, which she brands “child abuse.”Ms. Timken is one of at least three Republican candidates for Ohio’s Senate seat who are going after Dr. Fauci.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe spot, she said in an interview, was prompted by what she hears from voters who are resentful of vaccine mandates, confused by shifting public health advice and tired of being told what to do.“It taps into the real frustration they feel,” Ms. Timken said, “that Fauci claims to be the bastion of science, but I think he’s playing God.”She is one of three candidates with elite academic credentials who are going after Dr. Fauci in a crowded primary for the seat that Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, is giving up. The others are J.D. Vance, a lawyer with a Yale degree and the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Josh Mandel, the former Ohio state treasurer, whose law degree is from Case Western Reserve University.Mr. Vance called Dr. Fauci “a ridiculous tyrant” during a rally with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican banned from Twitter for spreading Covid misinformation. Mr. Mandel has railed against Dr. Fauci for months on Facebook and Twitter, calling him a liar and “one of the biggest frauds in American history.”Ohio Republicans are split between the Trump wing and centrists in the mold of John Kasich, the former governor. Those tensions were on display last week at Tommy’s Diner, a Columbus institution, and at a meeting of the Franklin County Republican Committee, which convened to vote on endorsements. Sentiments seemed to track with vaccination status.Mike Matthews, center, and George Wolf, right, are both vaccinated and didn’t find fault with Dr. Fauci. Andy Watkinson, at the table behind them, is unvaccinated and thinks Dr. Fauci “needs to retire.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAt the diner, Republicans like Mike Matthews, a retired state worker, and George Wolf, a retired firefighter, both of whom voted for Mr. Trump, found no fault with Dr. Fauci. Both are vaccinated. “I’ve never heard of anyone that I would trust more,” Mr. Wolf said.But at the next table, Andy Watkinson, a remodeling contractor who is unvaccinated, said he was a fan of Joe Rogan, the podcaster, provocateur and Fauci critic. “I think he’s done the same thing for 50 years and he’s in bed with all the pharma companies,” Mr. Watkinson said of Dr. Fauci, though there is no evidence of that. “He needs to retire.”At the committee meeting, views about Dr. Fauci were more strident.“He needs to be brought up on charges,” declared Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children. Echoing Dr. Robert Malone, who has become a conservative celebrity by arguing that Covid vaccine mandates are unethical experiments, she asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg Code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.“This whole thing is nothing but an experiment!” Ms. Bates exclaimed.Lisadiana Bates, a former business owner who is home-schooling her children, asserted that Dr. Fauci had “violated the Nuremberg code,” the set of research ethics developed after the Holocaust.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe roots of anti-Fauci campaign rhetoric can be traced to Washington, where Dr. Fauci has clashed repeatedly with two Republican senators who are also doctors: Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, an obstetrician.Mr. Paul has fueled speculation that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak produced by federally funded “gain-of-function” research — high-risk studies aimed at making viruses more infectious — in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci and other National Institutes of Health officials have said that the Wuhan research did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function studies, and that it is genetically impossible for viruses studied there to have produced the pandemic.The nuances of that dispute, however, have gotten lost in the increasingly hostile exchanges between the two men. In July, after Mr. Paul accused him of lying to Congress, Dr. Fauci shot back, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.” Last month, Dr. Fauci arrived at a Senate hearing brandishing a fund-raising webpage for Mr. Paul that included a “Fire Dr. Fauci” graphic, and accused Mr. Paul of exploiting the pandemic for political gain.Later in that same hearing, Dr. Fauci muttered under his breath that Mr. Marshall was “a moron” — a comment caught on an open microphone — after the senator posted Dr. Fauci’s salary on a placard and demanded his financial disclosure forms, suggesting he might be engaged in financial “shenanigans” with the pharmaceutical industry.(Dr. Fauci’s financial disclosure forms, which Mr. Marshall has since posted on the internet, show investments in bonds and mutual funds, not drug companies. He is paid an annual salary of $434,312 under a provision that allows government doctors and scientists to be highly compensated, akin to what they could earn in the private sector.)Dr. Fauci said he did not regret the “moron” remark, or the pushback against Mr. Paul. But Ms. Timken said calling Mr. Marshall a moron was “beyond the pale.”Even some Fauci fans in academia and government say he might have been better off keeping his cool to avoid amplifying his Republican critics and alienating voters who need to hear his public health message. Some suggest he lower his profile; he says the White House asks him to go on TV.“He’s been pushing back in a way that is not common for us to see for American scientists, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.If Democrats lose seats in the midterm elections, as many expect, Dr. Fauci may have a Republican-controlled Congress to contend with. Another Republican from Ohio, Representative Jim Jordan, who claims that Dr. Fauci knew the coronavirus “came from a lab,” has vowed that Republicans will investigate him if they win control of the House.Some of Dr. Fauci’s friends are urging him to avoid that possibility by retiring. He has been working on a memoir, but cannot look for a publisher while he is still a federal employee. Dr. Fauci says Republicans will not dictate the terms of his retirement, and he has no plans at the moment to step down. And, he said, he is not worried about any investigation.“I can’t think of what they would want to investigate except this whole pile of lies that they’re throwing around,” he said. More
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I’ll Bet on Susan Collins Over the Resistance
by Aurelia Butler 5 February 2022, 20:30
Here are two anecdotes from the still-unspooling saga of Jeff Zucker, no longer the head of CNN. First, from the aftermath: According to The Los Angeles Times, in a meeting between some of the network’s staffers and its corporate leadership, the CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel shared that four members of the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 had called to say that Zucker’s exit left them “devastated for our democracy.”Second, from the background to Zucker’s departure: We already knew that he blessed the wild prime-time lovefest between the brothers Cuomo, the CNN anchor and the New York governor. But now it’s being reported by The New York Post that Zucker helped arrange the absurd interviews, sometimes through the influence of his paramour, a former Andrew Cuomo communications director, and even allegedly gave the New York governor advice on how to swat at Donald Trump during his famous Covid-19 briefings.You can put these anecdotes together and get a decent understanding of what went wrong in important parts of American media during the Trump presidency. The powerful belief that only CNN — indeed, only Jeff Zucker — stood between democracy and authoritarianism encouraged the abandonment of normal journalistic standards, the sacrifice of sobriety and neutrality to what Armin Rosen, writing for UnHerd, dubs the “centrist-branded panic industry.”Undergirding this shift, at CNN and elsewhere, was a theory that the way to blunt Trump’s demagogic power was to assemble the broadest possible coalition of elites in media and politics, to establish moral clarity and create an effective cordon sanitaire.In 2016, I believed in this strategy, urged it on Republicans during the primaries and participated in it — along with most conservative commentators I respected — by opposing Trump’s election in the fall.But then Trump won — with a minority of the vote, yes, but all that elite opposition couldn’t even get Hillary Clinton to 49 percent, and the Republicans won more votes nationally than Democrats in House elections, paying no obvious price for having nominated Trump. The American people listened to the Never Trump alliance, fanned out across our newspapers and magazines and networks, and delivered their verdict: For every Republican we persuaded, a different sort of swing voter seemed to discover that maybe there were good reasons to take a chance on Trump.What followed in Trump’s presidency was a doubling down on the elite-opposition strategy — but increasingly I doubted its approach. In its most sincere form the anti-Trump front became paranoid and credulous, addled by the Steele dossier and lost in Twitter doomscrolling. In its more careerist form, it became a racket for former Republican consultants. And in general it became its own ideological echo chamber, a circle of clarity closed to anyone with doubts.In detaching somewhat, I remained an anti-Trump conservative; after the 2020 election’s aftermath, it’s safe to say that I’m forever Never Trump. But I decided that fundamentally the elite-consolidation strategy was a failure — that it succeeded in 2020 only because of the pandemic and that it may fail in 2024 — and that if Trump were to be permanently defeated, one of two things needed to happen: Either some adaptation from Republicans, one that might seem ugly or compromised in its own way (as you see now, say, in Ron DeSantis’s winks and nods to anti-vaxxers), or some shift that made the leftward-lurching Democrats seem less dangerous to cross-pressured Americans.So those are the two questions that this column takes up regularly: Can there be Trumpism without Trump, and what’s so unappealing or frightening about progressivism and the Democratic Party? And the consistency of those themes clearly sometimes exasperates people who think they amount to moral equivalence or denial about how awful the Republican Party has become.I don’t mind those critiques, but I will close this exercise in navel-gazing with a concrete example of where I think that they go wrong. For the united front of Never Trump, there’s no greater heroine at the moment than Liz Cheney, and no clearer embodiment of Republican cowardice than Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who even now won’t say definitively that she’ll oppose Trump if he’s the 2024 nominee.I also admire Cheney’s direct anti-Trumpism, as I’ve admired it from Mitt Romney, and now even a little from Mike Pence. (Yes, it’s a low bar.) But if you believe, reasonably, that the immediate danger posed by Trump’s demagogy involves an attempted Electoral College theft in 2024, then Cheney’s work is a lot less important than the bipartisan effort underway in the Senate to reform the Electoral Count Act. And that effort is being steered, with some success so far, by Collins.Maybe the effort will ultimately fail. But it’s quite possible that the most important response to the events of Jan. 6 will be shepherded by Republicans playing a careful inside game, with the cautious navigation of the senior senator from Maine more essential than a thousand essays about never giving Trumpism an inch.That’s not a heroic view of how democracies are stabilized and demagogues finally retired. But if the choice is between this unheroism and the mentality that gave us Jeff Zucker and the brothers Cuomo, for now I’m inclined to bet on Susan Collins.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More
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The Politics of Gloom: Suburban Women Voice Concerns
by Aurelia Butler 3 February 2022, 23:00
Some voters aren’t sold on the idea that an election will save them from their anguish.Earlier this week, 10 women from across the country met on Zoom and talked for two hours as part of a focus group on politics. All of the women were white, lived in the suburbs and had been identified as swing voters. One was a mother from Iowa who owns a small business. Another teaches special education in Florida. And there was a school bus driver from Pennsylvania.The session was sponsored by several liberal groups who invited us to tune in but asked us not to identify the participants or the organizations. They cited a need to protect the participants’ privacy and to separate the views of the focus group from the views of the sponsoring organizations.The women first responded to a question about how things were going in the country. The most optimistic answer might have been “uncertain.” The others shared that they were “nervous,” “concerned,” “frustrated” and “irritated.”The teacher from Florida spoke about struggling to keep up with medical bills for her cancer treatment. “I thought I was ahead but I keep falling behind,” she said. One recently split up with her spouse over how seriously to take Covid. One devotes an entire day every weekend to running her errands, so she can save money on gas.“It’s been the worst time,” said an educational consultant in Pennsylvania. “I can’t believe that we’re living through this.”This focus group of 10 women is a grain of sand on the beach that is the American electorate. But they open a window into a widespread gloom that helps explain why some voters doubt that the Biden administration can fulfill its promise to restore their lives to normal. These women are consumed by the problems that the federal government has said it’s trying to solve, but they seem to believe that the government lacks the power to fix them.Focus groups are but one data point in the run-up to an election. A professional mediator guides the group’s discussion, with the goal of revealing perspectives that don’t usually get captured in polling, which is a far more scripted and fast-paced interaction.Focus groups can provide anecdotes to explain trends in polling, and the organizers tend to group voters by their demographics. The organizer of this focus group is conducting sessions with multiple demographic groups; the one we were invited to this week happened to center on the views of white women. The participants were identified as swing voters because they had expressed misgivings about their past votes — some of the women had voted for Donald Trump, while others had voted for President Biden.Democrats need support from suburban women if they want to keep their House and Senate majorities in November. The women in the focus group didn’t necessarily dislike Biden. They supported the infrastructure law and opposed measures that restrict voting access. They applauded Biden for his hot-mic moment — the one when he muttered a disparaging remark about a Fox News reporter. They disliked Trump, and they were disgusted with those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.Despite all of that, they weren’t eager to vote for Democrats in the midterm elections in November.“I can’t really have any hope for 2022 coming up,” said a woman from Tennessee who works for a professional wrestling company. “So they’re not giving me any sort of ambition to feel like I have any sort of trust in the government to fix things or at least get the ball going in the right direction.”A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.Democrats know they need to campaign on their accomplishments to preserve their majorities. Biden himself has suggested that he needs to do a better job telling voters what his administration and Democrats in Congress have done. But, as these women made clear, just talking to voters isn’t enough. Democrats need to make sure voters feel the effects of their efforts, too.“It’s absolutely essential that by Election Day, these suburban women are looking at Washington and seeing it as a place that can get things done,” said Meredith Kelly, a Democratic strategist.Learning ‘how to play in the sandbox’The women in the focus group did not know that the moderator guiding the discussion was a Democrat or that the sponsors were liberal organizations. All they knew before logging on was that they would be observed, though they did not know by whom. Some of them refused to answer a few questions, saying they were not informed enough to form an opinion. And some of them said they usually avoided talking about politics.When they were asked how they saw their role in the midterm elections, they laughed. “The suckers,” an Arizona mother answered. “We’re that automated laugh reel,” joked a woman in Utah.They saw Washington more as a playground than as a place where problems get solved.“At the end of the day you need to learn how to play in the sandbox together,” an interior designer from Georgia said, lamenting about bickering politicians.When it came to the infrastructure law, some of the women agreed that Democrats had included nonessential items that had nothing to do with roads or bridges. But they also thought Republicans should have voted to pass it anyway.“We need it, so whatever’s shoved in there at this point, just take it,” the Georgia woman said.They generally agreed that Biden stood out from other politicians for being “empathetic.” But even if they believed that Biden had wanted to make a difference, they didn’t think he was an exception to the rule. They seemed to doubt that any politician could solve the country’s biggest problems.The women expressed that corporations and the wealthiest Americans wielded the most power, not politicians. But they didn’t think there was anything the government could do to make corporations pay their fair share — these companies always find loopholes, they argued.After two hours of venting their frustrations, they concluded the conversation with an excoriation of the rioters who stormed the Capitol.“How did we let it get that bad?” asked the woman in Utah.With that, the moderator told them their time was up. She asked them to type up final thoughts before they logged off. One immediately left the call, while the others took a moment to say their goodbyes. The teacher in Florida, who spoke of struggling with cancer, was the last to sign off.“Thank you,” she told the moderator. “I got a lot out of it.”What to read tonightIn Washington State, Black voters’ ballots were rejected four times as often as those of white voters in the 2020 election, Mike Baker reports. All of those ballots were thrown out because of problems with voters’ signatures.Biden spoke alongside Mayor Eric Adams of New York to assert his support for law enforcement and other measures to increase public safety, Katie Glueck, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael Wilson report.Sarah Bloom Raskin, the nominee for vice chair of supervision at the Federal Reserve, has an even narrower path to being confirmed if Senator Ben Ray Luján is out while recovering from a stroke. Raskin, who is well-known in the banking industry, is married to Representative Jamie Raskin.the former guyDonald Trump endorses David Perdue for governor of Georgia.Perdue for GovernorThe Kool-Aid ManRemember those old commercials in which a giant, smiling pitcher of Kool-Aid interrupts a baseball game or a wedding, bursting through a wall to share the joy of a sugary beverage?From the Republican establishment’s perspective, the role of the Kool-Aid Man was played this week by the former president, who crashed the proverbial party in two states: Georgia and New Hampshire.In Georgia, Trump cut his first face-to-camera ad for a candidate, David Perdue. At Trump’s urging, the former senator is challenging Brian Kemp, the sitting governor, in the upcoming Republican primary.“The Democrats walked all over Brian Kemp,” Trump says in the ad. “Brian Kemp let us down. We can’t let it happen again.”It’s an allusion to Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him in Georgia, and another way to air his anger that Kemp refused to go along with his efforts to overturn the vote. The district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is investigating Trump for seeking to improperly influence the outcome of that election.“While President Trump brought jobs back from overseas, David Perdue made a career outsourcing them to China, Mexico and other countries,” Cody Hall, a spokesman for the Kemp campaign, said of the ad. “That’s not America First — that’s David Perdue padding his own wallet on the backs of hardworking Americans.”As for New Hampshire, Trump’s on-and-off political lieutenant, Corey Lewandowski, told a conservative radio host that the former president had empowered him to find a primary challenger for the state’s moderate Republican governor.“The president is very unhappy with the chief executive officer of the State of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu,” Lewandowski told Howie Carr, a Boston-area radio personality. “And Sununu, in the president’s estimation, is someone who’s never been loyal to him. And the president said it would be really great if somebody would run against Chris Sununu.”A spokesperson for Sununu did not respond to a request for comment. But Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, had plenty to say about Trump’s intervention.“This is another outrageous example of the Trump cancel culture that will do nothing except help elect more Democrats,” Hogan said. He added, “If we double down on failure and focus on the former president’s strange personal grievances, then we will deserve the result.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More
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Trump v. DeSantis: Does the Florida Governor Really Have a Shot?
by Aurelia Butler 3 February 2022, 19:00
In early 2016, as Jeb Bush floundered, the Republican establishment began to throw its support behind a different politician from Florida who seemed as if he could defeat the upstart Donald Trump. Senator Marco Rubio was 44 and handsome, and had put together a somewhat impressive legislative record during his five years in office. National Review called Rubio a “Republican dream” and hedge fund managers were donating millions to his campaign. Trump led comfortably in the polls, but it was still early, as G.O.P. insiders reminded us, and they still hadn’t put their thumbs fully on the scale. We all know how the story ends: Rubio wasn’t able to mount any sort of credible challenge to Trump and withdrew after just a few months.Today, we are hearing about yet another Florida politician in his early 40s — Gov. Ron DeSantis — who, according to many of those same establishment figures, will collect a vast majority of support from donors. And he is already the subject of plenty of positive media coverage. The headlines about DeSantis are eerily similar to those about Rubio in 2016: “The Rise of Ron DeSantis,” “Why Never-Trumpers Should Bet on DeSantis Now” and “Looks Like Ron DeSantis Could Turn Into Trump’s Personal Nightmare.” If DeSantis runs for president, his job won’t be so much to win the presidency on his own merits, but rather to stop Donald Trump.How seriously should we take DeSantis’s chances?Trump holds sizable margins in pretty much every poll you can find, but some of the numbers are tightening. Last week, the polling firm Echelon Insights published a raft of data on the Florida governor. It found that Trump’s lead over DeSantis among G.O.P. voters, which, according to its own poll, was 62 percent to 22 percent of respondents in October, had shrunk to 57 percent to 32 percent as of late January. Perhaps the most compelling bit of information Echelon found was that while 54 percent of Republicans thought “Trump was a great president and should remain the leader of the Republican Party,” 22 percent said Trump “was a great president but it is time for the Republican Party to find a new leader” and 18 percent said Trump “was not a great president and the Republican Party would be better off without his influence.” Which means that 40 percent of G.O.P. voters are at least open to the possibility of someone new.So things, perhaps, aren’t quite as locked up as they might appear, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of Echelon Insights, told me. When asked whether Trump should run again, many of the respondents to her poll showed “a shocking level of ambivalence” to that question, she said. These people were not never-Trumpers or center-of-right Republicans; they were people who had thought Trump had done a good job but also now believed that it might be time for a fresh voice.These polls, of course, measure sentiment at a fixed moment in time. Given that, it’s difficult to know exactly what to make of a seeming growing hesitancy among Republican voters about Trump, or, for that matter, what it says about DeSantis’s shot.What’s clearer is that Trump has some built-in advantages that are unlikely to change.When the election machine truly kicks in, Trump will no doubt garner a vast majority of the media attention once again. He obviously enjoys unrivaled name recognition. And Trump’s absence from office this term could give him an edge because he has not had to take the blame for what now feels like an endless pandemic. That burden has mostly been shouldered by Joe Biden and can explain, in large part, the president’s tanking approval numbers.Plus, a December University of Massachusetts Amherst poll found that only 21 percent of Republicans thought that Joe Biden won a legitimate victory in 2020, a number that hasn’t budged much over time. There’s also some evidence that shows that G.O.P. voters who think the election was illegitimate appear more likely to vote.When all these things are considered, DeSantis, then, should be seen more as a primary challenger to a popular incumbent. Nobody since the advent of the modern-day presidential primary has successfully unseated an incumbent for the nomination.There’s also a question of timing at play here. DeSantis’s recent rise to national prominence has come from his handling of the pandemic — he has become the loudest anti-lockdown voice in the national conversation and can point to his repeated refusal to shut down his state. This might be a popular stance in 2022, but it’s hard to imagine how it will play in two years. If Covid is shutting down schools and businesses in two years, we will most likely be looking at a vastly different country. If we have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it’s quite possible that nobody will really care how DeSantis handled the pandemic.Anderson believes that DeSantis’s success comes in large part from his willingness to fight, a trait that Trump, of course, also possesses. While she thinks that DeSantis has a chance, she also pointed to the former Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker as a cautionary tale. “Walker is an interesting example of someone who captured the conservative imagination because he was fighting with the teachers unions, and he was standing strong against those Democratic legislators,” Anderson said. “And yet, when push came to shove, that effort fizzled out. And so if you’re DeSantis, you want to avoid that path of being someone who gets a lot of attention and a lot of interest because, hey, you were fighting the right fights at the right time against the right people.” This approach works to a certain extent, Anderson said, but there are also times when things just don’t translate onto the national stage.DeSantis’s stances on Covid have garnered him a reasonable amount of national name recognition. Last month, a Reuters poll found that 80 percent of Republican voters had at least heard of him. If this were a normal Republican election run-up, DeSantis would probably be leading right now: An Echelon Insights poll from December that did not include Trump found that DeSantis comfortably led all other potential G.O.P. nominees. But Trump’s path to power is littered with the campaigns of other upstart Republican candidates who checked off all the right boxes and got along well with the establishment. Is it really reasonable to think DeSantis’s fate will be any different?Have feedback? Send a note to kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.” More

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