Elections

With the economy in crisis, the vote on Sunday is shaping up to be one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s toughest fights to hold onto power in his 20 years as the country’s premier politician.Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey are shaping up to be a referendum on the long tenure of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — the country’s dominant politician over the last two decades.Mr. Erdogan, 69, has led Turkey since 2003, when he became prime minister. At the start, he was widely hailed as an Islamist democrat who promised to make the predominately Muslim country and NATO member a bridge between the Muslim world and the West. But more recently, critics have accused him of mismanaging a deep economic crisis.Now, Mr. Erdogan, who has long staved off challengers with a fiery populist style, finds himself in an extremely tight race as he seeks a third five-year term as president.What’s at stake?At the top of voters’ concerns is the reeling economy. Inflation, which surpassed 80 percent last year but has since come down, has severely eroded their purchasing power.The government has also been criticized for its initially slow response to the catastrophic earthquakes in February, which left more than 50,000 people dead. The natural disaster raised questions about whether the government bore responsibility, in part, for a raft of shoddy construction projects across the country in recent years that contributed to the high death toll.The election could also affect Turkey’s geopolitical position. The country’s relations with the United States and other NATO allies have been strained as Mr. Erdogan has strengthened ties with Russia, even after its invasion of Ukraine last year.When Mr. Erdogan first became prime minister in 2003, many Turks saw him as a dynamic figure who promised a bright economic future. And for many years, his government delivered. Incomes rose, lifting millions of Turks into the middle class as new airports, roads and hospitals were built across the country. He also reduced the power of the country’s secular elite and tamed the military, which had held great sway since Turkey’s founding in 1923.But in more recent years, and especially since he became president in 2014, critics have accused Mr. Erdogan of using the democratic process to enhance his powers, pushing the country toward autocracy.All along, Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party remained a force at the ballot box, winning elections and passing referendums that allowed Mr. Erdogan to seize even more power, largely with the support of poorer, religiously conservative voters.But economic trouble began around 2014. The value of the national currency eroded, foreign investors fled and, more recently, inflation spiked.A master of self-preservation, Mr. Erdogan earned a reputation for marginalizing anyone who challenged him. After an attempted coup in 2016, his government jailed tens of thousands of people accused of belonging to the religious movement formerly allied with Mr. Erdogan that the government accused of cooking up the plot to oust him. More than 100,000 others were removed from state jobs.Today, Turkey is one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists.After the earthquake, workers cleared rubble from what was an apartment complex in Antakya, Turkey, in February.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesWho is running?Mr. Erdogan faces stiff competition from a newly unified opposition that has appealed to voters’ disillusionment with his stewardship of the economy and what they call his push for one-man rule. They are backing a joint candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a retired civil servant who has vowed to restore Turkish democracy and the independence of state bodies like the central bank while improving ties with the West.Mr. Kilicdaroglu is the leader of the Republican People’s Party.Recent polls suggest a slight edge for Mr. Kilicdaroglu, 74, who is campaigning in opposition not only to Erdogan’s polices, but also to his brash style. He has fashioned himself as a steady Everyman and has pledged to retire after one term to spend time with his grandchildren.“The opposition has made a pretty good case that Turks have suffered economically because of Mr. Erdogan’s mismanagement,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkey scholar at the Brookings Institution.Other candidates include Muharrem Ince, who split from the Republican People’s Party to found the Homeland Party. Votes for him and another candidate, Sinan Ogan, could prevent either of the two front-runners from winning an outright majority, which would lead to a runoff on May 28.Kemal Kilicdaroglu is the front-runner among the opposition candidates for president.Sedat Suna/EPA, via ShutterstockWill these elections be free and fair?As in previous elections, Mr. Erdogan has used his expanded presidential powers to try and tilt the playing field in his favor.In recent months, he has increased the minimum wage, boosted civil servant salaries, increased assistance to poor families and changed regulations to allow millions of Turks to receive their government pensions earlier, all to insulate voters from the effects of rising prices.In December, a judge believed to be acting in support of Mr. Erdogan barred the mayor of Istanbul, a potential presidential challenger at the time, from politics after convicting him of insulting public officials. The mayor has remained in office pending appeal.Electoral posters for the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., in Kayseri.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThis would not be the first time that potential opponents of Mr. Erdogan have been sidelined.Selahattin Demirtas, of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, ran his presidential campaign from prison in 2018. The Turkish authorities have accused him of affiliation with a terrorist organization, but rights organizations have called his imprisonment politically motivated.Turkey has fought a decades-long battle with Kurdish separatists in the country and considers them terrorists.Mr. Demirtas’ party, the country’s third largest, has come under pressure from the constitutional court in the lead-up to the election. It is now running its campaign under a different party.The news media, largely controlled by private companies loyal to the government, have “worked as loyal propaganda machines,” said Ms. Aydintasbas, saying pro-government journalists have downplayed the economic crisis and trumpeted Mr. Erdogan’s response to the earthquake crisis as heroic.A local official in Antakya counting voting lists and slips ahead of this weekend’s election.Umit Bektas/ReutersWhat’s next?Voters will cast their ballots for the president and Parliament at polls across the country, which will open on Sunday at 8 a.m. local time and close at 5 p.m. Preliminary presidential results are expected later that evening, and parliamentary results on Monday.If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the votes, the election will go to a runoff on May 28.Gulsin Harman More

A state election in Karnataka was being watched for what it might say about national elections next year.With how often and how fiercely Narendra Modi injects himself into elections, you would think every race — down to the vote for municipal bodies in what will soon be the world’s most populous nation — is a referendum on his standing as the leader of India.On Wednesday, a state election in Karnataka, home to 65 million people, was being closely watched for what it might foretell about national elections early next year in which Mr. Modi will seek to extend his transformational prime ministership into a second decade.In Karnataka, his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., was trying to hold on to the only state it governs in the country’s more prosperous south, where its Hindu nationalist politics have found much slower reception.Initially, the B.J.P., in addition to boasting of social welfare programs, employed its usual campaign playbook of trying to polarize the state’s electorate along religious lines. This included, as a last-ditch effort, an attempt to take benefits away from Muslims and distribute them to two electorally important Hindu castes, before the judiciary stepped in to rebuke and pause the effort.A man dressed as a Hindu god waited for Mr. Modi to drive by on Saturday. Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHaving seemingly reached a saturation point in how many votes can be extracted through religious division in a place like Karnataka, where caste rivalries and divisions among Hindus remain a major electoral factor, the B.J.P. then made the race about trust in the popular Mr. Modi. He arrived in full force, holding 19 different rallies in the state.Among them were long “road shows” in which he rode through the streets of Bengaluru, the tech hub also known as Bangalore, in an open-top vehicle decked out in flowers and pictures of himself. News reports estimated that anywhere between 10 and 50 tons of flower petals were required for his longest road show, covering 16 miles, as supporters showered them on the prime minister.“I did not take much profit in that, because the flowers are offered to Mr. Modi — he is like God,” said V. Manjunath, who owns a flower store.In the final days of campaigning, even as Manipur, a state in India’s east, was engulfed in deadly ethnic violence, Mr. Modi remained focused on Karnataka. His lieutenants pushed the idea of a “double-engine government,” with the national B.J.P. government, vast resources at its disposal, helping the B.J.P. state government. The message was clear: It doesn’t matter who the state leaders are, because there is one driver, Mr. Modi.Mr. Modi kept his focus on the Karnataka election even as ethnic violence flared in eastern India.Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesResults from the Karnataka vote are expected on Saturday. For the opposition Indian National Congress, crushed by Mr. Modi at the national level in the last two elections, in 2014 and 2019, a win there would be a much-needed morale booster.Congress has many things going for it in Karnataka that it does not at the national level. It has kept its ranks there largely united, and even lured important B.J.P. leaders to switch sides, while on the national level and in other states it has been mired in infighting.It also tried in Karnataka to keep the electorate focused on issues such as rising food and fuel prices, as well as repeated corruption allegations against local B.J.P. leaders.In one of the culminating rallies, Priyanka Gandhi, Congress’s general secretary, emphasized to those gathered that her party was focused on “your issues” — guaranteeing electricity subsidies, small payments to female-run families and to unemployed graduates, and rations to struggling families.She contrasted such practical assistance to the B.J.P. leader’s grievance-laden efforts to portray himself as a victim despite his vast power. “Not in one program have they told you how many jobs they have created, how many hospitals they have built,” Ms. Gandhi said, taking a dig at Mr. Modi. “He has just told you the list of how many times he has been abused.”The Congress party’s chances of forming a government in Karnataka, on its own or in a coalition, appeared high, according to opinion polls. The hard part, analysts said, would be to maintain momentum in other state elections, and to scale up its Karnataka performance in the national elections.Priyanka Gandhi, the general secretary of the opposition Indian National Congress, during a rally on Sunday.Jagadeesh Nv/EPA, via ShutterstockIf Congress is to put up a fight against Mr. Modi’s electoral juggernaut in the national race, it will have to cobble together a vast coalition of regional parties that have shown they can defeat the B.J.P., and do it so that its claim on leading that coalition does not derail it.The opposition must coalesce around key issues such as job creation and avoid a “leadership-driven unity,” said Sandeep Shastri, an academic and political analyst based in Bengaluru. “If it is a leadership-driven unity, then you have lost the battle even before it’s begun — because the B.J.P. wants it to be a leadership-driven battle, and against Modi they have no chance.”When the Congress party veered into an issue in Karnataka that sat squarely in the B.J.P.’s comfort zone, Mr. Modi’s lieutenants seized on it.In its campaign manifesto, Congress promised “decisive action” and even a ban on Bajrang Dal, a right-wing Hindu group that often engages in vigilante violence. The B.J.P., which has banned similar Muslim groups, quickly cast it as evidence of Congress’s disregard for Hindu values and its appeasement of the minority group.The Congress party proposed that the right-wing group Bajrang Dal be banned.Jagadeesh Nv/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the past couple of years, Mr. Modi’s party and its supporters had stirred several religiously charged issues in Karnataka, whose population is about 13 percent Muslim. B.J.P. leaders and supporters banned girls from wearing the head scarf as part of their school uniform, curbed halal food and even called for an economic boycott of Muslims by banning them from engaging in business near Hindu temples.The B.J.P.’s step away from those issues as the election neared, analysts said, was an admission that religious polarization was simply solidifying the support of a section of voters it would have captured anyway. In a sign of Mr. Modi’s sway with his supporters, even those who disagree with the country’s divisive politics often pin none of the blame on him.Evidence of the limited dividend of division was clear at the Shree Siddagangaa Mutt, a major temple institution of the Lingayat caste, a strong support base for the B.J.P., in the city of Tumkur.In India’s north, the B.J.P. has had success in using religious polarization to unite Hindus and minimize caste divides. But in a demonstration of how caste allegiance in Karnataka does not necessarily translate into support for exclusionary politics, a majority of the 10,000 students at the schools and colleges that the Lingayat institution runs are from other castes and religions.“There is no question of their caste and creed — they stay together, eat together,” said Siddalinga Mahaswami, the institution’s head.B.J.P. leaders said they had not given up on their Hindu nationalist agenda in the state, known as Hindutva, but had simply dialed it down a notch during elections.Polling officials collecting electronic voting machines on Tuesday.Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Without Hindutva agenda, there is no B.J.P.,” said Chalavadi Swamy, a party member in the Karnataka Legislative Council. “But aggressively, we are not taking it now.”“In the north, Hindutva means Hindutva — everybody will follow,” Mr. Swamy said. “In South India, it’s very difficult to understand the game — the complexity is there.”As residents in Karnataka went out to vote, Mr. Modi was already in another state, Rajasthan, which will hold an election later this year, driving through throngs of supporters as he was showered with yet more flower petals. More

At the heart of the American ethos is the contested idea of freedom.In the video announcing his 2024 re-election bid — pointedly called “Freedom” — President Biden staked out his vision, declaring:Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes from the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.“The question we’re facing,” Biden told viewers, “is whether in the years ahead, we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer,” adding:Every generation of Americans will face the moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment.The 2024 election shows every sign of becoming a partisan battle to claim ownership of the ideal of freedom, with each side determined to persuade voters that the opposition’s assertions are not just false but a threat to individual and group rights.This dispute is possible because freedom as an abstraction is fraught with multiple and often conflicting meanings. The debate over where to draw the lines between freedom, liberty, rights, democracy, responsibility, autonomy, obligation, justice, fairness and citizenship has been going on for centuries, but has steadily intensified with the success of the liberation movements of the past seven decades — the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and sexual rights revolutions.In sharp contrast to Biden, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in “The Courage to Be Free” — his campaign book, published in February — warns that “the threat to freedom is not limited to the actions of governments, but also includes a lot of aggressive, powerful institutions hellbent on imposing a woke agenda on our country.”The enemies of freedom, DeSantis contends, are “entrenched elites that have driven our nation into the ground,” elites that “control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, corporate media, Big Tech companies and universities.”These privileged few, DeSantis argues, “use undemocratic means to foist everything from environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) policies on corporations, forcing as well critical race theory on public schools,” in what the Florida governor calls “an attempt to impose ruling class ideology on society.”This debate fits into a larger context famously described by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 Oxford University speech, “Two Concepts of Liberty”:If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.Positive freedom, Berlin continued,derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object.Jefferson Cowie, a history professor at Vanderbilt, captured the intensity and depth of division over freedom during the civil rights movement in his book “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this week.Cowie wrote that the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” inaugural speech, on Jan. 14, 1963,invoked “freedom” 25 times — more than Martin Luther King Jr. used the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”For Wallace, in other words, the right to maintain segregation was a form of freedom.The dichotomy between the notions of freedom promulgated by George Wallace and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to polarize the nation today.Rogers M. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email in response to my inquiry about the contest over freedom:Biden stands in the liberal tradition going back to F.D.R., which holds that to be truly free, people have to be able to meet their material needs, so that they have opportunities for their diverse pursuits of happiness; and they also need democratic institutions giving them a share in shaping their collective destinies.Ronald Reagan, according to Smith, “thought freedom meant being largely free of government interference in people’s lives, whether through regulation or assistance. He did believe in freedom as democratic self-governance.”For Trump and DeSantis, Smith argued, freedom is more constrained and restrictive. For these two:Freedom means having governmental policies that protect the ways of life they favor against those they don’t. Their notion of freedom is the narrowest: in fact, it is primarily an argument for using coercive governmental power, and in Trump’s case private violence, against all who they see as threats to their preferred ways of life. They support democracy as long as, but only as long as, it produces the results they want.Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley, pointed out in his email that different types of freedom can impinge on each other as well as create different winners and losers:Negative liberty is freedom from external constraints, particularly from the government. This is the dominant idea, I think, in the Bill of Rights. It is linked to individualism and libertarianism. So I am free to carry a gun on the right, free to have an abortion or change my sex on the left. Positive liberty means the freedom to act to provide collective goods so it is easy to see that there can be a tension between the two.As with many political concepts, Citrin continued:There is an elasticity in this term that allows competing parties to stake a claim for their version of freedom. Biden paints Trump as a threat to one’s freedom to have an abortion or to vote; Trump claims the deep state is a threat to your privacy or legal rights. In addition, one group’s freedom constrains another’s.On April 29, Conor Friedersdorf published “Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom” in The Atlantic. As its headline suggests, the essay is a wide-ranging critique of the policies adopted under the DeSantis administration in Florida.Friedersdorf cited a recent DeSantis speech — “I don’t think you have a truly free state just because you have low taxes, low regulation, and no Covid restrictions, if the left is able to impose its agenda through the education system, through the business sphere, through all these others. A free state means you’re protecting your people from the left’s pathologies across the board” — which, Friedersdorf remarks, he would describe instead “as an anti-woke nanny state, not a state that values and protects freedom.”Friedersdorf does not, however, limit his critique to the conservative governor and quite likely presidential candidate, pointedly noting that in his own state of California, a Democratic bastion,Our dearth of freedom to build new dwellings has burdened us with punishing housing costs and immiserating homelessness. Our dearth of educational freedom consigns kids from poor families to failing schools. Our higher-than-average taxes do not yield better-than-average public services or assistance. And during the coronavirus pandemic, far from being a refuge of sanity, California responded with a lot of unscientific overzealousness, like the needless closure of beaches and parks.In practice, neither the left nor right has clean hands on the question of freedom.Conservative Republicans, including but not limited to DeSantis, have enacted restrictions on teaching about race and sex in public schools; have banned books in public libraries; barred cities from passing ordinances on the minimum wage, paid sick leave, firearms policy, plastic bags and marijuana decriminalization; and purposefully sought to suppress voting by minorities and college students.While certainly not equivalent, left-leaning students and faculty have led the charge in seeking to “cancel” professors and public figures who violate progressive orthodoxy, in disrupting conservative speakers on campuses and in seeking to bar or restrict teaching material considered hurtful or harmful to marginalized groups.Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed in an email that Biden and the Democratic Party are well positioned to claim the freedom mantle:I want to suggest two reasons why this focus may not only be warranted but also have great appeal. The first is the battle over abortion rights. The second is the new attitude of Republicans toward the business community.On abortion, she continued, “I would argue that the ability to choose whether or not to have a child is a fundamental right,” adding her belief that:Before the Dobbs decision, we had found a workable compromise on this issue: no or limited abortions after fetal viability around 24 weeks. But the kind of six-week limit that is now the law in Florida and Georgia, not to mention the total ban in 14 other states, is an almost complete abrogation of the rights of women.On the treatment of business, Sawhill wrote: “Republicans have always been the party of corporate America, dedicated to limiting regulation and keeping taxes low. Gov. DeSantis’s attack on Disney and other so-called ‘woke’ companies is beginning to undermine the party’s reputation.”The bottom line, she concluded, was that “when Democrats talk about freedom, it’s not just rhetoric. There is substance behind the message.”Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, makes the case that the threats to freedom from the right are far more dangerous than those from the left.In an April 24 essay, “When Conservatives Used to be Liberals,” he argues that traditionally American conservatives differed from their European counterparts in “their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights and a vigorous private sector.” These principles, he continued, “defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism and multiple limits on state power.”This understanding of conservatism, Fukuyama writes, “has been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.”The result: “American conservatives are now talking more like older European ones,” older ones “like Spain’s Francisco Franco or Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who were happy to see democracy abolished in their countries altogether.”Fukuyama acknowledged:There is plenty to criticize on the woke left, but this new type of conservative is not talking about rolling back particular policies; they are challenging the very premises of the liberal state and toying with outright authoritarianism. They are not simply deluded by lies about the 2020 election, but willing to accept nondemocratic outcomes to get their way.How, Fukuyama asks, could such a dire situation occur in this period of American history?The new illiberal conservatives talk about an “existential” crisis in American life: how the United States as traditionally understood will simply disappear under pressure from the woke left, which then justifies extreme measures in response.In fact, Fukuyama counters:It is hard to think of a time when the United States has been more free than it is in 2023. The much-feared tyranny of the woke left exists only in certain limited sectors of U.S. society — universities, Hollywood, and other cultural spaces, and it only touches on certain issues related to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity. It can be bad in these spaces, but most Americans don’t live there.Fukuyama is correct in citing the right’s exaggerated fears of the “woke” political agenda to justify authoritarian assaults on democracy, but he underestimates the adverse consequences of what many voters view as the freedom-threatening excesses of unrestrained liberalism.These include progressive policies that support the release of potentially violent criminals without bail; progressive prosecutors who refuse to press gun cases; the presence of homeless camps with open drug dealing on the sidewalks of Democratic cities; and the mentally ill roaming urban neighborhoods.For many voters, the consequences of these policies and situations are experienced as infringing on their own freedom to conduct their lives in a safe and secure environment, protected from crime, disease and harassment.Homelessness has become the subject of an ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom, a debate taking place now in New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams provoked angry protests — even before the chokehold death of a homeless man, Jordan Neely, by a passenger on an F train in Manhattan on May 1 — with his call to “involuntarily hospitalize people” who are a danger to themselves.In city centers large and small across the country, advocates for the homeless argue that street people without homes should be allowed to live and camp in public places, while others argue that the state should be empowered to close camps that allegedly pose threats to sanitation and public health — with no resolution in sight.William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, argues in a 2005 essay, “Taking Liberty,” that “for much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders.”From Teddy Roosevelt’s expansion of “the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world” to F.D.R.’s redefinition “to include social protection from the ills of want and fear,” to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to a “civil and political freedom that included all Americans,” Galston maintains that liberals have successfully argued that freedom often can “be advanced only through the vigorous actions of government.”Liberals began to lose command of freedom in the 1960s, Galston concludes:What began honorably in the early 1960s as the effort to expand freedom of speech and self-fulfillment was transformed just a decade later into an antinomian conception of freedom as liberation from all restraint. Enthusiasts could no longer distinguish between liberty and license, and so lost touch with the moral concerns of average citizens, especially parents struggling to raise their children in what they saw as a culture increasingly inhospitable to decency and self-restraint.“As progressives abandoned the discourse of freedom,” Galston writes, “conservatives were more than ready to claim it.”I asked Galston whether he stood by what he wrote 18 years ago. He replied by email:Mostly, but some of it is dated. I did not anticipate that a commitment to fairness and equality of results would morph into a culture of intolerance on college campuses and other areas where a critical mass of progressives has been reached.Looking toward Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, there are conflicting signs favoring both left and right in the competition to determine which side is a more effective proponent of freedom.On the right, conservatives can point to two positive developments, both reflected in polls.The first was the May 7 ABC News/Washington Post survey that suggested Joe Biden is more vulnerable than previously recognized. Both Donald Trump and DeSantis led Biden — Trump by 45 percent to 38 percent, DeSantis by 42 percent to 37 percent.The second survey was a May 5 Washington Post-KFF poll showing that “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children” and “Most Americans (57 percent) don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth.”By nearly two-to-one margins, respondents said, “trans women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls” — in high school sports, 66 percent to 34 percent, and in college sports, 65 percent to 34 percent.These data points are politically significant because Biden is a strong proponent of trans rights, committed to protecting the “fundamental rights and freedoms of trans Americans,” including challenges to state laws barring transgender students from “playing on sports teams” consistent with their gender identity.Conversely, there is no question that Republican state legislators and governors have initiated concerted attacks on freedoms supported by liberals, and that many of these freedoms have wide backing among the public at large.These attacks include book banning, opposed by at least four to one, and bans on abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy. A Wall Street Journal poll in September 2022 found that “62 percent opposed an abortion ban at 6 weeks of pregnancy that only included an exception for the health of the mother, and 57 percent opposed a ban at 15 weeks with an exception only for the health of the mother.”The outcome of the election will determine, at least for a brief period, the direction in which the nation is moving on freedom and liberty. Given the near parity between Republicans and Democrats, neither side appears to be equipped to inflict a knockout blow. But the ABC/Washington Post survey showing both Trump and DeSantis easily beating Biden is a clear warning signal to the Democratic Party and to liberals generally that they cannot — and should not — take anything for granted.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

Some Democrats fear that the campaign’s early sluggishness shows a lack of urgency ahead of a possible rematch against Donald Trump. His aides say they know what they’re doing.Two weeks after President Biden unveiled his re-election bid, his campaign manager has yet to start the job, his seven co-chairs have not had a group discussion and his team has made little outreach to allies in Congress.For all the attention on Mr. Biden’s gauzy announcement video and the symbolism his campaign attributed to the day he entered the race — precisely four years after he began his 2020 bid and with the same message of saving the nation’s very soul — there is little evidence of the typical preparation for a national political campaign.Mr. Biden’s top advisers insist the limited-release nature of his 2024 campaign is boring by design. They say they are holding down costs by outsourcing as much as possible to the Democratic National Committee while the president’s senior staff members remain ensconced in top White House roles that allow them to engage in campaign strategy.“All of the pieces that should and need to fall into place will,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and Democratic megadonor and one of the Biden campaign co-chairs, said in an interview.But for an incumbent president in full control of his own re-election timeline, the decision to begin with such a skeletal operation has left even supporters confused. Democratic allies worry, some in public and more in private, that Mr. Biden and his political team — whose successes have come chiefly by running against Donald J. Trump rather than through organic liberal enthusiasm — are not displaying the necessary urgency for the coming battle.“Part of me is troubled that people are more enthusiastic about doing the often unglamorous work of government policymaking when there’s an extremely important political campaign that is staring us in the face,” said John Del Cecato, a strategist on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “I don’t know if that speaks to a belief that this will be a joyless campaign re-election effort or if it’s something else.”In the coming weeks and months, Mr. Biden will face two of the thorniest political issues of his presidency: an expected upturn of migrants at the Mexican border as a pandemic-era restriction on asylum requests expires this week and a looming debt limit crisis that threatens the American economy.A Trump-era immigration policy that led to the swift expulsion of many migrants at the southern border will lift on Thursday. Officials are bracing for an increase in migrants at the border.Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Biden is headed to a suburb of New York, where he will discuss the debt limit in the district of one of the 18 House Republicans who represent areas that the president carried. Then he will head to Manhattan for two fund-raisers.Representative Mike Lawler, the freshman Republican who represents the district, said that the president’s trip was not intimidating and that he had been invited and planned to attend.“I guess he’s trying to exert pressure in a district he won by 10 points,” Mr. Lawler said. “It speaks volumes that that same district elected me to represent it. And I ran on serving as a check and balance on the Biden agenda.”Money, Biden advisers say, was a driving factor in entering the race. The campaign has already entered into a joint finance agreement with 47 of the 50 state Democratic Parties, which will allow it to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time from individual donors.Top Biden officials dismiss the early concerns from inside the party as sideline sniping. In their view, they rightfully ignored naysayers to keep Mr. Biden in his Delaware basement during the early months of the pandemic, disregarded calls to knock on doors in the fall of 2020 and highlighted threats to democracy in the midterm elections last year despite pleas from many Democrats to focus on the inflation-racked economy.That string of victories has given Biden aides supreme confidence in their stay-the-course instincts, an ethos shared by Mr. Biden and top White House advisers including Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn.“We are meeting all of the goals and metrics we’ve set for ourselves to assemble another winning coalition in 2024,” said Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesman.Jim Messina, who served as Mr. Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, said the Biden team had some advantages that Mr. Obama did not, including a fully operational Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Obama had allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.“They’re staffed in the one place they need to be staffed,” Mr. Messina said of the party and its fund-raising operation, which is organizing the New York events.Polls show that a majority of Democrats want the party to nominate someone other than Mr. Biden. A gloomy Washington Post/ABC News survey released over the weekend found that 58 percent of Democratic-leaning adults felt this way.When it comes to raising money online, this lack of excitement has been a worry for Biden advisers, especially those who recall his 2019 struggles in that arena against his leading liberal rivals.Mr. Munoz declined to say how much money the campaign had raised in its first 24 hours, but ActBlue, the online portal for contributions to Democratic candidates, reported $6.1 million in donations in the first 24 hours after Mr. Biden announced his candidacy. That is about the same as the amounts that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas raised in the first day of their 2020 presidential campaigns.But not all of those ActBlue donations went to Mr. Biden; they make up the total given to every Democrat in the country that day.Mr. Biden is facing a looming showdown over the nation’s debt limit with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fractious Republican caucus. Al Drago for The New York TimesThe campaign is preparing to lean heavily on major donors in the first months of the race, and invited top bundlers to Washington on the first weekend of the campaign for a private briefing. Mr. Katzenberg said the campaign’s fund-raising would rely equally on Mr. Biden’s popularity among Democratic donors and a liberal fear that Mr. Trump could return to the White House.“The difference between passion and anxiety is not discernible,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “Whether somebody is doing this out of their passion and belief in the president — fantastic. If they’re doing it out of anxiety of what the alternative is — fantastic. The color of the green is the same.”Last week, Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder and one of the party’s most important financiers, organized a donor briefing at the Rosewood hotel in San Francisco, pulling in several dozen donors for the pro-Biden super PAC American Bridge, according to two attendees.Notably, the early television ads that the Biden campaign has announced were paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which had $28.7 million on hand at the beginning of April. For now, senior Biden officials are planning to push as many costs as they legally can to the party, which can raise far larger sums. The campaign does not have a physical headquarters yet; for now, aides are working out of the D.N.C.’s building in Washington.Mr. Biden’s New York trip will include two small fund-raisers that are being pulled together relatively hastily. Tony James, a former top executive at the private equity giant Blackstone, is hosting one event, where tickets begin at $25,000, according to invitations. Donors were told that Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, would also attend, and the goal for the two events was to bring in $3 million, according to a person briefed on the plans.For now, the White House seems happy to cede the national stage to the Republican primary race. Mr. Biden’s first television interview after his announcement, on MSNBC, was buried at 10 p.m. last Friday.“It would be unfortunate if they let the Republican nominee govern the conversation on a day-to-day basis,” said Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Mr. Sanders’s 2020 bid. “It feels like too much of a wild card to sit back. You’ve got to figure out a way to excite and energize people about your own conversation and to drive Donald Trump into that one.”Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, said she had yet to hear any outreach about the president’s re-election bid from Biden campaign aides or the campaign’s co-chairs. She said she had seen little excitement about Mr. Biden in her Dallas-area district and had told worried constituents to get behind the president’s re-election.“The stakes are too high for us to play chicken with this,” she said. “We all know that we’ve got issues with our family. But at the end of the day, I would not trade my family in for the alternative.”Mitchell Berger, a South Florida campaign bundler who has been involved in Democratic politics for decades, said the onus should not be on the Biden campaign to generate excitement. He said comparisons to Mr. Obama were not helpful.“President Biden is an exceptional political actor and he does very well with people, but, you know, the excitement generated by the Obamas is a once-in-a-generation kind of thing,” said Mr. Berger, who attended the campaign’s donor gathering in Washington last month.Mr. Katzenberg said Mr. Biden’s campaign had made a deliberate choice to begin without a full staff in place. The campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, remains in her White House job until next week, and other critical roles, including a finance director and a communications director, remain unfilled.“It’s not a question of whether it could or couldn’t have been done, it just wasn’t a priority,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “It’s simply not material, let alone essential, that it get done before.” More

Wednesday’s town hall has already proved divisive — and it could be an unsettling preview for the TV news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely to feature Mr. Trump.Should a leading presidential contender be given the opportunity to speak to voters on live television?What if that contender is former President Donald J. Trump?Mr. Trump is set to appear on CNN on Wednesday night for a town hall in New Hampshire — his first live appearance on a major TV news network (besides those controlled by Rupert Murdoch) since 2020 — and a torrid media debate is swirling.Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty open attempt by CNN to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called the town hall “very hard to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the United States Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged.Those objections intensified on Tuesday after Mr. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice impeached insurrectionist?” Alexander S. Vindman, the Army colonel who was a witness in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter.Mr. Trump is also, at the moment, the highest-polling Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign and the de facto leader of his party. Some veteran TV journalists wonder: What’s the alternative?“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said in an interview. “I’m not sure that news organizations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Wednesday’s town hall, where Mr. Trump will field questions from Republican and undecided voters, is in some ways a stress test — and an unsettling preview — for the television news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely, in its early stages at least, to prominently include Mr. Trump.Any telecast featuring the former president is bound to be divisive. Were anchors too harsh? Too lenient? How quickly did they react to false claims? And foes of Mr. Trump will cringe at seeing him on air at all.But Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS anchor, said that interviews of important political figures were necessary. “There’s no question he might well get the nomination,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for.”CNN faced criticism in 2016 for granting Mr. Trump hours of unfettered airtime during the Republican primary. Jeff Zucker, the network’s president at the time, later acknowledged he had overdone it.Mr. Trump then spent years vilifying the network, leading chants of “CNN sucks” and barring its correspondent Jim Acosta from the White House. A YouGov poll last month found that CNN was the country’s most polarizing major media source, with the widest gap between the portion of Democrats who trust it and the portion of Republicans who don’t.Mr. Trump last appeared on CNN in 2016, and since then much has changed. CNN was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, and Mr. Zucker was replaced; his successor, Chris Licht, pledged to broaden the network’s appeal. He is backed by David Zaslav, the Warner chief executive, who has batted away objections to Wednesday’s Trump town hall.“The U.S. has a divided government; we need to hear both voices,” Mr. Zaslav said last week on CNBC, where he was questioned repeatedly about the decision to host Mr. Trump. “When we do politics, we need to represent both sides. I think it’s important for America.”Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has soured on Fox News, irked by Mr. Murdoch’s support for a potential Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. And he has taken notice of Mr. DeSantis’s aversion to appearing on mainstream outlets like CNN.Mr. Trump and CNN are not exactly reconciled. There is the awkward fact that Mr. Trump still has a pending $475 million defamation lawsuit against the network. And in a missive on Truth Social on Tuesday, the former president told fans that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.” He added: “Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?”As olive branches go, it felt a bit spindly. But David Chalian, CNN’s political director, shrugged it off. “We never stopped covering him as president despite everything he said about us,” Mr. Chalian said in an interview. “We never stopped doing our jobs.”CNN executives will air Mr. Trump’s remarks live, without any time delay. That means if Mr. Trump makes a false claim, it will be up to the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, or an onscreen graphic to correct him in real time. Mr. Trump’s last three interviews on Fox News were prerecorded. (Fox recently paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, after several of its anchors amplified Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the company.)In the interview, Mr. Chalian said that CNN was “in the business of live news events — that’s what we do.” He added, “I obviously can’t control what Donald Trump says, but what we can control is our journalism.”CNN did not agree to preconditions for the town hall, Mr. Chalian said — “No question is off the table” — and Ms. Collins has spent several days preparing for the broadcast. Selecting Ms. Collins to moderate is in keeping with Mr. Licht’s emphasis on reporting over punditry; Ms. Collins is best known for day-to-day White House coverage and previously worked at The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet.Mr. Koppel, in the interview, said Ms. Collins was a “tough and able” journalist who could handle Mr. Trump in a live setting. He said CNN had many reasons to go forward with the event.“Has Trump pushed the boundaries of honesty, good taste, decency, humanity, to such a degree that we should not put him on the air at all, unless we’ve had the chance to sanitize what he has to say?” Mr. Koppel said. “I can understand that’s a reasonable question to ask. But it puts a very heavy burden on the shoulders of the people who run our networks. Because it means we are going to let them decide who gets on the air, and who doesn’t.” More

The former House January 6 committee member Liz Cheney released an attack ad against Donald Trump in New Hampshire on the eve of his appearance there in a controversial CNN town hall.“There has never been a greater dereliction of duty by any president,” Cheney warns in the ad, which focuses on Trump’s incitement of the deadly Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.“Donald Trump has proven he is unfit for office. Donald Trump is a risk America can never take again.”Trump incited the attack by his supporters in an attempt to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. Nine deaths have been linked to it. Thousands of arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured – some for seditious conspiracy.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans.Cheney, the daughter of the former congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney, was vice-chair of the House committee which investigated the Capitol attack and, regarding Trump, made criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.Cheney lost her Wyoming seat to a Trump-backed challenger last year.Now working on a book – entitled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning – she has not counted out running for the Republican nomination against Trump, or running for president as an independent conservative.Her new ad will run only on CNN in New Hampshire, where at St Anselm College on Wednesday night, CNN will host a Trump town hall with Republican voters.CNN has defended its decision to host Trump by pointing out that he is the clear Republican frontrunner. Cheney’s ad will run before and during the town hall.The same day Cheney’s ad came out, Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation in a case brought by E Jean Carroll, a writer who claims Trump raped her. Ordered to pay around $5m in damages, Trump responded angrily, denying wrongdoing and saying he would appeal.Trump faces legal jeopardy on a scale unprecedented for a presidential candidate, let alone the clear leader for a major party nomination.Investigators in Georgia are expected soon to announce indictments related to Trump’s attempted election subversion there.The federal investigation into his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, and his incitement of the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, goes on.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal authorities are also examining Trump’s retention of classified information after leaving office.Last month in New York, he pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal counts related to his hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair Trump denies.Trump also faces a New York state civil suit over his business and tax affairs.Nonetheless, Trump leads by wide margins in polling regarding the Republican nomination in 2024. Cheney barely features.Speaking to the New York Times, a spokesperson for Trump called Cheney “a stone-cold loser who is now trying to grift her way to relevance”.Conversely, the Guardian columnist Robert Reich has said Cheney “has displayed more courage and integrity than almost any other member of her party – indeed, given the pressure she was under, perhaps more than any lawmaker now alive”. More

Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse.Donald Trump’s legal problems are growing deeper.Yesterday, a jury found the former president liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, ordering him to pay her $5 million. The case was a civil trial, which means that Trump is not subject to prison time. But the verdict indicates that jurors believed Carroll’s claim that Trump assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.Carroll also accused Trump of raping her. The jury ruled against Carroll on that count, finding insufficient evidence to support her allegation.Today’s newsletter will walk through the details of the case, the reactions to the verdict and the potential political consequences.The caseAt the heart of the lawsuit was Carroll’s account of her encounter with Trump, which she described in detail during the trial. She said that she saw him outside the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan nearly three decades ago, and that he had asked her to help find a gift for a female friend. The two bantered while walking through the store, and he asked her to try on a gray-blue bodysuit from the lingerie section. She declined and told him to put it on instead. Trump then motioned her into a dressing room, where he threw her against the wall, used his weight to pin her down and raped her, according to Carroll.The episode “left me unable to ever have a romantic life again,” Carroll said. (She was able to sue after so much time had passed under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that provides victims of abuse a one-time opportunity to sue the accused.)To make her case, Carroll and her lawyers relied on Trump’s history of comments denigrating women. They pointed to the “Access Hollywood” tape, released during the 2016 election, on which he had boasted that he could grab women by their genitals without their permission. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump said. He stood by those remarks during a deposition in the Carroll case.Carroll’s lawyers argued that Trump’s comments showed he was capable of the assault that she had accused him of. The jury, composed of six men and three women, concluded that the allegations of sexual abuse, but not of rape, were more likely to be true than untrue, holding Trump liable.Trump denied the accusations. He did not testify, and his lawyers called no witnesses as a defense in the trial. He previously told reporters that the allegations could not be true because Carroll was not his “type.”Trump promised to appeal the verdict. “I have absolutely no idea who this woman is,” Trump posted yesterday on Truth Social, his social media platform. “This verdict is a disgrace — a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!”The reactionsTrump is set to appear live on a CNN town hall tonight, where he will take questions from voters.Many of Trump’s political rivals and opponents, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, stayed quiet about the verdict. Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author running for president, defended Trump: “I’ll say what everyone else is privately thinking: If the defendant weren’t named Donald Trump, would there even be a lawsuit?”One 2024 candidate did criticize Trump. “The jury verdict should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump,” Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas’s former governor and a longtime Trump critic, said.The political impactIt is not clear how the verdict will affect Trump’s presidential campaign. His poll numbers against DeSantis, his main potential rival in the Republican primary, improved even after a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records.But Trump’s advisers are not making a similar prediction after the Carroll verdict, my colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote.Trump is almost certain to confront more legal problems before the 2024 election. The Manhattan trial could start as soon as next January. Trump is also under investigation for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents.More on the verdictMore than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, but Carroll’s is the only allegation that a jury has affirmed.Why was Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape? New York law gave jurors three types of battery to consider.While the verdict may have been foreseeable, how Republicans will respond is less clear, David French writes in Times Opinion.The verdict is a reminder that the legal onslaught against Trump can’t be deflected with lies, Michelle Goldberg writes in Times Opinion.THE LATEST NEWSPoliticsSpeaker Kevin McCarthy, left, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPresident Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy did not reach a consensus over the debt ceiling. They agreed to meet again.Representative George Santos, the New York Republican whose finances have been under investigation, faces federal criminal charges.A recent poll showed Trump leading Biden in the 2024 race. It was an outlier, Nate Cohn writes, but its message is clear: Don’t underestimate Trump.Lawmakers in Texas are pushing voting restrictions that only apply to Harris County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Houston.Senate Democrats asked the billionaire Harlan Crow for a full accounting of his gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas.Florida officials demanded revisions to school textbooks mentioning socialism and Black Lives Matter protests.InternationalA naval guardsman killed at least three people at a synagogue during a Jewish pilgrimage in Tunisia.The Israeli army launched airstrikes on the Islamic Jihad armed group in Gaza, killing three of its leaders and 10 civilians, Palestinian officials said. Here’s a guide to the group.Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was arrested on corruption charges. He accuses the military of conspiring against him.HealthThe U.S. will end its Covid emergency tomorrow, winding down programs that began when the virus dominated everyday life.Women should have regular mammograms starting at age 40 rather than 50, an expert panel said.Other Big StoriesTucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said he would start a show on Twitter. That could violate his deal with the network.New York City, where about half of middle schoolers are not proficient in reading, is changing how it teaches the subject.The Metropolitan Museum of Art will hire a team to scour its collections for looted treasures.A woman wrote a children’s book to help her sons process their father’s death. Now she is accused of killing him.OpinionsIf cities want to survive the unpredictability of our climate, they should accommodate an unpredictable ecosystem, Ben Wilson argues.A new Netflix docudrama depicts Cleopatra as culturally Black, Gwen Nally and Mary Hamil Gilbert write.Here are columns by Jamelle Bouie on mass shootings and Thomas Friedman on Vladimir Putin.MORNING READSIn Japanese, these foods are fuwa fuwa, which means “fluffy fluffy.”Esther ChoiBeyond crunchy: Cuisines around the world prize texture as much as taste.Hiatus: Some women are taking the summer off from dating apps.Metropolitan Diary: Mic drop at the opera.Health: How to spot — and remove — skin tags.Canine needs: Walking your dog with a harness is safer than leading them by the collar.Advice from Wirecutter: The best Mother’s Day gifts.Lives Lived: Grace Bumbry’s vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars. She died at 86.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICN.B.A. playoffs: The Nuggets and Sixers earned 3-2 series leads with victories last night. Women’s soccer: It’s notable enough to be the first Native American to play in the N.W.S.L., but Madison Hammond is much more.An uncertain future: The Oakland A’s agreed to their second land deal in a month for property in Las Vegas, where the franchise plans to move.ARTS AND IDEAS Buddy Holly won Best in Show at the 147th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesBest in showBuddy Holly, a petit basset griffon Vendéen, took the top prize at the Westminster Dog Show. He’s the first of his breed — better known as P.B.G.V., because that is easier to say — to do so. (Second place went to Rummie, a Pekingese whose breeder and handler, David Fitzpatrick, has produced two previous best in show winners, including Wasabi, the 2021 champion.)“I have dreamed of this since I was 9 years old,” said Buddy Holly’s owner and trainer, Janice Hayes. She said the dog was “the epitome of a show dog; nothing bothers him.” Now he gets to relax and go back to his daily life, which involves hanging out with “his girlfriends,” Hayes said. “He never has a bad day”: The Times’s Sarah Lyall visited Striker, a Samoyed who was a crowd favorite at last year’s show.Two Times photographers went behind the scenes. Do not miss their pictures.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookAndrew Purcell for The New York TimesThe secret ingredient in this spaghetti Bolognese is Worcestershire sauce.What to Watch“Dealing With Dad” is a lighthearted movie about generational trauma and chronic depression. What to Listen toHere are six new songs you should hear.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was windfall. Here are today’s puzzle and the Bee Buddy, which helps you find remaining words.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle and Sudoku.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — GermanP.S. Emma Goldberg, who covers the future of work, wants to hear how readers’ jobs have changed in the past few years.Here’s today’s front page. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected]. More

The bills propose limits on polling places, tougher penalties for illegal voting and a way for the Republican-led state to order new elections in its largest city.HOUSTON — Across Harris County, an emerging Democratic stronghold in reliably red Texas, roadside signs posted last November urged harried drivers to vote Republican. A celebrity furniture salesman, beloved by many Houstonians, cut ads with the Republican candidate for the top county administrator’s post.The 2022 races for local judges and county leaders were among the hardest fought and most expensive yet seen in the sprawling county of 4.8 million, which includes Houston, as Republicans looked to capitalize on crime concerns to make headway in the state’s largest urban area.But they fell short.Now, the county is in the cross hairs of the Republican-dominated state Legislature, which is trying to exert more control over voting there. Lawmakers are pushing dozens of new election bills, including limits on polling places, felony penalties for illegal voting and a mechanism for the state to order new elections when voting problems occur in Texas counties with more than 2.7 million people, a category that includes only Harris County.At the same time, more than a dozen election challenges have been filed by losing Republican candidates in the county who have argued that significant problems at a limited number of polling places on Election Day, including insufficient supplies of ballot paper, were enough change the outcomes of races. While local leaders acknowledge issues, evidence has not been presented that they affected the results.Still, the two-front fight, both in the courts and in the State Capitol, highlighted just how important it is for Republicans to keep Harris County in play and not let it become another strongly blue urban center along the lines of Austin or Dallas. As recently as 2014, the party controlled the county, whose Republican top official was re-elected in a landslide. But it has been moving left ever since.“I tell people, we could be the reason we lose Texas, just because of our size,” said Cindy Siegel, the chair of the county Republican Party, sitting in her office under a painting of George W. Bush with smoke rising from Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, 2001.“We’re the wall,” she added. “And they say, so goes Texas, so goes the country. So Harris County is the battleground.”Harris County, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, includes the reliably Democratic city of Houston.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe election bills aimed at the county are part of a broad effort by Republican state leaders to increase their control over Texas’ Democratic-run urban areas. They include bills prohibiting local governments from adopting certain local ordinances, including over worker pay or hours, and allowing for the removal of elected local prosecutors who refuse to enforce certain laws, such as those banning abortion. The approach mirrors those in other red states with large blue cities, such as Tennessee and Florida.Republican lawmakers in Texas passed an overhaul of election rules just two years ago in a bitter fight with Democrats. They returned to the subject this session in large part to address the results in Harris County in November.The election there provided a contentious backdrop because there were real issues during the vote. Some polling places opened late, while others struggled with enough paper to accommodate the two-sheet ballot printouts needed for the county’s huge list of races. The local district attorney, a Democrat, opened an investigation last year.“The legislative push is to make sure that this never happens in any county in Texas,” said Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and the sponsor of several of the bills. “I believe the lack of ballot paper is voter suppression.”But county officials said the election bills do not address the issues that arose in Harris County. Instead, they said, the proposed laws could dampen turnout by limiting voting options and would give a partisan secretary of state, an official appointed by the governor, the power to overturn results and order a new vote if ballot paper issues arose again.Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, said the election challenges appeared to try to lay the groundwork for giving Republicans more control over the elections in a Democratic county. “It is a solution in search of a problem that’s not widespread,” he said.“As a Black man whose grandfather paid a poll tax, this whole ordeal is infuriating,” said Mr. Menefee, a Democrat. “It’s a complete misuse of the word disenfranchisement from people who, by the way, are still working to disenfranchise folks.”The scale of the problems on Election Day — which featured new voting machines and a lengthy ballot that required two pages of paper per voter — remain a matter of dispute, both in court and before the Legislature. But they do not appear to have affected the vast majority of the county’s 782 polling locations.Election workers organized ballot machines and results at NRG Arena in Houston on Election Day in 2022.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesAt a hearing before a State House committee in March, the head of the secretary of state’s elections division said that despite logistical problems, the 2022 election “was one of the best elections we’ve seen” in several years in Harris County, though he acknowledged it was a low bar given the roundly criticized primary election earlier in the year.Republicans have said the November results were indeed affected because, they have argued, the ballot issues arose in precincts where their voters turn out in large numbers. Democratic county officials have said the problems occurred in other areas as well and were limited in scope: A postelection report by the election administrator, Clifford Tatum, found that 68 polling places reported running out of paper on Election Day, and 61 said they later received additional paper.County officials have resisted releasing documents and other information about the handling of voting issues on Election Day in response to public information requests, citing the ongoing litigation. Among Senator Bettencourt’s election bills is one that would remove the “litigation exception” for requests for certain election records.With that backdrop, the State Senate has advanced more than a dozen election bills, explicitly or implicitly aimed at Harris County, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island that includes not only the reliably Democratic city of Houston but also some of its more moderate suburbs.The county since 2016 has shifted ever more firmly into the Democratic column in presidential races and local ones as well, as formerly conservative neighborhoods and growing Houston suburbs have grown more diverse and trended blue. The political make-up of the five-member commissioners court, which administers the county, has gone from a three-two Republican majority in 2014 to a four-one Democratic majority now.Republicans are hoping, if not to reverse that trend, then at least to keep the contests close and, sometimes, winnable.“The Texas Legislature will ensure that there are consequences for Harris County’s failure to run elections,” said Senator Mayes Middleton, a Houston-area Republican and the sponsor of the bill to allow the secretary of state to order new elections in certain cases of ballot paper problems. “Disenfranchising voters is unacceptable,” Mr. Middletown said, in a statement.Also of concern to Democrats and advocates of expanding access to the polls is another bill, which passed the State Senate last month, that would limit voters to their assigned polling place. Some counties, including Harris County, currently allow voters to cast a ballot anywhere in the county.“It’s definitely one of the most damaging,” said Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, because by limiting voters’ options it could decrease turnout. The bill, like others that have made it through the Senate, must still pass the more moderate, Republican-controlled State House.In the last election, voters whose polling places ran out of paper were able to go to another location in the county, though some gave up without voting.Twenty-one Republican candidates have filed election challenges, including Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who lost the Harris County judge race by 18,000 votes.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesMany of the legal challenges to the November election in Harris County involve voters who were unable to cast ballots.Leila Perrin said she had gone to vote in a more conservative section of West Houston shortly before the polls closed on Election Day and encountered a chaotic scene. “I went to get out of my car, and these people were leaving and they said, ‘Don’t bother,’” she recalled. “I said ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘They don’t have any paper ballots.’”Ms. Perrin, 72, had planned to vote against the top county official, the Democratic county judge Lina Hidalgo. So she drove to another polling site nearby and found the same situation. By then it was 10 minutes before the polls closed. “So I just went home. I was furious,” she said.Twenty-one Republican candidates have filed election challenges including Ms. Perrin’s favored candidate, Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who lost to Ms. Hidalgo by 18,000 votes. The first trial is set to begin in June.Some voters also found themselves unable to vote in predominantly Democratic precincts temporarily on Election Day, though no Democratic candidates have filed challenges. For example, voters were turned away from one such location that did not open for hours. All polls in the county were ordered to stay open an extra hour under an emergency court order, but then voting was halted by the Texas Supreme Court after an appeal from the Republican attorney general.“Issues don’t mean conspiracies,” said Representative John Bucy, a Democratic member of the Texas House elections committee. “Our elections are run effectively in the state of Texas. Nothing is perfect, but they’re effective.”At a hearing of the elections committee last month, an election judge in Harris County said he had run out of paper by 6 p.m. on Election Day despite flagging the issue several times during the day.“We had about 40 people in line, most of whom left to find another polling place,” said the judge, Christopher Russo. Those who stayed would be able to vote, he said he told them, but he could not guarantee how long it would take to get the paper.“I finally received ballot paper at 9:05 p.m.,” he said. By that time, only four people remained in line. More