PEN America just released a new report that illuminates how far-reaching the right-wing movement against free expression in schools has become. Book bans increased by 33 percent during the 2022–23 school year, compared to 2021–22—which was already an exceptional year for literary censorship.

More than revealing the scale of the bans, the report also offers insight into a few of the organizations behind them: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education. According to the report, a staggering 86 percent of book bans last year occurred in school districts with a local chapter of one of these three groups.

The groups use a range of tactics to shape the ideology of their local curricula—from taking over school boards to enlisting parents to protest, to promoting restrictive legislation. To understand the extent of their commitment is to understand what it will take to fight back.

These groups make little effort to hide their intentions. The Vermont chapter of Parents’ Rights in Education hosted an event earlier this year for “parents fed up with transgender and DEI education,” while the national organization claims that schools are “utilizing material from Marxist doctrine” to perpetuate “anti-American, anti-white, and anti-capitalist sentiments amongst students.”

They don’t just air grievances. Their website offers free trainings for parents to help them testify to school boards—or even get elected to them. They advocate for bathroom bills and teacher restrictions and laws requiring school staff to out queer students to their parents. And of course, they’re pushing for book bans—though the organization’s executive director would have you believe these aren’t real bans, because you can still purchase the books in question “via booksellers or the Internet.”

Citizens Defending Freedom is even less subtle—their site boasts endorsements from disgraced former Trump adviser Mike Flynn and disgraced current MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. They successfully campaigned for the Texas State Board of Education to dissociate from the American Library Association (which they call a “woke organization”), and want other states to do the same. One chapter recently challenged over 100 books as “age-inappropriate” for Fort Worth’s school libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale—even though banning The Handmaid’s Tale sounds like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Then there’s Moms for Liberty. When it launched in 2021, the organization was originally focused on fighting against Covid-19 protections—like mask and vaccine mandates—in schools. Now they spend their time electing school board members who share their concerns, and flooding board meetings with parents who are outraged that their kids are reading books about interracial relationships, hurricanes, and male seahorses carrying eggs.

When Moms for Liberty gets a book banned, not only does it deprive one district of that specific text; it can set a dangerous standard. Earlier this year, the group successfully banned a graphic-novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank from a Florida high school—which included passages about puberty that other adaptations omitted. Flash-forward to last week in Texas: a teacher was fired for assigning the same book to her eighth grade reading class.

Never mind that those eighth graders are the same age Frank was when she wrote her diary, experiencing puberty themselves and asking similar questions about their bodies—including, as Frank wrote, curiosities about “the little hole underneath.” Parents are supposed to pretend that exposure to that level of graphic detail will permanently warp the minds of their 14-year-olds.

Meanwhile, in February, a South Carolina high school teacher assigned her AP English students Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Two students objected to the book’s discussion of Blackness in America, and reported their teacher to a school board member who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty. Because a state proviso explicitly prohibits lessons that make students “feel discomfort” about their race, the curriculum was immediately abandoned, and the books taken away.

But for all the dystopian stories about students’ being “protected” from an honest education, these censorious groups have to reckon with a powerful adversary: the students themselves.

According to the PEN report, students across the country are pushing back. In Lancaster, Pa., middle school students staged a walkout to protest the potential removal of LGBTQ content from their school libraries. In Plattsmouth, Neb., a school board meeting had to be moved to a larger venue because a flood of students and parents were set to protest a similar move. And two high school sophomores in Orchard Park, N.Y., have founded an organization of their own to fight book bans: Students Protecting Education.

These students are speaking up, organizing, and crucially, recognizing just how much power is held by school boards. As know-nothings continue to invest time and resources into showing up at meetings and winning these seats, those who care about the freedom to read can’t afford not to do the same.

Too often, even the most well-intentioned adults forget how mature and intelligent kids can be. They can handle challenging material. They can learn and grow from discomfort. And as their rights to do those things are challenged, they might just lead their own resistance.

The Guardian US and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (Cpost) at the University of Chicago are co-hosting an event on Tuesday focusing on dangers to democracy and anticipated threats to the 2024 election.

The Guardian’s Fight for Democracy project has been working with Cpost since June 2023, reporting on the project’s Dangers to Democracy surveys which dive into Americans’ views on political violence, conspiracy theories and threats to US elections. The first survey found that a staggering 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House.

The latest September survey found that Trump’s presidential candidacy and the now mounting indictments against him are radicalizing Americans on both sides of the aisle to support violence to achieve political goals.

More specifically, the survey found that 5.5% of Americans, or 14 million people, believe the use of force is justified to restore Trump to the presidency, while 8.9% of Americans, or 23 million people, believe force is justified to prevent Trump from being president.

The Guardian is committed to reporting on these threats as the 2024 election approaches, including what election officials and other policymakers are doing to combat them, how voters may be affected, how misinformation might amplify them, and how the country could be better prepared to prevent another violent attack like what occurred on 6 January 2021.

In the past few months alone, the Guardian has tracked Republican efforts to use conspiracy theories to oust Wisconsin’s respected and bipartisan top election official, reported on various rightwing attempts to skew electoral maps to dilute the power of minority voters, and featured deep dives into the people trying to hold Trump and his allies accountable for attempting to steal the 2020 election.

The Fight for Democracy team will continue to track these efforts and more as the next presidential election nears and threats become more pervasive, including publishing Cpost’s latest findings.

“We are now in the age of what I call ‘violent populism’ where violent ideas by a dedicated minority are moving from fringe to mainstream, creating an environment where incendiary political rhetoric can stimulate violent threats to our democracy,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs Cpost.

The September survey found that Americans are more deeply distrustful of their democratic institutions and democratically elected leaders and more supportive of violence than in January 2023, when the survey about political violence was started, according to Pape.

The survey has been assessing nine measures of antidemocratic attitudes, including the beliefs that elections won’t solve America’s fundamental problems and that political elites are the most corrupt people in the US. Eight of the nine measures are worse today than at the beginning of 2023, Pape said.

Still, a vast majority of all Americans think Republicans and Democrats in Congress should make a joint statement condemning any political violence.

“We need to lean into this finding with bipartisan cooperation among our frontline democratic institutions to safeguard democracy,” Pape said. “If incendiary rhetoric stimulates political violence, calming rhetoric can diminish it.”

Almost everyone in journalism is a fan of "Succession," which meant that the HBO show heavily shaped the reaction to last week's announcement that Rupert Murdoch was stepping down as the chair of Fox Corp. and News Corp. All eyes landed on Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son who is taking over from his father as the official head of the right-wing media empire. Influenced by the soap opera machinations of "Succession," most discourse was over what direction the younger Murdoch would take the company and whether his father was actually stepping down — or whether he was secretly controlling his son.

It's all interesting stuff, but in focusing on the internal family dynamics of the Murdochs, the discussion was too quickly turned away from what is likely to be the much bigger story for right-wing media: The multitude of outside challengers to the Fox News throne. For years now, there's been a growing network of well-funded GOP propaganda outlets that, using social media to expand their reach, have positioned themselves well to cannibalize the Fox News audience. Murdoch's departure may provide the opening they've needed to get even more money and influence. This should alarm everyone, because as god-awful as Fox News is, the competitors are worse: They lie more often and more boldly. They're more explicitly racist, homophobic, and sexist. And they worship Donald Trump like a god.

A new CNN-University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll underscores how, as bad as Fox News is, its increasingly strong competition is even scarier. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post analyzed the statistics on media consumption and found some alarming results.

While 43 percent of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters who watch Fox News and 45 percent of conservative radio listeners say they're voting for Trump in the GOP primary — similar to his overall share of 39 percent — those numbers rise to 65 percent for Rogan's listeners and a remarkable 76 percent of Newsmax viewers....

Newsmax viewers are also significantly more favorable toward Trump. While 64 percent of likely GOP voters who watch Fox have a favorable view of Trump, 95 percent of Newsmax viewers do.

A full 90% of the polled Joe Rogan listeners are supporting either Trump or unapologetic charlatan Vivek Ramaswamy. At least those who have long been skeptical of claims that Rogan and his audience are "independent" now have rock solid proof that they were always right-wing shills. The bad news is that Rogan is already one of the most successful contenders for the Fox News throne. He gets an estimated 11 million listeners an episode. The highest-rated show on Fox News, "The Five," typically has between 2 and 3 million viewers.

The perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda.

Rogan is probably the most successful but is just one in a growing crowd of propagandists who want to take a bite out of the Fox News audience. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire claims over a million subscribers. Charlie Kirk's TPUSA has reportedly grown into a $80 million company. PragerU claims over 8 billion video views. Still, Fox News has maintained its position as the 800-pound gorilla of right-wing media.

Unsurprisingly, then, many of these smaller competitors didn't bother to hide how much they hoped, without Rupert Murdoch in charge, Fox News would falter, giving them a chance to gobble up more of the MAGA audience. Steve Bannon raved that Fox is "TV for stupid people." Glenn Beck implied that Lachlan Murdoch hates conservatives. (In reality, most reports suggest the younger Murdoch is more right-wing than his father.) Newsmax went in for kill by publicizing Trump's snide anti-Murdoch comments, and claiming Murdoch is in bed with the hated Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Right now, as historian Nicole Hemmer told Slate, these contenders see Fox News as a wounded animal that will be much easier to take out than it was a few years ago. That's because, she explained, "I still don't think people outside of right wing circles fully appreciate how disillusioned and even angry many on the right are towards Fox."

Bluntly put, the perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda. Murdoch envisioned Fox News being just news-like enough to garner a reputation as a legitimate press outlet. For a long time, that was fine with the audience, who also wanted to participate in the illusion that this is "news." But what the Fox competitors offer is a different vision: One where any fact that gets in the way can be dismissed out of hand, and "truth" is whatever the right-wing audience wants to believe.

These tensions came to a head during the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Fox initially reported the truth, which is Joe Biden had won the White House. As court documentation made clear, what happened then was that the audience revolted and, fearful of losing audience share to even shadier outlets, Fox pivoted towards championing Trump's false claims that the election was stolen.

In the short term, that worked. Viewers, satiated with the lies they desired, stayed on board. But in the longer term, there were serious consequences. Fox News lost a massive defamation lawsuit to Dominion Voting Systems, who was repeatedly smeared in "news" segments advancing the Big Lie. Murdoch then fired one of the network's most aggressive liars, host Tucker Carlson. The one-two punch convinced many viewers that Fox News had lost its taste for disinformation. Fox has been able to claw some of its audience back, by playing fast and loose with the facts. A lot of viewers, however, worry Fox will never provide the high-octane bullshit they crave, and so they're permanently relocating to media outlets that are even less ethical.

Fox alternatives know that their relative freedom to lie is a selling point to right-wing audiences. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a story about which podcasts are the worst purveyors of disinformation, and Bannon's "War Room" topped the list. His response? To brag about it openly and praise his audience for "helping us spread misinformation." For the MAGA crowd, lying is good and consuming lies is how they demonstrate their right-wing bona fides. Fox News, which is hamstrung by fear of lawsuits and Murdoch's lingering desire to be treated as a respectable figure, has lost esteem with the lie-addicted GOP base.

No one should write a premature obituary for Fox News yet, however.

By all accounts, Lachlan Murdoch is more right-wing than his father, and less worried about the consequences of blasting out disinformation. There's a not-small chance that, under the younger Murdoch's leadership, Fox will start to move harder to the right and, despite all the lawsuits, more determined than ever to mislead viewers. After all, the market pressures that led Fox News to embrace the Big Lie haven't gone away. If anything, they're getting worse, as the network faces increasing challenges from small but hungry outlets who will say anything, no matter how false or outlandish, to get an audience.

But whether Fox News survives or not, one thing is certain: Right-wing media will get worse. All the incentives push GOP propagandists into more lurid and dishonest rhetoric. In a crowded field, the way to stand out is to outdo other right-wing outlets with racist vitriol, wild conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric. As long as there's a huge audience ready to pay for so much ugliness, there will be shameless people eager to create it.

During a campaign trip to South Carolina, Donald Trump took some time to visit the gun store that sold weapons to the racist Jacksonville, Florida, mass shooter.

Trump visited Palmetto State Armory on Monday, where he admired a handgun engraved and decorated in his honor. He repeatedly said he wanted to buy a gun there—which would be a violation of federal law given his many indictments.

A lot of the media has focused on whether Trump actually purchased a gun and violated the law, but less attention has been paid to Trump’s decision to visit Palmetto State Armory, as opposed to any other gun store in South Carolina.

In late August, a white man opened fire in a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black Jacksonville neighborhood, killing three people, all of whom were Black. The shooter, who then killed himself, used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, at least one of which was painted with a swastika. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the shooter “hated Black people” and acted alone.

At least one of the guns came from Palmetto State Armory, a store in Summerville, South Carolina. The Jacksonville sheriff’s office shared photos of the firearms used in the attack on its Facebook page. One of the guns is clearly engraved with the Palmetto State Armory logo. The shooter had also drawn swastikas on the gun.

When the Jacksonville shooting happened, Trump did not issue any statement on the tragedy. But you could argue that this campaign stop is a kind of tacit statement. He put the spotlight on Palmetto State Armory, praised its inventory, and tried to offer it business.

Palmetto State Armory has openly embraced far-right ideology. In 2020, it began marketing its products using imagery and language associated with the “boogaloo,” slang for racist violence and even a call for full-on race war. It has also come to mean war to topple the government.

The Jacksonville shooter shouldn’t have been able to buy the guns in the first place. He was held in Florida state custody in 2017 for mental health issues, disqualifying him from owning a gun under a statute called the Baker Act.

With so many eyeballs on Trump, Palmetto State Armory would never have gotten away with selling him a gun. But as Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pointed out, the store “could sell an AR-15 to a young, mentally troubled white supremacist.”

Landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under former President Donald Trump could return under a new push by U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel. The rules would reclassify broadband access as an essential service on par with other utilities like water or power.

“For everyone, everywhere, to enjoy the full benefits of the internet age, internet access should be more than just accessible and affordable,” Rosenworcel said at an event at the National Press Club. “The internet needs to be open.”

The proposed rules would return fixed and mobile broadband service to its status as an essential telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. It would also prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from selling “fast lanes” that prioritize some traffic over others in exchange for payment.

The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in.

Rosenworcel said the FCC will vote in October to take public comment on the proposed rules.

Net neutrality is the principle that internet providers treat all web traffic equally, and it’s pretty much how the internet has worked since its creation. But regulators, consumer advocates and internet companies were concerned about what broadband companies could do with their power as the pathway to the internet — blocking or slowing down apps that rival their own services, for example.

The FCC in 2015 approved rules, on a party-line vote, that made sure cable and phone companies don’t manipulate traffic. With them in place, a provider such as Comcast can’t charge Netflix for a faster path to its customers, or block it or slow it down.

The net neutrality rules gave the FCC power to go after companies for business practices that weren’t explicitly banned as well. For example, the Obama FCC said that “zero rating” practices by AT&T violated net neutrality. The telecom giant exempted its own video app from cellphone data caps, which would save some consumers money, and said video rivals could pay for the same treatment. Under current chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC spiked the effort to go after AT&T, even before it began rolling out a plan to undo the net neutrality rules entirely.

A federal appeals court upheld the rules in 2016 after broadband providers sued.

However, the FCC junked the Obama-era principle in 2017. The move represented a radical departure from more than a decade of federal oversight.

Congress returns to Washington Tuesday with a government shutdown less than five days away and lawmakers are still scrambling for ways to avoid it.

That wasn't supposed to be the case.

It has been less than three months since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reached an agreement with President Biden that set spending levels for the year. That agreement was part of a bipartisan debt limit package that overwhelmingly passed the House in a 343-117 vote.

McCarthy negotiated that plan. House Democrats agreed. So did Senate Republicans. And Senate Democrats. But a small group of hard-line conservatives in the House immediately rejected the plan for failing to agree to deeper spending cuts. The group pressured McCarthy into backing away from the agreement.

Details of a possible Senate-led spending stopgap began to emerge Monday night as Senate leaders worked on a bill. Any Senate-led solution would require unanimous agreement to move fast enough to avoid a shutdown, and even then, a deal would almost certainly require votes from House Democrats in order to pass.

For the past several months, McCarthy has accepted the conservative demands as he attempts to navigate a razor-thin majority of just four votes.

McCarthy has said, repeatedly, that he does not want to see the government shut down.

"I don't think anybody wins a shutdown," McCarthy told reporters in the Capitol last week. "Think for one moment what a shutdown does. It stops paying our troops. How do you have more leverage in that situation? I've watched shutdown after shutdown, everybody loses."

House Republicans spent the weekend setting up a plan to hold votes on several of the 12 annual funding bills that include deep spending cuts. Those bills align with conservative demands, but they will not prevent a shutdown.

Senate takes spending steps

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has been working with Republican counterparts on their own solution, though the fate of a bill is far from certain.

Last week, Schumer moved a legislative vehicle forward that could be used as a stopgap spending bill and sent to the Republican-led House. The Senate could take a procedural vote to start floor work on the plan Tuesday evening when they return from their holiday recess.

"As I have said for months, we must work in a bipartisan fashion to keep our government open, avoid a shutdown and avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on the American people. This action will give the Senate the option to do just that," Schumer said.

However, the process could take days even with the objection of one member of the Senate.

It's unclear if the Senate could muster enough bipartisan support for the plan if it includes additional aid for Ukraine or several, recent U.S. public disasters, including the deadly fires in Maui, a key objective for Democrats.

House could still block a stopgap spending bill

Even if the Senate is able to move quickly on a stopgap, it's unclear if McCarthy would allow a Senate plan to get a vote. Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz has threatened to begin the formal process to remove McCarthy as speaker if he does not comply with far-right demands.

McCarthy is also under pressure from former President Trump, who has pushed for spending cuts. Trump is in close contact with some of the GOP holdouts in the House and has posted publicly in favor of cuts.

"The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!" Trump posted Sunday on his social media site Truth Social.

Trump went on to criticize Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been supportive of a stopgap spending bill and has said he supports the agreement McCarthy reached with Biden during the debt limit talks.

A small bipartisan group of lawmakers known as the Problem Solvers Caucus has begun work on a plan to use a House procedure known as a discharge petition to get around McCarthy and force a vote on spending. That plan could take weeks and would require at least 218 votes, meaning Democrats and Republicans would have to agree to the strategy.

For now, that leaves the fate of government spending largely in McCarthy's hands.

Tomorrow night, seven GOP candidates will debate in California. Their task is a complicated one: to set themselves apart from President Donald Trump while making themselves appealing to voters who largely still support him. To woo those Republican primary voters, these candidates may end up taking some positions that put them outside the mainstream of public opinion — which could hurt them if they wind up making it onto the general election ballot next year.

According to a 538 analysis, the people who vote in Republican primaries look very different demographically and think very differently than Americans as a whole when it comes to key political issues. We took a look at Cooperative Election Study data from Harvard University, a survey of at least 60,000 Americans on a range of issues taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms. We found that on key topics like immigration, abortion and government regulation, what GOP primary voters want is not the same as the country as a whole. That could box the ultimate Republican nominee into positions that are pretty unpopular with the general public.

GOP primary voters are whiter, older and more evangelical than Americans overall

The vast majority of Republican primary voters (92 percent) were white in 2020, the last presidential election year, compared to 69 percent of the general electorate, according to our analysis of the CES data. (Republican primary voters were those verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, while the general electorate refers to all respondents who were at least 18 years old. For more information on methodology, see the italicized section below.) They’re also older: Eighty-three percent was age 45 and older in 2020. That year, 45 percent of the general electorate was under 45 and 55 percent was 45 and over. There was a similarly sized difference between the Republican and general electorate in 2022.

Another demographic point hints at the different values shaping political views: Sixty percent of Republican primary voters identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, while only 34 percent of the general electorate does. It’s a group that has more traditional, conservative views on gender roles and marriage, among other issues, which helps explain the big differences we see on hot-button topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

These demographic differences mean that the group of voters choosing the Republican candidate have a completely different history, worldview and peer group from the generally younger and more diverse voters that could head to the polls in the November elections. That can shape the candidates’ views on a number of issues, from immigration to the future of the environment.

GOP voters are more anti-immigrant than Americans overall

Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was based, in part, on his anti-immigrant views, including his promise to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Immigration policy emerged as a major partisan split in that initial campaign, and Trump ran on the issue again in 2020. In the 2024 race, most of his leading opponents largely support his policies: continue building the border wall, spend more to secure the border and ban sanctuary cities.

Immigration remains a top issue for likely Republican primary voters, according to a recent FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. But it’s also an issue where they differ a great deal from the general voting population, which means even if the candidates’ hardline stances are popular in the primary, the ultimate nominee may have to pivot in the general election.

In the last two cycles, Republican primary voters departed from the general electorate on almost every issue the survey asked about regarding immigration. (We used both 2020 and 2022 data in our analysis. The presidential election year in 2020 may be most similar to 2024 in terms of who votes and why, but we also looked at 2022 as a point of comparison because that data is more recent.) But the biggest gap was on the question of whether respondents supported increasing “spending on border security by $25 billion, including building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.” In 2020, 89 percent of Republican primary voters supported that proposition, compared with 45 percent of the general electorate. (Two years later, there was a 39-percentage-point difference between the Republican and general electorate on this question.) Among the general electorate, a slim majority — 55 percent in 2020 and 51 percent in 2022 — opposed that policy. If anything, the voters who turned out in the last presidential year were more divided on this issue than those who voted in the midterms.

Republican primary voters were also much more likely to support increasing border patrols, withholding federal funds from police departments that don’t report immigration status to federal officials and reducing legal immigration. The differences in these issues ranged from 20 to 35 points. The general public was also much more likely to support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, by 68 percent both years, while 62 and 64 percent of Republican primary voters opposed such a move in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

All of this means that there’s much more of an appetite for hard-line stances on immigration among GOP primary voters than among the public as a whole. It’s also something that Republicans just care more about: Immigration is a less salient issue for the electorate as a whole, with 9 percent ranking it as a top issue in a Center for Immigration Studies poll released in June. So while Republican voters might be prioritizing promises to curb immigration, the general electorate may be less motivated on the issue.

Republican primary voters are much less supportive of abortion rights

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion has emerged as a major issue for the general electorate, with abortion-rights supporters and the Democratic Party winning elections across the country. In this year’s primary, the GOP candidates have waffled so far on abortion and it’s not hard to see why — embracing positions that primary voters agree with could end up being a huge liability in the general election.

According to the 2020 CES data, only 16 percent of Republican primary voters said they support the proposal to “always allow a woman to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice,” compared with 56 percent of the general electorate, a 40-point difference. In 2022, there was a 39-point difference between the two groups. Republican primary voters were also more likely to say that abortion should be permitted only in the case of rape of incest, that all abortions should be banned after the 20th week of pregnancy, that employers should be allowed to decline abortion coverage in insurance plans and that federal funds shouldn’t be used in abortions.

So it’s not hard to see why Republican candidates are having trouble taking a stand on this issue — particularly since there actually isn’t a big divide when it comes to the restrictive abortion policies that more than 20 states have embraced since last summer. (Though some legislation remains tied up in courts.) In 2022, only 24 percent of Republican primary voters agreed that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances, just 7 points higher than the general public. That was down from 32 percent in 2020, and could mean that the near-total abortion bans in those states may be too extreme for even Republican voters.

Less government spending and control is a big issue for Republicans

During the 2020 election, then-President Trump called Democrats’ Medicare for All proposal “socialism.” Attacking universal health care as a Trojan horse of socialism has a long history in conservative American politics.

Health care may be less of a rallying cry in 2024, but the idea of expanding Medicare remains a dividing line, and that may be in part because it can serve as a proxy issue for different ideas in how big the government should be. The Republican Party passed a resolution denouncing socialism earlier this year, after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. That suggests that socialism and big government in general will remain a line of attack against Democrats and their likely nominee, President Joe Biden — but that’s a position that will resonate much more with Republican primary voters than the public as a whole. A solid majority, 68 percent, of the general public supported the idea of expanding Medicare into a single comprehensive public health program in 2022, 46 points more than Republican primary voters. That’s similar to the gap from 2020, which was 49 points.

Suspicion of government regulation shows up in other places, too. Republican primary voters view environmental regulation with more skepticism than the general public does. There was a nearly 40-point gap in support for issues such as giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate carbon emissions, giving the agency more power to enforce the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, and requiring states to use a minimum amount of renewable energy in 2022. Those gaps were similar in 2020.

Republicans haven’t changed their views on climate change much in the past decade, even as most adults started to see it as a major threat, according to the Pew Research Center. (The CES doesn’t ask this question directly.) Fifty-four percent of all adults think climate change is a major threat, while only 23 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults do, according to Pew’s figures published in August. That’s especially true of young voters: Fifty-nine percent of voters under the age of 30 think addressing climate change should be a priority, according to an NPR/Marist poll from July.

Republican voters seem to care more about whether a candidate shares the same views than whether they’re electable, which means they’re likely to be evaluating the primary race on these issues. Because of those pressures, the primary can steer the candidates further and further from the mainstream.

Methodology

The Cooperative Election Survey is administered by YouGov and consists of a nationally representative sample of American adults. The 2020 pre-election survey included 61,000 adults (referred to as the general electorate above), of which 3,593 were considered Republican primary voters. The 2022 pre-election survey included 60,000 adults, of which 4,121 were considered Republican primary voters.

The general electorate was the broadest group of adult Americans: all adults aged 18 or older, regardless of their status as active registered voters. If we limited our analysis only to those who were active voters at the time of the survey, the analysis might not be representative of the broader general electorate that is currently eligible to vote, as an individual’s status as an active registered voter can easily change. We compared adult Americans to voter-validated electorates from the last two elections and found that opinions were fairly similar across all groups. Republican primary voters consisted of respondents who the CES verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, according to Catalist (2020) or TargetSmart (2022) records. For 2020, we included respondents who voted specifically in the presidential primary, as some states hold those primaries separately from their state or federal primaries.

There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is the fight over who will come a distant second to Donald Trump in the presidential primaries.

There are many strange aspects to both shows. But here’s the one that has long puzzled me: Everyone says that with the rise of MAGA, the G.O.P. has been taken over by populists. So why is the Republican Party’s economic ideology so elitist and antipopulist?

Listen to the rhetoric of the people making Kevin McCarthy look like a fool or of the presidential candidates, and it’s full of attacks on elites — but also of promises to cut taxes for the rich and slash government spending that benefits the working class. For example, Nikki Haley — who is making a credible bid to be Trump’s also-ran, given Ron DeSantis’s implosion — is calling for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

As I write this, McCarthy is reportedly trying to appease MAGA dissidents with a temporary funding bill that would cut nonmilitary discretionary spending outside of Veterans Affairs by 27 percent — meaning savage cuts to things like the administration of Social Security (as opposed to the benefits themselves).

The thing is, such proposals are deeply unpopular. It’s true that Americans tell pollsters that the government spends too much, but if you ask them about specific types of spending, the only area on which they say we spend too much is foreign aid, which is a trivial part of the budget. Oh, and most Americans still support aid to Ukraine.

So there would seem to be an opening for politicians who are right wing on social issues like immigration and wokeness but are also genuinely populist in their spending priorities. Such politicians exist in other countries. For example, Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, whose party has deep links to the nation’s fascist past, ran last year on a platform calling for earlier retirement for some workers and increases in minimum pensions and child benefits.

So why aren’t there such figures in the G.O.P.? To be fair, during the 2016 campaign Trump sometimes sounded as if he might turn his back on Republican economic orthodoxy, but once in office he pursued the usual agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the rest.

Part of the answer may lie in the American right’s general mind-set, which valorizes harshness, not empathy. People who are drawn to MAGA tend to imagine that solving society’s problems should involve punishing people, not helping them.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of ignorance: MAGA politicians, who generally disdain any kind of expertise, may not have any clear idea of what the federal government does and where tax dollars go.

Finally, there’s the Clarence Thomas factor.

What I mean is that part of the explanation for the absence of genuine Republican populists may involve the gravitational pull of big money, which is both broader and subtler than the way it’s often portrayed.

If the accusations against Senator Robert Menendez are true — and it’s not looking good — old-fashioned bribery, payments to politicians in exchange for favors, hasn’t gone away. But it’s probably not shaping party ideology.

Campaign contributions, on the other hand, definitely do shape ideology; DeSantis was touted as a rival to Trump because he got a lot of support from big donors who believed he would serve their interests and had real political skills. (Being rich doesn’t necessarily come with good judgment.)

But there’s a sort of gray area that doesn’t involve outright bribes in the sense of money given in return for specific actions but nonetheless involves a form of soft corruption. For the fact is that public figures whom the very rich see as being on their side can reap considerable personal rewards from their positions.

Recent revelations about Justice Thomas show how this works. ProPublica reports that he has received many favors from ultrawealthy conservatives, notably lavish free vacations. These reports are shocking because we don’t expect such behavior from a Supreme Court justice, and Thomas may have violated the law by failing to disclose these gifts. But does anyone doubt that many politicians who favor tax cuts for the rich and reduced benefits for the working class, even as they rail against elites, receive similar favors?

And the hermetic information space of the American right surely facilitates this soft corruption. Suggestions of improper influence on right-wing officials and politicians won’t get much coverage on Fox News, except possibly for claims that they’re the victims of a liberal smear campaign.

Now, I don’t know how important these different factors are to the fact that America’s “populists” are anything but populist in practice. But we do need to ask why people who denounce elites somehow always manage to avoid targeting corporations not named Disney and billionaires not named George Soros.

The speaker of the House is the only congressional officer mentioned in the Constitution, other than a temporary Senate officer to preside when the vice president can’t. The speaker’s job isn’t defined, but surely it includes passing legislation that keeps the federal government running.

But Kevin McCarthy, the current speaker, isn’t doing that job. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to see how he can pass any bill maintaining federal funding, let alone one the Senate, controlled by Democrats, will agree to. So we seem to be headed for a federal shutdown at the end of this month, with many important government activities suspended until further notice.

Why? McCarthy is a weak leader, especially compared with Nancy Pelosi, his formidable predecessor. But even a superb leader would probably be unable to transcend the dynamics of a party that has been extremist for a generation but has now gone beyond extremism to nihilism.

And yes, this is a Republican problem. Any talk about dysfunction in “Congress,” or “partisanship,” simply misinforms the public. Crises like the one McCarthy now faces didn’t happen under Pelosi, even though she also had a very narrow majority. I’ll come back to that contrast. First, let me make a different comparison — between the looming shutdown of 2023 and the shutdowns of 1995-96, when Newt Gingrich was speaker.

If you had told me back then that I’d someday hold up Gingrich as a model of rationality, I wouldn’t have believed you. But hear me out.

Back in 1995, while Gingrich’s tactics — his willingness to employ blackmail as a political strategy — were new and dangerous, he had an actual policy goal: He wanted to force major cuts in federal spending.

Furthermore, Gingrich tried to go where the money was. The federal government is an insurance company with an army: The great bulk of nonmilitary spending is on the big safety-net programs, that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And Gingrich in fact sought deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

He didn’t get them, and the government’s role in promoting health insurance coverage eventually expanded greatly — although Medicare has been surprisingly successful at containing costs. Still, Gingrich’s goals were at least coherent.

McCarthy, in his desperate efforts to appease his party’s hard-liners, has acted as if their refusal to approve federal funding is a Gingrich-like demand for reduced federal spending. He tried to pass a continuing resolution — a bill that would temporarily keep the money flowing — that involved deep cuts to certain parts of the federal government.

But there are three notable aspects to this attempt. First, even if he had managed to pass that resolution, it would have been dead on arrival in the Senate.

Second, unlike Gingrich back then, McCarthy tried to go where the money isn’t, slashing nonmilitary discretionary spending. That’s a fairly small part of the federal budget. It’s also a spending category that has already been subject to more than a decade of austerity, ever since President Barack Obama made concessions to Republicans during the debt ceiling confrontation of 2011. There just isn’t any significant blood to be gotten out of this stone.

Finally, even this extreme proposal wasn’t extreme enough for Republican hard-liners. I liked what one representative told Politico: “Some of these folks would vote against the Bible because there’s not enough Jesus in it.” The point is that the party’s right wing isn’t actually interested in governing; it’s all about posturing, and the budget fight is a temper tantrum rather than a policy dispute.

If the G.O.P. were anything like a normal party, McCarthy would give up on the right-wingers, gather up the saner Republican representatives — it would be misleading to call them “moderates” — and make a deal with Democrats. But that would almost surely cost him the speakership, and in general more or less the whole G.O.P. is terrified of the hard-liners, so the party’s positions end up being dictated by its most extreme faction.

As I said, all of this is very different from what happens on the other side of the aisle. You still sometimes see analyses that treat Democrats on the left and Republicans on the right as equivalent, but they’re nothing alike. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, in fact, interested in policy; it tries to push the party’s leadership in its direction, but it’s willing to take what it can get. That’s why Pelosi, with only a narrow majority during Biden’s first two years, was nonetheless able to get enacted landmark bills on infrastructure, climate and technology, while McCarthy can’t even keep the government running.

Now, a protracted shutdown would be highly disruptive, and if past confrontations are a guide, the public would blame Republicans — which is what led Gingrich to back down in the 1990s. But it’s not clear that McCarthy, or whoever replaces him if he’s overthrown, would be willing or even able to make a deal that reopens the government. How does this end?

Russian intelligence agents have tried to recruit sources from churches in the United States, leading to an intervention by the FBI, according to a recent story.

The September 14 story in Foreign Affairs detailed how the FBI warned Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Christian parishes about possible efforts of Russian spies to use their churches for recruitment. One suspected Russian agent was allegedly willing to blackmail church members.

Orthodox Christianity is a popular religion in Russia and Ukraine, but especially in Russia. The Russian branch of the church has also publicly supported Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which has caused friction with parishes all over the world. Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill has also stirred controversy for his ties to Putin, as well as for a sermon that urged mobilized troops to "go bravely to fulfill your military duty."

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote that they reviewed FBI documents that "identify and highlight the activities of a senior member of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department whom the FBI suspects of having ties to Russian intelligence."

"The FBI's warning suggests that the church may be even more closely linked to the Putin regime than many observers assume, with potentially significant implications for the Kremlin's overseas influence," they wrote.

"The documents identify and highlight the activities of a senior member of the Russian Orthodox Church's foreign relations department whom the FBI suspects of having ties to Russian intelligence."

Newsweek could not verify the contents of the FBI documents, and the agency did not directly address the warning when contacted for comment.

"While we have no comment on the specifics of your inquiry, the FBI regularly meets and interacts with members of the community," the FBI told Newsweek in a statement. "We do this to enhance public trust in the FBI, to enlist the cooperation of the public to fight criminal activity, to provide information in support of crime prevention efforts, and to open lines of communication to help make the FBI more responsive to community concerns."

Per Foreign Affairs, the FBI warning said there were reasons to suspect that a senior official in Russia's Department for External Church Relations who recently traveled to America was a "Russian Intelligence Officer operating under non-official cover."

"His objective in the United States, according to the warning, was to recruit the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and other Orthodox churches," Soldatov and Borogan wrote.

The official was reportedly stopped and searched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers when he arrived in the United States in 2021. He was said to have been in possession of documents related to Russia's foreign intelligence service and its military intelligence agency.

The story noted that the official allegedly had files on church members for the purpose of blackmailing them into working for the Kremlin.

"According to the FBI notification, the Russian national was also carrying 'files regarding the source/agent recruitment process' as well as dossiers on church employees, including detailed biographical information about them and members of their families—information that the warning suggests could be used to blackmail employees of the church into participating in spy operations," the story said.

Soldatov appeared on CNN last week to discuss his reporting on the Kremlin's links to the Orthodox Church in the United States.

He told host Erin Burnett that not only had Moscow agencies "found a way out to use the church, but that the church is apparently quite happy to be used."

When asked about the size of Russia's intelligence network in America's Orthodox churches, Soldatov said that "it is a big platform because the Russian Orthodox Church is very well present here in the United States and actually getting bigger."

There are more than 2,000 Orthodox Christian parishes in the United States as of 2020, according to usreligioncensus.org.

When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”

Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.

Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.

“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”

Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.

Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.

There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.

“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”

The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”

Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”

At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.

“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”

These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?

“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”

The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.

“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.

But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.

Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights. skip past newsletter promotion

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McConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.

The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.

Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.

“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.

Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”

Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.

Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.

“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.

“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”

As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.

Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.

“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”

Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s known as “automatic voter registration” statewide.

Automatic registration makes getting on the voter rolls something you have to opt out of, rather than actively sign up for in advance. An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically

registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

“I see voter participation as key to strengthening democracy,” Shapiro told me in an interview, noting that he is “committed to ensuring free and fair elections, and to making sure every eligible voter can make their voice heard.”

The insight behind automatic voter registration is that the registration process often creates a bureaucratic barrier that needlessly dissuades voting and is sometimes manipulated by vote-suppressors. By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.

In Pennsylvania’s version of automatic registration, residents who are obtaining new or renewed driver’s licenses and state ID cards will be automatically moved through the voter registration process unless they opt out — provided they are eligible to vote. This will be achieved using the governor’s control over state agencies that administer processes involving driver’s licenses and voting registration.

The change could be dramatic. Shapiro said the state has calculated that 1.6 million people who are eligible to vote in Pennsylvania are not registered, and his office estimates that automatic registration could add tens of thousands of new residents to the voter rolls.

All this has the makings of an important experiment. Perhaps no Democrat campaigned as aggressively in defense of democracy in last year’s midterm elections as Shapiro did. As state attorney general in 2020, he fought Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss, and in 2022, Shapiro vowed to use the governorship to prevent a future stolen election, parlaying all that into a landslide victory over ultra-MAGA opponent Doug Mastriano.

In Pennsylvania, the state GOP continues to elevate election deniers to positions of local importance, in effect feeding doubts about the state’s voting system itself. But if automatic voter registration is well received in Pennsylvania, it could act as an antidote to that MAGA mania.

That’s because efforts to weaken public confidence in elections often seek to exploit existing public beliefs that the system is cumbersome and prone to human error and hacking, even if those beliefs are wrong. If automatic registration can make the voter rolls more accurate and make the system of enrollment and registration more efficient and user-friendly, that could make voters less susceptible to that sort of demagoguery.

“The answer to people undermining faith in our democracy is to give people a democracy that works,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. He added that automatic voter registration shows voters that “the people who are attacking our democracy are wrong” and that “the people who are running our elections are trustworthy.”

This is why those who win elections by vowing to protect democracy should deliver on a broader pro-democracy program. In Minnesota, Democrats who gained ground at the state level passed such a package earlier this year. Such policies, which include expanded early voting, same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting, are all designed to make election systems more functional and inclusive.

Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.

Offering a concrete pro-democracy agenda is a good way for Democrats to keep reinforcing that positive dynamic — and keep putting MAGA on the defensive.