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      Biden Courts Democrats and Republican Leaders on Infrastructure

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      The meeting produced little progress, underscoring the political challenge for President Biden as he seeks to exploit the narrowest of majorities in Congress to revive the country’s economy.WASHINGTON — To hear the participants tell it, President Biden’s first-ever meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress was 90 minutes of productive conversation. It was cordial. There were no explosions of anger. More

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      Republicans Attack Democrats as Liberal Extremists to Regain Power

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      As Democrats prepare to run on an ambitious economic agenda, Republicans are working to caricature them as liberal extremists out of touch with voters’ values.WASHINGTON — Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.“Will Axne Pack the Court?” was the headline on a statement the party rushed out, saying the move to expand the court “puts our democracy at risk.”The attack vividly illustrated the emerging Republican strategy for an intensive drive to try to take back the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans are mostly steering clear of Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, such as an infrastructure package and a stimulus law that coupled pandemic relief with major expansions of safety-net programs, and are focusing instead on polarizing issues that stoke conservative outrage.In doing so, they are seizing on measures like the court-expansion bill and calls to defund the police — which many Democrats oppose — as well as efforts to provide legal status to undocumented immigrants and grant statehood to the District of Columbia to caricature the party as extreme and out of touch with mainstream America.Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats’ push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.The approach comes as President Biden and Democrats, eager to capitalize on their unified control of Congress and the White House, have become increasingly bold about speaking about such issues and promoting a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule. It has given Republicans ample fodder for attacks that have proved potent in the past.“They are putting the ball on the tee, handing me the club and putting the wind at my back,” said Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.Democrats argue that Republicans are focusing on side issues and twisting their positions because the G.O.P. has nothing else to campaign on, as Democrats line up accomplishments to show to voters, including the pandemic aid bill that passed without a single Republican vote.“That was very popular, and I can understand why Republicans don’t want to talk about it,” said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But we’re going to keep reminding folks who was there when they needed them.”The contrast is likely to define the 2022 races. Democrats will sell the ambitious agenda they are pursuing with Mr. Biden, take credit for what they hope will continue to be a surging economy and portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party pushing Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election. Republicans, who have embraced the false claims of election fraud and plan to use them to energize their conservative base, will complain of “radical” Democratic overreach and try to amplify culture-war issues they think will propel more voters into their party’s arms.A release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted what it called the “three pillars” of the Democratic agenda: “The Green New Deal, court packing and defund the police,” even though the first two are far from the front-burner issues for Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders and the third is a nonstarter with the bulk of the party’s rank and file.President Biden and Democrats have promoted a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesLast week Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, sought to thrust a new issue into the mix, leading Republicans in protest of a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the nation’s legacy of slavery. He has taken particular aim at the 1619 Project, a journalism initiative by The New York Times that identifies the year when slaves were first brought to America as a key moment in history.“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday during an appearance in Louisville. “I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that year 1619 was one of those years.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, has been explicit about his strategy.“Now what I talk about every day is do we want open borders? No. Do we want to shut down our schools? No. Do we want men playing in women’s sports? No,” Mr. Scott said during a recent radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.“Do we want to shut down the Keystone pipeline? No. Do we want voter ID? Yes,” he continued. “And the Democrats are on the opposite side of all those issues, and I’m going to make sure every American knows about it.”Democrats who have fallen victim to the Republican cultural assault concede that it can take a toll and that their party needs to be ready.“It was all these different attacks that were spread all over mainstream media, Spanish-language media, Facebook, WhatsApp,” said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic House member from South Florida who was defeated last year after Republicans portrayed her as a socialist who was anti-police. “A lot of it was misinformation, false attacks.”She said Democrats must begin taking steps now to combat Republican misdirection, warning that their legislative victories might not be enough to appeal to voters.“We can have a great policy record,” she said, “but we need to be present in our communities right now, reaching out to all of our constituencies to tell them we are working for them, that their health and their jobs are our priorities.”On the Supreme Court issue, progressive groups began pushing the idea of an expansion after Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices, including one to a vacancy that Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling in the last year of his presidency and another who was fast-tracked right before last year’s election.Hoping to neutralize the issue, some Senate Democrats who will be on the ballot next year have made it clear that they would oppose expanding the court, and the bill seems to be going nowhere at the moment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring any court bill to the floor until at least after a commission named by Mr. Biden to study the matter issued its report, which is due in six months. The president has been cool to the expansion idea as well.The office of Ms. Axne, the only Democrat in Congress from Iowa, did not respond to requests for reaction to the Republican attacks on her over the court plan. In an interview with MSNBC, Ms. Axne said that she, like Ms. Pelosi, would await the findings of the commission.But Republicans are not waiting to try to score political points. They say more moderate Republican voters and independents who broke with the party during the Trump years have been alienated by the call to enlarge the court and other initiatives being pushed by progressives.One key for Republicans next year will be winning back suburban voters while running campaigns that also energize the significant segment of their supporters who are fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump and want the party to represent his values. That may be a difficult balance to achieve, as evidenced this week when Republican leaders moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of the party’s No. 3 leadership post for calling out the former president’s false election claims.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said it would matter less what Republicans said about Democrats than what his party was able to accomplish.“The one thing that will win people over, no matter what they do, is whether we can deliver,” he said. “They are doing what appeals to their base, but the voters in the middle, including a good chunk of Republican voters, actually care about getting things done.”Instead of focusing on Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, Republicans are seizing on measures like a bill to expand the Supreme Court.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Peters said Democrats would be better positioned to rebut attacks such as those that falsely portray them as pressing to defund the police after voters had experienced two years of the party holding power.“President Biden and the caucus have been very clear that we are not about defunding the police, we are about making sure police have the resources they need to do their jobs,” he said. “Ultimately, it is about how it is impacting people’s lives.”Mr. Kaufmann, the Republican leader in Iowa, begged to differ. He said he believed the hot-button issues Republicans were homing in on would drive voters more than “the nuance of tax policy and who gets credit for the vaccine.” He is eager to get started.“Some of this stuff is really controversial,” he said. “These are all very bold and clearly delineated issues. I can use this to expand the base and get crossover voters.” More

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      Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

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      Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump’s Republican Party.Liberal onlookers exploring the rise of right-wing populism accuse their adversaries of racism and sexism. There is plenty of truth to this view, but it’s not the whole story.In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump’s most loyal backers:Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Unleashing it is like splitting the atom; it creates enormous energy, which can lead to more honest discussions and long-delayed redress of grievances. It can also undermine personal relationships — and political regimes. Because its destructive potential is so great, it must be faced.Recent decades, Galston continues, “have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography” — difficult for “those outside its orbit to understand.”They — “social conservatives and white Christians” — have what Galston calls a “bill of particulars” against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston’s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”“They believe we have a powerful desire for moral coercion. We tell them how to behave — and, worse, how to think. When they complain, we accuse them of racism and xenophobia. How, they ask, did standing up for the traditional family become racism? When did transgender bathrooms become a civil right?”“They believe we hold them in contempt.”“Finally, they think we are hypocrites. We claim to support free speech — until someone says something we don’t like. We claim to oppose violence — unless it serves a cause we approve of. We claim to defend the Constitution — except for the Second Amendment. We support tolerance, inclusion, and social justice — except for people like them.”Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but increasingly at the white collar, managerial and professional occupational structure.Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”In an essay published in Boston Review last month, Acemoglu looked at the issue over a longer period. Initially, in the first four decades after World War II, advances in automation complemented labor, expanding the job market and improving productivity.But, he continued, “a very different technological tableau began in the 1980s — a lot more automation and a lot less of everything else.” In the process, “automation acted as the handmaiden of inequality.”Automation has pushed the job market in two opposing directions. Trends can be adverse for those (of all races and ethnicities) without higher education, but trends can also be positive for those with more education:New technologies primarily automated the more routine tasks in clerical occupations and on factory floors. This meant the demand and wages of workers specializing in blue-collar jobs and some clerical functions declined. Meanwhile professionals in managerial, engineering, finance, consulting, and design occupations flourished — both because they were essential to the success of new technologies and because they benefited from the automation of tasks that complemented their own work. As automation gathered pace, wage gaps between the top and the bottom of the income distribution magnified.Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:Falling BehindThe change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind. More

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      Should Biden Emphasize Race or Class or Both or None of the Above?

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      Should the Democratic Party focus on race or class when trying to build support for new initiatives and — perhaps equally important — when seeking to achieve a durable Election Day majority?The publication on April 26 of a scholarly paper, “Racial Equality Frames and Public Policy Support,” has stirred up a hornet’s nest among Democratic strategists and analysts.The authors, Micah English and Joshua L. Kalla, who are both political scientists at Yale, warned proponents of liberal legislative proposals thatDespite increasing awareness of racial inequities and a greater use of progressive race framing by Democratic elites, linking public policies to race is detrimental for support of those policies.The English-Kalla paper infuriated critics who are involved in the Race-Class Narrative Project.The founder of the project, Ian Haney López, a law professor at Berkeley and one of the chairmen of the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice, vigorously disputes the English-Kalla thesis. In his view, “Powerful elites exploit social divisions, so no matter what our race, color or ethnicity, our best future requires building cross-racial solidarity.”In an email, López wrote me that the English and Kalla studyseems to confirm a conclusion common among Democratic strategists since at least 1970: Democrats can maximize support among whites, without losing too much enthusiasm from voters of color, by running silent on racial justice while emphasizing class issues of concern to all racial groups. Since at least 2017, this conclusion is demonstrably wrong.English and Kalla, for their part, surveyed 5,081 adults and asked them about six policies: increasing the minimum wage to $15; forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt; affordable housing; the Green New Deal; Medicare for All; decriminalizing marijuana and erasing prior convictions.Participants in the survey were randomly assigned to read about these policies in a “race, class, or a class plus race frame,” English and Kalla write.Those given information about housing policy in a “race frame” read:A century of housing and land use policies denied Black households access to homeownership and neighborhood opportunities offered to white households. These racially discriminatory housing policies have combined to profoundly disadvantage Black households, with lasting, intergenerational impact. These intergenerational impacts go a long way toward explaining the racial disparities we see today in wealth, income and educational outcomes for Black Americans.Those assigned to read about housing policy in a “class frame” were shown this:Housing is the largest single expense for the average American, accounting for a third of their income. Many working-class, middle-class, and working poor Americans spend over half their pay on shelter. Twenty-one million American families — over a sixth of the United States — are considered cost-burdened, paying more for rent than they can afford. These families are paying so much in rent that they are considered at elevated risk of homelessness.The “race and class group” read a version combining both race and class themes.English and Kalla found thatWhile among Democrats both the class and the class plus race frames cause statistically significant increases in policy support, statistically indistinguishable from each other — among Republicans the class plus race frame causes a statistically significant decrease in policy support. While the race frame also has a negative effect among Republicans, it is not statistically significant.Among independents — a key swing group both in elections and in determining the levels of support for public policies — English and Kalla found “positive effects from the class frame and negative effects from both the race and class plus race frames.”A late February survey of 1,551 likely voters by Vox and Data for Progress produced similar results. Half the sample was asked whether it would support or oppose zoning for multiple-family housing based on the argument thatIt’s a matter of racial justice. Single-family zoning requirements lock in America’s system of racial segregation, blocking Black Americans from pursuing economic opportunity and the American dream of homeownership.The other half of the sample read that supporters of multiple-family zoningsay that this will drive economic growth as more people will be able to move to high opportunity regions with good jobs and will allow more Americans the opportunity to get affordable housing on their own, making it easier to start families.The voters to whom the racial justice message was given were split, 44 in support, 43 in opposition, while those who were given the economic growth argument supported multiple-family zoning 47-36.After being exposed to the economic growth message, Democrats were supportive 63-25, but less so after the racial justice message, 56-28. Republicans were opposed after hearing either message, but less so in the case of economic growth, 35-50, compared to racial justice 31-60.López founded the Race-Class Narrative Project along with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a California-based communications consultant, and Heather McGhee, a former president of Demos, a liberal think tank and author of the recent book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”I asked López about the English-Kalla paper. He was forthright in his emailed reply:As my work and that of others demonstrates, the most potent political message today is one that foregrounds combating intentional divide-and-conquer racial politics by building a multiracial coalition among all racial groups. This frame performs more strongly than a class-only frame as well as a racial justice frame. It is also the sole liberal frame that consistently beats Republican dog whistling.Shenker-Osorio faulted English and Kalla’s work for being “unsurprising”:If you tell someone to support a policy because it will benefit a group they’re not part of, and that doesn’t work as well as telling them to support a policy they perceive will help them — this isn’t exactly shocking.Testing the effectiveness of messages on controversial issues, Shenker-Osorio continued, has to be done in the context of dealing with the claims of the opposition:Politics isn’t solitaire and so in order for our attempts to persuade conflicted voters to work, they must also act as a rebuttal to what these voters hear — incessantly — from our opposition. A class-only message about, say, minimum wage, held up against a drumbeat of “immigrants are taking your jobs” or racially-coded caricatures of who is in minimum wage jobs doesn’t cut through. Neither does a message about affordable housing credits or food stamps when the opposition will just keep hammering home the notion of “lazy people” wanting “handouts.”Unless Democrats explicitly address race, Shenker-Osorio wrote, millions of whites, flooded with Republican messages demonizing minorities, will continue to beprimed to view government as taking from “hard working people” (coded as white) and handing it to “undeserving people” (coded as Black and brown). If we do not contend with this basic fact — and today’s unrelenting race baiting from the right — then Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” will simply continue to haunt us. In other words, if the left chooses to say nothing about race, the race conversation doesn’t simply end. The only thing voters hear about the topic are the lies the right peddles to keep us from joining together to demand true progressive solutions.The Race-Class Narrative Project, which has conducted extensive surveys and focus groups, came to the conclusion that race could effectively be addressed in carefully worded messages.For instance:No matter where we come from or what our color, most of us work hard for our families. But today, certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists hurt everyone by handing kickbacks to the rich, defunding our schools, and threatening our seniors with cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for our hard times at poor families, Black people, and new immigrants. We need to join together with people from all walks of life to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights in our past.The race-class project also tested the efficacy of a class only message — “We need elected leaders who will reject the divide and conquer tactics of their opponents and put the interests of working people first” — versus a race and class message that simply added the phrase “whether we are white, Black or brown” to read:We need elected leaders who will reject the divide and conquer tactics of their opponents and put the interests of working people first, whether we are white, Black or brown.The result? The race and class message did substantially better than the class alone message among both base Democratic voters and persuadable voters. Base Democrats approved of the class message 79-16 and approved of the race and class message 86-11. Fewer persuadable voters approved of the class message than disapproved, 42-45, while more approved than disapproved of the race and class message, 48-41.I asked Shenker-Osorio how well she thinks Biden is doing when he talks about race:It’s definitely hit or miss. Sometimes he uses what I shorthand as “dependent clause” messaging where you name race after you’ve laid out an economic problem or offered an economic solution — e.g. “It’s getting harder for people to make ends meet, and this impacts [X Group] in particular.” This doesn’t work. For many people of color, this feels like race is an afterthought. For many whites, it feels like a non sequitur.At other times, Shenker-Osorio continued, Bidendoes what we’ve seen work: begin by naming a shared value with deliberate reference to race, describe the problem as one of deliberate division or racial scapegoating, and then close with how the policy he is pushing will mean better well-being or justice or freedom for all working people.In partial support of the Shenker-Osorio critique, Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, emailed me to say:The English and Kalla survey experiment was done in a particular context that did not include Republican messaging, media coverage and imagery, and other content that “real-world” politics cannot escape. If Republicans use race, whether through dog whistles or more overt racism, then it might be the case that Democratic “class only” appeals will fall flat as voters infer racial content even when Democrats don’t mention race.Another “important piece of context,” Grumbach wrote, “is that Biden is an older white man, which, research suggests, makes his policy appeals sound more moderate to voters than the actually more moderate Obama proposals.” More

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      Trump’s Latino Support Was More Widespread Than Thought, Report Finds

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      While Latinos played a major role in Democratic victories last year, Donald Trump’s outreach to them proved successful in states around the country, not just in certain geographic areas.Even as Latino voters played a meaningful role in tipping the Senate and the presidency to the Democrats last year, former President Donald J. Trump succeeded in peeling away significant amounts of Latino support, and not just in conservative-leaning geographic areas, according to a post-mortem analysis of the election that was released on Friday.Conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs, the report found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Mr. Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.Using data from Equis Labs’ polls in a number of swing states, as well as focus groups, the study found that within those groups, there was a shift toward Mr. Trump across the country, not solely in areas like Miami or the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where the growth in Mr. Trump’s Latino support has been widely reported.“In 2020, a segment of Latino voters demonstrated that they are more ‘swing’ than commonly assumed,” the report stated.Ultimately, Mr. Trump outperformed his 2016 showing among Latino voters, earning the support of about one in three nationwide, even as Joseph R. Biden Jr. won those voters by a roughly two-to-one margin over all, according to exit polls.All told, close to 17 million Latino voters turned out in the general election, according to a separate analysis published in January by the U.C.L.A. Latino Policy & Politics Initiative. That represented an uptick of more than 30 percent from 2016 — and the highest level of Latino participation in history.With the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic downturn taking center stage on the campaign trail, Equis Labs found that many Latino voters — particularly conservatives — had focused more heavily on economic issues than they had four years earlier. This helped Mr. Trump by putting the spotlight on an issue that was seen as one of his strong suits and by drawing some attention away from his anti-immigrant language.In focus groups, Equis Labs’ interviewers noticed that Mr. Trump’s history as a businessman was seen as a positive attribute by many Latino voters, who viewed him as well positioned to guide the economy through the pandemic-driven recession. Partly as a result, the analysis found, many conservative Latino voters who had been hanging back at the start of the campaign came around to supporting him.Driving up turnout among low-propensity voters — something that Senator Bernie Sanders had sought to do during his campaign for the Democratic nomination — did not necessarily translate into gains for Democrats in the general election, the study found. People who were likely to vote generally grew more negative on Mr. Trump’s job performance over the course of 2020, but among those who reported being less likely to participate in the election, his job approval rose.This finding is likely to fuel hand-wringing among Democratic strategists who worried that Mr. Biden had not done enough to court skeptical Latino voters ahead of November.The movement toward Mr. Trump appeared mostly “to be among those with the lowest partisan formation,” the analysts wrote. “We know enough to say these look like true swing voters. Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own.”Chuck Coughlin, a Republican pollster in Arizona, said he was unsurprised by the results of the Equis Labs report, given what he said had been a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to win Latino support.“You saw it in the rallies out here,” he said. “They did a rally down in Yuma. They did a rally at the Honeywell plant out here. All of those featured Hispanic small-business owners. They were working that crowd.”He said the Trump campaign’s messaging on economic and social issues had resonated for many Latino voters, particularly older ones. “They’re pro-business, they’re pro-gun, they don’t like higher taxes, they don’t trust the government,” he said. “It’s the same constituency that you see among Anglo Trump voters.”While the report didn’t closely analyze voters by their nations of origin, it did demonstrate that Mr. Trump’s relative success among Latino voters compared with four years earlier was not limited to areas with large populations of Cuban-Americans, Venezuelan-Americans and other demographics that have typically trended more conservative.Carmen Peláez, a playwright and filmmaker in Miami who helped lead the campaign group Cubanos con Biden, said that after the election, many observers had sought to ascribe Mr. Trump’s improvement among Florida Latinos to a shift among Cuban-Americans in the southern part of the state.The findings from Equis Labs validated her experience last year, she said, which showed that Latinos of all nationalities had been targeted online with advertisements and messages that scared them away from Democrats.“People love blaming the Cubans, but you can’t just blame the Cubans,” she said. “There is a cancer in our community, and it’s disinformation, and it’s hitting all of us.”Ms. Peláez said Democrats had habitually taken Latino voters for granted by mistakenly assuming that they knew those voters’ political habits and attitudes. Cuban-Americans, for example, are often painted with a broad brush as conservative.“It was assumed all Latinos would be pro-immigration or they were taken for granted because they were assumed to be a lost vote,” she said. “There’s never a lost vote if you are really willing to engage. But willing to engage means setting aside your own prejudices.” 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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      Trump 2.0 Looks an Awful Lot Like Trump 2020

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe conversationTrump 2.0 Looks an Awful Lot Like Trump 2020Are we really going to do this again?Gail Collins and Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.March 1, 2021Credit…Mark Peterson for The New York TimesBret Stephens: I don’t know about you, Gail, but watching Donald Trump’s speech at the CPAC conference in Orlando brought to mind that Michael Corleone line: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Here we were, barely a month into the Biden presidency, thinking we could finally put one American disaster behind us and have normal arguments about normal subjects, and now we may be staring at the worst sequel of all time.The idea of another Trump presidential run is worse than “The Godfather Part III.” It’s “Dumb and Dumberer” meets “Friday the 13th Part VIII.”Gail Collins: Well, he made it very clear he’s planning on a “triumphant return to the White House.” If you folks want to save the Republican Party, you’re going to have to take him on.Bret: I’ve always wanted to write a musical called “The Mitt and I.”Gail: Seeing Trump so clearly gearing up for another presidential run brought me back to an ongoing argument we’ve been having. Third parties. Am I to understand you’re a fan?Bret: I’m not a fan of third parties that have no hope of winning elections and mainly serve as vanity projects for the likes of Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. And I’m obviously not a fan of extremist parties, whether they are of the George Wallace or Henry Wallace varieties.On the other hand, I’d be a fan of a right-of-center party that can replace the current Republican Party, one that believes in the virtues of small government and personal responsibility without being nativist and nasty.Gail: A lovely idea, but it’s not going to work. Nobody’s ever made it work. We’ve already seen an exodus of moderates and sane conservatives from the Republican Party, leaving it even loopier. And Trump is threatening to start a third party of his own, or at least he was, which would split things even more.Feel free to daydream about the perfect, sane, moderate alternative Republican Party, Bret, but no chance.Bret: Well, Abe Lincoln made it work by building a party on the wreckage of the Whigs.Gail: Not going to interject that it took a civil war …Bret: And there’s a political moment here. Gallup released a poll two weeks ago showing that 62 percent of Americans believe that “parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed.” Among self-identified Republicans, the number was a notch higher: 63 percent. I think you are underestimating the number of people who feel they’ve been abandoned by a Republican Party that became a whacked-out cult of personality under Trump. What’s missing isn’t an agenda; it’s a galvanizing personality to lead a new movement.Gail: Which galvanizing personality do you have in mind — Mitt Romney?Bret: Given what happened to the G.O.P., I bet you sometimes wish he’d won back in 2012.Gail: Um, no. But let’s look at now. Reforming the current Republican Party would mean a million grass-roots battles to retake the base. Understandable that people would just prefer to start a new movement — much less nasty infighting. Just sincere get-togethers of like-minded people, holding barbecues and giving interviews to folks like us who are desperate to think this could work.But you could never create a massive 50-state party structure, with enough voters willing to make the very large decision of abandoning the party they’ve identified with forever. More