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      Trump’s Fraud Trial and McCarthy’s Ouster Show How Chaotic the GOP Has Become

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      A revolt in Congress. Insurgent candidacies in swing states. A likely nominee on trial. This week showed how the party has turned more insular, antagonistic and repellent to general-election voters.Turbulence has trailed the Republican Party ever since Donald J. Trump’s rise. This week, that chaos looked like an organizing principle.Internal discord rippled through the party’s ranks in battleground states and the nation’s capital, showing clearly how a Trumpian algorithm has incentivized Republicans to keep their electorally self-destructive patterns in place.In Arizona and Michigan, two firebrand conservatives kicked off campaigns for the U.S. Senate, complicating plans from party leaders to retake the chamber in November.In Congress, conservative lawmakers ended the speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy in an unprecedented power struggle that served as a gift to gleeful Democrats eager to tell 2024 voters about the failures of Republican governance.And in downtown Manhattan, the prohibitive favorite for the party’s presidential nomination, Donald J. Trump, sat in a courtroom — his lips pursed and eyebrows knit — at his civil fraud trial, the latest in a long line of legal setbacks that will tie him up in court throughout the campaign season. Even after a judge imposed a gag order on him for attacking a court clerk on social media, Mr. Trump lashed out online at the prosecutor and declared the trial a “witch hunt.”Taken together, the events this week showed how disorder has created its own reward system among Republicans, turning the party increasingly insular and antagonistic — and, as a result, more repellent to general-election voters. After three consecutive disappointing election cycles for the party, it shows few signs of getting itself back on track.Long gone are the carrots and sticks that traditionally helped party leaders shepherd their flocks, like fund-raising help from national committees or plum committee assignments.Instead, the way to rise as a Republican is, one, to display unbending devotion to Mr. Trump and then, two, to embrace some mix of relentless self-promotion, militant opposition to Democrats and a willingness to burn the federal government to the ground — even if it means taking the party down, too.“This all goes back to our reward structure, and how that’s gotten turned on its head,” said Doug Heye, a former aide to Representative Eric Cantor, the onetime majority leader ousted in 2014 by a far-right challenger, pointing out that some of the most controversial Republicans in Congress have bigger social media followings than the party’s leaders.“As long as you’re talking about fighting — regardless of whether you have a strategy to land a punch or win a round — you never actually have to win, because that’s what gets the most attention,” Mr. Heye continued. “And that means Republicans are now sort of always talking between ourselves, and the rest of the country we either don’t engage or hold in contempt.”What’s new is how ingrained such instincts have become among Republicans. Impractical purity tests are creating new divisions in an already fragmented party, like an uncontrollable mitosis damaging nearby tissue with potentially fatal consequences.That means the challenge for one of the nation’s two major political parties is whether it can find a way to thrive when it is powered by a strain of conservatism that somehow grows more potent in defeat.This quandary was articulated by Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana, a far-right Republican weighing a Senate bid against Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent. Mr. Rosendale recently told donors that while his party had anticipated a wave of victories in last year’s midterm elections, he had been “praying each evening for a small majority.”“Because I recognize that that small majority was the only way that we were going to advance a conservative agenda, and that if it was the right majority, that if we had six or seven very strong individuals, we would drag the conference over to the right — and we were able to do that,” Mr. Rosendale said in a video of the meeting posted by The Messenger.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster on Tuesday was carried out by just eight Republican members of the chamber, including Mr. Rosendale and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Floridian who sat next to Mr. Rosendale during the donor event.Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist who interviewed the two congressmen during the fund-raiser, said, “Matt Gaetz gave me that lecture in July of 2022 about the smaller majority — and you are correct, sir.”While Mr. Bannon, now a podcast host, helped orchestrate Mr. McCarthy’s downfall, other conservative media personalities — including Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro — blasted the move.But this antagonistic partisanship has proved successful only for the most provocative members of the party who represent the most gerrymandered districts, which leave them accountable only to primary voters. Republicans following this playbook in battleground states or more competitive districts have shouldered the blame for the party’s underperformance in recent years.So far, many Republicans seem uninterested in mitigating their electoral misery.Far from viewing the gag order as an embarrassment, the Trump campaign sensed an opportunity. It blasted the news to supporters in an email that aimed to launder grievances into cash for his presidential bid.In many ways, the courtroom is the new campaign trail for Mr. Trump, who wasn’t required to appear at the trial but opted to do so anyway — and has repeatedly addressed the news media at the courthouse.Even after dozens of criminal charges piled up against him this summer, Mr. Trump has widened his lead in the presidential primary race by portraying himself as the victim of political persecution, and vowing revenge on his perceived enemies if voters return him to the White House.The tactics have rallied his base of supporters, and there is nothing to suggest Mr. Trump will shift that strategy as his trial dates collide with some of the most important milestones on the Republican primary calendar.The party’s first nominating contest is in Iowa on Jan. 15, the same day Mr. Trump’s civil trial is scheduled to begin into whether he owes the writer E. Jean Carroll damages for defaming her after she accused him of raping her.On March 4, Mr. Trump is set to stand trial over federal criminal charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. The next day, Republicans hold their “Super Tuesday” primaries.Two more trials will unfold during the primary season — one later in March over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, stemming from a hush money payment made to a porn star in 2016, and another in May over charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents.Then, in July, Republicans hold their presidential nominating convention.But if Mr. Trump and other Republicans come up short on the first Tuesday in November 2024, the events that unfolded during the first week of October 2023 may begin to explain those failures. More

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      GOP Candidates Split Over Kevin McCarthy’s Ouster as House Speaker

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      The ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Tuesday exposed sharp divisions among the Republican presidential field, with at least one candidate saying that the power move by right-wing caucus members had been warranted — but others bemoaned the turmoil, and some stayed silent.Several hours before the House voted to vacate the speakership, former President Donald J. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he was fed up with the infighting within the G.O.P.“Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” he wrote.But Mr. Trump did not weigh in directly after Mr. McCarthy was removed from his leadership post.His differences with Mr. McCarthy had been simmering in the open, including over a federal government shutdown that was narrowly averted Saturday when the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for another 45 days.Mr. Trump publicly egged on far-right House members to dig in, telling them in an Oct. 24 social media post, “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” He accused Republican leaders of caving to Democrats during negotiations over the debt ceiling in the spring, saying that they should use the shutdown to advance efforts to close the southern border and to pursue retribution against the Justice Department for its “weaponization.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was the only Republican presidential candidate openly welcoming the discord as of Wednesday morning.“My advice to the people who voted to remove him is own it. Admit it,” he said in a video posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. “There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was. But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?”Mr. Ramaswamy, who had previously argued that a temporary government shutdown would not go far toward dismantling the “administrative state,” said that the status quo in the House was untenable.“Once in a while, a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing,” he said. “Just ask our founding fathers. That’s what this country is founded on, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is now running against his former boss for the party’s nomination, lamented the revolt against Mr. McCarthy. Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, he said that he was disappointed by the outcome.“Well, let me say that chaos is never America’s friend,” Mr. Pence, a former House member, said.But earlier in his remarks, he downplayed the fissure between Republicans in the House over Mr. McCarthy’s status and fiscal differences. He asserted that a few G.O.P. representatives had aligned themselves with Democrats to create chaos in the chamber, saying that on days like this, “I don’t miss being in Congress.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida questioned the motivations of Representative Matt Gaetz, a fellow Floridian who is Mr. McCarthy’s top antagonist in the House. During an appearance on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis suggested that Mr. Gaetz’s rebellion had been driven by political fund-raising.“I think when you’re doing things, you need to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It shouldn’t be done with an eye towards trying to generate lists or trying to generate fund-raising.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also criticized Mr. Gaetz on Tuesday, telling Forbes that his overall approach did “a lot of damage.” Of the efforts to oust Mr. McCarthy, he added: “It’s not helpful. It certainly doesn’t help us focus on the issues that everyday voters care about.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey chimed in Wednesday morning, denouncing the hard-right rebels and expressing concern about the electoral implications. In an appearance on CNBC, he said their actions had given voters “more of a concern about our party being a governing party, and that’s bad for all of us running for president right now.”Mr. Christie said the roots of the chaos lay with Mr. Trump, who he said “set this type of politics in motion.” He also blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms, which gave Republicans only a narrow House majority and made it possible for a handful of people like Mr. Gaetz to wield such outsize influence.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador who has been rising in some polls, appeared to keep silent in the hours after Mr. McCarthy was ousted. A spokeswoman for her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Matt Gaetz Is Polarizing, in Both Congress and His Florida District

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      In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Mr. Gaetz is admired for shaking up the House, but he also has plenty of critics.He is polarizing in Washington and polarizing at home. And in both places these days, he is getting more attention than anyone might expect, given his lack of seniority and thin legislative record.As Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida orchestrated the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday, constituents in his overwhelmingly Republican district had plenty of thoughts about their congressman’s actions and suddenly robust national profile.“If we got rid of the speaker of the House, hopefully we get someone in there who doesn’t make backdoor deals with Democrats,” said Sandra Atkinson, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Okaloosa County, adding that Republicans were proud of him for following through on his word.Critics in his district saw a political moment that was about ego and ambition and little more.“He is following through on using chaos as both a performative art — that phrase is overused but it’s true — and because he’s frustrated he’s not getting his own way,” said Phil Ehr, a Democrat who ran against Mr. Gaetz in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “In some ways, he’s acting like a petulant child.”Yet for all of his time spent picking fights — and, his critics say, little time crafting legislation — Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle, where he won re-election last year by nearly 36 percentage points. His skirmishes in Washington, and a federal investigation that revealed embarrassing details about this private life, have done little to bruise him.Palafox Pier in Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday. Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle where he won re-election last year.Elijah Baylis for The New York Times“There’s a lot of people who like Matt Gaetz,” said Joel Terry May, 67, a local artist, as he showed off a painting in downtown Pensacola to visitors from New Orleans. “He speaks for the people, and he speaks out.”Mr. May, who grew up in Alabama, remembers a time when former Gov. George C. Wallace visited his school back in the 1960s.“People didn’t like George Wallace nationally, but the people who elected him and represented him did,” he said. “That’s what Gaetz also understands. When you represent somebody, you want them to maintain the feel of the people. People want to see Washington work. They want their representatives to have a pulse on the area.”Mr. Gaetz is widely disliked by his peers in Congress but is grudgingly acknowledged to be smart and crafty, and certainly a master of drawing attention to himself. Mr. Gaetz was re-elected last year while under the cloud of an investigation in a federal sex-trafficking case that ultimately resulted in no criminal charges against him. (A congressional ethics review is pending.) Twice, women have been arrested after throwing their drinks at him.Now, his support for a far-right posture that could shut down the federal government — directly affecting many of the people he represents — is unlikely to dent him, his critics acknowledged.“He is loved by the First Congressional District,” said Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary.Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary. campaigning in Pace, Fla., last year. Gregg Pachkowski/Pensacola News Journal/ USA TODAYMr. Lombardo attributed his loss, among other things, to Mr. Gaetz’s family ties — his father, Don Gaetz, is a wealthy and well-known former president of the Florida Senate who on Monday filed to run for the Senate again after stepping down in 2016 — and his devotion to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gaetz is one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in Congress and has backed him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“He was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,” Mr. Lombardo said of the congressman, “and the First District is all about Trump.”No other congressional district in the country has as many military veterans, a group that could have been badly hurt by a shutdown. Yet even his critics concede that Mr. Gaetz remains popular among them.Barry Goodson, 70, a registered Democrat and retired Army veteran who once helped organize people against a plan backed by Mr. Gaetz to privatize some of Northwest Florida’s sandy-white beaches, said he worries his health care providers at the Department of Veterans Affairs would suffer under a shutdown.“I still can’t understand why Gaetz hates negotiating rather than working out something for the people in the district,” he said.“A chaos agent is not good for public policy,” said Samantha Herring, a Democratic national committeewoman in Walton County. “It’s not good for getting highway funds, education and veterans affairs.”And Mr. McCarthy’s ouster left even some fans of Mr. Gaetz with questions about exactly what had been accomplished.“That just makes me support him even more,” said Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy.Elijah Baylis for The New York TimesJohn Roberts, chairman of the Escambia County Republican Party, said that Republicans, even those typically sympathetic to Mr. Gaetz’s views on other policies like immigration and the national debt, generally supported keeping Mr. McCarthy as speaker.“It’s not like we’re mad at Matt Gaetz; he’s still a good congressman,” he said. “But I think this was probably the wrong move.”But as the House smoldered and shook, other backers of Mr. Gaetz said they were all in.Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, has voted for Mr. Gaetz. Upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Hudson offered only more praise.“That just makes me support him even more,” Mr. Hudson said.He added that the ouster of Mr. McCarthy “speaks to how the world really is right now. We’re tired. We’re fed up. We want to see people start getting things done.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Biden Has to Look Beyond Trump and His MAGA Millions

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      Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy.Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his allies to accept election defeats:As you think about the threat to democracy, do you think about it specifically as the refusal to accept election defeats and peaceful transfer of power? Or does it more broadly encompass some of the longstanding features of democracy, like the Electoral College, the nature of the Senate, the gerrymandering process, that sometimes thwarts the will of the majority?In his answer, Biden more or less confirms that yes, when he speaks of the threat to democracy, he specifically means the threat coming from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. For Biden, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the “underpinnings of democracy.” The issue, for him, is that MAGA Republicans would try to overturn elections and “prevent the people’s voice” from being expressed, not to mention heard.Toward the end of the interview, Biden takes care to emphasize the extent to which he separates MAGA Republicans from the rest of the public. “I really do believe the vast majority of the American people are decent, honorable, straightforward,” the president says. The MAGA radicals, he adds, are “a minority of the minority.” Biden goes on to argue that this majority of decent Americans “needs to understand what the danger is if they don’t participate.”This last point is interesting. If the most radicalized and anti-democratic segment of the public is also a small and unrepresentative minority, then there’s no real reason to worry about its influence on electoral politics. Yes, it may elect a few similarly radical members of Congress — who at this moment are giving the Republican speaker of the House a terrible headache — and it may even be strong enough again to choose a major-party nominee. But if these voters are a distinct minority, that nominee will be easily defeated at the ballot box. That is, unless the institutions of our democracy amplify that minority’s influence — which they do.Biden might reject Harwood’s suggestion that the institutions of the American political system constitute a threat to American democracy as dire as the threat posed by Trump, but the only way to square the circle of a radical minority with democracy-destroying potential is to acknowledge the way our institutions work to empower the people who hope to overturn constitutional government altogether.One response is to say that this dynamic represents a distortion of our political institutions: It’s just that they’re not working properly! But that’s not right, is it?Whatever they were, the radical impulses that animated or shaped the most prominent and influential of the American revolutionaries were refracted through an inherited commitment to the received hierarchies of status that shaped their world. What’s more, the framers of the Constitution were pushed toward a mistrust and wariness of popular government as a result of the riots, rebellions and other forms of mass discontent that characterized American politics under the Articles of Confederation.For as much as we have changed and transformed our political institutions — to make them far more inclusive and responsive than they were at their inception — it is also clear that they retain the stamp of their heritage.Our counter-majoritarian institutions, for example, continue to place an incredibly higher barrier to efforts to reduce concentrations of wealth and promote greater economic equality. There is a real chance, for example, that the Supreme Court will deem a wealth tax constitutionally impermissible in its next term. And the United States Senate is a graveyard of attempts to expand federal aid and social insurance, the most recent of which was a child allowance that, while it was in effect, slashed child poverty by nearly half in 2021.But more immediate to Biden’s concerns about democracy is the fact, as I have discussed before, that the Trump crisis may never have materialized if not for specific institutions, like the Electoral College, that gave Trump the White House despite his defeat at the hands of most voters. And even with the Electoral College, Trump might not have won if our Supreme Court had not, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the most aggressive and effective rule for the federal protection of voting rights since Reconstruction.Trump aside, various efforts to invalidate elections and create durable systems of minority rule in the states are possible only because of a constitutional structure that gives a considerable amount of power and sovereignty to sub-national units of political authority.Naturally, a U.S. president cannot publicly say that the system he presides over has serious flaws that undermine its integrity. But it does. And there is a good chance that if Trump becomes president a second time, it will be less because the voting public wants him and more because our institutions have essentially privileged his supporters with greater electoral power. If anyone is aware of this, it has to be Biden, who won the national popular vote by six million in 2020, but would have lost the election if not for a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of so-called swing states.All of this is to say that assuming we meet the immediate challenge and keep Trump from winning next year, it will be worth it for Americans to start to think — out loud, in a collective and deliberate manner — about the kinds of structural reforms we might pursue to make our democracy more resilient or even to realize it more fully in the first place.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 Poland, Supporters of Opposition March in Warsaw Ahead of Key Election

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      The fate of democracy and aid for Ukraine undergird the October vote, which will decide whether the governing Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row.Huge crowds marched through Poland’s capital, Warsaw, on Sunday, converging around a giant flag commemorating a 1944 uprising against Nazi Germany, as opponents of the governing party sought to rally voters for a critical general election that they see as the last chance to save the country’s hard-won democratic freedoms.The Warsaw city government, which is controlled by the opposition, put the crowd at a million people at its peak. But state-controlled television, which mostly ignored the event, instead broadcasting a pre-election convention by the governing Law and Justice party, estimated fewer than 100,000 had turned out, citing police sources.The march was the biggest display of antigovernment sentiment since Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement rallied against communism in the 1980s. It set the stage for the final stretch of an increasingly nasty election campaign. Poland, bitterly polarized on everything from relations with the rest of Europe to abortion rights, will hold a general election on Oct. 15 that will decide whether the conservative Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row in government.In a speech peppered with references to Poland’s past struggles for liberty, Donald Tusk, the main opposition leader, appealed for patriots to cast out a right-wing nationalist government that he said was pitting Poles against Poles, defiling the legacy of national heroes who had resisted foreign occupation.He promised to end what he called “the Polish-Polish war” stoked by the governing party’s denunciation as traitors Poles who deviate from traditional Catholic values or look to the European Union for help against discrimination and government meddling in the judiciary.“Change for the better is inevitable,” he said.Billed as “the march of a million hearts,” the event featured Polish and E.U. flags, as well as a few American ones waved by Poles with family in the United States. Before leading a huge crowd in singing the Polish national anthem, which starts with the words “Poland has not yet perished,” Mr. Tusk said the opening line “has never had such a strong and authentic ring as it does today.”Seeking to reclaim patriotism from Law and Justice, which presents itself as a protector of Polish values and sovereignty against E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels and accuses Mr. Tusk of being a stooge for Germany or Russia or at times both countries, the opposition leader said: “They are not Poland. We are Poland!”Donald Tusk, the leader of opposition Civic Coalition, attended the march in Warsaw on Sunday.Omar Marques/Getty ImagesSpeaking to his own supporters at a pre-election party convention in the southern city of Katowice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman and Poland’s de facto leader, mocked Mr. Tusk as “such an idiot” whose victory would lead to the country’s enslavement by foreign powers.He claimed that Mr. Tusk’s term as prime minister, from 2007 to 2014, had made “Poland subordinate to external forces,” especially Germany and Russia. Law and Justice, he said, needed “mobilization, faith, determination and work” to “ensure that Tusk’s system does not return to Poland.”Recent opinion polls give Law and Justice around 38 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Tusk’s Civic Coalition, an alliance of centrist and center-left forces, with smaller left and far-right parties trailing far behind. The gap narrowed sharply over the summer, but after a full-throated media campaign demonizing Mr. Tusk and his supporters as enemies of the Roman Catholic Church, Law and Justice picked up support, particularly in areas that rely on the party-controlled state broadcasting system.No single party is expected to win a majority in the vote, and the shape of the next government will depend on which of the front-runners — Law and Justice or Civic Coalition — can find allies to form a coalition.As Mr. Tusk spoke to supporters in Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, addressed the Law and Justice convention in southern Poland, hammering the party’s favorite theme that the opposition serves German and Russian interests.“Tusk was their handmaiden,” he claimed, referring to energy deals struck between Berlin and Moscow while Mr. Tusk was Poland’s prime minister before taking a job in Brussels as president of the European Council — another strike against him, in the governing party’s view.Worried about competition from Konfederacja, a far-right group that has been vocal about reducing Poland’s assistance to Ukraine, Law and Justice has sent mixed messages in recent weeks about its policy toward Kyiv. It has insisted that it would not do anything to reduce the flow of weapons to fight Russia’s invading forces, while suggesting recently that it might do just that.Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Morawiecki told a national broadcaster that Poland was “no longer transferring any weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming ourselves with the most modern weapons.” Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, later walked back Mr. Morawiecki’s remarks, clearly made for electoral reasons but still unsettling for Poland’s foreign partners.Desperate to hang on to voters in rural areas, an important base of support, Law and Justice has vowed to halt the import of cheap Ukrainian grain and protect Polish farmers from the damage this has caused to their income. The grain was meant to just transit through Poland, but some of it was siphoned off for sale on the domestic market.Pre-election promises by the Polish government, along with those of Slovakia and Hungary, to halt all deliveries of Ukrainian grain did not stop the leader of a Polish farm lobbying group, Agrounia, from speaking on Sunday in support of the opposition.Law and Justice’s pre-election shifts and maneuvers have confused and annoyed fellow European countries that previously viewed Poland as a solid anchor of the West’s support for Ukraine, particularly those like Germany that Warsaw has repeatedly chided for not being steadfast enough in helping Kyiv.Janusz Michalak, 71, a retired logistics manager who joined the march with his wife, Alicija, said he had lived through communism and worried that Law and Justice — through cynical maneuvers to win support, the tight control of state broadcasting and the demonization of its political foes — want “us silent under their boot like the communists did.”“If we don’t change this government, democracy dies in Poland,” he added.Anatol Magdziarz More

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      ‘This Is Going to Be the Most Important Election Since 1860’

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      I recently sent out a list of questions about the 2024 elections to political operatives, pollsters and political scientists.How salient will abortion be?How damaging would a government shutdown be to Donald Trump and the Republican Party?Will the MAGA electorate turn out in high percentages?Will a Biden impeachment by the House, if it happens, help or hurt the G.O.P.?Will the cultural left wing of the Democratic Party undermine the party’s prospects?Will the key battleground states be Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin?How significant will Black and Hispanic shifts to the Republican Party be and where will these shifts have the potential to determine the outcome?Will Kamala Harris’s presence on the ticket cost Biden votes?Why hasn’t Biden gained politically from his legislative successes and from improvements in the economy? Will that change before the 2024 election?Why should Democrats be worrying?From 2016 to 2023, according to Morning Consult, the share of voters saying that the Democratic Party “cares about me” fell from 43 to 41 percent while rising for the Republican Party from 30 to 39 percent; the share saying the Democrats “care about the middle class” fell from 47 to 46 percent, while rising from 33 to 42 percent for the Republican Party.What’s more, the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is “too liberal” rose from 40 to 47 from 2020 to 2023, while the percentage saying the Republican Party was “too conservative” remained constant at 38 percent.Why should Republicans be worrying?Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, responded to my question about MAGA turnout by email: “Turnout among MAGA supporters may be less important than how many MAGA voters there are in the 2024 election and in which states they are.”One of the most distinctive demographic characteristics of self-identified MAGA voters, Stein pointed out, “is their age: over half (56 percent) were over the age of 65 as of 2020. By 2024, the proportion of MAGA voters over 70 will be greater than 50 percent and will put these voters in the likely category of voters leaving the electorate, dying, ill and unable to vote.”Because of these trends, Stein continued, “it may be the case that the absolute number and share of the electorate that are MAGA voters is diluted in 2024 by their own exit from the electorate and the entry of new and younger and non-MAGA voters.”Along similar lines, Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, argued by email that generational change will be a key factor in the election.Between 2020 and 2024, “about 13 million adult citizens will have died” and “these lost voters favored Trump in 2020 by a substantial margin. My rough estimate is that removing these voters from the electorate will increase Biden’s national popular vote margin by about 1.2 million votes.”The aging of the electorate works to the advantage of Biden and his fellow Democrats. So too does what is happening with younger voters at the other end of the age distribution. Here, Democrats have an ace in the hole: the strong liberal and Democratic convictions of voters between the ages of 18 and 42, whose share of the electorate is steadily growing.Joe Trippi, a Democratic consultant, was exuberant on the subject:Don’t forget Gen Z. They are on fire. Unlike you and me who dove under our school desks in nuclear attack drills but never experienced a nuclear attack, this generation spent their entire school lives doing mass shooting drills and witnessing a mass shooting at a school in the news regularly.Young voters, Trippi continued, “are not going to vote G.O.P. and they are going to vote. Dobbs, climate, homophobia, gun violence are all driving this generation away from the G.O.P. — in much the same way that Dems lost the younger generation during the Reagan years.”Wattenberg was more cautious. He estimated that 15 million young people will become eligible to vote between 2020 and 2024.“How many of them will vote and how they will vote is a key uncertainty that could determine the election,” he wrote. “Given recent patterns, there is little doubt that those that vote will favor the Democratic nominee. But by how much?”There are some developments going into the next election that defy attempts to determine whether Democrats or Republicans will come out ahead.Take the case of all the criminal charges that have been filed against Trump.In more normal — that is, pre-Trump — days, the fact that the probable Republican nominee faced 91 felony counts would have shifted the scales in favor of the Democrats. But these are not normal times.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out that the 2024 election has no precedent.“How will the Trump prosecutions unfold amidst the primaries and the presidential campaign?” Lee asked in an email. “How will developments in these cases be received by Republicans and the public at large? We have little relevant precedent for even considering how these cases are likely to affect the race.”Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, agreed, noting in an email: “How will Trump’s trials evolve and how will people react to them? What happens if he is convicted and sentenced? What happens if he is acquitted?”Lee and Jacobson were joined in this line of thinking by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who emailed his view thatThe greatest uncertainty on the G.O.P. side is the potential impact of the Trump trials. An acquittal, especially in the first case to go to trial, would almost certainly strengthen him. But what about a conviction, especially if it involves jail time? That may be the greatest uncertainty in American politics in my lifetime.Some of those I contacted observed that the prospect of one or more third-party bids posed a significant threat to Biden’s chances.Paul Begala, a Democratic political operative and CNN contributor, wrote by email:Please allow me to start with what to me is the most critical variable in the 2024 presidential election: Will Dr. Cornel West’s Green Party candidacy swing the election to Donald Trump? If I were working for the Biden-Harris ticket, that’s what would keep me up at night.In Begala’s opinion, “Dr. West has more charisma, better communications skills, and greater potential appeal than Dr. Jill Stein did in 2016. If, in fact, he is able to garner even two to five percent, that could doom Biden and the country.”And that, Begala continued, does not “even take into account a potential centrist candidacy under the No Labels banner. Biden won moderates by a 30-point margin (64-34), and 38 percent of all voters described themselves as moderate in 2020. If No Labels were to field a viable, centrist candidate, that, too, would doom Biden.”Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed, arguing that third-party candidates are a “huge issue”:The role of No Labels and, secondarily, of Cornel West: They could be genuine spoilers here. And that is their goal. Harlan Crow and other right-wing billionaires did not give big bucks to No Labels to create more moderate politics and outcomes.Among those I contacted for this column, there was near unanimous agreement that abortion will continue to be a major issue — as it was in 2022, when abortion rights voters turned out in large numbers, lifting Democrats in key races.“It is the single most significant factor helping Democrats,” Ornstein declared, adding, “The fact that red states move more and more to extremes — including banning abortions for rape and incest, watching women bleed with untreated miscarriages, seeing doctors flee, criminalizing going to another state — will fire up suburban and young voters.”Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University, pointed out in an email thatDemocrats nationwide are taking a page out of the playbook of former President George W. Bush’s longtime adviser, Karl Rove. In those years, Republicans used state ballot measures and referendums on divisive culture war issues that split their way to mobilize conservative voters. In those days, the subject matter was often gay rights.Citing a June Ipsos poll that found “public opinion around the Dobbs decision and abortion remains mostly unchanged compared to six months ago,” Gest argued “that abortion remains salient more than a year after the revocation of abortion rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, but Democrats in many states will also use ballot measures to ensure it is top of mind.” Gest also noted that “supermajorities of the country favor preserving access to abortion to some extent.”Stein, however, wrote by email that while a majority of voters have remained in favor of abortion rights, they appear to be placing less importance on the issue than was the case immediately after the Dobbs decision.Stein pointed to a March Morning Consult survey that found “10 percent of voters in the most competitive congressional districts rank issues such as abortion as their top voting concern, down from 15 percent in November.”But, Stein added, Republican state legislators are not helping their own political fortunes by muting discussion of abortion; instead, they have been unrelenting in their efforts to elevate the prominence of abortion. “The recent sentencing of a mother in Nebraska who provided her daughter abortion pills,” he wrote, “puts a very real face on the consequences of Dobbs and restrictions on abortion rights,”There was some disagreement among those I contacted over the political consequences of a government shutdown, something that could well happen within days unless Speaker Kevin McCarthy can find a path to enactment of budget legislation.Frances Lee said that shewould probably discount the effects of a government shutdown. Their effects seem largely to be confined to the shutdown period itself. Once resolved, they quickly fade from memory. Trump presided over the longest government shutdown in history in 2018-19, and that fact played no role in the 2020 elections.Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, however, contended that it is “hard to imagine it won’t blow back on them — every previous shutdown has, and this one’s justifications seem nonexistent.”William Galston, a senior fellow at Bookings, agreed, writing by email:Evidence from past shutdowns suggests that it would be damaging, and this time Trump has chosen to get involved directly, which I think is a mistake. Republicans’ dysfunction in recent weeks has occurred in broad daylight, which increases the odds that they’ll get the lion’s share of the blame.Begala, in character, was the most outspoken:The G.O.P. is talking about shutting down the government, impeaching the president, removing the Speaker, and crippling the military by blocking vital promotions. Their brand is chaos. Like Clinton before him, Biden is well positioned to use a government shutdown to jujitsu the G.O.P. and win re-election.There was also some disagreement among those I queried over whether Kamala Harris would cost Biden votes.Begala dismissed the possibility:Nope. Democrats tried to make Spiro Agnew an issue; it failed. They tried to make Dan Quayle an issue; failed again. Harris has found her voice on abortion rights, which are a central issue.Ornstein was succinct: “Vice-presidential candidates do not cost votes.”Gest, however, argued against this idea:I think she will. Fairly or unfairly, she is viewed as more threatening to Republicans than Biden himself, which is why the DeSantis campaign has tried to bait her into conflict with his provocations. And because of President Biden’s advancing age, her profile holds more gravity than most running mates.There is one issue that has been increasingly troubling for Democrats: Will the modest but significant shifts among Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party continue and will they increase?Gest wrote that “if Republicans suddenly make significant inroads with Latinos in the Southwest, they could change the dynamics” in states like Arizona and Nevada.But in order to do so, Gest cautioned, shifts to the Republican Party among minorities “would need to outnumber the pandemic-era arrival of left-leaning transplants from coastal urban cities. To the extent that these transplants have settled in their new homes, they can solidify Democratic support.”In a December 2022 Politico article, “How Demographic Shifts Fueled by Covid Delivered Midterm Wins for Democrats,” Gest made the case thatData from the U.S. Postal Service and Census Bureau shows how the pandemic drove urban professionals who were able to work remotely — disproportionately Democrats — out of coastal, progressive cities to seek more space or recreational amenities in the nation’s suburbs and Sun Belt. This moved liberals out of electoral districts where Democrats reliably won by large margins into many purple regions that had the potential to swing.Gest cited large population growth coinciding with much stronger than expected Democratic gains in places like Arizona’s Maricopa County — which, between 2018 and 2022, “gained nearly 100,000 people, and Democrats’ margins rose by 17 points since that year: and Pima County, including Tucson, gained 16,000 people and its margins in the gubernatorial race swung 16 points for Democrats.”One source of uncertainty is the media, which can, and often does, play a key role in setting the campaign agenda. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is a prime example.In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard conducted a study, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” It that found that reporting on Hillary Clinton was dominated “by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails.”According to the study, the press, television and online media devoted more space and time to Clinton’s emails than it did to the combined coverage of Trump’s taxes, his comments about women, his failed “university,” his foundation and his campaign’s dealings with Russia.Going into 2024, it is unlikely the media could inflict much more damage on Trump, given that the extensive coverage of the 91 felony counts against him does not seem to affect his favorable or unfavorable rating.Biden, in contrast, has much more to gain or lose from media coverage. Will it focus on his age or his legislative and policy achievements? On inflation and consumer costs or economic growth and high employment rates? On questions about Biden’s ability to complete a second term or the threats to democracy posed by the ascendant right wing of the Republican Party?Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued that matters of immense concern are at stake: “This is going to be the most important election since 1860, because it is going to be about the future of this country as a democracy.”It will be an election, he continued,about whether this country will preserve the rule of law in an independent justice system; whether women will be respected as autonomous decision makers or subjected again, step-by-step, by a religion-encoded male supremacy; whether this country will continue to hold free and fair elections or generalize to the entire realm a new version of what prevailed in the South before the civil rights legislation.The 2024 election, in Kitschelt’s view, “is the last stand of the nationalist ‘Christian’ white right, as their support is eroding in absolute and relative terms, and of all those who believe that white supremacy across all U.S. institutions needs to be protected, even at the cost of giving up on democracy.”But, on an even larger scale, he argued, “The 2024 election will also be about whether this country will preserve a universalist sense of citizenship or devolve into a polity of splintered identity pressure groups, rent-seeking for shares of the pie.”Unfortunately, Kitschelt concluded, “if the Democrats let the Republicans succeed in priming the identity issues that divide the potential Democratic coalition, the white Christian nationalists will have a greater chance to win.”And that, of course, is a central goal of Trump’s — and of his campaign.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

      J.D. Vance Is Not Your Usual Political Opportunist

      by

      J.D. Vance was trying to find his groove. I had just shown up at his office last week to interview the Ohio Republican about his first nine months in the Senate, where he has proved curiously hard to pigeonhole. As we sat down, Mr. Vance — at 39, one of the chamber’s youngest members — squirmed in his ornate leather arm chair, complaining that it was uncomfortable. Whoever used it previously, he explained, had created a “giant ass print” that made it a poor fit for him.Then the senator kicked a foot up on the low coffee table in front of him. This gave me a glorious view of his custom socks: a dark-red background covered with pictures of his 6-year-old son’s face. On the far end of the table was a Lego set of the U.S. Capitol that his wife had bought him on eBay for Father’s Day. With his crisp dark suit, casual manner and personal touches, Mr. Vance suddenly looked right at home. I suspected there was some grand metaphor in all this about the young conservative working to carve out his spot in this world of old leather and hidebound traditions.I asked what had been his most pleasant discovery about life in the Senate. “I’ve been surprised by how little people hate each other in private,” he offered, positing that much of the acrimony you see from lawmakers was “posturing” for TV. “There’s sort of an inherent falseness to the way that people present on American media,” he said.This may strike many people as rich coming from Mr. Vance, who is one of the Republican Party’s new breed of in-your-face, culture-warring, Trump-defending MAGA agitators. And indeed, Mr. Vance knows how to throw a partisan punch. Yet in these early days on the job, he has also adopted a somewhat more complicated political model, frequently championing legislation with Democrats, including progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin.Pragmatic bipartisan MAGA troll feels like a dizzying paradoxical line to toe. And it risks feeding into the larger critique of Mr. Vance as a political opportunist. This is, after all, the guy who won attention in the 2016 election cycle as a harsh conservative critic of Mr. Trump, only to undergo a stark MAGA makeover and spend much of his 2022 Senate race sucking up to the former president. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee, told his biographer about the party’s 2022 midterm contenders. “It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”Mr. Vance is not one to ignore such swipes. “Mitt Romney is one to talk about changing his mind publicly. He’s been on every side of 35 different issues,” he clapped back to Breitbart News.But there seems to be something going on with Mr. Vance beyond the usual shape-shifting flip-floppery. He contends that his approach is the more honest, hopeful path to getting things done for the conservative grass roots. In his telling, he’s not the cynical operator; his critics are.In some respects — especially with his defense of Mr. Trump — the freshman senator is transparently full of bull. But when it comes to how to navigate and possibly even make progress in today’s fractious G.O.P., not to mention this dysfunctional Congress, he may well be onto something.Mr. Vance and I sat down on a morning when Congress was all a dither over a possible government shutdown being driven by a spending fight among House Republicans. While sympathetic to his colleagues’ concerns, Mr. Vance saw the battle as unfocused, unproductive and bad for the party.“My sense is this shutdown fight will go very poorly for us unless we’re very clear about what we’re asking for,” he told me. With different blocs of Republicans demanding different things, “that’s just going to get confused, and the American people are going to punish us for it.”He argued that if the conservatives would hunker down and focus, they could get one major concession. “And we should be fighting for that one thing,” he said. What did he think they should prioritize? “If we could get something real on border security, then that would be a deal worth taking.”Mr. Vance described himself less an ideological revolutionary than a principled pragmatist. He did not come to Washington to blow up the system or overhaul how the Senate operates. He said his outlook was, “There are things I need to get done, and I will do whatever I need to do to do them.”If this means making common cause with the political enemy now and again, so be it. “I am a populist in a lot of my economic convictions, and so that will lead to opportunities to working with Democrats,” he reasoned.Mr. Vance’s cross aisle endeavors include teaming up with Ms. Warren to push legislation that would claw back compensation from bank executives who were richly paid even as they were “crashing their banks into a mountain,” as Mr. Vance put it. He has joined forces with Ms. Baldwin on a bill that would ensure that technologies developed with taxpayer money are manufactured in the United States. He is working with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden on a bill to reduce thefts of catalytic converters. And in the coming weeks, his focus will be on pushing through railway safety reform that he and Ohio’s senior senator, Sherrod Brown, introduced in the wake of the derailment disaster in East Palestine. That is the bill about which he was most optimistic. “We have 60 votes in private,” he said.Even if nothing makes it through this year, Mr. Vance is playing the long game. “Those productive personal relationships are quite valuable because they may not lead to an actual legislative package tomorrow, but they could two years from now,” he said.Squishy “relationship” talk can be dangerous in today’s G.O.P., even for members of the relatively genteel Senate. Being labeled a RINO — that is, a Republican in Name Only — generally earns one the sort of opprobrium normally reserved for child sex traffickers.But here’s where his MAGA antics may provide a bit of cover. In his brief time in Washington, the senator has proved himself an eager and a prolific culture warrior. The first bill he introduced — an important moment in any senator’s career — aimed to make English the nation’s official language. In July, after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in university admissions, he fired off a letter to the eight Ivy League schools, plus a couple of private colleges in Ohio, warning them to retain any records that might be needed for a Senate investigation of their practices. That same month, he introduced a bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors. He even waded into the hysteria last winter over the health risks of gas stoves. This month, he’s out hawking a bill that would ban federal mask mandates for domestic air travel, public transit systems and schools, and bar those institutions from denying service to the maskless.Perhaps most vitally, Mr. Vance remains steadfast in his support of Mr. Trump. In June, he announced he was putting a hold on all Justice Department nominees in protest of “the unprecedented political prosecution” of Mr. Trump. And he plans to work hard as a surrogate to return the MAGA king to the White House. “I’m thinking about trying to be as active a participant as possible.”J.D. Vance during a Trump campaign rally last year.Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis critique of Mr. Trump’s critics can be brutal.“Trump is extraordinarily clarifying on the right and extra confusing on the left,” he said. The hatred for Trump among progressives is so strong that people cannot see past it to acknowledge the former president’s “good parts,” he contended. While among conservatives, “Trump has this incredible capacity to identify really, who the good people are on the right and who the bad people are on the right.”Elaborating on the “bad” category, he points to former Representative Liz Cheney and the neoconservative writer Bill Kristol. “They say, ‘Donald Trump is an authoritarian’ — which I think is absurd. ‘Donald Trump is anti-democratic’ — which, again, in my view is absurd. I think they’re hiding their real ideological disagreements,” he argued.Mr. Vance is entitled to his view, of course. But glibly rejecting stated concerns about Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic inclinations — and characterizing his critics’ reactions as “obsessive” — would strike many as the real absurdity.Asked specifically about Mr. Trump’s election fraud lies, which Mr. Vance has at times promoted, the senator again shifted into slippery explainer mode. “I think it’s very easy for folks in the press to latch onto the zaniest election fraud or stolen election theories and say, ‘Oh this is totally debunked,’” he said. “But they ignore that there is this very clear set of institutional biases built into the election in 2020 that — from big tech censorship to the way in which financial interests really lined up behind Joe Biden.”“People aren’t stupid. They see what’s out there,” he said. “Most Republican grass roots voters are not sympathetic to the dumbest version of the election conspiracy. They are sympathetic to the version that is actually largely true.”Except that, as evidence of what is “actually largely true,” Mr. Vance pointed to a 2021 Time article detailing a bipartisan effort not to advance a particular candidate but to safeguard the electoral system. More important, the “dumbest” version of the stolen election conspiracy is precisely what Mr. Trump and his enablers have been aggressively spreading for years. It is what drove the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, landed many rioters in prison, led to Fox News paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement and prompted grand juries to indict Mr. Trump in federal and state courts. Mr. Vance may want to believe that most Republicans are too smart to buy such lunacy, but he is too smart not to recognize the damage to American democracy being wrought by that lunacy.As for those who criticize his approach, Mr. Vance saw them as out of sync with voters. The conservative grass roots are “extremely frustrated with Washington not doing anything,” he said. “I think if you are a critic of them — if you are a critic of the way they see the world — you see people who want to blow up the system. Who are just pissed off. And they want fighters.” And not necessarily fighters who are “directed” or strategic in their efforts, he said, so much as just anyone who channels that rage.By contrast, “if you’re sympathetic to them and you like them,” he continued, you understand that “the problem is not that people don’t bitch enough or complain enough on television.” Rather, it’s that voters are fed up that “nothing changes” even when they “elect successive waves of different people. So I actually think being a bridge builder and getting things done is totally consistent with this idea that people are pissed off at the government as do-nothing.”When I asked how Mr. Vance defined his political positioning, he abruptly popped out of his chair and hurried over to his desk. He returned with a yellow sticky note on which he drew a large grid. Along the bottom of the paper he scrawled “culture” and on the left side, “commerce.” He started drawing dots as he explained: “I think the Republican Party has tended to be here” — top right quadrant, indicating a mix of strong cultural and pro-business conservatism. He added, “I think the Democratic Party has tended to be here,” pointing to the bottom left quadrant, which in his telling represents a strong liberal take on both. “And I think the majority, certainly the plurality of American voters — and maybe I’m biased because this is my actual view — is somewhere around here,” he said, placing them on the grid to suggest that people are “more conservative on cultural issues but they are not instinctively pro-business.”Michelle CottleMr. Vance reminded me that he has always been critical of his party’s pro-business bias. And it is primarily in this space that he is playing nice with Democrats.Bridge builder. Deal Maker. MAGA maniac. Trump apologist. Call Mr. Vance whatever you want. And if you find it all confused or confusing, don’t fret. That may be part of the point. Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.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