Elections

US Capitol attackBiden overrules Trump effort to keep White House files from 6 January panelThe National Archives told to give documents to House committee despite ex-president’s attempt assert executive privilege David Smith in Washington@ More

Jennifer Medina interviews her subjects multiple times — sometimes spending as many as 50 hours with them — to understand their complex political attitudes.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.From the 2016 to the 2020 elections, Donald Trump improved his performance among certain segments of Latino voters, prompting surprised reactions from many journalists and people who work in politics. But this phenomenon was clear to those carefully tracking Latino sentiment — and few were doing that more diligently than the Times political reporter Jennifer Medina, whose parents are Panamanian.Ms. Medina, who is based in Los Angeles, started working on campaign coverage in 2019, and that September she reported on Latinos attending a Trump rally, some of whom said they felt like political loners among their Democratic friends and family. In 2020, she followed up that work with accounts of Mr. Trump’s macho appeal and why evangelical Latinos considered him a defender of their religious values. She also recently looked at the role that Latino voters played in helping Gov. Gavin Newsom keep his job in the face of a recall election in California.Here, Ms. Medina talks about developing her beat, speaking to hundreds of voters and achieving depth in her conversations. This interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find yourself covering Latinos in the 2020 presidential campaign?The campaign was the first time in my career that I had covered national politics full time. Nobody ever explicitly assigned me the beat of covering Latino politics. I just followed where the story was, and that’s what the story was in 2020.The first Trump rally I went to was in New Mexico. The second was in Miami. In the audience of both rallies, there were tons of Hispanics. Just talking to them about why they supported him, what they thought about his statements against Mexicans and immigration, and how they grappled with that captivated me.On the flip side, when the Democratic primary was happening I was hearing people based on the East Coast saying, “Latinos are never going to support Bernie Sanders because they are scared of communism.” That’s true in Miami, but in Los Angeles and Las Vegas it couldn’t have been further from the truth.There was a lot of room for me to do good, nuanced coverage. That’s partly because Latinos have been largely overlooked by both parties and by the press. It’s only just dawned on people that this is a part of the electorate that can really decide elections.How were you able to characterize popular attitudes among a sprawling, diverse group like Latinos?During the election, I interviewed hundreds of voters. For every one person I quote, I talk to five other people.I’ll use a story on Latino Republican men as an example. I had phone numbers of men who had participated in a poll or men I had met reporting throughout the campaign. After I had spoken to 40 people, I started to see trends. I want to hear something over and over again before I describe it in The Times as a generalization.I’m also relying on conversations with political strategists and pollsters — not taking what they say at face value, but also not making generalizations without having other information to back them up.What does it take to achieve depth in these conversations?My approach with Trump supporters was the same as with any other voters: open-ended questions. “When did you first start to think this way?” “Would you talk about politics as a kid?” When you ask people questions like that, most are really eager to respond. People like to talk about themselves.There’s a pastor I interviewed who has a dear place in my heart. I became convinced that Latino evangelical churches were among the only places where Trump supporters and Democrats were interacting with each other on a regular basis. I set off to try to find a church I could profile, and I came across the Church of God of Prophecy in Phoenix and its pastor, Jose Rivera. I envisioned spending weeks there in person, but the church was the very last place I went last March before the shutdown.I knew I couldn’t spend time there the way I wanted to, but I called the pastor once every week. I realized he illustrated the support for Trump among Latino evangelicals, though he himself was not voting for him. He felt upset with his flock.I must have spent 50 hours on the phone with him.50 hours?Is that crazy?What do you learn in 50 hours that you couldn’t learn in 30?I was better able to articulate where Pastor Rivera was coming from, what he represented and what he didn’t represent, the more often that I spoke to him. He said different things at different times. There was one moment where he thought he might vote for Trump. He had these tortured conversations with his wife about why she was going to vote for Trump. I heard his thinking evolve and develop.This is like asking, “What do you learn in 50 years of life that you can’t learn in 30?” More

The future of the chancellor’s coalition looked increasingly uncertain after prosecutors opened a criminal investigation on suspicion that he paid off pollsters and journalists.BERLIN — The government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria teetered near collapse on Friday after federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation against him this week on suspicion of using government funds to pay for favorable opinion polls and news articles.Mr. Kurz, who has been feted as the young face of European conservatism, vigorously denied the charges. But he is now facing calls to step aside as three opposition parties plan to introduce a vote of no-confidence against him at a special parliamentary session next week.President Alexander Van der Bellen addressed the nation on Friday evening, reassuring Austrians that while the latest crisis threatened the government, the country’s democratic institutions remained intact and functional. “We have a crisis of government, not a crisis of state,” Mr. Van der Bellen said. “Our democracy is prepared for all possible situations, including this one.”The future of Austria’s government will now depend on the left-leaning Greens, the junior coalition partners, who were always uncomfortable political bedfellows with Mr. Kurz and who had campaigned on a platform of “clean politics.” Prominent voices in the Greens party now see that position and their support for the government as untenable under a chancellor who is suspected of using funds from the finance ministry to pay for positive media coverage.They are now calling for another member of his People’s Party to take over the chancellorship. Short of that, they could pull out of the ruling coalition and try to form a new government with a combination of smaller opposition parties, though they lack the numbers in Parliament. If all fails, the country could face new elections. “Such a person is no longer capable of performing his duties, and of course the People’s Party has a responsibility here to nominate someone who is beyond reproach to lead this government,” Sigi Maurer, the Greens’ leader in Parliament, said of Mr. Kurz.Mr. Kurz, 35, says he is determined to hang on. He rose to prominence after seizing control of the conservative People’s Party and refashioned it by co-opting many of the messages of the far right at a time when anti-immigrant populism was surging in Europe.After an intense, social media-savvy campaign focused largely on patriotic themes and a hard line against migration, Mr. Kurz became Austria’s youngest chancellor after elections in 2017, when he forged a government that included the far-right Freedom Party. Less than two years later that government collapsed after the far right was itself engulfed in scandal when a video emerged showing the Freedom Party’s then leader promising government contracts in exchange for financial support from a woman claiming to be a wealthy Russian. In new elections in 2019 Mr. Kurz came out on top once again, but pivoted to form a government with the left-leaning Greens, demonstrating his skill as a political shape shifter.Now it is Mr. Kurz who is suspected of the ethical breach that may implode his latest government.Austria’s federal prosecutor said on Wednesday it had launched a criminal investigation against Mr. Kurz and nine others on suspicion of misusing government funds to pay for polls and articles in the news media that cast him in a favorable light in the months leading up to and just after his election to the chancellery.Mr. Kurz before a meeting with Austria’s president, Alexander van der Bellen, on Thursday in Vienna.Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images“Between the years 2016 and at least 2018, budgetary funds of the Federal Ministry of Finance were used to finance surveys conducted by a polling company in the interest of a political party and its top official that were exclusively motivated by party politics, and sometimes manipulated,” the prosecutor’s office said. The results of the polls were then published in media belonging to the Österreich Media Group, “without being declared as an advertisement,” the prosecutors said. In exchange for the favorable coverage, prosecutors said they suspected that “payments were made to the media conglomerate.”The chancellor denied it. “I know what I did and I know that the accusations are false,” Mr. Kurz told reporters in Vienna on Thursday, where he met with Mr. Van der Bellen. “Just as the independent judiciary is an important pillar of our democracy, so is the presumption of innocence essential to our rule of law,” Mr. Kurz said. “At least, that has been the case until now.”Mr. Kurz and the leaders of his conservative party have so far rejected calls for him to step aside, circling the wagons instead. “The leaders of the People’s Party today made very clear that they only want to stay in this government under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz,” Elisabeth Köstinger, a member of the party and minister for tourism in Mr. Kurz’s government, told reporters.Mr. Kurz after parliamentary elections in 2017, when he joined the far right in government. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesSince taking over leadership of the People’s Party, Mr. Kurz has been its unchallenged leader, said Alexandra Siegl, a political analyst with Peter Hajek Public Opinion Strategies in Vienna.“You could say that the People’s Party in the past few years has been Sebastian Kurz,” she said. “There is no one else in the party who is as well known across the country and there is no obvious successor.”But there is also no easy path for his opponents to take power. The three opposition parties lack the majority needed for their no-confidence vote to succeed, unless several lawmakers from the Greens join them in support. On Thursday the leaders of the Greens met with their counterparts from the Socialists, the largest opposition party in Parliament, to try to find a solution. Even if the two were to join forces with the smaller, liberal Neos party, they would still lack a majority and could only survive by securing the support of the far-right Freedom Party, itself an awkward and potentially unstable proposition.“It is imperative that Mr. Kurz step down,” the Freedom Party’s current leader, Herbert Kickl, told reporters on Friday. He gave no indication whether his party would be willing to support a three-way minority government led by the Socialists. Failing that, Austria could face new elections — territory where Mr. Kurz has shown twice he knows how to perform. The Greens, on the other hand, have seen their support dwindle since 2019 and such a move could jeopardize two of their signature bills, which have been worked out with the government, but not yet passed into law.The Chancellery in Vienna on Wednesday.Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty ImagesBut the ongoing criminal investigation into Mr. Kurz , which will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to press charges, may make it impossible for the Greens not to bolt. On Friday, the prosecutors’ office made available more documents showing the text message exchanges between Mr. Kurz and his advisers, which included disparaging remarks about the previous conservative party leader and insults about members of the government in which he once served as foreign minister and calls to “stir up” a region against then Chancellor Christian Kern.“This hardens the suspicions against him,” Ms. Siegl said. Nevertheless, it may not be enough to shatter Mr. Kurz’s popularity among Austrians, especially a core group of supporters who continue to support his hard line on migration, she said. “They just push it to the side and say that every politician has something to hide, if you look hard enough,” she said. “No one likes to admit that they have been taken for a ride.” More

President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any hope of a governing majority. The coming year, while they still control the House, the Senate and the White House, is their last, best chance to alter course. To pass a package of democracy reforms that makes voting fairer and easier. To offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. To overhaul how the party talks and acts and thinks to win back the working-class voters — white and nonwhite — who have left them behind the electoral eight ball. If they fail, they will not get another chance. Not anytime soon.[Get more from Ezra Klein by listening to his Opinion podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”]That, at least, is what David Shor thinks. Shor started modeling elections in 2008, when he was a 16-year-old blogger, and he proved good at it. By 2012, he was deep inside President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, putting together the fabled “Golden Report,” which modeled the election daily. The forecast proved spookily accurate: It ultimately called the popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point in every swing state but Ohio. Math-geek data analysts became a hot item for Democratic Party campaigns, and Shor was one of the field’s young stars, pioneering ways to survey huge numbers of Americans and experimentally test their reactions to messages and ads.But it was a tweet that changed his career. During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2 percent, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon.” Nonviolent protests, he noted, tended to help Democrats electorally. The numbers came from Omar Wasow, a political scientist who now teaches at Pomona College. But online activists responded with fury to Shor’s interjection of electoral strategy into a moment of grief and rage, and he was summarily fired by his employer, Civis Analytics, a progressive data science firm.For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography.A socially distanced arrangement for state delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFreed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind, Shor was resurrected as the Democratic data guru who refused to soften an analysis the left often didn’t want to hear. He became ubiquitous on podcasts and Twitter, where Obama posts his analyses and pundits half-jokingly refer to themselves as being “Shor-pilled.” Politico reported that Shor has “an audience in the White House and is one of the most in-demand data analysts in the country,” calling his following “the cult of Shor.” Now he is a co-founder of and the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a progressive data science operation. “Obviously, in retrospect,” he told me, “it was positive for my career.”At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe. Since 2019, he’s been building something he calls “the power simulator.” It’s a model that predicts every House and Senate and presidential race between now and 2032 to try to map out the likeliest future for American politics. He’s been obsessively running and refining these simulations over the past two years. And they keep telling him the same thing.We’re screwed in the Senate, he said. Only he didn’t say “screwed.”In 2022, if Senate Democrats buck history and beat Republicans by four percentage points in the midterms, which would be a startling performance, they have about a 50-50 chance of holding the majority. If they win only 51 percent of the vote, they’ll likely lose a seat — and the Senate.But it’s 2024 when Shor’s projected Senate Götterdämmerung really strikes. To see how bad the map is for Democrats, think back to 2018, when anti-Trump fury drove record turnout and handed the House gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. Senate Democrats saw the same huge surge of voters. Nationally, they won about 18 million more votes than Senate Republicans — and they still lost two seats. If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now.Sit with that. Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate. You can see Shor’s work below. We’ve built a version of his model, in which you can change the assumptions and see how they affect Democrats’ projected Senate chances in 2022 and 2024. More

Donald Trump‘Can you believe this?’: key takeaways from the report on Trump’s attempt to steal the electionThe former president and his chief of staff pressed top department of justice deputies to probe allegations of fraud in the 2020 election Sam Levine in New YorkFri 8 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 06.09 EDTA 394-page Senate report released Thursday offers some of the most alarming details to date of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.For weeks after the November election, Trump and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, pressed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and top Department of Justice deputies to probe fanciful allegations of election fraud, according to the report. Here are six key takeaways from the report:Jeffrey Clark was willing to carry out Trump’s wishes and tried to pressure the acting attorney generalIn a late December phone call with Trump, Rosen was surprised when the president asked if he had ever heard of “a guy named Jeff Clark”. The inquiry seemed odd to Rosen; Clark did not work on matters related to elections, the report says. House Capitol attack panel subpoenas key planners of ‘Stop the Steal’ rallyRead moreRosen would later find out that Clark, a little known justice department lawyer, had already met with Trump, an admission that left him “flabbergasted”, since Clark was his subordinate. On 28 December, Clark emailed Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the principal associate deputy attorney general, with two requests. First, he wanted them to authorize a briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “on foreign election interference issues”. Clark needed the briefing, according to the report, to assess an allegation that a “Dominion [voting] machine accessed the internet through a smart thermostat with a net connecting trail leading back to China”.Clark also wanted the two top justice department officials to sign on to a letter to lawmakers in Georgia and other states announcing the justice department was probing election irregularities and urging them to convene special legislative sessions to consider alternate slates of electoral college electors. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue wrote back. Rosen, Donoghue, and Clark all had a “heated” meeting that evening in which Rosen and Donoghue made it clear they would not sign.Clark tried to use a potential appointment as acting attorney general as leverage to get top justice department officials to sign his letter.Either on 31 December or 1 January, Clark told Rosen that Trump had inquired whether Clark would be willing to serve as acting attorney general if the president fired Rosen. Clark told Rosen he hadn’t yet decided, but wanted to do more “due diligence”, on election fraud claims. A few days later, he told Rosen and Donoghue that it would make it easier for him to turn down Trump’s offer if Rosen signed his letter. “He raised another thing that he might point to, that he might be able to say no [to the President], is if – that letter, if I reversed my position on the letter, which I was unwilling to do,” Rosen told the senate committee.White House lawyers and other top DoJ officials threatened to resign if Clark was named the acting attorney generalOn 3 January, Clark told Rosen that Trump intended to appoint Clark the acting attorney general that day. That set off a scramble at the justice department, where Clark and Donoghue informed the heads of the department’s various divisions what was happening. They all agreed to resign if Trump followed through.Rosen and Donoghue met with Trump in the Oval Office that evening. “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election,” Trump said to open the meeting, according to Rosen. Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, described Clark’s letter as a “murder-suicide pact” and threatened to resign if Clark was appointed.After a three-hour meeting, Trump ultimately decided not to fire Rosen.The US attorney in Atlanta resigned after Trump threatened to fire himOne casualty of the 3 January meeting was Byung Jin Pak, who was then serving as the US attorney in Atlanta. During the meeting, Trump fumed that Pak had not uncovered evidence of election fraud and accused him of being a “never Trumper”. Trump instructed Donoghue to fire Pak. But Donoghue informed Trump that Pak intended to resign the next day. Cipollone advised Trump not to fire someone who was about to resign and Trump agreed to hold off.There was a problem: Pak intended to stay in his role until inauguration day. That night, Donoghue called Pak and persuaded him to resign early.Trump replaced Pak with Bobby Christine, another federal prosecutor in Georgia, bypassing a Pak deputy who was next in line to succeed him. Donoghue told the Senate panel he believed Trump wanted Christine because he would be more likely to investigate election irregularities.Meadows, the White House chief of staff, played a key role in pressuring the justice department to investigate absurd conspiracy theories about the electionOn 29 December, Meadows asked Rosen to look into a conspiracy theory known as “Italygate” that alleged satellites had flipped Trump votes for Biden. Days later, Meadows sent Rosen a YouTube video purporting to contain evidence to back up the “Italygate” theory. The same day, Meadows asked Rosen to connect with Clark about disproven allegations in Georgia. “Can you believe this?” Rosen wrote to Donoghue. “I am not going to respond.”Meadows also asked Rosen to meet with Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, a request Rosen rebuffed.Trump pressured the justice department to file a lawsuit in the supreme court seeking to invalidate the election results in six key statesIn late December, Trump asked the justice department to take the highly unusual step of filing an election lawsuit directly in the US Supreme Court. The suit would have asked the court to nullify Biden’s election victories in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.The solicitor general’s office (OSG) and the office of legal counsel (OLC) prepared memos explaining why the department could not file a lawsuit. “Among other hurdles, OSG explained that DOJ could not file an original supreme court action for the benefit of a political candidate,” the senate report says.A plain-English memo from OLC was more blunt. “[T]here is no legal basis to bring this lawsuit.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsTrump administrationUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

Former President Donald J. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of several Republican politicians.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.With all the subtlety of a bullhorn, former President Donald J. Trump has been hinting that he plans to run for office again in 2024.And Republicans are so far treating him with the deference they displayed while he was in the White House as they wait to see if he makes his move.On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Trump heads to Iowa for a rally at the state fairgrounds, a perennial stop on the presidential campaign circuit. Joining him will be several of the state’s top Republicans, including Gov. Kim Reynolds, Senator Charles E. Grassley and the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, Jeff Kaufmann — a testament to the former president’s enduring dominance.Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to cede the spotlight has cast doubt on the political futures of an entire group of Republican politicians who have suggested that they might someday want to run for president. And while they — like the rest of the country — can’t be sure what the notoriously fickle former president might do, some of them are trying to stake their claims as leaders in the party.That requires a good deal of delicacy on their part. And it got a little awkward this week for two of them.First there was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose refusal to interfere with the counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6 deeply angered Mr. Trump and helped precipitate the deadly assault on the Capitol that day. Mr. Pence gave an interview this week to Sean Hannity of Fox News and sounded at times an awful lot like someone who wants to be president.He attacked President Biden for withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan. He also criticized the president’s approach to domestic affairs — for “lecturing the American people about vaccine mandates” and promoting what Mr. Pence called a “massive, big-government, socialist bill” before Congress that would widen the social safety net and address problems like climate change.But when Mr. Hannity broached the subject of Mr. Pence’s reportedly frayed relationship with Mr. Trump, the former vice president tried to deflect by accusing the news media of blowing the events of Jan. 6 out of proportion, referring to it obliquely at one point as “one day in January.”“They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believe we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration,” Mr. Pence said.He did not address the fact that numerous rioters at the Capitol called for his execution during the attack, demanding that he be hanged for not carrying out Mr. Trump’s wishes. And Mr. Hannity didn’t bring it up.Then there was a speech by Nikki Haley, another former Trump administration official whose relationship with Mr. Trump was damaged because she had declared herself “disgusted” with him after Jan. 6 and predicted that he’d “lost any sort of political viability.”But Ms. Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, praised Mr. Trump in an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. She criticized Mr. Trump’s political opponents for accusing him of being compromised by the Russians, and said that Mr. Biden’s posture toward Russia was weaker by comparison.Separately, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, she lauded Mr. Trump’s ability to “get strong people elected” and insisted, “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”At the moment, that doesn’t seem like an option for Ms. Haley or anyone else who wants to have a bright future in the Republican Party. Mr. Trump continues to attack Republicans who broke with him after Jan. 6 and supported his impeachment, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.His first rally since the day of the Capitol riot was in June outside Cleveland. He endorsed a local Republican who was challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez in next year’s primary election. Mr. Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the riot, announced last month that he was leaving Congress rather than staying to face his Trump-approved challenger.Polls taken over the course of the year have shown that Mr. Trump remains the overwhelming favorite for Republican voters, suggesting that he would be difficult to beat in a primary if he did indeed run. Though his popularity suffered somewhat in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, most Republicans seem to have moved on. A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found that two-thirds of Republicans say Mr. Trump should continue to be a major national figure, an increase of 10 percentage points from January. Forty-four percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters want him to run again. The Pew poll also found little tolerance for dissent. Asked whether their party should accept politicians who openly criticize Mr. Trump, 63 percent said no.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

Drafts of a lawsuit filed with Supreme Court by Texas’ attorney general in December had been circulated by the leader of an anti-abortion group.WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s most prominent religious conservative lawyers played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the lawsuit that Republican state attorneys general filed in December in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election of President Biden, documents show.The lawyer, Michael P. Farris, is the chief executive of a group known as Alliance Defending Freedom, which is active in opposing abortion and gay rights. He circulated a detailed draft of the lawsuit that Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, ultimately filed against states including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin in an effort to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.Mr. Paxton filed the lawsuit on Dec. 7, after making some changes but keeping large chunks of the draft circulated by Mr. Farris.An additional 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit. Within four days, the matter was rejected by the court.But Mr. Farris’s role highlighted how religious conservatives supported Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to retain power by blocking certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.“Please find a much-improved version of the complaint attached,” Mr. Farris wrote in an email on Nov. 30 to the chief deputy attorney general in South Carolina, one of several Republicans whom Mr. Farris and a team of other conservative lawyers were trying to convince to file the lawsuit. “I will call you and update you on the alternatives.”The email, obtained via an open records request by The New York Times and researchers at Mount Holyoke College, included a detailed 42-page legal complaint, accusing the states of violating the Constitution by changing the rules related to absentee ballots and other election details without formal approval from state legislatures.The complaint Mr. Farris sent had conveniently left the identification of the Republican attorney general’s office that would ultimately file the litigation blank, instead writing “000 Street Ave, Capitol City, ST 00000, (111) 222-3333, [email protected], Counsel of Record.”Read the documentHere is the draft lawsuit that Michael P. Farris, chief executive of a group known as Alliance Defending Freedom, sent to the South Carolina attorney general, as he searched for a Republican state attorney general willing to file the lawsuit with the Supreme Court.Read Document Page 2 of 46Mr. Farris’s involvement in the effort, which has not previously been reported, came as part of a broad push by religious conservatives to get Mr. Trump re-elected. Their role intensified after the pandemic hit in early 2020 and states began to loosen absentee ballot rules, which the religious conservatives feared would lead to a surge in participation by liberal voters.Mr. Farris made a name for himself in the 1980s as the founder of a legal group that successfully pushed states nationwide to allow children to be taught at home, based on a belief that only through home-schooling, away from secular influences in public schools, could a broad Christian movement rise in the United States.At the Alliance Defending Freedom, Mr. Farris has helped drive the organization’s campaign against abortion and gay rights, including the lawsuit litigated by Mr. Farris’s team that sought to defend the right of a Colorado cake shop to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.Mr. Farris declined a request for an interview, but in an email he confirmed his role in the postelection effort, saying his involvement was not a part of his work at the Alliance for Defending Freedom, a nonprofit group that is prohibited under federal law from playing any role in a political campaign.“While it’s true that I care about this issue on a personal level, it is not something that ADF works on in any capacity,” he wrote. “As President and CEO, my charge is to focus on ADF’s mission, which is to protect Americans’ God-given freedoms. I have nothing to say about the details of the way forward on the issue of election integrity other than the hope that all Americans take the issue seriously.”A spokesman for Mr. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.Preparing mail-in ballots to send to voters in Texas last year. After the pandemic struck, religious conservatives feared a surge in absentee voting by liberals.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMr. Farris had not been a fan of Mr. Trump before his election, and publicly urged other conservative Christians to vote for another Republican candidate in 2016.“His candidacy is the antithesis of everything we set out to achieve,” Mr. Farris wrote in a Washington Post opinion column in June 2016. But Mr. Farris and other religious conservatives later told their followers that Mr. Trump had proven them wrong with his appointments of conservative judges, his efforts to block any federal spending on abortions, and his willingness to support efforts by certain business owners to discriminate against homosexuals. That included the Colorado cake shop, which won the right to refuse to sell to wedding cakes to gay couples — in a legal argument that the Trump Justice Department supported.Religious groups were active in publicly challenging the outcome of the November election from the start — even as a much more secretive campaign was underway, involving Mr. Farris and others, such as Mark D. Martin, the dean at Regent University School of Law, a self-described Christian institution.Mr. Martin, the former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, and Mr. Farris were both involved, emails obtained by The Times show, in attempts to recruit a Republican attorney general to file a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court to further the efforts by allies of Mr. Trump.Drafts of the lawsuit were also sent to the Louisiana attorney general, Jeff Landry, a Republican. But the most intensive efforts appear to have targeted South Carolina and Texas, the emails suggest, as conservative activists tried to convince South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, to serve as the lead plaintiff.Among those Mr. Farris pressed to file suit was Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s attorney general.Cliff Owen/Associated Press“Mike Farris, who is the President and CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) will be sending over reports, perhaps as early as this evening,” said one Nov. 27 email to Mr. Wilson, sent by conservative activist and author Don Brown, referring to reports examining the presidential election results and ongoing challenges.Three days later, Mr. Farris wrote to Mr. Wilson’s office, with a draft of the lawsuit he wanted Mr. Wilson to consider filing in U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Farris then spoke with Mr. Wilson about the possible lawsuit, according to the emails.“We have been having constant conversations with other state AGs and state AG staffs,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a Dec. 3 email, also obtained via an open-records request. “Had a follow-up conversation with Mike Farris yesterday morning prior to him flying back to Texas. Mike was very accommodating and knowledgeable about the legal issues raised in the pleading.”But Mr. Wilson raised objections to the legal arguments with Mr. Farris, he said, questioning whether one state had the right to sue another state over election procedures or what it might be reasonable to ask the Supreme Court to do as a “remedy” for such a legal dispute, given that it involved the outcome of the presidential election.“There were other issues that have been raised that have been difficult to overcome but our staff along with other states are still working through the issue,” Mr. Wilson said.Not discouraged, the team of conservative activists intensified their efforts to enlist Mr. Paxton, who within days moved forward with his suit on behalf of the State of Texas.“Our Country stands at an important crossroads,” the complaint filed by Mr. Paxton said in its opening argument. Those words were lifted verbatim from the draft Mr. Farris had sent, as was a subsequent passage asserting that “either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former.”Jim Rutenberg More

39 tabulation of ballots within a State. Bush II, 531 U.S. at 107. 163. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ created differential voting standards in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT III: EQUAL PROTECTION (ONE MAN, ONE VOTE) 164. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-163, above, as if fully set forth herein. 165. The one-man, one-vote principle of this Court’s Equal Protection cases requires counting valid votes and not counting invalid votes. Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 554-55; Bush II, 531 U.S. at 103 (“the votes eligible for inclusion in the certification are the votes meeting the properly established legal requirements”). 166. The actions set out in Paragraphs __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violated the one- man, one-vote principle by systemically excluding valid votes and those set out in Paragraphs __-__, __- __, __-__, __-__, __-__, and __-__ violate that principle by systemically including invalid votes in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. COUNT IV: DUE PROCESS (INTENTIONAL NONCOMPLIANCE) 167. Plaintiff State repeats and re-alleges the allegations of paragraphs 1-__, above, as if fully set forth herein. More