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      Some Texas Hispanics Drawn to Republicans Share Immigration Grievances

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s brand of populism has been widely viewed as an appeal to white voters. But similar grievances have resonated in the Rio Grande Valley in a profound way.BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Mayra Flores, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, has done much of her campaigning in South Texas in Spanish. She has heard one phrase repeatedly from voters as she and other candidates try to become the first Republicans to represent the Rio Grande Valley in Congress.¿Y nosotros?And what about us?“I hear every day that they’re tired — they feel that there is so much attention and help being given to the immigrants,” Ms. Flores said. “The attention’s on all these illegal immigrants, and not on them.”Grievance politics, it turns out, translates.Donald J. Trump’s brand of populism has been widely viewed as an appeal to white voters: Republicans around the country continue to exploit the fear that the left is attacking religious values and wants to replace traditional white American culture with nonwhite multiculturalism. But similar grievances have resonated in the Rio Grande Valley in a profound way, driving the Republican Party’s successes in a Democratic stronghold where Hispanics make up more than 90 percent of the population.The difference is in the type of culture believed to be under assault. Democrats are destroying a Latino culture built around God, family and patriotism, dozens of Hispanic voters and candidates in South Texas said in interviews. The Trump-era anti-immigrant rhetoric of being tough on the border and building the wall has not repelled these voters from the Republican Party or struck them as anti-Hispanic bigotry. Instead, it has drawn them in.“Our parents came in a certain way — they came in and worked, they became citizens and didn’t ask for anything,” said Ramiro Gonzalez Jr., a 48-year-old rancher from Raymondville, on the northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley. “We were raised hard-core Democrats, but today Democrats want to give everything away.”Ramiro Gonzalez Jr., a rancher in Raymondville, is among Latino conservatives who are reshaping South Texas politics.Jason Garza for The New York TimesFor years, the Republican primary in the Rio Grande Valley was an afterthought, a sleepy election overshadowed by a Democratic primary that grabbed all the attention and candidates. But this year, in the run-up to the Texas primary election on Tuesday, there has been a flurry of Republican rallies, door-knocking and events, including at the Hispanic community center that the Republican National Committee opened in McAllen four months ago.The Republican gains run far deeper than Mr. Trump and, in some ways, predate him, interviews with Hispanic voters and candidates showed. Republican candidates are building on a decades-long history of economic, religious and cultural sentiment that has veered toward conservatives. George W. Bush performed even better in his 2004 re-election campaign in the region than Mr. Trump did in 2020. Many of those who voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for president and then flipped for Mr. Trump had previously backed Mr. Bush.For the moment, Republicans in the Rio Grande Valley remain a minority. Last year, a Republican was elected mayor of McAllen, the Valley’s second-most populous city, and a Democratic state lawmaker in Rio Grande City switched to the Republican Party, both of whom earned praise from the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. But Democrats still dominate the vast majority of local elected offices in the Valley.A sign outside the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic community center in McAllen.Jason Garza for The New York Times“It’s still relatively insignificant, when you look at Democrat versus Republican overall,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a South Texas Democrat who narrowly won his 2020 re-election. He is now running in a redrawn neighboring district and is likely to face Ms. Flores as his Republican opponent in November. Though he said he was confident voters would “come home” to Democrats this fall, Mr. Gonzalez criticized the party for not doing more to focus on the region.A Guide to the Texas PrimaryThe 2022 midterm elections begin with the state’s primary on March 1.Governor’s Race: Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward shift will face a test in November. His likely challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is haunted by his 2020 presidential bid.Attorney General’s Race: Whether Ken Paxton can survive the G.O.P. primary may be the biggest test yet of Donald Trump’s continued power over voters.A Changing Landscape: Issues like abortion and immigration are driving Hispanic voters in Democratic strongholds to switch parties and prompting liberal candidates to shift tactics.A Deepening Divide: Competitive districts are being systemically erased across the country. Texas is an especially extreme example.New Voting Law: Officials have rejected thousands of absentee ballots based on new requirements, an alarming jump ahead of the primary.“So far I see no action,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I’ve had to rely on myself, not on the national party coming down here to save us, so in that respect, it’s sad.”For decades, conventional wisdom held that the more Hispanic voters showed up to the polls, the more precarious the political future would be for Republicans. But the inverse has lately been reshaping South Texas politics: As tens of thousands of new voters have gone to the polls, Republicans have gained more than Democrats. In Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, Mr. Trump received nearly twice as many votes in 2020 as he did four years earlier.Mr. Trump’s performance in these border counties was one of the big surprises of 2020, rattling Democrats who had assumed that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric would alienate Latinos. In this year’s midterm elections, South Texas is the setting for the only competitive House race in the state, and both parties now consider Hispanic voters across the country a potentially decisive swing vote.At a dinner for Ms. Flores’ campaign at Don Chucho Tacos y Tequilas in the border city of Brownsville, her supporters began with a prayer and the pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag. They wore wide-brimmed cowboy hats and red MAGA caps. They applauded when the mariachis took the stage — and when Ms. Flores introduced her husband, an off-duty Border Patrol agent.“We’ve been voting California values, Austin values, but not South Texas values,” Ms. Flores told the crowd. She added, speaking the Spanglish so prevalent in the region, “Spread the chisme. Somos Americanos.” Spread the word. We are Americans.“This,” she continued, “is our country.”“I want to bring God back into politics,” said Luis Cabrera, the pastor of City Church in Harlingen, Texas.Jason Garza for The New York Times‘We feel under attack’Pastor Luis Cabrera, 44, remembers the fear in his parents’ eyes when they fled Nicaragua in 1979, in the midst of the Sandinista revolution.His father, a lawyer for the ousted president, received death threats and after obtaining visas from the American embassy there, the family left nearly all they had behind, flying with $10,000 in cash on a flight to Washington, D.C. Eventually, Mr. Cabrera’s father found work as an immigration paralegal in Houston, and then took the family to the Rio Grande Valley.Now, Mr. Cabrera runs City Church, a small congregation in a former warehouse in the border city of Harlingen. He estimates that his church is 96 percent Hispanic, and 100 percent Republican.“The people coming now seem to be less willing to work and are more dangerous compared to how it used to be,” Mr. Cabrera said. “I’m not saying all of them, but trust me, there’s a lot of people who are crossing this border and they don’t care about this country. They want to just commit crime. They want to just come make money the wrong way. They don’t want the American dream.”The Rio Grande Valley lies at the southeast corner of the U.S.-Mexico border, an amalgam of dozens of small cities and towns across four counties, a mix of recently developed strip malls and centuries-old ranch land. The Stars and Stripes and other flags fly from the back of large pickup trucks and flagpoles installed on front yards. The vast majority of the Valley’s nearly 1.4 million residents speak Spanish and have ties to Mexico. Pockets of deep poverty remain, and residents have long viewed Border Patrol and other law enforcement jobs as a reliable path to the middle class. For all the talk by Republicans of border chaos and of dangerous migrants, crime in McAllen is at a historic low.Mr. Cabrera sells T-shirts at the entrance of his church.Jason Garza for The New York TimesThe gulf between the undocumented Central American migrants crossing the border and the Latino residents of the Valley is deep and wide.Many residents are Mexican Americans who have lived in the region for four or five generations, or proudly proclaim their parents and grandparents came to the United States legally. They know both Border Patrol agents and undocumented Mexican immigrants who have lived and worked in border cities for years. Those who are Republicans say they do not see their views on immigration as hypocritical or anti-Hispanic. Instead, they see themselves as a bulwark for law and order. A few thousand Border Patrol agents live and work in the region, many of them Hispanic, adding to a pro-law enforcement ethos that shows up in churches, schools and local politics.“We’re in a war — a war of ideas,” said Jessica Martinez, 33, a Brownsville stay-at-home mother who said she had never voted until she cast a ballot for Mr. Trump in 2020, after she grew frustrated with the relentless outrage against him from liberals. “That’s how we as Christians see it. We feel under attack.”In Harlingen, Mr. Cabrera turned the entrance of the church into a retail space. He displays and sells T-shirts reading Make America Godly Again and Make America Repent. For years, he said, he avoided speaking about politics from the pulpit. But in the last year he has hosted several Republican leaders at the church, including Mr. Abbott.“I want to bring God back into politics,” Mr. Cabrera said. “And so that’s what I’m doing.”‘I worry about our values’Joe Cadriel, a 57-year-old veteran of the gulf war’s Desert Storm and a retired social worker, has rarely placed campaign advertisements on his front lawn. But he made an exception for Ms. Flores, the Brownsville Republican running for Congress.Mr. Cadriel and his wife, Diana, a retired educator, both voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then cast their ballots for Mr. Trump four years later, convinced that he would best protect the southern border, a mere 10 miles from their Weslaco home.The couple grew up in the Rio Grande Valley as children of conservative Democrats, and they harbored a proud independent streak. Mr. Cadriel has been infuriated by illegal immigration for as long as he can remember — he said he once left a job because he felt too angry seeing food stamps and other benefits going to children of unauthorized immigrants.“I’m OK with people coming in saying I’m going to do something productive,” Mr. Cadriel said. “But that wasn’t what was happening. You’d have these people claiming they needed food stamps for their children, but their children were babies, so who do you think was benefiting from it? They were just trying to take advantage.”Joe and Diana Cadriel of Weslaco, Texas, voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2020.Jason Garza for The New York TimesThe Cadriels equate walking away from the Democratic Party with getting an education, not from college courses or books, but from conservative media and scripture. A retired educator and churchgoing Catholic, Ms. Cadriel, 57, slowly began to feel that her family’s traditional values were under attack. She stopped watching Good Morning America and The View in favor of Fox News.“I worry about where we’re headed, about what will and won’t be allowed,” she said. “I worry about our values.”Republican candidates like Ms. Flores hope to capitalize on the Cadriels and other former Democrats.Ms. Flores’ parents worked as migrant farmworkers, moving each year to pick cotton in West Texas. Though her parents were Democrats, Ms. Flores said she was raised with “conservative values” and was drawn to Republicans because of her anti-abortion views. Soon after graduating from South Texas College in 2019, she became involved with the Hidalgo County Republican Party, volunteering as the Hispanic outreach chair while she worked as a respiratory therapist.Ms. Flores’ campaign signs do not mention policy or party, but instead highlight three words: “Dios, familia, patria.” God, family, country. More

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      How Lopsided New District Lines Deepen the U.S. Partisan Divide

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      THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Representative Dan Crenshaw was tagged as a rising Republican star almost from the moment of his first victory: A conservative, Harvard-educated, ex-Navy SEAL who lost his right eye in Afghanistan, he bucked the 2018 suburban revolt against Donald J. Trump to win a House seat in the Houston suburbs.Mr. Crenshaw won again in 2020, handily, even as Mr. Trump carried his district by only a whisper.But this year, Mr. Crenshaw’s seat has been transformed by redistricting. More liberal enclaves, like the nightlife-rich neighborhoods near Rice University, were swapped out for conservative strongholds like The Woodlands, a master-planned community of more than 100,000 that is north of the city.The result: Mr. Trump would have carried the new seat in a landslide.The new lines mean Mr. Crenshaw now has a vanishingly slim chance of losing to a Democrat in the next decade. The only political threat would have to come from the far right — which, as it happens, is already agitating against him.All across the nation, political mapmakers have erected similarly impenetrable partisan fortresses through the once-in-a-decade redrawing of America’s congressional lines. Texas, which holds the nation’s first primaries on Tuesday, is an especially extreme example of how competition between the two parties has been systemically erased. Nearly 90 percent of the next House could be occupied by lawmakers who, like Mr. Crenshaw, face almost no threat of losing a general election, a precipitous drop that dramatically changes the political incentives and pressures they confront.“What the future of the Republican Party should be is people who can make better arguments than the left,” Mr. Crenshaw said in an interview. Yet in his new district, he will only need to make arguments to voters on the right, and the farther right.When primaries are the only campaigns that count, candidates are often punished for compromise. The already polarized parties are pulled even farther apart. Governance becomes harder.The dynamic can be seen playing out vividly in and around Mr. Crenshaw’s district. He appears in no imminent political danger. He faces underfunded opposition in Tuesday’s primary, out-raising rivals by more than 100 to one.But his repeated rebuke of those who have spread the falsehood that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election — fellow Republicans whom he has called “performance artists” and “grifters” capitalizing on “lie after lie after lie” — have made him a target of what he derisively termed “the cancel culture of the right.”“They view me as a threat because I don’t really toe the line,” Mr. Crenshaw said.He has especially sparred with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who, in the kind of political coincidence that is rarely an accident, found herself at a recent rally in Mr. Crenshaw’s district, declaring, “It is time to embrace the civil war in the G.O.P.”Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, with supporters after a rally in The Woodlands, Texas.Annie Mulligan for The New York Times“I oftentimes argue with someone you might know named Dan Crenshaw,” she later said, his name drawing boos. “I sure do not like people calling themself a conservative when all they really are is a performance artist themself.”What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Legal Battles: A North Carolina court’s ruling to reject a G.O.P.-drawn map and substitute its own version further cemented the rising importance of state courts in redistricting fights.In 2020, Texas was the epicenter of the battle for control of the House, with a dozen suburban seats around Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio all in play.In 2022, zero Texas Republicans are left defending particularly competitive seats. They were all turned safely, deeply red.“Not having competitive elections is not good for democracy,” said Representative Lizzie Fletcher, a moderate Democrat whose Houston-area district was also overhauled. To solidify neighboring G.O.P. seats, Republican mapmakers stuffed a surplus of Democratic voters — including from the old Crenshaw seat — into her district, the Texas 7th.That seat has a long Republican lineage. George H.W. Bush once occupied it. Under the new lines, the district voted like Massachusetts in the presidential election.For Ms. Fletcher, that means any future challenges are likely to come from the left. The political middle that helped her beat a Republican incumbent in 2018 is, suddenly, less relevant. “There is a huge risk,” she said, “that people will feel like it doesn’t matter whether they show up.”A proxy fight next doorPhill Cady is showing up. He is one of Mr. Crenshaw’s new constituents, an unvaccinated former airline pilot from Conroe who takes a weekly dose of hydroxychloroquine, the Trump-promoted anti-malaria drug that medical experts have warned against, to fend off Covid.Mr. Cady was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest the election results. (He said he didn’t enter the building.) He said Mr. Crenshaw’s acceptance of Mr. Trump’s defeat showed he had “lost his way,” and that Mr. Crenshaw should have helped those facing riot-related charges: “Why hasn’t he fought for the Texans to get out of jail?”Or, as Milam Langella, one of Mr. Crenshaw’s long-shot primary challengers, described the distance between the incumbent and his constituents: “The district is now blood red and he is not.”With Mr. Crenshaw facing only scattershot opposition, it was the neighboring open race to replace the retiring Representative Kevin Brady, a business-friendly Republican, that technically drew Ms. Greene to Texas.On one side is Christian Collins, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz, who is vowing to join the so-called MAGA wing in the House. He is backed by the political arm of the House Freedom Caucus, the party’s hard-line faction.Supporters of Christian Collins, a congressional candidate, at a Feb. 19 rally in The Woodlands, Texas. Redrawn maps mean more candidates are running in safe districts for their parties.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesOn the other side is Morgan Luttrell, a former member of the Navy SEALs who is backed by Mr. Crenshaw and a super PAC aligned with Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader.The contest is the first primary of 2022 that the McCarthy-aligned PAC has intervened in, as some McCarthy allies privately worry that the glut of new, deep-red Republican seats could complicate his speakership bid and governance of the House, should Republicans win a majority.“Does this create incentives to avoid governing? It clearly — clearly, that’s the case,” Mr. Crenshaw said. But he said it is hard to discern the impact of those incentives versus others, like social media amplifying outrage and the increasing sorting of Americans into tribes.There was tension in how Mr. Crenshaw described who holds the real power in the party, at once dismissing the far right as a fringe nuisance that only seeks to “monetize” division, while also saying traditional power brokers like congressional leaders are no longer the real political establishment either.“They’re trying to hang on by a thread,” Mr. Crenshaw said of Mr. McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. “They’re trying to wrangle cats.”The Collins-Luttrell race has become something of a proxy fight over Mr. Crenshaw.Morgan Luttrell speaking with a supporter in Conroe, Texas, in a congressional race exemplifying internal party fights in safe districts.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesA pro-Collins super PAC used Mr. Crenshaw’s name in an anti-Luttrell billboard along Interstate 45. In a debate, Mr. Collins attacked Mr. Luttrell by saying he had been “endorsed by Dan Crenshaw — I think that name speaks for itself.” At the Collins rally, speaker after speaker called Mr. Crenshaw a R.I.N.O. — a Republican in Name Only.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Will Trump’s Nod Be Enough for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton?

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      Attorney General Ken Paxton is likely to end up in a runoff after the Republican primary on March 1. But it remains uncertain who among his big-name challengers will join him there.MIDLAND, Texas — The litany of political vulnerabilities facing the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, would appear to seriously imperil his bid for a third term.There is the indictment in state court for securities fraud. Accusations of bribery and corruption. Senior aides turned whistle-blowers. An ongoing federal investigation.Altogether, it has been enough to attract primary challenges from three heavy hitters in Texas Republican politics: George P. Bush, the Texas land commissioner and grandson of former President George H.W. Bush; Representative Louie Gohmert, the outspoken East Texas congressman; and Eva Guzman, a former Texas Supreme Court justice.But whether Mr. Paxton can survive the Republican primary may be the biggest test yet of the power still wielded with voters by an even better-known name: Donald J. Trump.Mr. Paxton has positioned himself as the most aligned with Mr. Trump in a field of opponents eager to claim closeness with the former president. The Texas attorney general unsuccessfully sued to overturn the results of the 2020 election in several states and spoke at Mr. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.For his efforts, Mr. Paxton garnered Mr. Trump’s endorsement last year, and he had a speaking role at Mr. Trump’s massive rally of Republicans last month north of Houston.“An attorney general who has really led the way, somebody who has been brave and strong: Ken Paxton,” Mr. Trump effused during the rally at the Montgomery County fairgrounds. “Ken, brave and strong. And popular.”Well, not that popular.While polling better than any of his opponents, Mr. Paxton is facing the increasingly likely prospect of ending up in a runoff after the primary election on Tuesday. He has been below the 50 percent threshold in recent public polls, and his campaign is already preparing for another contest.Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general,  during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas last year.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThat has left the three challengers scrambling for second place. They have been crisscrossing the state, appearing in Republican forums and debates hosted by local party groups. A common theme has been that Mr. Paxton is so embattled he could actually lose to a Democrat in November — a shudder-inducing prospect for Texas Republicans, who have not lost a statewide race since 1994.“When you look at folks like A.O.C., for example, who come to Texas and say Texas is about to turn blue — well, she’s right if we nominate the wrong people as a party,” said Mr. Bush in an interview, referring to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.A Guide to the Texas PrimaryThe 2022 midterm elections begin with the state’s primary on March 1.Governor’s Race: Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward shift will face a test in November. His likely challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is haunted by his 2020 presidential bid.Switching Parties: Democrats have long held local offices in a small West Texas town. Then top officials decided to leave the party.Politics of Abortion: The fight over abortion rights is changing the political fabric of South Texas, long a Democratic stronghold.Effect of New Voting Law: The law, which Republicans said would make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat,” has led to a jump in rejections of absentee ballot applications.The race for attorney general has become a referendum on the future of the Republican Party in Texas, with various power centers — the remnants of the Bush political dynasty in Texas, the tort reform business elite, the ascendant Trump-without-Trump wing — lining up in different corners.In the waning days of the campaign, attacks have flown freely. Mr. Paxton has traded barbs with Mr. Gohmert. Mr. Bush and Ms. Guzman have gone after each other. But many voters, even those dedicated enough to show up at candidate forums, are only glancingly familiar with the challengers. And accusations against Mr. Paxton are not a new development; he has weathered them for years.Mr. Paxton, who declined an interview request, has been facing state charges of felony securities fraud since 2015, stemming from his time as a member of the Texas House during which, prosecutors have said, he directed investments to a firm without disclosing he would be compensated for doing so. Mr. Paxton has denied the charges and said the prosecution was politically motivated, and successfully delayed the trial amid procedural wrangling over where it should take place.He was re-elected in 2018 by less than 4 percentage points, a narrow margin in a Texas general election.Voters at a forum featuring gubernatorial and attorney general candidates in Midland, Texas.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThen, in 2020, several of Mr. Paxton’s top aides — high-ranking lawyers in the attorney general’s office with conservative credentials — accused him of bribery and abuse of power in connection with his actions on behalf of a real estate developer and campaign donor. Some of the officials, who have since been fired or resigned, have said the developer, Nate Paul, also hired a woman recommended to him by Mr. Paxton.Last week, four of the former officials, who filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Paxton over their firing, said the attorney general had been lying about their allegations as he campaigns for re-election.A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Both Mr. Paul and Mr. Paxton have denied any wrongdoing.Even with the swirl of accusations, Mr. Paxton has not been as weak a candidate as some in Texas political circles thought he would be.“People thought that Paxton would be vulnerable,” said Nathan McDaniel, a Republican political strategist based in Austin. “But what I see voters want is a fighter, someone who is going to sue Google or the Biden administration” as Mr. Paxton has done, repeatedly in the case of President Biden. In recent days, Mr. Paxton also took aim at the parents of transgender adolescents, issuing a formal opinion that certain medical treatments should be investigated as child abuse.“I don’t think personal woes matter as much to the electorate as you might think they do,” Mr. McDaniel said. “Now, if he’s in prison, that’s a whole different thing. But is that going to happen? I don’t think so.”In an interview, Mr. Gohmert predicted that Mr. Paxton would face corruption charges in federal court soon after the primary, leaving Republicans without a chance to replace him before the November general election if he were to win the primary.In response, Mr. Paxton’s campaign sent a statement from the attorney general attacking Mr. Gohmert for “clearly relying on lies, scare tactics and intimidation to win.”U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert greeting voters after a candidate forum.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesPolitical strategists said Mr. Gohmert represents the biggest threat to Mr. Paxton’s base of conservative support. Mr. Gohmert entered the race later than the other candidates, in November, but he has already attracted negative campaign mailers, Facebook ads and a television spot from Mr. Paxton.Mr. Gohmert also has had a friendly relationship with Mr. Trump and was the only other person running for attorney general whom Mr. Trump spoke fondly of during the rally last month.“Louie Gohmert, what a wonderful guy,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, acknowledging Mr. Gohmert among the elected officials there. “This is a man who has been a friend of mine from day one.”Mr. Bush, who tried hard to get Mr. Trump’s endorsement, did not attend the event because of a scheduling conflict, his campaign said.“I definitely wanted that endorsement along with the support of his supporters. That’s why I continue to reach out to not only his followers but also to those who advise him here in Texas,” Mr. Bush said in the interview, adding of Mr. Trump: “I think he made a mistake on this race.”Ms. Guzman, for her part, has been running a targeted campaign, seeking to peel off voters in unexpected places.“I have seen an Eva Guzman commercial during ‘Jeopardy!’ for the last week or two,” said Mari Woodlief, a Dallas-based political consultant. “‘Jeopardy!’ and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ are two of the best kept secrets in politics because their audience is almost all 60-plus and they’re voters.”At a campaign forum this month, the three battled before a staunchly conservative audience in a theater on the oil-rich plains of West Texas between Midland and Odessa. Each vowed to take a harder line than Mr. Paxton on the border, on crime and on allegations of fraud in Texas elections.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe hourlong debate began with Mr. Gohmert attacking Mr. Paxton for not doing more to investigate allegations of fraud in 2020 and ended with Mr. Bush vowing to fight liberal Democrats who “infest our local governments.” Along the way, Ms. Guzman held the crowd rapt with the story of her father’s killing “by an illegal immigrant” when she was 26.In an interview before the gathering, Ms. Guzman said the experience of seeing her father “covered in a yellow tarp” underscored for her how “these lawless borders are not victimless.” She said her experience on the bench made her better prepared for the job than any of her opponents.Ms. Guzman, who has the financial backing of Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a perennial power player in Republican politics, downplayed Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Paxton. “Texans want to choose for themselves,” she said.After the debate in the lobby of the theater, Roger Barnhart, 74, of Odessa and his son said they still had not decided who they would vote for.“I like Gohmert the most,” said Mr. Barnhart, adding that he was also impressed by Ms. Guzman.“A long time ago it used to be good to have the last name Bush out here — not anymore,” added his son, Dax Barnhart, 47, who works with his father in the hardware business.Though he had yet to make up his mind, the elder Mr. Barnhart came away with one solid impression of the candidates: “Any of them would be better than Paxton.” More

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      Ballot Rejections in Texas Spike After New Voting Law

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      Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, about 30 percent of absentee ballots were rejected in the state’s most populous counties. In 2020, the statewide rejection rate was less than 1 percent.Local election officials in Texas have rejected thousands of absentee ballots based on requirements set by the state’s new election law, an alarming jump that risks potentially preventing some Texans from voting in Tuesday’s primary election.The state’s Republican and Democratic primaries will be the first elections held since the Republican-led Texas Legislature overhauled the state’s election laws. Election officials in the most populous counties have rejected roughly 30 percent of the absentee ballots they have received — more than 15,000 ballots — as of Wednesday, according to a review of election data by The New York Times. The ballots were rejected largely because voters either did not include their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, or the numbers they put down did not match what officials had on file. The new identification requirements were put in place by the voting law passed last year, known as Senate Bill 1. The rate of rejection represents a significant increase from past elections, including in 2020, when the statewide rejection rate was less than 1 percent for the general election, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. In 2020, officials rejected 8,304 ballots in Texas out of nearly a million votes statewide. This year, that statewide number has already been surpassed in two counties alone: Harris County and Dallas County rejected more than 8,600 ballots as of Wednesday.The Times tallied absentee ballot rejections in 10 of the 13 counties with more than 400,000 residents. Bexar County, home to San Antonio, had not started its ballot review process as of Wednesday, and Tarrant County and Denton County, near Dallas, had been delayed by an ice storm. The total of rejected ballots could still change. Voters have until Election Day to submit their ballots and up to six days to fix ballot defects, depending on the circumstances of the rejections. In Williamson County outside Austin, for example, officials initially rejected 514 absentee ballots, but 167 of those had been corrected and counted as of Tuesday. The rise in rejections in Texas is the earliest sign that the spate of new election laws passed across the country last year after the 2020 election are having an effect. In the battleground states of Florida and Georgia, Republican legislatures passed sweeping new voting laws with identification requirements for the absentee ballot process that are similar to those in the Texas law. Florida and Georgia will hold their primaries later this year.A Guide to the Texas PrimaryThe 2022 midterm elections begin with the state’s primary on March 1.Governor’s Race: Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward shift will face a test in November. His likely challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is haunted by his 2020 presidential bid.Switching Parties: Democrats have long held local offices in a small West Texas town. Then top officials decided to leave the party.Politics of Abortion: The fight over abortion rights is changing the political fabric of South Texas, long a Democratic stronghold.Effect of New Voting Law: The law, which Republicans said would make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat,” has led to a jump in rejections of absentee ballot applications.Voters throughout Texas have been flooding voter protection hotlines, seeking guidance or expressing dismay that their absentee ballots had been rejected and returned after years of voting absentee without any problems.At the headquarters of the Dallas County Democratic Party, voters have called in with various issues regarding their ballots. The party has been scrambling to help voters as Tuesday’s Election Day deadline nears, including using text messages to send out information on new requirements to more than 30,000 voters in the county.“The calls have been pretty much constant since the last week in January, with confusion about the application process and then frustration about the rejections,” said Kristy Noble, the chairwoman of the Dallas County Democratic Party.Complications over absentee ballots have a more limited impact in Texas than in many other states, however. Texas only allows voters who are over 65 or who have a verified excuse to vote by mail. Though more than a million Texans voted by mail in the 2020 general election, that number is expected to fall this year as turnout regularly dips in the midterms.But with voting by mail limited to elderly and disabled voters, the concern that initially rejected ballots will disenfranchise voters has grown. Guillermina Nevárez lives at home in the Maverick County border region with her husband, Alfonso Nevárez Sr., and her 98-year-old mother, who is disabled and recovering from a recent surgery.In all three of their ballots, they missed the field to include their identification information, presuming that since their ballot application had been accepted they were free to cast their ballot.“We didn’t look at the fine print,” said Ms. Nevárez, who is also the mother of a former Democratic state representative. “And there’s so much of it, the fine print.”She corrected the three ballots and sent them back by mail. She is hoping that the information is correct — because of her mother’s condition, they cannot go in person to fix any issues.“It is very upsetting,” Ms. Nevárez said.The Texas law also bans methods of voting introduced in the 2020 election because of the pandemic, including drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, and it erects new barriers for those looking to help voters who need assistance, such as with translations.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the law in September. The move came after record turnout in the state: 11.3 million people voted in the 2020 election, including more than nine million who cast their ballots early.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas after signing Senate Bill 1 into law last year.LM Otero/Associated PressMr. Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Previously, the governor’s office has defended the law and blamed the high rejection rate of absentee ballot applications on local election officials. The Texas secretary of state’s office said that it has been trying to inform voters of the new changes to prevent anyone from having a ballot returned or rejected. “We have been working around the clock for the past month to get the word out through multiple channels,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the secretary of state, in an email. The state had already seen abnormally high rates of rejection for absentee ballot applications earlier this month, as voters struggled with the new identification requirements. Now, some voters who had to fix their applications are growing nervous that their ballots will not arrive in time ahead of the Tuesday primary. Others are resolving to just vote in person. Nancy Bryant, 67, lives in Dallas and has served as an election judge in previous elections. She filled out her application and was approved, so she sent in her ballot. This week, she learned her ballot was rejected and that county officials were going to mail it back to her for corrections. But with the primary fast approaching, Ms. Bryant had not received her ballot as of Friday, and she’s not sure if she’ll receive it in time to take it to a polling location on Election Day. Without her ballot, she may be forced to cast a provisional ballot. Either way, her wish to cast an absentee ballot has collided with the reality of the new Texas law, and the likelihood of voting in person.“If I don’t get it back in time, I’m going have to vote provisionally, which hurts me deeply,” Ms. Bryant said. “I am a dedicated voter.” More

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      How the Fight Over Abortion Rights Has Changed the Politics of South Texas

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      In the Laredo region, long a Democratic stronghold, that single issue appears to be driving the decision for many voters, the majority of whom are Catholic.LAREDO, Texas — Like the majority of her neighbors in the heavily Latino community of Laredo, Angelica Garza has voted for Democrats for most of her adult life. Her longtime congressman, Henry Cuellar, with his moderate views and opposition to abortion, made it an easy choice, she said.But as up-and-coming Democratic candidates in her patch of South Texas have leaned ever more liberal, Ms. Garza, a dedicated Catholic, cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2016, primarily because of his anti-abortion views.In choosing Mr. Trump that year and again in 2020, Ms. Garza joined a parade of Latino voters who are changing the political fabric of South Texas. In the Laredo region, where about nine out of 10 residents are Catholic, many registered voters appear to be driven largely by the single issue of abortion.“I’m willing to vote for any candidate that supports life,” said Ms. Garza, 75. “That’s the most important issue for me, even if it means not voting for a Democrat.”With a pivotal primary election just a week away, Ms. Garza is ready to to turn away from Democrats. Pointing at a wall covered in folkloric angel figurines at the art store she owns in Laredo, she explained why: “They are babies, angels, and I don’t think anyone has the right to end their life. We have to support life.”Angelica Garza voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because of his anti-abortion views.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesVoters like Ms. Garza are worrying Democratic leaders, whose once tight grip and influence on the Texas-Mexico border region has loosened in recent electoral cycles. Republicans have claimed significant victories across South Texas, flipping Zapata County, south of Laredo on the bank of the Rio Grande, and a state district in San Antonio. They also made gains in the Rio Grande Valley, where the border counties delivered so many votes for Mr. Trump in 2020 that they helped negate the impact of white voters in urban and suburban areas of the state who voted for Joe Biden.Much is at stake in Laredo, the most populous city of the 28th Congressional District, where Latinos are a majority, and which stretches from the eastern tip of San Antonio and includes a western chunk of the Rio Grande Valley. Since the district was drawn nearly three decades ago, the seat has been held by Democrats. Mr. Cuellar has represented the district since 2005. His moderate and sometimes conservative views — he was the only Congressional Democrat to vote against a U.S. House bill that would have nullified the state’s near-total ban on abortion that went into effect last September — have frequently endeared him to social conservatives and Republicans.But he now finds himself locked in a tight fight against a much more liberal candidate backed by the progressive wing of the party that includes Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Cuellar, whose home was raided last month by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation that neither he nor the government has disclosed, beat his opponent, Jessica Cisneros, by four percentage points in 2020.Should he lose the primary on March 1 to Ms. Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer who supports abortion rights, the path to flip the House of Representatives could very well run through South Texas, as Republicans have vowed an all-in campaign focused on religious and other conservative values. More

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      In Texas Governor’s Race, Beto O’Rourke Haunted by 2020 Campaign

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      Mr. O’Rourke’s remarks during his 2020 presidential campaign shadow him in the Texas governor’s race, complicating his attempt to pull off a Democratic upset.TYLER, Texas — Even in deep red East Texas, even on a Tuesday afternoon, even after a failed bid for the Senate followed by a failed bid for president, Beto O’Rourke still draws a crowd.More than 100 supporters gathered last week in a park in the city of Tyler, southeast of Dallas in the Piney Woods region. Among the friendly crowd, however, there was concern and even skepticism as Mr. O’Rourke tries to become the first Democratic governor of Texas in nearly 30 years.The Texas primary is fast approaching on March 1 — early voting began on Monday — but his real challenge is the general election in November, when he is expected to face the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott. Some of Mr. O’Rourke’s comments aimed at wooing national Democratic voters in the 2020 presidential primary — such as “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” — may have already weakened if not doomed his chances in November.“The comment about guns is going to be his biggest problem,” said Holly Gage, 40, who arrived at the Tyler park early with her family. “My husband is on the fence. It’s due to the gun thing.”“Texas,” added her mother, Sheila Thrash, 63, “believes in its guns.”Supporters waited in line to meet Mr. O’Rourke after his campaign event in Tyler.Montinique Monroe for The New York TimesMr. O’Rourke’s presidential campaign shadows his run for governor, complicating his effort to present himself as a pragmatic, there-for-you Texan who embraces responsible gun ownership and wants to win over moderate voters. His 2020 campaign remarks have figured prominently in attacks by Mr. Abbott and are familiar to many voters in a state where Democrats also proudly own guns. Mr. O’Rourke counts himself among their number — he and his wife own firearms, his campaign said — and he appears well aware of the liability.“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” Mr. O’Rourke said during a news conference in Tyler, in response to questions from The New York Times. “What I want to make sure we do is defend the Second Amendment.”Later in a telephone interview, he said he did not regret any policy positions he took while running for president and denied that he was walking back his comments about assault weapons. He said that as governor, he would push for universal background checks and requirements for the safe storage of firearms.“I don’t think that we should have AR-15s and AK-47s on the streets of this state — I have seen what they do to my fellow Texans in El Paso in 2019,” he said, referring to a gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history. “I haven’t changed a thing about that. I’m just telling you I’m going to focus on what I can actually do as governor and where the common ground is.”Mr. O’Rourke’s predicament illustrates how hard it can be for a red-state Democrat to return to local politics after running for federal office in the national spotlight. What appeals to voters in a crowded Democratic primary for president may turn off those in a statewide race back home in a Republican-dominated state.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.At the same time, Mr. O’Rourke has attracted legions of supporters and inspired Texas Democrats with his willingness to take on the state’s most powerful officeholders, and his charismatic insistence that Texas is not destined to remain in Republican hands.“No one is going to ride to our rescue, so we shouldn’t expect that,” Mr. O’Rourke said in the interview, citing new restrictive laws on abortion and voting passed by the State Legislature and signed by Mr. Abbott last year. “It’s on us, and that’s OK,” he added. “Traveling the state, it renews my confidence that we can do this.”Mr. O’Rourke after the Democratic presidential debate in Ohio in 2019. His position on gun control during the presidential campaign has resurfaced in his run for governor of Texas.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesA former three-term congressman from El Paso, Mr. O’Rourke, 49, entered the race for governor late last fall, delivering a jolt to a contest that many Democrats saw as unwinnable: an off-year election favoring Republicans; an incumbent governor with a roughly $60 million campaign war chest; and that decades-long losing streak. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994.“We don’t get to pick and choose what the political environment is like,” said State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat from San Antonio who has offered advice to Mr. O’Rourke during his campaign.Mr. Martinez Fischer said he did not believe, as some Texas political analysts do, that Mr. O’Rourke’s run was aimed at bolstering Democratic candidates in local races rather than actually winning. “I don’t think that Beto is looking to do any sort of suicide mission,” he said.Mr. O’Rourke remains the only Democrat in Texas with a strong statewide campaign organization, including thousands of devoted volunteers and an ability to raise money that rivals Mr. Abbott, the two-term Republican incumbent who has overseen a hard right turn in state government. During the most recent three-week filing period last month, Mr. O’Rourke raised $1.3 million, spent $600,000 and had $6 million in his campaign account. Mr. Abbott pulled in $1.4 million, spent $4.5 million and still had $62 million available in his account.Protesters showed up at Mr. O’Rourke’s rally in Tyler. He is a well-known figure in Texas, but has been trailing in polls on the governor’s race.Montinique Monroe for The New York TimesMuch about the O’Rourke campaign echoes his 2018 race to try to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, which energized Democrats across Texas and brought donations pouring in from around the country. There are the same black-and-white “Beto” posters, the speeches he delivers from the center of fawning crowds and the sense that an upset is possible.But much has changed. Mr. O’Rourke is no longer a fresh-faced newcomer. A poll last year found that he was better known among Texans than the actor Matthew McConaughey, who briefly flirted with a run for governor himself. Most Texans have an opinion of Mr. O’Rourke, and for many it is not favorable. So far, he has trailed Mr. Abbott in every poll, often by double digits.Mr. O’Rourke has been running a more traditional campaign than he did in 2018, taking large contributions, conducting polls on issues and going on the attack early against Mr. Abbott, including in a new ad. He has also been more closely coordinating with the state party.“We’ve already had discussions with him to get the Democratic Party and him in perfect sync,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. “That’s something that did not happen in 2018.”And Mr. O’Rourke does not benefit from the long runway he had in 2018, as he traveled the state and built his events from dozens of people to thousands. Now, as he drives around Texas highlighting the impacts of last year’s electrical grid failure, he is trailed by the opposition — members of Mr. Abbott’s campaign who have been coordinating with protesters at many of the stops.In Tyler, Mr. Abbott’s campaign spokesman, Mark Miner, arrived earlier than Mr. O’Rourke and helped to arrange a protest in favor of the oil and gas industry that included a big rig truck emblazoned with a heroic image of former President Donald J. Trump.“It’s about the Green New Deal versus the energy industry,” said State Representative Jay Dean, an East Texas Republican and general manager at Thomas Oilfield Services, as he stood near the big rig that he had helped bring to the protest. “I’m not that concerned about him,” he added of Mr. O’Rourke. “First of all, he’s not going to win.”At his campaign events in Waco and other cities, Mr. O’Rourke has focused on his proposals to fix the Texas power grid.Montinique Monroe for The New York TimesAt events in three cities last week, it was clear that Mr. O’Rourke, still an energetic campaigner who drives himself around Texas, has become more careful in his remarks and packaged in his presentation, as he is tugged along on a tight schedule kept by his campaign handlers. And his crowds are full of people who have supported Mr. O’Rourke for years, raising the question of how much he can grow his current base.During the more than 2,300-mile tour, which ended Tuesday on the anniversary of the day when the lights went out in most of Texas, Mr. O’Rourke delivered variations on a short speech focused on his proposals to address the wobbly Texas grid, such as connecting it with other states and prosecuting those who reaped huge profits from last year’s failure. He elicits cheers with promises to legalize marijuana and protect voting rights.“First time voters!” Mr. O’Rourke yelled before posing with a group of young women he met in Waco, after a nighttime speech in a park that drew what looked to be more than 200 people.In Austin the next day, Mr. O’Rourke visited a nonprofit that helped feed stranded residents during last year’s power grid failure, and he went along as their workers handed out meals to homeless men and women in a park between the Colorado River and a busy roadway.Mr. O’Rourke spoke to Josue Garcia, who lives in a tent in an Austin park with his wife and stepdaughter.Christopher Lee for The New York Times“You stay here?” Mr. O’Rourke asked during a conversation with Josue Garcia, 35.“Yes, in the green tent,” said Mr. Garcia, adding that he lived in the park with his wife and an adult stepdaughter, who works at Whataburger.“I’m Beto and it’s an honor to meet you.”“I’ll vote for him for sure,” Mr. Garcia said after Mr. O’Rourke went to talk to another man.Later, as the sun set over the State Capitol, a young and enthusiastic crowd gathered to see Mr. O’Rourke in the parking lot of the Texas AFL-CIO, across from the governor’s mansion.Mr. Abbott was out of town at the time but his campaign spokesman, Mr. Miner, a longtime senior communications aide to top Republicans, moved through the crowd of O’Rourke supporters, handing out fliers to reporters until he was escorted away by a union representative.On the sidewalk, protesters waved a Trump flag and an American flag and shouted — “Free crack pipes!” “Communism doesn’t work, Francis!” — in an attempt to interrupt Mr. O’Rourke’s nighttime speech, calling him by his middle name. An advertising truck showed a black-and-white video of Mr. O’Rourke morphing into President Biden, which was paid for by Mr. Abbott’s campaign.Many of Mr. O’Rourke’s supporters recalled losing power last year. But their anger at the handling of the freeze wasn’t the only issue that drew them to the rally.Nick Tripoli, 43, wore a mask with the words “Abort Greg Abbott” across it. He said he had heard Mr. O’Rourke speak in 2018 and had seen the enthusiasm he brought to Democrats.“I wanted to be a part of it,” Mr. Tripoli said. “Again.” More

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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”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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      ‘Taking the Voters Out of the Equation’: How the Parties Are Killing Competition

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      The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.WASHINGTON — The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the American political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process.“The reduction of competitive seats is a tragedy,” said former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We end up with gridlock, we end up with no progress and we end up with a population looking at our legislatures and having this feeling that nothing gets done.” He added: “This gridlock leads to cynicism about this whole process.”Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for adding to the tally of safe seats. Over decades, the parties have deftly used the redistricting process to create districts dominated by voters from one party or to bolster incumbents.It’s not yet clear which party will ultimately benefit more from this year’s bumper crop of safe seats, or whether President Biden’s sagging approval ratings might endanger Democrats whose districts haven’t been considered competitive. Republicans control the mapmaking for more than twice as many districts as Democrats, leaving many in the G.O.P. to believe that the party can take back the House majority after four years of Democratic control largely by drawing favorable seats.But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans.That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.“Democrats in New York are gerrymandering like the House depends on it,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization. “Republican legislators shouldn’t be afraid to legally press their political advantage where they have control.”New York’s new map doesn’t just set Democrats up to win more seats, it also eliminates competitive districts. In 2020, there were four districts where Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump were within five percentage points. There are none in the new map. Even the reconfigured district that stretches from Republican-dominated Staten Island to Democratic neighborhoods in Brooklyn is now, at least on paper, friendly territory for Democrats.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.North Carolina: The State Supreme Court ruled that new political maps were illegally skewed to favor Republicans.Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within.“When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.”Mr. Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Mr. Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing.Republicans are expected to win roughly 65 percent of Texas’ 38 congressional seats.Tamir Kalifa/Getty ImagesRepublicans argue that redistricting isn’t destiny: The political climate matters, and more races will become competitive if inflation, the lingering pandemic or other issues continue to sour voters on Democratic leadership.But the far greater number of districts drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party is likely to limit how many seats will flip — even in a so-called wave election.“The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Representative Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.”In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump won by five percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was within five points in 108 congressional districts.The phenomenon of parties using redistricting to gain an edge is as old as the republic itself, but it has escalated in recent decades with more sophisticated technology and more detailed data about voter behavior. Americans with similar political views have clustered in distinct areas — Republicans in rural and exurban areas, Democrats in cities and inner suburbs. It’s a pattern that can make it difficult to draw cohesive, competitive districts.No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More