Elections

The loss by Mr. Sweeney, a Democrat and the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey, suggest an erosion of Democratic support in suburban and rural areas.Stephen M. Sweeney, the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey, admitted defeat on Wednesday, eight days after voters elected a Republican truck driver who ran on a shoestring budget in one of the biggest political upsets in state history.Mr. Sweeney, the Democratic Senate president and a union leader, blamed his loss on overwhelming Republican turnout in his South Jersey district, which is about 15 miles outside Philadelphia.“It was a red wave,” he said in the State House complex in Trenton where he has governed with an iron fist since 2010, when he first took over as president of the Senate.Mr. Sweeney, who has made overtures about running for governor and holds a crucial role on a state redistricting committee, said that he planned to remain active in public life.“What the voters said in this election is New Jersey is a state filled with hardworking people who want to provide for their families and as leaders we need to speak directly to the concerns of all voters,” said Mr. Sweeney, an ironworker who has been in the State Senate since 2002. “I plan to keep speaking to those concerns.”Two hours later, the Republican who beat him, Edward Durr, stood in front of a microphone in the headquarters of the Gloucester County Republican Party, after pulling off one of the country’s most talked about upsets from a strip mall storefront next to a Batteries Plus shop.“I feel like I’m about to throw up,” Edward Durr said as he faced a phalanx of reporters after pulling off one of the biggest political upset in New Jersey history.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times“I feel like I’m about to throw up,” Mr. Durr, who has logged more than two million miles as a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanigan furniture chain, said of the media glare.Former President Donald J. Trump had called to congratulate him on Sunday, and Mr. Durr’s win was featured on cable and network news, quickly becoming fodder for comedians on “Saturday Night Live” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”His successful campaign was seen as emblematic of a surge of Republican voters coupled with a disenchantment with Democrats that also led to a Republican win for governor in Virginia and an unexpectedly narrow re-election victory for Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, in New Jersey.The statewide races are considered barometers of voter sentiment as Democrats struggle to hold on to a slim majority in Congress during next year’s midterm elections and illustrates the erosion of support for the party, especially in suburban and rural areas.Mr. Durr’s improbable victory has also led to an immediate shift in the discussion of priorities in Trenton.“I give the voters my promise I will fight the tyranny that Phil Murphy is, beginning on Day 1,” he said.Mr. Durr has spoken about his opposition to Mr. Murphy’s mandates related to mask-wearing and vaccination, and he would not say whether he had been inoculated against Covid-19.Before Election Day, Mr. Durr remained largely unvetted and unknown to the general public, and he continued doing damage control on Wednesday for comments he had made on social media, including one reflecting support for “both sides” of a violent racist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and another condemning Islam and disparaging the Prophet Muhammad.After speaking at the G.O.P. headquarters, he was driven two miles to Al Minhal Academy of Islamic Education, a Muslim masjid in Washington Township, to talk with members of the mosque and leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New Jersey. The group remained inside for about two hours; Mr. Durr left carrying a paperback copy of the Quran.“We wanted to dispel any of the beliefs he has about our community,” Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the council, said before the meeting.“We also want to remind him of his responsibility as an elected official,” Mr. Maksut said. “He represents Muslims as well. It’s his responsibility to keep their safety in mind.”Mr. Durr wrote a note on Al Minhal stationery, committing to working with the Muslim community “going forward.” “I stand against Islamophobia and all forms of hate,” the note read.Mr. Durr has also apologized for his comments on social media.“You get behind a keyboard, you don’t see a person and you don’t consider the other person,” he said on Wednesday.“These are things I’ve done in the past,” he added. “It doesn’t define me as a person.”Mr. Durr’s two Republican running-mates, Beth Sawyer and Bethanne McCarthy Patrick, also ousted two Democratic members of the State Assembly, Adam Taliaferro and John J. Burzichelli, a former mayor of Paulsboro first elected to the State House in 2001.Mr. Durr and Ms. Sawyer ran unsuccessfully for State Assembly in 2019, and they were recruited to compete again by Jacci Vigilante, a trial lawyer who serves as the Republican chairwoman for Gloucester County.“He was honored to be asked,” Ms. Vigilante said of Mr. Durr. “He accepted readily.”Ms. Sawyer, a real estate broker who also runs her own home renovation construction company, said voters spoke mainly of the high cost of living as she campaigned door to door. She said she expected to focus on containing taxes when she gets to Trenton.“Taxes, taxes, taxes,” Ms. Sawyer said. “And cut government bloating.”Over the past three years, the Gloucester County G.O.P. joined with other neighboring county parties to lease space for a headquarters and they have built an email list from scratch that now includes thousands of names, Ms. Vigilante said.The group has held weekly happy hours and breakfasts, and it has organized trips to Atlantic City, to try to generate support for Republican candidates in a region that for decades has been dominated by Democrats.“It’s hard to raise money, and it’s hard to build an organization when you can’t produce wins,” she said.After last Tuesday, that may be less of a problem. More

Voters will decide in June whether Chesa Boudin should remain in office, a test of the national movement to elect prosecutors who have promised to dismantle mass incarceration.Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco, will face a recall election next year after a backlash in one of America’s most liberal cities to his policies aimed at reducing the number of people in jails and prisons.Elections officials in San Francisco certified this week that recall supporters had gathered enough signatures to force an election in June, when Californians will vote in a statewide primary for governor and congressional seats. The district attorney contest will serve as a test of how far liberal prosecutors can go in changing the justice system at a time of rising concerns about crime.Mr. Boudin, a former public defender whose story of growing up a son of incarcerated parents was central to his campaign two years ago, is among a number of liberal prosecutors who have recently been elected on promises of reducing incarceration and tackling racial bias within the criminal justice system.But Mr. Boudin, like other liberal prosecutors in places such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles, has faced sharp pushback from conservative activists, as well as other residents concerned about public safety, who say that he is not taking a hard enough line on crime and that his policies have made San Francisco less safe.Mr. Boudin has also faced opposition from within his own office, which has seen high rates of turnover, with some prosecutors resigning in protest of the department’s policies.One homicide prosecutor in the office, Brooke Jenkins, who said she supported Mr. Boudin’s efforts to reduce prison sentences and address racial biases and said she identified as a progressive, recently resigned and has supported the recall effort, citing mismanagement and low morale.“It’s my perception that Chesa lacks a desire to actually and effectively prosecute crime, in any fashion,” Ms. Jenkins said. “While he ran on a platform of being progressive and reform focused, his methodology to achieving that is simply to release individuals early or to offer very lenient plea deals.”In his time in office, Mr. Boudin has become a polarizing figure in San Francisco, a place where many voters have embraced the notion of transforming the criminal justice system by locking away fewer people but at the same time have grown weary of petty crime and scenes of despair on city streets.Fears of growing crime have divided the city, even though it has not faced the type of surge in homicides and gun violence that other major cities have experienced since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Oakland across the Bay, which is facing a sharp rise in homicides, the primary concerns in San Francisco are property crimes like theft and burglary, and quality-of-life issues like open-air drug dealing and the proliferation of homeless encampments.“Everybody’s like, why doesn’t the D.A.’s office just scoop these people up and throw them in jail so I don’t have to look at them anymore,” said Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who is a supporter of Mr. Boudin. “That’s not how the law works. It is not a crime to be homeless.”Mr. Boudin framed the recall effort as driven by traditional law-and-order conservatives who want to roll back his efforts, such as not asking judges for cash bail, seeking more lenient sentences and sending fewer juveniles to prison.“This is clearly about criminal justice reform,” he said. “This is a question of whether we’re going to go forward and continue to implement data-driven policies that center crime victims, that invest in communities impacted by crime, and that use empirical evidence to address root causes of crime in our communities — if we’re going to go back to the failed policies of Reagan and Trump.”While fears about crime have fueled the recall effort, the data tells a more nuanced story: Major crimes were down 23 percent overall last year, according to the San Francisco Police Department, even as burglaries and auto thefts rose.Part of the problem, Mr. Boudin said, is that the police are arresting fewer people — an issue that he blames in part on the pandemic because many perpetrators, wearing masks to protect them from the virus, are difficult to identify.On Tuesday evening, Mr. Boudin was walking out of an event at a local university when a man came up to him and said, “When are you going to start making arrests?”“I said to him, I’m not going to start making arrests,” he recounted. “That’s not what the D.A. does. We don’t make arrests.”While some of the big money behind the recall effort comes from conservative donors — the largest donor toward an earlier effort was David Sacks, a conservative venture capitalist and former PayPal executive — the coalition lining up against Mr. Boudin also includes Democrats and others like Ms. Jenkins who identify as progressive but believe that Mr. Boudin’s policies are too radical.This recall effort comes on the heels of the failed attempt to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, which was fueled largely by conservative anger over the policies and business shutdowns that the governor used to contain the virus.George Gascón, Mr. Boudin’s predecessor as district attorney of San Francisco, has faced similar efforts to recall him from office since being elected as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles on a similar promise of reducing imprisonment. A first signature-gathering campaign failed, but a new effort to recall him is underway. More

The first woman in that position, she rose from being a receptionist in the governor’s office to claiming the top job herself.Ruth Ann Minner, who was raised by a sharecropper and dropped out of high school but went on to become the first and only woman to serve as governor of Delaware, died on Thursday at the Delaware Hospice Center in Milford. She was 86. The cause was complications of a fall, said Lisa Peel, one of her granddaughters.One of the last public events she attended was President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory celebration in Wilmington in November 2020. He called out her name from the stage before he began his speech, and he had been in touch with the family in recent days.Ms. Minner, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who was conservative on fiscal matters and progressive on social issues, served as governor from 2001 to 2009. A strong promoter of health care and a clean environment, she made headlines in 2002 for successfully pushing through one of the nation’s first smoking bans in public places, despite fierce opposition from many in Delaware’s powerful business community.She also successfully pushed for several education initiatives, including the first scholarship program in the nation to offer free college access to students who kept up their grades and stayed out of trouble. She implemented full-day kindergarten as well.Her other signal achievement was preserving and protecting the state’s open spaces, particularly its farmland and forests.Known for her no-nonsense approach and lack of pretense, Ms. Minner, who grew up during the Depression in a rural coastal area on the Delaware Bay, brought a down-to-earth style to the state capitol in Dover, where a political columnist called her the “Aunt Bee” of state government, a reference to the family matriarch on “The Andy Griffith Show.”“She was a leader who had a real common touch,” Gov. John Carney, who served as her lieutenant governor, said in a statement. Having grown up poor, he added, “she brought that perspective to her job every day, and she never lost her attachment to those roots.”Breaking the gender barrier when she was elected governor was not important to her, Ms. Minner told The Associated Press in 2000.“I’ve found out since the election, though, that it does matter to a lot of women,” she added. “It matters to a lot of young girls.”Ms. Minner in 2004 with John Carney, her lieutenant governor, after narrowly winning a second term.Pat Crowe II/Associated PressRuth Ann Coverdale was born on Jan. 17, 1935, in Milford, Del., the youngest of five children, and was raised in nearby Slaughter Neck. Her father, Samuel Coverdale, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Mary Ann (Lewis) Coverdale, was a homemaker.She left high school at 16 to work on the family farm. At 17 she married Frank R. Ingram, her junior high school sweetheart. The couple had three sons.Mr. Ingram died of a heart attack at 34 in 1967. In 1969 she married Roger Minner, with whom she operated a car-towing business. He died of cancer in 1991.She is survived by two sons, Frank Ingram Jr. and Wayne Ingram; seven grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her son Gary L. Ingram died in 2016.Having dropped out of high school, Ms. Minner was determined to make something of herself — and to show her sons that dropping out was not OK.She started by earning her high school equivalency diploma while working as a statistician with the Maryland Crop Reporting Service. She briefly attended Delaware Technical and Community College before landing a job as a clerk in the Delaware House of Representatives, where, she told The New York Times in 2001, she was able to study the ins and outs of statehouse politicking.She transferred to an office job with Sherman W. Tribbitt, a state representative. When he was elected governor in 1972, he brought her along as his receptionist. And then she ran for office herself.“I never had any intention of getting deeply involved in politics,” Ms. Minner told The Times. “But it finally got down to proving some things to myself.”She was elected to the State House in 1974. After eight years there and nearly a decade in the State Senate, she ran for lieutenant governor in 1992, with Thomas R. Carper at the top of the ticket. They won. In 2000, after two terms as governor, Mr. Carper was elected to the U.S. Senate and Ms. Minner was elected governor, winning 60 percent of the vote.By then, “she had become comfortable with being the only woman in the room,” Dr. Peel, her granddaughter, said in an interview. And Ms. Minner was one to stick to her guns, she said, to the point of being stubborn. When she made up her mind, there was no arguing with her.She faced a tough re-election fight four years later; after difficult battles with the legislature and scandals involving the state police and prison system, she squeaked into her second term with 51 percent of the vote.As Ms. Minner prepared to leave the governor’s office in 2009, Mr. Biden, who had just been elected vice president, participated in a tribute to her, at which he recalled her bruising fight to enact the ban on smoking in public places.“When we were watching your poll numbers falling precipitously, you did not budge,” he told her. “You were willing to risk your political life to get it done.”He added: “In this business of politics, the most important question is, what are you willing to lose over? If you can’t answer that question, then it’s all about ego and power and not about principle.” More

US Capitol attackProsecutors seek strongest sentences yet for US Capitol insurrectionistsA judge will decide on Wednesday if Scott Fairlamb should serve 44 months, as prosecutors seek a 51-month term for Jacob Chansley Guardian staff and agenciesWed 10 Nov 2021 09.38 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 10.00 ESTUS prosecutors are seeking the stiffest punishments yet for participants in the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump, urging judges to make an example out of a man filmed punching a police officer and another who stormed the Senate chamber wearing a horned headdress.At a court hearing on Wednesday, government lawyers will ask a judge to hand down a 44-month prison sentence for Scott Fairlamb, a former mixed martial arts fighter from New Jersey, who pleaded guilty in August to assaulting a police officer.White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed | Carol AndersonRead moreHe was screaming at officers, in footage caught by their body-worn cameras, before shoving one and then punching him in the face.He is to be sentenced by federal judge Royce Lamberth in Washington DC on Wednesday morning.Separately, prosecutors in a late-night court filing recommended a four-year, three-month sentence for Jacob Chansley, the intruder at the Capitol attack who was seen around the world invading Congress, shirtless, wearing a horned headdress and furs, and heavily tattooed.Chansley, of Phoenix, Arizona, was known to some at the time as the so-called “QAnon Shaman”.He pleaded guilty in September to obstructing an official proceeding when he took part in the assault.Lamberth, who is also handling Chansley’s case, will sentence him on 17 November.In a court filing, Fairlamb’s defense lawyer asked the judge to “take into consideration the approximate 11 months the defendant has already served in custody” and not add additional time.Attorney Harley Breite said his client had accepted responsibility for his actions.Chansley’s attorney, Albert Watkins, said in a Tuesday court filing that Chansley should be released “as soon as possible”, noting that Chansley will have spent more than 10 months in pre-trial detention.“I can say with confidence that Mr Chansley is in dire need of mental health treatment,” Watkins stated.About 700 people have been arrested over the attack on the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s November 2020 victory over Trump in the presidential election.So far, about 120 people have pleaded guilty and two dozen have been sentenced. Most of the guilty pleas have involved non-violent misdemeanor offenses carrying short jail sentences or probationary sentences.TopicsUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

Prince HarryPrince Harry says he warned Twitter boss a day before Capitol riot‘I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged. I haven’t heard from him since,’ Harry says01:18Sarah Marsh@sloumarshWed 10 Nov 2021 06.24 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 08.55 ESTPrince Harry has said he warned Twitter’s boss Jack Dorsey about his platform allowing political unrest a day before the Capitol riot that led to five deaths.The Duke of Sussex made the comments at the RE:WIRED tech forum in the US. He said: “I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged. That email was sent the day before. And then it happened and I haven’t heard from him since.”On the day of the 6 January riots, Donald Trump tweeted allegations of vote fraud before a rally in Washington DC. Members of the Proud Boy movement, a rightwing militia, stormed the Capitol to disrupt the official certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the White House race, as part of an attempt to overturn the election result.Harry was speaking via video chat at a session discussing whether social media was contributing to misinformation and online hatred. Dorsey, who is Twitter’s chief executive, has so far not commented.A study released in October by the social media analytics service Bot Sentinel identified 83 accounts on Twitter that it said were responsible for 70% of hateful content and misinformation aimed at Harry and his wife, Meghan.Harry said that “perhaps the most disturbing part of this [study] was the number of British journalists who were interacting with them and amplifying the lies. But they regurgitate these lies as truth.”He said social media companies were not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation, and the internet was “being defined by hate, division and lies”.He also argued that the word “Megxit”, used by the British press to describe the couple’s decision to quit their royal duties, was misogynistic.Harry said the word was an example of online and media hatred. “Maybe people know this and maybe they don’t, but the term ‘Megxit’ was or is a misogynistic term, and it was created by a troll, amplified by royal correspondents, and it grew and grew and grew into mainstream media. But it began with a troll,” he said. He did not elaborate.Harry and Meghan moved to California last year to lead a more independent life. He has said that part of the reason for their departure was the racist treatment of Meghan, whose mother is black and whose father is white, by the British tabloid media.TopicsPrince HarryTwitterJack DorseyUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

Prince Harry says he warned Twitter’s boss, Jack Dorsey, that the platform was ‘allowing a coup to be staged’, a day before the Capitol riot on 6 January. Speaking on a panel called the Internet Lie Machine, organised by Wired magazine, Harry says he had been in contact with Dorsey via email, but never received a reply after the storming of the Capitol. 
He also says the word ‘Megxit’, used to describe his decision to quit royal duties with his wife, Meghan, was a misogynistic term that had been created by a troll

Prince Harry says ‘Megxit’ is a misogynistic term aimed at his wife Meghan More

But a Trump lawyer has signaled an intent to appeal the ruling, which raises novel issues about an ex-president’s executive privilege powers.WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday night rejected a bid by former President Donald J. Trump to keep secret papers about his actions and conversations leading up to and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters.In a 39-page ruling, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that Congress’s constitutional oversight powers to obtain the information prevailed over Mr. Trump’s residual secrecy powers — especially because the incumbent, President Biden, agreed that lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 riot should see the files.Mr. Trump “does not acknowledge the deference owed to the incumbent president’s judgment. His position that he may override the express will of the executive branch appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity,’” Judge Chutkan wrote. “But presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”Mr. Trump retained the right to assert that his records were privileged, she added, but Mr. Biden was not obliged to honor that assertion. The incumbent president, she said, is better situated to protect executive branch interests, and Mr. Trump “no longer remains subject to political checks against potential abuse of that power.”The ruling does not necessarily mean that the National Archives will turn over the materials to the House committee investigating Jan. 6 any time soon. The case raises novel issues about the scope and limits of a former president’s executive privilege authority, and it is likely that it will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court.In a posting on Twitter, Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the case was destined to be appealed. He said Mr. Trump was committed to defending the right of past presidents — as well as present and future ones — to assert executive privilege and “will be seeing this process through.”The Jan. 6 committee has demanded that the National Archives and Records Administration turn over detailed records about Mr. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then sacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.Mr. Trump — who pursued a strategy of stonewalling all congressional oversight subpoenas while in office, running out the clock on such efforts before the 2020 election — has instructed his former subordinates to defy subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee and filed a lawsuit seeking to block the National Archives from turning over files from his White House.Last week, Judge Chutkan, a 2014 Obama appointee, had signaled skepticism about Mr. Trump’s legal arguments. Mr. Trump’s lawyer asserted that his residual executive privilege powers meant the courts should block Congress from subpoenaing the files, notwithstanding Mr. Biden’s decision not to assert executive privilege over them in light of the circumstances.Mr. Trump’s lawyer had argued that the public interest would be served by letting Mr. Trump keep the documents secret to preserve executive branch prerogatives. But Judge Chutkan wrote that his arguments did not “hold water” in light of Mr. Biden’s support for making them public and Congress’s need to investigate the attack without undue delays.Congress and the Biden administration, she noted, “contend that discovering and coming to terms with the causes underlying the Jan. 6 attack is a matter of unsurpassed public importance because such information relates to our core democratic institutions and the public’s confidence in them. The court agrees.”Earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall, demonstrated an intent to keep going by asking Judge Chutkan to impose an emergency injunction on the National Archives barring it from turning over the records while he appealed the matter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.Understand the Supreme Court’s Momentous TermCard 1 of 5The Texas abortion law. More