Elections

Astead Herndon, who hosts “The Run-Up” podcast, discussed his approach to the show and why voters’ voices matter.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In the first episode of “The Run-Up,” a podcast focused on the 2022 midterm elections, the host Astead Herndon calls a voter and asks how she’s feeling about the political climate.“I’m not expecting a whole lot from this conversation,” she says, “but I’ll give it a shot.” By later in the episode, she has opened up about her beliefs, and her doubts of whether her vote will actually matter.“The Run-Up” — which began in August 2016, three months before Donald J. Trump was elected president, and returned this month — can dig deep into the heart of the issues that shape American democracy. In early 2020, Mr. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times, traveled through Iowa to take the temperature of Democratic caucusgoers, sharing his findings as a guest on “The Field” podcast, an offshoot of “The Daily.” The experience helped him understand the power of audio in journalism. Now, through frank conversations with Times colleagues, political insiders and voters of different parties, Mr. Herndon will explore shifting politics and what they mean for the country.As “The Run-Up” kicks off and the midterms approach, Mr. Herndon spoke about the reboot of the podcast and how he’s tackling fraught topics. This interview has been edited.What’s your philosophy for this podcast?Sometimes, the way that political reporting talks to voters presumes that parties and insiders have all the knowledge, where I often think that what we have learned, particularly in this current political era, is that party insiders often have missed core things about the country and are surprised come Election Day.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.Good political journalism can do both at the same time: We both get a better understanding about how Washington and parties and candidates are coming to an election, and you also have a good understanding of where the country and constituents are.We’re trying to come from a place that does not lecture down to voters, but actually affirms how they feel through connecting dots.What’s the process for reaching out to voters for interviews on the podcast?I did not want to make a midterm show where only people who already understood the midterms’ importance would listen. I think that there are a lot of podcasts and a lot of political media that already exists for those people.We are trying to do something that is not just for those people, but that is for everyone else who doesn’t know if it matters. This is a podcast for everyone involved — we are not coming from a place that assumes language or assumes knowledge.That’s informed by my own experiences. I come from communities that were ignored by parties. I know what it’s like to live in places that feel neglected. And I know what it’s like when political media is not reflecting your concerns.What can listeners expect in future episodes?We want to deal with: How did we get here? How deep do these fractures go? And what is our commitment to democracy, really? Every one of the episodes will ask one of those questions.People deserve an answer about whether the system might hold, and what real cracks are there. I think that voters actually respond when political media is honest and transparent. When I am at a Trump rally versus when I am at a Bernie Sanders rally, that sentiment is universal — concern and anxiety about what democracy means, and whether it’s going to hold. They’re not coming from a universal agreement about the why, but it is a universal feeling that somebody is taking democracy from you.In that moment, to ask any question besides those core, fundamental ones is missing the point. The central question here has to be one that wrestles with democracy’s meaning and value for voters. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that those things are being more defined right now.Astead interviews Bishop Theodore Myers, founding pastor of Temple of Faith Bible Way Church.Clare Toeniskoetter/The New York TimesI think we have a democracy that has frequently had crossroads moments that forced the country to decide what it really means by that word. I think this election is another one of those moments.How do you cut through the noise in political media and get to the core of an issue?In some ways, I disagree with the premise — there is a lot of political media and noise out there, but there’s not a lot out there that is framed from the basis of voters’ concerns being justified. There’s not actually a lot out there that deals with whether our commitment to democracy is real. The reason that a lot of politics journalism has skirted from these questions is because they’re hard questions that have messy and nonlinear answers. The power of this podcast and the power of audio is that you can deal with messy, nonlinear stuff in a better way. More

In “The Divider,” political journalists keep their cool as they chronicle the outrageous conduct and ugly infighting that marked a presidency like no other.THE DIVIDER: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser“His job wasn’t to get things done but to stop certain things from happening, to prevent disaster.” This line from Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s detail-rich history of the Trump administration, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” technically applies to his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. But in truth it describes any of several dozen beleaguered helpmates to the former president, whose propensity for petulant rage kept Washington in a fit of indignation and the White House in a mode of perpetual damage control for the better part of four years. Comprehensively researched and briskly told, “The Divider” is a story of disasters averted as well as disasters realized.Squeezing the tumultuous events of the long national fever dream that was the Donald Trump presidency between two covers — even two covers placed far apart, as is the case with this 752-page anvil — would tax the skills of the nimblest journalist. Yet the husband-and-wife team of Baker and Glasser pull it off with assurance. It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).To be sure, asking readers in 2022 to revisit the Sturm und Drang of the Trump years may seem like asking a Six Flags patron, staggering from a ride on the Tsunami, to jump back on for another go. But those with strong stomachs will find a lot they didn’t know, and a lot more that they once learned but maybe, amid the daily barrage of breaking-news banner headlines, managed to forget.Baker, The New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, and Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, are the perfect pair to write this book, with a combined 60 years of Washington reporting experience and two other jointly authored books to their names. (I know both of them through professional circles; when Glasser edited Politico Magazine, she hired me to write a history column.) For a book produced so quickly, they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years, including those by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, and Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. (Something about writing a Trump book seems to call for two reporters.)Even while cataloging Trump’s most outrageous behaviors, Baker and Glasser strive to maintain a professional, dispassionate tone: analytical but not polemical. Inevitably, however, their low opinion of Trump shines through, occasionally garnished with a soupçon of snark. Of the president’s curiosity about whether nuclear bombs might deter tropical storms, they write, “Trump’s plans to deal with Hurricane Dorian thankfully did not involve atomic warfare.” Apart from the landmark Abraham Accords of 2020, which opened diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab nations, they devote only fleeting attention to Trump’s concrete achievements, of which even critics must concede there were a few. The strength of the pre-Covid economy — for which Trump doesn’t deserve full credit but which still helped millions of voters look past his failings and failures — is little discussed. Trump fans will surely object to the consistently negative judgments about their tribune.But the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy. To impose order on the chaos, the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia. Former Moscow correspondents and longtime Russia jocks, Baker and Glasser eschew the wilder conspiracy theories that were bandied about in left-wing circles during Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 campaign’s Russia connections.Instead, “The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.” The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment, which has since been overshadowed by the second.If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts. Because everyone had different ideas about where to restrain and where to encourage Trump, the White House became a den of “ongoing tribal warfare,” they write — an “Apprentice”-style reality-TV show in which the parties vied to win Trump’s favor and outlast their rivals, even while at times sabotaging the president’s agenda as they saw fit..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The dishy gossip and mocking nicknames the Trumpies coin for one another (Kushner is the “Slim Reaper,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen “Nurse Ratched”) make for amusing reading; they also highlight a dysfunctionality rare for even the Washington freak show. Every chapter, it seems, has a sentence like this: “While Priebus, Bannon and Kushner disliked each other, the one thing they agreed on was they all loathed [Kellyanne] Conway.” Or: “In public, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster were portrayed as fellow members of the Axis of Adults. In private, there was pettiness that at times suggested a middle school cafeteria.” The backbiting — and the sub rosa efforts to thwart their own president — led to constant personnel turnover, a dreary parade of firings, resignations and defenestrations. Trump would cashier one aide in favor of someone presumably more compliant, only for the new guy to find that Trump was even more willful and heedless of rules than he had dreamed. Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse. Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.” They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.” In this instance, Schiff was talking specifically about Trump’s plans to “compromise our elections,” and his words proved tragically prescient. “The Divider” concludes with a riveting few chapters on Trump’s mad scheming to hold onto power after his November 2020 defeat — resulting in the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.In the book’s final passages, we see Trump lurking in exile in Mar-a-Lago like a movie villain, having escaped Washington by the skin of his teeth, defeated but not altogether vanquished. In Hollywood, such endings serve to leave the door open to another installment. But as good as this book is, let’s hope Baker and Glasser won’t be writing a sequel.David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is writing a biography of the late congressman John Lewis.THE DIVIDER: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 | By Peter Baker and Susan Glasser | 752 pp. | Doubleday | $32 More

Perhaps you didn’t notice, but back in November, Kamala Harris made history by becoming the first woman to hold presidential power.OK, it was only for an hour and a half. But still.Joe Biden temporarily — very temporarily — transferred executive power to his vice president when he was preparing for a colonoscopy. That involved being under anesthesia, and you do not want the country being run by a guy whose brain is asleep, even if we experienced four years of that in the very recent past.But really, people. This should at least be a reminder of how far we haven’t come. Our country is 246 years old, and that translates into something like 2,160,000 hours. One and a half of which have been under a woman’s direction.It’s a little embarrassing when we hear the news from London that Liz Truss just became the new prime minister. She’s the third woman chosen to run the government in Britain. In the United States the number is:A. One — Hillary really won! Really, she won!B. Two — I am counting that day with Kamala Harris, plus I think we could throw in that time in Salem when the head witches took over.C. Gee, guess we’re still waiting.The country doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with women governors. Right now, only nine of our states are headed by a female executive, and four of the women first stepped into the job after the guy who was elected resigned, for reasons ranging from an ambassadorship to, well, Andrew Cuomo.We’re not doing terrific on the legislative side, either: A quarter of our senators are women, and about 28 percent of the members of the House are. After the midterms that could get worse. “It looks like under most likely scenarios we’ll have fewer women in the House and Senate next year,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who’s been a hurricane of fund-raising action for Democratic candidates, told me.Still, American voters find it much easier to imagine a female member of Congress than a female chief executive. “The stereotypes about women’s leadership are more in line with legislatures,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women in Politics. The problem, Walsh suggested, is that women are seen as good at getting along with other people but not necessarily at running things.In Britain, where the prime minister is typically the leader of the majority party, the getting-along part is perhaps more valued. The two previous women in the job, like Truss, were Tories: Margaret Thatcher for 11 years, beginning in 1979, and Theresa May, who led the government from 2016 to 2019.Thatcher was known as “the Iron Lady” and remembered, among other things, for the conflict in the Falkland Islands, a lesson to all other heads of state that the best possible way to win a war is in less than 10 weeks.We do not dwell on May’s regime much, but it did include a campaign against illegal immigrants with ads warning them to “go home or face arrest” and an image of handcuffs.She also once wore a T-shirt that read, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Hmmm.Of course, nobody wants to see just any woman running the United States. But there are plenty of female politicians with just as much leadership potential as any man. And the fight for equality has to go on until they have an equal shot at the presidency.Breathe deep and let’s see what’s happened in our history so far. And ignore the fact that there are chapters in even the most stirring story that aren’t inspiring. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was one of the first American women to be elected governor — in 1924 after her husband was impeached. She went on to make her mark by pardoning an average of 100 criminals a month during her first term, in what appeared to be a freedom-for-a-fee system.OK, back to the plus side: How about Margaret Chase Smith, who valiantly stood up to the crazed red-baiting of Joe McCarthy in the Senate when all her colleagues were quivering under their desks? In 1964 Smith held the very reasonable opinion that she’d make a better president than the likely Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. She also thought it was time to “break the barrier against women being seriously considered for the presidency.”Yeah, that was 58 years ago. Still waiting.Smith’s battle wasn’t a real test of how well a woman candidate could do, unless you presume said candidate could overcome minimal campaign funds, along with an unfortunate tendency to stress her recipe for blueberry muffins. But she’s definitely someone you’d like to think of as leading the way.And Hillary Clinton, who got the most votes in 2016, but was thwarted by our, um, unique Electoral College system, which presumes that every 193,000 people in Wyoming deserve the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.Gillibrand, who once made a brief try for the presidential nomination herself, is confident she’s going to see a woman in the White House during her lifetime. “There’d better be — I’m hoping in the next 10 years.”Me, too.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The former president stayed out of New Hampshire’s primaries, but Republicans nominated the candidates for Senate and the House most aligned with his political brand.Republican voters on Tuesday rendered their latest judgment on the tussle between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell for control of the party: They’re with Trump.In this week’s primary elections in New Hampshire, G.O.P. voters picked three hard-right candidates who have floated baseless theories about problems with the 2020 results — a sign that the election-fraud fever inside the Republican Party has not yet abated, if it ever will.First, in the Senate race against Maggie Hassan, the Democratic incumbent, Granite State Republicans chose Don Bolduc over Chuck Morse, a state lawmaker who had the financial and political backing of the local establishment as well as that of Senator McConnell, the minority leader, and his well-heeled allies.Bolduc, a decorated retired Army general who has avidly promoted Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential results, campaigned as a political outsider who was critical of both parties. He played up his military experience, including a stint fighting in Afghanistan as a “horse soldier” after the Sept. 11 attacks.Morse struggled to navigate the shifting waters of the Republican primary electorate, which, even in famously independent New Hampshire, has moved sharply rightward in recent years.At one point, Morse embraced the label “MAGA Republican” after President Biden’s speech castigating the Trump wing of the party as a threat to democracy. At the same time, Morse sought support from McConnell and Gov. Chris Sununu, a moderate who blasted Bolduc as a “conspiracy theory extremist.”Bolduc hit right back at Sununu, accusing him of sympathizing with the Chinese Communist Party and of being “in business with Saudi Arabian companies that give money to terrorists.”Bolduc also called Sununu, who loudly declared a lack of interest in challenging Hassan late last year, a “globalist world-government guy” — an insult popularized by Stephen Bannon, the recently indicted former Trump aide who frequently promotes aggressive anti-government language on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic.”On the Saturday before Election Day, Sununu nonetheless said of Bolduc: “I’ll endorse whoever the nominee is and support him. Of course I will, no question.”Sununu won his primary handily. But he is widely seen as having presidential aspirations, and the outcomes of New Hampshire’s other contests this week will inevitably raise questions about that. Namely: Are Republican voters truly looking for someone in the moderate mold he projects?The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Fierce Primary Season Ends: Democrats are entering the final sprint to November with more optimism, especially in the Senate. But Republicans are confident they can gain a House majority.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.In a key House primary, voters backed Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old former press assistant in the Trump White House, over Matt Mowers, who served as a political appointee in Trump’s State Department and later as a board member of the International Republican Institute, a pillar of the wheezing internationalist wing of the G.O.P. Leavitt has repeatedly pushed the fiction that Trump was robbed in 2020.And in New Hampshire’s other House district, another right-wing candidate, Robert Burns, won narrowly over George Hansel, the moderate mayor of Keene. Burns said during the campaign that he accepted Biden’s 2020 victory but believed that “a ton” of other elections were stolen that year.Notably, Trump did not endorse a candidate in any of New Hampshire’s Senate or House contests.Kathy Barnette gathered momentum late in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate but ultimately lost to Dr. Mehmet Oz.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesTuesday’s results recall a revealing moment in the Senate primary in Pennsylvania, when Kathy Barnette, an insurgent candidate seeking to claim Trump’s mantle, said at a debate: “MAGA does not belong to President Trump.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values,” she said. “It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.”Like Bolduc, Barnette had the backing of Bannon and other Trump-world celebrities with huge online followings. In her Senate race, Trump had endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television celebrity, over David McCormick, a former hedge-fund executive who came within just under a thousand of victory.But while Barnette’s shoestring campaign ultimately came up short, she was the one who briefly captured the imagination of the Republican grass roots — the same political forces that powered the primary victory of Doug Mastriano, the far-right G.O.P. nominee for governor in Pennsylvania.You can see that Trump-aligned coalition imposing its will on the political geography of New Hampshire. Morse racked up votes in more heavily populated southern parts of the state near Boston — he ran ahead of Bolduc by roughly 20 percentage points in Portsmouth, for instance — while losing or barely beating his rival in rural areas and towns further upstate.The New York TimesFor the coup de grâce, Bolduc even defeated Morse within the state senator’s own district, which includes the towns of Salem and Pelham.“Donald Trump still has a stranglehold on Republican primary voters, and Governor Sununu’s popularity is nontransferable,” said Joe Caiazzo, who ran presidential campaigns in New Hampshire for Senator Bernie Sanders.He added, “This is a sign that deniers will play an enormous role in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.”What to read tonightMike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and prominent promoter of 2020 election conspiracy theories, had his cellphone seized by federal agents at a Hardee’s restaurant in Minnesota — a clear sign that the Justice Department has intensified its interest in a state case against a Colorado county clerk accused of tampering with voting machines, Charles Homans, Ken Bensinger, Alexandra Berzon and Alan Feuer write.John Durham, the former U.S. attorney assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry with little fanfare, Katie Benner, Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage report.For more than a decade, Catherine Engelbrecht, a Texas small-business owner turned election-fraud crusader, has sown doubts about ballots and voting. Her patience has paid off, and now she’s seizing the moment, Cecilia Kang writes in a deeply reported profile.Under the new climate and tax law, the federal government will lease hundreds of millions more acres for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in the next decade, even as it invests $370 billion to move the country away from fossil fuels, Lisa Friedman writes.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Wednesday that she would resign. Despite the success of the far-right Sweden Democrats, they will influence but are not expected to be formally part of the governing coalition.BASTAD, Sweden — Sweden’s right-wing parties combined to win a remarkable, if slim, election victory on Wednesday, buoyed by surging support for a far-right nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, an electoral convulsion expected to shake national politics and likely end eight years of rule by the center-left.With over 99 percent of ballots counted, the Swedish Election Authority reported that the right-wing bloc had won 176 of the 349 seats in Parliament. The Swedish Social Democratic Party, the main party in the current governing coalition, grabbed the highest percentage votes as an individual party, but together with its allies, had secured 173 seats in Parliament, not enough to stay in power.The most stunning development was support for the Sweden Democrats, once considered an extremist party, which emerged as the second-most popular party in the country. While the party’s support will be essential to the right-wing bloc maintaining its majority bloc in Parliament, it is unlikely to be a formal part of the new government. During the election campaign, the bloc of right-wing parties agreed to support a government led by the center-right Moderate Party but not one led by the Sweden Democrats. That means the new government is expected to be led by Ulf Kristersson, head of the Moderates, who would become prime minister.Mr. Kristersson said on Facebook that his party and allies had been “given the mandate for change.”Analysts said that the vote on Sunday had been one of the closest in modern times and reflected a desire by Swedes to move in a new direction after decades of center-left policymaking that has included an openness toward asylum seekers, an emphasis on individual liberties and an adherence to socially liberal ideals.Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson conceded the result on Wednesday and announced that she would resign from the role on Thursday. “I know that a lot of Swedes are concerned. I see your concern and I share it,” she said of the advance from the Sweden Democrats.Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson on Wednesday.Jessica Gow/EPA, via Shutterstock“Now we will get order in Sweden,” Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday: “It is time to start rebuilding security, prosperity and cohesion. It’s time to put Sweden first.”The announcement of the results followed days of uncertainty, and election officials had delayed calling a winner so that they could tally mail-in votes and ballots from citizens living abroad.The right-wing bloc will be fragile: The Moderate Party, which finished in third place with 19.1 percent of the vote, and the Sweden Democrats, which took 20.6 percent, are likely to clash over several policies, such as welfare benefits, where the Moderates are looking for bigger cuts than the Sweden Democrats want.Other parties in the bloc, such as the Liberals, which took 4.6 percent of the vote, will also want to have their say, leaving the Moderates facing a complex task in balancing the competing interests.Soren Holmberg, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, said, “It will be a very fragile situation for Swedish parliamentary democracy for the next four years,” adding that there were enough political differences among the right-wing bloc to make consensus difficult.Already on Wednesday, Romina Pourmokhtari, a lawmaker for the Liberal Party vowed to bring down the government if the Sweden Democrats were in it.“I ran for office to defend human freedoms and rights. That’s where we Liberals need to put our energy in the coming years,” she told the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter.Nonetheless, the outcome will mean a change of direction for the country, analysts predicted, and it showcased the extent to which the party of the Sweden Democrats, which has worked to rebrand itself from its origins in Nazi ideology, had upended politics in the country.“It will be away from the Sweden we know until today — that trajectory is broken,” said Jonas Hinnfors, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg.Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party, speaking in Stockholm on Sunday. He has tried to moderate the party’s image.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat was still unclear, Professor Hinnfors noted, was precisely how much influence the Sweden Democrats would have, considering that the party had taken so much of the vote but was not expected to be a formal part of the new government. Four years ago, in the last election, right-wing parties had vowed not to work with the Sweden Democrats at all.During the election, the main issues for voters appeared to have been health care, immigration and integration, the energy crisis that has been prompted in large part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and law and order — in particular, the increasing prevalence of gun crime in a country normally known for high living standards.With inflation rising, Ms. Andersson, the outgoing prime minister and leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, had promised to increase welfare benefits, institute a tax on the highest earners, support those affected by rising energy prices and increase military spending. With those pledges, the party took 30.4 percent of the vote, more than any other single party but not enough to keep the center-left in power.The results mean that Sweden joins other nations in Europe where far-right parties that were once on the fringe have gained mainstream influence. They include Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France and the Vox party in Spain. In Italy, an alliance headed by a far-right party is leading in the polls to win this month’s election.Founded in 1988, the Sweden Democrats began their comparatively fast political rise when they crossed the threshold needed to enter Parliament in 2010, capturing 5.7 percent of the vote.By 2018, that support had grown to 17.5 percent of the vote, and this year, the party took 20.6 percent. In its campaign, the party vowed to be tough on crime and to take greater control over the education system, while calling for repatriation packages for some immigrants.Marianne Hallqvist, 68, a retired nurse’s assistant from Lund, a university city in southern Sweden, said she hopes the Sweden Democrats live up to their promise of raising pensions and tackling crime, which is why she voted for them.“I want a change,” Ms. Hallqvist said. “I think these parties can impose law and order in Sweden. I want police and law enforcement to have greater power.”Mr. Akesson, the longtime leader of the Sweden Democrats, has tried to moderate the party’s image and distance it from its white supremacist roots — acknowledging, for example, that a study of the party’s founders and their ideological beliefs did not make “for pleasant reading.”More recently, the party has reversed its opposition to Sweden’s joining NATO and stepped back from a proposal to leave the European Union.The essence of the Sweden Democrats’ vision is ethnonationalist and conservative, Professor Hinnfors said. “They want harmony in society by having everyone with their loyalty to Sweden,” he noted, adding that the party viewed multiculturalism as the root of many problems in Sweden.Other analysts said that they expected the party to focus on immigration, education and spending, including limiting financing for public services.“It’s about traditions, cultural heritage, values and the idea that there is a Swedish culture that is tied to Swedish identity and that must be protected and be preserved against other cultures,” said Linnea Lindskold, director for the Center of Cultural Policy Research at the University of Boras, in southern Sweden. Unlike other parties, she said, the Sweden Democrats wanted to have a hand in defining what cultural expressions and art were acceptable.Counting ballots in Stockholm on Monday. Analysts said that the vote on Sunday had been one of the closest in modern times.Tim Aro/TT News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe growing influence of the far right has caused some to express concern about the country’s future. “To all Black and brown people in Sweden — be extra vigilant now,” Jason Diakité, a Swedish rapper known as Timbuktu, wrote on Instagram.He added, “This election result will undoubtedly embolden even more extreme forces that have existed in this country for almost 100 years.” More

Generation Z has been pushing for more political power since its first members came of age in 2015. This year, it has its first opportunity to enter the halls of Congress — and, as the dust clears from a long primary season, two candidates are poised to take advantage.Karoline Leavitt won the Republican primary in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District on Tuesday, less than a month after turning 25, the constitutional minimum age to serve in the House. She is an underdog in the general election, facing a Democratic incumbent, Representative Chris Pappas. But the district is roughly evenly divided between the parties and the race is competitive.Even if Ms. Leavitt loses in November, the next Congress is virtually guaranteed to include a member of Generation Z: Maxwell Alejandro Frost, also 25, who won the Democratic primary last month for an open House seat in Florida’s solidly blue 10th Congressional District.Either of them, if elected, would be the youngest sitting member of Congress. If both are elected, the distinction will go to Ms. Leavitt, who is about seven months younger.But neither would be the youngest person ever elected to Congress.That record, unlikely ever to be broken, belongs to William C.C. Claiborne, who was 22 when he was elected to the House from Tennessee in 1797, according to congressional records. (There is some dispute in other sources about his exact age, but no dispute that he was younger than 25.) The age requirement was no different then: The Constitution said House members had to be at least 25, and Mr. Claiborne wasn’t. But the House chose to seat Mr. Claiborne anyway.A handful of 24-year-olds were seated in the 1800s, too, according to congressional records, as were some people who turned 25 less than a month before being sworn in.In modern times, however, it is rare for a 25-year-old to be elected to the House.Representative Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, managed it in 2020; if elected this year, Ms. Leavitt would be less than a month younger than Mr. Cawthorn was when he was elected. Before Mr. Cawthorn, the last 25-year-old to serve in the House was Thomas Downey, a New York Democrat elected in 1974.Generation Z leans strongly toward Democrats, but its members are not an ideological monolith, as evidenced by the political leanings of Ms. Leavitt and Mr. Frost.Mr. Frost is a progressive Democrat who supports Medicare for all, abortion rights and stricter gun laws. “I come from a generation that has gone through more mass-shooting drills than fire drills,” he told The New York Times in an interview after his primary victory, adding that he believed his generation had “a natural sense of seeing the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable.”Ms. Leavitt, whose campaign did not respond to an interview request, is a right-wing Republican who worked as a press aide for former President Donald J. Trump. She supports a “zero tolerance” policy against illegal immigration and opposes abortion and gun control. More

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats beat out more moderate right-wing parties in a country famed for liberal governance. It is the latest example of the right’s staying power across Europe.The final results of Sweden’s elections made history on Wednesday: The Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant far-right party with a recent history of overtly Nazi ideology, has won its best result ever. With 20.6 percent of the vote, it is in second place in Sweden’s multiparty system, beating out all of the more mainstream right-wing parties.There are two ways to think about this. The first is as something new and unusual: to focus on the party’s unprecedented success, and what it signals about a changing Sweden.But the other way to look at it is as the latest example of a pattern that has become typical across Europe: far-right parties’ winning substantial portions of the vote, if not actual power. (That is still likely to be the case in Sweden, where even though the bloc of right-wing parties together won a majority of parliament seats, the more mainstream of them are expected to form a government without the Sweden Democrats.)The NewThe Sweden Democrats won three percent more of the vote than their previous record of 17.5 percent in the 2018 election, continuing a trajectory of steady growth since it first entered parliament in 2010.This would grab attention in any country, but especially in Sweden, a country that is known for egalitarian social democracy.“Relative to other countries in Europe, when we look at cross-national surveys, Sweden always exhibits the highest or among the highest rates of tolerance for diversity — of, for instance, support for immigration, support for offering asylum,” said Jennifer Fitzgerald, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies the Swedish far right. “For years, when other countries were experiencing the growth of the far right, Sweden didn’t. And so I think maybe there was an expectation that there would be an exception there.”It is now clear that there isn’t.No single factor explains the rise of the far right in Sweden, said Sirus Hafstrom Dehdari, a political scientist at Stockholm University who studies the radical right and political identity.Police riot vans respond to the site of a far-right demonstration in Malmo, Sweden, in April.Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency, via ReutersThe 2008 financial crisis gave the party an early boost: Dehdari’s research found that each crisis-induced job loss translated into half a vote for the Sweden Democrats. Demographic change may be another factor: 20 years ago, about 10 percent of Sweden’s population was foreign-born. Now that number is more like 20 percent. More recently, heavy media coverage of an increase in gang-related killings, many of which occurred within immigrant communities, have connected immigration to crime in the public consciousness.But while there are many pathways to the far right, once there, its voters have appeared to be remarkably loyal, Dehdari said. People may have begun voting for the Sweden Democrats in the wake of the financial crisis, but they “didn’t go back to mainstream parties once they got a new job,” he said. A similar pattern may hold for more recent events too, such as the spike in crime, but it is too soon to say for sure.The PatternSweden is just the latest European democracy with a far right that is regularly able to command electoral support, joining a list that already included France, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Estonia, and others.“In many European countries, it seems like they get to 20 percent and then they hit the ceiling,” Dehdari said. “There needs to be some rather large change in society for them to grow a lot beyond 20 or 22 percent.”Twenty is a lot less than 50: such a party cannot expect to win an outright majority any time soon. But 20 percent is enough to be a major partner in a coalition — making the far right’s votes increasingly tempting for other parties seeking to form a government.So the most significant political question for Sweden is not how many votes the far right can get, but how the rest of the political system will respond to its growing popularity.So far, Sweden’s mainstream parties have maintained a so-called “cordon sanitaire,” agreeing among themselves that they will shut the far right out of governing coalitions and government posts. It is a strategy that has been used in other European countries, such as France, Germany, and Greece, to keep the far right out of power.But such pacts can be hard to maintain, particularly for mainstream right-wing parties, which often must choose between entering into agenda-diluting coalitions with center-left parties, or staying in the opposition because they refuse to join with the far right. Sometimes ambition beats out resolve: In Germany in 2020, two mainstream parties broke the cordon sanitaire to form a short-lived coalition with the far right in the state of Thuringia, prompting a political backlash and local government crisis.Counting the final ballots in Stockholm on Wednesday.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd even when mainstream parties do maintain the red line against far-right parties, that does not necessarily equal a blockade against far-right policies. In many countries, parties of the mainstream right have adopted hard-line positions on immigrants and refugees in an attempt to win votes back from insurgent far-right parties.That strategy has backfired in Sweden, however, Dehdari said, because validating far-right parties’ policies tends to reduce the stigma of voting for them. “Why don’t the voters go back?” he said. “Well, it’s because why vote for the copy when you can vote for the original?”In some other countries, including Italy, Austria and Sweden’s neighbor Finland, far-right parties have been allowed into governing coalitions. “Across countries where that boundary has been crossed and where far-right parties have become members of governing coalitions, it does seem to confer a certain level of legitimacy onto those parties,” Fitzgerald said.Counterintuitively, far-right parties themselves can sometimes pay a steep price for that kind of access to government, Dehdari said. In Finland, the far-right party then called the True Finns underwent a bitter internal split after conflict with its coalition partners over its election of new, more extremist party leadership.In Sweden, as the final election results trickle in, the cordon sanitaire seems to be holding. But as right-wing parties try to put together a coalition with razor-thin margins, they will face decisions about whether to allow the Sweden Democrats to become part of the government’s voting coalition — even if the party does not formally become a coalition member with cabinet posts — or to keep them out entirely.But the bigger picture, Fitzgerald said, is not just about mainstream parties’ treatment of the far right, but the health of the political system as a whole. She noted that early reports suggest that voter turnout was unusually low in this election, a sign of broader voter dissatisfaction. (Something similar happened in France’s presidential election last April, which saw low turnout, as well as record numbers of abstentions and blank ballots.)“I was just thinking, ‘Amanda’s going to call and I’m going to tell her something really boring about turnout,’” she joked during our conversation. “But to me, that absolutely should be part of the story here.”Research, including her own, is clear on that point, she said: “Far-right parties do better when turnout is low.” Which means that the real question might not be what Sweden’s mainstream parties can do about the far right, but whether they can persuade their own voters to show up to stop them. More

Robert Burns, a right-wing candidate aligned with former President Donald J. Trump, won Tuesday’s Republican primary in New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District, according to The Associated Press.He defeated six other Republicans, including George Hansel, a more moderate candidate who may have had a better chance of defeating the Democratic incumbent, Representative Ann McLane Kuster, in November. As of midday Wednesday, when the race was called, Mr. Burns was leading by more than 1,500 votes.The district — which includes the state’s second- and third-largest cities, Nashua and Concord, as well as large rural areas of western and northern New Hampshire — is competitive but leans toward Democrats.Mr. Burns, a local businessman and former treasurer of Hillsborough County, N.H., campaigned on ending economic reliance on China and on an array of conservative red-meat issues, including opposition to gun control, to pandemic mitigation measures and to the purported teaching of critical race theory.He won the primary despite raising less than half as much money as Mr. Hansel, according to Federal Election Commission filings.Mr. Burns may have benefited from more than $90,000 in spending by a Democratic political action committee, the latest example of a risky Democratic strategy to help far-right Republicans win primaries in the hopes that they will be easier to beat in the general election.A 30-second advertisement from the group, Democrats Serve, featured a clip of Mr. Burns calling himself “the only pro-Trump, unapologetic conservative” in the race. It was framed as an attack: “If we send Bob Burns, the ‘unapologetic conservative,’ to Congress, New Hampshire is going to get burned,” it said.But an array of Democratic organizations — outside groups as well as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House campaign arm — have run similar ads elsewhere to try to make opponents they view as weaker seem more attractive to conservative primary voters.Mr. Burns’s main opponent, Mr. Hansel, is the mayor of Keene and was endorsed by Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor. Mr. Hansel ran as the sort of moderate Republican who has traditionally done well in New England, allowing the party to retain a modicum of power even in very blue states. But this year’s primaries have shown that Republican voters’ appetite for such candidates has fallen.Mr. Hansel focused heavily on inflation and described himself as pro-choice — something that could have been an asset in the general election, given the backlash to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but that was a liability in a Republican primary. Mr. Burns, by contrast, has said he would support federal legislation to ban abortion after cardiac activity is detectable in the embryo or fetus, which is before many women know they are pregnant.In addition to Mr. Burns and Mr. Hansel, the primary in the Second District included Lily Tang Williams — a libertarian-leaning Republican who made her personal experience as a Chinese immigrant a centerpiece of her campaign — and four lesser-known candidates. More