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      Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away?

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      Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote.If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy?If the Democratic Party has been thrust into that role — whether it wants it or not — recent election results and adverse polling trends suggest that it stands a good chance of losing both branches of Congress in 2022 and that Trump or a Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024.The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democratic difficulties grow more out of structural advantages of the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate?If, as much evidence shows, working class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial, and gender issues than by economics — many non-college whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?I asked a group of scholars and Democratic strategists versions of these questions.Three conclusions stood out.There was near unanimous agreement that the Republican Party under the leadership of Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but disagreement over the degree of the danger.There was across the board opposition to the creation of a third party on the grounds that it would split the center and the left.In addition, a striking difference emerged when it came to the choice of strategic responses to the threat, between those who emphasize the built-in structural advantages benefiting the Republican Party and those who contend that Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues in order to regain support among working class voters, white, Black and Hispanic.Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard, argued in an email thatThe radicalized G.O.P. is the main anti-democratic force. Trump plays a crucial threatening role, but I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters. If Trump disappears or steps back, other Trumpists will step up, many are already in power.Skocpol’s point:Only repeated decisive electoral defeats would open the door to intraparty transformations, but the Electoral College, Senate non-metro bias and House skew through population distribution and gerrymandering make it unlikely that, in our two-party system, Democrats can prevail decisively.Because the Democratic Party is structurally weakened by the rural tilt of the Senate and the Electoral College — and especially vulnerable to gerrymandered districts because its voters are disproportionately concentrated in metro areas — the party “may not have enough elected power to accomplish basic voter and election protection reforms. Very bad things may happen soon,” Skocpol wrote. Republicans are positioned, she continued, “to undo majority democracy for a long time.”At the same time, Skocpol is sharply critical of trends within the Democratic Party:The advocacy groups and big funders and foundations around the Democratic Party — in an era of declining unions and mass membership groups — are pushing moralistic identity-based causes or specific policies that do not have majority appeal, understanding, or support, and using often weird insider language (like “Latinx”) or dumb slogans (“Defund the police”) to do it.The leaders of these groups, Skocpol stressed,often claim to speak for Blacks, Hispanics, women etc. without actually speaking to or listening to the real-world concerns of the less privileged people in these categories. That is arrogant and politically stupid. It happens in part because of the over-concentration of college graduate Democrats in isolated sectors of major metro areas, in worlds apart from most other Americans.Along similar lines, William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and former White House aide during the Clinton administration, wrote, “For the first time in my life, I have come to believe that the stability of our constitutional institutions can no longer be taken for granted.”Galston argues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party threatens to limit, if not prevent, efforts to enlarge support: “Everything depends on how much the Democrats really want to win. Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”“In my view,” Galston continued,the issue is not so much ideology as it is class. Working-class people with less than a college degree have an outlook that differs from that of the educated professionals whose outlook has come to dominate the Democratic Party. To the dismay of Democratic strategists, class identity may turn out to be more powerful that ethnic identity, especially for Hispanics.Democratic leaders generally and the Biden administration specifically, Galston said, have “failed to discharge, or even to recognize” their most important mission, the prevention of “Donald Trump returning to the Oval Office. They cannot do this with a program that drives away independents, moderates, and suburban voters, whose support made Biden’s victory possible.”The party’s “principal weakness,” Galston observes “lies in the realm of culture, which is why race, crime and schools have emerged as such damaging flash points.” In this context, “the Biden administration has failed to articulate views on immigration, criminal justice, education and related issues that a majority of Americans can support.”Not all of those I contacted have such a dire outlook.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, for example, agrees that “American democracy faced an unprecedented threat in 2020 when a sitting president refused to acknowledge electoral defeat,” but, she continued, “this threat was thwarted, to a great extent by that president’s own party. American democracy exhibited significant resilience in the face of the threat Trump posed.”This, Lee points out, is “a story of Republicans judges and elected officials upholding democracy at personal cost to their own popularity with Republican voters. Republican elected officials in a number of cases sacrificed their political ambitions in service to larger democratic ideals.”Lee cautioned that polls showing majorities of Republican voters questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election should be taken with a grain of salt:It is likely that a significant share of those who profess such beliefs are just simply telling pollsters that they still support Trump. I would not declare the death of democratic legitimacy on the basis of what people say in public opinion polls, particularly given that Republican elected officials all across the country participated in upholding the validity of the 2020 outcome.Lee does agree that “election subversion is by far the most serious threat to American democracy,” and she contends that those seeking to protect democracy should “should focus on the major threat: Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize American elections and Republicans’ efforts in some states to undermine nonpartisan election administration.”Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she “certainly see threats, but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”At the same time, she cautioned,the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.ALG Research, one of the firms that polled for the 2020 Biden campaign, conducted postelection focus groups in Northern Virginia and suburban Richmond in an attempt to explore the success of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who defeated Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race a month ago.A report on the study of 2020 Biden voters who backed Youngkin or seriously considered doing so by Brian Stryker, an ALG partner, and Oren Savir, a senior associate, made the case that the election was “not about ‘critical race theory,’ as some analysts have suggested.” Instead, they continued, many swing voters knew thatC.R.T. wasn’t taught in Virginia schools. But at the same time, they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula.ALG focus group participantsthought Democrats are only focused on equality and fairness and not on helping people. None of these Biden voters associated our party with helping working people, the middle class, or people like them. They thought we were more focused on breaking down social barriers facing marginalized groups. They were all for helping marginalized groups, but the fact that they couldn’t point to anything we are doing to help them was deeply concerning.In a parallel argument, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, wrote in an essay, “Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars,” thatDemocrats are not on strong ground when they have to defend views that appear wobbly on rising violent crime, surging immigration at the border and non-meritocratic, race-essentialist approaches to education. They would be on much stronger ground if they became identified with an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but nonideological education for their children.Looking at the dangers facing American democracy from a different vantage point, Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” rejected the argument that Democrats need to constrain the party’s liberal wing.“The Democrats have been amazingly successful in national elections over the last 20 years,” Levitsky wrote in an email.They have won the popular vote in 7 out of 8 presidential elections — that’s almost unthinkable. They have also won the popular vote in the Senate in every six-year cycle since 2000. You cannot look at a party in a democracy that has won the popular vote almost without fail for two decades and say, gee, that party really has to get it together and address its “liabilities.”Instead, he argued,the liabilities lie in undemocratic electoral institutions such as the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate (where underpopulated states have an obscene amount of power that should be unacceptable in any democracy), gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts in many states, and recent political demographic trends — the concentration of Democratic votes in cities — that favor Republicans.“Until our parties are competing on a level playing field,” Levitsky added, “I am going to insist that our institutions are a bigger problem for democracy than liberal elitism and ‘wokeness.’ ”Jacob Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale, takes a similar position, writing by email:There are powerful economic and social forces at work here, and they’re particularly powerful in the United States, given that it has a deep history of racial inequality and division and it is on the leading edge of the transformation toward a knowledge economy in which educated citizens are concentrated in urban metros. The question, then, is how much Democrat elites’ strategic choices matter relative to these powerful forces. I lean toward thinking they’re less important than we typically assume.Instead, Hacker argued, the Republican Party has becomeparticularly dangerous because it rests on an increasing commitment to and reliance on what we called “countermajoritarianism” — the exploitation of the anti-urban and status quo biases of the American political system, which allow an intense minority party with a rural base and mostly negative policy agenda to gain and wield outsized power.The conservative strategy, which Hacker calls “minoritarianism,” means that “Republicans can avoid decisive defeats even in the most unfavorable circumstances. There is very little electoral incentive for the party to moderate.”The result? “Neither electoral forces nor organized interests are much of a guardrail against a G.O.P. increasingly veering off the nation’s once-established democratic path.”Julie Wronski, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, described the systemic constraints on the Democratic Party in an email:In the current two-party system, the Democratic Party isn’t just the crucial institutional advocate of democracy. It is the only political entity that can address the federal and state-level institutions that undermine full and equal democratic representation in the United States. Decisive victories should be enough to send a message that Americans do not support anti-democratic behavior.The problem for Democrats, Wronski continued, is thatdecisive victories are unlikely to occur at the national level because of the two-party system and partisan gerrymanders. Winning elections (while necessary) is not enough, especially if core constituencies of Democratic voters are explicitly targeted through state-level voting restrictions and gerrymanders.Those who would seek to restore respect for democratic norms in Trump’s Republican Party face another set of problems, according to Wronski. At the moment, she writes, a fundamental raison d’être of the Republican Party is to prevent the political consignment “to minority status” of “whites, and in particular white Christians, whose share of the population, electorate, and federal-level office holders is diminishing.” This commitment effectively precludes the adoption of a more inclusive strategy of “appealing to racial, ethnic, and religious minority voters,” because such an appeal would amount to the abandonment of the Republican Party’s implicit (and often quite explicit) promise to prevent “the threat of minority status that demographic change poses to white Christians.”Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, anticipates, at least in the short term, a worsening of the political environment:Trump has the support of nearly half of American voters and is very likely to run for president in 2024. Given electoral trends, there is a high likelihood that he will win. Moreover, even if he doesn’t win legitimately, there is little doubt that he will once again try to subvert the election outcome. At that point, his party is likely to control both houses of Congress and he may be successful in his efforts.Enos argued in an email that “the liabilities of the Democratic Party can be overstated” when there isa more fundamental problem in that the working-class base, across racial groups, of the Democratic Party has eroded and is further eroding. That Democrats may not have yet hit rock bottom with working-class voters is terrifying for the future of the party. As much as people want to point to cultural issues as the primary reason for this decline in support, the wheels on the decline were put in motion by macroeconomic trends and policies that made the economic and social standing of working-class people in the United States extremely tenuous.Those trends worked to the advantage of Democrats as recently as the election of Barack Obama, Enos continued, when many working-class voters “looking for change, even voted for a Black man with a foreign-sounding name in 2008.” But, Enos continued, “when the Republican Party stumbled into a populist message of anti-elitism, protectionism, cultural chauvinism, and anti-immigration, it was almost inevitable that it would accelerate the pull of working-class voters toward Republicans.”At the moment, Enos believes, the outlook is bleak:Given the current institutional setup in the United States and the calcified nature of partisanship, I am not sure that Republicans can ever experience large-scale electoral defeat of the type that would shake them from their current path. In 2020, they were led by the most unpopular president in modern history running during a disastrous time for U.S. society and they still didn’t lose by much. That, perhaps, is the real issue — even though they are massively unpopular, partially because of their anti-democratic moves — the nature of U.S. elections means that they will never truly be electorally punished enough to cause them to reform.All of this raises a key question. Has the Republican Party passed a tipping point to become, irrevocably, the voice of ultranationalist racist authoritarianism?It may be that in too many voters’ minds the Democratic Party has also crossed a line and that Democratic adoption of more centrist policies on cultural issues — in combination with a focus on economic and health care issues — just won’t be enough to counter the structural forces fortifying the Republican minority, its by-any-means-necessary politics and its commitment to white hegemony.The Biden administration is, in fact, pushing an agenda of economic investment and expanded health care, but the public is not yet responding. Part of this failure lies with the administration’s suboptimal messaging. More threatening to the party, however, is the possibility that a growing perception of the Democratic Party as wedded to progressive orthodoxies now blinds a large segment of the electorate to the positive elements — let’s call it a trillion-dollar bread-and-butter strategy — of what Biden and his party are trying to do.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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      Redistricting Makes California a Top House Battlefield for 2022

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      As legislators across the country draw House maps to protect incumbents, a nonpartisan commission of California citizens is drafting one that will scramble political fortunes for both parties.FRESNO, Calif. — For nearly three years, Phil Arballo has been running for Congress against Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican that Democrats across the country have loved to loathe, raising money by the truckload and compiling an email outreach list that is all the more impressive considering his lack of political experience.On Monday, Mr. Nunes announced he would resign from Congress at year’s end to lead former President Donald J. Trump’s media and technology company, continuing an unswerving fealty to Mr. Trump that had turned him into a national figure of admiration on the right and contempt on the left.Mr. Nunes was prodded toward that decision in large part by the nonpartisan California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which this week is putting the finishing touches on new boundaries.The plan is likely to transform the district he has represented for 19 years from a dusty, rural swath that voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 by 5 percentage points into one centered here in Fresno, the fifth-largest city in California, which Joseph R. Biden Jr. would have carried handily.Mr. Arballo, who lost to Mr. Nunes last year and had been hoping to challenge him again, realizes he will have a different opponent.“It’s going to be fun, though,” Mr. Arballo said, speaking from his spare campaign headquarters in a nondescript office park here. “And what we can do is also wash away the gerrymandering that’s going to be happening all over the country.”Legislatures from Nevada to Georgia are drafting new House district lines under the required reapportionment that occurs every 10 years. Most of them are seeking to protect incumbency and maintain a partisan edge by eliminating competitive seats, a process that Republicans in particular have exploited to gain a heavy early advantage in their push to wrest control of the House next year. The Justice Department filed suit on Monday against a Texas map gerrymandered by the Republican-led legislature that would make that state redder, potentially leaving only a single district in play.Mr. Nunes in Washington last year. He announced on Monday that he would resign from Congress to lead former President Donald J. Trump’s media and technology company.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut in California, the map will stand in stark contrast to most of the country, scrambling the fortunes of lawmakers in both parties and creating the broadest — perhaps the only — true battlefield for 2022. Lawmakers should see the full plan by Friday, and the commission will send it to the secretary of state by Dec. 27.Legislatures in nine other states, working off the 2020 census, have completed new maps of 116 House districts. In only 10 of those would the candidate who won 2020 have prevailed by 7 percentage points or less, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project; that is half the number of competitive districts that existed in 2018 and 2020.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.In contrast, California alone could end up with eight or nine battleground districts.“There’s no question we’re going to end up with more competitive seats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in Sacramento.The first draft of the map shocked much of the California delegation. No longer able to count on his rural, agricultural base, Mr. Nunes would have had to win over the gracious neighborhoods along Van Ness Avenue in Fresno, with their verandas and Black Lives Matter flags, and the hipsters of the city’s Tower District, who have more affection for Devin Nunes’ Cow, a Twitter account mocking the congressman, than the man himself. The commission appears intent on giving Latinos in the Central Valley a chance to elect their first representative ever.Mr. Nunes could have moved to a new district taking shape along the Nevada border, which will be heavily Republican, but he chose to go elsewhere. He was not alone in pondering a new future. After losing his San Diego-area seat to a Democrat in 2018, another outspoken conservative, Darrell Issa, moved to a conservative district abandoned by the indicted Republican Duncan Hunter. That seat could end up far more competitive.Representative Mike Garcia, a Republican, won a special election to replace a young Democrat felled by a sex scandal, then shocked Democrats by winning re-election last year by 333 votes in a district that Mr. Biden won by 35,000. The commission, however, appears intent on lopping off Republican-heavy Simi Valley from Mr. Garcia’s district in north Los Angeles County, leaving him holding on by a thread to a considerably less conservative seat.“It makes guys like me perk up and go, ‘OK, what was the rationale for dumping this?’” Mr. Garcia said of the commission’s decision. “When you go through all the questions that are, in my opinion, objective, the only thing you’re left with is a rationale that is political.”Democrats are at risk, too. The commission has proposed eliminating the Los Angeles seat of Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, who in 1992 became the first Mexican American woman elected to Congress. Representative Katie Porter, a hero of the national Democratic Party, appears likely to be left with a more Republican district in Orange County — a fate that could prompt her to run for the Senate instead, either by challenging Alex Padilla, the Democrat appointed to fill Vice President Kamala Harris’s seat, or waiting for Senator Dianne Feinstein, 88, to step aside.Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard on Capitol Hill in 2019. The nonpartisan California Citizens Redistricting Commission has proposed eliminating her seat.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesCalifornia’s 10th Congressional District, currently represented by Representative Josh Harder, a young, up-and-coming Democrat, will become heavily Republican, most likely sending Mr. Harder in search of a new district. (It was the expected destination of Mr. Nunes.) That could cost the quiet backbench Democrat Jerry McNerney, who might find himself a sacrificial lamb.The former governor who set the process in motion, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is watching the free-for-all with glee. When he took office in 2003, he had never thought of redistricting reform, he said in an interview last week. But what he found was a system he called “wacky,” in which Democrats and Republicans came together every 10 years to redraw the lines of State Assembly districts, State Senate seats and U.S. House seats to preserve the status quo — politicians picking their voters, not the other way around.“It was worse than the Politburo,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican who came to office after a recall election. “The Constitution says, ‘We the people,’ not ‘We the politicians.’”From 2002 to 2010, one California congressional district changed party hands. Since 2012, when the first map of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s redistricting commission went into effect, 16 seats have flipped. He called it “without doubt” one of his proudest achievements.The commission includes five Republicans, five Democrats and four members not affiliated with a party, selected from citizen applicants. Commissioner J. Ray Kennedy, a Democrat, said the panel must create districts of equal population that are contiguous and compact, and to the extent practicable, keep counties, cities, neighborhoods and “communities of interest” together.A person should be able to walk from any part of a district to another without crossing into a different one, though bulges and loops do form to comply with the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that minority voters get representation. Competitiveness is not a criterion, but it is a byproduct.Compliance with the Voting Rights Act could create the first two Latino districts in the Central Valley, to the detriment of two Republicans: Mr. Nunes and Representative David Valadao, who will square off next year with Rudy Salas, a member of the State Assembly and a prime Democratic recruit. The district remains highly competitive but will slightly shift from Fresno and into Mr. Salas’s stronghold of Bakersfield.“The way that the commission is looking at this independently, it’s actually shifting the district toward my home base, Kern County, which is my media market, where they’ve known me for at least 12-plus years since my time at City Council, and now with the State Assembly,” Mr. Salas said on Tuesday. “So I feel very confident.”The contrast between California and the rest of the country is stark.Ryan Mulcahy, the campaign manager for Mr. Arballo’s congressional campaign, in Fresno, Calif., on Friday.Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesIn Georgia, Republican legislators collapsed two competitive districts won narrowly by Democrats into one heavily Democratic district in suburban Atlanta. The state will have no competitive districts next year.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Georgia Governor's Race Puts State at Center of 2022 Political Drama

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      Former Senator David Perdue, encouraged by Donald Trump, is challenging Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who defied the former president.ATLANTA — Former Senator David Perdue’s leap Monday into a primary challenge against Gov. Brian Kemp, his fellow Republican, ensured that Georgia will be at the hot molten core of the political universe next year, with costly and competitive races that will test the grip of Trumpism over the G.O.P. and measure the backlash against President Biden in a state that increasingly reflects the country’s demography and its divisions.Already a battleground at the presidential level, Georgia will be the scene of intense Republican primary showdowns for both governor and secretary of state, followed by general election contests in which Democrats — led by Senator Raphael Warnock, who is seeking a full term, and Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Mr. Kemp and announced another bid last week — hope to keep the state a bluer tint of purple.Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat after one term to the Democrat Jon Ossoff in January, is former President Donald J. Trump’s preferred candidate, while Mr. Kemp earned a place on Mr. Trump’s enemies list after declining to help the former president overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. The two will now face off in May in an internecine war that may offer the closest approximation to a referendum on Trumpism next year as any in the country.“Look, I like Brian. This isn’t personal,” Mr. Perdue said Monday in a video announcing his candidacy. But he implied that Mr. Kemp had damaged his standing with Georgia’s Trumpist base of Republican voters.“He has failed all of us,” Mr. Perdue said of Mr. Kemp, “and cannot win in November.”Aides to Mr. Kemp gave Mr. Perdue a blistering reception, revealing the depths of the anger over what they view as his betrayal of a fellow Republican and former political ally. They noted that the governor had actually beaten Ms. Abrams, while Mr. Perdue was, most recently, that most loathsome of nouns in the former president’s vocabulary: a loser.And Georgians First Inc., a pro-Kemp political action committee, released an ad reminding voters of Mr. Perdue’s stock trades of companies whose business fell under the purview of his Senate committees.While Mr. Kemp boasted a “proven track record,” a campaign spokesman for the governor, Cody Hall, said on Monday, “Perdue is best known for ducking debates, padding his stock portfolio during a pandemic, and losing winnable races.”Endorsing Mr. Perdue on Monday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp “a very weak governor” who “can’t win because the MAGA base — which is enormous — will never vote for him.”In entering the governor’s race, Mr. Perdue joins a number of other G.O.P. candidates who could form a slate of high-profile Trump loyalists in November: The former football star Herschel Walker, with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, is seeking the nomination to run against Mr. Warnock. And Representative Jody Hice is challenging the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who also rebuffed Mr. Trump’s entreaties to help overturn his defeat.Both Mr. Walker and Mr. Hice have parroted Mr. Trump’s false claim that election fraud cost him the 2020 election..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And Mr. Perdue did not limit his own attack to Mr. Kemp. Republicans were disunited in Georgia, he said, “and Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger are to blame.”The influence of Mr. Trump, who has not ruled out another presidential run in 2024, is bound to be felt in other states’ midterm races. But Mr. Trump has been particularly fixated on Georgia, a state he lost by fewer than 12,000 votes. He and some of his allies are being investigated by the Fulton County district attorney’s office for potential criminal violations after reaching out to state officials, including Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger, in an effort to change the election results.If Mr. Perdue and Mr. Walker lead the Republican ticket next fall, Georgia voters will be forced to choose between revulsion for Mr. Trump and his incendiary politics, on the one hand, and, on the other, dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden and unease with the liberal politics that Ms. Abrams and Mr. Warnock embody.The drama will unfold in a state that, with its gaping divides along the lines of race, class and region, mirrors the nation and its partisan, polarized and increasingly poisonous politics.Georgia also reflects broader trends among the two national parties. Democrats are increasingly turning to more diverse candidates. But the candidates are still stepping gingerly, as Ms. Abrams did in her launch video by trumpeting the idea of “one Georgia,” and seeking to elevate unifying issues that can appeal to die-hard liberals and fickle suburbanites alike.Some Democrats fear that Ms. Abrams, a veteran state legislator and voting-rights advocate, may face an uphill climb in the governor’s race given the challenges confronting the party nationally: an unpopular president, inflation, Covid-19, and simmering concerns over violent crime and how American history is taught in schools.But many expressed hope on Monday that the coming fight between Mr. Kemp and Mr. Perdue would benefit Ms. Abrams, who is seeking to become the state’s first Black governor, and other down-ballot Democrats.Stacey Abrams is hoping to benefit from the Republican infighting.Eze Amos for The New York Times“While David Perdue and Brian Kemp fight each other, Stacey Abrams will be fighting for the people of Georgia,” said her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, pointing to Ms. Abrams’s stances on health coverage, school funding and Covid-related health policies.For Republicans, Georgia has now become perhaps the most consequential proving ground in the party’s Trump wars. Should Mr. Perdue and other Trump-backed candidates lose their primaries, it will raise grave questions about the former president’s clout in the party as well as his own capacity to compete in a must-win state in 2024.By running, Mr. Perdue and his supporters are effectively sending the message that Mr. Trump must be accommodated — and his election denialism perpetuated.Mr. Perdue’s allies say their case is very simple: Mr. Kemp is unelectable next November because a significant number of Trump devotees will stay at home if he’s nominated.“The bitterness between Kemp and Trump is so deep that Kemp cannot win a general election,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is backing Mr. Perdue. “The question for Georgia Republicans is would you like Perdue or Stacey Abrams, because if you’re for Kemp, you’re effectively voting for Stacey Abrams.”For his part, Mr. Kemp, who in his 2018 race brandished guns and threatened to round up “criminal illegals” in his pickup truck, can be expected to remind Republican voters that it is hard to outflank him to the right on issues like gun rights or abortion rights. He also signed into law Georgia’s controversial new voting law, which limits ballot access for voters in urban and suburban areas that are home to many Democrats.Mr. Kemp’s supporters also say they believe that Ms. Abrams is enough of a polarizing force to cauterize any G.O.P. wounds sustained in the primary.“She will inspire Republicans to come back out,” said Erick Erickson, a Georgia-based conservative writer and radio host. “They’re not going to stay home in Kemp-versus-Abrams or Perdue-versus-Abrams.”Still, Mr. Erickson, an outspoken Trump detractor, expressed concern that a nasty primary could disrupt next year’s legislative session and deny Mr. Kemp any new accomplishments to run on.Brian Kemp earned a place on Mr. Trump’s enemies list after declining to help the former president overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesDemocrats, who are eager to amplify the opposition’s discord — and to downplay Mr. Biden’s unpopularity, which is weighing on the party in Georgia as elsewhere — can barely contain their glee.“All that Perdue is going to be talking about is ‘the election was stolen,’” said Jennifer Jordan, an Atlanta-area state senator running for attorney general. “The voters in my district, the chamber of commerce Republicans, that is incredibly unseemly to them. You have this guy, Perdue, who had some appeal in the business community, and he’s basically giving that away because now he’s just going to become Trump’s boy.”Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said she expected Republicans to rally around the party’s nominee in November. But even if that were Mr. Kemp, she said, Mr. Trump could still be a wild card.“If Brian Kemp won,” she said, “would Donald Trump be disciplined enough to keep his mouth shut in a general election?” More

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      in Elections

      Bob Dole, Old Soldier and Stalwart of the Senate, Dies at 98

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      Mr. Dole, a son of the Kansas prairie who was left for dead on a World War II battlefield, became one of the longest-serving Republican leaders.Bob Dole, the plain-spoken son of the prairie who overcame Dust Bowl deprivation in Kansas and grievous battle wounds in Italy to become the Senate majority leader and the last of the World War II generation to win his party’s nomination for president, died on Sunday. He was 98. His death was announced by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation.It did not say where he died. He had announced in February that he had Stage IV lung cancer and that he was beginning treatment.A Republican, Mr. Dole was one of the most durable political figures in the last decades of the last century. He was nominated for vice president in 1976 and then for president a full 20 years later. He spent a quarter-century in the Senate, where he was his party’s longest-serving leader until Mitch McConnell of Kentucky surpassed that record in June 2018.President Biden called Mr. Dole “an American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.” He added, “To me, he was also a friend whom I could look to for trusted guidance, or a humorous line at just the right moment to settle frayed nerves.”As the old soldiers of World War II faded away, Mr. Dole, who had been a lieutenant in the Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division and was wounded so severely on a battlefield that he was left for dead, came to personify the resilience of his generation. In his post-political career, he devoted himself to raising money for the World War II Memorial in Washington and spent weekends there welcoming visiting veterans.In one of his last public appearances, in December 2018, he joined the line at the Capitol Rotunda where the body of former President George H.W. Bush, an erstwhile political rival and fellow veteran, lay in state. As an aide helped him up from his wheelchair, Mr. Dole, using his left hand because his right had been rendered useless by the war, saluted the flag-draped coffin of the last president to have served in World War II.Mr. Dole with President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. He was national Republican chairman at the time. Associated PressPolitically, Mr. Dole was a man for all seasons, surviving for more than three decades in his party’s upper echelons, even though he was sometimes at odds ideologically with other Republican leaders.He was national Republican chairman under President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s; the running mate to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976; chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s; and presidential standard-bearer during Newt Gingrich’s “revolution” of the mid-1990s, when the Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years and upended the power dynamic on Capitol Hill.More recently, Mr. Dole, almost alone among his party’s old guard, endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in 2016, after his preferred candidates had fallen by the wayside. On the eve of his 93rd birthday, he was the only previous Republican presidential nominee to appear at the party’s convention in Cleveland, where Mr. Trump was nominated.Mr. Dole himself ran three times for the White House and finally won the nomination in 1996, only to lose to President Bill Clinton after a historically disastrous campaign. He had given up his secure post in the Senate to pursue the presidency, although, as he acknowledged, he was more suited to the Senate.As the Republican leader, he helped broker compromises that shaped much of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995. (Mr. Dole was not wild about the deployment either, but he long believed that a president, of either party, should be supported once he decided something as important as committing troops abroad.)A skilled legislative mechanic, Mr. Dole understood what every senator wanted and what each could live with, and he enjoyed the art of political bartering.He was so at home in the Senate’s marble corridors that during his last campaign, in 1996, he constantly had to remind voters that he was “not born in a blue suit” — Dole shorthand for saying that he had a life before arriving in Washington in 1961. In fact, he had been shaped profoundly by the twin experiences of growing up poor in Depression-era Kansas and enduring the shattering wounds of war.Young Bob, left, with his siblings in the backyard of their home in Russell, Kan.Dole family photo, via Associated PressWith dust storms blackening the skies of his tiny hometown, Russell, in north-central Kansas, and destroying the wheat economy, the Doles moved into the cramped basement of their home and rented out the upstairs to make ends meet.As for the war, it changed the course of Mr. Dole’s life. A star athlete who lettered in football, basketball and track and who was voted best looking in his class at Russell High School, he had planned to become a surgeon. Instead, he came home from the war in Europe in a body cast, mostly paralyzed.He spent 39 months convalescing, much of it in surgery — as a patient, not as the surgeon he had hoped to become. Instead, he became a lawyer and a politician, though his injuries kept him from many of the fundamental rituals of politics. His right hand was so damaged that he couldn’t shake hands, and he would clutch a pen in his fist to discourage people from trying. Unable to cut his meat with a knife, he tended to avoid political dinners and ate at home.Mr. Dole began his political career as a conservative and evolved into a pragmatist, even forging relationships with prominent liberals. With George S. McGovern of South Dakota, he expanded the food stamp program, and with Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, he made school lunches a federal entitlement. Kansas farmers applauded both efforts.He was such a good deal-maker that his own convictions were not always apparent. By the end of his long career, Mr. Dole had cast more than 12,000 votes, having stood on both sides of many issues.He opposed many of the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Avoiding budget deficits had been his North Star, given his hardscrabble youth. Sometimes he supported tax increases, which led Mr. Gingrich to brand him “the tax collector for the welfare state.” But in 1995, he tried to recast himself as a tax-cutter, memorably telling party leaders, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that’s what you want.” He then signed a pledge not to raise taxes as president, a pledge he had previously rejected.“It adds a certain poignancy,” Richard Norton Smith, the former director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009, “that he found himself chasing the caboose of movement conservatism at the height of his career.”Mr. Dole thrived as chairman of the Finance Committee, a powerful position that attracted big corporate donors often seeking favors. At one point he raised more money from special interests than any other senator. A particularly generous donor was Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agribusiness; over two decades, the company received millions of dollars in tax breaks and federal subsidies.“When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government,” Mr. Dole bluntly told The Wall Street Journal, pinpointing why the system benefited wealthy interests over poor ones.His fellow Republican senators elected him their leader in both the majority and the minority for a combined 11 years, from 1985 to 1996.Mr. Dole in 1990 on the balcony adjacent to the Republican leader’s office at the Capitol. The balcony was later named for him.Michael Geissinger/Library of CongressHe conducted much of his bargaining with other senators on the balcony off the Republican leader’s office. When he left the Senate in 1996, his colleagues unanimously passed a resolution naming it the Robert J. Dole balcony. It overlooked the National Mall and the Washington Monument, affording him what he wistfully called “the second-best view in Washington.” Unofficially, the balcony was called “Dole Beach,” because he often escaped there to soak up the sun and refresh his perpetual tan.But away from Capitol Hill, Mr. Dole was a fish out of water. His insider skills as a tactician and deal closer did not translate to the presidential campaign trail.During the 1996 race, he was faulted as having no overarching vision — for his campaign or for the country. He chafed at handlers who tried to package him, and he never adapted to the scripted politics of the television age. During speeches, he often lapsed into legislative lingo and referred to himself in the third person. He was detached as a candidate, more wry commentator than engaged participant.“Stayed on message,” Mr. Dole congratulated himself in front of reporters after one campaign event, then went on to mock the process in which he was involved: “Every time I do that ‘reconnect the government to values’ stuff, I feel like a plumber.”After that final quest for the presidency, Mr. Dole became a lobbyist for the powerhouse international law firm Alston & Bird. Despite his standing as a well-connected Washington insider, he cultivated a new persona, one unexpected for a man of Mr. Dole’s dark visage and mordant wit: that of self-deprecating loser.“Playing up the image of the downtrodden also-ran was great fun,” he wrote in his 2005 book, “One Soldier’s Story: A Memoir.” He starred in Super Bowl commercials for Visa (“I just can’t win”) in 1997 and for Pepsi in 2001 and later made a cameo in a Pepsi ad featuring Britney Spears. He spoofed previous ads he had made for the male potency drug Viagra, for which he had become a spokesman after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer.“Once you lose,” he told The New York Times, “people like you.”It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.Mr. Dole, then Senate majority leader, at a news conference with House Speaker Newt Gingrich during budget negotiations in 1996.David Scull/The New York TimesLike Nixon, Mr. Dole had overcome struggles early in life. And like Nixon, he felt embittered toward people for whom he thought things came easy.“I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way,” he said when he announced he was leaving the Senate in 1996.His bitterness found an outlet in partisanship, which he often expressed in acerbic asides. It flared in public during a vice-presidential debate in 1976, when he blamed Democrats for all the wars of the 20th century, and again in 2004, when some fellow Vietnam veterans challenged the military record of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Dole, who had received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with an oak leaf cluster, joined in, questioning whether Mr. Kerry had deserved his Purple Hearts.“Three Purple Hearts,” Mr. Dole said of Mr. Kerry, “and never bled that I know of.”Wounds and RecoveryRobert Joseph Dole was born in his parents’ house in Russell on July 22, 1923, the second of four children of Doran and Bina (Talbott) Dole. His mother was an expert seamstress and sold sewing machines; his father worked in a creamery and later ran a grain elevator.Mr. Dole enlisted in the Army Reserve during college and was called to active duty in 1943. On April 14, 1945, in the mountains of Italy outside the small town of Castel D’Aiano, about 65 miles north of Florence, the Germans began firing on his platoon. When he saw a fellow soldier fall, Mr. Dole went to pull him to safety. But as he scrambled away he was struck by flying metal. It blew apart his right shoulder and arm and broke several vertebrae in his neck and spine.His men dragged him back to a foxhole, where he lay crumpled in his blood-soaked uniform for nine hours before he was evacuated. He was just 21.It was a horrifying turn of events for one of Russell’s most promising young men. Unable to feed or care for himself, he feared he was doomed to a life of selling pencils on the street.Mr. Dole recovering from his war injuries in 1945. Flying metal had blown apart his right shoulder and arm and broke vertebrae in his neck and spine. Dole family photo, via Associated PressHe spent more than three years recovering and underwent at least seven operations. Back in Russell, he devised a homemade weight-and-pulley system to rebuild his strength. The townspeople rallied around him, pooling their nickels and dimes for his treatment.Russell was a speck on the flat Kansas prairie, but in the Dole biography it took on mythic significance. In his political campaigns, Russell was cast as the shaper of noble, small-town virtues and Mr. Dole as their personification.Remembering that period, and the generosity of his neighbors, often brought him to tears. In his first appearance with President Ford in Russell in 1976, with 10,000 well-wishers crammed into the downtown business district, he thanked the townspeople for their support after the war. Then he started to cry and couldn’t go on. The audience fell silent. Finally, Mr. Ford stood and began clapping, and the audience joined in.Regaining his composure, Mr. Dole said: “That was a long time ago.”And yet even in 1996, long after Russell and his recovery had become a staple of his origin story, he could hardly mention that period without choking up. When his image-makers wrote references to it in his prepared remarks, he would often skip over those passages or truncate them to avoid the inevitable tears.He could not avoid them on the final leg of his presidential campaign, however, by which time it was clear that he was going to lose. At a bowling alley in Des Moines, his friend Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator and Mr. Dole’s wingman in those last days on the road, delivered a spontaneous tribute to him.“This is the last crusade of a great warrior,” Mr. McCain told a small crowd over the clatter of falling bowling pins, “a member of a generation of Americans who went out and made the world safe for democracy so that we could have lives that were far better for ourselves and for our children.”Mr. Dole, standing nearby, wept.After the war, during his recuperation, he met Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist, and married her three months later, in 1948. He returned to college on the G.I. Bill. He already had credits from the University of Kansas, where he had studied pre-med. With Ms. Holden’s help, he earned a dual bachelor’s and law degree in 1952 at Washburn Municipal University (now Washburn University) in Topeka, Kan. They had a daughter, Robin, in 1954.Readjusting his aspirations from medicine to the law, Mr. Dole had to develop his mind, he said, because he could not use his hands. His life, he said, would be “an exercise in compensations.”Bob and Elizabeth Dole following their wedding  at the Washington National Cathedral in 1975.Dole family photo, via Associated PressRussell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.After a stint in the Legislature and as Russell County attorney, he won a House seat in Congress in 1960 and ascended to the Senate in 1968.The Nixon InfluenceNixon won the presidency that same year and became the driving political influence in Mr. Dole’s life. Mr. Dole saw them as soul mates. Both were self-made men, politically ambitious loners disaffected from their party’s elite Eastern establishment, Nixon hailing from California.Mr. Dole made a name for himself by zealously defending Nixon, particularly in the president’s continued prosecution of the Vietnam War and his controversial Supreme Court nominees. He could be so snarly, though, that Senator William B. Saxbe, Republican of Ohio, memorably derided him as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and said he was so disagreeable, “he couldn’t sell beer on a troop ship.”Even Nixon worried that Mr. Dole’s lust for the fight would undermine his effectiveness. In a memorandum made public years later, Nixon wrote that it was “important that we not let Dole destroy his usefulness by having him step up to every hard, fast one.”Mr. Dole had flown to Washington from Chicago aboard Air Force One in 1971 accompanying President Nixon and the first lady, Pat Nixon, along with members of Congress from Illinois: from left, Senator Charles H. Percy, Mr. Dole and Representatives Leslie C. Arends and John B. Anderson.Bob Daugherty/Associated PressNixon named him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971. It was a role Mr. Dole relished as he raked in political chits. The travel kept him far from home, and he and Phyllis divorced in 1972.Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, then a federal trade commissioner; she later became a cabinet secretary, president of the American Red Cross and a senator from North Carolina. They became one of Washington’s original power couples.Elizabeth Dole as well as Mr. Dole’s daughter, Robin Dole, survive him. His first wife, Phyllis Holden Macey, died in 2008. After Nixon won re-election in 1972 and the Watergate scandal was closing in, he dumped Mr. Dole as party chairman, saying the senator was too independent. But Mr. Dole remained loyal, so much so that he tried to shut down the live television coverage of the Watergate hearings.When Nixon died in 1994, Mr. Dole delivered a sentimental eulogy, sobbing as he described the disgraced former president as a “boy who heard train whistles in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track.”He also recalled Nixon’s advice that while failure was sad, “the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he believed that Nixon, in his preparations for his own funeral, had a political motive in asking Mr. Dole to deliver the eulogy. Nixon, Mr. Smith said, expected that Mr. Dole would become emotional, and that his “authentic display of grief” would reveal Mr. Dole’s human side and perhaps help his presidential bid.‘Democrat Wars’Ford, who was Nixon’s vice president and successor as president, gave Mr. Dole his first shot at national office, choosing him as his running mate in 1976. Ford needed to shore up strength with conservatives and also hoped that the selection would appeal to voters in farm states. But Mr. Dole’s performance during the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 15, 1976, against Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic nominee, was so harsh that some analysts say it contributed to Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter.Mr. Dole, the vice presidential nominee, with President Gerald R. Ford at the close of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City.United Press InternationalIn response to a question about Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon, Mr. Dole veered off topic and in an inexplicable tangent said: “I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”A stunned Mr. Mondale said he could not believe that Mr. Dole would cast the war against Germany and Japan in partisan terms. Mr. Dole, he said, “has richly earned his reputation as hatchet man.” Even Republicans joined in the post-debate criticism, as did Mr. Dole himself.“I went for the jugular,” he said later. “My own.”The reaction was so negative that he sought out an image consultant and paid her to help him appear more likable.Still, he ran for president in 1980, a misbegotten venture that ended almost as soon as it began. He tried again in 1988 and won his party’s Iowa caucus, but couldn’t overcome Vice President Bush’s forces in New Hampshire, where Bush had the invaluable support of the governor, John Sununu, and ran a TV spot suggesting that Mr. Dole would raise taxes.The ad infuriated Mr. Dole, who snapped that Bush should “stop lying about my record.” The comment only reinforced the impression that Mr. Dole was too mean to be president.But by 1996 his party seemed incapable of denying him the nomination. At that point, President Clinton was popular, the nation was enjoying a period of peace and prosperity, and the strongest potential Republican contenders — Gen. Colin L. Powell among them — declined to run.Mr. Dole prevailed over a weak primary field that included Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patrick Buchanan, a conservative broadcast journalist. But then Mr. Dole ran a terrible general election campaign, offering voters little rationale for denying Mr. Clinton a second term. At times, he made no pretense that he was even taking his task seriously.Bob and Elizabeth Dole after he won  the presidential nomination at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times“We’re trying to get good pictures,” he told reporters on his campaign plane the day after he quit the Senate to devote himself full time to running for president. “Don’t worry very much about what I say.”In 1995, Richard Ben Cramer, one of Mr. Dole’s biographers, asked him to name the first thing he might do in the White House.“Haven’t thought,” he replied in clipped Dole-speak, as quoted by Mr. Cramer.“If I get elected, at my age, you know,” he trailed off, revealing a paucity of plans for the presidency. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. It’s not an agenda. I’m just gonna serve my country.”His lack of preparation stood in stark contrast to his wife’s tendency to over prepare. Mrs. Dole delivered a polished star turn for her husband at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996. But her choreographed precision only highlighted how much her husband was winging it.“Watching Bob Dole campaign for the presidency,” the journalist Michael Kelly wrote in The New Yorker, “is a curious and dislocating experience, like showering clothed or eating naked.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he was always puzzled about why Mr. Dole, who had sought the nomination for so long, seemed to take it so casually and “wasn’t willing to adapt himself to the changing media climate.” Mr. Smith concluded that this was a mark of Mr. Dole’s integrity. “He couldn’t jackknife himself into a persona that was fundamentally at odds with the real thing,” he said.In one of his last public appearances, in 2018, Mr. Dole saluted the coffin of George H.W. Bush, the last president to have served in World War II.Erin Schaff for The New York TimesOthers said his goal was not the presidency but winning the nomination — and proving he could rehabilitate himself politically just as he had physically.Mr. Dole won 41 percent of the popular vote, with Mr. Clinton taking 49 percent and Ross Perot, a Reform Party candidate, winning 8 percent. The magnitude of Mr. Dole’s loss was more evident in the electoral votes; he won just 159 to Mr. Clinton’s 379.In his memoir almost a decade later, Mr. Dole framed his crushing defeat in a way that would have made Nixon proud.“Losing means that at least you were in the race,” he wrote. “It means that when the whistle sounded, life did not find you watching from the sidelines.” More

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      Ex-Senator David Perdue to Run for Governor of Georgia

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      Mr. Perdue, an ally of Donald Trump, will challenge the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, in a Republican primary.ATLANTA — David Perdue, the former U.S. senator from Georgia and ally of Donald Trump, plans to announce on Monday that he will run in a Republican primary against the state’s incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, according to people familiar with Mr. Perdue’s plan. Mr. Trump has vowed to orchestrate Mr. Kemp’s defeat as payback for the governor’s refusal to help overturn the former president’s November election loss in the state.The news of Mr. Perdue’s pending announcement, first reported on Sunday by Politico, illustrates both the grip the former president still wields over the G.O.P. and his willingness to upend state races entirely because of his personal pique toward Republicans he feels are insufficiently loyal to him.Mr. Perdue’s decision to try to knock out a fellow Georgia Republican in 2022 is also sure to ignite an ugly — and costly — intraparty war before a general election in which the Republican nominee will likely face Stacey Abrams, the Democratic superstar whose national fame will allow her to amass a huge campaign war chest. Ms. Abrams, who lost to Mr. Kemp in 2018, announced her own run for governor last week.Ms. Abrams’ announcement accelerated Mr. Perdue’s decision, moving up his timeline to before the new year. The former senator has told people he was uncertain about running but decided to run because he’s gravely worried about her prospects for victory over an incumbent who has been weakened by Mr. Trump’s unrelenting attacks.Mr. Perdue, 71, a wealthy former corporate executive, narrowly lost his U.S. Senate seat to Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, in a January runoff. Reports about his return, this time as a candidate for governor, have been circulating for weeks. A number of Republicans told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in October that Mr. Perdue was considering the move. At a September rally in rural Georgia, Mr. Trump appeared to encourage Mr. Perdue to challenge Mr. Kemp, who is seeking a second term..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Trump, standing at a lectern, turned to Mr. Perdue and praised him as a “great guy.”“Are you going to run for governor, David Perdue?” he asked.Mr. Trump then went on to accuse Mr. Kemp, 57, a former Trump favorite, of being a “RINO governor,” meaning “Republican in name only.” He also described him as “a complete and total disaster on election integrity.”The looming battle between Mr. Perdue and Mr. Kemp will help determine the extent of Mr. Trump’s influence heading into Georgia’s crucial 2022 general election. Mr. Trump has been working to set up a pro-Trump Republican slate in Georgia made up of politicians who have supported his false assertions that the 2020 presidential election was somehow “rigged.” The list so far includes the former football star Herschel Walker, who is running for U.S. Senate; U.S. Representative Jody Hice, who is running for secretary of state; and State Senator Burt Jones, who is running for lieutenant governor.The outcome of the Georgia elections will have important implications for the country. Raphael Warnock, the other Democratic senator from Georgia who won a January runoff race, is up for election in 2022, and that contest may help determine which party controls the Senate. And with Ms. Abrams in the race, the election will serve as a dramatic plot point in the closely watched story of one of the Democratic Party’s most respected and ambitious politicians.Ms. Abrams lost to Mr. Kemp in the 2018 governor’s race by about 55,000 votes. But the result was close enough to convince many observers that Georgia, once reliably Republican, had become a true battleground state. And Ms. Abrams’s organizing prowess is believed to have helped pave the path to victory for Senators Ossoff and Warnock, as well as President Biden, who also squeaked out an upset victory in Georgia.In 2018, Mr. Kemp ran as a “politically incorrect conservative” candidate proudly in the Trump mold, armed with a pro-Second Amendment message, a hard-line illegal immigration stance and, crucially, the endorsement of Mr. Trump himself.But the fact that Mr. Trump has unequivocally turned against Mr. Kemp — and is actively seeking vengeance — has created an awkward and potentially perilous situation for the governor. Polling commissioned by Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC released in August showed Mr. Kemp leading Mr. Perdue by six points among likely Republican primary voters. But the poll showed that if Mr. Perdue were endorsed by Mr. Trump, he would leapfrog ahead of Mr. Kemp.Mr. Kemp, however, is a savvy politician and former two-term secretary of state well-known to Georgia Republicans. A campaign disclosure from July showed that he had amassed nearly $12 million. But some Republicans are concerned that he will have to spend dearly to fend off Mr. Perdue’s primary challenge. If he wins, he may find himself depleted financially as he heads into a general election against the formidable Ms. Abrams.Some Republicans have quietly expressed surprise that Mr. Perdue would want to take on Mr. Kemp. Mr. Perdue did not seem to relish the down-and-dirty realities of running in a close race when Mr. Ossoff challenged him last year.In February, Mr. Perdue said that he would not challenge Mr. Warnock in the Senate race. The New York Times reported at the time that Mr. Perdue, aware of Mr. Trump’s vengeful streak, was put off by the idea of running for office in 2022 — and of being involved in Mr. Trump’s plot to get even with the people on his enemies list, including Georgia’s Republican governor. More

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      Feeling Hopeless About Today’s Politics?

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      Readers reflect different states of mind in response to a column by Michelle Goldberg about political despair.To the Editor:Re “The Problem of Political Despair,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, Nov. 23):I see hopelessness from my friends and colleagues across the nation.I taught high school history and government for 25 years, practiced law, ran for local office, and wrote speeches for both Republican and Democratic candidates up to the state level. Politics and government were my lifelong passions.But this year I was advised by medical providers that my saturation in the daily decline of our civic life was making me ill. I turned out to be representative of my friends, who withdrew from reading, discussing, listening to and commenting upon the state of our disunion.We beg those within the government to offer us crumbs of optimism, but it doesn’t heal the intuition that things will only devolve into some dystopian nightmare not yet fictionalized on film. Ms. Goldberg’s concern for her children is not misplaced.Lynne D. FeldmanUpper Saddle River, N.J.To the Editor:Despair is a state of mind, not reality. One of the most powerful weapons of those who seek to muscle their way into power or to destroy an enemy is to get inside the heads of their opponents. Hence, propaganda is one of the great weapons of would-be autocrats.When a president backs away from the battle over a Supreme Court justice nomination, as Barack Obama did, when we allow Americans to arm themselves with military-style weapons, when we allow gerrymandering to take away control from a majority and hand it to a minority, those are the moments when actions were needed but we shrank away. Add to that the propaganda meant to embolden the radical and immobilize the enemy and here we are in America today.We cannot change what has gone before. We can only recognize today’s threats and take action against them. Pass the voting rights legislation. Pass legislation meant to support middle-class Americans in their desires to live good lives. Aggressively prosecute those who openly threaten our way of life. Turn up the messaging from the White House and around the country to drown out the Tucker Carlsons of our world.Despair is a state of mind, not reality. Reality lives in the actions we take, and these times call for strong actions to be taken.Bruce NeumanWater Mill, N.Y.To the Editor:As a left-leaning mother of two daughters who has protested mightily for women’s rights and gun safety during my six decades on this threatened earth, I hoped to breathe a sigh of relief after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. I am instead far beyond “the bad feeling” Michelle Goldberg addresses in her column.The blatantly unconstitutional Texas abortion law that the Supreme Court refused to halt, the disturbing Rittenhouse verdict that encourages armed vigilantes to shoot to kill, a Republican Party that is OK with the posting of an image showing the throat-slashing of a female member of Congress — how do we wake up every day and not feel as if bringing children into this world was a mistake?Is this the country we envisioned for our families? No, no, a thousand times no!It is time for reasonable people from all parties to stop being complacent and start fighting for a fair and just country, as if our very lives depend on it — because they do! I am dusting off my protest signs and phoning my representatives and getting noisy! I will join with other like-minded souls to make my voice heard before it’s too late.I will actively work to vote out of office anyone, regardless of party, who doesn’t support women’s and abortion rights, common-sense gun safety and protecting our planet. The time to stand up for our children and prevent a return to Donald Trump in 2024 is now.Jill LeyGreenbrae, Calif.To the Editor:Michelle Goldberg calls on our political leadership to help us find a renewed faith in our democratic institutions, but I wonder if any such attempt would be inherently disingenuous. Even before the more radical instances of gerrymandering and whatever else we might associate with the most recent incarnation of the G.O.P., it seems as if our democracy has been lost for some time.Outside of a certain Tocquevillian nostalgia, it proves difficult to find examples of ordinary Americans exercising anything like self-government, and even that applied only to white men. Historically, the norm has been varying shades of oligarchy, occasionally punctuated by moments in which elite interests seemed to coincide with popular ones.Rather than wondering if our democracy is at risk because of despair, perhaps we should start asking whether it’s being helped at all by our continued optimism, and if instead we shouldn’t start to consider whether we’ve ever been democratic citizens at all.Caleb MillerMarblehead, Mass.The writer is a visiting assistant professor of politics at Washington and Lee University.To the Editor:We may very well be on the verge of a long, very long, period of minority rule in America, and therefore an end to democracy as we know it.A combination of voter suppression laws and gerrymandering will send even more radical representatives to Congress, and they will be in the majority. Look for the Republicans to continue to provide tax breaks for the rich, deny climate change and set their sights on gutting Social Security. Acceptance, even encouragement, of vigilantes openly carrying weapons on our streets will increase. Economic and racial equality efforts will be stopped in their tracks.When the Constitutional Convention had ended, Benjamin Franklin was asked what the delegates had given us. “A republic — if you can keep it” was his answer. One political party has decided that is no longer of interest to them.Robert CarrollQuincy, Mass.To the Editor:Well said, Michelle. My sentiments exactly.One thing you can say for Republicans, though, is they know how to win even if they don’t know how to (or care to) govern.I despair.Linda SlezakHampton Bays, N.Y.To the Editor:Michelle Goldberg is spot on regarding me.I am 71, a retired C.P.A. and attorney, well educated, well traveled, and politically active my entire life. At my age and experience I feel no loss in passion or energy. And I despair — in spite of all my hopes and abilities, I have lost faith in my country. And the only solution I can come to is to withdraw into the secure world I have built within my home and family.I deplore the antidemocratic and policy-less furor of the minority rule on the right. Rage and culture-cultism have gamed and overtaken a constitutional system that I see now was never built to withstand such an attack. And we are left not at all sure how to fix things.And my despair is enhanced by knowing the right understands that our greatest tool is the vote, and seeks and succeeds at every turn to undermine it.My time remaining is short, the bulk of a good life is now done and set, and I can put the world aside and watch it pass. But my children and grandchildren cannot.Lyndon DoddsSan AntonioTo the Editor:Thank you, Michelle Goldberg. You channeled my mind and heart when you wrote this.My first question is: “What can I do?” I believe if something needs to be better, be part of making it better.However, I ache for a new set of leaders who have the skills to connect with people. We need leaders with the political savvy to develop and navigate a strategy to shift our country’s attention to fundamental truths and call us to action.The Republicans have played the long game for 30 years. I am amazed at how they have stolen our democracy without firing a shot. It is time for a group of leaders to define a path out of this and bring the grass roots of the country along. This is a time for decisive, focused countermeasures.I am ready to do more than my fair share. Who are the leaders who can do this?Susan PleasantWinston-Salem, N.C. More

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      Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills

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      Republicans plan to carry their push to reshape the nation’s electoral system into next year, with Democrats vowing to oppose them but holding few options in G.O.P.-led states.A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia and a voting rights champion for her party, promise to put the issue front and center.But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview, adding that the country needed a Senate willing to “protect our democracy regardless of the partisanship of those who would oppose it.”Democrats and voting rights groups say some of the Republican measures will suppress voting, especially by people of color. They warn that other bills will increase the influence of politicians and other partisans in what had been relatively routine election administration. Some measures, they argue, raise the prospect of elections being thrown into chaos or even overturned.Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, though electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in American elections.“This is going to be one of the big political issues for at least the next year,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has helped craft voting legislation. He said the group wanted lawmakers to “stop thinking of election-related policies as something that only comes up once in a blue moon,” adding that “it should instead be something that comes up in every legislative session — that you take what you just learned from the last election.”G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states have put forward legislation to review the 2020 election and institute new procedures for investigating the results of future elections.Many of the other bills are similar to those passed this year, which aim to limit access to mail-in voting; reduce the use of drop boxes; enact harsher penalties for election officials who are found to have broken rules; expand the authority of partisan poll watchers; and shift oversight of elections from independent officials and commissions to state legislatures.It remains unclear how new voting bills might affect turnout, and some election experts say that any measures designed to suppress voting carry the potential to backfire by energizing voters of the opposing party.Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing for Florida to create an election law enforcement unit that would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election.”Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesIn Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is pushing for changes to election laws that build on the major bill his party passed this year, including a special force to investigate voting crimes. In New Hampshire, Republicans are proposing to require that all ballots be counted by hand and may try to tighten residency requirements. In Georgia, G.O.P. lawmakers are trying to restructure the Democratic-led government of the state’s most diverse county.The biggest potential changes to voting could come in Florida, which had just one prosecuted case of voter fraud in the 2020 election.Mr. DeSantis, who had been facing pressure from conservatives to greenlight a review of the 2020 election results in the state, has urged state lawmakers to send new election measures to his desk. One proposal would increase the penalty for the collection of more than two ballots by a third party from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony. Another calls for more routine maintenance of voter rolls, which voting rights advocates say would lead to more “purges” of eligible voters.The governor said last month that the prospective election law enforcement unit would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election” and would include sworn law enforcement officers, investigators and a statewide prosecutor. Critics argued that such a unit could intimidate voters and be prone to abuse by politicians.In New Hampshire, where Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, faces a potentially challenging re-election bid, Republicans have proposed to scrap the ballot-scanning machines that the state has used for decades in favor of hand-counting.That bill — introduced by Mark Alliegro, a Republican state representative who declined to comment about it — has drawn opposition from Democrats, who say that a lengthy delay between Election Day and the results would create an opening for those who want to challenge the election’s legitimacy.“Republicans are trying to sow distrust and discord in the process,” said Matt Wilhelm, a Democratic state representative. “If they’ve got an additional window of time of hours, days, weeks when Granite Staters don’t know the results of the election that they just participated in, that’s going to cast doubt on our democratic institutions.”A separate G.O.P. bill in New Hampshire introduced in the legislature’s prefiling portal contained a brief description: “Provide that only residents of the state may vote in elections.”Republicans have long tried to tighten residency requirements in New Hampshire, whose small population means that the elimination of even relatively small numbers of college students from the voter rolls could help give the G.O.P. an edge in close elections. This year, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected a 2017 state law requiring proof of residence to vote.A spokeswoman for Regina Birdsell, the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, said that it was “currently in draft form” and that Ms. Birdsell would not comment until the language had been finalized.Ballot-counting machines used in New Hampshire’s 2020 election were transported in May for a review of the results. A Republican proposal would scrap the machines in favor of hand-counting.Josh Reynolds/Associated PressIn Georgia, a plan by Republicans in the state legislature to restructure the government of Gwinnett County would effectively undercut the voting power of people of color in an increasingly Democratic area.Gwinnett, which includes northeastern suburbs of Atlanta, has swung from full Republican control to full Democratic control over four years, culminating last year with the selection of the first Black woman to oversee the county commission. President Biden carried the county by 18 percentage points last year.But last month, Clint Dixon, a Republican state senator, filed two bills that would allow the G.O.P.-led legislature to roughly double the size of the county’s Democratic-led board of commissioners and redraw new districts for the school board — moves that Democrats and civil rights leaders said would essentially go over the heads of voters who elected those officials.The changes would keep the county in Democratic control, but would most likely guarantee multiple safe Republican districts, including some that would be predominantly white despite the county’s diversity.After an outcry on the left, Republicans pushed the bills to the January session.Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county’s board of commissioners, said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”Mr. Dixon defended the bills, asserting that with more commissioners, voters would have more representation and elected leaders would be more accountable.“I don’t see any kind of swing back to a Republican majority; it has nothing to do with a power grab,” he said in an interview. “I think at that local level, local governance is intended at lower populations.”Investigating the 2020 election also remains a focus of many Republican state lawmakers.At least five states are pursuing partisan reviews of the 2020 election, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.“There was suspiciously high voter turnout that broke all projections,” said Nathan Dahm, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who sponsored a bill to review the results. “That alone is not enough to say that there absolutely was fraud, but it was suspicious enough to say that maybe there are some questions there.”Lawmakers will be aided in writing new voting bills by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which helped craft some of the 2020 legislation. A spokeswoman for the group said it would continue to push for measures including more maintenance of voting rolls; increased authority for poll watchers; reductions in the use of absentee ballots; more power for state legislatures in the election process; and additional voter identification regulations.Republicans around the country have highlighted polling that shows broad bipartisan support for some voter identification requirements.Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, has called for the state’s legislature to pass a bill that would require a state or federal photo ID to vote.“The idea that the voters of my state are too stupid to follow a simple photo ID requirement like this is ridiculous and ludicrous,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ashcroft noted that the Missouri bill would not ban people without IDs from voting; they would be allowed to vote provisionally and their ballots would be validated through signature matching.Voting rights leaders like Ms. Abrams, meanwhile, have sought to frame the issue as one that should transcend politics.“This isn’t simply about who wins or loses an election,” she said. “It is about what type of nation we intend to be. And are there consequences for undermining and breaking our system of government?” More

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      The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      Antebellum pro-slavery radicals spoke freely of secession and violence; Democratic Party paramilitaries planned their attacks on Reconstruction governments in public view; and the men who codified segregation into Jim Crow did so in the open. Bad actors, in other words, do not always make their plans in secret.When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”Those listeners were, well, listening. “Suddenly,” according to a recent ProPublica investigation, “people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”Many of these new activists very much want to “stop the steal.” In Michigan, ProPublica notes, “one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned.” In Arizona, likewise, new Bannon-inspired precinct officers have “petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the State Senate Republicans’ ‘forensic audit’ of 2020 ballots.”The obvious point of all this is to eliminate resistance should the outcome of the 2024 presidential election come down, once again, to the fortitude of local officials. In his desperate fight to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump looked for and found the soft spots in our electoral system. His supporters are fighting to make them more vulnerable.In tandem with the fight to seize control of election administration is an effort to gerrymander battleground states into nearly permanent Republican legislative majorities. “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia,” according to my colleagues in the newsroom, “Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.”In these states, Democrats could win a narrow majority of voters but gain fewer than half of the seats in the state legislature, while Republicans could win with that same majority and gain far more than half the seats. It’s an affront to the ideal of political equality, to say nothing of the “one person, one vote” standard enshrined in the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. A system in which some voters are worth much more than others — and where popular majorities are locked out of power if they contain the wrong kinds of people — is many things, but it isn’t a democracy (or, if you prefer, a “republic”).These impenetrable supermajorities serve a purpose beyond simple partisan advantage. The belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election is backed by the belief that elections are less about persuasion and more about rigging the process and controlling the ballots. And in the swing states that Trump lost, his strongest allies have pushed the radical idea that state legislatures have plenary authority over presidential elections even after voters have cast their ballots. Trump may lose the vote in Arizona, but under this theory, the legislature could still give him the state’s electoral votes, provided there is some pretext (like “voter fraud,” for example). What this would mean, in practice, is that these legislatures could simply hand their state’s electoral votes to Trump even if he were defeated at the ballot box.It’s with this in mind that we should look to Wisconsin, where Republicans are fighting to seize control of federal elections in the state now that they’ve gerrymandered themselves into an almost permanent legislative majority. (The Wisconsin Republican Party, along with the one in North Carolina, has been at the vanguard of the authoritarian turn in the national party.)Last month, Senator Ron Johnson said that lawmakers in his state could take control of federal elections even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in opposition. “The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Johnson said, in reference to the bipartisan commission Republicans had established to manage elections. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”And of course, Trump is taking an active role in all of this. From his perch in Mar-a-Lago, he has endorsed candidates for state legislative elections in Michigan with the clear hope that they would help him subvert the election, should he run as the Republican nominee for president in 2024. “Michigan needs a new legislature,” Trump wrote last month in one such endorsement. “The cowards there now are too spineless to investigate Election Fraud.”Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.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