Subterms
A perpetually expanding sprawl encircles Atlanta, the capital of Georgia and arguably all of the South. Newcomers from all over have powered its rapid growth, lured by a sense of promise and possibility. Because of the demographic shifts in these rapidly diversifying suburbs, Georgia recently emerged as a battleground state, after years of Republican dominance. […] More
For 16 years, the state has been a heartbreaker for Democrats, and so has Mecklenburg County — a reliably blue area that just hasn’t been blue enough.Ask any Democrat knocking doors, hosting debate watch parties or making phone calls in the blue pockets of North Carolina over the last several weeks, and they’ll say 2024 feels a lot like 2008.That was the year Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in more than three decades. No presidential candidate for the Democrats has managed it since, but an outpouring of excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten their hopes up.Democrats eager to avoid another disappointment point to the state’s biggest metropolitan area — and the source of the party’s biggest recent heartbreaks — as the key.Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.Ms. Harris will visit Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Voters recalled a Southern California school board president after his conservative majority approved policies on critical race theory and transgender issues.From the start, the three conservative board members of the Temecula Valley Unified School District made clear where they stood. On the same night in December 2022 that they were sworn in as a majority, they passed a resolution banning critical race theory from classrooms in their Southern California district.Months later, they abruptly fired the superintendent, saying they believed the district needed someone with new ideas. After that, they passed a rule requiring that parents be notified whenever a student requests to be identified as a different gender at school.The moves were applauded by conservatives, many of them Christian churchgoers who had helped to install the new board members, hoping that Temecula Valley could remain an island of traditional values in a liberal state.But this once rural area, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego, had transformed in recent decades into a diverse bedroom community, and many other families grew frustrated by what they considered to be the unwelcome incursion of national culture wars into their prized public schools.That backlash came to a head this month when voters recalled Joseph Komrosky, a military veteran and community college professor who had been the school board president since that December night. Mr. Komrosky’s ouster was made official on Thursday evening.“People are moving here so they can put their kids in the school district,” said Jeff Pack, whose One Temecula Valley PAC led the recall effort. “They don’t want all this partisan political warfare, this culture war stuff getting in the way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
A handful of injuries were reported in Gaithersburg, Md., a suburb of the nation’s capital. Baltimore is also under a tornado warning and flood watch.A storm swept through the suburbs of Washington, D.C. on Wednesday evening amid tornado warnings, damaging a few homes in Gaithersburg, Md., and injuring a handful of people, officials said.Officials advised people to take cover in Montgomery County in Maryland after the National Weather Service office in Washington issued a tornado warning and called it a “particularly dangerous situation.”“We believe there were multiple tornadoes,” said Pete Piringer, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service.Tornadoes in the EastLocations of tornado sightings or damage reported by trained spotters. More
Republicans had hope after 2022 that the nation’s residential redoubts were coming back to the G.O.P. But aside from New York, the suburbs on Tuesday swung back to the Democrats.From Northern Virginia to Northern Kentucky, the American suburbs rejected Republican candidates on Tuesday, sending a message that leafy residential communities where elections were once won and lost increasingly side with the Democratic Party — especially on abortion rights.Only in the New York suburbs of eastern Long Island did the Republican message on crime and “open borders” seem to resonate. Democrats took a drubbing in Suffolk County, where suburbanites may be recoiling at the migrant crisis plaguing the metropolis to the west.Elsewhere, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, voters rejected Republican messages on abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and crime, sending a signal that while they may fret over President Biden’s age and capabilities, they may worry more about Republican positions in the era of Donald J. Trump.“Suburban America left the G.O.P. in 2016 when they didn’t like Trump’s behavior,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and message adviser. “They began to come back in 2022 when they rejected Joe Biden’s economic policies, but they will leave again if the conversation is about abortion and social policy.”Abortion was dominant; suburban voters outside Ohio’s biggest cities voted overwhelmingly to establish the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. Kentucky’s incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who ran hard on abortion rights and kitchen-table issues like infrastructure spending, won not only Jefferson County, home to Louisville, and Fayette County, home to Lexington. He also beat his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, in Kenton and Campbell Counties, once reliably Republican redoubts across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s victorious Republican campaign for governor in Virginia had some Democrats worried that their lock on the suburban sprawl outside the nation’s capital wasn’t as tight as they had thought. Those same suburbs on Tuesday made Danica Roem, a Democrat, the first transgender state senator in the South, while helping Democrats seize a majority in the Virginia General Assembly and hold control of the State Senate.“We let the Democrats drive the message and make it all about abortion,” said John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia who lives in Loudoun County, a Washington exurb. “The Republican Party has to modernize its message on this issue if we’re going to convince Democrats and independents to cross over and vote Republican. The reality is Virginia has some districts that vote blue. In a year where Roe v. Wade is driving intensity, there’s no way for us to win those districts.”In retrospect, Mr. Youngkin’s victory may have been a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic, when suburban parents worried about school closures and responded to his singular focus on education, said Heather Williams, interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to state legislatures.This time, she said, some of the same parents recoiled from Republican efforts to ban books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes from libraries and more generally inject socially conservative views into the school system.“The issue of fundamental freedoms still really resonates,” she said.In the highly contested school board races around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, voters soundly rejected every candidate endorsed by the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, which had been leading efforts to excise L.G.B.T.Q. books from libraries and exert more conservative control over curriculums.In 2021, with the pandemic still hanging over the schools, the group claimed victory in 33 school board seats in the swing Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, Pa. On Tuesday, Moms for Liberty candidates lost five school board races in central Bucks County.“They just got crushed,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who worked with candidates in Pennsylvania. “Voters are looking for common-sense middle-of-the-road candidates, and that includes how they’ll view Donald Trump a year from now.”Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and former school board member from Indian River County, Fla., expressed no regret, saying that across the country, about 90 school board candidates endorsed by her group did win, out of 202 total that it backed. The “win rate” of Moms for Liberty did slip, from better than 50 percent in 2022 to 43 percent on Tuesday, she said. But, she said, the group will be back in 2024 with 139 candidates, better training for candidates, more money and more professional political partnerships.“We’re just getting started,” she said.The one Republican bright spot was significant: New York. In an otherwise disappointing midterm election in 2022, Republican victories in the suburbs of the nation’s largest city secured the party its narrow control of the House. Democrats are banking on a comeback to help retake the House.But the signal sent on Tuesday was that where voters are seeing the huge upswell of migrants from the southern border, the Republican message on crime and border security is working. In these areas, voters were not asked to litigate the abortion issue.Ed Romaine easily flipped the Suffolk County executive’s office from Democrat to Republican. A Republican, Kristy Marmorato, won a City Council seat in the Bronx for the first time in more than 50 years.Of course, the threat of an abortion ban did not hang over those races — because reproductive rights are already secure in New York.Reid J. Epstein More
The influx of asylum seekers has the makings of a potent political force, and Republicans are ready to test it in key 2024 house races.Republicans successfully made crime the defining issue of the 2022 midterm elections in New York, fanning fears about public safety to rout suburban Democrats and help secure the party its House majority.Barely a year later, as another critical election season begins to take shape, they appear to be aggressively testing a similar strategy, hoping that the state’s growing migrant crisis will prove as potent a political force in 2024.The rapid arrival in New York of more than 100,000 asylum seekers is already wreaking havoc on government budgets, testing the city’s safety net and turning Democratic allies against one another. Now, otherwise vulnerable Republicans in a half dozen closely watched districts have begun grabbing onto all of it as a lifeline to portray Democrats as out of touch and unable to govern.“This is a crisis of their own making,” said Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican fighting to hold a suburban district Mr. Biden won by 10 points.“It’s very similar to cashless bail,” Mr. Lawler said. “When you create a sanctuary city policy that invites migrants to come regardless of their status, you are going to get a lot of people coming, and now they can’t handle the influx.”Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican fighting to hold a suburban district President Biden won by 10 points, said the migrant crisis was of Democrats’ “own making.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesHearing the same echoes, Democrats are determined not to be caught flat-footed as they were a year ago. From the suburbs of Long Island to here in the Hudson Valley, their candidates are spending late summer openly clashing not just with Republicans who say they are to blame, but also with their own party leaders, including President Biden.In one of the most closely watched contests, Representative Pat Ryan, the lone frontline Democrat to survive the Republican suburban demolition last year, has teamed up with two Republicans to demand that Mr. Biden declare a state of emergency, and broke with his party to support a bill to discourage schools from sheltering migrants.“The No. 1 thing I learned as an Army officer: When in charge, take charge,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview. “We are in a crisis, the president is in charge, and he and his team need to take charge.”He is far from alone. Josh Riley, a Democrat who is trying to flip a neighboring district, called the president’s aloofness on the issue “offensive.”Mondaire Jones, a former Democratic congressman mounting a comeback attempt further down the Hudson, warned of “consequences at the polls” if his party does not step up.And his primary opponent, Liz Whitmer Gereghty, said Democrats across New York should be responding in lock step. “It kind of feels like we’re not,” she said.Both parties caution that the reality on the ground, where 2,900 migrants arrived just last week, is shifting too quickly for them to know exactly where the battle lines will be by next fall, when voters will also be weighing abortion rights and the criminal trials of former President Donald J. Trump, currently the leading Republican candidate.Republicans have been using fears about immigrants pouring across the border for years with only mixed success. And unlike a year ago, Democrats are trying to go on offense, accusing Republicans like Mr. Lawler of engaging in demagogy and reminding voters that his party helped stall a major immigration overhaul in Washington that they say might have prevented the latest influx.“Everybody understands this is a potential liability,” said Tim Persico, a Democratic consultant who oversaw the party’s House campaign operation last cycle. “I know there’s been a lot of finger pointing and kerfuffles, but there’s also pretty good evidence the mayor and the governor are trying to figure out how to solve this.”Still, there is little doubt that New York, a city known as a bastion for immigrants, is in the midst of a challenge to its political system with few modern parallels. Privately, Democratic pollsters and strategists are beginning to use focus groups and polls to test possible defenses on an issue they view as a tinderbox capable of igniting new political fires, fast.New York is housing roughly 59,000 asylum seekers a night because of a unique right-to-shelter mandate that dates back decades and is preparing to enroll some 19,000 migrant children in public schools this fall. An archipelago of temporary shelters has cropped up in hotels, parks and on public land, prompting increasingly raucous protests.And Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly warned of budget cuts as the cost of caring for the newcomers spikes into the billions of dollars — taxpayer money that Republicans are quick to point out could otherwise be used to help New Yorkers.As the numbers keep climbing, Democratic leaders have been forced to choose from unpalatable policy responses.Mr. Adams, for instance, has repeatedly demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul force reluctant counties outside the city to help shelter migrants. But doing so would prompt fierce backlash in many of the communities Democrats need in order to win the House, and the governor, who was already blamed for Democrats’ 2022 losses, has refused.On the other hand, any attempt by the city or state to drastically curtail the services it offers migrants would meet blowback from the left.The governor and mayor — along with congressional Democrats as ideologically diverse as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Ryan — are united in demanding more help from Mr. Biden. But push too hard and they risk bloodying their party’s standard-bearer heading into an election year.The White House did announce on Wednesday that it would dedicate personnel to help New York process work papers for asylum seekers and request additional federal funds from Congress to help the state. But Mr. Biden, who has to make his own national political calculations around immigration, appears to have little interest in taking a more visible role.Voters are watching. A recent poll conducted by Siena College found that 82 percent of registered voters view the influx as a “serious” problem, and a majority said that the state had “already done enough” for the asylum seekers and should focus on slowing their arrivals. The same poll showed nearly every major Democrat, including Mr. Biden, underwater among suburban voters.In many ways, those poor ratings have freed Democrats facing competitive races to distance themselves from their party in ways that telegraph to voters their understanding of the problem while differentiating themselves from Republicans’ more hard-line views on immigrants.It is a tricky balancing act. At the same time Mr. Ryan is locking arms with Republicans to pressure his own party, he is also trying to shift responsibility onto Republicans and defend himself against their attacks for making the county he once led a “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants.“Where you really get yourself in trouble as an elected official is when you don’t listen,” Mr. Ryan said, adding: “For political purposes, the MAGA Republicans want divisions and chaos. They are not actually working to resolve problems.”The task may be easier for challengers who are taking on Republican incumbents whom they can blame for failing to enact the kind of changes to the immigration system that could curb illegal border crossings, speed up the asylum system and eventually relieve pressure on New York.“In my district, the one person sitting at the table to fix this problem is Anthony D’Esposito, and he is doing nothing,” said Laura Gillen, a Democrat seeking a rematch against Mr. D’Esposito, who represents the South Shore of Long Island. (He and other New York Republicans helped pass an aggressive but partisan border security bill in May.)But Ms. Gillen, who wants to represent a district Mr. Biden won by 14 points, said the president deserved blame, too. She called a letter last week from his homeland security secretary critiquing New York’s handling of the migrants as “irresponsible.”Laura Gillen, a Democrat, plans to challenge Anthony D’Esposito, who represents the South Shore of Long Island and has taken aim at his approach to the migrant crisis.Heather Walsh for The New York TimesMr. Riley is taking a similar “all our politicians are failing us” approach, knocking both Mr. Biden and Representative Marc Molinaro, his Republican opponent.“Look, this is a federal problem and it requires a federal response, and I think President Biden needs to get his act together and help solve it,” he said.It is too soon to know whether the approach is working. In Mr. Ryan’s district, the views of voters interviewed near a hotel housing migrants appeared to break down on familiar lines. Dozens of voters, when asked by a reporter, voiced dissatisfaction with how migrants had been bused up from New York City, but they disagreed on who was to blame.“Not just the county but the country can handle this,” said Faith Frishberg, a Democrat, outside a waterfront restaurant in Newburgh. “Most of this failure is a failure to not address the immigration policy.”But there may also be a distinct drawback over time.Blaming Democratic leaders like Mr. Adams or Mr. Biden may be expedient short-term politics. But it risks reinforcing the notion that Democrats cannot govern — a potentially powerful boomerang effect in a state that has registered some signs of weariness of one-party rule in recent years.Republicans already appear eager to reinforce it.“I have not seen a less coordinated, less competent way of dealing with human lives,” Mr. Molinaro said. “I know the reporting today has become a little bit about how the president is pointing at the governor, the governor at the mayor. The story line is Democrat leaders are pointing at each other.”Timmy Facciola contributed reporting from Newburgh, N.Y., and More
To win back a key seat it lost in 2022, the party must first deal with a battle between Mondaire Jones and Liz Whitmer Gereghty, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sister.Sipping iced coffee at a diner the other day, Liz Whitmer Gereghty looked every bit the dream recruit Democrats need to recapture this coveted suburban House seat north of New York City.She once owned a shop down the street, served on the school board and speaks passionately about abortion rights. She also happens to be the younger sister of one of her party’s brightest stars, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.“My rights are at risk,” said Ms. Gereghty, 50. “Everything feels very urgent, and I have a congressman who is not representing me, so I raised my hand.”Problem is, she was not the only one. Mondaire Jones, a popular former congressman who represented much of the area until January, is also running and believes he is the best candidate to defeat Representative Mike Lawler, the Republican incumbent.It is a pattern repeating itself in swing seats across the country this summer, but nowhere more so than New York, where ambitious Democrats eager to challenge Republicans defending seats that President Biden won are creating primary pileups from Long Island to Syracuse.Contested primaries have long been a reality for both parties. But after Democrats’ underperformance in 2022 made New York a national embarrassment, party officials and strategists have been increasingly worried that Democrat-on-Democrat fights could drain millions of dollars and bruise a crop of eventual nominees, threatening their carefully laid plans to wrest back House control.“My view is we shot ourselves in the foot last cycle, and we seem intent on shooting ourselves in the head this cycle,” said Howard Wolfson, who helps steer tens of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“I can’t for the life of me understand why we can’t figure this out and ensure that we have one strong candidate running in each of these districts,” he added.Paradoxically, the problem could grow only more stark if Democrats win a lawsuit seeking to redraw the state’s district lines. That could ease the party’s path to victory, but also prompt the courts to push the primary date from June to late August, extending the bitter primary season and truncating the general election campaign.There is time for leaders like Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat and a New Yorker, to intervene if they want to. While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rarely interferes in open primaries, there is a tradition of less direct maneuvering to boost preferred candidates and edge others out.So far, Mr. Jeffries appears to be doing the opposite — privately encouraging more potential candidates, with mixed success, according to four Democrats familiar with his outreach who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss it. He tried to nudge State Senator Michelle Hinchey into a Hudson Valley contest earlier this year and urged the former Nassau County executive, Laura Curran, to enter a large primary field for another seat as recently as July.Mr. Jeffries has also offered support to Tom Suozzi to enter the race for his old House seat on Long Island, where a crowded field of Democrats is circling Representative George Santos, a first-term Republican who faces federal fraud charges.The leader’s allies argue that the competition will strengthen their nominees, and brush off concerns that Democrats will be short on funds. A Democratic super PAC has already earmarked $45 million for New York races. And the D.C.C.C. is pitching donors — as recently as a party retreat in Torrey Pines, Calif., last weekend, according to an attendee — to give to special “nominee funds,” a kind of escrow account collecting money for primary winners.“Leader Jeffries has no plan to endorse in any Democratic primary in New York,” said Christie Stephenson, his spokeswoman. “He is confident that whoever emerges in these competitive districts will be strongly positioned to defeat the extreme MAGA Republican crowd.”But the mix of ego and ideology buffeting the star-studded race between Mr. Jones and Ms. Gereghty shows the potential risks, particularly in such a high-profile race to reclaim a Hudson Valley seat lost last year by Sean Patrick Maloney, who was the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee at the time.Mr. Jones held the Hudson Valley seat, but opted in 2022 to run for an open seat in New York City, where he lost in a primary.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Jones, an openly gay Black Democrat, represented a more liberal configuration of the seat in Congress last term. But after a court imposed new district lines in 2022, Mr. Maloney opted to run for Mr. Jones’s seat instead of his traditional one. Rather than run against a party leader, Mr. Jones chose to move 25 miles to Brooklyn to run for an open seat there.He lost and has now moved back north.In a phone interview, Mr. Jones, 36, said he was confident that voters would understand his “impossible situation,” but regretted his decision not to challenge Mr. Maloney, who lost to Mr. Lawler in a seat Mr. Biden won by 10 points.Mr. Jones said the outcome showed that “you can’t just substitute any Democrat for Mondaire Jones in this district.” More than 100 local and national officials and groups — from the Westchester Democratic chairwoman to the congressional Black and progressive caucuses — have backed his comeback attempt, making him the clear front-runner against Ms. Gereghty.But some of the positions Mr. Jones trumpeted to win more liberal electorates in earlier campaigns could prove cumbersome.He is already tacking toward the center and would say little about Ms. Gereghty in the interview. Mr. Jones referred to his own calls to defund the police in 2020 as “emotional, facile comments”; his current campaign features video of Mr. Jones shaking hands with a local police chief while touting votes to increase police funding.Mr. Jones said he wanted to see New York grant judges new authority to set cash bail for defendants they deem dangerous. And he said he would support a state plan to tax cars traveling into central Manhattan only if there was a carveout for the suburban counties he represented.Over breakfast in Katonah, an affluent Westchester suburb, Ms. Gereghty pitched her modest record as an electoral strength in a general election. She cast herself as a member of the get-it-done wing of the Democratic Party, like her sister, and predicted Mr. Lawler would gleefully use Mr. Jones’s words against him, as he did to Mr. Maloney.“If you got tired of the Sean Maloney ads last year, we’ll at least have some more variety if he’s the candidate,” she said.Ms. Gereghty serves on a school board in her district, and was a former shop owner in the area.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesMs. Gereghty has no plans to drop out. But she has struggled to amass local support.Her most notable endorsement comes from Emily’s List, the national group dedicated to electing women who back abortion rights. Of the $408,000 she’s raised thus far, almost half came from residents of Michigan.Democrats have caught some breaks in neighboring districts.Republicans have yet to field a top-tier challenger to Representative Pat Ryan, the only Democrat defending a swing seat here. They are also headed toward their own fraught primary if Mr. Santos continues to run.Elsewhere, the candidates are crowding in.Three Democrats, including Sarah Hughes, a former gold medal figure skater, are vying to represent the party against Representative Anthony D’Esposito in a Long Island district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Three more have already raised at least $300,000 to run in Mr. Santos’s neighboring district. That does not include Mr. Suozzi or Robert Zimmerman, the party’s 2022 nominee, who is eyeing another run.A similar dynamic is playing out in Syracuse, where four Democrats are competing over whether a moderate or progressive should take on Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican who narrowly won a seat that favored Mr. Biden by eight points in 2020.“Primaries can be bloodying, and they cost a lot of money,” said Ms. Curran, who has decided not to run for Mr. D’Esposito’s seat. “It clouds the message and the mission.”Republicans have watched it all with delight.Mr. Lawler spent the month of August meeting constituents and gathering large campaign checks. He said he ran into Mr. Jones along the way and got an earful — about how frustrated the Democrat was to be stuck in a primary.He won’t have a Democratic primary vote, but Mr. Lawler, who will have to defend his own conservative votes unpopular in the district, made clear he has a preference.“Look, I’d be happy to run against either,” he said. “But Mondaire Jones certainly has a very long and detailed record that shows him clearly out of step.” More
More from our inbox:The Revolt in RussiaMigrants and New York’s SuburbsClimate Education: New Jersey’s ExampleThe special counsel, Jack Smith, released an indictment of former President Donald J. Trump this month.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Don’t do it, liberal America! Don’t get caught up in the melodrama of the Florida trial! The former president craves attention. The news media collude by granting him free publicity. Why give this despicable man what he wants?And the trial outcome? Yes, it seems that Jack Smith has an open-and-shut case. Yet there is a reasonable likelihood that we have a shut-and-shut-down judge. This is the bad luck of the draw.Judge Aileen M. Cannon has myriad tactics at her disposal to delay, disrupt and derail the proceedings. She can influence jury selection, undercutting chances of a unanimous guilty verdict. Even if the jury reaches that conclusion, it is the judge who sets the sentence. This could be a slap on the wrist.Why not assume that the chances of conviction and a serious sentence are small and turn your attention to other matters of national significance?If you must follow the legal adventures of the former president, it’s better to focus on the likely trial in Georgia and Mr. Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation.David B. AbernethyPortola Valley, Calif.The writer is professor emeritus of political science at Stanford University.To the Editor:Re “Trial Judge Puts Documents Case on Speedy Path” (front page, June 21):So Judge Aileen M. Cannon has set a trial date for August. I’m suspicious. She will have total power over the sentence as well as the ability to dismiss the case. Is she helping Donald Trump by getting the whole matter resolved quickly in order for it to be done before the election?How dare she ignore calls to recuse herself, given her record? She must be removed.Sandy MileySherrill, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Leaving Trump’s Fate to 12 Ordinary Citizens Is Genius,” by Deborah Pearlstein (Opinion guest essay, June 16):In ordinary times Professor Pearlstein’s belief in the wisdom of the jury system in trying Donald Trump would be warranted, but these are not ordinary times. Mr. Trump has primed his followers to threaten and intimidate anyone who might oppose him.No matter the strength of the case, I believe that at least some jurors will vote to acquit because they justifiably fear for their safety.David LigareCarmel Valley, Calif.To the Editor:Central to the case against Donald Trump are the details about the highly classified documents he took. And the key problem is that the defense’s right to see the government’s evidence conflicts with the absolute need to keep that material secret.There is then the possibility that the judge might agree to suppress such crucial evidence. Could people with the highest security clearance review the documents and present affidavits and witnesses in court supporting the government’s assertions?This might provide a litmus test for the integrity of the judicial process.Arnold MitchellScarsdale, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Judge’s Record in Trump Case Raises Concern” (front page, June 15):While I understand that any judge presiding over an unprecedented and historic case like this will receive scrutiny, I am appalled at how easily a Latina woman is denigrated for her inexperience and for bristling when she is questioned.Such descriptions hold no weight for this 49-year-old working mother and small-business owner. I’ve heard it all before ad nauseam.Speaking as a liberal, I hope that Judge Aileen M. Cannon proves all of her naysayers wrong and goes down in history as an amazing jurist.Would a male judge have had the same questions raised about him at the same stage of his career? I highly doubt it. So much of this article reads like water cooler talk about the new female boss.Shantha Krishnamurthy SmithSan Jose, Calif.To the Editor:It was not the Watergate break-in that brought Richard Nixon down; it was the cover-up and obstruction of justice. Similarly, it was not the taking or storage of classified documents that resulted in Donald Trump’s indictment; it was the lying to the F.B.I. and D.O.J. and obstruction of justice.Mike Pence and Joe Biden stored government documents, but promptly cooperated with the government and returned the documents. It’s not complicated.Alan M. GoldbergBrooklynTo the Editor:I already know how I would vote if I were on the jury of the Trump trial.Good luck finding 12 Americans who don’t.Eliot RiskinRiverside, Conn.The Revolt in Russia Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “How Revolt Undermines Putin’s Grip” (news analysis, front page, June 26):An autocrat must always appear strong. An act of treason and rebellion was committed against Russia, and Vladimir Putin blinked. His mentor Stalin is turning over in his grave.A severe crack has now developed in Mr. Putin’s power structure that he may not have enough cement to repair.Ed HoulihanRidgewood, N.J.To the Editor:What kind of world have we come to when we’re rooting for the mercenaries?Elliot ShoenmanLos AngelesMigrants and New York’s SuburbsEd Day, the Rockland County executive, is one of many county leaders who have taken legal steps to try to stop New York City from sending migrants their way.Gregg Vigliotti for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“New York City and Suburbs: A Rift Widens” (front page, June 18) highlighted the opposition of Ed Day, the Rockland County executive, to migrants being housed in hotels in the suburbs.Although some suburban residents oppose migrants coming to our communities, there are others who want to give migrants a chance to have a better life. I have met many Westchester residents who want to donate food and clothing to migrants.And — if the federal government would make it easier for the migrants to work legally — we could try matching employers who can’t find employees to work in their industry with migrants who would like to work legally in the suburbs.Churches and synagogues in the suburbs would welcome the opportunity to have congregants “adopt” individual migrants and to provide them with personal attention and help so they could live a better life.Ed Day does not speak for the suburbs.Paul FeinerGreenburgh, N.Y.The writer is the Greenburgh town supervisor.Climate Education: New Jersey’s Example Desiree Rios for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Schools Encourage 7-Year-Olds to Fix Climate Change, Not Fear It” (front page, June 17):Three cheers to my former home state, New Jersey, for having the guts and the smarts to take on climate change in its education system. The effects of our climate’s unsettling behavior will continue to be felt by all, whether you agree that it’s happening or deny it.The youngest of us will experience its effects longer than my generation of grandparents, so of course it is totally logical to begin with them in their early education years.The great purpose of education is to prepare all ages to live meaningfully in the world as it is and as it changes. Surely, teaching the young how to bend with the arc of change and sway with its seasons could not be more relevant today.I wish New Jerseyans well with this, but even more I wish them insight into what they are doing so they can become ambassadors to the other states and, yes, the federal Department of Education as well.Well done, New Jersey!Bill HoadleySanta Fe, N.M. More
Over the past half century, the percentage of Black Americans living in the nation’s suburbs has doubled, a shift that is changing the balance of political power in key regions of the country.This transition is simultaneously raising the living standards of better-off African Americans and leaving the poor behind in deteriorating urban neighborhoods.“Since 1970, the share of Black individuals living in suburbs of large cities has risen from 16 to 36 percent,” Alexander W. Bartik and Evan Mast, economists at the University of Illinois and Notre Dame, write in their 2021 paper “Black Suburbanization: Causes and Consequences of a Transformation of American Cities.”“This shift,” they point out, “is as large as the post-World War II wave of the Great Migration.”In contrast, the Black population in “central cities remained flat until 2000 and then declined significantly, leading their share of the national African American total to fall from 41 to 24 percent.” Urban census tracts that were majority Black and had a poverty rate above 20 percent in 1970, according to their data, “have since lost 60 percent of their Black population.”The two authors continue: “Black suburbanization has led to major changes in neighborhoods, accounting for a large share of recent increases in both the average Black individual’s neighborhood quality and within-Black income segregation.”In their paper, Bartik and Mast provide data showing that “suburbanization plays a major role in both rising income segregation within the Black population and a growing divergence in neighborhood quality of Black suburbanites and city dwellers,” which “has increased within-Black stratification due to a lack of low-cost suburban housing and relatively low white flight.”The exodus to the suburbs, according to the two economists,has accounted for most gains in Black households’ neighborhood characteristics, with Black city dwellers in some cases experiencing relative declines. For example, while the neighborhood median income of the average Black individual has modestly improved from 61 to 66 percent of the average White individual’s neighborhood income, the figure has fallen from 58 to 50 percent for Black city dwellers.Bartik and Mast’s analysis confirms the prescient warning of William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard, who famously wrote in his 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” that before the enactment of fair housing legislation, “lower class, working class and middle class Black families all lived more or less in the same communities, sent their children to the same schools, availed themselves of the same recreational facilities and shopped at the same stores.” The Black middle and working classes “were confined in communities also inhabited by the lower class; their very presence provided stability to inner-city neighborhoods and reinforced and perpetuated mainstream patterns of norms and behaviors.”The impoverished neighborhoods they leave behind now, Wilson continued, “are populated almost exclusively by the most disadvantaged segments of the Black community, that heterogeneous grouping of families and individuals who are outside the mainstream of the American occupational system.”A separate February 2023 study of Black suburbanization, “Racial Diversity and Segregation: Comparing Principal Cities, Inner-Ring Suburbs, Outlying Suburbs, and the Suburban Fringe,” by Daniel T. Lichter, Brian C. Thiede and Matthew M. Brooks of Cornell, Penn State and Florida State, confirmed many of the findings in the Bartik-Mast paper.One of the most striking shifts they report involves the degree of integration:The extraordinary increases in Black, Hispanic and Asian suburbanization since 1990 have changed the racial makeup of suburbia overall. Multiracial diversity is suffusing America’s suburbs as never before. We show, for example, that there is a 53 percent probability today that any two people randomly drawn from inner-ring suburban areas would be from different ethnoracial groups.At the same time, they write, one geographic region of suburbia — the outer rings — stands out from the rest:Not surprisingly, the least diverse part of suburbia is its fringe — formerly rural — counties, where the average likelihood of drawing two people of different races is only 34 percent overall. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis, untested empirically, that the exurbs may be providing “refuge” for suburban Whites fleeing growing racial diversity.Lichter and his co-authors measured different geographic areas from those used by Bartik and Mast, so the numbers vary, but the trends are similar.Lichter, Thiede and Brooks demonstrate that the rapid rate of increase in Black suburbanization between 1990 and 2020 far outpaced that of other demographic groups.In 1990, 33.9 percent of Black Americans in what are known as metropolitan statistical areas lived in the suburbs. By 2020, that grew to 51.2 percent, a 17.3-point shift over the same period; the share of Asian Americans in metropolitan statistical areas living in suburbs grew by 13.2 percentage points; and the share of Hispanics by 13.8 percentage points.While Black and other minority suburbanites have made economic gains, the suburbs, Lichter and his two colleagues argue,are likely to be infused with racial politics over the foreseeable future. School boards and local communities are increasingly divided on issues of inclusion and exclusion, on the racial gerrymandering of municipal and school district boundaries, and on restrictive zoning laws on housing and commercial activities. The suburbs are arguably at the frontline of America’s “diversity explosion,” where economic integration and cultural assimilation occur or are contested.In this context, Lichter, Thiede and Brooks contend:The idea of “melting-pot suburbs,” which signals residential integration, hardly seems apt. To be sure, the largest declines in Black-white segregation over the past decade were found in the suburbs. But any optimism from this result is countered by declines over the last decade in the exposure index between the Black and white populations in both inner-ring and outlying suburbs.What that means, they explain, is thatBlack individuals are no more likely to be living with White neighbors today than in the past. In fact, Black exposure to Whites in the suburbs seems to have declined, at least in those parts of the suburbs where most of the metro Black population lives.They call this — the fact that “declines in Black-white segregation occurred even as Blacks have become less exposed to whites” — a statistical paradox. One reason for it, they write, is “rooted mostly in white depopulation rather than white flight since 2010.”Past declines “in suburban segregation among Hispanics and Asians seem to have stagnated, or even reversed, over the past decade,” Lichter, Thiede and Brooks write.This finding, they continue,is potentially significant because it raises prospects of growing suburban fragmentation and spatial inequality. Suburbs may be less likely than in the past to connote entry into mainstream society or social mobility. Our findings suggest the formation of new ethnoburbs among the Asian and Hispanic populations — perhaps especially among first- and second-generation immigrants.A study of the shifting politics of suburbia from the 1950s to the present, “Not Just White Soccer Moms: Voting in Suburbia in the 2016 and 2020 Elections,” by Ankit Rastogi and Michael Jones-Correa, both at the University of Pennsylvania, found that from the 1950s to the start of the 1990s,Residing in racially homogeneous, middle-class enclaves, White suburban voters embraced a set of policy positions that perpetuated their racial and class position. Since the 1990s, however, the demographics of suburbs have been changing, with consequent political shifts.As a result, by 2020, “suburban voters were more likely to back Biden, the Democratic candidate, than his Republican counterpart Trump.”Why, the authors ask?White suburban precincts showed greater support for Biden in 2020 than for Clinton in 2016. Our analysis indicates, however, that if all suburban voters had voted like white suburbanite precincts, Trump would have carried metropolitan suburbs in 2020.So what saved the day for Biden? “Democrats carried metropolitan suburbs in 2020 because of suburban voters of color.”While suburban whites have moved to the left over the past three decades, there is continuing evidence of white resistance to suburban integration.Erica Frankenberg, Christopher S. Fowler, Sarah Asson and Ruth Krebs Buck, all of Penn State, studied declining white enrollment in public schools in their February 2023 paper, “Demographic and School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes: Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia, Between 1990 and 2010.”They found that from 1990 to 2010, there was “a steep decline in white, school-age children and an increase in Black, Hispanic, and Asian children in both neighborhoods and the schools that serve them,” which, they argue, suggests that “white households reluctant to send their children to diversifying schools are exiting (or never entering) these districts entirely.”The decrease in white students, they write, “may reflect two potential factors: either white families are leaving these public school districts or white households with school-age children are choosing not to enter these districts, perhaps opting for more distant and homogeneous districts.”Along similar lines, Lichter and Domenico Parisi, a sociologist at Stanford, and Michael C. Taquino of Mississippi State examine the response of whites to suburban integration in their 2019 paper, “Remaking Metropolitan America? Residential Mobility and Racial Integration in the Suburbs.”“The exodus of whites,” they write, “is significantly lower in predominantly white suburbs than in places with racially diverse populations. Most suburban whites have mostly white neighbors, a pattern reinforced by white residential mobility.”In addition, they continue, “suburban whites who move tend to choose predominantly white communities with mostly white neighbors.” Affluent whites, they note, are “better positioned to leave diversifying places for mostly white communities with white neighbors.”Their analysis shows that “white mobility rates were lowest in predominantly white places and blocks and highest in suburban places and blocks with significant Black populations.”The rates of white mobility, they add,were especially large if neighbors tended to be Black. Nearly 28 percent of whites moved away from predominantly Black neighbors, compared with an overall average of only 19.25 percent. In suburban blocks with mostly white neighbors, the mobility rate was even lower at 17.45 percent.Even more strikingly, they report:Whites living in predominantly Black blocks are 78 percent more likely to leave the place altogether than move to another block in the same place. Similarly, whites living in places with high concentrations of Blacks are 51 percent more likely to leave the place altogether than move to another block within the same place.A key measure of motivation in deciding to move is the composition of the neighborhood a white family moves to, according to their analysis.“A significant majority of white inter-suburban place moves,” they write,involve movement to predominantly white places (60.1 percent). Only a tiny fraction involved moves to places with predominantly Black populations (7.1 percent). Moves to mixed-race places, however, accounted for a significant minority share of all destinations (32.8 percent).In their conclusion, Parisi, Lichter and Taquino point to the choice of many suburbanizing whites of outer-ring neighborhoods: “Minority suburbanization has been countered demographically by white population shifts between suburban places, to outlying exurban areas and back to the city.”More specifically, they argue, “Our analyses show, at the block level, that suburban whites overwhelmingly have white rather than racially diverse neighbors, regardless of the overall racial composition of the particular suburban place they live.”In addition, “Whites are moving to other suburbs, gentrifying central cities, and exurban fringe areas that seem to set them apart spatially from newly arriving suburban minorities.”Despite the pessimism inherent in their analysis, the authors leave unanswered a question they pose at the end of their article: “Will white suburbanites join the new American racial mosaic? Or instead, will they leave areas of rapid racial and ethnic change, including the suburbs that no longer provide a ‘safe haven’ from racial minorities and immigrants?”From a different vantage point, an analysis of racial “tipping points” — the percentage of minorities in a neighborhood that precipitates rapid declines in the white population — suggests that the threat of white flight in the suburbs may be lessening.In “Beyond Racial Attitudes: The Role of Outside Options in the Dynamics of White Flight,” Peter Q. Blair, a professor of education at Harvard, develops a method for calculating tipping points that shows a steady and significant lessening of opposition to racial integration from 1970 to 2010. “The census tract tipping points,” Blair notes, “have a mean of 15 percent in 1970, 22 percent in 1980, 28 percent in 1990, 36 percent in 2000 and 41 percent in 2010.” He found that the median-tract tipping point also rose, but at a slower pace, from 13 percent in 1970 to 34 percent in 2010.Regionally, the mean tipping point shifted at the slowest pace in the Northeast (9 percent in 1970, 28 percent in 2010) and the Midwest (10 to 24 percent), and fastest in the West (12 to 43) and the South (17 to 41).Blair writes that his data are “consistent with white households becoming more tolerant of living with minorities.”At the same time, race continues to influence housing prices.In a December 2022 paper, “Quantifying Taste-Based Discrimination with Transaction-level Housing Data,” Tin Cheuk Leung, Xiaojin Sun and Kwok Ping Tsang, economists at Wake Forest University, the University of Texas at El Paso and Virginia Tech, explore “the impact of a marginal change of racial composition in a neighborhood by looking at price impacts for transactions that happen immediately after.” They find that “an additional nonwhite household within a radius of 0.2 miles reduces the price appreciation of a house by 0.08 percentage points.”Racial-prejudice effects, they calculate, “translate into a decrease in home value, for a typical house of $380,000 in Virginia, of $3,100 for every ten extra nonwhite neighbors.”These effects are strongest in rich neighborhoods: “The negative effects of a nonwhite neighbor in a rich neighborhood is 0.06 percentage points higher than in a poor neighborhood.”When selling homes, the race and ethnicity of the seller also influences the ultimate price, Leung and his colleagues write: “Compared to white sellers, nonwhite sellers receive significantly less, by more than three percentage points.”Tsang wrote by email, however, that he and his co-authorsdid find some evidence of declining racial prejudice over time. For example, according to our estimates, the price appreciation of a house between its repeated sales would be lower by about 1.1 percentage points for every ten nonwhite neighbors moving into its immediate neighborhood (within 0.2 miles) prior to 2017. After 2017, this number is only 0.65 percentage points.There is a more immediate issue closely tied to the question of whether white racial and ethnic hostility is declining or rising: the 2024 election.Running as an incumbent president, Donald Trump repeatedly sought to exacerbate racial conflict during the 2020 campaign, promising “People living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” as he put it in a June 20, 2020, Twitter post, that they would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” adding, for good measure, that “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down.”Trump’s campaign — based on driving increased racial hostility — did not succeed in 2020, but if he wins the Republican nomination for a third time, no one can predict the mood of the electorate on Nov. 5, 2024. That is especially true in the six to 10 battleground states that will determine the outcome — in a handful of which Trump won and lost by very small margins in both 2016 and 2020.In what may be a sign of lessening racial tension, however, a November 2022 analysis of census data published in The Washington Post — “How Mixed-race Neighborhoods Quietly Became the Norm in the U.S.,” by Ted Mellnik and Andrew Van Dam — reached a striking conclusion:Deep in the bowels of the nation’s 2020 census lurks a quiet milestone: For the first time in modern American history, most White people live in mixed-race neighborhoods. This marks a tectonic shift from just a generation ago.Back in 1990, 78 percent of white people lived in predominantly white neighborhoods, where at least four of every five people were also white. In the 2020 census, that’s plunged to 44 percent.In quite a few states, the change from 1990 to 2020 in the share of the population living in mixed-race neighborhoods is remarkable: Washington went from 14 to 77 percent; Utah, from 5 to 50 percent; Oklahoma, from 31 to 93 percent; and New Jersey, from 26 to 61 percent.America is undergoing a racial and ethnic upheaval that will profoundly shape election outcomes. On first glance, the trends would appear to favor Democrats, but there is no guarantee.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
