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      Can Glenn Youngkin Save the G.O.P. from Trumpism?

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      It’s a perfect fall weekend in Virginia horse country, about two weeks before Election Day, and the American Legion hall in Middleburg is decked out for a rally featuring Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who is not on the ballot but is stumping hard for his fellow Republicans. His name is everywhere: on a bright blue backdrop behind the stage, on the swag in the front room, on the side of a bus out front with the slogan “Strengthening the Spirit of Virginia Together.” The bus is a high-end prop for Mr. Youngkin’s “Secure Your Vote” tour, which has him crisscrossing the state to promote early voting. His attempt to reverse Republican mistrust of early and absentee voting is one way the governor stands apart from the leader of his party, Donald Trump. But it is not the only way.Looking over the crowd, you can’t help but notice a dearth of Trump paraphernalia. One woman has on a blue “Nikki Haley for president” vest, and another one is rocking a “Moms for Liberty” T-shirt. Virginia’s Republican base has plenty of Trump love, yet it’s not a visibly MAGA-rific gathering. This makes a certain political sense: Joe Biden won this county in 2020, as did Mr. Youngkin’s Democratic rival in 2021. But the fact that Mr. Youngkin is aggressively campaigning in blue areas is not only a sign of his popularity, it differentiates him from Mr. Trump, who largely sticks to safe conservative spaces.As Mr. Youngkin bounds into the hall in his signature red vest — smile beaming, cheeks ruddy from the wind — he radiates the upbeat, hunky-P.T.A.-dad vibe that helped carry him to victory in 2021. His voice ranges from an urgent whisper to a gargly rasp as he raves not about his personal grievances or some vision of American carnage, but about the “common sense” plans he and his party have for Virginia. He spotlights a handful of policy areas — jobs, tax relief, crime, mental health care, education — and contends that Republicans, and Virginians, “win” when sensible people come together. Mr. Youngkin’s sales pitch casts the G.O.P. as a party filled with practical folks who want to get stuff done — as opposed to the Democrats, he charges, who “just want to sell fear.”Remember that “fear” line. It’s revealing about Mr. Youngkin’s brand of politics, but it’s also about as edgy as the guy gets. His performance is a far cry from MAGA.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism

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      It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.The Claremont CatastrophistsProbably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.After leaving the Trump White House, Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”America faced a choice: Either Mr. Trump would prevail in his bid for re-election or America was doomed.John Eastman, a conservative lawyer also at the Claremont Institute, agreed. That is why, after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Eastman set about taking the lead in convincing Mr. Trump that there was a way for him to remain in power, if only Vice President Mike Pence treated his ceremonial role in certifying election results as a vastly broader power to delay certification.Despite legal troubles related to the efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Eastman’s attitude hasn’t changed. In a conversation this summer with Thomas Klingenstein, a leading funder of the Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman explained why he thought such unprecedented moves were justified.The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.That’s how, in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.In this conversation, Mr. Anton and Mr. Yarvin swapped ideas about how this theocratic oligarchy might be overthrown. It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.A year ago, Mr. Anton revisited the topic of “the perils and possibilities of Caesarism” on “The Matthew Peterson Show” with several other intellectual catastrophists with ties to the Claremont Institute. (Another panelist on the online show, Charles Haywood, a wealthy former businessman, used the term “Red Caesar,” referring to the color associated with the G.O.P., in a 2021 blog post about Mr. Anton’s second book.)On the Peterson show, Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.” (He also said that he would lament the United States coming to these circumstances because he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)The Christian Reverse RevolutionariesThose on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)But Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” (Mr. Deneen and I worked together professionally at several points over the past two decades, and Mr. Dreher and I have been friends for even longer.)Mr. Deneen’s previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was praised by writers across the political spectrum, including former President Barack Obama, for helping readers understand the appeal of the harder-edged populist conservatism that took control of the Republican Party in 2016. “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.The book opens with a tableau of a decaying country with declining economic prospects, blighted cities, collapsing birthrates, drug addiction and widespread suicidal despair. The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.Mr. Deneen is inconsistent in laying out how postliberal voters should achieve the overthrow of this progressive tyranny. In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace it. They include relocating executive branch departments of the federal government to cities around the country and the establishment of nationwide vocational programs.But in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.Despite that shift in content and tone, Mr. Deneen has been embraced by many New Right conservatives and G.O.P. politicians like Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Senator Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff has called him “one of the important people thinking about why we are in the moment we are in right now.”Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.The Bronze Age Pervert and the Nietzschean FringeFarther out on the right’s political and philosophical extremes there’s Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us. Mr. Trump, Mr. Alamariu believes, has pointed us in the right direction. But the former president is only the beginning, he writes. “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”It’s hard to know how seriously to take all of this. Mr. Alamariu, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, writes in such a cartoonish way and laces his outrageous pronouncements with so much irony and humor, not to mention deliberate spelling and syntax errors, that he often seems to be playing a joke on his reader.But that doesn’t mean influential figures on the right aren’t taking him seriously. Nate Hochman, who was let go by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol, told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset.’”Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.Combating the CatastrophistsSome will undoubtedly suggest we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed about such trends. These are just a handful of obscure writers talking to one another, very far removed from the concerns of Republican officeholders and rank-and-file voters.But such complacency follows from a misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals in radical political movements. These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?” Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.Yes, our politics is increasingly turbulent. Yet the country endured far worse turmoil just over a half-century ago — political assassinations, huge protests, riots, hundreds of bombings, often carried out by left-wing terrorists — without dispensing with democracy or looking to a Caesar as a savior.The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.None of which is meant to imply that liberalism is flawless or that it doesn’t deserve criticism. But the proper arena in which to take advantage of liberalism’s protean character — its historical flexibility in response to cultural, social and economic changes over time — remains ordinary democratic politics, in which clashing parties compete for support and accept the outcome of free and fair elections.Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes From the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.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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      in Elections

      Abortion Is on the Ballot in Tuesday’s Elections, Giving a Preview for 2024

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      Elections in Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia will give an early preview of how abortion will shape the political landscape in 2024, and the effectiveness of both parties’ approaches.Abortion has emerged as a defining fault line of this year’s elections, with consequential contests in several states on Tuesday offering fresh tests of the issue’s political potency nearly 18 months after the Supreme Court ended a federal right to an abortion.The decision overturning Roe v. Wade scrambled American politics in 2022, transforming a longstanding social conflict into an electoral battering ram that helped drive Democrats to critical victories in the midterm races. Now, as abortion restrictions and bans in red states have become reality, the issue is again on the ballot, both explicitly and implicitly, in races across the country.In Kentucky, Democrats are testing whether abortion can provide a political advantage even in a red state, as Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, has used the state’s near-total ban on abortions — which was triggered by the fall of Roe — to bludgeon his Republican opponent as an extremist. In Ohio, a socially conservative state, a ballot question that would enshrine abortion rights in the State Constitution will measure the extent of the country’s political pivot toward abortion rights.And in Virginia, the only Southern state without an abortion ban, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, is trying to flip the script in the state’s legislative elections, casting Democrats as “extreme” and saying his party supports a “common-sense position” — a 15-week ban.The contests give an early preview of how abortion will shape the political landscape in next year’s presidential and congressional elections — and the effectiveness of both parties’ approaches.Strategists across the political spectrum agree that abortion remains highly energizing for the Democratic coalition, particularly in states where Republicans could pass further restrictions. In Pennsylvania, where the parties are battling over a State Supreme Court seat, even a gun control advocacy group began ads backing the Democratic candidate by raising alarms about the future of abortion rights — a tacit nod to the issue’s resonance.“It’s still a very, very powerful issue to folks, both in terms of motivating Democrats to vote and as a very fruitful persuasion issue for swing voters,” said Angela Kuefler, a longtime Democratic pollster working on the proposed Ohio amendment.What remains less clear is how far into conservative areas Democrats’ arguments will be effective and whether Republicans can deflect some of the attacks.That’s what Republicans are trying to do in Virginia, where G.O.P. candidates like State Senator Siobhan Dunnavant, an OB-GYN running in one of the state’s most hotly contested races for a newly redrawn seat, have aired numerous ads on the issue.In one ad, she says, “I don’t support an abortion ban,” even though she supports a 15-week ban on the procedure with exceptions for rape, incest, the woman’s health and cases of several fetal anomalies. She argues that a 15-week restriction is not a ban but rather “legislation that reflects compassionate common sense.”“Every Republican in a swing district knows the Democrat playbook that’s going to be run against them,” said Liesl Hickey, a Republican strategist and ad maker working on the race. “The abortion issue can either define you, or you can define it in your campaign.”In Ohio, a red state with a history of opposition to abortion rights, Democrats are pushing a referendum that would enshrine abortion rights in the State Constitution.Julie Carr Smyth/Associated PressSince Roe was overturned, Democrats have prevailed in six out of six ballot measures that put the question of abortion straight to voters. This year, national groups backing both sides have poured tens of millions of dollars into the Ohio contest, transforming an off-year ballot measure into one of the most important races this fall.A victory in Ohio would provide further fuel for abortion rights efforts next year. That will be especially true in pivotal battleground states where campaigns are already underway, including Arizona, Florida and Missouri, said Amy Natoce, a spokeswoman for Protect Women Ohio, a group founded by national anti-abortion groups to oppose the amendment.“We know that all eyes are on Ohio right now,” she said. “States that are considering similar constitutional amendments are looking to us.”In Kentucky, Mr. Beshear is further testing the limits of where abortion can mobilize a Democratic coalition. Since Roe ended, the state has become engulfed in a political battle over how abortion should be regulated. A trigger law that took effect immediately after the decision banned abortion in nearly all circumstances, except to save the life of the woman or prevent severe injury. Efforts by abortion providers to block the ban in court were denied.Last fall, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state’s Constitution to ensure that no right to an abortion was in the document.In his campaign ads, Mr. Beshear has focused on how his Republican opponent, Daniel Cameron, supports a near-total ban.The Beshear campaign has aired some of the cycle’s most searing spots, including a straight-to-camera testimonial from a woman who was raped as a child by her stepfather. She says in the ad that Mr. Cameron would force child victims to carry the babies of their rapists.“We have the most extreme law in the country, where victims of rape and incest, some as young as 9 years old, have no options,” Mr. Beshear said this past week in Richmond, Ky. “The people of Kentucky have enough empathy to believe that those little girls ought to have options.”After the ad aired, Mr. Cameron, the state attorney general, flipped his position and said that he would support carving an exception in state law in instances of rape or incest. Even if Mr. Beshear wins re-election, he would most likely struggle to change the state’s abortion law because Republicans control the Legislature.Courtney Norris, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cameron, said in a statement, “Andy mischaracterizes and flat-out lies about Daniel’s position on a number of issues in an attempt to deflect attention away from his failures as governor and his extreme record on this issue.”Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, has used the state’s near-total ban on abortions to paint his Republican opponent as an extremist.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesStill, not every Democrat running in a red state has embraced Mr. Beshear’s approach. Just as in the midterms, when abortion benefited Democrats most in states like Arizona and Michigan, where the right to the procedure was directly at risk, Democrats are leveraging the issue race by race.In Mississippi, Brandon Presley, the Democratic candidate for governor, has promoted his “pro-life” stance in television ads and has focused on issues like Medicaid expansion. And Shawn Wilson, a Democratic who lost the race for governor in Louisiana last month, said he was personally “pro-life.” Both are deeply conservative states where abortion is banned in almost all circumstances.In Virginia, where abortion remains legal through the second trimester, Republicans are the ones mitigating their approach. Mr. Youngkin has tried to be proactive in his messaging on abortion, promising to sign a 15-week ban if he and his Republican allies take over both chambers of the Legislature.Such a policy would have significant implications for the entire region, because Virginia has become a destination for patients across the South seeking the procedure. Currently, abortion remains legal in the state until nearly 27 weeks, and afterward if needed to save the life of the woman.Most doctors say there is no medical basis for an abortion cutoff at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Nor would it stop the vast majority of abortions, given that more than 93 percent happen before that stage in pregnancy, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But 15 weeks is the point at which many polls indicate that a majority of Americans would support restrictions.That’s one of the reasons Mr. Youngkin’s political committee has spent $1.4 million on ads pushing what the spots call a “reasonable” 15-week limit and accusing Democrats of disinformation as a heartbeat can be heard in the background. “Here’s the truth: There is no ban,” the narrator says.National Republican strategists have been pushing that message as well, urging their candidates to embrace a 15-week ban and exceptions in cases of rape, incest and risks to the physical health of the woman — all relatively popular positions with the general public.Zack Roday, a top political adviser to Mr. Youngkin, said Republicans were trying to reclaim and redirect the extremist label. He said Republicans needed to proactively neutralize that attack and create a “permission structure” for voters who are wary of G.O.P. candidates’ stances on abortion but like their approach to other issues.“They understand 40 weeks, no limits is extreme,” Mr. Roday said. “We’re trying to reclaim and bat that down. Because when you do, the voters will look at you more broadly.”Democrats say there are significant complications to Mr. Youngkin’s strategy. Polls show that a plurality of voters dislike the Republican approach to abortion rights. In private meetings and research memos, even some Republican strategists have urged their candidates to move away from the “pro-life” label, saying that many Americans now equate the term with support for a total ban.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign in 2020, said that voters tended to see the issue of abortion as a fight over personal autonomy, and were less interested in litigating a number of weeks or specific exceptions.“Before Dobbs, people were very willing to entertain exceptions and restrictions,” she said. “Now they are much less open to that conversation because they just think there’s a bigger fundamental point here.”She added, “The fundamental freedom to an abortion has been taken away, and we want to guarantee that right.”State Senator Scott Surovell, the campaign chairman of the Virginia Senate’s Democratic caucus, said abortion remained the No. 1 issue driving people to vote.When Mr. Surovell first heard that Mr. Youngkin’s operation was planning to spend more than $1 million on abortion ads, he said he felt like what “the Union troops thought at Gettysburg,” when the Confederate army made a famously ill-fated charge.“You’re going to try to charge us here?” he said. “They’re going to try to attack us while we’re on the high ground here?”Reid J. Epstein More

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      The Presidential Fantasy Draft America Needs

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe polls are clear: Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has the full confidence of American voters. But is Biden’s latest competition, Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the answer to voters’ malaise? Or perhaps an independent candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?On this week’s episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts imagine their own alternative candidates for 2024 and debate what good — if any — could come from long-shot contenders.(A transcript of this episode can be found in the center of the audio player above.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Ken Wiedemann/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:“Dean Phillips Has a Warning for Democrats,” by Tim Alberta in The AtlanticThoughts about the show? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Katherine Miller. More

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      It Isn’t Easy to Be Mitt Romney

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      It’s a wretched time to be an institutionalist in the Republican Party. But it’s a vital time to read about one.The new speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is an election denier who finds the separation of church and state passé, while his party’s base seems eager to renominate a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president for the White House. It is in this era of degraded Republicanism that McKay Coppins has published “Romney: A Reckoning” — a look inside the public life and private misgivings of Willard Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, 2012 Republican presidential nominee, current senator from Utah and politician eternally miscast for his time and his party.“You don’t want to be the only one sitting at the table and no one wants to sit with you,” Romney says to Coppins, explaining how he feels during Republican caucus lunches. The feeling has trailed Romney throughout his political life.The easy story to write about Romney today is that of the courageous apostate, the lone Republican senator who voted to convict Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, the throwback to a vision of a party that barely exists today: fiscally conservative, morally upright, constitutionally conscientious. Washington journalists love tales of party-bucking mavericks, and Romney fits the part. Yet that is not the sole story that Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has chosen to tell.Instead, he explores the extent to which Romney wrestles with, and intermittently accepts, his role in what the Republican Party has become. When Coppins asks Romney if he would still have taken that courageous vote in Trump’s impeachment trial had the senator been 30 years younger, with many campaigns and elections still ahead of him, Romney demurs. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he admits. “I think I recognize now my capacity to rationalize decisions that are in my self-interest.”It is a memorable distillation of a life in politics, of the tension between high principle and unseemly justification. It’s a tension Romney has navigated better than most, in part for his willingness to acknowledge its existence.Rationalizations appear throughout Romney’s career. One came in 2012, when, as a presidential candidate, he sought and publicly accepted Trump’s endorsement for president, at a time when Trump was a reality-show host promoting the birtherism canard about President Barack Obama. Stepping on a Las Vegas stage with Trump was “one of the more humiliating chores” of Romney’s political life, Coppins writes, but the candidate explained it away as one of those things that politicians do. After all, if Obama could welcome endorsements from Kanye West and Lena Dunham, why couldn’t Romney stand alongside the host of “The Apprentice”? The awkwardness of the meeting was exquisite. “There are some things you just can’t imagine happening,” Romney said in front of the microphone. “This is one of them.”Four years later, during the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Romney delivered a brutal speech at the University of Utah attacking Trump’s policies (“The country would sink into a prolonged recession”), intelligence (“He is very, very not smart”), honesty (“His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University”) and character (“Imagine your children and grandchildren acting the way he does”). He almost seemed to enjoy himself, delivering zingers and pausing for laughs as though Trump’s ascent to the White House was one more thing he couldn’t imagine happening. During the race, he also assailed prominent Republicans, like Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and one of the first mainstream party leaders to back Trump. The endorsement “diminishes you morally,” Romney told Christie in an email, and only withdrawing it could “preserve your integrity and character.”Romney also tried to coordinate strategy with Trump’s primary opponents and, once it was clear Trump had secured the nomination, he even hoped to rustle up a third-party candidate. All such efforts are part of a self-perceived family trait that the senator calls the “Romney obligation” — the compulsion to run toward a crisis, whether that means saving the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from mismanagement and corruption or trying to rescue the 2016 Republican Party from its Trumpian fate.But Coppins raises the inevitable question: “Where was this principled stand when Romney was running for president himself?” Romney’s answer comes off as vaguely dismissive. “Obviously if I did anything to help legitimize him, I regretted it,” he said. That’s a big “if.” Obviously.John Angelillo/UPI, via Associated PressPerhaps, as Coppins suggests, Romney didn’t consider Trump much of a political threat in 2012, just one more bombastic donor to attract and appease. But there was no such excuse four years later, when Romney legitimized Trump yet again, this time shortly after the 2016 election, agreeing to meet with Trump to discuss becoming his secretary of state. After meeting with Trump, Romney even told reporters that he had “increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future.” It is hard to reconcile the man who pilloried Trump at the University of Utah earlier that year with the one sitting at dinner with Trump and Reince Priebus at Trump Tower’s Jean-Georges, with a look, as Coppins writes, of “forlorn defeat.”To his credit, Romney fesses up to his mixed motives. “I looked at what was happening in the world, and these were really troubling times,” he said to Coppins, arguing, as many Republicans did at the time, that the country needed serious people in the new administration. But Romney also relished the power and the relevance. “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do,” he said. “If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.” Trump wanted Romney to go further and repudiate his earlier attacks against him, but Romney declined. In a recent interview with me, Coppins described the secretary of state dalliance as “the last temptation” for Romney.The earlier temptations emerge well before Trump appears on the scene. As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Romney traveled the country in 2006 to raise funds for candidates and try out his own message ahead of the primary season. He wanted to talk about jobs, but conservative crowds preferred to talk guns and terrorists and abortion. Romney complied. “When you speak to the N.R.A.,” he told Coppins, “you change your tone. I admit it.… You say the things that make the audience respond positively.”It’s quite a Trumpian approach, though maybe just a political one, too. “A new incentive structure took shape on those stages,” Coppins writes. “A new persona formed.” Soon, Romney began blasting the “death tax” during speeches, for instance, mainly because doing so got a good response. “It was one of those things you say because you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re first running for president,” he told Coppins, a seemingly banal quote that grows more stunning with each rereading. Romney complains that he is “the authentic person who seems inauthentic,” but moments like those help explain why.There is a certain obliviousness to Romney’s campaigning, especially so during his 2012 presidential run, when the candidate still regarded the Tea Party as merely a movement for fiscal discipline. His campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens (who in the years since has become one of the most vociferous anti-Trumpers and one of the most disillusioned ex-Republicans), harbored no such illusions, telling Romney at the time that the primary was not about policy or ideology but about grievance and tribalism. “The base is southern, evangelical, and populist,” Stevens said. “You’re a Yankee, Mormon, and wealthy. We’re going to have to steal this nomination.”Observers of American politics often marvel that a country that twice elected Barack Obama could then replace him with Donald Trump. But it’s no less remarkable that a Republican Party that nominated Romney in 2012 could then turn around and choose Trump as its standard-bearer in 2016.Maybe Romney did steal the 2012 nomination from the proto-Trump Republican Party, or maybe Trump snatched the 2016 primary from the last gasp of the party establishment, or perhaps both are true. Regardless, Romney and his wife, Ann, were shocked as they watched Trump’s rallies on television, with the crowds “crescendoing to a state of near-delirium that bordered on bloodlust,” Coppins writes. As Ann Romney said to her husband, “Those people weren’t at our events.”Unless they were. In politics, people can be as extreme, or as reasonable, as their options.Damon Winter/The New York TimesCoppins depicts Ann Romney as the pivotal influence in her husband’s life; he is always trying to win and preserve her approval. A close second is his father, George Romney, the governor of Michigan, Republican presidential candidate and Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Nixon administration. “He’s both inspired by and at times haunted by his dad’s legacy,” Coppins told me, and their political careers feature parallels as well as divergences. Mitt’s stand against Trump is reminiscent of George’s opposition to the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater, and during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Mitt thinks back to his father’s steadfast support for civil rights in the late 1960s, even as urban unrest spread and Richard Nixon peddled law and order.Decades later, Romney remains aggrieved at the news media’s response when his father — in an infelicitous choice of metaphor — complained that he had undergone a “brainwashing” by the government spin about the Vietnam War. The controversy surrounding his use of that term finally derailed George Romney’s presidential aspirations. At the start of his own campaign for the 2008 nomination, Romney gave his senior staff a copy of an 88-page master’s thesis, written in 1969 by a George Romney campaign staffer, describing how his father had gone from front-runner to also-ran. The elder Romney’s crucial political misstep, Coppins writes, was a compulsion to speak his mind and stick to his beliefs, no matter the consequences, even when seeking the nation’s highest office.His son sought to avoid that mistake in his own White House bids. “The one question Romney would struggle to answer — even a decade later — was whether he had been true to himself in his pursuit of the presidency,” Coppins writes. (I hate to say it, but if you can’t settle that question after all those years, maybe you know the answer.) When Romney speaks to student groups these days, Coppins reports, the senator advises them never to trade away their integrity for political gain, and he says it with an air of someone who has lived that trade-off. “It’s not worth it,” he tells them. “Believe me.”Upon joining the Senate in 2019, “Romney finally felt free to follow his father’s example — the way he’d always wanted to — without worrying about the politics.” He knew that voting to convict Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency would marginalize him in the modern Republican Party, and he agonized over the decision; after all, it is one thing to be an outlier, another to be an outcast. (His 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, a former House speaker, showed his colors by reaching out when he had learned how Romney would vote, not to offer support but to try to talk him out of it.) “My promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside,” Romney said on the Senate floor, a brief but indelible counterpoint to what his party had become.Did this moment come late in Romney’s career, only once the prize of the presidency was no longer possible? Yes. Did it allow Romney to make a statement rather than a difference, in that his isolated vote could not produce Trump’s conviction? Of course. But over time, a statement can become a difference. As a senator, Romney still voted in line with Trump’s agenda most of the time, but his declaration that Trump’s behavior was “wrong, grievously wrong” was the assertion of principle over self-interest, affirming his father’s legacy and bringing him closer to fulfilling the Romney obligation. When I asked Coppins how history might look upon Romney, he answered: “If we could all be remembered for eventually reaching the best version of ourselves, I think that would be wonderful. And I think that would be fair for him.”Romney has long kept private journals, and Coppins noticed that the most copious entries came during the 2012 campaign, when Romney imagined he was gathering material for a memoir. He would never write one because, as he explained to Coppins, no one reads memoirs by the losers. That may be so. But “Romney: A Reckoning” shows that books about the losers can be worth the read, and that eventual victories can be worth the losses.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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      Mike Pence’s Hell Is Ours Too

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      It’s one thing to disparage Donald Trump. It’s quite another to throw your body between him and his efforts to steal the presidency. Mike Pence, God love him, did the latter, and that sealed his doom. To the hard-core MAGA corps, tyranny is the meaty breakfast of champions. Virtue and democracy are a wimp’s veggie canapés.But that’s not the only moral of Pence’s miserable polling and early exit from the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, which is, incredibly, even less appetizing for his departure. He did something else that was just as dissonant with the mood of his party — with the mood of America, really. He talked about goodness. He privileged upbeat over downbeat. While others maniacally fanned the flames of anger, Pence mellowly stoked the embers of hope.That’s not going to cut it in 2024. Pence’s fate validated that.I’m braced for the campaign season from hell, for a race for the White House that’s a rhetorically violent duel of dystopias, a test of who can sound the shriller death knell for America. It could be all Armageddon all the time.An exchange involving Pence and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Republican presidential debate last August in Milwaukee foreshadowed that. Pence took aim at his much younger rival’s perversely exuberant negativity, schooling him: “We’re not looking for a new national identity. The American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.” They just needed better leaders and a more responsive and responsible government.Ramaswamy practically snorted in performative disbelief. “It is not morning in America,” he countered, summoning the ghost of Ronald Reagan only to flog it. “We live in a dark moment. And we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold, cultural civil war.”Well, the “dark moment” purveyor has crossed the polling and fund-raising thresholds to appear on the stage of the next debate, which is in Miami next week. He rolls on. The pitchman for “freedom-loving, idealistic” Americans doesn’t. His bid for the presidency is history, much as good old-fashioned American optimism sometimes seems to be.That’s the context for the intensifying presidential campaign, in which the smartest strategy for spiteful times may be convincing voters that your opponent’s victory won’t merely jeopardize the health of the country. It will endanger the future of civilization. It will turn a “dark moment” pitch black. With a new war in the Middle East, a grinding war in Ukraine and China eyeing Taiwan like a great white sizing up a baby seal, that’s not a tough sell.And if President Biden, 80, is the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump, 77, is the Republican one, the conditions for extreme ugliness are optimal. (Or is that pessimal?) Assuming no major swerves from the present, each of these men would stagger agedly into the general election amid questions about his cognitive zest — and with anemic favorability ratings — that all but compel him to savage his opponent as the direr of two evils. That’s what wounded politicians do. They make the other candidate bleed.Biden, I feel certain, would prefer to play the happy warrior — it’s a better fit for his earnestness and goofiness. But those aren’t the cards he has been dealt. That’s not the casino he’s in.The world roils, and here at home, to his and his aides’ understandable bafflement and frustration, voters seem to be much more focused on the bad in the economy than the good (low unemployment, increased wages, annualized G.D.P. growth of 4.9 percent for the most recent quarter). In polls, Americans express more confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy than in Biden’s.On top of which, a majority of Democrats say that they’d prefer someone other (and younger) than Biden to be the party’s nominee, and the war between Israel and Hamas is sharpening intraparty divisions that have largely been avoided over the past few years.One solution is obvious: Divert attention to the MAGA menace. That tactic is as warranted as the menace is real. And Biden has practice at it, having given a big speech about a country “at an inflection point” before the midterms last year and having since issued stern warnings about “MAGA extremists.” Trump and other Republicans have even more thoroughly rehearsed their lines about America’s descent under Democrats into a lawless, borderless, “woke” abyss. Watch almost any hour of Fox News for florid depictions of this lurid hellscape, or listen to Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, a merchant of vengeance who defines himself almost entirely in terms of whom (and what) he’s against and how mercilessly he’ll punish them.“Much of the rhetoric from the declared and potential Republican candidates so far is remarkable for its dystopian tone,” Ashley Parker wrote in The Washington Post in March, noting the “apocalyptic themes” as prominent Republicans “portray the nation as locked in an existential battle, where the stark combat lines denote not just policy disagreements but warring camps of saviors vs. villains, and where political opponents are regularly demonized.”That was before Trump’s four indictments on 91 felony counts and the extra rage into which they whipped him. Before he mused publicly about whether Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason. If Trump was apocalyptic in March, he’s in an even more desperate realm now. I don’t think there’s a word — or, in presidential politics, a precedent — for it.What that bodes for the next year, and especially for the months just before Election Day, is a furious effort to fill Americans with even more fear and more anger than they already feel. Tell me how our country is governable on the far side of that.And say goodbye to Pence, not just as a candidate but as an emblem and ambassador of an attitude and era that are long gone.For the Love of SentencesHarrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”CBS, via Getty ImagesIn The Times, Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo appraised the art collection of Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant former prime minister of Italy, who died earlier this year: “The paintings are now stashed in an enormous hangar that critics have characterized as a sort of Raiders of the Lousy Art warehouse.” (Thanks to Rob Hisnay of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Miriam Bulmer of Mercer Island, Wash., for nominating this.)Also in The Times, Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.” (Susan Davy, Kingwood, Texas, and Mike Stirniman, Fremont, Calif.)And Patti Davis, in a tribute to the actor Matthew Perry’s candor about addiction, wrote: “That’s the best we can do in life — be truthful and hope those truths become lanterns for others as they wander through the dark.” (Eric Sharps, Campbell, Calif.) In The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counter-histories, grievances and fifty varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.” (Anne Palmer, Oberlin, Ohio)In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health, and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery, and sequins.” (Mitch Gerber, Rockville, Md.)In Grub Street, Mark Byrne took issue with a friend’s comment that the Greenwich Village restaurant Cafe Cluny is “too expensive for what it is.” “This is Manhattan: ‘Too expensive for what it is’ is written in rat’s blood on the stoops of our walk-ups,” he riffed. (Todd P. Lowe, Louisville, Ky.)In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri responded to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s insistence that “the human heart,” not easy access to deadly firearms, is the problem behind mass shootings: “Why don’t we have alien hearts with extra ventricles, splendidly green and impervious to pain; or efficient, 3D-printed e-hearts; or anatomically inaccurate paper hearts? So many better kinds of hearts to have! It isn’t the guns. The problem is the human heart. Weak, feeble, pitiful heart. Put it up against a gun, and it loses every time.” (David Sherman, Arlington, Va.)Also in The Post, Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.” (Mary Fran McShea, Frederick, Md.)And in The Athletic, Jason Lloyd described how Kevin Stefanski, the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, almost — but not quite — continued that pro football team’s magic streak of improbable victories in a game last weekend against the Seattle Seahawks: “He nearly had the lady sawed in half when he hit an artery.” (Jason Keesecker, Durham, N.C.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Listening to and DoingErin Schaff for The New York TimesCount me among those people who are terrified that third-party candidates might throw the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump, and consider me horrified, in that context, at the selfishness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West and the recklessness of the No Labels folks. The stakes of — and case against — what they’re doing are beautifully illustrated by Matt Bennett, one of the leaders of the group Third Way, in an especially fine episode of the podcast of the CNN political director, David Chalian, that was released Friday.The feedback that I received about my assertion in last week’s newsletter that college students should be challenged, not coddled, included recommendations for other writing on the topic, some of it from a decade or more ago, showing that the problem is hardly new. I found this eloquent, 21-year-old speech by P. F. Kluge about Kenyon College especially fascinating.My Times colleague Adam Nagourney did an impressive amount of research and got extraordinary access to key players to produce his recently published book “The Times,” which chronicles this news organization’s challenges, changes, resilience and growth over much of the past half century. If you’re an admirer of The Times and curious about its inner workings, you’ll find much to savor.Speaking of Times colleagues, David Leonhardt, a Pulitzer winner whose superb reflections and analysis in the Times newsletter The Morning are probably familiar to you, has just released an important new book, “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.” It’s on the top of my night table stack, metaphorically speaking, and might well appeal to you as well.On the evening of Mon., Nov. 20, I’ll be talking with the brilliant Times critic and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Morris at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Wesley is a delight to listen to, so if you’re in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, please join us. Details about the event, which is open to the public, are here.On a Personal NoteRegan during a past autumn in Central Park Frank Bruni/The New York TimesThe view of the midtown Manhattan skyscrapers from the north curve of the Great Lawn last weekend was as breathtaking as ever, but something wasn’t right.My amble through the Ramble was richly scored with bird song — and the trees wore their best autumn finery — but the magic wasn’t complete. I felt an absence.Regan wasn’t by my side. She and her dog sitter were back at our new home in North Carolina. And Central Park without her wasn’t Central Park at all.Since she and I moved away from New York City in the summer of 2021, my return trips to our former stamping grounds have been rare. I’ve been busy. I prefer looking forward to looking back. My new home is so easy, and the city is so tough. I have reasons aplenty and excuses galore.But I did return on Saturday, ever so briefly, for two friends’ big joint birthday party, and I found time for a two-hour walk though Central Park, which Regan and I used to visit multiple times daily. She’s how I know it so well. She’s why I love it so much.She tugged me into it, motivated me to explore it and forced me to look at it in fresh and more expansive ways, as I described extensively in my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk.” That’s part of what dogs do for us — they widen our worlds, in terms of both our movements and perceptions.Watching her romp across and rummage through Central Park’s lawns, arbors and woods, I imagined all of that through her eyes, ears and nose, and I tuned into details that I wouldn’t have spotted and savored otherwise.Being in the park without her was like being there with my gait impeded, my senses dulled, my emotions muffled. The park’s grandeur was intact. But my heart felt a little smaller. More

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      New York Election Will Test Asian Americans’ Political Power

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      Whether they stick with Democrats or continue their shift to the right, Asian American voters will help decide competitive races on Nov. 7.Two years ago, many Asian American voters in New York City demonstrated their political muscle by voting for Republicans in traditional Democratic enclaves, voicing their concerns about crime and education while sending a warning signal to Democrats.The message was quickly received.“Our party better start giving more” attention to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat and the first Asian American elected to Congress from New York, wrote on Twitter at the time, using more colorful language to drive home her point.Asian Americans’ growing political clout was also seen in the New York City Council that year, when a record five were elected, including the first Indian American and Korean American members.As the Nov. 7 election nears, in which every City Council seat will be up for grabs, Asian Americans’ strength — as well as their political alliances — will be put to another test.Several Asian Americans are running in this year’s Council races, most notably in a so-called Asian opportunity district in Brooklyn that was created last year as part of a once-a-decade redistricting process to reflect the community’s growth.“I’ve never seen so many Asian Americans running for office,” said Councilwoman Linda Lee, the Democratic incumbent from Eastern Queens who is running against Bernard Chow, a health care benefits adviser and a Republican, in another race where both major party nominees are of Asian descent.Councilwoman Linda Lee, a Democrat, was one of a record five Asian Americans to be elected to the Council in 2021.Janice Chung for The New York TimesWith Asian American influence clearly on the rise, Democratic and Republican leaders are strategizing over how best to capture their votes.Leading Democrats, including Attorney General Letitia James, have expressed concern that the party is losing touch with Asian American voters, especially in southern Brooklyn and Queens, in part because it has not capably battled “misinformation and disinformation.”Republicans, meanwhile, have cast the wave of migrants who have recently come to New York in a negative light, hoping to attract more conservative Asian American voters by deploying a similar strategy as last year, when they amplified fears of crime as a wedge issue.Focusing on such issues may attract Asian American swing voters who may not otherwise be inclined to “completely flip Republican,” said Jerry Kassar, chairman of the state Conservative Party, but are “willing to cast their vote for Republicans.”The Queens district being contested by Ms. Lee and Mr. Chow includes the Hollis, Douglaston and Bellerose neighborhoods and is 45 percent Asian. Like in many districts with significant Asian American populations, Democrats and Republicans there often hold similar stances on the top line issues of public safety, education and the arrival of migrants.Both Ms. Lee and Mr. Chow opposed the placement of a tent complex for 1,000 men in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Floral Park, Queens, but Mr. Chow contends, incorrectly, that the migrants are here illegally.“I earned my way in,” said Mr. Chow, who emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States to attend college before becoming a citizen.In July, while Ms. Lee was holding a news conference in a building near the psychiatric center to oppose the tent city, on the grounds that the infrastructure in the area wasn’t sufficient to provide for 1,000 additional people, Mr. Chow was outside with protesters, some who held up signs that said “send them back.”Mr. Chow said opposing the shelter was not enough and that Ms. Lee could have done more, including standing with protesters to demand change. Ms. Lee said she spends time with voters explaining what she has done to mitigate issues around the tent city but rejects the xenophobic comments made at some of the rallies.“Asylum seekers come here from horrible situations, and they want to work,” Ms. Lee said.In northern Queens, Asian American voters are being courted in a rematch of a 2021 election in which the Republican candidate, Vickie Paladino, narrowly defeated Tony Avella, a Democrat.Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, a Republican, works with three surrogates, including Yanling Zhang, right, to better reach Asian American voters.Janice Chung for The New York TimesMs. Paladino often knocks on doors with one of three Asian American surrogates, and Mr. Avella has prioritized printing campaign fliers in Mandarin and Korean, reflecting the fact that Asians now comprise 38 percent of the district.“I think the Asian community is finally coming into its own,” Mr. Avella said. “For decades, they were not listened to. Now, they can turn an election.”Asians are the fastest growing group in New York City, according to the 2020 census, which shows that New York City gained 630,000 new residents, 55 percent of whom are Asian, in the previous decade. “Asian Americans are a waking giant,” said Trip Yang, a Democratic consultant who is working on Mr. Avella’s campaign. “We’re not sleeping any more.”Both Ms. Paladino and Mr. Avella have said the nation’s southern border should be closed because of how the migrant crisis is affecting the city.But Mr. Avella has accused Ms. Paladino of making xenophobic remarks about Asians. He sent out a campaign mailer highlighting comments that Ms. Paladino made about how many “Asian languages” there are and noting that she liked a social media post saying that the country should “stop catering to Asians” because “we speak English,” using an expletive for emphasis.Ms. Paladino said Mr. Avella had dug up “joke tweets” from years ago because he had “nothing productive to add to the conversation,” and that she had worked on behalf of Asian Americans for years.Tony Avella, left, prints campaign fliers in Mandarin and Korean, in recognition that 38 percent of his district is of Asian descent.Janice Chung for The New York TimesIn the new Asian opportunity district in southern Brooklyn, the Democratic nominee, Susan Zhuang, and the Republican nominee, Ying Tan, each held rallies in August to oppose a migrant center in Sunset Park that is not even located in their district.Ms. Zhuang and Ms. Tan have focused their campaigns on crime, quality-of-life issues and education, as they fight to represent a district that is 54 percent Asian.During a recent debate, they argued over whether the other had done enough to protect the specialized high school entrance exam and speak out against migrant shelters. Ms. Tan said the city’s right to shelter should be eliminated entirely, while Ms. Zhuang said it should not apply to recent migrants.Mr. Yang, the Democratic consultant, said that the candidates’ response to the migrant influx illustrates how many Asian American voters are more concerned with particular issues than political party lines. Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, are more likely to be unaffiliated with a political party than any racial minority, he added.Hate crimes against Asian Americans is one those issues. A protest on Monday about a 13-year-old Asian teen who was beaten by an adult drew both Mr. Chow and John Liu, a center-left Democratic state senator and the first Asian American elected to citywide office.Both Mr. Liu and Mr. Chow called for criminal charges against the teen’s father to be dropped because he was acting in self-defense.“Incidents like that make people aware in terms of the importance of local elected officials,” said Yiatin Chu, president of the Asian Wave Alliance, which co-sponsored the protest. “What are they saying? How are they helping us navigate these things?”The protest was one of many recent examples of how Asian Americans are pushing elected Democrats to take their concerns more seriously.Shekar Krishnan, the first Indian American elected to the City Council, has a large Bangladeshi population in his district, but noted that there were very few Bengali dual-language programs in public schools.“Government is not hearing our concerns and not taking them seriously enough and treats us still like a monolith,” said Mr. Krishnan, who represents Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens.Grace Lee, an assemblywoman who represents Lower Manhattan, and Mr. Liu are publicly working to protect the commuter vans that are prevalent in Asian communities, and make sure they are not unduly harmed by new congestion pricing rules.The vans are a form of mass transit “that is vital to the Asian American community,” Ms. Lee said. “Those are the sort of things where representation matters.”Ms. Meng said she was starting to see things change. In a recent special election in a Queens Assembly district covering Kew Gardens, College Point and Whitestone, Democrats were able to win over voters who had supported Lee Zeldin, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, instead of Gov. Kathy Hochul.The Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee ran ads in Asian media every day during early voting and worked with a Chinese newspaper to place messages in WeChat, a Chinese messaging app.Councilwoman Sandra Ung represents a district in Flushing, Queens, that has the state’s highest share of Asians.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesOn a warm Friday evening, Sandra Ung, one of the five Asian Americans elected to the Council in 2021, walked north on Main Street in Flushing to knock on doors. Asians comprise 72 percent of her district, the highest share in the city, and Ms. Ung wanted to reach older, first-generation immigrants.One woman, speaking in Mandarin, wanted help finding her polling place. Ms. Ung, a Democrat, and her campaign manager both pulled out their phones.“Ni hao,” Ms. Ung said to another woman who stuck her hand out of the door just far enough to grab a flier written in Mandarin, Korean and English. After a brief conversation in Chinese, the woman said she planned to vote for Ms. Ung.“Sometimes,” Ms. Ung said as she headed for the next apartment, “they just want to have someone who is speaking their language.” More

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      DeSantis Leans Into Vaccine Skepticism to Energize Struggling Campaign

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      The Florida governor has so far found little success in getting his criticism of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 policies to stick, but that has not stopped him from trying.Gov. Ron DeSantis had hoped that his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped propel him to a resounding re-election in Florida last year, would produce similar results in the Republican presidential primary.But despite leaning into his record on Covid-19, Mr. DeSantis remains adrift in the polls and badly trailing former President Donald J. Trump, whose administration he has castigated for how it handled the pandemic. Mr. DeSantis points to how he guided Florida through the pandemic — reopening schools and businesses early and forbidding local governments and businesses from imposing mask and vaccine mandates — as a model for the nation.While Mr. Trump recently warned against the return of “Covid hysteria,” his administration led the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccines that many Republicans now question. Studies show the shots prevented millions of deaths and hospitalizations in the United States. But over the summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged to Fox News that the shots were “not a great thing to talk about” in his party.Mr. DeSantis has sought to exploit that anti-vaccine sentiment as a way to pry primary voters away from Mr. Trump, publicly casting doubt on their safety and effectiveness against the coronavirus. Scientific experts have labeled his views — and his administration’s decision to recommend that Floridians under 65 not receive the updated Covid-19 shot — as dangerous and extreme, even as many acknowledge that the school closures that Mr. DeSantis opposed went on for too long in some states.On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis again tried to rally vaccine-skeptic voters to his side, headlining a “Medical Freedom” town hall at a ski area in Manchester, N.H., alongside Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. During the event, which was hosted by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, the Florida governor insisted that federal public health agencies had spewed “nonsense” throughout the pandemic and needed a complete overhaul.He claimed that the Covid shots have been rolled out without proper clinical studies and that federal officials had either lied or were flatly wrong about the benefits and risks — a view that has been roundly condemned by a wide array of public health experts, academics and scientists. “We know the federal government muffed this in many different ways and we need a reckoning,” the governor said.Mr. DeSantis has found little success in getting his criticism of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 policies to stick, demonstrating the former president’s remarkable resilience with Republicans in the face of criminal indictments, growing attacks from rival candidates and his own verbal missteps.In interviews with The New York Times across the early nominating states, many voters have said they do not fault Mr. Trump for his response to a new and unknown virus, saying that he did his best in an uncertain situation. Such attitudes are common even among some of Mr. DeSantis’s supporters.“I’m always inclined to cut President Trump some slack on the epidemic because he was listening to people who supposedly knew what they were talking about,” said Richard Merkt, 74, who attended the town hall on Wednesday and said he plans to vote for Mr. DeSantis in the New Hampshire primary. Mr. Merkt is a former New Jersey assemblyman who has run for office in New Hampshire, where he retired. Bob Wolf, an undecided Iowa voter, said he admired Mr. DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic but did not blame Mr. Trump. “When Trump was in charge, I don’t think everyone knew what the facts were,” Mr. Wolf, a 44-year-old firefighter, said in an interview this fall.Still, Mr. DeSantis is clinging to his Covid policies as a pillar of a campaign. In September, he and Dr. Ladapo recommended that Floridians under the age of 65 should not get the updated Covid shot that targets the virus’s more recent variants. That guidance contradicted the advice of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had recommended the shot for most Americans six months and older.At the town hall, Dr. Ladapo praised Mr. DeSantis.“To read the data, to reach a conclusion, to know that conclusion is right, and all of these Harvard Ph.D’s and M.D.’s are wrong? That takes courage,” said Dr. Ladapo, who himself holds degrees from Harvard.Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, regularly appears with Gov. Ron DeSantis at events in the state, but this week joined him on the campaign trail. Chris O’Meara/Associated PressMore than 1.13 million Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, with the fatality rate far higher for the unvaccinated than for the vaccinated. A partisan divide has emerged in the nation’s death rate, which has been greater in Republican-leaning counties. Republicans now tend to be more skeptical than Democrats of vaccines of all types, a post-pandemic development.Florida was an early leader in vaccinating older residents against Covid, but achieved far lower vaccination rates for younger age groups as the governor shifted from a vocal advocate to a skeptic of shots. A New York Times analysis in July found that unlike the nation as a whole, Florida lost more lives to Covid after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.Mr. DeSantis has suggested that he is the only Republican who can capture general election voters who are angry about the government’s response to the pandemic, particularly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist, in the race as a third-party candidate.“RFK Jr. will be a vessel for anti-lockdown and anti-Fauci voters, if Trump is the nominee,” Mr. DeSantis said last month, in a reference to Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s former top infectious disease expert, whom he has said should be prosecuted. “If I’m the nominee, they all go to me.”When Mr. Kennedy was still running in the Democratic primary against President Biden, Mr. DeSantis even suggested that the longtime liberal might have a place in his presidential administration — a clear sign that he hoped to court supporters of Mr. Kennedy who share his views on vaccines.But so far, Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to break through in the Republican field have failed.Although the Florida governor generally has high favorability ratings among G.O.P. voters, Mr. Trump has maintained his dominant lead in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. One recent poll showed that former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina had caught up to Mr. DeSantis in Iowa — where he has staked his entire campaign. Polling averages put Ms. Haley ahead of him in both New Hampshire and South Carolina.Not only have the governor’s criticisms of Covid vaccines produced few political dividends in the primary, scientific experts characterize them as dangerous public health policy.Dr. Paul A. Offit directs the vaccine education center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and serves on the F.D.A.’s panel of outside vaccine experts that authorized the vaccines. He said tens of millions of Americans under the age of 65 suffer from underlying medical conditions that increase their risk of severe disease or death from Covid.“Does he think that only those over 65 are at risk?” he asked, referring to Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to recommend the shots for younger age groups. “We’ve moved, sadly, from scientific illiteracy to scientific denialism. Science doesn’t matter.”Dr. Scott Rivkees, Florida’s state surgeon general for more than two years under Mr. DeSantis, said the state was now quite isolated in its approach to Covid vaccinations.“I’m not aware of other states that have said that individuals younger than 65 should not get vaccinated against Covid,” said Dr. Rivkees, who left the administration in September 2021 and is now a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health.Mr. DeSantis’s team dismisses such criticism as more grousing from a “tyrannical medical establishment” that led the nation astray during the pandemic.“His actions have exposed the ‘experts’ for the political actors that the country now knows them to be — and that’s why they continue to attack him with failed science and fake narratives,” Bryan Griffin, press secretary for the DeSantis campaign, said in a statement. He said that Mr. DeSantis had “prioritized the truth” as governor and would “do the same for our nation as president.”Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement: “Ron DeSantis’s attempt to resurrect his old and tired anti-vaccine tantrum today is a reminder to voters that he played political games with Florida’s Covid response at every turn in a cheap effort to score political points with the extreme MAGA movement.” Public health authorities give Mr. DeSantis credit for insisting that Florida schools open their doors to students in the fall of 2020. Many experts now agree that too many school districts offered only remote learning for far too long. But they have heaped criticism on him for casting doubt on Covid shots.Mr. DeSantis claimed Wednesday, as he has previously, that federal authorities misled people into believing that the vaccines prevented infection. In fact, shots were authorized based on evidence that they reduced risks of severe disease and death, not infection.The governor also claimed that Dr. Ladapo had properly identified risks of the shots for young men. But the heads of the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. publicly warned Dr. Ladapo that his statements were misleading, saying such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness.”Mr. DeSantis also played up a state grand jury investigation he instigated nearly a year ago into what he claimed was possible criminal misconduct by Covid vaccine manufacturers. Critics labeled it a political stunt, and it has so far come to naught.But at the town hall Mr. DeSantis suggested that the issue would continue to come up on the campaign trail, saying: “There may be a report or something like that pretty soon.” More