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      A National Campaign to Restrict Voting

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      Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the weeks after the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican leaders emerged as defenders of election integrity, rebuffing demands by former President Trump to overturn the results. But now voting rights in the state are under threat. The Republicans in the state legislature watched as the state flipped for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in decades and two Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — won their Senate runoff elections. Their response was a package of voting restrictions. Today, we look at the measures introduced in Georgia and how similar laws may be passed elsewhere in the country. On today’s episodeNick Corasaniti, a domestic correspondent covering national politics for The New York Times. Three Democratic state representatives, Kim Schofield, second from left, Viola Davis and Sandra Scott, at a protest outside the Georgia Capitol as House members debated a bill on voting restrictions last week.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBackground reading Georgia Republicans have moved early in a campaign to rewrite voting rules. Republicans in other states are determined to follow them.The country’s most hotly contested state has calmed down after months of drama, court fights and national attention. But new storms are on the horizon.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

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      Trump May Start a Social Network. Here’s My Advice.

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      Recast your past failures as successes, engage in meaningless optics, and other tips from the Silicon Valley playbook.So Donald Trump wants to start a social network and become a tech mogul?Lucky for him, I am an expert in all things digital, and I’m willing to help. Tech is hard stuff, and new ventures should be attempted with extreme care, especially by those whose history of entrepreneurship is littered with the carcasses of, say, Trump Steaks.Or Trump Water. Or Trump University. Or Trump magazine. Or Trump Casinos. Or Trump Mortgages. Or Trump Airlines. Or Trump Vodka. Or the Trump pandemic response. Or, of course, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.So, Mr. Trump, here’s my advice.Right from the start, I advise you to embrace your myriad failures as if they’re your best friends. Every failed venture actually went exactly as planned. Give up your distaste for being called a “loser.” Drop your tendency to blame others. Quit falling back on conspiracy theories — which even Sydney “The Kraken” Powell is bailing on.Instead, use one of Silicon Valley’s favorite excuses for its mistakes, that old Thomas Edison trope: You didn’t fail, but found 10,000 ways that didn’t work. Even if “fail” and “don’t work” are the same thing, in tech these are seen as a badge of honor rather than as a sign that you are terrible at executing a business plan and engage in only meaningless optics.Which brings us to my next point: Engage in meaningless optics. In Silicon Valley, what people perceive is just as valuable as anything that is actually valuable.You think 5,000 Beeple JPEGs are worth $70 million? Well, I have a Jack Dorsey tweet for $2.9 million you might want to consider.Luckily, this fits right in your wheelhouse — a talent that you have displayed in spades since the beginnings of your career.Edison also said that “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” I might rephrase that for your entry into tech by saying, genius is 1 percent instigation and 99 percent perfidy.Instigation and perfidy, in fact, make the perfect formula for a modern-day social network, so you are already well on your way, given your skill set.Baseless conspiracies? Check. Incessant lies? Check. Crazy ALL-CAP declarations designed to foment anger? Check. Self-aggrandizing though badly spelled streams that actually reveal a profound lack of self-esteem? Check. Link-baiting hateful memes? Double check. Inciting violence over election fraud with both explicit and cryptic messages to your base, in order to get them to think they should attack the Capitol, like, for real? Checkmate — especially if you are former Vice President Mike Pence!As for Mr. Pence, you must get him to sign on to your platform, along with all the other right-wingers who groveled to you when you were on Twitter.And that doesn’t mean just the Florida member of the House of Representatives Matt Gaetz, who I assume will do that on any platform, but the whole passel of them, from Ted Cruz to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Marco Rubio to your current nemesis, Mitch McConnell. And, also, wait for it … folks like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders, as well as all those Hollywood celebs who hate-tweet at you, and, of course, all the fake media.To have an effective social network, you need the whole gang there in order to reach the blessed perfect formula: Enragement equals engagement. You didn’t start the fire — well, maybe you did — but you definitely need to keep stoking it.It might be challenging to get all of the complex tech to actually work. A social network requires a lot of it, including servers, apps and content moderation tools. You’ll need a whole army of geeks whom you’ll have to pay real money. (If you don’t, they will cyberhack you back to Queens.)And since all of this will be quite pricey, I suppose you could take over the pretty much defunct Parler. Its previous chief executive said in an interview with me that the platform wasn’t responsible for any of the post-presidential-election chaos, and that got the service thrown off all kinds of back-end platforms run by Google, Apple and Amazon.Still, Parler may be on life support, but the tech is already built — and the platform is already full of deplorables, or, um, “patriots,” who happen to believe more in QAnon wingnut ideas than in the Constitution.Also, you should think about having a fresh kombucha station at HQ.As for your future competitors … Twitter has seen its shares rise sharply since it tossed you off for life. You still might get a reprieve over at Facebook, where an oversight board is contemplating your fate. We’ll see what the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decides after the board makes a ruling.Keep in mind, Mr. Zuckerberg really is the most powerful man in the world; that was even the case when you were in the Oval Office. And while he once bear-hugged your administration, he is now sidling up to President Biden.Try to ignore that and learn to like your fellow tech moguls. You will be on their side. You’ll have to learn to love Section 230 — part of a 1996 law that shields companies from liability for what is said on their platforms — and abandon efforts to get rid of it (as you tried by executive order), since it will protect whatever toxic flood you unleash on your social media site.Which brings me to my last point: the name. It’s critical — and I am not sure how to approach it.Avoid MeinSpace and InstaGraft, for obvious reasons. The narcissist in you might go for The_Donald, which you might now be able to use, since Reddit banned the 800,000-member forum with that name for violating its rules against harassment, hate speech, content manipulation and more. (Sounds like just the kind of folks you like and who like you.)Personally, if you go this direction, I would use your name in a more creative way. My suggestion: Trumpet.Trumpets are brash and loud, and they’re often badly played and tinny. Right on brand, I’d say.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, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. More

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      Democrats Begin Push for Biggest Expansion of Voting Since 1960s

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      Democrats characterized the far-reaching elections overhaul as the civil rights battle of modern times. Republicans called it a power grab that would put their party at a permanent disadvantage.Democrats began pushing on Wednesday for the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century, laying the groundwork in the Senate for what would be a fundamental change to the ways voters get to the polls and elections are run.At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders made a passionate case for a bill that would mandate automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early and mail-in voting, end gerrymandering that skews congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage and curb the influence of money in politics.The effort is taking shape as Republicans have introduced more than 250 bills to restrict voting in 43 states and have continued to spread false accusations of fraud and impropriety in the 2020 election. It comes just months after those claims, spread by President Donald J. Trump as he sought to cling to power, fueled a deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that showed how deeply his party had come to believe in the myth of a stolen election.Republicans were unapologetic in their opposition to the measure, with some openly arguing that if Democrats succeeded in making it easier for Americans to vote and in enacting the other changes in the bill, it would most likely place their party permanently in the minority.“Any American who thinks that the fight for a full and fair democracy is over is sadly and sorely mistaken,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government.”Mr. Schumer’s rare appearance at a committee meeting underscored the stakes, not just for the election process but for his party’s own political future. He called the proposed voting rollbacks in dozens of states — including Georgia, Iowa and Arizona — an “existential threat to our democracy” reminiscent of the Jim Crow segregationist laws of the past.He chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at Republicans who were promoting them.It was the start of an uphill battle by Senate Democrats, who have characterized what they call the For the People Act as the civil rights imperative of modern times, to overcome divisions in their own ranks and steer around Republican opposition to shepherd it into law. Doing so may require them to change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, once used by segregationists to block civil rights measures in the 1960s.Republicans signaled they were ready to fight. Conceding that allowing more people to vote would probably hurt their candidates, they denounced the legislation, passed by the House this month, as a power grab by Democrats intent on federalizing elections to give themselves a permanent political advantage. They insisted that it was the right of states to set their own election laws, including those that make it harder to vote, and warned that Democrats’ proposal could lead to rampant fraud, which experts say has never been found to be widespread.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, on Wednesday at the hearing.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“This is an attempt by one party to write the rules of our political system,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has spent much of his career opposing such changes.“Talk about ‘shame,’” he added later.Some Republicans resorted to lies or distortions to condemn the measure, falsely claiming that Democrats were seeking to cheat by enfranchising undocumented immigrants or encouraging illegal voting. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the bill aimed to register millions of unauthorized immigrants, though that would remain unlawful under the measure.The clash laid bare just how sharply the two parties have diverged on the issue of voting rights, which attracted bipartisan support for years after the civil rights movement but more recently has become a bitter partisan battleground. At times, Republicans and Democrats appeared to be wrestling with irreconcilably different views of the problems plaguing the election system.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee, which convened the hearing, said states were taking appropriate steps to restore public confidence after 2020 by imposing laws that require voters to show identification before voting and limiting so-called ballot harvesting, where others collect voters’ completed absentee ballots and submit them to election officials. He said that if Democrats were allowed to rush through changes on the national level, “chaos will reign in the next election and voters will have less confidence than they currently do.”The suggestion piqued Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the committee chairwoman, who shot back that it was the current elections system — an uneven patchwork of state laws and evolving voting rules — that had caused “chaos” at polling places.“Chaos is what we’ve seen in the last years — five-hour or six-hour lines in states like Arizona to vote. Chaos is purging names of longtime voters from a voter list so they can’t go vote in states like Georgia,” she said. “What this bill tries to do is to simply make it easier for people to vote and take the best practices that what we’ve seen across the country, and put it into law as we are allowed to do under the Constitution.”With Republicans unified against them, Democrats’ best hope for enacting the legislation increasingly appears to be to try to leverage its voting protections — to justify triggering the Senate’s so-called nuclear option: the elimination of the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to advance most bills.Even that may be a prohibitively heavy lift, though, at least in the bill’s current form. Liberal activists who are spending tens of millions of dollars promoting it insist that the package must move as one bill. But Senator Joe Manchin III, a centrist West Virginia Democrat whose support they would need both to change the filibuster rules and to push through the elections bill, said on Wednesday that he would not support it in its current form.Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Mr. Manchin said he feared that pushing through partisan changes would create more “division” that the country could not afford after the Jan. 6 attack, and instead suggested narrowing the bill.Voters waited in line to cast ballots in the 2020 election in Suwanee, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There’s so much good in there, and so many things I think all of us should be able to be united around voting rights, but it should be limited to the voting rights,” he said. “We’re going to have a piece of legislation that might divide us even further on a partisan basis. That shouldn’t happen.”But it is unclear whether even major changes could win Republican support in the Senate. As written, the more than 800-page bill, which passed the House 220 to 210 mostly along party lines, is the most ambitious elections overhaul in generations, chock-full of provisions that experts say would drive up turnout, particularly among minorities who tend to vote Democratic. Many of them are anathema to Republicans.Its voting provisions alone would create minimum standards for states, neutering voter ID laws, restoring voting rights to former felons, and putting in place requirements like automatic voter registration and no-excuse mail-in balloting. Many of the restrictive laws proposed by Republicans in the states would move in the opposite direction.The bill would also require states to use independent commissions to draw nonpartisan congressional districts, a change that would weaken the advantages of Republicans who control the majority of state legislatures currently in charge of drawing those maps. It would force super PACs to disclose their big donors and create a new public campaign financing system for congressional candidates.Democrats also said they still planned to advance a separate bill restoring a key enforcement provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted it. The ruling paved the way for many of the restrictive state laws Democrats are now fighting.In the hearing room on Wednesday, Republicans ticked through a long list of provisions they did not like, including a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to make it more partisan and punitive, a host of election administration changes they predicted would cause mass “chaos” if carried out and the public campaign financing system.“This bill is the single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered,” Mr. Cruz said. “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.”Mr. Cruz falsely claimed that the bill would register undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too.In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens. It would extend the franchise to millions of former felons, as some states already do, but only after they have served their sentences.Senator Amy Klobuchar pressed against Republicans saying that it was the current elections system that had caused “chaos” at polling places.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThough few senators mentioned him by name, Mr. Trump and his false claims of election fraud hung heavily over the debate.To make their case, Republicans turned to two officials who backed an effort to overturn then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory. Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, and Todd Rokita, the attorney general of Indiana, both supported a Texas lawsuit late last year asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in key battleground states Mr. Biden won, citing groundless accusations of voting improprieties being spread by Mr. Trump.On Wednesday, Democrats balked when Mr. Rokita, a former Republican congressman, asserted that their proposed changes would “open our elections up to increased voter fraud and irregularities” like the ones that he said had caused widespread voter mistrust in the 2020 outcome.Senator Jon Ossoff, a freshman Democrat from Georgia, chastised the attorney general, saying he was spreading misinformation and conspiracies.“I take exception to the comments that you just made, Mr. Rokita, that public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election is born of anything but a deliberate and sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat,” Mr. Ossoff said.Mr. Rokita merely scoffed and repeated an earlier threat to sue to block the legislation from being carried out should it ever become law, a remedy that many Republican-led states would most likely pursue if Democrats were able to win its enactment.Election workers re-counting ballots in November in Atlanta.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“You are entitled to your opinion, as misinformed as it may be, but I share the opinion of Americans,” Mr. Rokita said.Sixty-five percent of voters believe the election was free and fair, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in late January, but only 32 percent of Republicans believe that. 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      Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run

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      G.O.P. lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are trying to gain broad influence over the mechanics of voting, in an effort that could further undermine the country’s democratic norms.In the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.Now state Republicans are trying to strip these officials of their power.Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections. The bill, which could clear the House as soon as Thursday and is likely to be passed by the Senate next week, would allow state lawmakers to seize control of county election boards and erode the power of the secretary of state’s office.“It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.”It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator is trying to remove a sitting judge who ruled against the party in an election case.Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.The maneuvers risk adding an overtly partisan skew to how electoral decisions are made each year, threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy. The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.“Republicans are brazenly trying to seize local and state election authority in an unprecedented power grab,” said Stacey Abrams, the Democratic voting rights advocate who served as the minority leader in the Georgia State House. She said it was “intended to alter election outcomes and remove state and county election officials who refuse to put party above the people.”She added, “Had their grand plan been law in 2020, the numerous attempts by state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters would have succeeded.”As Mr. Trump carried out his pressure campaign to try to overturn the election results in swing states, he found many sympathetic lawmakers willing to go along with him — but he was rebuffed by numerous election officials, as well as state and federal courts.The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.One of those officials is Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, who rebuffed Mr. Trump in the face of mounting pressure to falsely declare the election rife with fraud, despite multiple audits that affirmed the outcome.In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, repeatedly rejected Donald J. Trump’s entreaties to help him overturn the election results.Audra Melton for The New York TimesBut perhaps more consequential is Republicans’ targeting of county election boards. If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley, the sole Democratic member of the five-person state board.The provision has worried Democratic officials in major left-leaning counties like Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta, and Gwinnett County, as well as their surrounding suburbs. They fear that a partisan state board influenced by the Legislature may enact more restrictive policies for their counties, which are home to the majority of the Democratic voters in the state and a large concentration of the state’s Black voters.Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight. Asked for comment, his office offered only that he was in favor of “strengthened voter ID protections.”At the local level, at least nine Republican counties in Georgia have passed local legislation since November dissolving their current election boards — often composed of three Republicans and two Democrats — and replacing them with a new membership entirely appointed by the county commissioner, resulting in single-party boards.A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.“We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”He joked on Facebook that he would be setting up a GoFundMe page because “I have a pretty good idea which auditors will be fined first.”Election officials checked information on absentee ballot envelopes in Newton, Iowa, in October. A new law in the state restricting access to voting has targeted county election officials. Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesBobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.“There were multiple things that these county auditors did to take the law into their own hands, which is why we put these strict punishments and oversight in for auditors that go beyond the scope of their job,” Mr. Kaufmann said, referring to the auditors who proactively mailed ballots. “That’s the role of the Legislature, not the role of an auditor.”In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight. One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.“They don’t serve any purpose, except for the Legislature just trying to insert themselves into the process, create obstruction, and say that they did something in the name of election integrity without actually doing anything that does that,” said Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona.Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican state senator who has been a sponsor of many of the bills, did not respond to a request for comment.Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills. In North Carolina, which also has a Democratic governor, Republican legislators have publicly discussed introducing a similar bill, but have not yet done so.Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.That member, Aaron Van Langevelde, sided with the two Democrats on the state board in November, clearing the path for Michigan’s Electoral College votes to be awarded to President Biden.If Mr. Van Langevelde is ousted from the board, election officials in Michigan worry that the state Republican Party may again seek to hold up certification of a statewide election and possibly succeed, regardless of the success and security of the vote.It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.And Democrats could find a path to challenging some of these laws in deep-red Kansas.That state’s Republican-led Legislature put forward a proposal similar to those in Georgia and Arizona, seeking to limit the authority of the secretary of state to make emergency decisions and provisions for elections. But the Republican secretary of state, Scott Schwab, informed the Legislature that the proposal “could run afoul” of federal voting laws regarding military and overseas voters.The legislation was quickly amended the next day. More

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      We See the Left. We See the Right. Can Anyone See the ‘Exhausted Majority’?

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      Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system?Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, argues in a series of essays and a book, “Unstable Majorities,” that it is the structure of the two-party system that prevents the center — the moderate majority of American voters — from asserting their dominion over national politics:Given multiple dimensions of political conflict — economic, cultural, international — it is simply impossible for two internally homogeneous parties to represent the variety of viewpoints present in a large heterogeneous democracy.Inevitably, Fiorina writes,Each party bundles issue positions in a way that conflicts with the views of many citizens — most commonly citizens who are economic conservatives and culturally liberal, or economically liberal and culturally conservative, but also internationalist or isolationist-leaning positions layered on top of other divisions.Fiorina is addressing one of the most important questions in America today: Is there a viable center and can such a center be mobilized to enact widely backed legislative goals with bipartisan support?This issue is the subject of intense dispute among strategists, scholars and pollsters.In Fiorina’s view, polarization has been concentrated among “the political class: officeseekers, party officials, donors, activists, partisan media commentators. These are the people who blabber on TV /vent on Facebook/vilify on Twitter/etc.”This process effectively leaves out “the general public (a.k.a. normal people)” who are “inattentive, uncertain, ambivalent, uninvolved politically, concerned with bread-and-butter issues.”In support of his position, Fiorina has marshaled data showing that there are large numbers of voters who say that neither party reflects their views; that many of the most polarizing issues — including gay rights, gender equality, abortion and racial equality — rank 19 to 52 points below voters’ top priorities, which are the economy, health care, jobs and Medicare; and that the share of voters who describe themselves as moderate has remained constant since 1974.In addition, Fiorina cites two studies.The first, “A Not So Divided America,” conducted by the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland for a centrist group, Voice of the People. It found that if you compare “the views of people who live in red Congressional districts or states to those of people who live in blue Congressional districts or states,” on “only 3.6 percent of the questions — 14 out of 388 — did a majority or plurality of those living in red congressional districts/states take a position opposed to that of a majority or plurality of those living in blue districts/states.”Of those 14, according to the Voice of the People study, 11 concerned “ ‘hot-button’ topics that are famously controversial — gay and lesbian issues, abortion and Second Amendment issues relating to gun ownership.”The second study, “Hidden Tribes,” was conducted for “More In Common,” another group that supports centrist policies.According to the study,In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.In practice, the study found that polarization is driven in large part by the left flank of the Democratic Party and the right flank of the Republican Party, which together make up roughly a third of the electorate.The remaining two thirds areconsiderably more ideologically flexible than members of other groups. While members of the ‘wing’ groups (on both the left and the right) tend to hold strong and consistent views across a range of political issues, those in the Exhausted Majority tend to deviate significantly in their views from issue to issue.Not only that,the wing groups, which often dominate the national conversation, are in fact in considerable isolation in their views on certain topics. For instance, 82 percent of Americans agree that hate speech is a problem in America today, and 80 percent also view political correctness as an issue. By contrast, only 30 percent of Progressive Activists believe political correctness is a problem.Fiorina has many allies and many critics in the academic community.Those in general agreement include Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard and a contributing writer to The New Yorker, who wrote in an email:The fact that Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee and won the presidency in 2020, when there were many great candidates left of him, is evidence that a political center is not only viable but desired by the public.For a centrist candidate, Gersen argued, “the main principle is compromise rather than all or nothing.” In the case of abortion, for example, the principle of compromise recognizes thatthe majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal, but also favor some limits on abortion. Retaining a core right of abortion that respects both autonomy of adult individuals to make reproductive decisions and the value of potential fetal life is the approach that will seem acceptable to the majority of Americans and consistent with the Constitution.John Shattuck, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, notes that surveys and reports he has overseen affirm the strong presence of a middle ground in American politics:Polarization is pushed by the political extremes. The great majority of Americans, however, are not at the extremes and common ground exists among them on seemingly polarized issues.Instead, Shattuck wrote in an email, “Americans are fed up with polarization.” His data shows that71 percent believe Americans “have more in common with each other than many people think,” including 78 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Independents.There is, Shattuck argues, a powerful consensus on rights and freedoms that underpins American democracy:Bipartisan majorities consider the following to be “essential rights important to being an American today”: ‘“clean air and water” (93 percent); “a quality education” (92 percent); “affordable health care” (89 percent); and the “right to a job” (85 percent). These high levels of demand for economic and social rights are similar to the support for more traditional civil liberties and civil rights like rights of free speech (94 percent), privacy (94 percent) and equal opportunity (93 percent).There is another aspect to the debate.In most countries, Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue, both of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, write in their 2019 essay. “How Americans Were Driven to Extremes”:Polarization grows out of one primary identity division — usually either ethnic, religious, or ideological. In Kenya, for instance, polarization feeds off fierce competition between ethnic groups. In India, it reflects the divide between secular and Hindu nationalist visions of the country. But in the United States, all three kinds of division are involved.As a result:This powerful alignment of ideology, race, and religion with partisanship renders America’s divisions unusually encompassing and profound. It is hard to find another example of polarization in the world that fuses all three major types of identity divisions in a similar way.Bill McInturff, a founder of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, cast doubt in an email on the prospects for a new centrism:I am not sanguine about a national campaign that tries to find a middle ground on major cultural issues as being viable. We are in a “no compromise” era and that’s not changing any time soon.Similarly, Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, wrote in an email:Could Joe Biden end up being the last centrist Democrat in the way that George W. Bush might have turned out to be the last centrist Republican? I was never a fan of W, but looking back, you can see how the party was shifting away from the center inexorably toward the cultural and economic populism Trump catalyzed. I wonder if we look back a decade from now if Biden turns out to be the last of a kind. Is the future one where Republicans look more like Trump, and the Democrats tilt away from Biden’s center toward the more culturally progressive wing, one which might drive more centrist voters away?Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center provide scant optimism for proponents of less divisive politics.In a postelection report, Michael Dimock, Pew’s president, and Richard Wike, its director of global research, wrote that among both Biden and Trump voters, roughly 80 percentsaid their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine-in-ten — again in both camps — worried that a victory by the other would lead to “lasting harm” to the United States.From 1994 to 2019, Pew tracked the percentage point difference between Republican and Democratic responses to 10 policy positions, including “the economic system in this country unfairly favors powerful interests,” “the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values,” and “white people benefit from advantages in society that Black people don’t have.” More

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      Postal Service Plans Price Increases and Service Cuts to Shore Up Finances

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      The 10-year plan, which would lengthen promised delivery times and reduce post office hours, among other provisions, drew immediate condemnation from Democrats in Congress.WASHINGTON — The Postal Service unveiled a 10-year strategic plan on Tuesday that would raise prices and lengthen promised delivery times, among other measures, in an effort to recoup $160 billion in projected losses over the next decade.The announcement, which comes as the beleaguered agency is already reeling under nationwide delivery delays and falling use of traditional mail, drew immediate condemnation from Democrats in Congress, who would have to pass legislation to carry out some parts of the proposal. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California instead vowed to advance an infrastructure bill “to ensure that the Postal Service has the resources needed to serve the American people in a timely and effective manner.”Among other things, the plan would reduce post office hours, consolidate locations, limit the use of planes to deliver the mail and loosen the delivery standard for first-class mail from within three days in the continental United States to within five days, an effort to meet the agency’s 95 percent target for on-time delivery. In a news conference, Kristin Seaver, an executive vice president at the Postal Service, maintained that 70 percent of first-class mail would continue to be delivered in one to three days.The postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a Trump megadonor and former logistics executive who has faced criticism over his handling of the agency, argued that the steps were necessary given the Postal Service’s worsening financial situation. The agency, which is supposed to be self-sustaining, has lost $87 billion in the past 14 fiscal years and is projected to lose another $9.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 alone.“We have to start the conversation with we’re losing $10 billion a year,” Mr. DeJoy said in an interview on Tuesday, “and that’s going to continue to go up unless we do something.”“We are hopeful that this is taken for what it is, a positive story, and everybody, let’s get on board,” he added. “And I think, you know, there’s different aspects within each side of the aisle over there that this plan has good stuff for.”But if anything, the release of the plan appeared to intensify opposition to Mr. DeJoy’s leadership among Democrats, who had already blamed him for delivery slowdowns that coincided with operational changes last summer. They had also accused him of sabotaging the Postal Service as President Donald J. Trump promoted unfounded claims of vote-by-mail fraud before the 2020 election.On Tuesday, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, renewed a call for the sitting members of the agency’s Board of Governors to be fired and for Mr. DeJoy to be “escorted to the street where his bags are waiting for him.” The plan should be a “dead letter” for the agency, he added.Ms. Pelosi said Mr. DeJoy’s “cutbacks” would undermine the agency’s mission, “resulting in serious delays and degradation of service for millions.”The Postal Service said that relying more on ground transportation would make delivery more reliable. But the result would be, for some, slower mail.Among the most contentious provisions were price increases for the agency’s services. In its plan, the Postal Service said it expected to find $44 billion in revenue over the next 10 years through regulatory changes, including pricing flexibility. Mr. DeJoy said he could not offer details about the increases.The single largest opportunity for savings under the plan lies in lawmakers’ hands. Congress has mandated that the agency must prefund 75 years’ worth of its retiree health benefits. In the strategic proposal, the Postal Service estimates that it could recoup $58 billion by eliminating the prefunding requirement and introducing Medicare integration, which would align the agency’s retiree health benefit plans with those of many private sector employers and state and local governments.Mr. DeJoy and Ron A. Bloom, the chairman of the Board of Governors, would not offer an explanation of how the Postal Service might recoup the expected $58 billion without legislative and administrative action. Instead, Mr. Bloom maintained, “We’re going to make this happen.” Mr. DeJoy said the agency has had “good conversations” with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.“If people choose to make this about politics, then they can,” Mr. Bloom said. “And it’s Washington, so it won’t surprise anyone if that happens from some time to time.“But you know, you have a bipartisan Board of Governors. You had a rigorous process to choose the P.M.G.,” he added, referring to the postmaster general. “You have what I think is a plan that demonstrates what we’ve been saying for a while, which is we want to grow and revitalize this institution.”Postal legislation has languished in Congress, but Democrats expressed interest in pushing ahead. Senator Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, expressed concerns about several elements in the Postal Service plan but expressed support for postal legislation more generally.Postal Service insiders said the plan was mixed. It promises potential for growth and an investment in new vehicles, along with post offices that meet community needs. But other elements are cause for concern, they said.“If they’re talking about, you know, service excellence, that to us it’s a contradiction to then have mail take longer to get to point A and point B or to reduce hours in retail units,” said Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union. “So we certainly oppose and have deep concerns about those part of the plans.”At least some of the elements of the plan will require an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission before they can be enacted, said Michael Plunkett, the president of the Association for Postal Commerce. He called it a “tall order” that consumers would accept higher prices from the Postal Service, along with reduced service.Mr. Plunkett said the plan made clear the Postal Service was aiming to bolster its package services, which have made up a growing share of its business. But he said the lack of effort to retain mail volume was disappointing.“On the mail side, they seem to just accept the fact that mail is going away,” Mr. Plunkett said.Asked about his ties to Mr. Trump and those who might disapprove of the plan as a result of those connections, Mr. DeJoy brushed off any criticism.“I’m here representing the Postal Service,” he said, adding, “I don’t pay attention to that.” More