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      Pakistan Withers Under Deadly Heat and Fears the Coming Rains

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      Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, endured days of temperatures above 100 Fahrenheit, made worse by power cuts and high humidity.In nearly every corner of Karachi, there are signs of the heat wave scorching the sun-baked city.Hundreds of patients suffering from heat-related illnesses pour into the hospitals every day, pushing them far past their capacity. Morgues overwhelmed by a surge in bodies are struggling to find space.Frustrated residents have begun blocking roads with stones and sticks to protest shortages of electricity and drinking water. Even the usually bustling markets and streets have emptied as people avoid leaving their homes unless they must.Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its economic hub, is the latest place to suffer as South Asia roasts under a blistering heat wave this summer, a brutal reminder of the deadly toll of climate change in a part of the world especially vulnerable to its effects, and in a country where ineffective governance and large economic disparities have magnified the sufferings of its poorest citizens.In a particularly dire eight-day stretch late last month, temperatures reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), with high humidity adding to the misery. That was the hottest since 2015, a year when officials reported that more than 1,200 people died from heat-related causes in Karachi.With temperatures still hovering near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the sense of crisis has persisted.“It feels like living in a furnace,” said Akbar Ali, 52, a rickshaw driver who has transported many heat-struck people to the hospital in recent weeks. “It’s terrible seeing people collapse on the street.”Inside a crowded children’s ward at a hospital in Karachi on Friday. Children and older people are particularly sensitive to excess heat.Insiya Syed for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Heat Wave Bakes New Jersey, Residents Asked to Reduce Water Use

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      The intense and unusually early heat wave that has blanketed much of the Northeast for the past week continued on Sunday to scorch New Jersey, where excessive heat warnings or heat advisories were in effect in most of the state, according to the National Weather Service.Temperatures throughout the region were more than 10 degrees above average on Sunday, according to Joe DeSilva, a meteorologist with the Weather Service. Trenton, the state capital, reached 98 degrees — just two degrees shy of the city’s hottest recorded temperature, last logged in 1952, he said.The worst of the sweltering heat should be over by Sunday evening, Mr. DeSilva said, though temperatures were expected to remain in the 80s in the coming week.Officials in numerous communities urged residents — especially older people, homeless people and those with chronic health conditions — to prevent heat-related illness by staying hydrated, using air-conditioning, limiting strenuous physical activity and wearing loose, light-colored clothing. Pet owners should also monitor their animals for signs of overheating, such as excessive panting, drooling and lethargy, officials said.The state’s Department of Environmental Protection encouraged New Jerseyans to take advantage of the Chill Out NJ tool, an online map of public places where people can find air-conditioning, pools, splash pads, beaches or shady parks.The lengthy heat wave also prompted officials in some places, including Pennsville Township, Moorestown and Vineland in South Jersey, and Ridgewood, Denville and Butler in North Jersey, to announce mandatory or optional water restrictions, asking residents to refrain from washing their cars or watering their lawns. And at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, a National Women’s Soccer League game between Gotham F.C. and the Washington Spirit on Sunday was moved to 6 p.m. from 1:30 p.m. because of the heat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Should Historic Buildings Give Way to New Housing?

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      More from our inbox:Moving the Needle on TrumpRussian vs. RussianI’m Off Social MediaA duplex in Canarsie, still standing, where Mr. Appelbaum’s grandparents lived for three decades.To the Editor:Re “Preservation Has Become the Enemy of Evolution,” by Binyamin Appelbaum (Opinion, Jan. 7):We must destroy New York in order to save it? And discard our history and heritage for expediency’s sake?New York City needs more, not less, historical memory. What we do not need is a return to the housing policies of Robert Moses.Mr. Appelbaum writes that much of Brooklyn Heights has been fossilized. Would he say that Paris has been “fossilized” because its city leaders preserve its buildings? There’s no other place like Brooklyn Heights in the United States. But there are countless other cities around the globe with soulless, interchangeable skyscrapers. We mustn’t sacrifice what makes New York unique and beautiful simply for new buildings and for uncreative solutions to pressing housing problems.We have lots of unused commercial and industrial buildings in the city that can be converted to housing. We have millions of square feet of office space that will never be used again, despite the desires of wealthy developers. The solution isn’t to destroy the homes that are already built and have been preserved.How the Russian Government Silences Wartime DissentA law making it illegal to discredit Russia’s army has ensnared thousands of Russians for even mild acts or statements against the war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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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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      How Chicago’s Mayoral Runoff Could Play Out on a National Stage

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      The two mayoral candidates, both Democrats, are on opposite sides of the debate over crime and policing. Republicans, with an eye toward 2024, are watching closely.CHICAGO — For nearly three years, since the ebbing of the George Floyd protests of 2020, almost nothing has divided the Democratic Party like the issues of crime, public safety and policing, much to the delight of Republicans eager to center urban violence in the nation’s political debate.Now, an unanticipated mayoral runoff in the country’s third largest city between Paul Vallas, the white former Chicago public schools chief running as the tough-on-crime candidate, and Brandon Johnson, a Black, progressive Cook County commissioner questioning traditional methods of policing, will elevate public safety on the national stage and test how ugly the Democratic divide might get in a city known for bare-knuckled politics and racial division.Mr. Vallas, as Chicago’s schools chief, expanded charter schools, then virtually eliminated neighborhood public schools in the New Orleans school system.Taylor Glascock for The New York Times“Oh, it’s going to be good,” Christopher Z. Mooney, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of the runoff contest, which will culminate on April 4. “It’s going to get pretty rancorous, and underlying all of it will be the racial subtext.”The mayoral runoff pits two Democrats against each other, divided not only by ideology but also by race in a city where racial politics have been prominent since it elected its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, 40 years ago.A Republican hasn’t controlled City Hall since William H. “Big Bill” Thompson left office in 1931, with an open alliance with Al Capone and three safe deposit boxes containing almost $1.6 million.But this year’s Chicago election will be watched by Republicans intently. Crime has already emerged as a potent weapon for a G.O.P. eager to win back the suburbs and chip away at Democratic gains among urban professionals.It has also highlighted the Democrats’ divide between a liberal left that coined the phrase “defund the police” and a resurgent center insisting the party does “back the blue.”In New York City, a moderate Democrat, Eric Adams, harnessed the surge of violence that hit cities across the country, exacerbated by the pandemic, to win the mayoral race in 2021. A Republican-turned-Democrat, Rick Caruso, leaned on the issue of crime last year to force a runoff in the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles, though he ultimately lost the mayoralty to the more liberal candidate, Karen Bass.In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, the liberal district attorney of a city once synonymous with liberalism, was recalled last year by voters infuriated by rising disorder, and similarly progressive prosecutors from Philadelphia to Chicago have become lightning rods in conservative campaigns against supposedly “woke” law enforcement. Michelle Wu, the newly elected mayor of Boston, was forced just this week to respond to criticism of her handling of violence, after Black leaders accused her of ignoring their safety.And while the G.O.P. was disappointed with its showing in November’s congressional elections, one bright spot for Republicans came in victories in New York and California that were fueled by advertisements portraying Democratic cities as lawless. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said her Democratic Party may well have held onto control of the House in November if candidates had a better answer to Republican attacks on crime, especially in New York.Add to that the issue of education, another sharp divide between Mr. Johnson and Mr. Vallas, and the mayor’s race in the city of broad shoulders may play out exactly as Republican presidential candidates would want. Ever since Glenn Youngkin recaptured Virginia’s governorship for his party in 2021 with an education-focused campaign, Republicans have made problems in the nation’s schools a centerpiece of their attempted national comeback, especially in the suburbs.And that has included a pitch for more school choice, whether through charter schools or vouchers to help public school students attend private schools. Again, Mr. Vallas and Mr. Johnson represent polar opposite positions on the issue: Mr. Vallas, as Chicago’s schools chief, expanded charter schools, then virtually eliminated neighborhood public schools when he took over the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Johnson, a former schoolteacher and teachers union leader, stands firmly against that movement.Mr. Johnson, a former schoolteacher and teachers union leader, has fought against charter schools.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“This is a microcosm of a larger battle for the soul of the nation,” said Delmarie Cobb, a progressive political consultant in Chicago, “and being the third largest city, it’s going to get all the national coverage. This is going to be an intense five weeks.”For the national parties, those five weeks will be tricky. The runoff between Ms. Bass and Mr. Caruso in Los Angeles forced the Democratic establishment to get behind Ms. Bass, a known quantity with a long career in the House of Representatives. If the Democratic establishment rallies around Mr. Johnson, the outcome of the Chicago mayor’s race could mirror Los Angeles, come Election Day.But Mr. Johnson’s ardent progressivism, including his outspoken skepticism of policing as the answer to rising crime, could make him toxic to Democrats with national ambitions, including Illinois’ billionaire governor, J.B. Pritzker.Likewise, Mr. Vallas’s pledge to beef up Chicago’s police force and unshackle officers from the controls put on them after high-profile police shootings like the killing of Laquan McDonald could make him a hero of Republicans eying a run at the White House next year. But their endorsements would run counter to Mr. Vallas’s efforts in the nonpartisan mayoral race to persuade Chicagoans that he really is a Democrat.Rodney Davis, a former Republican House member from central Illinois, said that he had no doubt Mr. Vallas was a Democrat, but that the ideological divide in the mayoral contest was no less important because the contestants are from the same party.“Are voters going to think about whether Brandon Johnson calls Paul Vallas a Republican, or are they going to think, ‘Do I feel safe when I leave my kid in the car to go back inside and grab something? Do I feel like the public school system is getting better or worse?’” he said, adding, “This has set up a fight that really is less about politics and more about issues.”National Republicans, eager to make the crime debate central as they joust with each other for their party’s presidential nomination in 2024, are not likely to stay quiet.“They may want to exploit the situation,” said Marc H. Morial, a former New Orleans mayor who now heads the National Urban League.Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida swung through New York City, the Philadelphia suburbs and a bedroom community outside Chicago to speak to police unions about crime, and to lambaste what he called “woke” urban officials who he contends have eased up on policing and criminal prosecutions.“They just get put right back on the streets and they commit more crimes and it’s like a carousel,” Mr. DeSantis, an as-of-yet undeclared candidate for president, said Tuesday night during a speech in The Villages, a heavily Republican retirement community in Central Florida.Next, Mr. DeSantis is taking his critique of big cities on a national tour, including stops in states with the first three Republican primary contests, and will promote his new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”Though Donald J. Trump erected a gleaming skyscraper on the Chicago River, he has made the city his No. 1 example of what is wrong with urban America.“It’s embarrassing to us as a nation,” Mr. Trump said on a visit in 2019. “All over the world, they’re talking about Chicago.”Criminal justice could be a centerpiece in the coming fight between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis for the 2024 nomination. As president, Mr. Trump signed the “First Step Act,” a bipartisan criminal justice law that has freed thousands of inmates from federal prison. As a House lawmaker from Florida, Mr. DeSantis supported Mr. Trump’s bill in Congress in 2018, but as governor in 2019, when the state passed its own version of that federal legislation, he opposed a measure that would have allowed certain prisoners convicted of nonviolent felonies to be released after serving at least 65 percent of their sentences.The Trump measure was opposed by some Republicans, including Mr. Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, and the former president has since appeared eager to distance himself from the law.The race in Chicago will pit a candidate with the police union’s support against one who has the teachers’ union on his side.Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesDuring the past two years, Mr. Trump has spoken more about the need for tougher criminal justice laws, renewing his widely criticized proposal to execute drug dealers, and less about the benefits or outcomes of the First Step Act. Speaking to New Hampshire Republicans in late January, in the first public event of his latest presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he would have a tougher response to civil rights protests if elected to a second term.“Next time, it’s one thing I would do different,” Mr. Trump said.A Republican intervention in the mayoral runoff here would not be helpful to Mr. Vallas. He was forced to denounce Mr. DeSantis’s appearance in Elmhurst, Ill., last week lest he be tied to the polarizing Florida governor ahead of Tuesday’s voting.But Mr. Johnson almost certainly represents too perfect a target for Republicans to sit this one out. He may have walked back earlier comments on “defunding” the police, but last month, he was the only mayoral candidate who refused to say he would fill the growing number of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department.“Spending more on policing per capita has been a failure,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference outside City Hall last month.“Look, I get it,” he continued. “People are talking about policing as a strategy. But, keep in mind, that is the strategy that has led to the failures we are experiencing right now.”A substantive debate on the best approach to public safety could be good for Chicago and the country — if it stays substantive, Mr. Morial said. Policing is not only about the number of officers, he said, but about the accountability of the force and the trust of the citizens.Mr. Morial expressed doubt that Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis would keep the debate focused that way. But the nation will be watching, starting with the Chicago mayoral runoff, he said.“I’m watching this race closely,” he said. “I think it’s going to become a national conversation, which I think is going to be good.”Jonathan Weisman reported from Chicago, and Michael C. Bender from Washington. More

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      Why Chicago’s Mayoral Election Matters, Even if You Don’t Live in Chicago

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      America’s cities increasingly face similar problems, particularly worries about crime and hangovers from the pandemic. That’s why the mayor’s election in Chicago on Tuesday is about more than Chicago.CHICAGO — Mayor Lori Lightfoot faces eight challengers in a fierce mayoral election and risks being ousted from City Hall after one term. Here’s why the election, at a time of widespread unease in the nation’s cities, reflects issues that are resonating around the country.The race is a referendum on crime and policing.On the campaign trail and in debates, the election in Chicago has been driven by one issue above all others: crime.Under Ms. Lightfoot, who was elected in 2019, homicide rates soared to generational highs, an increase that was most deeply felt in pockets of the South and West Sides that have historically been plagued by gun violence. And residents throughout the city say they are unsettled by a spike in robberies, muggings, carjackings and other property crimes, and they have placed the blame on Ms. Lightfoot.She is facing her most serious competition from a tough-on-crime candidate, Paul Vallas, a former public schools executive who began attacking her record on public safety early in the campaign.The same political dynamic has played out in mayoral races in New York City and Los Angeles, with varying results: Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a former police captain, won office in 2021 amid widespread concerns about crime. But last fall, Los Angeles voters chose Karen Bass, a veteran Democratic congresswoman, over Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall developer who spent close to $100 million on a campaign that focused directly on concerns over crime and disorder.Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago met with Mayor Eric Adams of New York last year to discuss crime-fighting strategies.Tyler Pasciak Lariviere/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Lightfoot has crisscrossed Chicago telling voters that crime is down in the city and that her focus on the issue is yielding results: Homicides dropped in 2022 after rising in the two previous years. For many voters, it may be coming too late.The next Chicago mayor could reshape downtown.“Make no little plans,” Chicagoans like to say, quoting the city planner and architect Daniel Burnham, whose vision transformed Chicago’s lakefront and skyline.Cities around the county are struggling to redefine and revitalize their downtowns in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. And whoever wins the mayoral election in Chicago will have the opportunity to make very big plans for the city’s downtown, including its most prominent neighborhood, the Loop. The area was battered during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover.Ms. Lightfoot has already made proposals that could nudge the Loop away from its identity as a center for office workers, and toward becoming a more residential neighborhood and hub of cultural life. (The Chicago Loop Alliance, a business advocacy group, says the area is already well on its way: There are now more people living in the Loop than before the pandemic, reflecting growth of about 9 percent since 2020.)One plan introduced under the Lightfoot administration addresses the high vacancy rates for commercial space in the Loop, calling for older office buildings on LaSalle Street in the heart of Chicago’s business district to be turned into apartments and condominiums, including affordable housing. If the plan is successful, it may become a model for other big cities that find themselves with excess commercial real estate as remote workers continue to balk at returning downtown.Whoever wins the mayoral election in Chicago will have the chance to shape downtown Chicago as it adapts to the effects of the pandemic.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBig-city politics are in flux.Mayoral elections in Chicago are officially nonpartisan, but none of the nine candidates on the ballot on Tuesday is a Republican. (In the 2020 presidential election, 83 percent of Chicago voters voted Democratic.) Assuming none wins an outright majority on Tuesday, the top two finishers in the race will advance to a runoff on April 4. Who those candidates turn out to be may offer a glimpse into the direction of urban politics in post-pandemic America.Ms. Lightfoot has been attacked from both the right and the left, and her challengers fit in familiar niches on the national Democratic spectrum. Mr. Vallas has attracted support from more conservative voters, especially in heavily white wards on the Northwest and Southwest Sides, where many police officers, firefighters and other city workers live. He has also gained support from Democrats who voted for Ms. Lightfoot in 2019 but are now fed up over crime and are willing to vote for a more conservative candidate.The mayor also faces serious challenges from the liberal wing of the party, especially from Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the liberal Chicago Teachers Union. Mr. Johnson has gained momentum in the last several weeks, polls suggest, as progressive voters who are unwilling to give Ms. Lightfoot another chance have searched for an alternative. But at a time when public safety is the No. 1 issue for many voters, Mr. Johnson’s previous support for reducing police funding — a stance he later backtracked from — may complicate his mayoral bid. More

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      The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs

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      Rural America has become the Republican Party’s life preserver.Less densely settled regions of the country, crucial to the creation of congressional and legislative districts favorable to conservatives, are a pillar of the party’s strength in the House and the Senate and a decisive factor in the rightward tilt of the Electoral College. Republican gains in such sparsely populated areas are compensating for setbacks in increasingly diverse suburbs where growing numbers of well-educated voters have renounced a party led by Donald Trump and his loyalists.The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party is driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Even so, Republicans are grasping at a weak reed. In a 2022 article, “Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History,” Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, notes that “Between 2010 and 2020, rural America lost population for the first time in history as economic turbulence had a significant demographic impact. The rural population loss was due to fewer births, more deaths, and more people leaving than moving in.”The shift to the right in rural counties is one side of a two-part geographic transformation of the electorate, according to “The Increase in Partisan Segregation in the United States,” a 2022 paper by Jacob R. Brown, of Princeton; Enrico Cantoni, of the University of Bologna; Ryan D. Enos, of Harvard; Vincent Pons, of Harvard Business School; and Emilie Sartre, of Brown.In an email, Brown described one of the central findings of the study:In terms of major factors driving the urban-rural split, our analysis shows that rural Republican areas are becoming more Republican predominantly due to voters in these places switching their partisanship to Republican. This is in contrast to urban areas becoming increasingly more Democratic largely due to the high levels of Democratic partisanship in these areas among new voters entering the electorate. These new voters include young voters registering once they become eligible, and other new voters registering for the first time.There are few, if any, better case studies of rural realignment and the role it plays in elections than the 2022 Senate race in Wisconsin. The basic question, there, is how Ron Johnson — a Trump acolyte who derided climate change with an epithet, who described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement” and who proposed turning Social Security and Medicare into discretionary programs subject to annual congressional budget cutting —- got re-elected in Wisconsin.In 2016, Johnson rode Trump’s coattails and the Republican trail blazed by the former governor Scott Walker to a 3.4 point (50.2 to 46.8) victory, and swept into office, in large part by running up huge margins in Milwaukee’s predominately white suburbs. That changed in 2022.Craig Gilbert, a fellow at Marquette Law School and a former Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, conducted a detailed analysis of Wisconsin voting patterns and found that Johnsonperformed much worse in the red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee than he did six years earlier in 2016. Johnson lost Wauwatosa by 7 points in 2016, then by 37 points in 2022. He won Mequon in Ozaukee County by 28 points in 2016 but only by 6 in 2022. His victory margin in Menomonee Falls in Waukesha County declined from 32 points six years ago to 14 points.So again, how did Johnson win? The simple answer: white rural Wisconsin.As recently as 17 years ago, rural Wisconsin was a battleground. In 2006, Jim Doyle, the Democratic candidate for governor, won rural Wisconsin, about 30 percent of the electorate, by 5.5 points, “Then came the rural red wave,” Gilbert writes. “Walker carried Wisconsin’s towns by 23 points in 2010 and by 25 points in 2014.” In 2016, Johnson won the rural vote by 25 points, but in 2022, he pushed his margin there to 29 points.In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters in a single sentence: “First, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, second, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and third a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”These controversies included two Supreme Court abortion decisions, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (in 1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (in 1992); the 1989 appointment of Ralph Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition; the fire-breathing speeches of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention (Buchanan: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war for the soul of America”); and the 1993 “gays in the miliary” debate, to name just a few.“The 1992 election represented a milestone,” Hopkins writes:For the first time in the history of the Democratic Party, its strongest electoral territory was located exclusively outside the South, including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Maryland in the Northeast; Illinois in the metropolitan Midwest; and the Pacific Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California — all of which have supported the Democratic candidate in every subsequent presidential election.In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points, and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes, in a separate 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992—2018,” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”The same process took place in House elections, Hopkins observes:The proportion of House Democrats representing suburban districts rose from 41 percent after the 1992 election to 60 percent after 2018, while the share of Democratic-held seats located in urban areas remained fairly stable over time (varying between 33 percent and 41 percent of all party seats) and the share of rural districts declined from 24 percent to 5 percent of all Democratic seats.Hopkins pointedly notes that “The expanded presence of suburban voters and representatives in the Democratic Party since the 1980s was accompanied by a dramatic contraction of Democratic strength in rural areas.”Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton Administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade, and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called ‘Third Way’ made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”The diminution of partisan economic differences resulted in the accentuation ofthe very cultural differences that Gingrich-era Republicans sought to emphasize — on issues like homosexuality, immigration, public religion, gun rights, and minority politics. These issues are more galvanizing to the Upper Midwest regions adjacent to the South (West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana) — which are trending more conservative.The Upper Midwest, Gest continued, isa region unto itself — defined by manufacturing, unions, and social conservatism. As the manufacturing industry has moved offshore, union power declined and one of the richest, most stable parts of America became uniquely precarious inside a single generation. It is now subject to severe depopulation and aging, as younger people who have upskilled are more likely to move to cities like Chicago or New York. They have total whiplash. And Trump’s nostalgic populism has resonated with the white population that remains.Gest is outspoken in his criticism of the Democratic Party’s dealings with rural communities:Democrats have effectively redlined rural America. In some corners of the Democratic Party, activists don’t even want rural and white working class people in their coalition; they may even deride them. Rural and white working class Americans sense this.One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and ‘white-adjacent’ members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement is a driving force in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.In their 2022 paper, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment. Jacobs and Munis write:“Rural America,” Jacobs and Munis write,continues to grow older, poorer, and sicker — urban America wealthier and more diverse. These stark material divisions have contributed to partisan schisms, as individuals increasingly live in places that are politically homogeneous. A consequence of this is that, as Bill Bishop concludes, Americans “have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”In their 2022 paper “Symbolic versus material concerns of rural consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what Trujillo and Crowley call “symbolic” issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed though legislation.The hurdle facing Democrats is reflected in a comment James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, emailed to me, describing the roots of rural discontent with Democratic urban America:The disrespect is felt most acutely by the fact that dominant cultural institutions, including mass media, are predominantly urban in location and orientation. Smaller towns and outlying areas see themselves as misunderstood and mischaracterized by these media, as well as dismissed as out-of-touch and retrograde by urban populations. There is a considerable amount of truth in their perceptions.A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, the opposite of rural voters 54 percent Republican, 38 percent Democratic. 53 percent of those living in urban areas say rural residents have “different values,” while 58 percent of those living in rural communities say urban residents do not share their values. 61 percent of those living in rural communities say they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.I asked Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at Saint Joseph’s University who wrote “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” with her husband Patrick J. Carr, who died in 2020, to describe the state of mind in rural America. She wrote back by email:My best guess would be that it comes down to brain drain and college-educated voters. It has always been about the mobility of the college educated and the folks getting left behind without that college diploma. Not one high school dropout we encountered back when we wrote about Iowa managed to leave the county (unless they got sent to prison), and the kids with degrees were leaving in droves.Those whom Kefalas and Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa etc. (states where the public university is just exporting their professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare, it’s more like apartheid.”Urban rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the “calcification” of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded into the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.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