Elections

Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt may feel too early to be thinking about the 2024 presidential election — but it’s the perfect time to understand where the parties are at, and how their plans for the next election cycle are shaping up.In our first episode, we join the Republican National Committee in Dana Point, Calif., as it gathers for its winter meeting. After a disappointing midterms, fractures have formed within the committee’s ranks. After targeting Kevin McCarthy in the fight for House speaker, the grass roots turned their ire on Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the R.N.C.The effort to replace Ms. McDaniel at this year’s winter meeting is emblematic of what the party is at this moment: a mess of tangled lines and scrambled allegiances.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbout ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

What should we make of the role that abortion played in both the Chicago and Wisconsin elections this week?The elections this week in Chicago and Wisconsin were different in many ways. One was for mayor, the other for a state Supreme Court seat. One was in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the other in a closely divided swing state.But there was at least one issue — abortion — that was part of both campaigns. And the outcomes of both elections had something in common: The more liberal candidate won.In Wisconsin, abortion dominated the race to fill a pivotal seat on the state Supreme Court, with the winner, Janet Protasiewicz, making clear that she would vote to overturn the state’s abortion ban. She beat Daniel Kelly by 11 percentage points.In Chicago, the issue played a much smaller role, partly because mayors have little control over abortion policy. Still, the winner, Brandon Johnson, used a past statement of personal opposition to abortion by his opponent, Paul Vallas, as part of an argument that Vallas was far too conservative for Chicago. Johnson won by about three percentage points.Together, the elections add to the evidence that abortion can be a potent issue for left-leaning candidates in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s unpopular overturning of Roe v. Wade. Some Democrats have come to see the post-Roe politics of abortion as so favorable that they believe the party should organize its 2024 campaign around the issue, as Rebecca Traister recently described in New York magazine. These Democrats’ argument is as simple as the headline on the magazine’s cover: “Abortion wins elections.”Today, I want to examine that claim, considering the supporting and conflicting evidence. With help from colleagues, I’ll also help you understand the other lessons from Chicago and Wisconsin.‘What happened?’After the Supreme Court overturned Roe last June and allowed states to ban abortion, more than a dozen quickly imposed tight restrictions. Today, abortion is largely illegal in most of red America, even though polls suggest many voters in these states support at least some access.In response, Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning states emphasized abortion in last year’s midterm campaigns. The Democrats saw it as a way to energize liberals and win over swing voters and moderate Republicans:In Georgia, as CNN reported in September, Stacey Abrams had “found an issue to center her campaign around as Election Day approaches: protecting abortion rights in Georgia.” Abrams, a Democrat, was trying to defeat Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.In Florida, television commercials for Democratic Senate and governor candidates mentioned abortion nearly 28,000 times, according to one estimate.In Ohio and Texas, Democrats also emphasized the issue in statewide races.Democratic donors were hopeful enough about all these races that they poured money into them — and yet the party lost all of them. In some cases, the outcomes were landslides. “Abortion was supposed to be a defining issue for Florida Democrats,” read a headline in The Tampa Bay Times. “What happened?”The answer seems to be that abortion is a winning issue for Democrats, but only in some circumstances. When a campaign revolves around the subject — as the Wisconsin Supreme Court race did this week and voter referendums in Kansas, Kentucky and Michigan did last year — abortion can win big even in purple or red states. And when abortion serves as a symbol of a candidate’s broader conservatism — as in Chicago, and as some Democrats have used it in other mayoral races — the tactic can also work.But there is not yet evidence that abortion can determine the outcome of most political campaigns. In hotly contested races — for governor, Congress and other offices — most voters make their decisions based on an array of issues. And many Republican voters who support some abortion access are nonetheless willing to support a candidate who does not.In the latest edition of his newsletter, Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, combines abortion with another major issue — democracy — and makes the following argument: “If the 2022 midterm elections offered any lesson, it was that liberals excel when abortion and democracy are on the ballot. Liberal voters turn out en masse. A crucial sliver of voters — perhaps as few as one in every 30 or 40 — will flip to vote for the Democrat when they otherwise would have voted Republican.”My colleague Reid Epstein, who covered the Wisconsin race, put it this way: “The difference in Wisconsin is that voters were playing with live ammunition. The Protasiewicz campaign and Democrats broadly made it clear from the very beginning to voters that she would be the deciding vote to strike down the state’s 1849 abortion law, while the conservative in the race, Daniel Kelly, would be a vote to keep it.”For the other implications of the Wisconsin race, especially for the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislative maps, I recommend Reid’s latest article.More on ChicagoIn Chicago, Johnson offered a playbook for winning an election in a heavily Democratic city as a strong progressive. Johnson ran left in the first round of voting, becoming the favored candidate of liberal activists, and then moved back to the center in the final round (by effectively disavowing his earlier support for defunding the police).He has signaled that as mayor he will pursue a progressive agenda, raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for new services “Johnson talked frequently on the campaign trail about public safety,” Julie Bosman, The Times’s Chicago bureau chief, told me, “but he spoke about it in the larger context of increasing funding for public schools, creating anti-poverty programs and doubling youth employment.”Julie added: “This election tested the limits of the old-fashioned law-and-order message that drove Eric Adams’s win in New York. Voters I talked to at the polls yesterday said they were concerned about crime, but many of them said that they favored Johnson’s approach of building up social programs to fight poverty and violence, rather than trying to flood the streets with more police officers, as Vallas advocated.”For more on Chicago, see Mitch Smith’s story about how Johnson united a coalition of young, Black and progressive voters.Related:Idaho made it illegal to help someone under 18 leave the state to get an abortion without parental consent.“Who would like to watch me slay a zombie?” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, asked before signing legislation repealing Michigan’s abortion ban.Republicans gained a supermajority in North Carolina’s legislature after a Democrat switched parties. It could let them ban abortions.THE LATEST NEWSTrump IndictmentDonald Trump spent nearly an hour inside a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday. Here’s what happened.Trump’s charges bring uncertainty to both parties: Some think the case is flimsy, others that it has the potential to reverberate politically.Some of Trump’s aides acknowledge that the Manhattan case is bad for his campaign.Republicans say they will question Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, about Trump, but the reality is more complicated.From “all a pattern of behavior” to “such nonsense,” four Times Opinion writers assess the indictment.InternationalThese maps show Russia’s gains in Ukraine this year: three small settlements and part of the city of Bakhmut, a battlefield with limited strategic value.Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, are speaking in Beijing today. Macron said China could help bring peace to Ukraine.Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan’s president in California, a show of defiance to China.Other Big StoriesTennessee Republicans will vote today on whether to expel three Democratic lawmakers who joined a gun-control protest in the state legislature.A tech executive who founded Cash App was stabbed to death on the street in San Francisco.Catholic clergy in Baltimore abused hundreds of children and teenagers over six decades, according to the Maryland attorney general.In Ohio, a state that depends on the auto industry, electric cars are reshaping jobs.Oil and gas projects are back: Alaska’s Willow Project is one of hundreds that have been approved worldwide in the past year.A study rebutted decades of research claiming that moderate drinking has health benefits.OpinionsPerforming an abortion in Tennessee is a felony. Dr. Elise Boos has been doing it anyway.If something is advertised to you online, you probably shouldn’t buy it, Julia Angwin writes.MORNING READSHOKABig sneaker: Hokas broke the billion-dollar mark in 2022. How?Fancì Club: Meet the man behind the internet’s favorite outfits.Astronaut wrangling: NASA can send people to space. Engineering a surprise proved tricky.Retirement: Should we rethink how many years we work?Advice from Wirecutter: See if an outdoor TV is right for you.Lives Lived: Klaus Teuber began designing board games to unwind. One of his creations was The Settlers of Catan. Teuber died at 70.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICTee time: Only three players have repeated as Masters champions: Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo and Jack Nicklaus. Can Scottie Scheffler join them? Here are 10 things to know about this year’s tournament.Bucks and Nuggets clinch: Milwaukee and Denver are the No. 1 seeds in the N.B.A. playoffs. ARTS AND IDEAS The pianist Kirill Gerstein.Stephan RaboldReconsidering RachmaninoffSergei Rachmaninoff is a popular composer, but many classical music experts dismiss him as a sentimentalist who leaned into nostalgia. Now, 150 years after Rachmaninoff’s birth, the pianist Kirill Gerstein is re-examining the composer’s artistry.“We’ve tried various ways of dismissing it,” Gerstein said of Rachmaninoff’s catalog, “and it’s not going away, so possibly we can say: Well, maybe it’s not just because it’s pretty and it’s popular, but because it has a real core of aesthetic value.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookBobbi Lin for The New York TimesHot cross buns are a delicious symbol of Easter.What to ReadIn “The Peking Express,” James Zimmerman tells the story of justice-seeking bandits who derailed a train in rural China a century ago.What to Listen toFive minutes that will make you love the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams.Late NightThe hosts discussed Trump’s return to Mar-a-Lago.Now Time to PlayThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were cofounded and confounded. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Prohibit (three letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidBecause of an editing error, yesterday’s newsletter misstated the history of the type of charges against Donald Trump. The Manhattan district attorney more frequently files charges of falsifying business records as felonies, not misdemeanors.P.S. Washington State University gave Dean Baquet, The Times’s former executive editor, its Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award.Here’s today’s front page.“The Daily” is about U.S.-Africa relations.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected]. More

For Beijing, showing displeasure too openly carries risks, particularly of harming the chances for its preferred party in Taiwan’s coming presidential election.China fired off a volley of condemnations on Thursday after Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, met the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, but it held off from the kind of military escalation that threatened a crisis last summer, when Mr. McCarthy’s predecessor visited Taiwan.China’s angry reaction to the meeting between Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy in California followed weeks of warnings from Beijing, which treats Taiwan as an illegitimate breakaway region whose leaders should be shunned abroad. Despite the combative words, any retaliation by Beijing in coming days may be tempered by the difficult calculations facing China’s leader, Xi Jinping, including over Taiwan’s coming presidential race.Soon after the meeting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, China’s ministry of defense, foreign ministry and other offices in Beijing issued warnings to Taiwan and the United States.“Do not go down this dark path of ‘riding on the back of the U.S. to seek independence,” said the Chinese Communist Party’s office for Taiwan policy. “Any bid for ‘independence’ will be smashed to pieces by the power of sons and daughters of China opposed to ‘independence’ and advancing unification.”So far though, Beijing’s pugnacious language has not been matched by a big military response like the one last year. After the previous speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan in August in a show of solidarity, China’s People’s Liberation Army held days of miliary exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan.Early Thursday, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense detected one Chinese military plane that entered the “air defense identification zone” off Taiwan — an informal area where aircraft are supposed to declare their presence — and three Chinese navy vessels in seas off the island. Last year, China announced its blockade exercise on the same day that Ms. Pelosi arrived in Taipei.Taiwan military vessels docked at a Navy base in Suao, Taiwan, on Thursday.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times“China is not doing the kind of saber rattling that they were doing before the Pelosi visit. They haven’t set the stage in the same way,” said Patrick M. Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute, who attended a closed-door speech Ms. Tsai gave in New York last week. “They’re going to have their hands close around the throat of Taiwan, but we’ll have to see how they squeeze.”Mr. Xi, anointed last month to a third term as president, wants to deter Taiwan from high-level contacts abroad. Yet he is also trying to improve China’s relations with Western governments, restore economic growth and aid the chances of his favored party in Taiwan’s presidential election in January. An extended military crisis over Taiwan could hurt all three goals, especially the last one.“On the one hand, there’s a desire to signal to Taiwan, to the U.S. and also to Taiwan voters, that efforts to raise Taiwan’s international profile are unacceptable from China’s standpoint,” said Scott L. Kastner, a professor of politics at the University of Maryland. But, he added, “on balance the incentives are for the People’s Republic of China to act with more restraint than usual in the run-up to the election.”China’s ties with Europe, Australia and other Western governments have been damaged by disputes over Covid, Chinese political influence abroad, and Mr. Xi’s ties to Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is in China this week, and he is among the European leaders who Mr. Xi hopes can be coaxed away from Washington’s hard line on China.President Emmanuel Macron of France is welcomed by Chinese Premier Minister Li Qiang at the Great Hall of the People on Thursday in Beijing.Pool photo by Thibault CamusA menacing display by the People’s Liberation Army could also hurt the presidential hopes of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Nationalists, which favors stronger ties with China. Ms. Tsai must step down next year, and a crisis in the Taiwan Strait could help galvanize support for her Democratic Progressive Party and undercut the Nationalists’ case for more cooperation with Beijing.“Beijing will want to visibly register its displeasure, lest its leaders be accused at home of tolerating Taiwan’s efforts to move further away from China,” said Ryan Hass, a former adviser on China policy to President Obama and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “At the same time, Beijing also will want to preserve some headroom for further escalation should future circumstances require.”In Beijing and Taipei, memories linger of 1995, when Lee Teng-hui, then president of Taiwan, gave a speech celebrating Taiwan’s democratic transformation while visiting the United States. China condemned Mr. Lee’s visit and responded with military exercises that resumed in 1996. President Lee soundly won another term that year, despite Beijing’s missiles.President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan delivering a lecture at his alma mater, Cornell University, in 1995. Bob Strong/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 2020, Ms. Tsai rebounded from low approval ratings to win a second term after a Beijing-backed crackdown on protests in Hong Kong repulsed voters in Taiwan.“Beijing likely has learned from past experience that whenever it uses tough fire-and-fury rhetoric around Taiwan’s presidential election, usually that invites voter backlash,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist with the Taiwan Studies Program of the Australian National University in Canberra.Still, if Taiwanese voters felt that Ms. Tsai was goading Beijing, that could hurt her standing and her party’s image. Her trip to the United States reflected her careful calculus: She sought to deepen Taiwan’s ties with Washington, while avoiding giving China an excuse for a new round of threatening military exercises.In California, Ms. Tsai thanked the Republican and Democrat lawmakers who attended. “Their presence and unwavering support reassure the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated,” she said, standing next to Mr. McCarthy.Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy at a news conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesMany in Taiwan, especially supporters of Ms. Tsai’s government, believe that such meetings are important, despite Beijing’s warnings.“Taiwan is already very alone, and it’s very dangerous if we don’t show we have friends, especially the United States,” said Kao Teng-sheng, a businessman in Chiayi, a city in southern Taiwan, who previously ran a factory in southern China. “If she did not meet McCarthy, that would also be dangerous for Taiwan. It would look like we are panicking.”Taiwan’s presidential race is likely to come down to a contest between the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te, currently the vice president, and a Nationalist contender, possibly Hou You-yi, the popular mayor of New Taipei City. Beijing would prefer a Nationalist leader in Taipei, and over recent days has been hosting, and feting, Ma Ying-jeou, the previous Nationalist president.“In military threats, China’s attitude won’t soften, but it will also invite those like Ma Ying-jeou to China,” said I-Chung Lai, a former director of the China affairs section of the Democratic Progressive Party and now a senior adviser to the Taiwan Thinktank in Tapei.Beijing’s dismal relations with Washington may also factor into Mr. Xi’s calculations. At a summit in November, he and President Biden tried to rein in tensions over technology bans, military rivalry, human rights, and Chinese support for Russia.U.S. President Biden meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThose efforts stalled in February after the Biden administration revealed that a Chinese surveillance balloon was floating over the United States, and Mr. Xi affirmed his support for Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, during a summit in Moscow, despite the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A new crisis over Taiwan could push the strains between Beijing and Washington to a dangerous limit.Some Taiwanese analysts have said that China may announce some military exercises around Taiwan after Mr. Ma, the visiting former president, returns to Taipei on Friday.Even with Taiwan’s looming election, “if the Chinese Communist Party faces what it believes is a violation of its very core fundamental positions or interests, then it seems it won’t go soft on Taiwan,” said Huang Kwei-Bo, a professor of international relations at the National Chengchi University in Taipei who is a former deputy secretary-general of the Nationalist Party. More

Finally, here we are: Donald Trump’s first indictment. The 34 felony counts unsealed at his arraignment this week focus on the falsification of business records in the first degree, a low-level felony charge. This indictment may not prove to be the rock-solid legal case one might hope it to be. It neither addresses the gravest allegations leveled at Trump — subverting the vote, attempted coup, rape — nor is it the most potentially persuasive case against him under consideration. Whether the evidence proves strong enough to convict him will be up to legal analysts to parse and ultimately, a jury to decide months from now.But for the moment, let’s appreciate the karmic justice of these particular charges — no matter the outcome. Falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star, brings us full circle to the sleaziness we knew about well before Trump ever set foot in office. In the indictment’s focus on Trump’s financial malfeasance and his flagrant misogyny, the charges recall two pivotal events that took place before his election: his failure to disclose his tax returns and the contemptuous behavior revealed in the “Access Hollywood” tape.Both told us everything we could have expected from a Trump presidency. Both should have stopped Trump from becoming president. And the fact that they didn’t — that roughly half of American voters were willing to overlook Trump’s moral failings in the service of politics — shows why the country is still so intractably polarized. But neither side can claim it didn’t know exactly the kind of person who was elected in the first place.Let’s step back, then, to Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate in the 2016 election. Anyone who’d been following his antics for decades assumed, wrongly, that nobody would take seriously the prospect of a corrupt businessman, third-tier reality TV showman and object of tabloid ridicule as president.That many Americans nonetheless did take the prospect seriously seemed bound to be undone by those two pre-election events. First, Trump’s refusal to release his tax records was a departure from years of accepted practice. If he had nothing to hide, he would have shared his returns. If he had been telling the truth, he wouldn’t have repeatedly said he intended to share his returns. And if he couldn’t abide by this seemingly innocuous precedent, we knew he would not follow others. And that’s what we got: the blatant graft that marked his term in office, whether it was his rampant financial conflicts of interest, his frequent self-dealings and misuse of the Trump International Hotel and other properties or the taxpayer-funded excesses and shady profit-seeking by members of his extended family.The second event was the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, which revealed a man with such disdain for women that he would respect neither their humanity nor their bodily autonomy. To anyone paying attention, Trump’s vocal contempt for women had been on display in New York and on “The Howard Stern Show” for decades. But “Access Hollywood” made it plain to everyone, immediately before the election, exactly what kind of man they were getting: one who would callously separate mothers from their children at the border and deliberately appoint people to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade.Perhaps Trump himself recognized the parallel. As The Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted on the day he pleaded not guilty to the charges, “One of the few times Trump has looked as angry as he just did was when he was at the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton two days after the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape became public in October 2016.”Lying. Cheating, personally and professionally. Financial misdeeds. Sexism. Whatever the eventual outcome of this trial, the moral and political case against Trump now echoes the case against Trump back then.Last Thursday night at the end of a Broadway performance of “Parade,” a musical about the wrongful murder conviction of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1913, the star Ben Platt addressed the audience after the ovations to contrast that woeful history with the rightful indictment of Donald Trump that day. The audience’s resounding cheers in response may have surpassed the considerable applause for the performance itself.Some say the indictment of a former president, however justified, is no cause for celebration. That we should not be happy that a former American president has been charged with a crime. That it sets a dangerous precedent on the road to banana republic-dom.But we should be happy that this president was indicted.Too many years of knowing that Trump’s time in office would deliver on the sleaziness of its promise. Too many years of an endless cycle of revelations and accusations met with impunity have felt like an inconceivable injustice to those of us who continue to believe — against often crushing evidence to the contrary — in the existence of any kind of justice at all. There is, it must be said, a deep satisfaction in knowing that after too many years of suffering through the Trump we got, Trump himself finally has been gotten.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

Unproven claims about Dominion Voting Systems still spread widely online.With a series of billion-dollar lawsuits, including a $1.6 billion case against Fox News headed to trial this month, Dominion Voting Systems sent a stark warning to anyone spreading falsehoods that the company’s technology contributed to fraud in the 2020 election: Be careful with your words, or you might pay the price.Not everyone is heeding the warning.“Dominion, why don’t you show us what’s inside your machines?” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and prominent election denier, shouted during a livestream last month. He added that the company, which has filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against him, was engaged in “the biggest cover-up for the biggest crime in United States history — probably in world history.”Claims that election software companies like Dominion helped orchestrate widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been widely debunked in the years since former President Donald J. Trump and his allies first pushed the theories. But far-right Americans on social media and influencers in the news media have continued in recent weeks and months to make unfounded assertions about the company and its electronic voting machines, pressuring government officials to scrap contracts with Dominion, sometimes successfully.The enduring attacks illustrate how Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims have taken root in the shared imagination of his supporters. And they reflect the daunting challenge that Dominion, and any other group that draws the attention of conspiracy theorists, faces in putting false claims to rest.The attacks about Dominion have not reached the fevered pitch of late 2020, when the company was cast as a central villain in an elaborate and fictitious voter fraud story. In that tale, the company swapped votes between candidates, injected fake ballots or allowed glaring security vulnerabilities to remain on voting machines.Dominion says all those claims have been made without proof to support them.“Nearly two years after the 2020 election, no credible evidence has ever been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states,” Dominion said in an emailed statement.On Friday, the judge in Delaware overseeing the Fox defamation case ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that Fox News and Fox Business had made false claims about the company — a major setback for the network.Many prominent influencers have avoided mentioning the company since Dominion started suing prominent conspiracy theorists in 2021. Fox News fired Lou Dobbs that year — only days after it was sued by Smartmatic, another election software company — saying the network was focusing on “new formats.” Mr. Dobbs is also a defendant in Dominion’s case against Fox, which is scheduled to go to trial on April 17.Yet there have been nearly nine million mentions of Dominion across social media websites, broadcasts and traditional media since Dominion filed its first lawsuit in January 2021, including nearly a million that have mentioned “fraud” or related conspiracy theories, according to Zignal Labs, a media monitoring company. Some of the most widely shared posts came from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who tweeted last month that the lawsuits were politically motivated, and Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona who has advanced voter fraud theories about election machines since her defeat last year.Far-right Americans on social media and influencers in the news media continue to make unfounded assertions about Dominion and its electronic voting machines.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressMr. Lindell remains one of the loudest voices pushing unproven claims against Dominion and electronic voting machines, posting hundreds of videos to Frank Speech, his news site, attacking the company with tales of voter fraud.Last month, Mr. Lindell celebrated on his livestream after Shasta County, a conservative stronghold in Northern California, voted to use paper ballots after ending its contract with Dominion. A county supervisor had flown to meet privately with Mr. Lindell before the vote, discussing how to run elections without voting machines, according to Mr. Lindell. The supervisor ultimately voted to switch to paper ballots.In an interview this week with The New York Times, Mr. Lindell claimed to have spent millions on campaigns to end election fraud, focusing on abolishing electronic voting systems and replacing them with paper ballots and hand counting.“I will never back down, ever, ever, ever,” he said in the interview. He added that Dominion’s lawsuit against him, which is continuing after the United States Supreme Court declined to consider his appeal, was “frivolous” and that the company was “guilty.”“They can’t deny it, nobody can deny it,” Mr. Lindell said.Joe Oltmann, the host of “Conservative Daily Podcast” and a promoter of voter fraud conspiracy theories, hosted an episode in late March titled “Dominion Is FINISHED,” in which he claimed that there was a “device that’s used in Dominion machines to actually transfer ballots,” offering only speculative support.“This changes everything,” Mr. Oltmann said.Dominion sent Mr. Oltmann a letter in 2020 demanding that he preserve documents related to his claims about the company, which is often the first step in a defamation lawsuit.In a livestream last month on Rumble, the streaming platform popular among right-wing influencers, Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was indicted on 10 charges related to allegations that she tampered with Dominion’s election equipment, devoted more than an hour to various election fraud claims, many of them featuring Dominion. The discussion included a suggestion that because boxes belonging to Dominion were stamped with “Made in China,” the election system was vulnerable to manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party.Mr. Oltmann and Ms. Peters did not respond to requests for comment.The Fox lawsuit has also added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire.Far-right news sites have largely ignored the finding that Fox News hosts disparaged voter fraud claims privately, even as they gave them significant airtime. Instead, the Gateway Pundit, a far-right site known for pushing voter fraud theories, focused on separate documents showing that Dominion executives “knew its voting systems had major security issues,” the site wrote.The documents showed the frenzied private messages between Dominion employees as they were troubleshooting problems, with one employee remarking, “our products suck.” In an email, a Dominion spokeswoman noted the remark was about a splash screen that was hiding an error message.In February, Mr. Trump shared the Gateway Pundit story on Truth Social, his right-wing social network, stoking a fresh wave of attacks against the company.“We will not be silent,” said one far-right influencer whose messages are sometimes shared by Mr. Trump on Truth Social. “Dominion is the enemy!” More

Kevin McCarthy said the US must continue its arms sales to Taiwan after discussions with president Tsai Ing-wen in California. Tsai praised the ‘strong and unique partnership’ with the US.
McCarthy became the most senior US figure to meet a Taiwanese leader on American soil in decades, despite threats of retaliation from China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own. More

Mr. Johnson, a progressive county commissioner, won over liberal voters across the city after finishing second in a first round of balloting.CHICAGO — In the final days of the mayoral campaign in Chicago, Brandon Johnson drew more than 4,000 people to a jubilant rally featuring Senator Bernie Sanders, who endorsed him. He crisscrossed the South and West Sides, visiting six churches in a single Sunday. In a last push on Election Day, an army of volunteers for Mr. Johnson knocked on 46,000 doors across the city, whipping up enthusiasm and encouraging last-minute voters to get to the polls.The coalition that Mr. Johnson needed — young people, Black voters on the South and West Sides, a sizable number of Latino voters, white progressives on the North Side and along the lakefront — was coming together.On Tuesday, Mr. Johnson, a Democratic county commissioner who was unknown to many Chicagoans a few months ago, came from behind to defeat Paul Vallas, a more conservative Democrat and a former school executive who entered the runoff campaign with a significantly larger base of support. Mr. Vallas, 69, was the favorite of many moderate and conservative voters, running on a law-and-order platform in which he promised to expand the police force and crack down on crime.On Tuesday, Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner who was unknown to many Chicagoans a few months ago, came from behind to defeat Paul Vallas.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesBut even though large numbers of Chicagoans had said in polls that they considered public safety to be the most important issue in the election, it was Mr. Johnson, 47, who captured the slim majority of votes in Tuesday’s election. He tapped into the vast network of progressive groups in liberal Chicago — from the powerful teachers’ union to smaller, ward-based political organizations — who focused on field work to rally voters. Mr. Johnson pitched voters on a public safety plan that went beyond policing but distanced himself from past support for defunding of law enforcement.Chicago voters chose Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and union organizer with more liberal polices than his opponent Paul Vallas.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesMr. Johnson took advantage of widespread doubts among Democratic voters over Mr. Vallas’s party identification, ever since the emergence of a television interview from 2009 in which Mr. Vallas called himself “more of a Republican than a Democrat.”And Mr. Johnson capitalized on key endorsements to bolster his credibility among voters who did not know him well, especially those from Senator Sanders and Representative Jesús G. García, a progressive congressman with a base of support in mostly Hispanic neighborhoods on the West Side.“You walk into a runoff with a certain base, but then you’ve got to expand your base beyond that,” Andre Vasquez, a City Council member who organized for Mr. Johnson, said on Wednesday. “The Latino community did better for Brandon than expected. The North Side performed well. It feels like a coalition of everything.”Still, Mr. Johnson will take charge of a deeply divided Chicago. Mr. Vallas, who was once in charge of the city’s public school system, won nearly 49 percent of the vote to Mr. Johnson’s 51 percent, with thousands of mail-in ballots yet to be counted. In the first round of voting in February, Mr. Vallas received the most votes. Large numbers of Chicagoans said in polls that they considered public safety to be the most important issue in the election.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesAhead of the runoff, Mr. Johnson worked to increase turnout among young voters and broaden his support among Hispanic residents.“That’s one thing that really caught my attention about Brandon: He’s out here with my people, my Hispanic community, advocating for himself,” said Lily Cruz, 22, a college student from the Southwest Side who voted for Mr. Johnson. “I feel like he has put more effort than I’ve seen any other politician that wants to run for office,” she added.Mr. Johnson performed well in some largely white neighborhoods near Lake Michigan and in predominantly Hispanic areas northwest of downtown, just as he had in a first round of voting in February. But unlike then, Mr. Johnson, who is Black, dominated on Tuesday in wards with Black majorities, winning 80 percent of the vote in some of those areas on the South and West Sides.Chicago Mayor Runoff Election Results More

A resounding victory by a liberal judge who ran on abortion rights showed that a largely unified political left is keeping up its momentum, and served as a new warning sign to Republicans.MILWAUKEE — The commanding victory on Tuesday by a liberal candidate in a pivotal race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court showed the enduring power of abortion rights and issues of democracy as motivators for Democratic voters, as well as a continuing struggle among conservatives to put forward candidates who can unite Republicans and win general elections.The liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, swept onto the bench by 11 percentage points, a staggering margin in an evenly divided battleground state that signaled just how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has transformed American politics.The Wisconsin race centered squarely on abortion rights and political representation: Judge Protasiewicz all but promised voters that if they elected her, the court’s new 4-to-3 liberal majority would reverse Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and overturn the state’s famously gerrymandered, Republican-friendly legislative maps.Wisconsinites responded to that pitch, rejecting a conservative candidate backed by anti-abortion groups who took 2020 election deniers as a client and struggled to rally Republican donors behind him.The outcome, combined with a surprise victory in Chicago’s mayoral race by Brandon Johnson, an outspoken progressive, demonstrated that the country’s largely unified political left is sustaining momentum since its unexpectedly strong showing in the midterm elections, even as conservatives fight among themselves and struggle to counter Democratic messaging on abortion rights.Republicans are now heading into a series of coming races — for Kentucky governor this year and for president and an array of Senate seats in 2024 — with ample warning signs about the pitfalls of nominating candidates who hold positions on issues like abortion and elections that are unpopular with voters in the nation’s most competitive states.Judge Protasiewicz will join the court in August. Liberal lawyers in the state are already preparing to pursue lawsuits to roll back conservative policies. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe triumph by Judge Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, will also allow Wisconsin Democrats to pursue their own agenda through the courts after spending a dozen years ducking and running at most levels of state politics, worrying about what the dominant Republicans would lob at them next.“For a long time, Democrats in the Assembly have understood that our role is primarily being on defense,” Greta Neubauer, who leads the chamber’s Democratic minority, said at Judge Protasiewicz’s victory party in Milwaukee. Now, Ms. Neubauer said, “we have an opportunity to go on offense.”Judge Protasiewicz will be seated on the court on Aug. 1. A legal challenge to the state’s abortion ban is scheduled to begin in circuit court in Dane County next month, and while it is unclear when the ban could come before the State Supreme Court, the justices are widely expected to hear the case within a year or two and strike down the ban. Liberal lawyers are also eyeing the best way to frame a lawsuit that could prompt the court to throw out the Republican-drawn maps.During her victory speech, the liberal candidate said she would treat the role with “integrity,” then was joined on stage by current members of the court.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIt will be many months, at least, before there is a final State Supreme Court resolution on those and other hot-button issues likely to come before the court’s new liberal majority, which will consist of four women for the first time in the state’s history.To emphasize that point, when Judge Protasiewicz arrived to deliver her victory remarks on Tuesday night, she was trailed by the three sitting liberal justices as the sound system played Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.”“Today’s results mean two very important and special things,” Judge Protasiewicz told supporters. “First, it means that Wisconsin voters have made their voices heard. They have chosen to reject partisan extremism in this state. And second, it means our democracy will always prevail.”Judge Protasiewicz defeated Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who also lost an April 2020 election by 11 points and went on to represent the Republican National Committee in its efforts to overturn President Donald J. Trump’s defeat that year.Justice Kelly, who has long been an opponent of abortion rights, did little to parry Judge Protasiewicz on the issue. He never mentioned abortion in his television advertising and, during his final rally on Monday night in Waukesha, a parade of Republican officials spoke for more than an hour without mentioning abortion.Instead, Justice Kelly and his allies focused almost entirely on crime, an issue that also fell flat in Chicago, where Mr. Johnson, a liberal candidate, defeated Paul Vallas, who had tethered his campaign to a tough-on-crime message.Asked about his relative silence on abortion, Justice Kelly said that “the court does not do political decisions,” adding, “The question of abortion, that belongs in the Legislature to decide.”That approach turned Justice Kelly into a denier of the current political reality.Supportive right-wing radio hosts complained that he had not defended the state’s abortion ban, and conservative donors, whom Justice Kelly was reluctant to call to ask for money, steered clear of his campaign. And not enough of Wisconsin’s legions of conservative grass-roots voters were energized by his campaign speeches, which delved into legal theory and lamented his severe financial disadvantage.“Doing a statewide campaign, as it turns out, is kind of hard,” Justice Kelly said at the Waukesha rally.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed Justice Kelly, whom he endorsed in 2020, for neglecting to seek his endorsement this year, arguing on his social media site that this “guaranteed his loss.”Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond gave the Protasiewicz campaign a decided financial edge. Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois organized a March 6 videoconference that raised $5 million for the Protasiewicz campaign, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and allied groups. The party transferred $8.3 million to the Protasiewicz campaign.The Republican Party of Wisconsin gave no money directly to Justice Kelly. Instead, Republican donors poured $12 million into third-party groups, whose rates for television advertising are three times what candidates pay.Brian Schimming, the Wisconsin G.O.P. chairman, lamented the disparity and donors’ decision to keep an arm’s-length distance from Justice Kelly’s campaign.“There’s a fair bit of chatter about that right now,” he said. “We could have done a more efficient job of spending it.”Daniel Kelly, who has long been an opponent of abortion rights, did little to parry Judge Protasiewicz on the issue in their race.Marla Bergh for The New York TimesAfter abortion, the biggest issue facing the new liberal court will be the state’s legislative maps.Jeffrey A. Mandell, the board president and founder of Law Forward, a progressive law firm in Madison, said he aimed to have new maps in place in time for the 2024 election, which would most likely require the case to be decided and new maps to be drawn by next April, when candidates begin circulating petitions to qualify for the primary ballot.“There’s no time to waste,” Mr. Mandell said.The three sitting liberal justices declined to say whether they believed it was possible to have new maps ready for 2024, but Judge Protasiewicz said it was “unlikely” the court could decide a case and put new maps into effect by next year’s elections.Liberals will hold a 4-to-3 majority on the court through at least 2025, when Ann Walsh Bradley, a 72-year-old liberal justice poised to become the new chief justice under the new majority, faces re-election. Justice Bradley said Tuesday night that she would run for a fourth 10-year term.Democrats are hopeful about her chances: Since the Wisconsin Supreme Court began electing justices statewide in 1853, no justice who has won a competitive election, as Justice Bradley has done twice, subsequently lost one.Beyond abortion and redistricting, the new liberal majority will decide a host of other issues, including labor rights that were diminished by Republicans.Stephanie Bloomingdale, the president of the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O., said she had watched with jealousy this year as Michigan Democrats enacted a wide range of liberal policies after redistricting helped them take full control of their state government for the first time in 40 years.“We see them, we’re very proud of them, but we’re wishing it could be us,” Ms. Bloomingdale said. “You know, in Wisconsin, we can have nice things, too.”Even before Election Day, Wisconsin Republicans who saw that a liberal victory was likely began to disparage their State Supreme Court as an illegitimate body.“I don’t think people have any idea of what’s coming,” said Rebecca Bradley, a conservative Supreme Court justice who in a decision banning drop boxes last year compared the state’s 2020 presidential contest to elections in Syria, North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “We will have four people in Wisconsin robbing the people of the right to govern themselves.”But the scale of Judge Protasiewicz’s victory suggests that Wisconsin voters are inclined to dismiss the Republican arguments. She carried 27 of the state’s 72 counties — 11 more than Mr. Evers did when he was re-elected in November by three points — and nearly equaled the margin by which Jill Karofsky, a fellow liberal, defeated Justice Kelly in the 2020 election, when Democrats held their presidential primary on the same ballot.“I’m not concerned about the legitimacy of the court, because so many people voted for this court,” Justice Karofsky said as she nursed a Miller Lite at the Protasiewicz victory party. “So many people wanted this majority.” More