Elections

Scrolling through her social media feed, Laura Dornheim is regularly stopped cold by a new blast of abuse aimed at her, including from people threatening to kill or sexually assault her. One person last year said he looked forward to meeting her in person so he could punch her teeth out.Ms. Dornheim, a candidate for Parliament in Germany’s election on Sunday, is often attacked for her support of abortion rights, gender equality and immigration. She flags some of the posts to Facebook and Twitter, hoping that the platforms will delete the posts or that the perpetrators will be barred. She’s usually disappointed.“There might have been one instance where something actually got taken down,” Ms. Dornheim said.Harassment and abuse are all too common on the modern internet. Yet it was supposed to be different in Germany. In 2017, the country enacted one of the world’s toughest laws against online hate speech. It requires Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove illegal comments, pictures or videos within 24 hours of being notified about them or risk fines of up to 50 million euros, or $59 million. Supporters hailed it as a watershed moment for internet regulation and a model for other countries.But an influx of hate speech and harassment in the run-up to the German election, in which the country will choose a new leader to replace Angela Merkel, its longtime chancellor, has exposed some of the law’s weaknesses. Much of the toxic speech, researchers say, has come from far-right groups and is aimed at intimidating female candidates like Ms. Dornheim.Some critics of the law say it is too weak, with limited enforcement and oversight. They also maintain that many forms of abuse are deemed legal by the platforms, such as certain kinds of harassment of women and public officials. And when companies do remove illegal material, critics say, they often do not alert the authorities or share information about the posts, making prosecutions of the people publishing the material far more difficult. Another loophole, they say, is that smaller platforms like the messaging app Telegram, popular among far-right groups, are not subject to the law.Free-expression groups criticize the law on other grounds. They argue that the law should be abolished not only because it fails to protect victims of online abuse and harassment, but also because it sets a dangerous precedent for government censorship of the internet.The country’s experience may shape policy across the continent. German officials are playing a key role in drafting one of the world’s most anticipated new internet regulations, a European Union law called the Digital Services Act, which will require Facebook and other online platforms to do more to address the vitriol, misinformation and illicit content on their sites. Ursula von der Leyen, a German who is president of the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm, has called for an E.U. law that would list gender-based violence as a special crime category, a proposal that would include online attacks.“Germany was the first to try to tackle this kind of online accountability,” said Julian Jaursch, a project director at the German think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, which focuses on digital issues. “It is important to ask whether the law is working.”Campaign billboards in Germany’s race for chancellor, showing, from left, Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats.Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesMarc Liesching, a professor at HTWK Leipzig who published an academic report on the policy, said that of the posts that had been deleted by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, a vast majority were classified as violating company policies, not the hate speech law. That distinction makes it harder for the government to measure whether companies are complying with the law. In the second half of 2020, Facebook removed 49 million pieces of “hate speech” based on its own community standards, compared with the 154 deletions that it attributed to the German law, he found.The law, Mr. Liesching said, “is not relevant in practice.”With its history of Nazism, Germany has long tried to balance free speech rights against a commitment to combat hate speech. Among Western democracies, the country has some of the world’s toughest laws against incitement to violence and hate speech. Targeting religious, ethnic and racial groups is illegal, as are Holocaust denial and displaying Nazi symbols in public. To address concerns that companies were not alerting the authorities to illegal posts, German policymakers this year passed amendments to the law. They require Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to turn over data to the police about accounts that post material that German law would consider illegal speech. The Justice Ministry was also given more powers to enforce the law. “The aim of our legislative package is to protect all those who are exposed to threats and insults on the internet,” Christine Lambrecht, the justice minister, who oversees enforcement of the law, said after the amendments were adopted. “Whoever engages in hate speech and issues threats will have to expect to be charged and convicted.”Germans will vote for a leader to replace Angela Merkel, the country’s longtime chancellor.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressFacebook and Google have filed a legal challenge to block the new rules, arguing that providing the police with personal information about users violates their privacy.Facebook said that as part of an agreement with the government it now provided more figures about the complaints it received. From January through July, the company received more than 77,000 complaints, which led it to delete or block about 11,500 pieces of content under the German law, known as NetzDG.“We have zero tolerance for hate speech and support the aims of NetzDG,” Facebook said in a statement. Twitter, which received around 833,000 complaints and removed roughly 81,000 posts during the same period, said a majority of those posts did not fit the definition of illegal speech, but still violated the company’s terms of service.“Threats, abusive content and harassment all have the potential to silence individuals,” Twitter said in a statement. “However, regulation and legislation such as this also has the potential to chill free speech by emboldening regimes around the world to legislate as a way to stifle dissent and legitimate speech.”YouTube, which received around 312,000 complaints and removed around 48,000 pieces of content in the first six months of the year, declined to comment other than saying it complies with the law.The amount of hate speech has become increasingly pronounced during election season, according to researchers at Reset and HateAid, organizations that track online hate speech and are pushing for tougher laws.The groups reviewed nearly one million comments on far-right and conspiratorial groups across about 75,000 Facebook posts in June, finding that roughly 5 percent were “highly toxic” or violated the online hate speech law. Some of the worst material, including messages with Nazi symbolism, had been online for more than a year, the groups found. Of 100 posts reported by the groups to Facebook, roughly half were removed within a few days, while the others remain online.The election has also seen a wave of misinformation, including false claims about voter fraud.Annalena Baerbock, the 40-year-old leader of the Green Party and the only woman among the top candidates running to succeed Ms. Merkel, has been the subject of an outsize amount of abuse compared with her male rivals from other parties, including sexist slurs and misinformation campaigns, according to researchers.Ms. Baerbock, the Green Party candidate for chancellor, taking a selfie with one of her supporters.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesOthers have stopped running altogether. In March, a former Syrian refugee running for the German Parliament, Tareq Alaows, dropped out of the race after experiencing racist attacks and violent threats online.While many policymakers want Facebook and other platforms to be aggressive in screening user-generated content, others have concerns about private companies making decisions about what people can and can’t say. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has criticized the law for unfairly targeting its supporters, has vowed to repeal the policy “to respect freedom of expression.”Jillian York, an author and free speech activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Berlin, said the German law encouraged companies to remove potentially offensive speech that is perfectly legal, undermining free expression rights.“Facebook doesn’t err on the side of caution, they just take it down,” Ms. York said. Another concern, she said, is that less democratic countries such as Turkey and Belarus have adopted laws similar to Germany’s so that they could classify certain material critical of the government as illegal.Renate Künast, a former government minister who once invited a journalist to accompany her as she confronted individuals in person who had targeted her with online abuse, wants to see the law go further. Victims of online abuse should be able to go after perpetrators directly for libel and financial settlements, she said. Without that ability, she added, online abuse will erode political participation, particularly among women and minority groups.In a survey of more than 7,000 German women released in 2019, 58 percent said they did not share political opinions online for fear of abuse.“They use the verbal power of hate speech to force people to step back, leave their office or not to be candidates,” Ms. Künast said.The Reichstag, where the German Parliament convenes, in Berlin.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesMs. Dornheim, the Berlin candidate, who has a master’s degree in computer science and used to work in the tech industry, said more restrictions were needed. She described getting her home address removed from public records after somebody mailed a package to her house during a particularly bad bout of online abuse.Yet, she said, the harassment has only steeled her resolve.“I would never give them the satisfaction of shutting up,” she said. More

Sydney Harper and Soraya Shockley and M.J. Davis Lin and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAfter the 2020 census, New York, like many other states, is using population data to redraw congressional and legislative districts.With the midterm elections just a year away, the outcome of the reconfiguring could be crucial in determining which party takes control of the House of Representatives — which Democrats currently hold by a thin margin.Clearly aware of the stakes, New York Democrats are considering a tactic that is usually a preserve of the Republican Party: gerrymandering.On today’s episodeNicholas Fandos, a political correspondent for The New York Times.The State Legislature in Albany this month. Republicans and Democrats on the redistricting commission can’t agree on a set of maps for legislative districts.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesBackground readingA bipartisan commission will examine two competing proposals for the redistricting of New York State. The failure to compromise may pave the way for Democrats to step in and knock out Republican congressional seats.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop and Chelsea Daniel.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Theo Balcomb, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman, Wendy Dorr and Elizabeth Davis-Moorer. More

The inquiry into the 2020 vote, derided as a badly flawed partisan exercise, has already spawned imitators in other states.WASHINGTON — Republicans in the Arizona Senate are expected on Friday to unveil the results of the deeply flawed review they ordered into Democratic election victories last November in the state’s largest county.The study, conducted by Republican loyalists and conspiracy theorists, some of whom previously had called the election rigged, has long since lost any pretense of being an objective review of the 2020 election. It focuses on the votes that saw President Biden narrowly win the state and elected a Democrat, Mark Kelly, to the U.S. Senate, and its origins reflect the baseless Republican claims of a stolen election.But regardless of the outcome, the effort in Arizona has already inspired copycat efforts in other states still poring over the results from an election nearly a year old. And it has become a way to keep alive false claims of fraud and undermine faith in the 2020 election and democracy itself.In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example, Republican-dominated Legislatures have ordered Arizona-style reviews of the 2020 vote in their states, sometimes in consultation with the same conspiracy theorists behind the Arizona investigation.The speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos, ordered the inquiry in June days after former President Donald J. Trump lambasted the Legislature for not pursuing fraud claims. He expanded it in August, allotting $680,000 in tax dollars, a week after a private meeting with Mr. Trump. The Pennsylvania inquiry, announced in July, began in earnest last week with a demand for information on every voter in the state.David Deininger, a former Republican state representative and judge in Wisconsin who served on the state’s Government Accountability Board, said the stakes extended well beyond the 2020 election. “Because of the fanfare and notoriety of these investigations, people are beginning to lose confidence in the fairness and accuracy of election results,” he said.“I hate to point to the Jan. 6 riot in the Capitol,” he added, “but if people lose confidence in our elections, there will be more events like that.”An Arizona Senate spokesman, Mike Philipsen, said that a public briefing on the findings would be held on Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time, and that a link to the full report would eventually be posted on the Senate Republican caucus website.Mr. Biden carried Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and six in 10 Arizona voters last November, by some 45,000 votes out of roughly 2.1 million cast. He won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Legitimate audits of the vote ordered by the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the election, have repeatedly found no evidence of fraud that could have tainted the results.“We’re at an inflection point,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Phoenix pollster and Republican political consultant who has been skeptical of the Arizona investigation. “When the results drop, I’ll be curious to see how the Legislature’s Republican leaders react to this, including the State Senate itself.”The 16 Republicans in the 30-member Senate unanimously supported the review when it was proposed in December. But at least two Republican senators have publicly renounced their backing, one using Twitter in July to accuse the Senate president, Karen Fann, also a Republican, of a “total lack of competence” in overseeing the inquiry.The inquiry has been dogged from its start by slipshod and sometimes bizarre conduct. The firms conducting it had essentially no prior experience in election work, and experts said their haphazard recounting of ballots guaranteed unreliable results. Election officials said security lapses raised the risk that voting equipment had been compromised. And some aspects of the investigation — checking ballots for secret watermarks, and for bamboo fibers that would suggest they were printed in Asia — were based on outlandish conspiracy theories.Recent developments have only heightened skepticism about the election review.In July, officials said the vote review had been largely financed by nearly $5.7 million in donations from nonprofits run by far-right figures and allies of Mr. Trump. But in late August, a court-ordered release of documents related to the inquiry disclosed that another $1 million had come from an escrow account controlled by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump as he sought to subvert the election results.Ms. Mitchell was a participant in an infamous telephone conversation in January during which Mr. Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s win there, suggesting he could be guilty of “a criminal offense” if he did not.Although officials said Mr. Trump did not contribute to the escrow account, it remains unclear who did. An email among the released documents indicates that it came from a previously unknown group called the American Voting Rights Foundation, whose only known officer is an accountant who has managed money for Republican congressional campaigns and conservative political action committees.Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who advised former President Donald J. Trump, controls an escrow account that has given $1 million to the election review in Arizona.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOther documents show that the Arizona Senate signed two $50,000 contracts — to inspect voter signatures on mail ballot envelopes and images of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County — with Shiva Ayyadurai, an election conspiracy theorist who is against vaccines and known in far-right circles as “Dr. Shiva.”And this week, The Arizona Republic reported that Doug Logan, the head of Cyber Ninjas, the firm the State Senate hired to oversee the investigation, had worked with allies and lawyers for Mr. Trump last winter as they sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s election victory.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

The race for chancellor is tightening, but Angela Merkel says Armin Laschet is the man to fill her shoes.STRALSUND, Germany — Only days before Germans cast their ballots for a new Parliament and with it a new government and leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the campaign trail this week — further proof that her conservatives are in a perilous position.Ms. Merkel, of course, is no longer a candidate. She is stepping down and had hoped to stay away from the race. But instead she spent Tuesday in her own district stumping for the struggling candidate for her Christian Democratic Union, Armin Laschet. She even quipped about her smaller-than-average shoe size, hoping to convince voters that those shoes are best filled by Mr. Laschet.For weeks, polls have shown a lead for the Social Democratic Party, traditional rivals of the conservative Christian Democrats yet also their governing partners. But in the final week before Sunday’s vote, the conservatives have narrowed the gap to roughly three percentage points.The Christian Democrats are Germany’s largest political party and for decades have been the country’s most dominant political force. Despite their current second-place situation, they have a reputation for being strong closers, which is giving Mr. Laschet hope after an underwhelming campaign. The Green party, the unexpected early leaders in the race, are in third place at the moment.The Social Democrats are running one of their strongest election campaign in years, marked by clear messaging on progressive issues from increasing the minimum wage to creating more affordable housing. And their front-runner candidate, Olaf Scholz, has been selling himself as the best fit for Ms. Merkel’s shoes.The Social Democratic candidate Olaf Scholz during a campaign event this month in Munich.Andreas Gebert/Reuters“Social democracy is back,” said Andrea Römmele, dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.For years, the Social Democrats were the forgotten junior partner in the government, and Ms. Merkel often managed to win praise for ideas that they actually put forward, such as introducing a national minimum wage and allowing same-sex marriage.“In this election, the S.P.D. has succeeded in talking about their achievements while in government and to get credit for it,” Ms. Römmele said.A lack of a strong narrative has been one of the biggest problems nagging Mr. Laschet, who is the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia and leader of the Christian Democratic Union. His campaign has been marred by blunders that have led critics to question his professionalism and ability to lead.This week, he came under criticism again. On Tuesday, he released a new campaign video in which he is seen trying to calmly deal with a well-known anti-vaccine protester. But if he hoped the ad would show his diplomatic skills, it instead brought criticism of poor taste, because it was released days after a coronavirus denier shot and killed a 20-year-old gas station attendant who refused the man service because he did not wear a mask.Speaking to the several hundred people who had gathered late Tuesday on the wet cobblestones of the Old Market Square in this city on the Baltic Sea coast, which Ms. Merkel has represented since 1990, Mr. Laschet honored the victim, then chided the several dozen anti-vaccine demonstrators who had shown up to protest the government with shouts and whistles.“We do not want this violence,” he said. But neither his condemnation nor his pledge to increase security elicited much applause. He also didn’t manage to silence the noise beyond the barriers.Ms. Merkel and Mr. Laschet on Tuesday in Stralsund.John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe rally was meant to shore up support for Mr. Laschet, but for townspeople and tourists alike, it turned into an opportunity to catch a last glimpse of the woman whose outsize role in their country and in Europe has influenced their lives since November 2005.Christine Braun, a member of the Christian Democrats in Stralsund, said that Mr. Laschet would be getting her vote, but he was not the reason she was standing in the driving rain on a chilly September night.“I came to honor Ms. Merkel, our chancellor and representative,” she said, adding that throughout her 30 years representing the constituency, Ms. Merkel would visit regularly, attending meetings and engaging with the community. “She remained approachable and down-to-earth.”Vilana Cassing and Tim Taugnitz, both students in their early 20s, were vacationing in Stralsund and saw the posters advertising the event and Ms. Merkel’s attendance. They decided to attend more out of curiosity to see the woman who had shaped their lives than out of political interest.They described their political leanings as “leftist-Green,” saying they would vote on Sunday, but not for Mr. Laschet.“I think it is good if the Christian Democrats go into opposition,” Mr. Taugnitz said.That could happen. On Sunday, voters will go to the polls, though many may have already done so, with the pandemic resulting in an unusually high number of requests for mail-in ballots — a form of voting that has been around in Germany since 1957 and that organizers assure is safe.Should the Social Democrats emerge as the strongest party, they would still need to find at least one partner to form a government. While that means that the roles could be reversed, with the Christian Democrats as the junior partners under Mr. Scholz, more likely is a center-left alliance led by the Social Democrats together with the Greens and the business friendly Free Democrats.Campaign posters this month in Berlin showing the top candidates for chancellor: Annalena Baerbock, Olaf Scholz and Armin Laschet.Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesMr. Laschet has been warning against the threat posed by such an alliance, seeking to paint the other parties as a danger to the prosperity that Germans have enjoyed under Ms. Merkel.“It’s completely wrong what the S.P.D. and the Left and the Greens are planning,” Mr. Laschet told the crowd on Tuesday, referring to pledges to increase taxes on the country’s highest earners. “They should invest and create jobs.”Ms. Merkel instead sought to praise Mr. Laschet and Georg Günther, who hopes to win the seat in Parliament that she is vacating after 30 years, for their achievements. She expressed confidence that both men would continue the course that she had set and urged her supporters to back them.“Several times today I have reported my shoe size,” Ms. Merkel told the crowd in Stralsund. Nodding to Mr. Günther and smiling, she said that he could “manage” to fill her shoes — European size 38, or U.S. 7 and a half. Then she turned to Mr. Laschet and added, “he is the one who can do it,” at the chancellery.Listening from the sidelines, Thilo Haberstroh, a native of the southwestern city of Karlsruhe who was in Stralsund on business and only happened on the rally by chance, said he wasn’t convinced that anyone in the running had what it takes to be the next chancellor of Germany.“This was interesting, but none of them have really made an impression on me,” he said. “I still don’t know who will get my vote on Sunday.” More

In a special Opinion Audio bonanza, Jane Coaston (The Argument), Ezra Klein (The Ezra Klein Show) and Kara Swisher (Sway) sit down to discuss what went wrong for the G.O.P. in the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “This was where the nationalization of politics really bit back for Republicans,” Jane says. The three hosts then debate whether the media industry’s criticism of itself does any good at all. “The media tweets like nobody’s watching,” Ezra says. Then the hosts turn to The Wall Street Journal’s revelations in “The Facebook Files” and discuss how to hold Facebook accountable. “We’re saying your tools in the hands of malevolent players are super dangerous,” Kara says, “but we have no power over them whatsoever.”And last, Ezra, Jane and Kara offer recommendations to take you deep into history, fantasy and psychotropics.[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Read more about the subjects in this episode:Jane Coaston, Vox: “How California conservatives became the intellectual engine of Trumpism”Ezra Klein: “Gavin Newsom Is Much More Than the Lesser of Two Evils” and “A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture”Kara Swisher: “The Endless Facebook Apology,” “Don’t Get Bezosed,” “The Medium of the Moment” “‘They’re Killing People’? Biden Isn’t Quite Right, but He’s Not Wrong.” and “The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s Naïveté”(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photographs courtesy of The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at [email protected] or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce, Alison Bruzek and Nayeema Raza. Engineering, music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Kristin Lin. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen and Blakeney Schick. More

In the next national Parliament, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is likely to remain a pariah force. But it looks assured, too, of a role in shaping the country’s future.BERLIN — They promised they would “hunt” the elites. They questioned the need for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and described Muslim immigrants as “head scarf girls” and “knife men.”Four years ago the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, arrived in the German Parliament like a wrecking ball, the first far-right party to win a place at the heart of Germany’s democracy since World War II. It was a political earthquake in a country that had once seen Hitler’s Nazi party rise from the fringes to win power in free elections.As another election looms on Sunday, the worst fears of many Germans have not come true: Support for the party has dipped. But neither have the hopes that the AfD would disappear from the political scene as suddenly as it appeared. If Germany’s fate in this election will not be settled by the far right, political analysts say, Germany’s future will partly be shaped by it.“The AfD is here to stay,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology at Magdeburg University of Applied Sciences and an expert on the far right. “There was the widespread and naïve hope that this was a short-lived protest phenomenon. The reality is that the far right has become entrenched in the German political landscape.”The AfD is polling at roughly 11 percent, just below its 2017 result of 12.6 percent, and is all but guaranteed to retain its presence in Parliament. (Parties with less than 5 percent of the vote do not get any seats.) But with all other parties refusing to include the AfD in talks about forming the next governing coalition, it is effectively barred from power.“The AfD is isolated,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at Trier University.Yet with Germany’s two main parties having slipped well below the 30 percent mark, the AfD remains a disruptive force, one that complicates efforts to build a governing coalition with a majority of votes and parliamentary seats. Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two lead candidates in the election, believes that, eventually, the firewall other parties have erected against his party will crumble — most likely starting in one of the states in the former Communist East that is currently its power base.Tino Chrupalla, second from right, and other members of the AfD party before a meeting of the Parliament in Berlin last year.Michael Sohn/Associated Press“It’s not sustainable,” he said. “I’m confident that sooner or later there is no way without the AfD,” he told reporters this past week. “It will certainly start on the state level.”Founded eight years ago as nationalist free-market protest party against the Greek bailout and the euro, the AfD has sharply shifted to the right.The party seized on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome over a million migrants to Germany in 2015 and 2016, actively fanning fears of Islamization and migrant crime. Its noisy nationalism and anti-immigrant stance were what first catapulted it into Parliament and instantly turned it into Germany’s main opposition party.But the party has struggled to expand its early gains during the past 18 months, as the pandemic and, more recently, climate change have shot to the top of the list of voters’ concerns — while its core issue of immigration has barely featured in this year’s election campaign.The AfD has tried to jump on the chaos in Afghanistan to fan fears of a new migrant crisis. “Cologne, Kassel or Konstanz can’t cope with more Kabul,” one of the party’s campaign posters asserted. “Save the world? Sure. But Germany first!” another read.At a recent election rally north of Frankfurt, Mr. Chrupalla demanded that lawmakers “abolish” the constitutional right to asylum. He also told the public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that Germany should be prepared to protect its borders, “if need be with armed force.”None of this rhetoric has shifted the race, particularly because voters seem to have more fundamental concerns about the party’s aura of extremism. Some AfD leaders have marched with extremists in the streets, while among the party’s supporters are an eclectic array of conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazi sympathizers.The AfD has not been linked directly to political violence, but its verbal transgressions have contributed to a normalization of violent language and coincided with a series of deadly far-right terrorist attacks.Supporters of the party at a rally in the central German city of Magdeburg this summer.Annegret Hilse/ReutersIn June 2019, a regional politician who had defended Ms. Merkel’s refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch by a well-known neo-Nazi. The killer later told the court that he had attended a high-profile AfD protest a year earlier.Since then, a far-right extremist has attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle during a Yom Kippur service, leaving two dead and only narrowly failing to commit a massacre. Another extremist shot dead 9 mostly young people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau.The AfD’s earlier rise in the polls stalled almost instantly after the Hanau attack.“After these three attacks, the wider German public and media realized for the first time that the rhetoric of the AfD leads to real violence,” said Hajo Funke of the Free University in Berlin, who has written extensively about the party and tracks its evolution.“It was a turning point,” he said. “They have come to personify the notion that words lead to deeds.”Shortly after the Hanau attack, Thomas Haldenwang, the chief of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, placed elements of the AfD under surveillance for far-right extremism — even as the party’s lawmakers continued to work in Parliament.“We know from German history that far-right extremism didn’t just destroy human lives, it destroyed democracy,” Mr. Haldenwang warned after announcing his decision in March last year. “Far-right extremism and far-right terrorism are currently the biggest danger for democracy in Germany.”Today, the agency has classified about a third of all AfD members as extremist, including Mr. Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, the party’s other lead candidate. A court is reviewing whether the entire party can soon be placed under formal observation.Alice Weidel, the AfD’s other co-leader, during a media conference in Berlin last month.Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock“The AfD is irrelevant in power-political terms,” said Mr. Funke. “But it is dangerous.”Mr. Chrupalla, a decorator who occasionally takes the stage in his overalls, and Ms. Weidel, a suit-wearing former Goldman Sachs analyst and gay mother of two, have sought to counter that impression. As if to hammer home the point, the party’s main election slogan this year is: “Germany — but normal.”A look through the party’s 207-page election program shows what “normal” means: The AfD demands Germany’s exit from the European Union. It calls for the abolition of any mandates to fight the coronavirus. It wants to return to the traditional German definition of citizenship based on blood ancestry. And it is the only party in Parliament that denies man-made climate change, while also calling for investment in coal and a departure from the Paris climate accord.That the AfD’s polling numbers have barely budged for the past 18 months suggests that its supporters are not protest voters but Germans who subscribe to its ideas and ideology.“The AfD has brought out into the open a small but very radical electorate that many thought we don’t have in this country,” said Mr. Quent, the sociologist. “Four years ago people were asking: ‘Where does this come from?’ In reality it was always there. It just needed a trigger.”Mr. Quent and other experts estimate the nationwide ceiling of support for the party at around 14 percent. But in parts of the former Communist East, where the AfD has become a broad-based political force entrenched at the local level, it is often twice that — enough to make it the region’s second-strongest political force.Among the under 60-year olds, Mr. Quent said, it has become No. 1.“It’s only a question of time until AfD is the strongest party in the East,” Mr. Quent said.That is why Mr. Chrupalla, whose constituency is in the eastern state of Saxony, the one state where the AfD already came first in 2017, predicts it will eventually become too big to bypass.“In the East we are a people’s party, we are well-established at the local, city, regional and state level,” Mr. Chrupalla said. “In the East the middle class votes for the AfD. In the West, they vote for the Greens.”Christopher F. Schuetze More

The attention may be on House and Senate campaigns, but these races — some of which will be true tossups — may be just as important.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.This weekend, word leaked that Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman and presidential candidate, is on the cusp of announcing a run for governor of Texas next year, taking on the incumbent Republican, Greg Abbott.Given Mr. O’Rourke’s celebrity, and perhaps the schadenfreude some might feel of watching Texas once again elude a high-profile Democrat’s grasp, the news instantly made the state one of the marquee races of 2022. It also served as a reminder that for all of the attention ladled on the upcoming House and Senate campaigns, the governors’ races may be just as important.That’s because, as Jennifer Rubin noted last month in The Washington Post, state-level, statewide races offer a different, and maybe more accurate, reading of Trump-wing strength than congressional campaigns. That’s especially true now, after governors have waded into fights over masks, Covid vaccines and critical race theory, making the elections about not just the performance of individual governors, but also the strength of the MAGA cause as a whole.The parties certainly get it: According to OpenSecrets.org, the Democratic Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association have already raised a combined $46.6 million, and spent $28.2 million, for the 2021 and 2022 governor races, significantly more than usual. The money is also a function of the sheer number of upcoming races: two this year and an astounding 36 next November.Most of those races are in deeply red or deeply blue states, but analysts consider five to be true tossups — Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and another five as possible nail-biters — Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada and New Hampshire.Let’s take a look at the battlegrounds, state by state, to see what’s at stake and who might come out on top a year from now.ArizonaGov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, is leaving office because of term limits, making this an open race in a once-solidly red state that has been trending purple. As in Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and possibly Wisconsin, the race’s dynamics are complicated by a close Senate race — in this case, Mark Kelly, a freshman Democrat who won his seat last year in a special election, is running to defend it against a crowded field of five Republicans.Just as we saw in the California recall election last week, the candidates for governor are turning this into a referendum on Trumpism. Not that they need to say much: Mr. Ducey’s efforts to block local mask mandates and pass restrictive voting laws have already made this a state race with national implications.The leading Democratic candidate is Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state who saw her national profile rise in the months after the 2020 election, when she defended the integrity of the state’s vote against pro-Trump activists in the State Legislature who forced a recount.“Right now, our state government is being run by conspiracy theorists who are more focused on political posturing than getting things done, and that needs to change,” Ms. Hobbs said in her campaign announcement.She’s running against a widening field of Republicans, most of whom go beyond lip service in their adherence to Trumpism. It’s still early, of course, but the leader in at least one poll is Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who has trafficked in debunked Covid theories and declared her campaign a fight against “fake news.”She’s not alone in her right-wing pro-Trump flair. Kimberly Yee, the state treasurer, is an adamant Trump acolyte, and even Matt Salmon, a former congressman who was once a more conventional conservative, has picked up the MAGA banner. Yee is running on a platform of “Arizona first,” a clearly intentional echo of Mr. Trump’s “America first” rallying cry.GeorgiaLike Mr. Ducey, Gov. Brian Kemp, who is not term limited, has spent the past several months warring against masks and in favor of voting restrictions. But he is also in Mr. Trump’s cross hairs for refusing to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state in 2020 (something that Mr. Kemp doesn’t have the authority to do, a fact that doesn’t seem to register with Mr. Trump and his followers).Mr. Kemp faces an insurgent campaign in the primary from Vernon Jones, a former Democratic legislator who switched parties this year and is running on a promise to conduct a county-by-county ballot audit of the 2020 vote. Mr. Kemp has significantly more money than Mr. Jones, but Mr. Jones has a respectable 24 percent of Republican support, according to a poll by the Trafalgar Group, which also shows that an endorsement by Mr. Trump could rocket him past the incumbent. (There’s also talk that David Perdue, who lost his Senate race to Jon Ossoff in January, might enter the Republican primary.)No Democrat has announced a campaign, but all eyes in the party are on Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost to Mr. Kemp in 2018 and has since built a national profile, and a significant war chest, around grass-roots organizing and voter enfranchisement.The prospect of an Abrams candidacy creates an opportunity for Mr. Kemp: Mr. Jones may be more Trump-y (he is running on a Trump-inflected “Georgia first” line), but the incumbent can claim that he’s better positioned to stave off Ms. Abrams, whom he and his Republican allies are already painting as a threat to Georgian livelihood just short of General Sherman.Should Mr. Jones best Mr. Kemp in the primary (and if Ms. Abrams does decide to run), he would set up a historic race: the first time in modern U.S. history when both major parties nominated a Black candidate for governor.KansasIn 2018, Laura Kelly, a Democrat, won an unlikely victory in this blood-red state, thanks to the deep unpopularity of cuts to education spending by former Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, and the even deeper unpopularity of her opponent, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state.Ms. Kelly had hoped to benefit from a tough two-man Republican primary between Jeff Colyer, a former lieutenant governor who served as governor for a year after Brownback resigned to take a job with the Trump administration, and Derek Schmidt, the state attorney general. But Mr. Colyer pulled out of the race last month after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.Until Mr. Colyer pulled out, analysts considered the race a tossup, and Ms. Kelly still has several advantages, not least of which is the still-painful memory of the Brownback years. But this is a state that Mr. Trump won by about 15 percentage points in 2020 — in fact, it’s the only 2022 race where a Democrat faces re-election in a Trump state.PennsylvaniaLike Arizona, Pennsylvania has been a centerpoint for false claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election. This continuing obsession on the right has in turn colored the Republican primary to replace the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, who is term limited.Eight Republicans have declared their candidacy, though no one has emerged as a front-runner. All of them, to some degree, have embraced the pro-Trump cause, if not the specific claims about voter fraud. So far Lou Barletta, a former congressman, has attracted significant attention because of his hard-line immigration stance and name recognition, but it’s anyone’s race at this point.Only one Democrat, Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general, has entered the race, and it’s very likely to stay that way. With an open Senate seat drawing Democrats’ attention, Mr. Shapiro was able to stake a claim relatively early, and convince his party that a rally around his candidacy gave it the best shot at keeping the governor’s mansion.WisconsinGov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, won election in 2018 by a margin of just 30,000 votes, and Republicans smell blood in the water. Still, it took a long time for a candidate to announce — on Sept. 9, Rebecca Kleefisch, who served as lieutenant governor for eight years under Mr. Evers’s predecessor, Scott Walker, entered the race and immediately became the odds-on favorite to win the primary.A relative moderate, or at least a conventional Republican, she has nevertheless embraced right-wing voter-bait like robust vaccine exemptions and banning critical race theory from classrooms. She is also taking the risky strategy of leaning on her connections with Mr. Walker — he endorsed her, and his son is her campaign’s political director — even though Mr. Walker is a deeply divisive figure in the state.As in several other battleground states, the shape of the Wisconsin governor’s race will depend in part on the Senate: in this case, whether the Republican senator Ron Johnson runs for re-election, a decision he has yet to announce.The RestFlorida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada and New Hampshire — it’s still early, and each of these states could end up battlegrounds. Democrats pine for a misstep by Ron DeSantis of Florida; Republicans dream of defeating Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. As it stands, though, both incumbents will probably keep their jobs, as will two Democrats, Janet Mills in Maine (she may well face former Gov. Paul LePage, a deeply unpopular character) and Steve Sisolak in Nevada.New Hampshire is a bit different: The incumbent, Chris Sununu, a Republican, has publicly toyed with the idea of running for Senate instead, and if he did both parties would have to weed through a half-dozen or more candidates each who are already circling the primary. Whether the result would be a tossup general election or a likely Republican win is anyone’s guess at this point.Though let’s face it, so are most of the rest of these races; it’s 2021 after all (and soon to be 2022). And no one is banking on today’s topsy-turvy electoral fortune more than Beto O’Rourke — while most analysts consider Texas a likely Republican win, a poll this month by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas-Tyler put him just five points behind Mr. Abbott. It also has Mr. Abbott losing hard to a name that could only make sense in today’s anything-goes political climate: Matthew McConaughey.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

Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.Read the Trump campaign’s internal memoLast November, communications staff members on the Trump campaign hastily assembled a memo examining outlandish election claims. The memo found that many of the allegations were baseless.Read DocumentEven at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach voting machines and reverse the 2020 election’s outcome. Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressMr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More