By all estimates, a relatively small number of voters in just a few states are likely to decide this year’s presidential election: the undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Do you live in one of those states? Not sure whether to vote for President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump or someone else? If you lean one way, can you be persuaded to change your mind? Are you considering not voting at all?

My colleagues covering the elections for The Times and I would like to hear your views on politics.

I’ve covered national politics for The Times for the past five years, often focusing on what voters think about the country’s political debates and divisions. I often hear from those most committed to one party or the other, but I’m curious about the voters who are still figuring out their choice. What worries you? What inspires you? What will convince you one way or another?

We will read each submission and contact some respondents for more information. We will not share your contact information outside the Times newsroom and will not publish any part of your submission without first receiving a response and hearing from you.

In most battleground states, President Biden’s reelection campaign is being followed by worrying polls, complaints of a slow rise and Democratic calls to show more urgency to the threat posed by former President Donald J. Trump.

Then there’s Wisconsin.

Mr. Biden — who will travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday to visit his state campaign headquarters — did not need to fire up a reelection apparatus in Wisconsin. Local Democrats never shut down a storied organizing network they built for the 2020 presidential campaign and maintained through the 2022 midterm elections and a 2023 Supreme Court contest that was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history .

While Democrats in other presidential battlegrounds are still trying to explain what’s at stake in the 2024 election and what a second Trump term would mean, Wisconsin Democrats say their voters don’t have to tell the difference between winning and losing. to be told.

Wisconsin Democrats were pushed out of power for eight years by Governor Scott Walker and Republicans who had an iron grip on the state government, and then for another four years with a Republican-led legislature. Then they watched abortion become illegal overnight when an 1849 ban suddenly became law with the fall of Roe v. Wade. Party leaders in the state say there is widespread understanding that the stakes are not theoretical.

“We organize year-round in Wisconsin,” said Lt. Governor Sara Rodriguez. “We already have the infrastructure ready. We know how to do this, and we have been able to activate the people who know what is at stake.”

Mr. Biden has come to Wisconsin so often — eight visits since he became president, and six for Vice President Kamala Harris — that his visit on Wednesday comes almost as an afterthought to many Wisconsin Democrats.

An equally big problem for local organizers, Ms. Rodriguez said, are the Democratic Party of Wisconsin kickoff events, which will begin Saturday at the 44 offices being opened by the party and the Biden campaign across the state. Ms. Rodriguez said she planned to be in Wausau, a city in central Wisconsin where the progressive mayor will be up for re-election in April.

It helps Mr. Biden that the two issues his campaign has focused on — abortion rights and democracy — have been at the center of political discussion in Wisconsin in recent years.

Polls from The New York Times and Siena College in November showed that while Biden had a three-point Democratic lead in all the top states, he had a 13-point lead in Wisconsin alone. . In those polls, Mr. Biden led in Wisconsin while lagging in each of the other battleground states.

More recent studies of Marquette Law School And Fox news have discovered that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were actually locked in a feud; including third-party candidates, the former president is ahead by two or three points.

Wisconsin Republicans there contested Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory, who won just 20,608 votes, well into 2022. One of the party’s candidates for governor in 2022 ran to decertify the 2020 election and to revoke ten of Wisconsin’s electoral votes (which is not the case). something the Constitution allows), and the State Assembly has given permission for a year $2 million investigation to election fraud that provided no new evidence.

Last year, a liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won the crucial election for the state Supreme Court, a major victory for Democrats. Soon after, Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the state Assembly, floated the idea of ​​impeaching her before she could cast a decisive vote on issues that would ultimately lead to the undoing of the state’s gerrymandered legislative plans and abortion ban.

Internal polling by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin last September showed that 70 percent of Democratic voters had heard of Republican threats of impeachment — an extraordinary figure considering it was a state issue in an era of weakened local news reporting.

And right-wing Republicans in Wisconsin remain angry. On Monday, a group of them submitted more than 10,000 signatures to recall Mr. Vos, who is widely seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump despite his efforts to sow doubts about the election. (The Wisconsin Elections Commission said Tuesday that an initial review found that the recall group’s petitions did not contain enough valid signatures to force a recall election for Mr. Vos.)

Sen. Ron Johnson, the spiritual leader of Wisconsin Republicans, said in an interview Monday that Biden’s position in the state depended more on voters’ sour views on the economy than on questions about democracy and abortion rights.

“When you go to the supermarket and see what the bill is, when young people try to buy a house and realize it is completely unaffordable, when you are stuck in your house with your low interest mortgage and you can no longer trade because the interest rates are so much higher. These are the things that actually impact people,” Mr Johnson said. “They are not economists. They don’t look at the monthly economic numbers that Biden is trying to tout.”

Mr. Johnson said he “hoped Democrats would not be able to scare” on abortion rights and that he did not believe Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election draw – in which he was partly involved – the consequences for 2024.

“Personally, I think these are pretty forgotten stories,” he said. “The 2020 election mess is pretty much in the rearview mirror.”

Whether that’s true or not will become clearer during the Republican National Convention, which will be held at Milwaukee’s professional basketball arena in July.

Abortion is also a much more tangible issue in Wisconsin than in other political battlegrounds.

The procedure became illegal overnight in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the 1849 state law went into effect. Women across the state were outraged, and the issue led to victories for Gov. Tony Evers, Judge Protasiewicz and several mayors last spring.

By the time the courts ruled in September that abortions could resume in the state, Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats had waged a 15-month campaign to remind voters that conservatives were responsible for the ban. When he won his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2022, Mr. Johnson campaigned on holding a statewide referendum on the issue — partly to stave off his party’s support for abortion restrictions.

Dianne Hesselbein, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said abortion politics continues to drive political discussions, including one at her birthday party last weekend.

“My 24-year-old daughter said how excited she was to vote for Biden and how she never thought this whole abortion thing would actually happen,” Ms. Hesselbein said.

One point of danger for Wisconsin Democrats is the slow decline in attendance and enthusiasm of the state’s black voters, many of whom live on Milwaukee’s north side. In January, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission wrote in an email to party members that a decline in black turnout in the city “was due to a ‘well-thought-out, multi-faceted plan.’”

Democrats, who for years have fought with little success against Republican efforts to require voter ID, limit drop boxes and enact other voting restrictions, said in interviews that the elections of black Democrats as Milwaukee mayor and Milwaukee County executive Mr. would give a chance. Biden has key party surrogates that he did not have in his 2020 campaign.

“That’s really going to help us bring that excitement to these neighborhoods, to the communities that we grew up in,” said David Crowley, district administrator. “We can talk about the work we were able to do.”

When a 22-year-old nursing student was found dead on a wooded path at the University of Georgia, in what is believed to be the first homicide on campus in nearly three decades, it sent waves of grief and fear that roiled the university. core.

But when a 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela was charged Friday with the kidnapping and murder of college student Laken Riley, it did something different: It transformed Athens and Clarke County, a community of about 130,000 people about 70 miles east of Atlanta . into the latest flashpoint in the political battle over US immigration policy.

In a social media post on Monday, former President Donald J. Trump called the suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, a “monster” and accused President Biden of an “invasion” that is “killing our citizens.” Earlier in the day, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp denounced “this White House’s unwillingness to secure the southern border” at an event at the university.

A third Republican, Rep. Mike Collins, who represents Athens, wrote on social media: “The blood of Laken Riley is in the hands of Joe Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas and the Athens-Clarke County government,” referring to the unified city-county. government.

Such statements have struck many liberals as demagogic rhetoric on top of a heinous crime. In an interview Sunday, Athens-Clarke County Democratic Mayor Kelly Girtz said the conversation should focus on mourning the victim and blaming an individual rather than a group.

“This murder was a violent, heinous act,” he said, “and rests squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrator.”

Athens’ relatively liberal culture, local immigration policies and border crisis have combined with a brutal crime to create a toxic brew at Georgia’s flagship university, where student politics run the gamut.

In recent years, the city of Athens has seen a rise in local left-wing politicians, including Mr. Girtz, who have placed a new focus on issues of social justice and righting what they see as ongoing wrongs in the Deep South. They have not been shy about their embrace of undocumented immigrants and a Hispanic community whose numbers have increased dramatically in and around Athens over the past three decades.

At the same time, Athens remains something of a sacred space for conservatives in Georgia. The massive university, located in the middle of the city, has educated many of Georgia’s most powerful Republicans, including Governor Kemp, a native of Athens. And the school’s winning football team, as well as the tailgating and admiration it engenders, are core Georgia traditions that Mr. Kemp and others remarkable woven into a conservative tapestry of culture and policy.

Mr. Kemp, a former homebuilder and developer in Athens, won his first gubernatorial race in 2018 with a bold ad in which he declared: “I have a big truck, just in case I need to catch illegal criminals and bring them home. myself.” This month, he promised to send Georgia National Guard troops to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Mr. Kemp’s comments on Monday echoed a letter he sent to the White House on Friday in which he cited statistics on illegal border crossings and drug seizures at the southern border.

Mr. Girtz. was first elected in 2006 to the committee that governs the unified city-county government. He said that the more activist group of politicians and their supporters in Athens emerged to some extent from the new wave and post-punk music scene that famously emerged in Athens in the early 1980s and gave the world REM and the B-52s.

“People who were attracted to the magnetic creative energy of Athens grew into political thinkers,” Mr. Girtz said, “and much of that political thinking is left of center.”

In addition to addressing issues of race and class that had long divided many of Athens’ black and white residents, the new liberal lawmakers took a defiantly anti-Trump stance toward undocumented immigrants, many of whom are sent to Athens came to work in poultry farms or arrived during World War II. the construction boom of the early 2000s.

In 2018, then-local sheriff Ira Edwards, under pressure from Mr. Girtz and others, ended the practice of holding arrested immigrants in jail for 48 hours to give federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials a chance to detain them to fetch. for possible deportation.

The following year, Mr. Girtz and the committee passed a resolution denouncing white supremacy and declaring that undocumented immigrants should “feel welcome and comfortable” in dealing with the government.

And in 2020, voters elected a liberal district attorney, Deborah Gonzalez, who promised that “consider collateral consequences for undocumented defendants” when making charging decisions.

The Conservatives were shocked by all this – and remain so.

On Monday, State Representative Houston Gaines, a Republican from Athens, noted that Mr. Ibarra, the suspect in the University of Georgia murder, had been issued a criminal summons for shoplifting at an Athens Walmart in October, according to court records. Records show a court order was issued, meaning he most likely skipped a court date.

There is “an atmosphere where Athens is a place that welcomes people who, quite frankly, should not live in the United States,” Mr. Gaines said.

Mr. Ibarra was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol in September 2022 for crossing the border illegally and was quickly released with temporary permission to remain in the country, authorities said.

That release, or parole, was a practice the Biden administration adopted when officials were overwhelmed by large numbers of people crossing. About six months later, that practice ended.

According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mr. Ibarra was arrested in New York City in August on charges of child endangerment and violating driver’s license laws. He eventually moved to Athens and lived in an apartment within walking distance of the crime scene.

In 2022, the Republican-led state legislature took what Democrats said was an act of retaliation, redrawing Athens’ districts to rid the commission of three of its most liberal members. Ms. Gonzalez, the district attorney, was a key push last year for state lawmakers to create a commission with the power to fire prosecutors. (That committee is currently in operational limbo.)

Mr. Gaines said this week that he and other Republicans would try to push through bills in the coming days to tighten policies around undocumented immigrants.

For Mr. Girtz, the public policy debate is only part of the story. On Sunday morning, in a coffee shop near campus, the mayor, wearing an olive-colored military jacket and cap, dismissed the idea that he was responsible for the killing. He said Rep. Collins, who accused him of having blood on his hands, was harboring “some kind of cartoon story about how the universe works.”

Mr. Girtz spoke of the deep sense of shock and grief over Ms. Riley’s death. He also mentioned the Athens of 1964 murder of a black World War II veteran, Lemuel Penn, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.

Asked whether the conservative rhetoric sparked by the death of a young white woman could fuel retaliatory violence against immigrants in the city, Mr. Girtz said: “We live in a time when sometimes ugly and simplistic rhetoric fuels other terrible actions, so yes.”

The undocumented population in Athens lives with a mix of fear and frustration. “The really guilty ones are the Republicans and the federal government,” said an auto mechanic named Noe, who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation, “because every time there’s an election they treat us like a costal de boxeo — a punching ball.”

He added: “They beat us and treated us as if we were guilty of every bad act.”

At a trailer park north of the city, Jose Tapía, 50, a construction worker from Mexico and a legal U.S. resident, said he expected things would get harder for his undocumented neighbors. “I think there will be more tension,” he said. “I’m sure the police will be stricter.”

On Monday afternoon, hundreds of students gathered in a plaza near the student center for a vigil for Ms. Riley and another student who committed suicide last week. Some observers could be seen from nearby rooftops.

Most seemed focused on grieving and paying respects. A number of students said the politicization of Ms. Riley’s death seemed inappropriate. “It’s kind of gross,” said Maia Semmes, 25, a law student.

The Biden campaign is releasing a digital ad in three battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — with significant populations of Americans with Eastern European roots, attacking former President Donald J. Trump's recent threat to NATO countries.

The minute long advertisement highlights Mr Trump's claim that when he was president he told the leaders of NATO countries that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever they want” against countries that breach their financial obligations to the military alliance had not been fulfilled. (Trump has long portrayed NATO as some kind of protection racket, distorting the facts of an unofficial commitment to member states to increase their military spending.)

“No president has ever said anything like that,” says the ad's deep-voiced narrator.

The spot will run during the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5 and will target voters in three states crucial to Biden's re-election chances. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are “home to more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian – all NATO countries bordering Russia and facing the threat of enlargement of Putin's aggression in Ukraine,” the newspaper said. Biden campaign said in a statement.

Trump's disdain for NATO allies came as Biden and his Democratic supporters are trying to divert attention from voters' concerns about the president's age. In a speech at the White House on Friday following the death of Russian activist Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr Biden condemned Mr Trump's comments as “outrageous” for an American president, saying that “from Truman onwards they while When they heard this, they turned in their graves.” (The United States joined NATO in 1949 under President Harry Truman.)

Mr. Biden's campaign described the ad as a “six-figure” push but declined to say exactly how much was spent on it. It said the ad would appear in various forms on Meta, Google, Yahoo Native and YouTube.

Two of Georgia's largest black church groups are formally uniting for the first time to mobilize black voters in the battleground state ahead of November's presidential election.

The two congregations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, plan to pool their resources and their more than 140,000 parishioners in the state for the get-out-the-vote program, which they launched Monday at will announce at 1 p.m. the Capitol of Georgia.

Their efforts, which for now will be concentrated only in Georgia, are aimed at reviving the Black Church as a powerful driver of turnout at a time when national polls show lagging political energy among Black Americans — and waning enthusiasm for president Biden, who owes his rise to the White House in 2020 to their support.

The two churches have long pushed to expand and protect civil rights and voting rights across the country, but generally have not aligned their messages or shared resources.

Now, however, their leaders, Bishops Reginald T. Jackson and Thomas L. Brown Sr., say they view the stakes of this year's elections, as well as recently passed laws restricting voting rights and restructuring Georgia's congressional districts, as compelling reasons to work towards a common goal.

“This is serious and critically important,” said Bishop Brown of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, which presides over Georgia's approximately 300 churches. “We have to take leadership, and we have to make sure that our people are empowered, and especially in rural Georgia, we have to make sure that we are on the ground.”

He said at another point that “in the civil rights movement, at least in the late 1960s in particular,” there was more “solidarity between churches across denominational lines.” He added, “I think we've slowed down a little bit after some of those advances were made.”

The push from churches, whose congregants lean heavily Democratic, comes as Mr. Biden struggles to rebuild his support among Black voters. Donald J. Trump won just 11 percent of the black vote in Georgia in the 2020 election, according to exit polls. But in October, a New York Times poll showed Trump drawing 19 percent of these voters in the state.

“Given the importance of this election, and as we hear across the country that Blacks are not motivated to vote, and some Blacks have decided they are not going to vote, we felt it was important to formally do something together,” Bishop said Jackson, who presides over the more than 500 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia.

The budget for the voting program is modest — between $200,000 and $500,000 — but church leaders say the goal is to give the two churches one leading voice.

Other black faith groups are also trying to sway voters this year.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Poor People's Campaign, the economic justice coalition inspired by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Thursday announced a 30-state voter engagement campaign that will launch next month. .

In December, the National Action Network and the Conference of National Black Churches announced a joint get-out-the-vote campaign that will also seek to address urgent needs, such as vaccinations, in many communities.

Black churches have played a crucial role in turning out black voters for decades, often fueling Democratic victories. In Georgia, they turned out in droves in 2020 and helped Biden turn the state blue, and they did so again in Senate campaigns in 2021 and 2022, with Democrats also winning.

In part, the partnership between the two churches serves as a response to an established political network of predominantly white, conservative evangelical churches in Georgia and beyond. Their congregants form an important Republican constituency that has helped shape the party's policy goals for decades. In Georgia, evangelical denominations make up more than 50 percent of all Christian churches, while the share of historically black churches is 16 percent. according to a Pew Research Center study.

“Unfortunately, over the past thirty or forty years, the Black Church has not been as persistent or consistent in motivating and educating our community on issues that affect them,” Bishop Jackson said. “And what has happened, which to me is really frustrating, is that the white evangelicals have used that as an opportunity to send a lot of people into what we believe is an unchristian mentality.”

During the 2020 election, Bishop Jackson led a program called Operation Voter Turnout, which focused on voter education, registration drives, absentee ballot assistance and coordinated Sunday voting.

Now the lessons from that effort will be spread across the congregations of both churches. Their program includes regular listening sessions on politics and workshops on voting; creating “personal voter plans” for congregants to cast their ballots and convince their families to do the same; and weekly voter registration efforts.

“Voter registration will take place every Sunday in our churches,” said Cheryl Davenport Dozier, who helps coordinate civic engagement efforts for the AME Church of Georgia. “And in rural communities that are still reeling since Covid, we continue to have reach.”

She added, “Sometimes a hundred people come by, and we have voter registration forms there so we can reach people.” Even though some of those who show up are homeless, she said, “they still have the right to vote.”

Bishop Brown said the listening sessions would be especially important in helping church leaders understand why some Black voters in the state are feeling apathetic.

“It's one thing to read about the apathy and dissatisfaction with the Biden administration or anyone else,” he said. “I think we need listening sessions where we can talk to people on the ground about what's going on, what the dissatisfaction is, what the disappointments are, and where we can work with facts and solutions as much as possible.”

Leaders in both churches believe there is still time to revive one of the most influential voting groups in Georgia.

“No matter what anyone says, Black people believe in the institutions that are there to protect our rights,” said the Rev. Willie J. Barber II, who also works on community engagement efforts for the AME Church in Georgia and the same name as Mr Barber of the Poor People's Campaign. “One of the concerns is that they feel like this could easily go away. And how are we going to prevent this from happening? How am I going to keep democracy alive so that we can continue to live?”

Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Montana Republican, entered the state's Senate race on Friday, setting up a potentially divisive primary in a crucial national battleground for control of the chamber.

Mr Rosendale is entering the race from the far right of the party. He is a staunch opponent of abortion rights and voted to overturn the 2020 election, and he played a key role last year in ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a fellow Republican, as speaker of the House of Representatives.

But while that resume would normally make him a darling of Donald J. Trump's political movement, many loyalists of the former president have rallied behind Tim Sheehy, a retired Navy SEAL and founder of an aerial firefighting company who launched his own campaign in July before the Senate started.

The winner of the primary will face Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat seeking his fourth term. Mr. Tester is one of the country's most popular senators, according to Morning Consult polling, but he is seen as a vulnerable incumbent because of the deeply red nature of a state that Mr. Trump won by 16 percentage points in 2020. Montana also has a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature.

Before this year, the only time Mr. Tester shared a ballot in a presidential race was in 2012, when President Barack Obama reached a second term. Mr. Obama lost Montana by 13.5 points that year, but Mr. Tester won his race by four points.

When Mr Tester was re-elected in 2018, he defeated Mr Rosendale 50.3 per cent to 46.8 per cent. That loss played a role in the decision by Republican leaders, including Senator Steve Daines of Montana, to recruit Mr. Sheehy for this year's race. Mr. Daines oversees the party's Senate races as chairman of the National Republican Senate Committee.

Mr. Daines has in various ways helped Mr. Sheehy win support from Trump loyalists and deep-pocketed Republican donors, two forces within the party that have frequently worked at odds with each other in recent years. Mr. Sheehy has been endorsed by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and a super PAC backing Mr. Sheehy has raised millions from wealthy Wall Street executives.

Mr. Sheehy has also contributed about $1 million to his own campaign, spending more than $1 million Last year $4 million and entered this year with about $1.3 million in inventory.

But while Mr. Sheehy is seeking his first elected office, Mr. Rosendale is a well-known figure in Montana Republican politics. The battle for the Senate will be Rosendale's eighth political campaign in the past fourteen years. In his previous seven contests — four federal races, two state legislative campaigns and one for state auditor — Rosendale won five and lost two.

Mr. Rosendale has received support from key figures in Mr. Trump's orbit, including Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House strategist, and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. But what he especially misses is the support of Mr. Trump himself and his son Donald Trump Jr., both of whom repeatedly campaigned with Mr. Rosendale during the 2018 Senate race.

Mr. Rosendale's reluctance to endorse Mr. Trump's 2024 presidential bid immediately convinced many Trump loyalists to side with Mr. Sheehy last year, and is a key reason why the former president has not yet run for office has backed in the Senate race, according to people in the know. with the deliberations. Mr. Rosendale endorsed Mr. Trump's candidacy in December.

These pro-Trump forces showed their strength on Wednesday when House Speaker Mike Johnson backed away from his plan to support Mr. Rosendale after facing criticism from top Republican officials and prominent Trump supporters.

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching social studies.

She enjoyed discussing, as state requirements require, the advantages the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something some of her immigrant students feel naturally, she said.

And she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the country’s founding documents. The topic prompted her students at the Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the nation’s politics, they believed, failed to live up to the basic morality of the Ten Commandments.

This fall, Ms. Phillip will be one of thousands of social studies teachers adjusting to a hotly debated overhaul of social studies in several conservative states. The overhaul is led by Republican governors — Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia — who have also limited how race and gender are discussed in schools.

Above all, the new standards for citizenship are explicitly patriotic and emphasize the importance of children being proud of their country. The standards do not avoid discussions about race, but rather portray racism in a particular light, not as a structural feature of American life, but as a deviation from the country’s norms and ideals.

The guidelines also eliminate or reduce practical activities such as mock elections, debating current events and writing to elected officials — a response to widespread concerns among conservatives that teachers are using these activities to push their own political beliefs.

The state standards are yet another sign that the nation’s schools are on two tracks, with deep divisions over what children should learn about their country. In the past decade, states like California, Oregon, and Vermont have transformed social studies by adopting ethnic studies requirements and adding LGBTQ history, housing and credit discrimination, and critiques of capitalism to the curriculum .

Civics – the study of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship – is required in most states, but only about a fifth of American students have taken it. skill achieved in this subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to the assessment, students in eighth grade should be able to identify the three branches of the federal government and explain how the Electoral College works.

Republican state officials say their civic standards will address knowledge gaps with a back-to-basics approach, focused in part on a close reading of the Constitution. But there is also an ideological motivation that some experts say could prevent students from gaining a full understanding of the U.S. government.

In Florida, Virginia and South Dakota, education policymakers turned to experts affiliated with Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan that has taken on an increasing role in public education policy.

In South Dakota, Governor Noem has done just that promised to defeat what she called “rising anti-Americanism” in schools. Under state standards, which will be phased in over the next two years, first-graders are expected to recite the Preamble to the Constitution and much of the Declaration of Independence by heart. In fifth grade, they are expected to recite the Gettysburg Address and explain the major ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

Recitation is a popular practice in classical Christian schools. But some teachers, parents and the American Historical Association to have said the standards could reduce the focus on critical thinking and have argued that memorization may be too difficult for many young children, especially those who are not fluent in English.

In Florida, state reform focuses on teacher training. It offers $3,000 to instructors of any subject and level, including math and PE, to take an in-person or online citizenship course with Hillsdale-affiliated scholars. Tens of thousands of teachers took up the offer.

“Every teacher is essentially a social studies teacher,” said Stephen Masyada, director of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the University of Central Florida, who worked with the DeSantis administration on the training. “Whatever you teach, you are an example of good citizenship.”

According to several teachers who took the class but asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak to the news media, the course contains video lectures that contradict what mainstream historians tend to teach about the founding. The lectures argue that the founding fathers were influenced more by Christianity than by the secular Enlightenment and its ideas, such as Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers.

Mainstream historians tend to believe that while Christian beliefs played a role in its founding, secular ideas played a more central role.

Several teachers in Florida expressed doubts about their preparation to teach material about Christianity, saying their training focused on secular texts and ideas.

But teachers should not need a theological background to “research original texts” and “provide accurate and unbiased citizenship education,” Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Education, said in an email. Educators who doubt their ability to teach the influence of Biblical ideas, he added, “may not be suited to teaching civics in Florida.”

When it comes to race and slavery, civic norms follow laws that limit how history can be taught. The founders are depicted as flawed, but ultimately heroic.

For example, in South Dakota, seventh-graders learn that Jefferson enslaved people, but he condemned the slave trade in an early version of the Declaration of Independence.

Florida teacher education recognizes that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery, as in the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. But the training also argues that the Constitution planted the seeds for abolition by setting a path for Congress to end the foreign slave trade in 1808.

Albert S. Broussard, a history professor at Texas A&M University and author of widely used textbooks on American history, said many of the framers were aware that slavery contradicted their republican principles. But he teaches students that the Constitution was drafted as a document “for the protection of racial slavery” to secure the support of the Southern states.

Conservatives have promoted anti-communist curricula for a century. The new norms meet this goal by attacking the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. In Virginia, where the standards will go into full effect in two years, students will learn about “the inhumanity and hardship of totalitarian and communist regimes,” and will be prompted to reflect on the superiority of the U.S. government and the free market .

Aimee Rogstad Guidera, Virginia’s secretary of education, said the comparison was important because of “all the recent surveys and polls among young people who believe capitalism doesn’t work and that socialism is a better model.”

Comparing forms of government is “a good practice,” said Donna Phillips, vice president of the Center for Civic Education. The question is whether the guidelines provide “a foregone conclusion” about which systems are best; students, she said, should be encouraged to form their own ideas.

However, the debate is de-emphasized.

In its history and civic standards, South Dakota goes so far as to warn teachers against discussing current events, stating: “Discussing current political positions or engaging in political activism at the request of a school or teacher is not appropriate in a social school for primary and secondary education. studies class, and the color of one’s skin does not determine what one can or should learn.”

But shying away from current political events can go against the natural interest many teens have in exploring the world around them. Such discussions can be “motivational rocket fuel,” says David Griffith, deputy director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank focused on school choice and academic rigor.

Still, Mr. Griffith said he supported South Dakota’s standards and praised what he called their “very rigorous” content.

In Florida, Mr. Masyada argued that even though the state banned critical race theory, discussions about race and current events, such as the killing of George Floyd, could be had legally.

“You can talk about it in terms of, ‘This doesn’t meet our basic tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” he said. “You can’t talk about it like, ‘Our country has always been racist.’”

The big question is whether these social studies lessons will increase knowledge.

This fall, Ms. Phillip, the seventh-grade teacher in Orlando, presented new required content – ​​on the ancient Greek origins of America’s due process protections.

Her students looked for parallels with the American system.

One student asked, “Do the police make the laws?”

Another wondered: “Is there a jury in divorce court?”

Ms. Phillip noted that young adolescents tended to have basic but deep questions about government, which had a way of cutting through ideological debates.

“I make the choice to be positive,” she said. “America has changed a lot and there is still room for change. That is what the Constitution is about.”

Patricia Mazzei reporting contributed.

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching social studies.

She enjoyed discussing, as state requirements require, the advantages the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something some of her immigrant students feel naturally, she said.

And she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the country’s founding documents. The topic prompted her students at the Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the nation’s politics, they believed, failed to live up to the basic morality of the Ten Commandments.

This fall, Ms. Phillip will be one of thousands of social studies teachers adjusting to a hotly debated overhaul of social studies in several conservative states. The overhaul is led by Republican governors — Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia — who have also limited how race and gender are discussed in schools.

Above all, the new standards for citizenship are explicitly patriotic and emphasize the importance of children being proud of their country. The standards do not avoid discussions about race, but rather portray racism in a particular light, not as a structural feature of American life, but as a deviation from the country’s norms and ideals.

The guidelines also eliminate or reduce practical activities such as mock elections, debating current events and writing to elected officials — a response to widespread concerns among conservatives that teachers are using these activities to push their own political beliefs.

The state standards are yet another sign that the nation’s schools are on two tracks, with deep divisions over what children should learn about their country. In the past decade, states like California, Oregon, and Vermont have transformed social studies by adopting ethnic studies requirements and adding LGBTQ history, housing and credit discrimination, and critiques of capitalism to the curriculum .

Civics – the study of American government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship – is required in most states, but only about a fifth of American students have taken it. skill achieved in this subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. According to the assessment, students in eighth grade should be able to identify the three branches of the federal government and explain how the Electoral College works.

Republican state officials say their civic standards will address knowledge gaps with a back-to-basics approach, focused in part on a close reading of the Constitution. But there is also an ideological motivation that some experts say could prevent students from gaining a full understanding of the U.S. government.

In Florida, Virginia and South Dakota, education policymakers turned to experts affiliated with Hillsdale College, a Christian institution in Michigan that has taken on an increasing role in public education policy.

In South Dakota, Governor Noem has done just that promised to defeat what she called “rising anti-Americanism” in schools. Under state standards, which will be phased in over the next two years, first-graders are expected to recite the Preamble to the Constitution and much of the Declaration of Independence by heart. In fifth grade, they are expected to recite the Gettysburg Address and explain the major ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

Recitation is a popular practice in classical Christian schools. But some teachers, parents and the American Historical Association to have said the standards could reduce the focus on critical thinking and have argued that memorization may be too difficult for many young children, especially those who are not fluent in English.

In Florida, state reform focuses on teacher training. It offers $3,000 to instructors of any subject and level, including math and PE, to take an in-person or online citizenship course with Hillsdale-affiliated scholars. Tens of thousands of teachers took up the offer.

“Every teacher is essentially a social studies teacher,” said Stephen Masyada, director of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the University of Central Florida, who worked with the DeSantis administration on the training. “Whatever you teach, you are an example of good citizenship.”

According to several teachers who took the class but asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak to the news media, the course contains video lectures that contradict what mainstream historians tend to teach about the founding. The lectures argue that the founding fathers were influenced more by Christianity than by the secular Enlightenment and its ideas, such as Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers.

Mainstream historians tend to believe that while Christian beliefs played a role in its founding, secular ideas played a more central role.

Several teachers in Florida expressed doubts about their preparation to teach material about Christianity, saying their training focused on secular texts and ideas.

But teachers should not need a theological background to “research original texts” and “provide accurate and unbiased citizenship education,” Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Education, said in an email. Educators who doubt their ability to teach the influence of Biblical ideas, he added, “may not be suited to teaching civics in Florida.”

When it comes to race and slavery, civic norms follow laws that limit how history can be taught. The founders are depicted as flawed, but ultimately heroic.

For example, in South Dakota, seventh-graders learn that Jefferson enslaved people, but he condemned the slave trade in an early version of the Declaration of Independence.

Florida teacher education recognizes that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery, as in the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. But the training also argues that the Constitution planted the seeds for abolition by setting a path for Congress to end the foreign slave trade in 1808.

Albert S. Broussard, a history professor at Texas A&M University and author of widely used textbooks on American history, said many of the framers were aware that slavery contradicted their republican principles. But he teaches students that the Constitution was drafted as a document “for the protection of racial slavery” to secure the support of the Southern states.

Conservatives have promoted anti-communist curricula for a century. The new norms meet this goal by attacking the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. In Virginia, where the standards will go into full effect in two years, students will learn about “the inhumanity and hardship of totalitarian and communist regimes,” and will be prompted to reflect on the superiority of the U.S. government and the free market .

Aimee Rogstad Guidera, Virginia’s secretary of education, said the comparison was important because of “all the recent surveys and polls among young people who believe capitalism doesn’t work and that socialism is a better model.”

Comparing forms of government is “a good practice,” said Donna Phillips, vice president of the Center for Civic Education. The question is whether the guidelines provide “a foregone conclusion” about which systems are best; students, she said, should be encouraged to form their own ideas.

However, the debate is de-emphasized.

In its history and civic standards, South Dakota goes so far as to warn teachers against discussing current events, stating: “Discussing current political positions or engaging in political activism at the request of a school or teacher is not appropriate in a social school for primary and secondary education. studies class, and the color of one’s skin does not determine what one can or should learn.”

But shying away from current political events can go against the natural interest many teens have in exploring the world around them. Such discussions can be “motivational rocket fuel,” says David Griffith, deputy director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank focused on school choice and academic rigor.

Still, Mr. Griffith said he supported South Dakota’s standards and praised what he called their “very rigorous” content.

In Florida, Mr. Masyada argued that even though the state banned critical race theory, discussions about race and current events, such as the killing of George Floyd, could be had legally.

“You can talk about it in terms of, ‘This doesn’t meet our basic tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” he said. “You can’t talk about it like, ‘Our country has always been racist.’”

The big question is whether these social studies lessons will increase knowledge.

This fall, Ms. Phillip, the seventh-grade teacher in Orlando, presented new required content – ​​on the ancient Greek origins of America’s due process protections.

Her students looked for parallels with the American system.

One student asked, “Do the police make the laws?”

Another wondered: “Is there a jury in divorce court?”

Ms. Phillip noted that young adolescents tended to have basic but deep questions about government, which had a way of cutting through ideological debates.

“I make the choice to be positive,” she said. “America has changed a lot and there is still room for change. That is what the Constitution is about.”

Patricia Mazzei reporting contributed.

On a warm evening in June, Benjamin Wittes sat at a card table across from the Russian embassy in Washington, where he performed his light show.

Around him was a tangle of wires and equipment, including a laptop and two powerful light projectors. One of them beamed a huge blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag onto the embassy’s white facade.

That was just the beginning. “We have a little essay that we’re going to project line by line in three languages,” said Mr. Wittes, a leading expert on national security law. “It’s about stolen children.” By the end of the evening, he was beaming profanity in Ukrainian about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the towering embassy structure.

Mr. Wittes and his friends have lit up the embassy once every few weeks since the start of the war in Ukraine last year. It clearly gets under the skin of the Russians. On this night, the Russians tried to blot out his projections with projections of their own, including two giant white Zs – a nationalistic Russian symbol of the war effort.

Once, last spring, a Russian floodlight chased a Ukrainian flag across the facade of the embassy in a slapstick cat-and-mouse game that has since been viewed millions of times online. In April, a burly man in jeans and a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt emerged from the embassy and quietly blocked Mr. Wittes’ projectors with an open umbrella in each hand.

“They come into the spotlight with us,” said Mr. Wittes. “It’s really very youthful.”

It’s also the strange new normal around Russia’s main diplomatic outpost in the United States, a scene of near-constant protests, spy games and general madness as the most hostile relations in decades between the United States and Russia play out in the heart of Washington. . . Thousands of miles from the front in Ukraine, the embassy grounds have become a battlefield of their own.

The Russian ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, called it “a besieged fortress.” Within the high fences surrounded by security cameras, the compound is a self-contained village, complete with an apartment complex for diplomats and their families, along with a school, playground, and swimming pool. On a recent afternoon, a young girl was seen skateboarding near a vegetable patch.

In recent years, no fewer than 1,200 Russian personnel have worked on the embassy grounds. The State Department won’t say how many are left — the workforce here and at the US embassy in Moscow is now a touchy subject — but in January 2022 Mr. Antonov estimated the number at 184 diplomats and support staff.

And while embassy staff may be some of Washington’s least welcome residents, Biden officials are happy to be here. It is essential to maintain diplomatic ties, even in the worst of times, they say. Kicking the Russians out completely would also mean the end of the US diplomatic presence in Moscow, which, among other things, helps US citizens imprisoned in Russia.

Mr. Antonov has moved out of his official residence in a historic mansion near the White House and now lives at the embassy, ​​according to people who speak to him. He is an experienced diplomat who spent years negotiating arms control agreements with American counterparts in Geneva. But he also served as deputy defense minister when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and was hit by European Union sanctions.

He often complains about his limited contacts with Biden administration officials and members of Congress — Politico once called him “Lonely Anatoly‘ – as well as the protests and ‘hooliganism’ outside the gates of his embassy.

Protests are routine, with anti-Putin chants and broadcasts of the Ukrainian national anthem with supportive horns from passing cars. Houses across the street are decorated with Ukrainian flags and anti-Russian slogans. Neighbors shout “Slava Ukraini!” (long live Ukraine) to Russians coming and going.

Bob Stowers, a local resident, said that on his daily walk past the embassy, ​​he stops at each of the six security cameras and holds up a news article about imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “It makes me feel a little better,” he said.

Sometimes things get more serious: Neighborhood residents complain that Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare that runs past the embassy, ​​is occasionally closed off by Secret Service police investigating bomb threats — as many as 10 since the invasion, according to one estimate. neighbour, although some believe the Russians are exaggerating threats to silence protesters. (An explosive ordnance disposal squad was once called to investigate a papier-mache washing machine left in the embassy driveway; it turned out to be an innocuous symbol of consumer goods looted by Russian troops.)

An unofficial street sign at the end of the embassy driveway proclaims it to be “Zelensky Way”. Protesters, including Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, have planted sunflowers, Ukraine’s national flower, in the grass along the sidewalk. Neighbors say the flowers were torn up overnight.

However, what seems to anger Mr. Antonov the most is the FBI’s attempts to recruit spies into his midst.

“In short, our embassy operates in a hostile environment,” Mr. Antonov said told the Russian news service Tass last year. “U.S. security agents loiter at the Russian embassy handing out CIA and FBI phone numbers that can be called to establish contact.” (After initially saying Mr. Antonov might be available for an interview, the embassy stopped responding to questions for this article.)

While it is unclear whether business cards were actually presented, the FBI is not trying to hide its efforts to recruit Russians from behind the embassy gates. The agency publicly released a video this year encouraging Russian diplomats who may be against the war to get in touch. The video opens with an image of the Russian embassy before showing a bus and subway ride through the city to the doors of FBI headquarters.

“You can walk into any FBI field office and say you want to change the future,” the video assures would-be spies.

The FBI would not comment on Mr. Antonov’s claims about agents handing out business cards, but a spokesman said the agency “seeks information from members of every community of interest in an effort to counter threats to our national security.”

Nor did the bureau want to answer questions about the mysterious house across the street from the embassy. The residents are rarely seen and the curtains are always drawn, even though the lights are usually on at night. Many neighbors assume the house is manned by FBI agents keeping tabs on the Russians, a theory not exactly discouraged by the fact that a street-level Google Maps image of the house has been blurred.

The Russians have cause for paranoia. Shortly after beginning construction on the embassy in 1977, the FBI and National Security Agency began digging a secret tunnel under the complex in an attempt to tap communications. But the project had to be halted after it was exposed by Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who was arrested in 2001 for selling American secrets to Moscow. (Mr. Hanssen died in June.)

Douglas London, a Russian-speaking former CIA operative and the author of a recent book on espionage recruitment, said it would be difficult but not impossible to find Russians in the embassy willing to cooperate with the United States.

“If you’re a Russian official sent to the US, they’ve put extra vetting on you,” said Mr. London. “Nevertheless, some of our best assets over the years have been Russian officials in the US who have volunteered to help us. I think Putin should be concerned about his Russians here.”

Mr. Antonov even claims that he was personally recruited. Last June, he told Russian state television that he had received a letter from the foreign ministry asking him to “denounce my motherland and condemn the actions of the Russian president.” according to Tass.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged letter.

People who know Mr. Antonov call him an unlikely dissident. He is not a fanatical ideologue, they say, but he is also unfailingly loyal to the Kremlin. Some Westerners who have dealt with him describe him as cordial and even sympathetic. But he is also capable of caustic monologues; days before his country invaded Ukraine, Mr. Antonov insisted that there would be no war.

Despite the poisonous political cloud that surrounds him in many circles, Mr. Antonov tries to maintain some normal diplomatic habits. He receives fellow diplomats at his residence and greets them with caviar, fine wine, vodka and what guests describe as exquisite food, though he grumbles about losing his beloved chef, thanks to three-year US visa limits on Russians.

He hosts social events, including a December holiday reception for the news media, which is mostly attended by non-American journalists, according to people who were there. Those present were given a thick magazine about Russia’s heroic stand against the Nazis in Stalingrad.

At his residence in May, Mr. Antonov hosted a “Russia-Africa Unity Night,” underlining the Kremlin’s ties to many countries on the continent. Sleek sedans lined up outside, with diplomatic license plates denoting visitors from Egypt, Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, among others.

(A New York Times reporter who asked to attend the event received a formal email invitation — then received a follow-up message calling the invitation “no longer valid,” with no further explanation.)

Mr. Antonov may lament life in Washington, but for Americans in Moscow, it’s much worse, US officials say.

Protests are common there outside the US embassy, ​​although officials believe that unlike in Washington, they are organized by the host country government. American diplomats are constantly followed around the city by Russian security agents and sometimes intimidated. On the day in January that the newly confirmed U.S. ambassador, Lynne M. Tracy, first arrived at her office, the power mysteriously went out.

A former senior U.S. official recalled a recent incident where someone taped a giant letter Z to the car roof of a U.S. diplomat who was in a grocery store. State television later broadcast drone footage of the car entering the US embassy, ​​the former official said.

Last June, the city of Moscow renamed the plot around the US embassy give a new address: 1 Square of the Donetsk People’s Republic. (The name refers to the unrecognized Russian-installed government of an occupied eastern Ukrainian province.)

The Russians also have their projectors and have beamed images of the carnage of US wars in Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan to a building across from the US embassy.

As the war in Ukraine continues, it appears that this will not abate anytime soon. Mr. Wittes, for example, is deeply invested. “It took a lot of energy, a lot of money and a lot of experimentation” to perfect his light shows, he says. In addition, he said, “it makes Ukrainians happy.”