Elections

FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the January 6 insurrection and racial justice protests in 2020, according court order released Friday.FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and justice department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which has legal oversight of the US government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence released a heavily redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency.“Today’s disclosures underscore the need for Congress to rein in the FBI’s egregious abuses of this law, including warrantless searches using the names of people who donated to a congressional candidate,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.“These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It’s clear the FBI can’t be left to police itself.”At issue are improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US.That program, which is set to expire at the end of the year, creates a database of intelligence that US agencies can search. FBI searches must have a foreign intelligence purpose or be aimed at finding evidence of a crime. But congressional critics of the program have long raised alarm about what they say are unjustified searches of the database for information about Americans, along with more general concerns about surveillance abuses.Such criticism has aligned staunch liberal defenders of civil liberties with supporters of Donald Trump, who have seized on FBI surveillance errors during an investigation into his 2016 campaign. The issue has flared as the Republican-led House has been targeting the FBI, creating a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of government.In repeated episodes disclosed on Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed. The April 2022 order, for instances, details how the FBI queried the section 702 repository using the name of someone who was believed to have been at the Capitol during the January 6 6 riot. Officials obtained the information despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose”, the order said.The court order also says that an FBI analyst ran 13 queries of people suspected of being involved in the Capitol riot to determine if they had any foreign ties, but the justice department later determined that the searches were not likely to find foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.Other violations occurred when FBI officials in June 2020 ran searches related to more than 100 people arrested in connection with civil unrest and racial justice protests that had occurred in the US over the preceding weeks. The order says the FBI had maintained that the queries were likely to return foreign intelligence, though the reasons given for that assessment are mostly redacted.In addition, the FBI conducted what’s known as a batch query for 19,000 donors to an unnamed congressional campaign. An analyst doing the search cited concern that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but the justice department said only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard”.Officials said the case involved a candidate who ran unsuccessfully and is not a sitting member of Congress, and is unrelated to an episode described in March by congressman Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, who accused the FBI of wrongly searching for his name in foreign surveillance data.Senior FBI officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to reporters under ground rules set by the government, attributed the majority of the violations to confusion among the workforce and a lack of common understanding about the querying standards.They said the bureau has made significant changes since then, including mandating training and overhauling its computer system so that FBI officials must now enter a justification for the search in their own words than relying on a drop-down menu with pre-populated options.One of the officials said an internal audit of a representative sample of searches showed an increased compliance rate from 82% before the reforms were implemented to 96% afterward. 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George Santos is far from the first member of Congress to be indicted while in office. Both chambers and both parties have endured their share of scandals. In 2005, for instance, F.B.I. agents discovered $90,000 hidden in the freezer of Representative William Jefferson, who was under investigation for bribery. He refused to step down, wound up losing his seat in the 2008 election, and was later sentenced to 13 years in prison. James Traficant was expelled from Congress in 2002 after being convicted of bribery and racketeering. Bob Ney resigned in 2006 because of his involvement in a federal bribery scandal.But in one way, Mr. Santos is different from other members of Congress who have demonstrated moral failures, ethical failures, failures of judgment and blatant corruption and lawbreaking in office. What he did was to deceive the very voters who brought him to office in the first place, undermining the most basic level of trust between an electorate and a representative. These misdeeds erode the faith in the institution of Congress and the electoral system through which American democracy functions.For that reason, House Republican leaders should have acted immediately to protect that system by allowing a vote to expel Mr. Santos and joining Democrats in removing him from office. Instead — not wanting to lose Mr. Santos’s crucial vote — Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed a measure to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, notorious for its glacial pace, and the House voted predictably along party lines on Wednesday afternoon to follow that guidance.If the House doesn’t reverse that vote under public pressure, it’s incumbent on the Ethics Committee to conduct a timely investigation and recommend expulsion to the full House, where a two-thirds vote will be required to send Mr. Santos back to Long Island.Mr. Santos was arrested and arraigned in federal court last week on 13 criminal counts linked primarily to his 2022 House campaign. Mr. McCarthy and other members of the Republican leadership effectively shrugged, indicating that they would let the legal process “play itself out,” as the conference’s chair, Elise Stefanik, put it.In addition to expulsion, the Republican leaders have several official disciplinary measures they could pursue, such as a formal reprimand or censure, but so far, they have done little more than express concern. Mr. McCarthy has several tough legislative fights looming, including negotiations over the federal budget to avoid a government default, and Mr. Santos’s removal might imperil the G.O.P.’s slim majority. In effect, Mr. Santos’s bad faith has made him indispensable.His constituents believed he held certain qualifications and values, only to learn after Election Day that they had been deceived. Now they have no recourse until the next election.The question, then, is whether House Republican leaders and other members are willing to risk their credibility for a con man, someone whose entire way of life — his origin story, résumé, livelihood — is based on a never-ending series of lies. Of course they should not be. They should have demonstrated to the American people that there is a minimum ethical standard for Congress and used the power of expulsion to enforce it. They should have explained to voters that their commitment to democracy and public trust goes beyond their party’s political goals.At least some Republican lawmakers recognize what is at stake and are speaking out. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah reiterated his view that Mr. Santos should do the honorable thing and step aside, saying, “He should have resigned a long time ago. He is an embarrassment to our party. He is an embarrassment to the United States Congress.”Similarly, Anthony D’Esposito and Mike Lawler, both representing districts in New York, are among several House Republicans advocating his resignation. Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas has gone a step further, calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion and a special election to replace him. “The people of New York’s 3rd district deserve a voice in Congress,” he wrote on Twitter.Mr. Gonzales gets at the heart of the matter. Mr. Santos has shown contempt for his constituents and for the electoral process. Mr. McCarthy and the other Republican House leaders owe Americans more.Source photograph by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters.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

The Florida governor met with state lawmakers and made the standard diner visit to press flesh with voters, showcasing his more moderate side.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Friday hinted at how he might try to soften his image as a conservative hard-liner, a strategy that appeared intended to target more moderate voters in the state, which holds a centrist reputation and could be decisive in the Republican primary.During a discussion with state lawmakers outside Manchester, N.H., Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to declare his candidacy for president next week, largely focused on pocketbook and family issues with broader appeal, including school choice, tax cuts, crime and inflation, rather than aspects of the more divisive social agenda he has pushed as governor.For instance, Mr. DeSantis barely referenced his legislation on transgender issues and did not touch on abortion at all. Last month, he signed a six-week abortion ban, one of the most restrictive in the nation. (New Hampshire limits abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy.)“If you look at what we’ve been able to accomplish,” Mr. DeSantis said of his legislative record in Florida, “there is something in there for anybody in terms of the issues that we tackled.”Mr. DeSantis needs a strong showing in New Hampshire — along with a win in the more conservative Iowa — to demonstrate that he has staying power in the race against his main rival for the Republican nomination, former President Donald J. Trump, the governor’s allies and some of his political advisers say.Mr. Trump is running 20 points ahead of Mr. DeSantis in New Hampshire, according to a mid-April poll from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. The challenge for Mr. DeSantis lies in how he separates himself from Mr. Trump, not just on policy but also in terms of personality.“The message is very similar, but there are many people, and I would count myself as one of them, who are offended by Trump’s crudeness,” said Mark Pearson, a state representative in New Hampshire who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and attended the Manchester event on Friday, which took place at the Bedford Village Inn. “Elections are won in the middle. The battle is won with the Bedford soccer moms who are moderate Republicans, who are training their kids to speak politely, and Trump turns them off.”On a private conference call with donors and supporters a day earlier, Mr. DeSantis argued that he was the only Republican who could win a general election — and pointed to his support from legislators in New Hampshire, roughly 50 of whom have endorsed him. He also visited the state last month.The lawmakers who backed him, Mr. DeSantis said on the call, were “saying similar things like, you know, the governor is the guy, that he can win, he can get things done, all this other stuff.”Mr. Trump won New Hampshire in 2016, a victory that put him on the path to capturing the Republican Party’s nomination, after losing Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Trump won the state even as he favored large rallies over the more intimate politicking that New Hampshire residents say they want to see from candidates.“In New Hampshire, it’s about meeting almost every voter,” said Jason Osborne, the Republican State House majority leader, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. The important factor for the governor, Mr. Osborne said, is whether he will “be able to connect with people as he meets them face-to-face, looks them in the eye and describes his vision for the country.”After his remarks to the lawmakers, Mr. DeSantis met with voters in Manchester at the Red Arrow Diner, a mainstay of every presidential campaign that has already received visits this year from Nikki Haley (who enjoyed the “Haley Hashbrown Special,” according to a post on the diner’s website) and Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as Mr. Trump.Doug McGinley, a retired investment manager, snapped a picture of his grandson standing with the governor outside the diner. Mr. McGinley said he did not want to vote for Mr. Trump, whom he considers self-interested. But he isn’t yet sold on Mr. DeSantis.“I need to see more of him firsthand,” Mr. McGinley said. “I want to see if he can catch fire on a retail level. I’m glad to see him doing things like this.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. More

A Washington DC police officer was arrested on Friday on charges that he lied about leaking confidential information to Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio and obstructed an investigation after group members destroyed a Black Lives Matter banner in the nation’s capital.An indictment alleges that Metropolitan police department lieutenant Shane Lamond, 47, of Stafford, Virginia, warned Tarrio, then national chairman of the far-right group, that law enforcement had an arrest warrant for him related to the banner’s destruction.Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before Proud Boys members joined the mob in storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Earlier this month, Tarrio and three other leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy charges for what prosecutors said was a plot to keep the then president, Donald Trump, in the White House after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.A federal grand jury in Washington indicted Lamond on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.The indictment accuses Lamond of lying to and misleading federal investigators.Lamond is expected in court on Friday and is on administrative leave.Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the police department’s Homeland Security Bureau, was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys.His attorney, Mark Schamel, didn’t immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.Schamel has previously said that Lamond’s job was to communicate with a variety of groups protesting in Washington, and his conduct with Tarrio was never inappropriate and said his client “doesn’t share any of the indefensible positions” of extremist groups.The Metropolitan police department said it would do an internal review after the federal case against Lamond is resolved.Lamond’s name repeatedly came up in the Capitol riot trial of Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders.Messages introduced at Tarrio’s trial appeared to show a close rapport between the two men, with Lamond texting “hey brother”.Tarrio’s lawyers had wanted to call Lamond as a witness, but were stymied by the investigation into Lamond.Lamond used the Telegram messaging platform to give Tarrio information about law enforcement activity around July 2020, according to prosecutors.In December 2020, Lamond told Tarrio about where competing antifascist activists were expected to be.Jurors who convicted Tarrio heard testimony that Lamond frequently provided the Proud Boys leader with internal information about law enforcement operations before Proud Boys stormed the Capitol. More

It was interesting, after writing last week’s newsletter on the problems of conservative media, to watch Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Succession,” in which the show’s lightly fictionalized version of Fox News, run by its somewhat more meaningfully fictionalized version of the Fox-owning Murdoch family, takes center stage for an imagined election night. (There will be some spoilers below, fair warning.) Between the Dominion Voting Systems settlement and the Tucker Carlson firing, we’ve had a lot of real-world Fox drama lately, and the contrast between reality and fiction tells us something interesting about how art depicts our politics — and how the nature of democratic politics can resist successful dramatization.In the real world, the last presidential election night saw Fox News call Arizona early (calling it correctly, though probably earlier than was justified by the extremely narrow margin), yielding fury from Donald Trump’s campaign and backlash from the Fox audience, whose drift toward other outlets helps explain why Fox allowed election conspiracy theories to run wild on some of its shows. It was a case study in the problem I described last week, where conservative media has ended up captive to the particular expectations of a large television audience — a demand for infotainment, reality-TV drama, good guys and bad guys, nothing that doesn’t make sense within the expected nightly narrative.In the world of “Succession,” the key election-night dilemma is somewhat similar — when to call a crucial state — but the dynamics are quite different. The show’s presidential election is disrupted by a fire (arson?) at a Milwaukee precinct that destroys thousands of ballots, leaving the right-wing candidate ahead pending litigation, and his campaign wants ATN (the show’s Fox News) to call Wisconsin for him immediately. The decision gets punted up to the Roy siblings, the would-be heirs to their recently deceased father’s corporate empire, and though there are references to what the ATN audience wants, the Roys end up making a very bad, republic-undermining decision for reasons internal to their family dynamics. The brothers, Kendall and Roman, want to keep the company rather than go through with a planned sale to a Scandinavian tech billionaire, the right-wing candidate has promised to block the deal for them if he’s elected, and their sister, Shiv, the liberal of the group, is playing her own double game that blows up in her face.A key question throughout the show’s seasons has been whether “Succession” is ultimately the drama of, well, succession promised by the title — a story in the style of “The Godfather,” where one of the main characters emerges as the (corrupted) heir to the father’s empire — or whether it’s headed for a version of the “Hamlet” ending, where everybody stabs or poisons everybody else and some outsider shows up to claim the throne. With two episodes left, the dice seem loaded for the second outcome: Failsons and a faildaughter lose their company and, oops, bring down the American republic along the way.But as a political drama, which “Succession” is at least secondarily, both of these narratives are essentially elite-driven and family-driven, suggesting a world where to understand what happens in American politics, you mostly need to understand the pressures and pathologies afflicting a narrow group of power brokers.Which is, certainly, part of the truth. I write a lot about elites, everybody writes a lot about elites, because as the word suggests they’re pretty important to figuring out what’s going on in society — and also because when you write about politics for a living, you’re often writing for an audience that thinks of itself as at least elite-adjacent, part of the professional class, the overclass, the meritocracy.Thus a lot of arguments about the Republican Party in the age of Trump necessarily revolve around what some segment of this overclass is getting wrong. Is it liberal elites whose failures and ideological fixations keep giving oxygen to populism? Or media elites who keep covering Trump the wrong way (with vast disagreements about what the right way would be)? Or conservative elites who just need to summon moral courage and stand up against demagogy? Or the entire elite that needs replacement by a better one, ideally forged by classically minded finishing schools and papal encyclicals? The answer varies but the narrative endures because “affecting some change in elite behavior” is the biggest lever that seems within a pundit’s reach.When I watch “Succession” with this mind-set, my main complaint about the show’s political vision is that it mostly leaves out a kind of Republican elite who would be connected to any Fox News-like enterprise. The show obviously has no trouble scripting the amoral cynics getting rich off a conservative base they secretly despise, and it does a decent job channeling the voice of the very-online right (the far-right presidential candidate has a weird patois that sounds like Robert Nisbet crossed with a Nietzschean edgelord). But it doesn’t have much representation for the more normal Republicans who definitely exist inside Fox World, the kind of people who believe in conventional conservative principles and end up compromising with populists they dislike because of liberals they fear more. The show can only imagine weird fanatics on the one hand, and on the other hand pure cynics who secretly know the liberals are right and they themselves are bad guys.But what’s really missing from the political drama on “Succession” isn’t just sincere, non-edgelord Republicans. It’s the crucial role of non-elites — mass opinion, “the people,” anything from a national majority to a primary-season electorate or just a particularly large television audience — as a force unto themselves, a gravity well that every elite stratagem has to work with or around.Sure, the people don’t rule in some naïve or simplistic sense; some kind of elite power is always fundamental. But from a dramatic point of view, the mass American public is as important a “character” in the story of right-wing populism as Rupert Murdoch or for that matter Trump himself. The people, in the form of the mass Fox News audience, drove what happened around and after the 2020 election more than any sibling rivalry inside the House of Murdoch. They’re why the alleged election fraud fiasco went down the way it went down. They’re why Carlson became a cable news ratings king. They’re why, since his firing, a lot fewer people have been watching Fox and Newsmax has been pulling in about as many viewers in its 8 p.m. time slot as CNN.The same point applies to democratic politics writ large. People in rooms talking drive a lot of political action, but if they drove all of it, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would have been the Republican nominee in 2016 (when Murdoch’s network was surprised and overwhelmed by Trumpism), Elizabeth Warren probably would have been the Democratic nominee in 2020 and Trump definitely wouldn’t be a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024. Our elites can work to tame mass opinion, to master it or redirect it or find some means of resistance — but it’s always there, always doing something in the story.And if that’s a somewhat difficult thing for punditry to reckon with, at least we can write and talk about it in terms of opinion polling and television ratings and the like. Dramatizing the force of mass opinion artistically is much harder. It’s a big part of why there aren’t that many great novels or great movies about the workings of American democracy, relative to the monarchical systems of the past; one of the democratic age’s central characters, the mass public, is just really hard to realize on the page or on the screen.Likewise, a significant part of the contemporary appeal of both historical fiction and my own favored genre of fantasy is that they return politics to a period where the personal encompasses more of the political — where family rivalries and court intrigues loom larger, and mass politics means the occasional mob or the rampaging army but not the daily poll or the nightly ratings, the force of public opinion that lacks embodiment but constantly drives political action nonetheless.The elite world of “Succession,” where the patriarch Logan Roy was both a corporate king and a political kingmaker, is thus ultimately a kind of fantasy fiction, a George R.R. Martin-ish gloss on contemporary American politics: entertaining and smart and on point in some ways, hopefully headed for a more successful wrap than “Game of Thrones,” but finally inadequate to actual political reality, because it always leaves a protagonist offstage.Programming NotesFirst, a reminder that I’m part of a new Times podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” that comes out every Thursday; find the latest episodes here.Second, The Times has just introduced a new iOS app for audio journalism called New York Times Audio, featuring all our podcasts as well as narrated articles from across all our sections, from Opinion and Politics to Food and Sports. It includes the archive of “This American Life” and read-aloud stories from a range of national magazines. It’s available to Times news subscribers, and you can download it here.BreviaryNathan Pinkoski on the evolution of Francis Fukuyama.Scott Alexander compares Francis Galton and Paul Ehrlich.Alex de Waal on the war for Khartoum.Richard Rushfield and Matt Stoller on the Hollywood writers’ strike.Damon Linker tries to stabilize social liberalism. More

Turkey and Thailand held two huge elections this week, both with uncertain outcomes. Each shows some of the benefits that elections can hold for leaders who have amassed power with the tools of the state.Two important elections happened this week. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to win an outright victory so he now faces a runoff election that could be the most significant political challenge of his career. And in Thailand, ruled by military leaders who took power in a 2014 coup, voters overwhelmingly backed opposition parties, delivering a stinging rebuke to the military establishment. It remains to be seen how much power the junta will actually hand over.Both countries have me thinking about the type of government that is sometimes called a “competitive authoritarian” regime. Their leaders use the tools of state, such as purging foes from the bureaucracy and curtailing civil liberties, to consolidate their own power. But they regularly hold elections, and when they do, the votes are not shams. Voters can cast ballots with the expectation that they will be fairly counted, and that leaders will abide by the result.And yet the fact that those governments embrace elections can tell us something important about the nature of democratic backsliding, and perhaps something even more important about its opposite. Most people call it democratization, but I prefer to think of it, for the sake of verbal and conceptual symmetry, as democratic forwardsliding.Turkey has for years been sliding into a competitive authoritarian government, analysts say. Thailand isn’t one, at least not yet — its military leaders came to power in a coup, not an election — but its vote provides a useful point of comparison.After all, at first blush it’s a little odd that competitive authoritarian leaders hold real elections! In the usual story we tell about democracy, one of elections’ chief virtues is that they allow the public to check leaders’ power. Too much repression, the theory goes, will lead to a reckoning at the ballot box.That doesn’t seem like a prospect that would be popular with leaders who otherwise go to remarkable lengths to dismantle checks and balances. Competitive authoritarians often stack courts with friendly judges, undermine judicial review of their power, weaken legislative branches, jail journalists and try in various ways to stifle opponents.But that view misses out something else that elections can do: validate an authoritarian leader’s power by showing that the public supports the regime. And that validation, it turns out, is valuable enough to outweigh the risks inherent in elections — especially when the incumbent can take steps to manipulate the contest in his favor.In Turkey, Erdogan draws his claim to power, and his justification for his harsh and repressive treatment of the opposition, from public approval, said Turkuler Isiksel, a Columbia University political scientist. Like other populists, he claims to represent the interests of the people. Elections, which provide hard numbers on public support, are a powerful tool to support that claim.And conversely, rejecting election results can damage public support for the regime. Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, pointed to the example of Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral elections, which were seen as an important test of the popularity of Erdogan’s A.K.P. party. When that contest was initially held, the opposition candidate won by a narrow margin, but the race was invalidated by the courts, leading to public outrage at the perceived refusal to honor the results. When it was re-run a few months later, the opposition candidate won by a landslide — suggesting that for a substantial minority of voters, the failure to respect the initial result was enough to make them abandon Erdogan’s party.“They decided, ‘I’m changing my vote,’” Svolik said. “That suggests a high cost to being perceived as not abiding by the results of an election.” And while such precise natural experiments are rare, Svolik has found similar results when he ran experiments in other countries using hypothetical scenarios of candidates engaging in similar behavior.Which brings me to Thailand. At present, its leaders do not derive their legitimacy from public support — their 2014 coup ousted the democratically elected government by force after an extended period of political unrest.“Thailand is a very divided country that has a conservative establishment that keeps trying to find a way to write a constitution that allows it to win, but can’t do it because it’s not that popular,” said Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratization with a focus on Southeast Asia. The current government has tried to hedge the results of last weekend’s election by granting Thailand’s military-appointed Senate one-third of the votes to select the prime minister, effectively reserving veto power over any government that doesn’t win a supermajority. But, as Svolik’s research shows, overriding the results of the election risks public backlash.So why hold elections at all?It’s impossible to be sure of the junta members’ true motivations — such personal decisions are, ultimately, unknowable. It may be that the junta members see the risk of losing power in an election as less damaging than what could happen if they held onto power without one.There are real costs to holding power by force, for leaders themselves and their countries. If public outrage has no outlet in elections, that increases the likelihood of mass protests, uprisings, and violence. For years, Thailand has been trapped in a cycle of “protests and putsches,” as my Times colleagues Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono memorably described it — a loop that has only increased voters’ anger and support for opposition parties.Such cycles can be difficult to break. In Thailand, “they’re sort of in a coup trap, where the existence of a precedent for military intervention in politics makes people act as if that’s going to be possible, which makes it then possible,” Pepinsky said. “It’s a very bad equilibrium to be in.” Holding an election isn’t always a solution to that problem. Svolik pointed to the example of Myanmar, whose ruling junta cautiously handed over some power after semi-democratic elections in 2015 and 2020, but staged another coup in 2021. But it can still be a way to shift political disputes away from costly and damaging political violence. “Why don’t we just have a battle that’s called an election? It is much less costly,” Svolik said.That has benefits for the public as well as for leaders. Even though the legitimacy conferred by elections can help authoritarian leaders in the short term, Isiksel said, in the longer term it can aid democratization by strengthening democratic institutions, political parties, and the “civic habits” of voting and campaigning.Over time, those can build and reinforce on each other in ways that go beyond elections — a slow and incremental process of forwardsliding toward a more secure democracy.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

The centrist group is gaining steam — and raising money — in its effort to get a candidate on the 2024 ballot, with Joe Manchin at the top of their list.The bipartisan political group No Labels is stepping up a well-funded effort to field a “unity ticket” for the 2024 presidential race, prompting fierce resistance from even some of its closest allies who fear handing the White House back to Donald J. Trump.At the top of the list of potential candidates is Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who has been a headache to his party and could bleed support from President Biden in areas crucial to his re-election.The centrist group’s leadership was in New York this week raising part of the money — around $70 million — that it says it needs to help with nationwide ballot access efforts.“The determination to nominate a ticket” will be made shortly after the primaries next year on what is known as Super Tuesday, March 5, said Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder and leader of No Labels. A national convention has been set for April 14-15 in Dallas, where a Democrat-Republican ticket would be set to take on the two major-party nominees. (Mr. Biden is facing two long-shot challengers, and Mr. Trump is the Republican front-runner.)Other potential No Labels candidates being floated include Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, who has said he would not run for the G.O.P. nomination and is the national co-chairman of the group. But Mr. Manchin has received most notice recently after speaking on a conference call last month with donors.“We’re not looking to pick the ticket right now,” former Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and longtime associate of the group, cautioned in an interview on Wednesday as he prepared to meet with donors and leaders in New York. “Our focus is getting on the ballot.”Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, is also on No Labels’ radar.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThe drive has already secured ballot spots in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon and is now targeting Florida, Nevada and North Carolina. Ms. Jacobson called the project “an insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t support.”“We’re well aware any independent ticket faces a steep climb and if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggests an independent unity ticket can’t win, we will not nominate a ticket,” she said.Caveats aside, the effort is causing deep tensions with the group’s ideological allies, congressional partners and Democratic Party officials who are scrambling to stop it. Third-party candidates siphoned enough votes to arguably cost Democrats elections in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton). Republicans say the same thing about Ross Perot’s role in blocking George H.W. Bush’s re-election in 1992.“If No Labels runs a Joe Manchin against Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think it will be a historic disaster,” said Representative Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat and, until now, a strong supporter of the organization. “And I speak for just about every moderate Democrat and frankly most of my moderate Republican friends.”People close to Mr. Manchin have their doubts he would join a No Labels ticket. He must decide by January whether to run for re-election in his firmly Republican state. But he does see an avenue to return to the Senate.The state’s popular Democrat-turned-Republican governor, Jim Justice, is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Manchin, but so is West Virginia’s most Trump-aligned House member, Alex Mooney, who has the backing of the deep-pocketed political action committee Club for Growth.If Mr. Mooney can knock out Mr. Justice, or damage him badly by bringing up the governor’s centrist record and days as a Democrat, Mr. Manchin sees a path to re-election, and no real prospect of actually winning the presidency on the No Labels ticket.But he is keeping his options open, at least as he raises money under the No Labels auspices.“Let’s try to make people come back together for the sake of the country, not just for the sake of the party,” Mr. Manchin told the group’s donors on a recent conference call leaked to the news site Puck this month.Opponents are mobilizing to stop No Labels. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, sent a cease-and-desist letter this month to the group’s director of ballot access, accusing the organization of misrepresenting its intentions as it presses for signatures to get on the state’s presidential ballot.The Arizona Democratic Party sued this spring to get No Labels off the state’s ballot, accusing it of “engaging in a shadowy strategy to gain ballot access — when in reality they are not a political party.”One of No Labels’ founders, William Galston, a former policy aide to President Bill Clinton, publicly resigned from his own organization over the push. In an interview, he pointed to polling saying that voters who dislike both Mr. Trump and President Biden — “double haters” — say overwhelmingly they would vote for Mr. Biden in the end. Given an alternative, that might not be the case.And Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a centrist coalition aligned with No Labels that actually does No Labels’ legislative work, are in open revolt.“I can think of nothing worse than another Trump presidency and no better way of helping him than running a third-party candidate,” said Representative Brad Schneider, Democrat of Illinois.Former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, is the national co-chairman of No Labels.Andrew Mangum for The New York TimesNo Labels has long had its detractors, variously accused of ineffectuality, fronting for Republicans and existing mainly to raise large amounts of money from wealthy corporate donors, many of whom give primarily to Republicans.But the grumbling criticism took on a more urgent tone when Puck posted a partial transcript of a leaked conference call that No Labels held with its funders. On it, Ryan Clancy, the group’s chief strategist, said ballot organizers were at “600,000 signatures and counting,” and nearing slots on the ballot in “roughly 20 states,” with their eyes on all 50.Mr. Manchin joined the call as the closer: “The hope is to keep the country that we have, and you cannot do that by forcing the extreme sides on both parties,” he said.Mr. Manchin’s political appeal beyond West Virginia is questionable. The loudest discontent among Democrats with Mr. Biden has come from young voters, many of whom are animated by the issue of climate change, and they are not aligned with the coal-state Democrat on that.Mr. Manchin is not a climate denier in the traditional sense. He has repeatedly referred to the “climate crisis” caused by human activities.Yet Mr. Manchin, whose state produces some of the highest levels of coal and natural gas nationally and who has earned millions from his family’s coal business, has long fought policies that would punish companies for not shifting more quickly to clean energy and has accused Mr. Biden of promoting a “radical climate agenda.”But Democrats worry. The southwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh abut West Virginia, and it would not take many Democrats bolting to Mr. Manchin to hand Pennsylvania to Mr. Trump, they warn.Ms. Jacobson, on the leaked conference call, said No Labels had been “Pearl Harbored” by a March memo from the Democratic centrist group Third Way. The memo was bluntly titled: “A Plan That Will Re-elect Trump.”“It wasn’t exactly a sneak attack,” Third Way’s longtime leader, Matt Bennett, countered in an interview. “We are enormously alarmed.”Lisa Friedman More

A successful campaign will probably need the traits of both Trumpism and an alternative to Trumpism.Ronald Reagan rode the issues of 1979, some similar to today’s, to the Oval Office. George Tames/The New York TimesThere are two basic theories for how Donald J. Trump might be defeated in a Republican primary. It’s possible that neither, both or some combination of the two can actually work in practice. But by considering them in depth, it becomes easier to think about and judge the various efforts to beat him — and why so many haven’t pulled it off.In our next article, we’ll consider whether and how Ron DeSantis fits into the picture — and why his campaign has struggled to meet the very real challenge of defeating a former president.Theory One: Trumpism Without TrumpThis type of candidacy assumes that Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism reoriented the Republican Party in irreversible and advantageous ways, but that his personal conduct has been a disaster for conservatives.In this view, his poor hires and lack of experience and focus prevented him from being an effective president. His coarse remarks, tweets, election denialism and ultimately Jan. 6 not only cost Republicans the White House and the Senate, but also the opportunity for a truly decisive victory — like the one Mr. DeSantis won in 2022 in Florida.According to this theory, these same personal weaknesses are his vulnerability in a Republican primary in 2024. A challenger to Mr. Trump, therefore, ought to hew as close as possible to him on the issues, while distinguishing himself or herself on electability, competence and character.If you imagine yourself in a hypothetical brainstorming session for the Trumpism Without Trump campaign, you can imagine the kinds of attacks that might add up to a critique of a hapless, weak president who wasn’t up to the job of making America great again. In this view, Mr. Trump presided over rising crime, a strengthening China, growing trade deficits, rising drug overdose deaths and a stronger Democratic Party. He talked a big game, but didn’t accomplish much. He failed to build a wall. He lost to sleepy Joe Biden. He’s old. The election was stolen from under his nose. He let the Deep State drag him down and did nothing to dismantle it. He let Dr. Fauci into our lives, and the vaccine into our bodies. He didn’t command the respect of the military and hired countless people he now considers disloyal. Not every one of these attacks is ready for prime time, but some combination could work, and you could undoubtedly come up with other examples.The logic of Trumpism Without Trump has merit, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Indeed, it suffers from an obvious and fundamental problem: It doesn’t work if Republicans still want Mr. Trump.There’s another, less obvious issue: It’s hard for this type of candidate to unite the various skeptical-of-Trump factions. After all, many of the most vocal opponents of Mr. Trump oppose both Trumpism and the man himself. This sets up routine clashes between a Trumpism Without Trump candidate and his or her likeliest own supporters. It could even lead many of those supporters to seek an explicitly anti-Trump candidate.Theory Two: An alternative to TrumpismThis theory is a little more complicated. It describes something that doesn’t yet exist. But the case for this theory picks up with the last critique of Trumpism Without Trump.An anti-Trump candidate will probably need to be something more than Trumpism Without Trump: A reinvigorated brand of conservatism would be needed to pull off the challenging task of unifying everyone from the Trumpist types to the supporters of Mitt Romney’s Reaganism to the Ted Cruz Tea Partiers.Needless to say, this would be challenging. To do it, a conservative would need to find a message that at once checks the boxes and wins the hearts of various factions — without alienating the rest. This is not easy, given the many disagreements between the different factions of the Republican Party. But something like this has happened before under circumstances that in some ways resemble today’s.Recall the conditions that brought about the last great renewal of conservatism, in the 1970s. The parallels to today are striking. In both 1979 and 2023, conservatives could say inflation and crime was high; the Kremlin had decided to invade a neighbor; and a new class of young, highly educated activists was at once driving some old-school liberals to the right and sparking a full-blown conservative reaction. In each case, it was 15 years after an epochal breakthrough for Black Americans (the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008).As with today, the right was fractured. The politicians who embodied the different wings of a possible Republican coalition — Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Gerald Ford — were every bit as ideologically diverse as Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney. But the events of the 1960s and 1970s created conditions that allowed these groups to come together around a reinvigorated conservatism that dominated the Republican Party for the next 30 years.The reaction against the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s was strong enough to bring some once-liberal intellectuals and the religious right together against the excesses of the counterculture. The backlash against the civil rights era, rising crime and the failings of the Great Society brought blue-collar, urban, white ethnic Reagan Democrats together with Sun Belt suburbanites. High inflation and a growing tax burden offered a way for neoliberal economics to align big business, working-class economic interests and white resentment.The conditions for a rejuvenated conservatism today aren’t nearly as favorable as they were in 1979. They don’t even seem as favorable as they were in 2021. But it’s not 2015 anymore, either. Many of the conditions that helped lead to Trumpian populism are gone. Fear of economic stagnation, high unemployment and low interest rates have been replaced by inflation and high interest rates. Globalization is unequivocally in retreat. The Forever Wars are gone, and Great Power politics is back. Meanwhile, the rise of a new “woke” left and lingering resentment over coronavirus restrictions have brought a new set of issues that didn’t exist a decade ago.If you look in the right corners of the internet, you can see these changes congealing into new kinds of conservatives. You can spot neo-neo-cons on Substack, where Obama-era liberals who insist they aren’t conservatives rail against “woke” and forge unusual alliances with longtime conservatives. There’s even a neo-neoliberalism of sorts, as a small corner of the right mulls deregulation to contain costs, and even progressives find themselves mulling “supply side” policies. Many of the people dabbling in these ideas were also skeptics of coronavirus restrictions, especially school closings. Rising concern about Russia and China needs no explanation.If you put all of these various strands together, you can imagine the outlines of a reinvigorated conservatism tied to the challenges of 2023, not 2015 or 1979. Compared with 2015, it would be distinguished by anti-woke cultural politics, a stronger approach to Russia or China, and deregulation aiming to tackle inflation and promote “freedom.” It also fulfills the most important element for the Alternative to Trumpism theory: Moderate elites and Obama-era Tea Partiers can find common ground on all of these issues or at least tolerate the other side.But like Trumpism Without Trump, this approach faces a fundamental problem: It’s not obvious whether these new issues are strong enough to hold the disparate elements of the anti-Trump coalition together through a primary campaign.Over the last year or so, new developments have tended to weaken the punch of the new issues. The pandemic is past, at least politically. “Wokeness” may be fading somewhat as an issue. Meanwhile, the old issues are making a comeback. Inflation is edging down, but the end of pandemic-era restrictions has renewed focus on the border. The end of Roe v. Wade has thrust abortion back to the center of American life. Nothing similar could be said in 1979, when older divisive fights over civil rights or Medicare had plainly given way to a new set of more acute challenges. Imagine how much harder it would have been for Ronald Reagan to balance winning the South and the rest of the country in the Republican primary if Brown v. Board had been overturned by conservative judges in 1978.There’s another reason the new issues might not be enough: They don’t always offer easy avenues for attack against Mr. Trump. There are a few obvious but fundamentally limited opportunities, like Russia and China. But after that, it gets tougher. Inflation could be a plausible path: The argument would go that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, push for lower interest rates, immigration restrictions, government spending, stimulus checks and big tax cuts all contributed to supply chain issues, labor shortages and excess demand. This would even allow for a natural comparison lumping him in with Mr. Biden. But this attack is complicated to pull off, and it doesn’t seem to be political gold.Importantly, it is hard to attack Mr. Trump on “woke,” which is probably still the single new issue with the most resonance across the Republican Party, even if it isn’t quite as salient as it was a year or two ago. The attack on woke does offer some opportunity for a contrast with Mr. Trump, by embracing American Greatness as an explicit critique of woke anti-Americanism and an implicit critique of dystopian MAGA-ism. Nikki Haley has taken this tack. But it is not at all obvious whether this sunnier brand has any resonance with conservative voters.Realistically, a successful campaign will need the traits of both Trumpism Without Trump and an Alternative to Trumpism. Alone, neither quite seems like enough. The strongest candidacy will benefit a bit from some aspects of the other. Done right, perhaps no one would be quite sure which category it falls into.Next, we’ll consider why Mr. DeSantis is a distinct candidate who comes close to pulling off both, but so far hasn’t done either — with poll numbers to show for it. More