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      ‘Republicans Own These Issues, and They Can Hurt Democrats’

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      To advance his relentless political ambition, Donald Trump has ridden a promise, a commitment and a pledge.A promise to end the illegal flow of migrants, drugs, cash and guns “across our border.”A commitment to stop other countries seeking “to suck more blood out of the United States.”A pledge to impose law-and-order solutions on cities “where there is a true breakdown in the rule of law,” describing a majority-Black city like Baltimore as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and warning gangs of shoplifters just last week that if he is elected again, “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”How relevant are those themes going to be heading into the 2024 election? Will they work to attract enough voters for him to win? Do they address the sources of voter anxiety?Here are some sources of voter angst that have Trump relishing his rematch with President Biden. Crime — urban and rural — has become more unsettling and threatening. Carjacking, for example, is on the rise of (growing in Washington, D.C., from 152 in 2019 to 485 in 2022). Murder in major cities is up 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022; gun assaults are up 43.2 percent. Shoplifting in Trump’s telling creates an image of urban lawlessness reinforced by liberal prosecutors’ adoption of policies like no cash bail and the non-prosecution of misdemeanors. The southern border has become increasingly porous, with the number of migrants crossing into the United States in August breaking all records as the U.S. Border Patrol arrested over 91,000 migrants. Southern Republicans, in turn, have shipped migrants by bus to New York, Washington, Chicago and other municipalities.The incumbent president, Joe Biden — fairly or unfairly — does not convey the image of a leader in control of events.The damage inflicted on students in public schools by the Covid lockdown, by school shootings and by conflicts over race, gender and sexual identity — particularly over what can and cannot be discussed or taught — is broadly undermining confidence in American education.And then there is the problem of inflation, which for many Americans is eating away at their sense of security and their standard of living.The reality is that Trump has plenty to capitalize on, but the question remains: With his venomous and often incoherent rants, with 91 felony charges against him, with his White House record of chaos and mismanagement, has Trump worn out his welcome with all but his hard-core MAGA loyalists?I posed these questions to a cross-section of scholars and political operatives. Their responses suggest that Trump might well be a competitive nominee in 2024, with the potential to win a second term in the White House.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, captured in an email the conflicting forces at work as the next election approaches: “Americans see the collapse of safety in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco and blame the entire Democratic Party for the policies of a fringe extreme.”Westwood cited data in a Pew Research study showing that “a majority of Republicans and Independents and a near majority of Democrats (49 percent) reported that violent crime was important to their 2022 vote (including 81 percent of Blacks).”While “Trump is successfully branding Democrats as weak on crime and immigration,” Westwood continued, it remains uncertain whether he can persuade voters that he is the better choice: “It is hard for Trump to convince Americans that he is the tough-on-crime candidate while simultaneously demanding the destruction of the Department of Justice and railing against the integrity of the judicial system.”In the case of immigration, Westwood argued, “Democrats don’t seem to have a coherent policy they can sell to Americans.”“As with crime and immigration, the state of the economy should be wind behind a Republican’s sails,” he added.Trump, however, in Westwood’s view, remains an albatross strangling Republican ambitions:By sticking with Trump the party is potentially sacrificing huge advantages to support an elderly man who could spend the rest of his life in prison. This is a Republican election to lose, but Trump might just help the Democrats survive their own policy failures.In an April Brookings essay, “The Geography of Crime in Four U.S. Cities: Perceptions and Reality,” Hanna Love and Tracy Hadden Loh argue:While stoking fears of crime is an age-old election tactic, something feels different about its salience in the pandemic-era landscape. Faced with slow-recovering urban cores and predictions of an “urban doom loop,” many pundits and urban observers are returning to a playbook not fully deployed since the 1990s — pointing to public safety as the primary cause of a host of complex and interconnected issues, from office closures to public transit budget shortfalls to the broader decline of cities.Love and Loh interviewed nearly 100 business leaders, public officials and residents of New York, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago. Their primary finding:Respondents overwhelmingly pointed to crime — not the desire for flexible work arrangements — as the top barrier to preventing workers’ return to office. Across all four cities, the vast majority of resident, major employers, property owners, small business owners and other stakeholders reporting rising rates of violent crime and property crime downtown and indicators of “disorder” (such as public drug use) as the top barriers to stopping workers from coming back to the office — and thus impeding downtown recovery.Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Duke, wrote by email that both immigration and crime pose difficult political choices for Democrats, especially those with progressive ideals: “First for the migrant question, any large uptick in marginalized populations that is visible to native populations have the potential both to create unease among those populations and to be blamed for any increases in the risk of victimization that folks feel.”How much does this hurt the Democrats?“I would say a whole heck of a lot potentially unless they are willing to adopt the sort of stance to crime and punishment that President Bill Clinton took in his 1992 campaign and presidency.”The result?This rise in visible criminal activity and social unrest leaves Democrats where they essentially either give up their values in terms of crime and punishment and keep voters in the middle or hold the line in terms of crime and punishment (continuing to argue for more progressive policies) and risk losing some votes. It’s not a great spot.Wildeman is not alone in his belief that these issues are quite likely to work to the detriment of Biden and the Democratic Party generally.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, emailed his view thatthe themes that are to the Democrats’ disadvantage are more relevant than they were in 2016. The burden posed by migrants is a greater issue, and the increase in the crime rate and murder rate, along with the inability of law enforcement to control rampant shoplifting in some cities, can even make the Democrats’ base among minority voters and college educated voters uneasy, and also women — varying geographically.“Republicans own these issues,” Shapiro pointed out, “and they can hurt Democrats. These issues along with education, race and gender identity will help Republicans running for Congress and state offices, even if they benefit Trump less due to his other serious baggage.”Roland Neil, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation, also pointed to the dangers facing Biden and his fellow Democrats:Two things we can be certain of: first, violent crime increased dramatically in many cities, especially when the pandemic hit; and second, this coincided with various progressive criminal justice reform efforts, such as bail reform, more lenient prosecution in some jurisdictions and calls to defund the police.While the incidence of violent crime has subsided in recent months, Neil noted:Focusing on that misses the point, since the issues drawing attention are all real problems facing cities and the public has taken notice. They should not be dismissed as trivial, as they genuinely impact safety and quality of life.There is no consistent and reliable data, Neil wrote, “for crimes and disorder that have been drawing much attention, like carjacking, retail theft by flash mobs, open air drug markets and the changing nature of encounters with homeless people.”That said, he added, “there is evidence that carjackings are up in several cities since the pandemic. Also, drug overdose deaths are at historical highs, and motor vehicle theft is up sharply in many cities.”Philadelphia, according to Neil, “presents an interesting case: shootings and murder are down by about a quarter this year (from a very high level), but flash mob retail thefts likely create the sense of a city that is losing control.”Phillip Atiba Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale, stressed the racial implications of Trump’s strategy in his emailed reply to my inquiry, arguing that these have the strong potential to sway white voters:Broadly, I think the themes you outline can be simplified to, “We’re the victims, and the victimizers are getting away with murder.” And, yes, I think they’ll apply this year as well as in any year when the “we” includes a coalition of elites and paycheck-to-paycheck working folks, each of whom reasonably see themselves as losing ground they once felt confident belonged to them (however ill-gotten that ground was in the first place).According to Solomon:This is a country that generally makes life hard for working people and is busily shifting symbols around that are meaningful to people who identify as white. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to manipulate feelings that life is not fair into feelings that “we” are being persecuted by “those people” who are stealing what “rightfully belongs to us” — literally, figuratively and with all appropriate scare quotes.The current political environment entails both conflict between the parties and disputes within each of the parties. Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, described this ambiguity in an email:The conventional wisdom is that any Republican candidate for president, not just Trump, should focus on three issues: inflation, immigration and crime. Trump may be uniquely positioned to take advantage of these three issues, particularly since he has a more moderate image than his competitors on issues where Republicans are disadvantaged: abortion and entitlements — Social Security and Medicare.The flip side, Malhotra wrote, “is that the Democratic candidate for president should be focusing the campaign around abortion rights, climate change, health care and economic inequality.”Malhotra cited a Pew Research survey from June, “Inflation, Health Costs, Partisan Cooperation Among the Nation’s Top Problems,” that broke down the issues on which voters agree more with Republicans than Democrats and vice versa.Republicans had the edge on economic policy (42-30), immigration (41-31) and crime (40-30). Democrats led on climate change policy (41-27), abortion (43-31) and health care (39-27). The smallest gaps were on foreign policy, favoring Republicans (37-33), gun policy (statistically even) and education, favoring Democrats (37-33).Crime, in Malhotra’s view,is a particularly interesting topic because it’s always been more about perception than reality. Violent crime statistics have been declining during the Biden administration from the Covid peak, but there is a general image of lawlessness mainly around property crime, which I believe is a real and persistent problem in many areas.In the case of crime, Malhotra wrote, “You don’t actually need to be a victim or even in danger for it to affect your political worldview. I suspect a lot of Americans’ reaction to property crime is a sense of helplessness and a world they are not used to.”Malhotra made the case that Trump loyalists are a more complicated constituency than they are often described as being:There is a lot of talk of MAGA voters as wanting to go back to a 1950s America characterized by racism and sexism. I’m sure people like that exist, but there is another type of MAGA voter that I’ll call “end-of-history MAGA.”Many of these people are members of Gen X (born between 1961 and 1981), which is a generation that slightly leans Republican. “End-of-history-MAGA” people look back to the 1990s as a peak period of American greatness characterized by economic strength, declining crime, etc. I don’t think these people can be easily dismissed as racist or sexist. But they may believe that America has been in decline on many dimensions.The entry of growing numbers of younger voters into the electorate, Malhotra noted, will work to Biden’s advantage, as they “generally see immigration and crime as less important issues than older voters.”But, Malhotra cautioned, “a potential threat for Biden is that younger voters are being crushed by high rent, high interest rates and low housing supply, and they see little optimism for experiencing the American dream of homeownership.”Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, makes the point that in 2024 Trump will have been the nominee, if all goes as expected, three times in a row, and Biden twice. When combined with the increasing immovability of polarized Democrats and Republicans determined to support their own parties, “2024 will likely look much like 2020 and 2016.”“There simply won’t be much movement in the aggregate,” he added. “This means that even small things on the margin could end up mattering a lot.”Levendusky, in contrast to some others I have quoted here, suggests that despite a difficult set of issues, Biden may be stronger than expected:In a normal year, Biden would be in real trouble. But Trump brings his own unique issues as well, especially this year. He’s a uniquely mobilizing factor for Democrats — they view him as an existential threat, and his indictments may well drag down support among key groups he needs to win back in order to secure the White House.In the case of Trump’s indictments, Levendusky argues that “the core of Trump’s base is unlikely to be moved, but more marginal voters are a different story.” If these “wavering Republicans or independent voters are in key states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, etc., that will be extremely damaging to Trump.”Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively about crime, argued in an email that Biden can make the case that he has a better record on fighting gun violence and crime than is widely recognized:Candidate Trump will undoubtedly paint a portrait of urban America as lawless, dangerous, and disorderly, just as he did in 2016. That said, President Biden has a strong case to make that he has done more than any recent president to address gun violence.Gun violence, Sharkey wrote,began to skyrocket in the summer of 2020, when former President Trump was in office. Since that point, the level of violence has plateaued, and so far in 2023 the vast majority of U.S. cities have seen sharp declines in homicides and shootings.While the Republican Party, Sharkey continued,has railed against the Department of Justice and largely ignored the Jan. 6 assault on U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department officers, the Biden administration has invested additional federal funding in law enforcement while also using federal funds to support Community Violence Intervention programs, which, even if the funding was nowhere near sufficient, represents a historic expansion of the federal government’s approach to addressing violent crime. The passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the first major federal legislation to address guns in decades.A potential problem with Sharkey’s analysis is that in contemporary campaigns, especially those involving Donald Trump, it’s not at all clear that substance matters.Few, if any, have put it better than retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who on Oct. 2 expressed to CNN his frustration over seeing his ex-boss far ahead in the competition for the nomination:What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.’”A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.Kelly continued:A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. … A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      GOP Candidates Split Over Kevin McCarthy’s Ouster as House Speaker

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      The ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Tuesday exposed sharp divisions among the Republican presidential field, with at least one candidate saying that the power move by right-wing caucus members had been warranted — but others bemoaned the turmoil, and some stayed silent.Several hours before the House voted to vacate the speakership, former President Donald J. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he was fed up with the infighting within the G.O.P.“Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” he wrote.But Mr. Trump did not weigh in directly after Mr. McCarthy was removed from his leadership post.His differences with Mr. McCarthy had been simmering in the open, including over a federal government shutdown that was narrowly averted Saturday when the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for another 45 days.Mr. Trump publicly egged on far-right House members to dig in, telling them in an Oct. 24 social media post, “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” He accused Republican leaders of caving to Democrats during negotiations over the debt ceiling in the spring, saying that they should use the shutdown to advance efforts to close the southern border and to pursue retribution against the Justice Department for its “weaponization.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was the only Republican presidential candidate openly welcoming the discord as of Wednesday morning.“My advice to the people who voted to remove him is own it. Admit it,” he said in a video posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. “There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was. But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?”Mr. Ramaswamy, who had previously argued that a temporary government shutdown would not go far toward dismantling the “administrative state,” said that the status quo in the House was untenable.“Once in a while, a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing,” he said. “Just ask our founding fathers. That’s what this country is founded on, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is now running against his former boss for the party’s nomination, lamented the revolt against Mr. McCarthy. Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, he said that he was disappointed by the outcome.“Well, let me say that chaos is never America’s friend,” Mr. Pence, a former House member, said.But earlier in his remarks, he downplayed the fissure between Republicans in the House over Mr. McCarthy’s status and fiscal differences. He asserted that a few G.O.P. representatives had aligned themselves with Democrats to create chaos in the chamber, saying that on days like this, “I don’t miss being in Congress.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida questioned the motivations of Representative Matt Gaetz, a fellow Floridian who is Mr. McCarthy’s top antagonist in the House. During an appearance on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis suggested that Mr. Gaetz’s rebellion had been driven by political fund-raising.“I think when you’re doing things, you need to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It shouldn’t be done with an eye towards trying to generate lists or trying to generate fund-raising.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also criticized Mr. Gaetz on Tuesday, telling Forbes that his overall approach did “a lot of damage.” Of the efforts to oust Mr. McCarthy, he added: “It’s not helpful. It certainly doesn’t help us focus on the issues that everyday voters care about.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey chimed in Wednesday morning, denouncing the hard-right rebels and expressing concern about the electoral implications. In an appearance on CNBC, he said their actions had given voters “more of a concern about our party being a governing party, and that’s bad for all of us running for president right now.”Mr. Christie said the roots of the chaos lay with Mr. Trump, who he said “set this type of politics in motion.” He also blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms, which gave Republicans only a narrow House majority and made it possible for a handful of people like Mr. Gaetz to wield such outsize influence.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador who has been rising in some polls, appeared to keep silent in the hours after Mr. McCarthy was ousted. A spokeswoman for her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Americans Deserve Better From the House of Representatives

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      This article has been updated to include new information about Mr. McCarthy’s decision not to run for speaker again.The U.S. Capitol may be perched on a hill, but it is understandable why so many Americans look down on it.One of the main reasons is that their Congress, which ought to be a global beacon of liberal values, continues to succumb to self-inflicted paralysis. How else can it be that fewer than a dozen lawmakers from the outer fringes of the Republican Party are holding one of the world’s oldest democracies hostage to their wildest whims?On Tuesday a small group of Republicans effectively shut down all business in the House when they voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Though 210 of 218 House Republicans supported him, he lost his job when just eight members of the caucus voted against him, joining all Democrats who voted.Without a speaker, the House can get nothing done. There will be no votes or even debate about paying for the government’s operations, though the money runs out in six weeks. There will be no discussion of how to help Ukraine or how to deal with the nation’s immigration crisis or any of the other crises facing Washington.Even before he lost his job, Mr. McCarthy and his caucus lurched the nation from debt limit crisis to shutdown crisis to win debating points that might help them in the next elections rather than pass meaningful legislation that addresses the nation’s challenges. We’re now in the middle of yet another pointless fight, this time over the funding of the federal government and the leadership of the House.Republicans in the House showed briefly, on Saturday, that they were willing to do the right thing and compromise to avoid a shutdown. In the upcoming votes to choose a new speaker, they can and should do that again, by showing their commitment to responsible governance. If Democrats can help achieve that, they should. The next candidates for speaker could win Democratic votes by promising a different course, one that brings both parties together for the common good. Any other candidate for the job will also face the same choice.Voters have given Republicans a majority of seats in the House and thus control over selecting the speaker, who sets the agenda in the House. Those voters, in turn, should expect the body to serve the people who elected them.It’s possible that the Republican Party is finally ready to again choose pragmatism over partisanship. Last weekend Mr. McCarthy sought and received the support of hundreds of Democrats to pass a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, a measure that pushed a potential government shutdown 45 days down the road.It’s hard to get excited about a victory in a fight that never needed to happen, especially at the last possible moment. But the saga reflects the reality of D.C. today: Bipartisan compromise has become the sole path to governing in the United States in 2023.Democrats have the White House and a one-seat majority in the Senate, while Republicans control the House of Representatives and appointed a supermajority of conservatives on the Supreme Court. President Biden’s executive authority extends only as far as the courts have allowed, while the only path through the Senate is with enough bipartisan support to skirt the shoals of a filibuster. The government, like the nation, is divided.But political polarization is not the excuse for inaction that so many grandstanding politicos too often take it to be. With a divided Congress, the only way to get any legislation passed is with some support from the center of both parties. A Congress that operated in a more bipartisan manner could move the country beyond its impasses over issues like immigration or the sustainability of the social safety net. A more confident center-right party that doesn’t genuflect to Donald Trump would have an easier time achieving those ambitious acts of self-governance.While that’s a tall order, it is not impossible: Just look at the past few days.Mr. McCarthy did the right thing on Saturday, outmaneuvering the radicals in his own party, led by Representative Matt Gaetz, to keep the federal government open. The next speaker needs to deprive Mr. Gaetz and his ilk of the weapon they’ve been using to force the House leadership into compliance with their demands. Congress represents more than 330 million Americans; Mr. Gaetz and his allies should not be given a heckler’s veto over the business of government.It was a conscious choice by the ousted speaker of the House to give them one. In the face of intransigence from his right flank, the next speaker should drop the anachronistic practice that demands Republicans bring up only legislation backed by a majority of their members. The so-called Hastert rule, named for Dennis Hastert, the disgraced former speaker, appears nowhere in the Constitution and can be used to prevent the House from moving forward with bipartisan legislation.A new speaker should also commit to plain dealing with Democratic colleagues and may need them to prevent another putsch. Mr. McCarthy lost faith among Democrats by failing to keep his word and honor a deal over spending caps that he negotiated with the White House in May. The next speaker might consider that a good starting point for negotiations.Once a new speaker is chosen, the House will have less than 45 days to avert yet another standoff over a shutdown, and members of good will in both parties will again need to show that they are willing and able to compromise; the Democrats could permit more spending on border security, and Republicans should continue the vital flow of aid to Ukraine, among other issues.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said Tuesday that his caucus would “remain willing to find common ground on an enlightened path forward,” one that did not leave the public’s business at the mercy of a few extremists. Whichever leader Republicans now choose should agree to a similar path.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Matt Gaetz Is Polarizing, in Both Congress and His Florida District

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      In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Mr. Gaetz is admired for shaking up the House, but he also has plenty of critics.He is polarizing in Washington and polarizing at home. And in both places these days, he is getting more attention than anyone might expect, given his lack of seniority and thin legislative record.As Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida orchestrated the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday, constituents in his overwhelmingly Republican district had plenty of thoughts about their congressman’s actions and suddenly robust national profile.“If we got rid of the speaker of the House, hopefully we get someone in there who doesn’t make backdoor deals with Democrats,” said Sandra Atkinson, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Okaloosa County, adding that Republicans were proud of him for following through on his word.Critics in his district saw a political moment that was about ego and ambition and little more.“He is following through on using chaos as both a performative art — that phrase is overused but it’s true — and because he’s frustrated he’s not getting his own way,” said Phil Ehr, a Democrat who ran against Mr. Gaetz in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “In some ways, he’s acting like a petulant child.”Yet for all of his time spent picking fights — and, his critics say, little time crafting legislation — Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle, where he won re-election last year by nearly 36 percentage points. His skirmishes in Washington, and a federal investigation that revealed embarrassing details about this private life, have done little to bruise him.Palafox Pier in Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday. Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle where he won re-election last year.Elijah Baylis for The New York Times“There’s a lot of people who like Matt Gaetz,” said Joel Terry May, 67, a local artist, as he showed off a painting in downtown Pensacola to visitors from New Orleans. “He speaks for the people, and he speaks out.”Mr. May, who grew up in Alabama, remembers a time when former Gov. George C. Wallace visited his school back in the 1960s.“People didn’t like George Wallace nationally, but the people who elected him and represented him did,” he said. “That’s what Gaetz also understands. When you represent somebody, you want them to maintain the feel of the people. People want to see Washington work. They want their representatives to have a pulse on the area.”Mr. Gaetz is widely disliked by his peers in Congress but is grudgingly acknowledged to be smart and crafty, and certainly a master of drawing attention to himself. Mr. Gaetz was re-elected last year while under the cloud of an investigation in a federal sex-trafficking case that ultimately resulted in no criminal charges against him. (A congressional ethics review is pending.) Twice, women have been arrested after throwing their drinks at him.Now, his support for a far-right posture that could shut down the federal government — directly affecting many of the people he represents — is unlikely to dent him, his critics acknowledged.“He is loved by the First Congressional District,” said Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary.Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary. campaigning in Pace, Fla., last year. Gregg Pachkowski/Pensacola News Journal/ USA TODAYMr. Lombardo attributed his loss, among other things, to Mr. Gaetz’s family ties — his father, Don Gaetz, is a wealthy and well-known former president of the Florida Senate who on Monday filed to run for the Senate again after stepping down in 2016 — and his devotion to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gaetz is one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in Congress and has backed him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“He was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,” Mr. Lombardo said of the congressman, “and the First District is all about Trump.”No other congressional district in the country has as many military veterans, a group that could have been badly hurt by a shutdown. Yet even his critics concede that Mr. Gaetz remains popular among them.Barry Goodson, 70, a registered Democrat and retired Army veteran who once helped organize people against a plan backed by Mr. Gaetz to privatize some of Northwest Florida’s sandy-white beaches, said he worries his health care providers at the Department of Veterans Affairs would suffer under a shutdown.“I still can’t understand why Gaetz hates negotiating rather than working out something for the people in the district,” he said.“A chaos agent is not good for public policy,” said Samantha Herring, a Democratic national committeewoman in Walton County. “It’s not good for getting highway funds, education and veterans affairs.”And Mr. McCarthy’s ouster left even some fans of Mr. Gaetz with questions about exactly what had been accomplished.“That just makes me support him even more,” said Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy.Elijah Baylis for The New York TimesJohn Roberts, chairman of the Escambia County Republican Party, said that Republicans, even those typically sympathetic to Mr. Gaetz’s views on other policies like immigration and the national debt, generally supported keeping Mr. McCarthy as speaker.“It’s not like we’re mad at Matt Gaetz; he’s still a good congressman,” he said. “But I think this was probably the wrong move.”But as the House smoldered and shook, other backers of Mr. Gaetz said they were all in.Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, has voted for Mr. Gaetz. Upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Hudson offered only more praise.“That just makes me support him even more,” Mr. Hudson said.He added that the ouster of Mr. McCarthy “speaks to how the world really is right now. We’re tired. We’re fed up. We want to see people start getting things done.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Kari Lake Files to Run for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate Seat in Arizona

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      Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor who refused to acknowledge her loss in the Arizona governor’s race last year, filed paperwork on Tuesday to run for Senate, setting up what is expected to be one of the most competitive Senate races in the country as Republicans try to win back the chamber.The incumbent, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party last year to become an independent, has not confirmed whether she will run for re-election, but a prominent Democrat, Representative Ruben Gallego, is already challenging her. Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is also running.On Tuesday, Ms. Lake was in Washington, where she met with several Republican members of the Senate, including John Cornyn of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, according to people familiar with the discussions who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.She also met with Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Mr. Daines is considering an endorsement for Ms. Lake, which may convince moderate donors to give the conservative firebrand a second look.A person close to Ms. Lake confirmed that she had filed paperwork to open her Senate campaign. She is scheduled to hold her first rally as a candidate next week.Ms. Lake lost the governor’s race to Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes, a little over half a percentage point. She was one of many Republicans, including several in Arizona, who lost close contests last year after running on Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. While most of those Republicans conceded their own losses, Ms. Lake followed Mr. Trump’s lead and continued to insist that she had won even after her legal challenges were rejected.Her campaign circulated testimonials from supporters who claimed to have been disenfranchised by technical problems with voting machines, but a New York Times review found that most of them had been able to vote. She filed a lawsuit in December alleging deliberate misconduct by election officials — though she did not provide evidence of that, or of any unintentional disenfranchisement. A judge rejected her claims later that month.In February, when she said she was considering running for Senate, she was still claiming to be the rightful governor and raising money for lawsuits. The Arizona Supreme Court refused to hear her case in March, and in May, a lower-court judge threw out a challenge she had filed over the verification of signatures for mail-in ballots.During her campaign, she followed Mr. Trump in both style and substance, using the news media as a foil after working for years as a local television anchor in Phoenix. She repeatedly promoted Mr. Trump’s election lies, won his endorsement and in the Republican primary, defeated Karrin Taylor Robson, a rival supported by the state’s G.O.P. establishment. More

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      James Craig, a Republican, Enters Michigan Senate Race

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      James Craig, a former Detroit police chief, announced on Tuesday that he was running for the Senate seat in Michigan being vacated by Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat who is retiring after more than two decades in the position.Mr. Craig, 67, ran for governor of Michigan last year and was leading early Republican primary polls until he was disqualified because of forged signatures on his nominating petition.He is likely to promote his background in law enforcement as he campaigns on some of the conservative priorities that have helped propel former President Donald J. Trump.But national Republicans have privately expressed concerns about Mr. Craig’s candidacy, worrying that personal issues, including multiple bankruptcies and divorces, could prove detrimental to his campaign.The campaign arm for Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, has recruited former Representative Mike Rogers, 60, to run for the seat.The Democratic Party’s best-known candidate so far is Representative Elissa Slotkin, who was elected to Congress in the blue wave of 2018 and has won re-election twice in a swing district. Her primary opponents include Hill Harper, an actor; Nasser Beydoun, a businessman; and Pamela Pugh, the president of the State Board of Education. More

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      Biden Has to Look Beyond Trump and His MAGA Millions

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      Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy.Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his allies to accept election defeats:As you think about the threat to democracy, do you think about it specifically as the refusal to accept election defeats and peaceful transfer of power? Or does it more broadly encompass some of the longstanding features of democracy, like the Electoral College, the nature of the Senate, the gerrymandering process, that sometimes thwarts the will of the majority?In his answer, Biden more or less confirms that yes, when he speaks of the threat to democracy, he specifically means the threat coming from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. For Biden, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the “underpinnings of democracy.” The issue, for him, is that MAGA Republicans would try to overturn elections and “prevent the people’s voice” from being expressed, not to mention heard.Toward the end of the interview, Biden takes care to emphasize the extent to which he separates MAGA Republicans from the rest of the public. “I really do believe the vast majority of the American people are decent, honorable, straightforward,” the president says. The MAGA radicals, he adds, are “a minority of the minority.” Biden goes on to argue that this majority of decent Americans “needs to understand what the danger is if they don’t participate.”This last point is interesting. If the most radicalized and anti-democratic segment of the public is also a small and unrepresentative minority, then there’s no real reason to worry about its influence on electoral politics. Yes, it may elect a few similarly radical members of Congress — who at this moment are giving the Republican speaker of the House a terrible headache — and it may even be strong enough again to choose a major-party nominee. But if these voters are a distinct minority, that nominee will be easily defeated at the ballot box. That is, unless the institutions of our democracy amplify that minority’s influence — which they do.Biden might reject Harwood’s suggestion that the institutions of the American political system constitute a threat to American democracy as dire as the threat posed by Trump, but the only way to square the circle of a radical minority with democracy-destroying potential is to acknowledge the way our institutions work to empower the people who hope to overturn constitutional government altogether.One response is to say that this dynamic represents a distortion of our political institutions: It’s just that they’re not working properly! But that’s not right, is it?Whatever they were, the radical impulses that animated or shaped the most prominent and influential of the American revolutionaries were refracted through an inherited commitment to the received hierarchies of status that shaped their world. What’s more, the framers of the Constitution were pushed toward a mistrust and wariness of popular government as a result of the riots, rebellions and other forms of mass discontent that characterized American politics under the Articles of Confederation.For as much as we have changed and transformed our political institutions — to make them far more inclusive and responsive than they were at their inception — it is also clear that they retain the stamp of their heritage.Our counter-majoritarian institutions, for example, continue to place an incredibly higher barrier to efforts to reduce concentrations of wealth and promote greater economic equality. There is a real chance, for example, that the Supreme Court will deem a wealth tax constitutionally impermissible in its next term. And the United States Senate is a graveyard of attempts to expand federal aid and social insurance, the most recent of which was a child allowance that, while it was in effect, slashed child poverty by nearly half in 2021.But more immediate to Biden’s concerns about democracy is the fact, as I have discussed before, that the Trump crisis may never have materialized if not for specific institutions, like the Electoral College, that gave Trump the White House despite his defeat at the hands of most voters. And even with the Electoral College, Trump might not have won if our Supreme Court had not, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the most aggressive and effective rule for the federal protection of voting rights since Reconstruction.Trump aside, various efforts to invalidate elections and create durable systems of minority rule in the states are possible only because of a constitutional structure that gives a considerable amount of power and sovereignty to sub-national units of political authority.Naturally, a U.S. president cannot publicly say that the system he presides over has serious flaws that undermine its integrity. But it does. And there is a good chance that if Trump becomes president a second time, it will be less because the voting public wants him and more because our institutions have essentially privileged his supporters with greater electoral power. If anyone is aware of this, it has to be Biden, who won the national popular vote by six million in 2020, but would have lost the election if not for a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of so-called swing states.All of this is to say that assuming we meet the immediate challenge and keep Trump from winning next year, it will be worth it for Americans to start to think — out loud, in a collective and deliberate manner — about the kinds of structural reforms we might pursue to make our democracy more resilient or even to realize it more fully in the first place.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      House Democrat Leaves Leadership Position After Teasing Run Against Biden

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      Representative Dean Phillips would be a long-shot candidate, given that party leadership and major donors have coalesced around President Biden.Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota said Sunday that he would step down from his Democratic leadership position in the House as he flirts with a challenge to President Biden.Mr. Phillips, who served as co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, has for months called for other Democrats to run against Mr. Biden in the presidential primary, citing his age — Mr. Biden is 80 — as a hindrance.“My convictions relative to the 2024 presidential race are incongruent with the majority of my caucus, and I felt it appropriate to step aside from elected leadership to avoid unnecessary distractions during a critical time for our country,” he said in a statement to The Times.Mr. Phillips, 54, said in July that he was considering a run against Mr. Biden — though he would have an uphill climb, given that party leadership and major donors have coalesced around the incumbent president. Two long-shot Democratic candidates — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson — are already in the race, but have struggled to gain support from Democratic voters or donors. Mr. Kennedy has strongly hinted that he would launch a third-party bid. No other challengers to Mr. Biden have emerged, despite Mr. Phillips’ urging and warning signs for Mr. Biden in the polls. Several Democrats who were seen as potential candidates have thrown their support to the president.The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Phillips’ resignation.Mr. Phillips said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that he was “not pressured or forced to resign” and he complimented Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, the committee chairman, on their “authentic & principled leadership.”Mr. Phillips will continue to represent the suburban Minneapolis district that he flipped in 2018, when he became the first Democrat to win that seat since 1958. More