Elections

The developments on Capitol Hill highlighted the extent to which one of the greatest sins inside the Republican Party is to have certified Joseph R. Biden’s victory.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana had just survived a closed-door vote to end a tumultuous period of paralysis without a House speaker on Tuesday night and was celebrating with smiling and exhausted Republican colleagues.“Democracy is messy sometimes,” he said, “but it is our system.”But moments later, Mr. Johnson was confronted at a news conference about his own past role in American democracy, when he worked in alliance with former President Donald J. Trump to block the certification of the 2020 election.Boos rang out at the reporter’s inquiry. Mr. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Shut up! Shut up!” one congresswoman shouted. “Next question,” Mr. Johnson said. Only hours earlier, the speakership bid of another candidate, Tom Emmer, the majority whip, had been felled amid a lobbying blitz from Mr. Trump himself. Among Mr. Emmer’s apparent apostasies: certifying President Biden’s election. His tenure as speaker designate lasted only four hours.Then, on Wednesday, when Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat, chastised Mr. Johnson for leading efforts to reject the Electoral College votes on the House floor in 2020, one Republican lawmaker shouted back, “Damn right!”The back-to-back-to-back developments on Capitol Hill underscored not only the extent to which loyalty to Mr. Trump has become a prerequisite to taking power in today’s Republican Party, but also how — two and half years after a riot that left the Capitol covered with blood and broken glass — the greater sin inside the G.O.P. is to have stood with the voters that day and certified the election of Joseph R. Biden.“Bottom line is the Trump wing of the House is dominant and has been dominant for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania. Mr. Dent called Mr. Johnson “affable” and “bright” but said the political takeaway was clear: “A member of the Trump populist wing is now speaker.”Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally who filed the motion that took down former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, beamed, “This is what victory feels like,” celebrating Mr. Johnson’s rise on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Wednesday before the official floor vote. Mr. Gaetz called him “MAGA Mike Johnson” — the same moniker that the Biden campaign used hours later.At a New York courthouse, where he and his company are on trial for financial fraud, Mr. Trump himself praised Mr. Johnson. “I think he’s going to be a fantastic speaker,” the former president said Wednesday.The internal politics of House Republicans do not revolve solely around Mr. Trump. The former president had publicly backed Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio for speaker earlier this month, only to see him blockaded by a more moderate faction in the conference.But the end of the three-week paralysis shows that the party remains yoked to the former president’s election denialism, with Mr. Johnson’s selection by his Republican colleagues coming on the same day that one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers tearfully pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” said Jenna Ellis, a once-combative Trump attorney who is now cooperating with Mr. Trump’s prosecutors. Prosecutors struck deals with two other Trump figures, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, in the last week.It was a different story on Capitol Hill.With Mr. Trump dominating polls in the 2024 presidential primary — and even his top rivals staying relatively silent on his election fraud falsehoods — the party appears content to look past the fact that many of the party’s most prominent election deniers lost in key swing states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterm elections.For many Republicans, the primary victories that preceded those defeats are as politically significant. Last year, Mr. Trump sought to methodically cleanse the party of his critics, especially those who had voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 riot. He mostly succeeded: Only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him survived.In contrast, Mr. Johnson served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team. And before that he recruited House Republicans to sign onto a legal brief to object to the outcome of the 2020 election. When that failed, he had played a key role in articulating a rationale for Republican lawmakers to oppose certification of the 2020 results on the floor. His guidance did not directly echo Mr. Trump’s wild allegations and was narrower in scope, but it led to the same final vote.“We know now it’s too high of a hurdle to be directly criticized by Donald Trump” and still become speaker, said Kevin Sheridan, a veteran Republican strategist. Referring to Mr. Johnson, he added, “He seems to have found the right temperature for the porridge so far.”But Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, a nonprofit devoted to vote counting and election certification, said she was “very concerned” about Mr. Johnson’s ascent.“As a member of the House, Johnson was willing to use the powers of his office to try to obstruct a fair election and interfere with certification,” she said. “And we have to assume he would do the same with the broader powers of the speakership.”Mr. Johnson has served as vice chairman of the Republican conference and was previously the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He is initially expected to be a more policy-minded leader than Mr. McCarthy, who was best known for his backslapping personality. Mr. McCarthy also objected to certifying the election and visited Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago only weeks after the attack on the Capitol, in a trip that was widely seen to restore some legitimacy to the former president.An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson has vocally opposed abortion and gay marriage. (During the roll call vote in which he was elected as speaker, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, pointedly declared, “Happy wedding anniversary to my wife!” to Democratic applause.) Democrats were quick to highlight some of his hard-line stances.Elected to the House in 2016, the same year that Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Johnson, a former constitutional law attorney, will have the least years of House experience of any speaker in many decades. But he is representative of the wave of House Republicans who have served in Washington only since the party was reshaped by Mr. Trump — and who are now a majority of the conference.“If you don’t have a coup on your résumé,” Charlie Sykes, the Trump-tired editor in chief of The Bulwark, wrote in a column about the speakership fight, “don’t bother to apply.” More

The G.O.P. field, including former President Trump, has been wading into the emotional debate among students playing out over the deadly war between Hamas and Israel.As tensions mount on U.S. college campuses over the war in Gaza, several Republican presidential candidates are proposing a crackdown on students and schools that express opposition to Israel, appear to express support for the deadly Hamas attacks or fail to address antisemitism.Former President Donald J. Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have called for the federal government to revoke international students’ visas, while others have suggested that universities should lose public funding.After students at George Washington University projected messages on Tuesday onto the side of a campus building — including “Glory to our martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist genocide now” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a phrase that encompasses all of Israel as well as Gaza and the West Bank — two candidates argued almost immediately that the students or the universities, or both, should be punished.“If this was done by a foreign national, deport them,” Mr. Scott wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday morning. “If the college coddles them, revoke their taxpayer funding. We must stand up against this evil anti-Semitism everywhere we see it — especially on elite college campuses.”Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota wrote: “Antisemitism cannot be tolerated. Period. The students responsible should be held accountable and if the university fails to do so it should lose any federal funding.” He indicated in another post that he would “fully enforce” a Trump-era executive order to use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to revoke federal funding for any university that “enables” antisemitism.They and other Republicans are wading into an emotional debate on college campuses over Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict — turning the opinions of individual students and student groups, starting at Harvard and New York University, into national flash points. Days of simultaneous pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations have exposed painful divisions, including significant and potentially consequential ideological rifts between donors, students and faculty members.The suggestion of punishing anti-Israel views is part of a broader campaign against liberal-leaning campus environments, which many Republicans claim indoctrinate students. But it is also in tension with other parts of that campaign: In many cases, the same candidates have previously condemned what they described as censorship of students who expressed conservative opinions.Mr. Scott was a co-sponsor of a Senate resolution in 2021 that called on colleges and universities to “facilitate and recommit themselves to protecting the free and open exchange of ideas” and argued that “restrictive speech codes are inherently at odds with the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.”Mr. Burgum signed legislation in North Dakota, also in 2021, that forbade universities in the state to discriminate against student organizations or speakers based on their viewpoint.When asked where Mr. Scott drew the line between protected and unprotected speech, his campaign did not comment on the record but cited a previous statement in which he called it a “fine line.” Mr. Burgum’s campaign pointed to the Trump executive order as requiring action.Separately, on Tuesday, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida wrote in a letter to university presidents that he had determined — “in consultation with” Mr. DeSantis — that two campus chapters of the group Students for Justice in Palestine “must be deactivated.”The national Students for Justice in Palestine organization released guidance to campus chapters earlier this month calling for demonstrations “in support of our resistance in Palestine.” The guidance called Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,400 people, “a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy” and “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”It added, “This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”The letter from the chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, said the chapters had violated a Florida law against providing “material support” to “a designated foreign terrorist organization.”“The State University System will continue working with the Executive Office of the Governor and S.U.S.’s Board of Governors to ensure we are all using all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups,” it said. “These measures could include necessary adverse employment actions and suspensions for school officials.”The national Students for Justice in Palestine organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The letter came a few days after Mr. DeSantis declared at a campaign event in Iowa that, if elected president, he would revoke the visas of students who supported Hamas. He did not say how he would determine who fell into that category; some public commentary has applied the label “pro-Hamas” to demonstrators expressing broader support for Palestinians or opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which have killed more than 6,500 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. (Its figures could not be independently verified.)Mr. Trump made the same proposal at his own recent event in Iowa, also not providing details. “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home,” he said.Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, joined Mr. Scott and Mr. Burgum in saying she would cut federal funding to colleges that did not condemn students who supported Hamas.“No more federal money for colleges and universities that allow antisemitism to flourish on campus,” Ms. Haley wrote on X, arguing that the promotion of certain opinions in relation to the Hamas attack constituted “threatening someone’s life” and was “not freedom of speech.”Only one candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, publicly rejected efforts to punish schools or individual students for anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian statements.“Colleges are spaces for students to experiment with ideas & sometimes kids join clubs that endorse boneheadedly wrong ideas,” he wrote on X this month in response to an uproar over a letter from student groups at Harvard that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”He added: “It wasn’t great when people wearing Trump hats were fired from work. It wasn’t great when college graduates couldn’t get hired unless they signed oppressive ‘DEI’ pledges. And it’s not great now if companies refuse to hire kids who were part of student groups that once adopted the wrong view on Israel.” More

That House speaker mess was all Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to argue with me if I blame him for something bad. (“Saturday night’s block party was canceled because of the threat of rain and … Donald Trump.”) Still, follow this thought.The House Republicans are a rancorous crew, and they’ve got only a nine-member majority, one of the tightest in recent history. We’ve been hearing all week that a mere five rebels can halt progress on anything, even a basic task like electing a speaker. Interesting how narrow that majority is. Normally, in nonpresidential-election years, the party that didn’t win the White House gets a lift — often a huge one. Some voters are looking for balance, others are just kinda bored. Given the deeply nonelectric nature of Joe Biden’s victory, you’d figure the Republicans would have made a scary sweep in 2022.But no — and one of the reasons was the completely loopy candidates running on Republican lines in districts that should have been up for grabs. Some had been handpicked by Trump, like Bo Hines, a 28-year-old former college football star who moved into a North Carolina swing district a month before the May primary, won the nomination with the ex-president’s enthusiastic support and then, well, went down the drain.Trump endorsed three candidates in tossup districts last year; all of them lost. Plus there were lots of other dreadful Trump-backed contenders on the ballots — like Mehmet Oz, the longtime New Jersey resident who ran a disastrous race for the Senate in Pennsylvania and almost certainly pulled down the rest of his party’s ticket.POP QUIZ:Donald Trump, who’s facing 91 criminal charges around the country, is now on trial in New York for falsifying records to make himself look like an, um, non-failure in the real estate business. This week, he compared himself to a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner who served time in prison for his battles against apartheid. (“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason.”) He’s also compared himself to:A) Abraham LincolnB) JesusC) George WashingtonD) The Mona LisaThe answer is everybody but Jesus. And he did recently post a sketch on Truth Social showing Christ next to him in the courtroom.All that flailing around over selecting a House speaker was due, in part, to the Republicans’ failure to corral their Flimsy Five around any of the original contenders. But it was also very, very much about Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for logical candidates like Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, who’d made the dreaded mistake of voting to certify the results of the last presidential election.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump declaimed. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.”RINO, of course, stands for Republican in Name Only, something Trump has truly hated ever since he registered as a Republican in Manhattan back in 1987. Until he registered with the Independence Party in 1999, followed by the Democratic Party in 2001. But hey, he became a Republican again in 2009, then dropped his party affiliation in 2011, and switched back to being a Republican in 2012. There is absolutely no reason to imagine he would ever switch again. Unless, you know, there was something in it for him.Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who finally won the speaker’s job, is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to come up on top. Right-wing anti-abortion activist who gets along with his colleagues and who, crucially, has items in his résumé that won Trump’s heart. A former radio talk show host who helped lead the Republicans’ battle to overturn the election results! What could be more perfect?“GET IT DONE, FAST! LOVE, DJT!” our ex-president posted on Truth Social.(Earlier, once Emmer had crashed, Trump praised all the possible successors to the ousted Kevin McCarthy as “fine and very talented men.” Quick question: What’s missing in that description? One minor detail — the candidate swarm was notably lacking in female representation. Just saying.)So the beat goes on. Mike Johnson’s friends are celebrating. Much of the rest of the nation is wondering why the heck anybody would ever want to be speaker of the House with its current crush of Republican crazies.Welcome to your new job, Mike. Hope you enjoyed your big day. Just remember that it won’t be long before Congress has to pass another bill to keep the government operating or send the country teetering into disaster.Details, details.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, the newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.The election on Wednesday of Mr. Johnson, 51, to the post second in line to the presidency has focused new attention on his behind-the-scenes role in trying to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results.In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson persuaded more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them that the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would defend him.A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson was also a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.In 2020, Mr. Johnson embraced Mr. Trump’s wild and false claims of fraud. In a radio interview, he asserted that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”Mr. Johnson also falsely claimed the election was “rigged.”“You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Mr. Johnson said.No credible evidence has ever emerged to support the conspiracy theories about Dominion and another voting machine firm having helped to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion over reports broadcast by Fox that Dominion machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and injured about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”In 2020, the two men and their wives traveled to Israel together and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.Karoun Demirjian More

After her daughter was killed in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio figured it was time to get answers and help her city heal.On a recent Saturday morning, a day after what would have been Lexi Rubio’s 12th birthday, dozens gathered in the Texas city of Uvalde for a run in her honor. Blasting Lexi’s playlist, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, her mother, took off from under a towering mural of Lexi, one of 19 children and two teachers killed in a shooting at her school last year.This was more than a fund-raising run for charity — it was also a campaign event of sorts, as Ms. Mata-Rubio and the other competitors made their way past a series of signs in yellow (Lexi’s favorite color) announcing her candidacy for mayor.Ms. Mata-Rubio, a former news reporter, would be the first woman and only the third Latino to lead the Hispanic majority city, one that has been bitterly divided in the aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.Her campaign, in which she is vying with a veteran local politician and an elementary school art teacher, often prominently features her daughter’s favorite color and reminders of a tragedy that many would prefer to leave in the past.Ms. Mata-Rubio said she understood immediately that everybody in the small town of 15,000 people had lost something, if not a loved one, then certainly a sense of security. Like other parents, she complained that the authorities had released confusing and often conflicting information that made it hard to understand why they took more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman.Ms. Mata-Rubio, second from right, said she understood immediately that everybody in the small town of 15,000 people had lost something, if not a loved one, then a sense of security.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesUvalde has been bitterly divided in the aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesThe Uvalde parents also pushed for a ban on assault weapons like the one used in the attack on Robb Elementary School. The issue prompted deep divisions in a rural town renowned for white-tailed deer hunting, where many households have guns and rifles are a regular prize at school raffles.But as president of Lives Robbed, an organization made up of mothers and grandmothers of the Uvalde victims, Ms. Mata-Rubio has organized rallies, flown to Washington and sat through legislative hearings in Austin. And it did not feel like she was doing enough.When she saw an opening to run for mayor, she texted her husband, Felix, asking for advice.“You’re Lexi’s mom,” he replied. “You can do it.”For her, the mission is clear.“We still don’t have answers. We still don’t know what role everyone played then and what role everyone is playing now,” she said of the many ongoing investigations into the delayed police response by the local district attorney and others.She said she also wants to bring the town together over the still-contentious issues of assault weapons, and whether police officers who failed to confront the Uvalde gunman should be fired or face criminal charges.“I want to have the difficult conversations so that everybody feels heard,” Ms. Mata-Rubio said. “I’m going to be raising my children in this community. I want to bring the community back together again.”Felix Rubio, Ms. Rubio’s husband, and their daughter, Jahleela.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesIf Ms. Mata-Rubio were to win, she would become the first woman to lead the city.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesShe is running against a veteran local politician who hopes to return to office, Cody Smith, and an elementary school art teacher, Veronica Martinez, who have said during their campaigns that they not only want to bring Uvalde back from the nightmare of the shooting, but also to focus on other issues.In the most recent election in Uvalde County, which includes the county seat and six other small towns, voters largely failed to support politicians who backed more control on guns, delivering a political blow to the families of the victims who campaigned on their behalf. But a much narrower pool of voters will decide the mayor’s race, those who live within in Uvalde itself.Ms. Mata-Rubio’s campaign raised the most money in the 30-day period that ended in September, $80,000 to Mr. Smith’s $50,000, according to the most recent campaign finance report filings, with many of her donations coming from out of town. Ms. Martinez has not sought contributions.The Nov. 7 election, with early voting this week, was called after the current mayor, Don McLaughlin, announced he was leaving City Hall to run for a Texas House seat. The winner will need to run for a full four-year term in 2024.Veronica Martinez, an art teacher at Dalton Elementary School, said she hopes to create an open-door culture in a City Hall that often does not feel inviting to residents.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesCody Smith, a former mayor and a senior vice president at First State Bank of Uvalde, was first elected to the City Council in 1994 and also served as mayor in 2008 and 2010.Sergio Flores for The New York TimesIf Ms. Mata-Rubio or Ms. Martinez were to win, they would become the third mayor of Hispanic ancestry and the first woman to lead the city.George Garza, 85, who in the 1990s became the second Hispanic mayor, said the city’s Hispanic majority has often gone unrecognized in city politics. “Representation is important,” he said.Mr. Smith, a former mayor and a senior vice president at First State Bank of Uvalde, was first elected to the City Council in 1994 and also served as mayor in 2008 and 2010. He declined to be interviewed, but has called for supporting better communication between law enforcement agencies.Ms. Martinez, said she supports in principle some form of an assault rifle ban, but said the city must also focus on local issues that affect everyone, like lowering what people pay in property taxes on their homes.She said she hopes to change the culture in a City Hall that often does not feel inviting to residents.“Maybe I can effect some change, and do some good by having an open-door policy,” she said.Some voters like Amanda Juarez, 42, a teacher’s assistant, want to see a fresh face in city government, but she said that she worries that Ms. Mata-Rubio may focus too much on the tragedy and gun control issues. She said she appreciates Ms. Martinez’s calls for lowering taxes on property like her mobile home, whose assessed value recently went up by several thousand dollars for no apparent reason. “We need people who are going to solve our issues at the local level,” she said.Ms. Mata-Rubio, right, and her campaign manager, Laura Barberena, preparing for the Labor Day weekend parade in Uvalde in September.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesSome voters want to see a fresh face in city government. “We need people who are going to solve our issues at the local level,” said voter, Amanda Juarez.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesTo help win over voters interested in such grass-roots issues, Ms. Mata-Rubio has been knocking on doors and handing over yellow campaign signs and cards with her key campaign issues: Bring People Together, Protect Our History and Boost Our Economy.Moments after taking part in Lexi’s Legacy Run, as it was called, Ms. Mata-Rubio canvassed the streets and she ran into Antonia Rios, 80, a potential voter who was excited to see her. “No te conocía. I didn’t know you. You are very young,” Ms. Rios said, combining English and Spanish as many do in this town 60 miles east of the border with Mexico. “Yo voto por ti. I’ll vote for you.”Kirsten Noyes More

On Tuesday morning, Jenna Ellis became the third Donald Trump-allied lawyer to plead guilty in Fulton County, Ga., to state criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. She joins Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro in similar pleas, with each of them receiving probation and paying a small fine, and each of them cooperating with the prosecution in its remaining cases against Trump and his numerous co-defendants.The Ellis, Powell and Chesebro guilty pleas represent an advance for both the state election prosecution in Georgia and the federal election prosecution in Washington. While their guilty pleas came in the Georgia case (they’re not charged in the federal prosecution, though Powell and Chesebro have been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case), the information they disclose could be highly relevant to Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump.Perhaps as important, or even more important, the three attorneys’ admissions may prove culturally and politically helpful to those of us who are attempting to break the fever of conspiracy theories that surround the 2020 election and continue to empower Trump today. At the same time, however, it’s far too soon to tell whether the prosecution has made real progress on Trump himself. The ultimate importance of the plea deals depends on the nature of the testimony from the lawyers, and we don’t yet know what they have said — or will say.To understand the potential significance of these plea agreements, it’s necessary to understand the importance of Trump’s legal team to Trump’s criminal defense. As I’ve explained in various pieces, and as the former federal prosecutor Ken White explained to me when I guest-hosted Ezra Klein’s podcast, proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case. While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing — such as an intent to lie or the “intent to have false votes cast.”One potential element of Trump’s intent defense in the federal case is that he was merely following the advice of lawyers. In other words, how could he possess criminal intent when he simply did what his lawyers told him to do? He’s not the one who is expected to know election laws. They are.According to court precedent that governs the federal case, a defendant can use advice of counsel as a defense against claims of criminal intent if he can show that he “made full disclosure of all material facts to his attorney” before he received the advice, and that “he relied in good faith on the counsel’s advice that his course of conduct was legal.”There is a price, though, for presenting an advice-of-counsel defense. The defendant waives attorney-client privilege, opening up both his oral and written communications with his lawyers to scrutiny by a judge and a jury. There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.Apart from the implications of the advice-of-counsel defense, their criminal pleas, combined with their agreements to cooperate, may grant us greater visibility into Trump’s state of mind during the effort to overturn the election. The crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege prevents a criminal defendant from shielding his communications with his lawyers when those communications were in furtherance of a criminal scheme. If Ellis, Powell or Chesebro can testify that the lawyers were operating at Trump’s direction — as opposed to Trump following their advice — then that testimony could help rebut Trump’s intent defense.At the same time, I use words like “potential,” “if,” “may” and “could” intentionally. We do not yet know the full story that any of these attorneys will tell. We only have hints. Ellis said in court on Tuesday, for example, that she “relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” Indeed, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has indicted two other attorneys with “many more years of experience” — Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. If Ellis’s court statement is any indication, it’s an ominous indicator for both men.If you think it’s crystal clear that the guilty pleas are terrible news for Trump — or represent that elusive “we have him now” moment that many Trump opponents have looked for since his moral corruption became clear — then it’s important to know that there’s a contrary view. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a respected former federal prosecutor, argued that Powell’s guilty plea, for example, was evidence that Willis’s case was “faltering” and that her RICO indictment “is a dud.”“When prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings,” McCarthy writes, “they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment.” Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Ellis and Chesebro both pleaded to a single felony charge, but they received punishment similar to Powell’s. McCarthy argues that Willis allowed Powell to plead guilty to a minor infraction “because minor infractions are all she’s got.” And in a piece published Tuesday afternoon, McCarthy argued that the Ellis guilty plea is more of a sign of the “absurdity” of Willis’s RICO charge than a sign that Willis is closing in on Trump, a notion he called “wishful thinking.”There’s also another theory regarding the light sentences for the three lawyers. When Powell and Chesebro sought speedy trials, they put the prosecution under pressure. As Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney, wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, it was “extremely smart” to seek a quick trial. “They got the best deal,” Fleischman said, “because their lawyers picked the best strategy.”As a general rule, when evaluating complex litigation, it is best not to think in terms of legal breakthroughs (though breakthroughs can certainly occur) but rather in terms of legal trench warfare. Think of seizing ground from your opponent yard by yard rather than mile by mile, and the question at each stage isn’t so much who won and who lost but rather who advanced and who retreated. Willis has advanced, but it’s too soon to tell how far.The guilty pleas have a potential legal effect, certainly, but they can have a cultural and political effect as well. When MAGA lawyers admit to their misdeeds, it should send a message to the Republican rank and file that the entire effort to steal the election was built on a mountain of lies. In August, a CNN poll found that a majority of Republicans still question Joe Biden’s election victory, and their doubts about 2020 are a cornerstone of Trump’s continued political viability.Again, we can’t expect any single thing to break through to Republican voters, but just as prosecutors advance one yard at a time, opposing candidates and concerned citizens advance their cultural and political cases the same way. It’s a slow, painful process of trying to wean Republicans from conspiracy theories, and these guilty pleas are an important element in service of that indispensable cause. They represent a series of confessions from the inner circle and not a heated external critique.Amid this cloud of uncertainty, there is one thing we do know: With each guilty plea, we receive further legal confirmation of a reality that should have been plainly obvious to each of us, even in the days and weeks immediately following the election. Trump’s effort to overturn the election wasn’t empowered by conventional counsel providing sound legal advice. It was a corrupt scheme empowered by an admitted criminal cabal.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Jim Jordan’s bid last week to become speaker of the House — together with the withdrawal on Tuesday of Thomas Emmer from his campaign for the same job — revealed not only how far House Republicans have moved to the right, but also how weak the intraparty forces for moderation have become.The full House, including all 212 Democrats, rejected Jordan in the first floor vote, but 90 percent of Republicans backed the election-denying Trump avatar.Minutes before Emmer withdrew from the race yesterday, Politico reported that Donald Trump told an associate, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” It was, according to Politico, a reflection of Trump’s veto power among House Republicans — “that while Trump may not be able to elevate someone to the post — his earlier choice for the job, Jordan, flopped — he can ensure that a person doesn’t get it.”Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, published a piece on Oct. 20 on his Substack, “The U.S. House Has Sailed Into Dangerously Uncharted Territory. There’s No Going Back.”“Republicans have moved far to the right and polarization is at record highs,” Druckman wrote, citing a measure of ideological polarization between House Democrats and Republicans known as DWNominate which shows House Republicans moving steadily to the right, starting in 1968, reaching a level in 2022 substantially higher than at any point in time since 1880.House Democrats, in contrast, moved very slightly to the left over the same 1968-2022 period.I asked Drutman whether he thought House Republicans could move further right. He replied by email:Hard to say. We keep thinking the G.O.P. can’t move any further to the right and still win nationally, and yet, when more than 90 percent of districts are safe, and the Democratic Party is equally unpopular, and there are only two parties. the G.O.P. can win in too many places just by not being the Democrats.In 2022, Drutman continued, “the G.O.P. definitely paid a small but significant MAGA penalty. So I want to say there are limits, and that I really do hope we are close to reaching them. But I wouldn’t bank on that hope.”For those banking on hope, a closer examination of the Oct. 17 ballot I mentioned earlier, when Jordan won the votes of 200 of the 221 Republican members of the House, may dampen optimism.Not only did the Republican Caucus overwhelmingly back Jordan, but the intraparty forces that would normally press for centrist policies failed to do so.There are 18 Republicans who represent districts President Biden carried in 2020. These members, more than others, were forced to choose between voting for Jordan and facing sharp criticism in their districts, or voting against him and facing a potential primary challenger.This group voted two to one (12-6) for Jordan, deciding, in effect, that the threat of a primary challenge was more dangerous to their political futures than the fallout in their Democratic-leaning districts from voting for Jordan.Or take the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which describes its members as “tired of the obstructionism in Washington where partisan politics is too often prioritized over governing and what is best for the country.” Jordan’s approach to legislation and policymaking embodies what the problem solvers are tired of.Despite that, the Republican members of the caucus voted decisively for Jordan, 21-8, including the co-chairman of the caucus — Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Kean, the son and namesake of the distinctly moderate former governor of New JerseyIn a statement posted on the Problem Solvers’ website, Kean declared that he joined the group “to help find solutions for families and businesses in New Jersey. Every day of gridlock in Washington is another day that issues impacting my constituents at home go unaddressed.”A third overlapping group, The Republican Governance Group, would, in normal times, be a bastion of opposition to Jordan. The governance group calls for “common-sense legislation on issues including health care, energy, infrastructure and work force development” and its members “represent the most marginal, swing districts, and are ranked among the most bipartisan and most effective lawmakers on Capitol Hill.”The conference declares that it “needs to lead in a time when partisan gridlock often derails progress.”How did its members vote on Jordan? More than three quarters, 32, voted to make Jordan speaker; 10 voted against him.In the middle of the weeklong Jordan-for-speaker saga, Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote in “The Threat to Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House” that win or lose,Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them.Each time the Republican Party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, Brownstein continued,It has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.Earlier this week, Nate Cohn, a Times colleague, wrote in “Fight for Speaker Reveals Four Types of House Republicans”:Mr. Jordan fell short of winning the gavel three times. But his failed bid nonetheless revealed that the ultraconservative faction of congressional Republicans is larger in number and potentially more broadly acceptable to mainstream congressional Republicans than might have been known otherwise.An examination of the votes, Cohn continued, suggeststhat nearly half of congressional Republicans are sympathetic to Mr. Jordan and the conservative right wing, putting anti-establishment outsiders within striking distance of becoming the predominant faction in the House Republican conference. It suggests that the party’s right wing could, under circumstances not necessarily too different from those today, make a serious bid for House leadership — and win.The analyses above focus on the 90 percent of Republicans who voted for Jordan as evidence of the party’s rightward shift.There is an alternative approach: to focus on the 20-plus dissenters. This approach leads to different conclusions.An Oct. 19 Times article by my news-side colleague Catie Edmondson, for example, was headlined, “Mainstream Republicans, ‘Squishes’ No More, Dig in Against Jordan.”Focusing on the small group of Republicans who rejected Jordan, Edmondson wrote:In a remarkable reversal of roles, a group of roughly 20 veteran Republicans, including institutionalists and lawmakers in politically competitive districts, are flexing their muscles against Mr. Jordan’s candidacy. Their choice to do so has prolonged an extraordinary period of paralysis in the House, which began more than two weeks ago when the hard right deposed Kevin McCarthy as speaker. It has continued as Republicans wage an extraordinary feud over who should replace him.The next day, a Washington Post article by Jacqueline Alemany, “Concerns About Jordan’s Election Denialism Flare During Failed Bid for Speaker,” made the case that Jordan’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election proved to be a significant factor in his defeat.Alemany wrote:As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) waged his battle to become House speaker, some House Republicans were uncomfortable with the possibility of having an election denier occupying the most powerful legislative seat in the U.S. government heading into a presidential election year.I asked Matthew Green, a political scientist at Catholic University, whether it was more significant that House Republicans could not come up with enough votes to push either Steve Scalise or Jordan over the top or that both Scalise and Jordan actually received plus or minus 200 votes each? He emailed back:I think it’s more significant that neither Scalise nor Jordan could get the votes they needed to be elected Speaker. It’s a norm for lawmakers to vote for their party’s nominee for Speaker, no matter how odious they may find that person. That the G.O.P. could not keep McCarthy in power or immediately elect a replacement, even at the risk of extended paralysis of the House and major damage to the party’s reputation, signifies just how weak and divided the Republican Conference is right now.There is little doubt that the three-week-long struggle, still unresolved, to pick a new speaker is quite likely to inflict some costs on Republicans.First and foremost, if, as appears possible, the government is forced to shut down because of a failure to reach agreement on federal spending, Republicans have set themselves up to take the fall when the public decides which party is at fault.Previous government shutdowns, especially those in 1995 and 1996, backfired on Republicans, reviving Bill Clinton’s re-election prospects to the point that he won easily in November.I asked Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the current situation, and he emailed back: “A failure to choose a speaker before appropriations expire and the government shutdowns — that would look bad to many voters.”The Jordan campaign for speaker may turn into a liability for Republican members in districts won by Biden in 2020.After Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan, his probable Democratic challenger, Ashley Ehasz, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, declared:Brian Fitzpatrick has campaigned on his supposed commitment to reaching across the aisle and solving problems — but time and again his votes have shown who he really is. He voted to install an anti-abortion, election-denying extremist as speaker and has made his values perfectly clear.Sue Altman, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance and the probable Democratic challenger to Kean, said, after Kean voted for Jordan:Tom Kean Jr. just voted for a man who in his personal life helped cover up sexual abuse and in his political life tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and pass a national abortion ban. This is not the Republican Party of Tom Kean Jr.’s father, and Tom Kean Jr. has done nothing but enable the most extreme elements of his own party instead of being a voice for moderation. Jim Jordan is a radical election denier who does not represent the values of this district and Tom Kean Jr. should be ashamed of his vote.I asked Michael Olson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, about the possible costs of a Jordan vote for these 12 Republicans in Democratic-leaning seats. He replied by email:Concerns about appearing extreme should be particularly acute for these legislators. Most won by quite narrow margins. Voters do care about extremism on the margins — more extreme candidates seem to be more likely to subsequently lose — so a vote for Jordan could be a real liability in a campaign, or a vote against him a real feather in these folks’ caps as they try to establish their independent bona fides.The political calculus of these 12 Republicans is, however, complicated. Olson cited a 2023 paper, “A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress,” by Geoffrey Sheagley, Logan Dancey and John Henderson that reveals the difficulty of the choices facing members of Congress.Using poll data on the vote to impeach Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sheagley, Dancey and Henderson write that Democrats are:More approving of a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump. Republican respondents, however, are more approving of a conservative Republican representative and less approving of a representative who voted to impeach Trump.For a Republican deciding whether to vote for or against a Trump impeachment, the loss of support among Republican voters far outweighs the gains from Democrats: “Approval for a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump decreases by nearly a full point on the 4-point approval scale, while support among Democrats increases by only half a point.”The political implications of this choice are, however, very different for a Republican evaluating prospects in a closed primary in which no Democrats can vote, than in the general election, when Democrats do cast ballots.I asked Dancey, a political scientist at Wesleyan, about the calculations a Republican in a Democratic district has to make and he emailed back to say that a vote against Jordan would not prove excessively costly in November:In a general election matchup where the main choice is between a Republican and a Democrat, I suspect that the vast majority of Republican voters would stick with a Republican candidate who voted against Jordan. Even if they don’t like the position the Republican took on that one vote, they won’t see the Democratic candidate as a better option.In contrast, Dancey continued,Voting for Jordan carries some risk of losing support from independents and moderate Democrats in the general election, especially since Jordan received Trump’s endorsement. Republicans running in Biden districts have incentives to create an image as a more independent-minded Republican who isn’t fully aligned with Trump.That said, Darcey wrote, “Jordan is a less high-profile figure than Trump and at this point isn’t on track to actually become speaker. As a result, I doubt this one vote will be as consequential as something like voting to impeach Trump.”Perhaps most damaging to Republicans is the perception that they are dominated by a group more determined to wreak havoc than to govern.In 2019, I looked at a small percentage of voters committed “to unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”The notion was salient once more on Oct. 3, when a cadre of eight Republican members of the House — led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida — brought down Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Gaetz evoked havoc again on Oct. 19 when he posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter:Ever seen a SWAMP actually drained? This Florida Man has. It’s not orderly. Turns out, the alligators & snakes get unruly when the comfort of their habitat is disrupted. Chaos doesn’t scare me. American decline does.I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po Paris and lead author of the 2021 paper “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos,’ ” about the role of Gaetz and his seven allies. Arceneaux emailed back that he has no way of knowing, without conducting tests and interviews, how the eight “would answer the need for chaos survey items.”But, Arceneaux added, “their behavior is certainly consistent with the ‘burn-it-all-down’ mentality that we found associated with the need for chaos.”In addition, he continued,We also found that a drive to obtain status along with a sense that one’s group has lost social status increases one’s need for chaos. It would be interesting to study whether Freedom Caucus members are more preoccupied with concerns about status loss relative to other Republicans. If so, that would offer some circumstantial evidence that a need for chaos could at least partly explain their willingness to damage their own party.I asked Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, for his perspective on recent events in the House. He replied by email:I’ve long thought that a party’s drift to the ideological extreme would inevitably be stopped and reversed to a certain degree by big defeats that force party voters to come to terms with pragmatic reality. These days, I’m starting to believe that Republicans moving headlong to the right may just give in to the inertia of motion and continue their lunge toward extremism until they can no longer win an overall majority. I’m not convinced of this yet, but the G.O.P. has put the idea on the table.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

When Rishi Sunak became prime minister of Britain a year ago, there was little sense of celebration. The markets were in free fall after the disastrous 49-day tenure of his predecessor, Liz Truss, and the government was in disarray. Mr. Sunak, who had been rejected by Conservative Party members earlier in the year, was inserted by lawmakers in the desperate hope he could calm the crisis. Given that the party had just ousted two leaders in quick succession, it was unclear how long he would even stay in the post.One year later, he can take comfort that Britain is in a different place. It’s now possible, for a start, to have a conversation with visitors without being asked what on earth is going on. Projecting decency and stability, Mr. Sunak has calmed the markets, helped to repair relations with the European Union and sated his party’s appetite for regicide. The next election, due by January 2025, is on the horizon. Even party critics concede that Mr. Sunak will lead the Conservatives into it.But that’s where the good news stops for the prime minister. While Mr. Sunak has moved his party out of crisis mode, he is yet to win over voters. Against hopes that a new leader would raise the party’s fortunes, Mr. Sunak’s approval ratings have sunk along with esteem for the Conservatives. The polls repeatedly suggest a 20-point lead for the opposition Labour Party, whose leader, Keir Starmer, businesses and the media view as the prime minister in waiting.Adding to a sense of fatalism, a steady drip-feed of local elections — often set off by the bad behavior of Tory lawmakers — have cost the Conservatives once-safe seats. Two more, including one in Conservative hands since 1931, went over to the opposition last week. Mr. Sunak may be doing his best, in trying circumstances. But at the moment, it’s nowhere near enough.There’s an argument that any leader would struggle with the conditions Mr. Sunak inherited: high inflation, increased borrowing costs and low growth. Across the world, incumbent governments of all stripes are finding their time is up — whether it’s the center-left Labour Party in New Zealand or the right-wing populist Law and Justice party in Poland. When Mr. Sunak has found success, it’s been by making his own weather. His renegotiation of the Northern Ireland protocol, an especially vexed post-Brexit arrangement, showed maturity and won him a brief popularity bounce.Yet economic difficulties have been stubborn. Mr. Sunak, a former chancellor, was picked by lawmakers because of his economic credentials — and he has managed to win back some market confidence. But the government is still boxed in. The right of the party, including the outspoken Ms. Truss, wants tax cuts. Mr. Sunak won’t budge until inflation is down, which is not happening quickly enough. Facing a winter of high bills, Britons will be feeling the pinch for some time to come.But Mr. Sunak’s biggest challenge is the length of time his party has been in power. The Conservatives, plagued by scandal, have overseen a country where discontent is legion: A survey taken this summer found that three-quarters of people in Britain believe it is becoming a worse place to live. After 13 years of Tory rule — the same amount of time New Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, enjoyed in office — the other side can’t be blamed for Britain’s woes.Mr. Sunak’s attempts to overcome this fundamental problem are twofold. First, he has accepted that the country is not working and needs to change. His five priorities — halving inflation, stopping the boats carrying migrants across the Channel, cutting National Health Service waiting lists, growing the economy and reducing debt — are designed to reflect key voter concerns. But many are pessimistic that all the goals can be achieved. Continuing health worker strikes, for example, signal that unhappiness with the state of the N.H.S. is unlikely to subside ahead of the election.His second move is more ambitious. In a bid to shake off the baggage of previous Tory governments, Mr. Sunak is trying to depict himself as the change candidate. He has axed David Cameron’s pet project, a high-speed rail network linking the Midlands and the North, and scaled down the net-zero commitments embraced by Boris Johnson and Theresa May. The goal is to show him as a man of action with his own convictions, someone prepared, as he recently put it, to “be bold.” But running against your party’s own record is tricky, and it is already causing resentment among colleagues who served in previous administrations.Hope, strangely, could come from the opposition. Mr. Starmer is yet to be embraced by the public — his job satisfaction ratings remain stubbornly low — and support for his party largely stems from anti-Tory feeling rather than enthusiasm for Labour itself. By depicting Mr. Starmer as a flip-flopping leader at the helm of an ineffectual party, the Tories aim to claw back support. Yet it’s telling that conversations with Conservative lawmakers — some of whom have already begun planning for life after politics — tend to focus more on what will happen after defeat than on how they might win.In Tory circles, a dinner party game is to debate who the next leader might be. The current favorite is Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary who has made a name for herself with attacks on identity politics. But the scale of defeat is key. A small one would see status quo candidates, like the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, or the defense secretary, Grant Shapps, emerge. A wipeout — winning fewer than 200 seats out of 650 — would give the edge to wild-card candidates from the party’s right. In that scenario Suella Braverman, the hard-line anti-immigrant home secretary, would come to the fore.For the Tories, such a contest — full of bloodletting and bombast — could be a disaster, setting the stage for years in the wilderness. To prevent it and to forestall defeat, Mr. Sunak must change the narrative. Politics is unpredictable, as Britain has amply shown in the past eight years. But right now, one thing’s for certain: The prime minister is running out of time.Katy Balls (@katyballs) is the political editor of The Spectator.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More