Elections

Virginia Republicans in a tight governor’s race have been staging “Parents Matter” rallies and tapping into conservative anger over mandates and critical race theory.WINCHESTER, Va. — As a lifelong Republican in her home state of Virginia, Tammy Yoder faithfully casts her ballot for those who want to lower taxes, oppose abortion and back other conservative causes.But the issue that transformed Ms. Yoder, a stay-at-home mother, from a reliable voter to the kind of person who brings three young children to an evening campaign rally wasn’t her Christian values or her pocketbook.It was something even more personal, she said: What her children learn in school. “The past year has revealed a ton to me,” said Ms. Yoder, 41, as she waited in this Northern Virginia exurb for a speech by Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor. “The more I’ve listened and paid attention, the more that I see what’s happening in schools and on college campuses. And the stuff I see, I don’t want corrupting my children.”From fights over evolution to desegregation to prayer, education battles have been a staple of the country’s divisive cultural issues for decades. But not quite like this. After months of closed classrooms and lost learning time, Republicans in Virginia are making the schools the focus of their final push to capture the governor’s office, hoping to rally conservatives around both their frustrations over mask mandates and mandatory vaccinations and their fears of what their children are being taught.Vocal groups of parents, some led by Republican activists, are organizing against school curriculums, opposing public-health measures and calling for recalls of school board members. And Mr. Youngkin, a former private equity executive, has capitalized, seizing on conservatives’ concerns about instruction on race and the rights of transgender children to argue that Democrats want to come between parents and their children’s education.Mr. Youngkin’s attacks have forced Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor trying to win back his old job, onto the defensive, and have thrust the ordinarily local issues surrounding schools into the middle of a rancorous nationwide shouting match.The Virginia race offers an early electoral test of that conservative energy. A victory by Mr. Youngkin would mark the first statewide win for Republicans in a dozen years and likely trigger a political panic within the Democratic Party about its prospects in next year’s midterm elections. Some Republican officials and strategists liken the surge of activism to the Tea Party, the anti-government movement that helped them win control of the House in 2010 and unleashed a revival of outrage politics that would define their party for the next decade.At a campaign rally in Winchester, Mr. Youngkin made little mention of Mr. Trump, vaccines or the coronavirus.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There’s just so much focus on the schools, and it’s visceral,” said John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia from Loudoun County, where acrimonious school board meetings have led to arrests, death threats and constant airtime on conservative media. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m against the debt ceiling.’ This is like, ‘You’re destroying our children’s education.’ And, look, angry people vote.”Polling in recent weeks has shown a tight race, with Democrats less enthusiastic than Republicans about voting. Mr. McAuliffe, who was barred from seeking re-election in 2017 by Virginia law, is faring worse in the fast-growing, voter-rich Northern Virginia suburbs than Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, did when he won four years ago, according to some surveys.Mr. Youngkin’s focus on schools may not resonate as strongly with the broader electorate.Measures such as mask and vaccine mandates are cutting differently in the governor’s race in more liberal New Jersey and are overwhelmingly popular among Virginia’s independents and Democrats. Critical race theory — an advanced academic concept generally not introduced until college — is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia and many voters say they do not know enough about it to have an opinion. And turning schools into a cultural war zone by railing against equity initiatives, books with sexual content and public health measures avoids tackling issues like budget cuts and the other thornier problems facing American education.But in an off-year election, when both sides anticipate a sharp falloff in voting, victory may hinge on which candidate can best motivate their base. Mr. Youngkin and his strategists believe that in the fights roiling schools they have discovered the rare issue that can galvanize their voters, even in places that are shifting the state to the left.Frustration with education is an issue that unites Republicans, energizing moderates eager to ensure their children remain in school as well as conservatives who see a liberal plot to indoctrinate their children with the belief that white people are inherently racist.Mr. Youngkin and his strategists believe that in the fights roiling schools they have discovered an issue that can galvanize their voters.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“The former governor is saying, ‘Hey I’ll decide how to teach your kids, not you’ — that’s really the issue driving this,” said John Fredericks, who led Donald Trump’s Virginia campaign last year. “Glenn Youngkin is the candidate that’s been able to straddle both sides of the party. And so far he’s given us just enough where we can enthusiastically vote for the guy.”Republicans have centered much of their closing argument around a statement by Mr. McAuliffe in last month’s debate. The comment came after Mr. Youngkin attacked Mr. McAuliffe over his 2017 veto of a bill permitting parents to opt out of allowing their children to study material deemed sexually explicit. The dispute was prompted by a mother who objected to her son, a high school senior, reading literary classics including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”Mr. McAuliffe shot back that he did not believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In the weeks since, he’s stood by those remarks, saying that the state Board of Education and local school boards should determine what is taught in the classroom.But Mr. Youngkin and Republicans, stripping the quotation from its context, have turned the footage into the core of their argument that Mr. McAuliffe would side with government over parents. Video of the remark was featured in a flurry of digital ads and a statewide television commercial accusing Mr. McAuliffe of going “on the attack against parents.” Mr. Youngkin’s team began scheduling “Parents Matter” rallies in exurban counties, as they actively courted parent activist groups.And Mr. Youngkin has also voiced support for Byron Tanner Cross, a physical education teacher in Loudoun County. Mr. Cross was suspended after announcing at a school board meeting that he would not address transgender students by their preferred pronouns because of his Christian faith.At a campaign rally last week in Winchester, a small town in the Shenandoah Valley in one of the fast-growing exurb counties around Washington, Mr. Youngkin made little mention of Mr. Trump, vaccines or the coronavirus. Instead, he repeatedly invoked issues around schools as top priorities. He drew some of the loudest applause from the overwhelmingly white audience when he promised to ban critical race theory on his first day in office and vowed that schools would never be closed again.A victory by Mr. Youngkin would mark the first statewide win for Republicans in a dozen years.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“This is what big government means for Terry McAuliffe. He not only wants to stand between you and your children. He wants to make government a tool to silence us,” Mr. Youngkin told the crowd of nearly 200 people at a farm stand. “This is no longer a campaign. This is a movement. It’s a movement led by parents.”Mr. McAuliffe has dismissed the outrage surrounding critical race theory as “racist” and “a dog whistle.” He supports mask and vaccine mandates for students, teachers and school staff. (Mr. Youngkin says he encourages Virginians to get vaccinated against the coronavirus but does not support mandates.)But there are signs that Democrats sense danger. Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign has returned to highlighting his education proposals to undercut any argument that Mr. Youngkin could be stronger on the issue, promising to invest $2 billion in education, raise teacher pay, expand pre-K programs and invest in broadband access for students. On Friday, Mr. McAuliffe released an ad saying that Mr. Youngkin would cut billions of dollars in education funding and bring “Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’s education policies to Virginia.”The parent organizations in Virginia say they are nonpartisan and more focused on school board elections than national politics. But many are led by Republican activists, raise funds from Republican Party donors and are helped by conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which has held briefings to discuss model legislation to block critical race theory. Last month, the Republican National Committee ran ads attacking “fascist mask mandates” and highlighting video clips of angry parents yelling at school board members.Erin Holl, a Republican voter from Frederick County in the northern corner of the state, used to think of herself as conservative but not necessarily political. That was before the coronavirus. Months of online learning with her young daughters and the closure of her dog sitting business changed how much attention she paid the governor’s race.“I gave birth to her,” said Ms. Holl, gesturing to her daughter. “I have a right to say how she is raised. I have a right to say how she is vaccinated. This has changed how I felt about politics.” More

After the state’s political landscape shifted in 2019, the Democratic governor and the Republican attorney general disagreed on defending the law.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court heard arguments in an abortion case on Tuesday, but the issue for the justices was a procedural one: Could Kentucky’s attorney general, a Republican, defend a state abortion law when the governor, a Democrat, refused to pursue further appeals after a federal appeals court struck down the law?As the argument progressed through a thicket of technical issues, a majority of the justices seemed inclined to say yes.“Kentucky maybe ought to be there in some form, and the attorney general is the one that wants to intervene,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.More important abortion cases are on the horizon. In December, the court will hear arguments on whether to overrule Roe v. Wade in a case concerning a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks. And the justices have been asked to take another look at a Texas law that prohibits most abortions after six weeks, which the court allowed to go into effect last month by a 5-to-4 vote.Tuesday’s case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, No. 20-601, concerned a Kentucky law that challengers said effectively banned the most common method of abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy, dilation and evacuation. The justices barely discussed the law during Tuesday’s argument.Rather, they focused on the tangled history of the case and the complicated jurisdictional and procedural questions that arose from it.The case started in 2018, when the state’s only abortion clinic and two doctors sued various state officials to challenge the law. The state’s attorney general at the time, Andy Beshear, a Democrat, said his office was not responsible for enforcing the law and entered into a stipulation dismissing the case against him, agreeing to abide by the final judgment and reserving the right to appeal.The state’s health secretary, who had been appointed by a Republican governor, defended the law in court. A federal trial court struck the law down, saying it was at odds with Supreme Court precedent. The health secretary appealed, but the attorney general did not.While the case was moving forward, Kentucky’s political landscape shifted. Mr. Beshear, who had been attorney general, was elected governor. Daniel Cameron, a Republican, was elected attorney general.Mr. Beshear appointed a new health secretary, Eric Friedlander, who continued to defend the law on appeal. But after a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, affirmed the trial judge’s ruling, Mr. Friedlander declined to seek review from the full appeals court or the Supreme Court.Mr. Cameron, the new attorney general, sought to intervene in the appeals court, saying he was entitled to defend the law. The appeals court denied his request, ruling that it had come too late.On Tuesday, the justices probed the significance of the stipulation and the standards for when appeals courts should allow parties to intervene in the late stages of a case.Justice Clarence Thomas, who has taken to asking the first questions during arguments, said “there isn’t much law” on the appropriate standards.Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Sixth Circuit was entitled to take account of the fact that the attorney general had failed to file an appeal after losing in the trial court, notwithstanding the later election of a new attorney general.“Why would we call it an abuse of discretion for a court of appeals, after it’s rendered its judgment, to say we don’t really care what has happened in the political arena?” she asked.Matthew F. Kuhn, a lawyer for Mr. Cameron, said his client was acting in a different capacity when he sought to intervene. He was now, Mr. Kuhn said, representing the interests of the state.About 45 minutes into the argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer described what he said was really going on the case. “First the Republicans are in, then the Democrats are in,” he said, “and they have different views on an abortion statute.”What to Know About the Supreme Court TermCard 1 of 5A blockbuster term begins. More

A Marist College poll found that voters favored Gov. Kathy Hochul over potential primary rivals, including the state attorney general, Letitia James.When Kathy Hochul unexpectedly became governor of New York two months ago, she was immediately faced with two challenges: To learn to lead a state traversing a pandemic and simultaneously build a statewide campaign operation to run for a full term next year.Ms. Hochul immediately began courting donors and hiring campaign staff, as she faced the prospects of potentially running against Letitia James, the state attorney general, whose office led the sexual harassment investigation that ultimately led to the demise of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and to Ms. Hochul’s ascension.Ms. Hochul’s efforts appear to be paying off: A Marist College poll released on Tuesday found that Ms. Hochul would beat Ms. James and Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, if next year’s Democratic primary for governor were held today.The poll, the first significant survey to gauge New Yorkers on the 2022 Democratic race for governor, also found that Ms. Hochul would win the primary if Mr. Cuomo, the former three-term governor who resigned in disgrace in August, decided to run.In a hypothetical three-way primary, 44 percent of New York Democrats said they would vote for Ms. Hochul, 28 percent for Ms. James and 15 percent for Mr. Williams, while 13 percent said they were unsure.In a four-way race that included Mr. Cuomo, 36 percent of Democratic voters said they favored Ms. Hochul, while 24 percent said they would vote for Ms. James, 19 percent for Mr. Cuomo and 9 percent for Mr. Williams; 12 percent said they were unsure.The poll did not include other potential Democratic candidates who are thought to be considering a run for governor, including Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island.Ms. Hochul, who was elevated from lieutenant governor after Mr. Cuomo stepped down following allegations of sexual harassment, is so far the only Democrat to formally declare her candidacy. More

The New Jersey governor election is one of the first statewide contests to measure how voters feel about strict coronavirus mandates.Six weeks after announcing that grade-school students in New Jersey would again need to wear masks in class, Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, issued a new executive order, his 264th: Children 2 and older in day care centers would also have to wear face coverings.The howls of opposition were quick and fierce, and it became an immediate talking point for Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican challenging Mr. Murphy’s bid for re-election.“This is unconstitutional, un-American and has no scientific backing,” a fund-raising email from Mr. Ciattarelli and his running mate, Diane Allen, said of the practice, which is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.New Jersey’s contest, which along with Virginia’s is one of just two governor’s races in the country before next year’s midterm elections, is seen by some as an early barometer of voter sentiment.“The takeaway will be: Are we competitive or not?” said Leonard Lance, a New Jersey Republican and former congressman who lost his seat in the 2018 midterms as Democrats angered by President Donald J. Trump and his policies flipped control of the House.Mr. Murphy has tried to lash Mr. Ciattarelli to Mr. Trump, who lost to President Biden in New Jersey by 16 points — offering a likely preview of the kinds of attacks to come during the midterms next year.But New Jersey’s election on Nov. 2 also provides one of the first statewide tests of how voters feel about strict coronavirus-related mandates as the health crisis stretches into its 20th month and pandemic fatigue mounts.Voters surveyed in polls continued to give Mr. Murphy some of his highest marks for the way he has responded to the pandemic, and he has said he believed it was one of the most defining issues separating him and Mr. Ciattarelli. Last week, Mr. Murphy refused to rule out a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for students, a step taken by California, where, as early as next fall, inoculation against the virus will be required to attend school.Saily Avelenda, executive director of New Jersey’s Democratic State Committee, said she believed that mask wearing and vaccine mandates would be the most important factors driving voters to the polls.“It’s the issue that’s most affecting everybody, and it’s affecting everybody in real time,” Ms. Avelenda said. “People are genuinely terrified of turning New Jersey backward to a Florida or a Texas in Covid response.”Vice President Kamala Harris, center, toured a Covid-19 vaccination site at Essex County College in Newark with Mr. Murphy, right, on Friday.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStill, along the Jersey Shore in Ocean County, where Mr. Trump won by nearly 30 points, it remains easy to find anti-mask yard signs that read “Free the Smiles.” And across the state some local board of education meetings have grown tense with parents opposed to mask wearing in schools clashing with officials who are required to enforce the state mandate.In northern New Jersey, a Republican state senator, Holly Schepisi, said her office was fielding calls from parents “on both sides of the aisle” expressing concern about the new mask requirement for 2-year-olds, who have gone maskless in day care throughout the pandemic.The executive order, which was issued last month, is impractical, she said.“It’s hard enough to keep their shoe or their diaper on,” said Ms. Schepisi, who is a member of the Senate’s health committee and represents part of Bergen and Passaic Counties. “In addition to the question of ‘Why now?’ It was, ‘Where is this coming from?’”Registered Democrats in New Jersey outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million voters, giving Mr. Murphy a built-in advantage that several polls have shown Mr. Ciattarelli is struggling to overcome.A report released Friday by the Covid States Project, a research and tracking effort by several universities, found that governors of states with prohibitions on vaccine mandates, including Arkansas, Arizona and Idaho, got the lowest approval ratings.Nationwide, support for governors’ pandemic policies has dipped since June, but Mr. Murphy’s initiatives remained popular with 60 percent of respondents, said David Lazer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University and one of the project researchers.“In June, it was ‘Mission accomplished,’ and in September, it was, ‘We’re back to this nightmare,’ ” Professor Lazer said. “The good news for incumbents right now is the virus seems to be retreating.”In August, Mr. Ciattarelli appeared at a Board of Education meeting in Toms River to oppose the in-school mask mandate, claiming that masks inhibit learning and that parents — not the governor — should be able to choose.Ms. Schepisi, who was hospitalized with Covid-19 before vaccines were readily available, encourages eligible residents to be inoculated against the virus and supports indoor masking of students 5 and older. But she said the lack of legislative involvement in the rule-making process had struck a nerve. Polls, she said, were missing “the undercurrent of people who really think that government is now overreaching.”Lawrence E. Bathgate II, a New Jersey Republican fund-raiser who has served as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, agreed.“It’s taking away the choices that people have,” Mr. Bathgate said. “Is that what you want for another four years?”At the start of summer, Mr. Murphy, 64, became one of the last governors in the country to eliminate the state’s indoor mask mandate. Two months later, as cases tied to the highly contagious Delta variant spiked, he “strongly recommended” that people again wear masks indoors.He has required employees of schools, day care centers and health care facilities to be fully vaccinated or submit to regular testing — an opt-out important to the state’s powerful teachers union, one of Mr. Murphy’s strongest allies..css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}.css-1in8jot{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1in8jot{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1in8jot:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1in8jot{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}What to Know About Covid-19 Booster ShotsThe F.D.A. authorized booster shots for a select group of people who received their second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at least six months ago. That group includes: Pfizer recipients who are 65 or older or who live in long-term care facilities; adults who are at high risk of severe Covid-19 because of an underlying medical condition; health care workers and others whose jobs put them at risk. People with weakened immune systems are eligible for a third dose of either Pfizer or Moderna four weeks after the second shot.Regulators have not authorized booster shots for recipients of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines yet, but an F.D.A. panel is scheduled to meet to weigh booster shots for adult recipients of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.The C.D.C. has said the conditions that qualify a person for a booster shot include: hypertension and heart disease; diabetes or obesity; cancer or blood disorders; weakened immune system; chronic lung, kidney or liver disease; dementia and certain disabilities. Pregnant women and current and former smokers are also eligible.The F.D.A. authorized boosters for workers whose jobs put them at high risk of exposure to potentially infectious people. The C.D.C. says that group includes: emergency medical workers; education workers; food and agriculture workers; manufacturing workers; corrections workers; U.S. Postal Service workers; public transit workers; grocery store workers.It is not recommended. For now, Pfizer vaccine recipients are advised to get a Pfizer booster shot, and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients should wait until booster doses from those manufacturers are approved.Yes. The C.D.C. says the Covid vaccine may be administered without regard to the timing of other vaccines, and many pharmacy sites are allowing people to schedule a flu shot at the same time as a booster dose.Other locales have far stricter rules. In New York City, teachers and health care workers cannot opt out of the vaccine, and patrons of gyms and restaurants must offer proof of inoculation to enter.After adding a tax on income over $1 million and borrowing $3.67 billion in anticipation of pandemic-related budget shortfalls that proved less dire than predicted, Mr. Murphy has pledged not to raise taxes during a second term. He has also said that he would continue to focus on addressing the climate crisis.Since beating two candidates loyal to Mr. Trump to win the Republican primary, Mr. Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman who had been known for moderate views, has hammered away at issues that galvanize the former president’s conservative base.Striking a tough-on-crime theme, he has also emphasized the state’s and the nation’s uptick in shootings and criticized the legalization of marijuana.Mr. Ciattarelli has sounded themes popular with conservative Republicans.Seth Wenig/Associated PressMr. Ciattarelli, 59, has also reminded voters of the high death rate from the virus in New Jersey’s long-term care facilities and a sexual assault scandal involving a woman who volunteered for Mr. Murphy’s first campaign and reported being raped by a colleague.He once called Mr. Trump a charlatan and has said that Mr. Biden won the election legitimately. But Mr. Ciattarelli has been repeatedly forced to defend his decision to appear at a “Stop the Steal” rally after the November election, including during the first debate last month.The second and final debate is scheduled for Tuesday night.“They’re trying to appeal to Trump’s base,” said former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, a Republican who on Monday urged her party to support Democrats in the midterm elections as a bulwark against “pro-Trump extremists.”Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said “underlying partisan tribalism” had chipped away at candidates’ ability to woo voters from the opposing party.Voter turnout is seen as a vital part of Mr. Ciattarelli’s calculus. A Monmouth poll conducted in September found that Mr. Ciattarelli trailed Mr. Murphy by 13 percentage points.Mr. Ciattarelli, Mr. Murray said, “needs his base to be energized and the other side to be complacent or disenchanted.”“You’re not going to get them to vote for you,” he said of Mr. Murphy’s supporters. “What you’re trying to do is get them to stay home.”Both camps are hoping to drive up the early vote.For the first time, New Jersey is offering nine days of early in-person machine voting at polling sites, starting on Oct. 23, joining a majority of states that already offer the option. More

Though Mr. Parnas played a key role in the events that led to the former president’s impeachment, the charges he faces involve accusations of campaign finance violations.For Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman living in Florida, 2018 was a busy year.Sometime around March, he began showing up at Republican fund-raisers. Then, in late April, he dined on cheeseburgers and wedge salads with President Donald J. Trump.By May, a fledgling energy company that Mr. Parnas started with a partner, Igor Fruman, was listed as giving $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. Soon, Mr. Parnas was assisting President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as he oversaw a shadow diplomacy campaign to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a leading Democratic presidential candidate.Within a year, Mr. Parnas was under investigation, and in late 2019 he was arrested with Mr. Fruman at Dulles International Airport, where both held one-way tickets on a Lufthansa Airlines flight to Frankfurt.Now, Mr. Parnas is facing a trial on campaign finance charges that include contributions to the super PAC and a state candidate in Nevada, where he wanted to operate a cannabis business. And though the case has little to do with his dealings with the former president — who was not accused of wrongdoing in the matter — Mr. Trump’s shadow hangs over Mr. Parnas’s trial, which begins Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan.The trial is expected to fill in gaps in the story of Mr. Parnas’s improbable ascent and downfall, from humble beginnings in Brooklyn to playing a key role in a sequence of events connected to the impeachment of Mr. Trump over accusations that he had asked Ukraine to investigate unfounded allegations about Mr. Biden and a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had meddled in the 2016 election.“Parnas is an interesting figure because in many respects he was in the underbelly of the Ukraine story,” said Daniel S. Goldman, the House Intelligence Committee lawyer who led the Ukraine inquiry. “We understood that Parnas in particular was Giuliani’s liaison to a lot of the significant officials in Ukraine.”According to an indictment unsealed after the airport arrests, Mr. Parnas, along with Mr. Fruman and two other co-defendants, conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence “by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office.”Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty last month to soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national. Another co-defendant, David Correia, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.Igor Fruman, center, pleaded guilty in September to soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national.Go Nakamura/ReutersWhen jury selection begins on Tuesday, Mr. Parnas’s only remaining co-defendant will be a man named Andrey Kukushkin. He is described in court papers as a partner in the planned cannabis business and a participant in a conspiracy to make political donations using money from a rich Russian businessman, Andrey Muraviev.A prosecutor, Hagan Cordell Scotten, suggested during a recent court hearing that Mr. Parnas could be viewed as “something of a genius serial fraudster.”One man who lost money by investing in a company led by Mr. Parnas remembered him wearing diamonds and driving a Rolls-Royce. But behind the trappings of affluence was a history of debts and aborted businesses.As he entered the world of political donors, Mr. Parnas seemed to see it in purely transactional terms, using money to gain access to Republican influencers, then apparently hoping to use those connections to further various moneymaking efforts.While working with Mr. Giuliani in late 2018 and 2019, Mr. Parnas traveled to Kyiv to press officials there to investigate Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, who had served as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company.Records released by Mr. Parnas show that he maintained regular communication with Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, who was urging the removal of the United States ambassador in Kyiv and promising to help obtain information about both Bidens.Mr. Parnas also exchanged text messages with a Trump ally, Robert F. Hyde, that appeared to include references to people conducting surveillance on the ambassador, who Mr. Trump eventually recalled from her post. Mr. Giuliani later said in an interview with The New Yorker that he wanted that ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, “out of the way” because he feared she would complicate his attempts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.After Mr. Parnas’s arrest, Mr. Trump denied knowing him. Before long, Mr. Parnas reversed his loyalties, saying he regretted trusting Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump and providing documents, including some related to Ms. Yovanovitch, to the House Intelligence Committee as part of its impeachment inquiry.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Giuliani’s pre-election activities in Ukraine. He has denied wrongdoing.The schemes that prosecutors are planning to outline during the upcoming trial seem more brash than sophisticated.The $325,000 donation to the super PAC, America First Action, was made using money that an indictment said Mr. Fruman and others obtained through a private loan, prosecutors have said. Court papers said that the donation was falsely listed in the name of Global Energy Producers, the company Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were starting, because they were eager to “make it appear that GEP was a successful business.”Mr. Parnas is also accused of making a maximum contribution of $2,700 to the re-election campaign of Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas and a critic of Ms. Yovanovitch, using a credit card registered to an account belonging to Mr. Fruman and another person.And, according to an indictment, Mr. Parnas was part of a conspiracy to make political contributions by a foreign national. As part of that, the indictment said, a businessman — identified by prosecutors in a separate document as Mr. Muraviev — sent $1 million to a bank account controlled by Mr. Fruman “for purposes of making political donations and contributions.”Among candidates who prosecutors said Mr. Parnas promised to support was Adam Laxalt, who in 2018 was running for governor of Nevada and after the presidential election spoke at a news conference announcing a lawsuit by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. (That suit was dismissed by a state court judge for lack of evidence.)Prosecutors said in a recent court filing that Mr. Laxalt became suspicious about the origins of a $10,000 donation to his campaign identified as being from Mr. Fruman, and sent a check for that amount to the U.S. Treasury “in order to avoid continued possession of the illegal donation without returning it to a potential wrongdoer.”In court filings and during a recent hearing, prosecutors and defense lawyers offered some indications of what arguments they might advance and what evidence they could introduce during the trial.Prosecutors wrote that they intended to offer out-of-court statements made by both defendants, as well as Mr. Correia, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Muraviev. Most of those, they added, “were made in electronic communications, such as emails, text messages, and chats using WhatsApp.”Likely witnesses, they wrote, included Deanna Van Rensburg, who served as Mr. Parnas’s personal assistant from about April 2018 until his arrest, and Mr. Laxalt, now vying for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat.Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, suggested during the hearing, on Oct. 5, that he might portray his client as someone with a “relative lack of education” in the area of election law.And a lawyer for Mr. Kukushkin signaled that he planned to portray his client as a victim of Mr. Parnas rather than as his co-conspirator.The lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, described Mr. Parnas in a recent court filing as the perpetrator of a “con” who, along with Mr. Fruman and Mr. Correia, used a “dog and pony show” to dupe Mr. Kukushkin and many others.“They portrayed themselves as well-connected, powerful political power brokers, who could speak directly to the president of the United States, his children, his inner circle,” Mr. Lefcourt wrote. “Of course, it was all a ruse, one big fraud or Ponzi scheme.” More

Normally the political party that loses an election goes through a period of soul-searching and vigorous internal debate, while the winning party embraces a smug certainty about its own inevitable multigenerational dominance. In 2021, though, the roles are reversed.The widespread belief that Donald Trump was, in some sense, the real winner of an election that he lost has succeeded in pre-empting a Republican debate about why the Democrats captured the White House last year. Meanwhile, the Democrats, despite their control of the Congress and the presidency, are increasingly the ones arguing as though they’re already in the wilderness.The Democrats’ angst strikes me as a healthy development for liberalism. One problem with the emergency thinking that Trump inspires in his opponents — and one reason to resist it — is that it occludes real understanding of the political conditions that put him in power, and that might do so again. This is what you saw happen to the Democrats after 2016: The sense of being lightning-struck sent the center-left wandering into a maze of conspiracies, a haunted wood where villains like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg loomed larger than the swing voters they had lost and savior figures like Robert Mueller were supposed to unmake Trump’s power for them.Only the party’s left, its Bernie Sanders wing, fully developed a more normal theory of the 2016 defeat, trying to understand Obama-Trump voters in the context of globalization and deindustrialization as well as racism, fascism and Putinist dirty tricks. But this created a fundamental imbalance in the party’s conversation: With the Sanders faction trying to pull the party toward social democracy and the establishment acting as if its major challenges were Russian bots and nefarious Facebook memes, there was hardly anyone left to point out the ways that Democrats might be in danger of moving too far left — and the writers who did so were generally dismissed as dinosaurs.So it was up to Democratic voters to exert a rightward tug on their party — first by saving the party from the likely disaster of nominating the intelligentsia’s candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and ultimately by putting up a nominee, Joe Biden, whose long career as a moderate gave him some distance from the “Great Awokening” that swept liberal institutions in 2020.Now, though, with the increasing awareness that Bidenism is probably not a long-term strategy, we’re finally getting the fuller argument that should have broken out after 2016 — over what the Democrats can do, and whether they can do anything, to win over the working-class and rural voters alienated by the party’s increasingly rigorous progressive litmus tests.A key player in this argument is the pollster and analyst David Shor, whom my colleague Ezra Klein interviewed for a long essay last week, and who has emerged — after a temporary 2020 cancellation — as the leading spokesman for the pragmatic liberal critique of progressive zeal.This critique starts with a diagnosis: Democrats misread the meaning of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, imagining that it proved that their multiracial coalition could win without downscale and rural white voters, when in fact Obama had beaten Mitt Romney precisely because of his relatively resilient support from those demographics, especially across the industrial Midwest. And this misreading was particularly disastrous because these voters have outsize influence in Senate races and the Electoral College, so losing them — and then beginning to lose culturally conservative minority voters as well — has left the Democrats with a structural disadvantage that will cost them dearly across the next decade absent some kind of clear strategic adjustment.From this diagnosis comes the prescription, so-called popularism, glossed by Klein as follows: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”You will note that this banal-seeming wisdom is not an ideological litmus test: Where left-wing ideas are popular, Shor Thought would have Democrats talk about them more. But where they are unpopular, especially with the kind of voters who hold the key to contested Senate races, Democrats need a way to defuse them or hold them at a distance.Thus a “popularist” candidate might be a thoroughgoing centrist in some cases, and in others a candidate running the way Bernie Sanders did in 2016, stressing the most popular ideas in the social-democratic tool kit. But in both cases such candidates would do everything in their power not to be associated with ideas like, say, police abolition or the suspension of immigration enforcement. Instead they would imitate the way Obama himself, in his first term, tried to finesse issues like immigration and same-sex marriage, sometimes using objectively conservative rhetoric and never getting way out ahead of public opinion.Which is easier said than done. For one thing, the Democratic Party’s activists have a different scale of power in the world of 2021 than the world of 2011, and the hypothetical “popularist” politician can’t make their influence and expectations just go away. For another, as my colleague Nate Cohn points out, Obama in 2011 was trying to keep white working-class voters in the Democratic fold, while the popularist politician in 2022 or 2024 would be trying to win them back from the G.O.P. — a much harder thing to achieve just by soft-pedaling vexatious issues.At the very least a Democratic strategy along these lines would probably need to go further along two dimensions. First, it would need to overtly attack the new progressivism — not on every front but on certain points where the language and ideas of the progressive clerisy are particularly alienated from ordinary life.For instance, popularist Democrats would not merely avoid a term like “Latinx,” which is ubiquitous in official progressive discourse and alien to most U.S. Hispanics; they would need to attack and even mock its use. (Obviously this is somewhat easier for the ideal popularist candidate: an unwoke minority politician in the style of Eric Adams.)Likewise, a popularist candidate — ideally a female candidate — on the stump in a swing state might say something like: I want this to be a party for normal people, and normal people say mother, not “birthing person.”Instead of reducing the salience of progressive jargon, the goal would be to raise its salience in order to be seen to reject it — much as Donald Trump in 2016 brazenly rejected unpopular G.O.P. positions on entitlements that other Republican rivals were trying to merely soft-pedal.But then along with this rhetorical fire directed leftward, popularists would also need go further in addressing the actual policy concerns surrounding the issues they’re trying to defuse. Immigration is a major political problem for Democrats right now, for instance, not just because their activists have taken extreme positions on the issue, but because the border is a major policy problem: The effects of globalized travel and communication make it ever-easier for sudden migrant surges to overwhelm the system, and liberalism’s shift away from tough enforcement — or at least its professed desire to make that shift — creates extra incentives for those surges to happen under Democratic presidents.So in the long run — especially given climate change’s likely effect on mass migration — there is no way for Democrats to have a stable policy that’s pro-immigration under the law without first having a strategy to make the American border much more secure than it’s been under the Biden administration to date. How to do that humanely is a policy challenge, but if you really want to court voters for whom the issue matters, you have to take the challenge seriously — because the problem makes itself salient, and it isn’t going away.It’s worth nothing that even this combination — attack progressive excess, show Obama-Trump voters that you take their issues seriously — is still a somewhat defensive one. As Cohn notes, when Trump reoriented the Republican Party to win more working-class votes, he made a sweeping and dramatic — and yes, demagogic — case that he would be better than Hillary Clinton for their interests and their values. Democrats have specific ideas that poll well with these voters, but it’s not clear that even a sweeping “heartland revival” message could actually reverse the post-Trump shift.But even a strictly defensive strategy, one that just prevents more Hispanic voters from shifting to the Republicans and holds on to some of Biden’s modest Rust Belt gains, would buy crucial time for Democrats — time for a generational turnover that still favors them, and time to seize the opportunities that are always offered, in ways no data scientist can foretell, by unexpected events.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

The office was already under fire from Trump supporters, who passed sweeping legislation that could lead to a takeover by the Republican-controlled State Legislature.The elections office in Georgia’s heavily Democratic Fulton County said on Monday that two workers had been fired for shredding voter registration forms, most likely adding fuel to a Republican-led investigation of the office that critics call politically motivated.The workers, at the Fulton County Board of Elections, were dismissed on Friday after other employees saw them destroying registration forms awaiting processing before local elections in November, the county elections director, Richard Barron, said.Both the county district attorney and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s chief elections official, were asked to conduct inquiries into the matter, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission, Robb Pitts, said in a statement.But it was Mr. Raffensperger who first revealed the allegations of shredded registration forms, issuing a blistering news release demanding that the Justice Department investigate “incompetence and malfeasance” in the agency. “After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” he said.His declaration only underscored the political implications of the document-shredding charges, which would almost certainly have been less freighted in any other election office. Fulton County officials did not say how many forms were shredded, but Mr. Raffensperger put the total at about 300 in a county with 800,000 voters on the rolls.While the charges of wrongdoing surfaced on Friday, it was unclear when the actual destruction of registration forms might have occurred.Mr. Raffensperger, who won national attention for rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s request to “find” enough ballots to overturn President Biden’s narrow win in the state, faces a difficult primary race next spring against a rival endorsed by Mr. Trump. The Fulton County elections office, meanwhile, has become the object of fury by Trump supporters who baselessly claim that Mr. Biden’s win in the state was illegitimate.Some supporters are suing to conduct yet another review of the presidential vote in Fulton County, which includes a broad swath of metropolitan Atlanta and where 73 percent of voters favored Mr. Biden. The statewide Georgia vote has been counted three times with zero evidence of fraud.The Republican-dominated State Legislature approved legislation this spring that gives it effective control of the State Election Board, and empowers the board to investigate legislators’ complaints about local election bodies. Fulton County was quickly selected for an inquiry that eventually could replace the elections board with a temporary superintendent who would have sweeping powers to oversee the vote.Voting rights advocates and Democrats statewide have cast the inquiry as a first step toward a pro-Trump takeover of election machinery in the county most crucial to Democratic hopes in future elections.“I don’t think there’s another state in the union that has a State Election Board with the power to turn a nonpartisan elections office into a partisan arm of the secretary of state’s office,” Mr. Barron, the Fulton County elections director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The county’s performance in elections has been mixed. Primary elections last year were plagued by long lines, and county elections have long been the subject of complaints. A report by a state-appointed monitor concluded that elections there were “sloppy” but it found no evidence of “dishonesty, fraud or intentional malfeasance.”The elections board has cited recent improvements, such as revised training manuals and newly hired election managers, as evidence that it is addressing complaints. But the disclosure on Monday gives critics new ammunition at a time when the coming November election, for Atlanta’s mayor and City Council, is being seen as a test of the board’s competence.Mary Norwood, a Fulton resident who narrowly lost two races for Atlanta mayor, has been a longstanding critic of the board. She said she favored an inquiry into the shredding allegations.“If you have two employees who are terminated by the elections director, that certainly prompts an investigation and analysis,” she said. “It’s critical that we get this right.” More

Results showed the party of Muqtada al-Sadr making the biggest gains in a vote that could help shape Iraq’s direction and its relationship with both the United States and Iran.BAGHDAD — Followers of a Shiite cleric whose fighters battled U.S. forces during the occupation made the biggest gains in Iraq’s parliamentary election, strengthening his hand in determining whether the country drifts further out of the American orbit.While independent candidates won some seats for the first time in a political landscape altered by anti-government protests, it became increasingly clear as ballots were tallied Monday that the big winner in the Sunday vote was Sairoun, the political movement loyal to the cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.Sairoun won up to 20 additional seats in Parliament, consolidating its status as the single biggest bloc in the chamber and giving the mercurial cleric an even more decisive vote over the country’s next prime minister.The outcome could further complicate Iraq’s challenge in steering diplomatically between the United States and Iran, adversaries that both see Iraq as vital to their interests. Pro-Iranian militias have played an increased role in Iraq since the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 and have launched attacks on U.S. interests in the country.Mr. al-Sadr has navigated an uneasy relationship with Iran, where he has pursued his religious studies. Regarding the United States, he and his aides have refused to meet with American officials.He and the Iranian leadership shared similar goals when his fighters fought U.S. forces after 2003. But Mr. Sadr is viewed as an Iraqi nationalist, an identity that has sometimes put him in conflict with Iran — a country he cannot afford to antagonize.In a speech Monday night, Mr. al-Sadr said all embassies are welcome in Iraq as long as they do not interfere in Iraqi affairs or the formation of a government. The cleric also implicitly criticized the Iran-backed militias, some of which refer to themselves as “the resistance.”“Even if those who claim resistance or such, it is time for the people to live in peace, without occupation, terrorism, militias and kidnapping,” he said in an address broadcast on state TV. “Today is the victory day of the people against the occupation, normalization, militias, poverty, and slavery,” he said, in an apparent reference to normalizing ties with Israel.“He is using some sharp language against Iran and the resistance groups affiliated with Iran,” said Gheis Ghoreishi, a political analyst who has advised Iran’s foreign ministry on Iraq, speaking about Mr. Sadr’s victory speech in Clubhouse, an online discussion group. “There is a real lack of trust and grievances between Sadr and Iran.”In Baghdad Monday night, young men jammed into pickup trucks, waving flags, playing celebratory songs and carrying photos of Mr. Sadr as they cruised the streets of the capital.The election authorities announced preliminary results Monday evening with official results expected later this week. With 94 percent of the vote counted, election officials said the turnout was 41 percent — a record low that reflected a deep disdain by Iraqis toward politicians and government leaders who have made Iraq one of the most corrupt countries in the world.Election officials counting ballots at a polling station in Baghdad on Sunday.Thaier Al-Sudani/ReutersActivists who were part of anti-government protests that brought down the Iraqi government in 2019 won up to a dozen seats, running for the first time in this election, which was called a year early to answer demands for changes in Iraq’s political system.That system, in which senior government posts are divided by political leaders along sectarian and ethnic lines, remains unchanged. But a new electoral law loosened the stranglehold of large political blocs and made it easier for independent candidates and smaller parties to win seats.The preliminary results also showed that the political bloc headed by former Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki appeared to be the second biggest winner while parties tied to pro-Iranian militias lost ground.Mr. al-Maliki, a Shiite, gained wide support for having sent Iraqi government troops to break the militias’ hold on Iraq’s southern city of Basra in 2008. But he was later blamed for a descent into sectarianism that helped foster the rise of the Islamic State. But it was the Sadrists who were the clear winners on Sunday.“Of course I voted for the Sadrist bloc,” said Haider Tahseen Ali, 20, standing outside the small grocery where he works in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad neighborhood and a bastion of Mr. al-Sadr’s base. Mr. al-Sadr has assumed the religious legacy of his revered father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1999.“Even if he ordered us to throw ourselves from the roofs of our houses, I would throw myself,” said Abbas Radhi, an election worker overseeing one of the Sadr City polling stations, referring to Mr. al-Sadr.The cleric declared twice in the run-up to the vote that he was withdrawing his movement from the election process before reversing and declaring that the next prime minister should come from the Sadrist ranks. But Mr. al-Sadr appears open to negotiation about who should lead Iraq.Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, an independent who has tried to balance Iraq’s relations between the United States and Iran, and has made clear he wants to be prime minister again, will need Sadrist support.Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad on Sunday after casting his ballot.Ahmed Saad/ReutersWhile Shiite parties dominate Iraqi politics, the biggest Kurdish faction, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, along with a Sunni faction headed by the Parliament speaker, Mohamed al-Halbousi, also emerged with enough seats to play a role in deciding the next prime minister.The low turnout was a reflection of the disdain for Iraqi politicians, particularly among young voters who are faced with a future that offers few opportunities. Sixty percent of Iraq’s population is under the age of 25.“Clearly, people are still disillusioned even more with the political parties and the political process,” said Farhad Alaaldin, head of the Iraq Advisory Council, a research group in Baghdad. “People don’t believe that this election would bring about change, and that’s why they didn’t bother to turn out to vote.”The disillusionment extends from a deeply corrupt and dysfunctional government to the parliamentarians themselves. President Barham Salih has said an estimated $150 billion obtained through corruption has been smuggled out of Iraq since 2003. The organization of the election, with new biometric voting cards and electronic transmission systems designed to deter widespread fraud seen in previous elections, was declared by international observers to have met international criteria.But some organizations that had deployed observers during the voting cautioned that the low turnout meant a limited public mandate for the new government.“In the aftermath of the elections, the low turnout may cause questions as to the legitimacy of the government,” said Sarah Hepp, the director of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German-government funded political foundation. The protest movement two years ago spread from the south of Iraq to Baghdad when thousands of young people took to the streets to demand jobs, public services and an end to a corrupt political system.A demonstration in Baghdad earlier this month to commemorate slain activists.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesIn a challenge to neighboring Iran, they also demanded an end to Iranian influence in Iraq. Iran’s proxy militias have become part of Iraq’s official security forces but in many cases do not answer to the Iraqi government and are blamed for assassinations and disappearances for which they are never held accountable.Security forces and militia members killed more than 600 unarmed protesters since the October 2019 demonstrations, according to human rights groups.One of the leading protest candidates, Alaa al-Rikabi, easily won a seat in the southern city of Nasiriya. Mr. al-Rikabi has said the movement’s main goal was to shift protests from the streets to Parliament, where he said he and some of the other new lawmakers would demand change.“My people have not enough hospitals, not enough health care services. Many of my people are below the poverty line,” he said in an interview in August. “Most of them say they cannot feed their children, they cannot educate their sons and daughters.”Jaafar al-Waely, Falih Hassan and Nermeen al-Mufti contributed reporting from Baghdad. Farnaz Fassihi contributed from New York. More