A united “Divine Nine” could be a formidable political advantage as the vice president, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, looks to shore up the Democratic base. She’ll address another Black sorority on Wednesday.As Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign rushes to shore up its base, its efforts will be bolstered by a ready-made coalition: the more than two million members of Black Greek-letter organizations who have quickly united to mobilize Black voters nationwide.Before Ms. Harris had even hosted her first official campaign event as the de facto Democratic nominee, the heads of the “Divine Nine,” the country’s nine most prominent Black sororities and fraternities, were planning a giant voter organization effort. When President Biden announced on Sunday that he was stepping aside and endorsing Ms. Harris, excitement over her ascent spread swiftly among these groups’ members in group chats, Facebook groups and conference calls.After all, Ms. Harris, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha since her undergraduate days at Howard University, is one of them.“Greek letter organizations who have worked in the trenches, some for over 100 years, never received any kind of publicity, any kind of notoriety,” said Representative Frederica S. Wilson of Florida, who is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. Once Ms. Harris ran for president, in 2020, she said, that changed. “The A.K.A.s shouted to the highest hills, ‘That’s our soror! That’s our sister!’”On Wednesday, Ms. Harris is expected to address members of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at their Boulé, or annual national gathering, in Indianapolis — her first such event as the Democratic Party’s likely standard-bearer. Members of Alpha Kappa Alpha cheer for Vice President Harris during the Boulé in Dallas, on July 10, 2024.LM Otero/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.Bobb’s “election integrity” post at the RNC is expected to involve teams of poll workers, poll watchers and other efforts in swing states and she has begun talking with key Maga allies with similar missions. Bobb last month told the far-right reporter Breanna Morello that her top goal is “empowering the grassroots”.Bobb was on at least one conference call in March with a half-dozen Trump-allied groups including ones that echo her false claims about 2020 election fraud, according to a person on the call, who said: “We’re all going to coordinate.”Among the groups on the call, he added, was Arizona-based Turning Point Action, which has a track record of promoting falsehoods about 2020 election fraud.Many experts raise red flags about Bobb’s new RNC post.The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”.Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”Some key Democrats are also alarmed by what Bobb’s RNC role may presage.“Putting Christina Bobb in charge of election integrity is like putting Donald Trump in charge of integrity,” the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said. “They’re designing a platform for lies to wage the next insurrection.”Although Bobb’s “election integrity” slot is new and a work in progress, the RNC’s new leadership seems to be banking on her.Lara Trump, the new RNC vice-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on 12 March: “We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [RNC]. That means massive resources going to this one thing.”Lara Trump added: “We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” and signaled that volunteers for these slots and lawyers are needed.Bobb, whose official RNC title is senior counsel for election integrity, wrote on X: “I’m honored to be a part of the new team at the RNC.”Besides Bobb, the RNC in March tapped Charlie Spies, who had previously served as its election law counsel, to be its chief counsel.Further, the RNC also named William McGinley, a veteran election lawyer who worked in the Trump administration, as outside counsel for election integrity, a move that could presage more litigation.But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role.For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.A subsequent FBI raid found about 100 classified documents; Bobb, who reportedly was interviewed by the FBI, indicated that another lawyer drafted the letter she signed.Given that Bobb was only tapped for her RNC post this month, it is unclear whether she has begun recruiting staff or taken other steps to develop the RNC’s election integrity program.But a source close to the Trump campaign stressed that “the key to election observing is redundancy”, meaning that it would involve multiple coordinated efforts, which suggests that the RNC program will be done in tandem with similar poll-watching and poll worker drives by Trump allied groups.The need for “redundancy” and Bobb’s early conference call with several outside groups are emerging as key strategies for Bobb, as she revealed in an interview on 15 March with Morello, a conservative journalist who used to be with Fox News.Bobb told Morello that her top goal at the RNC is “empowering the grassroots. This has to be a grassroots approach … We have to empower people in their communities.”The RNC press office did not reply to a request for comment.The RNC’s election integrity drive this year comes after a few decades when a moratorium was imposed on RNC poll-watching operations due to aggressive tactics it employed in 1981 that went beyond permissible programs.At some polling places in New Jersey in 1981, the GOP used off-duty police officers and provided rewards to some people who claimed they had evidence of voting fraud. After those incidents, the party agreed to halt poll-watching efforts until 2018, when the moratorium terminated.Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020.“I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.Other lawyers express similar worries about Bobb’s background.“It’s unclear whether the RNC wants those who are not already loyalists to take its commitment to ‘election integrity’ seriously,” said the former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman.“But if it does, picking someone who, according to the Florida indictment against Trump, was the vehicle for certifying his false statements about returning all the classified documents in his possession, is an odd choice.”Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.“Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.” More

Federal investigators are still examining Donald Trump’s role in inciting the attack on the US Capitol.Michael Sherwin, the departing acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, confirmed that the former president is still under investigation over the 6 January putsch in an interview with CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday.“Maybe the president is culpable,” he said.Sherwin also said there were now more than 400 cases against participants in the riot and said that if it is determined Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died, did so because he was hit with bear spray, murder charges would likely follow.“It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to DC on 6 January,” Sherwin said. “Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach?“…Based upon what we see in the public record and what we see in public statements in court, we have plenty of people – we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.’ That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the president is culpable for those actions.“But also, you see in the public record, too, militia members saying, ‘You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.’”Trump addressed a rally outside the White House on 6 January, telling supporters to “fight like hell” to stop Congress certifying his election defeat by Joe Biden, which he falsely claims was the result of voter fraud. A mob broke into the Capitol, leading to five deaths, including a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when only seven Republican senators could be convinced to vote him guilty.Lawsuits over the insurrection, one brought by the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, are among proliferating legal threats to Trump now he has lost the protections of office.More than 100 police officers were allegedly assaulted during the riot. Sicknick died the next day. Cause of death has not been released. But two men have been charged with assaulting the 42-year-old officer with a spray meant to repel bears.Asked if a determination that Sicknick’s death was a direct result of being attacked with the spray would lead to murder charges, Sherwin said: “If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death, yeah. We have causation, we have a link. Yes. In that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.”[embedded content]He also said: “That day, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. It’s actually amazing more people weren’t killed. We found ammunition in [one] vehicle. And also, in the bed of the vehicle were found 11 Molotov cocktails. They were filled with gasoline and Styrofoam. [Lonnie Coffman, the man charged] put Styrofoam in those, according to the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], because when you throw those, when they explode, the Styrofoam will stick to you and act like napalm.”He also said pipe bombs placed near the Capitol by an unidentified suspect were not armed properly.“They were not hoax devices, they were real devices,” Sherwin said.Sherwin also said sedition charges, as yet not part of cases against participants in the riot, were likely.“We tried to move quickly to ensure that there is trust in the rule of law,” he said. “You are gonna be charged based upon your conduct and your conduct only.“… The world looks to us for the rule of law and order and democracy. And that was shattered, I think, on that day. And we have to build ourselves up again. The only way to build ourselves up again is the equal application of the law, to show the rule of law is gonna treat these people fairly under the law.” More

Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.Why am I so confident that the Forward Party will amount to nothing? Because there is a recipe for third-party success in the United States, but neither Yang nor his allies have the right ingredients.First, let’s talk about the program of the Forward Party. Writing for The Washington Post, Yang, Whitman and Jolly say that their party is a response to “divisiveness” and “extremism.”“In a system torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes,” they write, “you must reintroduce choice and competition.”The Forward Party, they say, will “reflect the moderate, common-sense majority.” If, they argue, most third parties in U.S. history failed to take off because they were “ideologically too narrow,” then theirs is primed to reach deep into the disgruntled masses, especially since, they say, “voters are calling for a new party now more than ever.”It is not clear that we can make a conclusion about the public’s appetite for a specific third party on the basis of its general appetite for a third party. But that’s a minor issue. The bigger problem for Yang, Whitman and Jolly is their assessment of the history of American third parties. It’s wrong.The most successful third parties in American history have been precisely those that galvanized a narrow slice of the public over a specific set of issues. They further polarized the electorate, changed the political landscape and forced the established parties to reckon with their influence.This also gets to the meaning of success in the American system. The two-party system in the United States is a natural result of the rules of the game. The combination of single-member districts and single-ballot, “first past the post” elections means that in any election with more than two candidates, there’s a chance the winner won’t have a majority. There might be four or five or six (or even nine) distinct factions in an electorate, but the drive to prevent a plurality winner will very likely lead to the creation of two parties that take the shape of loose coalitions, each capable of winning that majority outright.To this dynamic add the fact of the presidency, which cannot be won without a majority of electoral votes. It’s this requirement of the Electoral College that puts additional pressure on political actors to form coalitions with each other in pursuit of the highest prize of American politics. In fact, for most of American history after the Civil War, the two parties were less coherent national organizations than clearinghouses for information and influence trading among state parties and urban machines.This is all to say that in the United States, a successful third party isn’t necessarily one that wins national office. Instead, a successful third party is one that integrates itself or its program into one of the two major parties, either by forcing key issues onto the agenda or revealing the existence of a potent new electorate.Take the Free Soil Party.During the presidential election of 1848, following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of antislavery politicians from the Democratic, Liberty and Whig Parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!”The Free Soil Party, notes the historian Frederick J. Blue in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” “endorsed the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to extend slavery and must in fact prohibit its extension, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, declared its platform, “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject and is thus responsible for its existence.”This was controversial, to put it mildly. The entire “second” party system (the first being the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) had been built to sidestep the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party — which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, for president in the 1848 election — fought to put that conflict at the center of American politics.It succeeded. In many respects, the emergence of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of mass antislavery politics in the United States. They elected several members to Congress, helped fracture the Whig Party along sectional lines and pushed antislavery “Free” Democrats to abandon their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few short years they transformed American party politics. And when the Whig Party finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, after General Winfield Scott’s defeat in the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil Party would become, in 1854, the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which brought an even larger coalition of former Whigs and ex-Democrats together with Free Soil radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, antislavery party.There are a few other examples of third-party success. The Populist Party failed to win high office after endorsing the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, for president in 1896, but went on to shape the next two decades of American political life. “In the wake of the defeat of the People’s party, a wave of reform soon swept the country,” the historian Charles Postel writes in “The Populist Vision”: “Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”“By turn of fate,” Postel continues, “Populism proved far more successful dead than alive.”On a more sinister note, the segregationist George Wallace won five states and nearly 10 million ballots in his 1968 campaign for president under the banner of the American Independent Party. His run was proof of concept for Richard Nixon’s effort to fracture the Democratic Party coalition along racial and regional lines. Wallace pioneered a style of politics that Republicans would deploy to their own ends for decades, eventually culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.This is all to say that there’s nothing about the Forward Party that, as announced, would have this kind of impact on American politics. It doesn’t speak to anything that matters other than a vague sense that the system should have more choices and that there’s a center out there that rejects the extremes, a problem the Democratic Party addressed by nominating Joe Biden for president and shaping most of its agenda to satisfy its most conservative members in Congress.The Forward Party doesn’t even appear to advocate the kinds of changes that would enable more choices across the political system: approval voting where voters can choose multiple candidates for office, multimember districts for Congress and fundamental reform to the Electoral College. Even something as simple as fusion voting — where two or more parties on the ballot share the same candidate — doesn’t appear to be on the radar of the Forward Party.The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. “On every issue facing this nation,” they write, “we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”No, we can’t. When an issue becomes live — when it becomes salient, as political scientists put it — people disagree. The question is how to handle and structure that disagreement within the political system. Will it fuel the process of government or will it paralyze it? Something tells me that neither Yang nor his allies have the answer.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More