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      Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

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      Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump’s Republican Party.Liberal onlookers exploring the rise of right-wing populism accuse their adversaries of racism and sexism. There is plenty of truth to this view, but it’s not the whole story.In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump’s most loyal backers:Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Unleashing it is like splitting the atom; it creates enormous energy, which can lead to more honest discussions and long-delayed redress of grievances. It can also undermine personal relationships — and political regimes. Because its destructive potential is so great, it must be faced.Recent decades, Galston continues, “have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography” — difficult for “those outside its orbit to understand.”They — “social conservatives and white Christians” — have what Galston calls a “bill of particulars” against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston’s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”“They believe we have a powerful desire for moral coercion. We tell them how to behave — and, worse, how to think. When they complain, we accuse them of racism and xenophobia. How, they ask, did standing up for the traditional family become racism? When did transgender bathrooms become a civil right?”“They believe we hold them in contempt.”“Finally, they think we are hypocrites. We claim to support free speech — until someone says something we don’t like. We claim to oppose violence — unless it serves a cause we approve of. We claim to defend the Constitution — except for the Second Amendment. We support tolerance, inclusion, and social justice — except for people like them.”Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but increasingly at the white collar, managerial and professional occupational structure.Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”In an essay published in Boston Review last month, Acemoglu looked at the issue over a longer period. Initially, in the first four decades after World War II, advances in automation complemented labor, expanding the job market and improving productivity.But, he continued, “a very different technological tableau began in the 1980s — a lot more automation and a lot less of everything else.” In the process, “automation acted as the handmaiden of inequality.”Automation has pushed the job market in two opposing directions. Trends can be adverse for those (of all races and ethnicities) without higher education, but trends can also be positive for those with more education:New technologies primarily automated the more routine tasks in clerical occupations and on factory floors. This meant the demand and wages of workers specializing in blue-collar jobs and some clerical functions declined. Meanwhile professionals in managerial, engineering, finance, consulting, and design occupations flourished — both because they were essential to the success of new technologies and because they benefited from the automation of tasks that complemented their own work. As automation gathered pace, wage gaps between the top and the bottom of the income distribution magnified.Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:Falling BehindThe change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind. More

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      Constitutional Challenges Loom Over Proposed Voting Bill

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      The sprawling legislation, known as H.R. 1, could result in lawsuits leading to a dozen Supreme Court cases, legal experts said.WASHINGTON — If the sweeping voting rights bill that the House passed in March overcomes substantial hurdles in the Senate to become law, it would reshape American elections and represent a triumph for Democrats eager to combat the wave of election restrictions moving through Republican-controlled state legislatures.But passage of the bill, known as H.R. 1, would end a legislative fight and start a legal war that could dwarf the court challenges aimed at the Affordable Care Act over the past decade.“I have no doubt that if H.R. 1 passes, we’re going to have a dozen major Supreme Court cases on different pieces of it,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard.The potential for the bill to set off a sprawling constitutional battle is largely a function of its ambitions. It would end felon disenfranchisement, require independent commissions to draw congressional districts, establish public financing for congressional candidates, order presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, address dark money in political advertising and restructure the Federal Election Commission.The bill’s opponents say that it is, in the words of an editorial in The National Review, “a frontal assault on the Constitution” and “the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history.”More measured critics take issue with specific provisions even as they acknowledge that the very nature of the bill — a grab bag of largely unrelated measures — would make it difficult to attack in a systematic way. In that respect, the anticipated challenges differ from those aimed at the Affordable Care Act, some of which sought to destroy the entire law.John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University, said the bill went too far, partly because it was first proposed as an aspirational document rather than a practical one in 2019, when Republicans controlled the Senate and it had no hope of becoming law.“It seems very willing to brush past, at least in some cases, some relatively clear constitutional provisions,” he said, citing parts of the bill that require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns and force advocacy groups to disclose their contributors.In March, 20 Republican state attorneys general said they were ready to litigate. “Should the act become law,” they wrote in a letter to congressional leaders, “we will seek legal remedies to protect the Constitution, the sovereignty of all states, our elections and the rights of our citizens.”Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and one of the lead authors of the package, said drafters had written it with a fusillade of Republican legal challenges in mind and were confident that it would “survive the great majority of them” in the Supreme Court.“I’m extremely comfortable that we built this to last,” Mr. Sarbanes said. “We think that the components are ones that are well girded against constitutional challenge — even by a court that we can imagine will probably start from a place of favorability to some of these challenges.”Democrats have made the bill a top legislative priority. But with Republicans united in opposition in the Senate, its path forward is rocky.Before a key committee vote this month, proponents of the overhaul are expected to introduce a slew of technical changes meant to address concerns raised by state elections administrators. But pushing it through the full chamber and to President Biden’s desk would require all 50 Senate Democrats to agree to suspend the filibuster rule and pass it on a simple party-line vote, a maneuver that at least two Democrats have so far rejected.Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke at a news conference promoting H.R. 1 in March. Democrats have made the bill a top legislative priority.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSome scholars have urged congressional Democrats to concentrate their efforts on narrower legislation, notably the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which seeks to restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court effectively eliminated by a 5-to-4 vote in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.The provision, the law’s Section 5, required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting procedures. In the Shelby County decision, the court ruled that the formula for deciding which states were covered violated the Constitution because it was based on outdated data.“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the civil rights leader who served in the House for more than three decades until his death last year, responds to that invitation by updating the coverage formula. Whether the Supreme Court — which has become more conservative since 2013 — would uphold the new formula and allow Section 5 to be restored is an open question, but the Shelby County decision at least allows Congress to try.Similarly, the court’s precedents suggest that not all of the anticipated challenges to the much broader H.R. 1 would succeed.As a general matter, few doubt that Congress has broad authority to regulate congressional elections because of the elections clause of the Constitution.To be sure, the clause specifies that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”The clause’s next phrase, though, allows federal lawmakers to override most of the power granted to state legislatures: “But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.”The elections clause, supplemented by other constitutional provisions, Professor Stephanopoulos wrote in an article to be published in the journal Constitutional Commentary, means that “even the bill’s most controversial elements lie within Congress’s electoral authority, and Congress could actually reach considerably further, if it were so inclined.”But he acknowledged that there was controversy over the sweep of the provision. In a majority opinion in 2013, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an aside that the clause “empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them.” That statement was in tension with the controlling opinion in a 1970 decision that allowed Congress to lower the minimum voting age in congressional elections to 18 from 21.The Supreme Court justices last month. The court has become more conservative since 2013, when it effectively eliminated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf the statement from Justice Scalia is followed, it would raise questions about language in H.R. 1 that seeks to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences in states that would otherwise disenfranchise them.Several scholars said the provision might be vulnerable to a legal challenge. “That’s probably the most obvious red flag,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California.The Constitution grants Congress considerably less authority over presidential elections than congressional ones, allowing it to set only the timing. But some Supreme Court opinions have said the two kinds of authority are comparable.The bill’s requirement that states create independent commissions to draw congressional districts could also lead to litigation. Such commissions were upheld by a 5-to-4 vote in 2015 in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said Arizona voters were entitled “to address the problem of partisan gerrymandering — the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power.”With changes in the makeup of the Supreme Court since then, the Arizona precedent might be vulnerable, said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.“In litigation over the 2020 election, several justices — including Justice Brett Kavanaugh — questioned the validity of that precedent,” Professor Crum said. “Given the possibility that the court might overturn that decision in the near future, it is even more imperative that Congress step in and mandate the use of independent redistricting commissions for congressional districts.”In dissent in the Arizona case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution specified that only state legislatures had the power to draw congressional maps. Four years later, though, writing for the majority in rejecting a role for federal courts in addressing partisan gerrymandering, he wrote about independent commissions created by ballot measures with seeming approval and said Congress also had a role to play, citing an earlier version of H.R. 1.Representative John Lewis of Georgia outside the Supreme Court in 2013. A voting bill named for him seeks to restore enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, after the court effectively eliminated it.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe provision in H.R. 1 establishing a public financing system appears to be consistent with current Supreme Court precedentsIn 2011, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down a different Arizona law, which provided escalating matching funds to participating candidates based on their opponents’ spending. But Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in the case, Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, indicated that more routine public financing systems remained a valid constitutional option.“We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing as a means of funding political candidacy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “That is not our business.”Some of the disclosure requirements in H.R. 1 have drawn objections from across the ideological spectrum. The American Civil Liberties Union has said that it supports disclosures tied to “express advocacy” of a candidate’s election or defeat. The bill goes further, though, requiring disclosures in connection with policy debates that refer to candidates.That measure, two A.C.L.U. lawyers wrote in The Washington Post in March, “could directly interfere with the ability of many to engage in political speech about causes that they care about and that impact their lives by imposing new and onerous disclosure requirements on nonprofits committed to advancing those causes.”“When a group is advocating policy changes outside the mainstream,” they continued, “they need privacy protections to be able to speak freely and without fear of reprisal.”The Citizens United decision in 2010 upheld the disclosure requirements before it by an 8-to-1 vote, but a pending Supreme Court case, American for Prosperity v. Bonta, might alter the constitutional calculus.Professor McGinnis said he also questioned a provision in the bill that required leaders of organizations to say they stood by the messages in political advertisements. “This seems to me to be eating up airtime without any real justification and subjecting people to harassment,” he said.He also took issue with the bill’s requirement that presidential candidates disclose their tax returns, saying Congress cannot add qualifications to who can run for president beyond those set out in the Constitution: that candidates be natural-born citizens, residents for 14 years and at least 35 years old.A 1995 Supreme Court decision rejecting an attempt by Arkansas to impose term limits on its congressional representatives appears to support the view that lawmakers cannot alter the constitutional requirements.Even if every one of the objections to the bill discussed in this article were to prevail in court, most of the law would survive. “Part of why the attack on H.R. 1 is unlikely to be successful in the end is that the law is not a single coherent structure the way Obamacare was,” Professor Stephanopoulos said. “It’s a hundred different proposals, all packaged together.”“The Roberts court would dislike on policy grounds almost the entire law,” he added. “But I think even this court would end up upholding most — big, big swaths — of the law. It would still leave the most important election bill in American history intact even after the court took its pound of flesh.”Nicholas Fandos More

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      House Republicans Have Had Enough of Liz Cheney’s Truth-Telling

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      G.O.P. House members are plotting a fresh bid to dethrone Ms. Cheney from her leadership post. Her transgression: continued repudiation of Donald J. Trump and his false election claims.WASHINGTON — The first time defenders of Donald J. Trump came for Representative Liz Cheney, for the offense of having voted to impeach him, fellow Republicans closed ranks to save her leadership post, with Representative Kevin McCarthy boasting that their “big tent” party had enough room for both the former president and a stalwart critic.Evidently, not anymore.Just three months after she beat back a no-confidence vote by lopsided margins, Ms. Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, is facing a far more potent challenge that appears increasingly likely to end in her ouster from leadership. This time, Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, is encouraging the effort to replace her.Her transgression, colleagues say: Ms. Cheney’s continued public criticism of Mr. Trump, her denunciation of his lies about a stolen election and her demands that the G.O.P. tell the truth about how his supporters assaulted democracy during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The turnabout reflects anew the passion with which Republicans have embraced Mr. Trump and the voters who revere him, and how willing many in the party are to perpetuate — or at least tolerate — falsehoods about the 2020 election that he has continued to spread.What began as a battle over the party’s future after the violent end to the Trump presidency has collapsed into a one-sided pile-on by Team Trump, with critics like Ms. Cheney, the scion of a storied Republican family and the lone woman in her party’s House leadership, ostracized or moving toward the exits.The latest test for Ms. Cheney could come as soon as next week, when a growing group of Republicans is planning a fresh bid to dethrone her, with Mr. McCarthy’s blessing. Many of her colleagues are now so confident that it will succeed that they are openly discussing who will replace Ms. Cheney.The tensions escalated on Tuesday, when Mr. McCarthy went on Mr. Trump’s favorite news program, “Fox & Friends,” to question whether Ms. Cheney could effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger. (Beforehand, he told a Fox reporter, “I’ve had it with her,” and “I’ve lost confidence,” according to a leaked recording of the exchange published by Axios.)“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” Mr. McCarthy said during the portion of the interview that aired. “We all need to be working as one, if we’re able to win the majority.”With onetime allies closing in, Ms. Cheney, known for her steely temperament, has only dug in harder. Minutes after Mr. McCarthy’s TV hit, she sent her barbed reply through a spokesman, effectively suggesting that the minority leader and Republicans moving against her were complicit in Mr. Trump’s dissembling.“This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6,” said Jeremy Adler, the spokesman. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”One of the few Republican voices willing to rise to Ms. Cheney’s defense was Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who has himself come under attack from his party for his unrepentant criticism of Mr. Trump — even getting booed at the Utah Republican Party convention on Saturday.“Every person of conscience draws a line beyond which they will not go: Liz Cheney refuses to lie,” Mr. Romney wrote on Twitter. “As one of my Republican Senate colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”Many House Republicans insist they have no problem with Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump, which she described as a vote of conscience. Nor, they say, are they bothered by her neoconservative policy positions, which skew — like those of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — toward a hawkishness that is at odds with the “America First” slant of the party that Mr. Trump cemented.But they fear that Ms. Cheney’s refusal to stop criticizing Mr. Trump or condemning the events of Jan. 6 could weaken the party’s message going into the 2022 midterm elections, when they hope to portray Democrats as big-government socialists so villainous they should be voted out of the majority. It has also infuriated Mr. Trump.Many, including Mr. McCarthy, had hoped that after surviving the February vote of no confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the party and simply move on.Instead, she has doubled down and at times turned her fire on colleagues. The final straw for many came last week in Orlando, where Republicans gathered for their annual policy retreat in hopes of putting on a show of unity.Ms. Cheney told Punchbowl News that she would campaign in Wyoming — where she faces a primary challenge — defending her impeachment vote “every day of the week.” She told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President Biden’s electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for president. And she broke with leading Republicans when she said a proposed independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot should focus on the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, rather than scrutinizing violence by antifa and Black Lives Matter, as Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have demanded.Representative Kevin McCarthy has questioned whether Ms. Cheney can effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesA few days later, she drew attacks from the right for fist-bumping Mr. Biden at his speech before a joint session of Congress, and took to Twitter to defend herself for greeting the president “in a civil, respectful & dignified way.”“We’re not sworn enemies,” she wrote. “We’re Americans.”On Monday, after Mr. Trump issued a statement calling the 2020 election “fraudulent” and “THE BIG LIE,” Ms. Cheney quickly tweeted her rebuttal, writing that anyone who made such claims was “poisoning our democratic system.”Some Republicans privately likened her performance to picking at a scab, and many of Mr. Trump’s allies saw it as an opening to try again to depose her.“Liz has attempted (is FAILING badly) to divide our party,” Representative Lance Gooden, Republican of Texas, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, emulating Mr. Trump’s caustic Twitter style. “Trump is still the LEADER of the GOP, Liz! I look forward to her being removed SOON!”Ms. Cheney’s troubles chart a rapid shift for the Republican Party in the few months since Mr. Trump left Washington. Early on, she was part of a small but influential group of Republicans that included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and condemned Mr. Trump’s role in stoking the riot with false claims of a stolen election. But many of those lawmakers have since gone quiet, leaving Ms. Cheney, who once was enthusiastically spoken of as a future speaker or president, isolated.Ms. Cheney declined through a spokesman to comment, and several of her allies in the House would not speak on the record in her defense, underscoring the fraught nature of the vote and the pessimism some of them feel about her chances of surviving another challenge. A spokeswoman for Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and has been a leading critic of the former president, said in a statement that the congressman “unequivocally supports Liz Cheney for conference chair.”Those who know her best say privately that Ms. Cheney’s predicament reflects both her principles and her personality, including a stubborn streak that sometimes prompts her to act against her self-interest. One ally who has been exasperated by her in recent months described her actions as classic Liz Cheney: She will always do what she thinks is right, the Republican said on Tuesday, but she will just never stop to think she’s wrong.With Ms. Cheney hemorrhaging support, Republicans have already begun cycling through names of possible replacements for a post traditionally seen as a steppingstone to the top party positions. Mindful of the optics of replacing the only woman in leadership with another man, Republicans are eyeing choosing a woman.The leading contender appears to be Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising star in her fourth term who has long toiled to increase the number of women in the Republican ranks and has more recently become a fierce defender of Mr. Trump.Ms. Stefanik, 36, has begun reaching out to Republican lawmakers to gauge their support, according to two people familiar with the private conversations, and by Tuesday evening, one of her political aides was retweeting speculation that she would “make an outstanding conference chair.”Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership who initially whipped votes for Ms. Cheney, said that he was counting potential votes for Ms. Stefanik and believed the job would be hers if she ran. Republicans have also floated Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana as a possible alternative. As the top Republican on the Ethics Committee, Ms. Walorski this year successfully balanced the job of condemning Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past conspiratorial statements while arguing she should not be kicked off her committees. More

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      Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy

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      President Biden’s early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade […] More

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      Crist Enters Race to Face DeSantis, With More Democrats Likely to Follow

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      Charlie Crist has an extensive political history in Florida and is widely known throughout the state. But his candidacy is not likely to deter other Democrats like Val Demings and Nikki Fried.MIAMI — Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, entered the race for governor on Tuesday, becoming the first challenger to Ron DeSantis, a Republican who raised his profile by shunning lockdowns during the pandemic and is now a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2024.“Every step of the way, this governor has been more focused on his personal political fortune than the struggle of everyday Floridians,” Mr. Crist said under the blazing sun in St. Petersburg as he made his announcement. “That’s just not right. Just like our former president, he always takes credit but never takes responsibility.”His candidacy signaled the start of a long, expensive and most likely bruising campaign in a battleground state that has been swinging away from Democrats since 2016. Florida’s exceptionally tight governor’s races have been decided by around one percentage point since 2010, always in Republicans’ favor. The last Democrat to win election to the governor’s mansion was Lawton Chiles, who won a second term in 1994.Mr. Crist’s advisers see him as the Democrat with the most experience running statewide and appealing to a coalition of liberal and moderate voters in the way that President Biden did nationally — though not in Florida, which former President Donald J. Trump won by three percentage points.Mr. Crist has an extensive political history in Florida and is widely known throughout the state. He served as governor as a Republican from 2007 to 2011 before running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as an independent, losing to Marco Rubio. After switching parties, he later lost a Democratic bid for governor in 2014 against the Republican incumbent, Rick Scott.The arc of his political evolution was evident in the video he used on Tuesday to announce his candidacy. It featured footage of the hug with former President Barack Obama that led to Mr. Crist’s departure from the Republican Party 11 years ago.But Mr. Crist’s experience is unlikely to deter other Democratic candidates from joining the race. His clout has been diminished by years of electoral failures and by a party that is increasingly open to a wider range of more diverse public figures to be its standard bearers. Two women, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Representative Val Demings of Orlando, are considering their own runs for the governor’s mansion as Democrats.Ms. Fried scheduled a news conference in the State Capitol for the same time as Mr. Crist’s announcement. “As the only statewide elected Democrat, it makes absolute sense for me to be running for governor,” she said, but she added that she was not making an announcement at that time.Ms. Demings released a video on Tuesday that, while not declaring a candidacy, highlighted her career as Orlando police chief, impeachment manager in Congress and a shortlisted vice-presidential pick for Mr. Biden.Similar jockeying — though not quite as intense — is underway among Democrats looking to go up against Mr. Rubio, who also faces re-election next year.Asked about Mr. Crist’s announcement on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis mocked Mr. Crist’s party-switching. “Which party is he going to run under, do we know for sure?” he said.Referring to Democrats in general, he said: “I implore them, from my political interest: Run on closing schools. Run on locking people down. Run on closing businesses.” He added, “I would love to have that debate.”In advance of Mr. Crist’s announcement, Mr. DeSantis held an official event on Monday at Mr. Crist’s favorite seafood restaurant in St. Petersburg, touting the wins he had racked up during the session the Republican-controlled Legislature concluded last week — which he and Republican lawmakers used to champion policies that will appeal to Florida’s increasingly conservative electorate.And on Monday, Mr. DeSantis signed a bill and an executive order doing away with most of Florida’s remaining pandemic restrictions, contrasting his administration’s aversion for mandates to the restrictions in states led by Democrats.Still, Mr. Crist was withering in his criticism of the governor on Tuesday.“Gov. DeSantis’s vision of Florida is clear: If you want to vote, he won’t help you,” Mr. Crist said. “If you’re working, he won’t support you. If you’re a woman, he will not empower you. If you’re an immigrant, he won’t accept you. If you’re facing discrimination, he won’t respect you. If you’re sick, he won’t care for you.” More

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      Bee Nguyen, Georgia Democrat, Enters Race for Secretary of State

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      Ms. Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is the first major Democrat to announce a bid for the seat held by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who defied former President Donald Trump.ATLANTA — Next year’s secretary of state election in Georgia was already shaping up to be a tense and dramatic fight: the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger — who enraged former President Donald J. Trump for refusing to overturn the state’s election results — is facing a primary challenge from a Trump-endorsed fellow Republican, Representative Jody Hice.On Tuesday morning, the race got even more interesting with the entry of the first major Democratic candidate, State Representative Bee Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who has helped lead the fight against Republican-backed bills that restrict voting rights in the state.“Republicans have done everything in their power to silence the voices of voters who chose an America that works for all of us, and not just some of us,” she said in her announcement video. “But we will not allow anyone to stand in the way of our right to a free and fair democracy.” In an interview this week, Ms. Nguyen, 39, said that Mr. Raffensperger deserved credit for standing up to Mr. Trump and rejecting his false claims of voter fraud after the November election. But she also noted that since then, Mr. Raffensperger had largely supported the voting rights law passed by the Legislature in March and continued to consider himself a Trump supporter after the former president promulgated his falsehoods about the Georgia election.“I’ve been at the forefront of battling against voter suppression laws in Georgia,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Watching everything unfold in 2020 with the erosion of our Democracy, I recognized how critically important it was to defend our right to vote.”She added, “I believe Georgians deserve better, and can do better.”Mr. Trump lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes. After the election, he made personal entreaties to both Mr. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, asking the two Republicans to intervene and help overturn the results. When they declined, Mr. Trump vowed revenge.In late March, the former president endorsed Mr. Hice, a pastor and former radio talk-show host from Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.It’s not the only race in Georgia that Mr. Trump is hoping to influence in an attempt to exact retribution against those he deems disloyal. In January, Mr. Trump vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp as he sought re-election. Since then, former State Representative Vernon Jones, a former Democrat and a vocal Trump supporter, has entered the race, but Mr. Trump has not endorsed him.On Monday, however, the Georgia political world took notice when State Senator Burt Jones, a Republican, tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Trump meeting at Mr. Trump’s Florida home. Mr. Jones, who did not return calls for comment Monday, hails from a wealthy family and could put his own funds into a statewide race. But if he is interested in higher office, he has a number of choices beyond governor, including possibly jumping into next year’s contest for the U.S. Senate seat held by the Democrat Raphael Warnock.Ms. Nguyen, a supporter of abortion rights and critic of what she has called Georgia’s “lax” gun laws, could struggle to connect with more conservative voters beyond her liberal district in metropolitan Atlanta. She first won the seat in December 2017 in a special election to replace another Democrat, Stacey Abrams, the former state House minority leader who left her position to make her ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Mr. Kemp in 2018.Ms. Abrams, who is African-American, may be gearing up to run against Mr. Kemp again next year, and if Ms. Nguyen can land a spot on the general election ballot, it will reflect the changing demographics that helped Democrats like President Biden score upset wins in Georgia in recent months.In March, Ms. Nguyen was among a group of Asian-American Georgia lawmakers who forcefully denounced the mass shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors in which eight people were killed, including six women of Asian descent.Georgia’s secretary of state race, normally a low-profile affair, will be watched particularly closely next year given the razor-thin margins of the state’s recent elections, and its growing reputation as a key battleground in the presidential election.Mr. Raffensperger finds himself in a frustrating position. A statewide poll in January found that he had the highest approval rating of any Republican officeholder in the state, the likely result of the bipartisan respect he earned for standing up to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hice has a good chance of overpowering Mr. Raffensperger in a G.O.P. primary, given rank-and-file Republicans’ loyalty to the former president.Two other Republicans, David Belle Isle, a former mayor of the city of Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, and T.J. Hudson, a former probate judge, are also running.Daniel Victor More

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      Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope

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      Voters of color make up an increasing percentage of the United States electorate, but that trend isn’t hurting Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans.The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isn’t doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The expanding Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College underscores how the growing diversity of the nation may not aid Democrats enough to win in places they most need help. Just as often, population growth is concentrated in red states — like Texas and Florida — where the Democrats don’t win nonwhite voters by the overwhelming margins necessary to overcome the state’s Republican advantage.As for the Republicans, the widely held assumption that the party will struggle as white voters decline as a percentage of the electorate may be more myth than reality. Contrary to what Tucker Carlson says repeatedly on Fox News about the rise of “white replacement theory” as a Democratic electoral strategy, the country’s growing racial diversity has not drastically upended the party’s chances. Instead, Republicans face a challenge they often take for granted: white voters.One way to think about this is to compare today’s electorate with that of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were winning in landslides. Democrats, no doubt, have benefited from the increased racial diversity of the country since then: Mr. Biden would not have even come close to winning Georgia in November if its voters were as white they were back in the 1980s. Former President Donald J. Trump would have probably won re-election if he could have turned the demographic clock back to the ’80s and reduced the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. Today’s wave of Republican-backed laws restricting voting rights may be intended to do exactly that.In states like Georgia, where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even a return to the racial demographics of the 1980s wouldn’t do nearly as much to hurt Democrats as one might expect. Yes, the November result would have gone from an extremely close win for Mr. Biden to an extremely close win for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden would have won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though nonwhite voters had doubled their share of the electorate from 1984 to when Mrs. Clinton sought the presidency. Remarkably, Mr. Biden’s fairly modest gains among white voters helped him as much as the last 30 to 40 years of demographic shifts did.Similarly, Mr. Bush or Mr. Reagan would have still prevailed if they had had to win an electorate that was 29 percent nonwhite, as opposed to the merely 13 to 15 percent nonwhite electorates they sought to persuade at the time.This is not the conventional story of recent electoral history. In the usual tale, the growing racial diversity of the electorate broke the Reagan and Bush majorities and allowed the Democrats to win the national popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.And yet it is hard to find a single state where the increasing racial diversity of the electorate, even over an exceptionally long 30- or 40-year period, has been both necessary and sufficient for Democrats to flip a state from red to blue. Even in states where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, like Georgia and Arizona, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.One reason demographic change has failed to transform electoral politics is that the increased diversity of the electorate has come not mainly from Black voters but from Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters. Those groups back Democrats, but not always by overwhelmingly large margins.In 2020, Democrats probably won around 60 to 65 percent of voters across these demographic groups. These are substantial margins, but they are small enough that even decades of demographic shifts wind up costing the Republicans only a couple of percentage points.The new census data’s finding that the percentage of non-Hispanic white voters in the country’s electorate dropped by about two percentage points from 2016 to 2020 might seem like a lot. But with Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters representing the entirety of the increase, while the Black share of the electorate was flat, the growing nonwhite share of the electorate cost Mr. Trump only about half a percentage point over a four-year period.Another factor is the electoral map. The American electoral system rewards flipping states from red to blue, but many Democratic gains among nonwhite voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and often noncompetitive states. By contrast, many traditional swing states across the northern tier, like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, have had relatively little demographic change.The ability of Democrats to flip red states has been hampered by another pattern: the tendency for Republicans to fare relatively well among nonwhite voters in red states.It’s often said that Latino voters aren’t a monolith, and that’s certainly true. While Hispanic voters back Democrats by overwhelming margins in blue states like New York and Illinois, Republicans are often far more competitive among Latinos and members of other non-Black minority groups in red states — including those Democrats now hope to flip like Texas or Florida.Texas and Florida really would be blue if Latinos voted like their counterparts in New York or Illinois. But instead, Latino population growth has not quite had a strong pro-Democratic punch in the states where the party hoped to land a knockout blow.At the same time, white voters are easy to overlook as a source of Democratic gains, give that these voters still support Republicans by a comfortable margin. But Democrats probably improved from 39 to 43 percent among white voters from 1988 to 2020. It’s a significant shift, and perhaps even enough to cover the entirety of Mr. Bush’s margin of victory in the 1988 election, without any demographic change whatsoever.President Biden won seven states, including Wisconsin, while losing among their white voters.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIt’s a little easier to see the significance of Democratic gains among white voters at the state level. According to AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won white voters in states worth 211 electoral votes. Democrats like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004 probably didn’t win white voters in states worth much more than 60 electoral votes, based on exit poll and other survey data.Mr. Biden even won white voters in many of the states where the growing diversity of the electorate is thought to be the main source of new Democratic strength, including California and Colorado. And he also won white voters in many big, diverse states across the North where Republicans used to win and where nonwhite demographic change might otherwise be considered the decisive source of Democratic strength, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, which voted almost entirely Republican at the presidential level throughout the 1980s.According to the AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won seven states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — while losing among white voters. In these crucial states, Democratic strength among nonwhite voters was essential to Mr. Biden’s victory.But of these states, there are really only three where Mr. Biden clearly prevailed by the margin of the increased racial diversity of the electorate over the last few decades: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. He did not need to win any of these states to capture the presidency, but he would not have done so without long-term increases in both nonwhite voting power and Democratic strength among white voters.The story is quite different in the Northern battleground states. White voters still represent more than 80 percent of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the new census data. The nonwhite population in these states is predominantly Black; their share of the population has been fairly steady over the last few decades. But Mr. Biden won these states so narrowly that the relatively modest demographic shifts of the last few decades were necessary for him to prevail in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.It’s just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016. More

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      in Elections

      In South Texas, Hispanic Republicans Try to Cement the Party’s Gains

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      Conservative Hispanic leaders, especially women, are ascendant in the Rio Grande Valley, where Republicans are trying to forge lasting bonds with voters who swung sharply to the right in 2020.McALLEN, Texas — The front door of the Hidalgo County Republican Party’s office is covered with photographs of high-profile politicians in the party: Gov. Greg Abbott, Senator John Cornyn and former President Donald J. Trump. Nearly all of them are white men.Step inside, and you’ll see a bulletin board with pictures of local Republican leaders: Adrienne Pena-Garza, Hilda Garza DeShazo, Mayra Flores. Nearly all of them are Hispanic women.Hispanic Republicans, especially women, have become something of political rock stars in South Texas after voters in the Rio Grande Valley shocked leaders in both parties in November by swinging sharply toward the G.O.P. Here in McAllen, one of the region’s largest cities, Mr. Trump received nearly double the number of votes he did four years earlier; in the Rio Grande Valley over all, President Biden won by just 15 percentage points, a steep slide from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016.That conservative surge — and the liberal decline — has buoyed the Republican Party’s hopes about its ability to draw Hispanic voters into what has long been an overwhelmingly white political coalition and to challenge Democrats in heavily Latino regions across the country. Now party officials, including Mr. Abbott, the governor, have flocked to the Rio Grande Valley in a kind of pilgrimage, eager to meet the people who helped Republicans rapidly gain ground in a longtime Democratic stronghold.One of those people, Ms. Pena-Garza, the chair of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, grew up the daughter of a Democratic state legislator. As was common for most Hispanic families in the area, she said, voting for Democrats was a given. But after her father switched parties in 2010, Ms. Pena-Garza soon followed, arguing that Democrats had veered too far to the left, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control.“Politics down here did scare me because you didn’t go against the grain,” she said. “If someone’s going to tell you: ‘Oh, you’re brown, you have to be Democrat,’ or ‘Oh, you’re female, you have to be a Democrat’ — well, who are you to tell me who I should vote for and who I shouldn’t?”Ms. Pena-Garza said she was called a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — and a self-hating Latino, labels that have begun to recede only in recent years as she meets more Hispanic Republicans who, like her, embrace policies that they view as helping small business owners and supporting their religious beliefs.Now, she says, the political choice is a point of pride.“You can’t shame me or bully me into voting for a party just because that’s the way it’s always been,” she said.Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez, a Republican, is running against Representative Vicente Gonzalez, the Democrat who represents McAllen, in 2022.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesOne of the lingering questions of the 2020 election is just what drove this region — and other heavily Hispanic areas of the country — toward Republicans. The shift appeared to be particularly acute among women who call themselves conservative, according to a post-mortem analysis by Equis Labs, a Democratic-aligned research firm that studies Latino voters.Conversations with voters and activists in Hidalgo County suggested that there is not one answer but many: Women who staunchly oppose abortion voted for the first time; wives of Border Patrol agents felt convinced the Trump administration was firmly on their side; mothers picked up on the enthusiasm for Republicans from friends they knew through church or their children’s school.For many voters in the region, there is a profound sense of cynicism — a feeling that things will not change no matter who is charge. The border, after all, has been the site of a humanitarian crisis under both Democrats and Republicans. Nearly everyone here knows both undocumented immigrants and Border Patrol agents, occasionally even within the same family. And for many here, law enforcement remains one of the easiest paths to the middle class, and Republicans have portrayed national Democrats as hostile toward the police.Both Republicans and Democrats are likely this year to start funneling far more money into the region, where enthusiasm for the G.O.P. in 2020 was not limited to Mr. Trump. For the first time in recent history, a Republican came close to defeating the Democratic incumbent in Texas’ 15th Congressional District, which includes most of Hidalgo County and runs north of McAllen up to San Antonio.In next year’s race for the seat, the Republican candidate, Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez, is again challenging Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat — but they may be competing on different political terrain if the district’s “bacon strip” shape is altered in redistricting later this year.At the local Lincoln Reagan Republican dinner in March, Mr. Abbott rallied support for Ms. De La Cruz-Hernandez and encouraged other women like her to come into the G.O.P. fold, speaking in glowing terms about their political potential and saying he had “never been as impressed” with the leadership of a county party.“I’ve never been onstage with so many accomplished, articulate Latinas as I have been tonight with this group of ladies,” he told an enthusiastic crowd. “This is amazing. If I were the Democrats, I would be very afraid right now, because there is a storm coming, a storm that is going to win Hidalgo County. I wanted to be here in person, wanted to say thank you.”“You will knock that damn door down,” Mr. Abbott added. “You will shape and reshape politics in the Lone Star State.”Jessica Villarreal said she had no desire to be politically active while she served in the Army, but now considers herself a faithful Republican and is considering a run for elected office.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesLike many of her supporters, Ms. De La Cruz-Hernandez first registered as a Democrat, largely, she said, so she could vote in local primary elections.“That was just what you do,” she said. She added that while she could not recall ever having voted for a Democrat for president, she had hesitated to voice her political views publicly, fearing that it could hurt her insurance business. “But I never understood the Democratic values or message being one for me,” she said. “And I am convinced that people here have conservative values. That is really who the majority is.”During her last campaign, Ms. De La Cruz-Hernandez relied heavily on local efforts, drawing little attention from the national Republican Party in a race she lost by just three points. Now she is focusing early on building support from donors in Washington. Already, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has named Mr. Gonzalez a “Frontline” member, an indication that it views him as one of the most endangered House Democrats. And in March, the National Republican Congressional Committee put Mr. Gonzalez on its 2022 “Exit List” and began airing ads against him.In an interview, Mr. Gonzalez primarily attributed the closeness of his race last year to the lack of Democratic in-person campaigning amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the high turnout to the particular phenomenon of Mr. Trump, rather than a long-term shift.“For the Republicans to think that there is some dramatic change, that they should pour attention and money into this district, I think they will be sadly mistaken,” he said. “But I am taking nothing for granted.”People waved signs supporting former President Donald J. Trump in McAllen last month.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesLike other Democrats along the Texas border, Mr. Gonzalez has tried to distance himself from national Democrats; this year he asked Mr. Biden to rescind an executive order to temporarily stop new fracking on federal lands. Last month, he traveled to the border with the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan congressional group, and he has urged top Biden administration officials to come to the region.“We’re conservative Democrats down here,” he said. “We support a lot of international trade, we’re an agricultural community, we’re Catholic, we work in the oil fields, we’re avid gun collectors.”He added: “I think that’s pretty distinguishable from the rest of the Democratic Party. We can’t just assume that all Hispanics are going to stick with Democrats.”Mr. Gonzalez also attributed the shift toward Republicans in his district in part to misinformation, particularly on YouTube and other forms of social media. And some first-time Republican voters appeared to be swayed by false conspiracy theories.Elisa Rivera, 40, said she had voted for Mrs. Clinton in 2016, but did not understand the fierce reaction against Mr. Trump.“I was following along the family tradition, my dad is a hard-core Democrat, my father was really for unions, and I thought the Democrats defended the union,” Ms. Rivera said, before adding: “But then I started to research myself and found out the Democrats are supporting witchcraft and child trafficking and things like that, things that get censored because they get labeled conspiracy theory.”Other right-leaning Hispanic voters described a simple ideological shift.Mayra Rivera said her politics do not fit in a neat box.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesAs a child, Mayra Rivera, 42, worked in the fields with her parents, who arrived in the United States through the bracero program, which brought farmworkers to the country from Mexico. When her family struggled financially, she would walk door to door selling cupcakes. The first few times she voted, Ms. Rivera cast her ballot for Democrats. Even now, she said, her politics do not fit in a neat box.“My family doesn’t come from money, I have friends who are undocumented, I support medical cannabis,” she said. “But I definitely think Democrats are pushing free everything, giving the message that there’s no value in your hard work, and that’s not something I can believe in.”Like Ms. Rivera, Jessica Villarreal, 33, was only an occasional voter, and she had no desire to be politically active while she served in the Army. But now she considers herself a faithful Republican and is considering a run for elected office.“There are more of us who realize our beliefs are Republican, no matter what we’ve been told in the past,” Ms. Villarreal said. “I am a believer in God and the American dream, and I believe the Republican Party represents that.” More