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      Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally

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      We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.Michigan saw some of the most outrageous fake electoral certificates to emerge during the period leading up to the Capitol riot. Unlike the fake certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Michigan documents did not include a disclaimer that they were to be used only in the case of litigation. What’s more, the documents contained more outright false statements than simply declaring that the signers were the lawful electors of the winning candidate.For example, they state that the electors “convened and organized in the State Capitol,” when, according to the attorney general, they were hidden away in the basement of the state Republican headquarters. (It seems likely that the fake electors included this lie because Michigan law requires presidential electors to meet in the Capitol — a requirement and legal problem that a Trump campaign legal adviser, Kenneth Chesebro, had flagged in his confidential memorandum setting out the scheme.)In proving these cases, establishing intent will be key. Here, there are several indicators that the defendants may have been aware of the illicit nature of their gathering. According to congressional testimony from the state Republican Party’s chairwoman at the time, Laura Cox, the group originally planned to meet inside the Capitol and hide overnight, so they could vote in the building the following day. Ms. Cox said she told a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and supposedly organizing the fake electors “in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” and “a very, very bad idea and potentially illegal.”As she put it, Ms. Cox was “very uncomfortable” with facilitating a meeting of the fake elector group, and said so at the time in accord with her lawyers’ opinion. Ms. Cox even urged the group to draft a significantly more measured document simply “stating that if perhaps something were to happen in the courts, they were willing and able to serve as electors from Michigan for Donald Trump.” Her advice was not followed.At the time the fake electors met to allegedly forge their documents, they should have been aware that state officials had certified the election results for Joe Biden — it was national and state news. By that point, there was no prospect of changing that outcome through either litigation or legislative action. On the day prosecutors say the fake electors met, two of the most powerful Republicans in the state acknowledged as much. Mike Shirkey, the majority leader in the State Senate, and Lee Chatfield, the House speaker, both issued statements declaring the presidential race over. Mr. Shirkey said that Michigan’s “Democratic slate of electors should be able to proceed with their duty” without the threat of harassment or violence.The fake electors were told they were not allowed to bring their phones into the meeting at the Republican headquarters that day, according to testimony one of them gave congressional investigators. They were instructed to maintain secrecy and not to share any details about what was occurring. That secrecy suggests that they knew what they were doing was wrong.Michigan’s former secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, who had been designated a Trump elector, declined to participate in the proceedings, saying, according to Ms. Cox’s testimony, she was not comfortable doing so.With these facts, it would have been unthinkable for the state attorney general to choose not to prosecute the Michigan 16. Ms. Nessel’s office has regularly brought prosecutions, some of them against her fellow Democrats, centered on false documents in connection with elections. The case of the fake electors is far more egregious than most of those other cases: The defendants here were politically engaged individuals who should have been aware of the election results, as well as the flat rejection by the courts and Michigan Legislature of the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud.To be sure, some critics of the case may still think that the Michigan attorney general should have gone after Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants, who helped organize the false electors. But prosecutors have a responsibility first to pursue those individuals within their jurisdiction. By focusing solely on the figures who undertook their acts in Michigan, Ms. Nessel is wisely insulating her case against charges that she overreached, exceeding her jurisdiction.Of course, broader prosecutions may still be justified. Reporting indicates that the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., Fani Willis, may be considering a different kind of wide-ranging case, involving state RICO crimes. Unlike the Michigan prosecution, her case may focus on Mr. Trump’s direct efforts to pressure state election officials — efforts that were caught on tape — and Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to provide false statements of election fraud to state officials.If broad-based indictments ultimately emerge out of Georgia, and are supported by the facts and appropriate law, then we would welcome it. That is part of the genius of American democracy: The states, which are responsible for running our elections, are laboratories of both democracy and of accountability.Ms. Nessel’s case also leaves a clear lane for Mr. Smith, the special counsel. She has avoided charging high-level national individuals whom Mr. Smith is apparently investigating. If anything, her case provides greater foundation for Mr. Smith to act, and he now seems to be following through. If Ms. Nessel can move against these individuals in Michigan, Mr. Smith can and should do the same against the ringleaders. Together, they can hold both the foot soldiers and their organizers accountable for their actions leading up to the Capitol riot.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, is a co-editor in chief of the Just Security website.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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      What Really Happened in the Midterms?

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      A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesMore than eight months later, all the data from the 2022 midterm elections is — finally — final. The two most rigorous reports, from the Pew Research Center and Catalist, are finished.And yet despite all the data, there is a piece of the midterm puzzle that still hasn’t quite been resolved: How exactly did the Democrats manage to nearly sweep every competitive House and Senate race, even though they often fared quite miserably elsewhere?The Catalist report suggested it was the turnout, finding that Democrats won “with electorates in these contests looking more like the 2020 and 2018 electorates than a typical midterm.” Pew also pointed to turnout, but with a different interpretation, writing that Republicans won control of the House “largely on the strength of higher turnout,” and found that disproportionate numbers of Biden voters and Democrats from 2018 stayed home.You might imagine ways to square the two claims, but neither report offers a clear way to reconcile these competing stories. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, doesn’t mention a word on the partisan makeup of the electorate, despite possessing the data to do so. The Pew report, meanwhile, is framed around explaining how Republicans won the House popular vote by three points — an important outcome, but one overshadowed by the Democratic hold in the Senate and the razor-thin Republican House majority.Fortunately, our data at The New York Times can help piece together what remains of the puzzle. Over the last few years via Times/Siena College polls, we’ve interviewed tens of thousands of voters nationwide and in the crucial battleground states and districts. This data can be linked to voter registration files — the backbone of both the Catalist and Pew reports — that show exactly who voted and who did not (though not whom they voted for, of course), including in the states and districts that decided the midterm election.The findings suggest that the turnout was mostly typical of a midterm election and helped Republicans nationwide, but there are good reasons to doubt whether it was as helpful to the party out of power as it had been in previous midterms.It certainly wasn’t enough to overcome what truly distinguished the 2022 midterm election: the critical sliver of voters who were repelled by specific Republican nominees, Donald J. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.At a glance, a typical midterm electorateTo some degree, every midterm leans toward the party out of power, and has an older, whiter electorate. Last November was no exception. Just consider these figures on 2022 voters nationwide:73 percent of registered Republicans (defined by whether someone is registered as a Republican or participated in a recent Republican primary) turned out in 2022, compared with 63 percent of registered Democrats. The 10-point turnout advantage meant Republicans narrowly outnumbered Democrats among 2022 voters given that there are about five percentage points more registered Democrats than registered Republicans by this measure.Just 45 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic voters turned out, compared with 58 percent of non-Hispanic whites, according to data from the Census Bureau. The findings are consistent with data from voter registration files and the actual results, as we reported last fall, along with the Pew and Catalist reports, in showing a weak turnout among Black voters.Voters over 65 represented 33 percent of the electorate, according to the L2 data, compared with just 10 percent for those 18 to 29.All of these patterns are consistent with a typical midterm turnout.The size of the Republican registration advantage is almost exactly in line with the available historical data. It also aligns neatly with our pre-election estimates, which you can see for yourself in our final (and highly accurate) Times/Siena polls.And as we reported in December, this basic story holds up in the battleground states as well. Republicans outvoted Democrats everywhere, including in the very states where Democrats excelled.A hidden Democratic turnout advantage?All of this seems to add up to a stark Republican turnout advantage, powered by an older, whiter and more Republican electorate.But perhaps surprisingly, there are reasons to think the actual turnout advantage for Republican candidates might not have been nearly so large as these figures suggest.Just start with the Pew report, which found that Trump voters were four points likelier to turn out than Biden voters, 71 percent to 67 percent. That’s an important advantage, but it’s less than half the size of the 10-point Republican turnout advantage by registration. The Pew figures actually suggest the 2022 midterm electorate backed Joe Biden in 2020, even though registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats.The Times data suggests something similar. According to our estimates, 69.1 percent of Trump voters turned out compared with 66.7 percent of Biden voters — essentially the same as the Pew figures, though edging even closer to parity.These estimates are based on a statistical model that marries Times/Siena polling data and voter records (including someone’s party registration) to predict how registrants voted in the 2020 election. I’ve forced you through that wonky sentence because it means that these estimates are entirely consistent with and inclusive of all of those various Republican-friendly turnout figures offered earlier: Our estimate is that Republicans outvoted Democrats by 10 points but that Trump voters nonetheless outvoted Biden voters by only two points.Looking at the data more carefully, the source of this disparity is mostly among Democrats. The registered Democrats who stayed home in 2022 were disproportionately likely to be those who sometimes vote Republican. The Democrats who turned out, on the other hand, were especially loyal Democrats who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. This is partly because of education — midterm voters are more highly educated — but the survey data suggests that this Democratic advantage ran a lot deeper.It’s worth being cautious about this finding. The 10-point G.O.P. turnout advantage cited earlier is essentially a fact. The possibility that the practical turnout advantage for Republican candidates might have been only a third of that or less is an estimate based on fallible survey data. It’s also dependent on accurately surveying a group of people — nonvoters — who are very difficult for pollsters to measure.But the Times and Pew data tell a very similar story, despite very different methodologies, and the accurate topline results of the pre-election surveys add additional harmony. The possibility of some kind of hidden underlying Democratic advantage in motivation is also consistent with other data points on 2022, like Democrats’ astonishing success in ultra-low-turnout special elections.Close to parity in the battlegrounds?The 2022 midterm election was not a simple election decided by a national electorate. It was unusually heterogenous, with Republicans enjoying a “red wave” in states like Florida or New York while other states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could be argued to have ridden a “blue wave.”As we’ll see, nowhere near all of the difference between these states can be attributed to turnout. But part of the difference was the disparate turnout, with Republicans enjoying a far larger turnout advantage than they did nationwide in states like Florida, while Democrats did better than they did nationwide in states like Pennsylvania. And since our estimates suggest that the Republican turnout advantage nationwide was fairly modest — more modest than the party registration figures suggest — the estimates also show that neither party enjoyed a significant turnout advantage in many battleground states where Democrats turned in above-average performances.In Northern battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Ohio, Biden and Trump voters turned out at nearly identical rates, according to our estimates.In contrast, Trump voters were likelier to turn out than Biden voters by around 10 percentage points or more in states like Florida and New York. In practice, this meant that the Florida electorate most likely voted for Mr. Trump by double digits, even though he carried the state by just three points in 2020.Most states, including the key Sun Belt battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia, fell in between the Northern battlegrounds and the red-wave states like New York or Florida.A decisive advantage among swing votersThe resilient Democratic turnout in many key Northern battleground states might seem like a key that unlocks what happened in 2022, but it explains less than you might think.According to our estimates, Biden voters only narrowly outnumbered Trump voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Democratic candidates for Senate and governor won in landslides that greatly exceeded Mr. Biden’s margin of victory. Similarly, Trump voters outnumbered Biden voters in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where Democrats posted crucial wins that assured control of the Senate.Ultimately, the Democratic performance depended on something that went far beyond turnout: A segment of swing voters decided to back Democratic candidates in many critical races.For all the talk about turnout, this is what distinguished the 2022 midterms from any other in recent memory. Looking back over 15 years, the party out of power has typically won independent voters by an average margin of 14 points, as a crucial segment of voters either has soured on the president or has acted as a check against the excesses of the party in power.This did not happen in 2022. Every major study — the exit polls, the AP/VoteCast study, the Pew study published this week — showed Democrats narrowly won self-identified independent voters, despite an unfavorable national political environment and an older, whiter group of independent voters. A post-election analysis of Times/Siena surveys adjusted to match the final vote count and the validated electorate show the same thing. It took the Democratic resilience among swing voters together with the Democratic resilience in turnout, especially in the Northern battlegrounds, to nearly allow Democrats to hold the U.S. House.In many crucial states, Democratic candidates for Senate and governor often outright excelled among swing voters, plainly winning over a sliver of voters who probably backed Mr. Trump for president in 2020 and certainly supported Republican candidates for U.S. House in 2022. This was most pronounced in the states where Republicans nominated stop-the-steal candidates or where the abortion issue was prominent, like Michigan.Democratic strength among swing voters in key states allowed the party to overcome an important turnout disadvantage in states like Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. That strength turned Pennsylvania and Michigan into landslides. And it ensured that the 2022 midterm election would not go down as an easy Republican victory, despite their takeover of the House, but would instead seem like a setback for conservatives. More

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      The Supreme Court’s Rejection of a Disputed Legal Theory on Elections

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      More from our inbox:Race and ClassDemand Tax Relief‘Make Reading Fun Again’The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllThe case will have no practical impact in the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. The state has waged many battles over redistricting.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Court Rules State Control of U.S. Voting Has Limits” (front page, June 28):Several high-profile cases were decided by the Supreme Court this month, but only one, Moore v. Harper, had the potential to affect the very lifeblood of our democracy — voting. This election law case considered, in part, a controversial constitutional theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.At issue was whether or not state legislatures had absolute power with no electoral oversight authority by state courts to regulate federal elections. With unchecked power, state legislators in key swing states could have rejected the voters’ slate of electors and appointed their handpicked substitutes.The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect our democracy. By rejecting the dangerous independent state legislature theory, the court safeguarded state-level judiciaries, shielding the will of the voters in the process.Jim PaladinoTampa, Fla.To the Editor:In the 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, the fact that a supermajority including both Democratic and Republican appointees reaffirmed the American constitutional order is the latest example that the Republican-appointed justices are not in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and the extreme right of the Republican Party.This should provide comfort for those who believe in the separation of powers as prescribed in our Constitution.John A. ViterittiLaurel, N.Y.To the Editor:Adam Liptak writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling that soundly dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory.The article quotes Richard L. Hasen, a U.C.L.A. law professor and leading election law scholar, who said the ruling giving the Supreme Court the ultimate say in federal election disputes was “a bad, but not awful, result.”It seems globally accepted that legal disputes, including election disputes, should be decided by courts, and that in federal democracies, the highest national courts are best suited to have the last word in federal election cases.While it is common for politicians and lawyers worldwide to dismiss international best practices based on the uniqueness of their legal systems, in the U.S., too, only the Supreme Court can ensure consistency across all states and thus protect the integrity of federal elections.Jurij ToplakNew YorkThe writer is a visiting professor at Fordham University School of Law.To the Editor:In your article the Supreme Court justices whose opinions pose a threat to voting rights and democracy are referred to as “conservative.” The justices’ positions are not “conservative,” if conservative refers to those who are committed to preserve traditional institutions, practices and values.I would ask that The Times consider a better word to describe these justices, whose positions on legal issues are heavily influenced by considerations of preserving Republican rule, class structures and Christian ideological dominance.Cindy WeinbaumAtlantaRace and Class Pablo DelcanTo the Editor:Re “Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, June 26):Providing support for those who have been hurt by past discrimination is an important step in alleviating the harm caused by America’s long history of racism.However, including all who are economically disadvantaged in any initiatives, as Professor McWhorter suggests, will broaden support for affirmative action programs while assisting more people who need a hand up.Ignoring this slice of the populace is what has led to simmering resentment in many communities and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.Rather than pitting groups against one another, we should strive to lift up the fallen, regardless of the origin of people’s suffering.Edwin AndrewsMalden, Mass.Demand Tax ReliefHomeowners 65 or older with income of less than $500,000 could qualify for a property tax cut of as much as $6,500 a year.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Property Taxes Could Be Cut in Half for Older New Jersey Homeowners” (news article, June 22):As a suburban homeowner in Nassau County in New York, I find it reassuring to see neighboring New Jersey working hard to address the problem of high property taxes. It just approved a property tax reduction program for homeowners 65-plus called StayNJ, designed to offset some of the highest property taxes in the country.The people of New York State must demand that their elected officials pass similar relief for their constituents, who also live in a state with high property taxes. We are still suffering from a $10,000 state and local taxes deduction cap on our federal income tax that was passed under former President Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats promised to repeal this as one of their legislative priorities and have failed to keep their promise so far. So it is up to us to demand action from the New York State Legislature.Philip A. Paoli Jr.Seaford, N.Y.‘Make Reading Fun Again’To the Editor:Re “13-Year-Olds in U.S. Record Lowest Test Scores in Decades” (news article, June 22):The latest data is out on reading scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S., and it’s not good. Children’s reading levels are at their lowest in decades.In your article, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics states, “This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”Indeed, we see this challenge every day in the faces of children in our homes, schools and communities. We are responding by bolstering instruction, tutoring and summer learning, all of which offer reason to hope.But what stood out to me most in this story was that fewer kids report reading for fun, with 31 percent saying they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared with 22 percent in 2012.Could reigniting a love for reading and the joy of books be an answer we’re missing to this problem? Imagine every child with an abundant home library, cuddled up with a parent or under the covers reading a book, starting from birth.At a time when our education system is struggling, and life is hard for so many children, let’s make reading fun again!Mary MathewDurham, N.C.The writer is director of advocacy for Book Harvest, which provides books and literacy support to children and families.The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllAn AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “As German Worries About Future Rise, Far-Right Party Surges” (news article, June 21):The expanding and emboldened far-right element in Germany is not solely a concern for Germans; it is also troubling for the international community in general and Jews in particular.Extremism fueled by xenophobia and a deep sense of nationalism in a country that carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is foreboding and a grave threat to democracy.With global antisemitism increasing at an alarming rate and Nazism experiencing an unsettling resurgence, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the political gains that it has made are a proverbial red flag.When extremism becomes normalized and gains a foothold in the mainstream political arena and people flagrantly fan the flames of fanaticism, we have a societal and moral obligation to sound the alarm.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa. More

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      A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime

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      If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.Not a crime: Federal crimes.All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.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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      Republicans Are No Longer Calling This Election Program a ‘Godsend’

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      To hear many Republicans tell it, American elections are awash in incompetence and fraud: shady precinct workers, dead people voting, unverifiable mail-in ballots and so on — and that was even before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Virtually all of the stories are exaggerated, misleading or simply false. And genuine voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. Still, Republican officials have for a long time rightly insisted on the importance of election integrity. So why are so many of them rejecting what was, until a few months ago, widely agreed to be the single best program for shoring up that integrity?Over the past 18 months, eight Republican-led states (with more likely to follow) have resigned their membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan data clearinghouse that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate and up-to-date.Before we get into the groundless conspiracy theories that led to this mass exodus, consider the sheer logistical challenge of maintaining voter rolls in a country of more than 330 million people. Americans have a tendency to move, within a state or between states, often forgetting to update their voter registration along the way. Sooner or later, they die. The result is that the rolls of many states are littered with errors: People who are unintentionally registered in more than one place or who remain on the books after they’ve departed a state or this world. In 2012 as many as one in eight voter registrations nationwide was invalid or highly inaccurate, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped form ERIC that year as part of its data-based approach to public policy debates.Because of our decentralized election system, the responsibility to sort out this mess falls to the states. Federal and state laws require states to maintain accurate voter rolls, but the states have no established way to communicate and coordinate with one another. The existence of searchable voter data itself is relatively new: As recently as 2000, only seven states had computerized statewide voter databases.In short, it’s easy to proclaim that free, fair and well-run elections are the lifeblood of democracy; it’s a lot harder to put that ideal into practice. One early effort, like the Interstate Crosscheck program, failed miserably because of inadequate data analysis and poor security practices. ERIC has succeeded by devoting the time, money and expertise necessary to build a comprehensive, secure and useful database of voter information. That information — drawn from voter rolls, D.M.V. records, Social Security death records and change-of-address data — gets analyzed, matched and compiled into reports that are provided to the states to help them clean up their rolls.The work has paid off: Through April 2023, ERIC has identified nearly 12 million voters who moved across state lines, more than 24 million whose in-state registrations required updates, more than 1 million in-state duplicates and nearly 600,000 dead people who had not been removed from the rolls. In addition, ERIC requires that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters, although it is difficult to determine just how many new voters have signed up as a result.ERIC did all of this in a true example of bipartisanship. “It’s a place where red and blue states were able to come together, have this really boring but really effective data system for keeping the right people on the rolls and removing the wrong people from the rolls,” said Danielle Lang, the senior director of the voting-rights program at the Campaign Legal Center.The reviews, especially from Republicans, were glowing. When Florida joined ERIC in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was “the right thing to do for our state, as it will ensure our voter rolls are up-to-date and it will increase voter participation in our elections.” This year, Iowa’s Republican secretary of state called ERIC a “godsend”; his counterpart in Ohio said it was “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.” By 2022, 31 states and the District of Columbia had signed up to pay the organization’s $25,000 membership fee. (States also pay annual dues based on their voting-age population.)Given the level of baseless hysteria surrounding voting, maybe it was too much to expect it all to last. In January 2022, the extreme right-wing website Gateway Pundit published a series of articles accusing ERIC of being “essentially a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll cleanup.” It claimed that the program was funded by George Soros — eternally the dark mastermind of every liberal corruption in the right-wing mind-set — and described one of its founders, David Becker, as a “hard-core leftist.” (Mr. Soros has given money to Pew but not to ERIC, not that it really matters.) Gateway Pundit also strongly suggested, without the slightest proof, that ERIC was somehow connected to Democratic Party databases.None of this should have been too surprising for a website that continually traffics in the most outlandish election conspiracies and is every so often labeled false or “pants on fire” by fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact.But the misinformation worked. One week later, Louisiana dropped out of the program and didn’t give a clear reason.Other states, all Republican-led, began to follow, each with dubious rationales. Some said they didn’t like being required to spend money to reach out to unregistered voters, who they believed (wrongly) are more likely to vote for Democrats. Others cited the Soros conspiracy theory. Florida officials cited undefined “partisan tendencies” and concerns about data security (though ERIC has never had a data breach). The basic theme of all the complaints was distilled in a social-media post by Donald Trump, who claimed in March that ERIC “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.If so, it’s doing a poor job, Mr. Becker pointed out. “I hate to tell Democrats this, but ERIC is not delivering them elections,” he said. “Florida joined just before 2020 and then had the greatest Republican rout in history.”Mr. Becker, who served as a nonvoting member of ERIC’s board until his term expired this year, flagged a deeper flaw in the departing states’ reasoning: They control ERIC, along with the other member states. All the states were fully aware of the terms and costs of the agreement when they joined. If they want to change the way ERIC functions, it’s entirely within their power to offer a proposal and hold a vote, as they have done many times.There is, of course, a far simpler explanation for the Republican desertion of ERIC: politics. Many of the officials who have pulled their states out of ERIC are running for higher office, and that means appealing to the Republican base, which is still addled by the toxic fumes of Mr. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement. (Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer who was central to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss, has been a leading advocate of the ERIC exodus.) Under the persistent influence of the former president, most Republican voters have been conditioned to view all electoral outcomes that don’t go their way as de facto illegitimate.Republicans who are not running for higher office, on the other hand, seem to have no trouble defending ERIC. “Making policy choices based on misinformation is the worst,” said Gabe Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, which joined ERIC in 2019 and is happy to stick with it. “We’re already under pressure, but our calculus is what’s best for the voters of Georgia, because that’s our job.”The problem is that, as the only game in town, ERIC works best when more states join. States that have resigned no longer have a good way to analyze or share their voter data, and states that remain will receive less useful reports (and will pay more money) because the pool of participants is smaller. In short, everyone loses.“The very actors who said they care about list maintenance the most are now abandoning the only tool they had available,” said Ms. Lang. “It seems like the goal is to create chaos — to lead to bloated rolls so they can point at them and say, ‘Look at the problem we have,’ even though it’s a problem entirely of their own making.”That would seem to be a paradox, but it turns out it’s the whole point.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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      Republicans Did Something Most People Don’t Like, So They’re Changing the Rules

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      When Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, announced her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in February, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” That, she said, “has to change.”Her fellow Republicans appear to disagree. Across the country, Republican officeholders and activists have abandoned any pretense of trying to win a majority of voters. Last week, for example, Cleta Mitchell — a top Republican lawyer, strategist and fund-raiser — told donors to the Republican National Committee that conservatives had to limit voting on college campuses and tighten rules for voter registration and mail-in ballots. Only then, she said, could Republicans level the playing field for the 2024 presidential election. “The left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side — theirs,” she said in her presentation. “Our constitutional Republic’s survival is at stake.”The Republican Party’s hostility to popular government is most apparent on issues where the majority stands sharply opposed to conservative orthodoxy. Rather than try to persuade voters or compromise on legislation, much of the Republican Party has made a conscious decision to insulate itself as much as possible from voters and popular discontent.None of this is new, of course. The first major wave of Republican voter restrictions landed in 2011 after the previous year’s Tea Party-driven election. The Supreme Court unraveled a key section of the Voting Rights Act two years later in Shelby County v. Holder. And it’s been more than 10 years since Republicans in Wisconsin gerrymandered themselves into an almost impenetrable legislative majority.There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage. It’s an abrupt change from earlier decades, when Republicans used referendums to build support and enthusiasm among their voters on both social and economic issues.The initiative and referendum processes were envisioned at the start of the 20th century to circumvent an unrepresentative and recalcitrant legislature. And in the year since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, voters have used both to do exactly that. As my newsroom colleagues Kate Zernike and Michael Wines noted on Sunday, “Voters pushed back decisively after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, approving ballot measures that established or upheld abortion rights in all six states where they appeared.”In the face of public opposition to their unpopular views on abortion, Republicans had three choices: make the case to voters that tough abortion restrictions were worthwhile; compromise and bend to public opinion; or change the rules so that their opponents could not protect abortion rights against the will of a legislature that wants to ban the procedure.You know where this is going.Ahead of an effort to enshrine abortion rights into the state Constitution with a ballot measure that would go to voters in a November general election, Ohio Republicans are advancing a ballot measure that would raise the threshold for passing such a measure to 60 percent. If they get their way, the measure could go to voters in an August special election (previously, Ohio Republicans had opposed August special elections). This new rule requiring a supermajority would take only a simple majority to pass.In the wake of successful ballot initiatives to adopt the Medicaid expansion and legalize recreational marijuana, which passed in 2020 and 2022, Missouri Republicans also want to create a new supermajority requirement for ballot measures. One proposal would require 60 percent of the vote; the other two would require a two-thirds vote. Another related proposal would require any ballot initiative to receive a majority of the vote in half of Missouri’s 34 State Senate districts, most of which are sparsely populated. It would create, in essence, an electoral college for ballot initiatives.Republicans in Florida want to raise their state’s threshold for amending the Constitution through ballot initiative from 60 percent of the vote to nearly 67 percent. And after voters in Arkansas rejected a ballot measure to put new restrictions on future ballot measures, Republicans under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders simply passed the changes into law, using the legislature to do what they could not accomplish with the ballot measure.There is a point to make here about supermajority thresholds for lawmaking, whether it’s in or outside the legislature. The common defense of the supermajority threshold is that it is a tool to build or encourage consensus. But as Alexander Hamilton observed of the Articles of Confederation — which demanded consensus, even unanimity, for the Confederation Congress to take action — “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision) is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to the lesser.” In other words, a supermajority requirement is more akin to a minority veto than it is a technique for the promotion of consensus.There are times and circumstances where demanding a supermajority makes sense. But the Republican opponents of majority rule for ballot initiatives aren’t thinking about the best way to structure direct lawmaking by the public. They are thinking about the best way to keep voters from stopping their efforts to ban abortion (or legalize marijuana or give health insurance to working people), as if all power belongs to them and not, say, the people.As a unit of governance, the state legislature is both unusually powerful, with broad discretion over large areas of public policy, and unusually open to partisan and ideological capture through luck, timing and open manipulation of the rules. Part of the political story of the past decade (and farther back still) is how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have used these facts to their advantage.With gerrymandering, Republicans in several otherwise competitive states have built a nearly impenetrable wall around their legislative majorities. Through restrictions on the vote, they can keep as many of their opponents from the ballot box as is feasible. With fanciful doctrines like the so-called independent state legislature theory, they could have a pretext for amassing even more power to shape elections — even if the Supreme Court rejects the theory in its strongest form. And if all of this isn’t enough to tilt the playing field, Republicans can, as we see, change the rules of referendums and initiatives to limit direct policymaking by the voters.One of the many self-justifying myths about the counter-majoritarian features of the American political system is that they exist to curtail or prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” Americans today might want to remember something the framers never forgot: Much worse than the tyranny of the many is the tyranny of the few.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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      Is a 6-Week Abortion Ban a Disaster for DeSantis? Two Theories.

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      There were plenty of midterm elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a price over new abortion restrictions.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Will the abortion issue define him?Eze Amos for The New York TimesAfter the liberal triumph in this month’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, you probably don’t need much convincing that abortion rights can be a big political winner for Democrats.But after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law last week banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, it is worth considering another set of races: the elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a stiff political price for new abortion restrictions.Surprisingly, Republicans tended to fare just as well in the midterms in the states where abortion was recently banned as they did in the states where abortion remained legal.This is a little perplexing. There isn’t a definitive explanation, but I’ll offer two basic theories. Depending on your preferred answer, Mr. DeSantis’s anti-abortion stance may be an electoral death wish — or abortion simply may not be quite as helpful to Democrats as it seems based on the highest-profile elections, like the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race.Oddly enough, Wisconsin offers a stark example of how abortion may not always help Democrats. Abortion was banned there after the Dobbs decision, but in the midterms Republican candidates for U.S. House still won more votes than Democrats in a state Joe Biden carried in 2020. The Republican senator Ron Johnson won re-election as well. The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won re-election by three percentage points — a fine performance, but not a Democratic romp.It’s worth noting the unusual circumstances of Wisconsin’s abortion ban. The law banning abortion was originally enacted in 1849 — not by today’s Republicans — and went info effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned, giving the G.O.P. some maneuvering room. The Republican state Legislature argued for adding exceptions; Mr. Johnson pushed for an abortion referendum. Perhaps Republicans in the state just weren’t seen as responsible for the ban.But Wisconsin isn’t alone. A similar story played out in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia. In some of these states, Republican governors enacted bans or other major restrictions that went into effect after the Dobbs decision. In others, Republican bans were blocked by the courts. But in all of them, Republicans nonetheless posted average to above-average midterm results.In fact, there was only one state — West Virginia — where abortion was banned and where Democrats posted well above-average results in House races. Overall, Republican House candidates outran Donald J. Trump by a typical or above average amount (six points or more) in 10 of the 13 states where abortion was banned after Roe.What makes sense of this pattern? Of the two basic possibilities, one would augur well for Democrats; the other would bode better for Mr. DeSantis.Theory No. 1: It’s about demographics.Abortion is relatively unpopular in states where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion, like Texas or Georgia. These states tend to be relatively religious states in the South. There aren’t many of the secular, white, college-educated liberal Democrats who could bring about a “Roevember” backlash.There seems to be a lot to this theory. Not only does it explain many of the cases in question, but it also fits a broader pattern from last November: Democratic strength in the House vote was somewhat correlated with support for abortion (though big Democratic failures in New York and California stand out as obvious exceptions).But this theory doesn’t quite explain everything. In particular, it doesn’t work outside the South, including in places like Ohio or Wisconsin, where we know the right to abortion is popular. That’s where it’s important to notice my qualifier: where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion. If demographics are the predominant explanation, then the Republican resilience in the North must be because voters simply didn’t hold them responsible for banning abortion. Democrats could hope Republicans will pay a greater political cost when they unequivocally restrict abortion, like what Mr. DeSantis is doing now in Florida.Theory No. 2: When abortion is the most important issue.This is what I’ll call the salience theory: It takes a special set of circumstances for Democrats to make abortion the most important issue to voters, like a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who promises to represent the decisive vote to legalize abortion when an abortion case is pending before the court, or a Michigan referendum that explicitly decides the future of abortion in a state.As with the demographics theory, the salience theory is also consistent with polling and the general story of the 2022 midterms. Only a sliver of voters said abortion was the most important issue, not because abortion rights wasn’t important to them but because there were lots of other genuinely important issues at stake — the economy and inflation, crime, guns, democracy, immigration, and so on. With so many other issues, it makes sense that abortion plays only a marginal role in vote choice unless a distinct set of circumstances focuses the electorate on abortion alone.The salience theory also fits one of the patterns of the election: the highly localized results. There were states where Democrats excelled, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, even as they struggled in California or New York. Where Democrats did well, they had the fodder to focus voters on one of their best issues, like attacking stop-the-steal candidates. Where they struggled, Republicans managed to focus the electorate on an issue like crime (democracy or abortion seemed less important).It’s worth emphasizing that the salience theory doesn’t mean that abortion as an issue didn’t help Democrats in 2022. If Roe hadn’t been overturned, abortion would have been less salient everywhere and perhaps Democrats would have fared a bit worse across the board. But it would mean that Republican support for an abortion ban is not, on its own, sufficient to make abortion the predominant issue and bring stiff political costs to conservatives.While this theory offers better news for Mr. DeSantis, it would nonetheless contain a lesson for Democrats: It seems they would be wise to find creative ways to keep the electorate focused on abortion. State referendums might be one option, much as Republicans put same-sex marriage on the ballot in 2004. A campaign to pass federal abortion legislation might be another path as well. More

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      Republicans Are Forgetting One Crucial Truth About People and Their Bodies

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      In the homestretch of the epic Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ended last week with a blowout victory for liberals, voters’ cellphones pinged incessantly with text message ads.“Woke trans activists have their candidate,” one text message said, according to Wisconsin Watch, a local nonprofit news site. “Schools across Wisconsin are stripping away parental rights and trans kids behind parents backs. There’s only one candidate for the Supreme Court who will put an end to this. Vote for Judge Daniel Kelly by April 4 and protect your children from trans madness.”For a judicial race that centered on two big issues the Wisconsin Supreme Court is likely to consider soon, abortion and voting, it might seem odd that these ads in support of the conservative candidate chose to focus on an issue nowhere near the top of the agenda on the court’s upcoming docket.For reasons that are now obvious, conservative groups supporting Kelly largely avoided touting his opposition to abortion. That’s a sure loser, as the G.O.P. is rapidly learning. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to run on preserving the right-wing gerrymander that gives conservatives a total lock on Wisconsin’s Legislature and congressional delegation either. So some supporters reached for the wedge issue du jour: transphobia.An article of faith has emerged among hard-right conservatives — and has been worried over by some centrist pundits — that parental concerns about health care and social support for transgender children make for a potent wedge issue. After all, it has all the hallmarks of an effective culture war hot button: It involves strange new social and medical practices and unfamiliar ways of life, and children are sometimes concerned. But it’s not working the way conservatives expected.The end of Roe has reversed the tides of the culture war. The right has now lost it by winning the biggest victory of all. State legislatures across the country are enacting draconian abortion bans that are producing predictably tragic outcomes. Americans don’t have to imagine what the right will do with its power over women’s lives because we see it in every headline about women risking death because a doctor is too scared of running afoul of an anti-abortion law to provide a necessary medical procedure. It has become blindingly obvious what happens when Republicans legislate what Americans do with their sex organs. And voters, understandably, don’t like what they see.For years even before the fall of Roe, conservatives have used hard-edge anti-trans messaging in both red and swing state races, only to come up short. They tried it in North Carolina’s 2016 governor’s race, in the aftermath of a controversial bill requiring people to use the bathroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. The Democrat, Roy Cooper, won despite a hail of anti-trans ads. They tried it against Andy Beshear, the Democratic candidate for governor in deep-red Kentucky in 2019, and failed. In 2022, G.O.P. candidates tried to use L.G.B.T. issues as a wedge in races in swing states from the Midwest to the Sunbelt to New England. The data suggest that opposition to trans rights cannot overcome — or possibly even make a dent in — the advantage that comes to Democrats in swing states for supporting abortion rights. It’s not even close.“Transphobia was, and is, the dog that couldn’t hunt,” wrote the anonymous but eerily prescient polling analyst who writes a Substack newsletter under the name Ettingermentum.Wisconsin was the most recent example of this failure. The American Principles Project, a Virginia organization that is a driving force behind the harsh anti-transgender laws sweeping red states, spent almost $800,000 on ads supporting Kelly in the State Supreme Court race, according to Wisconsin Watch. A video paid for by the organization’s PAC accompanied text messages that described his liberal opponent, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, as “endorsed by all the woke activists that are stripping parents of their rights in Wisconsin schools and forcing transgenderism down our throats,” Wisconsin Watch reported.In one mendacious video advertisement the narrator claims that a 12-year-old was medically transitioned without parental consent. The video shows images of surgical scarring and implies that this child underwent surgery at the behest of school officials. This is absolutely false. The child in question merely changed their name and pronouns.But any hopes that this messaging would drive swing voters seems to have fallen flat. Indeed, the margin of victory in Wisconsin exceeded predictions. Joe Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes in 2020. Protasiewicz won by 200,000.The failure of anti-trans messaging as a wedge issue may seem surprising because the Democratic Party really does seem to have a problem when it comes to parents and schools. Resentment over Democrats’ support for school closures during the pandemic has become a liability for the party among educated suburbanites, as the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia demonstrated.But Republicans seem to be making the grave error of assuming that someone angry about school closures in the fall of 2021 is a potential conscript in their war today against drag queens and trans people. So far there appears to be little appetite among swing-state voters for laws that could — if our worst fears are realized — allow school officials to demand inspections of their child’s genitals before soccer matches and swim meets. Besides, there’s a far more urgent issue when it comes to students’ safety: In a country where child shooting deaths went up 50 percent from 2019 to 2021, who would trust their children to the political party that opposes gun regulation?There is no doubt that attitudes about gender are changing quickly, and changing especially quickly among young people. But it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about how Americans really feel about this. In a Pew poll last June, a large majority of respondents said they favor legal protections for trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. Other findings suggest unease: 43 percent said gender identity norms were changing too quickly. Majorities support requiring athletes to compete as their sex assigned at birth. Depressingly, 46 percent said they supported criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors.But one finding from that same poll stood out to me: 68 percent of respondents aren’t paying close attention to the trans bills popping up across the country, and three-quarters of self-identified moderates said they weren’t following the issue closely. But that doesn’t mean they are interested in restrictive or repressive laws, much less willing to vote on the basis of support for such policies.Of course, this lack of attention can cut both ways. Voters who aren’t paying attention to the issue are unlikely to be drawn to the polls to vote against a transgender care ban, either. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, presumed to be a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has been able to defy post-Roe gravity and increase his support despite prosecuting an aggressive culture war campaign against queer people. It remains to be seen how this would play out in a presidential election, which would run smack into swing states that have recently rejected in statewide elections both anti-abortion and anti-trans candidates.Democrats — and all Americans — should support the rights of all queer people, not just for electoral advantage but as a matter of principle. There is a clear line from the fight over bodily autonomy in reproductive rights to the fight for access to medical care for trans people. It’s a matter of dignity, too. Trans rights, much like abortion, present a profound challenge to the gender binary, which upholds the world’s oldest and most persistent hierarchy. People who don’t want to or cannot fit within their traditionally prescribed roles — mother, father, woman, man, boy, girl — increasingly have the freedom to live their lives beyond those circumscribed identities.The right has responded to this flowering of freedom with a barrage of repression. In states where Republicans have an ironclad grip on power, they have been incredibly successful. There are hundreds of bills passed or pending that vary in their intrusion on personal liberty but share the goal of giving right-wing politicians the power to control the bodies of citizens through law. On Thursday, this frenzy reached cruel new heights when the attorney general of Missouri issued new emergency rules that put up steep barriers to transgender care, not just for children but also for adults. These barriers could amount to a virtual ban on gender-affirming care for most transgender people in the state.In the face of this onslaught, some centrists seem determined to keep flirting with trans skepticism. It is easy to see why trans issues have become the place for certain centrists to try to perform their moderation — queer people have served this purpose for decades. While other forms of open bigotry became taboo, homophobia and the view that queer people’s rights were a marginal concern has persisted. It has happened before. Bill Clinton heavily courted the gay vote to win the presidency in 1992, only to turn around and sign into law two odious policies: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Clinton has since rent his garments over his regrets, but the fact remains that he enshrined discrimination against queer people into federal law.Republicans like to say they are the party of common sense. But what they seem to have forgotten is the commonest sense of all: Most people do not want the government making personal decisions for them. People want to control their own bodies. People want the freedom to decide when and how to form families. Suddenly, after years of pointing fingers at the left for so-called cultural totalitarianism, Republicans have now decisively revealed themselves to be the “jackbooted thugs” wanting details on your teenage daughter’s menstrual cycle. It’s hard to imagine a less appealing message to swing voters than that.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