Elections

The world is not ready for the coming electoral tsunami. Neither is Facebook. With so many elections on the horizon — France, Kenya, Australia, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States will hold elections this year — the conversation now should focus on how Facebook is preparing.I know what it’s like to prepare for an election at Facebook. I worked there for 10 years, and from 2014 through the end of 2019, I led the company’s work across elections globally. It has poured more than $13 billion into building up its safety and security efforts in the United States since the 2016 elections, when the platform was too slow to recognize how its products could be weaponized to spread misinformation.Responsible election plans cannot be spun up in days or weeks. It takes time not only to organize internally but also to make meaningful and necessary connections with the communities around the world working to secure elections. Facebook must begin serious, concerted, well-funded efforts today.For some of the elections happening in the first half of this year, Facebook is cutting it close. But there’s still time for Facebook to commit to a publicly available road map that outlines how it plans to build up its resources to fight misinformation and hate speech around the world. Algorithms that find hate speech and election-related content; labels that give people more context, like those in the United States applied to content that questioned the election results; and efforts to get people accurate information about where, when and how to vote should all be a part of the baseline protections Facebook deploys across the globe. On top of these technical protections, it needs people with country-specific language and culture expertise to make tough decisions about speech or behavior that might violate the platform’s rules.I’m proud of the progress the company made in bringing more transparency to political and issue ads, developing civil society partnerships and taking down influence operations. None of that progress happened spontaneously. To combat the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that exposed 126 million Americans to its content before and after the 2016 elections, for example, Facebook needed new policies, new expertise and a revamped team at the platform dedicated to these issues. Because of those innovations, the company was able to take down 52 influence networks in 2021.Facebook couldn’t do this work alone. Partnerships with organizations such as the Atlantic Council, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and many others were crucial.But even then, providing the technical infrastructure to combat misinformation is only half the battle. Facebook faced scrutiny again in 2020 and 2021 for how it handled everything from President Donald Trump’s Facebook account to false election fraud claims and Jan. 6. Many of the conversations I had at the time revolved around balancing the right to free speech with the harm that speech could cause someone.This is one of the central dilemmas companies like Facebook grapple with. What is the right call for company administrators when a sitting president of the United States violates their platform’s community standards, even as they believe that people should be able to hear what he has to say? When are people exercising their right to organize and protest against their government, as opposed to preparing for a violent insurrection?Similar issues come up in other countries. Last year the Russian government pressured Apple and Google to remove an app created by allies of Aleksei Navalny, an opponent of President Vladimir Putin’s. Refusing the government would have put their employees in Russia at risk. Complying would go against free-expression standards. The companies chose to protect their employees.These are the kinds of difficult questions that crop up in every country, but Facebook also needs country-specific monitoring. Human expertise is the only way to truly understand how heated discussions are shifting in real time and to be sensitive to linguistic and cultural nuances. The word “dill” in Russian translates to “ukrop,” for example, which has been used as a slur against Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians, however, reclaimed the word and even named a political party after it. A global framework that fails to account for these kinds of situations or that is overly reliant on technology to address them is not prepared to confront the reality of our complex world.Facebook has invested billions in this kind of work. But a majority of its investment for classifying misinformation, for example, has focused on the United States, even though daily active users in other countries make up the vast majority of the user base. And it’s not clear which efforts Facebook will extend from U.S. elections to those in other countries. It’s unlikely that within the next two years, much less the next few months, Facebook can build up protections in every country. But it must start planning now for how it will exponentially scale up people, products and partnerships to handle so many elections at once in 2022 and 2024.It should be transparent about how it will determine what to build in each country. In 2019, Facebook had more than 500 full-time employees and 30,000 people working on safety and security overall. Even with that amount of human talent, it could cover the national elections in only three major countries at once. At least that many people were needed for the United States in 2020. In two years, people in the United States, India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico and Britain are to go to the polls in national elections. Facebook will need to consider hiring at least 1,000 more full-time employees to be ready for the next big election cycle. If the company is cutting it close for 2022, it has just enough time to be really ready for 2024.These problems are not ones that Facebook can fix on its own. Its parent, Meta, is a private company but one with tremendous influence on society and democratic discourse. Facebook needs to continue to recognize the responsibility it has to protect elections around the world and invest accordingly. Governments, civil society and the public should hold it accountable for doing so.Katie Harbath is the chief executive of Anchor Change, a company focused on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. She formerly worked at Facebook, where she helped lead its work on elections.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

A New York Times analysis reveals how the left outdid the right at raising and spending millions from undisclosed donors to defeat Donald Trump and win power in Washington.For much of the last decade, Democrats complained — with a mix of indignation, frustration and envy — that Republicans and their allies were spending hundreds of millions of difficult-to-trace dollars to influence politics.“Dark money” became a dirty word, as the left warned of the threat of corruption posed by corporations and billionaires that were spending unlimited sums through loosely regulated nonprofits, which did not disclose their donors’ identities.Then came the 2020 election.Spurred by opposition to then-President Trump, donors and operatives allied with the Democratic Party embraced dark money with fresh zeal, pulling even with and, by some measures, surpassing Republicans in 2020 spending, according to a New York Times analysis of tax filings and other data.The analysis shows that 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 — compared to roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the G.O.P.The findings reveal the growth and ascendancy of a shadow political infrastructure that is reshaping American politics, as megadonors to these nonprofits take advantage of loose disclosure laws to make multimillion-dollar outlays in total secrecy. Some good-government activists worry that the exploding role of undisclosed cash threatens to accelerate the erosion of trust in the country’s political system.Democrats’ newfound success in harnessing this funding also exposes the stark tension between their efforts to win elections and their commitment to curtail secretive political spending by the superrich.Spurred by opposition to President Trump, donors and operatives allied with the Democratic Party embraced dark money with fresh zeal in 2020.Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesA single, cryptically named entity that has served as a clearinghouse of undisclosed cash for the left, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, received mystery donations as large as $50 million and disseminated grants to more than 200 groups, while spending a total of $410 million in 2020 — more than the Democratic National Committee itself.But nonprofits do not abide by the same transparency rules or donation limits as parties or campaigns — though they can underwrite many similar activities: advertising, polling, research, voter registration and mobilization and legal fights over voting rules.The scale of secret spending is such that, even as small donors have become a potent force in politics, undisclosed money dwarfed the 2020 campaign fund-raising of President Biden (who raised a record $1 billion) and Mr. Trump (who raised more than $810 million).Headed into the midterm elections, Democrats are warning major donors not to give in to the financial complacency that often afflicts the party in power, while Republicans are rushing to level the dark-money playing field to take advantage of what is expected to be a favorable political climate in 2022.At stake is not just control of Congress but also whether Republican donors will become more unified with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Two Republican secret-money groups focused on Congress said their combined fund-raising reached nearly $100 million in 2021 — far more than they raised in 2019. More

Mr. Mattarella has presided over a chaotic seven years in which the country swung wildly from the left to the right, acting as the guardrails of Italy’s democracy.ROME — After noxious and chaotic back-room negotiations, Italian lawmakers said on Saturday that they had reached a consensus to keep the status quo in place and would ask the country’s current president, Sergio Mattarella, to serve another seven-year term.The Italian Parliament is expected to re-elect Mr. Mattarella later Saturday, in the sixth day of secret votes that have revealed the fractious politics and crumbling alliances just beneath the surface of Italy’s national unity government.In Italy’s unpredictable politics, nothing is certain until the ballots are officially counted, and Mr. Mattarella, at 80, has been reluctant to serve again. But a week of inconclusive voting had already revealed the inability of the different political interests within the governing coalition to rally around a new candidate.The apparent choice of Mr. Mattarella essentially amounted to a punt — to avoid early elections and to prolong Italy’s current period of stability under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who himself had coveted the job.But in a private meeting on Saturday morning, Mr. Draghi personally asked Mr. Mattarella to consider staying on because the political chaos over the inconclusive ballots had begun to suck in institutional figures, like the president of the Senate and the head of the Secret Service, two prominent women who were proposed as candidates only to be roundly rejected and tarnished.Mr. Draghi returned from the meeting and then called the governing coalition’s party leaders to try to broker a deal, according to an official in Mr. Draghi’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.By leaving Mr. Draghi in place, the lawmakers hoped to avert the political chaos of early elections that his departure may have encouraged. The choice of Mr. Mattarella instead increased the likelihood that Mr. Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, would continue to lead the unity government.Having Mr. Draghi’s hand on day-to-day affairs was certain to calm international markets as well as the European Union’s leadership in Brussels, which is counting on Italy to effectively manage hundreds of billions of dollars in pandemic recovery funds and demonstrate the wisdom of the bloc’s experiment in collective debt.Mario Draghi, left, at the Quirinal Palace in Rome in February 2021.Francesco Ammendola/Presidential Palace, via ReutersMr. Draghi’s supporters would have preferred that he be elected president, hoping that his steadying influence, even in the often ceremonial role of the presidency, would provide Italy stability beyond the country’s next scheduled elections, in 2023.But for them, the re-election of Mr. Mattarella amounts to the second-best option because it freezes the current political situation in place and leaves open the possibility that Mr. Draghi could still someday ascend to the Quirinal Palace, the home of presidents and the past home of popes.While Mr. Draghi is expected to stay on as prime minister for the months ahead, speculation is rife that Mr. Mattarella would resign early from his second term as president and open the way for Italy’s next Parliament to elect Mr. Draghi at a less politically delicate time. The official in Mr. Draghi’s office said Mr. Draghi and Mr. Mattarella did not discuss anything of the sort on Saturday morning.Mr. Mattarella “understands that this is a critical time for Italy,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, an expert in the Italian political system at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “And that the status quo needs to be kept.”But months can be an eternity in Italy’s volatile politics. Most experts agree that as the elections get closer, the political ambitions and gamesmanship of the opposing political parties in the government will make it increasingly hard for the government to act, to pass new legislation, or even to stay together.And there is no guarantee that Mr. Mattarella would resign, or if he did, that the new Parliament would be filled with electors partial to Mr. Draghi.Mr. Mattarella was first elected in 2015 when he was championed by the prime minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, and he enjoyed broad support across the political spectrum. Born in Palermo, Sicily, he is the younger brother of Piersanti Mattarella, whom the mafia assassinated in 1980 during his term as Sicily’s governor.Sergio Mattarella, a reserved lawyer who taught parliamentary law in Palermo, was elected to Parliament in 1983 as a member of the Christian Democratic Party, which dominated postwar Italy until it imploded after a series of bribery scandals in the early 1990s. He served in Parliament until 2008, holding a number of high-level government posts under the Christian Democrats and in later center-left governments. In 2011, he was elected by Parliament to Italy’s Constitutional Court.As president, the grandfatherly Mr. Mattarella, with his snow-white hair and quiet style, has demonstrated moral authority in his ceremonial role.But he has also presided with a firm hand over a chaotic seven years in which the country swung wildly from the left to the right and elected among the most populist and anti-European Parliaments in Europe before transforming once again into an establishment bedrock under Mr. Draghi, whom Mr. Mattarella personally brought in to end a government crisis last year.After populists scored large victories in the 2018 elections, Mr. Mattarella prevented from taking power a government that he considered in violation of the Italian Constitution for its anti-European character, resulting in leaders of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement calling for his impeachment. It is a mark of how much Italian politics has moderated around Mr. Draghi that those same leaders today urged their followers to vote for Mr. Mattarella. But many of them had a strong personal interest in stability, as early elections were likely to cost many of them their jobs and pensions.Counting votes on Saturday at Parliament in Rome.Pool photo by Roberto MonaldoMr. Mattarella repeatedly made it clear that he did not want to stay in the job and had moved his things to a new apartment in Rome. Memes swapped among Italian politicians and reporters this week showed Mr. Mattarella answering the phone and pretending he was not home, or tying sheets together to sneak out of a window of the presidential palace. After news of his selection became public, Italian commentators jokingly expressed solidarity with his plight of having to pack and unpack boxes.But over a week of disastrous negotiations that highlighted the lack of cohesion across the political spectrum, but especially in the country’s center right, which came into the election hoping to flex its muscles but left weak and splintered, he emerged as the only name anyone could agree on.Matteo Salvini, the leader of the nationalist League party who had hoped the election would act as a show of force for the center right and his role as its de facto leader, exited the week much weaker and politically bloodied. All of his proposed candidates, and there were many, failed to gain traction.“We’ll ask Mattarella to stay,” he said Saturday. “And like this, the team stays as it is. Draghi remains at Palazzo Chigi” in his office of prime minister.Silvio Berlusconi, who had himself hoped to become president before withdrawing his candidacy shortly before voting began, had put a veto on Mr. Draghi becoming president because it could endanger the government. Mr. Berlusconi had a “long and cordial” phone call with Mr. Mattarella “ensuring him our fullest support,” according to Antonio Tajani, a leader of Mr. Berlusconi’s political party, Forza Italia. Mr. Tajani said he was very satisfied with the choice of Mr. Mattarella.The centrist Italia Viva party, led by Mr. Renzi, applauded the choice of Mr. Mattarella. “We voted for him then and today we vote for him again enthusiastically,” the group said on Twitter.If Mr. Mattarella is the winner of the week’s voting, and Mr. Draghi remains a player and a potential president for Italy, the election had its fair share of casualties, too. While the Democratic Party got its chosen candidate, the center right emerged seeming battered and inept. Some of its biggest power players talked about resigning. The contempt and diverging interests among the nominal allies spilled into view.Mr. Mattarella on Saturday outside the Quirinal Palace.Massimo Percossi/EPA, via Shutterstock For days, the competing political parties engaged in all sorts of tactics to pursue their narrow interests, gain the upper hand or defend against partisan candidates. They cast blank ballots and floated symbolic candidates used to measure the compactness of their voting blocs. They timed their own voters to make sure they were not writing down names on blank ballots. They publicly offered what they called ideal, real, credible candidates, but in reality, they meant to burn those candidacies by merely articulating the syllables of their names.On Thursday, the threshold for victory went down to 505 votes, an absolute majority, and tensions increased. On Friday, the number of votes increased to two a day, and Mr. Salvini, tried to force a candidacy of a political ally, Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, the president of the Senate, despite threats from liberals and his nominal partners in the national unity coalition that it would prompt the collapse of the government.Her candidacy came up far short and did not even succeed in winning all of the votes of the center-right bloc. Momentum began to move toward Mr. Mattarella, but on Friday night, desperate politicians, including the embittered former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, whom Mr. Mattarella had replaced with Mr. Draghi, expressed backing for a generic female candidate. The move was roundly interpreted as a last-ditch power tactic and merely claimed new political casualties. But on Saturday, all of those gambits seemed to end and the members of the national unity government decided to keep things exactly how they were, with Mr. Mattarella as president and Mr. Draghi as prime minister. But everything also seemed different. The election had taken a toll.The election, Enrico Letta, the leader of the Democratic Party, told reporters on Saturday, showed “a political system that is blocked.” He added, “This isn’t working.”Elisabetta Povoledo More

In what may be the last chapter in their unlikely story, Mr. Avenatti cross-examined Ms. Daniels for several hours during his trial on Friday.In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.“Yes,” she responded.The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”Yes, she said.He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.She responded affirmatively.As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

The panel demanded information from 14 people who were part of bogus slates of electors for President Donald J. Trump, digging deeper into an aspect of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack issued 14 subpoenas on Friday to people who falsely claimed to be electors for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., digging deeper into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.The subpoenas target individuals who met and submitted false Electoral College certificates in seven states won by President Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“The select committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”The so-called alternate electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, in seven states that Mr. Trump lost and submitted bogus slates of Electoral-College votes for him, the committee said. They then sent the false Electoral College certificates to Congress, an action Mr. Trump’s allies used to try to justify delaying or blocking the final step in confirming the 2020 election results — a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, to formally count the electoral votes.The 14 individuals subpoenaed on Friday were: Nancy Cottle and Loraine B. Pellegrino of Arizona; David Shafer and Shawn Still of Georgia; Kathy Berden and Mayra Rodriguez of Michigan; Jewll Powdrell and Deborah W. Maestas of New Mexico; Michael J. McDonald and James DeGraffenreid of Nevada; Bill Bachenberg and Lisa Patton of Pennsylvania; and Andrew Hitt and Kelly Ruh of Wisconsin.The subpoenas order the witnesses, all of whom claimed to be either a chair or secretary of the fake elector slates, to turn over documents and sit for depositions in February.Those who signed onto the fake slates of electors were mostly state-level officials in the Republican Party, G.O.P. political candidates or party activists involved with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. None of those who were subpoenaed responded on Friday to requests for comment.On Friday, the committee also issued a subpoena to Judd Deere, a former White House spokesman who interacted with Mr. Trump the day before the Capitol riot in a meeting in which Mr. Trump asked how to get Republicans in Congress he described as “weak” to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the panel’s activities. That subpoena was reported earlier by CNN.The committee’s latest subpoenas came as the Justice Department said this week it was investigating the fake electors.The scheme to employ the so-called alternate electors was one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive efforts to overturn the election, beginning even before some states had finished counting ballots and culminating in the pressure placed on Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the joint congressional session. At various times, the gambit involved lawyers, state lawmakers and top White House aides.As early as Nov. 4, Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, received a message from an unidentified Republican lawmaker proposing an “aggressive strategy” to maintain his grip on power. According to the strategy, Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania would “just send their own electors” to the Electoral College instead of those chosen by voters to represent Mr. Biden.Within a month, two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, spoke to Republican lawmakers in swing states like Michigan and Arizona, urging them to convene special sessions to choose their own electors.Around the same time, John Eastman, another lawyer who would ultimately work for Mr. Trump, spoke by video to lawmakers in Georgia, advising them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

The president’s woes have delighted Republicans, who have been seeking to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of voters after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.WASHINGTON — Republicans on Capitol Hill are using President Biden’s failures to fuel their bid to retake control of Congress, focusing on his collapsing legislative agenda, his unfulfilled promise to “shut down” the coronavirus pandemic and rising voter anxieties over school closures and inflation as they seek a winning message for this year’s elections.Mr. Biden’s troubles have frustrated Democrats, prompting calls for a major course correction. At the same time, they have delighted Republicans, who have been intent on rehabilitating themselves in the eyes of voters after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year, which highlighted the party’s lurch toward extremism and its continuing rifts under the influence of former President Donald J. Trump.Now, after months of grappling with their party’s role in stoking the riot, the ongoing influence of Mr. Trump’s election lies and the rise of right-wing activists who risk alienating more mainstream conservative voters, Republicans believe they are finally in a position to capitalize on what they view as a historically advantageous environment.Many Republicans say they see no need for any course correction — or to put forward a positive agenda in an election year they say will boil down to a referendum on Mr. Biden.“I’ll let you know when we take it back,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said at a news conference this month when asked what his party’s agenda would look like if it won control of Congress. He added, “The election this fall is a referendum on this all-Democratic government.”With inflation at a 40-year high, Republicans have spotlighted so-called kitchen-table issues like rising gas and home heating costs. They have sought to undermine Mr. Biden’s most ambitious policy proposals by casting them as “reckless spending,” and they have gloated as Democrats have been unable to hold together to push them through. And they have highlighted the administration’s foreign policy setbacks, like the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, in an effort to undercut Mr. Biden’s competence in the eyes of voters.Republicans have single-mindedly kept the focus on President Biden.Cheriss May for The New York Times“They’ve been like a bass drum in a band — it’s going on all the time,” Josh Holmes, a political adviser to Mr. McConnell, said of the Republicans and their stream of critiques. “Leadership has never gotten off on a tangent of talking about the 2020 election. They’ve been entirely forward-looking.”The message discipline could be foiled as the campaign season intensifies and Republican candidates seeking Mr. Trump’s endorsement embrace his false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen. Mr. Trump has already denounced Republican lawmakers by name for voting to impeach him and to pass Mr. Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan.“They can try to hide and distract from Tump as much as they want, but the reality is you have a former president who is hitting the campaign trail twice a month,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a Democratic strategist and former communications director for the Democratic National Committee. “He’s still out there, and he says crazy things and gets coverage.”A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans are already poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s race will be at the center of the political universe this year, but there are several important contests across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.Chris Meagher, a White House spokesman, said Republicans were “rooting for inflation and don’t have a plan to address price increases for working families.” He added, “They don’t have a plan to beat back the pandemic or to grow jobs.”For Republicans, the biggest political fear is that they may be peaking too soon. In private meetings, some have raised the question of whether voters will still blame Mr. Biden for the prolonged pandemic in the fall if the Omicron wave subsides and supply chain issues dissipate.But for now, with Mr. Trump out of office and Mr. Biden struggling to energize the voters who elected him, Republicans are feeling optimistic.They have expressed glee over the decision by Democrats to take up voting rights legislation in a midterm election year, an ultimately losing legislative fight that left senators in the majority party struggling to explain arcane filibuster rules, while Republicans focused on more tangible topics like the price of a gallon of milk.“If I had one wish, it would be that the election would be today, because the political environment is so good for us,” said Richard Walters, the chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, pointing to Mr. Biden’s declining approval rating, which this month hit 41 percent in a Pew Research Center survey.Republican strategists note with optimism that no president in the past 70 years has ever improved his approval rating substantially after late January of a midterm election year. And while nominating a Supreme Court justice to succeed Justice Stephen G. Breyer offers Mr. Biden an opportunity to energize crucial Democratic constituencies, Republicans were quick to shrug it off given that it would not change the court’s conservative tilt.Republicans have single-mindedly kept the focus on Mr. Biden.In the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, has worked to keep his more incendiary members out of the news — with mixed success — and hammered away at the president.He has also tried to lay out what Republicans would do if they won control, releasing a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would give parents more say in their children’s curriculum and drawing up a list of investigations the House would open to scrutinize the Biden administration. He recently sought advice from former Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose “Contract With America” in 1994 encapsulated the Republican message as the party campaigned successfully to win control of the House that year.Mr. Gingrich, whose meeting with Mr. McCarthy was reported by The Washington Post, recently said on Fox News that if Republicans won this year, members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack could be jailed.In the Senate, Republican leaders have used regular news conferences, often attended by a majority of their members, as what they call “plug-and-play forums” to speak directly to voters at home about Mr. Biden and his party.Representative Kevin McCarthy has hammered away at the president while working to keep his more incendiary members out of the news.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“The role I see of the minority is to point out the fact that his administration is ignoring the needs of the American people,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, said in an interview.Mr. Barrasso said the concerns he had heard from constituents over this week’s recess had been left unaddressed in Washington.“Heating costs are up, grocery costs are up, and you have a president talking about spending all of this additional money and focusing on voting,” he said. “People asked me 23 different things, and voting ended up dead last.”Some lawmakers and top Republican strategists argue that with Mr. Biden’s numbers sagging and his policies floundering, he is doing their job for them.“When your opponents are hanging themselves, don’t cut the rope, and that’s what we see the Democrats doing here,” said Jeff Roe, the founder of Axiom Strategies, a political consulting firm that has worked for Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, both Republicans. “All we need to do is stay out of the way.”Republicans on Capitol Hill point to the withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer — a tumultuous period during which a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. service members — as the turning point for a once-popular administration. Internal Republican polls showed Mr. Biden losing six percentage points in his approval rating at that time, a decline that he has not managed to reverse.“Republicans have a lot of significant, deep problems, but Democrats have been so bad that it made it really easy to overlook them,” said Brendan Buck, a former adviser to the past two Republican speakers of the House, Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner. Republicans are still dealing with the culture wars and populism that may pose serious long-term demographic challenges, he said, but for now the Democrats have overshadowed those fissures.Mr. McCarthy, who is in line to be speaker if Republicans win the House, has been increasingly bullish about the prospect, predicting that 70 Democratic-held seats will be competitive.There are some bright spots for Mr. Biden. Democrats view his opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice as a chance for a change in focus and a moment for him to claim a high-profile victory. Mr. Biden has highlighted the 3.9 percent unemployment rate as part of the recovery he promised to Americans, and his top aides have underscored that he has overseen the strongest economic growth in decades.The Senate map for Democrats is also somewhat favorable; Mr. Biden won a majority of the battleground states with Senate races that are likely to decide control of the chamber.Ms. Hinojosa said Democrats must spend heavily in competitive states to tell voters the story of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments.“The White House realizes that and there’s a better-coordinated effort to do that than there has been in the past,” she said. “They’re just going to need to do it more aggressively.”But some Republicans believe it will be difficult for Mr. Biden to improve his standing.“The left is disappointed with him and the anti-Trump Republicans and independents thought they were going to get a moderate governing,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “I don’t know how resolving the pandemic is going to affect that fundamental reality that he is completely misplaying his hand.” More

Political Theater on an Ohio Debate StageTrip GabrielReporting on national politicsMandel called Harper a “loony Nancy Pelosi” over her support of green energy and called himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Harper said she was “scared, as a woman, as a Black person,” of the idea of Mandel getting “anywhere near a seat of power in the United States Senate.”The Ohio primary is May 3. Stay tuned. More

More from our inbox:Grading Biden on the EconomyIf Only Republicans Were as Bold as the BritsSanctions Against Russia if It Invades UkraineYes, They Deserve a Lawyer  Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro, photographs by Chris Jackson/Getty Images and Pool photo by Steve ParsonsTo the Editor:“14 Independent Voters Share Their Fears” (Sunday Review, Jan. 23) reflects attitudes that may cause the downfall of the Biden presidency and result in even greater negative consequences.In response to a request for “a word or phrase that describes President Biden,” the answers were weakly moderate (e.g., “reasonable”) to completely negative (e.g., “incoherent,” “pathetic,” “clueless,” “complete disaster,” “spaced out”).Consider the issues and opposition that Mr. Biden faces: Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, Chinese economic and territorial expansionism, Covid, a divided Congress, Iran negotiations, Build Back Better, inflation, Supreme Court rulings, voting rights, economic and social justice, and last, but definitely not least, climate change. Consider also that the Afghanistan pullout and infrastructure bill are done.I do not believe that any president since World War II has confronted and tried to address so many major, even existential, issues at one time. I was not initially a Biden supporter. I do not necessarily agree with him on everything. My solutions may differ on the issues. But if I were to be asked for a word to describe President Biden, it would be “courageous.”Dean R. EdstromEden Prairie, Minn.To the Editor:As I read through the transcript of the focus group with “independent” voters, I couldn’t help but think: I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Where’s my focus group?The media’s obsession with using Obama-Trump voters as a representation of independent voters has never made sense to me. While these voters may represent a segment of independent voters, they seem more drawn to strong personalities than good policies. Many in the group seemed susceptible to misinformation, a trait that I imagine led them to Donald Trump.There are other independents in this country who can provide much more interesting (and dare I say nuanced) takes on how the administration is doing. Those voters can have just as much of an impact on the elections in 2022 and 2024, if not more. I hope The Times will consider highlighting those voices as well in the future.Eric HinkleArlington, Va.Grading Biden on the Economy  Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photographs by Doug Mills/The New York Times, and Lauri Patterson, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “President Biden’s Economy Is Failing the Big Mac Test” (editorial, Jan. 23):Your editorial succinctly summarizes the economic policies of the Biden administration, the current state of the economy and its likely future trajectory. With all that in mind, it concludes that President Biden made the right choice in firing up the economy to avoid a sluggish recovery that would have caused considerable pain for many, even though this approach has caused near-term pain for a segment of the population.Were one, however, to read the headline, or even its first few paragraphs, one would come away with the incorrect notion that Mr. Biden — who the editors acknowledge has less ability to affect the economy than popularly conceived — has engaged in failed policies that have left people worse off than they ought to be.The Times can and should do better.Seth GinsbergEnglewood, N.J.To the Editor:The Times’s failing grade for President Biden’s economic performance needs to be re-examined. The editorial tells us your main measure is real weekly wages — the average worker’s wages adjusted for inflation. The editorial determined that Mr. Biden has failed, since the average real weekly wage fell by 2.3 percent over the last year.There are two major problems with this measure. The first is a composition effect. In 2020, many low-paid workers were laid off. This raises the average, in the same way the average height in a room rises when the shortest person leaves. The composition effect went the opposite way in 2021, as low-paid workers were rehired.The other is a pandemic price effect. Many prices, most notably gasoline, were depressed when the world economy shut down because of the pandemic. Predictably, these price declines were reversed when the economy reopened.If we want a more honest measure, we would look at real wage growth over the last two years, which is a very respectable 2.9 percent.Dean BakerKanab, UtahThe writer is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.To the Editor:The problem is, nobody really understands the economy.Different economists will give different reasons for why the economy is doing what it’s doing. Some will get it right, many won’t. Some might be only partly right.When it comes down to it, there are often multiple reasons why the economy does what it does. And, no matter what the president does, the economy will go its own way because of multiple factors. So is President Biden at fault? A little bit yes and a little bit no.We have an economy being manipulated by Covid, oil-producing nations, supply chains, businesses inflating prices, etc. The president is the most prominent individual to aim at, but he’s only a small part of the problem. Do you know anyone who’d be more effective?Marshall CossmanGrand Blanc, Mich.To the Editor:Rather than blaming “Democrats, unable to agree on the terms of a permanent expansion” for the expiration of the child tax credit, the blame should be placed on one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin, and the 50 Republicans who are united in opposition.Michael CaplowSeattleIf Only Republicans Were as Bold as the BritsPrime Minister Boris Johnson in Parliament on Tuesday.Jessica Taylor/Uk Parliament, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “How Partying Could Be Boris Johnson’s Undoing” (The Daily podcast, Jan. 25):As I watch the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, tumble into a conflagration of his own lies and hubris as he flagrantly flouted Covid restrictions while the rest of Britain abided by the rules, I am struck by the members of his own Tory Party who are openly stating their disgust at his behavior.Certainly they are motivated by self-interest and the preservation of the Tory majority, but one can only wonder where we would be in this country if Mitch McConnell and other Republicans had confronted Donald Trump and openly declared their actual personal opinions about his mendacity and malignancy as David Davies, a senior member of the Conservative Party, did in Parliament. He quoted the words spoken to Neville Chamberlain: “You have sat there too long for all the good you have done. In the name of God, go!”The Republican leadership simply did not have the morality and courage of David Davies. We are all paying the price for their lack of character.Robert GrossmarkNew YorkTo the Editor:I have been struck throughout the pandemic by the resonances with Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which a prince, attempting to escape a deadly plague, holes himself inside a palace and throws a masquerade ball. Spoiler alert: The plague gets in, disguised as a flamboyantly dressed guest.It does not surprise me that Boris Johnson’s demise may be thanks to a party of his own.Alice WalkerBrooklynSanctions Against Russia if It Invades Ukraine Mikhail Metzel/SputnikTo the Editor:If Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine, then the United States, Britain and the European Union should close their borders to Russian citizens and deny them visas.Let the oligarchs find new places to buy their mansions and launder their money. The West should not be a refuge for Russian money and rich Russians.Michael R. SlaterSan Luis Obispo, Calif.Yes, They Deserve a LawyerThe Rev. John Udo-Okon, pastor of the Word of Life International Church in the South Bronx, hopes to be trained to help his congregants defend themselves against debt-collection suits.Thalia Juarez for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Do Debtors Really Need a Lawyer When Sued?” (news article, Jan. 26):Yes, they do! Hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly Black and brown low-income people face debt collection in New York State — from pending cases and cases in which creditors secured court judgments against them. Why should they have to settle for nonprofessional counsel in legal proceedings that can determine if they have food on the table and a roof over their heads for themselves and their families?If you have the means, you would never settle for a nonprofessional, and they should not have to either. New York State should expand civil legal services in this grossly underfunded area, particularly at this critical time.Dora GalacatosNew YorkThe writer is executive director of the Feerick Center for Social Justice, Fordham University School of Law. More