Elections

Elected leaders and voters in New York remain split over the ranked-choice system, but officials in Washington and elsewhere like the results. The most high-profile experiment in ranked-choice voting in U.S. history just took place in New York City. The reviews are mixed.Hundreds of thousands of voters ranked up to five candidates on their ballots in the Democratic primary for mayor, and many were glad to have that option. Others found the system confusing or wished they had been more strategic in making their choices.Some elected officials want to scrap the system because they believe it may disenfranchise Black voters, among others. But for now, it appears, ranked-choice voting is here to stay. Eric Adams, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary, saw his lead over the second-place candidate shrink from 75,000 votes to only 7,197 after ranked-choices were counted, and he attacked two of his rivals for campaigning together in the race’s final days to try to beat him. One of Mr. Adams’s allies, Councilman I. Daneek Miller of Queens, is promoting a bill that would let New Yorkers decide whether they want to keep ranked-choice voting, although there does not appear to be enough support among his colleagues for it to be approved.“You see these large leads dwindle because of voter rankings,” Mr. Miller said. “Is this an exercise in mediocrity? Do we want fourth- and fifth-place votes deciding leadership?”This year’s primary was the first time New York had used ranked-choice voting in a citywide race. The system is used in other countries and in cities like San Francisco, but it had never been attempted in a larger American city. Other places, including Washington D.C., the Seattle area and Lansing, Mich., could move to adopt the system. Christina Henderson, a member of Washington’s city council and a supporter of a bill that would bring ranked-choice there, said the New York election showed the system’s benefits, including the diversity of winning candidates like Mr. Adams, who is likely to become the city’s second Black mayor.“Races are more dynamic and collegial with genuine policy debates supplanting negative campaign tactics,” Ms. Henderson said.The new system changed how some candidates campaigned for mayor, encouraging them to appeal to their rivals’ supporters to earn a spot on their ballots. By striking a late alliance with Andrew Yang, for example, Kathryn Garcia won over many of his voters.But a major snafu by the city’s perennially dysfunctional Board of Elections — accidentally releasing an inaccurate vote count — could undermine confidence in the system. And although Mr. Adams won the primary, his allies have raised concerns that ranked-choice voting could hurt Black voters who might choose only one candidate. Some Black leaders sued last year to try to stop the system from being introduced.Mr. Adams himself has criticized how ranked-choice voting was rolled out, but he does not want to eliminate it. He said it was an obstacle for some voters and called for more education about it. “Your New York Times readers, your Wall Street Journal readers and all of those that had the ability to analyze all this information, it’s fine for them,” Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on WNYC this week. “But that’s not the reality when English is a second language, that’s not the reality for 85- and 90-year-old voters who are trying to navigate the process. Every new barrier you put in place, you’re going to lose voters in the process.”The system’s supporters have defended it vigorously, arguing that voters did understand how to use it. Maya Wiley, who finished third in the Democratic mayoral primary, wrote a piece for The Washington Post in support of the system despite losing. Ranked-choice advocates say the system helped improve the fortunes of female and minority candidates. The City Council appears poised to have its first-ever female majority, and women finished second and third in the mayoral primary. “We won’t let anyone take away the people’s voice and go back to the old system where costly, low-turn out runoff elections actually disenfranchised people,” said Debbie Louis, the lead organizer for Rank the Vote NYC, a group that supports the voting system. Some voters did not like the new approach. Rebecca Yhisreal, 61, who lives in West Harlem, said she voted for Mr. Adams first and ranked three other candidates on her ballot. But she said she preferred the old system, under which New Yorkers voted for one candidate and if no one got more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff. “It was kind of confusing,” she said. “I would rather it go back to how it was.”William Brown, a retiree who lives in Harlem, said the crowded mayoral ballot, which had 13 Democrats, had made it difficult for him to make sense of each candidate’s positions and to determine how to rank those he liked best. He said he had ranked Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, first, and had forgotten how many other candidates he ranked.“It’s unfair,” he said. “You have to take the time to understand it, but there’s too many candidates. It’s detrimental.”Mr. Miller, who is in his final year in the City Council and testified at a State Assembly hearing this week with other critics of ranked-choice voting, said residents in his Southeast Queens district had complained to him about the new system. It encouraged voters to focus on the horse race between candidates rather than on issues, he said.Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes on an initial tally, the process moves to an elimination-round method. The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidates those voters ranked next. The process continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.Some voters expressed regret that they had not been more shrewd by picking between Mr. Adams or Ms. Garcia so that their ballot helped decide the winner. More than 140,000 ballots were “exhausted,” meaning they did not name either finalist and were therefore thrown out. Those ballots represented nearly 15 percent of the 940,000 votes cast, a higher rate than in some other ranked-choice elections. In London Breed’s 2018 mayoral victory in San Francisco, about 8.5 percent of ballots were exhausted. Advocates for ranked-choice voting say the share of exhausted ballots should decrease as New Yorkers become more familiar with the system.Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, said he wanted to see more detailed voter data before deciding whether the system was a success. He said he would be concerned if the data showed wealthy voters ranking five candidates and poorer ones not doing so.“What I don’t want to see is a system that enfranchises some people and not others and we need the research to really tell what happened here,” Mr. de Blasio said.The city’s Board of Elections is planning to release detailed ballot information in the coming weeks that will reveal which neighborhoods took full advantage of ranked-choice voting. The information, known as the cast-vote record, will not be made public until recounts are completed in two unresolved City Council races. Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, does not appear to favor doing away with ranked-choice voting. Asked about his position on Mr. Miller’s bill, Mr. Johnson’s spokeswoman said in a statement that New Yorkers had voted to create the system in 2019.“Nearly three-quarters of voters approved the new system,” the spokeswoman, Jennifer Fermino, said. “The mission now should be to help provide more education on this important change to our elections.”Many voters liked ranked-choice voting. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Andrew Wilkes, 35, a pastor and policy director for Generation Citizen, a nonprofit civic-education group, said he felt the system gave voters more choices and made it easier for candidates of color to enter the race. He ranked Ms. Wiley first among the five candidates he listed for mayor.“I found it pretty intuitive,” Mr. Wilkes said. More

President Biden made a gleeful return to the campaign trail on Friday evening, joining former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who is seeking to regain his old job in November, for his first campaign event since his inauguration.In a park in Arlington County, a short drive from Washington, Mr. Biden appeared to be back in his electoral element, shedding his necktie, whipping up the crowd and repeatedly casting Mr. McAuliffe as a crucial ally in his fight for a sprawling agenda to remake American capitalism.“I need him,” Mr. Biden said as Mr. McAuliffe beamed behind him. “I need him.”Mr. McAuliffe easily won the Democratic nomination for the Virginia governor’s race in June, hoping to return to the office four years after he served his term. The state does not permit governors to run for consecutive terms.Mr. Biden won Virginia handily last year on his way to the White House, but some Democrats are worried about Mr. McAuliffe’s prospects this year against the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, a political newcomer and former private equity executive. Mr. Youngkin has the ability to spend millions of dollars of his own money to help make the race competitive.Trading his more serene presidential demeanor for a fiery campaign one, Mr. Biden sought to tie the coming elections to his own political project. Instead of his typical practice in White House speeches of leaning into the microphone and whispering to emphasize his points, the president leaned in and shouted.“We’re going to have to go out and win, win this thing, win races up and down the ticket,” he implored the crowd.Mr. Biden repeatedly praised his coronavirus relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, including the direct checks that were sent to low- and middle-income workers. He also pitched his suite of proposals to overhaul American capitalism, including reducing prescription drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and making two years of community college free for all students, paid for by raising taxes on corporations and high earners.In each case, Mr. Biden called Mr. McAuliffe a partner in his vision. “Terry and I share the same basic truth,” Mr. Biden said. “Trickle-down economies never work.”He leaned on policy to draw contrasts with Republicans. “In this election and in 2022, the question the American people are going to be asking is whether or not we’re helping them and their families,” Mr. Biden said. He added: “We have to show we do understand, and we’re delivering for them. And we’re keeping our promises.”Republicans sought to criticize Mr. McAuliffe over the visit. In a news release on Friday, the Republican National Committee called Mr. Biden and Mr. McAuliffe “swampy career politicians with failed records who are now tripping over themselves to embrace the radical left as quickly as possible.”Mr. McAuliffe, who mulled a presidential run in 2020 but passed and endorsed Mr. Biden, has sought to make the race a referendum on former President Donald J. Trump, who has backed Mr. Youngkin enthusiastically. Mr. Trump remains popular with Republicans in the state’s rural areas but has alienated moderates in the Washington suburbs.Mr. McAuliffe has sought to tether Mr. Youngkin to Mr. Trump, joking that he would pay for the fuel for Mr. Trump to visit the state and campaign for Mr. Youngkin. And the former governor has embraced Mr. Biden, expressing hope that the president will campaign for him multiple times before November.In his speech introducing Mr. Biden, Mr. McAuliffe accused Mr. Youngkin of founding his campaign “on an election integrity plan that was based on Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory about the 2020 election, and for five months that is the only plan that he had on his website.”“Let me clear it up for you,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “Joe Biden won that election.”Mr. McAuliffe later drew cheers for vowing to raise Virginia’s minimum wage to $15 an hour within the next three years, an echo of Mr. Biden’s unsuccessful attempts to raise the federal minimum wage to that level.Then he yielded to Mr. Biden, who commanded the stage for almost exactly a half-hour. When the president finished — with a more energetic-than-normal version of his typical request for God to bless America and its troops — he turned to embrace Mr. McAuliffe, then wheeled back to the crowd, smiling and waving. More

To write three books in four years about Donald Trump has been an immersion into his obsessions and fixations. This is why I know the obvious: Donald Trump will run for president again.This spring, in another of his compulsive bids for attention — indifferent to whether it is good or bad — he hosted me at Mar-a-Lago, even after I had written two unflattering books about him (one whose publication he tried to stop), for an interview and dinner. After dinner, I asked about his plans for a presidential library, the traditional retirement project and fund-raising scheme of ex-presidents. There was a flash of confusion on his uniquely readable face, and then anger, aroused, I figured, by the implication of what I seemed to be saying — that his time in office was past.“No way, no way,” he snarled, “no way.”It is an existential predicament: He can’t be Donald Trump without a claim on the presidency. He can’t hold the attention and devotion of the Republican Party if he is not both once and future king — and why would he ever give that up? Indeed, it seemed to be that I was strategically seated in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago when I arrived precisely so I could overhear the efforts by a Republican delegation to court and grovel before Mr. Trump and to observe his dismissive dominance over them.More than a bit of his subsequent conversation with me was about his contempt for any Republican who might be less than absolute in his or her devotion to him — after all, he had the power to make or break the people who have since disappointed him (like Senator Mitch McConnell and Justice Brett Kavanaugh). He seemed not so much paranoid about challenges to him but warlike, savoring his future retributions.He repeatedly returns to his grudge against his once obsequious vice president with relish; Mike Pence has become more public about his own political ambitions. In his telling, it is Mr. Pence whose actions confirmed “the steal,” by his refusal to overturn the electoral vote count, over which he presided in January in the Senate. I believe he will run again just to stop the men who, in his view, helped take the presidency from him from trying to get it for themselves. The reports that reach him of the West Wing and members of his administration who refuse to subscribe to the idea of “the steal” only feeds his fury and determination to punish all doubters — “some very weak people who have worked for me but won’t in the future,” as he told me.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has become another frequent subject at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where the former president is spending the summer away from the Florida heat. Many members of Trumpworld believe Mr. DeSantis, who came in second to Mr. Trump in a CPAC straw poll this month, might, unbelievably, run for the 2024 nomination even if Mr. Trump runs. The idea that Mr. DeSantis, who Mr. Trump believes he “made” by his endorsement, might not accept his dependence on and obligation to Mr. Trump would be a personal affront that must be met. Mr. Trump pointedly blew off the governor’s request that he postpone a Florida rally in the aftermath of the Surfside building collapse. Clear message: The governor is not the boss of him. (Mr. DeSantis has denied making this request.)The continued career of Mr. McConnell, to whom Mr. Trump has not spoken since vilifying him with a heap of obscenity after Mr. McConnell acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory, is unfinished business. (Trump aides believe the two are likely to never speak again.)Mr. Trump believes that Mr. McConnell retained his Senate seat in 2020 only because of his support. The war against Mr. McConnell is a war about who controls the Republican Party — if it’s Mr. Trump’s party, it can’t be Mr. McConnell’s. If candidates win because of his endorsements, thereby making Mr. Trump himself the ultimate winner, and inevitable front-runner, then it’s surely his party. Mr. Trump, whose political muscle helped oust some Republican enemies from office in 2018, is confident about evicting Mr. McConnell once back in power. (I doubt he pays attention to the fact that Mr. McConnell was re-elected to a six-year term and has a reasonable chance of becoming the Senate majority leader again.)Many Democrats believe that the legal pursuit of the former president’s family business in New York, and other cases, including the investigation of his attempt to overturn election results in Georgia, might seriously impede his political future. But in Mr. Trump’s logic, this will run the opposite way: Running for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.Mr. Trump also believes he has a magic bullet. In his telling, the Republicans almost took back the House in 2020 because of his “telerallies,” telephone conference calls in congressional districts that attracted in some instances tens of thousands of callers. Who has that draw? he asked me, nearly smacking his lips. In 2022, with his draw, the Republicans, he is certain, will retake the House with his chosen slate of candidates. And indeed, this actually might be true.But perhaps most important, there is his classic hucksterism, and his synoptic U.S.P. — unique selling proposition. In 2016 it was “the wall.” For 2022 and 2024 he will have another proposition available: “the steal,” a rallying cry of rage and simplicity.For Democrats, who see him exiled to Mar-a-Lago, stripped of his key social media platforms and facing determined prosecutors, his future seems risible if not pathetic. But this is Donald Trump, always ready to strike back harder than he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to silence any doubts with the sound of his own voice, to take what he believes is his and, most of all, to seize all available attention. Sound the alarm.Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is a journalist and the author, most recently, of “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Anita Dunn, who is returning to her Democratic consulting company next month, has long faced questions about how her influence in the White House intersects with her company’s corporate work.WASHINGTON — For the past 17 months, since shaking up his campaign after an embarrassing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Joseph R. Biden Jr. has relied on Anita Dunn, a veteran Washington consultant, for both guidance and grudge-holding.Ms. Dunn, 63, provided direction when Mr. Biden’s campaign was flailing. Later, she refused to give Julián Castro, a former housing secretary, a requested speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention, still upset about his debate-night jab at Mr. Biden’s mental acuity, according to people familiar with the snub. And in the West Wing, she has had a hand in shaping every major policy push so far.Now Ms. Dunn is set to return to her powerful Democratic consulting company, leaving a hole in Mr. Biden’s small inner circle as the highly infectious Delta variant is ripping through unvaccinated communities and the fate of Mr. Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure deal is teetering on the edge of collapse.“She brings stability and a faithfulness to strategy,” said David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager. “You see it in the White House, where they’re very disciplined on their approach to Covid, to the economy, to the use of the president. That discipline and not swinging at every pitch is really classic Anita.”Ms. Dunn has prepped the president for every interview and news conference since she took over his campaign and driven the administration’s buttoned-up approach to dealing with the news media. She is widely credited with elevating women to senior positions in the West Wing. And she is adamantly opposed to Mr. Biden regularly taking questions from reporters, which she believes does little to advance his agenda. She prefers town hall events.But for all her discipline and expertise, Ms. Dunn’s presence in the Biden administration, and in the Obama administration before that, has raised questions about how her influence in the government intersects with the corporate work of her company, which represents clients seeking to influence policy.Ms. Dunn has only separated herself from SKDK, the corporate and political consulting company she helped found and is returning to next month, for brief periods of campaign and government work. And the fact that she is exempt from filing public financial disclosures required of full-time presidential appointees has drawn criticism from some ethics watchdogs.Her presence in the West Wing is also evidence of how Mr. Biden has prioritized his reliance on trusted figures with decades of Beltway experience, even as he promised to end the access-peddling that proliferated during the Trump administration. (This week, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a close friend of former President Donald J. Trump and one of his top 2016 campaign fund-raisers, became the latest in a series of former Trump fund-raisers, advisers and associates to face criminal charges. He was accused of using his access to Mr. Trump to advance the foreign policy goals of the United Arab Emirates and then repeatedly misleading federal agents about his activities.)Ms. Dunn and her colleagues have said she has always been scrupulous about adhering to ethics rules. SKDK emphasizes that it does not lobby but does political and media consulting.Ms. Dunn and her husband, Robert Bauer, a former White House counsel who still serves as the personal lawyer for both Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama, have long been part of the infrastructure of national Democratic politics in Washington.After the 2020 election, Ms. Dunn intended to return to her position as managing director at her company, which represents Pfizer, AT&T and Amazon, among other corporate behemoths as well as nonprofits like the N.A.A.C.P.Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, however, had other plans. They pressed Ms. Dunn to join the incoming administration, reminding her that the pandemic was killing 3,000 people a day and that Mr. Biden relied on her experience and decisiveness.Ms. Dunn did not feel as if she could say no, colleagues said.She agreed to come in only on a short-term basis, as a “special government employee,” a designation that exempts her from public financial disclosures required of full-time government staff members but also caps the number of days she can spend in the White House.Ms. Dunn, left, with Bill Knapp and Hilary Rosen, partners at the corporate and political consulting company SKDK in Washington in 2015.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesShe also did not intend to oversee Mr. Biden’s campaign. But after he finished fourth place in the Iowa caucuses, followed by a disastrous fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, Ms. Dunn, colleagues said, was motivated by a mix of loyalty and desperation.There was little money in February 2020. There were no crowds. Ms. Dunn seized control of the entire operation, living out of a Hampton Inn in Philadelphia near the campaign headquarters and approving $200 in office supply expenditures, colleagues recalled.The campaign turned around, with Ms. Dunn seen as one of the key forces behind Mr. Biden’s victory.Her move into the president’s inner circle was “more gradual than dramatic,” said Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff. “It’s kind of been building over time.”Ms. Dunn began to cement her place in Mr. Biden’s trusted kitchen cabinet of advisers in 2015, when Steve Ricchetti, Mr. Biden’s adviser and longtime friend, included her in conversations meant to help Mr. Biden decide whether to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. The meetings were raw, given the recent death of Mr. Biden’s son Beau Biden.Ms. Biden and Jill Biden in Los Angeles on Super Tuesday. Ms. Dunn helped turn the Biden campaign around from a fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses to victories in a majority of Super Tuesday states.Josh Haner/The New York TimesMs. Dunn helped Mr. Biden conclude that the timing was not right. Mr. Biden turned to her again in 2018 when he began to seriously ponder a run against Mr. Trump.In her current role, she is making a salary of $129,000, just under the $132,552 threshold that requires filing public financial disclosures. (Mr. Bauer, who is a co-chairman of the president’s commission to evaluate proposed overhauls to the Supreme Court, is also a special government employee, although his role is unpaid.)Eleanor Eagan, a research director for the Revolving Door Project, criticized the administration for allowing Ms. Dunn to avoid disclosure rules. “Biden promised to restore trust in government in the wake of Trump’s fantastically corrupt administration,” Ms. Eagan said. “Allowing this and similar evasions is a clear violation of that pledge.”Now Ms. Dunn is returning to the private sector, where her colleagues benefit from her connections in the West Wing.Ms. Dunn’s company was also hired to handle the $2.2 million direct mail contract for the Biden campaign, according to campaign filings, underscoring how the business and political worlds are sometimes aligned.Some of SKDK’s clients have drawn controversy, as was the case with NSO Group, an Israeli cybertechnology company that has been accused of using its spyware to hack the phones of journalists and human rights activists, according to The Intercept. Hilary Rosen, a partner at SKDK, said it stopped representing the company in 2019 and dropped it as a client over the spyware allegations.A senior White House official said Ms. Dunn would be subject to postgovernment restrictions that apply to former federal employees. That includes a two-year restriction on whom she contacts on matters in which the government has a “substantial interest” that was pending under her official responsibility in the White House.Even with her return to the company, nobody in the White House expects Ms. Dunn’s influence in Biden world to end completely. In fact, many view her departure as a brief moment to breathe before she starts to plan the president’s re-election, which so far he has indicated he intends to wage.“She’ll always be a phone call away,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser in the White House. More

Once upon a time, it would have been huge news if the chairman of the former president’s inaugural committee was indicted on charges of acting as an agent of a foreign power. More

As a crackdown widens in her country, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is trying to build a broad phalanx of Western opposition to a dictatorship that she says is on its “last breaths.”VILNIUS, Lithuania — She has met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and President Emmanuel Macron of France. Just this week, she was feted in Washington, where she was received by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.But while Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the unlikely pro-democracy leader from Belarus, may have little trouble getting a meeting, her high-flying company only underscores her predicament.It’s been almost a year since Ms. Tikhanovskaya was forced to flee Belarus after claiming victory in presidential elections. Now the challenge she faces is how to maintain influence in Belarus from abroad. The support of Western leaders may help, but goes only so far.Still, the meetings are part Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s strategy to build a broad Western phalanx against the Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has limited her ability to challenge him inside the country, where her return would mean certain imprisonment.Only months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand that Mr. Lukashenko resign. It was a rare democratic outburst in an eastern European country — outside the European Union and NATO — that has carefully tried to maneuver between Russia and the West, but has turned to Moscow as a primary source of support.But now opposition figures are disappearing into prisons, and protests are dwindling.“Now it’s impossible to fight openly,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said. “It’s difficult to ask people to go out for demonstrations because of a sense of fear. They see the brutality of the regime, that the most outstanding leaders and prominent figures are in jail. It’s really scary.”An opposition rally protesting the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, in October, 2020.Associated PressUnable to encourage protests inside Belarus, and with Moscow supporting Mr. Lukashenko, Ms. Tikhanovskaya is using the primary tool available to her in exile: Western support.This week, she had meetings at the State Department, the White House, the Senate and attended the launch of the Friends of Belarus Caucus in the House of Representatives.“I asked the U.S. to be the guarantors of our independence,” she told the Voice of America on Tuesday after meeting with Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.In a series of meetings, she sought more comprehensive sanctions on Belarus’s elites and businesses, to show them that it was “becoming more costly for them to support Lukashenko.”Though there were statements of support and admiration from members of Congress and the Washington elite, no new measures were announced.She and her team also sought to postpone a nearly $1 billion planned disbursement by the International Monetary Fund to Belarus, but have so far been unable to convince the institution to cancel the payment.Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s trip will continue in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, underscoring the value of Western support — and its limits.Her task, she said in an interview in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she and her team have made their base, was to convince her international supporters that change can come to Belarus with their assistance.“We can’t postpone this aim because we postpone freedom of our prisoners and we have to convince other countries in this as well,” she said before leaving for the United States.Supporters of Ms. Tikhanovskaya rallied in June in Warsaw, Poland, where they held up posters of prominent opposition bloggers who are in detention.Omar Marques/Getty Images“And with these detentions, with this violence, they show that they don’t have other methods of persuading people that they are strong, except violence,” she said. “It can’t last long, really. This is like the last breaths before death, because you can’t tighten the screws endlessly.”Some who support Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s movement worry about how it can remain relevant inside Belarus with its leader abroad.“When you are abroad in a safe situation, then all your calls to action will be very skeptically accepted in Belarus,” said Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former Belarusian diplomat.Ms. Tikhanovskaya was clear that local actors make the decisions, and that when she sought funding, it was for supporters in Belarus. “When they are ready, it’s they who decide, not us,” she said.Mr. Slunkin acknowledged that Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been a tireless and effective advocate for her country internationally. Even so, the repression in Belarus is widening.This month, the Belarus Supreme Court sentenced Viktor Babariko, a former bank chief who was barred from running for president in elections last August, to 14 years in prison for bribery and money laundering in a verdict widely seen as politically motivated.On July 14, Belarusian law enforcement officers conducted what Amnesty International called an “unprecedented wave of searches and detentions,” raiding the offices of at least a dozen civil society and human rights organizations and opposition groups.In the past year, more than 35,000 people have been detained, according to the United Nations. Tens of thousands of Belarusians have fled abroad. The list of political prisoners kept by the human rights organization Viasna, itself raided recently, includes 577 individuals.In May, a European plane traveling through Belarus’ airspace was forced to land in Minsk, where Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian dissident aboard, was seized.Belarus riot police detaining a demonstrator during an opposition rally in Minsk, Belarus, in 2020.Associated PressThe environment was “very dangerous,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya acknowledged, but she insisted she and her supporters could still be effective.“God bless the internet,” she said. “I am in constant dialogue with people who are on the ground. I don’t feel like I am in exile.”There are complications as she tries to coordinate the opposition from Lithuania, which borders Belarus and where she and her team were give special diplomatic status in early July.“The more time you spend abroad, the more time you are detached from the public you represent,” Artyom Shraibman, founder of Sense Analytics and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said by phone from his self-imposed exile from Belarus in Ukraine.“If we are honest, spending a year outside of the country where the society is changing and you have not been observing it — you are only communicating with the part of society that is as engaged as you are.”Many experts, like Mr. Slunkin, believe the key way to resolve the crisis is to increase the price of Russian support for Belarus. Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been careful not to criticize Moscow openly, but neither have they succeeded in reaching out to Russian officials.“She is being perceived by many as being pro-Western, and unacceptable to Moscow, which is true,” Mr. Shraibman said. “And this is not her choice.”President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus with his primary backer, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in May.Pool photo by Sergei IlyinWith everything she does, Ms. Tikhanovskaya said, she is mindful of how her actions can affect people behind bars in Belarus, including her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, who ran a popular YouTube channel before announcing his own candidacy for president.He, like Mr. Babariko, and a prominent opposition politician, Valery Tsepkalo, was barred from running and jailed ahead of the ballot. Ms. Tikhanovskaya collected signatures for her candidacy and ran in the place of her husband.In detention since May 2020, he is currently on trial, accused of organizing riots and “inciting social hatred.”“I’m always keeping in mind that my husband is a hostage, the same as thousands of people,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said.But she was adamant that she wants to keep the promise she campaigned on last August: new elections in which she is not necessarily on the ballot.“I’m the same woman, already with experience, already with more braveness than I had before. But look, I’m not I’m not making my career here. After elections, I will step away from all this with ease.” More

Former congresswoman Abby Finkenauer, a 32-year-old Democrat, is jumping into next year’s race against Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, an 87-year-old Republican who was first elected to the seat eight years before she was born.Ms. Finkenauer, who is from Dubuque, was narrowly defeated by the Republican Ashley Hinson last year after serving a single term representing the eastern part of the state. She kicked off her campaign Thursday by accusing Mr. Grassley and other top Republicans of “remaining silent” when the Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6.“It’s politicians like Senator Grassley and Mitch McConnell who should know better but are so obsessed with power that they oppose anything that moves us forward,” she said in an announcement video posted on her Twitter account. “Since the Capitol was attacked, they’ve turned their backs on democracy and on us.”Mr. Grassley, who was the third-ranking Republican at the time of the riot, decried it as “an attack on American democracy itself” and called on the perpetrators to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”But he subsequently opposed Democratic efforts to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection, saying that he viewed it as a “scheme” intended to distract from what he called President Biden’s failure to contain the migrant crisis at the border. And he has compared the most serious assault in the history of the Capitol to smaller, violent left-wing demonstrations in Portland, Ore., and other cities.A spokesman for Mr. Grassley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Finkenauer, who has run as a moderate in the past to attract centrists in a district that contained the urban centers of Cedar Rapids and Waterloo, signaled that she would focus on union rights, the agricultural sector and issues vital to her generation of younger voters in the upcoming election.“My parents could not give me a trust fund or debt-free college, but they taught me about seeing work to be done and doing it,” said Ms. Finkenauer, whose father was a welder, and mother a public school employee.She is the first Democratic candidate to announce her candidacy. Mr. Grassley defeated his Democratic challenger in 2016, former Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, by 25 points — a similar margin as in his previous victories.The state, once a bipartisan proving ground, veered sharply to the right in the last two presidential elections, delivering solid victories to former President Donald J. Trump after narrowly breaking for former President Barack Obama in the previous two cycles.Republicans responded to Ms. Finkenauer’s announcement by tying her to her party’s left wing, and by mocking her failure to win a second term.“Abby Finkenauer and her far-Left positions are indistinguishable from those of Bernie Sanders, A.O.C., and the socialist squad, so it’s not surprising Iowans fired her just last year,” a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman said in a statement. “Today, Abby signed up to become a two-time loser.” More

A powerful legislator, he became chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 2005 but faced scrutiny from the Justice Department for his ties to a lobbyist.Jerry Lewis, a powerful House Republican whose largess to his district in California established him as a master of the earmark but led to an investigation of his actions by the Justice Department, died on July 15 at his home in Redlands, Calif. He was 86.His son Dan confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.Mr. Lewis was elected in 1978 and served 17 terms in the House. A conservative who preferred working with Democrats to confrontational politics, he was a major fund-raiser for Republican candidates; his party’s third-ranking member, as conference chairman; and, briefly, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.“He represented a style of politics that no longer dominates the party,” John H. Pitney Jr., an aide of Mr. Lewis’s in the mid-1980s who is now a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said by phone. “He was very much an ally of Bob Michel” — the former House minority leader from Maryland — “and never a favorite of the Gingrich faction, which took him down from the chairmanship of the House Republican Conference” in 1992. (Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip and later the speaker, supported the successful candidacy of Dick Armey of Texas over Mr. Lewis.)Mr. Lewis was best known for sending enormous sums of money back to his district through the use of earmarks, provisions in congressional spending bills that direct funds to a specific recipient. He sent tens of millions of dollars to educational, medical and research institutions, military installations, a dam on the Santa Ana River, extensive tree clearing in the San Bernardino National Forest and other projects in his Southern California district.In 2005, when he became chairman of the Appropriations Committee — after six years as chairman of its defense subcommittee — he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside about his ambition for his district.“My goal as chairman is not just to create a huge funnel to San Bernardino and Riverside counties,” he said. “But I have a feeling we will in California manage to get our share.”But in 2006, the Justice Department began an investigation into whether Mr. Lewis had improperly steered millions of dollars in earmarks to clients of a lobbyist, Bill Lowery, a former Republican congressman from California and an old friend. Some of the clients donated to Mr. Lewis’s re-election campaign.Subpoenas were issued seeking details about how communities and businesses in Mr. Lewis’s district chose to hire Mr. Lowery’s firm, how much they paid, and the nature of communications between the firm and Mr. Lewis.Four years later, the Justice Department dropped the investigation.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that had been critical of Mr. Lewis’s ties to Mr. Lowery, condemned the Justice Department’s decision.“Exactly what will a politician have to do for the Department of Justice to sit up and take notice?” Melanie Sloan, then the group’s executive director, said in an interview with The Associated Press.Looking back on the investigation in 2012, shortly before he retired from the House, Mr. Lewis told the Southern California public radio station KPCC, “It’ll always be there, and the reality is that we have attempted to be a positive impact in public service.”Charles Jeremy Lewis was born on Oct. 21, 1934, in Seattle and moved with his family to San Bernardino, Calif., as a child. His father, Edward, was a civil engineer who worked on the construction of New Deal projects. His mother, Ruth, was a homemaker.After studying veterinary science at the University of California, Berkeley, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. After working in the insurance business, Mr. Lewis served on the San Bernardino Board of Education and then was elected to the California State Assembly. He served there for a decade. During his tenure, he pushed for voter approval to make a reporter shield law — to protect the confidentiality of sources — an amendment to the state constitution and wrote legislation that established an air pollution control agency in Southern California.Once elected to the House, he was named to the Appropriations Committee in his second term and became chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Four years later he took over the defense subcommittee. His two years as Appropriations Committee chairman ended in 2007, after Democrats won the House majority.In addition to his son Dan, Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Arlene (Willis) Lewis; a daughter, Jenifer Engler; two other sons, Jerry Jr., and Jeff; a stepdaughter, Julie Willis Leon; two stepsons, Jimmy and Marty Willis; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and two brothers, Ray and John. His marriage to Sally Lord ended in divorce.Having the same name as a famous comedian was something that trailed Mr. Lewis throughout his career. “He had a good sense of humor” about it, Dan Lewis said. He recalled his father campaigning at a parade in Apple Valley, Calif., where people were eager to see the funnyman, not the lawmaker. The crowd might have been disappointed, he said, but the congressman “wasn’t annoyed.” More