Elections

Alyce McFadden
June, 28, 2022 More

US Capitol attack: militia member gets longest prison sentence yetMan with ties to Three Percenters, who said he planned to violently drag Pelosi from building, sentenced to seven years An associate of the far-right Three Percenters militia group has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.It is the longest sentence imposed so far among hundreds of cases related to the insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump who sought to stop the official congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory over his Republican rival.Prosecutors said Guy Reffitt had told fellow members of the Texas Three Percenters militia group that he planned to drag the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi out of the Capitol building by her ankles “with her head hitting every step on the way down”, according to a court filing.Reffitt was sentenced in Washington DC on Monday after being convicted by a jury in March of obstructing Congress’ joint session, of interfering with police officers outside the Capitol and of threatening his two teenage children if they reported him to law enforcement.Justice department prosecutors recommended a 15-year prison sentence for Reffitt, with the duration warranted “for terrorism”.The longest sentence before Reffitt’s 7.25-year term was handed down was five years and three months, for two men who admitted assaulting police officers at the Capitol.Reffitt’s defense had asked for no more than two years in prison.Videos captured the confrontation between outnumbered US Capitol police officers and a mob of people, including Reffitt, who approached them on the west side of the building that afternoon, shortly after Trump had held a rally calling on the crowd to go to the Capitol and urging supporters to “fight like hell” to keep him in power.Garland promises ‘justice without fear or favor’ as DoJ digs into Trump’s January 6 roleRead moreReffitt was armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol in a holster on his waist, carried zip-tie handcuffs and was wearing body armor and a helmet equipped with a video camera when he advanced on officers, according to prosecutors.He retreated after an officer pepper-sprayed him in the face, but he waved on other rioters who ultimately breached the building, prosecutors said.Reffitt’s 19-year-old son, Jackson, testified that his father had told him and his sister, then 16, that they would be traitors if they reported him to authorities and warned them that “traitors get shot”.The Three Percenters movement refers to the myth that only 3% of Americans fought in the revolutionary war against the British.Reffitt lived with his wife and children in Wylie, Texas, a Dallas suburb. He drove to Washington with Rocky Hardie, a fellow member of the militia group.Hardie testified that both of them attended Trump’s rally.More than 840 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. More than 340 of them have pleaded guilty and more than 220 have been sentenced, with nearly half of them receiving terms of imprisonment. Approximately 150 others have trial dates stretching into 2023.Reffitt is one of seven Capitol riot defendants to get a jury trial so far. Jurors have convicted all seven on all counts.The Department of Justice has not ruled out Trump and members of his cohort from its widening criminal investigation into events surrounding January 6 as well as the insurrection itself.The attorney general, Merrick Garland, last week pledged “to bring to justice everybody who is criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power” and to pursue wrongdoing “without fear or favor”.Separately, a bipartisan House select committee is investigating events leading up to, on and immediately after January 6 and has held a series of public hearings that are expected to resume in the fall, that also examine Trump’s role.TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

WASHINGTON — What should you do when you know you’re losing?In a political system, it’s an easy question on paper, but a hard one to deal with personally in the moment. It’s at the heart of a peaceful transition of power, and former President Donald J. Trump’s answer to that question in 2020 — his refusal to admit that he lost — hammered away at the political foundations of the country.It’s also a question that works in other ways: What you should do when you think you might be losing is something Democrats shouldn’t forget ahead of November’s midterm elections. The threat of lost power has animated the last six years of national politics, particularly inside the Republican Party as officials gave way to Mr. Trump and political gravity, remaking their priorities, boundaries and message in the process.His continued refusal to admit his 2020 defeat makes that tension within the party more alive than ever. Over the past year, Mr. Trump has occasionally issued statements declaring “1 down, 9 to go!,” “2 down, 8 to go!” It’s like a metronome in the background of the midterms, as the Republicans who voted to impeach him retire, leave, lose, exist in a state of uncertainty, reorient themselves to reality.On the receiving end of Mr. Trump’s attacks and especially the worries from inside the Republican Party about losing, consider Representative Liz Cheney. She seems to know she’s likely to lose her congressional primary on Aug. 16. In a G.O.P. debate earlier this summer in Wyoming, rather than any talk about inflation or local issues, she devoted her closing debate statement to two minutes on the Constitution, the importance of not telling lies, and the option to vote for someone else if people are looking for a lawmaker who will violate their oath of office.From the outside, how Ms. Cheney has approached the last 18 months might represent the best example of one point of view on the meaning of Jan. 6, 2021, its causes, solutions, the role of the individual and how political figures should face the prospect of losing power.Many of us agree on a foundational premise about the recent history of our country: The post-2020 election period was a nightmare, culminating in the events of Jan. 6. Mr. Trump repeatedly said the election was stolen, many Republican leaders placated him, some segment of the population listened, and some segment of that population bashed in the windows of the Capitol. Even if we acknowledge that, serious people can still disagree about the nature of the problem, and therefore its solution, and therefore the meaning of the time we’re living in.Consider these two admittedly reductive binaries:1. Donald Trump is the logical extension of the Republican Party.2. Donald Trump is an anomaly.a. Systems matter most for the peaceful transfer of power.b. Individual choices matter most for the peaceful transfer of power.Either framework produces a number of possibilities and they can overlap in unusual ways. A lot of Republican voters and many progressive writers view Mr. Trump as in keeping with the historical bounds of the Republican Party; and plenty of others, haters and lovers alike, view him as a singular entity in American life.The American social contract, meanwhile, requires both democratic structures and perpetual individual choices in the interests of the common cause. Before the 2016 election, in a piece pinpointing a central problem Mr. Trump posed, Charles Krauthammer wrote that the democratic system is “a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat,” a “sublimation” that only works by dint of mutual agreement on its legitimacy and boundaries, and fragile norms of restraint built over “decades, centuries.”If you start clicking these binaries together, you can trace logical paths to wildly different arguments about the current path out of these problems. An emphasis on structure, on Mr. Trump as the product of our system and the saturation of election denial as a reflection on that system, can take you everywhere from the legislators diligently trying to pour concrete into the archaic flaws of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, to the writers who argue that expanding the Supreme Court will correct for political ossification and minoritarianism.And an emphasis on Mr. Trump as anomaly takes you right to Capitol Hill on a recent Thursday night with Ms. Cheney. Dressed in white and seated inside a room watched by millions, she sat up on the dais for hours, stoic and grim, during the committee’s last hearing this summer.Ms. Cheney has argued that personal agency matters since Jan. 6 took place: Institutions comprise individuals and individuals shape political reality, regardless of whether they intend to do so. Officials, she told one interviewer, have a duty “to recognize that we can influence events.” She told another, “We clearly have a situation where elected officials have to make a decision about whether we are bystanders or leaders,” calling it “irresponsible” to act “as though our institutions are self-sustaining, because they’re not; it takes us, it takes people, to do that.”In a closing statement that addressed criticisms of the committee, Ms. Cheney centered the individual against the system. Individual witnesses testified instead of hiding behind executive privilege, she said; individuals have made what she called a “series of confessions” from inside the party and White House, rather than as part of some broader political class against Mr. Trump; an individual like William P. Barr is no “delicate flower” that will break under cross-examination. Each theoretical objection to the committee’s political case corkscrewed into a central point about the principal character in this scenario: that, in the lead-up to Jan. 6, it didn’t matter what everyone knew and said inside and outside the White House, Mr. Trump was going to do what he did. And in response, Ms. Cheney has pointedly subjected herself to his endless reserves of attacks, as well as the party’s essential ostracism.Over the last decade, some conservative Trump critics have tended to be of the more-in-sadness-than-in-anger style, and often a little at a loss about how to deal with Mr. Trump and everything MAGA entails, in policy and style.Ms. Cheney, however, isn’t like that, or hasn’t been for the last 18 months. There is no emotion; if those guys run hot, she runs cold, “as emotional as algebra,” as one Republican lawmaker said last year; there is no personal anecdote about how life has become more difficult for her; there is very little ornamentation; there is nothing but this granite singularity. She is apparently willing to continually give up power without it appearing like much of a sacrifice, so much so that you can almost forget it’s happening. Here, then, is the individual, making a choice, extending personal agency to the max within the bounds of the political system, to address the crisis posed by another individual in Mr. Trump.Ms. Cheney shares some of her father’s speaking tonalities and mannerisms. There’s that same precision and even keel, the disinterest in public opinion vs. their own perspective, the emphasis on American exceptionalism, and the little extra current produced by a subtle wryness, like they might end a speech, “Thank you; I’ll see you all in hell.” Setting aside the larger policy matters, some of the qualities people hated (or loved) about Dick Cheney are ones people love (or hate) about Ms. Cheney.Since Mr. Trump announced for president in 2015, his emotions have shaped politics, from policy to the everyday tenor of the White House to the relentless campaign against those he believes have wronged him. His emotional valence echoes throughout American politics and culture, and worked to increase the pitch and excess of those who support him and many who respond to him. Even the select committee drifts into this excessive dimension in highlighting the tabloid (see: the dripping ketchup), which the public and especially media sometimes elevate over more dire information. In this general universe of emotion, Ms. Cheney’s ordered lack of it might be the source of public fascination with her currently, even beyond the intrinsic anger and praise for people who break with party.But Ms. Cheney flatly telling Republican officials that their dishonor will remain after Mr. Trump leaves is not an obvious path to remaining in the United States Congress, representing arguably America’s most conservative state. And this is where an emphasis on individual choice becomes more complicated in a two-party system.During this midterm cycle, a small handful of Republicans have tried to triangulate out of a situation where Mr. Trump has made their refusal to do what he wants an endless attack line. “We made a determination that, if you want to win an election, we are going to have to have people who like Trump also like us,” an aide to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia recently told CNN after his defeat of a challenger Mr. Trump backed solely because Mr. Kemp did not intervene in Georgia’s election results. “We had to give Trump supporters permission to like both of them.”Ms. Cheney clearly either did not believe that was a path open to her or did not want to attempt it. Her answer, in this in-between period after Jan. 6 and before the next presidential election where nothing about the future is determined, has been to commit entirely to what’s causing her to lose, most likely, a primary, and ultimately her power. She seems, at the very least, frustrated that many of her elected peers have been unwilling to take even the path of Mr. Kemp or former Vice President Mike Pence in how they discuss the 2020 election. If you buy into the idea that the difference between one person and the next really matters in politics, and especially in governance, this requires endless separating between vain and noble motives, and more to the point, worthless and meaningful actions.Getting out of this situation, where a big segment of voters falsely believe an election was stolen and a former president has made it a political mission to remove from office anyone who disagrees, is deeply complicated.In an interview last winter, the Republican Representative Peter Meijer, who also voted to impeach Mr. Trump and may himself lose a primary this week, carefully framed the problem as one where “you subordinate what your principles may be, saying, ‘Well, I know that this is really important but there’s a thing I care about more, and if I am not in office … I won’t be able to do that thing I care about more.’” These concessions, he said, can “really accumulate into someone just losing any sense of bearing.”There’s a line of thinking, one that somehow achieves eternal hope and cynicism simultaneously, that Mr. Trump imperils himself through his fixation on the past, and his power will fade and the country will move on passively, and lawmakers — the ones who privately want Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Pence, or anyone else to be president — can slip from one era to the next silently, without having to risk losing much of anything.That perspective relates to one that’s been there from the beginning, that an external collective composed of the party apparatus, or donors, or cable news, will intervene and reassert some authority they don’t have over Mr. Trump and talk the voters out of it — that now, for real, someone will turn on him, and that a large segment of the country doesn’t actually want Mr. Trump. It’s even, on some level, related to the political cynicism of the Democrats spending to promote candidates who believe the 2020 election was stolen because they might be easier to beat in a general election, like elections are just spreads to bet against.Inconveniently, then, for anyone hoping Jan. 6 ended on Jan. 6, the hearings this summer have centered on the wreckage of people’s lives: bodies crumpling against concrete steps, volunteers leery of giving their names, audio of frightened Secret Service agents, apologetic men who’ve pleaded guilty, and things happening even when some other authority theoretically should have been there. The hearings have been ruin, ruin, ruin all the way down, with visible lucky breaks that avoided further violence or legal nightmares in between.The hearings have deepened our understanding of that period, and reoriented the public’s attention toward its severity. The meaning of it all — especially the direction to go in from here — remains unresolved, a developing conversation about whether the solution is legal or political, systems and individuals.But the case Ms. Cheney has been implicitly making since Jan. 6 is that you have to use power while you still have it, and act like you’re prepared to lose it, rather than risking something worse in an effort to maintain it or conceding the truth only when there’s nothing left to do. Because, more than anything, her actions seem to reflect the ultimate individualist view of the last six years: If you don’t do it yourself, nobody is coming to help you.Ms. Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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

China has stepped up its warning against Nancy Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan, saying its military will ‘not sit idly by’ if it goes ahead this week. The explicit message came amid reports that the US House speaker, who began her tour of Asia at the weekend, may be arriving in Taipei on Tuesday and as China’s People’s Liberation Army was celebrating the 95th anniversary of its founding. China’s spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that because of Pelosi’s status, a visit to Taiwan, which China claims as its own province, would ‘lead to egregious political impact’

China’s military ‘will not sit idly by’ if Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan More

Gail Collins: Never really thought I’d be leading off with a toast to Joe Manchin, Bret, but troubled times require low expectations.Bret Stephens: You came around!Gail: Joe came around! Or caved, which sounds a little more satisfying. Of course we’ve still got his Senate colleague Kyrsten Sinema and her tax obsessions to worry about. But if it all comes together this week, we’ll get the big Biden program to battle climate change. Will that make you as happy as it would make me, hmm?Bret: Your happiness sounds like it’s an 8 or a 9 on a 10-point scale, and mine is probably around a 5. The Senate just passed a $280 billion bill to support the semiconductor industry under the guise of standing up to China, which is really just a huge giveaway to Intel and other U.S. chip makers. Now we’re dropping another $369 billion, and a lot of that will be in the form of corporate subsidies for companies like Tesla and General Motors. I know Manchin and Larry Summers are saying this will help bring down inflation. But pumping a lot of money into an economy usually has the opposite effect.On the other hand, it’s a whole lot less than the trillions the administration wanted to spend last year, so I’ll take that as a victory. It might keep the nuclear industry alive, which is also vital if we are serious about tackling climate change, and it might also reduce some of the permitting bottlenecks that get in the way of energy infrastructure. And the two bills are solid legislative wins for President Biden, who really, really needed them.Gail: As did all of us who are still Friends of Biden — although I guess we’d prefer not to be called F.O.B.s.Bret: Shame the news arrives the same week we get the second straight quarter of negative economic growth, which is … not a recession?Gail: I prefer to think of it as an, um, a very relaxed financial time.Bret: Not sure how much it would help Biden if he were to say, “Folks, the economy isn’t stalling. It’s relaxing.” Sorry, go on.Gail: And while of course politics is utterly beside the point — who in the world would worry about the entire makeup of Congress? — this legislation has got to help the Democrats come election time. Lots of good reasons we’re in an economic … slump. But you’ve got to be able to deliver a plan for making things better.One of my favorite parts of the bill is the way it clamps down on pharmaceutical companies. Like giving the government power to negotiate on the prices of some drugs covered by Medicare.Bret: Terrible! Price controls inevitably lead to less innovation, fewer incentives to manufacture generics and biosimilars and crazy distortions as pharmaceutical companies jack up the price of some drugs to make up for lost revenue in others. It’s just as bad an idea as rent control and rent stabilization, which is great for some but distorts the overall market and makes the city more expensive.Gail: Hey, we the taxpayers are funding those drugs and we should get assurance that all our money isn’t going to Big Pharma’s profits.Sorry, go on.Bret: I still don’t see the legislation swinging a lot of votes to the Democrats in the midterms. Biden also got his big infrastructure bill passed last year and it didn’t help him one bit politically. The only thing that can save the Democrats now is Donald Trump and his dumb political endorsements.Gail: Anybody you’re thinking of in particular? For instance, that dweeb Blake Masters in Arizona who we talked about recently? The one who now graciously admits he “went too far” when he wrote a youthful essay implicitly criticizing American involvement in World War II. I believe you said if you were voting in Arizona and Masters won the primary, you’d support the — hehehehe — incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly.Bret: Yes, reluctantly. As David Sedaris might put it, the choice between Democrats and most Republicans these days is like a choice between a day-old baloney sandwich with a sad little pickle on a stale roll versus a plate of rancid chicken served with a sprinkling of anthrax on a bed of broken glass.I’ll take the sandwich.Gail: Got some other big primaries coming up on Tuesday besides Arizona. I’m sure a lot of Missouri Republicans would be happy to see the end of Eric Greitens, a former governor, who now seems to be fading in his run for the Senate. Can’t imagine why, given that he was forced to resign from office in an ethics crisis that included a mind-boggling sex scandal.Bret: The fact that he was the front-runner, at least until recently, really tells you that the G.O.P. has reached its psychotic stage. To recap, Greitens, a former Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, resigned in disgrace as governor four years ago after barely a year in office. Later, his ex-wife alleged in a sworn affidavit, which Greitens disputes, that he knocked her down and confiscated her cellphone, wallet and keys to keep her and their children prisoner in their home. Also, that he was physically violent toward their 3-year-old son.Gail: Which really should have sealed the deal.Bret: More recently, he filmed an ad that was a live-action fantasy of shooting RINOs — “Republicans in Name Only” — that struck many of us as a pretty open invitation to violence. Even Josh Hawley thinks he’s vile, which is like Nikita Khrushchev taking a strong moral exception to Mao Zedong.Gail: Seems like his fading in the polls shouldn’t require a celebration, but we’ll take what we can get.Bret: As for Masters, his candidacy seems to rest on his promotion of so-called replacement theory.Gail: Yes, the idea that Democrats are encouraging immigration so they can create a minority-majority of voters.Bret: It’s almost amusing, since the most significant replacement to happen in Arizona was the one in which white settlers stole sovereign Mexican territory in an unprovoked invasion and dispossessed Native American tribes.Gail: Bless you.Bret: It’s also a master class in political malpractice, since it only alienates Hispanic voters, who are often fairly conservative and increasingly open to voting for Republicans. Are you feeling optimistic?Gail: Have to admit I’m kinda worried that a lot of liberal voters — particularly the younger ones — are just so appalled by the way things have been going with abortion and guns, and so depressed by the state of the economy, that they’ll just sit this one out.Bret: Yeah, but don’t discount the rancid chicken factor. As in, for instance, the Senate race in Georgia, or the governors’ races in Maryland and Pennsylvania.Gail: Well, just to stick with Georgia for a second, it does seem a guy like Herschel Walker, with a really dreadful performance record as a father, should have tried not to build his campaign around being a family-values candidate.Bret: With luck, maybe after a few losses Republican voters will finally get the message that a Trump endorsement in the primary is the political kiss of death in the general election.Then again, it would also help Democrats if someone cured Biden of his habit of saying things that quickly prove totally wrong. The other day he said there wasn’t going to be a recession. Before that, inflation was “temporary.” Last summer, it was that the Taliban wasn’t going to overrun Kabul. You can almost know what’s coming by expecting the opposite of whatever he predicts. That’s why I’m confident he won’t run for a second term. He keeps insisting that he will.Gail: I still don’t see any point in Biden’s announcing he won’t run this early in the calendar. He should wait until the end of the midterm elections. Then we can all turn our attention to the hordes of would-be successors waving their hands.That’ll still give Democrats a year to check out the options. Don’t you think that’s enough?Bret: If you’re the billionaire governor of Illinois, Jay Pritzker, it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since fund-raising isn’t an issue. Pete Buttigieg can’t be feeling as lucky. But either way I think it would be better for Biden to announce before the midterms. Maybe he will even find it liberating to be a president who can really govern for the rest of his term without the burden of a presumptive campaign and all the nagging questions about it. And it will send the message that he has the grace and wisdom to know it’s time to step aside, which is more than can be said for the Chuck Grassleys and Dianne Feinsteins of politics.Gail: Biden’s political clout, wobbly as it is right now, will vanish completely if he embraces lame-duck-hood. Announcing he’s not running by the end of the year seems a good timetable. But of course actually trying to stay in for another race would be a disaster.Bret: Gail, before we go we should probably mention that we’ll be taking the next two weeks off for travel and family. Any parting suggestions or recommendations for our readers till we reconvene?Gail: Stay cool, read something good — I’ve really been enjoying “A Gentleman in Moscow,” by Amor Towles, a novel about a count who’s trapped in his hotel after the Russian Revolution. That’s one for now, but when we get back, Bret, we’ve got to have that favorite-books conversation we’re always threatening to have.And what’s your tip?Bret: Same. Devote a few weekend mornings to some of the terrific longer pieces in The Times. Start with Alex Vadukul’s devastating, breathtaking portrait of Daniel Auster, Paul Auster’s son. It’s a modern-day “American Tragedy,” worthy of Dreiser. Then get out in the sun and count your life’s blessings. I hope there are many.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

PHOENIX — This spring, Mark Finchem traveled to Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a documentary advancing the specious notion that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from President Donald J. Trump by an army of leftists stuffing drop boxes with absentee ballots. As a state representative and candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, Mr. Finchem was a minnow among the assembled MAGA stars, the likes of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.But he still got his face time.“President Trump took 20 minutes with me,” Mr. Finchem later recounted during a campaign stop. “And he said: ‘I want you to understand something. The Arizona secretary of state race is the most important race in the United States.’”Arizona, of course, occupies a special place on Mr. Trump’s map of election indignities — as the onetime Republican stronghold where President Biden’s narrow and crucial victory was first called by, of all networks, Fox News. Should Mr. Trump run again in 2024, a friendly secretary of state, as administrator of the state’s elections, could be in a position to help him avoid a repeat.Now, as Arizona prepares for its primaries on Tuesday, Mr. Finchem is the candidate of a Trump-backed America First coalition of more than a dozen 2020 election deniers who have sought once-obscure secretary of state posts across the country. While most of them have been considered extremist long shots, a recent poll gave Mr. Finchem an edge in Arizona’s four-way Republican race, though a significant majority of voters are undecided.Mr. Finchem’s campaign pronouncements are testament to the evolution of the “Stop the Steal” movement: It is as much about influencing future elections as it is about what happened in 2020.Mark Finchem, a proponent of the “Stop the Steal” narrative, appeared with former President Donald J. Trump at a rally this past month in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesTo that end, Mr. Finchem, who has identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers militia in the past, may be the perfectly subversive candidate. Like his America First compatriots, he seeks, quite simply, to upend voting.He wants to ban early voting and sharply restrict mail-in ballots, even though the latter were widely popular in Arizona long before the pandemic. He is already suing to suspend the use of all electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona, in litigation bankrolled by the conspiracy theorist and pillow tycoon Mike Lindell. And he has co-sponsored a bill that would give the state’s Republican-led legislature authority to overturn election results.If he loses his own race, Mr. Finchem told a June fund-raiser, “ain’t gonna be no concession speech coming from this guy.”Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment for this article, and one of his lawyers declined to comment. But in a May email he assured Republican supporters that if he had been in office in 2020, “we would have won. Plain and simple.” In the days after the election, he was co-host of an unofficial hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel where Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, aired bogus stolen-elections claims. He was instrumental in trying to advance a slate of fake Trump electors in Arizona — part of a scheme to overturn the elections in a number of states that is being investigated by the Justice Department — and he is helping gather signatures to petition to decertify the state’s election results, even though that is not legally possible.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will on Monday endorse Representative Mondaire Jones, a first-term upstate congressman who is facing a stiff battle in his bid to capture an open seat in New York City.Following an unusually messy redistricting process, Mr. Jones opted not to run again in his current district, which encompasses Rockland County and parts of Westchester County, or in a neighboring one to the south. Either would have required him to compete against incumbents, one of whom is the powerful chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.When that chair, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, announced he would run in Mr. Jones’s reconstituted 17th District — drawing outcries from Mr. Jones and his allies — Ms. Pelosi supported Mr. Maloney.With her endorsement on Monday, Ms. Pelosi will be making some amends, hoping that her backing may help Mr. Jones get more traction in a district where he only recently moved.“Mondaire Jones has gotten real results for New Yorkers,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement provided to The New York Times. The speaker credited Mr. Jones for playing a “vital role in passing life-changing legislation that has lifted up working families, helped deliver expanded access to health care and invested in affordable housing.”New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: This year, for the first time in over 75 years, the state ballot appears destined to offer only two choices: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican. Here is why.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.New York’s messy redistricting process created new maps that jumbled primary contests across the state, but had a particularly chaotic effect in New York City.Representative Jerrold Nadler represents the existing 10th District through the end of the year. But after reapportionment drastically altered the district contours, he opted to instead compete against Representative Carolyn Maloney for the 12th District, which now envelops his Upper West Side political base.His decision created a rare open seat in the 10th District, a safely Democratic stronghold that now encompasses Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, including Sunset Park and Park Slope. That has sparked a political gold rush, with roughly a dozen candidates on the ballot for the Aug. 23 primary.Late-summer turnout is likely to be low, as many voters are expected to be on vacation or unaware of the unusually timed contest. Its outcome is likely to turn heavily on voter outreach and absentee ballot operations; endorsements may also play a small factor.Mr. Jones’s first term in Congress has been active. His eagerness to sponsor and co-sponsor bills put him at the top of Axios’s 2021 list of “the most legislatively active freshmen in Congress.” More recently, he co-sponsored legislation to enshrine marriage equality into federal law and another bill that would provide monthly payments to families with children.“Whether it was passing monumental voting rights protections or securing billions of dollars in new investments in New York City’s housing, health care and schools, I’ve worked closely with Speaker Pelosi to deliver real results for New York’s working families, and I’m proud to have her support,” Mr. Jones said in a statement. Mr. Jones has secured the support of several other House colleagues, including Representative Pramila Jayapal, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But recent polls suggest Mr. Jones’s campaign is struggling to stay in the top tier, and Nydia Velázquez, the congresswoman who represents much of the existing district, has endorsed one of Mr. Jones’s rivals, Carlina Rivera, a New York City councilwoman.It is unclear how much influence Ms. Pelosi’s endorsement will yield, or if will come with any financial support from the House Majority PAC or the Democratic funding arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But it may help in other ways.“Obviously it will be helpful, in that it will bring more attention to what has been arguably a struggling campaign out of the box,” said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist who worked on former mayor Bill de Blasio’s abortive run for the same seat.But Mr. Kwatra cautioned that the voters who do turn out to vote out will be unusually well-informed about the election, and will have strong opinions about the candidates that are not likely to be swayed by a political endorsement.“The ones that do end up voting in this election, they’re going to be very sophisticated and very clear about why they’re voting and who they’re voting for,” he said. More

Donald Trump seemed to usher in a new era of Democratic grass-roots engagement. More than four million people marched in the streets the day after his inauguration. Several thousand chapters of Indivisible, one of the biggest new “Resistance” organizations, sprung up, covering every congressional district. On the Democratic fund-raising platform ActBlue, the number of donors more than quadrupled in roughly four years, reaching 15 million during the 2020 election cycle.But less than two years later, Democrats and national progressive organizations seem to have done very little to translate that energy into a lasting movement. What happened?National Democratic and progressive groups together burned through the surge of liberal organizing under Mr. Trump, treating impassioned newcomers like cash cows, gig workers and stamp machines to be exploited, not a grass-roots base to be tended. Worse, research by academics and political professionals alike suggests many of the tactics they pushed to engage voters proved ineffective.Some may even have backfired. Millions of dollars and hours were wasted in 2018 and 2020. And yet, as the party stares down a bleak midterm landscape, with abortion rights on the line, the Democratic establishment and progressive organizations alike are doubling down on the same old tactics.For all the conflict between mainstream Democratic and progressive leaders, most share a common way of thinking about electoral politics. To the “Beltway Brain,” as we think of it, voters are data points best engaged via atomized campaigns orchestrated from afar.The core role of supporters is to be whipped into panicked giving by messages like this one from Nancy Pelosi on April 28: “I asked — several times. Barack Obama told you the stakes. Joe Biden made an urgent plea,” she said. “I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll be blunt: All these top Democrats would not be sounding the alarm if our democracy wasn’t in immediate danger of falling to Republicans in this election. I need 8,371 patriots to step up before time runs out, rush $15, and help me close the fund-raising gap before the End of Month Deadline in 48 hours.”Inside Democratic fund-raising circles, this tactic is known as “churn and burn”: a way of squeezing money out of individual donors that reliably produces brief spikes in donations but over the course of an election cycle overwhelms their willingness to keep giving. Even worse, these apocalyptic messages fuel despair. If “democracy is in the balance” and then Democrats fail to pass restorative measures, voters inevitably must wonder, why keep trying?The notion that digitally targeted, professionally scripted, just-in-time voter contacting is the best use of volunteer energy became conventional wisdom among Democratic campaign gurus after Barack Obama’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2008. People who cut their teeth on that campaign now dominate Democratic politicking. After the 2016 election, establishment Democrats and new “Resistance” groups alike pioneered new tactics, encouraging volunteers not just to cold-call swing voters across the country and sign up for shifts knocking doors in faraway swing districts, but to send semi-automated texts and handwritten postcards, as digital tools for “distributed organizing” made such microtargeted anonymous contacting ever cheaper.Recent studies show that the effectiveness of such approaches varies from small to nil to negative. People who volunteer on campaigns are often nothing like other Americans in their politics. The gulf is particularly wide on the Democratic side, where infrequent and swing voters of all ethnicities, ages and life experiences tend to encounter highly educated, liberal and white volunteers.In elections where voters are already getting bombarded with ads, the odds that a volunteer contact can help get people to the polls may be canceled out by the odds the contact will turn them off entirely. One study found that handwritten postcards supporting state legislative candidates in 2018 actually reduced turnout. Meanwhile, Sister District Action Network found that a postcard campaign they coordinated in 2019 had a “marginally significant negative effect” on turnout in primaries, and no impact in the general election.Yet national groups continue to push this approach. This year, Vote Forward aims to have volunteers print and send some 10 million heavily scripted voter turnout letters. With most of the personalization gone and the risks of counterproductive freelancing clear, one could well ask why these groups are using volunteers at all. Are “letters to voters” just chum to draw in small-dollar donors? A gig-economy scheme that works only because volunteers pay for their own stamps?There’s a better way. One of us, Dr. Putnam, has been observing progressive infrastructure in Pittsburgh’s once ruby-red northern suburbs since 2017, when ordinary voters appalled by Donald Trump came together by the dozens and then hundreds, hoping to contest every seat, in every election. In 2017 they helped elect the first Democrat within memory to the North Allegheny school board; in 2018 they helped flip a State Senate seat and oust an incumbent Republican congressman. In 2019 they battled for town council seats.Each year, they gained experience and had more political conversations that were within their own community, but outside their own bubble. They heard firsthand their neighbors’ reactions to national Democrats’ sound bites. They learned not to overestimate the impact of anonymous contacting.For 2021, they recruited four school board candidates, intentionally choosing people whose profile and networks did not just echo those of activists. Rather than spamming voters via distant digital volunteers, the team primarily sent the candidates themselves and trusted endorsers (community leaders and popular local incumbents) to knock on doors. Volunteers instead focused on hyperlocal fund-raising and house parties, capitalizing on their existing ties rather than ignoring them.Dr. Putnam handed out cards for the candidates on Election Day, watching as the campaign team executed a turnout effort reminiscent of an old-fashioned party machine. In the face of a huge infusion of Republican cash and attacks on mask mandates, Covid policies and “critical race theory,” two of the four were elected, and one of them is thought to be the first African American ever to serve on the North Allegheny school board. Their supporters are already at work on the next election.Doubters may ask if this kind of retail politics can scale up. But the real question is, how have national Democrats and progressives fooled themselves into believing a party can survive without it? Logistics experts know the last mile of a delivery is generally the most expensive and that the rest is worthless without it. A container truck is not going to get a package into a cul-de-sac and up the steps to the porch, no matter how sophisticated the routing software, without an actual local person involved.A political party that has few, if any, year-round structures in place to reach voters through trusted interlocutors — and learn from how they respond — can do no more than lurch from crisis to crisis, raising money off increasingly apocalyptic emails, with dire warnings “sounding the alarm” about a democracy in “immediate danger of falling.”Republicans, of course, also treat the news as an endless series of crises. But their calls to oppose socialism or critical race theory or transgender-inclusive bathrooms generate energy that flows into local groups that have a lasting, visible presence in their communities, such as anti-abortion networks, Christian home-schoolers, and gun clubs. Right-wing activists are encouraged to run for local office by overlapping regional, statewide and national personal networks that conservatives have built with decades of sustained investment. When not connected to such networks, Democrats receiving apocalyptic messages can feel more battered than activated, leading to demoralization and despair.If democracy is indeed on fire, the thing to do is to stop asking people to buy water bottles and organize them into fire brigades instead. Neither the national Democratic Party nor progressive leaders seem to have learned that lesson. They aren’t wrong to call the next election the most important in our lifetimes. And abortion bans and the Jan. 6 committee hearings may well recharge their base. But it’s what the base manages to build with that energy that will matter.Lara Putnam (@lara_putnam) is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Micah L. Sifry (@Mlsif) is the author of “The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet).” He writes The Connector, a newsletter about democracy, organizing and tech.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