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      With Abortion Rights Under Threat, Democrats Hope to Go on Offense

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      Warning of Texas-style laws nationwide, the party believes it can use the issue to turn out suburban women in the Virginia governor’s race this fall and the 2022 midterms.VIRGINIA BEACH — Kenzie Smith is “not big into politics,” she said, and while she votes faithfully in presidential elections, for Democrats, she is less interested in off-year races, such as those seven weeks away in Virginia for governor and the legislature.But the recent news that the Supreme Court had allowed Texas to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, grabbed her attention.The fear that such a restrictive law, which she called “insane,” could come to Virginia if Republicans take power has sharpened her desire to turn out on Election Day. “If there are laws like what’s going on in Texas coming here, I’d absolutely be motivated to go to the polls over that,” said Ms. Smith, 33, a marketing consultant.The Supreme Court’s decision on Sept. 1 to let Texas enact the country’s most restrictive abortion law came as a grievous blow to abortion rights advocates, a long-sought victory for abortion opponents and, for Democrats, a potential political opportunity.As the party mobilizes for next year’s midterms, its first big test on the issue will come in the Virginia elections this fall. Democrats are hoping to win a tight governor’s race and keep control of the legislature in a state that has moved rapidly to the left. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is running for his old office, has repeatedly promised to be a “brick wall” against anti-abortion measures, and has played up his defense of abortion rights at a debate last week, on the campaign trail and in fund-raising appeals.Democrats in Virginia and beyond are focusing in particular on suburban women, who played a large role in electing President Biden, but whose broader loyalty to his party is not assured. With Republicans smelling blood in next year’s midterm elections as Mr. Biden’s approval ratings slip and the economy faces a potential stall over the lingering pandemic, Democrats are looking for issues like abortion to overcome their voters’ complacency now that Donald J. Trump is gone from office.In more than two dozen interviews in the politically divided city of Virginia Beach, the largest in the state but essentially a patchwork of suburban neighborhoods, Democratic-leaning and independent female voters expressed fear and outrage over the Supreme Court’s green light for the Texas law. Many said it intensified their desire to elect Democrats, although historically, single issues have not driven turnout waves; candidate personalities and the overall economy have.Even a number of women who said they favored Republicans noted that they also supported abortion rights — which may explain why G.O.P. candidates in Virginia have played down the issue, scrubbing anti-abortion comments from campaign websites and walking back some remarks.In a debate on Thursday between candidates for governor, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, said, “I would not sign the Texas bill today.” But he dodged when asked if he would sign a six-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape and incest. He affirmed that he supported a “pain-threshold bill,” which generally outlaws abortion after 20 weeks.Mr. McAuliffe said he was “terrified” that “the Trump Supreme Court” could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision granting a constitutional right to an abortion. He said he supported “a woman’s right to make her own decision to a second trimester.” He misleadingly said that Mr. Youngkin “wants to ban abortions.”Early in the campaign, a liberal activist recorded Mr. Youngkin saying that he had to play down his anti-abortion views to win over independents, but that if he were elected and Republicans took the House of Delegates, he would start “going on offense.” The McAuliffe campaign turned the recording into an attack ad.Ellen Robinson was “horrified” by the Texas law.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesKathleen Moran said the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas law “scared” her.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesRepublicans portray Mr. McAuliffe as favoring abortions up to the moment of birth, trying to tie him to a failed 2019 bill in the legislature that would have loosened some restrictions on late-term abortions. Virginia law permits abortions in the third trimester if a woman’s life is in danger.Polling on abortion shows that Americans’ attitudes have remained stable for decades, with a majority of around 60 percent saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In Virginia, slightly fewer people, 55 percent, agree, according to the Pew Research Center.However, in a contradiction that illustrates the moral complexities of the issue, national polls also show that majorities favor abortion restrictions that are impermissible under Roe, such as outlawing second-trimester abortions in most cases.A Washington Post-Schar School poll of Virginia conducted this month, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Texas law, found that abortion ranked low among voters’ concerns, with only 9 percent saying that it was their most important issue in the governor’s race.The starkness of the Texas decision — and the prospect that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe next year in a case involving a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi — has sharpened the issue.Virginia Beach presents a test case of the fraught abortion issue on the front lines of America’s shifting electoral landscape. The large population of military families has long lent a conservative cast to local politics, but last year the city voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, Mr. Biden, for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson. Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat and former Navy commander whose congressional district includes Virginia Beach, is among Republicans’ top targets for 2022.The city stretches from saltwater taffy shops on the touristy Atlantic beaches to quiet streets of brick homes that lace around the area’s many bays. Outdoor conversations are interrupted by earsplitting military jets, which rarely draw a glance skyward.Ellen Robinson, a retired nurse, who identifies as a political independent, was “horrified” by the Texas law and said that if the court overturned Roe, “I think it would be the beginning of fascism in this country.”Kathleen Moran, a technical editor in the engineering field, who favors Democrats, said the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas law “scared” her.“I have boys who will be dating women,” she said. “I have nieces. This goes back to the whole ‘white men get to make all the decisions about everything.’”Ms. Moran said she was more intent on voting after the court declined to halt the Texas law, which the Biden administration is trying to block.“We are in a really dangerous situation,” she said. “Obviously for abortion, we don’t want to become Texas, but on a lot of issues we could lose what is now a blue state.”While many Republican women across Virginia would most likely support stricter abortion laws, few conservative-leaning women in suburban Virginia Beach expressed support for a six-week abortion law or a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Overall, while these women didn’t always embrace the “pro-choice” label, they agreed that women should be able to make their own reproductive decisions.Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, dodged a question at a debate about whether he would sign a six-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape and incest.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“I know Republicans have been against abortion forever, but as a woman, I think I ought to be able to choose myself,” said Janis Cohen, 73, a retired government employee. Her lawn featured a parade of signs for G.O.P. candidates. When it was pointed out that one of them, Winsome Sears, who is running for lieutenant governor, has said she would support a six-week abortion ban, Ms. Cohen fired back that the current governor, the Democrat Ralph Northam, was what she considered an abortion extremist.In 2019 the governor, a pediatric neurologist, seemed to suggest that a delivered baby could be left to die if the mother requested an abortion while in labor with a deformed fetus unlikely to survive. Republicans across the country seized on the comments as sanctioning “infanticide.” Mr. Northam’s office called the accusations a bad-faith distortion of his views.Polls of the Virginia governor’s race have generally forecast a close race, including one by Emerson College last week with the candidates within the margin of error.Nancy Guy, a Democratic state delegate who flipped a Republican-held seat in Virginia Beach by just 27 votes in 2019, said that before abortion rose as an issue in recent weeks, “most people were complacent and not paying attention.”Ms. Guy’s opponent has pledged that if elected, he will donate his salary to a so-called crisis pregnancy center that steers pregnant women away from abortions. The contrast could not be more clear to voters who follow the issues. Still, Ms. Guy said, with the news constantly churning, it is difficult to know what will drive voters nearly two months from now to cast ballots.Nancy Guy, a Democratic state delegate, said that before abortion rose as an issue in recent weeks, “most people were complacent and not paying attention.”Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesDemocrats in Virginia made huge strides during Mr. Trump’s divisive leadership, culminating in 2019, when the party took control of both the State Senate and House of Delegates. But Democrats’ majorities are slim, and Republicans believe they have an anti-incumbent wind at their backs this year. Three statewide positions are on the ballot on Nov. 2 — governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general — along with all 100 seats in the House.The field director for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia said that on average, 10 to 15 volunteers were on door-knocking shifts, compared with 25 to 40 two years ago, a worrying sign for supporters of abortion rights.Han Jones, Planned Parenthood’s political director in Virginia, added: “People are exhausted with elections and exhausted with Donald Trump’s rhetoric and feel like they can take a break. We could easily go red in this election alone if Democratic voters who are not feeling as passionate or leaned in don’t turn out to vote.”A team of Planned Parenthood canvassers who visited a neighborhood of attached town homes recently encountered general support for Democrats, but not much awareness of the election or enthusiasm for it.One voter, Carly White, said abortion was a touchy subject in her household. “I’m for Planned Parenthood but my husband is not,” she said, stepping outside a home with a small, precisely trimmed lawn. “I think the issue is, he’s a man. He’s never grown a baby. I just can’t — I don’t like somebody telling me what I can do with my own body.” More

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      Justin Trudeau Wanted an Election. Do Voters See a Power Grab?

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      A snap election that was supposed to be a show of strength has instead allowed opponents to highlight the prime minister’s weak points.BURNABY, British Columbia — Outside a TV studio in a Vancouver suburb where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada was recording an interview days ahead of the country’s election, a man shouted insults, mostly obscene, about Mr. Trudeau and his family while blasting Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” from a stereo on a cart.Heckling is something Mr. Trudeau has always faced, but this time the attacks have new bite. After six years in office, a prime minister who promised “sunny ways” and presented himself as a new face is now the political establishment, with a track record, and missteps, for opponents to criticize. Even if the Liberal Party clings to its hold on Parliament, as observers expect, this bruising election campaign has done him no favors.Ben Chin, the prime minister’s senior adviser, said that no politician could have sustained Mr. Trudeau’s initial popularity.“If you’re in power for six years or five years, you’re going to have more baggage,” Mr. Chin said. “You have to make tough decisions that not everybody’s going to agree with.”For much of his time in office, opposition party leaders have accused Mr. Trudeau of putting his personal and political interests ahead of the nation’s good — of which the snap election being held on Monday is the most recent example. They also have had rich material to attack him on over controversies involving a contract for a charity close to his family, and a finding that he broke ethics laws by pressing a minister to help a large Quebec company avoid criminal sanctions.And for every accomplishment Mr. Trudeau cites, his opponents can point to unfulfilled pledges.Anti-vax protesters have thronged his events, some with signs promoting the far-right People’s Party of Canada, prompting his security detail to increase precautions.One rally in Ontario where protesters significantly outnumbered the police was shut down over safety concerns, and at another in the same province, the prime minister was pelted with gravel as he boarded his campaign bus. A local official of the People’s Party later faced charges in that episode of assault with a weapon.Justin Trudeau at an election campaign stop on Friday in London, Ontario.Carlos Osorio/ReutersMr. Trudeau has many achievements since 2015 to point to. His government has introduced carbon pricing and other climate measures, legalized cannabis, increased spending for Indigenous issues, and made 1,500 models of military-style rifles illegal. A new plan will provide day care for 10 Canadian dollars a day per child.Though his popularity has diminished, Mr. Trudeau’s star power remains. When he dropped by the outdoor terrace of a cafe in Port Coquitlam, an eastern suburb of Vancouver, for elbow bumps, quick chats and selfies with voters, a crowd soon swelled.“We love you, we love you,” Joy Silver, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher from nearby Coquitlam, told Mr. Trudeau.But as Election Day nears, many Canadians are still asking why Mr. Trudeau is holding a vote now, two years ahead of schedule, with Covid-19 infections on the rise from the Delta variant, taxing hospitals and prompting renewed pandemic restrictions in some provinces or delaying their lifting in others.Also criticized was that he called the vote the same weekend Kabul fell to the Taliban, when Canadian troops were struggling to evacuate Canadians as well as Afghans who had assisted their forces.“They’ve been struggling with answering that question the whole campaign,” said Gerald Butts, a longtime friend of Mr. Trudeau’s and a former top political adviser. “And that’s part of why they’re having trouble getting the message across.”Mr. Trudeau has said that he needs to replace his plurality in the House of Commons with a majority to deal with the remainder of the pandemic and the recovery that will follow — although he avoids explicitly saying “majority.” The Liberal Party’s political calculation was that it was best to strike while Canadians still held favorable views about how Mr. Trudeau handled pandemic issues, particularly income supports and buying vaccines.“We’re the party with the experience, the team and the plan to continue delivering real results for Canadians, the party with a real commitment to ending this pandemic,” Mr. Trudeau said at a rally in Surrey, another Vancouver suburb, standing in front of campaign signs for candidates from the surrounding area. “Above all, my friends, if you want to end this pandemic for good, go out and vote Liberal.”During much of the 36-day campaign, the Liberals have been stuck in a statistical tie with the Conservative Party of Canada led by Erin O’Toole, each holding about 30 percent of the popular vote. The New Democrats, a left-of-center party led by Jagmeet Singh, lies well behind at about 20 percent.From left, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,  Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats, and Erin O’Toole of the Conservatives at a debate in Gatineau, Quebec, this month.Pool photo by Adrian WyldKimberly Speers, a political scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said that Mr. Trudeau’s personality and celebrity may be working against him.“The messaging, from the N.D.P. and the Conservatives especially, is that it’s a power grab and it’s all about him,” she said. “And that message has just really seemed to stick with voters.”Some scandals during his tenure have helped the opposition, too. In 2019, Mr. Trudeau’s veterans affairs minister, an Indigenous woman, quit amid allegations that when she was justice minister he and his staff had improperly pressured her to strike a deal that would have allowed a large Canadian corporation to avoid a criminal conviction on corruption charges.Despite his championing of diversity, it emerged during the 2019 election that Mr. Trudeau had worn blackface or brownface three times in the past. And last year a charity with deep connections to his family was awarded a no-bid contract to administer a Covid financial assistance plan for students. (The group withdrew, the program was canceled and Mr. Trudeau was cleared by the federal ethics and conflict of interest commissioner.)His opponents have also focused on promises they say he’s fallen short on, including introducing a national prescription drug program, creating a new electoral structure for Canada, lowering debt relative to the size of the economy, ending widespread sexual harassment in the military and solitary confinement in federal prisons. The Center for Public Policy Analysis at Laval University in Quebec City found that Mr. Trudeau has fully kept about 45 percent of his promises, while 27 percent were partly fulfilled.Mr. Singh has been reminding voters that Mr. Trudeau vowed to bring clean drinking water to all Indigenous communities. There were 105 boil-water orders in effect at First Nations when Mr. Trudeau took power, with others added later. The government has restored clean water to 109 communities, but 52 boil-water orders remain.“I think Mr. Trudeau may care, I think he cares, but the reality is that he’s often done a lot of things for show and hasn’t backed those up with real action,” Mr. Singh said during the official English-language debate. Mr. O’Toole, for his part, has sought to portray the vote as an act of personal aggrandizement.“Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives: privileged, entitled, and always looking out for number one,” he said at a recent event in rural Ottawa. “He was looking out for number one when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic.”Security and secrecy have increased at Mr. Trudeau’s campaign stops after several of them were disrupted by protesters angry about mandatory Covid-19 vaccination rules and vaccine passport measures that the prime minister has imposed.Justin Trudeau walking with his wife, Sophie, and his son, Hadrien, at a campaign stop on Monday in Vancouver, Canada. Jeff Vinnick/Getty ImagesAt the rally outside of a banquet hall in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, Mr. Trudeau, sleeves rolled up and microphone in hand, gave an energetic speech before diving into a mostly South Asian crowd eager to pose for pictures with him.In a change from previous practice, the crowd had been gathered by invitation rather than by public announcement, partly to keep its size within pandemic limits, and no signs promoted the event on the formidable gate to the remote location. Up on the hall’s roof, two police snipers in camouflage surveyed the scene.After an earlier rally in Ontario was canceled, Mr. Trudeau was asked if American politics had inspired the unruly protests. His answer was indirect.“I think we all need to reflect on whether we do want to go down that path of anger, of division, of intolerance,” he said. “I’ve never seen this intensity of anger on the campaign trail, or in Canada.”Translating wider poll results into precise predictions of how many seats the parties will hold in the next House of Commons is not possible. But all of the current polling suggests that Mr. Trudeau may have alienated many Canadians with an early election call and endured abuse while campaigning, for no political gain. The most likely outcome is that the Liberals will continue to hold power, but not gain the majority he sought.If that proves to be the case, Mr. Butts said, “It’s going to end up pretty close to where we left off, which is a great irony.”Vjosa Isai More

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      Don’t Let Trump Steal the Show With ‘Stop the Steal’

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      You cannot actually debunk Republican accusations of voter fraud. You can show they aren’t true (and they aren’t), but that has no bearing on the belief itself.“Voter fraud” is not a factual claim subject to testing and objective analysis as much as it’s a statement of ideology, a belief about the way the world works. In practice, to accuse Democrats of voter fraud is to say that Democratic voters are not legitimate political actors; that their votes do not count the same as those of “the people” (that is, the Republican electorate); and that Democratic officials, elected with those illegitimate votes, have no rightful claim to power.In a sense, one should take accusations of voter fraud seriously but not literally, as apologists for Donald Trump once said of the former president. These accusations, the more florid the better, tell the audience that the speaker is aligned with Trump and that he or she supported his attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. They also tell the audience that the speaker will do anything necessary to “stop the steal,” which is to say anything to stop a Republican from losing an election and, barring that, anything to delegitimize the Democrat who won.In the last days of the California recall election that ended this week, for example, the leading Republican candidate, Larry Elder, urged his supporters to report fraud using a website that claimed to have “detected fraud” in the results. “Statistical analyses used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) have detected fraud in California resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor,” the site read. Elder himself told Fox News that the 2020 election was “full of shenanigans.”“My fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here,” he said.Never mind that the results had not yet come in at the time Elder promoted this website, or that he was a long shot to begin with. The last Republican to win statewide high office in California was Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, when he ran successfully for re-election after winning the 2003 recall vote against the Democrat Gray Davis. Newsom, a Democrat, won his 2018 race for governor by nearly 24 points. Elder was not doomed to lose, but the idea that the election was rigged — that he was robbed of victory by mass cheating and fraud — was ridiculous. But again, the point of voter fraud accusations isn’t to describe reality; the point is to express a belief, in this case, the belief that Newsom and his supporters are illegitimate.There are other candidates running for office making similar claims. Adam Laxalt, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race, has promised to “file lawsuits early” in order to “tighten up the election.” Laxalt co-chaired Trump’s 2020 campaign in the state and supported the effort to overturn the results. “There’s no question that, unfortunately, a lot of the lawsuits and a lot of the attention spent on Election Day operations just came too late,” he said in a recent interview.Trump endorsed Laxalt this summer, praising his commitment to the voter fraud narrative. “He fought valiantly against the Election Fraud, which took place in Nevada,” said Trump in a statement. “He is strong on Secure Borders and defending America against the Radical Left. Adam has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”This isn’t just rhetoric either. The ideological belief in voter fraud is driving actual efforts to delegitimize Democratic Party victories and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of Republican candidates. In Florida, for instance, a member of the state House of Representatives introduced a draft bill that would require an Arizona-style election audit in the state’s largest (and most heavily Democratic) counties.In Georgia, a Trump-backed candidate for secretary of state, Jody Hice, is running on a promise to do what the incumbent Brad Raffensperger wouldn’t: subvert the election for Trump’s benefit should the former president make another bid for the White House. “If elected, I will instill confidence in our election process by upholding the Georgia Constitution, enforcing meaningful reform and aggressively pursuing those who commit voter fraud,” Hice said in a statement announcing his candidacy in March. As a congressman, he voted against certifying the 2020 election in January and, the following month, told a group of conservative activists, “What happened this past election was solely because of a horrible secretary of state and horrible decisions that he made.”There is also the question of Republican voters themselves. According to a Monmouth University poll taken in June, nearly one-third of Americans believe that Joe Biden’s victory was the result of fraud, including 63 percent of Republicans. If Republican politicians keep pushing the voter fraud narrative, it is as much because Republican voters want to hear it as it is because those politicians are themselves true believers.If this voter fraud ideology were just a matter of bad information, it would be straightforward (if not exactly easy) to fix. But as the legal scholar Ned Foley has argued, the assertion of fraud — the falsification of reality in support of narrow political goals — is more akin to McCarthyism. It cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.The problem is that to break the hold of this ideology on Republican voters, you need Republican politicians to lead the charge. A Margaret Chase Smith, for example. But as long as Trump controls the party faithful — as long as he is, essentially, the center of a cult of personality — those voices, if they even exist, won’t say in public what they almost certainly say behind closed doors.It is up to Democrats, then, to at least safety-proof our electoral system against another attempt to “stop the steal.” The Senate filibuster makes that a long shot as well, even as centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin insist that there’s a compromise to strike with Republicans. Let’s hope he’s right because at this stage of the game, it is the only move left to play.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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      What Exit Polling Tells Us About Voters in the Recall

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      The only exit poll from California’s recall election showed Mr. Newsom winning with an unusual coalition. In a departure from nearly every recent election, longstanding racial and ethnic divides between white voters and voters of color seemed to vanish.According to the exits, 63 percent of people of color and 60 percent of Latino voters chose “No” on the question of whether to remove the governor, compared to 59 percent of white voters. Typically, Democrats fare somewhat worse among white voters in California, but much better among other voters. The 63 percent and 60 percent showings of people of color and Latinos would be the weakest for a California Democrat in memory.If true, the exit poll result would mark a seminal moment in California’s political evolution. It would suggest that growing Democratic strength among college graduates — and weakness among those without degrees — has begun to significantly reduce the gap between white voters and others, and nearly eliminate it altogether in the state.But the actual results of the recall election tell a different story. They don’t show much of anything unusual at all. The results suggest that Mr. Newsom won with a fairly typical coalition for a California Democrat in recent years, one not too dissimilar from the one that elected him in 2018 and elected President Biden in 2020.The governor may have fared somewhat worse among nonwhite voters than Democrats did a decade ago, but in the end, California voted for the Democrat — and it seems to have done so in about the same way it has in recent cycles, including among Asian and Latino voters.Millions of votes remain to be counted, and a clearer picture may emerge in the coming days as more votes are tallied. But so far, the county-by-county results are nearly identical to those from 2018 or 2020. There’s only one county — Riverside County — that flipped from 2018 so far, and it flipped to Mr. Newsom.On average in the recall election, the “No” vote in a typical county was only about 2 percentage points different than Mr. Newsom’s vote share in 2018. It’s hard to reconcile the stability of the results so far with the huge shift in Mr. Newsom’s coalition indicated by the exit poll. The results don’t show evidence of a stark drop-off in Democratic support among Latino voters, either.Mr. Newsom performed about as well as he did four years ago in relatively diverse Southern California, including in heavily Latino stretches of the rural Central Valley and the Imperial Valley, where Democrats only compete on the strength of Latino voters.Still, Mr. Newsom’s support there was already relatively weak for a Democrat: He often fared about as poorly as Mr. Biden, and worse than Gov. Jerry Brown did in 2014. The 2018 exit poll showed Mr. Newsom winning 64 percent of Latino voters, down from the 73 percent share won by Mr. Brown in 2014.The exit poll on Tuesday was conducted by Edison Research and sponsored by major television news networks. Unlike traditional in-person exit polls, most California exit poll interviews are typically conducted by telephone to reach early and mail-in voters. This year, the recall exit poll added an online and text message component.It is possible the additional online and text interviews may have contributed to some of the unusual shifts that were apparent in the poll. More

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      Could Navalny’s ‘Smart Voting’ Strategy Shake Up Russia’s Election?

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      Five of the opposition leader’s exiled allies are engineering an election campaign that they hope will put dozens of Kremlin opponents into Parliament.MOSCOW — In an undisclosed location outside Russia, five people have been meeting regularly for months to plot out how to deliver an improbable blow to President Vladimir V. Putin in this weekend’s Russian election.The five are allies of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, all of them exiled because of the threat of lengthy jail sentences. Their strategy is to use the parliamentary election that runs from Friday to Sunday to undermine Mr. Putin’s ruling United Russia party — even though the authorities have barred just about all Navalny backers and other well-known opposition figures from getting on the ballot.The idea, which Mr. Navalny calls smart voting, is to coalesce opposition-minded voters around one particular candidate running against United Russia in each of the country’s 225 electoral districts. That candidate could be a liberal, a nationalist or a Stalinist. Before Russians go to the polls, they can punch their address into the “Navalny” smartphone app, which then responds with the names of the candidates they should vote for — whether or not voters agree with those persons’ views.“We want as many non-Kremlin-approved politicians as possible to end up in Parliaments, including regional ones,” Ruslan Shaveddinov, one of the Navalny allies working on the “smart voting” push, said in a telephone interview. “This, at any rate, creates turbulence in the system, which is very, very important to us.”The smart voting strategy shows how an opposition movement that the Kremlin has managed to crush inside Russia in recent months is still able to influence political events from the outside. It is also a reason this weekend’s elections will come with a degree of suspense, even though an overall victory for United Russia is assured.“If you get the name of a candidate through smart voting and go to the polls, you will become 1,000 percent more influential and powerful than that version of you that complains and does nothing,” Mr. Navalny wrote in a letter from prison published Wednesday, imploring his supporters to vote. “Don’t you want to try?” he asked. “And also become a better version of yourself?”A similar tactical voting strategy has been tried before, not always with success. Brexit opponents employed it in Britain’s 2019 parliamentary elections but failed, as the Labour Party suffered the worst defeat in decades at the hands of the Conservatives.However, Russia is a far different case. Its nominal democracy is not free and fair, but the Kremlin still seeks the sheen of popular legitimacy by holding elections in which a stable of dull parties typically splits the opposition vote. The Navalny strategy, first deployed regionally in 2019, seeks to turn that system of “managed democracy” against Mr. Putin. While Mr. Navalny’s personal approval rating remains low in Russia — the independent pollster Levada put it at 14 percent in June — the authorities appear spooked by his team’s push.Face masks depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, left, among others are displayed for sale at a street souvenir shop last week in St. Petersburg, Russia.Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated PressThe Russian internet regulator has blocked access to the smart voting website and demanded that Google and Apple remove “Navalny” from their app stores. The companies have not done so, prompting fresh allegations of American interference in Russian elections. Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, claimed without offering evidence that smart voting was affiliated with the Pentagon.Last week, the Foreign Ministry summoned the American ambassador in Moscow, John J. Sullivan, to present what it described as “incontrovertible proof of violation of Russian law by American ‘digital giants’ in the context of the preparation and conduct of the elections.”Grigorii Golosov, a political scientist at the European University at St. Petersburg who has studied smart voting, says the Kremlin has good reason to be nervous. Even a state-run pollster, VTsIOM, puts United Russia’s current level of support at 29 percent — down from about 40 percent ahead of the last election, in 2016. Given that Russia’s single-mandate districts require only a simple majority to win, he said, a few additional percentage points generated by smart voting could be enough to push a challenger past United Russia in a competitive field.To be sure, the notion of success is relative. United Russia is almost certain to retain its majority in the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, because half of the 450 seats are apportioned by party list. The ruling party is sure to get the most votes, and Russian elections are rife with fraud.But Mr. Navalny’s allies say that even electing a few dozen new members of Parliament who oppose United Russia would be significant, because it would complicate the Kremlin’s dealings with what in recent years has been little but a rubber-stamp legislature. And they insist that in much of the country, the vote-counting process is transparent enough to make an attempt to unseat United Russia lawmakers by democratic means worthwhile. For now, the main opposition parties in Parliament, the Communists and nationalists, have been mostly loyal to Mr. Putin. But that could change.“If more serious political complications were to begin in Russia for some reason, then control of Parliament becomes critical,” Mr. Golosov said. “If the Kremlin weakens in the eyes of the opposition parties, they will start acting in their own interests.”Mr. Navalny’s staff members say they spent months analyzing every federal electoral district, as well as regional and city elections that are also being held this weekend. The team of five analysts spearheading the project — Mr. Shaveddinov; Mr. Navalny’s longtime chief of staff, Leonid Volkov; and three others — have been gathering for hourslong meetings multiple times a week. Mr. Shaveddinov said they consulted polling data, dozens of regional experts and reports from the ground to determine the person best positioned to defeat the United Russia candidate in each contest.They also point to the 2019 elections to the Moscow City Duma, in which 20 candidates picked by Mr. Navalny’s team won, diluting the number of United Russia members in the legislature from 38 to 25, out of 45 seats.“The Kremlin is trying to roll over all of politics with concrete,” Mr. Shaveddinov said. “And still, various flowers bloom.”Mr. Shaveddinov, who is 25, fled Russia earlier this year. He spent 2020 in what he describes as modern-day exile, detained and sent to a year of mandatory military service at a remote outpost on an island in the Arctic Ocean. Now he is abroad, hosting weekly YouTube shows with Mr. Volkov that seek to mobilize support for the smart voting strategy. Russian law enforcement officers attempting to detain Ruslan Shaveddinov in 2017, during a rally in Moscow. Evgeny Feldman/ReutersMr. Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent last year and arrested in January upon returning to Moscow from treatment in Germany. Nationwide protests followed his return, and Russia outlawed his movement and forced his top allies to flee. On Wednesday, the Navalny team published its 1,234 federal and regional voting recommendations, waiting until two days before the start of the election in order to prevent its picks from being removed from the ballot. For those who installed “Navalny” on their smartphones, the news arrived by push notification: “Your candidates are already in the app. Open it, look and vote!”More than half the Duma candidates the team endorsed were Communists — even though the party’s leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, this year called Mr. Navalny “a traitor who arrived to set the country on fire.”The strategy has stirred some discontent among Kremlin critics, especially in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg where several opposition candidates are running in the same district. The risk is that the Navalny team could misjudge which candidate has the most support, and end up splitting rather than consolidating the opposition vote.In District 198, in Moscow, the Navalny team chose Anastasiya Bryukhanova, a 28-year-old manager who works on urban improvement projects. Another opposition candidate running in the same district, Marina Litvinovich, took to Twitter and Facebook to call the decision “a big mistake” and stopped short of endorsing Ms. Bryukhanova.Marina Litvinovich speaking to her potential voters last month in Moscow.Daniel Kozin/Associated PressIn an interview, Ms. Bryukhanova estimated that the smart voting endorsement could add at least seven percentage points to her result.“This significantly increases our chances of victory,” she said.The goal of smart voting is to motivate people like Azalia Idrisova, a 33-year-old entrepreneur in the mental health field in Moscow who said she was overwhelmed by the number of candidates and political parties on the ballot. She said she would follow the smart voting recommendations, even though she expected the election results to be falsified.“All I can do is to go vote,” she said.Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting. More

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      Early Recall Voters Are as Democratic as in 2020. Here’s What it Means for Newsom.

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      Already, more people have returned ballots than cast votes in the last California recall election in 2003. More than nine million votes have already been received in the California recall election, suggesting a relatively high turnout more reminiscent not of a low-wattage special election but of a high-profile midterm.These nine million votes will probably account for most of the ballots cast in the election. They were overwhelmingly cast by mail or through early in-person voting. And they offer an emerging picture of an electorate that is somewhat older, whiter and more highly educated than those who had returned ballots at this time in last November’s presidential election.Overall in the recall, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 25-point margin in ballots recorded so far, 51 to 26 percent, according to figures from Political Data, a California-based data vendor. That Democratic advantage is nearly identical to the 50 percent to 25 percent edge that California Democrats enjoyed among the ballots returned by this point in 2020.Like last November’s election, registered Democrats have been slightly likelier to cast advance ballots than Republicans, likely reflecting the new Democratic enthusiasm for mail voting during the pandemic — or Republican skepticism of mail voting during the Trump era.President Biden went on to win California by 29 percentage points.Despite the similar partisan makeup of the advance vote, the state has received fewer ballots than at this point in the general election, when 13 million ballots had already been returned to election officials.Over all, 16 percent of the returns are from 18- to 34-year-old voters and 18 percent are thought to be Latinos, based on their surnames or neighborhoods. At this point in 2020, 21 percent were ages 18 to 34 and 21 percent were Latinos.Typically, young and Latino voters are likelier to vote closer to the election and will likely represent a larger share of all voters, as they did in 2020.Even so, the recall turnout appears high by nearly any other standard besides the 2020 election. Already, more people have returned ballots than cast votes in the last California recall election in 2003, when the Democratic governor Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. It is also higher than the total turnout in the 2014 midterm election.The relatively high and Democratic turnout so far has further narrowed the already daunting path to recall Mr. Newsom. The possibility that Republicans might benefit from an unusual turnout advantage was thought to be one of the likeliest ways that the recall effort might succeed in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. More

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      As California Votes, It Rethinks Its Tradition of Direct Democracy

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      Any proposed changes to a century-old recall law are likely to be met with stiff opposition from Republicans, who see it as one of the last avenues of influence in a Democratic-led state.SACRAMENTO — As Californians went to the polls on Tuesday to determine whether Gov. Gavin Newsom would be removed from office, the recall election had already spawned another campaign: to recall the recall.In a state famous for its acts of direct democracy, whether banning affirmative action or legalizing cannabis, detractors of this year’s special election say the recall process is democracy gone off the rails, a distraction from crises that require the government’s attention, and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.California’s forests are on fire, with wildfire smoke sending thousands of residents fleeing. Towns are running out of water from severe drought. And some rural hospitals are packed with coronavirus patients.Many voters who went to the polls on Tuesday said the election was an unwelcome distraction that preoccupied Mr. Newsom and, some critics said, might have prevented him from taking on tough decisions.“This recall is so dumb,” said Frankie Santos, a 43-year-old artist who voted in Hollywood on Tuesday. “It’s so not a good use of resources.” She said that if she could have scrawled “absolutely no” to recalling Mr. Newsom without invalidating her ballot, she would have.Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the State Assembly, and other legislative leaders have already said discussions were underway to place a constitutional amendment regarding recalls before voters in 2022.Voters waited to enter a polling site at a library in Huntington Beach.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesAn election worker collected mail-in ballots at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena.Ryan Young for The New York Times“This is a system that was put in place 100 years ago,” said Mr. Rendon, referring to the current recall rules. “We’ll be asking if this is what’s best for the state.”The election, which is costing the state $276 million to administer, has at times had a circus atmosphere to it, not least when one of the 46 candidates on the ballot brought a large bear to a campaign rally.No one in the state’s Democratic leadership is suggesting the elimination of recalls, which are baked into the State Constitution. But many are vowing to make it more difficult for them to qualify for the ballot, or to change the rules on how a successor is chosen.Currently, opponents of a governor — or any other elected official in California — can trigger a recall election by submitting signatures equal to 12 percent of the turnout in the most recent election for that office.In a sharp piece of political irony, it will take a referendum to decide whether to change this particular referendum.Democrats will be working over howls of opposition from Republicans, who see the recall process as one of the few resorts left to them in a state where Democrats control every statewide office and have supermajorities in the Legislature.“The last thing we need is legal changes that make it even harder for Californians to access their government,” said Kevin Kiley, a Republican assemblyman who ran in the recall election.Mr. Kiley said Democrats had already tried to delegitimize the process by calling it a democratic coup.“If they are trying to make it harder or impossible to hold your public officials accountable, that is absolutely something that I would oppose,” Mr. Kiley said.Critics of the recall process say it is fundamentally antidemocratic. With a simple majority, voters could recall Mr. Newsom, who was well ahead in the polls in the final days of campaigning. But his replacement would be chosen by plurality.Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked members of the IBEW Local 6 union for their support in San Francisco.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesLarry Elder, the leading Republican candidate, in Whittier last week.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesPolling showed that the front-runner to replace Mr. Newsom, the conservative talk show host Larry Elder, had nowhere near a majority of support, and many Democrats left that section of the ballot blank.Among Newsom supporters, there were strong feelings about the recall.Jose Orbeta, an employee of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, was blunt in describing the recall election as he voted on Tuesday.“Waste of time,” he said. “It’s a power grab by the G.O.P.”Mr. Newsom had done a “decent job” leading California through the pandemic, he said.Recalls in California date back more than a century, to a suite of reforms passed from 1910 to 1913 under Gov. Hiram Johnson, a Republican and progressive crusader. They were the capstone of a yearslong effort to curb the political power of the Southern Pacific railroad, which all but owned the state’s government and economy, controlling politicians, judges and regulators.Mr. Johnson’s reforms broke the hold, overhauling the state’s election system and, through a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1911, instituting the system of referendums, ballot initiatives and the recall. Kevin Starr, a California historian who died in 2017, called this “the very re-creation of the political and social order of California.”It is often pointed out that Mr. Johnson’s reforms — tools that were explicitly created to curb the influence of big business on California’s politics — have now become a major corporate weapon. This is particularly true of initiatives, which can be put on the ballot with a few million dollars’ worth of clipboard-holding workers gathering signatures from registered voters.One recent example was Proposition 22, a $200 million initiative by the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees.“That is the bigger problem here,” said Jim Newton, a historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written biographies of the governors Earl Warren and Jerry Brown.“It’s not whether Gavin Newsom gets 51 percent or we have Gov. Larry Elder. That’s important, but the general premise that the initiative, referendum and recall are intended to curb the influence of powerful special interests has been tipped entirely on its head and it has now become the tool of special interests.”Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert and the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that the state’s recall process is unconstitutional because the two-step nature of the process — with voters deciding whether to recall the sitting governor and then, separately, choosing a replacement — makes it possible for a new governor to take office with less popular support than the old one.If 49 percent of voters supported Mr. Newsom, 25 percent supported Mr. Elder, and fewer than that supported any other candidate, Mr. Elder would become governor with about half as many votes as Mr. Newsom. In that scenario, the vote of one Elder supporter would effectively have twice as much power as the vote of a Newsom supporter, said Professor Chemerinsky — and that would violate the “one person, one vote” principle affirmed in two Supreme Court decisions in 1964, Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders.Californians were not forced to confront that problem in the 2003 recall, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Gov. Gray Davis, because Mr. Schwarzenegger received more votes on the second question than Mr. Davis did on the first.Voters cast their ballots at Redwood Playhouse in Garberville.Alexandra Hootnick for The New York TimesLeaving a voting site at Jesse Owens Park in Los Angeles on Monday.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMr. Davis, the first California governor to lose a recall election, said in an interview that the ability to recall officials was part of California’s “unique direct democracy approach to voting,” but that he supported changes to the specifics of the process.“For 110 years, anyone running for governor knew there was a possibility of being subject to a recall,” he said. “It comes with the territory — and life isn’t always fair.”But he argued that the threshold for getting a recall on the ballot — signatures from 12 percent of the voters in the previous election for governor — was insufficient in an era that allows interest groups to gain supporters with the click of a button on Facebook.“We should go from a 12 percent to a 25 percent threshold,” Mr. Davis said, and ask voters only one question: “Who should serve out the balance of the governor’s term?”State Senator Josh Newman, who experienced the state’s recall rules firsthand when he was recalled in 2018 and replaced by a candidate who received fewer votes than him in the recall election, said he planned to propose a constitutional amendment early next year that would remove the replacement race on the ballot. Voters would decide whether a governor should be recalled, and if so, the lieutenant governor would automatically take the job. Mr. Newman ran against his replacement and won back his seat in 2020.Yet amid the plans and proposals to tweak the recall rules, there were voters who wanted them to stay just as they are.Jim Mastrosimone, a voter in Irvine, groused that the list of replacement candidates was too long after casting his vote for Mr. Elder.But ultimately, Mr. Mastrosimone said, he is happy Californians have recall elections.“It gives the power to the little guy,” he said.Thomas Fuller More

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      How large is Newsom's lead in the California recall election polls?

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      After the polls overestimated Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2020, it is reasonable to wonder whether Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lead in the California recall election might prove as illusory as Hillary Clinton’s lead in Wisconsin or Joe Biden’s in Florida.It’s not impossible. But Mr. Newsom’s lead now dwarfs the typical polling error and is large enough to withstand nearly every statewide polling miss in recent memory.Opposition to recalling Mr. Newsom leads by 17 points, 58 to 41 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight average. Polls in 2020 overestimated the Democrats by an average of about five percentage points.There was no state in either the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections where the final polls missed by 17 percentage points. Perhaps the worst recent polling miss — Senator Susan Collins’s comfortable nine-point victory after trailing in the polls by three points — is in the ballpark, but would still fall five points short of erasing Mr. Newsom’s lead.Many of the most embarrassing and high-profile misses for pollsters, such as the seven-point polling errors in Wisconsin in 2016 and 2020, might still leave Mr. Newsom with a double-digit victory.It is hard to find many precedents for such a large polling error. According to Harry Enten, a writer at CNN, there are only four cases in the last 20 years where the polling average in a race for governor was off by at least 15 percentage points.Mr. Newsom’s opponents can hope that the idiosyncrasies of a recall election might make it more challenging for pollsters than a typical general election. Special and primary elections often have larger polling errors.But the polls were fairly accurate in the last California gubernatorial recall and dead-on in the high-profile effort to recall former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin in 2012. The high turnout in early voting in California so far tends to reduce the risk that an unusual turnout would contribute to a particularly large polling error.And California is not a state where the polls have missed badly in recent election cycles. The largest polling errors have been in Wisconsin, Maine and other states with large numbers of white working-class voters. That’s not California. Just 22 percent of California voters in 2020 were whites without a four-year college degree, the second lowest of any state, according to census data.Perhaps as a result, statewide polling in California has generally been fairly accurate.Joe Biden led the final California polls by 29.2 points, according to FiveThirtyEight.He won by 29.2 points. More