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      How a Year Without Roe Shifted American Views on Abortion

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      New and extensive polling shows public opinion increasingly supports legal abortion, with potential political consequences for 2024.For decades, Americans had settled around an uneasy truce on abortion. Even if most people weren’t happy with the status quo, public opinion about the legality and morality of abortion remained relatively static. But the Supreme Court’s decision last summer overturning Roe v. Wade set off a seismic change, in one swoop striking down a federal right to abortion that had existed for 50 years, long enough that women of reproductive age had never lived in a world without it. As the decision triggered state bans and animated voters in the midterms, it shook complacency and forced many people to reconsider their positions.In the year since, polling shows that what had been considered stable ground has begun to shift: For the first time, a majority of Americans say abortion is “morally acceptable.” A majority now believes abortion laws are too strict. They are significantly more likely to identify, in the language of polls, as “pro-choice” over “pro-life,” for the first time in two decades.And more voters than ever say they will vote only for a candidate who shares their views on abortion, with a twist: While Republicans and those identifying as “pro-life” have historically been most likely to see abortion as a litmus test, now they are less motivated by it, while Democrats and those identifying as “pro-choice” are far more so.For More Democrats, Abortion Is a Litmus TestThose who say they will vote only for a candidate who shares their view on abortion

      Source: GallupBy Molly Cook EscobarOne survey in the weeks after the court’s decision last June found that 92 percent of people had heard news coverage of abortion and 73 percent had one or more conversations about it. As people talked — at work, over family Zoom calls, even with strangers in grocery store aisles — they were forced to confront new medical realities and a disconnect between the status of women now and in 1973, when Roe was decided.Many found their views on abortion more complex and more nuanced than they realized. Polls and interviews with Americans show them thinking and behaving differently as a result, especially when it comes to politics.“This is a paradigm shift,” said Lydia Saad, director of United States social research for Gallup, the polling firm. “There’s still a lot of ambivalence, there aren’t a lot of all-or-nothing people. But there is much more support for abortion rights than there was, and that seems to be here to stay.”Gallup happened to start its annual survey of American values just as the court’s decision in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, leaked last May. That was when the balance began to tilt toward voters identifying as “pro-choice.” And when the question was divided into whether abortion should be legal in the first, second or third trimester, the share of Americans who say it should be legal in each was the highest it has been since Gallup first asked in 1996.The New York Times reviewed polls from groups that have been asking Americans about abortion for decades, including Gallup, Public Religion Research Institute, Pew Research, Ipsos, KFF and other nonpartisan polling organizations. All pointed to the same general trends: growing public support for legalized abortion and dissatisfaction with new laws that restrict it.Polls show that a majority of Americans now believe abortion laws are too strict.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesPollsters say the biggest change was in political action around abortion, not necessarily in people’s core views. Polls regarding whether abortion should be legal or illegal in most or all cases — long the most widely-used metric — have remained relatively stable, with the percentage of voters saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases slowly ticking up over the past five years to somewhere between 60 percent and 70 percent.And generally, most Americans believe abortion should be limited, especially in the second and third trimesters — not unlike the framework established by Roe.But there were sudden and significant jumps in support for legalized abortion post-Dobbs among some groups, including Republican men and Black Protestants. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the percentage of Hispanic Catholics saying abortion should be legal in all cases doubled between March and December of last year, from 16 percent to 31 percent. And the share of voters saying abortion should be illegal in all cases dropped significantly in several polls.That largely reflected the dramatic change in abortion access. Fourteen states enacted near-total bans on abortion as a result of the court’s decision. News stories recounted devastating consequences: Women denied abortions despite carrying fetuses with no skull; a 10-year-old pregnant by rape forced to cross state lines for an abortion; women carrying nonviable pregnancies who could not have an abortion until they were on the brink of death.“While Roe was settled law, you kind of didn’t have to worry about the consequences,” said Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, a writer for Commonweal, the Catholic lay publication, and a mother of four. “You could say, ‘I think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances,’ if you didn’t really have to think about what it would mean for that to happen.”Raised in the church and still active in her parish, Ms. O’Reilly, 42, embraced its teachings that abortion was equivalent to murder, as part of a broader church doctrine on the protection of life that also opposes capital punishment and mistreatment of migrants.Her evolution to supporting abortion rights started two years ago when she had a miscarriage that required emergency dilation and curettage; only when she saw her chart later did she realize the term was the technical name for abortion. “When people have the idea that abortion equals killing babies, it’s very easy to say, ‘Of course I’m against that,’” she said. “If you start seeing how reproductive health care is necessary to women, you start to see that if you’re supporting these policies that ban abortion, you’re going to end up killing women.”“While Roe was settled law, you kind of didn’t have to worry about the consequences,” said Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, a writer for Commonweal, the Catholic lay publication, and a mother of four.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesShe wrote about her experience and joined other Catholic women, largely writers and professors, in publicizing an open letter to the Catholic church, declaring that “pro-life” policies centered on opposition to abortion “often hurt women.” They called on the church and elected officials to embrace “reproductive justice” that would include better health care and wages for pregnant women and mothers.Ms. Wilson O’Reilly now believes decisions on abortion should be up to women and their doctors, not governments. It’s impossible to draw a “bright line” around what exceptions to the bans should be allowed, she said.Still, she doesn’t call herself a “pro-choice Catholic”: “I think you can hold the view that a developing life is sacred and still not feel that it is appropriate or necessary to outlaw abortion.” In a poll by KFF, the health policy research firm, a plurality of Americans — four in ten — and more among Democrats and women, said they were “very concerned” that bans have made it difficult for doctors to care for pregnant women with complications. Gallup found Americans more dissatisfied with abortion laws than at any point in 22 years of measuring the trend, with new highs among women, Catholics and Protestants saying the laws are “too strict.”A Pew poll in April concluded that views on abortion law increasingly depend on where people live: The percentage of those saying abortion should be “easier to get” rose sharply last year in states where bans have been enacted or are on hold because of court disputes.In South Carolina, which recently banned abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, Jill Hartle, a 36-year-old hairdresser, had only ever voted Republican. She called herself “pro-choice,” she said, but did not think about how that collided with the party’s opposition to abortion, even though she considered herself an informed voter, and her family talked politics regularly.She became pregnant shortly before the court’s decision to overturn Roe. At 18 weeks, anatomy scans determined that the fetus had a heart defect that kills most infants within the first two weeks of life, one that Ms. Hartle knew well because it had killed her best friend’s child.At the time, her state’s legislature was debating a ban. “The first words the doctor said were, ‘There are things I can discuss with you today that I may not be able to discuss with you tomorrow or in a week because our laws are changing so rapidly in South Carolina,’” she said.Ms. Hartle and her husband ended up traveling to Washington for an abortion.Jill Hartle, center, hugs a Republican lawmaker after describing her experience having an abortion during a legislative committee hearing in South Carolina.Joshua Boucher/The State, via Associated PressPeople, she said, told her she could not be a Christian and have an abortion; others said what she had was “not an abortion” because her pregnancy was not unwanted. After she recovered, she started a foundation to fight against what it calls the “catastrophic turnover” of Roe and to help other women find abortions. She began testifying against proposed bans and campaigning for Democratic candidates.“I want to tell people it’s OK to vote against party lines,” she said. South Carolina legislators passed the state’s ban in May, over the opposition of a small group of female legislators, both Republican and Democrat. Polls show that the state’s voters oppose the ban, but as in many states, legislative districts are gerrymandered and seats often go uncontested, so Republican lawmakers are often more concerned about a primary challenge from the right than a general election fight. Groups that oppose abortion rights emphasize that most Americans want restrictions on abortion — and indeed, just 22 percent of Americans in Gallup’s poll said abortion should be legal in the third trimester.“People will react to a once-in-a-generation event. That’s true, and it should be a wake-up call for Republicans,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which was founded to help elect lawmakers who oppose abortion rights. Republicans, she said, have to paint Democratic candidates as the extremists on abortion: “If they don’t, they may very well lose.”A coalition of Republicans and evangelicals has waged a four-decade campaign to end abortion, but the number of Americans identifying as evangelical has declined sharply. And polls on abortion suggest political dynamics may be shifting.High proportions of women ages 18 to 49, and especially Democrats, say they will vote only for candidates who support their views on abortion. On the flip side, Republicans are less enthusiastic. The Public Religion Research Institute found that the share of Republicans who think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases and who said they would vote only for a candidate whose view matched their own had dropped significantly, to 30 percent last December from 42 percent in December 2020.“That’s a direct effect of Dobbs,” said Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of PRRI and a political scientist. “Does it mean that suddenly Republicans will change their minds about abortion? No, partisans vote for partisans,” she said. “But this is an issue of salience and turnout.”John Richard, a 73-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in the swing district of Bucks County, Pa., said he had always voted Republican until he became a “Never Trumper.” The court’s decision in Dobbs made him go so far as to switch his voter registration to Democrat.“If my daughters came to me and said they want an abortion, I’d try and talk them out of it,” Mr. Richard, a retired supermarket manager, said. “But I don’t think anyone has the right to tell you how to control your own body. I fought in a war for that. I didn’t do that for no reason.”“It’s not enough anymore to ask what people think about abortion, because to them abortion is part of a larger set of concerns about the country,” said Tresa Undem, who conducts polls for businesses as well as Democratic-leaning groups.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesAsked in polls to name their biggest concern, most people still don’t say abortion. But in polls and in interviews, many relate abortion rights to other top concerns: about dysfunctional government, gun violence, civil rights and income inequality.“It’s not enough anymore to ask what people think about abortion, because to them abortion is part of a larger set of concerns about the country,” said Tresa Undem, whose firm conducts polls for businesses as well as for Democratic-leaning groups.Starting with the leak and ending after the midterm elections last year, Ms. Undem conducted three surveys that tracked engagement with the issue by how many ads people saw, conversations they had and what concerns they raised about abortion.Increasingly, people mentioned concerns about losing rights and freedoms, the influence of religion in government, threats to democracy, as well as maternal mortality and whether they want to have more children. The biggest change in polls has been the swing in who votes on abortion. In the most recent example, Gallup found that in 2020 roughly 25 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike had said they would vote only for a candidate who shared their view on abortion. The share of Democrats saying this has jumped since the leak of the Dobbs decision, to 41 percent. Among Republicans the percentage was down slightly.In San Antonio, Sergio Mata, a 31-year-old artist, said he was shocked when Texas passed a ban on abortion in 2021, and by how much anti-abortion sentiment he suddenly heard around him. As a gay man and the American-born son of Mexican immigrants, he fears that gay rights will be reversed and birthright citizenship will be taken away: “I kind of feel what will happen if my existence gets illegal.”He considers himself a Democrat, but the overturning of Roe, he said, “pushed me to be more extreme,” he said. That meant paying more attention to the news and voting in the midterm elections for the first time.Sergio Mata, a 31-year-old artist, said he was shocked when Texas passed a ban on abortion in 2021, and by how much anti-abortion sentiment he suddenly heard around him.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesIn Portland, Ore., Ruby Hill, who is Black, said she had been alarmed at the flourishing of the Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups around her. She lives not far from where two members of an extremist gang ran over a 19-year-old Black man with a Jeep in 2016. Ms. Hill, also a Democrat, said she was then redistricted into a largely white congressional district represented by a Republican.The Dobbs decision, she said, made her start recruiting supporters of abortion rights among her friends, her grandchildren and their friends, and family members in Tennessee and California and Virginia over a weekly Zoom, “so they can convince people they know to stand up for more rights before more get taken from us,” she said. “If they got away with this and they feel that nobody cares, it’s more rights they are going to proceed to take away — civil rights, voting rights, abortion, birth control, it’s all part of that one big package. If you sit on the sideline, it says that you think it’s OK.” More

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      North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

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      When it had a Democratic majority last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.Such political jockeying once was limited mostly to confirmation fights over seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. But as the nation’s partisan divide has deepened, and the federal courts have offloaded questions about issues like abortion and affirmative action to the states, choosing who will decide state legal battles has increasingly become an openly political fight.The new Republican majority of justices said the North Carolina Supreme Court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the General Assembly had drawn.“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the majority. “Were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”Justice Newby said that Democrats who led the previous court had claimed to have developed a standard for deciding when a political map was overly partisan, but that it was “riddled with policy choices” and overstepped the State Constitution’s grant of redistricting powers to the legislature.Legal scholars said the ruling also seemed likely to derail a potentially momentous case now before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the same maps. In that case, Moore v. Harper, leaders of the Republican-run legislature have argued that the U.S. Constitution gives state lawmakers the sole authority to set rules for state elections and political maps, and that state courts have no role in overseeing them.Now that the North Carolina Supreme Court has sided with the legislature and thrown out its predecessor’s ruling, there appears to be no dispute for the federal justices to decide, the scholars said.The ruling drew a furious dissent from one of the elected Democratic justices, Anita S. Earls, who said that it was pervaded by “lawlessness.” She accused the majority of making specious legal arguments, and at times using misleading statistics, to make a false case that partisan gerrymandering was beyond its jurisdiction.“The majority ignores the uncontested truths about the intentions behind partisan gerrymandering and erects an unconvincing facade that only parrots democratic values in an attempt to defend its decision, ” she wrote. “These efforts to downplay the practice do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted.”Some legal experts said the ruling underscored a trend in state courts that elect their justices, in which decisions in politically charged cases increasingly align with the ideological views of whichever party holds the majority on the court, sometimes regardless of legal precedent.“If you think the earlier State Supreme Court was wrong, we have mechanisms to change that, like a constitutional amendment,” Joshua A. Douglas, a scholar on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said in an interview. “But changing judges shouldn’t cause such a sea change in the rule of law, because if that’s the case, precedent has no value any longer, and judges really are politicians.”The state court also handed down two more rulings in politically charged cases, overturning decisions that favored voting-rights advocates and their Democratic supporters.In the first, the justices reconsidered and reversed a ruling by the previous court, again along party lines, that a voter ID law passed by the Republican majority in the legislature violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution.In the second, the justices said a lower court “misapplied the law and overlooked facts crucial to its ruling” when it struck down a state law denying voting rights to people who had completed prison sentences on felony charges but were not yet released from parole, probation or other court restrictions.The lower court had said that the state law was rooted in an earlier law written to deny voting rights to African Americans, a conclusion that the Supreme Court justices said was mistaken.The new ruling undid a decision that had restored voting rights to more than 55,000 North Carolinians who had completed prison sentences. Those rights are now revoked, lawyers said, although the status of former felons who had already registered or voted under the previous ruling appeared unclear.The ruling on Friday in the gerrymander case, now known as Harper v. Hall, came after partisan elections for two Supreme Court seats in November shifted the seven-member court’s political balance to 5-to-2 Republican, from 4-to-3 Democratic.The Democratic-controlled court ruled along party lines in February 2022 that both the state legislative maps and the congressional district maps approved by the Republican legislature violated the State Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, free elections, free assembly and equal protection.A lower court later redrew the congressional map to be used in the November elections, but a dispute over the State Senate map, which G.O.P. leaders had redrawn, bubbled back to the State Supreme Court last winter. In one of its last acts, the Democratic majority on the court threw out the G.O.P.’s State Senate map, ordering that it be redrawn again. The court then reaffirmed its earlier order in a lengthy opinion.Ordinarily, that might have ended the matter. But after the new Republican majority was elected to the court, G.O.P. legislative leaders demanded that the justices rehear not just the argument over the redrawn Senate map, but the entire case.The ruling on Friday came after a brief re-argument of the gerrymander case in mid-March.North Carolina voters are almost evenly split between the two major parties; Donald J. Trump carried the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote. But the original map of congressional districts approved by the G.O.P. legislature in 2021, and later ruled to be a partisan gerrymander, would probably have given Republicans at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Using a congressional map drawn last year by a court-appointed special master, the November election delivered seven congressional seats to each party. With the decision on Friday, the G.O.P. legislature is likely to approve a new map along the lines of its first one, giving state Republicans — and the slender Republican majority in the U.S. House — the opportunity to capture at least three more seats. 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

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      Three Takeaways From a Tumultuous Day in Politics

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      A blowout in Wisconsin, an indictment in New York and a progressive victory in Chicago.Supporters of the victorious Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, on Tuesday night in Milwaukee. Abortion was a key issue. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIt has been a big — even historic — week in American politics. Donald J. Trump was indicted. The liberal candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, easily prevailed over a conservative, Daniel Kelly. And Brandon Johnson, a progressive, was elected the mayor of Chicago.What did we learn? While in some cases it’s too soon to say much, here are a few early takeaways:It’s still 2022, at least in WisconsinIf the 2022 midterm elections offered any lesson, it was that liberals excel when abortion and democracy are on the ballot. Liberal voters turn out en masse. A crucial sliver of voters — perhaps as few as one in every 30 or 40 — will flip to vote for the Democrat when they otherwise would have voted Republican.That pattern continued in Wisconsin on Tuesday, when the liberal candidate won by 11 points, a striking margin for Wisconsin. Like many of the best Democratic showings of 2022, the Wisconsin race seemed likely to decide the fate of the state’s abortion ban and its gerrymandered legislative maps.Interestingly, Wisconsin was not a state where Democrats excelled last November. They didn’t fare poorly, but Senator Ron Johnson still won re-election and the incumbent Democratic governor won by just three points. The 2022 showing was no Democratic romp like in Pennsylvania or Michigan, where a stop-the-steal candidate or abortion referendum helped Democrats.This time, the issues facing Wisconsin voters were more like those in Michigan and Pennsylvania. As a result, Wisconsin liberals won a Pennsylvania-like and Michigan-like landslide.Too early to tell on Trump, but a short-term bumpIt’s still far too soon to say how the indictment of Mr. Trump will play out. But there are already plenty of signs that he has gained among Republican primary voters since last Thursday, when news of the indictment broke. Indeed, all four polls taken over this period showed Mr. Trump gaining compared with their previous survey.We’ll probably return to this question in more depth next week. After all, none of these polls were taken after his flight to New York or his surrender to authorities in Manhattan. And he was already gaining before the news of his indictment, so it’s hard to distinguish his latest gains from the continuation of a longer-term trend.Still, it would be no surprise if Mr. Trump is benefiting from the indictment. For days, the conservative media ecosystem has been dominated by a chorus of his defenders, including none other than his chief rival, Ron DeSantis. This is about as favorable of a media environment as it gets for a Republican primary candidate.How this will play over the longer term — especially if Mr. Trump faces other indictments — remains to be seen.Brandon Johnson, a progressive, as he concluded his victory speech on Tuesday in Chicago.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesBlack voters are the fulcrum of a divided Democratic electorateThe Chicago mayoral race wasn’t a Democratic primary, but it was about as close as it gets for a general election: Both candidates were Democrats, and 82 percent of Chicago voters backed Mr. Biden in 2020. Like many Democratic primaries over the last decade, it pitted an activist-backed progressive against a more moderate candidate.But while we’ve grown accustomed to victories for moderate Democrats in most of these intra-primary fights, in Chicago it was the progressive candidate Brandon Johnson who prevailed. That’s in no small part thanks to the backing of Black voters, who have often offered decisive support to high-profile establishment-backed candidates, from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Eric Adams.With many examples of Black voters backing moderate candidates over the years, it can be tempting to assume that they are the reliable moderate allies of the establishment. In reality, it’s not so simple. In particular, Black voters have often backed Black progressives over white moderates and liberals.In the New York mayoral race, Black voters overwhelmingly backed Mr. Adams over the liberal Kathryn Garcia, even though they also preferred the Black progressive Maya Wiley over Ms. Garcia, based on data from ranked choice balloting. When Black voters side with progressives, the establishment’s position suddenly looks a lot weaker: Black voters represent around 20 percent of Democratic voters.Mr. Johnson, who is Black, routinely won 80 percent of the vote in the South Side’s majority Black wards, helping him squeak past the moderate Paul Vallas, who won a lot of the rest of the city.Mr. Johnson’s success doesn’t necessarily mean that Black Democrats are feeling the Bern, or otherwise itching to support progressive candidates. In this year’s primary, Mr. Johnson fared best in relatively young and white progressive areas on Chicago’s North Side, while the incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, carried the South Side wards where Mr. Johnson would dominate just a month later.But the importance of Black voters to progressive fortunes might offer a lesson for activists who hope one of their own might win a Democratic presidential primary.After all, the last candidate to beat the Democratic establishment in such a Democratic primary was none other than Barack Obama. More

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      After His Arraignment, Trump Lashes Out

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      More from our inbox:‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoA Renewed Interest in Freudian PsychoanalysisLos cargos contra Trump representan la culminación de una investigación de casi cinco años de duración.Dave Sanders para The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies” (front page, April 5):After Judge Juan M. Merchan warned at Donald Trump’s arraignment that all parties must refrain from making statements about the case with the potential to incite violence and civil unrest, what does the former president who can’t keep his mouth shut do during his speech a few hours later?He says hateful things about Judge Merchan and his family, and vilifies District Attorney Alvin Bragg, District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and the special counsel Jack Smith.And one of the former president’s sons put a photograph of Judge Merchan’s daughter on social media — a clear invitation to violence.It’s time for the former president to be gagged. And when he speaks out with hateful words again, a contempt order and jail time may put a sock in his mouth. About time.Gail ShorrWilmette, Ill.To the Editor:Crowd size has always been important to Donald Trump. It is the metric he uses, along with TV ratings, to measure his impact, to gauge his popularity, to feed his ego.The crowd that showed up Tuesday at his arraignment was hardly composed overwhelmingly of Trump supporters. It looked as if the media and anti-Trump people more than countered his base.No matter how Mr. Trump spins it, no matter how many times at his future rallies he proclaims an overwhelming showing of support in New York City, the camera doesn’t lie.It was good to see him cut down to size Tuesday. For the first time in his adult life he could not control the narrative. He called for a massive protest, he predicted “death and destruction” if he was charged, and he got neither.Len DiSesaDresher, Pa.To the Editor:The April 5 front-page headline “Even as Biden Has Oval Office, Predecessor Has the Spotlight” is a statement that is true only because your newspaper and other media outlets allow Donald Trump to occupy center stage.This behavior of the media has been mentioned many times before, and many believe that the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity provided to Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign contributed to his winning the election.It is now 2023 and we are facing an election that could well decide the future of America. I am therefore requesting that The Times stop paying so much attention to Mr. Trump (we’ve heard everything he has to say many times before) effective immediately.David SommersKensington, Md.To the Editor:I felt a real jolt seeing the photo of former President Donald Trump seated at the table in a Manhattan courtroom. It was the jolt of the norms of American justice falling back into alignment.Christopher HermanWashington‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoJanet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, during her election night party in Milwaukee on Tuesday. She ran on her open support of abortion rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” (news article, April 5):While New York and the nation were fixated on the circus that was Donald Trump’s arraignment, a special election was held in Wisconsin that decided whether conservatives or liberals would control that state’s Supreme Court. Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, won the race and gave liberals control of the highest court in Wisconsin.Wisconsin is an important swing state, and this new balance of power in the court will have dramatic effects on abortion rights, potential election interference and how election districts are drawn. Conservatives, who have had control of the Supreme Court, will no longer be able to gerrymander voting districts to favor Republicans, nor will they be able to successfully challenge the results of a free and fair election.While this is only one state, we may see similar results in other swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and, yes, even Texas. Donald Trump is to Democrats the gift that just keeps on giving.Henry A. LowensteinNew YorkTo the Editor:Three news stories from your newspaper indicate that Tuesday was a great day for liberals and progressives: “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies,” “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” and “Rejecting a ‘Republican in Disguise,’ Chicago Voters Elect Johnson as Next Mayor.”While conservative Republicans are obsessed with culture wars and MAGA, progressives are making political headway. Let’s hope that we continue on this march to liberalism till our nation is free from prejudices, curbs on reproductive and gender freedoms, relentless gun-related violence, etc.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.A Renewed Interest in Freudian Psychoanalysis Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Back to the Couch With Freud” (Sunday Styles, March 26):It is true that people “see what they want in Freud.” Thus, a younger generation might think Freud “gay friendly” because a 1935 letter declared, “Homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.”However, the article omits that Freud went on to describe homosexuality in that same letter as an “arrest of sexual development.”Freud’s theory that gay people suffered from psychological stunted growth rationalized many decades of discrimination in which openly gay men and women were refused psychoanalytic training because they were “developmentally arrested.” Only in 1991 did the American Psychoanalytic Association change its policies refusing admission to gay candidates.I am glad that Freud is having a renaissance. However, any reading or interpretation of his work should not ignore the historical context in which he lived and the ways, for better or worse, in which some of his theories have been used to discriminate.Jack DrescherNew YorkThe writer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, is the author of “Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man.”To the Editor:I was pleased to see New York Times coverage of the “Freudaissance,” which I have been a joyful participant in for more than a decade now, both personally and professionally.One of the understandings I have come to, having spent countless hours on both sides of the proverbial couch, in both psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioral contexts, is that these two approaches do not really diverge from each other as much as many tend to assume that they do.I see the C.B.T. founder Aaron Beck’s three levels of cognition (automatic thoughts, core beliefs and cognitive schemas) mapping neatly onto Freud’s topographical model of the mind (the conscious, preconscious and unconscious, respectively).And I see the dialectic behavioral therapy founder Marsha Linehan’s construct of the “wise mind” as an integration of the rational and emotional minds matching Freud’s structural model of the ego as a synthesis of superego and id.Different terms resonate differently in different generations and with different individuals, but rather than disproving or undermining Freud’s theories, I see today’s evidence-based approaches as indications that the father of modern psychology was apparently onto something more than a century ago.Rachel N. WynerWest Hempstead, N.Y.The writer is a clinical psychologist. More

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      This Wisconsin Court Race Is Highly Partisan. It Wasn’t Always That Way.

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      Supreme Court races were once more swayed by endorsements from legal and law enforcement officials. Now they’re indistinguishable from other elections.Today’s election in Wisconsin will be closely watched for its impact on the partisan makeup of the state’s top court, with abortion rights and election rules frequent topics of the campaign. The contest between Daniel Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice, and Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, is set to be one of the most consequential — and expensive — elections in the country this year.Judicial elections in Wisconsin are officially nonpartisan, but the races have become increasingly political. While it used to be common for voters to cast ballots for judges with whom they weren’t ideologically aligned, Democratic counties now heavily favor the liberal judicial candidates and Republican counties the conservative ones.The trend has been turbocharged in recent years as partisan polarization has grown nationally and as overt partisanship has crept into the dialogue among candidates for the court.It wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s and 1990s, races were largely seen as less partisan and more swayed by endorsements from leaders in the legal and law enforcement community, according to Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll. He has studied the relationship between the ideological voting patterns in state Supreme Court races and presidential races.“Supreme Court races at the time seemed to be about who had more endorsements from sheriffs and prosecutors than anything else,” he said.While many candidates during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s had discernible ideological leanings, there was almost no relationship between electoral support for judicial candidates and presidential candidates of the corresponding political party. A notable example is Dane County, a longtime Democratic stronghold that is home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2000, a majority of voters in Dane County voted for Diane Sykes, a conservative judicial candidate, while also voting for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president.Partisanship began creeping into races over the next decade. In a particularly vicious 2008 campaign, the conservative candidate, Michael J. Gableman, ran TV ads falsely accusing his opponent, the only Black justice on the state Supreme Court, of securing an early release of a rapist who was also Black. Mr. Gableman won by a narrow margin. After leaving the bench, he led a partisan inquiry into whether there was election fraud in Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.The Relationship Between the Judicial and Presidential VoteState Supreme Court and presidential election results have become increasingly correlated in Wisconsin. More

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      The Election That Could Reshape Wisconsin, and the Country

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWisconsin will hold an election for a seat on its Supreme Court today, and it is no exaggeration to say that the result could end up reshaping U.S. politics for years to come.The Times political correspondent Reid J. Epstein explains why the race to replace a single judge has become the most important American election of 2023.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Janet Protasiewicz, left, and Daniel Kelly during a debate in Madison, Wis., last month. Ms. Protasiewicz is a liberal, while Mr. Kelly is a conservative.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBackground readingCash is pouring in to the Wisconsin race, and some of the candidates have shed any pretense of judicial neutrality.Here’s what you need to know about the battle for the seat.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Wisconsin’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Race: What to Watch

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      The election for a swing seat on the court is likely to determine whether abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps.WAUKESHA, Wis. — American political candidates routinely drum up support by warning voters that this election, really, is the most important of their lifetimes.It’s almost always an exaggeration, but the description might just fit for Wisconsin’s deeply polarized voters, who on Tuesday will choose a justice to fill a swing seat on the state’s Supreme Court.The winner — either Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, or Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice — will have the deciding vote on a host of major issues, including abortion rights, gerrymandered political maps, and voting and election cases surrounding the 2024 presidential contest.Officials on both sides have described the stakes of the officially nonpartisan race in existential terms — either they win and democracy survives, or they lose and it perishes.Wisconsin Democrats, who have been lost in the political wilderness for a dozen years, cast Judge Protasiewicz as their path to a promised land of abortion rights and fair maps. The state’s Republicans say Justice Kelly is their last hope to ward off liberal tyranny by fiat.Here are four themes animating Tuesday’s election:Wisconsin could turn sharply back to the left — or not.Wisconsin Republicans tend to talk about the election as if Judge Protasiewicz would roll onto the Supreme Court with a giant eraser to wipe out all of the legislative policies and structural advantages the G.O.P. has built for itself since Scott Walker became governor in 2011.They’re not entirely wrong.“A lot of the duly passed laws by the elected representatives of the state of Wisconsin would be deemed invalid,” Duey Stroebel, a Republican state senator from Cedarburg, said last week. “It wouldn’t be the people electing their representatives that would be making decisions, it would be her, based on her personal beliefs.”Indeed, Judge Protasiewicz has been clear about her views. She has signaled her opposition to Wisconsin’s 1849 law banning abortion in nearly all cases, which went back into effect when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, and she has called the legislative maps Republicans drew to give themselves a durable near-supermajority in the State Legislature “rigged” and “unfair.”But the state’s Democrats sound similarly apocalyptic about the prospect of Justice Kelly, who lost a 2020 bid to retain his seat on the court, returning to deliver conservatives a majority. He is aligned with the state’s anti-abortion groups and has said there is no legal problem with the maps.He also worked as a legal adviser for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Wisconsin when they sought to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. That Republican effort to undo Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin was only narrowly rejected by the State Supreme Court, which voted 4 to 3 to uphold the results.“Dan Kelly advised fake electors in 2020,” said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly, referring to a brazen plan by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn results in several states. “I absolutely fear what he would do in 2024 if a challenge to the popular vote and the election results came in front of him.”Abortion and crime are the two main issues.From the beginning of her campaign, Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) has sought to make the race a referendum on abortion rights in Wisconsin. Her campaign has spent $12 million on television ads in the last six weeks reminding voters that she supports them and Justice Kelly does not.“Judge Janet Protasiewicz believes in women’s freedom to make their own decisions when it comes to abortion,” her closing television ad states.It is a bet on the power of the most potent issue for Democrats since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court left the issue to the states.Even Republicans acknowledge privately that if the election is about abortion, Judge Protasiewicz has the advantage. Justice Kelly has not been as explicit, but he has implied that because legislators enacted the state’s abortion ban 174 years ago, they would need to rescind the law — something the current Republican majorities are unlikely to do.Hundreds of abortion rights supporters marched to the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., in January. Nearly all abortions became illegal in Wisconsin when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“He’s running a bit of a traditional campaign talking about larger issues of judicial restraint and things of that nature,” said Mr. Walker, the former governor who appointed Justice Kelly to the State Supreme Court in 2016. “She just spelled it out, and that very well may be the case for the left and the right in the future, just people saying, ‘Here’s how I’m going to vote.’”Republicans, as usually happens in Wisconsin, have tried to make the election about crime. Outside groups backing Justice Kelly have bombarded Judge Protasiewicz with ads attacking her as soft on violent criminals.Last week, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s business lobby, removed from the television airwaves an ad claiming that Judge Protasiewicz had issued a soft sentence to a convicted rapist. The victim in that case had told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the ad had caused her new trauma and that she had no problem with the length of the sentence.In another episode, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, while southern Wisconsin was under a tornado watch last week, texted to voters a replica of an emergency weather alert warning that Judge Protasiewicz was “a soft-on-crime politician with a long history of letting dangerous criminals go free.”The cash-filled contest is all over Wisconsin TV screens.All indications are that more people will vote in this Supreme Court election than any other in Wisconsin history.More people voted in the Feb. 21 primary contest than participated in the state’s primaries in August, when there were races for governor and Senate. According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the early-vote total as of Monday amounted to about a third of the total turnout of the 2019 State Supreme Court race, the last one that did not fall on the same day as a presidential primary.The record-smashing spending in the race — $39 million on television alone, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm — has ensured that just about every Wisconsinite is at least aware of the race, a key hurdle in typically low-turnout spring elections.The ultimate cost is expected to triple the previous high-water mark for spending on an American judicial election, which was $15 million for a 2004 Illinois Supreme Court race.Weeks ago, Wisconsin Democrats switched their strategy. Instead of sending door-to-door canvassers to visit voters who typically cast ballots in spring elections, they focused on reaching out to a broader group of people who tend to vote in November general elections.“When I was out knocking on doors a month or two months ago, people were aware that this election was coming, because they were seeing YouTube ads with their kids,” Ms. Neubauer said. “They were being bombarded with information about this election.”A key State Senate race is also unfolding.Wisconsin is also holding a special election on Tuesday for a vacant State Senate seat that covers parts of four counties in the suburbs north of Milwaukee.The district has long been held by Republicans but is trending away from the party. Mr. Trump carried it by 12 percentage points in 2016 but by only 5 in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, is contesting it with a heavy emphasis on abortion rights.Jodi Habush Sinykin, a Democrat, is running for a State Senate seat in suburbs north of Milwaukee. Morry Gash/Associated PressIf the Republican candidate, State Representative Dan Knodl, wins, his party will have a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate, which would allow the G.O.P. to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mr. Knodl, in an interview with PBS Wisconsin, said the impeachment powers granted to State Senate Republicans with his election “certainly would be tested.”Mr. Stroebel, the Republican state senator from Cedarburg, called impeaching Judge Protasiewicz over expected rulings on abortion and gerrymandering unlikely “but certainly not impossible.”If Dan Knodl wins his race for State Senate, Republicans will have a two-thirds supermajority, which would allow them to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Associated Press“If she truly acts in terms of ignoring our laws and applying her own personal beliefs, then maybe that’s something people will talk about,” he said. “If the rulings are contrary to what our state laws and Constitution say, I think there could be an issue.”Even if Republicans do not seek to impeach Democratic officials, the mere possibility could limit Democrats’ ambitions.“Just the threat of it obviously changes the way that public officials will act,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Madison. “It will make agency heads and civil servants be extremely timid and feel like they can’t carry out their job responsibilities.” More