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The Marsy's Law campaign says it expects to spend millions of dollars to support the amendment. But the idea that a California billionaire could lead the charge to amend the New Hampshire Constitution is also rubbing some local lawmakers the wrong way.

Amanda Grady Sexton, state director for the Marsy's Law campaign, disagrees with the argument that the amendment isn't a response to a local problem. Sexton has worked with the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence since 2001 and says acquiring constitutional rights for crime victims has long been a goal for her organization.

"I've got a woman whose husband was killed in a car accident in August of last year and she can't get the crime report from [the Department of] Public Safety because they're afraid to release the information," Mickelson said. "They're not sure if there was a crime, and if there was, who the victim is."

Mr. Darby, the Charleston minister, said he believed the whiteness of the Iowa and New Hampshire electorates affects how they view the primary’s central question of electability.He contended that many white voters in those states could “afford” to base voting decisions solely on policy outlines and ideological promises, while many black voters were conditioned by history to assume the worst about politicians

This does not appear to concern the bills’ sponsors, though. The larger purpose, it seems, is to rally the Republican base—to push back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.

the Republicans’ bogeyman is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory.

he theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism.

in 2020, after Derek Chauvin was captured on video kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and the United States became awash in anti-racist reading lists—some of which included books and articles that discussed critical race theory—Fox suddenly took a great interest in the idea. It became the latest in a long line of racialized topics (affirmative action perhaps being the most prominent) that the network has jumped on

Others, perhaps most prominently Randall Kennedy, who joined the Harvard Law faculty a few years after Bell left, questioned how widely the theory could be applied. In a paper titled “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” Kennedy argued that white racism was not the only reason so few “minority scholars” were members of law-school faculties. Conservative scholars argued that critical race theory is reductive—that it treats race as the only factor in social identity.

As with other academic frameworks before it, the nuances of critical race theory—and the debate around it—were obscured when it escaped the ivory tower.

The theory soon stood in for anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race. Conservatives would boil it down further: Critical race theory taught Americans to hate America.

oday, across the country, school curricula and workplace trainings include materials that defenders and opponents alike insist are inspired by critical race theory but that academic critical race theorists do not characterize as such.  

For some, the theory was a revelatory way to understand inequality.

Since June 5, 2020, the phrase has been invoked during 150 broadcasts.

Rufo employed the term for the first time in an article. “Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility,’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government,” he wrote.

In early September, Tucker Carlson invited him on his Fox News show during which Rufo warned viewers that critical race theory had pervaded every institution of the federal government and was being “weaponized” against Americans.

Within three weeks, Trump had signed an executive order banning the use of critical race theory by federal departments and contractors in diversity training

Trump’s executive order was immediately challenged in court. Nonprofit organizations that provide these training sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took office

Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing systemic racism

Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity training. For years, some progressives, including critical race theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action?

For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years

a strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.

“Senator Tim Scott denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to fight.”

"I think I am going to sign a caucus card for Pete today," she said. Asked what she would do if Buttigieg didn't win the nomination, Hrdlicka was direct: "I am going to vote for Trump."

Buttigieg's campaign is enthused by these supporters, but knows it will take more than just a surge in former Republicans to win the Iowa caucuses. So Buttigieg has begun to put the hard ask on voters here in Iowa, urging them to embrace the next few weeks as decision time.

"We've advanced to this stage in the race with a message that obviously wasn't based on me having been a household name for or having an office in Washington, DC," Buttigieg said in Newton on Wednesday. "It's about making sure we connect with the lived experience on the ground of the voters who have so much to gain or lose by the decisions that are going to be made in the White House in the years ahead."

Some states process early ballots first, and will report those early in the night, while others save them for last. Here is a breakdown of what to watch for in the pivotal states.

Similarly, in Minnesota, there might be a "red mirage" that misleadingly looks like a Trump lead. Minnesota was one of the closest states Trump lost in 2016, and he hopes to flip it this year, though he is lagging in the polls.

This dynamic is also expected in Texas, Ohio and Iowa, largely for the same reasons. They'll quickly post results from the historic levels of pre-Election Day voting, which likely helps Biden.

In Georgia, some counties will report large chunks of absentee ballots quickly after the polls close, but other counties won't right away. It's unclear exactly how this will shake out on election night.

Additionally, in New Hampshire and Maine, local officials will blend absentee ballots and Election Day ballots before the results are released, eliminating any "shifts." These states favor Biden, but there is a tight race to win one electoral vote in Maine's 2nd Congressional District.

“I want this trial to be seen by everybody in the world,” Mr. Trump said to a cheering crowd, referring to his federal election trial in Washington. “The prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness, and I want sunlight.”

As he has before, Mr. Trump again called for executing drug dealers, praising China for making drug trafficking a capital offense. But in New Hampshire, a state where the opioid crisis has hit particularly hard, he turned to an informal straw poll to strengthen his case.

“Let’s have a vote,” Mr. Trump said to the crowd. “Who would be in favor of the death penalty — now, wait, don’t go yet — knowing that it will solve the problem?”

Mr. Trump also repeated lies, falsehoods, exaggerations and half-truths that he has told routinely on a number of subjects, including on gas prices, U.S. energy independence, election fraud and the 2020 elections.“I’m a very proud election denier,”

And he complimented President Xi Jinping of China, of whom he said, “He’s like Central Casting. There’s nobody in Hollywood that can play the role of President Xi — the look, the strength, the voice.”

For example, a school board can remove the book Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum (because of profanity and mouse nudity), but should it? A school board can remove To Kill a Mockingbird (for alleged racial insensitivity) from a required reading list, but should it? 

In Board of Education v. Pico, a 1982 Supreme Court case that cast doubt on the ability of public schools to ban library books on the basis of their ideas alone, the court’s plurality described a purpose of public education as preparing “individuals for participation as citizens," and as vehicles for "inculcating fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”

I mounted a Christian defense of American classical liberalism, and I made the case that–while no system of government is perfect–American classical liberalism does possess two cardinal virtues. Its protections of liberty recognize both the dignity and the imperfection of man. 

Our nation is a diverse pluralistic constitutional republic, and as James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, we cannot respond to the inevitable rise of competing factions by suppressing liberty, tempting as that always is. Madison was shrewd and realistic enough to recognize that liberty empowers factions. As he put it, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.”

At the same time, however, “it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

Systematically suppressing ideas in public education does not help our students learn liberty, nor does it prepare them for pluralism. It teaches them to seek protection from ideas and that the method for engaging with difference is through domination. 

And few liberties encompass both that dignity and imperfection more than the right to speak. The violation of that right–the deprivation of that dignity–can inflict a profound moral injury on a citizen and it can help perpetuate profound injustices in society and government. As Douglass noted, free speech is the “dread of tyrants.”

Moreover, as John Stuart Mill’s argument for free speech demonstrates, free speech rests on a foundation of humility.

Summarizing Mill, Greg articulates “three possibilities in any given argument:

You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.

You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.

You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.

In short, I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility.

As American animosity rises, we simply cannot censor our way to social peace or unity. We can, however, violate the social compact, disrupt the founding logic of our republic, and deprive American students and American citizens of the exchange of ideas and of the liberty that has indeed caused, as Douglass prophesied, “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong” to tremble in the face of righteous challenge.

hearing on Tuesday that was intended to give committee members, particularly Democrats, a chance to explore the issue of civilian control of the military,

Mr. Cohen, who signed a letter during the campaign arguing that Donald J. Trump was unfit to serve as commander in chief, argued that an exception should be made because General Mattis was a person of integrity, had important experience at a time when the Pentagon has to contend with multiple threats and might dissuade the incoming administration from acting recklessly.

Hicks, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the hearing that it was appropriate to make an exception for General Mattis, and praised his character and expertise. But she stressed that this was the sort of exception that should be made only rarely.

The only previous case in which a legal exception was made so that a military officer could become defense secretary was George C. Marshall.

Faced with the Korean War and growing tensions with the Soviet Union, Congress passed an amendment in 1950 allowing General Marshall to become the Pentagon chief.

Senator Jeane Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said that Mr. Cohen’s assertion that General Mattis could be a stabilizing force within the Trump administration was the “strongest argument” in favor of confirming the retired Marine general.

asked for advice on crafting legislation to ensure that confirming General Mattis would not open the door for similar nominations of recently retired officers to run the Pentagon.

General Mattis’s supporters hope President Obama will sign the legislation before leaving office.

At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.

When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.

Mr. Obama also offered only tepid support to the most important political actor in progressive and Democratic politics: the labor movement.

In fact, he spent the last couple of years of his presidency pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade law vociferously opposed by the labor movement. Under President Obama, union membership has declined to 11.1 percent from 12.3 percent.

Models, it appears, do not substitute for the hard work of organizing and engaging voters in nonpresidential years; models that apparently drove nearly every decision made by the Clinton campaign are no substitute for listening to voters.

On the eve of the 2016 election, the president used the refrain: “We’ve seen America turn recession into recovery” and 15.5 million new jobs. Pointedly, he said, “Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling.”

The public’s reaction was stark from the beginning. People did not believe his view on the economy, and his approval ratings fell in Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2010 and in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2014 — the states that led the working-class move away from the Democrats.

Just as important, however, was the discontent brewing with the Democrats’ own base. Combined, the approximately 40 percent of minority, unmarried female and millennial voters disapproved of how President Obama was handling his job in 2010 and 2014, and many stayed home during the off-year elections. Mitt Romney carried white millennials by 7 percentage points in 2012.

The president will leave office with a rising approval rating near the same league of Ronald Reagan, an economy nearing full employment and real wages tipping up. Yet a majority of voters in the last election said the economy was the top issue in their vote.

We think voters were sending a clear message: They want more than a recovery. They want an economy and government that works for them, and that task is unfinished.

First, the anti-immigration obsession that had transfixed the right-wing inured many supposed gate-keepers (e.g., magazines, pundits) as well as the base to a candidate peddling a dangerous brew of nativism, protectionism and isolationism. If the “respectable” publications rant and rave about “amnesty,” one can imagine why Trump’s idea for a wall might have gotten traction rather than guffaws

Second, over the past seven years, the anti-government tirades from talk radio, from Beltway groups such as Heritage Action and even from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) saturated the base, convincing them that everyone with experience “betrayed them” and only outsiders devoid of exposure to governance had the secret sauce for peace and prosperity.

Third, the “establishment” — the officialdom of the Republican National Committee — facilitated Trump’s rise, convinced he’d run as an independent

One, therefore, is left with an unpleasant reality: A plurality of GOP voters wanted Trump

A significant segment of the GOP primary electorate itself lacked common sense, standards of decency, and intolerance of bigotry and cruelty. No group was worse than the evangelical “leaders” who cheered him along the way.

A Republican wag joked that the GOP needs not only a new candidate but also a new base. There is something to that. In the 2016 postmortem, it will be worth examining the extent to which the GOP has promoted crackpots, become ghettoized in distorted right-wing media and lost track of what 21st-century America believes and looks like

the party as a whole has to expand its vision and its base. It’s time to stop reveling in ignorance and celebrating lost causes.

It’s a problem when the rest of the country has to rescue the GOP and the country from Republican voters’ terrible judgment.

In practice, or perhaps out of necessity, the Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008 chose the upscale white-downscale minority approach that proved highly successful twice, but failed miserably in 2010, and appears to have a 50-50 chance in 2012.

Calmes and Landler describe how Obama’s re-election campaign plans to deal with the decline in white working class support in Rust Belt states by concentrating on states with high percentages of college educated voters, including Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire.

“My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

As a practical matter, the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.

A top priority of the less affluent wing of today’s left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation. These voters generally take the brunt of recessions and are most in need of government assistance to survive. According to recent data from the Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population, depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to meet their needs for food.The better-off wing, in contrast, puts at the top of its political agenda a cluster of rights related to self-expression, the environment, demilitarization, and, importantly, freedom from repressive norms — governing both sexual behavior and women’s role in society — that are promoted by the conservative movement.

Therefore, it can be hard to accept at face value any promises made or policies articulated.

violent revolt has often been the catalyst for change in this country and that nonviolence, at least in part, draws its power from the untenable alternative of violence.

We can’t rush to label violent protesters as “thugs” while reserving judgment about the violence of police killings until a full investigation has been completed and all the facts are in.

We can’t condemn explosions of frustration born of generations of marginalization and oppression while paying only passing glances to similar explosions of frustration over the inanity of a sports team’s victory or loss or a gathering for a pumpkin festival.

Nonviolence, as a strategy, hinges on faith: It is a faith in ultimate moral rectitude and the perfectibility of systems of power.

The time that any population will silently endure suffering is term-limited and the end of that term is unpredictable, often set by a moment of trauma that pushes a simmering discontent over into civil disobedience.

in those moments, America feigns shock and disbelief. Where did this anger come from? How can we quickly restore calm? How do we instantly start to heal?

That is because America likes to hide its sins. That is because it wants its disaffected, dispossessed and disenfranchised to use the door under the steps. That is because America sees its underclass as some sort of infinity sponge: capable of quietly absorbing disadvantage, neglect and oppression forever for the greater good of superficial calm and illusory order.

Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Despite the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was eight years ago. Some Republicans worry that a strategy of telling voters, in effect, that things are much worse than they thought is a losing one. They point to how candidates like George W. Bush, who ran in 2000 as the amiable “compassionate conservative,” were almost always upbeat.

Quoting something he said George W. Bush had once told him, Mr. Castellanos added, “Nobody ever bought a product that made them feel worse.”

In the three winning states — Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina — voters said they thought the Republican was the more optimistic candidate. Only in the state Republicans lost, New Hampshire, did voters say they felt the Republican, Scott Brown, was the more pessimistic candidate. Still, some Republicans question the power of optimism, noting that voters picked the candidate of hope and change in 2008 and that many are unhappy with the results.

Indeed, some Republicans are now debating how great the country is (or isn’t), whether it needs to be made great again and who can best do that. And like many debates among Republicans, this one returns to the legacy of Reagan.

Looking at the presidents that most Americans would consider great leaders, Mr. Castellanos, the Republican brand strategist, said they all shared one theme: an optimistic vision for where the country was headed. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal; John F. Kennedy, the New Frontier; Reagan, the “rendezvous with destiny”; Bill Clinton, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”

The voters sent a clear message that income inequality weighed on their minds, with more than one in four Democratic voters saying the issue was the most important facing the nation, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

Mr. Sanders’s strong performance in Iowa was a significant milestone in a campaign in which he began 40 percentage points behind Mrs. Clinton when they both declared their candidacies last spring

While she long said that Iowa would be a tight race, and improved upon her 2008 performance when she won 29.5 percent and fell to third place behind John Edwards, Mrs. Clinton nonetheless hoped that she would start exorcising the ghosts of 2008 with a victory here

Mr. Trump’s populism, a combination of economic nationalism that favors protectionism and a strongman approach to foreign countries that is also noninterventionist, defies almost everything Republicans in Washington have stood for

While Republican business leaders and their lobbying groups push for free trade, Mr. Trump has rallied thousands by promising to slap 35 percent tariffs on imported goods made by American companies that move factories abroad.

Mr. Trump’s call to deport more than 11 million undocumented people in the country, denounced as impossible and inhumane, has substantial support. One in four voters in a New York Times poll last year said illegal immigrants should be required to leave the country.

Exit polls from the New Hampshire primary, which Mr. Trump won decisively, showed 65 percent of Republicans supported his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Keith Hutto, a plumbing contractor who attended the rally with Mr. Moody, blamed George W. Bush for the housing bust and financial crisis that occurred during his second term. “My business in 2006, halfway through, it got bad, Mr. Hutto said. “We kept the doors open and all, but right into 2008 and even into 2010, it was tough.”

Mr. Trump led Mr. Cruz by 20 percentage points among evangelical voters, whose support Mr. Cruz rallied to win the Iowa caucuses this month.

The poll showed Mr. Trump losing supporters after the debate on Saturday, with 40 percent supporting him before and 31 percent afterward.

Another pollster, David Woodard of Clemson University, said his survey of Republicans showed Mr. Trump’s support holding steady after the debate.

the Republican base was angry about sending politicians with impeccable conservative credentials to Washington, but seeing nothing change there.

There are crucial differences between Trump’s and Sanders’s solutions to the problems they’ve identified, of course. Trump says our elites are weak, stupid, and corrupt. Sanders says our elites are being corrupted

Trump says the elites are cheating ordinary Americans by helping illegals, major corporations, and China, and vows to break this corrupt system over his knee and get it working again, because he’s not one of those elites

We’re being ripped off, and Trump and Sanders are the only two candidates who are really saying that. They are speaking to people’s sense that our economic and political systems are cheating them, that they are being failed because the underlying rules of those systems have themselves been rigged.

Sanders, by contrast, is making a sustained argument for political and campaign finance reform. For him, the culprit is not an elite that is actively trying to help illegals and China and allowing the country to slide into ruin out of national security weakness and ineffectiveness. Rather, it’s an oligarchy that has enriched itself by rigging the economy to effect a massive transfer of wealth upwards and to paralyze our political system from doing anything about it, thus corrupting our political classes.

While Clinton tends to focus on incremental solutions aimed at boosting wages and opportunity, and mitigating people’s economic difficulties on the margins, Sanders wants to rid the system entirely of its dependence on big money in order to actively reverse the upward redistribution of wealth

What both Trump and Sanders share is that they treat the problem as one of political economy, in which both the economic and political systems are rigged in intertwined ways, thus speaking directly to people’s understandable intellectual assessment of what is deeply wrong with our system and why it no longer works for them.

The Trump/Sanders indictment of our political economy may end up not having long term potency, after all. But this is the account that both Trump and Sanders have offered for their success, so maybe it’s worth taking seriously.