Elections

Trump sought to mount ‘armed revolution’, militia ex-spokesman saysWitness Jason van Tatenhove testifies at seventh public hearing, ‘This could have been the spark that started a new civil war’ More

Donald J. Trump’s behavior in the days leading up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was viewed by 75 percent of likely Republican presidential primary voters as the president “just exercising his right to contest the election,” while 19 percent said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy,” according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.But among Republicans who said they wouldn’t back the former president in the 2024 primary, 32 percent said he was a threat to democracy, suggesting that contingent could form the base of Mr. Trump’s opposition.For those primary voters who wouldn’t back Mr. Trump, 59 percent said Mr. Trump was just contesting the election. However, 21 percent said Mr. Trump’s behavior included serious federal crimes, compared with 3 percent of Mr. Trump’s core supporters who said the same.The poll also showed that 86 percent of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary voters believed Mr. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. One-third of the Republican anti-Trump voters said the same.Still, while Mr. Trump has described election integrity as the country’s most pressing concern, just 3 percent of the Republican respondents named it as the nation’s top problem.Travis Reinink, a Republican voter in Nevada who participated in the poll, said President Biden’s victory was illegitimate and that he viewed the House investigations into Mr. Trump’s behavior as “one-sided.” Still, he said recent testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson “opened my eyes to some stuff.”Mr. Reinink said he would vote for Mr. Trump in a rematch of the 2020 contest.“I know that he was very brazen,” Mr. Reinink said. “But Trump is who he is, and he’s not going to change. It’s one of the things I both like and dislike about him.” More

Pat A. Cipollone, President Donald J. Trump’s second and final White House counsel, appeared for a videotaped, transcribed interview with the House Jan. 6 committee last week after being subpoenaed, and his testimony could help the panel flesh out episodes at the heart of its investigation.Mr. Cipollone — who also sat for an informal interview with the committee in April — was present for several key meetings related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power and subvert the results of the 2020 election. Several witnesses have described Mr. Cipollone as opposing those efforts at critical moments.In particular, Mr. Cipollone was at a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in the Oval Office. During that meeting, Mr. Trump entertained proposals from his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; a lawyer, Sidney Powell; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, to use the military or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines to look for electoral fraud.Since Mr. Cipollone’s informal appearance in April, the committee has heard from many additional witnesses. One of them — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff in the final year of the Trump administration — provided the committee with extensive testimony about Mr. Trump’s actions and statements ahead of the Capitol riot and during it, as well as about conversations she said she had with senior advisers.Ms. Hutchinson described a conversation with Mr. Cipollone in which he cautioned against Mr. Trump traveling to the Capitol with his supporters after his planned speech at a rally at the Ellipse, near the White House.In Ms. Hutchinson’s telling, Mr. Cipollone warned that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.”Two people close to Mr. Cipollone said he did not recall that conversation, and that the committee had been alerted before his testimony last week that he would not confirm it had taken place.Instead, the committee focused on soliciting testimony from Mr. Cipollone that could support information they had gathered from other witnesses.According to two people familiar with his appearance, Mr. Cipollone was asked about discussions related to presidential pardons in the final weeks of the presidency. He was also asked his opinion of Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud, as well as Mr. Trump’s attacks on Vice President Mike Pence. More

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida faces political pressure from Republicans to further curb abortions — and risks to his re-election campaign and any presidential aspirations if he goes too far.When the Supreme Court erased the constitutional right to an abortion last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was among the many Republicans who celebrated. “The prayers of millions have been answered,” he tweeted.But while other Republican leaders vowed to charge ahead with new restrictions — or near-total bans — Mr. DeSantis offered only a vague promise to “work to expand pro-life protections.”More than two weeks later, he has yet to explain what that means.Mr. DeSantis, a favorite among those Republicans who want to move on from the Trump era, is rarely a reluctant partisan warrior. But his hesitance to detail his plans for abortion policy reflects the new and, in some states, difficult political terrain for Republicans in the post-Roe v. Wade era, as Democrats grasp for advantage on the issue in an otherwise largely hostile midterm election year.In April, Mr. DeSantis signed a law barring abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, bringing the state’s limit down from 24 weeks. But with Roe overturned, some on the right now see a 15-week ban as insufficient, and other Republican governors, particularly in Southern states, have pushed for more aggressive restrictions.Mr. DeSantis has described fetuses in the womb as “unborn babies.” Yet he has largely avoided specifying what other restrictions he might endorse. When a state representative filed legislation last year seeking a six-week ban, the governor would not support or oppose it. “I have a 100 percent pro-life record,” he said instead.Now, campaigning for a second term as governor, Mr. DeSantis is coming under intense pressure from powerful parts of the G.O.P. base to further curb abortions in Florida — the most populous state with a Republican governor where abortions are still fairly widely available.Yet doing so could undermine Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to recruit residents and businesses to his state and complicate his re-election campaign, not to mention his national ambitions, because polls show that a majority of Floridians, and of Americans, want to keep most abortions legal. In a New York Times/Siena College poll this week, U.S. voters, by a 2-to-1 margin, or 61 percent to 29 percent, said they opposed the Supreme Court’s decision.Abortion rights demonstrators in front of the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee on Friday.Lawren Simmons for The New York TimesThat leaves Mr. DeSantis in an unfamiliar position: on the sidelines on a major cultural-political issue. Though he has spoken about wanting to prevent abortions from taking place late in pregnancy — a far less controversial stance than pushing for an outright ban — he has said nothing about calling a special session to enact additional restrictions, as anti-abortion activists hope he will.And Republicans nationally have noticed his hesitancy so far.“This is a guy who jumps into the culture wars when he thinks he can make a point,” said Mike DuHaime, who managed Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign in 2008 and was a top adviser to Chris Christie’s in 2016.Read More on the End of Roe v. WadeA Culture Warrior Goes Quiet: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida celebrated the end of Roe. But his hesitance to detail his plans for abortion policy in his state reflects the new and difficult political terrain for Republicans.Under Pressure to Act: Democrats in Congress are moving ahead on measures to preserve abortion access, but with Republicans and at least one Democrat opposed in the Senate, the bills are all but certain to fail.The Right to Travel?: Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the Constitution did not allow states to stop women from traveling to get abortions. But what a state may choose to do if a resident travels to get an abortion is not clear.‘Pro-Life Generation’: Many young women mourned the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. For others it was a moment of triumph and a matter of human rights.Mr. DeSantis is not the only Republican governor whose supporters expect more from him now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. But few have as much at stake: Mr. DeSantis’s next move could not only affect his re-election in Florida but also complicate a presidential bid.Mr. DeSantis was the most popular alternative to Donald J. Trump among Republican primary voters when they were asked about potential 2024 presidential candidates, according to the Times/Siena poll. Mr. DeSantis trailed Mr. Trump 49 percent to 25 percent, but was favored over the former president by younger Republicans, those with a college degree and those who said they voted for President Biden in 2020.The poll showed that Mr. DeSantis was still relatively unknown, with about one-fourth of Republicans saying they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about him. But he was well liked among those who did. Among white evangelical voters, 54 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the Florida governor while just 15 percent said they had an unfavorable view of him.And abortion opponents are not shy about pressing Mr. DeSantis for bold new action.“There’s an enormous expectation,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, a conservative Christian group. “I think he realizes this is something that has to be dealt with.”A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis’s office would only refer to a previous statement when asked whether a special session of the legislature — or any other move related to abortion — was in the offing.Mr. DeSantis signed the new 15-week abortion ban to great fanfare in April.“This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation,” he said at the time, accusing the “far left” of “taking the position that babies can be aborted up to the ninth month.”“We will not let that happen in the State of Florida,” he vowed.The new law, which took effect July 1, was briefly blocked by a state judge, but that ruling was placed on hold pending appeal, leaving the 15-week ban in place. Mr. DeSantis’s administration wants the Florida Supreme Court to uphold the new law.Doing so would require reversing 30 years of legal precedent asserting that a privacy provision in the State Constitution applies to abortion. But the seven-member court, which for decades pushed back against some of the more ambitious policies enacted by Republican governors and lawmakers, is now made up entirely of conservative justices appointed by Republican governors, including three appointed by Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Stemberger predicted that if, as expected, the court allows the 15-week ban to stand, lawmakers will move to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — either during a special session after the November election or in the next regular legislative session in March.Kelli Stargel, a Republican state senator, sponsored Florida’s 15-week abortion ban.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressState Senator Kelli Stargel, the Lakeland Republican who sponsored the 15-week abortion ban, said lawmakers would undoubtedly face pressure to do more, especially if women from other states with newly tightened restrictions started coming to Florida for abortions.“Hearing that people are going to be traveling into Florida is very disturbing to me and I’m sure very disturbing to others,” said Ms. Stargel, who is reaching her term limit and is running for Congress.Even as the Florida law was being debated, some anti-abortion activists described it as merely a first step; others explicitly told lawmakers it did not go far enough in restricting the procedure. In May, after a draft of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe was published, Florida abortion opponents pushed for a complete ban to be taken up in one of the Legislature’s special sessions.State Representative Anna V. Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, said she expected Republicans to file proposals for a six-week abortion ban and for a complete ban next year, as well as for new restrictions on medical abortions, in which prescription drugs are used to end a pregnancy. The fact that medical abortion was defined for the first time in this year’s law suggests to Ms. Eskamani that such abortions could be regulated in the future.Ms. Eskamani noted that Mr. DeSantis’s statement after Roe was overturned was “pretty watered-down.”“It’s clear that he knows this is politically unpopular,” she said. “It’s also a wake-up call for Democratic voters.”Mr. DeSantis has widely been expected to win re-election by a comfortable margin, which could bolster his standing in a crowded Republican presidential primary field for 2024.But a large margin of victory is not assured.Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, at an art exhibit in Miami on Friday. At least one poll has shown a prospective race between Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Crist as tight.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesRepresentative Charlie Crist and Nikki Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner, are competing in the Democratic primary for governor. Public polling of the general election is scant; the most recent credible surveys are from earlier this year and show Mr. DeSantis with a healthy lead over Mr. Crist. Mr. DeSantis’s popularity in the state has grown since last year. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll of likely voters in January showed Mr. DeSantis leading Mr. Crist by six points and leading Ms. Fried by 11.At least one poll has shown a prospective race between Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Crist as tight. That private survey, taken last month by the veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio, who often works for former President Donald J. Trump and has frequently worked in Florida, showed Mr. DeSantis as the slight favorite in a competitive race, running just three points ahead of Mr. Crist. That survey was of registered voters, which can be less predictive than one of likely voters.Races for governor in Florida have been close in recent years as politics have become more polarized. In 2014, then-Gov. Rick Scott barely eked out a victory over Mr. Crist. In 2018, Mr. DeSantis won by a narrow margin over the Democrat, Andrew Gillum, who was recently indicted on conspiracy and fraud charges.And Mr. DeSantis is one of the most polarizing and overtly partisan statewide elected Republicans in the country — taking on Disney after it criticized a bill limiting what schools can teach about sexual and gender identity, denouncing Covid-19 vaccines for young children and opening up several fronts in the broader Republican battle against critical race theory.Some anti-abortion activists appeared willing to give Mr. DeSantis room to maneuver politically.“Ron DeSantis is one of the best governors in the country, and I believe that he will work to pass the most conservative bill he can possibly get through the Legislature,” said Penny Nance, chief executive and president of Concerned Women for America, which calls itself the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization. She said she supported a six-week abortion ban in Florida.“There are no concerns or reservations about his pro-life convictions,” said Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “And for that reason, I think he’s going to have running room to make his own decision when it comes to taking the next steps with legislation to protect unborn children.”With abortion a topic of fresh intensity among conservatives positioning themselves to run for president — some of whom, like former Vice President Mike Pence, want to see bans in every state — Mr. DeSantis faces pressure from the right both in Florida and beyond.As even his admirers are reminding him.Andrew Shirvell, founder and executive director of Florida Voice for the Unborn, described Mr. DeSantis as “a tremendous ally for the pro-life movement,” but expressed some impatience with his silence on abortion since the Supreme Court’s decision.“It is frustrating that the governor doesn’t speak out more about this,” he said. “But I attribute that to other pressures going on just months before the election.”Still, to hear Mr. Shirvell tell it, Mr. DeSantis will eventually need to press for further action on abortion in Tallahassee. “It’s really up to the governor to twist the arms of the legislative leaders if he’s got presidential ambitions,” he said. More

As I wrote in this newsletter in March, the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by George W. Bush when he was a presidential candidate, pithily captures a wisdom that’s difficult to discount, regardless of one’s political stripe. But its emergence as a critique of the educational establishment has meant that it’s generally thought of as a charge from the right.There are times, though, when the right might consider attending to the proverbial log in its own eye, few more obvious and disturbing than the elevation of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, a Black man, as the Republican Party’s candidate in this year’s Georgia Senate race.To start, Walker is fact-challenged: His campaign removed a false claim from its website that he graduated from college. He has falsely claimed to have worked in law enforcement. The lucrative chicken processing business he has reportedly claimed to own is apparently neither especially lucrative nor owned by him. In a local TV interview this year, he said, implausibly, “I’ve never heard President Trump ever say” that the 2020 election was stolen.As Maya King reported this week for The Times, “After repeatedly criticizing absent fathers in Black households,” Walker “publicly acknowledged having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact.”It is hardly uncommon, however, for people running for office to have messy pasts. And in theory, someone could be an effective senator while, like Walker, questioning the theory of evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?” he asked in March. “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.” Or even while, as he did two years ago, offering the take that there existed a “dry mist” that “will kill any Covid on your body” that “they don’t want to talk about.”The problem with Walker is how glaringly unfit he is for public office apart from all that.Asked whether he would have voted for President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, Walker objected that it was “totally unfair” to expect him to answer the question because he hadn’t yet seen “all the facts,” apparently unaware that one would expect him to have formed an opinion via, well, following the news. Asked, on the day of the Uvalde massacre, about his position on new gun laws, Walker seemed unclear that candidates are expected to at least fake a basic familiarity with the issues, responding, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”Days later on Fox News, he went into a bit more detail in a verbal bouillabaisse that almost rose to the level of performance art, saying:You know, Cain killed Abel. You know, and that’s a problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?This isn’t a mere matter of verbal dexterity. He’s not just a political neophyte getting his sea legs as a public speaker — in recent months, we’ve watched Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, going through that. Walker isn’t just gaffe-prone, as Biden has been throughout his career. He isn’t someone underqualified and swivel-tongued, like the former governor and current congressional candidate Sarah Palin, who still gives the impression of someone who could have learned on the job. Walker doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue about, or interest in, matters of state, and gives precious little indication that this would change.Here’s where I’m supposed to write something like, “Walker makes Donald Trump look like Benjamin Disraeli by comparison.” But it’s more that Trump, who has endorsed Walker, is pretty much as clueless. Trump’s speeches are riveting — at least to his devotees — and certainly more practiced, but given how recently we’ve seen what happens when someone who would lose an argument with a cloud is placed in a position of grave responsibility, it’s rather grievous to see Republicans now do this with Walker.So why are they doing it?You could say that the issue here is less racism than strategy. The incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, is Black, and Georgia Republicans presumably hope that a useful number of Black voters who might otherwise default to supporting him will be swayed by another Black candidate with a famous name, regardless of his lack of credentials. Banking on public naïveté isn’t necessarily a racist act, but the optics here are repulsive: It’s hard to imagine Republicans backing a white candidate so profoundly and shamelessly unsuited for the role. It presents a double standard that manifests as a brutal lack of respect for all voters, Black voters in particular.Serious figures have served in Congress’s upper house, from Henry Clay to Lyndon B. Johnson, Margaret Chase Smith to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to Tim Scott. And now, potentially, Herschel see-it-and-everything-and-stuff Walker? This amounts to the same kind of insult that comes from the left when elite schools lower admissions criteria in order to attract more Black students — a kind of pragmatism forged in condescension. Some call that bigotry. I would quibble about the definition, but only that, and not loudly. Walker as a candidate for the United States Senate is water from the same well.Have feedback? Send me a note at [email protected] McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

The January 6 committee was originally expected to hold another hearing on Thursday detailing Donald Trump’s response to the insurrection as it unfolded.But a committee aide said yesterday that the panel would hold only one hearing this week, and members are instead expected to reconvene next week.The aide said the delay was meant to give committee members an opportunity to review “new and important information” that has been received “on a daily basis” as the hearings unfold.But the committee has not provided any further details about the next hearing, which could be the panel’s last hearing for the time being.Donald Trump’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon, suffered heavy setbacks in his contempt of Congress case on Monday after a federal judge dismissed his motion to delay his trial, scheduled for next week, and ruled he could not make two of his principal defences to a jury.The flurry of adverse rulings from District of Columbia district judge Carl Nichols – a Trump appointee – marked a significant knock back for Bannon, who was charged with criminal contempt after he ignored a subpoena last year from the House January 6 select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol by extremist Trump supporters in 2021.Nichols refused in federal court in Washington DC, to delay Bannon’s trial date set for next Monday, saying that he saw no reason to push back proceedings after he severely limited the defences that the former Trump aide’s lawyers could present to a jury.The defeats for Bannon stunned his lead lawyer, David Schoen, who asked, aghast: “What’s the point of going to trial if we don’t have any defences?”Read the Guardian’s full report:Bannon suffers setback as judge rejects delaying contempt of Congress trialRead moreToday’s January 6 hearing is expected to feature clips from the select committee’s interview last week with Pat Cipollone, who served as Donald Trump’s White House counsel.Cipollone met with investigators behind closed doors for more than eight hours on Friday, after he was subpoenaed by the committee last month.Jamie Raskin, who will co-lead today’s hearing with Stephanie Murphy, said Cipollone corroborated key elements of the testimony already heard by the committee. That includes the testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.“Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings,” Raskin told NBC News today. “I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.”Hutchinson’s explosive testimony at a committee hearing last month included detailed descriptions of Trump’s outrage on January 6 and in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, as he peddled lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.According to Hutchinson, Trump was informed that some of his supporters were carrying weapons on January 6 and still told them to march to the Capitol, as lawmakers met to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the election. Hutchinson said that Trump planned to go to the Capitol with his supporters and tried to grab for the steering wheel of his car when his team told him that he would instead return to the White House after his speech on January 6.Ex-White House aide delivers explosive public testimony to January 6 panelRead moreAn aide to the January 6 committee said the members would focus on a meeting held on 18 December 2020, with Donald Trump and members of his legal team, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.At that point, there was a growing schism within Trump’s inner circle between those who believed it was time for the president to accept his electoral defeat and those who pushed even more radical actions such as seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel to investigate the election.Hours after the meeting, Trump sent a tweet that Murphy perceived as a “siren call” to militia groups that 6 January 2021 would be the “last stand” in a sprawling effort to overturn the results of an election he lost.“Big protest in DC on January 6th,” Trump wrote in that December tweet. “Be there, will be wild!”The tweet was a “pivotal moment that spurred a change of events including a pre-planning by the Proud Boys”, the aide said.Capitol attack panel to examine role of far-right groups in January 6 violenceRead moreGreetings from Washington, live blog readers.The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its next public hearing this afternoon.The panel will examine Donald Trump’s links to far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whose members participated in the January 6 insurrection.Committee members have said the hearing will particularly focus on Trump’s 19 December tweet urging his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” event on 6 January, the day that Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Committee member Stephanie Murphy, who will lead today’s hearing alongside Jamie Raskin, said Sunday that Trump’s tweet served as a “siren call” to far-right extremists.“People will hear the story of that tweet and then the explosive effects it had in Trump world and specifically among the domestic violence extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point,” Raskin said on Sunday.The hearing will get under way at 1pm ET, so stay tuned.Here’s what else is happening today:
The Senate judiciary committee is holding a hearing on the end of Roe. The lieutenant governor of Illinois, Juliana Stratton, will testify alongside four other witnesses.
Biden is meeting with the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two leaders will discuss “their visions for North America and their efforts to address global challenges such as food security, continued cooperation on migration, and joint development efforts”, per the White House.
The White House will host the Congressional Picnic this afternoon. After the picnic, Biden will fly from Washington to Jerusalem.
The blog will have more updates and analysis coming up. More

“This is how we all feel about politics right now,” a Twitter user wrote of one submission for a New York county’s “I voted” sticker design contest.Ashley Dittus, an election official in Ulster County, N.Y., vividly remembers her excitement when the first submission for this year’s countywide youth “I voted” sticker design contest appeared in her email this spring. The entry, from Hudson Rowan, 14, was an electric concoction of colors: a pink and purple and turquoise creature with a wild bloodshot stare, a toothy neon grin and spiderlike legs. To the right, scrawled in red letters: I VOTED.Ms. Dittus, the county’s Democratic commissioner of elections, immediately printed out the design and started showing it to people in her office. Everyone’s reaction was the same, she said: It made them smile.“This design is colorful and crazy and kind of weird,” she said. “It’s just not what you think of when you think of a traditional ‘I voted’ sticker, so we all kind of love it.”The Republican election commissioner, John Quigley, agreed. “I found it best when someone tweeted, ‘This is how we all feel about politics right now,’” he wrote in an email.The response to his submission surprised Hudson, who will start his first year at Rondout Valley High School this fall.After his mother persuaded him to enter the competition, he said in an interview, he didn’t dwell much on it, thinking his interpretation wasn’t “classically” patriotic but wanting it to reflect his style anyway.The creature in his drawing has been described as many things, he said, but he’s not exactly sure how to describe it himself. Besides, he said, “it’s more just for the individual to decide what it is.”“Politics right now in the world is all kinds of crazy,” he added, “and I feel like the creature that I drew kind of resembles the craziness of politics and the world right now.”Whatever it is, the “chaotic, random lines” of his drawing, as he describes it, have resonated with many online.Since voting for the winning entry began in July, Hudson’s entry has received more than 158,500 votes, out of the about 169,500 total votes cast — completely overtaking last year’s roughly 2,200 votes. The county has a population of about 180,000 people and about 122,000 active registered voters, but the contest is not limited to county residents.Hudson’s mother, Molly Rowan, said in an interview that she had encouraged him to enter the competition as a way to get him more civically engaged. “I just thought it would be a good way to be involved with politics and a community at the age that he’s at,” she said.“Hudson has always drawn with a lot of feeling,” she said. “I love that he stayed true to his style.”Hudson is one of six finalists whose logos are up for a public vote that will close on July 29. The five runners-up will have their designs printed on stickers for the special election in August. But only the winning logo, which will be announced on Aug. 1, will receive an award from the Ulster County Legislature and appear on stickers distributed in the county’s general election on Nov. 8.Launched last year as part of the election office’s youth engagement initiatives, the contest is open to the county’s 13- to 18-year-olds, Ms. Dittus said, with submissions accepted from early April through the end of June.For its first two years, it was slow to take off, with only 14 submissions this year and 12 last year — until interest in Hudson’s design exploded online.On top of coverage from local and national media, the design has garnered a number of fans on Twitter and TikTok. Ms. Dittus said she hopes that the attention will lead to increased interest from teenagers in the county around voting and that more youth-oriented initiatives will be launched by elections offices across the country.“We just want to leave our mark in the realm of civic engagement so that people know that, No. 1, that we exist and that we’re here as a resource for all voters and people that are interested in voting,” she said.As for Hudson, he’s planning on spending the summer before starting the ninth grade visiting his grandparents, hanging out with his friends and dabbling in new drawings.“I’m trying to think up some ideas,” he said. “You’ll see.”Ana Ley More

As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.”Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination.Republican Voters on Their Preferred Candidate for PresidentIf the Republican 2024 presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were: More