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      The Wrong Side of the Gender Gap

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      The deepening gender gap in American voting, with men favoring the Republican Party and women favoring the Democrats, is well known, if not well understood. So what explains the presence of millions of men in the Democratic Party and millions of women in the Republican Party? What distinguishes these two constituencies, whose partisanship runs against the grain?I asked Heather L. Ondercin, a political scientist at Appalachian State University who has written extensively on gender issues, including in “Marching to the Ballot Box: Sex and Voting in the 2020 Election Cycle,” for her thoughts on these questions. She emailed back:Regardless of identification as a man or a woman, more stereotypically “masculine” individuals (male and female) — aggressive, assertive, defends beliefs, dominant, forceful, leadership ability, independent, strong personality, willing to take a stand, and willing to take risks — tend to identify with the Republican Party. Individuals (men and women) who are more stereotypically “feminine” — affectionate, compassionate, eager to soothe hurt feelings, gentle, loves children, sensitive to the needs of others, sympathetic, tender, understanding, and warm — tend to identify with the Democratic Party.In a case study of what Ondercin describes, Melissa Deckman, a political scientist at Washington College who is also chairman of the board of the Public Religion Research Institute, and Erin Cassese, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, published research into “gendered nationalism” in 2019 that sought to identify who is most “likely to believe that American society has grown ‘too soft and feminine.’”Deckman and Cassese found a large gender gap: “56 percent of men agreed that the United States has grown too soft and feminine compared to only 34 percent of women.”But the overall gender gap paled in comparison with the gap between Democratic men and Republican men. Some 41 percent of Democratic men without college degrees agreed that American society had become too soft and feminine compared with 80 percent of Republican men without degrees, a 39-point difference. Among those with college degrees, the spread grew to 62 points: Democratic men at 9 percent, Republican men at 73 percent.The gap between Democratic and Republican women was very large, but less pronounced: 28 percent of Democratic women without degrees agreed that the country had become too soft and feminine compared with 57 percent of non-college Republican women, while 4 percent of Democratic women with degrees agreed, compared with 57 percent of college-educated Republican women.The data described by Deckman and Cassese illuminate two key aspects of contemporary American politics. First, despite the enormous gaps between men and women in their voting behavior, partisanship is far more important than gender in determining how people vote; so too is the crucial role of psychological orientation — either empathic or authoritarian, for example — in shaping allegiance to the Democratic or Republican parties.The Deckman-Cassese study is part of a large body of work that seeks to answer a basic question: Who are the men who align with the Democratic Party and who are the women who identify as Republicans?“Gender and the Authoritarian Dynamic: An Analysis of Social Identity in the Partisanship of White Americans,” a 2021 doctoral dissertation by Bradley DiMariano at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, found patterns similar to those in the Deckman-Cassese study.Among white Democratic men, an overwhelming majority, 70.7 percent, were classified in the DiMariano study as either non-authoritarian (50.71 percent) or “weak authoritarian” (19.96 percent), while less than a third, 29.3 percent, were either authoritarian (10.59 percent) or “somewhat authoritarian” (18.74 percent). In contrast, among white Republican men, less than half, 48.3 percent, were non-authoritarian or weak authoritarian, while 51.7 percent were authoritarian or somewhat authoritarian.The partisan divisions among white women were almost identical: Democratic women, 68.3 percent non- or weak authoritarian and 31.7 percent authoritarian or somewhat authoritarian; Republican women, 45.6 percent non- or weak authoritarian and 54.4 percent authoritarian or weak authoritarian.When researchers examine the stands people take on specific issues, things become more complex.Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts and a co-director of the Cooperative Election Study, provided The Times with data on levels of support and opposition on a wide range of issues for Democratic men, Democratic women, Republican men and Republican women.“One thing that strikes me is that Democratic men and women have very similar issue positions, but Republican women are consistently less conservative on the issues compared to Republican men,” Schaffner wrote by email. “Sometimes the gap between Republican men and women is actually quite large, for example on issues like equal pay, minimum wage, right to strike and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity/sexual orientation.”Take, for example, the question of whether workers should have the right to strike. Almost identical percentages of Democratic men (84) and women (85) agreed, but Republican men and women split 42-58. Similarly, 90 percent of Democratic men and 92 percent of Democratic women support reviving Section 5 the Voting Rights Act — which was designed to prohibit discriminatory electoral practices — while 37 percent of Republican men supported that position and 56 percent of Republican women did. On legislation requiring equal pay for men and women, 93 percent of Democratic men and 97 percent of Democratic women were in support, compared with 70 percent of Republican men and 85 percent of Republican women.Natalie Jackson, director of research at P.R.R.I., provided The Times with poll data posing similar questions. Asked if “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity,” the P.R.R.I. survey found that 80 percent of Republican women and 82 percent of Republican men agreed, while 65 percent of Democratic women and 66 percent of Democratic men disagreed. Seventy-six percent of Democratic women and 77 percent of Democratic men agreed that undocumented immigrants living in this country should be allowed “to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements,” while 46 percent of Republican women and 39 percent of Republican men agreed.Conflicting attitudes toward risk also drive partisanship. In “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception,” a 2007 paper by Dan M. Kahan of Yale Law School, Donald Braman of George Washington University Law School, John Gastil of Penn State, Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and C.K. Mertz of Decision Research, studied the attitudes toward risks posed by guns and by environmental dangers. Drawing on a survey of 1,844 Americans, their key finding was:Individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the “white male effect,” which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful.The authors reported that conservative white Republican men (“persons who held relative hierarchical and individualistic outlooks — and particularly both simultaneously”) are the “least concerned about environmental risks and gun risks.” People “who held relatively egalitarian and communitarian views” — predominantly Democrats — “were most concerned.”On environmental risk, the people who were most risk tolerant were white men, followed by white women, then minority-group men and, the most risk averse, minority-group women. The order was slightly different in the case of risk associated with guns: White men demonstrated the least risk aversion followed by minority-group men, then white women and finally minority-group women.Kahan and his collaborators went on: “Increasing hierarchical and individualistic worldviews induce greater risk-skepticism in white males than in either white women or male or female nonwhites.”In other words, those who rank high in communitarian and egalitarian values, including liberal white men, are high in risk aversion. Among those at the opposite end of the scale — low in communitarianism and egalitarianism but high in individualism and in support for hierarchy — conservative white men are markedly more willing to tolerate risk than other constituencies.In the case of guns and gun control, the authors write:Persons of hierarchical and individualistic orientations should be expected to worry more about being rendered defenseless because of the association of guns with hierarchical social roles (hunter, protector, father) and with hierarchical and individualistic virtues (courage, honor, chivalry, self-reliance, prowess). Relatively egalitarian and communitarian respondents should worry more about gun violence because of the association of guns with patriarchy and racism and with distrust of and indifference to the well-being of strangers.A paper published in 2000, “Gender, race, and perceived risk: the ‘white male effect,’” by Melissa Finucane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, Slovic, Mertz, James Flynn of Decision Research and Theresa A. Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, tested responses to 25 hazards and found that “white males’ risk perception ratings were consistently much lower” than those of white women, minority-group women and minority-group men.The white male effect, they continued “seemed to be caused by about 30 percent of the white male sample” who were “better educated, had higher household incomes, and were politically more conservative. They also held very different attitudes, characterized by trust in institutions and authorities and by anti-egalitarianism” — in other words, they tended to be Republicans.While opinions on egalitarianism and communitarianism help explain why a minority of white men are Democrats, the motivation of white women who support Republicans is less clear. Cassese and Tiffany D. Barnes, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, address this question in their 2018 paper “Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender, Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races.”Cassese and Barnes found that in the 2016 election, social class and education played a stronger role in the voting decisions of women than of men:Among Trump voters, women were much more likely to be in the lower income category compared to men, a difference of 13 points in the full sample and 14 points for white respondents only. By contrast, the proportion of male, upper-income Trump supporters is greater than the proportion of female, upper-income Trump supporters by about 9 percentage points in the full sample and among white voters only. These findings challenge a dominant narrative surrounding the election — rather than attracting downwardly-mobile white men, Trump’s campaign disproportionately attracted and mobilized economically marginal white women.Cassese and Barnes pose the question: “Why were a majority of white women willing to tolerate Trump’s sexism?” To answer, the authors examined polling responses to three questions: “Do women demanding equality seek special favors?” “Do women complaining about discrimination cause more problems than they solve?” and “How much discrimination do women face in the United States?” Cassese and Barnes describe the first two questions as measures of “hostile sexism,” which they define as “negative views toward individuals who violate traditional gender roles.”They found that “hostile sexism” and “denial of discrimination against women are strong predictors of white women’s vote choice in 2016,” but these factors were “not predictive of voting for Romney in 2012.” Put another way, “white women who display hostile sexist attitudes and who perceive low levels of gender discrimination in society are more likely to support Trump.”In conclusion, Cassese and Barnes write:Our results also address analysts’ incorrect expectations about women voters defecting from the G.O.P. in response to Trump’s campaign. We explain this discrepancy by illustrating that some white women — particularly those without a college education — endorse hostile sexism and have weaker perceptions of systemic gender discrimination. These beliefs are associated with an increased likelihood of voting for Trump — even when controlling for partisanship and ideology.An additional variable predicting Republican partisanship is “social dominance orientation,” briefly defined as a preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality. Arnold Ho is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and lead author of the 2015 paper “The Nature of Social Dominance Orientation: Theorizing and Measuring Preferences for Intergroup Inequality Using the New SDO7 Scale.” He wrote that he and his colleagues found “consistent gender differences across all samples, with men having higher levels of social dominance orientation than women” and that there are “moderate to strong correlations between SDO and political conservatism across all samples, such that greater conservatism is associated with higher levels of SDO.”Ho measured conservatism on the basis of political affiliation — Democratic liberal, Republican conservative and self-identification as a social and economic liberal or conservative.A 2011 paper by I-Ching Lee of the National Taiwan University and Felicia Pratto and Blair T. Johnson of the University of Connecticut — “Intergroup Consensus/Disagreement in Support of Group-Based Hierarchy: An Examination of Socio-Structural and Psycho-Cultural Factors ” — makes the case that… in societies in which unequal groups are segregated into separate roles or living spaces, they may not compare their situations to those of other groups and may be relatively satisfied. In such cases, we would expect dominants and subordinates to be more similar in their attitude toward group-based hierarchy.On the other hand, they continued:… in societies in which people purport to value equality, subordinates may come to expect and feel entitled to equality. The evidence and signs they observe of inequality would then mean that reality is falling short of their ideal standards. This condition may lead them to reassert their opposition to group-based hierarchy and to differentiate from dominants.It may be, then, that the association of the Democratic Party with values linked more closely to women than men is a factor in the party’s loss of support among Hispanic and Black men. As my colleague Charles Blow wrote in “Democrats Continue to Struggle With Men of Color” in September: “For one thing, never underestimate the communion among men, regardless of race. Men have privileges in society, and some are drawn to policies that elevate their privileges.”President Biden’s predicament with regard to all this is reflected in the contradictory findings of a March 17-21 AP/NORC poll of 1,082 Americans on views of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.On one hand, 56 percent of those polled described Biden’s response as “not been tough enough” compared with 36 percent “about right” and 6 percent “too tough.” There were sharp partisan divisions on this question: 68 percent of Republicans said Biden’s response to the invasion was not tough enough, and 20 percent said it was about right. Fifty-three percent of Democrats said it was about right, and 43 percent said not tough enough. Independents were closer to Republicans than to Democrats: 64 percent not tough enough, 25 percent just right.Conversely, the AP/NORC survey found that 45 percent of respondents said they were very or extremely “concerned about Russia using nuclear weapons that target the United States,” 30 percent said they were “somewhat concerned,” and 25 percent said they were “not very or not at all concerned.”The potential pitfalls in the American response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine range from provoking Vladimir Putin to further escalation to diminishing the United States in the eyes of Russia and the rest of the world. The specific dangers confronting policymakers stem from serious decisions taken in a crisis climate, but the pressures on those making the decisions are tied to the competing psychological dispositions of Republicans and Democrats described above, and they are tied as well to discrepancies between men and women in toleration of the use of force.In a 2018 paper, “The Suffragist Peace,” Joslyn N. Barnhart, Allan Dafoe, Elizabeth N. Saunders and Robert F. Trager found that “At each stage of the escalatory ladder, women prefer more peaceful options.”“More telling,” the authors write,is to compare how men and women weigh the choice between backing down and conflict. Women are nearly indifferent between an unsuccessful use of force in which nothing is gained, and their country’s leader backs down after threatening force. Men, by contrast, would much rather see force used unsuccessfully than see the country’s reputation endangered through backing down. Approval among men is fully 36 percent higher for a use of force that achieves nothing and in which over 4,000 U.S. soldiers die than when the U.S. president backs down and the same objective outcome is achieved without loss of life.The gender gap on the use of force has deep roots. A 2012 study, “Men and Women’s Support for War: Accounting for the gender gap in public opinion,” found consistently higher support among men than women for military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, concluding that the evidence shows a “consistent ‘gender gap’ over time and across countries.” According to the study, “it would be rare to find scholarship in which gender differences on the question of using military force are not present.”The author, Ben Clements, cites “psychological differences between women and men, with the former laying greater value on group relationships and the use of cooperation and compromise, rather than aggressive means, to resolve disputes.”It should be self-evident that the last thing this country needs at a time when the world has drawn closer to the possibility of nuclear war than it has been for decades is a leader like Donald Trump, the apotheosis of aggressive, intemperate white manhood, who at the same time unreservedly seeks the admiration of Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians.The difficult task facing Biden is finding the correct balance between restraint and authority, between harm avoidance and belligerent opposition. The situation in Ukraine has the potential to damage Biden’s already weakened political stature or to provide him with an opportunity to regain some of the support he had when first elected.American wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been costly for incumbent American presidents, and Biden faces an uphill struggle reversing that trend, even as the United States faces the most dangerous set of circumstances in its recent history.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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      G.O.P. Presses for Greater Edge on Florida and Ohio Congressional Maps

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      In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a map drawn by his fellow Republicans in the Legislature. In Ohio, Republicans closed in on a G.O.P.-friendly map for the midterm elections.With the midterm election cycle fast approaching, Republicans in the key states of Florida and Ohio have made critical progress in their push to add to their dominance on congressional maps by carving new districts that would be easier for G.O.P. candidates to win.In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vetoed congressional maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and called for a special session to draw new maps in mid-April, a rare fracture between the Republican governor and state lawmakers. Mr. DeSantis had previously pledged to veto the maps and had pushed his own maps that would have given his party a stronger advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.In Ohio, a new map of congressional districts that is gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans appeared highly likely to be used in the midterm elections after the State Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it would not rule on a challenge to the map until after the May 3 primary election.The Republican pressure comes as Democrats have fared better than expected in this year’s redistricting cycle. Democrats have drawn aggressive gerrymanders in states like New York, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, while Republicans have sought to make their current seats safer in states like Texas and Georgia.The result is an emerging new congressional landscape that will not tilt as heavily toward Republicans as it did after the last redistricting cycle, in 2011. In the first elections after that round of redistricting, in 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans maintained control of the chamber with 33 more seats than Democrats.The realignment in this year’s redistricting has rankled some Republicans across the country, who had called on G.O.P.-led state legislatures to be more aggressive in drawing maps.“Republicans are getting absolutely creamed with the phony redistricting going on all over the Country,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement last month.Mr. DeSantis seemed to share Mr. Trump’s view, taking the rare step of interjecting himself into the redistricting process and proposing his own maps, twice. His most recent proposal would have created 20 seats that would have favored Republicans, and just eight that would have favored Democrats, meaning the G.O.P. would have been likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Mr. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.Legislators in the Florida House of Representatives discussed redistricting at a session in January.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressBut Republicans in the State Legislature, who often acquiesce to Mr. DeSantis’s requests, largely ignored the governor’s proposed maps and passed their own maps that would have most likely given Republicans 18 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. Mr. DeSantis declared the maps “DOA” on Twitter when they passed.In a news conference on Tuesday announcing his veto, Mr. DeSantis said the map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature violated U.S. Supreme Court precedent.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“They forgot to make sure what they were doing complied with the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. DeSantis said at the State Capitol.The vetoed map did away with a seat held by a Black Democrat, Representative Al Lawson of Tallahassee, and created a smaller district in Jacksonville where a Black Democrat might get elected. Mr. DeSantis had proposed maps earlier this year that further eroded minority representation, including in Mr. Lawson’s district.Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that the map lawmakers end up drawing in the special session would still be likely to face a court challenge. The state’s current map was drawn by the courts after Florida voters wrote anti-gerrymandering provisions into the State Constitution in 2010.On Tuesday, the governor appeared to take aim at those provisions, calling them far-reaching and inconsistent. He hinted that in the future, the state might argue in federal court that the provisions were unconstitutional, but he said his intent was not necessarily to repeal them.“Our goal in this was just to have a constitutional map,” he said. “We were not trying to necessarily plot any type of litigation strategy.”He added, “We will obviously say it’s unconstitutional to draw a district like that, where race is the only factor,” referring to Mr. Lawson’s heavily Black district in North Florida.Legislative leaders in Florida told lawmakers to plan to be in Tallahassee for the special session April 19-22. Florida has a relatively late primary election, set for Aug. 23, and voting is unlikely to be threatened by the uncertainty over the maps. However, some House races have yet to attract a full field of candidates, in part because the district lines remain unclear.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Ginni Thomas Is No Outlier

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      At this point, there’s very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question.Take Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. She is an influential and well-connected conservative political activist who has been a fixture of Washington since the late 1980s. A fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, she reportedly urged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to do everything in his power to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Trump in power. And judging from her text messages to Meadows — which include the hope that the “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators” are awaiting trial before military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay — she is also something of a “Q” believer, one of millions of Americans who embrace the conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a messianic war against the “deep state.”Ginni Thomas is also, notably, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And while Justice Thomas is in no way responsible for the actions of his spouse, it does beggar belief to think he is unaware of her views and actions, including her work to keep Trump in office against the will of the electorate.But that’s something of a separate issue. What matters here is that we have, in Ginni Thomas, a very high-profile Republican activist who holds, and acts on, fringe, conspiratorial beliefs. And she is not alone.Like Thomas, Attorney General William P. Barr is a mainstay of the Republican establishment in Washington, a consummate insider with decades of political and legal experience. His service under President Ronald Reagan in the White House led to his appointment as head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President George H.W. Bush. From there, he was appointed deputy attorney general and then, in 1991, attorney general. He returned to public life in 2019 to serve a second stint as attorney general, this time under Trump.But there’s no reason to think that Barr’s traditional credentials somehow preclude fringe beliefs. As it turns out, they don’t.In a November 2019 speech sponsored by the Federalist Society, Barr spoke at length on his vision of executive power under the Constitution. In his view, the framers “well understood that their prime antagonist was an overweening Parliament,” and that their aim at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was to create a powerful, “unitary” executive with the singular authority of a monarch. “To my mind,” he said, “the real ‘miracle’ in Philadelphia that summer was the creation of a strong Executive, independent of, and coequal with, the other two branches of government.”Barr concedes the fact of “checks and balances” but insists that, properly understood, the executive branch has nearly limitless authority across multiple arenas. In his view, Congress has no right to challenge claims of executive privilege and the courts have no right to limit the president’s power to make war. “The Constitution is designed to maximize the government’s efficiency to achieve victory — even at the cost of ‘collateral damage’ that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm,” Barr said. “The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.”These are extreme views. What Barr describes isn’t a president, but a king. It is a gussied-up version of Trump’s belief that, under Article II of the Constitution, he had “the right to do whatever I want as president.” It may not be QAnon, but it still belongs to the fringe.With that said, and despite his later rejection of Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, Barr does appear to hold somewhat conspiratorial views not unlike those of Ginni Thomas. In an interview he gave to The Chicago Tribune just before the 2020 election, Barr insisted that mail-in voting would lead to “selling and buying votes” and implied that Democrats would manufacture votes to win elections.“Someone will say the president just won Nevada. ‘Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted!’ Yeah, but we don’t know where these freaking votes came from,” Barr said.You can play this game with any number of prominent Republicans. Leading figures like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia regularly give voice to conspiracy theories and other wild accusations. Last month, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, released an 11-point agenda that, among other things, denies the existence of transgender people and calls on the government to treat socialism as a “foreign combatant.”And those Republicans who don’t openly hold fringe views are more than willing to pander to them, from Senator Ted Cruz’s enthusiastic embrace of “stop the steal” to Senator Josh Hawley’s QAnon dogwhistle that Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, is soft on (and sympathetic to) child predators.For Democrats, and especially for Democratic leadership, the upshot of all of this is that they should give up whatever hope they had that the Republican Party will somehow return to normal, that the fever will break and American politics will snap back to reality. From its base to its leaders, the modern Republican Party is fully in the grip of an authoritarian movement animated by extreme beliefs and fringe conspiracy theories.Democrats can’t force Republicans onto a different path. But they also can’t act as if they’re above the fray. That appears to have been the plan so far, and if the current political state of the Democratic Party is any indication, it’s not working. The only alternative is to confront the Republican Party as forcefully as possible and show the extent to which that party has descended into conspiracies and corruption.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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      Democrats and Republicans Won’t Stop Committing Political Malpractice

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      In the spring of a new president’s second year in office, political junkies know all too well what to expect from the midterm elections.A president (of whatever party), elected largely thanks to public distaste for his opponent, came in with his party in control of Congress and intent on not wasting an opportunity for transformative policy change. For all his talk of building new coalitions, he focused on the priorities of his party’s core activists, and by now it’s pretty clear that most voters don’t love what they see. The only way his party will avoid losing at least one house of Congress is if the other party somehow makes itself even more obnoxious. The question for November is whom the public will like less.Something like this has been the pattern of our politics for three decades now — long enough that we rarely stop to wonder much at just how strange it is or how we might change it. Neither party does much to expand its appeal or its coalition. Both double down on the voters they can count on, hoping they add up to a slim, temporary majority. If that doesn’t work, they just do it again.For political parties, whose very purpose is to build the broadest possible coalitions, such behavior is malpractice. So why has it persisted for so long? Why is public disaffection not pushing politicians to change their strategies or their agendas and seek durable majorities?The very fact that voters are unhappy with both parties makes it hard for either one to take a hint from its electoral failures. Even more than polarization, it is the closeness of elections that has degraded the capacity of our democracy to respond to voter pressure. In an era of persistent, polarized deadlock, both parties are effectively minorities — but each continues to think it is on the verge of winning big.To see why, it’s worth first noticing how unusual such persistent deadlock is. As the political scientist Morris Fiorina showed in his 2017 book, “Unstable Majorities,” our two-party system has usually produced durable partisan patterns of governance. Realignments have occasionally transformed a longstanding minority into the dominant party of a new era, but long stretches in which power has shifted back and forth have been rare. The only previous one was from 1874 to 1894. Ours has already been longer.Consider the previous hundred years or so. Republicans won seven of the nine presidential elections from 1896 to 1928 and controlled both houses of Congress for most of that stretch. Then from 1932 through 1950, Democrats won five presidential elections in a row and controlled Congress for all but two years. After that came more than four decades of durably divided government: Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections from the 1950s through the 1980s — including a 24-year stretch with only one, single-term, Democratic presidency. But in that time, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for 40 straight years and the Senate for 34 of those years. You might say that was an age of two overlapping majorities, in contrast to our age of two polarized minorities.But since 1992, elections for president and Congress have been consistently up for grabs. Two presidents have been elected while losing the popular vote, which happened only twice in the previous two centuries. Control of Congress has swung back and forth more rapidly than in any previous era.The effects of this flux have been perverse. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand its coalition and become a majority, but actually both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat its own as massive triumphs.This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither of our parties has learned much in a long time, and neither can quite grasp that it just isn’t very popular and could easily lose the next election.This dynamic has many causes — from the advent of party primaries to the evolution of the media and much in between. Polarization doesn’t have to mean deadlock, but a long-term pattern of growing negative polarization, in which each party sees the other as the country’s biggest problem, creates incentives for the parties to seek narrower but ideologically purer wins rather than build broader if less ideologically coherent coalitions.Yet the pattern isn’t inevitable, and it’s crucial to see that the very closeness of elections blinds politicians to potential ways of breaking out of it. As the political scientist Frances Lee has shown, the minority party in Congress now always thinks it’s one election away from power and so sees no reason to change its appeal or to bargain to address the country’s longer-term needs. Younger politicians who have known only this period assume there is no other way — that short-termism is unavoidable and governing means frantically expending rather than patiently amassing political capital.This also intensifies party cohesion. As the political scientist Daniel DiSalvo has argued, internal factions let parties evolve toward new voters and vice versa, but our era has seen fewer and weaker factions. Narrow elections invite strict unity, so the parties now hunt heretics rather than seek converts. Witness, for instance, the Arizona Republican and Democratic Parties censuring Gov. Doug Ducey and Senator Kyrsten Sinema for undermining party unity. Both parties act as if they have too many voters, rather than too few.Breaking this pattern would have to start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if politicians seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded our leaders for a generation because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock.That doesn’t mean reaching for the center in a shallow ideological sense, let alone hoping swing voters catch up with the priorities of party activists. It requires not so much offering different answers to the questions that have long shaped our political divisions but taking up some new questions better rooted in the public’s contemporary concerns — about new sources of financial insecurity and high living costs, threats to parenthood and childhood, dangers of concentrated corporate power, sources of cultural dislocation, perils of internet governance and other challenges that scramble familiar partisan dogmas. Such questions can be answered in right-leaning or left-leaning ways, but they first need to be asked.Some Republicans have long pointed to the need to move beyond the terms of Reaganism, and some even hoped that Donald Trump’s ascent might enable such a move. But Mr. Trump’s vile cult of personality only reinforced the trench-warfare dynamics. He mostly offered a model of how to squander opportunity: He won independents by six percentage points in 2016 and then lost them by 13 in 2020. That Republicans are even contemplating nominating him again shows they are not attuned to the need to break out of the age of deadlock.Some Democrats can see the problem, too. In an important recent paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, two veterans of the Clinton White House, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, raised the alarm about the narrowness of their party’s appeal. “Unless they want to spend their careers in a minority party,” they argued, Democrats “must acknowledge the need to win swing states — and the political implications of this necessity.” But such arguments can barely be heard over the din of party activists who aggressively alienate potential swing voters with heedless cultural radicalism.Each party is therefore left pursuing a losing strategy and saved from disaster only by the fact that the other party is doing the same. The first to realize that this is not working will face a real opportunity. The party that grasps that it has been losing for a generation will have a chance to make itself the next big winner in our politics.Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer and is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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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      Local Election Officials in Georgia Oppose G.O.P. Election Bill

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      As Republicans rush to pass a second round of new voting and election rules, a bipartisan group of election officials is fighting back.ATLANTA — A year ago, when Georgia Republicans passed a mammoth law of election measures and voting restrictions, many local election officials felt frustrated and sidelined, as their concerns about resources, ballot access and implementation went largely ignored.This year, Republicans have returned with a new bill — and the election officials are pushing back.A bipartisan coalition of county-level election administrators — the people who carry out the day-to-day work of running elections — is speaking out against the latest Republican measure. At a legislative hearing on Monday, they warned that the proposal would create additional burdens on a dwindling force of election workers and that the provisions could lead to more voter intimidation.“You’re going to waste time, and you’re going to cause me to lose poll workers,” said Joel Natt, a Republican member of the Forsyth County board of elections, referring to a provision in the bill that he said would force workers to count hundreds of blank sheets of paper. “I have 400 poll workers that work for our board. That is 400 people that I could see telling me after May, ‘Have a nice life,’ and it’s hard enough to keep them right now.”Among other provisions, the bill would expand the reach of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation over election crimes; limit private funding of elections; empower partisan poll watchers; and establish new requirements for tracking absentee ballots as they are verified and counted.The bill passed the Georgia House this month, roughly two weeks after it was first introduced. Initially, the State Senate appeared set to pass the measure at a similar speed. The state’s legislative session ends on April 4, giving lawmakers less than a week to pass the bill.But county-level election officials worked behind the scenes, in letters and phone calls to legislators, expressing their concerns about the bill and dissatisfaction that they had not been consulted in the drafting process.The pushback comes as the impact of the wave of election laws passed by Republicans last year is beginning to be felt. In Texas, where a new law altered the absentee ballot process, election officials dealt with widespread confusion among absentee voters in the March primary. Mail ballot rejections surged, and county officials worked around the clock to help voters fix their ballots. Still, more than 18,000 voters had their ballots tossed out.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.The vocal opposition from Georgia election officials represents a shift from a year ago, when some individual officials, mostly Democrats, spoke out against the first Republican bill. But many local officials simply felt ignored by lawmakers who were eager to appear to be addressing Republican voters’ false beliefs about fraud in the 2020 election.The statewide association of local election officials is now working to “start taking stances on legislation like this, where the association would have a view that represents a majority of our members,” said Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor for Bartow County, which is deeply Republican, who serves as a secretary for the association. He added that the group had not taken a stance on the election bill but that many members were voicing their opinions individually.At a conference this month, Ryan Germany, general counsel for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, encouraged members to speak up.“They really need to know what you guys think about this stuff because they hear from a lot of people, but I don’t think they hear from a lot of election officials,” said Mr. Germany, who spoke favorably about several provisions in the bill, according to audio of the event obtained by The New York Times.Dozens of voting rights advocates and county election officials crowded the State Senate Ethics Committee hearing on Monday afternoon, saying the bill would make it harder for election administrators to do their jobs.From left, State Senators Sally Harrell, Butch Miller and Jeff Mullis listened as Cindy Battles, right, testified during the hearing on Monday. Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There are so many unfunded mandates being passed by this body. You are not giving county election officials the budget that they need to run their elections,” said Cindy Battles, the policy and engagement director at the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group. “And then you are making it more difficult to get what they need.”Several officials pointed to a provision that would require elections administrators to account for all elections-related documents, including the pieces of paper that ballots are printed on. Mr. Natt, the vice chair of elections for Forsyth County’s board of elections, held up a ream of paper to represent one of the hundreds of blank sheets of paper that his office would need to count under the law.“That is a lot of counting. That is a lot of time and waste management,” he said.State Representative James Burchett, a Republican from southeastern Georgia and sponsor of the bill, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month that “the intent of the bill is to address issues that we’ve seen in the elections process.”During the hearing on Monday, State Senator Butch Miller, a Republican and member of the State Senate Ethics Committee, appeared to consider some of the officials’ concerns.“I think we’ll probably have additional work to be done,” he said. While Mr. Miller said he was not interested in sweeping changes to the bill, he also said he was not opposed to “tweaking them and accommodating certain issues.” The committee has not yet scheduled a vote on the bill.Election officials warned about language they considered too broad in a provision that restricts third-party donations to election offices. The proposal is popular among Republicans who believe grants from an organization tied to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, had undue influence in the 2020 election. Some Georgia election officials said the legislation would require any organization that makes a donation to receive approval from the state board of elections. That could include churches or other local groups that offer their buildings as polling locations.“By a strict interpretation of this particular provision, that would be a grant of gift or donation,” Milton Kidd, the elections director in Douglas County, a deeply Democratic county, said in an interview.Mr. Kidd added that many churches did not have staff to handle the application process, which could threaten his ability to maintain enough polling locations.Officials also took issue with a provision requiring partisan poll watchers to be given “meaningful access” to observe the ballot-counting process. The language might jeopardize the privacy of the ballot, they said.“I am a big fan of poll watchers, of being observed, I want my polling places to have observation, it’s a very important part of the process,” said Mr. Kirk, the administrator in Bartow County, which is northwest of Atlanta. “But it’s also very important to have guardrails on that observation, to keep it from becoming disruptive, to make sure a person’s information stays safe.”A provision that gives the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the power to subpoena election records for fraud investigations has also stirred opposition, mostly among Democratic local officials, who view it as both unnecessary — the secretary of state’s office currently handles election investigations — and intended to scare off voters.“That just smacks of voter intimidation,” said Dele Lowman Smith, the chair of the DeKalb County board of voter registration and elections. “And that’s a big concern.” More

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      Biden’s Center-Leaning Budget Bends to Political Reality

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      With his party facing potentially gale-force headwinds in the midterm elections, President Biden released a budget on Monday that tacks toward the political center, bowing to the realities facing endangered Democrats by bolstering defense and law enforcement spending and tackling inflation and deficit reduction in service of what he called a “bipartisan unity agenda.”Under the plan, the left wing’s hopes for a peace dividend at the end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be scotched in favor of a new Great Powers military budget that would bring the Defense Department’s allocation to $773 billion, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the level for fiscal 2021. Rather than cuts, Mr. Biden pledges to bolster the nation’s nuclear weapons program, including all three legs of the nuclear “triad”: bombers, land-based intercontinental missiles and submarines.“We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis, and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values,” the budget states, justifying large increases to project U.S. military and diplomatic strength globally.Far from defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two popular slogans on the left, the budget robustly funds both. Customs and Border Protection would receive $15.3 billion, ICE $8.1 billion, including $309 million for border security technology — a well-funded effort to stop illegal migration. The nation’s two primary immigration law enforcement agencies would see increases of around 13 percent.The budget even includes $19 million for border fencing and other infrastructure.Federal law enforcement would receive $17.4 billion, a jump of nearly 11 percent, or $1.7 billion over 2021 levels. And the president, acknowledging widespread concerns that are driving Republican attacks against Democrats, vows to tackle the rise in violent crime.The proposals track with some of the main attack lines Republicans are using against Democrats in the run-up to the November contests, as they portray Mr. Biden and his allies in Congress as weak on security, soft on crime and profligate with federal spending to the point of damaging the economy.Liberal Democrats would see some of their priorities addressed, including “through substantial funding for climate programs and “environmental justice” initiatives, as well as changes to incarceration policy. But many on the left will be disappointed. In lieu of broad student debt forgiveness, an executive order that many Democrats have been pressing for since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, the Education Department’s student lending services would receive a huge increase, 43 percent, to $2.7 billion.Swing-district Democrats who have been pressing Mr. Biden to address widespread concerns about rising prices would be able to point to a number of programs to combat inflation, the biggest issue weighing down their prospects. The president promises large-scale efforts to unclot supply-chain bottlenecks that are raising costs and large-scale deficit reduction that could cool the economy. More

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      Ted Cruz Knows Which Side He’s On

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I think many Americans would give President Biden reasonably high marks for his handling of the war in Ukraine so far. His speech in Poland, in which he said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” may have been provocative, and it might have his advisers scrambling to soften it, but it was right, and the right message to send about what should become of Vladimir Putin’s foul regime.Yet Biden still reminds me of George H.W. Bush, who handled the big foreign policy crises of his day with aplomb but wound up as a one-termer. What do you think of the comparison?Gail Collins: Hey, isn’t it interesting to recall that when Bush was fighting to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991, the big American ally was Russia? Those were the days, I guess. Just noticed that a Gallup poll found that right after the war, Bush had an 89 percent approval rating.Bret: Bush had the advantage of not having to face down a nuclear-armed adversary — thanks to an Israeli strike on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor a decade earlier.Gail: And yet he got defeated for a second term by Bill Clinton. We could discuss the possibility of Biden suffering a similar fate — perceptions of a bad economy trump strong foreign policy. Except that Clinton’s genius was in portraying himself as a Democrat who normal Republicans didn’t have to fear. Very, very doubtful the next Republican presidential nominee is going to be able to turn that trick.Do you really think Biden would be walloped if people actually had to compare him to Trump, one on one, presuming the two of them ran again?Bret: I continue to have a hard time believing that Biden intends to run again, when he’s 81. I also don’t think Trump’s going to run — he’s damaged himself more deeply than he probably realizes with his imbecile praise of Putin and his continued election denialism.Gail: This scenario presumes Trump bows to reality. Hehehehehe. Sorry, continue.Bret: Fair point.Assuming your hypothetical turns out to be right, I’d probably place a small bet on Trump winning a rematch, awful as that is. I know Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were able to turn their presidencies around after difficult starts. But both men were naturally gifted political figures in a way Biden just isn’t. Both men were in touch with the center of American politics in a way Biden should be, but isn’t, because he steered too far to the left in his first year. And both men were sailing into calmer seas, economically speaking, as they prepared their re-election campaigns, whereas I don’t see inflation being tamed except at the price of a very steep recession.Would you bet on Biden in a rematch?Gail: Yeah, but I don’t think Biden is going to run. Although he’d be crazy to formally announce this soon and turn the bulk of his presidency into a lame-duck limp.Bret: Don’t agree that he should wait to announce, but that’s an argument for another time.Gail: And I don’t think his problem is steering too far to the left. His problem is that he doesn’t — never did have — that political genius for selling the country, or even his supporters, on a big message.Bret: Give ’em hell, Harry, he is not. But it looks like he’s trying with his plan to tax the very rich. Which … well, what do you think of it?Gail: Ah, Bret, our most reliable, perpetual disagreement. Yeah, given the fact that the richest Americans are now paying an effective tax rate around 8 percent, I would say a minimum of 20 percent on households worth more than $100 million is not a burden.Bret: Probably won’t get past the Senate, may be ruled an unconstitutional wealth tax by the Supreme Court and is reminiscent of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was supposed to hit only a handful of high-flyers in the 1970s but wound up taxing far less wealthy people. But the proposal could still be … popular. Anything else you’d like to see him do?Gail: I’d also be happy to see him lead a quest to control prescription drug prices: Let Medicare negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry and cap the cost of certain medications, like insulin. It’d be a debate people could really get into.Bret: I think job No. 1 for Biden is to make sure Putin experiences unmistakable defeat in Ukraine. A stalemated truce in which Russia steals more of Ukraine’s coastline, ports and energy riches will only entice Putin to create further crises so that he can “solve” them in exchange for Western concessions. I also think we should accept more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees; we should welcome as many who want to come here with open arms.Gail: We should talk more about the refugees long term, but of course the immediate challenge is to support them in every way possible.Bret: If Romania can take in more than half a million refugees, we can take in at least as many.Gail: Not going to argue, but right now back to domestic matters …Bret: Biden’s other big task is doing what he can to ease the burden of inflation. We both know that’s mainly a job for the Fed. But the government can still ease all kinds of regulatory burdens that constrict supply chains, like employing members of the National Guards to make up for the trucker shortage. I’m also in favor of the proposal from Maggie Hassan and Mark Kelly — both Democratic senators — to suspend the federal tax on gasoline for the rest of the year, though I would only reinstate it once the price of gasoline falls below $3.50 a gallon, no matter whether that happens before November or after. Gas taxes are really regressive once you stop to think of the bite they take out of the pockets of working-class people who drive back and forth to work.Gail: Short-term gas price relief would be great, as long as it’s combined with long-term plans to fight climate change with energy-efficient cars and more mass transit. Although I know the latter tends to cause many conservative conservatives to shudder.On a completely different but totally fascinating topic: Ginni Thomas. Wife of a Supreme Court justice and now revealed as a very aggressive, deeply crazy activist in the Trump-really-won sideshow.Should we worry about her? Is she dangerous or just astonishingly weird?Bret: Depends on whether you think that being a fever-swamp conservative is dangerous, weird or just the depressing new normal. “All of the above” is also a possibility. Mrs. Thomas attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. She urged the Trump team to feature Sidney Powell, the lawyer with bizarro theories about voting machine fraud. And she wrote Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, some texts right after the election was called for Biden, telling him to “stand firm” against “the greatest Heist in our History.”All of which says to me that I’m glad I’m not the one who gets to hang with Ginni Thomas, but de gustibus non est disputandum, as they used to say. Do you think her behavior should require Clarence Thomas to recuse himself in some cases?Gail: If they get an overturn-the-election case, or even anything relating to the Jan. 6 riots, I would say he’d either have to recuse or be impeached. Otherwise it’s hard to imagine enough pressure building. But I’d be happy to hear I’m wrong. What do you think?Bret: He’d have to recuse himself in those kinds of cases, because the appearance of a conflict of interest is now overwhelming. That said, if every public official were on the hook for nutty things done or said by spouses or family members, it would probably have unintended consequences nobody would like. For instance: Hunter Biden.Gail: I will refrain from dipping back into our Hunter Biden argument except to point out that some experts think he’s getting a reasonable price for his artwork these days. Lips sealed …Bret: But speaking of the Supreme Court, did you watch the Senate hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson? How do you think she did?Gail: Better than great.Bret: Agree. I don’t think her confirmation is in any doubt, especially now that Joe Manchin has come out in her favor, but I enjoyed watching her politely making mincemeat of Ted Cruz, who is a one-man reminder of why sentient people hate politicians. If Republicans were wiser, they’d register their disagreements with some of her positions but vote to confirm her on the principle that she’s fully qualified to serve on the high court. But … they won’t.Gail: Also watching the dreaded Marsha Blackburn asking Jackson to define “woman.” Glad we agree that Republicans aren’t wise.Bret: In the meantime, Gail, it looks like we have a new superinfectious sub-variant of Covid to keep us awake at night. Forget Omicron, now we’ve got Omigod.Gail: I’m going with Dr. Fauci’s theory that it’s not something to get frazzled about. Unless, of course, you haven’t been vaccinated, in which case there’s probably not any point in having a conversation.But I am appalled that Congress didn’t approve the $15.6 billion Biden wanted for tests, treatments and research on vaccines for new variants. If I’m going to side with the throw-away-masks crowd, I’m also going to side with the fund-the-support-system gang.Bret: If we’re going to start thinking of Covid as a relatively normal illness, maybe we need to stop treating it like a national emergency. What do you say we argue about this another day?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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      DeSantis Is Trump 2.0

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      The greatest damage Donald Trump did may not be in the actions he took, but in the influence he had.Donald Trump isn’t the brightest bulb. He’s tremendously talented as a room-reader and as a reflector of emotion, but he is no brilliant tactician, no wise sage, no erudite intellectual.He runs on spectacle and fury. There is no grand vision or grand plan. His quest is to win the moment. His focus is too narrow to even consider the larger struggle.But he did something, unleashed something, that is so much bigger than he is now or ever will be: He pushed the limits of acceptability, hostility, aggression and legality beyond where other politicians dared push them. And for the most part, he has not only survived it, but been rewarded for it.Now, the danger is that Republicans won’t only try to imitate Trump but to one-up him.Take Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis.He is often described as a Trump ally, but covetousness is often born of communion. If “The Talented Mr. Ripley” had a political corollary, it might well be The Scheming Mr. DeSantis.Whereas Trump’s rhetoric was poisonous, and he issued some incredibly harmful orders and his administration instituted some corrosive policies, he wasn’t able to codify much of it. Some of Trump’s most high-profile policies — though not all — have been reversed by the Biden administration.DeSantis, along with some other Republican governors, is taking the next step, doing the thing that Trump couldn’t do much of: getting laws to his desk and signing them. They have taken what might once have been stigmas, realized that in the modern Republican Party they confer status, and converted them into statutes.It was on the state level that Jim Crow was erected, and it is on the state level that Donald Crow is being erected.Just take a look at the things that DeSantis has done since the 2020 elections.He has signed a voter suppression law, during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” no less, that included more restrictions on drop boxes and granted new authority to partisan poll watchers.He’s expected to sign the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which does far more damage than just tamping down classroom discussion. As my colleagues Amelia Nierenberg and Dana Goldstein have pointed out, it also has far-reaching implications for how mental health services are delivered to children, even those who may not be L.G.B.T.Q. One clause in the law reads:“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”As Nierenberg concludes, “The impact is clear enough: Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades.”He has signed an anti-protesting law, which granted some civil protections to people who drove through protesters blocking a road. As The Orlando Sentinel reported in April 2021, when the bill was signed, the law “might have protected the white nationalist who ran over and killed counterprotester Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville tumult in 2017.” A judge blocked the legislation last fall.Earlier this month, the Florida Legislature passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” another so-called anti-critical race theory law. This one invoked the idea that a lesson that may make a person “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” should be banned.DeSantis, who has been a big proponent of the bill and signed an executive order to this effect, is expected to sign the bill.DeSantis is even going further than his own Republican-controlled Legislature is willing to go on some issues. He threatened to veto a redistricting map drawn up by the Legislature that would most likely increase Republican seats. But it didn’t go far enough for DeSantis. He drew up his own map that would go further, reducing the Black and Hispanic voting power even more.He has also proposed raising his own defense force. As CNN reported in December, he wants to “re-establish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control,” one that would “not be encumbered by the federal government.”DeSantis has repeatedly claimed that he has no plans to run for president in 2024, but you always have to take politicians demurring in this way with a healthy dose of skepticism.DeSantis is playing to the base that Trump exposed and unleashed, but unlike Trump, he is demonstrating to them what it looks like when their priorities have the durability of enacted law. He is trying to be for them what Trump was not: a competent legislative deal maker.I don’t know whether DeSantis will run for president or if he could win, but he is the first version of what many of us fear: a Trump-like figure with less of the bombast (though DeSantis has plenty) and more of the killer skill to enact policy.DeSantis is Trump 2.0.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More