Elections

The authorities in Albuquerque said Solomon Peña, who lost his bid for a State House seat in November, was behind a series of recent shootings targeting Democratic elected officials.The authorities in Albuquerque said on Monday that a former Republican candidate who lost his bid for a State House seat in November had been arrested in connection with a series of recent shootings at the homes and offices of a half-dozen Democratic elected officials.Chief Harold Medina of the Albuquerque Police Department said at a news conference that the former candidate, Solomon Peña, was “the mastermind” behind a conspiracy in which four other men were paid to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators.Mr. Peña lost the election in a landslide to an incumbent Democrat, Miguel Garcia, but refused to concede after making unfounded claims of election fraud.Chief Medina said a gun that was found during the arrest of another suspect in the shootings last week was later linked to Mr. Peña.No one was injured in the shootings at three residences, a workplace and a campaign office in Albuquerque. Three of the shootings took place in December and two this month, most recently on Jan. 5.After losing the election, Mr. Peña “reached out and contracted someone for an amount of cash money to commit at least two of the shootings,” Kyle Hartsock, deputy commander of the Police Department’s homicide unit, said at the news conference. Mr. Hartsock said there was evidence that Mr. Peña pulled the trigger at a shooting on Jan. 3.This is a developing story. More

If the midterm elections could be rerun this month, Democrats would probably end up in full control of Congress. President Biden’s approval ratings are rising. Inflation is down, and consumers are feeling more optimistic. And Americans are getting a better look at the G.O.P.’s actual policy agenda, which is deeply unpopular.OK, we don’t give politicians who lost an election the opportunity for a mulligan, even when they falsely claim that the election was stolen. But it is, I think, worth noting just how much the economic and hence political environment has shifted in the past few months, and to start thinking seriously about the possibility that Democrats might be in a startlingly strong position next year.It’s hard to overstate how bad things looked for Biden’s party on election eve. The last report on consumer prices released before the midterms showed inflation of 8.2 percent over the previous year, a terrible number by anyone’s reckoning. The unemployment rate was still very low by historical standards, but the news media was full of warnings about hard times ahead, and a large majority of likely voters believed (falsely) that we were in a recession.Given the perceived grimness of the economic environment, Republicans and many political analysts confidently expected a huge electoral red wave.Why didn’t that happen? Part of the answer may be that Americans weren’t feeling as bad about the economy as some surveys suggested. It’s true that the venerable University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment had fallen to levels last seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, during the worst slump since the Great Depression.But the Michigan index was probably distorted by partisanship: Did Republicans really believe, as they claimed, that the economy was worse than it had been in June 1980? (Back then the economy actually was in a recession, inflation was 14 percent, and unemployment was above 7 percent.)And another longstanding index of consumer confidence, from the Conference Board, was telling a quite different story, with consumers feeling pretty good about the economy. I’m not sure why these measures were so different, but the Conference Board measure seemed to do a better job of predicting the vote — although the backlash over Roe v. Wade, and against some terrible Republican candidates, surely also played a role.In any case, in mid-January — a bit over two months after the election, but three consumer price reports later — things look very different. There’s still no recession. Consumer prices actually fell in December; more to the point, they’ve risen at an annual rate of only 2 percent over the past six months.And while consumer expectations haven’t caught up with financial markets, which appear to believe that inflation will stay low for the foreseeable future, consumer expectations of inflation are back down to their levels of a year and a half ago.Which raises a question few would have asked even a few months ago: Is Joe Biden — who, for the record, had a much better midterm than Ronald Reagan did in 1982 — possibly headed for a “morning in America” moment?A few months ago I looked at the “misery index” — the sum of unemployment and inflation, originally suggested by Arthur Okun as a quick-and-dirty summary of the state of the economy. I used to think this index was silly; there are multiple reasons it shouldn’t make sense. But it has historically done a surprisingly good job of tracking consumer sentiment. And as I noted even then, the misery index seemed to be declining.Well, now it has fallen off a cliff. If we use the inflation rate over the past six months, the misery index, which stood at 14 as recently as June, is now down to 5.4, or about what it was on the eve of the pandemic, when Donald Trump confidently expected a strong economy to guarantee his re-election.Nor is that the only thing Democrats have going for them. The green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are leading to multiple new investments in domestic manufacturing; it’s unclear how many jobs will be created, but the next two years will give Biden many opportunities to preside over factory openings, giving speeches about how America is, um, becoming great again.Now, I’m not predicting a Democratic blowout in 2024. For one thing, many things can happen over the next 22 months, although I don’t think Republicans, even with cooperation from too many in the media, will convince Americans that the Biden administration is riddled with corruption. For another, elections often turn not so much on how good things are as on the perceived rate of improvement, and with inflation and unemployment already low, it’s not clear how much room there is for a boom.Also, extreme political polarization has probably made landslide elections a thing of the past. Republicans could probably nominate George Santos and still get 47 percent of the vote.But to the extent that the economic landscape shapes the political landscape, things look far better for Democrats now than almost anyone imagined until very recently.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

NASHVILLE — January in Nashville ushers in two forces for chaos: erratic weather and irrational legislators. Both are massively disruptive. Neither is surprising anymore.In the age of climate change, Mark Twain’s old joke about New England — if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes — is true all over the country. But even careening between thunderstorms and snow, sometimes in a single day, erratic weather is easier to cope with than the G.O.P. Unlike human beings, weather isn’t supposed to be rational.Neither, it seems, are Republicans, at least not anymore, and a blue city that serves as the capital of a red state had better brace itself when the legislature arrives in town. Nothing good ever comes when the Tennessee General Assembly reconvenes, but any Nashvillian paying attention understood that this time the usual assaults would be unusually bad.Last year, when Nashville’s Metro Council voted not to support the state’s bid for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, retaliation was widely understood to be inevitable, according to Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News.Now we know what shape retaliation will take: Last week, on the first day of the new legislative session, Republicans in both the Tennessee House and Senate introduced legislation that would cut our Metro Council in half. (The bills ostensibly apply to all city governments with a legislative body larger than 20 members, but that’s just Nashville.) If passed, the law would overturn not only a 60-year history but also the will of the Nashville people, who voted in 2015 to keep its 40-member council intact.The new bills set a “dangerous precedent,” according to the Democratic House caucus chair, John Ray Clemmons. “The G.O.P. supermajority’s continued efforts to overstep into local affairs and usurp the decision-making authority of local officials for the purpose of centralizing more and more power at the state level is concerning,” Mr. Clemmons told The Tennessean. “Ultimately, Nashville families know what’s best for Nashville.”Metro Council is larger than the legislative branch of every American city except Chicago and New York, cities that dwarf Nashville. There are good arguments for reducing its size, which is the result of compromises made in 1962 when residents of Davidson County voted to form a metropolitan government, but that’s a different question. What matters here is that the state of Tennessee is once again interfering in the self-governance of the blue city that drives the economic engine of the entire red state. And state lawmakers are doing it for absolutely no reason but spite.There is, of course, a long history of legislative pre-emption in Tennessee. The tactic is also used by Democratic-controlled legislatures, but it is especially egregious in Southern states governed by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker here introduced a bill that would ban local governments from helping residents fund out-of-state abortions — a policy that members of Nashville’s council have already proposed.It’s no surprise that the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement is also the party of undermining local governance. But it’s worse this year, or at least it feels worse this year, because this year Nashville voters can’t count on representation at the national level either.The South used to be the land of the Yellow Dog Democrat — someone who would vote a straight Democratic ticket even if the Democratic candidate were a yellow dog — but those days are long gone. There are still legions of Democrats down here, as well as a growing number of voters who are left of the mainstream Democratic Party, but they are clustered in college towns and growing cities like Nashville, where they live and work shoulder to shoulder with old-school conservatives and rabid Donald Trump supporters alike. Joe Biden won Nashville with almost 65 percent of the vote.But thanks to a brutally gerrymandered election map, we didn’t send a moderate Democrat, one who could reasonably represent the interests of both Nashville liberals and Nashville conservatives, to Washington this year. Instead, the newly mutilated Nashville is represented by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.This particular injustice likely seems irrelevant to anybody who doesn’t live here. Occurring as it does among so many other political injustices in a nation moving rapidly toward minority rule, even the utter disenfranchisement of an entire American city is hard to get particularly worked up about.But you ought to be worked up about it. You ought to be protesting in the streets about it because what is happening in Tennessee, and in so many other states governed by Republican supermajorities, goes a long way toward explaining what is happening in the U.S. Congress.Andy Ogles, for example, is the newly elected congressman from Tennessee’s redrawn Fifth District, a seat held for two decades by Rep. Jim Cooper back when the seat still included all of Nashville. In Washington, Mr. Ogles immediately allied himself with the nihilist wing of the Republican Party, voting 11 times against Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the speakership. In Nashville, then, we have gone from being represented by a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats to being represented by a founding member of what might well be called the Dead Dog Caucus. What else should we call legislators who have no interest in legislating?In dismembering Nashville to create three Republican voting districts, in other words, the Tennessee General Assembly managed only to nationalize its own brand of chaos. And maybe that was the whole point.Mark E. Green, an ardent Trump supporter who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes parts of Nashville, is a vocal election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the far-right flank of the party sought nominal justification to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Even after the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Green voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election. As Holly McCall, the editor in chief of the nonprofit news site the Tennessee Lookout, writes, such behavior from elected officials has “seeded our voting public with mistrust that continues to harm our democracy.”But wrecking American democracy is not enough for the Dead Dog Party. Last fall Mr. Green flew to Brazil to do the same thing in that much more fragile democracy. In a trip paid for by the American Conservative Union, he met with Brazilian lawmakers pushing to change election laws. The meeting’s agenda: to discuss “voting integrity policies.” We know what happened next: Thanks in part to one of Nashville’s representatives in Congress, anti-democracy riots are now an American export.Meanwhile, here at home, Mr. Green has just been named chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”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

Lauren Justice for The New York TimesConservatives have controlled the court since 2008. Though the court upheld Wisconsin’s 2020 election results, last year it ruled drop boxes illegal, allowed a purge of the voter rolls to take place and installed redistricting maps drawn by Republican legislators despite the objections of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. More

More from our inbox:‘All Polls Are Not Created Equal’The Myth of the American Dream Brea Souders for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” by Matthew Walther (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 29):Just because poetry is not a popular art form in North America doesn’t mean it’s dead. If Mr. Walther would look closer, he’d see it thriving in local scenes.Poetry is free to change into something Mr. Walther doesn’t recognize as good, but it is not free to die. A poem is a process set in motion by a compulsion to sing in the teeth of death.As the world changes, poets change forms and Mr. Walther has a right to feel shortchanged, but his neglect for everything fabulous that’s happened since T.S. Eliot “finished poetry off” is puzzling.For instance, he ignores the influence of Whitman and Surrealism on the Beats and the impact of French poets like Apollinaire on the quotidian rhythms of New York poets in the postwar American boom, bypassing it all to insist that everyone after Eliot was cursed to rewrite “The Waste Land.” No vision so negative can win.In fact, as a teacher and a poet whose work has been published in this newspaper, I’ve found that our art form’s thrilling and nearly secret history of struggle and triumph is one that most laypeople want to learn about. And I would guess that many young poets, M.F.A.’s or not, are captured by the thrill of becoming part of the story.America today is poetry-curious, and it would be wonderful to see more articles in The Times talking about poetry culture with love and humor.Julien PoirierBerkeley, Calif.To the Editor:Matthew Walther’s lament that poetry is dead because poets are no longer in touch with mysterious forces of the natural world raises once again questions that never fail to excite me: What is a poem? Is there a “right” poem and a “wrong” poem? Not really. Is there an aesthetically “good” poem and a “not so good” poem? Yes, but how different readers arrive at their assessments is as variable as the wind.Mr. Walther implies that we are separate from “nature” and that perhaps poetry could be revived if we returned to a pre-technological sensibility. But what is “nature,” exactly, and where is “nature”? Outside the city, in mountains or sea?What if “nature” is inside every one of us? Aren’t we as much “nature” as the bird and the tree? Our “nature” as a source of poetry is inexhaustible.Barbara BlatnerNew YorkThe writer is a playwright, poet and composer.To the Editor:As one of the judges of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Awards in poetry, I can assure Matthew Walther that his concerns about the demise of the form are premature.Having read several hundred volumes of poetry written in 2022, I can also reassure him that the vast majority of poems include no references to “an empty plastic bottle” or “an iPhone with a cracked screen.”Rather, they are wondrous and inventive, blazing and desperate, vibrant with the same joys and agonies and mystic awe that have kept poetry alive since the origins of human language. Fortunately, neither “The Waste Land” nor any critic can kill these voices or silence their rhythms.Jacob M. AppelNew YorkThe writer is vice president and treasurer at the National Book Critics Circle.To the Editor:Poetry is dead? No way. I’m a trauma surgeon. I know what’s dead when I see it.A year or two ago, I stood with my team in the emergency room awaiting the arrival of a severely injured patient. Our chaplain was there, as usual, and we chatted about an essay that I’d read on the Poetry Foundation website about chaplaincy and poetry. She’d already heard about it from another hospital chaplain.Our nurse leader chimed in. “I love that site,” he said. “I get their poem of the day.”Then the injured person showed up. We stopped chatting and went to work, inspired by our unexpected connection in poetry, which is definitely not dead.Elizabeth DreesenChapel Hill, N.C.‘All Polls Are Not Created Equal’Skewed red-wave surveys fed home-team boosterism among right-wing news outlets and benefited from cheerleading by former President Donald J. Trump.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Skewed Polling Washed Away ‘Red Tsunami’” (front page, Dec. 31):I agree that partisan polls erroneously created the expectation of a red wave/tsunami for the midterm elections. But that’s only half the story. Why did poll aggregators and election analysts embrace these knowingly partisan polls? Yes, costs for independent, nonpartisan polls have skyrocketed.In response to this challenge, organizations like the Marist Poll and others systematically revised methods to address the mounting difficulties of reaching voters and rising costs without sacrificing accuracy.The Marist Poll’s final round of surveys included a national poll and battleground state polls in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. There wasn’t a trace of a red wave/tsunami to be found in any of the poll results.What can be learned about poll coverage from this election cycle? Consider the source of the information. That may be the cornerstone of journalism, but it doesn’t drive poll coverage. Partisan-based polls should be treated as if you were hit over the head with a frying pan.In addition, more is not necessarily better. Relying upon the influx of partisan polls will likely only send you in the wrong direction. Making statistical adjustments for a polling organization’s partisanship, as some forecasters do, is not an elixir.Independent, nonpartisan, transparent polls conducted by an organization with a time-tested record must rule the day, particularly in our current partisan charged environment. All polls are not created equal, and it is a mistake to treat them as such.Lee M. MiringoffPoughkeepsie, N.Y.The writer is director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.The Myth of the American Dream Masha FoyaTo the Editor:Re “What Lies at the Heart of the American Dream” (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 8):Costica Bradatan misses a wider reality about the so-called American dream. He speaks of the “fear of failure” that, he believes, is at its core. But for that fear to be operative there needs to be the opportunity to fail.So, to better understand the American dream, I suggest that Mr. Bradatan travel to cities and towns and rural communities throughout this country. Perhaps then he’ll understand that this dream is only a myth. For countless people, trapped in low-wage work and cycles of poverty, it’s just too dangerous to even think of dreaming. They can’t worry about failing when there’s no opportunity to even fail.Indeed, if we look beyond the surface, the rhetoric surrounding this American myth is just a convenient way to maintain the status quo. It rests on the false foundation that everyone can lift themselves up by their bootstraps — and risk failure. That if you’re poor and struggling, it’s a failure to take personal responsibility.In the end, the American dream ignores the structural, systemic issues that keep this dream beyond so many people’s reach. The dream is just some rhetorical phrase often used to ignore the deep chasm of inequality here in America.Arnold S. CohenNew YorkThe writer is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and former president of the Partnership for the Homeless. More

Israel’s new right-wing government is moving quickly to transform the country.Israel’s government, the most right-wing in its history, is barely three weeks old and already leaving its mark, quickly pressing ahead with legislation that critics fear will erode Israeli democracy. Benjamin Netanyahu has returned as prime minister, this time leading a coalition of conservative, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.I spoke with Isabel Kershner, a correspondent in The Times’s Jerusalem bureau, about the right’s push to transform Israel.Ian: What is the new government trying to accomplish?Isabel: The right-wing parties in the coalition are all extremely ideological, and Netanyahu has made a lot of concessions to them. The new minister of national security is an ultranationalist who has been convicted of inciting anti-Arab racism. He got more authority over the police. The new hard-right finance minister is claiming more authority over Jewish settlements and civilian affairs in the occupied West Bank. Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers want more autonomy and more funding for religious students and schools.The government is also moving to radically overhaul the judiciary. There’s a perception on the right that the Supreme Court is overly activist and sides with liberals on issues like settlements. Now the coalition wants to give parliament more power to select judges and override Supreme Court rulings. Critics say the coalition’s proposed changes would completely change the nature of Israel’s liberal democracy, which is dynamic but also fragile. Israel doesn’t have a formal constitution; it has basic laws that can be changed with 61 out of 120 votes in the parliament. Netanyahu’s coalition has 64.Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. Has that made him more reliant on the far right?Israel’s whole political morass — the deadlock that’s produced five elections in four years — is basically because Netanyahu has been indicted on corruption charges but won’t step aside. In the past, Netanyahu preferred to form governments with more centrist or even center-left parties. This time, the centrists refused to align with a prime minister on trial, so Netanyahu was at the mercy of far-right parties after the election. They were the only partners he could form a government with, and they knew that.How has the country reacted?What’s taken many Israelis by surprise is the dizzying speed and determination with which the new government has moved ahead. That’s really galvanized the opposition. Before the election, the liberal and centrist parties in parliament basically failed to cooperate with each other. Suddenly you’re seeing them sitting together, planning the next demonstration and making radical statements of their own. Yair Lapid, the centrist opposition leader, said the judicial overhaul constituted “extreme regime change” and could eliminate Israeli democracy.Israeli soldiers close off the entrance to a Palestinian neighborhood in the West Bank.Samar Hazboun for The New York TimesIt reminds me of the mood in the U.S. after Donald Trump got elected.There was a pro-L.G.B.T.Q. protest on the day the new government was sworn in, because Netanyahu’s coalition includes some extremely anti-gay lawmakers. There have since been protests, including a big one last night, in Tel Aviv, a more secular, liberal city about an hour from Jerusalem.Israel has seen big protests before. In recent years anti-Netanyahu demonstrators protested outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. But that was a much more grass-roots, bottom-up movement. What we’re seeing now is the leaders of the opposition parties calling on people to come out into the streets.What does the new government mean for relations with the Palestinians?The levels of confidence are below zero. One of the main concerns for the Palestinian Arabs who make up one-fifth of Israel’s citizens is a surge in crime, murders and criminal gang warfare. The previous Israeli government, which for the first time included a small Islamic Arab party in the governing coalition, prioritized fighting crime in conjunction with Arab local authorities. Now the minister overseeing the police has a history of being an anti-Arab activist and provocateur. Meanwhile, the situation regarding the Palestinians in the occupied territories was already tense, and things have quickly become confrontational.How has all this left Israelis feeling about the state of their politics?Things here feel more polarized than ever, and there’s a lot at stake. The country is split over what kind of democracy Israel should be and how it’s going to relate to Palestinians. Even among the half of the country that did vote for a right-wing party, not all of them are happy. It’s gone a bit further than some of them wanted. Some are throwing their hands up or switching off the news. Anecdotally, I’m hearing about more people applying for foreign passports. Among those who oppose the government, there’s a kind of doomsday feel.More about Isabel: She grew up in the United Kingdom, speaks Hebrew and studied Arabic at Oxford University. She spent a gap year in Israel, then another year in Egypt. An early obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led her to journalism.Related: Will the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem be built on confiscated Palestinian land?, Rashid Khalidi asks in Times Opinion.NEWSInternationalPatients arrive at the emergency room of a Shanghai hospital.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesChina reported nearly 60,000 deaths linked to Covid in the month since it lifted its strict pandemic restrictions.A plane crash in Nepal killed at least 68 people.Ecuador’s failure to curb some Amazon drilling shows how global financial forces drive biodiversity loss.War in UkraineA Russian strike destroyed an apartment building in Dnipro, Ukraine, killing at least 21 people in one of the largest losses of civilian lives away from the frontline.Britain said that it would give battle tanks to Ukrainian forces, breaching a Western taboo against sending such powerful weapons.Russia has looted Ukraine’s museums in what experts say is the biggest art heist since World War II.PoliticsPresident Biden’s aides found more classified documents at his Delaware home than previously revealed.The special counsel investigating the documents will have to reconstruct the frenetic last days of Biden’s vice presidency, The Times’s Peter Baker writes.Representative George Santos spoke under an alternate identity and encouraged transgender people to vote Republican at an L.G.B.T.Q. event in 2019.Other Big StoriesMore storms are soaking California, putting nearly 26 million people under flood watch.Someone in Maine won an estimated $1.35 billion in the Mega Millions lottery, its second-largest jackpot ever.Auburn University banned TikTok on campus Wi-Fi networks, but students are still using the platform on their phones.FROM OPINIONJoe Biden has a path back to political popularity — and to winning re-election, says Ross Douthat.Prince Harry’s memoir is about hunting and being hunted, Maureen Dowd writes.Sexual violence remains a global scourge we haven’t done enough to fight, Nicholas Kristof writes.The Sunday question: What do Biden’s classified document revelations mean for Donald Trump?Prosecutors are now less likely to charge Trump for keeping government records at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes. Good, says The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle: Indicting Trump would reinvigorate his support in a moment of weakness.MORNING READSA dog at Pitti Uomo, the men’s clothing trade fair in Italy.Clara Vannucci for The New York TimesDesigner pet apparel: A multibillion-dollar market includes dog accessories.Based on a true story? Historical dramas are flourishing — but are taking liberties with the facts.Vows: The universe brought them together twice.Sunday routine: Rachael Price, the singer of Lake Street Dive, combs old journals for lyric ideas.Advice from Wirecutter: Get ready for usernames and passwords to disappear.BOOKSPeople place offerings in the Ganges River in Varanasi, the Indian “city of the dead.”Rebecca Conway for The New York TimesSecular seeker: Pico Iyer studied the supernatural in cultures around the world.By the Book: The novelist Patrick Modiano says good books make good people.Our editors’ picks: “A Heart That Works,” a deeply moving and darkly funny memoir by the comedian Rob Delaney, and eight other books.Times best sellers: Danielle Steel’s “Without a Trace” is one of four new thrillers, all written by women, on the latest hardcover fiction list.THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEPhoto illustration by Andrew B. MyersOn the cover: The Fed may finally be winning the war on inflation. But if it leads to a recession, those on the margins will feel the most pain.Ethicist: An ex-husband sexually abused his sister as a child. Should his partner have been warned?Eat: Add miso and pecans to your banana bread.Read the full issue.THE WEEK AHEADWhat to Watch ForThe N.F.L. playoffs continue with wild-card games today and Monday.The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, convenes Monday.Monday is Martin Luther King’s Birthday, a federal holiday. Financial markets will be closed.Tennis’ Australian Open begins Monday.Jury selection begins Tuesday in a lawsuit by Tesla shareholders against Elon Musk, accusing him of costing them billions with his tweets.The Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday.What to Cook This WeekDavid Malosh for The New York TimesAfter the holiday break, you might feel ready to try new things. Emily Weinstein felt that way, too, so she chose five weeknight meal recipes that excited her. Melissa Clark’s new Green Curry Salmon gets even better when you cook it in a pot with coconut rice. Crispy pepperoni chicken uses crushed pizza crust, inspired by the chefs at Don Angie in New York. And Yewande Komolafe recommends serving roasted mushrooms in ata din din, a Nigerian red-pepper sauce.NOW TIME TO PLAYThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were cardigan and carding. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Worked for the C.I.A., maybe (five letters).Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.Here’s today’s Wordle.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at [email protected] up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

Election deniers in Lycoming County convinced officials to conduct a 2020 recount, a three-day undertaking that showed almost no change, but left skeptics just as skeptical.WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.A ballot cast for former President Donald J. Trump that was part of the county’s recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?It did not.“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday.“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.The county’s election professionals spent months responding to the arguments of the election deniers in public hearings and fielding their right-to-know requests for the minutiae of voting records. Mr. Lehman said he did not think an encounter with the facts would change the views of some people.“You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” he said.Mr. Trump hosted a campaign rally in Lycoming County at the Williamsport Regional Airport in October 2020. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOne of the residents who pushed for the hand recount, Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, the former chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Lycoming County, said he was happy the results matched the 2020 voting machine counts, though he said other questions needed to be addressed.“Our goal from Day 1 when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we find it, we’ll fix it — we just want to restore voter confidence,” said Mr. Stroehmann, a founder of the far-right Lycoming Patriots group.He and Ms. DiSalvo were inspired by the debunked claims of a retired Army officer named Seth Keshel, who gained attention in 2021 with the assertion that there were 8 million “excess votes” cast for Mr. Biden. His analysis has been dismissed by professors at Harvard, the University of Georgia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.A petition circulated by Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann noted that registered Republicans grew their numbers in Lycoming County compared with Democrats from 2016 to 2020, but that Mr. Biden managed to win more votes than Hillary Clinton. Election deniers found this suspicious.“If Republicans GAINED voters and Democrats LOST voters — why did Biden receive 30% MORE votes in the November 2020 election than Hillary Clinton did in 2016?” their petition asked.Mr. Lehman called the argument nonsensical. Party registration does not dictate how someone will vote, he said. Mr. Biden outperformed Mrs. Clinton in nearly every Pennsylvania county in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump also raised his vote totals in the county by 16 percent.“The voters’ unpredictability — it makes democracy both majestic and messy,” Mr. Lehman told county commissioners at a hearing last year. The commission ultimately approved the recount two to one, along partisan lines.Mr. Lehman monitoring ballots being recounted in Williamsport on Wednesday.Pat Crossley/Williamsport Sun-GazetteElection officials at every level have been harassed and vilified since 2020, when election conspiracists echoing Mr. Trump blamed officials and helped inspire the “Stop the Steal” movement. On an election conspiracy show that was streamed on Rumble, Mr. Stroehmann called for an investigation into Mr. Lehman, who he said is “part of the steal.”“Our director of voter services is playing for the other team,” Mr. Stroehmann said on the show. “He’s as liberal as the day is long.”Richard Mirabito, a Lycoming County commissioner who is a Democrat, said there was no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing by Mr. Lehman. “He’s held in the highest esteem of integrity,” he said. “Those kinds of statements undermine the confidence of people in our system.”Mr. Mirabito voted against the recount but was overruled by the two Republicans on the board. Scott L. Metzger, a Republican and the chair of the county commission, also vouched for Mr. Lehman. “He’s done an outstanding job,’’ he said. After the 2022 midterms, requests for recounts in Pennsylvania races that were not close inundated counties, delaying the certification of some results. In Arizona and New Mexico, rural county commissions held up certifying primary or general election results last year.Across the country, a wave of Trump-backed election conspiracists who ran for statewide offices with control over voting lost their races. But some election deniers won races at the local level, where pressure by activists on officials has a better chance of yielding results.Officials in Lycoming County, a rural area of north-central Pennsylvania, were still estimating the final cost of the recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Metzger — one of the two Republicans on the commission who approved the recount — said that he voted for it after thousands of people signed petitions, and others approached him on the street saying they didn’t want to vote because they distrusted the system. Now that the recount matched what voting tabulator machines showed in 2020 and that there was no evidence of fraud, Mr. Metzger said, it was time to move on. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it,” he said.Before the commissioners voted for the recount, Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann presented the results of what they called a door-to-door canvass of some county residences. The canvassing was conducted by volunteers from Audit the Vote PA, a group founded in 2021 under the false belief that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, won Pennsylvania.Canvassers claimed to have found multiple “anomalies,” including votes that were tabulated from people in nursing homes who did not recall voting, as well as people who said they had voted, though there was no record of it.Mr. Lehman said he and his staff addressed each case. For those in nursing homes, the election office pulled records showing they had returned a mail ballot with their signature on the envelope. The canvass, he said, lacked rigor, adding that he was not surprised some people might have claimed to have voted in a face-to-face interview when they actually had not.Election deniers have no plans to stand down. They have requested reams of documents that they believe will expose fraud once and for all.“We’ve received a series of crazy records requests,” Mr. Lehman said. “You can quote me. They are insane.”Stacks of boxes containing ballots from the 2020 election, which are stored in a secure room of the county’s elections department. Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesElection deniers asked for copies of every application for a mail ballot, requiring Mr. Lehman and his staff to laboriously redact all personal information. They are pressing for copies of every ballot cast on Election Day 2020, and they have gone to court to seek digital data from the voting machines at each of the 81 county precincts.Though observers from both parties watched the hand recount this week, Ms. DiSalvo raised questions about the process, including that Mr. Lehman oversaw the adding up of the recounted votes.“We asked to see the tally sheets before the final processing and were denied,” Ms. DiSalvo said, referring to the paperwork used by ballot counters. The elections director, she added, had a “vested interest in making sure the numbers aligned.”Her group has filed a right-to-know request for the hand-count tally sheets.Mr. Lehman, a former Eagle Scout and teacher, displays two iconic photographs in his office. One shows Harry S. Truman in 1948 holding aloft the famously erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline. The other shows Lyndon Johnson solemnly taking the oath of office on Air Force One in 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy.“They’re both transitions of power,” Mr. Lehman said. “One is comic, the other tragic. We’ve managed to process them both as a country. I don’t know which category to put 2020 in. We need to get back to a place where we can process the outcomes of elections in a constructive, healthy way.” More

Something unusual happened to Joe Biden this week. A reputable poll, from The Economist and YouGov, showed him with a positive job approval rating — even hitting 50 percent approval among registered voters, against 47 percent disapproving.Maybe the poll was an outlier, a blip; Biden’s approval numbers have improved since his summertime nadir, but his polling average is still below 45 percent. Maybe any improvement will be undone by further revelations about stashed classified documents from his V.P. days — though it will be hard to top the comedy value of some of the papers being in the garage with his Corvette.But as congressional Republicans gear up for a year of internal knife fights and fiscal brinkmanship, it’s worth considering what it would take for a true Biden comeback, a return to actual popularity.Before the midterms I tried to identify three original sins in the Biden administration — three freely chosen, unnecessary courses that contributed to the president’s underwater numbers. They were the White House’s early decisions to limit energy production and roll back some Trump immigration policies (which were then followed by the gas-price spike and the border crisis), the surfeit of spending in the American Rescue Plan that contributed to the inflation surge and the failure to show any actual moderation on cultural issues to match Biden’s original moderate-Catholic-Democrat brand.One issue I didn’t include was the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, both because it wasn’t a major issue in the midterm campaign and because I thought the withdrawal itself was a necessary and gutsy decision, notwithstanding the disastrous execution. But if you look at the arc of Biden’s approval ratings, the fall of Kabul looks like a major inflection point, a moment that sowed the first serious doubts about the administration’s competence.So envisioning a Biden comeback requires imagining these liabilities being overcome or reversed, or just having their salience diminished. On the economy, such a scenario would run like this: The Republican House snuffs out any possibility of new inflationary spending, inflation continues to diminish without unemployment surging, China’s reopening helps normalize the global economy, Putin’s energy weapon proves to be a one-off blow rather than a continuing drag, and we get through this strange post-pandemic period without a real recession.On foreign policy, the Biden best case is probably further gains for the Ukrainians in the spring and then some kind of stable cease-fire, which would enable him to take credit for blunting Russian aggression and also successfully managing the risks of World War III. We may get more of a bloody stalemate instead, but the White House’s handling of the Ukraine war is probably its most successful policy to date; if it still looks successful in a year’s time, the memory of the Kabul breakdown should be fully washed away.On immigration and the border crisis, the Biden administration clearly thinks it’s pivoting rightward with new restrictions on asylum; the political effectiveness of the policy, though, will turn on whether it actually succeeds. On other cultural issues, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that Biden will execute any notable pivot — but the White House can hope that a divided government will effectively ease voter anxieties about wokeness without the administration needing to make any enemies to its left.The role of congressional Republicans generally is key to the recovery scenario. The Biden administration can look back on successful political rebounds by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that were clearly mediated by G.O.P. fecklessness. On the evidence of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership to date, history may be returning to those grooves.But with this important difference: Clinton and Obama were unusually talented politicians in the prime of their political lives, while Biden is something else — a likable-enough political insider who’s now conspicuously too old for his job.Occasionally this reality can be oddly advantageous for the White House. In cases like the classified-document revelations or the Hunter Biden imbroglios, the idea of Biden doing something shady accidentally or cluelessly, rather than with conscious corruption, is more plausible than in prior presidencies.But mostly Biden’s age creates challenges that the Clinton and Obama administrations didn’t have to worry about. When events turn against his administration, as they did in 2021 and certainly could again in 2023 if the above scenarios don’t pan out, this president can look especially overmastered, especially ill-equipped to lead or turn the ship around. And even when things are going relatively well — even in a clear rebound scenario — the shadow of Biden’s diminished capacities may still be a drag on his support.Presuming, that is, that the Republicans find an opposing candidate who draws clear contrast in vigor and capacity. If they return instead to a certain former president whom Biden beat once already — well, that’s the strongest comeback scenario, and the clearest path to another term.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