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      Newsom’s Strategy for California Recall: It’s Me or the Abyss

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      Ahead of the vote on Tuesday, the governor is running not so much on his own policies as against the influence of a certain former president.SACRAMENTO — As the campaign to oust him heads into its final weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is hammering home the choice he has presented to voters since the start of the recall — Donald J. Trump or him.“We defeated Trump last year, and thank you, but we haven’t defeated Trumpism,” the governor has repeated for the past two weeks in a blitz of campaign stops and Zoom calls. From vaccine resistance to climate denial, he says, everything that terrified California liberals about the last president is on the ballot. And far more than his own personal future hangs in the balance: “This is a matter of life and death.”His opponents dispute that. The governor, they say, is the problem, and the recall never would have come to an election had a critical mass of the state not resented his pandemic restrictions on businesses and classrooms, even as his own finances were secure and his own children got in-person instruction. The former president, they note, is not a candidate. “Newsom is scaremongering,” David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist supporting the recall, tweeted recently.Only three governors have faced recall votes in the United States before Mr. Newsom, and he — and the Democratic establishment — are going all-out in presenting the effort as a radical power grab, with some partisans even comparing it at one point to the violent Jan. 6 attempt to block President Biden’s election.By invoking Mr. Trump as his opponent of choice, Mr. Newsom is reprising a message that he has used in the past to blunt criticism effectively, while also testing a strategy that is likely to be echoed by Democrats seeking to mobilize voters in midterm races across the country next year.In effect, the leader Californians elected in a 2018 landslide is running less on the Democratic policies of a Democratic incumbent than on an urgent if familiar call to action against an existential threat to blue state values.Polls suggest Mr. Newsom is making his case and has pulled ahead of his opponents — an abrupt focusing of Democratic minds after likely voters indicated earlier this summer that the race might be tightening. A survey released last week by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 39 percent of likely voters, mostly Republican, support the recall, while 58 percent plan to vote no.His edge among female voters has been especially strong, buttressed by campaign appearances in recent days by Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. President Biden will campaign with him on Monday and former President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders appear in his campaign ads.He has amassed some $70 million in anti-recall contributions. That’s less than the hundreds of millions of dollars unleashed last year, for instance, in a fight over an initiative involving labor protections for gig workers, but still far more than the money amassed by the other 46 challengers on the ballot. And his team has mobilized a massive get-out-the-vote effort with tens of thousands of volunteers texting tens of millions of voters and canvassing for him in seven languages.The governor also has had progress against Covid-19 to tout, with new cases plateauing across the state as 80 percent of eligible Californians report having gotten at least one vaccine dose. In contrast, Orrin Heatlie, a retired Republican sheriff’s sergeant from rural Northern California and the recall’s lead proponent, has not been able to campaign lately for the initiative he started. In a text message interview, Mr. Heatlie said he was sick at home with Covid-19.The landscape has bolstered the governor’s claim that his removal would undermine the will of a majority of Californians, and reminded voters that the recall was a long shot until the pandemic. Initially supportive of Mr. Newsom’s health orders, Californians wearied of the governor’s complicated directives. Dissatisfaction boiled over in November, when Mr. Newsom was spotted mask-free at an exclusive wine country restaurant after urging the public to avoid gathering. A court order extending the deadline for signature gathering because of pandemic shutdowns allowed recall proponents to capitalize on the unease.Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally for Gov. Gavin Newsom in San Leandro, Calif., on Wednesday.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesCalifornia has 5.3 million Republicans, and while the state does not release the party affiliations of people who sign petitions, Democrats note that only 1.5 million voter signatures were required to bring the recall to a special election. Most of the early energy and funding came from the far right: Fox News regulars such as Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee promoted the recall. Early rallies were heavily attended by anti-vaccine activists, QAnon devotees and demonstrators in “Make America Great Again” gear.And, Democrats note, the right stands to gain nationally if Mr. Newsom is recalled. If Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat opens prematurely, California’s governor will appoint her replacement, and a Republican would shift control of the chamber to the G.O.P.Longtime observers note, however, that the governor’s approach also is time-tested.“Newsom’s strategy has been to remind voters what would be taken away if he were gone rather than what he’s given while he’s here,” Joe Eskenazi, a San Francisco political writer, recently wrote in the news site Mission Local, noting that the governor similarly framed a progressive opponent as “Gavin Newsom vs. The Abyss” in his 2003 San Francisco mayoral campaign.It is also a variation on a strategy deployed in 2012 by Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin and the only governor in U.S. history to have beaten a recall. A tea party Republican, Mr. Walker faced backlash for efforts to curtail collective-bargaining rights for most public workers. Rather than assume a defensive posture, Mr. Walker portrayed the attempt to remove him as a public employee union power grab.The portrayal supercharged the state’s Republican base and unleashed a torrent of money from out-of-state conservative donors. The victory not only saved Mr. Walker’s job but also boosted his national political profile.Mr. Newsom’s political future now rides on that kind of mobilization. The math is on his side.Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one in California. His campaign acted early to deter any strong Democratic challengers. And even with his critics, Mr. Newsom appears to have more support than when Californians recalled former Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. At the time, seven in 10 voters disapproved of Mr. Davis’s performance.Pandemic voting rules that boosted turnout to a record 81 percent of registered voters in 2020 remain in place, allowing all of the state’s 22 million-plus registered voters to vote for free by mail.Paul Mitchell, vice president at Political Data Inc., a nonpartisan supplier of voter information, said more than a third of the electorate has already voted, with participation by independent voters significantly lagging and far more Democratic than Republican ballots so far.“If they get to 60 percent turnout,” Mr. Mitchell said, “it’s almost mathematically impossible for Newsom to lose.”Orrin Heatlie, the recall’s lead proponent, at his home in Folsom, Calif., in February. Max Whittaker for The New York TimesBut there’s no guarantee they’ll hit that “golden number.” Participation among young and Latino voters has been “paltry,” he said. Until recently, polls showed that many Democrats were unaware there was a recall.And Mr. Newsom, notwithstanding 53 percent job approval ratings, has lacked the personal popularity of, say, former Gov. Jerry Brown, his predecessor. The governor must beat back the recall decisively, said Steve Maviglio, a California Democratic political consultant, “because if the margin is close, there’ll be blood in the water,” potentially complicating Mr. Newsom’s re-election in 2022.The recall ballot asks Californians to answer two questions: Should Mr. Newsom be recalled, and if so, who should replace him? If a simple majority votes no on the first question, the second is moot. But if the recall passes, the governor’s post will go to the challenger with the most votes, even if only a tiny sliver of the electorate chooses that person — a feature that has prompted calls for reform from critics.Nathan Click, a former spokesman for the governor who is now working against the recall, said Mr. Newsom’s team understood early that they would need to make their case quickly. As early as December — six months before the recall would officially qualify for the ballot — the governor’s supporters were echoing the language of their official petition responses, decrying proponents as “anti-vaccine pro-Trump extremists.”In January, the state Democratic Party chairman called the recall “a California coup,” comparing it to the Jan. 6 insurrection. And in March, Mr. Newsom used his “state of the state” speech to denounce “California critics out there who are promoting partisan political power grabs.”Now, the very name of Mr. Newsom’s campaign — “Stop the Republican Recall” — aims to mobilize the state’s dominant party. His television ads and social media implore voters to stop the “boldfaced Republican power grab.”In speeches, Mr. Newsom attacks the front-running challenger, the conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, as a Trump clone who would recklessly undo the state’s progress in curbing Covid-19 infections and “vandalize” California’s identity.Larry Elder, front-running challenger to Gov. Gavin Newsom, at a campaign event in Thousand Oaks, Calif., on Monday.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesAs it did for Mr. Walker, the strategy has inspired gushers of funding. State campaign finance law caps donations to individual challengers but treats recalls as voter initiatives, allowing unlimited contributions. Mr. Elder, whose Trumpian rhetoric has been described as a gift in itself to Mr. Newsom, has so far raised about $13 million; checks to the anti-recall effort for more than $100,000 have alone totaled more than $50 million. Public employee unions and progressives have been especially generous to the governor.Recall proponents predict a closer-than-expected finish, but either way, they say, they have succeeded. Mike Netter, who helped launch Mr. Heatlie’s petition, said their grass roots group has grown to some 400,000 Californians already organizing ballot measures on school choice and other conservative causes.“No one believed in us, but we got on the ballot, we have all these people and we’re not going away,” said Mr. Netter. “I don’t think anyone ever expected Gavin Newsom to have to spend $68 million just for the race to be this close.” More

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      Mountain of Money Fuels Newsom’s Surge to Recall Election Finish Line

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      The California governor has taken full advantage of the state’s loose financing rules for recall elections, overpowering Republican challengers for whom the cavalry never arrived.Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bid to fend off a recall in California has been bolstered by an infusion of tens of millions of dollars from big donors in recent months that delivered him an enormous financial advantage over his Republican rivals in the race’s final stretch.There had been moments over the summer when Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, had appeared vulnerable in public polls, as California’s unique recall rules seemed to provide an opening to conservatives in one of the most reliably Democratic states in the nation. But Mr. Newsom raised more than $70 million this year into an account to battle the recall, much of it in July and August, allowing him and his allies to dominate the television airwaves and out-advertise his opponents online.California has no limits on donations to recall committees, and Mr. Newsom has taken full advantage of those loose rules. His contributions have included an early $3 million from Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix; $500,000 from the liberal philanthropist George Soros; and $500,000 from the Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. Dr. Priscilla Chan, a philanthropist and the wife of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, contributed $750,000, and the real estate magnate George Marcus gave $1 million.Millions of dollars more have come from interest groups with business before the state, including labor unions representing service workers, teachers and prison guards, the real estate industry and Native American tribes that operate casinos.On the Republican side, the financial cavalry never arrived.Mr. Newsom’s aggressive efforts to keep any other prominent Democrat from running consolidated the party’s financial might toward protecting his post. In a California recall, voters consider two questions: first, whether to recall the governor and second, whom the replacement should be. During the last recall election, in 2003, Democrats struggled to sell the famously unwieldy slogan “no on recall; yes on Bustamante” as Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, swept into the governorship.This year, Democrats and Republicans in the state seem to agree on one thing ahead of the election on Tuesday: The money mattered. All told, Mr. Newsom has spent more battling the recall than he did on his 2018 election.“If Gavin didn’t raise the money, given the amount of apathy and angst, he could have lost,” said Kerman Maddox, a Democratic strategist in California who has also worked as a party fund-raiser. “I’m just going to be real.”Dave Gilliard, a Republican strategist involved in the recall efforts, said of the cash gulf: “It’s definitely made a difference.”Despite the large sums involved in the recall, the race’s total cost is actually less than that of a single ballot measure last year, when Uber and Lyft teamed up to successfully press for rules allowing app-based companies to continue to classify drivers and other workers as independent contractors. That ballot measure drew roughly $225 million in spending because of the state’s many large and costly media markets, including Los Angeles.Mr. Newsom used his financial edge to swamp his Republican rivals and proponents of the recall on television by a nearly four-to-one ratio in July and August, spending $20.4 million to the recall supporters’ $5.6 million, according to data provided by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Some of those ads framed the race in the starkest of terms, with one spot saying the recall’s outcome was “a matter of life and death” because of the coronavirus. On YouTube and Google, the financial disparity was even more stark. Mr. Newsom has spent nearly $4.1 million, according to Google disclosure records, while his leading Republican opponent, the radio talk show host Larry Elder, has spent a little more than $600,000.Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, gave $3 million to Mr. Newsom’s campaign.Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesDr. Priscilla Chan gave $750,000. California has no limits on donations to recall committees.Steve Jennings/Getty ImagesThe sudden emergence of Mr. Elder as the Republican front-runner — he entered the contest in July and had raised more than $13 million by the end of August — provided Mr. Newsom with a ready-made Republican foil. An unabashed conservative, Mr. Elder had left a trail of radio clips in which he outlined positions unpopular with Democrats on issues like the environment, abortion and the minimum wage.“Lo and behold, he got a gift from the gods in the name of Larry Elder, the conservative African American version of Donald Trump,” Mr. Maddox said, adding that the specter of an Elder governorship had motivated big and small donors alike.It had not always been clear that Mr. Newsom would have such a decisive cash advantage. Some party contributors were slow to engage. Ron Conway, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist who organized early anti-recall efforts and fund-raising in the spring in the tech community, said he had been dismissed early on. “At the time, many people thought I was being alarmist,” he wrote in an email. “They don’t think that anymore!”State records show that nearly two-thirds of donations of $10,000 or more to Mr. Newsom’s main anti-recall account came after July 1. And overall, more than 80 percent of the donations over $10,000 to that account came from inside California.“Democrats would rather not have to fund an off-year race in California,” said Dan Newman, an adviser to Mr. Newsom. “But they didn’t hesitate once it was clear what’s at stake.”Mr. Newsom’s campaign said it expected to pass 600,000 donations by the election after running a robust online donation program. Still, much of the money came from giant contributions, with $48.2 million in his main anti-recall account from donations of $100,000 or more.In late August, at a donor retreat in Aspen, Colo., for contributors to the Democratic Governors Association, attendees said there was some grumbling and irritation at the need to divert any resources to a state as blue as California — especially given how many tough governors’ races are set to unfold in 2022.The governors association has sent $5.5 million to the Newsom operation opposing the recall so far.“It doesn’t bode well for Democrats in 2022 if they have to burn millions of dollars on a recall in the most liberal state in America,” said Jesse Hunt, the communications director for the Republican Governors Association.From the start, Mr. Newsom’s campaign framed the recall as a Republican power grab, which made it particularly unappealing for some bigger G.O.P. contributors to inject themselves into the race, according to both national and California Republicans. The state’s unusual requirement that the names of top donors appear in advertisements was also a turnoff, along with general disbelief that California could ever truly be flipped.“You have a lot of people who are for us but who never believe it could be done,” said Anne Hyde Dunsmore, the campaign manager of Rescue California, one of the pro-recall efforts. “No, the money didn’t come in, and no, it wasn’t for a lack of asking.”Larry Elder, who has emerged as Mr. Newsom’s leading challenger, raised $13 million in his first two months in the race.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesSome significant checks did come. Mr. Elder received $1 million from Geoffrey Palmer, a real estate developer and top Republican donor. Saul Fox, a private equity executive, made a $100,000 donation. And Mr. Elder quickly lapped the rest of the Republican field in fund-raising with big and small donations.John Cox, the Republican who lost to Mr. Newsom in a 2018 landslide, has spent millions of his own dollars running again. Among his costly moves was campaigning with a 1,000-pound Kodiak bear named Tag, who also appeared in Mr. Cox’s ads.Kevin Faulconer, a Republican former mayor of San Diego, raised more than $4 million for his candidacy, and Kevin Kiley, a Republican state assemblyman, raised more than $1 million.Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender activist and former Olympian, received a wave of publicity upon her entrance to the race. But her bid, and her fund-raising, have mostly fallen flat. As of late August, Ms. Jenner had raised less than $1 million and had less than $28,000 in cash on hand — with more than that in unpaid bills.Gale Kaufman, a Sacramento-based Democratic strategist, said the fractured and financially weak Republican field “kept them from ever being able to create a ‘yes’ campaign” — for the recall — “that resonated.”“They’re not speaking with one voice and they’re not saying the same thing,” she said.Mike Netter, a Republican who was one of the recall’s early grass-roots organizers, was frustrated by Democratic attacks that the push was a Republican effort to seize power. He said that little conservative support had materialized after the recall proponents put the measure on the ballot.“If we’re supposedly so Republican-driven, where’s our money? Where’s the air cover from our supposed right-wing secret organizations?” Mr. Netter said, citing the lack of big donations from the party and leading in-state Republicans like Representative Devin Nunes. “No one has believed in us this whole way. And it’s not like we have that kind of money. It’s not like the Koch brothers are my cousins or something. I went to San Diego State.”Shawn Hubler More

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      Tag the Bear, Mascot of California Recall, Faces a Lawsuit

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      The campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom has been going well for the governor lately. Less so for Tag the bear.“Animal rights people are suing us,” said Keith Bauer, the longtime trainer for the 1,000-pound Kodiak who became famous this year as part of a campaign stunt for John Cox, one of the four dozen or so candidates challenging Mr. Newsom. “It’s ridiculous.”Mr. Cox, a San Diego Republican who lost to Mr. Newsom in a landslide in 2018, garnered attention this spring when he began making appearances with the bear to underscore his campaign theme that Mr. Newsom was a privileged “beauty” while Mr. Cox was a powerful “beast.”Bryan Pease, a lawyer who leads the board of the Animal Protection and Rescue League in San Diego, said the nonprofit group sued to enjoin Mr. Cox and the bear’s owner from bringing Tag back to San Diego.The complaint, filed in San Diego Superior Court in May, notes that, other than in the zoo, municipal code bans bears and other wild animals from the city. It also alleges that drugs and electrical wires were used to keep the bear docile during appearances, citing an email from Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, the Kern County supplier of show business animals that owns the bear and rents him for events and commercials.“They said Tag was drugged because he was so nice at personal appearances,” said Mr. Bauer, who was not named in the suit, which he called “groundless.”“Tag is just nice,” he added. “What do you want me to do? Pinch him in the butt to make him mean?”A spokesperson for Mr. Cox’s campaign blamed “liberal activists playing politics through the courts” for the lawsuit and denied that the bear was mistreated.Mr. Pease said his animal rights group was “an equal opportunity assailant,” noting that it recently sent out a mass email condemning Representative Juan Vargas, a San Diego Democrat, for holding a fund-raiser at the Del Mar racetrack.In any case, Tag’s trainer said, he and the bear have had little luck monetizing their campaign close-up.“We’ve gotten a couple of jobs,” Mr. Bauer said, taking a break on Thursday from a job in Pittsburgh, where he was working with a trained squirrel named Nut Nut.“But it hasn’t changed anything.” More

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      Kevin Faulconer on Covid Mandates, Housing and the California G.O.P.

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      He was the mayor of San Diego, California’s second-largest city, for the better part of a decade until he reached his term limit last year, praised in some quarters for being an increasingly rare moderate Republican in a state where the G.O.P. has struggled.But many Californians could not pick Kevin Faulconer out of a lineup.That has been a bit of a problem for Mr. Faulconer, who is one of more than 40 candidates vying to take Gov. Gavin Newsom’s place in Tuesday’s recall election. One recent poll shows Mr. Faulconer at a very distant second place to Larry Elder, the conservative radio host and Republican front-runner.Unlike the other candidates, though, Mr. Faulconer has experience in government. In recent weeks, Democratic strategists and The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board have urged Californians to vote no on the recall question, and — rather than leave blank the question on which candidate should replace Mr. Newsom if he is recalled — “hold your nose and select” Mr. Faulconer.Mr. Faulconer’s candidacy in the recall has been widely viewed as a chance to get his name in front of voters before running in the regular race for governor next year, which he announced early this year that he would join — regardless of whether a recall took place.Mr. Faulconer said in an interview he was adamant that his collaborative “common-sense” approach to governance and focus on policy will resonate with Californians weary of partisan tribalism. And that, he said, is what he hopes will set him apart.“My one goal is continuing to get out my message of someone who’s ready to lead, has the experience and will actually bring real solutions to California,” he said. “And somebody who knows how to bring people together.”Here’s what else he had to say, lightly edited and condensed:I’ll jump right into it: If you’re elected governor, would you keep mask, vaccine or other pandemic-related mandates in place?I would say, first of all, I want everyone to get the vaccine. Every opportunity I get, I stress that — my family is vaccinated. That is the best way for us to get on the other side of this pandemic.But you can’t mandate your way out of Covid-19. So I do not support mandates or bans, either way.You have to let local health officials make those determinations based upon the facts on the ground in their area. Los Angeles is going to be different than Sacramento, which is going to be different than the Bay Area. So my policy is one of education, education, education.Kevin Paffrath, a Democrat, and the Republicans John Cox, Kevin Kiley and Kevin Faulconer at a debate in August.Pool photo by Scott StrazzanteSo would you be in favor of lifting vaccine mandates for educators?I’m a big believer in letting the local facts on the ground dictate the proper steps to take based upon the health conditions in that community.You would leave that up to district officials or local public health officials?I would leave that to local public health officials. I think we saw 90 percent of educators had gotten vaccinated without a mandate. Again, I think that speaks to the power of education.What would you say to people in communities where public health officials have been threatened for doing their jobs and imposing restrictions, and where residents opposed to mask mandates have successfully pushed back against them?I would say the science doesn’t change based on politics. And I again urge you to trust the science and the local conditions in that community.So would you immediately reverse all the mandates that apply to state workers?I would allow local officials to make those decisions for themselves. I believe that testing is a responsible solution. Again, I want everyone to get vaccinated, and I absolutely believe that helps reduce the vaccine hesitancy if you’re not mandating everything.You’ve talked a lot about better addressing homelessness than Governor Newsom. What would your priorities be?We took very significant action in San Diego to change the dynamics. It was compassionate and it was firm. I did not allow tent encampments on the sidewalks in San Diego and in our public spaces because I believe if you let somebody live in an unsafe, unclean, unsanitary environment, you’re condemning them to die there. And we’re better than that.We were the only big city in California where we actually reduced homelessness by double digits. I set up a series of shelters in San Diego, and I made a deal with the community. I said, “It’s going to be cleaner and safer with this shelter than before it was there.”I created a new division of the San Diego Police Department called the Neighborhood Policing Division and it made a dramatic difference. These were officers, so our police officers, but in khaki pants and blue polo shirts. They became the No. 1 entity to refer people to the shelters.I’m going to lead by example as governor and do the same thing. I believe that every human being has a right to shelter. I also believe that when we provide that shelter, you have an obligation to use it, and I enforced that.During your tenure as mayor, San Diego pushed forward some of the most aggressive laws in the state for creating accessory dwelling units on single-family lots. And the state’s Senate Bill 9 just passed, which allows duplexes in single-family neighborhoods. Do you think the state should go further? Do you support S.B. 9?We need to produce more housing, period. And one of the things that this governor has completely ignored is reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, which is used to stop housing projects in California. It takes too much time. It takes too much extra dollars. It makes it more expensive.But really quickly, what’s your stance on S.B. 9?I believe our best opportunity is in our multifamily zones. What you don’t want to do is eliminate all single-family zoning, as some in the Legislature are advocating. I think our biggest opportunity to have the density where you want it is along our transit zones. And that’s exactly what we did in San Diego, with our Complete Communities that we passed.So do you support S.B. 9?You can’t eliminate single-family zoning. No.In 2016, you opposed former President Donald Trump. In 2020, you supported him. Where do you stand now?I did in 2020, and my vote was based upon the economy. I haven’t interacted with him since I was mayor.I think Gavin Newsom wants to make this campaign all about the former president. I think what Californians want is a governor who’s going to focus on California. The former president didn’t call himself the homeless czar like Gavin Newsom. It’s not the former president who’s not moving forward on water storage in California, wildfire reduction. This recall is really a referendum on Gavin Newsom’s failures.Mr. Faulconer boarding his campaign bus after an event at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles in August.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressThe former president, as you said, is not in charge of California. At the same time, he is clearly influencing the Republican Party across the country. What do you think the Republican Party stands for now? And what do you align with, if not former President Trump?I believe we need to make it more affordable for families in California. That’s why I put forward the largest middle-class tax cut in California history.People are voting with their feet. They’re leaving our state because it’s too expensive. I believe we need to make it easier to build and start a small business. It’s not having a carbon copy of the national party. I call myself a California Republican.What does that mean to you? Democrats have a huge advantage in terms of registration in California — how does the California Republican Party need to shift?The registration in the city of San Diego mirrors that of California as a whole. How do you win in California? You win by focusing on issues and common sense. You have to build coalitions. That’s exactly what I did as mayor.That’s what this campaign has been built on, which is if you’re a Republican, I want your vote. If you’re a Democrat, I want your vote. If you’re an independent, I want your vote. And I think nobody else who’s running has also had to work with a legislature or, in my case, a majority-Democrat City Council.And so all of the housing reforms that you and I have just talked about, all of the homeless action that we took, all of the action on public safety, which I was very proud of, all of my budgets — every single one had to be approved by a majority-Democrat legislature.How did you feel about extending pandemic aid to undocumented workers, many of whom were essential. And would you reverse any legislation that gives undocumented people access to health care or driver’s licenses?My focus would have been obviously on Californians.You don’t think undocumented residents of California are Californians?I do, but like I said, legal citizens would have been my focus.I think that our immigration policy is completely broken at the federal level. And I’ve supported comprehensive immigration reform very loudly for a very long time. As governor I would advocate for that, because we know that the effects of a broken immigration policy affect us so incredibly much here in California.If you don’t become governor in the recall, you’re planning to run again next year.I was absolutely planning to run in 2022 when I started. I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t think that California was ready for a change, that we should have a competition of ideas. We’ve had one-party rule in California now for over a decade. And I believe that that has led to just a state going in the wrong direction. More

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      The Trump Coup Is Still Raging

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      What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not a coup attempt. It was half of a coup attempt — the less important half.The more important part of the coup attempt — like legal wrangling in states and the attempts to sabotage the House commission’s investigation of Jan. 6 — is still going strong. These are not separate and discrete episodes but parts of a unitary phenomenon that, in just about any other country, would be characterized as a failed coup d’état.As the Republican Party tries to make up its mind between wishing away the events of Jan. 6 or celebrating them, one thing should be clear to conservatives estranged from the party: We can’t go home again.The attempted coup’s foot soldiers have dug themselves in at state legislatures. For example, last week in Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced a draft of legislation that would require an audit of the 2020 general election in the state’s largest (typically Democratic-heavy) counties, suggesting without basis that it may show that these areas cheated to inflate Joe Biden’s vote count.Florida’s secretary of state, a Republican, knows that an audit is nonsense and has said so. But the point of an audit would not be to change the outcome (Mr. Trump won the state). The point is not even really to conduct an audit.The obviously political object is to legitimize the 2020 coup attempt in order to soften the ground for the next one — and there will be a next one.In the broad strategy, the frenzied mobs were meant to inspire terror — and obedience among Republicans — while Rudy Giuliani and his co-conspirators tried to get the election nullified on some risible legal pretext or another. Republicans needed both pieces — neither the mob violence nor an inconclusive legal ruling would have been sufficient on its own to keep Mr. Trump in power.True to form, Mr. Trump was able to supply the mob but not the procedural victory. His coup attempt was frustrated in no small part by a thin gray line of bureaucratic fortitude — Republican officials at the state and local levels who had the grit to resist intense pressure from the president and do their jobs.Current efforts like the one in Florida are intended to terrorize them into compliance today or, short of that, to push such officials into retirement so that they can be replaced with more pliant partisans. The lonely little band of Republican officials who stopped the 2020 coup is going to be smaller and lonelier the next time around.That’s why the Great Satan for the Republican Party right now is not Mr. Biden but Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of a small number of Republicans willing to speak honestly about Jan. 6 and to support the investigation into it — and willing to contradict powerful people like Kevin McCarthy of California, who has falsely (and preposterously) claimed that the F.B.I. has cleared Mr. Trump of any involvement in Jan. 6.The emerging Republican orthodoxy on Jan. 6 is created by pure political engineering, with most party leaders either minimizing, halfheartedly defending or wholeheartedly celebrating the coup, depending on their audience and ambitions. Pragmatic party leaders like Mitch McConnell, and others like him who were never passionately united with Mr. Trump but need his voters, are hoping that the memory of the riot gets swept away by the ugly news from Afghanistan and the usual hurly-burly. But other Republicans have praised the rioters: Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina insisted that those who have been jailed are “political prisoners” and warned that “bloodshed” might follow another “stolen” election. The middle-ground Republican consensus is that the sacking of the Capitol was at worst the unfortunate escalation of a well-intentioned protest involving legitimate electoral grievances. More

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      How Seriously Broken Is California’s Recall Election?

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      California’s process for recalling its governor is so broken, some Democratic strategists are encouraging a vote for a Republican former San Diego mayor because “he’s not insane.” Millions of mail-in ballots were already cast before the state even released a list of qualified write-in candidates to potentially replace the sitting governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, leaving voters to choose from a list of 46 mostly gadflies and wannabes.Voters are asked to answer two questions: First, do they want to recall Mr. Newsom, and second, if he is recalled, whom do they want to replace him? The governor can be recalled through a simple majority vote. His replacement needs only a plurality, no matter how small. This means that Mr. Newsom could win the support of 49 percent of voters and still be recalled. A candidate vying to replace him could be elected with half of that support, or even less.Election rules don’t allow for Mr. Newsom’s name to appear on the ballot, as is the case in a number of other states with recall rules, or for him to serve if he wins as a write-in candidate. That structure may amount to unconstitutional disenfranchisement. Another wrinkle: In order for votes for write-in candidates to count, the person written in must have filed paperwork to qualify. The list of qualified write-in candidates wasn’t made public until last Friday, less than two weeks before polls close on Sept. 14 — but weeks after mail-in ballots were sent out.Scrapping the century-old recall system altogether would deny California voters an important check on their top elected official. Whatever the result of the Newsom recall effort, however, the process is well past due for an overhaul.For starters, California’s recalls can happen in off-years, which makes them ripe for manipulation by the minority party. There have been at least 179 recall attempts in California since the measure was adopted by voters in 1911, and every governor since 1960 has faced at least one.The timing also means a far smaller electorate ends up determining who is the state’s leader. Special elections will always draw fewer voters, but for something as consequential as the governorship of the country’s most populous state, every effort should be made to increase turnout, including potentially requiring them to be held during regularly scheduled votes. Voters in off-cycle elections generally skew older, whiter and more conservative, a recent study led by the University of California, San Diego, found. In other words, not very representative of California’s population.Early polling suggested that as few as one-third of the state’s 22.3 million registered voters may participate this time — and they are facing a dizzying array of choices for Mr. Newsom’s potential successor. The slate is a ragtag bunch including the former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner, YouTube star Kevin Paffrath and mononymous billboard personality Angelyne. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor, is among the few with any prior political experience.The leading candidate is the Republican talk-radio host Larry Elder, whose conservative policy positions — including his opposition to mask mandates, abortion rights and a minimum wage, as well as his troubling views on women’s rights and climate change — aren’t in line with any statewide election result in California for decades.Yet polls show he is the top candidate with the support of just 20 percent of likely voters. In California’s recall scheme, he could assume the governor’s office with well under two million votes, compared with the 7.7 million votes Mr. Newsom won in the regular 2018 election.“The system as it’s designed allows a minority faction that really has no hope of winning statewide election to get a recall on the ballot,” said Chris Elmendorf, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, who studies elections.Some Californians point to the last recall election, in 2003, as evidence that the system works. That year, voters booted Gray Davis, a Democrat, and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. While Mr. Schwarzenegger fell short of winning an outright majority, at least more people voted for him than voted to keep Mr. Davis.But is that good enough? There are numerous ways that California should reform its recall system.First, it ought to shift the burden of winning majority support from the incumbent — who was, after all, duly elected by the voters — and put it on the recall effort. There is a reason that impeaching and removing the president requires not only a majority vote in the House but also a supermajority in the Senate. In a democracy, the results of a regularly scheduled election should not be overturned before the next election except in the most extraordinary circumstances.Other states with recall provisions, like Minnesota and Washington, require an act of malfeasance or a conviction for a serious crime for the recall to proceed. Mr. Newsom’s maskless dinner at a high-end restaurant to celebrate a lobbyist’s birthday, which buttressed the recall effort, was certainly hypocritical and tone-deaf, but it shouldn’t alone be grounds for early eviction from office.Another needed reform is to make it harder to get a recall on the ballot in the first place. Among the 18 other states with voter recall measures, none have a lower threshold than California’s. It takes signatures equal to just 12 percent of the total votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election to initiate a recall in California. In many other states, the threshold is 25 percent. In Kansas, the bar is 40 percent. In 2020 alone, at least 14 governors nationwide faced recall efforts, but only California’s attempt proceeded to a ballot, according to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform and the author of a recent book on recall elections. That’s due in part to those other states’ higher thresholds. California already has a more stringent 20 percent standard for recalls of state lawmakers and judges. That would make sense for governors as well.Finally, California’s system discourages the sitting governor’s party from backing a replacement candidate for fear of bolstering the recall effort. That’s why Mr. Newsom asked voters to vote “no” on the recall and leave the second question blank. Doing so makes it even more likely that a candidate from the opposing party will win.Another fix would be to hold the vote on the recall itself on a different day than the vote on a successor, as several other states do. That would give replacement candidates time to put together a campaign on the issues, rather than just on the recall itself.Alternatively, lawmakers should consider requiring a recalled governor’s seat to be turned over to the democratically elected lieutenant governor, who would otherwise assume the post if the governor died, resigned or was impeached.Properly conducted, recalls can serve an important function in representative democracies, a salve for buyer’s remorse in extreme circumstances. But it should be in the state’s interest to have the broadest and most diverse electorate possible. That’s not now the case in California, where many people aren’t even aware the recall election is happening, even though ballots were sent to all registered voters in the state.A system that allows a legitimately elected governor to be replaced with a fringe candidate winning only a small fraction of the vote is in desperate need of reform. California voters should vote no on the recall question, and the Legislature should, at last, begin the work of revising the state’s recall elections.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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      One Thing We Can Agree on Is That We’re Becoming a Different Country

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      A highly charged ideological transition reflecting a “massive four-decade-long shift in political values and attitudes among more educated people — a shift from concern with traditional materialist issues like redistribution to a concern for public goods like the environment and diversity” is a driving force in the battle between left and right, according to Richard Florida, an urbanologist at the University of Toronto.This ideological transition has been accompanied by the concentration of liberal elites in urban centers, Florida continued in an email,brought on by the dramatic shift to a knowledge economy, which expresses itself on the left as “wokeness” and on the right as populism. I worry that the middle is dropping out of American politics. This is not just an economic or cultural or political phenomenon, it is inextricably geographic or spatial as different groups pack and cluster into different kinds of communities.Recent decades have witnessed what Dennis Chong, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, describes in an email as “a demographic realignment of political tolerance in the U.S. that first became evident in the late 1980s-early 1990s.”Before that, Chong pointed out, “the college educated, and younger generations, were among the most tolerant groups in the society of all forms of social and political nonconformity.” Since the 1990s, “these groups have become significantly less tolerant of hate speech pertaining to race, gender and social identities.”Chong argued that “the expansion of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, L.G.B.T.Q. and other groups that have suffered discrimination has caused a re-evaluation of the harms of slurs and other derogatory expressions in professional and social life.”The result?“In a striking reversal,” Chong wrote, “liberals are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives of a wide range of controversial speech about racial, gender and religious identities.”Pippa Norris, a lecturer in comparative politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School — together with Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died in May — has explored this extraordinary shift from materialist to postmaterialist values in advanced countries, the movement from a focus on survival to a focus on self-expression, which reflects profound changes in a society’s existential conditions, including in the United States.In an Aug. 21 paper, “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?” Norris writes, “In postindustrial societies characterized by predominately liberal social cultures, like the U.S., Sweden, and U.K., right-wing scholars were most likely to perceive that they faced an increasingly chilly climate.”Using data from a global survey, World of Political Science, 2019, Norris created a “Cancel Culture Index” based on political scientists’ responses to three questions asking whether “aspects of academic life had got better, no change, or got worse, using the 5-point scale: 1. Respect for open debate from diverse perspectives, 2. Pressures to be ‘politically correct’ and 3. Academic freedom to teach and research.”Using this measure, Norris found that “American scholars on the moderate right and far right report experiencing worsening pressures to be politically correct, limits on academic freedom and a lack of respect for open debate,” compared with the views of moderate and more left-wing scholars:The proportion of those holding traditionally socially conservative values has gradually experienced a tipping point in recent decades, as this group shifts from hegemonic to minority status on college campuses and in society, heightening ideological and partisan polarization. In this regard, the reported experience of a chilly climate in academia among right-wing scholars seems likely to reflect their reactions to broader cultural and structural shifts in postindustrial societies.Inglehart, in his 2018 book, “The Rise of Postmaterialist Values in the West and the World,” described how increasing affluence and economic security, especially for educated elites, have beentransforming the politics and cultural norms of advanced industrial societies. A shift from materialist to postmaterialist value priorities has brought new political issues to the center of the stage and provided much of the impetus for new political movements. It has split existing political parties and given rise to new ones and it is changing the criteria by which people evaluate their subjective sense of well-being.Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and the author of “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities,” argued in a series of emails that the views of white liberals are shaped by their distinctive set of priorities. In contrast to white conservatives, Kaufmann wrote, “white liberals have low attachment to traditional collective identities (race, nation, religion) but as high attachment to moral values and political beliefs as conservatives. This makes the latter most salient for them.” According to Kaufmann, white liberals “have invested heavily in universalist ethical values.”Matthias Jung/laif, via ReduxIn Kaufmann’s view, a new, assertive ideology has emerged on the left, and the strength of this wing is reflected in its ability to influence the decision making of university administrators:In universities, only 10 percent of social science and humanities faculty support cancellation (firing, suspension or other severe punishments) of those with controversial views on race and gender, with about half opposed and 40 percent neither supporting nor opposed. And yet, this does not appear to cut through to the administrations, who often discipline staff.On Sept. 4, The Economist published a cover story, “The Illiberal Left: How Did American ‘Wokeness’ Jump From Elite Schools to Everyday Life?” that argues that there is:a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness.From another angle, Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and a former Obama administration official, asks in “The Power of the Normal,” a 2018 paper:Why do we come to see political or other conduct as acceptable, when we had formerly seen it as unacceptable, immoral, or even horrific? Why do shifts occur in the opposite direction? What accounts for the power of “the new normal”?Sunstein is especially concerned with how new norms expand in scope:Once conduct comes to be seen as part of an unacceptable category — abusiveness, racism, lack of patriotism, microaggression, sexual harassment — real or apparent exemplars that are not so egregious, or perhaps not objectionable at all, might be taken as egregious, because they take on the stigma now associated with the category.Sunstein is careful to note, “It is important to say that on strictly normative grounds, the less horrific cases might also be horrific.”A key player in this process is what Sunstein calls “the opprobrium entrepreneur.” The motivations of opprobrium entrepreneurs:may well be altruistic. They might think that certain forms of mistreatment are as bad as, or nearly as bad as, what are taken to the prototypical cases, and they argue that the underlying concept (abuse, bullying, prejudice), properly conceived, picks up their cases as well. Their goal is to create some kind of cascade, informational or reputational, by which the concept moves in their preferred direction. In the context of abuse, bullying, prejudice, and sexual harassment, both informational and reputational cascades have indeed occurred.Sunstein cites “microaggressions” as an area that “has exploded,” writing:At one point, the University of California at Berkeley signaled its willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements,” including “America is a melting pot,” “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”Opprobrium entrepreneurs can be found on both sides of the aisle.Jeffrey Adam Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University, has written about a flood tide of Republican-sponsored bills in state legislatures designed to prohibit teaching of “everything from feminism and racial equity to calls for decolonization.” In an article in February, “The New War On Woke,” Sachs wrote:One of the principal criticisms of today’s left-wing culture is that it suppresses unpopular speech. In response, these bills would make left-wing speech illegal. Conservatives (falsely) call universities ‘brainwashing factories’ and fret about the death of academic freedom. Their solution is to fire professors they don’t like.Sachs’ bottom line: “Once you let government get into the censorship business, no speech is safe.”Zachary Goldberg, a graduate student at Georgia State, has researched “the moral, emotional and technological underpinnings of the ‘Great Awokening’ — the rapid and recent liberalization of racial and immigration attitudes among white liberals and Democrats” for his doctoral thesis.Goldberg has produced data from the 2020 American National Election Studies survey showing that white liberals, in contrast to white moderates and conservatives, rate minorities higher on what political scientists call a thermometer scale than they do whites.One of the less recognized factors underlying efforts by conservatives and liberals to enforce partisan orthodoxy lies in the pressure to maintain party loyalty at a time when the Democrats and Republicans are struggling to manage coalitions composed of voters with an ever-expanding number of diverse commitments — economic, cultural, racial — that often do not cohere.Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political scientist, elaborated in an email:For issue activists and party leaders in the United States, management of internal party heterogeneity is a central task. In order to get what they want, the core of “true believers” on issue x must develop strategies for managing those with more moderate or even opposing views, who identify with the party primarily because of issue y. One strategy is persuasion on issue x via messaging, from social media to partisan cable television, aimed at wayward co-partisans. Another is to demonize the out-party on issue y in an effort to convince voters that even if they disagree with the in-party on issue x, the costs of allowing the out-party to win are simply too high. A final strategy is to relentlessly enforce norms by shaming and ostracizing nonconformists.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who has written extensively about Democratic Party conflicts, what role he sees white liberal elites playing in the enforcement of progressive orthodoxies. He wrote back:You ask specifically about “white liberal elites.” I wonder whether the dominant sentiment is guilt as opposed to (say) fear and ambition. Many participants in these institutions are terrified of being caught behind a rapidly shifting social curve and of being charged with racism. As a result, they bend over backward to use the most up-to-date terminology and to lend public support to policies they may privately oppose. The fear of losing face within, or being expelled from, the community of their peers drives much of their behavior.For some white liberals, Galston continued:adopting cutting-edge policies on race can serve as a way of enhancing status among their peers and for a few, it is a way of exercising power over others. If you know that people within your institution are afraid to speak out, you can get them to go along with policies that they would have opposed in different circumstances.Instead of guilt, Galston argued, “this behavior is just as likely to reflect leadership that lacks purpose and core convictions and that seeks mainly to keep the ship afloat, wherever it may be headed.”“Amidst this sea of analytical uncertainties, I am increasingly confident of one thing: a backlash is building,” Galston wrote.The policies of elite private schools reported on the front page of The New York Times will not command majority support, even among white liberals. As awareness of such policies spreads, their conservative foes will pounce, and many white liberals who went along with them will be unwilling to defend them. The fate of defunding the police is a harbinger of things to come.Jonathan Haidt, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, contends that a small constituency on the far left is playing an outsize role:Progressive activists make up 8 percent of the U.S. population, and they are the ones who frequently use terms like “white supremacy culture” and “power structures.” This group is the second whitest of all the groups (after the far right), yet they give the coldest “feeling thermometer” ratings to whites and the warmest to Blacks. In this group there does seem to be some true feelings of guilt and shame about being white.Haidt contends that “the animating emotion” for acquiescence to the demands of this type of progressive activist by those with less extreme views:is fear, not guilt or shame. I have heard from dozens of leaders of universities, companies, and other organizations in the last few years about the pressures they are under to enact D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies that are not supported by research, or to say things that they believe are not true. The vast majority of these people are on the left but are not progressive activists. They generally give in to pressure because the alternative is that they and their organization will be called racist, not just within the organization by their younger employees but on social media.How do things look now?“The First Amendment on Campus 2020 Report: College Students’ Views of Free Expression,” a study produced by the Knight Foundation based on a survey of 3,000 students, found strong support for free speech. The report noted that “68 percent regard citizens’ free speech rights as being ‘extremely important’ to democracy” and “that 81 percent support a campus environment where students are exposed to all types of speech, even if they may find it offensive.”At the same time, however, “Most college students believe efforts at diversity and inclusion ‘frequently’ (27 percent) or ‘occasionally’ (49 percent) come into conflict with free speech rights,” and “63 percent of students agree that the climate on their campus deters students from expressing themselves openly, up from 54 percent in 2016.”Similarly, according to the Knight survey, trends on social media from 2016 to 2020 were all negative:Fewer students now (29 percent) than in 2016 (41 percent) say discussion on social media is usually civil. More students than in the past agree that social media can stifle free speech — both because people block those whose views they disagree with (60 percent, up from 48 percent in 2016) and because people are afraid of being attacked or shamed by those who disagree with them (58 percent, up from 49 percent in 2016).It’s not too much to say that the social and cultural changes of the past four decades have been cataclysmic. The signs of it are everywhere. Donald Trump rode the coattails of these issues into office. Could he — or someone else who has been watching closely — do it again?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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      How Educational Differences Are Widening America’s Political Rift

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      College graduates are now a firmly Democratic bloc, and they are shaping the party’s future. Those without degrees, by contrast, have flocked to Republicans.The front lines of America’s cultural clashes have shifted in recent years. A vigorous wave of progressive activism has helped push the country’s culture to the left, inspiring a conservative backlash against everything from “critical race theory” to the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.These skirmishes may be different in substance from those that proceeded them, but in the broadest sense they are only the latest manifestation of a half-century trend: the realignment of American politics along cultural and educational lines, and away from the class and income divisions that defined the two parties for much of the 20th century.As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.Over the longer run, some Republicans even fantasize that the rise of educational polarization might begin to erode the Democratic advantage among voters of color without a college degree. Perhaps a similar phenomenon may help explain how Donald J. Trump, who mobilized racial animus for political gain, nonetheless fared better among voters of color than previous Republicans did, and fared worse among white voters.President Biden won about 60 percent of college-educated voters in 2020, including an outright majority of white college graduates, helping him run up the score in affluent suburbs and putting him over the top in pivotal states.This was a significant voting bloc: Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.Yet even as college graduates have surged in numbers and grown increasingly liberal, Democrats are no stronger than they were 10, 30 or even 50 years ago. Instead, rising Democratic strength among college graduates and voters of color has been counteracted by a nearly equal and opposite reaction among white voters without a degree.When the Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidency in 1960, he won white voters without a degree but lost white college graduates by a two-to-one margin. The numbers were almost exactly reversed for Mr. Biden, who lost white voters without a degree by a two-to-one margin while winning white college graduates.About 27 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters in 2020 were white voters without a college degree, according to Pew Research, down from the nearly 60 percent of Bill Clinton’s supporters who were whites without a degree just 28 years earlier. The changing demographic makeup of the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling dynamic, in which the growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party.The Democratic advantage among college graduates may be a new phenomenon, but the relative liberalism of college graduates is not. College graduates have been far likelier than voters without a college degree to self-identify as liberal for decades, even when they were likelier to vote Republican.College graduates attribute racial inequality, crime and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems, while voters without a degree tend to focus on individualist and parochial explanations. It is easier for college graduates, with their higher levels of affluence, to vote on their values, not simply on economic self-interest. They are likelier to have high levels of social trust and to be open to new experiences. They are less likely to believe in God.The rise of cultural liberalism is not simply a product of rising college attendance. In fact, there is only equivocal evidence that college attendance makes people vastly more liberal. Far from the indoctrination that conservatives fear, liberal college professors appear to preach to an already liberal choir.But it is hard to imagine the last half-century of liberal cultural change without the role played by universities and academia, which helped inspire everything from the student movements and New Left of the 1960s to the ideas behind today’s fights over “critical race theory.” The concentration of so many left-leaning students and professors on campus helped foster a new liberal culture with more progressive ideas and norms than would have otherwise existed.“If you live in a community which is more liberal, there’s a self-reinforcing ratcheting effect,” said Pippa Norris, a professor and political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School who believes that the rise of higher education contributed to the rise of social liberalism throughout the postindustrial world.As college graduates increased their share of the electorate, they gradually began to force the Democrats to accommodate their interests and values. They punched above their electoral weight, since they make up a disproportionate number of the journalists, politicians, activists and poll respondents who most directly influence the political process.At the same time, the party’s old industrial working-class base was in decline, as were the unions and machine bosses who once had the power to connect the party’s politicians to its rank and file. The party had little choice but to broaden its appeal, and it adopted the views of college-educated voters on nearly every issue, slowly if fitfully alienating its old working-class base.Republicans opened their doors to traditionally Democratic conservative-leaning voters who were aggrieved by the actions and perceived excesses of the new, college-educated left. This G.O.P. push began, and continues in some ways today, with the so-called Southern strategy — leveraging racial divisions and “states’ rights” to appeal to white voters.The reasons for white working-class alienation with the Democrats have shifted from decade to decade. At times, nearly every major issue area — race, religion, war, environmentalism, guns, trade, immigration, sexuality, crime, social welfare programs — has been a source of Democratic woes.What the Democratic Party’s positions on these very different issues have had in common is that they reflected the views of college-educated liberals, even when in conflict with the apparent interests of working-class voters — and that they alienated some number of white voters without a degree. Environmentalists demanded regulations on the coal industry; coal miners bolted from the Democrats. Suburban voters supported an assault gun ban; gun owners shifted to the Republicans. Business interests supported free trade agreements; old manufacturing towns broke for Mr. Trump.A similar process may be beginning to unfold among Hispanic voters. The 2020 election was probably the first presidential contest in which the Democratic candidate fared better among voters of color who graduated from college than among those without a degree. Mr. Trump made large gains among voters of color without degrees, especially Latino ones. The causes of his surge are still being debated, but one leading theory is that he was aided by a backlash against the ideas and language of the college-educated left, including activist calls to “defund the police.”For some Republicans, Mr. Trump’s gains have raised the possibility that it may be easier to appeal to working-class voters of color.“It doesn’t seem quite as big of a bridge to cross as saying, ‘Let’s go back and win white suburbanites,’” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who is writing a book on how the party might build a multiracial coalition.True or not, it’s a view that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it leads Republicans to adopt strategies aimed at making it a reality.There is no guarantee that the rising liberalism of the Democratic primary electorate or college graduates will continue. The wave of activism in the 1960s gave way to a relatively conservative generation of college graduates in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Perhaps something similar will happen today.What can be guaranteed is that the college-educated share of the population — and the electorate — will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state where four-year college graduates represented the majority of voters in a presidential contest. In 2020, the state was joined by New York, Colorado and Maryland. Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut and others are not far behind. Nationwide, four-year college graduates might represent a majority of midterm voters at some point over the next decade. More