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      Analysis: Amid Biden’s Dismal Polling, Don’t Expect Him to Shift Strategy

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      Officials in the president’s orbit say polls won’t change a strategy centered on comparing the Biden agenda with a Republican one, even as some allies feel betrayed by his policies.For weeks, polls have shown President Biden trailing his likely challenger, former President Donald J. Trump. Protesters have streamed through Washington, demanding that Mr. Biden call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Groups of key voters, including young people and voters of color, have suggested that they might not support Mr. Biden in the 2024 election.With so many troubling signals, what is a president seeking re-election to do? The answer, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, is to stay the course.Several officials in the Biden campaign and the White House are adamant that unflattering polls and vocal criticism from key constituents over Gaza, immigration and other issues simply have not been enough to shift a strategy that is centered on comparing the Biden agenda with policies favored by Republicans.The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would turn up the volume on that battle cry beginning in 2024.The polls — and the reams of what officials see as negative news coverage — have at times frustrated everyone, including Mr. Biden. But the polling has not changed the president’s mind on any of the issues that could bring political peril next year, including his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza or place conditions on military aid to Israel, the officials said.“They’re not freaking out,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime confidant to Mr. Biden, said in an interview about the president and his team. “When you signed up for this thing, you didn’t sign up to be at 80 percent in the polls. These are genuine veterans, and they’re picked because of their ability to be calm in difficult times.”This thinking is not likely to satisfy a cacophony of voices outside that small circle. Immigration has been one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities. In recent weeks, the White House has considered major new restrictions on migration to satisfy Republicans who refuse to approve aid for Ukraine or Israel without a crackdown at the border.Although members of Congress have not yet secured a deal, the fact that the White House has signaled openness to even some of the policies has drawn enormous criticism from progressives in his own party and immigration advocates who supported him in the past.“For the White House to endorse such cruel policies would be a betrayal to millions of Americans who believed President Biden’s campaign promises to restore our humanitarian leadership and the rule of law,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a refugee advocacy organization.Democrats are clamoring for the president to do more and say more about the threat Mr. Trump poses to democracy. Others want Mr. Biden to encourage the Israelis to end their large-scale campaign in Gaza. Still others say he is running out of time to make the strongest case possible for himself against an opponent who is skillful at commandeering a news cycle.A poll released by The New York Times on Tuesday showed widespread disapproval of Mr. Biden’s decisions around the war in the Middle East. But the polling also showed that those surveyed care much more about the state of the economy than they do about foreign policy, and that a majority of them still support providing military and economic aid to Israel.“The very real investments, resources and work we’re putting in right now aren’t for the next poll of the day — they’re to win an election next November,” said Kevin Munoz, a Biden campaign spokesman.He also pointed to several other polls published this week that show better odds for Mr. Biden in 2024, including polling from The Times that showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among likely voters.The plan for Mr. Biden to dig out of the bad news swirling around him in Washington, his advisers say, is to relentlessly focus on his agenda during visits to key states, like the one he made to Wisconsin on Wednesday.The state is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. Ms. Harris chose the state to kick off a countrywide tour in support of reproductive rights, beginning in January.During a visit to Milwaukee on Wednesday, Mr. Biden did not focus on foreign policy or immigration or polls. Instead, he talked about investments in the business community during remarks at a Black chamber of commerce.Mr. Biden also said his administration had worked to forgive student loan debt — another point of criticism among Democrats — despite a Supreme Court decision that invalidated his plan for even more relief. According to figures released this month by the Education Department, the administration has wiped out $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.During his remarks, Mr. Biden highlighted Mr. Trump’s recent comments on immigrants “poisoning” the blood of the country, words that echoed Adolf Hitler’s comments about Jewish people.“Well, I don’t believe, as the president — former president — said again yesterday, that immigrants are polluting our blood,” Mr. Biden said. “The economy and our nation are stronger when we’re tapped into the full range of talents in this nation.”Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, said in an interview that the next year would be about addressing the concerns of different groups of voters but also about drawing a clear comparison with Mr. Trump.“Our job will be to make sure people know that they’ve been heard,” Mr. Wilker said, but also to present a comparison between Mr. Trump and “a seasoned leader who actually knows how to listen to people, bring people together and get things done.” In Wisconsin, the Biden campaign has hired a state campaign manager and piloted a volunteer program, with a focus on colleges and Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The program, which also has a pilot in Arizona, will focus on leveraging the social networks of volunteers rather than the door-knocking campaigns of past elections. (A graphic designer, Mr. Wilker said, is on hand to create shareable memes and graphics around topics — basically, an emoji-friendly version of a bumper sticker.)This week, the Biden campaign spent money on advertisements centered on Mr. Biden’s visit that promoted local investments that had come through infrastructure legislation. When Wisconsinites Google political news coverage, the Biden campaign will have paid for search results to surface local stories about the president’s visit.But Mr. Biden’s advisers know that he is a more important messenger than any campaign ad. On Wednesday, the president stopped twice to talk to reporters.In one exchange after landing in Milwaukee, Mr. Biden departed from his usual tendency to abstain when asked about the latest story swirling around Mr. Trump — a court ruling in Colorado that declared the former president ineligible to be placed on the primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection during the Jan. 6 attacks. Mr. Biden said it was “self evident” that his opponent was an insurrectionist, though he said whether Mr. Trump was on the ballot was up to the court.“You saw it all,” Mr. Biden told reporters. “And he seems to be doubling down on — about everything.”Then he acknowledged that his day job was calling.“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got to go do this event.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      Fake electors in Wisconsin first to admit Biden won election and face penalty

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      A group of Republican fake electors in Wisconsin acknowledged Joe Biden won the presidency and agreed they would not serve in the electoral college in 2024 as part of a settlement agreement in a civil lawsuit on Wednesday.The settlement, first reported by the Washington Post, marks the first time any of the fake electors from 2020 have formally acknowledged wrongdoing in a legal case and have faced any kind of penalty. The case was filed by two Biden electors and a Wisconsin voter last year. They sought up to $2.4m in damages, in addition to permanently barring the fake electors from ever being able to serve as presidential electors again.No money is involved in the settlement, according to a copy of the agreement that was obtained by the Washington Post. The fake electors agreed to never serve in an election in which Donald Trump is on the ballot. They also agreed to fully cooperate in any justice department investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The lawsuit is continuing against Jim Troupis, a Wisconsin attorney who helped organize the effort there, as well as Ken Chesebro, a lawyer who was the architect of the effort to convene false slates of electors across the country.The effort to get pro-Trump slates of electors in place if allies were able to stop the certification of the presidential vote has drawn scrutiny from both federal and state prosecutors. The Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, has criminally charged those who served as fake electors there. Chesebro and some of the Georgia fake electors were also charged as part of the wide-ranging Rico prosecution into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe attorney general of Nevada is also reportedly investigating the fake elector slate there as is the Arizona attorney general. More

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      Wisconsin Judge Dismisses Felony Charge in ‘Ballot Selfie’ Case

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      The debate over a candidate’s photo reflects concerns among states over selfies of ballots and of people showing how they vote. A Wisconsin judge on Monday dismissed a felony charge against a school board candidate who had posted a photograph on Facebook of a ballot with his name filled in.In his ruling, the judge, Paul V. Malloy of Ozaukee County, threw out the count of voter fraud against the man, Paul H. Buzzell, 52, a former school board member in Mequon, a suburb of Milwaukee, who was voted back onto the board during an election in April, online court records show. Judge Malloy ruled on a motion to dismiss by Mr. Buzzell’s lawyers, who argued that the state law prohibiting so-called ballot selfies was overly broad and violated the constitutional guarantee of free expression. “What is at stake is branding a politician a felon for declaring to the world that the politician displayed” a marked ballot “showing a vote for himself in an election,” the motion said. Mr. Burrell would have faced a maximum possible sentence of three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine had he been convicted. He would also have been barred from running for elected office.The case reflects the debate among states over selfies of ballots and of people showing how they vote. Some legislators have argued that public displays of marked ballots can be used to influence voters in an election or to promote vote buying. Others, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say such laws banning voting selfies on social media restrict free speech.Under Wisconsin law, it is an election fraud violation for a person to show his or her marked ballot to someone else, or to mark a ballot so that it is identifiable as his or hers. It is one of at least 18 states that have laws prohibiting selfies displaying a voter’s marked ballot.In 2020, the Wisconsin Senate passed a bill to legalize ballot selfies, but the State Assembly failed to pass a bill that would eliminate the statute, The Associated Press reported.According to a criminal complaint, Mr. Buzzell, 52, published a photograph on Facebook of a marked ballot on March 27 ahead of an election for the Mequon-Thiensville School Board. Witnesses reported the post to the Mequon Police Department as a case of possible election fraud, the complaint said. The photograph of the ballot showed the oval next to Mr. Buzzell’s name filled out as well as that of another candidate, Jason P. Levash, court documents show. Mr. Levash serves as the school board’s vice president, and Mr. Buzzell serves as treasurer. “He displayed a marked ballot showing a vote for himself,” Mr. Buzzell’s lawyer, Michael Chernin, said on Tuesday, adding that Mr. Buzzell indicated that the ballot in question was his daughter’s. Mr. Buzzell, when contacted by the police on April 2, said that “his understanding was that it was not illegal to post a photo of a ballot with his name on it,” the complaint said. He cast his own ballot in person on April 5, according to the complaint.While the dismissal means that the prosecutors’ case cannot move ahead, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which reported on Monday that the charges had been dropped, quoted the Ozaukee County district attorney, Adam Gerol, as saying that he would ask the attorney general to decide whether to file an appeal or issue an opinion. “It’s in the A.G.’s hands,” said Mr. Gerol, a Republican. He did not immediately reply to a message left at his office on Tuesday.The office of Josh Kaul, the attorney general, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Wisconsin Department of Justice would review the district attorney’s request and “proceed appropriately.” More

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      Wisconsin supreme court appears poised to strike down legislative maps and end Republican dominance

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      The Wisconsin supreme court appeared poised to strike down the current maps for the state legislature after three hours of oral argument on Tuesday, a decision that could end more than a decade of Republican dominance and eliminate some of the most gerrymandered districts in the United States.The four liberal justices on the court all seemed ready to embrace an argument from challengers in the case, Clarke v Wisconsin elections commission, that the maps violate the state constitution because they include more than 70 districts. It was unclear, however, how the justices would handle the redrawing of a map and whether it would immediately order elections for the entire legislature next year in new districts. Wisconsin voters elect 99 assembly members every two years, but only about half of the 33-member state senate would normally be up for election next year.Much of Tuesday’s oral argument focused on how to interpret the definition of contiguity in Wisconsin’s constitution. The document mandates that assembly districts “be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable” It says state senate districts shall be comprised of “convenient contiguous territory”. Despite that requirement, 75 of the state’s 132 legislative districts – 54 in the state assembly and 21 in the senate – contain at least one detached piece.Taylor Meehan, an attorney for legislative Republicans, argued that districts had long been considered to be contiguous as long as they kept towns, counties and wards whole. In Wisconsin, localities have annexed disconnected parts of land that have resulted in strange shapes. “You can define contiguity as strictly or as loosely as you want,” she said.“That’s the tail leading the dog. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to look at the definition to determine what the law is,” said Jill Karofsky, a liberal elected in 2020, who asked some of the most pointed questions.Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, another liberal on the court, said history from the time Wisconsin’s constitution led her to believe that it was “unconvincing” that contiguous could “mean something other than physical contact”.Mark Gaber, a lawyer from the non-profit Campaign Legal Center who represented some of the challengers, also said that it was possible to draw physically contiguous districts that included the detached portions.“There’s not a single place in Wisconsin where it’s not possible to bound the districts with county, town and ward lines and to be 100% contiguous,” Gaber said.In 2011, Republicans drew districts for the state legislature that were so distorted in their favor that it made it impossible for them to lose their majorities. Last year, the state supreme court implemented new maps that made as little change as possible from the old ones when lawmakers and the state’s Democratic governor reached a redistricting impasse.The court’s liberal wing seemed unsettled on how they would proceed with a potential remedy to fixing the maps (state election officials have said they would need a new map in place no later than 15 March 2024 for use in next year’s elections). The justices asked all of the lawyers in the case on Tuesday to submit the names of non-partisan mapmakers who could serve as a special master to advise them in coming up with new maps. The request signaled the court was aware of the need to move quickly if they are going to strike down the map.Meehan, the attorney for legislative Republicans, and Richard Esenberg, an attorney with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, both argued that any non-contiguous defects in the map could be addressed with tweaks to the defective areas and without redrawing the entire map. Redrawing the entire map, they suggested, would simply allow the challengers a back door to try to get districts that were more friendly to Democrats. Meehan said the arguments were a “wolf in sheep’s clothing designed to backdoor a political statewide remedy”.Karofsky seemed unpersuaded.“Over half of the assembly districts in this state have a constitutional violation,” she said. “Why don’t we start clean?”Sam Hirsch, a lawyer representing mathematicians and statisticians challenging the maps, urged the justices not to draw the map themselves, but instead give the legislature a chance to fix them. Getting involved in the actual districting, he said, was a “slippery slope that you don’t want to go down”.Brian Hagedorn, a conservative justice, pressed the challengers to explain how they should think about partisan fairness if the maps get redrawn. He suggested that there was no way for a court to determine whether there was an acceptable number of Republican or Democratic districts.Gaber responded with a much simpler principle that he said should guide decision.Many of the questions from the conservative justices sharply pressed the challengers in the case why they had not raised their claims two years ago, when the supreme court initially decided the redistricting case. Justice Rebecca Bradley, one of the three conservatives on the seven-member court, repeatedly noted that two years ago, no party had raised a contiguity challenge and had stipulated that all the districts complied with the court’s definition of contiguity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe clear subtext was that the challengers were bringing the new claims now because liberals flipped control of the supreme court. The case was filed the day after Janet Protasiewicz formally took her seat on the supreme court in August, flipping control of the bench and giving liberals a 4-3 majority. Protasiewicz, who called the maps “rigged” during her campaign last year, a comment that has prompted Republicans in the legislature to threaten impeaching her.Bradley interrupted Mark Gaber, a lawyer for challengers, less than 10 seconds after he began his argument on Tuesday. “Where were your clients two years ago?” she asked. At one point Bradley bluntly said that the challengers were only bringing the case because the composition of the court had changed.The question set the tone for many of the questions from Bradley and the court’s conservative minority. They pressed Gaber and other attorneys seeking to get rid of the maps on why they did not raise their arguments two years ago when the court picked the current maps.“You are ultimately asking that this court unseat every assemblyman that was elected last year,” said Bradley, comparing the plaintiffs’ request to implement a new map before the 2024 elections – and additionally, to hold early special elections for representatives not up for election in 2024 – to Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. She later asked Esenberg, one of the attorneys defending the map, whether he really expected to get a fair hearing before the court.Other challengers warned that a court decision wading into redistricting would invite future challenges and would signal there was no finality to rulings in redistricting cases. “Is there any end to this litigation?,” Annette Ziegler, a court’s chief justice and a conservative, asked at one point.“It is remarkable to see a matter, a particular case or controversy, fully litigated before this court, and then an attempt made to effectively reopen this a year later, after a change in the composition of the court,” said Esenberg. He described a situation where the state repeatedly and rapidly adjusts its legislative maps, hindering representatives’ ability to serve their constituents in office.“The constitution takes a back seat to what you just described?” countered Justice Rebecca Dallet.Several of Bradley’s questions were pointed. At one point, she yelled at Karofsky, a liberal on the court, for cutting her off during a question and asked: “Are you arguing the case?”The map for Wisconsin’s state assembly may be the most gerrymandered body in the US. It packs Democrats into as few districts as possible while splitting their influence elsewhere. Even though Wisconsin is one of the US’s most politically competitive states, Republicans have never held fewer than 60 seats in the state assembly since 2012. The gerrymandering in the assembly carries over to the state senate, where Wisconsin law requires districts to be comprised of three assembly districts.The court’s liberal justices seemed less interested in a second part of the challenge to the map, an argument the way the maps came to be implemented ran afoul of the state constitution. In 2021, the state supreme court took over the redistricting process after the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, vetoed a GOP-drawn plan. The court, which then had a conservative majority, invited a range of submissions for a new map, but announced it would pick a proposal that made as little change as possible to the existing maps. It initially chose a plan drawn by Evers, but that map was rejected by the US supreme court. The state supreme court then chose a different plan submitted by legislative Republicans. It was the same map Evers had vetoed in 2021.That decision, the challengers argue, allowed the legislature to essentially override Evers’s veto, the challengers say, violating the separation of powers between governmental branches. The state supreme court also exercised a constitutionally permissible role in choosing a map, they say, because the governor and lawmakers had reached an impasse. More

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      ‘Deliberate and anti-democratic’: Wisconsin grapples with partisan gerrymandering

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      The Wisconsin supreme court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most closely watched voting rights cases in the country this year. The challenge could ultimately lead to the court striking down districts in the state legislature, ending a cemented Republican majority, and upending politics in one of the US’s most politically competitive states.The case, Clarke v Wisconsin Elections Commission, is significant because Wisconsin’s state legislative maps, and especially its state assembly districts, are widely considered to be among the most gerrymandered in the US. In 2011, Republicans redrew the districts in such a way that cemented an impenetrable majority. In the state assembly, Republicans have consistently won at least 60% of the 99 seats, sometimes with less than 50% of the statewide vote. In 2022, Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, won re-election by three points, but carried just 38 of 99 assembly districts.The Evers result underscored a disturbing anti-democratic reality in Wisconsin: the results of state legislative elections are determined before a single vote is cast. Because of that dynamic, the case could restore representation to Wisconsin voters, making their districts more responsive to how they vote.A ruling striking down the maps is likely to result in a legislature in which Republicans have a much narrower majority and could reshape policymaking in Wisconsin. Issues that have broad public support in Wisconsin, like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization, have been non-starters in a legislature where the GOP majority is ironclad. A legislature in which Republicans are fearful of losing their majority may be more willing to at least consider broadly popular issues.“What’s at stake in this case is really democracy in the state of Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandel, president of Law Forward, which is representing some of the challengers in the suit.Republicans have wielded their legislative power ruthlessly and effectively for more than a decade. When Democrats won the governor’s and attorney general’s offices in 2018, Republicans stripped them of some of their power. Republican lawmakers ignored Evers’ requests for special sessions on a myriad of issues. More recently, they launched an investigation into the 2020 election that devolved into chaos, have floated impeachment for a supreme court justice and attacked the non-partisan administrator of the state elections commission.Then, liberals flipped control of the state supreme court in April in the most expensive state supreme court race in US history. Justice Janet Protasiewicz, the newest member of the court’s liberal majority, said during the campaign the maps were “rigged”, a comment that has led Republicans to call for her impeachment. The case was filed the day after Protasiewicz formally took her seat on the court in August.Tuesday’s case is one of several in recent years that have focused on state courts and state constitutions as a vehicle to strike down gerrymandered maps. In 2019, the US supreme court said that federal courts could not do anything to stop partisan gerrymandering, but encouraged litigants to turn to state courts.The challengers argue that the existing maps violate the Wisconsin state constitution for two reasons. First, they say, 75 of Wisconsin’s 132 state legislative districts are non-contiguous – 54 in the state assembly and 21 in the state senate. They argue that’s a clear violation of a state constitutional requirement that requires assembly districts to “be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable”. The constitution also says state senate districts must be “convenient contiguous territory”.The contiguity requirement serves a democratic purpose, Mandel said. When someone has a problem in their community, it should be easy for them to band together with their neighbors and bring their grievances to a common representative.“It is not easy or obvious for the people to figure this out when you scatter representatives from a district into these tiny municipal islands,” he said. “The vast majority of the districts in the state have this problem. It is a feature of the way they chose to draw this map. It is not a mistake or a slight mapmaking error or an oversight. It’s deliberate and it’s anti-democratic.”But lawyers representing legislative Republicans take a much different view of the contiguity requirement in their brief to the court. Districts are non-contiguous, they argued, because municipalities in the state have annexed islands that do not always touch the main part of its boundaries. The contiguity requirement in the state constitution refers to keeping towns and municipalities together, they said.“Literal islands are ‘contiguous’ because they are joined together by municipal boundaries,” they write in one brief. “Invisible district lines do not stop legislators or voters from traveling between municipalities and nearby municipal islands,” they argue in another.The challengers also argue that the process by which the maps were implemented violate the state constitution’s separation of powers.Wisconsin Republicans initially passed a new map in 2021 that Evers vetoed. The state supreme court, then controlled by conservatives, accepted a request from a conservative group to take over the redistricting process.The court, which had a conservative majority at the time, announced that it would make as little change as possible to the existing maps, a major win for Republicans since the districts were already heavily gerrymandered in their favor. The court then initially picked a map that had been submitted by Evers, but the US supreme court struck it down. The Wisconsin supreme court then picked maps that Republicans submitted. It was the same plan Evers had vetoed months earlier.The new map preserved the Republican tilt in districts and shored up their advantage in the few places where they had been able to make inroads.That decision by the court essentially amounted to an end run around Evers’ veto and violated the separation of powers in the Wisconsin constitution, the challengers in the case argue.“The court took away or negated the governor’s veto power without ever saying he used it inappropriately or something like that,” Mandel said. “They just said, ‘Well, nonetheless, that becomes the law.’ That can’t be right.”Republicans argue there was nothing unconstitutional about the process by which the court chose the maps. The court didn’t choose the map because it was rejected by the legislature, but picked it as one of several that were submitted by parties.“The Governor and the Legislature – like the other parties – briefed the issues to the Court and supported their proposals with expert reports. And the Court – treating the Governor and Legislature as parties – selected among proposals as an appropriate least-changes judicial remedy,” they wrote.Wisconsin election officials have said that any new map would need to be in place no later than 15 March 2024 in order to be used in next year’s elections. Because of that tight deadline, a ruling is expected in the case relatively quickly.A decision striking down Wisconsin’s map would also be a major symbolic victory in efforts to rein in extreme partisan gerrymandering over the last decade.The district is the remaining crown jewel of a 2010 Republican effort called Project Redmap, which successfully flipped state legislatures across the country in favor of of the GOP, giving them the power to draw heavily distorted districts. Using a combination of litigation and ballot measures, Democrats and gerrymandering reformers have been able to strike down those maps in many places, but Wisconsin’s have remained untouched.“The designers of these maps knew precisely how long these lines would endure. But almost no one else did,” said David Daley, a senior fellow at FairVote who wrote a book about Redmap called Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “I don’t think anyone understood that the consequences of the 2010 election in Wisconsin would be to leave Republicans in charge for another 14 years.”“It’s been difficult to call the state a functioning democracy since early in Barack Obama’s first term,” he added. “It’s perhaps the most cautionary tale of the dangers of runaway partisan gerrymandering in an age where polarization and technology can allow operatives to draw maps that lock themselves in power not just for one entire electoral cycle, but well into a second decade.” More

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      A Jan. 6 Defendant Pleads His Case to the Son Who Turned Him In

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      The trial was over and the verdict was in, but Brian Mock, 44, kept going back through the evidence, trying to make his case to the one person whose opinion he valued most. He sat at his kitchen table in rural Wisconsin next to his son, 21-year-old A.J. Mock, and opened a video on his laptop. He leaned into the screen and traced his finger over the image of the U.S. Capitol building, looked through clouds of tear gas and smoke and then pointed toward the center of a riotous crowd.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.“There. That’s me,” he said, pausing the video, zooming in on a man wearing a black jacket and a camouflaged hood who was shouting at a row of police officers. He pressed play and turned up the volume until the sound of chants and explosions filled the kitchen. “They stole it!” someone else yelled in the video. “We want our country back. Let’s take it. Come on!”A.J. shifted in his chair and looked down at his phone. He smoked from his vape and fiddled with a rainbow strap on his keychain that read “Love is love.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      When It Comes to Disdain for Democracy, Trump Has Company

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      It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to our place in this society.It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.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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      in US Politics

      Biden faces calls not to seek re-election as shock poll rattles senior Democrats

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      Senior Democrats have sounded the alarm after an opinion poll showed Joe Biden trailing the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in five out of six battleground states exactly a year before the presidential election.Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Biden ahead in Wisconsin, according to a survey published on Sunday by the New York Times and Siena College. Biden beat Trump in all six states in 2020 but the former president now leads by an average of 48% to 44% across these states in a hypothetical rematch.Additional findings released on Monday, however, showed that if Trump were to be convicted of criminal charges against him, some of his support in some swing states would erode by about 6%, which could be enough to tip the electoral college in Biden’s favour.Even so, the survey is in line with a series of recent polls that show the race too close for comfort for many Trump foes as voters express doubts about Biden’s age – the oldest US president in history turns 81 later this month – and handling of the economy, prompting renewed debate over whether he should step aside to make way for a younger nominee.“It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm,” David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “He’s defied CW [conventional wisdom] before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party – not ‘bed-wetting,’ but legitimate concern.”Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation and a former Republican official, tweeted: “It’s time. President Biden has served our country well. I’m confident he’ll do so for the next year. But it’s time for an act of personal sacrifice and public spirit. It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation. It’s time for Biden to announce he won’t run in 2024.”Andrew Yang, who lost to Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, added: “If Joe Biden were to step aside, he would go down in history as an accomplished statesman who beat Trump and achieved a great deal. If he decides to run again it may go down as one of the great overreaches of all time that delivers us to a disastrous Trump second term.”The New York Times and Siena poll suggests that Biden’s multiracial and multigenerational coalition, critical to his success in 2020, is decaying. Voters under age 30 favour the president by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Trump’s edge in rural regions.Black voters – a core Biden demographic – are now registering 22% support in these states for Trump, a level that the New York Times reported was unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times. The president’s staunch support for Israel in the current Middle East crisis has also prompted criticism from young and progressive voters.Survey respondents in swing states say they trust Trump over Biden on the economy by a 22-point margin. Some 71% say Biden is “too old”, including 54% of his own supporters. Just 39% felt the same about Trump, who is himself 77 years old.Electability was central to Biden’s argument for the nomination three years ago but the poll found a generic, unnamed Democrat doing much better with an eight-point lead over Trump. Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota has launched a long-shot campaign against Biden in the Democratic primary, contending that the president’s anaemic poll numbers are cause for a dramatic change of course.Next year’s election could be further complicated by independent runs from the environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr and the leftwing academic Cornel West.Trump is dominating the Republican presidential primary and plans to skip Wednesday’s third debate in Miami, Florida, in favour of holding a campaign rally. He spent Monday taking the witness stand in a New York civil fraud trial. He is also facing 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions.The Biden campaign played down the concerns, drawing a comparison with Democratic incumbent Obama’s 2012 victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Biden’s spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said in a statement: “Predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later. Don’t take our word for it: Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama only for him to win handedly a year later.”Munoz added that Biden’s campaign “is hard at work reaching and mobilizing our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and Maga [Make America great again] Republicans’ unpopular extremism. We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”The margin of sampling error for each state in the Sunday poll is between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points, which is greater than Trump’s reported advantage in Pennsylvania.Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast and a former conservative radio host, wrote on X: “Ultimately, 2024 is not about re-electing Joe Biden. It is about the urgent necessity of stopping the return of Donald J Trump to the presidency. The question is how.” More