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after months of hearing the party front-runner talk about Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists, followed by discussion of the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and any American-born children with undocumented parents, most Latino voters changed their minds. The party brand suffered at the hands of its most popular candidate, and now all the Republican candidates hoping to be the next nominee are disadvantaged.

At the most basic level, the argument is that a strong party brand serves all members of the party seeking election, because a strong signal is more valuable than a weak one. And of course a popular brand is more desirable than an unpopular one. Think of it as quality control.

In less than a year, Mr. Trump has both weakened the party signal and made it less popular, especially among groups that the party needs to court.

George J. Borjas, a professor of economics at Harvard, argues thatillegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 billion to $128 billion.

The left, Lind said,cannot cope with reality of how low-wage unskilled immigration has been driving down wages at the bottom of the labor market since the 1960s. Whenever multiculturalism collides with the interests of labor, multiculturalism wins.

The dynamic interaction of three current trends — voter anger over immigration, over offshoring and robotization, and over damage wrought by the economic meltdown of 2008 — has been crucial to Trump’s success.

: “In 1979, the four middle-skill occupations (sales; office and administrative workers; production workers; and operatives) accounted for 60 percent of employment,” according to David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. By 2012, “it was 46 percent.”

the aftereffects of the financial collapse: “The cost of the crisis, assuming output eventually returns to its precrisis trend path, is an output loss of $6 trillion to $14 trillion. This amounts to $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household,”

While the recession was an economic phenomenon, its impact went beyond a sizable drop in output or consumption. The adverse psychological consequences are enormous

The “stark legacy of the recession and the lackluster labor market” are apparent in “reduced opportunity and deterioration,” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve. The number of men and women “not in the labor force” continues to grow, from 92.5 million in November 2014 to 94.4 million last month.

Many old-stock inhabitants see immigrants not only as competitors for jobs, but also as rival claimants on government resources.

These voters have turned to Trump because no other political actor offers them anything at all.

to condemn the concerns themselves as mere bigotry is to deny some important truths about American life in the 21st century. Immigrants really do compete with natives. Sometimes they displace them. Immigration has costs as well as benefits, and those costs fall more heavily on those who are already losing ground.

As in Europe, as in America: the refusal of responsible leaders to address real and important voter concerns does not banish those concerns: it only opens the door to extremists and demagogues who will promise to address issues that the mainstream won’t acknowledge.

if 2015 has a political message for Republicans, it is that the rank-and-file of the party does not think that the “Republican reform” agenda as advanced by the GOP’s internal policy elite goes anything like far enough.

Republicans have spent half a decade talking about the need to develop new ideas at some point in the future. And it is ideas that are needed—plans that might make a difference—not mere messaging exercises. If nothing else, the Jeb Bush campaign should mark the limits of the post 2012 strategy that you can rebrand the Republican pizza while making no changes to the recipe

Blondness, then, exists as a complicated form of self-expression. It can signal youth, beauty, privilege, and conformity. But it can also represent rebellion, independence, and the demand to be looked at and respected. It’s a choice that’s both distinctly personal and deeply intertwined with what society has taught people to value. Rankine and Lucas have a term for that: complicit freedom

Trump proved in the 2016 election that immigration unified the GOP much more effectively than did its traditional focus on reducing entitlement spending, free trade and low deficits. Among the GOP base, the populist issues of trade and immigration are now far more animating than even abortion or taxes.

I never understood why a movement would take pride in rejecting modernism (rather than shaping it, conserving what is good and discarding what is not), but on top of that, stopping a huge demographic shift — the largest, most diverse generation in history (millennials) supplanting aging baby boomers — seems futile and irrational.

The retreat into ethno-nationalism is no small matter but rather goes to the very definition of America and the core questions the Civil War, the civil rights movement and every wave of anti-immigration sentiment have presented: Who is an American? Does America need immigrants to prosper and to renew its creed in each generation?

Trump and this iteration of the Republican party have made aversion to diversity such a vital principle, it cannot be considered trivial. This is how Republicans have chosen to define themselves these days — and why many of us can no longer call themselves Republicans.

. The key theme is the extreme valorization of soldiers, police officers and immigration patrol officers as the central element of patriotism. Each of these are merited as part of a range of beliefs and values and commitments that make us American. Trump makes them central and almost sacral in a way that is at war with elemental American traditions, though we would be naive and dishonest to say his reactionary posture doesn’t also have deep roots in our history. We must remember both realities.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in the 1960s to a young Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

For white supremacy to be made perfect, the lowest white man must be exalted above those who are black.

In a way, Donald Trump represents white people’s right to be wrong and still be right. He is the embodiment of the unassailability of white power and white privilege.

To abandon him is to give up on the pact that America has made with its white citizens from the beginning: The government will help to underwrite white safety and success, even at the expense of other people in this country, whether they be Native Americans, African-Americans or new immigrants.

Trump’s supporters are saying to us, screaming to us, that although he may be the “lowest white man,” he is still better than Barack Obama, the “best colored man.”

No matter how much of an embarrassment and a failure Trump proves to be, his exploits must be judged a success. He must be deemed a correction to Barack Obama and a superior choice to Hillary Clinton. White supremacy demands it.

he current turmoil over immigration conflates several separate issues. One is DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. These are the so-called Dreamers, who number about 800,000.

A third issue is the future of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come to the United States over decades and have effectively integrated into American life. The Trump administration has ordered a broad immigration crackdown against them.

Donald Trump is by no means America’s first racist president. But he ran a campaign explicitly rooted in bigotry, exclusion and white resentment. To his die-hard but ever-shrinking base, comments like those he made Thursday only reaffirm his solidarity with the cause. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, certainly saw it this way. “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” the site wrote in a post.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.

It was operating at 125% capacity as of Thursday morning, with dozens more people lined up outside seeking tests and treatment.

In the Elmhurst and the nearby Corona neighborhood, one in four people lack health insurance. One in four live in poverty. Those numbers have probably grown since Covid-19 put a record 3 million Americans out of their jobs, with more expected to file for unemployment next week.

New York City is home to 560,000 undocumented immigrants. There is a gulf between the sort of healthcare an undocumented immigrant and a native-born American can access. A city report found 94% of US-born New Yorkers had health insurance, compared to only 42% of undocumented immigrants, in 2018.

Like so many other hospitals in the US and across the world, Elmhurst has also been struggling with a lack of vital equipment and protective gear for medical workers, to help prevent them contracting the disease.

Under normal circumstances, Elmhurst has a 15-bed intensive care unit. Now, it is full with Covid-19 patients who require invasive intubation to be on ventilators. As of Thursday morning, 45 of the hospital’s now 63 ventilators were in use, a person with knowledge of hospital inventory said.

In the last 48 hours, 50 additional hospital staff have been sent to Elmhurst hospital, and 60 patients transferred elsewhere to try to alleviate the strain on hospital staff. De Blasio said he is transferring another 40 ventilators to the hospital.

You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.

This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.

Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.

just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.

At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.

What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun

With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.

Yet, they have no more in common with theocrats like the Taliban than ordinary Americans have with the religious fervor of ordinary Afghanis.

In doing so they support an agenda that favors the wealthy and makes them even poorer.

Such advocacy of religion is unheard of in Europe but that may be because the majority is no longer religious and because voting members of the native population (as distinct from immigrants) are not very devout.

That seems like another great reason for really separating church and state.

He deplored “the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said has become so prevalent in American politics.

The remarkable moment came just hours after Mr. Trump had renewed his attacks on another critic in the Republican Party, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, saying he “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” Mr. Corker, appearing more weary than angry, said the president “is debasing our country.”

Mr. Flake’s dramatic decision and the back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Mr. Corker appeared to mark a moment of decision for the Republican Party. A week ago, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, decrying the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he sees overtaking American politics. Former President George W. Bush, in yet another speech, lamented, “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

But Mr. Flake, choosing the Senate floor for his fierce denunciation, appeared to issue a direct challenge to his party.

Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. He had already touched on these themes in a book he published in August that was highly critical of the president.

“We must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

“It is often said that children are watching,” he continued. “Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?”

Larger vehicles, such as the popular SUVs and trucks that dominate new car sales, are more dangerous for pedestrians than sedans. Meanwhile, the federal government doesn't mandate safety tests that consider pedestrian safety, only those that protect vehicle occupants.

In addition to releasing preliminary statistics for 2020, the GHSA also took a deep dive into figures from 2019 and before. The group reported about a third of pedestrians were intoxicated when they were struck, and deaths are more common at night and in warm states (possibly because warmer weather encourages nighttime walking). This year, for the first time, the GHSA also broke out data by race and found Black, Native American and Hispanic people were substantially overrepresented in pedestrian deaths, compared with their proportion of the overall population.

That trend, too, predates the pandemic. But Naomi Doerner, director of equity, diversity and inclusion at transportation consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard, notes the disparities of the pandemic affected pedestrian vulnerability, too.

After Sammy's death, Cohen co-founded a group called Families for Safe Streets that provides support to victims' families and advocates for policy changes to reduce traffic deaths. Slower speed limits and street redesigns such as wider sidewalks, narrow roads and rumble strips are among the group's priorities.

For Pho, the months since her mother's death have been anguished, her grief compounded by painful legal and criminal proceedings, and by the wave of anti-Asian harassment unfolding during the pandemic.

But she said she's found it healing to reach out to local advocacy groups such as Cohen's that are working to make streets safer."It's a trend that's just going to continue if we don't address it," Pho says. "It is a crisis."

Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.

It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.

“The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do

Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.

This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”

National parks are warming twice as fast as the rest of the country, said Brengel, the NPCA’s vice-president of government affairs. “We’re seeing the effects, whether it’s invasive species, wildfires, sea level rise or wildlife being pushed out of its usual habitat.”

Haaland is charged with managing natural resources and federal lands that comprise one-fifth of the United States and are responsible for a quarter of the country’s annual carbon emissions.

In its first two months, the Biden administration has started to reverse some of Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions, directing the interior department to review the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments – a step toward restoring their protections – and paused the sale of new oil and gas leases on public lands.

“I think the encouraging thing is they want to do something and they’re being very inclusive,” said David Willms, the senior director for western wildlife with the National Wildlife Federation.

The National Parks Conservation Association hopes to see the department move away from the last administration’s energy dominance agenda, enhance water protections, support more wildlife corridors and expand national park land. And Haaland is the right person for the job, Brengel said.

“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide,” he said. “Let more people vote.”

House Democrats last week passed HR1, a bill that contains some of the most sweeping measures to expand voting rights since the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Amid the increasing efforts to restrict voting rights, there are increasing calls for Democrats to get around the 60-vote filibuster in the US Senate in order to pass the measure.

The US constitution gives the president little power over voting rights. The executive order Biden will sign will therefore implement relatively modest but potentially consequential changes.

The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state requests so

Offering voter registration opportunities at agencies could boost registration rates among populations where it currently lags.

Another provision in the order requires the Department of Justice to provide people in federal custody – including those on probation – with voter registration information and “to the extent practicable and appropriate” to facilitate voting by mail.

Biden’s order also directs the attorney general to establish procedures to help formerly incarcerated people get identification they can use to vote.

The order also instructs the federal government to study how to improve voting access for people with disabilities and how each federal agency can improve voter registration opportunities.

It directs officials to come up with a plan to improve vote.gov, the federal website for voting information. Biden will also establish a Native American voting rights steering group and instruct the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Defense to study how to improve voting access for federal employees and the military as well as Americans overseas.

Oh, and a long history of having to be self-reliant when the U.S. government fails to step up and provide support.

America in its early days was not a full democracy by any stretch of the imagination. The institution of chattel slavery remained a bedrock of our society, and much of our economy. The violent, forced seizure of Native American land was a cornerstone of the American ideal of “manifest destiny,” codified into policy through laws like the Indian Removal Act.

our republic did not arrive overnight.

There is nothing magical about our democracy that will rise up and save us. Building the democratic processes we cherish today took hard and dedicated work, and protecting them will take the hard and dedicated work of people who love this country.

t took a literal civil war to quash a violent white-supremacist insurrection, and then to extend basic rights to the formerly enslaved.

Even then, it would take decades of organizing to guarantee women the right to vote—and later basic reproductive freedom

It would take a labor movement to outlaw child labor, institute the 40-hour work week, establish a minimum wage, and create the weekend.

And it would take a civil-rights movement, a century after the Civil War, to end legal segregation and establish basic protections for Black people in this country.

The genius of our Constitution is not that it was ever sufficient (the Bill of Rights was not even included at first), but that it was modifiable—subject to constant improvement and evolution as our society progressed.

Our republic is like a living, breathing organism. It requires attention and growth to meet the needs of its population. And just as it can be strengthened, it can be corrupted, weakened, and destroyed.

Donald Trump was not elected in a vacuum. Inequality, endless wars, and the corruption of unaccountable elites are all common precursors to either violent revolutions or dramatic expansions of democracy.

President Joe Biden has been tasked with bringing us back from the brink. He will govern a country whose citizens no longer share the same basic reality. He will govern a country that has deep, unhealed wounds and layers of unresolved traumas. We must all work with him and with one another to heal those wounds and to resolve those traumas. The insurrection on January 6 tells us that we are almost out of time.

Will we follow Trump and his co-conspirators down the path of democratic breakdown, or choose instead the arduous route of democratic reform?

Those who plot, plan, or incite violence against the government of the United States must be held fully accountable. That includes not just conviction of the former president by the United States Senate, but removal of any lawmaker or law-enforcement officer who collaborated with the attackers.

We are doomed to repeat this cycle of instability and backsliding if we do not make a bold effort to reimagine our democracy—from our elections on down. We need to end the dominance of unchecked corporate money in our politics, remove the substantial barriers to voting for low-income communities and people of color, ban gerrymanders, and give full voting rights and self-government to the voters of Washington, D.C.

We must remove the antidemocratic elements from our system, including by eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, reforming the courts, abolishing the Electoral College, and moving toward a ranked-choice voting system.

political violence does not go away on its own. Violent clashes and threats to our democracy are bound to repeat if we do not address the structural inequities underlying them. The next Trump will be more competent, and more clever. The work to prevent the next catastrophes, which we should all be able to see coming, starts now.

for decades the decennial count has started early in Alaska,

For most Americans, the 2020 census won't begin for months

And this year, on January 21, they're starting in Toksook Bay

where around 660 people live, where snowmobiles are a major form of transportation, and where 54-year-old Robert Pitka says this is the biggest event the community has seen in his lifetime.

"I'm still trying to grasp how I can explain it," he says. "It's special."

Just how cold does it get in Toksook Bay?

Cold enough that US Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham made a point of offering one piece of advice last week for anyone who's planning to travel there: Bring a heavy coat.

The average high temperature in the region in January -- their coldest month -- is 12 degrees Fahrenheit.

Census officials say Toksook Bay was selected to be the place where the first Americans are counted in 2020 because the majority of the village is Alaska Native -- about 94% of residents are Yup'ik -- and because the village is accessible by plane from the hub city of Bethel, Alaska, about 115 miles to the east.

When the 2010 census began in Noorvik, Alaska, the director of the census traveled by dogsled to meet with residents and leaders there.

Because there aren't any hotels in town, Robbins said the school is preparing for journalists covering the census to spend the night there.