Elections

Experiments that yielded promising results in 2022 may not be enough if Trump is on the ballot again.With a highly successful polling cycle behind them, some pollsters believe a tactic that gained widespread adoption in 2022 may help carry them through the next presidential election. But even the tactic’s adherents say it may not be a panacea, particularly if former President Donald J. Trump is once again on the ballot.Pollsters have increasingly been weighting surveys based on whom respondents recall voting for in a previous election, in addition to adjusting for standard demographics such as race and age. This tactic has long been used in other countries to improve poll accuracy, but has become widely used in the United States only in recent years.“We are all terrified,” said Cameron McPhee, the chief methodologist at SSRS, CNN’s polling partner and a pollster that weighted some of its polls on recalled vote in 2022. She added, “We all feel good about the changes we made in 2022, but I think there is still a big question mark” headed into 2024.By weighting on recalled vote, pollsters can more easily correct partisan imbalances in who responds to polls, and in recent years Democrats have tended to respond to polls at higher rates than Republicans. Perhaps more important, weighting on recalled vote can specifically increase the influence of Trump supporters, a group that polls struggled to measure accurately in 2016 and 2020.The tactic’s adoption by pollsters in the United States remains far from universal. Several prominent pollsters achieved accurate results without it — including The New York Times/Siena College, which was named America’s most accurate political pollster by FiveThirtyEight after the 2022 cycle.Overall, 2022 was one of the most accurate years for polling in recent history, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. Many pollsters “probably would have gotten 2022 right even without that extra weighting step, because we did,” said Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Poll.After 2016, post-election analyses found that polls had consistently underrepresented less educated voters, who tended to disproportionately support Mr. Trump. To fix this, pollsters widely adopted education as an additional survey weight, and a cycle of accurate polls in 2018 seemed to reflect a return to normalcy.But in 2020, polls were more biased than they had been in any modern election, over-representing Democratic support by nearly five percentage points, as opposed to three percentage points — a more normal amount of error — in 2016.“I think one of the reasons 2022 was successful — and even to some extent 2018 — was that Trump himself was not on the ballot.” Mr. Murray said. “If history is any guide, we are probably going to see that nonresponse going into 2024 based on how the Republican nomination is going.”The 2020 election presented another distinct challenge — it took place amid the pandemic. Pollsters found that some Americans, stuck at home and lonely, were more likely to respond to surveys. While that was initially seen as a boon, it might have led to even more bias if it meant the uneven adherence to stay-at-home orders added another source of bias to who picked up the phone.Weighting on recalled vote is not without its concerns.Voters have been shown to have poor recall of whom they voted for or even whether they voted at all, typically being more likely to recall voting for the winner. One study of Canadian voters found up to a quarter of voters were inconsistent when recalling whom they had voted for.This misrepresentation of past vote can push polls in different directions depending on who won the most recent election. In 2022, that meant respondents were more likely to say they had supported Joe Biden, and pollsters using recalled vote would end up giving them less weight, meaning Republican support was bolstered.But with a prior winner from a different party, the effect would be reversed. An assessment by The Times found that weighting its 2020 polls using recalled 2016 vote would have made them even more biased toward Mr. Biden. And a report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examining how 2020 polls could have been improved found that polls that weighted on recalled vote were no better than those that didn’t.Similarly, in 2022, weighting by recalled vote would have made Times/Siena polls less accurate. As published, without weighting on recalled vote, the final polls of Senate, governor and House races had an average error of less than two percentage points and zero bias toward Democrats or Republicans. When weighted using recalled vote to 2020 election results, average error would have increased by a percentage point, and overall the polls would have been slightly biased toward Republicans.But that might have been a consequence of other decisions The Times makes, which includes weighting to demographic information available on the voter file that is not always available to other pollsters.Other pollsters have found the recalled vote method to yield significant improvements over typical weighting schemes. SSRS used a range of weighting methods in 2022, including recalled vote for some of its polls, and also experimented with weighting on political identification. Its post-election analysis found that using recalled vote as a weight would have been the most accurate overall approach, increasing average accuracy by more than three percentage points over just weighting on standard demographics.“It’s a brute force method,” said Clifford Young, the president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “That is, we don’t really know what it corrects for. Does it correct for only nonignorable nonresponse? Or does it correct for coverage bias? Or maybe a likely voter problem? Maybe all three.”Even so, pollsters are generally optimistic. “What the evidence is showing is that it gets us in a much better place in our polls than not using it,” Mr. Young said, noting that he believed most pollsters would be weighting on past vote in 2024. “I think the evidence thus far suggests it does more good than harm.” He added, “If we use the same weighting and correction methods that we used in 2020 in 2024, we’re going to miss the mark.” More

It is far too soon to speculate about who will be the Republican nominee for vice president, but a Trump-DeSantis ticket seems highly unlikely.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Tuesday that he would not be interested in running as former President Donald J. Trump’s vice president, if Mr. Trump does win the 2024 nomination.“I’m not a No. 2 guy,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a question during an appearance on the Wisconsin Right Now podcast. “I think I’m a leader. Governor of Florida, I’ve been able to accomplish a lot. I think I probably could do more staying there than being V.P., which doesn’t really have any authority.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, immediately shot down the idea that the former president would even consider Mr. DeSantis, a one-time ally now challenging him for the Republican nomination, as a running mate.“Ron DeSantis isn’t anybody’s guy. He’s not ‘the guy.’ He’s just ‘a guy,’” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “Ron is just there, sullen and sad, because his numbers are as tiny as him.”The early (very early) vice-presidential sweepstakesWith not a single primary ballot cast, it is far too soon to speculate about who will be the Republican nominee for vice president. But that hasn’t stopped voters and political observers from doing just that.At events for Mr. DeSantis in the early nominating states, some voters have said that they wish the much younger Mr. DeSantis would run on the same ticket as Mr. Trump.“DeSantis is four years too early,” said Jim Mai, a Republican voter in the crowd for a speech Mr. DeSantis gave in Sioux Center, Iowa, in May. “Trump should run and have DeSantis as his vice president.”But a joint ticket between the two Florida men would prove logistically challenging.The 12th Amendment to the Constitution forbids members of the Electoral College from voting for a president and vice-president who are both from the same state as themselves. So if Mr. Trump picked Mr. DeSantis, or another Florida resident like Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, who is also in the race, he would forfeit the state’s 30 electoral votes.One solution: Mr. Trump, who switched his residency to Florida ahead of the 2020 election, could change it back to New York.Who might Trump ask to be his vice president, if he is the nominee?It’s unclear if any of the leading candidates trailing Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis might be interested in joining the former president’s ticket, if indeed he wins the nomination.Some of the more likely possibilities could be former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who has lavished praise on Mr. Trump; and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, whom Mr. Trump has spoken kindly of.But on Monday, when Mr. Scott was asked on Fox News if he would consider it, he said: “You get in the race for president to win, only to win.”Others have made criticism of Mr. Trump central to their campaigns and would almost certainly have no interest. Nor would Mr. Trump be interested in him.Of course, Mr. Trump could select someone who is not currently running for president.Presidential candidates usually select a running mate to help them shore up support in a crucial swing state or with a specific constituency of voters. But Mr. Trump’s advisers have frequently said that he doesn’t think he needs any such help from a No. 2.Have any Republicans expressed interest in being the nominee’s running mate?At this point in the race, it is unlikely that a major contender for president would publicly downgrade their aspirations to the No. 2 spot.Former Vice President Mike Pence — who has been there, done that — has said that he thinks “running for vice president twice is enough for any American.”Maria Comella, a senior adviser to Mr. Christie, pointed to the former New Jersey governor’s record opposing Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign. “Considering he’s said he won’t support him if he’s the nominee or vote for him, think it’s pretty obvious the answer is no,” she said in a statement.And Tricia McLaughlin, a senior adviser to Mr. Ramaswamy, said he “expects to be our next president and isn’t interested in a VP slot.”The campaigns of Ms. Haley and Mr. Suarez did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Bret Hayworth More

Even though Democrats held the Senate and other key offices, Republican turnout was more robust, and the party showed strength among women, Latinos and rural voters, a new report found.Even though Democrats held off a widely expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, Republican turnout was in fact stronger, and the party energized key demographic groups including women, Latinos and rural voters, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.And for all the Democratic emphasis on finding Republican voters who could be persuaded to buck their party in the Trump era, Pew found that a vast majority of voters stuck with the same party through the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections. Just 6 percent of voters cast ballots for more than one party over those three elections — and those voters were more likely to be Democrats flipping to Republican candidates than Republicans to Democratic candidates.“An eternal debate among political analysts after each election is what was a bigger factor in the outcome — persuading voters to switch their allegiance, or getting more of their core party loyalists to vote,” said Hannah Hartig, one of the authors of the Pew report.Voters who cast a ballot in 2018 but skipped the 2022 midterms had favored Democrats by two to one in the 2018 election.Democrats tried last year to energize these voters, seeking to inflate Mr. Trump’s profile and tie other Republicans to him. Mr. Biden coined the phrase “ultra-MAGA” to describe Republicans in an effort to engage Democratic voters.In the end, what most likely drove Democrats to the polls was less about Mr. Biden’s actions than a broader reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Dan Sena, a former executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the Pew results suggested that the key to 2024 would be persuading independent and moderate Republican voters who dislike both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump to support Democrats. Abortion rights, he said, is the issue most likely to do so.“There is a group of persuadable Republicans that the Democrats were able to win over,” Mr. Sena said. “Those voters align very closely with those who see choice and personal freedom on health care in alignment.”Pew’s analysis is based on a panel of over 7,000 Americans whose attitudes and voting behavior the group has tracked through multiple election cycles. Pew also compared voters to state voting rolls to verify that they actually cast ballots in 2022. Taken together, this provides a portrait of the 2022 electorate.In most midterm years, the party that is not in the White House fares well. And while Republicans enjoyed a turnout advantage in 2022, they nevertheless fell short of expectations and did not match Democrats’ turnout advantage in 2018, the first midterm election after Mr. Trump took office.Still, midterm voters historically skew older and whiter than voters in presidential years, a phenomenon that tends to benefit Republicans. The 2018 midterms were, in many ways, the exception to that rule, with increased turnout across age groups, but especially among young people. The 2022 electorate was more in line with historical trends.Much of the narrative around the 2022 election has centered on Democratic energy after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. And while that played out in key governor’s races in states where abortion was on the ballot, nationally, Democrats appear to have lost ground with a crucial group: women.In the 2018 election cycle, when increased activism — including the Women’s March — fueled record turnout among women, Democrats had an advantage of 18 percentage points. That edge shrunk to just three points in 2022, Pew found.However, the study found that few women actually switched the party they were supporting. Instead, most of the drop for Democrats stemmed from the fact that Republican women voted at a higher rate than Democratic women.Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats overall, but by a much smaller margin than four years earlier. In 2018, Democrats won 72 percent of Hispanic voters, but in 2022 they won only 60 percent. The decline began in 2020, when Democrats also won about 60 percent of Hispanic voters.And Republicans also continued to increase their support from rural voters. The party made gains with them not only through increased turnout, but also among rural voters who had voted for Democrats in the past but cast ballots for Republicans in 2022.“The Trump base continues to be motivated,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who ran the party’s House super PAC in 2018.Yet, Mr. Bliss added, “In a handful of races that really matter, we had bad candidates, and in all the races that matter, we were dramatically outspent.” More

Holding court in a Pizza Ranch restaurant on Tuesday in Newton, Iowa, Asa Hutchinson was trying to keep his long-shot presidential bid aloft as formidable Republican heavyweights continued to dominate the state’s attention.The would-be caucusgoers listened as he avoided easy answers, carefully sidestepped social issues that he worried were too divisive and made copious references to his previous stints in government — that his stops along the path leading him here had included the House of Representatives, leadership roles in the Homeland Security Department and Drug Enforcement Administration and, most recently, the governor’s mansion in Arkansas.The problem for Mr. Hutchinson was clear and obvious — only eight Iowa voters were there with him, all tucked into the Pizza Ranch’s “Bunk House,” a party room just off the buffet table.“Our strategy is to do well in Iowa; we want to be in the top five,” he explained. “We want to be able to go to New Hampshire, which we’ve been campaigning in, and then we’re going to hit the South — South Carolina, Arkansas and the other Southern states. We’re in this for the long haul.”Mr. Hutchinson seems to represent a throwback to a different era of Republicanism, embracing the earnest “compassionate conservatism” of former President George W. Bush.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesMr. Hutchinson’s campaign has been struggling to reach anything like cruising altitude. With the first Republican debate, in Milwaukee, a little more than a month away, he is far from having the 40,000 individual donors required to meet the Republican National Committee’s threshold for a spot on stage. A failure to appear could sink his campaign.“I’ll be very straightforward with you: I’m not there yet,” the former governor told the radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, adding, “we’re above 5,000, so we’ve got, again, more work to do.”He has yet to post public fund-raising numbers: “You’ll get the report when it’s filed later this week,” he said on Tuesday. He then acknowledged: “We’d like to have more money.”But Mr. Hutchinson’s struggles go beyond fund-raising, to the heart of any politics: appeal. Or just who is looking to buy what he’s selling in a race dominated by far bigger names: a former president, a former vice president, the sitting governor of the third largest state in the nation, the only Black Republican in the Senate, and others.Mr. Hutchinson entered the race relatively early, and with an obvious calling card: his outspoken opposition to former President Donald J. Trump. But that lane is now occupied by a much more brash contender, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.Another distinguishing feature of Mr. Hutchinson’s candidacy is his lengthy government résumé. But voters looking for strong credentials seem to be more drawn to Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations.Few would question Mr. Hutchinson’s religious faith, but former Vice President Mike Pence has been in the trenches with the G.O.P.’s evangelical voters for years. Nor does Mr. Hutchinson have the personal wealth being brought to the campaign by the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, or the smooth salesmanship of the moneyed entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy.Instead, Mr. Hutchinson seems to represent a throwback to a different era of Republicanism, embracing the earnest “compassionate conservatism” of former President George W. Bush, remaining unaligned with any particular wing of the party and offering a broad pitch.He says the economy will be the defining issue of the 2024 race, and though he says that he, too, worries about contested cultural issues like transgender rights, he frets that such issues may be leading the party’s leadership astray.“Today, regretfully we have leaders that build on the divide, increase the divide, and say, how can we make money off the divide?” he said in Newton.And he scorns easy answers, even when his audience might look for them. Asked about China and the fentanyl trade, he explained that China sends hard-to-trace precursor chemicals to Mexico, where the drug cartels then manufacture the opioids. China broke off cooperation on the issue when an American politician — and a Democrat at that — former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan.“I don’t know if you can make China do anything,” he said.For months, Mr. Hutchinson has said that he has time to gain altitude, but even he spoke with a tone of desperation on Tuesday, noting that the Iowa caucuses were recently scheduled for an early date, Jan. 15, with the first debate just over the horizon.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesHe castigated one competitor, Mr. Ramaswamy, by name, for meeting slogans like “Drain the swamp!” with easy answers, such as an eight-year term limit for federal employees, which he said would make recruitment and retention of vital employees like border patrol officers next to impossible.As for the party’s “Build the wall!” mantra relating to all aspects of border security, he noted that on a recent trip to the border he had seen places where smugglers had blasted holes in the wall with acetylene torches and Border Patrol welders had patched them over, marking the repair dates in chalk.“I’m looking at a wall with all kinds of welding marks on there and all kinds of scribbled dates on there,” he said. “The point being that a wall is not enough.”But in an era of Republican passion, the broad appeal and conciliatory talk that worked for Mr. Bush nearly a quarter century ago now feels a mile wide and an eighth of an inch deep, always on the verge of drying up completely.The few voters who came to hear Mr. Hutchinson’s message on Tuesday said they were not giving up on his chances. Deanna Ward, of Ames, a retired secretary at Iowa State University, said at a Tuesday morning meet-and-greet in Nevada, Iowa, that she liked Mr. Hutchinson’s national security experience and handle on policy.“He understands the border crisis, he understands diplomacy,” she said.Steve and Anna Wittmuss drove from their home in West Des Moines, about an hour away, to catch Mr. Hutchinson in Newton. Mr. Wittmuss leans Republican, he said; Ms. Wittmuss is a Democrat. Both are eager for an alternative to the front-runner in the Republican race, Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie’s stalwart criticism of Mr. Trump has its appeal, said Mr. Wittmuss, who fondly recalled listening to Mr. Christie in 2016, as he recited lengthy and nuanced answers to difficult political questions.“Then he went back to New Jersey and did some things so stupid you just couldn’t believe it,” he said, pointing to the scandal that became known as Bridgegate as well as Mr. Christie’s infamous 2017 trip to a beach that had been closed because of a government shutdown.For months, Mr. Hutchinson has said that he has time to gain altitude, but even he spoke with a tone of desperation on Tuesday, noting that the Iowa caucuses were recently scheduled for an early date, Jan. 15, with the first debate just over the horizon.In Nevada, Iowa, Luke Spence, a pilot for United Airlines, hosted Mr. Hutchinson and estimated that he had staged around 50 “Coffee With the Candidate” events since he had started them as a personal passion project in 2019, during the run-up to the 2020 Iowa caucuses. On Tuesday morning, he said, he had gathered his smallest crowd ever. Just six Iowans had climbed the stairs, above Farm Grounds Coffee Shop on the town square, to hear Mr. Hutchinson.“Well, it’s a Tuesday morning,” Sue Vande Kamp of Nevada said afterward, as she praised Mr. Hutchinson’s ability and willingness to listen to voter concerns.Mr. Hutchinson said he was undeterred by such showings. He said he would not be lured into setting the terms of his withdrawal, if, say, he misses the debate in August, or the later debates, or if he fails to secure a top finish in the caucuses in January.“The only standard I set for myself is, we all should be self-evaluating as time goes on,” he said. “You know, I don’t expect 12 to be in the race when you get into Super Tuesday.” More

Stoked by former President Donald J. Trump, congressional Republicans have been trying to undermine the F.B.I.’s legitimacy with the public.Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, confronted an extraordinary political storm on Wednesday in testifying before Congress, with Republicans who once defended the bureau now denouncing it as a weapon wielded against former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Wray, who is appearing for the first time before the House Judiciary Committee since Republicans won the House, is most likely girding for the worst. The committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, has said it “will examine the politicization” of the F.B.I. under Mr. Wray and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.In his opening statement, Mr. Jordan accused the bureau of a litany of abuses. He urged Democratic lawmakers to join Republicans in blocking the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program known as Section 702 and raised questions about funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.“I hope they will work with us in the appropriations process to stop the weaponization of the government against the American people and end this double standard that exists now in our justice system,” he said.Anticipating the questioning to come, the top Democrat on the committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, described the hearing as “little more than performance art.” He countered that Republicans had initiated an array of “baseless investigations” in a bid to “protect Donald Trump from the consequences of his actions.”Stoked by the former president, congressional Republicans have adopted an increasingly caustic tone in their criticism of the country’s premier law enforcement agency, trying to damage its legitimacy and to undermine its standing with the public.That criticism was once trained on the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election. It is now focused on other flash points: Mr. Trump’s indictment in an inquiry into his handling of classified documents; the F.B.I.’s role in the search of his estate in Florida in August, as part of that inquiry; unfounded claims of a “two-tiered” system of justice favoring Democrats; and the Justice Department’s plea agreement with President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.So far, Republicans have not provided evidence that the F.B.I. and Mr. Wray are partisan, but they will try to catch him off balance and seed doubt about his motives.Here is what to look for:How will Mr. Wray respond?Mr. Wray infuriated Mr. Trump, who viewed the director’s declaration of independence as disloyalty. But Mr. Wray has previously testified before Congress, steadfastly defending the F.B.I. as nonpartisan and taking fire on Twitter from Mr. Trump, while he was president.Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Wray in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey, who as F.B.I. director had opened the Russia investigation. Since then, Mr. Wray has been under constant pressure from Republicans, who have simultaneously decried lawlessness in cities run by Democrats while attacking the F.B.I.’s role in political investigations.In the past, Mr. Wray has responded to attacks by parsing his words carefully. In his opening statement, he forcibly defended the F.B.I. and declined to discuss open investigations, which is the policy of the Justice Department.“I want to talk about the sheer breadth and impact of the work the F.B.I.’s 38,000 employees are doing, each and every day,” he said, citing the bureau’s work in addressing violent crime, fentanyl trafficking and efforts by China to steal trade secrets. “Because the work the men and women of the F.B.I. do to protect the American people goes way beyond the one or two investigations that seem to capture all the headlines.”Republicans are going to war.Mr. Trump and his supporters — as well as a vocal group of former F.B.I. officials who have aligned themselves with Republicans in Congress — believe the government is trying to silence and punish conservatives and see the bureau as a dangerous extension of that effort.Case in point: In January, House Republicans voted to investigate law enforcement, creating the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Republicans have claimed that the F.B.I. prodded Twitter to discriminate against their party as well as conservative or right-wing protesters at school board meetings and abortion clinics. Those issues have proved to be powerful drivers of voter turnout in the party’s pro-Trump base.The subcommittee is led by Mr. Jordan, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s.Last month, House Republicans on the Oversight Committee moved to hold Mr. Wray in contempt of Congress. But they called off a planned vote days later after the bureau said it would make available a document at the center of their dispute, involving an unverified allegation of bribery against Mr. Biden when he was vice president.Mr. Trump and his supporters have promoted the idea that the Mar-a-Lago search was intended to neutralize his electoral chances.Mr. Trump and his allies have raged at his indictment and the search of Mar-a-Lago in August, when F.B.I. agents descended on his residence and uncovered hundreds of classified documents.The former president and his supporters have said that Mr. Trump declassified the records, meaning there was no misconduct to start, and that the search was an example of an uneven application of justice.But so far no evidence has emerged that the documents were declassified or that the search, which was approved by a federal judge, was improper or politically motivated. In fact, the search unfolded after Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted the government’s requests that he return the material.In recent weeks, Steven D’Antuono, the former top F.B.I. agent overseeing the documents case, testified behind closed doors before Mr. Jordan.Asked if “anyone was motivated by animus” in the documents investigation, Mr. D’Antuono said no, according to a transcript of his testimony.Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Wray in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHunter Biden reached a plea deal. Republicans hate it.Under the deal with the Justice Department, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and to be sentenced to probation. The department also said it would not prosecute him for buying a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs.Republicans have assailed the deal, calling it too lenient, even though years of investigation by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney found evidence to charge Mr. Biden only on the narrow tax and gun issues, rather than the wide-ranging international conspiracies peddled by Mr. Trump and his allies.That U.S. attorney, David C. Weiss, who signed off on the agreement, has also come under fire. On Monday, Mr. Weiss rebutted a key element of testimony to Congress by an Internal Revenue Service official who said that Mr. Weiss had complained about being blocked from pursuing more serious charges.Republicans will claim the Durham investigation showed that the F.B.I. was politically motivated in pursuing its Russia inquiry.A final report by John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, looked at the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation into any ties Mr. Trump’s campaign had with Russia but found no evidence of politically motivated misconduct.Still, Mr. Durham’s report has continued to fuel Republican claims of bias, with some accusing the F.B.I. of making moves motivated by political favoritism.That charge almost immediately resurfaced during Mr. Wray’s hearing. Mr. Durham’s “ lengthy report reluctantly concluded that the F.B.I. quote, failed uphold its mission of strict fidelity to the law,” Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said shortly after Mr. Wray’s testimony began.Even as Mr. Trump and his loyalists had long insisted that Mr. Durham’s investigation would unearth a “deep state” conspiracy intended to damage him politically, Mr. Durham never charged high-level government officials.Instead, Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases involving accusations of making false statements, both of which ended in acquittals, while using his report to cite flaws in the F.B.I.’s early investigative steps that he attributed to confirmation bias.Will Americans trust the F.B.I.?Republicans have claimed the Justice Department is “weaponized” against conservatives, but the allegations that were brought forth by aggrieved former F.B.I. officials have foundered.Instead, Democratic investigators have uncovered that those former F.B.I. officials have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and have received financial support from a top ally of Mr. Trump’s.In a heated exchange, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said the American public trusted the F.B.I. more under J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s first director, than under the leadership of Mr. Wray. Mr. Wray countered that the number of F.B.I. applicants had surged in Mr. Gaetz’s home state. Mr. Gaetz said he was “deeply proud” of these people and “they deserve better than you.”Still, the back-and-forth is having an impact. Mr. D’Antuono, in his testimony, rebuffed allegations of political bias and rejected calls to defund the bureau — but expressed concern about the future.“In my opinion,” he said, “the more the American people hear about not trusting the F.B.I., it’s not a good day for this country.” More

In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.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

Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most women know they are pregnant. Republican lawmakers, who hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban. The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours More

The Florida governor has faced tough questions and critical coverage lately from Fox News and other conservative outlets, in a sign of growing skepticism.In March, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida laid the groundwork for his presidential run, he joined the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade to play a nationally televised game of catch on his hometown baseball field outside Tampa.The questions Mr. DeSantis faced were as relaxed as the tosses.“Locker room gets you ready for the press, right?” Mr. Kilmeade asked. “Because your teammates, if they like you a lot, they rip you all the time.”At the time, Mr. DeSantis was seen by many in the Republican Party as the strongest possible alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, who had repeatedly attacked the network and had seen his relationship with its owner, Rupert Murdoch, evaporate.Four months later, with Mr. DeSantis’s campaign having failed to immediately catch fire against Mr. Trump, Fox News is not taking it quite so easy on Mr. DeSantis anymore.Over the last week, he has confronted noticeably tougher questions in interviews with two of the network’s hosts, Will Cain and Maria Bartiromo, who pressed him on his anemic poll numbers and early campaign struggles. It was a striking shift for a network that for years has offered Mr. DeSantis a safe space as a congressman and a governor.Other outlets in Mr. Murdoch’s media empire have also been slightly less friendly of late.A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal criticized a tough immigration bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law in May. And The New York Post, which hailed the governor as “DeFuture” on its front page last year, has covered his lagging poll numbers, as well as the backlash to a video his campaign shared that was condemned as homophobic.Mr. DeSantis was always bound to be subjected to more scrutiny as a candidate, rather than a candidate in waiting. His decision to challenge Mr. Trump — who remains a favorite of Fox News’s audience and some of its hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo — was also certain to result in sideswipes from fellow Republicans.But taken together, the signs of skepticism from previously friendly conservative megaphones suggest that Mr. Murdoch’s media empire might now be reassessing him as the early shine comes off his campaign.Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets are less determinative of outcomes in Republican politics than they once were, but they remain influential.Victoria Jones/Press Association, via Associated PressEven if Mr. Murdoch’s outlets as a whole are less determinative of outcomes in Republican politics than they once were, they remain influential, and G.O.P. candidates and major party donors still pay close attention to their coverage.Whether Mr. Murdoch wants to see Mr. DeSantis as the nominee is unclear. Some of Mr. DeSantis’s moves — like his ongoing punitive battle with Disney — are unlikely to have pleased the business-minded Mr. Murdoch, who nearly a decade ago called for federal officials to make immigration reform a priority.The media mogul likes to watch political races play out, even live-tweeting reactions to one of the Republican presidential debates during the 2016 election. Mr. Murdoch has privately told people that he would still like to see Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia enter the race, according to a person with knowledge of the remarks. And he has made clear in private discussions over the last two years that he thinks Mr. Trump, despite his popularity with Fox News viewers, is unhealthy for the Republican Party.A spokesman for Mr. Murdoch and a spokesman for Fox did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign declined to comment. Privately, his advisers say that tougher questions were always expected and that the governor plans to continue holding interviews with Fox hosts who may challenge him.Republican voters view Mr. DeSantis favorably overall, but he has been unable to meaningfully narrow the polling gap between him and Mr. Trump since entering the race, even as he remains the former president’s leading challenger. Mr. DeSantis has also continued to show an awkward side in unscripted exchanges where he is challenged — a contrast with Mr. Trump, a no-holds barred campaigner who seems to enjoy combative interviews.The tide has not completely shifted. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page took a new jab at Mr. Trump for adjusting his policy positions depending on which audience he is addressing, and gave Mr. DeSantis a slight boost by comparing him favorably.For Fox, navigating its coverage of Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Trump and an already bitter Republican presidential primary race is just one challenge.This spring, the network paid dearly for its airing of Mr. Trump’s false election claims, settling a defamation lawsuit related to its coverage of the 2020 presidential contest for a staggering $787.5 million. Further legal dangers lie ahead.Less than a week after the settlement, Fox dismissed Tucker Carlson, its most popular prime-time host, in an earthquake for the conservative media ecosystem. The network now faces persistent concerns about dipping ratings and upstart competitors that are eager to claw away Fox viewers who want a more pro-Trump viewpoint.Although Mr. Trump still appears on Fox News, his relationship with the network remains hostile, to the extent that people close to him say there is little chance he will participate in the first Republican presidential debate, which Fox News is hosting next month. (Mr. Trump, who leads in national polls by roughly 30 percentage points, also does not want to give his rivals a chance to attack him in person, those people said.)Mr. DeSantis, who typically shuns one-on-one interviews with mainstream political reporters, has a long and positive history with Fox News.Mr. DeSantis with his wife, Casey, after winning the Florida governor’s race in 2018. For years, he has enjoyed a friendly relationship with Fox News. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAs a congressman, he co-hosted the show “Outnumbered” several times. In 2018, he announced his run for governor on “Fox & Friends.” During the coronavirus pandemic, Sean Hannity of Fox News praised Mr. DeSantis in an interview, saying: “I’m an idiot. I should be in Florida. You should be my governor.”And after declaring his candidacy for president in a glitch-ridden livestream on Twitter seven weeks ago, Mr. DeSantis immediately went on Fox for an interview, although the network did poke fun at his technical difficulties.Mr. Trump himself raged earlier in the year about what he perceived as Fox’s excessively friendly treatment of Mr. DeSantis. “Just watching Fox News. They are sooo bad,” Mr. Trump wrote on his TruthSocial site in May. “They are desperately pushing DeSanctimonious who, regardless, is dropping like a rock.”He has also taken digs at features in The New York Post, including one in which the writer Salena Zito did a lengthy interview with Mr. DeSantis in his hometown, Dunedin, Fla. — an article Mr. Trump denounced as a “puff piece.” (The Post, once one of Mr. Trump’s favorite papers, has ripped into him.)Mr. Trump was undoubtedly more pleased last Thursday when Mr. Cain, the Fox host, pressed Mr. DeSantis on his poll numbers, asking the governor why he was so far behind.In response, Mr. DeSantis suggested that he was being unfairly attacked both by the “corporate media” and, somewhat incongruously, by the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has criticized him for his hard-line stances on immigration.“So I think if you look at all these people that are responsible for a lot of the ills in our society, they’re targeting me as the person they don’t want to see as the candidate,” explained Mr. DeSantis, adding that his campaign had “just started.”Mr. Cain tried again, saying that he believed Mr. DeSantis had “done a wonderful job” as governor but that “there are those that say there’s something about you that’s not connecting, for whatever reason, not connecting with the voter.”Mr. DeSantis wove around the question and noted that his campaign had raised $20 million in its first six weeks.“We’re in the process of building out a great organization, and I think we’re going to be on the ground in all these early states,” he said.Mr. Cain is no dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter. He has talked about voting against Mr. Trump in 2016. But when Mr. DeSantis joined Ms. Bartiromo, who relentlessly pushed the former president’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, for an interview on Sunday, he surely expected to be challenged.“You’ve done a great job pushing back against ‘woke,’ we know that,” Ms. Bartiromo said after allowing Mr. DeSantis to hit his usual talking points for several minutes. “But I’m wondering what’s going on with your campaign. There was a lot of optimism about you running for president earlier in the year.”Mr. DeSantis forced out a laugh as Ms. Bartiromo read negative headlines about his campaign. He then jumped into a rebuttal that focused on his efforts to build strong organizing operations in Iowa and New Hampshire.“Maria, these are narratives,” he said. “The media does not want me to be the nominee.”Jonathan Swan More