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      Winsome Sears Wants Black Voters to Rethink the G.O.P.

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      The incoming lieutenant governor of Virginia was an unlikely candidate: a deeply conservative Black woman, and an immigrant, who supports Donald Trump.RICHMOND, Va. — On a December afternoon, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, stood at the podium in the State Senate chamber where she will soon preside. It was empty but for a few clerks and staffers who were walking her through a practice session, making pretend motions and points of order. Ms. Sears followed along as the clerks explained arcane Senate protocols, though she occasionally raised matters that weren’t in the script.“What if they’re making a ruckus?” Ms. Sears asked her tutors.Then, a clerk said, pointing to the giant wooden gavel at Ms. Sears’s right hand, you bang that. Ms. Sears smiled.That she was standing here at all was an improbability built upon unlikelihoods. Her campaign was a long shot, late in starting, skimpily funded and repeatedly overhauled. The political trajectory that preceded it was hardly more auspicious: She appeared on the scene 20 years ago, winning a legislative seat in an upset, but after one term and a quixotic bid for Congress, disappeared from electoral politics. She briefly surfaced in 2018, announcing a write-in protest against Virginia’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, but this earned her little beyond a few curious mentions in the press.Yet just three years later she is the lieutenant governor-elect, having bested two veteran lawmakers for the Republican nomination and become the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history. She will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Ms. Sears during a campaign event for Glenn Youngkin in October. She became the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe focus on Ms. Sears’s triumph, in news profiles and in the post-election crowing of conservative pundits, has been on the rare combination of her biography and politics: a Black woman, an immigrant and an emphatically conservative, Trump-boosting Republican.“The message is important,” Ms. Sears, 57, said over a lunch of Jamaican oxtail with her transition team at a restaurant near the State Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”This is the question that Ms. Sears embodies: whether she is a singular figure who won a surprise victory or the vanguard of a major political realignment, dissolving longtime realities of race and partisan identification. Democrats say there is little evidence for the latter, and that Ms. Sears won with typical Republican voters in an especially Republican year. But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”Ms. Sears dates her own partisan epiphany to her early 20s. She already had plenty of life experience by that point: moving at the age of 6 from Jamaica to the Bronx to be with her father, who had come seeking work; joining the Marines as a lost teenager and learning to be a diesel mechanic; becoming a single mother at 21. When she listened to the 1988 presidential campaign, hearing the debates over abortion and welfare, she realized, to her surprise, that she was a Republican.More than a dozen years passed before Ms. Sears, then a married mother of three who had run a homeless shelter and gone to graduate school, began her political career. At the urging of local Republicans, she ran in 2001 for the House of Delegates in a majority Black district in Norfolk. The seat had been held by Billy Robinson Jr., a Democrat, for 20 years; his father had held it before him. Weeks before the election, Mr. Robinson spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge. Ms. Sears won in the surprise of the election season.Ms. Sears will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Steve Helber/Associated PressIn the Legislature, she adjusted to the political architecture and her unusual place in it: joining, then leaving, the legislative Black caucus; voting dependably as a Republican but calling earlier than many colleagues for the resignation of the Republican House speaker when news broke of his sexual harassment settlement.She did not run for re-election, instead launching an underdog campaign against Democratic U.S. Representative Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott returned to Congress, where he remains, and the House of Delegates seat returned to Democratic hands for good. Ms. Sears was “done with politics,” she said.Her family moved to the small city of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, where Ms. Sears and her husband ran a plumbing and electrical repair shop. She held a few posts — on the state board of education and on a committee at the Department of Veterans Affairs — and wrote a book, “Stop Being a Christian Wimp!” Much of her focus was on caring for a daughter struggling with mental illness. In 2012, the daughter, DeJon Williams, was killed in a car accident along with her two young children.While Ms. Sears was absent from politics, Barack Obama won the presidency, Trayvon Martin was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, Donald Trump was elected and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Sears’s political example, as a Black woman Republican representing a majority Black district in Virginia, went unrepeated.Republicans, she said, rarely even tried to sever the old ties between Black voters and the Democratic Party. This is partly why she decided to run this year.“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”Ms. Sears favors strict limits on abortion, supports vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and insists that gun control laws do not deter crime but that gun ownership does.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesShe stood to the right of much of the field and was arguably the furthest right of the three Republicans nominated for statewide office. She favors strict limits on abortion, calling Democratic abortion policies “wicked”; she is an advocate of vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and of tighter restrictions on voting; and she insists that gun control laws do not deter crime — gun ownership does. A photo that went viral last spring, showing her holding an AR-15 while wearing a blazer-and-dress outfit suitable for a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, propelled her as much as anything to the Republican nomination.Ms. Sears derides the left as too concerned with race but often explains her politics as rooted in Black history, stressing Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric on self-reliance as a Jamaican immigrant in Jim Crow America, emphasizing that Harriet Tubman carried a gun and referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in explaining her opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates. “If the Democrats are always going to talk about race, then let’s talk about it,” she said.She rejects the notion that the problems Republicans have attracting Black voters might run deeper than mere neglect. She was angered when Republicans nominated Corey Stewart, who had a history of associating with Neo-Confederates, for the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Virginia. But she said this didn’t give her qualms about the party. She remains a champion of Mr. Trump, who openly endorsed Mr. Stewart; indeed, she was the national chairwoman of a group called “Black Americans to Re-elect the President.”Jennifer McClellan, a Democratic state senator from Richmond, agreed that Democrats could not assume that Black people would show up for them at the polls, saying that Black voters, like any voters, choose candidates based on who they believe is going to help solve their problems. But, she continued, little that Ms. Sears has said suggests she would be that person in office.“The vast majority of Black voters disagree with her on abortion, on school choice, on guns,” Ms. McClellan said. “Those aren’t necessarily the issues driving Black voters anyway. It’s the economy, it’s health care, it’s broader access to education.”Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always eventually run for governor. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe evidence that this year’s elections scrambled the fundamentals of race and partisanship is mixed at most. If anything, some Republicans worried that Ms. Sears’s hard-right politics might jeopardize the campaign strategy of appealing to more moderate voters. This risk was largely mitigated, said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host, by the fact that Ms. Sears’s general election campaign, which he called “a train wreck from start to finish,” never raised enough money to really broadcast her politics.In any case, the attention was overwhelmingly directed to the top of the ticket.“The election this year was all about the gubernatorial candidates,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. There were few big surprises in the exit polls, several political experts said, and Ms. Sears won her race by a margin that would have been expected of just about any Republican this year.But there were some warning signs for Democrats, outlined in a postelection survey by the Democratic Governors Association. While Black Virginians overwhelmingly voted for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor, the analysis found a drop in Democratic support among Black men, compared with the 2020 presidential election. There was notable erosion in Democratic support among Asian and Latino voters as well.“We don’t need to be tied or beholden to one particular party,” said Wes Bellamy, a Black political activist and a former vice mayor of Charlottesville. He will be watching Ms. Sears closely, he said.Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always run for governor. If Ms. Sears advocates for policies that improve the day-to-day lives of Black people and, more crucially, if she can persuade her Republican colleagues to go along, Mr. Bellamy said, “I think she’s gold.” More

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      Will Trump Undercut a Red Wave?

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      Former Senator David Perdue knows how to crash a party. When he announced that he would seek the 2022 Republican nomination for governor in Georgia, challenging the incumbent, Brian Kemp, he did more than enter a primary race. He illustrated the dangers facing the G.O.P. in the coming year.Georgia Republicans are divided over former President Donald Trump and torn between mainstream credibility and the conspiratorial fringe. Mr. Perdue — an ally of Mr. Trump — has made these divisions worse. The beneficiary? The Democrat Stacey Abrams.Republicans worry about internal strife and outlandish messages that turn off swing voters because everything else is going their way. The party did well in last month’s elections. President Biden’s low approval ratings endanger Democrats in Congress, where Republicans must net only five seats in the House and one in the Senate to seize control.Republican strength at the state level gives the party an advantage in drawing new maps of congressional districts, which will amplify their slim lead in the FiveThirtyEight estimate of the congressional generic ballot.Yet history shows how expectations can be thwarted. Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: an enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve.It will be hard for the party to appeal to the suburban independents who decide elections, though Mr. Youngkin’s success suggests a path. He is the first Republican elected governor of Virginia in over a decade because of his emphasis on kitchen-table issues like rising prices and school closures. He ignored immigration, encouraged vaccination while opposing government mandates and stayed clear of Mr. Trump during the general election. He focused on parental involvement in education and planted himself firmly in the center-right of the political mainstream. When asked about a Trump rally where the Pledge of Allegiance was recited to a flag supposedly connected to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Youngkin called it “weird and wrong.” One Republican senator joked in private that Mr. Youngkin had figured out how to hold Mr. Trump’s hand — under the table and in the dark.Other candidates won’t be as skilled or as lucky as Mr. Youngkin. Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme. Last month, one Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate, Sean Parnell of Pennsylvania, suspended his campaign after he lost a custody battle against his estranged wife. The Trump endorsees Kelly Tshibaka of Alaska and Herschel Walker of Georgia are untested on the campaign trail. In races where Mr. Trump hasn’t yet endorsed, Blake Masters of Arizona, Eric Greitens of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio may secure the MAGA base by forfeiting viability in the general election.Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.The former president was content to keep a distance in this year’s races for governor. He won’t be so quiet next year — especially if he concludes that a successful midterm is a key step to his restoration to power in 2024. A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.Mr. Youngkin showed that a positive message attuned to middle-class priorities repels Democratic attacks. If Republicans campaign on a unified message that applies conservative principles to inflation, the border, crime, education and health care, they might be able to avoid being tagged as the party of extremism, conspiracy and loyalty to Mr. Trump. Their problem is that they have no such message.Mr. McConnell has reportedly told Senate Republicans that they won’t release an agenda before the midterms. He’s worried that specific proposals are nothing but fodder for Democratic attacks. What should worry him more are rudderless Republican candidates who allow their Democratic opponents to define them negatively — and then, if they still win, take office in January 2023 with no idea what to do.In an ideal world, more Republicans would think seriously about how best to provide individuals and families with the resources necessary to flourish in today’s America. They would spend less time attacking one another and more time offering constructive approaches to inflation and dangerous streets. They would experiment with a ranked-choice primary system that played a role in Mr. Youngkin’s nomination in Virginia and in the law-and-order Democrat Eric Adams’s win in New York City’s mayor’s race. Interested Republicans would declare today that Mr. Trump won’t deter them from seeking the presidency — reminding him that renomination is not guaranteed.But that’s not the world we live in. Republicans appear either unwilling or unable to treat the former president as a figure from the past whose behavior has done the party more harm than good. They take false comfort in the idea that midterm elections are “thermostatic,” the inevitable repudiation, climatic in nature, of the governing party. They assume they will win next year without doing anything of significance. And they may be right.Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the forthcoming “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.”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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      Republicans Have a Golden Opportunity. They Will Probably Blow It.

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      Last weekend I considered what the Democratic Party should expect from politics after Covid — the hope of revived popularity for Joe Biden under return-to-normalcy conditions, the danger that the left-tilting party might be losing ground across multiple different demographic groups. Now, after an interlude of giving thanks, let’s consider how post-Covid politics might look from the Republican side.Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.This pattern seems unlikely to be broken even if Biden’s poll numbers bounce back across 2022 and 2023. In that scenario Republicans will still probably narrowly recapture the House of Representatives, returning to the position that they held immediately after last November’s election — as a minority coalition, but a large one rather than a rump, which thanks to its structural advantages can always hope to hold at least part of Congress and ride a few lucky breaks into the White House.But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the party’s good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue. The problems in the Democratic Party — the danger that its progressive turn is costing it conservative-leaning minority votes, even as anti-Trump suburban voters could swing back to the G.O.P. — create an opportunity for Republicans to win real popular majorities at the national level, on the scale of Bush in 2004 if not quite Ronald Reagan. But the fact that they don’t need to be a majority coalition to exercise a certain power means that they’re more likely to choose badly, and stay roughly where they are.The alternative, the best-case post-Covid scenario for the party, was visible in Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia campaign, which essentially blended elements from Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 with Mitt Romney in 2012, while shedding the baggage that kept both men from winning popular-vote majorities. Youngkin has a Romney-esque persona — the corporate suit and genial family man — but where the man from Bain Capital ended up captive to party dogma on taxes and entitlement cuts, the former Carlyle Group executive promised higher education spending and tax cuts that benefit the lower-middle class, playing against the corporate-Republican and supply-side stereotypes.Meanwhile, Youngkin imitated Trump not just in his relatively populist promises but also in his willingness to pick cultural fights — in this case, on critical race theory in schools — that other moderate Republicans might shy away from. But then in most other ways he was an anti-Trump: decent rather than bullying, reasonable rather than paranoid, keeping conspiracism at a distance, reassuringly competent rather than apocalyptic.So that’s all the G.O.P. needs nationally to fully exploit its post-Covid opportunities — a more populist economic agenda, a willingness to take the fight to the progressive left (but with a smile) and an end to Trumpian conspiracism.But do enough actors in the party really want that combination? At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think they’re on the cusp of imposing one upon the party. But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as they’re restored to power.Among the party’s voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite not for the Youngkin-style appropriation of certain parts of Trumpism, but for Donald Trump in full — nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives can’t entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.And here’s the thing: Between the Democratic Party’s weaknesses, Biden’s age and the unimpressiveness of his possible successors, Republicans could very easily be competitive in 2024 while renominating Trump and campaigning on a purely negative agenda.Sure, they can’t expect to govern effectively that way, and they’d be throwing away a potentially golden opportunity. But in the end the race would be close, there would be some exciting constitutional-crisis possibilities in the aftermath, and if the Democrats pulled it out, well, their majorities would be slim and 2026 would be just around the corner.And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 15 years, it’s that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.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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      G.O.P. Is Energized, but ‘Trump Cancel Culture’ Poses a Threat

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      The former president, tightening his grip on the party as a haphazard kingmaker, threatens Republican incumbents and endorses questionable candidates.PHOENIX — As the country’s Republican governors met this week, there was an unmistakable air of celebration in the conference rooms and cocktail parties marking their annual postelection conference. Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin of Virginia was swarmed with well wishers and favor seekers who believed his victory in a liberal-leaning state offered the party a road map for next year’s midterm elections.Out of earshot of the reporters and donors congregating amid the palm trees and cactuses of the Arizona Biltmore resort, however, a more sober, less triumphant and all-too-familiar conversation was taking place among the governors: What could be done about Donald J. Trump?In a private meeting of the Republican Governors Association’s executive committee, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland brought up Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against incumbent Republicans he dislikes — an effort that appears to be escalating, as the former president pushes former Senator David Perdue of Georgia to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp.“It’s outrageous, unacceptable and bad for the party,” Mr. Hogan said in an interview about the former president’s intervention, which he termed “Trump cancel culture.” And it’s happening, he added, “with House members, governors and senators.”Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, chairman of the association, assured his fellow governors that the R.G.A. would support Republican incumbents, according to several governors in the room.One year after his defeat, Mr. Trump is not only still looming over the G.O.P., but also — along with his imitators — posing the biggest threat to what is shaping up to be a fruitful year for Republican candidates. With President Biden’s approval ratings mired below 50 percent — in some surveys, below 40 percent — and voters in a sour mood, Republicans are well positioned to make gains in Congress and statehouses across the country.But there is Mr. Trump, threatening primary challenges to some House Republicans in key swing districts, endorsing Senate candidates who make party leaders uneasy and recruiting loyalists to take out Republican governors from Idaho to Georgia.Mr. Youngkin’s success in a campaign in which his Democratic opponent relentlessly linked him to Mr. Trump has emboldened the former president to further tighten his grip on the party, one whose base remains deeply loyal to him.Moving beyond the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him this year, Mr. Trump is now threatening to unseat lawmakers who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. He taunts Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as an “old crow” on a near-daily basis, while demanding that Mr. McConnell be removed from his leadership post. And, most alarming to the clubby cadre of Republican governors, Mr. Trump has already endorsed two challengers against incumbent governors and is threatening to unseat others.“Saving America starts by saving the G.O.P. from RINOs, sellouts and known losers!” Mr. Trump said last week, using the acronym for “Republicans in name only.”As Mr. Trump weighs a 2024 comeback, he is plainly determined to ensure that the party he could return to remains every bit as loyal to him as it was when he held office.“It’s very foreign to the conduct that we’re used to,” said Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor, who has worked with every Republican president and former president since Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Trump’s post-presidential predecessors, he said, “were scrupulous about not getting involved in primaries.”Representative Tom Emmer, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, accused the news media and Democrats of focusing too much on Mr. Trump. Yet it was House Republicans, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who invited the former president to headline the committee’s signature fall fund-raiser this month.Of the Republican incumbents Mr. Trump is targeting, Mr. Emmer said, “You’re talking about people that have run tough races and been very successful.”Governor Ducey assured the R.G.A. that he would support their incumbents and that he was not running for Senate.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesBeyond targeting lawmakers he feels have not proved sufficiently faithful, Mr. Trump has also normalized aberrant behavior in Republican ranks and fostered a culture of fear among party officials who want to move on from his presidency or at least police their own members. After just two House Republicans voted to censure Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic lawmaker, for example, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Gosar’s re-election, affirming his status as a Republican in good standing.It is the former president’s insistence on playing a haphazard kingmaker, however, that is most troubling to Republican officials and strategists. In Pennsylvania, where the party is perhaps most at risk of losing a Senate seat, Mr. Trump endorsed Sean Parnell, a military veteran who has been accused by his ex-wife of spousal and child abuse.More broadly, Mr. Trump is complicating Mr. McConnell’s recruitment campaign by making clear his contempt for the sort of center-right Republicans who refuse to echo his lies about last year’s election. Two New England governors, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Phil Scott of Vermont, indicated this month that they would not run for the Senate, Mr. Hogan appears more intent on pursuing a long-shot presidential campaign, and Mr. Ducey continues to insist that he will not challenge first-term Senator Mark Kelly.“I’m not running for the United States Senate, and I’m 100 percent focused on this final year as Arizona’s governor,” Mr. Ducey said in Phoenix, while voicing his respect for Mr. McConnell, who is wooing him with the ardor and attentiveness of a college football coach pursuing a five-star high school quarterback.Mr. Ducey, who is one of Mr. Trump’s most frequent targets for his refusal to overturn Arizona’s vote for Mr. Biden, betrayed it-is-what-it-is fatigue with the former president. The governors would “control the controllable,” he said. Attempting to consider Mr. Trump’s role, he added, was like “trying to predict what can’t be predicted.”Most other Republican governors in Phoenix were just as uninterested in discussing Mr. Trump, displaying the sort of evasiveness many adopted while he was in office.Hustling to a panel session, Mr. Kemp dismissed a question about a challenge from Mr. Perdue by noting that he had already “made statements on that.” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, who faces a challenge from former Representative Jim Renacci, said, “I don’t think the president is going to do that,” when asked about whether Mr. Trump would side with Mr. Renacci. Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, whom Mr. Trump blames for not being allowed to hold a July 4 rally on the U.S.S. Alabama in Mobile, said she was “going to be fine” in her primary and then jumped in a waiting vehicle.And on the question of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, perhaps the former president’s top Senate Republican target, the state’s governor, Mike Dunleavy, twice said only, “I’ll let people know,” when asked if he would support her.Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said he did not think Mr. Trump would side with DeWine’s challenger, former Representative Jim Renacci.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesThe Republicans most willing to speak frankly about Mr. Trump were those open to 2024 presidential runs.Mr. Sununu, the New Hampshire governor and political scion, who this month infuriated Senate Republicans by ridiculing the Senate and declining to challenge Senator Maggie Hassan, said, “I think Brian Kemp is doing a phenomenal job.”In an earlier political era, that would have been unremarkable praise for a fellow Republican governor. But in a news conference at the meeting here, not one of four Republicans on the dais was willing to offer such a vote of confidence in the Georgia governor.Mr. Perdue has inched closer to challenging Mr. Kemp, saying in a radio interview this week that a lot of Georgians believe that “people in power haven’t fought for them, and caved in to a lot of things back in 2020,” and that he was “concerned about the state of our state.”As significant for the G.O.P.’s future, Mr. Sununu said, “Yeah, sure,” when asked if he was open to a presidential bid, and made clear he would not defer to Mr. Trump. “That’s a decision that I’m going to make based on what I can deliver, not based on what anyone else is thinking,” he said.The only other Republicans who appear at least willing to break with Mr. Trump on a case-by-case basis are Mr. McConnell and his top lieutenants. While they have rallied to the former football star Herschel Walker, whom Mr. Trump pushed to run for the Senate in Georgia, Mr. McConnell’s allies have made clear their support for Mr. Ducey and have stayed out of Senate races in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where Mr. Trump has intervened.“At the end of the day, in most of these races, we’re going to have credible, competitive candidates,” said Steven Law, who runs a McConnell-aligned Republican super PAC. “There may be a few places where we need to be engaged to make sure we put our best foot forward.”Some Republican Senate strategists are having painful flashbacks to the last big G.O.P. wave, in 2010, when Republicans swept more than 60 seats in the House but several weak Republican candidates lost key Senate contests.“Republicans running bad candidates doesn’t guarantee Democrats will win,” said J.B. Poersch, president of the Senate Majority PAC, the leading Senate super PAC for Democrats. “But it sure does help.”For now, public surveys and internal party polling show that support for Democrats is eroding — the kind of political climate where even less-than-stellar Republican recruits might win.Perhaps what is giving Democrats the most solace is the calendar.“The silver lining is it’s November 2021 and not November 2022,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on Mr. Biden’s campaign last year. He added, “We’re probably at the worst point.”But Jeff Roe, who was the chief strategist for Mr. Youngkin’s campaign, said past presumptions that Republican primary voters would give little consideration to electability may not be accurate after the party fell entirely out of power in 2020.“Electability used to be fool’s gold in Republican politics,” said Mr. Roe, who was Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign manager in his 2016 bid for president. “Now it’s not. Now it’s a factor. Ideology is not the only measure anymore.”He added, “The Republican electorate is allowing for imperfect nominees just to make sure we win.” More

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      How Loudoun Schools Got Caught in Virginia’s Political Maelstrom

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      Loudoun County tried to address racism and promote diversity within its schools. Then it found itself on Fox News.LEESBURG, Va. — Long before the father was tackled by sheriff’s deputies at the school board meeting, before there was shouting to reopen classrooms and before “parents matter” became the central slogan of the most closely watched campaign in the post-Trump era, Loudoun County was just another American suburbia taking a hard look at its schools.The county, at the edge of the Virginia sprawl outside Washington, had grown much more diverse. White students were no longer in the majority, and educators were trying to be more aware of how racism could affect their students’ education.The district hired a consulting firm to help train teachers about bias. It tried to hire more teachers of color. And a high school changed its mascot from the Raiders, named for a Confederate battalion, to the Captains.But there were rumblings of resistance.Vocal parents protested the district’s antiracism efforts as Marxism.Some teachers disliked the trainings, which they found ham-handed and over the top.And evangelical Christians objected to a proposal to give transgender students access to the restrooms of their choice — complaints that were magnified when a male student wearing a skirt was arrested in an assault in a girl’s bathroom.Loudoun County High School changed its mascot from the Raiders, a nod to a Confederate battalion, to the Captains, in 2020.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesWithin a year, Loudoun County had become the epicenter of conservative outrage over education. Several hundred parents, in a district of 81,000 students, managed to pummel their school board and become a cause célèbre for opposing the district’s handling of race and gender issues.Along the way, they got plenty of help from Republican operatives, who raised money and skillfully decried some of the district’s more aggressive efforts, even buying an ad during an N.F.L. game.The media also jumped in, feeding the frenzy. The story rebounded from one outlet to another, with conservative media leading the way, from The New York Post to The Daily Wire to Fox News, which aired 78 segments on the racial issues at Loudoun schools from March to June this year, according to Media Matters, a left-leaning group that scrutinizes media coverage.By November, these skirmishes had been transformed into a potent political movement — parents’ rights — that engulfed the state’s schools and the governor’s race. The Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, successfully tapped into the fury, adopting the slogan “parents matter.”“Glenn became a vessel for their anger,” said Jeff Roe, the founder of Axiom Strategies, Mr. Youngkin’s campaign consultant.Glenn Youngkin tapped into the fury over schools, with the slogan “parents matter.”Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThe campaign identified early on, he said, that education was a key issue that could make inroads in Democratic strongholds. Mr. Youngkin’s opponent, the former governor Terry McAuliffe, won Loudoun County, but by a far narrower margin than President Joe Biden had won last year.Ian Prior, a Republican political operative who lives in the county and has been at the center of the fight, called education the “one unifying issue out there that kind of gets everybody.”Now, Republicans and Democrats are dissecting how these educational issues can be used in the midterm elections next year.Loudoun may well be their case study.A District, Struggling With ChangeIn the not-too-distant past, Loudoun County was dominated by farmers and Republicans. In recent years it has experienced a wave of residential growth to 420,000 people, becoming more suburban, increasingly diverse and, at the same time, more liberal.The student body has changed, too. Twenty five years ago, 84 percent of the students were white; today, 43 percent are, owing partly to an influx of immigrants working in technology jobs. Currently, 7.2 percent of students are Black.The shift hasn’t been easy. In 2019, for example, an elementary school asked students, including a Black student, to emulate runaway slaves during a game mimicking the Underground Railroad, drawing criticism from the local NAACP.Parents also said they encountered racist treatment, both subtle and overt. Zerell Johnson-Welch, who is Black and Latina, moved to the district in 2008 with her husband and three children.One day, her daughter came home upset, she said.“She was in an advanced math class,” Ms. Johnson-Welch said. “A kid yelled out, ‘Why are you in this class?’” — using a racial epithet to emphasize that she did not belong.Loudoun County commissioned a study by a consulting firm, the Equity Collaborative, which bore out such stories, concluding that Black, Hispanic and Muslim students had been the focus of racial slurs and that Black students were disciplined more frequently than others.Members of the Loudoun County NAACP and the Loudoun Freedom Center called for the school board to address racial equity concerns at a news conference in 2019.Patrick Szabo/Loudoun NowLoudoun set out on a plan. In addition to changing the high school mascot, the school system released a video apologizing to Black residents for past racial discrimination. The schools devised a protocol for dealing with racial slurs and other hate speech. And teachers underwent training in cultural sensitivity.There was backlash.Some teachers objected to a chart in their training that listed different groups as either “experiences privilege” or “experiences oppression.” Christians were privileged, for instance, while non-Christians were oppressed.Monica Gill, an American history teacher at Loudoun County High School, also objected to an animated video called “The Unequal Opportunity Race,” in which white people get a head start, while people of color must wait and then face obstacle after obstacle.The video, she said, was an overgeneralization that itself embraced a racial stereotype.“I didn’t grow up in white privilege,” Ms. Gill said. “I worked hard to get through college, and it wasn’t handed to me by any stretch. It seemed to me that this whole thing they were pushing was very shallow.”Mr. Prior, a former Trump administration official with two children in the district, wrote a piece in October 2020 for The Federalist, a conservative outlet, in which he raised questions about what he called the “supercharged” antiracism effort..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}But Beth Barts, a former school board member, said the effort was worth it.“Whites are now less than half our student population,” she said. “It was important that we recognize that, and we teach that other voices should also have a place at the table.”Some people don’t like that, she added. “They felt threatened.”Parents and community members at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in June.Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersThe pandemic did not help ease anxiety. The state’s schools were slow to reopen, and parents became increasingly agitated, concerned that virtual learning was harming their children, academically and emotionally.At a school board meeting in January 2021, Brandon Michon, a father of three, lined up with about 50 other parents to argue that in-person classes needed to resume.“You should all be fired from your day jobs,” Mr. Michon practically yelled into the microphone. “Figure it out or get off the podium.”His diatribe went viral, with an assist from Fox News, where he became a repeat guest. Weeks later, Mr. Prior learned that his name had been placed on what he viewed as a sort of “enemies list” by a Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County,” he said in an interview.The list, he said recently, led him to form Fight for Schools, a political action committee.Mr. Prior promoted his cause nationally, becoming a frequent guest on Fox News, including “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”Mr. Prior also began efforts to recall several school board members, including Ms. Barts, a former school librarian who had joined the Facebook group.By May 2021, Mr. Prior’s political action committee had launched an ad that referred to the teacher training materials, warning that Loudoun schools were instructing teachers that Christians are oppressors.Ian Prior, a conservative operative, speaking to parents during a recent rally outside of the Loudoun County Public School offices in Ashburn, Va.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesTeachers and administrators said that conservative activists had cherry-picked the most extreme materials to try to prove their point, but some educators also acknowledged that some of the training was over the top, including the “experiences oppression” chart. A spokesman for Loudoun County schools said that chart is no longer used.Many teachers are also quick to defend the training. One of them, Andrea Weiskopf, said that part of the idea was to raise awareness that students from different backgrounds could perceive literature and events differently.Understand the Debate Over Critical Race TheoryCard 1 of 5An ​​expansive academic framework. More

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      Gov. Murphy’s Republican Foe, Jack Ciattarelli, Will Concede

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      It took nine days. But Mr. Ciattarelli is expected to acknowledge on Friday that he has lost the race for governor of New Jersey.Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican vying to unseat Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, will concede defeat on Friday, acknowledging that there is no chance he can overcome the 74,000-vote gap now separating the candidates, according to two people close to his campaign.The Associated Press and other national news outlets had declared Mr. Murphy, a first-term Democrat, the winner a day after the Nov. 2 election when he held a roughly one percentage point advantage over Mr. Ciattarelli.Over the last nine days, Mr. Murphy’s lead only grew as mail and provisional ballots were slowly tallied in liberal-leaning strongholds, prompting Democratic strategists to accuse Mr. Ciattarelli of stoking distrust in the election system as he used the inconclusive race results to raise campaign funds.Mr. Murphy’s campaign manager, Mollie Binotto, criticized the delay as an “assault on the integrity of our elections,” and the governor called it “dangerous.”Still, Mr. Murphy’s relatively narrow win jolted Democratic Party leaders and suggested an erosion of support among suburban and independent voters as the party prepares for what will be an uphill battle to retain control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.Some Democratic lawmakers in swing districts in New Jersey are expected to face stiff challenges from Republicans eager to reverse Democratic gains.By Thursday, Mr. Murphy’s lead had reached 2.9 points — a full percentage point greater than the margin of victory in Virginia, where the former Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, conceded his race against a Republican businessman, Glenn Youngkin, the morning after polls closed.Earlier this week, Mr. Murphy said that the convention of a losing candidate accepting and conceding defeat goes to the heart of “what it is to be an American.”“It’s bigger than winning or losing,” he said.New Jersey’s vote count was unusually slow this year. The delays were blamed on a learning curve linked to new electronic voting equipment and the high volume of paper mail ballots, which represented about one-fifth of the total vote and had to be counted manually, starting on Election Day.Mr. Ciattarelli had maintained that it was statistically possible he could come within one point of Mr. Murphy after the approximately 70,000 emergency provisional ballots were counted, a threshold at which his campaign said it would consider asking a judge to authorize a recount.But it became clear on Thursday that the gap was unlikely to shrink significantly, campaign officials said, even though emergency provisional ballots in a handful of counties had not yet been evaluated or counted.Mr. Ciattarelli is expected to appear at 1 p.m. on Friday in Raritan, N.J., where he lives, to formally concede defeat.Mr. Murphy’s campaign had no immediate comment. More

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      How Likely Is a Democratic Comeback Next Year?

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      The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and they face real limits on what they can do about it.There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020.This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do? The passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as the possible passage of the party’s Build Back Better social spending package could help, though there is likely not a significant direct reward — new laws aren’t a magic bullet in campaigning. But a year from now, Democrats could be coming into the election under strong economic conditions and no longer mired in a high-profile intraparty stalemate (the McAuliffe campaign pointed to Democratic infighting as a drag).Factors like gas prices and the trajectory of Covid may be largely beyond the Democrats’ influence, but it is entirely possible that the country’s mood will brighten by November 2022 — and that could bolster Mr. Biden’s approval rating.When parties have bucked the midterm history, they’ve sometimes had an unusually good development emerge in their favor. If there is any lesson from last week’s results, it is that the circumstances were ordinary, not extraordinary. If they remain so, the Democratic outlook for next year — as it so often is for the presidential party in a midterm election — could be bleak.Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and the author of “The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in U.S. House Elections.”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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      Is a Red Wave Coming for Biden’s Presidency?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.The Republican Party, you may have heard by now, has a lot of news to celebrate after last week’s elections. In Virginia, a state that President Biden won by 10 points last year, it took back the governor’s mansion, a feat it hadn’t managed in over a decade. Republicans also came within striking distance of doing the same in New Jersey, a more deeply blue state that Biden won by about 16 points. And in New York, Democrats lost ground in local races too.Needless to say, tonight’s results are consistent w/ a political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 3, 2021
      What does the G.O.P.’s rebound tell us about how the electorate is changing, and what does it portend for the country’s political future in 2022 and beyond?The thermostat strikes backIn 1995, the political scientist Christopher Wlezien developed a theory known as the thermostatic model of American politics: The idea, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, is “to think of the electorate as a person adjusting their thermostat: When the political environment gets ‘too hot’ for their liking, they turn the thermostat down. When it gets ‘too cold,’ they turn it back up.”In practice, the thermostatic nature of public opinion means that the president’s party tends to struggle in off-year elections. Such swings have been observed for decades:The effect occurs for two reasons, The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. explains. “First, there is often a turnout gap that favors the party that doesn’t control the White House,” he writes. “Off-year elections have much lower turnout than presidential ones, but typically more people from the party that doesn’t control the presidency are motivated to vote in opposition to whatever the incumbent president is doing.” A turnout gap was certainly in evidence last week.The second reason for thermostatic backlash is that some voters switch from the president’s party, which also appears to have happened last week: Exit polls suggested that 5 percent of 2020 Biden voters backed Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, while just 2 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 supported Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat. “That only accounts for a few points,” Bacon notes, but given that Youngkin won by less than two percentage points, “those small shifts matter.”[“How shocking were New Jersey and Virginia, really?”]So why are voters cooling toward the Democrats?As Democrats make sense of their losses, “one fact stands out as one of the easiest explanations,” The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. “Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than nearly any president in the era of modern polling.”Why?Some argue that Biden is performing poorly because he has tacked too far left on policy. Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, told The Times: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”Others blame a more general political-cultural gestalt: “wokeness.” “Wokeness Derailed the Democrats,” the Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote last weekend. This line of argumentation has drawn criticism for being deliberately, even insidiously vague. But when it comes to last week’s elections, much of the “wokeness” debate, on both sides of the aisle, has revolved around the so-called critical race theory controversy in K-12 schools, which this newsletter explored at length in July.There are strong counterarguments to both of these explanations. As Beauchamp writes, while Youngkin did at one point vow to ban what has disingenuously been called critical race theory in public schools, his campaign wasn’t nearly as focused on the issue as some pundits made it out to be. Nor does the “critical race theory” controversy explain the election results in New Jersey, where there was a similar backlash against Democrats despite the race’s not being “particularly culture-war focused.”The Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the real reason education was such an incendiary issue this election cycle “likely had less to do with critical race theory than with parent fury over the drawn-out nightmare of online school.” Zachary D. Carter agrees: “A lot of suburban parents lost faith in Virginia’s public schools over the past year, and as a result, they’re more open to conservative narratives about problems in public schools.”As for the idea that the Democrats’ underperformance owes to Biden’s leftward shift on policy, one could just as easily — if not more easily — take the opposite reading of events: During his campaign, Biden openly aspired to a presidency that would rival or even eclipse that of F.D.R.; in office, however, his legislative agenda, which remains broadly popular, has been stripped down and delayed by his own party. Couldn’t disappointment, not backlash, be to blame for his party’s low turnout?Some say that last week’s electoral shifts have even more general causes. Put simply, Americans are in a gloomy mood. A chief reason appears to be the pandemic, which has disrupted everyday life and the economy for longer than many expected.In the words of The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, Democrats are losing the “vibe wars”: “Despite many positive economic trends, Americans are feeling rotten about the state of things — and, understandably, they’re blaming the party in power.”3 trends worth watchingRepublicans can succeed — and are perhaps even stronger — without Trump. As the G.O.P. pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson notes, Youngkin was able to enjoy the advantages of Trump — who over the past five years turned many formerly disengaged voters into habitual Republican voters — without incurring any of his liabilities. He did so mainly by neither embracing nor disavowing the former president.“In the current political environment, the Trump coalition seems primed to turn out and stick it to the Democrats even if Trump isn’t on the ballot himself,” she writes. And that means that “trying to use the fear of Trump to hold on to swing voters doesn’t seem as viable a strategy for Democrats.”Democrats’ problem with white non-college-educated voters is getting worse. For decades now, left-wing parties around the world have been losing support among their traditional working-class base. The Democratic Party has also suffered from this phenomenon, as the white electorate has become less polarized by income and more polarized by educational attainment.That trend appeared to assert itself in Virginia’s election last week, according to FiveThirtyEight, as the divide between white voters with and without a college degree grew.It’s not just white voters. In recent years, Democrats have also lost ground among Latino voters and, to a smaller extent, Black and Asian American voters, with the sharpest drops among those who did not attend college.The writer and researcher Matthew Thomas argues that there are signs that the racial depolarization of the electorate may be accelerating: In New York’s mayoral election last week, he notes, Queens precincts that are more than 75 percent Asian swung 14 points toward Republicans from four years ago, while Queens precincts that are over 75 percent Hispanic swung 30 points toward Republicans.“There’s no easy solution to the decades-long demobilization of working-class voters,” he writes. “But the left can’t afford to chalk up all of our defeats to whitelash alone. This country is in the midst of a profound realignment along axes of culture and education that are about to make race and class seem like yesterday’s news.”[“Why Americans Don’t Vote Their Class Anymore”]So are Democrats — and free and fair elections — doomed?As Bacon notes, the results from last week suggest that the Republican Party will suffer few electoral consequences in 2022 for its recent anti-democratic turn. “In normal circumstances, I’d see that as a bad thing, since my policy views are closer to the Democrats,” he writes. “But in our current abnormal circumstance, with U.S. democracy on the precipice because of the extremism of the current G.O.P., everyone needs to understand that normal could well be catastrophic.”How should Democrats respond?Some argue that they should tack to the center: “Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office,” the Times editorial board writes.Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale, thinks that’s precisely the wrong approach given the popularity of progressive economic policies: “Even if progressives were to secure a welfare package and retain influence in their party, Trump — or an even more popular Republican — could still win the presidency. But this outcome is a near certainty if the Democrats return to centrist form — as seems the likeliest outcome now.”In the end, as Moyn suggests, policy may not have the power to save Democrats from defeat. As The Times’s David Leonhardt noted last week, some political scientists believe that Democrats overweight the electoral importance of policy and don’t talk enough about values.And the values Biden ran on were, in effect, a liberal answer to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” creed, a promise to restore “the soul of America” to its former self. “Joe Biden promised normality, Americans got abnormality, and Democrats got punished at the polls for it,” Thompson writes in The Atlantic. “The path toward a more successful midterm election for Democrats in 2022 flows through the converse of this strategy. First, make things feel better. Then talk about it.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“What Moves Swing Voters” [The New York Times]“Why Virginia’s And New Jersey’s Elections Could Suggest A Red Wave In 2022” [FiveThirtyEight]“The Powerful G.O.P. Strategy Democrats Must Counter if They Want to Win” [The New York Times]“Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. Here’s How Biden Can, Too.” [The New York Times]“How to Rebuild the Democratic Party” [The New Republic] More