Both Martin O’Malley, the Democrat who leads Maryland, and Bob McDonnell, his Republican counterpart in Virginia, are rising political stars. Each is chairman of his party’s national governors’ association, and each is a standard-bearer for his party’s presidential nominee. Each is also mentioned as a possible 2016 presidential candidate. Some people say that much of the talk about a Maryland-Virginia face-off is overblown. As for the governors, each says that if there is in fact a rivalry, his state is winning it. “I’m just trying to do what is right for Virginia, and I’m sure Governor O’Malley is trying to do the same, but we have different philosophies and different outcomes,” said Mr. McDonnell, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates and a former state attorney general. Much of that difference has to do with taxes. Mr. McDonnell, elected in 2009 and limited by law to one term, takes pride in his efforts to burnish Virginia’s reputation as a low-tax, business-friendly state. Sales tax is 5 percent in Virginia and 6 percent in Maryland. Top-bracket income-tax payers pay 5.75 percent in Virginia while those in Maryland pay 9 percent. Virginia’s corporate tax rate is 6 percent and Maryland’s is 8.25 percent. Virginia’s unemployment rate is 5.9 percent, compared with 7.1 percent in Maryland — both lower than the national average. Working with Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, Mr. McDonnell has been able to balance the state’s budget without raising taxes, though critics have derided some of his solutions as gimmicks, notably some approaches to financing future state pensions. And, like other Virginia governors from both parties, he has been chided for putting off long-term investments in highways and mass transit. Mr. O’Malley, a former Baltimore mayor, has a reputation, for better or for worse, of raising taxes — more than 20 separate increases since becoming governor in 2008. It is a legacy that a Republican opponent might find an irresistible target if Mr. O’Malley ever runs for president. Early in his first term he called a special session in the General Assembly that resulted in $1.4 billion in increases in taxes on sales, tobacco, personal income and corporations. He also levied a temporary tax on millionaires. More recently, with the state facing a $1 billion budget deficit in 2013, he signed a tax increase on Maryland’s top earners that ensured them one of the highest income tax rates in the country. Mr. O’Malley argues that tax rates are just one measure of a state’s standing. “On the other side of the river, especially under Governor McDonnell, they would have you believe that it all begins and ends with tax rate,” Mr. O’Malley said. “We all strive to be competitive on that score.” He added, “But there are other things that determine whether or not your state is well-equipped and whether your children are more likely to be winners or losers in a changing economy.” He mentioned that Maryland is first in median income, while Virginia is eighth, and that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranks Maryland first in innovation and entrepreneurship, while Virginia again ranks eighth. He also noted that Maryland had the fourth-highest percentage of workers in “green jobs,” in 2010, compared with Virginia at 20th, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Green Goods and Services Survey released in March. Mr. O’Malley noted that Education Week ranks his state as No. 1 in K-12 public education. He also argued that he has been more committed to investing in public education than has Mr. McDonnell. For the 2012-13 school year, Virginia’s financing for K-12 education decreased by 10 percent compared with 2008 levels, while Maryland’s investment increased 7.4 percent. Mr. O’Malley says he has invested in human capital to urge Maryland toward “building an economy for the future that will last,” through maximizing educational attainment, developing worker skills and focusing on emerging sectors including life sciences and biotechnology. The roles of Mr. O’Malley and Mr. McDonnell as leaders of their governors’ associations put them on a national stage as stewards of their parties’ message and approach to governance. There are now 29 states with Republican governors, 20 headed by Democrats and one with an independent. Eleven states have governors’ elections this year. “Yeah, I want to win as many governors’ races as I can,” Mr. McDonnell said. “But not because I’m in competition with Governor O’Malley, but because I really do believe the 29 Republican governors are doing some unique things in reforming government in their states and giving new birth to federalism. Because they focus on fiscal responsibility and low taxes and limited government they are getting better results for their people.” He added, “I say this not just about Virginia and Maryland, but I could say it about Wisconsin and Illinois or other Republican governors.” Mr. O’Malley, of course, is not so upbeat about the impact of Republican governors. “Some of these newly elected governors who were elected in 2010 or even 2009 promised they would restore the economy,” Mr. O’Malley said. “Instead when they got in, they governed by rolling back individual rights — rolling back women’s rights, rolling back voters’ rights, rolling back workers’ rights. The people in a lot of the states — Ohio, Florida and others — are scratching their heads and feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse for putting in people with such a narrow right-wing ideology.” Despite their differences, Mr. O’Malley, 49, and Mr. O’Donnell, 58, are friendly on the regional level and have more in common than just their Irish-Catholic backgrounds and rising fame. They have worked together on regional issues, including the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, public safety in the capital region and transportation issues. By most accounts, the men and their staffs have a good working relationship with each other. Both men said they would be open to a different type of partnership: “I understand he is a pretty good guitar player,” Mr. McDonnell said of Mr. O’Malley, who plays and sings in an Irish rock band. “We ought to get together; I play the drums, although I don’t play them well.” Mr. O’Malley sounded intrigued by the prospect. “Does he have a practice tape or anything he can send us?” he asked. “I’d love to jam with him, it’d be fun. I’m totally open — music is nonpartisan.”
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Democrats Bet on Shift in Hispanic Numbers to Win Arizona Race
Mr. Carmona, 62, is an untested candidate of vast experiences with a made-for-Hollywood biography. He was a high school dropout, born into poverty in New York City to Puerto Rican parents who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse. He served in Vietnam, earning Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts and other combat decorations, and attended medical school before his eventual rise to surgeon general under President George W. Bush. He is running for public office for the first time, challenging a six-term congressman, Jeff Flake, 49, a Republican. Both are vying for the seat held by another Republican, Senator Jon Kyl, who is retiring. Though there is little reliable polling in the contest, both camps acknowledged that the race is closer than they expected in such a heavily Republican state. Beyond the balance of power in the Senate — enough states are in play that Republicans could regain the majority — the race carries enormous significance for Arizona, whose shifts in demographics threaten to upend its role as a Republican stronghold. Mr. Carmona was handpicked by President Obama to run for the Senate because of his résumé and his ethnicity, which could help galvanize the state’s Latino voters. The Democratic Party then cleared the field for him, sparing him primary attacks but depriving him of the chance to test his skills before the big fight. Mr. Flake, in the meantime, waged a feisty primary contest against Wil Cardon, a wealthy businessman who spent a small fortune on his campaign but lost by a considerable margin. Unlike Mr. Carmona, who often refers to himself as a “street kid,” Mr. Flake was raised on a ranch in Snowflake, a northern Arizona town named in part for his great-great-grandfather, the Mormon pioneer William J. Flake. Mr. Flake says he is “for limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility and free trade,” tenets that have earned him staunch support from the Tea Party movement. He has also embraced issues of particular significance to rural voters, like environmental rules that he says have curbed the operation of coal plants, leaving many people unemployed and “devastating small-town economies.” From his campaign headquarters in Phoenix on Tuesday, where he was surrounded by young volunteers polling voters on the phone, Mr. Flake said, “I’m fighting to have some rational policy,” singling out the Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency as agencies that “need to be reined in.” Outside groups have been pouring money and resources into the state as the race has tightened. On Wednesday, FreedomWorks for America, a “super PAC” linked to the Tea Party, opened an office in Mesa. The operation at the heart of Mr. Flake’s base in suburban Phoenix will organize volunteers to solicit votes, said its executive director, Russell Walker, who flew in from Washington. On Tuesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bought $526,000 in airtime on behalf of Mr. Carmona, its first direct expenditure in the contest. (The committee had previously given $500,000 to the state’s Democratic Party to help pay for the campaign’s field offices, among other things.) The National Republican Senatorial Committee has donated $500,000 worth of ads to the Flake effort. Mr. Carmona, a longtime independent, is running as a Democrat. That is not because the party is “a perfect fit,” he said, but because “I was forced to pick a position, and when I looked at where the Republicans were, especially in this state — immigration, women’s issues — I chose the Democratic Party.” He has nonetheless tried to stitch together what he has taken to calling “a coalition of reasonable people” to carry him to victory. He has focused on constituencies long believed to be Republican stalwarts, like veterans, who make up roughly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state, and seniors, many of whom dislike the Medicare plan proposed by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Mr. Carmona has also appealed to women who are unhappy about the state’s attempts to curb reproductive rights. All along, though, Mr. Carmona has courted Latino voters. He released his second Spanish-language commercial on Tuesday, which introduces him as “uno de nosotros” — one of us — while highlighting Mr. Flake’s vote against the Dream Act, which would have given certain immigrants brought to the country illegally as children a path to legalization. Mr. Flake has begun to make his case to Latinos as well. He has started running his first Spanish-language ad on television and radio, trying to tap into whatever anti-Obama sentiment there is in that community by referring to Mr. Carmona as “el hombre de Obama” — Obama’s man. A combination of factors, including the state’s legislative push to curb illegal immigration and the presence of a Hispanic candidate like Mr. Carmona in the race, — have been galvanizing among advocacy groups in Arizona, triggering the largest Latino voter registration efforts in memory. Still, Tara Blanc, a lecturer at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University who has studied Latino voting patterns in the state, said Latinos tended to be poorer, younger and less educated than the rest of the population. Those factors generally contribute to low turnouts, she said, so “whether they’ll go to the polls is anybody’s guess.” Their transformative power lies, most likely, in the future. By 2030, Latinos are expected to make up 25 percent of all registered voters in Arizona, up from 15 percent in 2010, according to an analysis by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State. Chip Scutari, who runs a bipartisan political consulting firm in Phoenix, said a Latino on the ballot could be “the tipping point for the Latino vote.” But, he added, the state has “a lot of conservative, pro-life Latinos,” who are more likely to vote Republican. “To say the Latino vote will automatically go to Democrats,” Mr. Scutari said, “is oversimplifying the situation.”
Friday, October 19, 2012
September Is the Best Fund-Raising Month for Obama in 2012
President Obama’s campaign raised more money in September than any candidate has raised in a previous month this year, according to several Democrats familiar with the campaign’s money-raising operation.
Several sources said the president’s haul last month exceeded the $114 million he raised in August, in part on the strength of donations that flowed in after the Democratic National Convention and former president Bill Clinton’s well-received speech.
One Democrat familiar with the fund-raising effort said Mr. Obama and his allies at the Democratic National Committee raised more than $150 million in September.
Officials with the campaign declined to comment on the news, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. One Democratic source said aides were still tallying the funds raised in September ahead of the official report they must submit later this month.
Mr. Obama edged out Mitt Romney’s $112 million in August. In 2008, Mr. Obama had the biggest month ever for any presidential candidate, raising $193 million that September.
This year’s haul signals a boost in financial support for Mr. Obama as he nears the conclusion of his battle with Mr. Romney in a little over a month. It ensures that Mr. Obama will have plenty of money for the balance of the campaign despite having been outraised by his Republican rival throughout the summer.
And it comes as Mr. Obama’s campaign confronts the president’s lackluster performance at the first presidential debate Wednesday night.
Mr. Romney’s campaign did not release any information about its fund-raising on Thursday.
Mr. Obama’s advisers have long warned that Mr. Romney’s fund-raising prowess and the success of Republican “super PACs” that are backing him threatened to put the president at a financial disadvantage going into the final stretch.
In fact, it appears to be Mr. Romney who has struggled to keep up. Mr. Obama’s campaign has run far more ads than Mr. Romney in the last several weeks. And the president’s ground operation — which was built over the course of several years — is far larger than Mr. Romney’s.
The never-ending money chase is largely Mr. Obama’s own doing. By choosing to reject federal campaign funds in 2008, Mr. Obama effectively condemned himself — and his future rival — to a continuing need to raise money all the way to election day. (Senator John McCain of Arizona chose to take the federal money in 2008 and was vastly outspent.)
Now, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have continued to hold fund-raisers and make appeals to their supporters for cash even as they hold big rallies in battleground states across the country.
Mr. Obama’s apparent success in September may be a result of a surge in small donors, who have long been a vital part of the president’s financial base. The campaign said on Monday that it had collected money in more than 10 million individual donations, a record.
By contrast, Mr. Romney has tended to rely more on fewer — but wealthier — donors. That has meant that more of Mr. Romney’s money is housed at the Republican National Committee, which, by law, can accept much larger contributions from individuals.
Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.
‘North Dakota Nice’ Plays Well in Senate Race
Dan Koeck for The New York TimesHeidi Heitkamp, the Democratic Senate candidate in North Dakota, visited Perry Benton of Minot while campaigning last week. MINOT, N.D. — Heidi Heitkamp, a Democratic Senate candidate, called Leonard Rademacher a few weeks ago looking for his vote, but Mr. Rademacher, a 74-year-old retiree, was feeling ill, so Ms. Heitkamp called him back. 
A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
Representative Rick Berg, the Republican candidate, campaigning at a business in Fargo. “I said: ‘Heidi, save your breath. I’m voting for you,’ ” Mr. Rademacher recalled, marveling at her personal attention. “I don’t necessarily agree with her, but I trust her.” Gary Volk backed Ms. Heitkamp, a former state attorney general, after she sat for four hours on a slab of concrete next to what was once his house, listening to his struggles to recover from catastrophic flooding last year. Larry Windus’s mind was made up by an encounter with her opponent, Representative Rick Berg, a Republican, that ended with the candidate turning his back on him. “He’s not very personable,” said Mr. Windus, 55, a dishwasher at Charlie’s Main Street Cafe here. Senate Republicans considered the state in their column when Senator Kent Conrad, a veteran Democrat, announced his retirement last year. But with shoe leather, calibrated attacks and likability — an intangible that goes far in North Dakota — Ms. Heitkamp has made this a real fight. Though North Dakota is deeply conservative and is on no one’s presidential map as a question mark, this race could be one of the biggest surprises of the 2012 contests. And, like all close races this year, it could help decide control of the Senate. Even the National Republican Senatorial Committee conceded in its most recent attack ad here that Ms. Heitkamp is making headway. “Heidi Heitkamp: You might like her, but on the issues she’s wrong for North Dakota,” it said. The contest — the state’s first competitive one since 1986 and probably its nastiest in modern history — features two very different politicians with very different styles: the rumpled Democrat against the well-turned-out Republican, the longtime denizen of state government against the affluent businessman. Ms. Heitkamp hugs her way through a room. Mr. Berg approached a table of women in Fargo on Wednesday and then sheepishly backed off, saying: “We won’t bug you. We’ll just keep going.” Ms. Heitkamp sees the Senate as a platform to help North Dakotans, with air service, veterans’ health care, flood control, wind energy production and agricultural assistance. Mr. Berg wants North Dakota to help the nation. “We’ve gone from a state that has kind of been in the bottom half of the country in terms of our economics and business to really the envy of the nation,” he said at Butler Industries, a heavy-equipment dealer in Fargo that is booming along with North Dakota’s energy and agriculture sectors. “My passion is taking what we’ve done in North Dakota — if you will, the North Dakota way — and applying it nationally. If we do that, we can reignite America’s economic engine.” Ms. Heitkamp, surveying the slow rebuilding after the flooding in Minot, offered a different sentiment. “You stand here, and you say this should not be,” she said. In short, the campaign is a contest between North Dakota Nice and the national strategy of the Republican Party. “Everyone’s pretty likable,” Mr. Berg said with a shrug. “The issue is not about a personality contest. This whole thing kind of boils down to, do you want someone who’s going to fight against President Obama.” Tight Senate races in Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts and North Dakota all feature one candidate who must count on voters going one way in the presidential race and another down the ballot to prevail. But in North Dakota, voters have been splitting their tickets for decades. The seat up for grabs here has been in Democratic hands for 52 years. Only once in that span, in 1964, has the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.
Romney Ad Says Obama Distorts Tax Cut Plan
In a television ad released Sunday, the Romney campaign returned to one of the most contentious issues of the presidential debate, accusing President Obama of falsely claiming that Mitt Romney would cut $5 trillion in taxes.
Mr. Obama repeated the accusation several times in the debate last Wednesday and that assertion has been a staple of Democrats’ accusations that Mr. Romney’s economic plans favor the rich.
“President Obama continues to distort Mitt Romney’s economic plan,’’ the narrator of the ad says. “The latest? Not telling the truth about Mitt Romney’s tax plan.’’
The ad cites an independent fact-check by The Associated Press and even includes a sound bite of Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, telling CNN, “Well, O.K., stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion.”
The issue turns on semantics as much as math. Mr. Romney has proposed a package of tax cuts, including a 20 percent reduction in marginal income tax rates and zeroing out estate taxes, as well as making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts. Add everything up and the theoretical loss of federal revenue over 10 years is $5 trillion, according to the independent Tax Policy Center.
But that is only half of the story. Mr. Romney describes his proposal as “revenue neutral’’ – any hole punched in the annual deficit would be filled by eliminating tax deductions on high earners and closing other loopholes.
“I’m not looking for a $5 trillion tax cut,’’ Mr. Romney insisted in the debate. “What I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit. That’s part one. So there’s no economist that can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds $5 trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan.’’
Mr. Romney has left himself open to the Democrats’ attacks by not specifying how he would make up the loss in revenue, specifically which tax deductions he would eliminate. And he also counts on his plan to spur economic growth and add to tax collections, a proposition that federal budget experts have difficulty factoring into their estimates.
The issue is hardly going away.
The Obama campaign released its own video on Sunday accusing Mr. Romney of rewriting his earlier proposals during the debates, including the $5 trillion reduction in taxes. “When the cameras rolled, a performance began,’’ the video says. “But the problem is, that’s all it was.’’
And on Thursday Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who will face Representative Paul D. Ryan in a vice presidential debate this week, mocked Mr. Romney’s claims about his tax proposals. “Last night we found out he doesn’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,’’ he said. “I guess he outsourced that to China or something.’’
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Republicans Seize On Biden's 'Middle Class' Remark
James Hill for The New York Times Supporters waited to greet Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a campaign rally on Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C.A stray sentence by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday became the latest remark seized by the opposition and turned into a blistering line of attack against him.
After Mr. Biden described the middle class as having “been buried the last four years,’’ Republicans pounced, treating it as an unwitting admission of President Obama’s failures.
The vice president was criticizing the Republican ticket for pursuing a tax overhaul that would raise taxes on the middle class, he said.
“How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years?’’ Mr. Biden said at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C.
The Republican barrage came fast and furious by Twitter message, news release and campaign conference call. It began with a Twitter message from Mitt Romney’s account:
Agree with @joebiden, the middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November #CantAfford4More
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 2, 2012
Campaigning in Iowa, Representative Paul D. Ryan reinforced the message. “Of course the middle class has been buried,’’ he said. “They’re being buried by regulations; they’re being buried by taxes; they’re being buried by borrowing. They’re being buried by the Obama administration’s economic failures.”
The Romney-Ryan campaign even held an afternoon press call with one of its fiercest surrogates, John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, to drive home the theme.
Republicans seemed to seize on the remark with special fervor, coming as it did one day before the first debate between Mr. Romney and President Obama, in which the cost of Mr. Romney’s proposed tax cuts for the rich and his disparagement of 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes are sure to be topics of discussion.
In response, the Obama campaign called the attacks “desperate and out of context.’’
“As the vice president has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy,’’ a spokeswoman, Lis Smith, said.
In his North Carolina remarks, Mr. Biden was citing, as the Democrats have for months, an independent study that found that cutting tax rates by 20 percent and closing loopholes to avoid increasing the deficit, as Mr. Romney proposes, could be done only by raising taxes on households earning less than $200,000.
The audience booed.
“No, no – all kidding aside,’’ Mr. Biden said. “With all the boos – I mean, we can stop all that malarkey. Look, guys, this is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest. How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years? How in the Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?’’
Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan dispute the accuracy of the study, by the Tax Policy Center, and they have cited studies of their own showing their tax plan will not hit the middle class.
The maladroit sentence was the latest in a long series this year that have been yanked from context and used by the opposition, including Mr. Romney’s remark that he “liked to fire people” and Mr. Obama’s comment that “you didn’t build that.”
Later in the day, Mr. Biden clarified his meaning. “The middle class was buried by the policies that Romney and Ryan have supported,” he told a crowd in Asheville, N.C.
Easier Access to Ballot Is Pushed by Democrats
In the last few weeks, potential voters in California have been able to register online for the first time, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow residents to register and vote on Election Day. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, and voting rights advocacy groups hope as many as five states might join them next year. Democratic lawmakers here described the legislation as a potential counterweight to Republican-backed laws in other parts of the country requiring photo identification to vote and making it more difficult to register. “It’s extremely important that as some states in the nation are moving to suppress voter turnout, California is moving forward to expand voter participation,” said Mike Feuer, a Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored the Election Day registration law. “I hope California is the catalyst for other states to encourage civic engagement and participation.” The changes in California are hardly revolutionary. Election Day registration, which is already in effect in eight states, began in the early 1970s in states like Maine and Wisconsin. Online registration has now expanded to more than a dozen states since it was first established, in Arizona in 2002. But conservative efforts to require people to show photo ID, a step they say is necessary to prevent voter fraud, seem to have galvanized some Democrats to try to expand ballot access — long an item on the party’s agenda, but one that had not been a top priority in recent years in many states. In May, Connecticut became the first state in five years to approve Election Day registration. When he signed the bill into law, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement, “Despite the pervasive climate across the U.S. to restrict voting rights, Connecticut has moved in the opposite direction.” Demos, a nonprofit organization that has worked to expand ballot access since the contested 2000 presidential election, has identified five additional states — Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and West Virginia — where they hope to pass Election Day registration laws next year. In each of those states, Democrats control the governorship and at least one chamber of the legislature. Voter registration laws were not always so infused with partisan politics. In the 1990s, Republican strongholds like Idaho and Wyoming instituted Election Day registration. The National Conference of State Legislatures says that while little evidence of in-person voter fraud has been found, voter turnout in states with Election Day registration has been at least 10 percent higher than in states without it. “Historically, this kind of work has been supported by Republican and Democratic states,” said Steven Carbó, state advocacy director for Demos. “There is no objective reason why we can’t be back at that point.” Online registration has retained some measure of bipartisan support. The South Carolina Legislature unanimously approved it this year (although, in California, the vote broke along strict party lines). But Election Day registration has become the exclusive province of Democrats. Since 1996, only four states have approved Election Day registration, and in each case it was a Democratic governor who signed the bill into law. Republican lawmakers in Maine and Montana have tried unsuccessfully to repeal their longstanding Election Day registration laws. Mr. Feuer’s bill passed through the State Assembly with no Republican support. “I think this really leaves the California voting system wide open to fraud,” said Connie Conway, the Republican leader in the State Assembly. Mr. Feuer argued that both the online and Election Day registration laws included strong safeguards against voter fraud. Online registration will be an option only for residents who already have a California ID, and the Election Day registration law enhances penalties for fraud, and allows those who register that day to cast only provisional ballots. Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “The Voting Wars,” said that neither side’s ostensible rationale for pushing changes to voting laws should be taken entirely at face value. Republicans, he said, have advocated for ID requirements in part to restrict the number of voters from the other party, since many population groups whose members tend to lack photo IDs also tend to vote Democratic. Democrats, meanwhile, have opposed all efforts to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls, which he called “a relatively small problem, but a real problem, and one that in the off-season needs to be corrected.” “On both sides there is the official story, and then the realpolitik,” Mr. Hasen said. That is the one thing that just about everyone agrees on. “Has it gotten more politicized?” Ms. Conway said. “Oh yeah.”
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