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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

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      Voting in the California Recall: Ballots, Deadlines and Registration

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      More than 35 percent of California’s active, registered voters have already cast their ballots, and early voting is underway in several counties. If you missed the deadline to register to vote in the recall election, don’t worry. You can still register on Tuesday.Our Voter Guide has everything you need to know about where to vote, how to turn in your ballot and when we can expect to know the results.Where is my ballot?All registered and active California voters should have received a ballot by mail in the past few weeks. You can mail that ballot back or return it to a secure drop box by 8 p.m. You can track when your vote-by-mail ballot was mailed, received and counted at https://california.ballottrax.net/voter/.Where can I vote in person?Voters can cast ballots in person (you can find early voting locations here.) until 8 p.m. Pacific when polls close.You can check whether you’re registered to vote here. Visit the Secretary of State’s website to learn more about same-day voter registration.When will we know the results?So when will we know the results? After Election Day, county election officials have to complete their work receiving and counting ballots, although we may have some idea of the vote by then, since nearly eight million ballots have already been returned and many more are expected to come in as we get closer. Counties can process early ballots and get them ready to count, but they cannot start tallying until the polls close. More

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      False Election Claims in California Reveal a New Normal for G.O.P.

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      In an echo of 2020, Republicans are pushing baseless allegations of cheating in the state’s recall race even before Election Day.The results of the California recall election won’t be known until Tuesday night. But some Republicans are already predicting victory for the Democrat, Gov. Gavin Newsom, for a reason that should sound familiar.Voter fraud.Soon after the recall race was announced in early July, the embers of 2020 election denialism ignited into new false claims on right-wing news sites and social media channels. This vote, too, would supposedly be “stolen,” with malfeasance ranging from deceptively designed ballots to nefariousness by corrupt postal workers.As a wave of recent polling indicated that Mr. Newsom was likely to brush off his Republican challengers, the baseless allegations accelerated. Larry Elder, a leading Republican candidate, said he was “concerned” about election fraud. The Fox News commentators Tomi Lahren and Tucker Carlson suggested that wrongdoing was the only way Mr. Newsom could win. And former President Donald J. Trump predicted that it would be “a rigged election.”This swift embrace of false allegations of cheating in the California recall reflects a growing instinct on the right to argue that any lost election, or any ongoing race that might result in defeat, must be marred by fraud. The relentless falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election have only fueled such fears.“I very honestly believe there were irregularities and fraudulent activity,” Elena Johnson, 65, a teacher in Los Angeles County who was in the crowd at a rally for Mr. Elder last week in Ventura County, said of the presidential contest last year. “It was stolen.”Because of her concerns about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Ms. Johnson said, she would be casting her ballot in person on Tuesday instead of by mail. She said she was supporting the Republican because she thought California, her adopted home after immigrating from the Philippines 40 years ago, was on the brink. “California is where I came, and California is where I want to stay,” she said.Since the start of the recall, allegations of election fraud have been simmering on social media in California, with daily mentions in the low thousands, according to a review by Zignal Labs, a media tracking agency.But singular claims or conspiracy theories, such as a selectively edited video purporting to show that people with a post office “master key” could steal ballots, have quickly ricocheted around the broader conservative ecosystem. The post office video surpassed one million views, amplified by high-profile Trump allies and members of the conservative news media.Nationally, Republican candidates who deny the outcomes of their elections remain outliers. Hundreds of G.O.P. candidates up and down the ballot in 2020 accepted their defeats. But at the same time, many of them joined Mr. Trump in the assault on the presidential race’s outcome, and in other recent election cycles, candidates, their allies and the conservative news media have increasingly expressed doubts about the validity of the electoral process.And while false claims of wrongdoing have long emerged in the days and weeks after elections, Republicans’ quick turn in advance of the California recall — a race that was always going to be a long shot for them in a deep-blue state — signals the growing normalization of crying fraud.“This is baked into the playbook now,” said Michael Latner, an associate professor of political science at California Polytechnic Institute. As soon as the recall was official, he added, “you already started to see stories and individuals on social media claiming that, you know, they received five ballots or their uncle received five ballots.”Some Republican leaders and strategists around the country worry that it is a losing message. While such claims may stoke up the base, leaders fear that repeatedly telling voters that the election is rigged and their votes will not count could have a suppressive effect, leading some potential Republican voters to stay home.Republican officials have tried to encourage their voters to vote by mail while also acknowledging their worries about fraud.Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressThey point to the Senate runoff elections early this year in Georgia, where two Republican incumbents, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, were ousted by first-time Democratic challengers. Though the state had just voted Democratic in the presidential election for the first time in decades, the Senate races were seen as an even taller task for Democrats.But in the months after the November general election, Mr. Trump fired off countless attacks against the legitimacy of the Georgia contests, floating conspiracy theories and castigating the Republican secretary of state and governor for not acquiescing to his desire to subvert the presidential election. When the runoffs came, more than 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November did not cast ballots, according to a review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. More than half of those voters were from constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates, the review found.“The person that they most admired in their conservative beliefs was telling them that their vote didn’t count,” said Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia, a Republican, referring to Mr. Trump. “And then the next day he would tell him that the election was rigged, and then the next day he would tell them, ‘Why even show up?’ And they didn’t. And that alone was enough to swing the election to the Democrat side.”“This whole notion about fraud and elections,” Mr. Duncan continued, “it’s a shiny object that quite honestly is about trying to save face and not own reality.”Republican officials in California have performed a balancing act, trying to acknowledge their voters’ worries about fraud while ensuring that the same voters trust the state’s vote-by-mail system enough to cast a ballot. Party officials have promoted mail voting on social media, and have leaned on popular members of Republican leadership, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, to cut videos preaching the security of voting by mail.But some leading Republicans in the state have simultaneously denounced a bill passed by the State Legislature this month that would permanently enact a mail voting expansion that was introduced as an emergency measure in 2020. Republicans in the Legislature have continued to baselessly claim that mail voting invites fraud and that drop boxes remain unsecure.“I can tell you story after story in my district,” State Senator Shannon Grove, a Republican from Bakersfield, said during a floor debate this month. She added that the Democrats who dominate the chamber would admit they had also heard complaints “if you guys were honest.”The state Republican Party has also ramped up what it calls an election integrity operation, which aims to recruit more poll watchers and is directing voters to a hotline to send in complaints of fraud. The program, according to Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the state party, was designed to assure voters that the California election would be secure.Larry Elder has changed his position on whether he thought President Biden won the election fairly.Allison Zaucha for The New York Times“My entire focus,” Ms. Patterson said in an interview, “is to build trust and faith within our process and make sure people are confident.” She added that she was not paying attention to the national conversation about voter fraud and that she was not worried about the Republican effort hurting turnout because “our No. 1 turnout operation is having Gavin Newsom as our governor every day.”“I’ve always focused on California; everything outside of that is noise,” Ms. Patterson said. “We have to fix our own house before we can worry about what’s going on at the national level.”Mr. Elder, the Republican challenger to Mr. Newsom who has claimed without evidence that there will be “shenanigans” in the voting process, has also set up a tip line for voters to offer evidence of fraud.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      How Educational Differences Are Widening America’s Political Rift

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      College graduates are now a firmly Democratic bloc, and they are shaping the party’s future. Those without degrees, by contrast, have flocked to Republicans.The front lines of America’s cultural clashes have shifted in recent years. A vigorous wave of progressive activism has helped push the country’s culture to the left, inspiring a conservative backlash against everything from “critical race theory” to the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.These skirmishes may be different in substance from those that proceeded them, but in the broadest sense they are only the latest manifestation of a half-century trend: the realignment of American politics along cultural and educational lines, and away from the class and income divisions that defined the two parties for much of the 20th century.As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.Over the longer run, some Republicans even fantasize that the rise of educational polarization might begin to erode the Democratic advantage among voters of color without a college degree. Perhaps a similar phenomenon may help explain how Donald J. Trump, who mobilized racial animus for political gain, nonetheless fared better among voters of color than previous Republicans did, and fared worse among white voters.President Biden won about 60 percent of college-educated voters in 2020, including an outright majority of white college graduates, helping him run up the score in affluent suburbs and putting him over the top in pivotal states.This was a significant voting bloc: Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.Yet even as college graduates have surged in numbers and grown increasingly liberal, Democrats are no stronger than they were 10, 30 or even 50 years ago. Instead, rising Democratic strength among college graduates and voters of color has been counteracted by a nearly equal and opposite reaction among white voters without a degree.When the Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidency in 1960, he won white voters without a degree but lost white college graduates by a two-to-one margin. The numbers were almost exactly reversed for Mr. Biden, who lost white voters without a degree by a two-to-one margin while winning white college graduates.About 27 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters in 2020 were white voters without a college degree, according to Pew Research, down from the nearly 60 percent of Bill Clinton’s supporters who were whites without a degree just 28 years earlier. The changing demographic makeup of the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling dynamic, in which the growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party.The Democratic advantage among college graduates may be a new phenomenon, but the relative liberalism of college graduates is not. College graduates have been far likelier than voters without a college degree to self-identify as liberal for decades, even when they were likelier to vote Republican.College graduates attribute racial inequality, crime and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems, while voters without a degree tend to focus on individualist and parochial explanations. It is easier for college graduates, with their higher levels of affluence, to vote on their values, not simply on economic self-interest. They are likelier to have high levels of social trust and to be open to new experiences. They are less likely to believe in God.The rise of cultural liberalism is not simply a product of rising college attendance. In fact, there is only equivocal evidence that college attendance makes people vastly more liberal. Far from the indoctrination that conservatives fear, liberal college professors appear to preach to an already liberal choir.But it is hard to imagine the last half-century of liberal cultural change without the role played by universities and academia, which helped inspire everything from the student movements and New Left of the 1960s to the ideas behind today’s fights over “critical race theory.” The concentration of so many left-leaning students and professors on campus helped foster a new liberal culture with more progressive ideas and norms than would have otherwise existed.“If you live in a community which is more liberal, there’s a self-reinforcing ratcheting effect,” said Pippa Norris, a professor and political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School who believes that the rise of higher education contributed to the rise of social liberalism throughout the postindustrial world.As college graduates increased their share of the electorate, they gradually began to force the Democrats to accommodate their interests and values. They punched above their electoral weight, since they make up a disproportionate number of the journalists, politicians, activists and poll respondents who most directly influence the political process.At the same time, the party’s old industrial working-class base was in decline, as were the unions and machine bosses who once had the power to connect the party’s politicians to its rank and file. The party had little choice but to broaden its appeal, and it adopted the views of college-educated voters on nearly every issue, slowly if fitfully alienating its old working-class base.Republicans opened their doors to traditionally Democratic conservative-leaning voters who were aggrieved by the actions and perceived excesses of the new, college-educated left. This G.O.P. push began, and continues in some ways today, with the so-called Southern strategy — leveraging racial divisions and “states’ rights” to appeal to white voters.The reasons for white working-class alienation with the Democrats have shifted from decade to decade. At times, nearly every major issue area — race, religion, war, environmentalism, guns, trade, immigration, sexuality, crime, social welfare programs — has been a source of Democratic woes.What the Democratic Party’s positions on these very different issues have had in common is that they reflected the views of college-educated liberals, even when in conflict with the apparent interests of working-class voters — and that they alienated some number of white voters without a degree. Environmentalists demanded regulations on the coal industry; coal miners bolted from the Democrats. Suburban voters supported an assault gun ban; gun owners shifted to the Republicans. Business interests supported free trade agreements; old manufacturing towns broke for Mr. Trump.A similar process may be beginning to unfold among Hispanic voters. The 2020 election was probably the first presidential contest in which the Democratic candidate fared better among voters of color who graduated from college than among those without a degree. Mr. Trump made large gains among voters of color without degrees, especially Latino ones. The causes of his surge are still being debated, but one leading theory is that he was aided by a backlash against the ideas and language of the college-educated left, including activist calls to “defund the police.”For some Republicans, Mr. Trump’s gains have raised the possibility that it may be easier to appeal to working-class voters of color.“It doesn’t seem quite as big of a bridge to cross as saying, ‘Let’s go back and win white suburbanites,’” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who is writing a book on how the party might build a multiracial coalition.True or not, it’s a view that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it leads Republicans to adopt strategies aimed at making it a reality.There is no guarantee that the rising liberalism of the Democratic primary electorate or college graduates will continue. The wave of activism in the 1960s gave way to a relatively conservative generation of college graduates in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Perhaps something similar will happen today.What can be guaranteed is that the college-educated share of the population — and the electorate — will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state where four-year college graduates represented the majority of voters in a presidential contest. In 2020, the state was joined by New York, Colorado and Maryland. Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut and others are not far behind. Nationwide, four-year college graduates might represent a majority of midterm voters at some point over the next decade. More

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      in Elections

      Snap Out of It, America: Give Kids the Right to Vote

      by

      This essay is part of a series exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment. Read more about this project in a note from Ezekiel Kweku, Opinion’s politics editor.

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      The 2020 presidential election saw the highest vote total in any American election ever, driven by a historic increase in turnout among eligible voters. Even so, the total number of voters amounted to just 48 percent of the population measured in the 2020 census. Most people living in America either could not or did not cast a vote.For each group of people prohibited from casting a vote, there is some rationale, Noncitizens are not formally part of the body politic; democracies since Athens have included franchise restrictions as punishment for criminals; children can’t make well-informed rational choices. Many people may disagree with one or several of these choices. Maybe denying the franchise to felons is unjust given bias in the criminal justice system, or perhaps permanent residents should be allowed to vote, as they often could in the 19th century.But of these three groups, there is only one where the justification for denying the vote is based in irrational animus: the denial of the franchise to children.This is an injustice that should be corrected. All citizens should be allowed to vote, regardless of their age. The minimum voting age should be zero, with parents and guardians casting the vote for their small children. As those children grow older, parents can include the vote in the gradual increase in independence and responsibility given to young people, until finally their children vote for themselves, likely in their early teen years.Such a policy is not only imperative on the basis of nondiscrimination, but it would also improve our political system. This idea may sound strange, but it may be just the political corrective our society needs.The intuitive explanation for the prohibition against children voting is that they are incapable of understanding the issues. However, were governments to impose an IQ test for the ballot box, it would be plainly unconstitutional; “literacy tests” for voters have a terrible legacy. Were people with cognitive impairments denied the vote as a class, this would be considered discriminatory on its face and, frankly, bigoted (and even the individual cases of “mental incompetence” being used to deny the franchise have rightly provoked anger).Yet when our society’s hostility toward children manifests in the view that they can be denied the vote on the exact grounds we would all see as bigoted in any other case, it is unremarkable. Nor do many common proposals to lower the voting age do much to address this critique. Lowering it to 16, as Andrew Yang proposed, on the ground that 16-year-olds are old enough to drive or work simply preserves the underlying bias that would limit the franchise to the smart and the rich.Many people can follow this argument so far: Let any kid old enough to pull the lever do so. But even this creates an inconsistent standard, since paralyzed people, for example, have a right to physical assistance in the voting booth.If older people with dementia can be escorted into the voting booth by a family member who will assist their decision, as they can be under the Voting Rights Act, it’s difficult to explain why small children with an incomplete understanding of the process couldn’t be assisted by those who are raising them in the same way. The results of that election will affect a child’s life for far longer an elderly person’s.The electoral innovations of 2020 reveal the inadequacy of many other critiques. Mail-in voting has now been tested in many states and, while some conservatives (myself included) have concerns about the lack of privacy and security afforded by this system, the broad popularity of mail-in voting is likely to make it endure.And as long as we have mail-in voting, it’s ridiculous to act as if families making collective voting decisions together, or even filling out their ballots in full view of one another, is bad. My wife and I completed our absentee ballots side by side (disclosure: she doesn’t think our 19-month-old should be allowed to vote). We might worry that parents would pressure children to make votes they don’t want to make, but that is no justification for denying children the vote. We already trust parents in numerous far more sensitive domains, and we do not apply such concerns about undue pressure in other instances, like older people living with their children.In other words, if we simply apply the same principles to children that we apply throughout the rest of our democracy, the logical conclusion is obvious: The voting age should be “at birth,” and parents should be able to provide whatever degree of assistance is necessary to enable their children to have their interests represented. That a child is too young to speak or walk is no argument against child voting, since many other nonverbal, immobile people who need daily assistance are also allowed to vote.But child voting should not be favored simply on the grounds that we must allow it in order to avoid discrimination. Child voting is not a necessary evil, it’s good. The choice to deny the vote to children creates absurd policy dynamics: The Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of important policies like a carbon tax or an expansion of the child tax credit on a 10-year baseline, with an electorate that is, on average, just a bit more than 10 years away from retirement.And although parents as a class will never perfectly represent their children’s values and interests, they are likely to do a pretty good job — and we already trust them to make many other decisions on behalf of their children. Moreover, political preferences are fairly heritable, which means parents are likely a decent proxy for what their children would believe were they adults, at least on average.Adding children into the electorate, and adding parents who care about the long-term outlook for their children’s lives, will help offset the overweening (and often destructive) political power of retirees. Our politics are short-termist where they should be forward-looking. Giving children the vote will make it easier to build political coalitions around investments in the future even if their 10-year C.B.O. score is hefty.Extending the franchise to birth will also function as a valuable form of societal catechesis. Modern, post-materialist societies have invented the pernicious life stage of “youth” as socially separate from childhood and adulthood, creating a period where young people are functionally adults in terms of their capacities, but persist in the habits of children, devoid of serious responsibility.This change has created generations of narcissists, from the boomers to Gen Z. Abolishing one of the key markers of the end of adolescence and allowing children of any age to assume adult responsibilities whenever they are ready will help young people leap directly from childhood to “adulting.”Finally, much has been made of America’s lowest-in-history birthrates. Proposals to lift those rates have ranged from large cash transfers to parents, to child care, to maternity leave, to a renewal of nationalism and religious revival. Debates about the gendered politics around fertility can become rancorous. But offering children the vote would be an excellent form of soft, egalitarian natalism.Giving children the vote wouldn’t make a direct transfer of any kind to parents, but it would help to change the social narrative around children: They would no longer be just a burden we pay for until they hit the labor force. They would be part of society, valuable stakeholders, with worthwhile voices of their own.Giving children votes would communicate to parents and to children as they mature that wider society is invested in preparing for a better future, in listening to their ideas, and partnering in their ambitions. It would recognize the valuable work done by parents all around the country every day in making box lunches, waiting in lines to drop off their youngsters at school, and rocking a crying child back to sleep. And it would say to every child, “There is plenty of room in the American story for you.”Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) is a demographer, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a Robert Novak journalism fellow.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.hed More