Elections

The Republican leader’s claim about high voter turnout in previous elections wasn’t too far off base, but that doesn’t mean voting access is assured.Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.“In a recent survey, 94 percent of Americans thought it was easy to vote,” he continued. “This is not a problem. Turnout is up. Biggest turnout since 1900. It’s simply they’re being sold a bill of goods to support a Democratic effort to federalize elections.”Mr. McConnell’s remarks were roundly criticized by the Congressional Black Caucus, Democratic lawmakers and others. Some accused the senator of racism in appearing to imply that Black voters are not American.“After centuries of building this nation, Republicans still don’t consider Black voters to be Americans,” tweeted Representative Ayana S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts. “We cannot pretend that the days of Jim Crow are behind us.”“Being Black doesn’t make you less of an American, no matter what this craven man thinks,” tweeted Charles Booker, a Kentucky Democrat running to unseat the state’s junior senator, Rand Paul.Still, Mr. McConnell’s comments raised questions about how turnout for Black voters compared with that of other demographic groups, and what that might say about voting access.In a statement provided to The New York Times on Thursday, Mr. McConnell sought to clarify his remarks, saying that he has “consistently pointed to the record-high turnout for all voters in the 2020 election, including African Americans.” A spokesman for Mr. McConnell also cited Census Bureau demographic data on voter turnout for the past four federal elections. In the 2020 election, for example, 62.6 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 66.8 percent of all eligible Americans, a difference of 4.2 percentage points. In the 2018, 2016 and 2014 elections, the gaps were even smaller, at about 2 percentage points.So while Black American voter turnout is not “just as high” as overall voter turnout, as Mr. McConnell said, it does seem comparable in several recent elections.But the disparity is more stark between Black and white voters. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Michael McDonald, a voter turnout expert at the University of Florida, Black Americans have almost always voted at lower rates than white Americans. The exceptions were in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Those were the only years in which Black turnout surpassed white turnout.The racial voting gap has fluctuated in recent decades. According to Mr. McDonald’s analysis, in the 1988 presidential election, 46.8 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 55.7 percent of eligible white Americans — a gap of 8.9 percentage points. That gap had shrunk by the 2016 presidential election to 4.8 percentage points, before increasing to 7 percentage points in 2020.But overall, the 2020 election attracted the highest voter turnout in more than a century. And in a Pew Research Center poll conducted just days after the election, 94 percent of those surveyed said it had been very or somewhat easy to vote, as Mr. McConnell said.However, high voter turnout and perceptions that voting was easy in past elections do not prove that concerns about voting access in future elections are “misplaced,” as Mr. McConnell suggested. At least 19 states passed laws in 2021 restricting voting access. Georgia’s efforts in particular may have an outsize impact on Black voters.And the high turnout in 2020 was fueled in part by unusually high voter engagement. In a Pew poll conducted in July and August 2020, 83 percent of respondents said it really matters who wins the presidency, the highest percentage to give that response in the survey’s 20-year history.“More people were voting in 2020 because more people were interested in voting. That is not a measure of how many were impacted because of voting restrictions,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It can’t be that we are satisfied with disenfranchising 10 percent of the population because 60 percent of the population showed up.” More

Republicans in three states have proposed strike forces against election crimes even though fraud cases remain minuscule.WASHINGTON — Reprising the rigged-election belief that has become a mantra among their supporters, Republican politicians in at least three states are proposing to establish police forces to hunt exclusively for voter fraud and other election crimes, a category of offenses that experts say is tiny at best.The plans are part of a new wave of initiatives that Republicans say are directed at voter fraud. They are being condemned by voting rights advocates and even some local election supervisors, who call them costly and unnecessary appeasement of the Republican base that will select primary-election winners for this November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race.The next round of voting clashes comes after the apparent demise of Democratic voting rights legislation in Washington on Thursday. It is a reminder that while the Democratic agenda in Washington seems dead, Republican state-level efforts to make voting harder show no sign of slowing down.Supporters say the added enforcement will root out instances of fraud and assure the public that everything possible is being done to make sure that American elections are accurate and legitimate. Critics say the efforts can easily be abused and used as political cudgels or efforts to intimidate people from registering and voting. And Democrats say the main reason Republican voters have lost faith in the electoral system is because of the incessant Republican focus on almost entirely imagined fraud.The most concrete proposal is in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the State Legislature last week for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office. The plan, which Mr. DeSantis has been touting since the fall, would include 20 sworn police officers and field offices statewide.Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the Florida Legislature for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThat was followed on Thursday by a pledge by David Perdue, the former Georgia senator who is a Republican candidate for governor, to create his own force of election police “to make Georgia elections the safest and securest in the country.” Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat in 2020, claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking re-election, weakened election standards and refused to investigate claims of fraud following President Biden’s narrow win in the state.And in Arizona, a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.Ms. Rogers’s bill probably faces an uphill road in the Legislature, where Republicans are only narrowly in control and have been battered for their support of a widely ridiculed multimillion-dollar inquiry into 2020 election results. Prospects for the Florida and Georgia proposals are less clear.The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him.Mr. DeSantis took a tough line in November when he unveiled his proposal, saying that the new unit would chase crimes that local election official shrug at. “There’ll be people, if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don’t do anything,” he said at an appearance in West Palm Beach.“I guarantee you this,” he added. “The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that.”None of the three states — and for that matter, none of the other 47 and the District of Columbia — reported any more than a minuscule number of election fraud cases after the 2020 races. Mr. DeSantis said after the 2020 vote that his was “the state that did it right and that other states should emulate.” The only notable hint of irregularity in Florida was the recent arrest on fraud charges of four men in a retirement complex north of Orlando. At least two of them appeared to be winter Floridians accused of casting ballots both there and in more frigid states to the north.Trump supporters gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in downtown Phoenix as ballots were counted in November 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Perdue say their strike forces are still needed to root out other election irregularities and to bolster their constituents’ sagging faith in the honesty of the vote. The same rationale has powered so-called audits of election results and clampdowns on election rules by Republican-run legislatures across the country.Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.Mr. Trump comfortably won Florida by about 370,000 votes in 2020, and his narrow losses in Arizona and Georgia were confirmed by expert audits, recounts and even the notorious Cyber Ninjas inquiry into the vote in Maricopa County.“We don’t need further investigations into elections that are freely and fairly conducted,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “We’ve established that again and again and again. This is more pablum to the people who believe in fraud and conspiracy theories and lies that the last election was stolen.”Neither the new laws nor election autopsies appear to have shaken the conviction of many Trump supporters that the election system is suspect. Some scholars say they see the police forces as the latest bid by politicians to scratch that itch.Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.The idea of an election police force is not new, even in the states where they are being proposed. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already oversees 23 investigators whose purview includes election irregularities, and an assistant state attorney general exclusively prosecutes crimes in elections, the judiciary and local governments. The Arizona attorney general manages a relatively new “election integrity” investigative unit, and Florida election violations are prosecuted by both state and local authorities, as is true in most states. More

The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County, Ga., is investigating possible election interference by the former president and his allies.A district attorney in Atlanta on Thursday asked a judge to convene a special grand jury to help a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.The inquiry is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president. The grand jury request from the district attorney in Fulton County, Fani T. Willis, had been expected after crucial witnesses refused to participate voluntarily. A grand jury could issue subpoenas compelling those witnesses to provide information.The distinction of a special grand jury is that it would focus exclusively on the Trump investigation, while regular grand juries handle many cases and cannot spend as much time on a single one. The Georgia case is one of two active criminal investigations known to involve the former president and his circle; the other is the examination of his financial dealings by the Manhattan district attorney.“The District Attorney’s Office has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions,” Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to Christopher S. Brasher, the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court; the letter was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Judge Brasher declined to comment.Ms. Willis added, “We have made efforts to interview multiple witnesses and gather evidence, and a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”The inquiry is the only criminal case known to have been taken up by a prosecutor that focuses directly on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. It is set to play out in a state taking center stage in the nation’s battle over voting rights, and one where a heated Republican primary for governor is testing Mr. Trump’s strength as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.If the investigation proceeds, legal experts say that the former president’s potential criminal exposure could include charges of racketeering or conspiracy to commit election fraud.The inquiry centers on Mr. Trump’s actions in the two months between his election loss and Congress’s certification of the results, including a call he made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Ms. Willis said that Mr. Raffensperger was among those who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena.“We already have cooperated,” Mr. Raffensperger said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “Any information that they’ve requested, we sent it to them. And if we’re compelled to come before a grand jury, obviously, we will follow the law and come before a grand jury and testify.”Representatives for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, but the former president did release a statement characterizing his phone call with Mr. Raffensperger as “perfect.” He has cast other investigations, including one being conducted by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, as politically motivated. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic stronghold, and Ms. Willis is a Democrat.The Georgia inquiry is one of several criminal, civil and congressional investigations focused on Mr. Trump. He and his allies have been sparring in court with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee won a major victory on Wednesday when the Supreme Court refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records, and on Thursday, the panel asked Ivanka Trump to cooperate in the inquiry.In addition to the criminal inquiry being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney, Ms. James is leading a civil fraud investigation into Mr. Trump’s business empire. She has issued subpoenas seeking interviews with two of his adult children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and her office previously interviewed a third, Eric Trump.In Atlanta, Ms. Willis said last year that she would consider racketeering charges, among others. An analysis released last year by the Brookings Institution that has been studied by Ms. Willis’s office concluded that Mr. Trump’s postelection conduct in Georgia had put him “at substantial risk of possible state charges,” including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

The Fox News host Sean Hannity had some blunt advice for President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 7, 2021: “No more stolen election talk.”His guidance did not take. But documents disclosed on Thursday showed in vivid detail just how closely Mr. Hannity had worked with White House aides in a fervent, if brief, effort to persuade Mr. Trump to abandon his false claims about voter fraud after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.One day after the attack, Mr. Hannity sent a text message to Kayleigh McEnany, then the White House press secretary, describing a five-point plan for approaching conversations with the president, according to documents released by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.After urging Ms. McEnany to avoid discussion of a “stolen election,” Mr. Hannity proffered another talking point to use with Mr. Trump: “Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real, and many people will quit …”Mr. Hannity appeared to be referring to the possibilities that Mr. Trump could be impeached, face mass resignations from his staff or be temporarily removed from office by a group of his cabinet secretaries invoking the 25th Amendment.Ms. McEnany replied: “Love that. Thank you. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce.”Fox News, where Ms. McEnany is now a commentator and a co-host of a weekday program, declined to comment on Thursday.In public, Mr. Hannity and Ms. McEnany remain lock-step supporters of Mr. Trump and his worldview. But their private exchanges show the level of alarm among even the president’s closest allies after the Jan. 6 riot, as Mr. Trump persisted in his false claims that the election had been stolen from him and his political future appeared deeply precarious.The exchanges were included in a letter sent by the House committee to Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter and one of his senior advisers. The committee is seeking Ms. Trump’s cooperation as it tries to piece together a scramble inside the White House to persuade Mr. Trump to denounce the attackers at the Capitol.In another exchange included in the letter, Mr. Hannity urged Ms. McEnany to keep the president away from certain advisers. “Key now. No more crazy people,” Mr. Hannity wrote. Ms. McEnany replied: “Yes 100%.”This month, the House committee asked Mr. Hannity to cooperate and answer questions about his communications with Mr. Trump and his aides in the days surrounding the riot. At the time, the committee disclosed messages in which Mr. Hannity advised Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, on the president’s political future. “He can’t mention the election again. Ever,” Mr. Hannity wrote on Jan. 10, 2021, to Mr. Meadows and Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.A lawyer for Mr. Hannity, Jay Sekulow, has said the committee’s request to interview Mr. Hannity raises “First Amendment concerns regarding freedom of the press.”Luke Broadwater More

Georgia prosecutor seeks special grand jury into Trump’s election interferenceDA requests subpoena power to compel testimony from witnesses, such as Brad Raffensperger, who Trump asked to ‘find’ 11,780 votes The prosecutor for Georgia’s biggest county on Thursday requested a special grand jury with subpoena power to aid her investigation into former US president Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the state’s 2020 election results.In a letter to Fulton county’s chief judge, first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, district attorney Fani Willis wrote that multiple witnesses have refused to cooperate without a subpoena requiring their testimony.“Therefore, I am hereby requesting … that a special purpose grand jury be impaneled for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia,” Willis wrote.The investigation by Willis, a Democrat, is the most serious inquiry facing Trump in Georgia after he was recorded in a phone call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to overturn the states election results based on unfounded claims of voter fraud.Criminal inquiry into Trump’s Georgia election interference gathers steamRead moreThe prosecutor specifically mentioned that Raffensperger, whom she described as an “essential witness”, had indicated he would only take part in an interview once presented with a subpoena.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Trump adviser previously criticized the investigation as a “witch-hunt” designed to “score political points”.A spokesperson for the superior courts in Fulton county, which encompasses most of the state capital Atlanta, said there was no immediate timeline for a response to Willis’s request.In the letter, Willis said a special grand jury, which can subpoena witnesses, was needed because jurors can be impaneled for longer periods and focus exclusively on a single investigation.During the 2 January 2021 call, the former Republican president urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The transcript quotes Trump telling Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” which is the number Trump would have needed to win Georgia.Legal experts have said Trump’s phone calls may have violated at least three state election laws: conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, and intentional interference with performance of election duties.The possible felony and misdemeanor violations are punishable by fines or imprisonment.TopicsGeorgiaUS politicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

American democracy has often confronted hostile forces from outside the United States; rarely has it been under as much of a threat from forces within the nation. The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.Again and again, we have heard conservatives argue that even if you believe that Donald Trump is flawed and the MAGA movement is worrisome, the left is much more dangerous. We disagree. Fears about the left’s increasingly authoritarian, radical tendencies are well grounded; but they have blinded many conservatives to the greater danger posed by the right, which we believe is a threat to our constitutional order and therefore to conservatism itself.We come to our view after writing and warning about the illiberal left for much of our careers. One of us wrote a book nearly 30 years ago criticizing those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech; the other has been sounding alarms about left-wing ideology since his days as an official in the Department of Education during the Reagan years.Since then, the left has grown more radical, more aggressive and less tolerant. With the help of social media and influence in academia — and sometimes in newsrooms and corporate H.R. departments — a small number of die-hard progressives (they make up only about 8 percent of the public, according to one recent survey) exert a hugely disproportionate influence on the culture. Progressives are “often imposing illiberal speech norms on schools, companies and cultural institutions,” the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait writes. There have been many examples of squelching arguments that although controversial deserve full and frank airing in a free society. Universities have attempted to kick off their campuses Christian ministries that require their leaders to be Christian, and we have written in these pages about efforts to weaken protections for religious liberty.Structural racism — the perpetuation of de facto discrimination by ingrained social arrangements and assumptions — is a reality in American life. But the hodgepodge of ideas in the bucket that has come to be known as “critical race theory” includes radical claims that deny the enduring value of concepts like equality of opportunity and objectivity and reject “the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy” as “a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” The most extreme versions of these ideas might not be taught in high schools (yet), but their influence is undoubtedly being felt.The progressive movement, then, is increasingly under the sway of a totalistic, unfalsifiable and revolutionary ideology that rejects fundamental liberal values like pluralism and free inquiry. And conservatives aren’t hallucinating about its influence. Surveys show that 62 percent of Americans and 68 percent of college students are reluctant to share their true political views for fear of negative social consequences. A Cato Institute study found that nearly a third of Americans — across the political spectrum, not just on the right — say they’re worried about losing a job or job opportunities if they express their true political views. Another study suggested that the level of self-censorship in America may be three times what it was during the McCarthy era.The left is not solely responsible for creating these fears, but it has played the most significant role. Yet even granting all that, the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.Any account of the malignancy of the American right has to begin with Mr. Trump, whose twisted sensibilities continue to define the Republican Party. It was he who attempted what no president had ever tried: overturning an election. He based his effort on a huge campaign of disinformation. Mr. Trump pressured the vice president, governors, secretaries of state, election officials and appointees at the Department of Justice to join him in his efforts. One of his lawyers reportedly proposed a plan to nullify the election. Congress’s Jan. 6 committee will reveal more and possibly worse.The Republican Party, rather than spurning Mr. Trump and his efforts, has embraced them. Around the country, prospective Republican candidates, far from opposing #StopTheSteal lies and conspiracy theories, are running on them in 2022, according to a Washington Post tally. Any prominent Republican today who disputes #StopTheSteal can expect to be targeted by the base, booed at any large gathering of Republicans, censured by party apparatchiks and possibly threatened with physical violence.Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans said that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.In classic conservative fashion, they designed the U.S. Constitution, and its attendant institutions and norms, both to constrain us and to help us be our better selves. The MAGA right has no love for those institutions and norms. It inflames ugly passions and warps reality. It is profoundly anticonservative, capable of twisting in any direction for the sake of raw power. It represents a profound break with the American conservative tradition.And so to regard the radical left as a reason to excuse, minimize or ignore the malign movement on the right is an abrogation of conservative duty and principle. If MAGA prevails, conservatism will be gravely injured — and American democracy will be, too.Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s record-setting $21.6 million in donations flowed from a who’s who of New York’s special interests.Last November, when many of Manhattan’s skyscrapers sat half-empty, Gov. Kathy Hochul made a high-stakes wager on New York City’s commercial real estate industry: She vowed to move ahead with a marquee plan to restore Pennsylvania Station and erect new office towers around it.For Manhattan’s mega-rich real estate developers, the announcement signaled Ms. Hochul’s support for the kind of grand projects that foretell a windfall, and some found a concrete way of showing their approval to the new governor.In the weeks that followed, Ms. Hochul’s campaign received checks for $69,700, the legal limit, from some of the city’s biggest real estate executives, including Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust, which is positioned to directly benefit from the project that he once called a “Promised Land.” Other checks trickled in from developers, builders, engineers and even some who opposed it.The campaign contributions flowed from a broader spigot of cash turned on last fall by New York’s varied special interests, from real estate and building trades to hospitals, labor unions and gaming companies, directed toward Ms. Hochul’s election campaign.The donations included $200,000 in checks from the family behind a major construction firm with millions in state contracts, $47,000 that was tied to a gaming giant leaning on the state to expand legal gambling, and $41,000 traced back to a single Albany lobbyist.The funds helped Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who unexpectedly ascended to office last August, assemble a record-setting $21.6 million war chest, and claim a steep advantage heading into June’s Democratic primary and November’s general election.People and industries with financial interests before the state have long been reliable donors to top elected officials, showering them with money that, at times, can pose ethical and legal problems.There has been no evidence that the contributions from Mr. Roth and other developers were directly related to Ms. Hochul’s Penn Station plan, but those and others may still prompt scrutiny about her decision-making as she negotiates the state’s $216 billion budget.“It’s not like this isn’t a problem, but it is a well-trod path,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, which pushes for tighter campaign finance laws. “She’s just running through it instead of walking.”More than 95 percent of the funds she collected came from donors who gave $1,000 or more, according to a review of publicly available campaign filings, despite the Hochul campaign’s claims of success in pulling in small donations. Dozens of people wrote the governor checks for the legal maximum.Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for Ms. Hochul’s campaign, pointed to contributions from every county in the state and said that the campaign was proud that her agenda “has resonated with a diverse coalition of supporters.”“In keeping with the governor’s commitment to maintain high ethical standards, campaign contributions have no influence on government decisions,” he said.Many of her donors are fixtures in New York politics and were stalwart supporters of her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo, who collected tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions by often using the same tactics Ms. Hochul is employing. But where Mr. Cuomo had years to build those relationships and fill his campaign coffers, Ms. Hochul has done so in a matter on months.Few industries gave more — and frequently in large amounts — than real estate, where large developers are keenly watching how Ms. Hochul will not only approach large, state-funded capital projects but the future of the state’s affordable housing law.Douglas Durst, who oversees a multibillion dollar real estate empire and chairs the influential Real Estate Board of New York, gave her $55,000. The family of Scott Rechler, a top donor to Mr. Cuomo whose RXR Realty controls millions of square feet of commercial real estate, gave $60,000. Members of the Rudin, Tishman and Speyer families — whose names dot buildings across the city — collectively contributed more than $400,000. Top executives at Related Companies, the group behind Hudson Yards, maxed out.The new governor, who has cast herself as pro-business and greenlighted a rash of expensive capital projects amid an influx of federal funds, also quickly began collecting funds from the state’s construction industry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars came from unions, trade groups and executives representing bricklayers, sheet metal workers, engineers, elevator constructors, machine operators, construction companies and even a law firm that specializes in construction accidents.Hospitals, nursing homes and other health groups, who scored significant victories in Ms. Hochul’s budget, including retention bonuses for frontline health workers, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well. Over two days in October and December, for example, more than 60 LLCs associated with nursing or rehabilitation homes all gave $1,000 or more apiece.Three family members associated with the Haugland Group, a Long Island construction and energy firm with lucrative state contracts at Kennedy Airport and with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, gave more than $200,000 altogether.A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 5A crowded field. More

More than a dozen big Wall Street money managers said no to Trump Media, but the Pentwater and Sabby hedge funds are among those that have committed millions.Last month, Donald J. Trump’s fledgling social media company announced that it had lined up $1 billion from 36 investors. The size of the deal, the former president said in the announcement, signaled that his start-up’s plan to end the “tyranny” of Big Tech had significant support.Getting there was no slam dunk.Beginning in the fall, bankers for the company, Trump Media & Technology Group, approached dozens of investors pitching the $1 billion deal, which offered them lucrative financial terms. By then, the start-up — intended partly as a conservative alternative to Twitter — had separately raised roughly $300 million through its planned merger with a special purpose acquisition company.Those willing to put up at least $100 million, Trump Media’s bankers told potential investors, would get a call from Mr. Trump, said five people who were briefed about the pitches but were not authorized to speak publicly. Despite the opportunity to invest in a deal whose terms were structured to make a profit for investors, many of Wall Street’s big names passed.More than a dozen well-known hedge funds and investment firms were hesitant to go into business with Mr. Trump, people briefed on the matter said, because any association with him could risk alienating their investors, which often include public pension funds and foundations. Others were wary of Mr. Trump’s history of corporate bankruptcies and disputes with lenders and partners, and concerned that details about his media company were scant.At the moment, Trump Media — which hired former Representative Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump ally, as chief executive in December — has no disclosed revenue or products.Among the funds that turned down Trump Media’s bankers were Millennium Management, a $57 billion hedge fund; Hudson Bay Capital, a $15 billion hedge fund; and Balyasny Asset Management, a hedge fund with $13 billion in assets, according to a spokesman. Apollo Global Management, the big private equity firm, also passed, a person briefed on the matter said. The deal on offer is known as a “private investment in public equity,” or PIPE, which gives certain investors discounted shares in a public company.People close to the three hedge funds did not explain why the firms had chosen not to invest.Highbridge Capital Management, a hedge fund unit of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, had bought shares in the initial public offering of Digital World Acquisition, the SPAC that later agreed to merge with Mr. Trump’s company. However, Highbridge didn’t go into the PIPE deal because of the optics of doing business with Mr. Trump, one person familiar with the decision said. Investors who buy shares of a SPAC don’t know what company it will end up merging with, which is why they’re often called “blank check” companies.A spokesman for JPMorgan declined to comment.Mr. Nunes did not respond to emails seeking comment sent to his Trump Media address and the general company address. Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, also did not respond to requests for comment.A lawyer for Trump Media and two bankers at EF Hutton, the small investment bank that arranged the financing and recently took the name of a once storied Wall Street firm, either declined to comment or did not return requests.Trump Media agreed to merge with Digital World in October, raising $293 million. On Dec. 4, the Trump company announced that it had lined up an additional $1 billion through the PIPE deal. Three dozen investors signed up, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, although they will have to turn over that money only if Trump Media’s merger with Digital World closes. Currently, that merger is under regulatory investigation. Its outcome will determine whether the deal can go through.Devin Nunes gave up his House seat to become chief executive of Trump Media in December.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAmong the bigger investors: Pentwater Capital, a $10 billion hedge fund in Naples, Fla., and Sabby Management, a hedge fund in Upper Saddle River, N.J., that manages more than $500 million, several people who were briefed about their involvement said. The amounts that Pentwater and Sabby invested couldn’t be learned.“Investors have different risk preferences, including reputational as well as financial risk,” said Usha Rodrigues, who teaches corporate law at the University of Georgia School of Law. “If the deal is sweet enough, then the bankers will find someone who is likely to bite.”In the days before Trump Media announced its $1 billion financing, the former president called a handful of hedge funds, family offices and others who had signaled they would invest at least $50 million each, two people briefed on the matter said. The calls were intended as both a deal sweetener for larger investors and an opportunity for them to ask Mr. Trump questions about the start-up’s plans before they made plans to invest, several people said.Early on, Trump Media bankers told some prospective investors that they would get a call from Mr. Trump if they put in $100 million, according to interviews with those investors. Later on, other investors were told that $50 million was enough for a call.The roughly $1.3 billion raised by the two deals would provide Mr. Trump with funds to get his company going. But before a single dollar can hit Trump Media’s balance sheet, its deal with Digital World must overcome scrutiny by securities regulators. The S.E.C. is investigating some of the events leading up to the Oct. 20 announcement of Trump Media’s planned merger with Digital World.Regulators opened the inquiry after The New York Times reported that the chief executive of Digital World, Patrick Orlando, had talks with representatives of Trump Media as far back as March and had never disclosed that to investors — potentially flouting securities regulations. Regulators are also looking into trading in Digital World securities that happened before the merger announcement.As the start-up waits for the regulatory scrutiny to wrap up and its merger with Digital World to close, several people close to Mr. Trump have sought to raise a few million dollars from past supporters of his to provide Trump Media with funds to get going, said people who were approached or told about the efforts.Among those urging Trump donors to invest is Roy Bailey, a lobbyist who is also raising money for a super PAC that is financing Mr. Trump’s political operation as he weighs another presidential campaign in 2024, two people approached by Mr. Bailey said.One Republican donor, Dan Eberhart, who said he had spent time at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida recently, said he had “been approached by a number of people in Trump’s orbit” about investing in Trump Media. But, Mr. Eberhart said, “my focus is on investing in candidates to help us win back the Senate.”If regulators approve Trump Media’s merger with Digital World, investors in the $1 billion private deal stand to do well whether or not the company thrives. As part of the deal, investors get to buy shares of Trump Media for roughly 40 percent less than the prevailing market price. If the shares rise, they can profit from the rally. If the shares fall, their chance of losing money is significantly lower than that of the company’s other investors.The investors also have the right to “short,” or borrow stock to bet on a fall of Trump Media shares, as a further protection against the risk of a price decline.Vik Mittal, chief investment officer with Meteora Capital, which invested in the Digital World I.P.O., said the PIPE “provides downside protection to PIPE investors if shares of Digital World decline and unlimited upside if the deal works out.” His firm considered going into the PIPE but declined for reasons that Mr. Mittal did not want to divulge.In the meantime, retail investors have turned Digital World into something of “meme stock,” propping up its share price partly because of its association with Mr. Trump. Shares trade around $80 — much higher than the $10 price of the SPAC’s initial public offering.Susan C. Beachy More