Elections

Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat who was floated as a potential vice-presidential pick in 2020, will challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, in a 2022 race likely to be fought over the legacy of a third Sunshine Stater — former President Donald J. Trump.The announcement on Wednesday by Ms. Demings, the former police chief of Orlando and one of the managers of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, was expected for weeks.But it came as welcome news to embattled Democrats in the state, giving them a high-profile and well-funded opponent against a tough and wily incumbent who once scorned, and now supports, Mr. Trump.Ms. Demings, who is Black, made it clear she would not abide by the middle-of-the-road messaging favored by recent Democratic candidates like former Senator Bill Nelson. In her kickoff announcement, she made a direct appeal to her party’s diverse, urban base, speaking bluntly about her race, gender and experiences growing up in segregated Jacksonville in the 1960s.“When you grow up in the South poor, Black and female, you have to have faith in progress and opportunity,” she said in a video posted on her Twitter page early Wednesday, showing her walking past a church in her hometown. “My father was a janitor, and my mother was a maid. She said, ‘Never tire of doing good, never tire.’”Mr. Rubio, responding with his own Twitter post, previewed his counter messaging, attacking Ms. Demings as a “far-left liberal Democrat” and “do-nothing” member of Congress.Two other Democrats from the Orlando area, Representative Stephanie Murphy and former Representative Alan Grayson, are also considering jumping into the race.Ms. Demings faces a daunting task. Florida Democrats have been battered by mounting losses in a perpetual battleground state trending red, capped by Mr. Trump’s comfortable win in the state last year.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has emerged as a leader of the Trump wing of the party and is said to be considering a 2024 presidential run, also faces re-election next year.The presence of Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Rubio on the same ballot is almost certain to boost turnout on both sides and elicit massive small-donor contributions in a state with several big, expensive media markets.Ms. Demings seemed to be leaning toward the governor race earlier this year: When Representative Charlie Crist declared his Democratic candidacy against Mr. DeSantis this spring, her team released a polished biographical video on the same day.Nikki Fried, a Democrat who serves as Florida agriculture commissioner, is also running for governor. She is one of the few statewide officials who is a Democrat; Florida’s other senator, Rick Scott, is a Republican.In 2016, Mr. Rubio easily defeated his Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy, then a congressman. But that same year Mr. Trump demolished him in the Republican presidential debates, mocking him as “Little Marco” and hammering him for supporting a bipartisan immigration bill that would have offered undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.Over the past four years Mr. Rubio has focused on policy work and avoided high-profile political fights, careful to support Mr. Trump when he could, while politely parting with him over several foreign policy issues, including Mr. Trump’s ill-fated overtures to North Korea, China and Russia.The former president reciprocated in April, offering his onetime critic a “Complete and Total Endorsement” to quell rumors of a primary challenge against Mr. Rubio from the right. More

The good will President Biden brings on his first trip abroad papers over lingering doubts about U.S. reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay.WASHINGTON — It should not be that hard to be an American leader visiting Europe for the first time after President Donald J. Trump.But President Biden will face his own challenges when he departs on Wednesday, especially as the United States confronts a disruptive Russia and a rising China while trying to reassemble and rally the shaken Western alliance as it emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Biden, who will arrive for a series of summit meetings buoyed by a successful vaccination program and a rebounding economy, will spend the next week making the case that America is back and ready to lead the West anew in what he calls an existential collision between democracies and autocracies.On the agenda are meetings in Britain with leaders of the Group of 7 nations, followed by visits to NATO and the European Union. On Mr. Biden’s final day, in Geneva, he will hold his first meeting as president with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Mr. Biden’s overarching task is to deliver the diplomatic serenity that eluded such gatherings during four years in which Mr. Trump scorched longstanding relationships with close allies, threatened to pull out of NATO and embraced Mr. Putin and other autocrats, admiring their strength.But the good will Mr. Biden brings simply by not being Mr. Trump papers over lingering doubts about his durability, American reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay. At 78, is Mr. Biden the last gasp of an old-style, internationalist foreign policy? Will Europe bear the cost of what increasingly looks like a new Cold War with Russia? Is it being asked to sign up for a China containment policy? And will Mr. Biden deliver on climate?Those questions will loom as he deals with disagreements over trade, new restrictions on investing in and buying from China and his ever-evolving stance on a natural gas pipeline that will route directly from Russia to Europe, bypassing Ukraine.Throughout, Mr. Biden will face European leaders who are wary of the United States in a way they have not been since 1945 and are wondering where it is headed.“They have seen the state of the Republican Party,” said Barry Pavel, the director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at The Atlantic Council. “They’ve seen Jan. 6. They know you could have another president in 2024.”White House officials say that stable American diplomacy is back for good, but of course they cannot offer any guarantees after January 2025. European officials are following the raging political arguments in the United States, and they note that Mr. Trump’s grip on his party is hardly weakening.Days before Mr. Biden’s departure, Republicans in Congress rejected the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot. Republican lawmakers embrace Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Democrats are faltering in their efforts to pass sweeping legislation to counter Republican attacks on voting rights at the state level.Through it all, Mr. Trump keeps hinting at a political comeback in four years. “There’s an anxiety about American politics,” said Ian Lesser, a vice president at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Simply, what is going to happen in the midterm elections? Whether Trumpism will prove more durable than Mr. Trump. What is coming next in American politics?”If the future of the United States is the long-term concern, how to manage a disruptive Russia is the immediate agenda. No part of the trip will be more charged than a daylong meeting with Mr. Putin.Mr. Biden called for the meeting — the first since Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Putin’s denials of election interference at a summit in Helsinki, Finland, three years ago — despite warnings from human rights activists that doing so would strengthen and embolden the Russian leader. Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, has noted that American presidents met with their Soviet counterparts throughout the Cold War, and their Russian successors afterward. But on Monday, he said Mr. Biden would warn Mr. Putin directly that without a change in behavior, “there will be responses.”Yet veterans of the struggle between Washington and Moscow say disruption is Mr. Putin’s true superpower.President Donald J. Trump embraced the denials of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Putin doesn’t necessarily want a more stable or predictable relationship,” said Alexander Vershbow, who was an ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush. “The best case one can hope for is that the two leaders will argue about a lot of things but continue the dialogue.”White House officials say the president has no intention of trying to reset the relationship with Russia. Having called Mr. Putin a “killer” this year, Mr. Biden is cleareyed about his adversary, they said: He regards Mr. Putin more as a hardened mafia boss, ordering hits with the country’s supply of nerve agents, than a national leader.But Mr. Biden is determined to put guardrails on the relationship, seeing out some measure of cooperation, starting with the future of their nuclear arsenals.But there is a dawning awareness in Europe that while Mr. Putin cherishes his growing arsenal, Russia’s nuclear ability is a strategic remnant of an era of superpower conflict. In what Mr. Putin recently called a new Cold War with the United States, the weapons of choice are cyberweapons, ransomware wielded by gangs operating from Russian territory and the ability to shake neighbors like Ukraine by massing troops on the border.Mr. Biden will embrace NATO and Article V of its charter, the section that commits every member of the alliance to consider an armed attack on one as an armed attack on all. But it is less clear what constitutes an armed attack in the modern age: a cyberstrike like the SolarWinds hacking that infiltrated corporate and government networks? The movement of intermediate-range missiles and Russian troops to the border of Ukraine, which is not a NATO member?Mr. Biden’s associates say the key is for him to make clear that he has seen Mr. Putin’s bravado before and that it does not faze him.“Joe Biden is not Donald Trump,” said Thomas E. Donilon, who was a national security adviser to President Barack Obama and whose wife and brother are key aides to Mr. Biden. “You’re not going to have this inexplicable reluctance of a U.S. president to criticize a Russian president who is leading a country that is actively hostile to the United States in so many areas. You won’t have that.”When Mr. Biden defines the current struggle as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” though, he appears to be worrying more about China’s appeal as a trading partner and source of technology than Russia’s disruptions. And while Europeans largely do not see China as the kind of rising technological, ideological and military threat that Washington does, it is an argument Mr. Biden is beginning to win.The British are deploying the largest fleet of its Navy warships to the Pacific since the Falklands War, nearly 40 years ago. The idea is to re-establish at least a visiting presence in a region that once was part of its empire, with stops in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. But at the same time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has signed on to the effort by Washington — begun by Mr. Trump and accelerated by Mr. Biden — to assure that Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, does not win new contracts to install 5G cellular networks in Britain.Some in Europe are following suit, but Mr. Biden’s aides said they felt blindsided last year when the European Union announced an investment agreement with China days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. It was a reflection of fears that if the continent got sucked into the U.S.-China rivalry, European companies would bear the brunt, starting with the luxury auto industry in Germany.The future of the agreement is unclear, but Mr. Biden is going the other way: Last week he signed an executive order banning Americans from investing in Chinese companies that are linked to the country’s military or ones that sell surveillance technology used to repress dissent or religious minorities, both inside and outside China. But to be effective, the allies would have to join; so far, few have expressed enthusiasm for the effort.Mr. Biden may be able to win over skeptics with his embrace of the goal of combating climate change, even though he will run into questions about whether he is doing enough.Four years ago, at Mr. Trump’s first G7 meeting, six world leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate accord while the United States declared it was “not in a position to join the consensus.”Protesters outside the White House in 2017 as Mr. Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Biden is reversing that stance, pledging to cut U.S. emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade and writing in an op-ed in The Washington Post before the summit that with the United States back at the table, countries “have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress.”But world leaders said they remained wary of the United States’ willingness to enact serious legislation to tackle its emissions and deliver on financial promises to poorer countries.“They have shown the right approach, not necessarily to the level of magnitude that they could,” said Graça Machel, the former education and culture minister of Mozambique.Key to reaching ambitious climate goals is China, which emits more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. Peter Betts, the former lead climate negotiator for Britain and the European Union, said the test for Mr. Biden was whether he could lead the G7 countries in a successful pressure campaign.China, he said, “does care what the developing world thinks.”Lisa Friedman More

Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities.Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.”The actions of Republican state legislators to curtail absentee voting, limit days for early voting and seize control of local election boards have prompted 188 scholars to sign a “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards,” in which they assert:We have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures.Among statutes Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or are in the process of approving are “laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections” thatcould enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t.Virginia Gray, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, argued in an email that for Republicans, “the strongest factors are racial animosity, fear of becoming a white minority and the growth of white identity.” She noted that Tucker Carlson of Fox News articulated Republican anxiety during his show on April 8:In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.Trump, Carlson and their allies in the Republican Party, Gray continued,see politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, law professors at the University of Chicago, make the case in their 2018 paper, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” that in the United States and other advanced democracies, the erosion of democracy will be gradual and stealthy, not an abrupt shift to authoritarianism.“Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay?” Huq and Ginsburg ask:There are two modal paths of democratic decay. We call these authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion to three institutional predicates of democracy occurring simultaneously: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. We show that over the past quarter-century, the risk of reversion in democracies around the world has declined, whereas the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is neither exceptional nor immune from these changes.In an email, Ginsburg wrote that there are two forces that lead to the erosion of democracy: “charismatic populism and partisan degradation, in which a party just gives up on the idea of majority rule and seeks to end democratic competition. Obviously the U.S. has faced both forces at the same time in Trumpism.”From a different vantage point, Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, argues that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn in examining the consequences of Republican tampering with election administration, with one more dangerous than the other. In an email, Berman writes:The downward spiral refers to attempts by Republicans to do two related things. First, effectively making voting more difficult by, for example, restricting voting by mail, shrinking voting times and places, adding ID requirements and so on. The second is injecting partisanship into the electoral oversight process. As potentially harmful as the first is, the latter is even more worrying.In other circumstances, Berman argues, one could imagine “having a good faith debate about the conditions under which mail-in ballots are distributed and counted, whether ID should be required to vote and if so of what type, etc.”But in the current contest, “these concerns are not motivated by a general desire to improve the quality of our elections, but rather by false, partisan accusations about the illegitimacy of Biden’s victory and so good faith discussions of reform are impossible.”The Republican initiatives to inject partisanship into the oversight process, in her view,are even more straightforwardly dangerous: elections are democracy’s backbone, anything that subjects them to partisan manipulation will fatally injure its functioning and legitimacy. The officials who oversee elections are democracy’s referees — once they lose their objectivity, the entire game loses its legitimacy. Republican attempts, accordingly, to diminish the objectivity of the electoral oversight process by, for example, giving more power to legislative branches and elected politicians over it, are direct attempts to rig the game so that, should Democrats win another election that Republicans consider contested, the outcome can be manipulated. There is simply no way democracy can function if those designated to oversee its most basic institution are motivated by partisan rather than legal and constitutional concerns.Among those I consulted for this column, there was wide agreement that democratic backsliding is a process difficult for the average voter to detect — and that one of the crucial factors enabling the current procedural undermining of democracy in the states is that voters have little interest in or understanding of election rules and regulations.“Democratic erosion is subtle and slow, often nearly imperceptible until it’s too late,” Robert Blair, a political scientist at Brown, wrote in an email:The U.S. will not become an autocracy. Political parties will not be banned; elections will not be canceled or overturned willy nilly. But the U.S. may increasingly become a “democracy with asterisks,” one in which the playing field is tilted heavily in favor of whichever party writes the rules of the game.Blair is decidedly pessimistic about the likelihood that American voters will succeed in opposing the degradation of the system:I have very little faith in the American public as a bulwark against these threats. In general Americans do not prioritize democratic principles in our vote choices, and we are alarmingly willing to tolerate antidemocratic ideas and actions by co-partisans. Polarization seems to make this worse. If American democracy is at risk, citizens will not save it.Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed this point in an email:“We all grow up knowing that the person who wins more votes should win the election,” Hopkins continued,but none of us grow up knowing anything about how to handle provisional ballots or which allegations of voter fraud are credible. Relatively few people are equipped to directly evaluate claims that an election was fraudulent, so voters necessarily rely on politicians, media commentators and other elites to tell them if something ran afoul. In fact, it’s precisely the public’s general commitment to democracy that can be used against democracy by political leaders willing to lie about elections.The low visibility and lack of public understanding of arcane shifts in election law — for example, the shift of responsibility for determining winners and losers from election officials to state legislatures — greatly empowers partisan elites.Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank and one of the organizers of New America’s “Statement of Concern,” wrote by email:A longstanding finding in political science is that it is elites who preserve democracy, and elites who destroy democracy. Overwhelming majorities of voters support democracy in the abstract, but if they are told by elites that “the other party is trying to destroy democracy and these emergency measures are needed to preserve democracy by keeping the other side out of power,” most partisan voters are going to follow their leaders and support anti-democratic changes. This is especially the case in a highly-polarized binary political system in which the thought of the opposing party taking power seems especially odious and even existential.Like many of the co-signers of the “Statement of Concern,” Drutman has no expectation that the Supreme Court would step in to block states from tilting the partisan balance by tinkering with election rules and procedures:The conservative Supreme Court has given states wide latitude to change electoral laws. I don’t see how a 6-3 conservative court does much to interfere with the ability of states to choose their own electoral arrangements. The conservative majority on the Court has clearly decided it is not the role of the Supreme Court to place reasonable boundaries on the ability of partisan legislatures to stack elections in their favor.Laura Gamboa, a political scientist at the University of Utah, is less harsh in her assessment of the citizenry, but she too does not place much hope in the ability of the American electorate to protect democratic institutions from assault:I don’t think Americans (or most other people) have a normative preference for dictatorship. Overall, people prefer democracy over authoritarianism. Having said that, polarization and misinformation can lead people to support power grabs. Research has shown that when a society is severely polarized and sees the out-group (in this case out-party) as “enemies” (not opponents), they are willing to support anti-democratic moves in order to prevent them from attaining power. More so, when they are misled to believe that these rules are put in place to protect elections from fraud.More important, Gamboa argued that the corrosion of political norms that protect democratic governancecan definitively evolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law. Institutions do not survive by themselves, they need people to stand by them. This type of manipulation of electoral laws undermines the legitimacy of elections. Rules and norms that were once sacred become part of the political game: things to be changed if and when it serves the political purpose of those in power. Once that happens, these norms lose their value. They become unreliable and thus unable to serve as channels to adjudicate political differences, in this case, to determine who attains and who does not attain power.The fact that public attention has been focused on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and Republican stonewalling against the creation of a commission to investigate the attack on Congress, helps mask the fact that the crucial action is taking place across the country in state capitols, with only intermittent national coverage, especially on network television.These Republican-controlled state governments have become, in the words of Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding,” the title of his April paper.Grumbach developed 61 indicators of the level of adherence to democratic procedures and practices — what he calls a “State Democracy Index” — and tracked those measures in the states over the period from 2000 to 2018. The indicators include registration and absentee voting requirements, restrictions on voter registration drives and gerrymandering practices.Grumbach’s conclusion: “Republican control of state government, however, consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.”The results, he writes,are remarkably clear: Republican control of state government reduces democratic performance. The magnitude of democratic contraction from Republican control is surprisingly large, about one-half of a standard deviation. Much of this effect is driven by gerrymandering and electoral policy changes following Republican gains in state legislatures and governorships in the 2010 election.In terms of specific states and regions, Grumbach found that “states on the West Coast and in the Northeast score higher on the democracy measures than states in the South,” which lost ground over the 18 years of the study. At the same time, “states like North Carolina and Wisconsin were among the most democratic states in the year 2000, but by 2018 they are close to the bottom. Illinois and Vermont move from the middle of the pack in 2000 to among the top democratic performers in 2018.”Grumbach contends that there are two sets of motivating factors that drive key elements of the Republican coalition to support anti-democratic policies:The modern Republican Party, which, at its elite level, is a coalition of the very wealthy, has incentives to limit the expansion of the electorate with new voters with very different class interests. The G.O.P.’s electoral base, by contrast, is considerably less interested in the Republican economic agenda of top-heavy tax cuts and reductions in government spending. However, their preferences with respect to race and partisan identity provide the Republican electoral base with reason to oppose democracy in a diversifying country.At one level, the Republican anti-democratic drive is clearly a holding action. A detailed Brookings study, “America’s electoral future: The coming generational transformation,” by Rob Griffin, Ruy Teixeira and Frey, argues that Republicans have reason to fear the future:Millennials and Generation Z appear to be far more Democratic leaning than their predecessors were at the same age. Even if today’s youngest generations do grow more conservative as they age, it’s not at all clear they would end up as conservative as older generations are today.In addition, the three authors write, “America’s youngest generations are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations.”As a result, Griffin, Teixeira and Frey contend,the underlying demographic changes our country is likely to experience over the next several elections generally favor the Democratic Party. The projected growth of groups by race, age, education, gender and state tends to be more robust among Democratic-leaning groups, creating a consistent and growing headwind for the Republican Party.From 2020 to 2036, the authors project that the percentage of eligible voters who identify as nonwhite in Texas will grow from 50 to 60 percent, in Georgia from 43 to 50 percent, in Arizona from 38 to 48 percent.As these percentages grow, Republicans will be under constant pressure to enact state legislation to further restrict registration and voting. The question will become: How far are they willing to go?I posed that question to Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford. His reply:As for whether this electoral manipulation will “devolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law,” I would say that the Republican Party has already crossed the Rubicon. For four years during the Trump presidency, they defended or ignored his blatant abuses of power, his violations of democratic norms, and his attacks on our democratic institutions, and they routinely circled the wagons to protect him. They had countless opportunities to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and they consistently failed to do so.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

When Donald Trump, the patron saint of sore losers, appeared at a Republican event on Saturday night and compared the 2020 election to a “third-world-country election like we’ve never seen before,” it wasn’t just another false rant from the former president. His words also described his attempted subversion of democracy in the run-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.Consider Mr. Trump’s remarks at his rally just before the attack: “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he said. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president.”Or consider Mr. Trump’s harassment of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with the request to “find” him votes, or his relentless harassment of other election officials and governors.Many Republicans want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But how is that possible when the former president won’t move on from the Nov. 3 election and continues to push the same incendiary lies that resulted in 61 failed lawsuits before Jan. 6, led to an insurrection and could lead to yet more violence?If you doubt that a threat of violence exists, look at the recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which shows that a dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory is believed by 15 percent of our fellow Americans — including almost one in four Republicans, 14 percent of independents and even 8 percent of Democrats.Republicans, instead of opposing a commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, need to be at the forefront of seeking answers on the insurrection and diminishing the power of QAnon and the other conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump has fueled. While he is still popular within the party, Mr. Trump is a diminished political figure: 66 percent of Americans now hope he won’t run again in 2024, including 30 percent of Republicans. He is not the future, and Republicans need to stop fearing him. He will continue to damage the party if we don’t face the Jan. 6 facts head-on.Nothing less than a full investigation is essential. As a House Republican chief counsel during the Clinton administration, I see a clear set of unanswered questions about Jan. 6, as well as evidence that needs to be gathered and that our country needs to understand. An investigation should cover the events related and leading up to Jan. 6, as well as all the parties involved. Who planned and funded the Trump rally that day, and who picked the speakers and got attendees there? How did supporters of QAnon, Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys get there? What happened as the White House planned for Jan. 6?Whether it is a congressionally formed commission or a congressional committee, the subpoenas and testimony would produce records that tell the story. Imagine all the thousands of texts, emails, phone calls and other records from the weeks leading to and on Jan. 6 that are not yet part of the public record. This material will come out eventually — in hearings, in books or in the media — but Republicans should be part of the process, to help provide accountability and prevent future attacks.While a commission would be best, a congressional select committee with a five-Democrat, five-Republican split and the same rules as a commission would have, could also work. In the meantime, any standing committee with subpoena power could begin the information-gathering process immediately.Many Republican leaders seem to think any all-encompassing investigation will be bad for the party. I disagree. Some prominent Republicans want to uncover the truth, as are police officers who heroically protected members of Congress and their staff on Jan. 6. Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after engaging with the Trump-inspired mob, supported Mr. Trump. Officer Michael Fanone, who was shocked multiple times with a stun gun and beaten and suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, told me he is a Republican. Officer Harry Dunn said: “We were victims of an assault, of an attack, and we deserve justice and we deserve to know everybody who was involved, and we want them held accountable.” Many of our officers feel they are being left on the field, and they wonder, what happened to “Back the Blue.”Mr. Trump’s lies are red meat to those in the conspiracy world who have already demonstrated what they are prepared to do. The danger also extends to states, as Mr. Trump tells people that election outcomes in Georgia and Arizona will be overturned, and he could be reinstated as president in August. How will QAnon followers or Oath Keepers respond when that does not happen?Many Republicans rationalize ignoring his rhetoric: His speech on Saturday wasn’t even aired live on Fox or CNN, and he may end up being indicted in New York and occupied with legal and financial problems. So, this thinking goes, what’s the harm in humoring the guy a little longer?The harm is that the lies have metastasized and could threaten public safety again. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have increased 107 percent this year. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, has noted, “There’s no reason to believe that anybody organically is going to come to the truth.” Representative Liz Cheney, another Republican, said, “It’s an ongoing threat, so silence is not an option.”Humoring the guy also emboldens Mr. Trump’s pardoned allies like Steve Bannon and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Republicans are now flocking to Mr. Bannon’s podcast to audition for Mr. Trump’s support, and Mr. Bannon says “a litmus test” will be whether they are willing to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election. Later this month, Mr. Flynn will appear at an Oklahoma campaign rally with Jackson Lahmeyer, a political novice who is challenging Senator James Lankford, the Republican incumbent. Mr. Lahmeyer claims the 2020 election was stolen and touts Mr. Flynn’s endorsement, saying we have to be willing to “Fight Like a Flynn.”Republicans would be better advised to fight like Senator Margaret Chase Smith. During the Joseph McCarthy era in 1950, she advised fellow Republicans that the Democrats had already provided Republicans with sufficient campaign issues, and they need not resort to McCarthy’s demagogy.The same is true today. Republicans need to have more faith in their policies and stop being afraid of a dangerous and diminished man who has divided the country and now divides our party. Reconsider the commission, let the investigation go ahead, and run and win in 2022 on the truth.Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican and a lawyer, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019.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

Dianne Morales Faced a Campaign Uprising. Will It Matter to Voters?Ms. Morales is running for New York City mayor on a platform of tackling inequality and shifting resources away from policing. But her campaign has been marred by defections and dysfunction.Dianne Morales campaigned last month at a barber shop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She is running on a leftist platform and advocates cutting $3 billion from the N.Y.P.D.’s budget.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe New York City mayoral race is one of the most consequential political contests in a generation, with immense challenges awaiting the winner. This is the eighth in a series of profiles of the major candidates.June 9, 2021Dianne Morales arrived at a racial justice protest in April, as she had done many times before. This one, however, was different: she was still a Black woman, a mother, an activist — but now, she had become well-known as a mayoral candidate, too.She was a familiar sight at the Barclays Center, hugging friends and greeting supporters, while a handful of aides flanked her. One speaker warned that the protest was not a “campaign stop.” So Ms. Morales asked a campaign staffer, outfitted in a loud purple T-shirt emblazoned with “DIANNE MORALES FOR N.Y.C. MAYOR,” to turn the shirt inside out.“I don’t want this to be political — this isn’t just a moment for us,” she said that evening.From the beginning of her campaign for mayor, Ms. Morales set out to establish herself as the activist-candidate-next-door, the person riding the bus instead of advertising on the side of it. Her long-shot candidacy sought to tap into the zeitgeist of last summer, when the pandemic and protests against police brutality shined a light on New York’s stark racial and economic inequities.Ms. Morales’s values attracted left-leaning voters to her campaign, but she is struggling to explain why her own staff has abandoned her weeks before the June 22 primary.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesBut in recent weeks, Ms. Morales’s campaign has been stalled by its own dysfunction. Two high-level staffers resigned following staff misconduct, six more were terminated and most remaining staff members, who have formed a union, are on strike. At least four political groups, including the Working Families Party, have rescinded their endorsements, donations slowed to a crawl and her senior adviser has joined a rival campaign.Over the weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, Ms. Morales’s ideologically closest opponent. The endorsement was the most significant sign that progressive leaders see Ms. Wiley as their last, best hope to prevent a more centrist candidate from becoming mayor.Ms. Morales, who staked a claim to the “inherently radical” nature of her campaign, is now struggling to explain why her own staff has abandoned her weeks before the June 22 primary and why one of the most prominent left-wing leaders in the country is not supporting her.Still, she is marching on, holding campaign events and filming an ad in the wake of the walkout. She addressed the accusations last week during a mayoral debate, highlighting her decades of experience as a manager of the operations and staffs of large nonprofits and stressing that she had acted quickly to address personnel concerns.“We responded, we addressed it and we are moving on, moving forward on this campaign, and I’m looking forward to that,” she said.Nia Evans, Ms. Morales’s deputy campaign manager, spoke at a rally in favor of the campaign staff’s new union late last month.Anna Watts for The New York TimesHer career path, largely in education and nonprofits, stands out in a field of lawyers, politicians and businessmen. Her background — working class, Afro-Latina, first-generation college graduate — has helped her appeal to traditionally underrepresented groups. And her campaign, with the most left-leaning platform in the race, has drawn in supporters who believed she would eschew politics as usual.‘She may compromise, but she doesn’t lose’A native of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Ms. Morales, 53, was raised by Puerto Rico-born parents. Her mother worked as an office manager for a union, and her father as a building manager. Finances were so tight that Ms. Morales shared a bed with her grandmother until she left for college.She attended Stuyvesant High School, where one of her teachers was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt, and Dartmouth College. Ms. Morales has said that she was sexually assaulted during her first week on campus, and she left Dartmouth at the end of her freshman year, eventually graduating from Stony Brook University, on Long Island. After college, she worked as a waitress and a special-education teacher; she later received master’s degrees, in social administration and education administration, from Columbia and Harvard.Ms. Morales then spent two years at the city’s Department of Education, under Michael Bloomberg, as chief of operations and implementation in the Office of Youth Development. She held leadership positions at various nonprofits like The Door, a youth development organization, and Phipps Neighborhoods, the social services arm of Phipps Houses, a housing development group, where she served as chief executive for a decade before filing to run for mayor.She raised her two children in Brooklyn; both graduated from public schools. Ms. Morales has been transparent about struggles her family has faced: her son, 22, was punched by a police officer at a protest, her daughter, 20, was sexually assaulted, and Ms. Morales had to sue the D.O.E. for what she said was a lack of services provided for her daughter’s learning disability. The city provided the services Ms. Morales requested after six years. In the interim, she placed her daughter in a private school.Ms. Morales officially kicked off her campaign last November, after months of heavy involvement in a mutual aid group in Bedford-Stuyvestant, Brooklyn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“There’s a fierceness about her, and you want that on your side,” said Lutonya Russell-Humes, a professor and longtime friend of Ms. Morales. “She just doesn’t lose. She may compromise, but she doesn’t lose.”She has talked about how after a career in advocacy work, she wanted to tackle inequity in a bigger, broader way. So in 2019, she filed to run for mayor. Ms. Morales said she was moved to act in part by her disappointment over Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, and she pledged to run a campaign that would be heavy on ethics, respect and dignity.She officially kicked off her campaign in November 2020, amid months of heavy involvement in a mutual aid group in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she coordinated food distribution efforts, organized a community fund-raiser, and later arranged for vaccine appointments.As a candidate, Ms. Morales has advocated for rent relief, hazard pay and the release of vulnerable people from Rikers Island. Her staff grew from about a dozen to nearly 100 aides this spring, as Ms. Morales continued to push her central proposal: cutting $3 billion from the police budget, which she says would ultimately lead to greater protection of New Yorkers, especially Black and Latino residents.Facing the progressive paradoxAlmost immediately, Ms. Morales faced the same paradox that has confronted politicians and activists in the progressive left at large: Members of the communities they say they speak for — especially Black and brown New Yorkers — do not always agree with the agendas they propose.Last year, many Black and Latino council members were hesitant to vote yes on a proposal that included, among other things, a pledge to cut $1 billion from the N.Y.P.D., worried that shrinking the police force would adversely affect underserved neighborhoods already marred by violence. Several Black council members vehemently opposed the proposed cut, calling the movement “political gentrification” or likening it to “colonization.”A recent NY1/Ipsos poll found that 72 percent of likely Democratic primary voters supported an increased police presence, following an uptick in high-profile incidents of violent crime. Ms. Morales said that many constituents she has spoken to wanted more access to resources and community programs, services she said could be funded by cuts to the police department’s budget.Ms. Morales has appealed to members of traditionally underrepresented groups, some of whom say they find her more accessible than past candidates for mayor.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHer plan for her first 100 days in office includes a citywide rent moratorium for individuals and small businesses, ending the N.Y.P.D.’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and providing immediate housing, through hotels and city-leased properties, for homeless people.The funding for her policies is largely contingent on increasing taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, and reimagining the city’s budget, cutting bloat and overspending.“I don’t think she identifies as a socialist, but a lot of socialists really like Dianne,” State Senator Jabari Brisport said in March, around the time he endorsed Ms. Morales.Still, Ms. Morales has battled questions of ideological consistency among activists on the left. She supported charter schools, which many progressives believe exacerbate inequality, as recently as last year. And an old interview in which she admitted to voting for Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in the 2018 Democratic primary for governor instead of his progressive challenger, Cynthia Nixon, made waves.“I’m one of those people that was at the point of feeling like the government wasn’t having an impact on my life on a day-to-day basis, and I went with the familiar,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “It’s definitely not something I feel great about.”She’s also faced plenty of scrutiny around her term as the chief executive of Phipps Neighborhoods: Tenant activists deemed its umbrella organization, Phipps Houses, one of the worst evictors in New York City in 2018 and 2019. (A Phipps spokesperson said the organization followed through with evictions on less than 1 percent of its tenants each year.)She emphasized the separation between the development group and the organization she led. “I’m very deeply proud of the work I did,” she said in an interview. “But it’s also true that Phipps Houses is a serious evictor. Those two things are true at the same time.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In addition to concerns about Phipps’ reputation, Ms. Morales’s reported take-home pay, nearly $350,000 in 2018, was an eye-popping figure for a candidate who has strongly emphasized her working-class identity, though even as chief executive, Ms. Morales was not the highest paid employee at the organization — filings show that at least three men earned more than she did.“I’m not going to apologize for making a decent living and being able to provide for my family,” Ms. Morales said. Since she stepped down from that position in January 2020, she says, she has not collected a salary. Ms. Morales has been transparent about struggles her family has faced. She and her son celebrated his graduation from college last month.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA leftist candidate in a liberal townRunning for major office as a leftist is no easy feat, even in a town as overwhelmingly Democratic as New York City. As last summer’s uproar over police brutality, social justice and inequality began to cool, polls mostly placed Ms. Morales in the single-digits, despite some indications that voters were looking for a progressive candidate.She became increasingly focused on capturing voters who felt either excluded by or disappointed with their current representation: people on the front lines of protests and the pandemic.“It’s surprising to me, given what the appetite felt like a year ago,” Ms. Morales said. “It felt like we were ready for a little bit more of rebel revolution. And now it feels kind of like, we’re like, ‘OK, that’s nice.’”Gabe Tobias, manager of Our City, a super PAC that supports progressive candidates, pointed to the recent elections of Mr. Brisport and Representative Jamaal Bowman as proof that left-leaning candidates can win. “People in New York are open to voting for people on the left if they like the candidate,” he said. “But the candidates aren’t rallying people.”Still, Ms. Morales had a devoted, even if small, following that she thought she could grow. Fervent supporters defended her when an investigation by The City last month revealed that in 2002, Ms. Morales paid a $300 bribe to a corrupt water inspector to erase a $12,000-plus water meter bill and then lied twice to city investigators.She was working as a senior employee at the Department of Education at the time, and investigators recommended that she be fired. Instead, Ms. Morales resigned. The water bill turned out to have been fraudulently inflated, and the inspector was later convicted of misconduct.Ms. Morales sought to turn the negative press into a moment that, once again, reinforced her theme of being an ordinary New Yorker. In a statement, she cast herself as a victim, and emphasized how many people were vulnerable to similar scams: “When I say I know what it means to be a New Yorker, I mean it.”The day after her statement appeared was her best fund-raising day on record: she received over $50,000 from 1,225 people.Throughout the race, Ms. Morales has sought to be seen not as politician or a manager, but as a public servant who is still connected to the public. Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThen, later in May, Whitney Hu, Ms. Morales’s campaign manager, and Ifeoma Ike, her senior adviser, resigned to protest what they called weeks of inaction regarding two staff members accused of discrimination and sexual harassment. (Ms. Hu and Ms. Ike did not respond to requests for comment; Ms. Ike has since joined Ms. Wiley’s campaign.) The two accused staff members have since been terminated. Allegations of poor management, discrimination, lack of pay and health care and a hostile work environment had plagued the campaign for weeks.Some of her staff members said they felt she was not living up to the lofty ideals she espoused on the campaign trail: A candidate who immediately called for the resignations of Mr. Cuomo and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller and mayoral candidate, over allegations of sexual misconduct, was now accused of not addressing it among her own staff.Many of the 90-plus members of the staff moved to unionize, striking after Ms. Morales fired four employees associated with the organizing effort and did not provide a reason. Less than two weeks before the mayoral primary, the strike is still underway, and union members have reported being locked out of work accounts.Ms. Morales recognized the union, but she said she could not agree to many of its demands, some of which — such as for workers to be paid severance after the campaign’s end — she contended violated campaign finance laws. (The Campaign Finance Board handbook disputes this.)“I’m supportive of the organizing, I’m supportive of folks making good trouble, but I can’t actually tolerate disruptive, undermining behavior, and I think that is an issue that we have to deal with,” she said.The fallout has been particularly damaging for Ms. Morales, whose progressive base of supporters may be less likely to forgive what they see as ethical transgressions.“Was there anything that could’ve been done differently? I guess so,” said Peter Ragone, a political adviser who has worked on more than two dozen campaigns. “No candidate or their advisers has ever had to manage their way through something like this, so of course it’s a mess,” he added.But Ms. Morales has embraced the tension within her campaign. In a recent interview with NY1 about the unionization effort, she said: “It’s a beautiful and messy thing.” More

The four-way Republican primary to run against New Jersey’s Democratic governor in November has become a test of former President Donald J. Trump’s brand of conservative politics. Jack Ciattarelli, a former state lawmaker making his second bid for governor, has been forced to defend his moderate views by his chief rival, Hirsh Singh, a self-described “Trump Republican.” More

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe is running for his old job and faces four Democratic opponents for the nomination: Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, State Senator Jennifer McClellan, State Delegate Lee Carter and former State Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy. Republicans have already selected their nominee, Glenn Youngkin, a former private-equity executive. More

Jack Ciattarelli won New Jersey’s Republican primary and will face Philip D. Murphy, the Democratic incumbent, in November.Jack Ciattarelli, a businessman and former lawmaker, beat back challenges from candidates loyal to former President Donald J. Trump to win Tuesday’s Republican primary in New Jersey, setting the stage for one of only two governor’s races in the nation in November.Mr. Ciattarelli, a moderate former assemblyman making his second bid for governor, will now face Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination and is hoping to ride high approval ratings for his handling of the pandemic to a second term.Democrats control all branches of government in New Jersey and outnumber Republicans by nearly 1.1 million voters.Still, Mr. Murphy’s run is dogged by nearly a half-century of history: The last Democrat to be re-elected governor in New Jersey was Brendan T. Byrne, in 1977.Mr. Murphy’s favorable ratings have slipped by about seven percentage points since the start of the second wave of the pandemic in October 2020, according to a new Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, but are still at a robust 47 percent.“He’s in a solid position that any politician would envy,” said Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling.Mr. Murphy’s handling of the pandemic earned high marks from 31 percent of residents, according to the poll. But only 7 percent said he deserved an “A” grade on tax policies, a perennial, bread-and-butter voter issue in New Jersey, where residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country.Mr. Ciattarelli’s showing among his Republican base is considered likely to dictate the tenor and policy focus of the campaign. The election will come nearly a year into the first term of President Biden, a Democrat, making it an early bellwether of the electorate’s mood as the midterm congressional elections approach. Virginia is the only other state with a race for governor.“What happens really influences the direction of the Republican Party going forward,” Dr. Koning said, adding that the election will indicate whether, in New Jersey, Republicans will “continue to follow the moderation that the party has been known for” or “become more nationalized toward Trumpism.”Less than two hours after polls closed, Mr. Ciattarelli was declared the winner by The Associated Press. He had captured 49.6 percent of the vote in the four-man race for the Republican nomination by late Tuesday. His win comes four years after a second-place primary finish behind Kim Guadagno, the then-lieutenant governor.“Tonight New Jerseyans showed they are ready for a change, and we are just getting started,” Mr. Ciattarelli, 59, said in a statement. “The fact is, after four years of Murphy’s failed leadership, our state is struggling.”“We will make New Jersey more affordable by lowering property taxes,” he added. “We will create jobs. We will bring Main Street small businesses back to life. We will reduce the size and cost of government.”The Republican primary was seen as a test of the potency of Mr. Trump’s combative brand of politics among New Jersey’s party faithful, and the public discourse often touched on themes from the former president’s divisive term: the politics of mask wearing and the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s win.“We all know Trump won,” Hirsh Singh, an aerospace engineer and self-described Trump Republican who was running his fourth recent campaign for office, said as he faced off against Mr. Ciattarelli in the only public debate of the primary. Only Mr. Singh and Mr. Ciattarelli qualified for public financing, making them eligible for the debate.But it was Philip Rizzo, a pastor and real estate developer who also aligned himself with Mr. Trump, who was in second place late Tuesday with nearly 26 percent of the Republican vote, four percentage points ahead of Mr. Singh.Brian Levine, a former mayor of Franklin, N.J., finished fourth.Turnout was low, with fewer than 1 in 5 registered Republicans voting.Political analysts said the results could pressure Mr. Ciattarelli to strike national themes popular with Trump supporters instead of the good government and fiscal responsibility motifs that are more likely to resonate with mainstream Republicans and the state’s 2.4 million independent voters.Mr. Ciattarelli in 2015 called Mr. Trump a “charlatan.” In last month’s debate, when asked if he supported the former president, he said, “I supported Donald Trump’s policies.”“If he’s got to look over his shoulder every time something happens to make sure the Trump wing of the party is still with him, that’s going to be a serious constraint for him,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.But Benjamin Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University, said Republicans were likely to quickly coalesce around their candidate.“There’ll be some day-after stories about whether he received a high enough percentage of the vote,” Dr. Dworkin said. “But that’s not going to matter by Day 3.”Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman, beat three opponents to win the Republican primary for governor. Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesAll 120 legislative seats were also on Tuesday’s ballot.One of the most fiercely contested Democratic primaries was in Bergen County, for a seat held by Senator Loretta Weinberg, a liberal icon who announced in January that she was retiring. Her exit set up a match between two former allies in the Assembly, Valerie Vainieri Huttle and Gordon Johnson. Without a primary opponent, Mr. Murphy has had a healthy head start in the campaign.By last week, he had spent $7.25 million, outpacing spending by all the Republican candidates combined, according to New Jersey’s Election Law Enforcement Commission.He has used the advantage to promote a range of first-term policy wins, including equal pay for women, a $15 minimum hourly wage, a new tax on income over $1 million and legalized marijuana.“The choice in November is clear,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement soon after the polls closed Tuesday. “It’s a choice between standing for higher wages or going back to an economy that only worked for the wealthy and well connected.”In November, the state borrowed $3.67 billion to plug an expected gap in revenue, enabling Mr. Murphy to propose an election-year budget that calls for no new taxes and few cuts, and sets aside extra funds for the state’s strapped pension program.But the governor, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs investment banker, also pushed through a $14 billion package of corporate tax breaks in less than a week, a move that irked his progressive base.Mr. Murphy’s political maneuvers were seen as helping him broker at least a temporary peace with the Senate’s Democratic president, Stephen M. Sweeney, and a onetime archrival, George Norcross III, an insurance executive and South Jersey power broker. Mr. Norcross benefited greatly from tax incentives passed under Mr. Murphy’s Republican predecessor, Chris Christie, leading to frequent criticism by Mr. Murphy — and a contentious investigation — during the first two years of his term.“Everybody recognized they’re on the same ballot this year,” Dr. Dworkin said. “There’s a détente for now.”Mr. Murphy may yet find himself haunted by another voting quirk in New Jersey: It has been more than three decades since voters elected a governor who hailed from the same party that won the White House in the year after a presidential contest.But the Democrats’ enrollment edge in New Jersey has expanded rapidly, and many voters not affiliated with either of the two dominant parties are considered social moderates.“New Jersey’s electorate is blue and getting bluer,” Dr. Dworkin said. More